Very few events are recorded as having taken place through this spring and summer which tend to throw light on the character or proceedings of Henry of Monmouth. He remained in Wales, probably without (p. 220) leaving it for any length of time. The crown had been already settled upon him and his three brothers in succession; but on the 22nd of December this year, in full parliament, at the urgent instance of the great people of the realm, the succession was again limited to Henry the Prince and his three brothers, and their heirs, but not to the exclusion of females. The French made a more feeble attempt to assist Glyndowr, in 1406, with a fleet of thirty-six vessels, the greater part of which was shipwrecked in a storm.[216] They had been more successful on their former invasions of Wales: but they found in that wild and impoverished country little to induce them to persevere in a struggle which promised neither national glory nor individual profit; and they left Owyn to drag out his war as he best could, depending on his own resources. [Footnote 216: The French about this time made a sort of piratical attack on the Isle of Wight.] It is with unalloyed satisfaction that we are able to record the testimony which the Commons of England at this time, by the mouth of their Speaker, bore to the character of Henry of Monmouth. It may seem strange that no use has been made of this evidence by any historian, not even by those who have undertaken to rescue his name from the aspersions with which it has been assailed. The tribute of praise and admiration for his son, then addressed to the King on his throne, (p. 221) in the midst of the assembled prelates, and peers, and commons of the whole realm, is the more valuable because it bears on some of those very points in which his reputation has been most attacked. The vague tradition of subsequent chroniclers, the unbridled fancy of the poet, the bitterness of polemical controversy, unite in representing Henry as a self-willed, obstinate young man, regardless of every object but his own gratification, "as dissolute as desperate," under no control of feelings of modesty, with no reverence for his elders, discarding all parental authority, reckless of consequences; his own will being his only rule of conduct, his own pleasures the chief end for which he seemed to live. These charges have been adopted, and re-echoed, and sent down to posterity with gathered strength and confirmation, by our poets, by our historians, civil and ecclesiastical, by the ornaments of the legal profession,--even one of our most celebrated Judges adding the weight of his name to the general accusation. It is not the province of this work to vindicate the character of Henry from charges brought against him: truth, not eulogy, is its professed object, and will (the Author trusts) be found to have been its object not in profession only.