To understand what degree of reliance should be placed upon this passage as a channel of biographical information, it is only necessary to recal to mind two points established beyond doubt from history: first, that the Prince was then not twelve years and a half old; and secondly, that the circumstance, previously to which this lamentation must be fixed, took place NOT THREE MONTHS after the coronation, subsequently to which the King created this his "unthrifty son," "this gallant, dissolute as desperate," Prince of Wales.[315] The scene is placed by Shakspeare at Windsor; and the conversation between (p. 343) Henry IV. inquiring about his son, and Percy, so unkindly fanning his suspicions, is ended abruptly by the breathless haste of Lord Albemarle, who breaks in upon the court to denounce the conspiracy against the King's life. This could not have been later than January 4, 1400; for on that day the conspirators entered Windsor, after Henry IV, having been apprised of their plot, had left that place for London. The coronation was celebrated on the 13th of the preceding October, and the Prince of Wales was born August 9, 1387. The whole year before his father's coronation he was in the safe-keeping of Richard II, through some months of it in Ireland; and, on Richard's return to England, he was left a prisoner in Trym Castle. How many days before the coronation he was brought from Ireland to his father, does not appear; probably messengers were sent for him immediately after Richard fell into the hands of Henry IV. The certainty is, that "_full three months_ could not have passed" since they last saw (p. 344) each other; the strong probability is, that both father and son had kept the feast of Christmas together at Windsor. That a boy of not twelve years and a half old, just returned from a year's safe-keeping in the hand of his father's enemy and whom his father, not three months before, had created Prince of Wales with all the honours and expressions of regard ever shown on similar occasions, should have been the leader and supporter of a dissolute crew of unrestrained loose companions, the frequenter of those sinks of sin and profligacy which then disgraced the metropolis (as they do now), is an improbability so gross, that nothing but the excellence of Shakspeare's pen could have rendered an exposure of it necessary.[316]