Sir John Hawkins,[326] when he cites this passage as evidence of an ebullition of wanton insolence and unrestrained impetuosity, in illustration of the character of Henry, to whom he ascribes the unjustifiable suppression of an act of parliament, lays himself open to blame in more points than one. In the first place, he ought not, as regards the suppression of an act of parliament, to have charged upon Henry, as a self-willed act, what, to say the very least, was equally the act of the whole Privy Council; and then he ought not to have endeavoured to brand him with disgrace on the testimony of a witness who wrote nearly a century and a half after the asserted event. [Footnote 326: Pleas of the crown.] Hall, who wrote only at the commencement of the reign of Edward VI, (the first edition of his work having appeared in 1548,) thus states the charge against Henry: "For imprisonment of one[327] of his wanton mates and unthrifty playfaires, he strake the Chief Justice with his fist on his face; for which offence he was not only committed to streight prison, but also of his father put out of the Privy Council and banished the (p. 364) court, and his brother Thomas Duke of Clarence elected president of the King's counsail, to his great displeasure and open reproach." [Footnote 327: Shakspeare represents Henry as having given the Chief Justice the blow some time before the expedition against the Archbishop of York.--2 Hen. IV. act i.] Perhaps it might be argued without unfairness, that the great variation and discrepancy in the traditions respecting this affair in the Prince's life would induce us to believe that, at all events, something of the kind actually took place; that, without some foundation in real fact, so extraordinary a transaction could never have been invented; that, whatever difficulty we may find in filling up the outline, the broad reality of an insolent and violent bearing shown by the Prince to a Judge on the bench ought to be admitted; and that any variation as to the person of the Judge, or the court over which he presided, or the time at which the incident might have taken place, or the degree of insult and personal violence exhibited, is unessential, and proves only the inaccuracy in detail of various accounts, all of which combine, independently of those minute circumstances, to establish the main point. To this argument it might also be added, that the very circumstance of an inspection of original documents presenting names of real living persons, identically the same with those which Shakspeare has given to the minor heroes of his drama, (such as Bardolf, Pistol, &c.) intimates a knowledge on his part of the transactions of those times which entitles him to a higher degree of credit, as seeming to imply that he might have had (p. 365) recourse to documents which are now lost: