Henry was born in the castle of Monmouth on August 9th, 1387. He was the eldest of the six children of Henry of Lancaster by Mary de Bohun, younger daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey de Bohun.[1] Humphrey, as the last male descendant of the De Bohuns, united in himself the dignities and estates of the Earls of Hereford, Northampton, and Essex. The elder daughter, Eleanor, was married to Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward the Third. Eleanor’s husband hoped to secure the whole of the Hereford estates, amounting, it is said, to fifty thousand nobles of annual income (not less, it may be calculated, than two hundred thousand pounds of money at its present value). He took charge of his sister-in-law, and had her carefully instructed in theology, intending that she should take the veil in a convent of the Sisters of St. Clare. John of Gaunt had other views for her future. He took occasion of his younger brother’s absence in France to have her removed to Arundel Castle, where she was very soon afterwards married to his son Henry. She died in 1394 in her twenty-fifth year. She was better educated, it appears, than most of the ladies of her day, and it would seem that some of her taste for books descended to her son. The character of Henry of Lancaster has been variously estimated. He won in his youth a high reputation for enterprise and courage. We find him fighting against the Mahommedans in Barbary in one year, and in the next against the Pagan tribes of Lithuania. His skill in all martial exercises was conspicuously great. But, according to one account, he was so stained with crime that his own father wished him to be put to death. He was a bold and probably an unscrupulous man, whom circumstances exposed to a very strong temptation. The weaknesses and vices of Richard the Second put the throne within his reach. We can easily believe that he really felt himself better qualified to rule than his feeble and capricious cousin, and it is just possible that he may have persuaded himself or been persuaded by others that there was something in his claim of hereditary right to the throne. The power unjustly gained was retained by the methods to which an usurper is commonly driven, by falsehood and by cruelty. Former friends were betrayed--as, for example, the Lollards, who certainly had helped him to the throne--and enemies were ruthlessly crushed. The power thus won and maintained descended to his son in happier circumstances. The younger Henry’s title was not seriously questioned. There was, it is true, a conspiracy against him, but it was not supported by any formidable party in the nation. A great success, won early in his reign, made him the object of popular enthusiasm. At the same time he had the advantage of a singularly attractive exterior: the hereditary beauty of the Plantagenets was conspicuous in him. And he was _felix opportunitate mortis_: he died before the lustre of his achievements