The young Henry’s accession to the throne is said to have been the occasion of a sudden change which converted a reckless and profligate youth into a sober God-fearing man. The contemporary evidence for this assertion comes from two sources--Thomas Walsingham, one of the long line of writers who formed the historical school of St. Alban’s, and Thomas Elmham, who was then a monk of Canterbury and afterwards became one of Henry’s chaplains. Elmham writes: “He was in the days of his youth a diligent follower of idle practices, much given to instruments of music, and one who, loosing the reins of modesty, though zealously serving Mars, yet fired with the torches of Venus herself, and, in the intervals of his brave deeds as a soldier, wont to occupy himself with the other extravagances that attend the days of undisciplined youth.” And after treating of the death of the King he goes on to put a confession of sin into the mouth of the Prince. Strong as are the expressions, they are nothing more than what are uttered day after day by worshippers whom neither the world nor their own conscience accuses of any heinous crime. Further on we read: “After he had spent the day in wailing and groaning, so soon as the shades of night covered the earth, the weeping Prince, taking advantage of the darkness, secretly visited a certain recluse of holy life at Westminster; and laying bare to him the secret sins of his whole life, was washed in the laver of true repentance, and receiving the antidote of absolution against the poison that he had before swallowed, so put off the mantle of vice and returned decently adorned with the cloak of virtue. Thus a barren willow was changed into a fruitful olive, a Cocytus into an Euphrates, a Paris into a Hippolytus, the left into the right, by a happy miracle.” Hardyng, Walsingham, and Otterbourne all use language to the same effect; and finally we have the testimony of the Italian who wrote under the pseudonym of Titus Livius. He was not strictly a contemporary; but he seems to have been in the service of Humphrey of Gloucester, the King’s brother, and some weight must be given to his words. They are, it will be seen, little more than another version, couched in less extravagant language, of the chronicle of Elmham, and run thus: