Finally, what may be called a reparation was made to the memory of the prince whom Henry’s father had dispossessed. Richard had been buried almost secretly at Langley, in the Church of the Preaching Friars. His body was now removed to London, and buried in royal style in the Abbey of Westminster; “not,” says Walsingham, “without great expense on the part of the King, who now confessed that he owed him the same respect that he did to his own natural father.” At the same time the King provided that “four tapers should burn day and night about his grave while the world endureth;” once a week a _dirige_ was to be chanted, and on the next day a requiem. After a mass a distribution was to be made of eleven shillings and eightpence; while on the _obit_, or anniversary of death, as much as twenty pounds was to be given away. Thus reconciled to the enemies, living or dead, of his house, Henry could address himself with good conscience and hope to the work of his life. CHAPTER VI THE FRENCH CROWN A famous scene in _Henry the Fifth_ represents two English prelates consulting together how they may best put aside the imminent demand of the Commons for a secularisation of a great part of the Church revenues. The clergy were to be stripped of what would maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand or more esquires, besides lazar-houses and poor-houses, and still have a “thousand pounds by the year” for the coffers of the King. Such a spoliation would not only “drink deep,” as the Bishop of Ely says, but, as his brother of Canterbury replies, “drink the cup and all.” The King’s new-born piety would not be a sufficient protection against this danger. Nor would it be averted even by the offer of a greater sum by way of contribution than the clergy had ever offered to any one of his predecessors. A more potent help would be found in the suggestion, “Of his true titles to some certain dukedoms; And, generally, to the crown and seat of France, Derived from Edward, his great-grandfather.” We are not called upon to discuss the historical foundation for this story. The chroniclers of the sixteenth century probably put something of the feelings which were dominant in their own times into their narratives of the earlier age. But the movement which culminated in the action of Henry the Eighth was then beginning. The wealth of the Church was certainly overgrown and often ill-applied. Cupidity it was sure to excite; but wise and honourable statesmen also regarded it with dislike as an influence adverse to the national prosperity. But to suppose that the ecclesiastical authorities could stifle these feelings by forcing, so to speak, upon the nation a war to which it was averse or even indifferent is to contradict all the analogies of history.