But King Richard, maddened by the death of Mortimer, which he felt was dangerous to himself, raised another great army, and, in 1398, again invaded Ireland. He was accompanied by a younger son of his uncle, John of Gaunt, “time-honored Lancaster,” and also by Prince Henry, eldest son of Henry of Hereford and afterward Henry V, the hero of Agincourt. The boy was only in his twelfth year, but well grown and brave as a lion. In the first encounter with the formidable MacMurrough, in the glens of Carlow, he so distinguished himself that Richard II knighted him on the field. This march from Waterford to Dublin proved, in the end, even more disastrous than the former one. MacMurrough kept up his harassing tactics, as usual. The rain poured down in torrents. The Irish drove all the cattle away from the English line of march, and destroyed the growing crops. Nearly all the baggage-animals of the invading force died for want of forage, and the army was in a state of famine and revolt, when it finally reached the seacoast near the present town of Arklow, where some English ships, laden with provisions, saved it from actual starvation. The remnant made its way to Dublin, where other disastrous news awaited King Richard. Henry of Hereford, eldest son of John of Gaunt, whom he had unjustly exiled, and whose lands he had seized, now, on the death of his father, having become Duke of Lancaster, came back from the continent, having heard of Richard’s misfortunes in Ireland, and laid claim to the crown. Richard, after ordering young Prince Henry and his uncle to be imprisoned in the castle of Trim—still one of the finest Norman keeps in Ireland—set sail for England. Henry, who had by this time raised a large army, made him prisoner and sent him to Pontefract Castle, in Yorkshire, where, soon afterward, he was starved to death, or otherwise foully made away with. Prince Henry and his uncle were immediately released when the Duke of Lancaster ascended a usurped throne as Henry IV of England. And thus was laid the bloody foundation of the dreadful after wars between the rival royal houses of York and Lancaster, which ended in the extermination of the legitimate Plantagenets. An illegitimate branch, directly descended from John of Gaunt, still survives in the ducal house of Beaufort. Art MacMurrough remained a conqueror to the end, and kept up the war with the Normans. In 1404, he defeated at Athcroe (Ford of Slaughter), near Dublin, Lord Thomas of Lancaster, brother of the king, putting most of the English to the sword, and desperately wounding the prince himself. Only a few years ago, Irish laborers, excavating for a railroad at Athcroe, came upon nearly a thousand bent swords, some of them badly decomposed by rust, buried in the river bed. They were the swords taken from the dead English, in 1404, and bent across the knees of the victorious Irish, according to their custom in those days.