The briefest summary of Fastolf’s military career[49] will suffice to show how closely it accords with the writer’s description. Son of a Norfolk squire and born in or about 1378, he appears to have begun active service early in the reign of Henry IV. with that king’s second son, Thomas, afterwards Duke of Clarence. In 1401, though a mere lad of fourteen, Thomas of Lancaster, as he was then called, was appointed his father’s Lieutenant in Ireland. Fastolf was in his train there in 1402, if not before, and on 14th April, 1406,[50] he had from him a grant of the office of joint Chief Butler of Ireland during the minority of the Earl of Ormonde. He was still in Ireland when he married Millicent, daughter of Robert, Lord Tiptoft, and widow of the Deputy Lieutenant, Sir Stephen Scrope. The marriage took place on 13th January, 1409, only four months after the death (4th September, 1408) of the lady’s first husband,[51] whose son and heir Stephen was a minor ten or twelve years old at the time.[52] Besides other advantages, it gave Fastolf the control over lands of his wife and stepson in Yorkshire, at Castle Combe in Wiltshire, and elsewhere, and he seems to have exercised it with little regard to any one’s interest except his own. His earliest service in France probably dated from 1412. He figures in the long muster-roll of esquires who joined the expedition under Clarence in August of that year,[53] and before its close he had become Lieutenant of the castle of Bordeaux.[54] With the accession of Henry V. his energy and undoubted talent for war found ample scope. His contract in June, 1415,[55] to serve the king with ten men-at-arms and thirty archers was speedily followed by Henry’s invasion of France and the siege of Harfleur. Evidently it was not long before he attracted notice, for when the town surrendered on 22nd September he was at once put in command of it under the king’s uncle, Thomas Beaufort, Earl of Dorset.[56] This did not prevent him from displaying his prowess a month later at Agincourt; and he was again active in the sieges of Caen and Rouen and in other operations during Henry’s second invasion of Normandy in 1417–1419. Hardly any name in fact of secondary rank more frequently recurs in the chronicles and documents of the war for a quarter of a century. Already knighted before 29th January, 1415–6,[57] he was made a knight banneret in 1423 and a Knight of the Garter in 1426; and, only to mention a few of the posts conferred upon him,[58] in 1420 he was made Governor of the Bastille of St. Antoine at Paris, in 1422 Master of the Household to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, and in 1423 Lieutenant of Normandy and Governor of Anjou and Maine. In the minor battles and sieges which made up so much of the desultory warfare of the time he was everywhere conspicuous. On 2nd March, 1423, with the Earl of Salisbury, he recovered Meulan; on 17th August, 1424, he shared in the victory at