It is almost as if Henry’s early death, at the age of thirty-four, came as a judgment for allowing Oldcastle to fall into the hands of the priests; and the memory of the subduer of France will ever bear the dark shadow of Oldcastle’s cruel murder. Although it would not be fair to the English clergy to compare them with their Spanish and French brothers in the matter of cruelty, they were not far behind them in their remorseless persecution of all who dared to differ from their doctrines. Until the rule of the priest was forcibly extinguished by Elizabeth’s adoption of the Reformed faith, executions and tortures which would have disgraced savages, formed part of the English Code. But in spite of the priests, the torture chamber, and the stake, the spirit of Wyckliffe and his followers was not quenched in the country; it always existed most strongly in the country towns, and when the persecution of Queen Mary and Bishop Bonner outraged the great bulk of the nation, the fires of reform, which had only smouldered, but which had never been extinguished, burst out into flame, and the hateful reign of the persecuting priest was finally and for ever overthrown. The campaigns in France, like those in Wales and Scotland, added to the distinguished prisoners of State placed within the durance of the Tower walls by the fortune of war. Of the French came the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, with the Counts of Eu, Vendome, the Marshal Boucicourt, and many other knights after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. I have made mention elsewhere of the famous imprisonment of the Duke of Orleans in the White Tower. He was released in 1440, on the payment of a ransom of fifty thousand pounds, a sum approximately ten times that of our present money value; but many of these French captives died in the Tower, among them the Duke of Bourbon and the Marshal Boucicourt. After the death of Henry V., and during the Protectorate which governed the country during the minority of Henry VI., the young King’s guardian, the Bishop of Winchester, taking advantage of the absence of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the actual Protector, reinforced the garrison of the Tower, and on the Duke’s return from France refused to admit him to the fortress, with the result that the aid of Parliament had to be invoked to arrange matters between the Duke and the Bishop. Throughout Henry’s troubled reign the Tower was full of prisoners, some of them French and Scotch taken in the wars, and amongst others Owen Tudor, the father of the future Henry VII. The Duchess of Gloucester, an aunt by marriage of the King, was also imprisoned in the fortress upon the charge of witchcraft and sorcery, a circumstance of which Shakespeare made signal use in his tragedy dealing with the unfortunate Henry’s life.