and was not held responsible for any of the unpopular acts done by the Government of his father.  They were at variance not long before Henry IV.’s death, but little is known as to the nature of their quarrels.  The crown scene, in which the Prince helps himself to the crown while his father is yet alive, is taken by Shakspeare from Monstrelet, who is supposed to have invented all that he narrates in order to weaken the claim of the English monarch to the French throne.  If Henry IV., when dying, could declare that he had no right to the crown of England, on what could Henry V. base his claim to that of France?

Henry V. died before his only son, Henry VI., had completed his first year; and Henry VI. was early separated from his only son, Edward of Lancaster, the same who was slain while flying from the field of Tewkesbury, at the age of eighteen.  There was, therefore, no opportunity for quarrels between English kings and their sons for the sixty years that followed the death of Henry IV.; but there was much quarrelling, and some murdering, in the royal family, in those years,—­brothers and other relatives being fierce rivals, even unto death, and zealous even unto slaying of one another.  It would be hard to say of what crime those Plantagenets were not guilty.[A] Edward IV., with whom began the brief ascendency of the House of York, died at forty-one, after killing his brother of Clarence, his eldest son being but twelve years old.  He had no opportunity to have troubles with his boys, and he loved women too well to fall out with his daughters, the eldest of whom was but just turned of seventeen.  The history of Edward IV. is admirably calculated to furnish matter for a sermon on the visitation of the sins of parents on their children.  He had talent enough to have made himself master of Western Europe, but he followed a life of debauchery, by which he was cut off in his prime, leaving a large number of young children to encounter the worst of fortunes.  Both of his sons disappeared, whether murdered by Richard III. or Henry VII. no one can say; and his daughters had in part to depend upon that bastard slip of the Red-Rose line, Henry VII., for the means to enable them to live as gentlewomen,—­all but the eldest, whom Henry took to wife as a point of policy, which her father would have considered the greatest misfortune of all those that befell his offspring.  Richard III’s only legitimate son died a mere boy.

[Footnote A:  It has been said of the Plantagenets that they “never shed the blood of a woman.”  This is nonsense, as we could, time and space permitting, show by the citation of numerous facts, but we shall here mention only one.  King John had a noble woman shut up with her son, and starved to death.  Perhaps that was not shedding her blood, but it was something worse.  Before English statesmen and orators and writers take all the harlotry of Secessia under their kind care and championship, it would be well for them to read up their own country’s history, and see how abominably women have been used in England for a thousand years, from queens to queans.]