Prince Henry in his childhood rarely wept, and endured pain without a groan.  When a boy wrestled with him in earnest, and threw him, he was not “seen to whine or weep at the hurt.”  His sense of justice was early; for when his playmate the little Earl of Mar ill-treated one of his pages, Henry reproved his puerile friend:  “I love you because you are my lord’s son and my cousin; but, if you be not better conditioned, I will love such an one better,” naming the child that had complained of him.

The first time he went to the town of Stirling, to meet the king, observing without the gate of the town a stack of corn, it fancifully struck him with the shape of the top he used to play with, and the child exclaimed, “That’s a good top.”  “Why do you not then play with it?” he was answered.  “Set you it up for me, and I will play with it.”  This is just the fancy which we might expect in a lively child, with a shrewdness in the retort above its years.

His martial character was perpetually discovering itself.  When asked what instrument he liked best, he answered, “a trumpet.”  We are told that none could dance with more grace, but that he never delighted in dancing; while he performed his heroical exercises with pride and delight, more particularly when before the king, the constable of Castile, and other ambassadors.  He was instructed by his master to handle and toss the pike, to march and hold himself in an affected style of stateliness, according to the martinets of those days; but he soon rejected such petty and artificial fashions; yet to show that this dislike arose from no want of skill in a trifling accomplishment, he would sometimes resume it only to laugh at it, and instantly return to his own natural demeanour.  On one of these occasions, one of these martinets observing that they could never be good soldiers unless they always kept true order and measure in marching, “What then must they do,” cried Henry, “when they wade through a swift-running water?” In all things freedom of action from his own native impulse he preferred to the settled rules of his teachers; and when his physician told him that he rode too fast, he replied, “Must I ride by rules of physic?” When he was eating a cold capon in cold weather, the physician told him that that was not meat for the weather.  “You may see, doctor,” said Henry, “that my cook is no astronomer.”  And when the same physician, observing him eat cold and hot meat together, protested against it, “I cannot mind that now,” said the royal boy, facetiously, “though they should have run at tilt together in my belly.”

His national affections were strong.  When one reported to Henry that the King of France had said that his bastard, as well as the bastard of Normandy, might conquer England, the princely boy exclaimed, “I’ll to cuffs with him, if he go about any such means.”  There was a dish of jelly before the prince, in the form of a crown, with three lilies; and a kind of buffoon, whom the prince used