g Henry V. was born at Monmouth,
August 9th, 1388, from which place he took his surname. He was the
eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, afterwards Duke of
Hereford, who was banished by King Richard the Second, and, after that
monarch's deposition, was made king of England, A.D. 1399. At eleven
years of age Henry V. was a student at Queen's College, Oxford, under
the tuition of his half-uncle, Henry Beaufort, Chancellor of that
university. Richard II. took the young Henry with him in his expedition
to Ireland, and caused him to be imprisoned in the castle of Trym, but,
when his father, the Duke of Hereford, deposed the king and obtained the
crown, he was created Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall.

In 1403 the Prince was engaged at the battle of Shrewsbury, where the
famous Hotspur was slain, and there wounded in the face by an arrow.
History states that Prince Henry became the companion of rioters and
disorderly persons, and indulged in a course of life quite unworthy of
his high station. There is a tradition that, under the influence of
wine, he assisted his associates in robbing passengers on the highway.
His being confined in prison for striking the Chief Justice, Sir William
Gascoigne, is well known.

These excesses gave great uneasiness and annoyance to the king, his
father, who dismissed the Prince from the office of President of his
Privy Council, and appointed in his stead his second son, Thomas, Duke
of Clarence. Henry was crowned King of England on the 9th April, 1413.
We read in Stowe-- "After his coronation King Henry called unto him all
those young lords and gentlemen who were the followers of his young
acts, to every one of whom he gave rich gifts, and then commanded that
as many as would change their manners, as he intended to do, should
abide with him at court; and to all that would persevere in their former
like conversation, he gave express commandment, upon pain of their
heads, never after that day to come in his presence."

This heroic king fought and won the celebrated battle of Agincourt, on
the 25th October, 1415; married the Princess Katherine, daughter of
Charles VI. of France and Isabella of Bavaria, his queen, in the year
1420; and died at Vincennes, near Paris, in the midst of his military
glory, August 31st, 1422, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, and the
tenth of his reign, leaving an infant son, who succeeded to the throne
under the title of Henry VI.

The famous Whit