FullReads

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 to banter, said to the prince that that dish was worth a crown. “Ay!” exclaimed the future English hero, “I would I had that crown!”–“It would be a great dish,” rejoined the buffoon. “How can that be,” rejoined the prince, “since you value it but a crown?” When James I. asked him whether he loved Englishmen or Frenchmen better, he replied, “Englishmen, because he was of kindred to more noble persons of England than of France;” and when the king inquired whether he loved the English or the Germans better, he replied the English; on which the king observing that his mother was a German, the prince replied, “‘Sir, you have the wyte thereof;’–a northern speech,” adds the writer, “which is as much as to say,–you are the cause thereof.”

Born in Scotland, and heir to the crown of England at a time when the mutual jealousies of the two nations were running so high, the boy often had occasion to express the unity of affection which was really in his heart. Being questioned by a nobleman, whether, after his father, he had rather be king of England or Scotland, he asked, “Which of them was best?” Being answered, that it was England; “Then,” said the Scottish-born prince, “would I have both!” And once, in reading this verse in Virgil,