In 1410 Henry asked Parliament for permission to collect a tenth and a fifteenth annually, whenever Parliament should not be sitting. Had the request been granted, the result for a frugal monarch would have been hardly less than independence of parliamentary control. He was refused. Without the frequent necessity of calling a Parliament, Henry’s last years, instead of their smooth constitutional trend, might readily have had as tragic a story as those of Richard II. He died in 1413.
His son Henry V came to the throne without dispute, and for a brief nine years fired the souls of the English people with zest of conquest and pride of race. A warrior, the mediæval ideal of a king, he was yet noble of mind and soul. Had his brilliant career not so suddenly flickered and gone out, he might have won a place beside Edward I; as it was, the constitutional history of his reign reveals no struggle between people and monarch over the sordid wherewithal to fight his battles; both sides apparently honored the other. The taxation during his reign was heavy, but it was voted gladly to the king who could use it as a means to victory at Agincourt. Henry V, whom his people loved enough to make legendary participant in their revellings, died in France, 31st August, 1422.
Henry VI was almost as unfortunate in his birth as in his death, and his life seemed to bring him nothing but disaster. He was barely a year old when his father died, his troubled reign saw the Wars of the Roses, and tradition has it that he died by the hand of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, afterward king. Weak in health, the possessor of a mind which in boyhood showed the feverish precocity that foreshadows an unbalanced maturity, he was nevertheless generous, temperate, mild, and devoted.
[Declaration for appropriation of supplies]
The early part of his reign gives one of the few instances chronicled under the Lancastrian kings of an attack upon constitutional usages in taxation. In 1425 while the Duke of Bedford and Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester were acting virtually as regents to their nephew the young king, Bedford together with various other lords announced in Parliament that a certain subsidy, which had been appropriated for a particular purpose, should be levied for the king’s use notwithstanding the conditions attaching to it; they advanced an opinion of the justices favoring their action. The commons vindicated their right, however, in the same Parliament; they made a fresh grant, restating the former conditions, with this explicit addition, “No part thereof be beset ne dispendid to no othir use, but oonly in and for the defense of the seid roialme.”[261]