Page:The religious life of King Henry VI.djvu/76

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PERSONALITY AND

exercised constant personal care over them. He crowned his work by himself laying the first stone, and as I myself [i.e. Capgrave] witnessed, he offered this his foundation to God Almighty with the deepest devotion."[1]

Bernard André, who wrote in the reign of Henry VII, tells how the pious King Henry VI had foretold the accession of the then king to the English throne; and speaking of the imprisonment of the former, says: " I cannot here keep back my tears, when thinking of the savage, fierce and cruel way in which this holy man was treated." Then after a lamentation upon the excesses of the Wars of the Roses, he says: "This King [Henry VI] always obeyed thy commandments O God! he was always just, pious and innocent. And so at last in regard to this holy King it is made known that he, who was wrongly deposed from his royal throne, is crowned with a celestial diadem, together with the kings in heaven."[2]

The same contemporary authority, Bernard André, also speaks of the heroic patience of the King in bearing his sufferings in prison.

  1. De illiutribus Henricis (Rolls Series), pp. 130-3.
  2. Historia Reg. H. VII (Rolls Series), pp. 14-20.