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 of Arc, came to lead her people and inspired them with the belief that God would fight for them if they would fight bravely for their country. She was just a peasant-girl of no education, but of beautiful life and well able to stand hardship; she believed that the Saints appeared to her and urged her to deliver France. The French soldiers came to believe it too, and she led them to battle dressed in full armour and riding astride of a white horse. She allowed no bad language to be used in the army: ‘If you must swear, Marshal,’ she said to one of the proudest French nobles, ‘you may swear by your stick, but by nothing else.’ The English caught her and burned her as a witch, but she lives in the hearts of all good Frenchmen (and Englishmen) as a saint and a heroine until this day. Step by step the English were driven back till all Normandy, all Aquitaine were lost, and in 1453 nothing remained to us but Calais.

King Henry VI was not sorry; by this time he knew how wicked his fathers attack upon France had been. But the fighting instinct of Englishmen was desperately sore; defeat after such victories seemed unbearable. And, while the barons’ quarrels round the King’s totterng throne became shriller and shriller, there were but too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they did not much care whom so long as there was plunder at the end. Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery, cruel woman, ignored her gentle husband and governed in his name. She had already made herself the partisan of one of the two baronial factions, and had struck down the King’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester. Her favourite minister, the Duke of Suffolk, was actually caught and beheaded by common sailors on board