Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/500

436 ambassador was empowered to treat not only with the king, but with his uncles, paternal and maternal, for marriages to be made between the Prince of Wales, his brothers and sisters, and the children, male or female, of the King of France, or his uncles. Charles peremptorily refused to receive the ambassador, disclaiming all knowledge of Henry as King of England.

But soon after this Charles of France received what he considered satisfactory news of the death of Richard, and sent Blanchet, his maistre des requestes, to announce that he should not disturb the truce made in the life-time of his dear son Richard, but demanded the immediate restoration of Isabella with her dower and jewels. The French commissioners were, however, instructed not to call Henry king, but to speak of him, in addressing the English envoys, as "La seigneur qui vous a envoyez," the lord who has sent you, and in writing, "La partie d'Angleterre," the English party.

Owen Glendower's Oak, near Shrewsbury.

Nothing at this time resulted from the endeavours to obtain Isabella, as Henry was not only anxious to marry her to his son, the Prince of Wales, but was very poor, and had no intention of returning the 200,000 francs of dowry, or the jewels. France, on its part, though professing to maintain the truce, did not omit what appeared a favourable opportunity to deprive England of her remaining possessions in that country. The people of Guienne wore greatly excited at the news of the deposition of Richard. He had been born amongst them, and a strong sympathy existed there in his favour. With all the warm feeling and imagination of the South, they now pictured him to themselves as all goodness. To them, indeed, he had been distant, and his rule, compared with that of the French, mild and indulgent. They uttered the most fervent imprecations on the heads of the Londoners, who, they said, had effected his ruin, and protested against submission to the usurper.

This was a temper precisely such as suited the French desires of acquisition in that quarter. The Duke of Burgundy, then all powerful, owing to the unhappy and continually recurring mental malady of the king, proposed to invade the English provinces. Accordingly, he marched upon Guienne, while the Duke of Bourbon appeared on another part of the frontiers, issuing proclamations, and offering most flattering conditions to the people to induce them to throw off their allegiance to the English, and unite themselves to France.

But this, instead of the effect anticipated, acted upon the Gascons as a direct sedative. The inhabitants had only to look on their own cities and lands, and then on those of the French to perceive that they would lose infinitely by the change. In the time of Charles V. it had been widely different. Then the English under the Black Prince had been haughty, and, owing to the demands for their perpetual campaigns, exacting and oppressive; while Charles the Wise had politically endeavoured to spare his own subjects, and thus to allure those of the English to revolt. Now all was changed. The unhappy reign of Charles VI., who was continually falling into fits of derangement, which gradually enfeebled his intellect, gave boundless scope for the contentions and assumptions of his powerful kinsmen, and left the country exposed to their pillage. The treasury of France was exhausted. The Government was poor and rapacious, and his uncles were arbitrary and merciless in their impositions. The whole of France was drained by every species of tax and arbitrary tallage, which were levied three or four times a year by the collectors with military bands at their backs. M. Thierry, in his History of Guienne, has drawn a