Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/554

540 conclusion of the existing armistice. Sigismund went on to Constance in prosecution of his plans for the Church, and Burgundy retired to Valenciennes, as if also about to co-operate with Henry by the muster of his Flemish forces. But here a new and unexpected turn of affairs appears to have taken place. John, the new dauphin, had shaken himself loose of the Armagnac party, and made overtures to Burgundy. The duke caught at the opportunity of having the dauphin in his hands, and by such an alliance regaining his ascendancy in the state without incurring the odium of supporting a foreign invader against the rightful sovereign.

The two princes swore eternal friendship to each other. The dauphin pledged himself to assist the duke in driving from power the Armagnacs, and the duke engaged to aid the dauphin in expelling the English from France. The Armagnacs, confounded at this new coalition, issued a summons in the king's name to the dauphin to return to Paris, with which the prince offered to comply on condition that he brought the Duke of Burgundy and his followers with him. Finding that they could not induce the prince to quit his new ally, there is every reason to believe that they dispatched him with poison, for on the 14th of April, 1417, he was taken suddenly ill, and died in agonies with all the symptoms of poison. No one at that time doubted that it was the work of the Armagnacs, and it was generally believed that the abandoned Queen Isabella, or more properly Jezebel, was an active accomplice in the destruction of both this and her preceding son, whom she hated for their opposition and exposure of her flagitious life.

But if Isabella was guilty of these revolting crimes, she was speedily punished. Her youngest son, Charles, who now became dauphin, though but sixteen, was extremely artful, and by no means disposed to yield to the domination of his mother, whom he as heartily despised as his elder brothers had done. Isabella, through all the calamities which had afflicted France, had pursued the same unbroken course of vice and dissipation. Her court was a vile sty of sensuality and profligacy, without one particle of pity for the miseries of the people. As one paramour was assassinated, as was the case with the Duke of Orleans, she provided herself with another, and this modern Messalina outraged the feelings of the suffering people by a constant round of balls, masquerades, fêtes, and court galas, while France was pouring its best blood on the battle-field, or famine was raging in the most opulent towns. Age had not abated her heartless follies; the old king was in a state of imbecility, alternating with madness, and was so totally neglected by her, that he was, sometimes found half-starved, without attendants, and covered with vermin, from the want of clean linen.

Meantime Isabella lived in royal state in the castle of Vincennes, in the midst of her voluptuous court, and protected by a strong guard, commanded by her paramour, Bois-Bourdon, the Sieurs De Graville and De Giac. The moment that there became a strife for power between Isabella and the now dauphin, Charles, the king, who had been hitherto perfectly indifferent to the queen's proceedings, and lived obscurely with his own mistress, evinced a wonderful sensitiveness to Isabella's peccadilloes. He had De Bois-Bourdon arrested, put to the torture, and then flung into the Seine, sewn up in a leathern sack, with a label attached—"Let pass the justice of the king." Isabella herself was arrested and sent into close confinement at Tours. The Count of Armagnac is said to have the more willingly executed this severity on Isabella, because she had violently complained of his seizure of her treasures both at Paris and Melun, a measure to which the public necessities had driven him.

Engaged to frenzy by the loss of her favourite, of her power, and of her money, Isabella now meditated deep revenge. She had hated the Duke of Burgundy with a mortal hatred ever since he assassinated her beloved Duke of Orleans; and he had now added to his offences by implicating her in a manner in the murder of her own son, the Dauphin John. He had sent all over France a circular letter, accusing in the most unmeasured terms the Armagnac party, with whom Isabella was then actively united, of having poisoned the dauphin, charging on them all the miseries and disgraces that afflicted France, and calling on the people to come forward and punish the murderous traitors. "One evening," said the duke in his letter, "our most redoubtable lord and nephew fell so grievously sick, that he died forthwith. His lips, tongue, and face were swollen; his eyes started out of his head; it was a horrible sight to see, for so look people that are poisoned."

Yet the very next thing which the public heard was that Isabella had escaped from her prison at Tours, and thrown herself into the arms of the Duke of Burgundy, her old and most detested enemy. Such are the terrible extremes of a bad woman's vengeance. She now burned, at any cost, to revenge herself on Armagnac, and not less so on her own son Charles, whose destruction she sought as earnestly as she had done that of his brothers. This most unnatural woman had bribed her keepers to allow her to attend early mass at the church of Marmontier, in the suburbs of Tours. They accompanied her, but suddenly found themselves surprised by the Duke of Burgundy, who had secreted himself for the purpose in a neighbouring forest, with 800 men-at-arms. The moment Isabella was in the guardianship of this prince, she proclaimed herself regent of the kingdom during the continuance of the king's malady, and the Duke of Burgundy her lieutenant.

Such was the position of affairs in France at the moment that Henry V. of England landed at Touque, on the coast of Normandy, on the 1st of August, 1417, with 16,000 men-at-arms, an equal number of archers, and a long train of artillery, and other military engines, attended by an efficient body of sappers, miners, carpenters, and other artificers, and a fleet of 1,500 ships. Two years had elapsed since the fatal battle of Azincourt; yet the infatuated princes of France, though they knew that Henry never had his eyes off their country, but was constantly employed in planning its subjugation, bad taken no measures whatever for its defence. On the contrary, they had spent the time in mutual destruction, and in doing all in their power to exhaust its strength, and demoralise the people. They appeared given up by an indignant Providence to the destroying force of their own base passions, a nation of suicidal monsters rather than of men; and while Henry of England was landing on