Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/574

560 It is probable that these were sentiments which the king expressed, and that they owe their sibylline form to some chronicler or astrologer of the time. It is certain that Speed, Stowe, Fabyn, and Holinshed concur in saying that the king "prophesied the calamities of Henry VI." The boy was born on the 6th of December, 1421. On hearing of the fall of Meaux, Catherine left her infant to the care of its uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and hastened to join Henry in France. She was escorted by the Duke of Bedford and 20,000 fresh troops, to enable Henry to complete the conquest of her brother and his unhappy country. She landed at Harfleur on the 21st of May, where she was received with great state and rejoicing by numbers of noblemen and gentlemen, who accompanied her on her route to Paris by Rouen to the Bois de Vincennes, where her father's court resided. Henry set out from Meaux to meet her there, and thence the two courts proceeded together to Paris to spend the festival of Whitsuntide.

But in the midst of these gay though unsatisfactory rejoicings, there came a pressing message from the Duke of Burgundy to Henry, entreating him to hasten to his assistance against the dauphin. Those sturdy Scots who had made such havoc amongst Henry's troops at Beaujé, were still in the country; and the dauphin, collecting 20,000 men in the south, had put them under the command of the Earl of Buchan, the leader of those troops. They had crossed the Loire, taken La Charité, and proceeded to invest Cosne. At Cosne the dauphin joined Buchan; and the Duke of Burgundy, to whom these towns belonged, seeing that his hereditary duchy of Burgundy would next be menaced, was most urgent in his appeal to Henry to fly to his assistance.

Henry, in the midst of his glory and his good fortune, had for some time felt the approaches of an illness that no exercise in the field or festivities in the city enabled him to shake off. In vain he resisted the insidious disease. It seized relentlessly on his constitution, and defied all the science of his physicians. At the call of Burgundy, however, he roused himself, and set out from Paris at the end of July. Cosne had agreed to surrender if not relieved by the 16th of August, and Henry was impatient to come up in time. But a greater conqueror than himself was now come out against him. Death had laid his hand upon him; and he had only reached Sonlis, about twenty-eight miles from Paris, when he was seized with such debility that he was obliged to be carried thence to Corbeil in a horse-litter. There, spite of his determined attempt to go on, his malady assumed such feverish and alarming symptoms that he was compelled to give up, and surrender the command of the army to the Duke of Bedford. He had left the queen at Senlis, but she was now returned to the Bois de Vincennes, and thither he caused himself to be conveyed by water.

In the castle of Vincennes, which had witnessed many a strange passage in the history of France and her sovereigns, the great conqueror now lay helpless and hopeless of life, tended by Catherine and her mother. His very name had scared once more the dauphin from the field. No sooner did he hear that Henry was on the way, than he hastily abandoned the siege of Cosne, re-crossed the Loire, and threw himself again into Bourses. The Duke of Bedford, who found no enemy in the field, was preparing to cross the Loire in pursuit of him, when he was recalled to the dying bed of his royal brother.

If there ever was a combination of circumstances to make a death-bed hard, and cause the heart to cling tenaciously to life, they were those which surrounded Henry of Monmouth. But never, in the most trying hour of his existence, not even when he contemplated the vast hosts hemming him in on the eve of the great fight of Azincourt, did he display such unbroken firmness. For himself he expressed no anxiety and no regrets; his only solicitude was for his son and successor, still only nine months old. He called to his bedside his brother the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Warwick, and others of his lords, and to them he gave the most solemn injunctions to be faithful guardians of their infant sovereign. He expressed no remorse for the blood which he had shed in his wars, unquestionably believing all that he had so often, asserted, that he was the chosen instrument of Providence for the chastisement and renovation of France.

To the Duke of Bedford he said, "Comfort my dear wife—the most afflicted creature living." He most earnestly recommended, both to him and all his commanders, to cultivate the friendship of the Duke of Burgundy; never to make peace with Charles, who called himself dauphin, except on condition of his total renunciation of the crown; never to release the Duke of Orleans or any of the French princes of the blood taken at Azincourt, nor in any way to yield the claims of his son on France. He appointed his brother the Duke of Gloucester protector in England during his son's minority, and his brother the Duke of Bedford regent in France, who should avail himself on all occasions of the counsel of the Duke of Burgundy. Being assured by his physicians that he had not more than two hours to live, he then sent for his spiritual counsellors; and while they were chanting the seven penitential psalms he stopped them at the verse, "Build thou the walls of Jerusalem," and assured them that when he had completed the settlement of France he had always intended to undertake a crusade. This was precisely what his father had done on his death-bed; and this appeared still a favourite idea of the European princes.

Having thus systematically concluded all his affairs, temporal and spiritual, he calmly expired on the last day of August, 1422, amid the sobs and deep grief of all around him.

The contemporary writer, Titus Livius, who had seen him, thus describes his person:—"In stature he was a little above the middle size; his countenance was beautiful, his neck long, his body slender, and his limbs most elegantly formed. He was very strong; and so swift, that, with two companions, without either dogs or missive weapons, he caught a doe, one of the fleetest animals. He was a lover of music, and excelled in all martial and manly exercises."

The qualities of his mind were in no respect inferior to those of his body. He was generous, aspiring, undaunted, and far-seeing. He has been compared disingenuously, by some historians, with the two great Edwards, but in nothing was he their inferior. In a far shorter career, he equalled, if he did not surpass, their military genius; and in all that related to humanity