Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/577

A.D. 1422.] his own right, the king before his death having named him regent. But the peers insisted that what they did was made necessary by the extreme youth of the king, and Gloucester was obliged to give way.

The Parliament immediately on assembling ratified all the acts by which it had been convoked, and entered upon the duty of arranging the form of government for the minority. Gloucester contended that his authority as regent did not depend on the consent of the council, but was the act of the late king himself; and that in no commissions of the late king had any such words as acting by the consent of the council been introduced. But Parliament declared the appointment of the late king to be of no force, inasmuch as to make it valid, it required the consent of the three estates. It was also shown that the two last centuries presented three minorities, those of Henry III., Edward III., and Richard II., and in none of them, except in the two first years of Henry III., had the powers of the executive government been committed to a guardian or a regent.

They refused altogether the title of regent, as far as England was concerned, but, leaving the Duke of Bedford regent of France, they did not even grant to Gloucester the same power under another name in this country. They gave the chief authority to the Duke of Bedford as the elder brother, and nominated him not regent, which might sanction the idea of his authority being derived from the crown only, but protector, or guardian of the kingdom. They then appointed Gloucester protector during the Duke of Bedford's absence only, making him, as it were, merely deputy-protector, his brother's lieutenant.

They thus completely set aside the arrangement of the late king, and reduced the power of Gloucester to a subordinate degree. They limited it still more by appointing the chancellor treasurer and keeper of the privy seal, and sixteen members of council, with the Duke of Bedford as president. In the absence of the duke, Gloucester was to officiate as president. The care of the young king was committed to the Ear1 of Warwick, and his education to Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, afterwards the famous Cardinal Beaufort. Beaufort was one of the three natural sons of John of Gaunt by Catherine Swynford, who were legitimated by royal patent, and had taken the name of Beaufort from the castle of Beaufort in France, where they were born. The bishop was thus half-brother to Henry IV., and, consequently, great uncle to the infant king. Both as a churchman, and as belonging to a family which, though of royal blood, could have no pretensions to the crown, Parliament deemed him a fitting person to enjoy that important office.

These arrangements must have been very mortifying to the Duke of Gloucester; but being proposed by the Peers, and fully consented to by the Commons, he acquiesced in them with the best grace he could. The following liberal salaries were voted to the members of council:—

Having also enacted regulations for the proceedings of the council, and continued the tonnage and poundage and the duties on wool for two years, the Parliament was dissolved.

In France the Duke of Bedford appeared, for the moment, all powerful. He had a reputation for ability, both in the council and the field, second only to his late brother the king. He had had great experience under the consummate command of Henry V., and was everywhere regarded as a man of the highest prudence, probity, bravery, and liberality. The authority which the English Parliament had conferred on him, adding even to that designed by the late king, raised him still more in public opinion. He had now the whole power of England in his hands. His troops had long been inured to victory, and he was surrounded by a number of the most distinguished generals that the nation had ever produced. There were the Earls of Somerset, Warwick, Suffolk, Salisbury, and Arundel, the brave Talbot, and Sir John Fastolfe. He was master of three-fourths of France, was in possession of its capital, and was in close alliance with the most powerful prince of France, the Duke of Burgundy. Following out the dying advice of the late king, he offered to Burgundy the regency of France, but that prince declined it, and, by the advice of his council, Charles VI. conferred it on Bedford.

While everything thus appeared to favour the English interest, the dauphin's affairs were eminently discouraging. He possessed but a fragment of France in the south, and his officers were more celebrated for their ferocity than their military skill. He was only about twenty years of age, and had the character of an indolent and dissipated prince. His wife, Mary of Anjou, was a woman of great beauty and virtue, but she was neglected by him for his mistress, Agnes Sorel, to whom he was blindly devoted. The Duke of Burgundy, the most powerful prince of the blood, was his mortal enemy, on account of the assassination of his father. The other great princes of his family, who should now have given strength to his party, the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the Counts of Eu, Angoulème, and Vendome, had been prisoners in England ever since the fatal day of Azincourt. The Duke of Brittany, one of the greatest vassals of his crown, had now deserted him and gone over to Burgundy and England. No other prince or noble had joined his standard, nor any foreign nation except the Scots.

But in the very depth of these depressing circumstances a sudden light sprang up. His father, Charles VI., died on the 21st of October, 1422, at his palace of St. Pol in Paris. This event was not likely to afflict the dauphin greatly. The Valois had shown a wonderful callousness to their natural ties, and for years the dauphin had been engaged in active war with both his parents, and had been formally renounced and disinherited by them. In a political point of view the death of the king was of the very highest advantage to him. It cut at once a powerful bond of obedience to the English. Many of the French nobility, while ostensibly supporting the English, did it only out of deference to their own monarch. But that monarch once gone, they could not for a moment think of conferring their allegiance on a mere child and a foreigner when the true heir was at hand. In all French hearts, more or less, whenever or however situated, those sentiments began actively to stir; and the death of