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1415–1422] and had to take the offensive instead of being attacked in a strong position. The heavily armoured French noblesse, embogged in miry meadows, proved helpless before the lightly equipped English archery. The slaughter in their ranks was terrible, and the young duke of Orleans, the head of the predominant faction of the moment, was taken prisoner with many great nobles. However, so exhausted was the victorious army that Henry merely led it back to Calais, without attempting anything more in this

year. The sole tangible asset of the campaign was the possession of Harfleur, the gate of Normandy, a second Calais in its advantages when future invasions were taken in hand. The moral effects were more important. The Orleanist party was shaken in its power; the rival Burgundian faction became more inclined to commit itself to the English cause, and the terror of the English arms weighed heavily upon both.

It was not till the next year but one that Henry renewed his invasion of France—the intervening space was spent in negotiations with Burgundy, and with the emperor Sigismund, whose aid the king secured in return for help in putting an end to the scandalous “great

schism” which had been rending the Western Church for so many years. The English deputation lent their aid to Sigismund at the council of Constance, when Christendom was at last reunited under a single head, though all the reforms which were to have accompanied the reunion were postponed, and ultimately avoided altogether, by the restored papacy.

In July 1417 Henry began his second invasion of France, and landed at the mouth of the Seine with a powerful army of 17,000 men. He had resolved to adopt a plan of campaign very different from those which Edward III. or the Black Prince had been wont to pursue, having in view

nothing more than the steady and gradual conquest of the province of Normandy. This he was able to accomplish without any interference from the government at Paris, for the constable Armagnac, who had succeeded the captive Orleans at the head of the anti-Burgundian party, had no troops to spare. He was engaged in a separate campaign with Henry’s ally John the Fearless, and left Normandy to shift for itself. One after another all the towns of the duchy were reduced, save Rouen, the siege of which, as the hardest task, King Henry postponed till the rest of the countryside was in his hands. He sat down to besiege it in 1418, and was detained before its walls for many months, for the citizens made an admirable defence. Meanwhile a change had taken place in the domestic politics of France; the Burgundians seized Paris in May 1418; the constable Armagnac and many of his partisans were massacred, and John the Fearless got possession of the person of the mad Charles VI., and became the responsible ruler of France. He had then to choose between buying off his English allies by great concessions, or taking up the position of champion of French interests. He selected the latter rôle, broke with Henry, and tried to relieve Rouen. But all his efforts were foiled, and the Norman capital surrendered, completely starved out, on the 19th of January 1419. On this Burgundy resolved to open negotiations with Henry; he wished to free his hands for an attack on his domestic enemies, who had rallied beyond the Loire under the leadership of the dauphin Charles—from whom the party, previously known first as Orleanists and then as Armagnacs, gets for the future the name of the “Dauphinois.” The English king, however, seeing the manifest advantage of his position, tried to drive too hard a bargain; he demanded the old boundaries of 1360, with his new conquest of Normandy, the hand of the princess Catherine, and a great sum of ready money. Burgundy dared not concede so much, under pain of alienating all his more patriotic supporters. He broke off the conference of Meulan, and tried to patch up a peace with the dauphin, in order to unite all Frenchmen against the foreign invader. This laudable intention was wrecked by the treachery of the young heir to the French throne; on the bridge of Montereau Charles deliberately murdered the suppliant duke, as he knelt to do homage, thinking thereby that he would make an end of the Burgundian party (Sept. 9, 1419).

This abominable deed gave northern France for twenty years to an English master. The young duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, and his supporters in Paris and the north, were so incensed with the dauphin’s cruel treachery that they resolved that he should never inherit his

father’s crown. They proffered peace to King Henry, and offered to recognize his preposterous claim to the French throne, on condition that he should marry the princess Catherine and guarantee the constitutional liberties of the realm. The insane Charles VI. should keep nominal possession of the royal title till his death, but meanwhile the Burgundians would do homage to Henry as “heir of France.” These terms were welcomed by the English king, and ratified at the treaty of Troyes (May 21, 1420). Henry married the princess Catherine, received the oaths of Duke Philip and his partisans, and started forth to conquer the Dauphinois at the head of an army of which half was composed of Burgundian levies. Paris, Picardy, Champagne, and indeed the greater part of France north of the Loire, acknowledged him as their sovereign.

Henry had only two years longer to live; they were spent in incessant and successful campaigning against the partisans of his brother-in-law, the dauphin Charles; by a long series of sieges the partisans of that worthless prince were evicted from all their northern strongholds.

They fought long and bitterly, nor was this to be marvelled at, for Henry had a custom of executing as traitors all who withstood him, and those who had once defied him did well to fight to the last gasp, in order to avoid the block or the halter. In the longest and most desperate of these sieges, that of Meaux (Oct. 1421–March 1422), the king contracted a dysenteric ailment which he could never shake off. He survived for a few months, but died, worn out by his incessant campaigning, on the 31st of August 1422, leaving the crown of England and the heirship of France to his only child Henry of Windsor, an infant less than two years old.

Few sovereigns in history have accomplished such a disastrous life’s work as this much-admired prince. If he had not been a soldier of the first ability and a diplomatist of the most unscrupulous sort, he could never have advanced so far towards his ill-chosen goal, the conquest of

France. His genius and the dauphin’s murderous act of folly at Montereau conspired to make the incredible almost possible. Indeed, if Henry had lived five years longer, he would probably have carried his arms to the Mediterranean, and have united France and England in uneasy union for some short space of time. It is clear that they could not have been held together after his death, for none but a king of exceptional powers could have resisted their natural impulse to break apart. As it was, Henry had accomplished just enough to tempt his countrymen to persevere for nearly thirty years in the endeavour to complete the task he had begun. France was ruined for a generation, England was exhausted by her effort, and (what was worse) her governing classes learnt in the long and pitiless war lessons of demoralization which were to bear fruit in the ensuing struggle of the two Roses. It is a strange fact that Henry, though he was in many respects a conscientious man, with a strong sense of responsibility, and a sincere piety, was so blind to the unrighteousness of his own actions that he died asserting that “neither ambition nor vainglory had led him into France, but a genuine desire to assert a righteous claim, which he desired his heirs to prosecute to the bitter end.”

The guardianship of the infant Henry VI. fell to his two uncles, John of Bedford and Humphrey of Gloucester, the two