Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/577

 THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 527 The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, held the dauphin responsible for his father's murder and came over wholly to the English side. He agreed to the The Treaty Treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which Henry V ofTr °yes married the French Princess Catherine and was to become King of France upon the death of the insane Charles VI. An assembly of the Estates at Paris approved the treaty, and Henry was making good his claim by further conquests at the dauphin's expense, when death overtook him in 1422 at the age of only thirty-five. Charles VI died a little later in the same year. Henry VI, son of Henry V, was not yet a year old; but his uncle, the Duke of Bedford, tried to pro- cure the French throne for him and continued the military successes of the English for some years. He also tried to give Normandy and other French territory under his rule good government. But the people were neither prosperous nor happy under English rule ; the country was still suffering from the effects of the war; the captains of Charles VII, as the former dauphin styled himself, kept making raids; and local resistance to English rule kept cropping out. The situation by 1429 was as follows: Charles VII, who was but nineteen at his father's death, whose face was un- prepossessing in appearance, and whose short, The siege knock-kneed legs moved with an undignified gait, of 0rleans had so far remained inactive south of the Loire. He ap- peared to have no money and to be controlled by unworthy favorites, and was derisively known as "the King of Bourges," from the cathedral town where he most often held his court. The English and Burgundians held everything north of the Loire and some territory on the southwestern coast. We have before noted the strategic importance of Orleans, situated upon the northernmost bend of the Loire, as the key to the interior of France. It now barred the way of the English south and they were besieging it. Charles, located for the present at Chinon rather than at Bourges, seemed unable to do anything to relieve the beleaguered city. An illiterate peasant girl now turned the tide of victory