prodigious numbers, the lines, according to the lowest estimate, being, twenty men in depth. The most probable estimate of the French numbers' is that they were ten times as many as the English. The two armies passed several hours without a movement on either side. At length the English began to advance. The archers went boldly on to meet the mailed chivalry. Onward rushed the thousands of horsemen to break the line of the hardy yeomen. The sharpened stakes were planted in the earth; and the archers shrank not from the charge. The arrows again flew; and the horses, becoming unmanageable from their wounds, the knights were driven back upon the van, which they threw into confusion. The king now advanced with his main body. A deadly conflict ensued. The archers The second threw away their bows, and fought with sword and bill. French line was soon reached; and here again the contest became more a slaughter than a battle. The enormous numbers of the French were the chief cause of their destruction. Their heavy armour was an incumbrance instead of a defence. The rear division, after the overthrow of the first and second division, took to flight. In three hours this terrible fight was Few were left alive for ransom. In a momentary alarm Henry ordered a massacre of all the prisoners. He stopped the carnage when he found that the danger was imaginary. On the part of the English, the duke of York and the earl of Oxford were slain, with some hundreds of inferior degree. Of the chivalry of France, the flower perished. Seven of the princes of the blood and eight thousand gentlemen of France fell in that field of carnage. Henry slept on the night of the 25th of October at Maisoncelles. The next day, he, with the duke of Orleans and many other noble prisoners, went his unmolested way to Calais.

over.

CHAPTER X.

THE great victory of Agincourt was publicly known in London on the 29th of October. Henry remained at Calais till the 17th November. When the king's ship sailed into the port of Dover, the people rushed into the sea, and bore their hero to the shore. He entered London in solemu procession on the 23rd of November.

The war was carried on in Normandy; and the French made descents on the English shores of the Channel. Harfleur was besieged in June, 1416; and the English garrison was reduced to the greatest distress, when it was relieved from blockade by the capture of the large carracks and other vessels that kept the mouth of the Seine. Meanwhile Henry had secured the alliance of the duke of Burgundy. The feuds of the Burgundians and the Armagnacs were as violent as ever, and were accompanied by the most intolerable oppression of the people by the reigning faction under the constable, Armagnac. The duke of Orleans, the real head of this party, was shut up in the castle of Pontefract, solacing his long captivity in England by the composition of verses which entitle him to rank amongst the best French poets of his age. The insane king passed his life in fatuous indif

A.D. 1417.

SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF ROUEN.

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ference to all around him; and the court of the queen exhibited a licen* tious profusion, the more disgusting from its contrast with the universal wretchedness.

On the 23rd of July, 1417, the king of England again embarked with a mighty army at Southampton. It was more numerous and more powerfully equipped than the force which, two years before, had landed in Normandy; consisting of forty thousand men, with miners and ordnance. At this crisis, the duke of Burgundy was marching upon Paris, resolved upon the extermination of the faction which held the government. Henry landed at Tonque, near Harfleur; and shortly after went on to besiege Caen, which city was taken by assault on the 4th of September. Many other fortresses in Normandy speedily submitted; and Henry went into winter quarters. The French government, distracted with the movements of the duke of Burgundy, made no effectual resistance to the English. Henry continued to secure one fortress after another; and, holding his court at Caen, confiscated the estates of Norman lords, and bestowed them upon his English followers.

The summer of 1418 was a terrible season for France. The duke of Burgundy had retreated from before Paris in the previous year; for his partisans in the city had been expelled, and the count of Armagnac had the young dauphin, Charles, in his hands, as well as the unhappy king. The queen had been deprived of her power, as regent, and had been sent as a prisoner to Tours. Suddenly the duke of Burgundy appeared before Tours; delivered the queen from captivity; and received from her the appointment of governor-general of the kingdom. At the end of May there was a fearful massacre of the Armagnacs by an infuriated Paris mob; and many of them were held as prisoners. On the 12th of June, there was a cry that the terrible duke was at the gates; but the people shouted for Burgundy; and, breaking open the prisons and private houses where the Armagnacs were confined, massacred fifteen hundred victims in one morning. Amongst them was the count of Armagnac. On the 14th of July the queen and the

duke of Burgundy entered Paris in triumph.

The rule of Henry in Lower Normandy, which he had nearly conquered, was mild and conciliating. He abolished the odious tax on salt, and set a limit to illegal exactions. But the people of Rouen, into which city large numbers of armed men had been thrown under the command of chiefs who had retired before Henry, resolved to resist the progress of the invader. The English invested the city on the 30th of June. Henry set about the reduction of the place upon a system far more efficacious than any sudden assault. On the land side he dug deep ditches; and he fortified his lines with towers and artillery. The land approach was completely blockaded. The islands of the Seine above Rouen were filled by him with troops. The stream was barricaded with iron chains; and immediately above the town he formed a bridge of boats manned with archers. He soon compelled the surrender of the castle on the hill of St. Catherine. Below Rouen he commanded the navigation of the Seine by his armed vessels; and the mouth of the river was guarded by a powerful fleet. For twenty weeks the devoted people beheld the gradual approach of famine. The population consisted of a hundred and fifty thousand souls. At last

K

the garrison surrendered on the 19th of January, 1419, and the soldiers marched forth without arms, engaging not to serve against the king for one year.

There were two authorities in France, who refused to unite in repulsing their common enemy. The dauphin held a court and parliament at Poitiers; the duke of Burgundy ruled at Paris. In the mean time Henry continued to advance towards the capital. A truce was at length concluded by him with the duke of Burgundy; and it was agreed that the king of France and the king of England should have a meeting. In July, 1419, the queen, the princess Katherine, and the duke of Burgundy, came, without the king, to Meulan, on the Seine; and here Henry met them, with great state on either side. Although the English king professed himself anxious for an alliance with a lady so fair and gracious as the princess, he demanded the complete execution of the treaty of Bretigny. The negotiations were again broken off. The dauphin and the duke of Burgundy now made some show of reconciliation; and within a week after the conference at Meulan, they agreed to terms of union. With the same boldness as he displayed when met by divided councils, Henry marched on towards Paris.

On the 23rd of July, the king, the queen, and the duke of Burgundy went to the capital, which was completely undefended. On the 29th, news came that the English had taken Pontoise. The court removed from Paris, to which the troops of Henry were rapidly approaching. The dauphin solicited another interview with the duke of Burgundy, on matters of importance to the welfare of the kingdom. The place appointed was the bridge of Montereau. The dauphin was in a sort of lodge in the centre of the bridge when the duke advanced. They had each taken oaths pledging the safety of the other. The duke of Burgundy had left his attendants a little behind him ; and as he bent his knee to the dauphin, he was struck down and quickly murdered; the servants of the duke being immediately surrounded by a large body of armed men. The dauphin gave out that the duke offered insult and violence to him; but there can be no doubt that the treacherous murder was premeditated, and the mode of accomplishment resolved upon. The heir of the crown of France was at this time seventeen years of age.

Philip, the son of the murdered duke of Burgundy, was married to a daughter of the king of France. He, immediately on the death of his father, sought an alliance with Henry of England. The terms of a treaty were arranged; which was finally concluded at Troyes, on the 21st of May, 1420. The king of England was to receive the hand of the Princess Katherine; to be immediately regent of the kingdom; and to be recognised as successor to the crown on the death of Charles VI. When the terms of the treaty were announced to the parliament and other authorities of Paris, the highest eulogium was pronounced upon the king of England as a lover of peace and justice, a protector of the poor, a defender of the Church. The people were encouraged by these statements to hope for some happy termination of their miseries. The marriage of Henry with the princess of France was celebrated at Troyes, on the 2nd of June.

The bridal month of Henry and his fair queen was passed in besieging Sens, and Montereau, and Villeneuve. When these were taken, Melun was

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besieged for four months. After its surrender on the 18th of November, the kings of France and England made a triumphant entry into Paris; and the three estates of the kingdom gave a solemn approval of the treaty of Troyes. At the beginning of 1421 King Henry held a parliament at Rouen. Immediately after, Henry and his queen went to England; and on the 23rd of February, Katherine was crowned at Westminster.

The peace of Troyes was approved by the English parliament, and the Commons granted a subsidy to continue the war. But the first statute of this parliament shows that the laurels which Henry acquired were obtained at the price of the depopulation of the country; and, even in this season of popular excitement, there was a petition complaining of the intolerable burden of the war.

The king and his queen were making a progress through the kingdom, and had arrived at York, when news came which speedily called back Henry to France. He had left his brother, the duke of Clarence, as his lieutenant in Normandy. Anjou, which recognised the authority of the dauphin, was invaded by the duke; and at Beaujé, on the 22nd of March, he was surprised in his work of wasting the country by a great force of Anjevins, aided by several thousand Scottish auxiliaries under the earl of Buchan, the second son of the regent of Scotland. The duke was slain; and the greater number of his vanguard were killed or taken prisoners. The English archers, however, came up, and drove the French and Scots from the field. Henry set sail from Dover, and landed at Calais on the 12th of June. He was accompanied by the young king of Scotland, who had been sixteen years a captive in Windsor Castle. Many Scottish knights also joined Henry, whose force consisted of four thousand men-at-arms, and twenty-four thousand archers.

After several minor successes, King Henry, at the earnest entreaty of the people of Paris, undertook the siege of the city of Meaux, about thirty miles from the capital. The commander of the place, known as the Bastard of Vaurus, was a devoted adherent of the count of Armagnac, in revenge for whose death he carried on a partisan warfare with a ferocity of which even those times of bloodshed furnished few examples. Henry undertook to subdue this brigand. But Meaux was a place of remarkable strength; and it was seven months before it was wholly taken. In this siege Henry lost several of his best captains, amongst whom were the earl of Worcester and lord Clifford; and his men were swept away by an epidemic sickness. At last the garrison was starved out; and the commander was decapitated. By the surrender of Meaux the English became masters of the greater part of France to the north of the Loire. The queen of Henry had borne him a son, and she came back to France, with her infant, to join her husband in Paris. There was a short season of festivity at the Whitsuntide of 1422; and then the king set out to raise the siege of Caen. He had for some time been labouring under a disease, which he bore up against with the same iron will that made him front every danger and difficulty of warfare. At Corbeil he became too ill to proceed; and his brother, the duke of Bedford, took the command of the army, in concert with the duke of Burgundy. Henry was carried back on a litter to the Bois de Vincennes. It soon became evident that his malady, what

cure.

ever it might be, was beyond the medical skill of those days to arrest or The English who surrounded the bed of the dying man saw the same composure which he had always shown in the battle-field. He commended his child to the care of his brother, the duke of Bedford, desiring the earl of Warwick to be his tutor. His brother of Gloucester he wished to be guardian of England. He advised that the regency of France should be offered to the duke of Burgundy; but in the event of his refusal to the duke of Bedford. Above all, he urged that no peace should be concluded with the dauphin, unless Normandy were ceded in absolute sovereignty to the English crown.

Henry V. died on the 31st of August, 1422, in the tenth year of his reign, the thirty-fourth of his age. The devoted attachment to him of the English in France was expressed in funeral solemnities more than usually significant of real sorrow. A fleet waited to convey the body and the mourners to Dover, and all that remained of the warrior and statesman was finally deposited in Westminster Abbey.

Henry V. was undoubtedly a prince of eminent talents, with a zealous though erring sense of religious obligation. His negotiations show that his real policy towards France was to recover what had been lost after the treaty of Bretigny; and that his demand of the French crown would have been soon abandoned had not the distractions of France offered an irresistible temptation to his enthusiastic ambition. His bravery, fortitude, and perseverance won the admiration of the English people; and his career, though misdirected by the lust of conquest, was not without its national benefit. From his time there was no dream in Europe that the English might be subjugated.

When the death of Henry V. became known in London, some of the leading peers assembled, and issued writs for a new parliament. Gloucester claimed to be regent according to the desire of his brother; but the lords resisted that claim, saying that the king could not grant governance of the land to any person except while he lived; and Gloucester was only allowed to be chief of the council, in the absence of the duke of Bedford, with the name of protector and defender.

In less than two months after the death of Henry V., Charles VI., king of France, also died. At the funeral solemnities at St. Denis, the herald cried aloud, "Long life to Henry, king of France and England, our sovereign lord." There were now two kings in France-an infant in Paris, with a regent who governed north of the Loire; and the dauphin, alike the object of party hatred and party adulation, who was crowned at Poitiers as Charles VII.; and who ruled or influenced most of the provinces south of the Loire. Brittany at first remained neutral in this great quarrel. Burgundy was with the English.

The more important of the early contests between the regent Bedford, and Charles VII., were the battle of Crevant, in 1423, where the earl of Salisbury signally defeated the earl of Buchan, commanding an allied army of French and Scots; and the battle of Verneuil, where Bedford utterly routed the French army. The duke of Bedford married a sister of the duke of Burgundy; and he negotiated a marriage between another sister of that duke, and the duke of Brittany. But these friendships were soon