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deep seated corruption in mind and character. Nevertheless the revulsion against the treaty of Troyes was real and serious, even in the very heart of the party attached to the duke of Burgundy. He was obliged to lay upon several of his servants formal injunctions to swear to this peace, which seemed to them treason. He had great difficulty in winning John of Luxembourg and his brother Louis, bishop of Thérouenne, over to it. "It is your will," said they; we will take this oath; but if we do, we will keep it to the hour of death." Many less powerful lords, who had lived a long while in the household of Duke John the Fearless, quitted his son, and sorrowfully returned to their own homes. They were treated as Armagnacs, but they persisted in calling themselves good and loyal Frenchmen. In the duchy of Bergundy the majority of the towns refused to take the oath to the king of England. The most decisive and the most helpful proof of this awakening of national feeling was the ease experienced by the dauphin who was one day to be Charles VII. in maintaining the war which, after the treaty of Troyes, was, in his father's and his mother's name, made upon him by the king of England and the duke of Burgundy. This war lasted more than three years. Several towns, amongst others, Melun, Crotoy, Meaux, and St. Riquier, offered an obstinate resistance to the attacks of the English and Burgundians. On the 23rd of March, 1421, the dauphin's troops, commanded by sire de la Fayette, gained a signal victory over those of Henry V., whose brother, the duke of Clarence, was killed in action. It was in Perche, Anjou, Maine, on the banks of the Loire and in southern France that the dauphin found most of his enterprising and devoted partisans. The sojourn made by Henry V. at Paris, in December, 1420, with his wife, Queen Catherine, King Charles VI., Queen Isabel, and the duke of Burgundy, was not, in spite of galas and acclamations, a substantial and durable success for him. His dignified but haughty manners did not please the French: and he either could not or would not render them more easy and amiable, even with men of note who were necessary to him. Marshal Isle-Adam one day went to see him in camp on war-business. The king considered that he did not present himself with sufficient ceremony. "Isle-Adam," said he, "is that the robe of a marshal of France?" "Sir, I had this whiteygrey robe made to come hither by water aboard of Seine-boats." "Ha!" said the king, "look you a prince in the face when you speak to him?" "Sir, it is the custom in France that when

one man speaks to another, of whatever rank and puissance that other may be, he passes for a sorry fellow and but little honorable if he dares not look him in the face." "It is not our fashion," said the king: and the subject dropped there. A popular poet of the time, Alan Chartier, constituted himself censor of the moral corruption and interpreter of the patriotic paroxysms caused by the cold and harsh supremacy of this unbending foreigner who set himself up for king of France and had not one feeling in sympathy with the French. Alan Chartier's Quadriloge invectif is a lively and sometimes eloquent allegory in which France personified implores her three children, the clergy, the chivalry, and the people, to forget their own quarrels and unite to save their mother whilst saving themselves; and this political pamphlet getting spread about amongst the provinces did good service to the national cause against the foreign conqueror. An event more powerful than any human eloquence occurred to give the dauphin and his partisans earlier hopes. Towards the end of August, 1422. Henry V. fell ill; and, too stout-hearted to delude himself as to his condition, he thought no longer of any thing but preparing himself for death. He had himself removed to Vincennes, called his councillors about him, and gave them his last royal instructions. "I leave you the government of France," said he to his brother, the duke of Bedford, "unless our brother of Burgundy have a mind to undertake it; for, above all things, I conjure you not to have any dissention with him. If that should happen-God preserve you from it!--the affairs of this kingdom which seem well advanced for us would become bad." As soon as he had done with politics he bade his doctors tell him how long he had still to live. One of them knelt down before his bed and said, “Sir, be thinking of your soul; it seemeth to us that, saving the divine mercy, you have not more than two hours." The king summoned his confessor with the priests, and asked to have recited to him the penitential psalms. When they came to the twentieth versicle of Miserere: Ut ædificentur muri Hierusalem (that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up), he made them stop. "Ah!" said he, "if God had been pleased to let me live out my time, I would, after putting an end to the war in France, reducing the dauphin to submission or driving him out of the kingdom in which I would have established a sound peace, have gone to conquer Jerusalem. The wars I have undertaken have had the approval of all the proper men and of the most holy per

sonages; I commenced them and have prosecuted them without offence to God or peril to my soul." These were his last words. The chanting of the psalms was resumed around him, and he expired on the 31st of August, 1422, at the age of thirtyfour. A great soul and a great king; but a great example also of the boundless errors which may be fallen into by the greatest men when they pursue with arrogant confidence their own views, forgetting the laws of justice and the rights of other men.

On the 22nd of October, 1422, less than two months after the death of Henry V., Charles VI., king of France, died at Paris in the forty-third year of his reign. As soon as he had been buried at St. Denis, the duke of Bedford, regent of France according to the will of Henry V., caused a herald to proclaim, "Long live Henry of Lancaster, king of England and of France!" The people's voice made very different proclamation. It had always been said that the public evils proceeded from the state of illness into which the unhappy King Charles had fallen. The goodness he had given glimpses of in his lucid intervals had made him an object of tender pity. Some weeks yet before his death, when he had entered Paris again, the inhabitants in the midst of their sufferings and under the harsh government of the English had seen with joy their poor mad king coming back amongst them, and had greeted him with thousand-fold shouts of "Noël!” His body lay in state for three days, with the face uncovered, in a hall of the hostel of St. Paul, and the multitude went thither to pray for him, saying, "Ah! dear prince, never shall we have any so good as thou wert; never shall we see thee more. Accursed be thy death! Since thou dost leave us, we shall never have aught but wars and troubles. As for thee, thou goest to thy rest; as for us, we remain in tribulation and sorrow. We seem made to fall into the same distress as the children of Israel during the captivity in Babylon."

The people's instinct was at the same time right and wrong. France had yet many evil days to go through and cruel trials to endure; she was, however, to be saved at last; Charles VI. was to be followed by Charles VII. and Joan of Arc.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE HUNDRED YEAR'S WAR-CHARLES VII, AND JOAN OF ARC. 1422-1461.

WHILST Charles VI. was dying at Paris, his son Charles, the dauphin, was on his way back from Saintonge to Berry, where he usually resided. On the 24th of October, 1422, at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, he heard of his father's death. For six days longer, from the 24th to the 29th of October, he took no style but that of regent, as if he were waiting to see what was going to happen elsewhere in respect of the succession to the throne. It was only when he knew that, on the 27th of October, the parliament of Paris had, not without some little hesitation and ambiguity, recognized "as king of England and of France, Henry VI., son of Henry V. lately deceased," that the dauphin Charles assumed on the 30th of October, in his castle of Mehunsur-Yèvre, the title of king and repaired to Bourges to inaugurate in the cathedral of that city his reign as Charles VII.

He was twenty years old, and had as yet done nothing to to gain for himself, not to say anything of glory, the confidence and hopes of the people. He passed for an indolent and frivolous prince, abandoned to his pleasures only; one whose capacity there was nothing to foreshadow and of whom France, outside of his own court, scarcely ever thought at all. Some days before his accession he had all but lost his life at Rochelle by the sudden breaking down of the room in the episcopal palace where he was staying; and so little did the country know of what happened to him that, a short time after the accident, messengers sent by some of his partisans had arrived at Bourges to inquire if the prince were still living. At a time when not only the crown of the kingdom but the existence and independence of the nation were at stake Charles had not given any signs of being strongly moved by patriotic feelings. "He was, in person, a handsome prince and handsome in speech with all persons and compassionate towards poor folks," says his contemporary Monstrelet; "but he did not readily put on his harness, and he had no heart for war if he could do without it." On ascending the throne, this young prince, so little of the

politician and so little of the knight, encountered at the head of his enemies the most able amongst the politicians and warriors of the day in the duke of Bedford, whom his brother Henry V. had appointed regent of France and had charged to defend on behalf of his nephew, Henry VI., a child in the cradle, the crown of France already more than half won. Never did struggle appear more unequal or native king more inferior to foreign pretender.

Sagacious observers, however, would have hasily discerned in the cause which appeared the stronger and the better supported many seeds of weakness and danger. When Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, heard at Arras, that Charles VI. was dead, it occurred to him immediately that if he attended the obsequies of the English king of France he would be obliged, French prince as he was and cousin-german of Charles VI., to yield precedence to John, duke of Bedford, regent of France and uncle of the new king Henry VI. He resolved to hold aloof and contented himself with sending to Paris chamberlains to make his excuses and supply his place with the regent. On the 11th of November, 1422, the duke of Bedford followed alone at the funeral of the late king of France and alone made offering at the mass. Alone he went, but with the sword of state borne before him as regent. The people of Paris cast down their eyes with restrained wrath. "They wept," says a contemporary, "and not without cause, for they knew not whether for a long, long while they would have any king in France." But they did not for long confine themselves to tears. Two poets, partly in Latin and partly in French, Robert Blondel and Alan Chartier, whilst deploring the public woes, excited the popular feeling. Conspiracies soon followed the songs. One was set on foot at Paris to deliver the city to King Charles VII., but it was stifled ruthlessly; several burgesses were beheaded, and one woman was burned. In several great provincial cities, at Troyes and at Rheims, the same ferment showed itself and drew down the same severity. William Prieuse, superior of the Carmelites, was accused of propagating sentiments favorable to the dauphin, as the English called Charles VII. Being brought, in spite of the privileges of his gown, before John Cauchon, lieutenant of the captain of Rheims [related probably to Peter Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, who nine years afterwards was to sentence Joan of Arc to be burned], he stoutly replied, "Never was English king of France and never shall be." The country had no mind