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
Effect of
the battle.
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 England and the council of Constance. 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
Henry’s second invasion of France.
Conquest of Normandy.
Triumph of the Burgundians.
Henry takes Rouen.
Murder of John of Burgundy.
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
The Burgund-ians acknowl-edge Henry as heir of France.
Treaty of Troyes.
father’s crown. They proffered peace to King Henry,
and offered to recognize his preposterous[1] 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. Death of Henry V. 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 Effects of his conquests. 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
- ↑ The peculiar absurdity of Henry’s claim to be king of France was that if, on the original English claim as set forth by Edward III., heirship through females counted, then the earl of March was entitled to the French throne. A vote of the English parliament superseding March’s claim in favour of that of Henry IV. could obviously have no legal effect in France.
