3.12 ENGLAND. 



had agreed to put himself at their head, with a design to overturn 

 the government ; but this appears to have been a groundless accusa- 

 tion by the clergy, though he was put to death in consequence of it. 

 His oniy real crime seems to have been the spirit with which he 

 opposed the superstition of the age ; and he was the first of the 

 nobility who suffered on account of religion. Henry was about this 

 time engaged in a contest with France, which he had many incite- 

 ments for invading. He demanded a restitution of Normandy, and 

 other provinces that had been taken from England in the preceding 

 reigns ; also the payment of certain arrears due for king John's ran- 

 som since the reign of Edward III ; and availing himself of the dis- 

 tracted state of that kingdom by the Orleans and Burgundy factions, 

 he invaded it, first took Harfieur, and then defeated the French in 

 the battle of Agincourt, which equalled those of Cressy and Poictiers 

 in glory to the English, but exceeded them in its consequences, oil 

 account of the vast number of French princes of the blood, and other 

 great noblemen, who were there killed. Henry who Avas as great 

 a politician as a warrior, made such alliances, and divided the French 

 among themselves so effectually, that he forced the queen of France, 

 whose husband, Charles VI, was a lunatic, to agree to his marrying 

 her daughter, the princess Catharine, to disinherit the dauphin, and 

 to declare Henry regent of France during her husband's life, and him. 

 and his issue successors to the French monarchy, which must at this 

 time have been exterminated, had not the Scots (though their king 

 still continued Henry's captive) furnished the dauphin with vast sup- 

 plies, and preserved to him the French crown. Henry, however, 

 made a triumphal entry into Paris, where the dauphin was proscrib- 

 ed ; and after receiving the fealty of the French nobility, he returned 

 to England to levy a force that might crush the dauphin and his 

 Scottish auxiliaries. He probably would have been successful, had 

 he not died of a pleuritic disorder, in 1442, the thirty-fourth year of 

 his age, and the tenth of his reign. 



Henry VI, surnamed of Windsor, was no more than nine months 

 old, when, in consequence of the treaty of Troyes, concluded by his 

 father with the French court, he was proclaimed king of France as 

 well as England. He was under the tuition of his two uncles, the 

 dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, both of them princes of great ac- 

 complishments, virtues, and courage, but unable to preserve their 

 brother's conquests. Upon the death of Charles VI, the affections of 

 the French for his family revived in the person of his son and suc- 

 cessor Charles VII. The duke of Bedford, who was regent of France, 

 performed many glorious actions, and at last laid siege to Orleans, 

 which, if taken, would have completed the conquest of France. The 

 siege was raised by the valour and good conduct of the Maid of 

 Orleans, a phenomenon hardly to be paralleled in history, she being 

 born of the lowest extraction, and bred a cow-keeper, and some time 

 a helper in stables in public inns. She must, notwithstanding, have 

 possessed an amazing fund of sagacity, as well as valour. After an 

 unparalleled train of heroic actions, and placing the crown upon her 

 sovereign's heac\ she was taken prisoner by the English in making a 

 sally during the siege of Compiegne, who burnt her alive for a witch, 

 at Rouen, May 30, 1431. 



The death of the duke of Bedford, and the agreement of the duke 

 of Burgundy, the great ally of the English, with Charles VII, con- 

 tributed to the entire ruin of the English interest in France, and the 



