Henry left the army under command of the Earl of Dorset, and hastening to Paris, paid a hasty visit to his father-in-law at the Bois de Vincennes. He then joined the army and advanced against Chartres, which was besieged by the Dauphin. The siege of Chartres was raised at Henry's approach, Beaugency was next taken, and the Dauphin retreated beyond the Loire. In the meantime the King of Scots, to whom Henry had assigned the siege of Dreux, prosecuted his mission with equal zeal and talent, and brought that strong place to capitulate on the 30th of August.
The whole of France, from the north to Paris, and from Paris to the Loire, was almost entirely in the hands of the English and their allies the Burgundians. The Dauphin, unable to stand a moment before the superior genius and troops of Henry, fell back successively from post to post, till he took refuge in the well-fortified city of Bourges. The troops of Henry had suffered considerably by their rapid marches and from scarcity of provisions. Henry, therefore, abandoned the pursuit of the Dauphin for a while; the country, from its past calamities, still lying a desert, and the miserable people perishing of hunger. He sought out sufficiently good quarters for his army, and left them to refresh themselves while he paid a short visit to Paris. He was very soon, however, in the field again, and by the 6th of October had sat down before the city of Meaux on the Marne. He was induced to undertake this siege from the earnest solicitations of the people of Paris. They represented that it was the stronghold of one of the most ferocious monsters who in those fearful times spread horror through afflicted France. This was an old companion of the late Count of Armagnac, called the Bastard of Vaurus, who had become so infuriated by the murder of his master, that the whole of mankind hardly seemed sufficient to appease, by death and suffering, his revenge. It cost Henry ten weeks to carry the town; and then the monster of Vaurus retired with his garrison to the market-place, which defied all the efforts of the English and their allies. The siege was carried on with sanguinary fury; no quarter was given on either side. On the 10th of May, 1422, the market-place was compelled to surrender from absolute famine; though the Dauphin had despatched the Sieur d'Affemont to endeavour to throw supplies into this fortress. Affemont was taken prisoner, and the place fell. The Bastard of Vaurus was beheaded, his body hung up on his own oak, and his banner, surmounted with his head, was attached to its highest bough. Three of his chief companions, who had vied with him in violence and ferocity, were executed with him; and a number of persons, suspected of being accessory to the death of the Duke of Burgundy, were marched to Paris to take their trials.
Henry had spent seven months in these operations. They had cost him a great number of his brave soldiers, and some of his most tried officers—amongst them the Earl of Worcester and Lord Clifford, who fell before the walls of Meaux. Sickness swept away many others; but the advantages of the reduction of Meaux were as distinguished as the cost; for it laid all the north of France as far as the Loire, with the exception of Maine, Anjou, and a few castles in Picardy, under his dominion. Whilst he lay before Meaux, however, he received the joyful intelligence of the safe delivery of his queen of a son, who had received his own name; the Duke of Bedford, the Bishop of Winchester, and Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault and Holland—who proved the cause of many misfortunes to the infant prince—being sponsors at his baptism.
One thing, however, troubled his joy on this auspicious event. Henry had probably studied the so-called science of astrology at Oxford, for it was part of the mass of rubbish regarded as real knowledge at that time. On leaving England, therefore, he strictly enjoined Catherine not to lie in at Windsor, for he had ascertained that the planets cast forward a lowering shadow upon Windsor, in the week when she might expect her confinement. From waywardness, or some other cause, Catherine specially chose as the place of her accouchement the forbidden spot—a conduct which she lived bitterly to rue. On the news being brought to Henry at Meaux, he eagerly demanded where the boy was born, and on being told it was at Windsor, he appeared greatly struck and chagrined, and repeated to his chamberlain, Lord Fitzhugh, the following lines:—
"I, Henry, born at Monmouth,
Shall small time reign and much get;
But Henry of Windsor shall long reign, and lose all.
But as God wills, so be it."
It is probable that these were sentiments which the king expressed, and that they owe their sibylline form to some chronicler or astrologer of the time. It is certain that Speed, Stowe, Fabyan and Holinshed concur in saying that the king "prophesied the calamities of Henry VI." The boy was born on the 6th of December, 1421. On hearing of the fall of Meaux, Catherine left her infant to the care of its uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and hastened to join Henry in France. She was escorted by the Duke of Bedford and 20,000 fresh troops, to enable Henry to complete the conquest of her brother and his unhappy country. She landed at Harfleur on the 21st of May, where she was received with great state and rejoicing by numbers of noblemen and gentlemen, who accompanied her on her route to Paris by Rouen to the Bois de Vincennes, where her father's court resided. Henry set out for Meaux to meet her there, and thence the two courts proceeded together to Paris to spend the festival of Whitsuntide.
But in the midst of these gay though unsatisfactory rejoicings there came a pressing message from the Duke of Burgundy to Henry, entreating him to hasten to his assistance against the Dauphin. Those sturdy Scots who had made such havoc amongst Henry's troops at Beaugé, were still in the country; and the Dauphin, collecting 20,000 men in the south, had put them under the command of the Earl of Buchan, the leader of those troops. They had crossed the Loire, taken La Charité, and proceeded to invest Cosne. At Cosne the Dauphin joined Buchan; and the Duke of Burgundy, to whom these towns belonged, seeing that his hereditary duchy of Burgundy would next be menaced, was most urgent in his appeal to Henry to fly to his assistance.