Henry, in the midst of his glory and his good fortune, had for some time felt the approaches of an illness that no exercise in the field or festivities in the city enabled him to shake off. In vain he resisted the insidious disease. It seized relentlessly on his constitution, and defied all the science of his physicians. At the call of Burgundy, however, he roused himself, and set out from Paris at the end of July. Cosne had agreed to surrender if not relieved by the 16th of August, and Henry was impatient to come up in time. But a greater victor than himself was now come out against him. Death had laid his hand upon him; and he had only reached Senlis, about twenty-eight miles from Paris, when he was seized with such debility that he was obliged to be carried thence to Corbeil in a horse-litter. There, spite of his determined attempt to go on, his malady assumed such feverish and alarming symptoms that he was compelled to give up, and surrender the command of the army to the Duke of Bedford. He had left the queen at Senlis, but she was now returned to the Bois de Vincennes, and thither he caused himself to be conveyed by water.
In the castle of Vincennes, which had witnessed many a strange passage in the history of France and her sovereigns, the great conqueror now lay helpless and hopeless of life, tended by Catherine and her mother. His very name had once more scared the Dauphin from the field. No sooner did he hear that Henry was on the way, than he hastily abandoned the siege of Cosne, recrossed the Loire, and threw himself again into Bourges. The Duke of Bedford, who found no enemy in the field, was preparing to cross the Loire in pursuit of him, when he was recalled to the dying bed of his royal brother.
If there ever was a combination of circumstances to make a death-bed hard, and cause the heart to cling tenaciously to life, they were those which surrounded Henry of Monmouth. But never, in the most trying hour of his existence, not even when he contemplated the vast hosts hemming him in on the eve of the great fight of Agincourt, did he display such unbroken firmness. For himself he expressed no anxiety and no regrets; his only solicitude was for his son and successor, still only nine months old. He called to his bedside his brother the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Warwick, and others of his lords, and to them he gave the most solemn injunctions to be faithful guardians of their infant sovereign. He expressed no remorse for the blood which he had shed in his wars, unquestionably believing all that he had so often asserted, that he was the chosen instrument of Providence for the chastisement and renovation of France.
To the Duke of Bedford he said, "Comfort my dear wife—the most afflicted creature living." He most earnestly recommended the Duke and all his commanders to cultivate the friendship of the Duke of Burgundy; never to make peace with Charles, who "called himself Dauphin," except on condition of his total renunciation of the crown; never to release the Duke of Orleans or any of the French princes of the blood taken at Agincourt; nor in any way to yield the claims of his son on France. He appointed his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, protector in England during his son's minority, and his brother the Duke of Bedford regent in France, who should avail himself on all occasions of the counsel of the Duke of Burgundy. Being assured by his physicians that he had not more than two hours to live, he then sent for his spiritual counsellors; and while they were chanting the seven penitential psalms he stopped them at the verse, "Build thou the walls of Jerusalem," and assured them that when he had completed the settlement of France he had always intended to undertake a crusade. This was precisely what his father had done on his death-bed; and this appeared still a favourite idea of the European princes. Having thus systematically concluded all his affairs, temporal and spiritual, he calmly died on the last day of August, 1422, amid the sobs and deep grief of all around him. The contemporary writer, Titus Livius of Friuli, who had seen him, thus describes his person:—"In stature he was a little above the middle size; his countenance was beautiful, his neck long, his body slender, and his limbs most elegantly formed. He was very strong; and so swift, that, with two companions, without either dogs or missive weapons, he caught a doe, one of the fleetest animals. He was a lover of music, and excelled in all martial and manly exercises." He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
HENRY VI.
Arrangements during the Minority—Condition of France—Death of Charles VI.—Bedford's Marriage—Battle of Crévant—Release of the Scottish King—Battle of Verneuil—Gloucester's Marriage and its Consequences—Rivalry of Gloucester and Beaufort—Siege of Orleans—Battle of the Herrings—Joan of Arc—The March to Orleans—Relief of the Town—March to Rheims—Coronation of Charles—The Repulse from Paris—Capture of the Maid—Her Trial and Death—Coronation of Henry—Bedford Marries again—Congress of Arras—Death of Bedford—The Tudors—Contests between Beaufort and Gloucester—Henry's Marriage—Deaths of Gloucester and Beaufort—Disasters in France—Fall and Death of Suffolk.
Henry VI., on the death of his father, was scarcely nine months old. However prosperous his father had been, and however well fortified he seemed to have left him in the care of his mother and the ability and unity of his uncles, as well as the reverence of the people for their late brilliant king, no one who had studied history, even in the smallest degree, but must have foreseen in the course of so long a minority many troubles, and probably much disaster. It would, indeed, have been a miracle if the clashing ambitions of the blood-relations, and of other great men around the infant king's throne, had not produced much trouble and civil conflict. But the prospect of his power in France was still more critical. There he was the nominal heir to a throne of which his father had not lived to obtain possession—of a kingdom not yet entirely subdued by the British arms; a kingdom naturally hostile to an English ruler; a kingdom of proud, sensitive people, who, though they had consented to the ascendency of Henry V., in order to procure some degree of repose, yet had by no means forgotten the haughty and the cruel deeds of the English in their country; above all, a kingdom in which the rightful heir to the throne was still alive—in fact, had still most devoted adherents; and who presented to their feelings the image of a young prince unjustly and unnaturally excluded from his own great patrimony by an imbecile father and a haughty conqueror.
The effect of these circumstances became first manifest in England. After the interment of Henry V., Queen Catherine retired to Windsor with her infant charge, and the Parliament proceeded to take measures for the security of the throne during the minority. The nobles during the reign of Henry V. had been held in perfect and respectful subordination by the ability and the high prestige of the king. Parliament had asserted its own, but sought not to encroach on the royal prerogative in the hands of a sovereign who showed no disposition to encroach on the popular rights. But now Parliament, and especially the House of Peers, showed unmistakable evidence of a consciousness of their augmented authority.