Second invasion of France.—Conquest of Normandy.
Having come to an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy, and obtained from him a promise of neutrality, Henry invaded France for the second time in the summer of 1417. He took with him an army of somewhat over 16,000 men, landed in Normandy, and began to reduce one after another all the fortresses of that province. Utterly humbled by the memory of Agincourt, the Armagnacs made no attempt to meet him in the open field. Some of the Norman towns held out gallantly enough, but they got no aid from without. At the end of a year the whole duchy, save its capital, the city of Rouen, was in English hands. Henry then assumed the state of Duke of Normandy, and put the whole land under orderly government, a boon it had not enjoyed for twenty years. He gave Norman baronies and earldoms to many of his English followers, and handed over the control of the cities to burghers of the Burgundian faction, who served the English readily enough, out of their hatred for the Armagnacs. For thirty years Normandy was to remain English. Rouen was added to the rest of the duchy after a long siege of six months, in which half the population perished by hunger. Irritated by this long resistance, Henry imposed on it the harsh terms of a ransom of 300,000 crowns, and hung Alain Blanchart, the citizen who had been the soul of the obstinate defence (January, 1419).
While the conquest of Normandy was in progress, the French factions had been more bitterly at strife than ever. In 1418 the Burgundian party in Paris rose against their rivals, and massacred every man on whom they could lay hands, including Bernard of Armagnac himself. The control of the party of the feudal noblesse then passed into the hands of the young dauphin Charles, the heir of France.
Murder of the Duke of Burgundy.
The fall of Rouen, however, frightened John of Burgundy, and unwilling that France should fall wholly into the power of his ally King Henry, he made proposals for a reconciliation with the Dauphin and his Armagnac followers. The treacherous young prince accepted the overtures with apparent cordiality, and invited Duke John to meet him on the bridge of Montereau to settle terms of peace. But when Burgundy came to the conference, he was deliberately slain by the Armagnac captains, in the presence and with the consent of the Dauphin (August, 1419).
Treaty of Troyes.
The murder of Montereau was destined to make Henry master of France. When Philip of Burgundy, the son of Duke John, heard of his father's death, he vowed unending war against the Dauphin and his faction, and took the field to help the English to complete the conquest of France. Nor was Philip of Burgundy the only helper that Henry secured: the Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria, bitterly hated her son the Dauphin, and was glad to do him an evil turn. She proposed that Charles should be disinherited, and that the crown should pass with her favourite daughter Catherine to the hands of the English king. So at Troyes, in Champagne, Henry, Philip of Burgundy, and Queen Isabella concluded a formal treaty by which Henry received Catherine to wife, and was to succeed to the French throne on the death of his father-in-law, the old King Charles VI., who still lingered on in complete imbecility (June 2, 1420).
Henry master of Northern France.
The treaty of Troyes put Paris and the greater part of Northern France into Henry's hands. Casting national feeling aside in their bitter partisan spirit, the Burgundian faction everywhere accepted the King of England as the lawful regent and governor of France. South of the Loire the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends still held their own, but north of it they only possessed scattered fortresses dotted about in Picardy, the Isle-de-France, and Champagne, from Boulogne in the north to Orleans in the south.