After taking formal possession of Paris and holding a great meeting of the Estates of the French realm at Rouen, Henry returned in triumph to England with his young wife. He had reached a pitch of success in war such as no English king had ever attained before, and the nation, blinded by the personal merits of its king and gorged with the plunder of France, forgave him all his faults. The waste of life and money, the never-ending persecution of the Lollards, the precarious tenure of the conquests in France—due, in sober truth, merely to the aid of the Burgundian faction—were all forgotten.
Defeat of the English at Beaugé.
Henry had not long been in England, when bad news crossed the Channel after him. He had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a small army, to hold Maine against the Dauphin's adherents. But the Armagnac bands had lately been strengthened by succours from Scotland, under the Earl of Buchan, the son of the regent Albany. For, although the King of Scots had been a prisoner in English hands for ten years and more, his subjects and his uncle the regent were not thereby constrained to keep the peace with England. Pushing forward rashly to attack the Scots and Armagnacs, Clarence was routed and slain at Beaugé (1421). The enemy at once overran Maine, and began to infest the borders of Normandy.
Henry's third expedition.
This compelled the king to cross once more over the sea in order to repair his brother's disastrous defeat. In a campaign extending from the summer of 1421 to that of the following year, he cleared the Dauphin's army out of their foothold north of the Loire, and then proceeded to starve out one by one their isolated strongholds in the north of France, the chief of which were Dreux and Meaux.
Siege of Meaux.—Death of Henry.
It was during the siege of Meaux, which continued all the winter of 1421 and spring of 1422, that Henry's health began to give dangerous signs of breaking up. He had been campaigning from his boyhood, and had never hitherto shown any weakness of constitution. But the winter colds of 1421-2, or the camp-fever bred in the trenches during the long siege of Meaux, had brought him very low. He was carried back toward Paris in a desperate state of weakness from ague and dysentery. Soon after, to the horror and dismay of the English and their French partisans, he died at the castle of Vincennes on August 31, 1422, before he had attained his thirty-fifth year.