The duke took leave of the king, said business required his presence in Flanders, and went off as fast as he could.
When it was known that he had gone, there was a feeling of regret and disquietude amongst the sensible and sober burgesses at Paris. What they wanted was peace; and in order to have it the adherence of the Duke of Burgundy was indispensable. Whilst he was present, there might be hope of winning him or forcing him over to it; but, whilst he was absent, headstrong as he was known to be, a renewal of war was the most probable contingency. And this result appeared certain when it was seen how the princes hostile to the Duke of Burgundy, above all, Duke Charles of Orleans, the Count of Armagnac and their partisans hastened back to Paris, and resumed their ascendency with the king and in his council. The dauphin, Louis Duke of Aquitaine, united himself by the ties of close friendship with the Duke of Orleans, and prevailed upon him to give up the mourning he had worn since his father’s murder; the two princes appeared everywhere dressed alike; the scarf of Armagnac re-placed that of Burgundy; the feelings of the populace changed as the fashion of the court; and when children sang in the streets the song but lately in vogue, “Burgundy’s duke, God give thee joy!” they were struck and hurled to the ground. Facts were before long in accordance with appearances. After a few pretences of arrangement the Duke of Burgundy took up arms and marched on Paris. Charles VI., on his side, annulled, in the presence of Parliament, all acts adverse to the Duke of Orleans and his adherents; and the king, the queen, and the dauphin bound themselves by oath not to treat with the duke of Burgundy until they had destroyed his power. At the end of March, 1414, the king’s army was set in motion; Compiegne, Soissons, and Bapaume, which held out for the Duke of Burgundy, were successively taken by assault or surrendered; the royal troops treated the people as vanquished rebels; and the four great communes of Flanders sent a deputation to the king to make protestations of their respect and an attempt to arrange matters between their lord and his suzerain. Animosity was still too lively and too recent in the king’s camp to admit of satisfaction with a victory as yet incomplete. On the 28th of July began the siege of Arras; but after five weeks the besiegers had made no impression; an epidemic came upon them; the Duke of Bavaria and the constable, Charles d’Albret, were attacked by it; weariness set in on both sides; the Duke of Burgundy’ himself began to be anxious about his position; and he sent the Duke of Brabant, his brother, and the Countess of Hainault, his sister, to the king and the dauphin, with more submissive words than he had hitherto deigned to utter. The Countess of Hainault, pleading the ties of family and royal interests, managed to give the dauphin a bias towards peace; and the dauphin in his turn worked upon the mind of the king, who was becoming more and more feeble and accessible to the most opposite impressions. It was in vain that the most intimate friends of the Duke of Orleans tried to keep the king steadfast in his wrath from night to morning. One day, when he was still in bed, one of them softly approaching and putting his hand under the coverlet, said, plucking him by the foot, “My lord, are you asleep?” “No, cousin,” answered the king; “you are quite welcome; is there anything new?” “No, sir; only that your people report that if you would assault Arras there would be good hope of effecting an entry.” “But if my cousin of Burgundy listens to reason, and puts the town into my hands without assault, we will make peace.” “What! sir; you would make peace with this wicked, this disloyal man who so cruelly had your brother slain?” “But all was forgiven him with the consent of my nephew of Orleans,” said the king mournfully. “Alas! sir, you will never see that brother again.” “Let me be, cousin,” said the king, impatiently; “I shall see him again on the day of judgment.”
Notwithstanding this stubborn way of working up the irreconcilable enmities which caused divisions in the royal family, peace was decided upon and concluded at Arras, on the 4th of September, 1414, on conditions as vague as ever, which really put no end to the causes of civil war, but permitted the king on the one hand and the Duke of Burgundy on the other, to call themselves and to wear an appearance of being reconciled. A serious event which happened abroad at that time was heavily felt in France, reawakened the spirit of nationality, and opened the eyes of all parties a little to the necessity of suspending their own selfish disagreements. Henry IV., King of England, died on the 20th of March, 1413. Having been chiefly occupied with the difficulties of his own government at home, he, without renouncing the war with France, had not prosecuted it vigorously, and had kept it in suspense or adjournment by a repetition of truces. Henry V., his son and successor, a young prince of five and twenty, active, ambitious, able, and popular, gave, from the very moment of his accession, signs of having bolder views, which were not long coming to maturity, in respect of his relations with France. The Duke of Burgundy had undoubtedly anticipated them, for, as soon as he was cognizant of Henry IV.‘s death, he made overtures in London for the marriage of his daughter Catherine with the new King of England, and he received at Bruges an English embassy on the subject. When this was known at Paris, the council of Charles VI. sent to the Duke of Burgundy Sire de Dampierre and the Bishop of Evreux bearing letters to him from the king “which forbade him, on pain of forfeiture and treason, to enter into any treaty with the King of England, either for his daughter’s marriage or for any other cause.” But the views of Henry V. soared higher than a marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. It was to the hand of the King of France’s daughter, herself also named Catherine, that he made pretension, flattering himself that he would find in this union aid in support of his pretences to the crown of France. These pretences he put forward, hardly a year after his accession to the throne, basing them, as Edward III. had done, on the alleged right of Isabel of France, wife of Edward II., to succeed King John. No reply was vouchsafed from Paris to this demand. Only the Princess Catherine, who was but thirteen, was presented to the envoys of the King of England, and she struck them as being tall and beautiful. A month later, in August, 1414, Henry V. gave Charles VI. to understand that he would be content with a strict execution of the treaty of Bretigny, with the addition of Normandy, Anjou, and Maine, and the hand of the Princess Catherine with a dowry of two million crowns. The war between Charles VI. and John the Fearless caused a suspension of all negotiations on this subject; but, after the peace of Arras, in January, 1415, a new and solemn embassy from England arrived at Paris, and the late proposals were again brought forward. The ambassadors had a magnificent reception; splendid presents and entertainments were given them; but no answer was made to their demands; they were only told that the King of France was about to send an embassy to the King of England. It did not set out before the 27th of the following April; the Archbishop of Bourges, the most eloquent prelate in the council, was its spokesman; and it had orders to offer the King of England the hand of the Princess Catherine with a dowry of eight hundred and forty thousand golden crowns, besides fifteen towns in Aquitaine and the seneschalty of Limoges. Henry V. rejected these offers, declaring that, if he did not get Normandy and all the districts ceded by the treaty of Bretigny, he would have recourse to war to recover a crown which belonged to him. To this arrogant language the Archbishop of Bourges replied, “O king, what canst thou be thinking of that thou wouldst fain thus oust the King of the French, our lord, the most noble and excellent of Christian kings, from the throne of so powerful a kingdom? Thinkest thou that it is for fear of thee and of the English that he hath made thee an offer of his daughter together with so great a sum and a portion of his land? Nay, verily; he was moved by pity and the love of peace; he would not that the innocent blood should be spilt and Christian people destroyed in the hurly-burly of battle. He will invoke the aid of God Almighty, of the blessed virgin Mary, and of all the saints. Then by his own arms and those of his loyal subjects, vassals, and allies, thou wilt be driven from his kingdom, and, peradventure, meet with death or capture.”
On returning to Paris the ambassadors, in presence of the king’s council and a numerous assembly of clergy, nobility, and people, gave an account of their embassy and advised instant preparation for war without listening to a single word of peace. “They loudly declared,” says the monk of St. Denis, “that King Henry’s letters, though they were apparently full of moderation, had lurking at the bottom of them a great deal of perfidy, and that this king, all the time that he was offering peace and union in the most honeyed terms, was thinking only how he might destroy the kingdom, and was levying troops in all quarters.” Henry V., indeed, in November, 1414, demanded of his Parliament a large subsidy, which was at once voted without any precise mention of the use to be made of it, and merely in the terms following: “For the defence of the realm of England and the security of the seas.” At the commencement of the following year, Henry resumed negotiations with France, renouncing his claims to Normandy, Anjou, and Maine; but Charles VI. and his council adhered to their former offers. On the 16th of April, 1415, Henry announced to a grand council of spiritual and temporal peers, assembled at Westminster, his determination “of setting out in person to go and, by God’s grace, recover his heritage.” He appointed one of his brothers, the Duke of Bedford, to be regent in his absence, and the peers, ecclesiastical and laical, applauded his design, promising him their sincere co-operation. Thus France, under a poor mad king and amidst civil dissensions of the most obstinate character, found the question renewed for her of French versus English king-ship and national independence versus foreign conquest.
On the 14th of August, 1415, an English fleet, having on board, together with King Henry V., six thousand men-at-arms, twenty-four thousand archers, powerful war-machines, and a multitude of artisans and “small folk,” came to land near Harfleur, not far from the mouth of the Seine. It was the most formidable expedition that had ever issued from the ports of England. The English spent several days in effecting their landing and setting up their siege-train around the walls of the city. “It would have been easy,” says the monk of St. Denis, “to hinder their operations, and the inhabitants of the town and neighborhood would have worked thereat with zeal, if they had not counted that the nobility of the district and the royal army commanded by the constable, Charles d’Albret, would come to their aid.” No one came. The burgesses and the small garrison of Harfleur made a gallant defence; but, on the 22d of September, not receiving from Vernon, where the king and the dauphin were massing their troops, any other assistance than the advice to “take courage and trust to the king’s discretion,” they capitulated; and Henry V., after taking possession of the place, advanced into the country with an army already much reduced by sickness, looking for a favorable point at which to cross the Somme and push his invasion still farther. It was not until the 19th of October that he succeeded, at Bethencourt, near St. Quentin. Charles VI., who at that time had a lucid interval, after holding at Rouen a council of war, at which it was resolved to give the English battle, wished to repair with the dauphin, his son, to Bapaume, where the French army had taken position; but his uncle, the Duke of Berry, having still quite a lively recollection of the battle of Poitiers, fought fifty-nine’ years before, made opposition, saying, “Better lose the battle than the king and the battle.” All the princes of the royal blood and all the flower of the French nobility, except the king and his three sons, and the Dukes of Berry, Brittany, and Burgundy, joined the army. The Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, and the Constable d’Albret, who was in command, sent to ask the King of England on what day and at what place he would be pleased to give them battle. “I do not shut myself up in walled towns,” replied Henry; “I shall be found at any time and any where ready to fight, if any attempt be made to cut off my march.” The French resolved to stop him between Agincourt and Framecourt, a little north of St. Paul and Hesdin. The encounter took place on the 25th of October, 1415. It was a monotonous and lamentable repetition of the disasters of Crecy and Poitiers; disasters almost inevitable, owing to the incapacity of the leaders and ever the same defects on the part of the French nobility, defects which rendered their valorous and generous qualities not only fruitless, but fatal. Never had that nobility been more numerous and more brilliant than in this premeditated struggle. On the eve of the battle, Marshal de Boucicaut had armed five hundred new knights; the greater part passed the night on horse-back, under arms, on ground soaked with rain; and men and horses were already distressed in the morning, when the battle began. It were tedious to describe the faulty manoeuvres of the French army and their deplorable consequences on that day. Never was battle more stubborn or defeat more complete and bloody. Eight thousand men of family, amongst whom were a hundred and twenty lords bearing their own banners, were left on the field of battle. The Duke of Brabant, the Count of Nevers, the Duke of Bar, the Duke of Alencon, and the Constable d’Albret were killed. The Duke of Orleans was dragged out wounded from under the dead. When Henry V., after having spent several hours on the field of battle, retired to his quarters, he was told that the Duke of Orleans would neither eat nor drink. He went to see him. “What fare, cousin?” said he. “Good, my lord.” “Why will you not eat or drink?” “I wish to fast.” “Cousin,” said the king, gently, “make good cheer: if God has granted me grace to gain the victory, I know it is not owing to my deserts; I believe that God wished to punish the French; and, if all I have heard is true, it is no wonder, for they say that never were seen disorder, licentiousness, sins, and vices like what is going on in France just now. Surely, God did well to be angry.” It appears that the King of England’s feeling was that also of many amongst the people of France. “On reflecting upon this cruel mishap,” says the monk of St. Denis, “all the inhabitants of the kingdom, men and women, said, ‘In what evil days are we come into this world that we should be witnesses of such confusion and shame!’” During the battle the eldest son of Duke John the Fearless, the young Count of Charolais (at that time nineteen), who was afterwards Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was at the castle of Aire, where his governors kept him by his father’s orders and prevented him from joining the king’s army. His servants were leaving him one after another to go and defend the kingdom against the English.
When he heard of the disaster at Agincourt he was seized with profound despair at having failed in that patriotic duty; he would fain have starved himself to death, and he spent three whole days in tears, none being able to comfort him. When, four years afterwards, he became Duke of Burgundy, and during his whole life, he continued to testify his keen regret at not having fought in that cruel battle, though it should have cost him his life, and he often talked with his servants about that event of grievous memory. When his father, Duke John, received the news of the disaster at Agincourt, he also exhibited great sorrow and irritation; he had lost by it his two brothers, the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Nevers; and he sent forthwith a herald to the King of England, who was still at Calais, with orders to say, that in consequence of the death of his brother, the Duke of Brabant, who was no vassal of France, and held nothing in fief there, he, the Duke of Burgundy, did defy him mortally (fire and sword) and sent him his gauntlet. “I will not accept the gauntlet of so noble and puissant a prince as the Duke of Burgundy,” was Henry V.‘s soft answer; “I am of no account compared with him. If I have had the victory over the nobles of France, it is by God’s grace. The death of the Duke of Brabant hath been an affliction to me; but I do assure thee that neither I nor my people did cause his death. Take back to thy master his gauntlet; if he will be at Boulogne on the 15th of January next, I will prove to him by the testimony of my prisoners and two of my friends, that it was the French who accomplished his brother’s destruction.”