His son and successor Philip was in his twenty-third year. He is called in history Philip-the-good for reasons perhaps as satisfactory as in the case of his great grandfather king John II. He was good tempered however, and whenever his domestic servitors, his equerries and his chamberlains came to talk with him about household matters he received them affably instead of kicking them on the shins with his jack-boots as his sire had done, and as was indeed the style in those days.
Philip had married Charles’s sister Michelle of France; but he eagerly adopted the theory of his English counsellors, that Charles was the assassin; and he went home and exclaimed O Michelle your brother has murdered my father! The poor princess threw herself into his arms and declared that his enemies were her enemies, and the tragedy worked no breach between them.
But Philip thought of nothing but revenge. He sent an envoy to the English king offering a formal alliance with him for the destruction of the French monarchy. The astonishing treaty as Hume calls it, by which this prince of the blood royal of France declared himself the enemy of his family, of his country and of that throne to which he was so nearly related that in the chapter of chances he might become its heir, is called the treaty of Troyes from Troyes in Champagne where it was signed.[8]
It was about the time of this treaty that the English court was set agog by the flirtation between Jaqueline and the duke of Gloucester, and by the application they were making to both popes to open the way to their marriage. Nothing could be more threatening to the House of Burgundy than that an English prince should acquire Holland and the other provinces that had fallen to Jaqueline; and duke Philip, notwithstanding his alliance with Henry, interfered vigorously and successfully to prevent pope Martin from annulling the previous marriage of Jaqueline. When the annulment was finally obtained from Benedict, Philip appealed to Henry himself to stop the espousals by his royal authority. But Henry was quite willing his brother should win so great a prize. There was to be sure, hazard in it; but he trusted to his own address to keep Philip quiet, and allowed the marriage to take place. Nor did he trust in vain. That gifted monarch had sounded the depths and the shallows of his ally. He knew that Philip was the most pig-headed of mortals; and that he would submit to still greater humiliations rather than give up his schemes of vengeance.
Up to this time the arms of England had been successful; but they now met with a reverse the consequences of which were far-reaching; though English historians affect either to ignore the transaction, or to refer to it as an affair of no importance. Henry had gone back to England, leaving his victorious army under the command of his brother Thomas duke of Clarence. Thomas could not forgive himself for not having been at Agincourt on that day of glory; and he resolved to have an Agincourt of his own. The French under the Marshal de Lafayette—an ancestor of our own Lafayette—were in a strong position at Beaugé. A little way off lay a body of Scotch under the earl of Buchan, ready to second the French; but the English despised the Scotch even more than they did the French, for they had beaten them oftener and at greater odds.[9]
Clarence did not hesitate to attack the French position. He was received with steadiness; and at the critical moment Buchan and his red-headed crew bore down upon the field. Clarence was slain, and his army defeated.
Henry whose opinion of the disaster was different from that of the English historians, flew back to France, and in the most obstinate of all his campaigns, succeeded in winning back the ground that had been lost. But that campaign which the defeat of Beaugé alone had rendered necessary, was fatal to him. Worn out with care, fatigue and exposure he lay dying at Vincennes.
He called to him his next brother John duke of Bedford, appointed him regent of France, and enjoined upon him always to preserve the friendship and alliance of the duke of Burgundy, as essential to the conquest of the kingdom. He constituted his brother Humphrey regent of England, and adjured him never to leave that island while the war lasted. These two injunctions had the same drift, and showed what was weighing upon Henry’s mind. He had been confident of his own power to obviate the mischief threatened by the English marriage of Jaqueline, but he was not sure his brothers would be equal to it; and the apprehension was not ill founded.
The monarch died and was embalmed and sent to England. He was perhaps the greatest of England’s kings. His chief faults were cruelty and arrogance, and they both stood in his way. Assuming to be king of France he regarded as a traitor worthy of death every Frenchman who resisted him. This theory drove the French into that tenacious defence of their towns which checked his progress; and at the same time his haughty airs alienated the Burgundian nobles. Dare you look me in the face when you speak to me? said he to L’isle Adam, Philip’s governor of Paris. Sire, replied the Burgundian, there lives not the man that I look not in the face when I speak to him.
A few weeks after Henry’s death, his poor crazy father-in-law Charles VI. was laid beside his ancestors in the abbey of Saint Denis. Not a single prince of the House of Valois followed him to his grave. Not a single prince of any blood save the duke of Bedford alone who conducted the obsequies. As they turned away from his tomb, the good monks of the abbey who had sung the requiem, fell into a dispute with the servants of the king’s household about the possession of some ornaments that had been used in the funeral. From words they come to blows, and the battle waxed so fierce that Bedford and his suite were fain to turn back and strike right and left to quell the tumult.