Agincourt
Henry V., the Prince Hal of Shakespeare's dramas, developed from a foolish prince into a wise king, but he was not wise enough to resist the temptation, given him by the rivalry between the French king and the powerful Duke, to regain what England once held on the Continent. He was wise enough, however, to conduct his campaign in a different manner from that in which former leaders of English armies in France had waged war. The Black Prince and others had marched, conquering and raiding, into the country, with very little apparent plan. Henry V.'s first enterprise was indeed rather of the same kind, and nearly ended in a disastrous failure. But he turned the threatened disaster into a resounding victory in the battle of Agincourt. The chivalry of France was caught up in marshy ground, and the archers of England shot them down. It was a repetition of Crécy and of Poitiers. The slaughter of Frenchmen of distinction and high birth was very great, and this wonderful victory made the English soldier a terror in France for years to come.
But the danger, from which only a wonderful victory could have rescued him, seems to have taught Henry a lesson. In his next campaign he set to work in a methodical way to conquer Normandy, making the country safe behind him as he progressed. It was a slower way than that of the Black Prince, but far more sure.
The French king was kept busy by Burgundy. He could send no help to his vassal of Normandy, and the whole of Normandy fell into Henry's hand. The Burgundians meantime had captured Paris; and now a desperate deed of treachery was done by the heir to the French throne. The actual King of France was insane, and incapable of taking any part in the government.
To break, as he thought, the Burgundian power, the Dauphin, that is, the eldest son of the king, murdered the Duke of Burgundy even as the latter knelt before him to do homage. The Duke's purpose in doing this homage was to unite the forces of Burgundy and France against the growing power of Henry. After this desperate deed the Burgundians deemed it their best course to make terms with Henry, and the terms they made were that he should marry the daughter of the mad King of France and should be placed, with the help of Burgundy, on the French throne as soon as the mad king died—excluding the Dauphin from the succession.
They were terms which committed Henry to a constant war with the Dauphin's forces. In this he was consistently successful; but the project formed by his treaty with the Burgundians was broken by his early death. Henry VI., his son and successor as King of England, was then two years old.
The English regent, who had charge of the kingdom while Henry VI. was under full age, carried on the war in France against the party of the Dauphin. And it was waged with steady success, so that the Dauphin, now come to the throne as Charles VII., was on the point of giving up all as lost, when the tide of England's victory was checked and then turned back by one of the most wonderful persons whom we meet in the whole course of the story—Joan of Arc.
This peasant girl, becoming prophetess, led the soldiers of France to victory and inspired them with the belief that heaven was on their side. From that moment the tide turned and all went in France's favour. The "Maid of Orleans," Joan herself, was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and to our shame was burnt by the English as a heretic. But the French successes continued, none the less; the Burgundians wavered and went over to the King of France again; and precisely in the middle year of the fifteenth century, 1450, the English lost Normandy and all their hold on Northern France.
Three years later that strip of Guienne, the coast line from Bordeaux southward, went the same way, and England was left with not a foot of French soil except the town of Calais.
And now it would seem as if England might at length hope to settle her own troubles within her island boundaries. If that was a hope which any men of that day entertained it was grievously disappointed, for she was just about to enter on those terrible years of civil war between the two great dukedoms of York and Lancaster, each claiming the throne, which went on during nearly all the latter half of the century. For their badge and emblem the Yorkists had a white rose and the Lancastrians a red, and from these roses those dreadful wars are known as the Wars of the Roses.