Isabel and the king and Burgundy meanwhile escaped to Troyes, while the dauphin marched to Montereau with twenty thousand men. The dauphin then despatched Tanneguy du Châtel to invite the duke to Montereau; but Burgundy for some days deferred giving any answer, saying that the dauphin ought to come to his father, the king, and the queen at Troyes.' This, however, the dauphin declined to do; and at length the duke consented to an interview with him on the bridge at Montereau. The result was tragical. They had scarcely met, when Tanneguy du Châtel struck down Burgundy with his battle-axe, and others rushed forward and completed the murder before the dauphin's eyes.

At the time when Burgundy was assassinated his son Philip, Count of Charolais, who had married Michelle, one of the daughters of Charles and Isabel, was at Ghent; and to that city the news was carried to him.

'My lord, what ails you?' asked the young wife in alarm.

'Michelle,' replied he, turning to the princess, my father has been murdered by your brother,' and he resolved on allying himself with the English.

Isabel and the king, with their daughter Katherine, were at Troyes when they heard of the catastrophe, and they were greatly displeased. In fact, every hope of resisting the English now vanished; and both parties having applied to Henry, he consented to an alliance with the young Duke of Burgundy on condition of receiving the hand of Katherine, the regency of France for the present, and the crown after the death of Charles. The court of France being in no condition to trifle longer with the invader, agreed to all he asked; and, a treaty having been signed at Troyes in the April of 1420, Henry and Katherine were soon after united in the church of St. Peter.

Isabel's importance was now gone. It is true that while her husband lived, and her son-in-law ruled France,

she was still, on great occasions, a pretty conspicuous figure in Paris. But Charles and his spouse were king and queen but in name; and when the chronicler describes their state on the occasion of their daughter's return from England, he describes a king whose sceptre has passed away, and a court from which the glory had departed.

On the 21st of May in this year, 1422, Katherine, Queen of England, who had been some time recovered of her lying-in of her first-born child, Henry, arrived at Harfleur in grand state, attended by ladies without number, and escorted by a large fleet filled with men-at-arms and archers under the command of the Duke of Bedford, brother to the king. On landing she went to Rouen, and thence to the castle of Vincennes to meet the king.

'King Henry departed from Meaux with the princes to meet her; and she was received by them as if she had been an angel from heaven. Great rejoicings were made by the King and Queen of France for the happy arrival of their sonin-law and their daughter; and on the 30th of May, Whitsun eve, the kings of France and of England, accompanied by their queens, left Vincennes and entered Paris with much pomp. The King and Queen of France were lodged at the Hôtel of St. Pol, and the King of England and his company at the Louvre.

'In each of these places the two kings solemnly celebrated the feast of Pentecost, which fell on the day after their arrival.

'On this day the King and Queen of England were seated at the table gorgeously apparelled, having crowns on their heads. The English princes, dukes, knights, and prelates were partakers of the feast; and the tables were covered with the rarest viands and choicest wines. The king and queen this day held a grand court, which was attended by all the English at Paris; and the Parisians went to the Louvre to see the king and queen at table crowned with their most precious diadems; but as no

meat or drink was offered to the populace, they went away discontented.

'For, in former times, when the Kings of France kept open court, meat and drink were distributed abundantly by the king's servants. King Charles, indeed, had been as liberal and courteous as his predecessors. But he was now seated in his Hôtel of St. Pol, at table with his queen, deserted by his grandees and others of his subjects, as if he had been quite forgotten. The government and power of the kingdom were now transferred from his hands into those of his son-in-law, King Henry, and he had so little share, that he was managed as the King of England pleased, and no attention was paid him.'*

The days of the hero-king and of his unfortunate fatherin-law were both numbered. On the 3rd of August, 1422, Henry breathed his last at Vincennes; on the 22nd of October Charles expired at the Hôtel of St. Pol. The Duke of Bedford, who was named Regent of France during the minority of his nephew, Henry VI., had even fewer motives than his departed brother to treat Isabel with particular distinction; and the widowed queen had to atone for the errors of her youth and womanhood by an old age of misery and neglect.

When, in 1431, Henry, then a boy of ten, was taken to Paris to be crowned, Isabel was not allowed to have an interview with her grandson. Her mortification must have been extreme. However she did see him from a window as he rode past the Hôtel de St. Pol, after his coronation. The young king saluted her; and she, having returned it, retired from the window in tears.

Isabel might well weep, for her humiliation was great; and the influence of the once powerful queen fell so low, that people even ventured, to her face, to remind her of her frailties, and to assert that the dauphin was not the son of

*Monstrelet's Chronicle.

King Charles. It is supposed that such raillery wounded her so deeply as ultimately to cause her death.

It was at the Hôtel St. Pol, where she had resided since her husband's death, that Isabel, on the 30th of September, 1435, drew her last breath. Her body was conveyed for interment to St. Denis, and laid by the side of her husband in the ancient sepulchre of the Kings of France; but her heart was deposited in the church of the Celestins, hard by the spot where, thirty years earlier, the mangled corpse of the murdered Orleans had found a resting place. Neither pomp nor ceremony was observed at her funeral. Indeed, it is stated that, to save expense, the coffin was conveyed in a small boat to St. Denis, attended only by five persons, and chroniclers record that the widowed queen closed her life in poverty and obscurity, hated by the French and despised by the English.

271

Valentine Visconti, Duchess of Orleans.

FRO

ROISSART relates that when Isabel of Bavaria, in 1389, made her celebrated entry into Paris, and when the queen and a crowd of ladies began the procession 'in open litters, most richly ornamented,' there was one exception: 'the Duchess of Touraine was not in a litter; but, to display herself the more, was mounted on a palfrey magnificently caparisoned, led by the Count de la Marche and the Count de Nevers.' A little vanity, however, was not unpardonable under the circumstances; and the duchess, then about twenty-three, and of remarkable beauty, could hardly have taken a better way of making a favourable impression on the theatrical people among whom she had just come as a stranger.

The duchess was a daughter of the house of Visconti, who had risen to high rank by taking the winning side in the struggle of Louis of Bavaria and Charles of Bohemia for the imperial crown. On the way from Aix-la-Chapelle, the Emperor Charles was so magnificently entertained by the Visconti, that he bestowed on them the title of Duke of Milan and the territory of the Milanese. One of them, Galeas de Visconti, advanced his fortune by espousing, in 1350, Blanche, daughter of the Count of Savoy; and had a son, John Galeas, for whom he was ambitious of forming a still higher alliance.

Events favoured the Duke of Milan's aspirations. At that time John, King of France, taken at Poictiers, was a