were overjoyed at this family peace, which lasted | about four months. Then the Orleanists took up arms to drive the Duke of Burgundy from power, and, if possible, to death. Isabella, the ex-queen of England, and the wife of the present Duke of Orleans, had died the preceding year in child-bed, and now the young duke took for his second wife Bona of Armagnac, daughter of Bernard, Count of Armagnac, and grand-daughter of the Duke of Berri. The Count of Armagnac was a man of great power, courage, and activity; and hence, from the youth and inexperience of his son-in-law, he became the real as well as nominal chief of the Orleanists, who were thence called the Armagnacsa name memorable in French history. The Duke of Berri, the Duke of Brittany, and the Count d'Alençon, took up arms, and joined the Count of Armagnac, with all the nobles of the Orleans' faction. The Duke of Burgundy was obliged to conclude a convention, and to retire from Paris, and then the young Duke of Orleans, with a naked sword in his hand, demanded justice for the death of his father. At this crisis the Duke of Burgundy applied for assistance to the King of England; and Henry immediately sent over eight hundred lances and one thousand of his best bowmen. This force, small as it was, enabled the Bourguignons, or Burgundians, to drive the Armagnacs from Paris; and in the month of October, 1411, John Sans-peur again. entered the capital, where he was received as the deliverer of France. He used his means without mercy, as far as imprisonment, fines, and forfeitures, were concerned, but he shed no blood-for he professed to have a great horror of blood. In flying from Paris, the Orleanists had made free with a treasure which the queen had deposited in the abbey of St. Denis; and from this moment Isabella cooled in her zeal for the party. Though expelled from the capital, the Armagnacs made head in the provinces on the upper Loire. The Duke of Burgundy, taking with him the poor king and the dauphin, marched against them; and, after a short campaign, laid seige to Bourges, which had become the centre of the party. John Sans-peur had not been very grateful for the opportune aid he had received from England; and it was, besides, no part of Henry's plan that one party should crush the other, or, at least, not until he had reaped his harvest out of their mad discord. The late Duke of Orleans had, indeed, been his personal enemy; but that weak man had gone to his account, and the cool-headed Bolingbroke seldom permitted any of his passions to interfere with his deep-laid schemes. The Armagnacs, who had decried that measure in the opposite faction as the extremity of baseness, now, in their turn, applied to England for assistance; and Henry listened with a ready ear to their proposals. As their condition was desperate, he drove a good bargain. In the month of May, 1412, the contracting parties-the Dukes of Berri, Orleans, and Bourbon, with the Count of Alençon (the

*

Count of Armagnac did not appear by name), agreed to acknowledge Henry as lawful Duke of Acquitaine, to assist him to recover all the rights and appurtenances of that duchy, to hold of him by homage all the lands they possessed within its limits, and to give security that the counties of Poictou and Angoulême should be restored to him on the deaths of the present possessors. Henry, on his part, agreed to assist them, as his faithful vassals, in every just quarrel; to enter into no treaty whatever with the Duke of Burgundy or any of his family without their consent, and to send to their assistance one thousand men-at-arms, and three thousand archers, to serve for three months, they paying the proper wages.* The news of this treaty could not be kept secret, for Henry's part of it was carried into almost immediate execution. Both among the Armagnacs and the Burgundians there were still many individuals of note not devoid of patriotism-wise men who saw the inevitable consequences of introducing an English army into the heart of France. Meetings and consultations were held, and, at last, a conference was agreed upon. The Duke of Burgundy met his uncle, the Duke of Berri, at a place secured by barricades outside the walls of Bourges: great precautions had been taken on either side to prevent surprise and assassination; and so the uncle and nephew embraced each other tenderly over a barrier. After a long conference, the Duke of Berri agreed that the Armagnacs would submit to the royal authority: Burgundy, in the name of the king, engaged that the past should be forgotten. It was mutually agreed that the party names of Armagnacs and Bourguignons should never again be pronounced; and that, without any distinction, all Frenchmen should enjoy their liberties and their property in the peace which God had sent them. The young Duke of Orleans was absent; but he soon after attended a family meeting, and swore, with the Duke of Burgundy and the rest of the princes, to be true to the peace of Bourges. It was further agreed that the Duke of Burgundy should give one of his daughters in marriage to the Count of Vertus, a younger son of the man he had murdered. To show their perfect reconciliation and brotherly intimacy, the two Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans rode together mounted on the same horse. The simple people, at this touching sight, shouted with joy, and sang "Gloria in excelsis;" but, adds the chronicler, evil tongues were not sparing of them behind their backs, but loudly spoke their minds about this reconciliation.†

Matters were at this point when news arrived that an English army, under the command of the Duke of Clarence, Henry's second son, had landed in Normandy, where the Count of Alençon and some other nobles had joined it. The first condition of the recent peace was, that the Armagnacs or Orleanists should break off all league and confederacy with the English. This they were ready

enough to do; and they forthwith sent a deputation to inform the Duke of Clarence that they had made their peace, and that he might return home, as they no longer wanted his assistance. The young duke demanded payment of the expenses of the expedition; and his troops, finding no proper provision made for them, began to plunder the country. An attempt was made, by promises of payments, to gain time, in order to collect an army; but, in fact, the money was the least of the objects of the young duke's consideration; and he marched on through Normandy into Maine, while another English division, issuing from Calais, occupied a great part of Artois. There was a sounding of trumpets through the whole kingdom, and every warrior in France was summoned to join the royal standard at Chartres; but the summons was not well attended to, and it was thought better really to pay the English the money they demanded. The exchequer had no means, and the Burgundians said that the English ought to be paid by those who had invited them. This was a good argument, but it certainly would not have been acted upon had it not been for this little circumstance; from Maine the Duke of Clarence had marched through Anjou, and was now threatening to overrun in an hostile manner the whole of the

duchy of Orleans. Seeing this, the Duke of Orleans hastened to the head-quarters of the English, carrying with him all the money he could raise. The Duke of Clarence received him very courteously; and it was arranged that the French prince should take upon himself the payment of the whole cost of the expedition, and place his young brother, the Duke of Angoulême, in the hands of the English as security. When this was done it was expected that Clarence would return; but this prince had no such intentions: he marched on for Guienne, and, being joined on the road by a few old friends of the English, he traversed the whole of France with an army which did not exceed eight thousand men, and got safely to Bordeaux. From the moment of concluding the agreement with the Duke of Orleans he made his soldiers cease their depredations; but as they went along, in tolerable order, the English could not help telling the French that they would soon return to carry on war in the name of their own king, Henry.* Such were the last foreign operations of this reign, which was now drawing rapidly to its close.

Although Henry had overcome every obstacle except the wholesome opposition of his parliament, and had humbled or destroyed all his enemies, his last years were far from being the happiest of his life.

His able but remorseless career,-his successes, even more than his misfortunes,—had proved to him the insecurity and hollowness of men's hearts: whatever relying faith he had in earlier life was all gone, and he felt that worst species of unhappiness which arises from a confirmed doubt as to the existence of human worth and disinterested

• Monstrelet.-Juvenal des Ursins.-Pierre de Fenin.-Villaret.Barante..

and

affection. In his busy years, when surrounded with actual dangers of all kinds, he was cheerful and communicative, and fond of talking mixing with the people; but in his later days he became gloomy, solitary, and suspicious. It is very probable that he felt some pangs of remorse, but bad health may have been the disposing cause; for, as long as he was well, he considered that he had only done what was best for his country, and that his constant success was a proof that he had acted under the favour and inspiration of Heaven. Both body and mind had been overworked: he became prematurely old, was afflicted by a cutaneous disorder, which some called the leprosy, and was subject to epileptic fits. His devotion assumed a gloomy cast. Before his accession he was suspected of being no friend to the church, and of leaning towards the doctrines of Wickliffe, as his father, John of Gaunt, had done before him. It was essentially necessary to his success that he should remove this suspicion; and hence probably, for a mere reason of state, he passed in the first year of his reign, with the hearty concurrence of both lords and commons, the detestable statute for the burning of heretics; and caused penal fires, for matters of religion, to be lighted for the first time in England. But it seems to have been from a more inward conviction that, in the tenth year of his reign, he pronounced the severest sentences against all Wickliffe's writings; and that in the following year he rejected a petition for the revocation or qualification of his statute against heretics or Lollards, and told the commons that the punishment should be made more rigorous and sharp.* It appears pretty evident that, in his latter years, he entertained a jealousy of the popularity of his own son and heir; but this is so common a feeling with kings of all times and all countries, as scarcely to deserve notice as anything remarkable in his case. It is also generally stated that the wild and dissolute conduct of the Prince of Wales was the cause of much uneasiness; but the many virtues of that prince were almost invidiously eulogized, in the latter part of this reign, by the very parliaments that treated his father most harshly; and it has been concluded by an excellent writer, that these records of parliament ought to be taken as a strong presumption that some early petulance or riot has been much exaggerated by the old chroniclers whom Shakspeare has followed with such dramatic effect. † Allowing, however, the proper weight to this reflection, we should bear in mind the difference of the worship paid to the rising and the setting sun; we should remember that it has been a not unusual practice with popular bodies to contrast the untried heir-apparent with the old king, concealing the vices and making an idol of the former; and we shall be much mistaken if we allow too much to the simplicity and honesty of the age that produced Henry of Bolingbroke. Men were as capable of pitting the son against the father at the beginning of the fifteenth as they

were at the end of the eighteenth century. But still, with every allowance for policy and party feeling, Henry may still, in the words of another judicious writer,* have been "in the number of those aspiring youths that had mixed pleasure with ambition;" and the popular tales of his youthful freaks may not be wholly without foundation. The stories usually inserted in our histories do not rest on any contemporary authority, but seem to have been first told by Hall and Stowe, who wrote in the time of Elizabeth and James I., and who probably took up their accounts from popular tradition, with the embellishments incident to such stories transmitted through many ages. The jealousy entertained by Henry of the ambition and popularity of his son has great probability in its favour; but here, again, the story of the Prince of Wales taking away the crown during one of the king's fits, with Henry's anger on the occasion, followed by his misgivings as to his right to the crown of England, rests on the authority of Monstrelet, a foreign writer, not very well ac

• Mackintosh.

*

King Henry was praying before the shrine of St. Edward, in Westminster Abbey, when he was seized with his last fit. They carried him into the apartments of the abbot, and there he lay down to die in the Jerusalem chamber; the name of which is said to have recalled an old prophecy, with the notion he had once entertained of making a crusade for the recovery of the holy city. He expired on the 20th of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh year of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign. His body was conveyed by water to Feversham, and from thence by land to Canterbury Cathedral, where he was buried by the side of the Lady Mary de Bohun, his first wife, and the mother of all his children.

The prophecy was that he should die in Jerusalem. It is probable that the visit paid to him, in the early part of his reign, by Manuel Palæologus, Emperor of Constantinople, who came to implore the aid of the English and the other nations of the West, against Bajazet and the Turks, may have had the effect of occasionally turning the active mind of Henry towards the then almost forgotten East.

deepened the favourable impressions his character had previously made. He immediately ordered that the body of Richard II. should be removed from its obscure tomb in the Friars' Church at Langly, and brought with funeral pomp to London, there to be interred among the kings of England. This was done; and after solemn obsequies, the remains of Richard were buried in Westminster Abbey, close by those of his first wife, the 'Good Queen Anne,' as he himself in his life had desired. A dead king could do no mischief; but it might have been otherwise with a living prince, whose right to the crown had been formerly proclaimed by a powerful party in the state; yet Henry released the Earl of March from the captivity in which he had been kept by his cautious predecessor, and allowed him to enjoy the estates of his father. Not long after he recalled the son of the gallant Hotspur from his long exile in Scotland, and restored to him the hereditary honours and lands of the Percies. He pursued the same generous course with other individuals, and the effect was seen in the devoted affection of men who had hitherto been most inimical to the house of Lancaster.

The first year of the new reign was, however, disturbed by a popular commotion in London, in which religious feelings were mixed up with political aspirations. During the sitting of Henry's first parliament, placards were stuck up by night on the church doors of London, stating that there were a hundred thousand men ready to assert their rights by force of arms if needful. This announcement was attributed to the religious innovators called Lollards, of whose tenets we shall have occasion to speak more at length in the next chapter. Their leader, or he on whose strength and talent they most relied, was Sir John Oldcastle, commonly called, in right of his wife, the Lord Cobham. He Was a strong man, and a metely good man of war," and he had been the intimate associate and friend of Henry when Prince of Wales. Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was a man of action, but probably not more of a persecutor than the majority of the clergy, accused Oldcastle to the king, at the moment, it appears, when he was incensed at the threats of the Lollards. Henry, however, was not in a mind to deliver up a man he esteemed to the tender mercies of an inquisition: he told the archbishop that he himself would talk with Oldcastle and try to bring him to the right way. As Henry had studied at Oxford, he was probably not unacquainted with the divinity of the schools; but his arguments failed to convince his old associate, and then Henry, like other controversialists, grew angry. A polemic and a king, backed by a bench of bishops, by an army, and by the great mass of the people, were fearful odds against a subject stout and able as he might be. Henry began to threaten and to enforce his arguments by references to the statute de heretico

Walsing. Henry attended as chief mourner in the funeral ession of Richard.

VOL. II.

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comburendo, upon which Sir John withdrew from Windsor to his manor of Cowling, in Kent. Upon this, Henry gave up his old friend to Archbishop Arundel, and issued a severe proclamation against the whole body of the sectarians, listeners as well as preachers, and the archbishop cited Oldcastle to appear in his court. Sir John would not suffer any man to serve the summons upon him, and he derided the authority of the church. Pressed by the clergy, Henry sent out an armed force, to which Oldcastle surrendered. He was carried a prisoner to the Tower, but neither captivity nor the formidable front of his accusers and judges could damp his ardour in the cause of religious reform. Alone and unsupported, he pleaded two whole days in the synod of prelates and abbots, who, however, convicted him of incorrigible heresy. He was delivered over to the secular arm, or, in other words, sentenced to the flames; but the king granted a respite for fifty days, and, before that term elapsed, Sir John contrived, or was permitted, to escape from the Tower. It is quite certain, after the lengths to which they had gone against him, that the clergy would never have permitted him to live in peace; and Oldcastle, who was a gallant and experienced soldier, may have relied on the co-operation of those who had embraced the same opinions, and may have hoped to obtain security for property and life by force of arms. It is said that he collected a great host of enthusiasts, and made an attempt to surprise the king at Eltham Palace, and that, failing in this enterprise, he ordered the Lollards from various quarters to march towards London, and assemble suddenly in St. Giles's Fields, "above Holborn," on the day after the Epiphany or Twelfth Day. The king was warned of the plot, and during the preceding day, the Mayor of London arrested several suspicious persons in the city: among others, a squire belonging to Sir John Oldcastle was seized" at the sign of the Ark, without Bishopgate." Every alderman was ordered to keep great watch in his ward; and a little after midnight, on January 7, 1414, Henry went out of London with a great force, commanding all the gates of the city to be closed, and well guarded, which was done in order to prevent the Lollards within the walls from joining those without. In the pastoral meadows of St. Giles, where it was rumoured that 25,000 insurgents were to meet under the orders of Sir John Oldcastle, he found only some fourscore men; but these, it is said, had arms upon them, and, it is added, that some of the number who were caught confessed that they had come thither to meet Sir John Oldcastle. Henry then sent detachments along several roads; but the only assemblage of any consequence surprised was one at Harengay Park, where certain lords took many Lollards, and, among them, one William Murle, a rich maltman or brewer, of Dunstable, who had his two horses, trapped with gold, following him, and a pair of gilt spurs in his bosom, for he thought to have been made a knight on the morrow by the hands of