By C. E. BISHOP.

VIII.—THE LAST GREAT INVADER OF FRANCE.

You remember Franklin’s story of the speckled axe; how he turned the grindstone to polish it up nice, and, tiring of the revolutions, concluded he “liked a speckled axe best.” There was a king of England who had a very speckled character and the people of England (who turned the grindstone for him) long liked their king’s speckled character best of all the kings that they had known.

When Prince of Wales he “cut up” so that he got the name of “Madcap Harry,” some of the most amusing of his pranks being highway robbery and burglary, for all which he was admired in his day and immortalized, along with Jack Falstaff, by Shakspere. One of the light spots on this character is his obedience to the commitment by Chief Justice Gascoigne; and although it belongs to the realm of tradition, it is so pleasant to believe and is so quaintly told by Lord Campbell that we’ll e’en accept it: One of the Prince’s gang of cut purses had been captured and imprisoned by Gascoigne, and the Prince came into court and demanded his release, which was denied. The Prince, says the chronicle, “being set all in a fury, all chafed and in a terrible maner, came up to the place of jugement, men thinking that he would have slain the juge, or have done to him some damage; but the juge sitting still without moving, declaring the majestie of the king’s place of jugement, and with an assured and bolde countenance, had to the Prince these words following: ‘Sir, remember yourself. I kepe here the place of the kinge, your soveraine lorde and father, to whom ye owe double obedience: wherefore eftsoones in his name I charge you desiste of your wilfulness and unlawfull enterprise, and from hensforth give good example to those whiche hereafter shall be your propre subjectes. And nowe, for your contempte and disobedience, go you to the prison of the Kinge’s Benche, whereunto I committe you, and remain ye there prisoner untill the pleasure of the kinge, your father, be further knowen.’”

The prince’s better nature, and a sense of his family’s precarious situation before the law perhaps, induced him to accept the sentence and go to jail. On hearing this the king is recorded as saying: “O merciful God, how much am I bound to your infinite goodness, especially for that you have given me a juge who feareth not to minister justice, and also a sonne, who can suffre semblably and obeye justice.”

In keeping with this wonderful “spasm of good behavior” is the sudden change that came over the Madcap as soon as he became King Henry V. He became as remarkable for his austere piety as he had been for his wickedness. Unfortunately, his piety took the shape of burning Lollards (the shouting Methodists of that day), and he signed the warrant under which the brave and innocent Sir John Oldcastle, his old friend and boon companion, was hung up in chains over a slow fire.

There could be but two outlets in those days for such a degree of piety as Henry had achieved: as whatever he undertook must be bloody and cruel, the choice lay between a crusade or an invasion of France. As the latter promised the most booty and least risk he seemed to have a call in that direction. The attempt seemed about equal to an able bodied man attacking a paralytic patient in bed. The king of France was insane: his heir was worthless and lazy; the queen regent was an unfaithful wife and an unnatural mother, who took sides with the faction that was trying to dethrone the king and destroy his and her son. The kingdom was torn to pieces by civil strife between the Orleanists and the Burgundians, each vying with the other in cruelty, treachery, violence and plundering the government and outraging the people. There was an awful state of affairs—just the chance for a valiant English king.

Henry put up a demand for the French crown, under the pseudo claim of Edward III., whose house his father had deposed. A usurper claiming a neighbor’s crown by virtue of the usurped title of an overturned and disinherited dynasty; as if one stealing a crown got all the reversions of that crown by right. Henry would have made a good claim agent in our day! And the English people, with the remembrance of Cressy and Poictiers, of the Black Prince, and the captive King of France, and all the booty and cheap glory that made England so rich and vain sixty years before, fell in with Henry’s amiable designs on France. It was perfectly clear to the whole nation, from the chief justice down to the clodhopper, that Henry’s claim to the crown of France was a clear and indefeasible one; that the war would be for a high and holy right—and could not fail to pay.

And this was the main object of Henry after all: to divert the kingdom’s attention from his own usurped title by a foreign war; to fortify usurpation at home by attempted usurpation abroad. His father had enjoined upon him this policy, in Shakspere’s words—

So in July, 1415, Henry and 30,000 more patriots, sailed across the channel on 1,500 ships and landed unopposed at the mouth of the Seine. It took them six weeks and cost half the army to reduce the Castle of Harfleur, surrounded by a swamp, and then his generals advised him to abandon the campaign. But he dare not go back to his insecure throne with failure written on his very first attempt at glory; the expedition had cost too much money and he must have something to show for it. So boldly enough he struck for the heart of France.

This whole campaign was a close copy after the invasion by Edward III. in 1346. There was the same unopposed march to the walls of Paris, almost over the same ground; the retreat before a tardy French host; the lucky crossing of the river Somme, over the identical Blanchetacque Ford, and the bringing to bay of the English by many times their own number of French, were all faithfully repeated; while the battle of Agincourt took place only a short distance from the field of Cressy, and in its main features was a repetition of that engagement. But in one respect, honorable to him, Henry did not copy after Edward and the Black Prince. He forbade all plundering and destruction; a soldier who stole the pix from a church at Corby was instantly executed.

The description of the scenes before the battle, when,

the contrary despondency of the English, the lofty, heroic tone of Henry with his men, when he declared gaily he was glad there were no more of them to share the honor of whipping ten to one of the French; and his proclamation that any man who had no stomach for this fight might depart; we “could not die in that man’s company that fears his fellowship to die with us.” But his humble prostration in the solitude of his own tent when he prayed piteously,—

All this makes up one of Shakspere’s most moving scenes. The action and the result of this battle are as inexplicable as those of Cressy and Poictiers. We know that now, as then, the sturdy English archers did their fearful execution on the massed French. France had learned nothing in seventy years of defeats and adversity; she had no infantry, entrusted no peasantry with arms: still depended on gentlemen alone to defend France—and again the gentlemen failed her. Sixty thousand were packed in a narrow passage between two dense forests. On this mass the bowmen fired their shafts until these were exhausted. Then throwing away their bows, swinging their axes and long knives, and planting firmly in the earth in front of them their steel-pointed pikes, they waited the charge of the French chivalry. The mud was girth-deep. The horses stumbled under their heavily-armored riders. Such as reached the English line struck the horrid pikes and were hewn down by the stalwart axmen. They break and retreat, carrying dismay and confusion to the main body. The pikes are pulled up, and the line advanced. A charge of English knights is hurled upon the broken mass of French, and their return is covered by the axmen, who advance and form another line of pikes to meet the countercharge of French. So it goes on, until the French host is a mob, and the English are everywhere among them, hewing, stabbing, and thrusting. “So great grew the mass of the slain,” said an eye-witness, “and of those who were overthrown among them, that our people ascended the very heaps, which had increased higher than a man, and butchered their adversaries below with swords and other weapons.” It all lasted three hours before the French could be called defeated, for they were so numerous and were packed so closely that even retreat was long impossible. Before the battle had been decided, every Englishman had four or five prisoners on his hands, whom he was holding for ransoms. This was the grand chance to recoup all their losses and sufferings and grievous denial of plunder. This was a predicament for a victorious army, and if a small force of the French had made a rally they might then have reversed their defeat on the scattered English. Henry tried to avert such a catastrophe by sounding the order for every man to put all his prisoners to death: but cupidity saved many, nevertheless.

The flower of the chivalry of France perished on this field, greatly to the relief and benefit of France. Seven of the princes of the blood royal, the heads of one hundred and twenty of the noble families of France, and eight thousand gentlemen were counted among the 30,000 slain. The feudal nobility never recovered from the blow,—but France did, all the sooner for lack of them.

The victorious army made its way to Calais, and Henry returned to England, “covered with glory and loaded with debt.” But there was unlimited exultation when Henry came marching home, into London, under fifteen grand triumphal arches, insomuch that an eye-witness says, “A greater assembly or a nobler spectacle was not recollected to have been ever before in London.”

Campaign after campaign into France followed; she being plunged deeper and deeper into civil war, anarchy, and mob-rule. Rouen fell in 1419, and the two kings arranged a peace and a marriage between Henry and the princess Catherine. (The courtship in Shakspere is racy.) In 1420 the two kings, side by side, made a triumphant entry into Paris, and Henry was acknowledged as successor to the French crown after Charles VI. should die. Another great demonstration was seen in London when the French Catherine was crowned Queen of England (1421). Ah! there was a fearful Nemesis awaiting this newly-married pair in the insanity of their son, inherited from Catherine’s father. And England was to pay dearly for her French glory in the miseries of the reign of Henry VI. and the dreadful Wars of the Roses. Indeed, she was already paying dearly in the load of taxation and the loss of life those wars had entailed, insomuch that even now there was a scarcity of “worthy and sufficient persons” to manage government affairs in the boroughs and parishes.

The English army in France met with a sudden reverse, the commandant, the Duke of Clarence, being slain. More troops had to be raised and taken to France, and in the effort to keep his grasp on the prostrate kingdom, Henry himself was prostrated in the grasp of an enemy he could not resist. So, on the 31st of August, 1422, in the midst of his campaign, Henry died.

The priests came to his bedside and recited the penitential psalm: when they came to “Thou shalt build up the walls of Jerusalem,” the dying man said: “Ah, if I had finished this war I would have gone to Palestine to restore the Holy City.” He was the last of the crusade dreamers, and the last of the great invaders of France among English kings. In a few years all that he had won, and all that the greatest English generals and the prowess of her archers could avail were scattered by a mere girl creating and leading to victory new French armies.

And this bauble of war was all there was of Henry Fifth’s reign, the pride of the House of Lancaster. So we can hardly join in the lamentation of the Duke of Bedford:

The historian, White, pretty well sums up this “speckled character:”

“His personal ambition had been hurtful to his people. In the first glare of his achievements, some parts of his character were obscured which calm reflection has pointed out for the reprobation of succeeding times. He was harsh and cruel beyond even the limits of the harsh and cruel code under which he professed to act. He bought over the church by giving up innovators to its vengeance; he compelled his prisoner, James I. of Scotland, to accompany him in his last expedition to France to avenge a great defeat his arms sustained at BeaugÉ at the hands of the Scotch auxiliaries, and availed himself of this royal sanction to execute as traitors all the Scottish prisoners who fell into his hands. His massacre of the French captives has already been related, and we shall see how injuriously the temporary glory of so atrocious a career acted on the moral feelings of his people when it blunted their perception of those great and manifest crimes and inspired the nobles with a spirit of war and conquest which cost innumerable lives and retarded the progress of the country in wealth and freedom for many years.”

[To be continued.]