AS you know, Edward III. had made an unjust claim to the French crown,
and, with the Black Prince, had supported it by the victories of Crecy
and Poictiers. But Edward died, and the Black Prince died, and his son,
Richard II., was the friend of France, and married a French princess.
Richard, too, was done to death, but Henry IV., who succeeded him, had
so much work on his hands in England that he left France alone. Yet
France was wretched, because when the wise Charles V. died in 1380, he
left two children, Charles the Dauphin, and his brother, Louis of
Orleans. They were only little boys, and the Dauphin became weak-minded;
moreover, they were both in the hands of their uncles. The best of these
relations, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, died in 1404. His son, John the
Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, was the enemy of his own cousin, Louis of
Orleans, brother of the Dauphin Charles, who was now king, under the
title of Charles VI. John the Fearless had Louis of Orleans murdered,
yet Paris, the capital of France, was on the side of the murderer. He
was opposed by the Count of Armagnac. Now, the two parties of Armagnac
and Burgundy divided France; the Armagnacs professing to be on the side
of Charles the Dauphin. They robbed, burned, and murdered on all sides.
Meanwhile, in England, Henry V. had succeeded to his father, and the
weakness of France gave him a chance to assert his unjust claim to its
throne. He defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415, he carried the Duke
of Orleans a prisoner to London, he took Rouen, and overran Normandy.
The French now attempted to make peace among themselves. The Duke of
Burgundy had the mad Charles VI. in his power. The Dauphin was with the
opposite faction of Armagnac. But, if the Dauphin and the Duke of
Burgundy became friends, the Armagnacs would lose all their importance.
The power would be with the Duke of Burgundy. The Armagnacs, therefore,
treacherously murdered the duke, in the name of the Dauphin, at a
meeting on the Bridge of Montereau (1419). The son of the duke, Philip
the Good, now became Duke of Burgundy, and was determined to revenge his
murdered father. He therefore made friends with Henry V. and the
English. The English being now so strong in the Burgundian alliance,
their terms were accepted in the Peace of Troyes (1420). The Dauphin was
to be shut out from succeeding to the French crown, and was called a
Pretender. Henry V. married the Dauphin's sister Catherine, and when the
mad Charles VI. died, Henry and Catherine were to be King and Queen of
England and France. Meantime, Henry V. was to punish the Dauphin and the
Armagnacs. But Henry V. died first, and, soon after, the mad Charles
died. Who, then, was to be King of France? The Armagnacs held for the
Dauphin, the rightful heir. The English, of course, and the Burgundians,
were for Henry VI., a baby of ten months old. He, like other princes,
had uncles, one of them, the Duke of Gloucester, managed affairs in
England; another, the Duke of Bedford, the Regent, was to keep down
France. The English possessed Paris and the North; the Dauphin retained
the Centre of France, and much of the South, holding his court at
Bourges. It is needless to say that the uncles of the baby Henry VI.,
the Dukes of Gloucester and Bedford, were soon on bad terms, and their
disputes made matters easier for the Dauphin. He lost two great battles,
however, Crevant and Verneuil, where his Scottish allies were cut to
pieces. The hearts of good Frenchmen were with him, but he was indolent,
selfish, good-humoured, and governed by a fat, foolish favourite, La
Tremouille. The Duke of Bedford now succeeded in patching up the
quarrels among the English, and then it was determined (but not by
Bedford's advice) to cross the Loire, to invade Southern France, to
crush the Dauphin, and to conquer the whole country. But, before he
could do all this, Bedford had to take the strong city of Orleans, on
the Loire. And against the walls of Orleans the tide of English victory
was broken, for there the flag of England went down before the peasant
girl who had danced below the Fairy Tree of Domremy, before Joan the
Maiden.