hoped to live in peace; perhaps he reckoned upon the devotion of his brethren. It is related that he assembled a considerable number of Lollards, and that he made an attempt to surprise the king; having failed in his design, he had convoked his partisans in the fields of St. Giles, near London, on the morrow of the Epiphany. The king was forewarned of the conspiracy and repaired thither. Sir John was not there; a hundred men at the utmost had assembled in the meadow; they carried arms, and confessed that they were waiting for Oldcastle. Two or three other little assemblages were also captured, and, on the 13th of January, thirty Lollards suffered at St. Giles's the punishment of traitors. The Parliament was agitated, and the State was believed to be in danger; the judges, and magistrates were authorized to arrest every individual suspected of heresy, and made oath to prosecute the guilty in all parts. Death and confiscation were decreed against them. {12} Sir Roger Acton, a friend of Oldcastle, was arrested, quartered, and hanged on the 10th of February. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Arundel, died on the 28th of the same month; but his successor, Chicheley, was no less ardent than he against heresy, and it was at his request and at his suit that Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, after having for a long while remained concealed, was rearrested in 1417, and burnt at a slow fire in the meadow of St. Giles, on the 25th of December following. The terror which the Lollards had caused was beginning to subside. The king had had leisure to reflect upon the sad condition of France; the weakness in which it was plunged reminded him of the counsels of his dying father. It is said that Henry IV. had advised his son to engage his country in a great war, to divert it from conspiracies. The ardour of the young king had become inflamed at this idea, and he had come to look upon himself as the messenger of God, sent to punish the crimes of the French princes, and to deliver from their hands the kingdom which they were oppressing. In the month of July, 1414, he suddenly laid claim to the crown of France, as the decendant of Isabel, the daughter of Philip the Fair. This pretension, groundless on the part of Edward III., became absurd in the mouth of Henry V., because the right of succession if transmissible by females, belonged to the Earl of March. The Duke of Berry, then in power, peremptorily repelled the demand of King Henry, who thereupon proclaimed other pretensions. He consented to leave the throne to King Charles, but he claimed for England the absolute sovereignty of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Aquitaine, besides the towns and territories ceded in other parts of France by the treaty of Brétigny. {13} He claimed at the same time one half of Provence, the inheritance of Eleanor and Sanche, the wives of Henry III., and of his brother, the Duke of Cornwall; and the fifteen hundred thousand crowns remaining to be paid upon the ransom of King John;