The state of France at the date of the accession of Henry V. was deplorable. The king, Charles VI., had long been mad; his occasional lucid intervals, when he was supposed to resume the reins of government, only served to make confusion worse. The queen was one of the worst of women, without the great abilities which went some way towards atoning for the wickedness of Catharine de Medicis or her namesake of Russia. The Dauphin was a dissolute and reckless boy. All good government was lost: for power was disputed by two bitterly hostile factions, each of which used it in turn for its own purposes. One was headed by the duke of Burgundy, cousin of the king, son of the boy who was taken prisoner at Poitiers beside his father king John. The other, which bore the name of Armagnacs,[32] was headed by the young duke of Orleans, the king's nephew, between whom and John of Burgundy there was an irreconcilable blood-feud. The statesmanship of France was not ill-represented by the Dauphin's insult to Henry V., in sending him a present of balls at his accession, with a message implying that he deemed the young king, perhaps the ablest man of his age, little better than a child. Shakespeare makes much of the story that the archbishop of Canterbury urged Henry to undertake war with France, in order to divert his attention from ecclesiastical affairs at home. Whatever weight this may have had, the opportunity was obvious, and Henry was very well competent to use it. In August 1415 Henry V. landed at the mouth of the Seine, with a well-equipped army of about 30,000 men. No better point for an invasion could be chosen: there was a good harbour for his base, and almost the shortest distance from the sea-shore to Paris is straight up the Seine. Before however he could advance Harfleur must be taken, and this cost an unexpectedly long time. More than a month elapsed before the town surrendered; and then it is suggested that dysentery, which was raging alike inside and outside the walls, was largely answerable for the surrender. The siege was conducted entirely by battering, like a siege of three or four centuries later: probably the comparative slowness and inadequacy of the cannonade was more or less balanced by the inferiority of the defensive works to those of later times. When the town had fallen (or was on the point of falling, for the date is not quite certain), Henry sent a message to the Dauphin, offering to settle the dispute by single combat with him, as his father was incapacitated. The proposal is altogether in the style of chivalry, and was doubtless considered the right and proper thing to do: but seeing that the Dauphin was a weak and debauched lad, and Henry in the very prime of vigour, there was nothing really high-minded about it. Henry deemed himself bound to wait for an answer, and during the interval resolved on his course of action. His army had been frightfully reduced by illness as well as by the losses in the siege: we are told that 5000