In 1435 died the Duke of Bedford, and in the same year Charles VII, moved from his sluggishness, concluded at Arras a treaty with Philip of Burgundy that secured his entry into Paris. By good fortune his young rival in the ensuing campaigns, the English King, Henry VI, had inherited, not the energy and valour of his father, but an anaemic version of his French grandfather’s insanity. Even before his first lapse into melancholia, he was the weak puppet of first one set of influences, then another; and the factions that strove to govern for their own interests in his name lost him first Normandy and then Guienne. Finally they carried their feuds back across the Channel to work out what seemed an almost divine vengeance for the anarchy they had caused in France, in the troubled ‘Wars of the Roses’. Under Charles VII, well named _le bien servi_, France, as she gradually freed herself from a foreign yoke, developed from a mediaeval into the semblance of a modern state. Wise ministers, whom in his later years the King had the sense to substitute for his earlier workless favourites, built up the power of the monarchy, restored its financial credit, and established in the place of the disorderly ‘companies’ a standing army recruited and controlled by the crown. These things were not done without opposition, and the rebellion of ‘the Praguerie’, in which were implicated nearly all the leading nobles of France, including the King’s own son, the Dauphin Louis, was a desperate attempt on the part of the aristocracy to shake off the growing pressure of royal control. It failed because the nation, as a whole, saw in submission to an absolute monarch a means, imperfect perhaps but yet the only means available at the moment, of securing the regeneration of France. It is significant that when Louis XI succeeded to Charles VII he inevitably followed in his father’s footsteps, forsaking the interests of the class with which he had first allied himself, in order to rule as an autocrat and fulfil the ideal of kingship in his day. _Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._ Philip VI of France 1328-50 John II of France 1350-64 Charles V of France 1364-80 Charles VI of France 1380-1422 Charles VII of France 1422-61 Henry V of England 1413-22 Henry VI of England 1422-61 Boccaccio 1313-75 Jeanne d’Arc 1412-30 XIX SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES