so severely commenting, records that Henry spoke of that subject openly and unreservedly to those who stood around his bed, expressing his sure trust that the guilt of that blood did not stain his soul, who sought only his just inheritance; but rested on the heads of (p. 311) those who, by their obstinate perseverance in injustice, compelled him to appeal to the God of battle in vindication of his own rights. [Footnote 238: Hume's Hist. vol. iii. ch. xix.] Again, Henry declares, on the faith of a dying Christian Prince, that it had verily been his fixed resolution, as soon as his wars in France had been brought to a favourable issue, to proceed to the Holy Land. Hume says that this was a late and feeble resolve; and the ground on which he rests this charge of falsehood is, that the mode of those enterprises was then past. Hume ought to have known, as an ordinary historian, that the mode of those enterprises was not then past; and Hume might have known that Henry's was not a death-bed resolve, to which the expiring self-deceiver clung for comfort when the world was receding from his sight; but that in his health and strength, and in the mid-career of his victories, he had actually taken preliminary measures for facilitating the execution of that very design. With regard to the first position asserted by Hume, that "the mode of these enterprises was gone by," the facts of history are so far from authorizing him to make such an assertion, that they combine to expose its rashness and unsoundness. When Henry succeeded to the throne, he found a large naval and military force actually prepared by his father for the proclaimed purpose of executing such an enterprise, the undertaking of which was only prevented by his death.[239] And (p. 312) even a century after, the mode of those enterprises had not yet passed; for Pope Leo X. successfully negociated a league between the chief powers of Christendom, engaging them to unite against the infidel dominion of the Turk. Not only were such crusades subjects of serious and practical consideration in Europe just before Henry's accession to the throne, and a full century after it, but, during the last years of Henry's life, most vigorous and persevering exertions were made by the Sovereign Pontiff to effect an immediate expedition of the confederated powers of Christendom to Palestine, with the avowed purpose of crushing the power of the infidels. The histories of those times bear varied evidence to the same points: we must here, however, confine our attention to some facts more immediately connected with the case before us. In the year 1420,[240] July 12, Pope Martin V, conceiving that Sigismund would very shortly bring the war which he was then waging against the Hussites in Bohemia to an end, in a bull dated Florence calls upon all Kings, Prelates, Lords, and people, adjuring them most solemnly, by the shedding of Christ's