WARS WITH FRANCE. -- CAUSES WHICH INFLUENCED HENRY. -- SUMMARY OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE FROM THE TIME OF EDWARD III. -- REFLECTIONS ON HENRY'S TITLE. -- AFFAIRS OF FRANCE FROM HENRY'S RESOLUTION TO CLAIM HIS "DORMANT RIGHTS," AND "RIGHTFUL HERITAGE," TO HIS INVASION OF NORMANDY. -- NEGOCIATIONS. -- HIS RIGHT DENIED BY THE FRENCH. -- PARLIAMENT VOTES HIM SUPPLIES. 1414. WARS WITH FRANCE. It falls not within the province of these Memoirs to justify the proceedings of Henry of Monmouth with regard to France, by an examination into the soundness of his claims, and the abstract principles on which he and his subjects and advisers rested them. But it is incumbent on any one who would estimate his character uprightly, to weigh the considerations by which he was influenced in the undertaking, neither according to our present standard, nor independently of all the circumstances of the age in which he lived, and the sentiments then generally prevalent among men of education and reputed probity. Historians have generally represented it as an established fact (p. 071) that the clergy, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury, alarmed at the bold and urgent call of the Commons upon the King to seize the church patrimony, and from its proceeds apply whatever was required by the exigencies of the state, hit upon the expedient of stimulating him to claim France as his inheritance; thus withdrawing his mind from a measure so fatal to their interests. Though the evidence on which such a tradition rests is by no means satisfactory, we may perhaps receive it as probable. That the Commons were clamorous for the confiscation of the ecclesiastical revenues, and that the clergy voluntarily voted a very large subsidy to aid the King in prosecuting his alleged rights on the Continent, are matters of historical certainty. That the ecclesiastics, moreover, originally suggested to him the design of reviving his dormant claim to an inheritance in the fair realm of France, and then fostered the thought, and justified the undertaking by argument, and pledged their priestly word for the righteousness of his cause, is doubtless no unreasonable supposition. Still the clergy do not appear to have been in the least more eager in the scheme, or more anxious to protect themselves and their revenues from spoliation by such a scheme, than were the laity enthusiastically bent on a harvest of national glory and aggrandizement from its success.[64] In a word, the King himself, the nobles, and the people, all seem (p. 072) to have been equally determined to engage in the enterprise, and to support each other in the resolution that it was not only practicable, but most fully justifiable by the laws of God and man.