It would be equally erroneous to suppose that Henry himself was driven to embark in war by a feeling of the insecurity of his position, and by the desire to conceal by the glory of his military achievements the weakness of his title to the throne. Still it is true that the claim to the French crown was the heritage of the Plantagenets, and that Henry was compelled to assert it if he would show himself the authentic representative of the second Henry and the third Edward. For some time after William of Normandy seized the English throne the relations of the King of England to the King of France--it might be more correct to say, the king who reigned at Paris--were those of an over-powerful vassal to a weak suzerain. When Henry the Second actually ruled over a larger part of France than the prince who was nominally its sovereign, this reversal of the ordinary state of things, according to which the lord was the superior, the vassal the inferior, was complete. But the tendency of things was to strengthen the central power at Paris, and to weaken the great feudatories. The English kings could not retain a permanent hold on their continental possessions. In the course of the forty-three years’ reign of Philip Augustus the vast French territory held by Henry the Second was reduced to the provinces of Gascony and Guienne, from more than a half to less than a tenth of the whole country. Without following in detail the events of the next hundred years, we may say that their tendency was to separate the two countries more and more completely, and to prepare the way for the change in their relations which may be held to date from the year 1327. In that year the last of the three sons of Philip the Fair died childless. Edward the Third of England, as the son of Philip’s daughter Isabella, put forward a claim to the succession as against Philip of Valois, who, as descended from a common grandfather, Philip the Hardy, was his first cousin.[5] This claim he attempted to enforce by the invasion which began with the brilliant victories of Crecy and Poictiers, and reached a certain measure of success in the Treaty of Bretigny (1360). But before many years had passed, all but Calais was lost to England; and when Henry the Fifth resolved to recover what he claimed as the inheritance of his predecessors, he had to begin, it may be said, the work of conquest over again. Allies, however, he had whose assistance he was to find very useful. The dynasty of De Montfort had been established in possession of the dukedom of Britanny in a great measure by English help, and though the relations between the two countries had not been invariably friendly since that time, the sense of this obligation, and, still more powerfully, a jealous fear of the French king, inclined Britanny to the English alliance.