The devotional aspect of his character has been spoken of more than once in these pages. It would be unjust to doubt the sincerity of his piety because many of his acts seem inconsistent with our own conceptions of the character which piety should produce. It was not the less genuine in him because it did not make him tender-hearted or philanthropic, because he pursued his great scheme of conquest without scruple, without remorse, without a thought for the blood which he was shedding, or for the desolation which he was causing. His religion made him what few kings have been, temperate and chaste. It did not make him merciful; it would not be too much to say that in Henry’s age it made no man merciful. We must compare it, not with the religion of a Havelock or a Gordon, but with the grovelling superstition of a Lewis the Eleventh. It would certainly be more just to charge him with fanaticism than with hypocrisy. He seems to have looked upon his wars for the acquisition of the French crown as a devout prince two centuries before might have looked upon a crusade. It was his mission to recover what he seems, difficult as it is to believe it, to have sincerely regarded as his rightful inheritance. By one of those processes of self-deception that are so difficult to imagine of others, so easy to perform for ourselves, he had persuaded himself of the soundness of a title which seems to us to need no refutation; and all his candid, his almost audacious confidence, his unhesitating rejection of compromises, as well as the earnestness of his prayers and thanksgivings for victory, indicate a profound conviction that he was doing a work to which he had been divinely sent. If we are to compare him with the famous conquerors of the world, we should find his parallel in Alexander, convinced that it was his mission to take the vengeance of force for centuries of Persian wrong, rather than in Napoleon, whose faith did not go beyond a conviction of the power of his big battalions. Of Henry’s qualities as a military leader it is impossible to speak too highly. The one possible exception where he may be thought to have failed, not indeed in skill, but in prudence, was the march from Harfleur to Calais. Yet it was a piece of calculated audacity abundantly justified by the result. To have gone back from Harfleur with nothing to show for a wasted army but a single seaport, would have discredited him both at home and abroad. He had to make an impressive display of his superiority if he was to be accepted as the future conqueror of France. His career after this was one of unbroken success--success earned by courage, foresight, tactical skill, fertility of resource, economy of strength, in short, by all the qualities of a great captain. There is no more conclusive proof of his greatness than the instantaneous change which his presence wrought in the prospects of a campaign: _Ipso adventu profligata bella_.