Clarence did not hesitate to attack the French position. He was
received with steadiness; and at the critical moment Buchan and his
red-headed crew bore down upon the field. Clarence was slain, and his
army defeated.
Henry whose opinion of the disaster was different from that of the
English historians, flew back to France, and in the most obstinate of
all his campaigns, succeeded in winning back the ground that had been
lost. But that campaign which the defeat of Beaugé alone had rendered
necessary, was fatal to him. Worn out with care, fatigue and exposure
he lay dying at Vincennes.
He called to him his next brother John duke of Bedford, appointed
him regent of France, and enjoined upon him always to preserve the
friendship and alliance of the duke of Burgundy, as essential to the
conquest of the kingdom. He constituted his brother Humphrey regent
of England, and adjured him never to leave that island while the war
lasted. These two injunctions had the same drift, and showed what was
weighing upon Henry’s mind. He had been confident of his own power to
obviate the mischief threatened by the English marriage of Jaqueline,
but he was not sure his brothers would be equal to it; and the
apprehension was not ill founded.
The monarch died and was embalmed and sent to England. He was perhaps
the greatest of England’s kings. His chief faults were cruelty and
arrogance, and they both stood in his way. Assuming to be king of
France he regarded as a traitor worthy of death every Frenchman who
resisted him. This theory drove the French into that tenacious defence
of their towns which checked his progress; and at the same time his
haughty airs alienated the Burgundian nobles. Dare you look me in the
face when you speak to me? said he to L’isle Adam, Philip’s governor of
Paris. Sire, replied the Burgundian, there lives not the man that I
look not in the face when I speak to him.
A few weeks after Henry’s death, his poor crazy father-in-law Charles
VI. was laid beside his ancestors in the abbey of Saint Denis. Not a
single prince of the House of Valois followed him to his grave. Not a
single prince of any blood save the duke of Bedford alone who conducted
the obsequies. As they turned away from his tomb, the good monks of the
abbey who had sung the requiem, fell into a dispute with the servants
of the king’s household about the possession of some ornaments that had
been used in the funeral. From words they come to blows, and the battle
waxed so fierce that Bedford and his suite were fain to turn back and
strike right and left to quell the tumult.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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