The French king was kept busy by Burgundy. He could send no help to his vassal of Normandy, and the whole of Normandy fell into Henry's hand. The Burgundians meantime had captured Paris; and now a desperate deed of treachery was done by the heir to the French throne. The actual King of France was insane, and incapable of taking any part in the government. To break, as he thought, the Burgundian power, {200} the Dauphin, that is, the eldest son of the king, murdered the Duke of Burgundy even as the latter knelt before him to do homage. The Duke's purpose in doing this homage was to unite the forces of Burgundy and France against the growing power of Henry. After this desperate deed the Burgundians deemed it their best course to make terms with Henry, and the terms they made were that he should marry the daughter of the mad King of France and should be placed, with the help of Burgundy, on the French throne as soon as the mad king died--excluding the Dauphin from the succession. They were terms which committed Henry to a constant war with the Dauphin's forces. In this he was consistently successful; but the project formed by his treaty with the Burgundians was broken by his early death. Henry VI., his son and successor as King of England, was then two years old. The English regent, who had charge of the kingdom while Henry VI. was under full age, carried on the war in France against the party of the Dauphin. And it was waged with steady success, so that the Dauphin, now come to the throne as Charles VII., was on the point of giving up all as lost, when the tide of England's victory was checked and then turned back by one of the most wonderful persons whom we meet in the whole course of the story--Joan of Arc. This peasant girl, becoming prophetess, led the soldiers of France to victory and inspired them with the belief that heaven was on their side. From that moment the tide turned and all went in France's favour. The "Maid of Orleans," Joan herself, was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and to our shame was burnt by the English as a heretic. But the French successes continued, none the less; the Burgundians wavered and went over to the King of France again; and precisely in the middle year of {201} the fifteenth century, 1450, the English lost Normandy and all their hold on Northern France. Three years later that strip of Guienne, the coast line from Bordeaux southward, went the same way, and England was left with not a foot of French soil except the town of Calais.