However, the able members of the party drew up, for the repression of abuses, the ordinance of 1413, known as the Cabochian ordinance, whose application would have been successful, if in making elections universal it had not made its administration impossible (May 25th). “But,” says Augustin Thierry, “men were found to conceive that great reform charter, joint work of the citizens and the university, while none could be found to execute and maintain it. Wise men and those accustomed to affairs had at this time neither will power nor political energy. They kept themselves apart, and all action rested upon fanatics and the unruly who precipitated, through their intolerable excesses, a reaction which brought about their fall and put a stop to all reform.” [Sidenote: [1413-1415 A.D.]] What the bourgeoisie respected, the mob outraged. It proscribed not only vice and immorality, but wealth, and mingled pillage and murder with its reforms; it disgraced finally those who had employed it and who, blushing at the association, now preferred the Armagnacs to the Cabochians. Called upon by all men of moderation the Armagnacs put a stop to the mob’s excesses, but at the same time overthrew the reform measures of the bourgeoisie (September 5th, 1413). John the Fearless fled again to his Flemish provinces.[b] Charles VI marched in person against him at the head of the Armagnacs, besieged and took Soissons, of which the inhabitants of every age and sex were inhumanly massacred. Arras was next invested,[32] but the Armagnacs becoming disgusted at the tediousness of the siege, as the Burgundians had been the previous year at that of Bourges, an accommodation ensued, the duke of Burgundy making verbal submissions, and promising never to show himself in Paris again. (Treaty of Arras, September, 1414.) HENRY V INVADES FRANCE--A FRENCH VIEW [Sidenote: [1415 A.D.]] Whilst France was thus occupied and torn by civil contests, Henry V had succeeded, in 1413, to the throne of England.[h] He now judged the time come to interfere in the French mêlée. He stood, moreover, in need of a foreign war to settle himself on the throne his father had usurped. Since the great campaigns of the preceding century, the idea of a war with France had ever been popular in England. Therefore, when Henry proposed a serious expedition, he obtained easily from parliament six thousand men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers, with whom he debarked at Harfleur on the 14th of August, 1415. After a heroic defence which lasted a whole month, Harfleur, unsuccoured, was compelled to give up. But Henry V had lost fifteen thousand men (two thousand men-at-arms, thirteen thousand archers)--the half of his army. Too feeble now for any great undertaking, he resolved to march across country to Calais, and to throw the French knighthood a new and insolent defiance.