For a moment turning our attention from the queen, let us advert to the political conditions in France. From the time of the assassination of Louis d' Orléans there had been civil war, with rare and brief intervals of peace, between the partisans of Burgundy and those of Orléans, now led by Bernard d'Armagnac, whose daughter Charles d'Orléans had married after the early death of his first wife, Isabelle de France. While civil war in itself would have caused misery and ruin enough, its horrors were enhanced by the crafty policy of Henry IV. of England, who, when he was not able to intervene in person, responded to the solicitations of first one party and then the other, and thus caused Armagnacs and Bourguignons to exhaust themselves in fruitless strife. It was the craft of Henry IV. and the folly of France that prepared the way for Agincourt, that crushing victory of the great Henry V., who in the presence of the overwhelming French army proclaimed, in Shakespeare's paraphrase of his words: "We are enow To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honor. God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more!" The event justified King Harry's boastful confidence: the chivalry of France found itself discredited, dead, or in captivity. And yet, even in the hour of France's distress, the indolent Isabeau could hardly be prevailed upon to take any action in behalf of her son, the dauphin, Louis de Guienne who, in fact, lived but a little over two months after Agincourt, and was succeeded by Jean de Touraine. In two years more (1417) Jean de Touraine was dead, poisoned, it was said, by Bernard d'Armagnac; the new dauphin, Charles, was a boy of but fourteen years. This Charles, one of the most uncomfortably cold and contemptible personages in history, had been reared by the queen and the Armagnac party with sentiments of the bitterest hatred against the Burgundians. Determined to win complete control of Charles, Bernard d'Armagnac sought to discredit Isabeau with her son and with the king. There was no difficulty in finding pretexts, for the sober-minded Juvenal des Ursins tells us that in the chateau of Vincennes, whither Isabeau had retired to revel more at ease, "many shameful things were done" by the queen and her troop of rakes and gaudily dressed ladies; but indecency in dress was not the only scandal that Bernard revealed to the king, who was at the time in better mental condition than for years.