29. Charles VI. —(continued)
CHAPTER XXIX. Charles VI. —(continued) 1392-1422
The first time that the king began to get better it was hoped that he would soon be completely cured. He was, in fact, for some months quite as usual; and there were feasts and rejoicings in honour of his being well again, in all of which he took part. One evening, at a ball, he and five of his young friends dressed themselves up as wild men, and came in to dance before the guests. They had on tunics daubed over with pitch, with tow fastened on to it to make them look hairy. The king's young brother was foolish enough to hold up a torch close to the face of one of these men, in order to find out who he was; the tow and pitch caught fire, and blazed up all over his body, till the poor man looked like a column of flame. Unfortunately all these young men, except the king, were chained together; the fire spread from one to another, and burned so fiercely that it was impossible to put it out. One of the five broke his chain, escaped from the others, threw himself into a tub of water which was standing outside the ballroom, and thus saved his life; but the other four all died, two at once and two within two days after.
Charles himself was safe; but this dreadful sight seems to have cured him for the time of his great love for shows and feasts; and he was beginning to attend seriously to important matters of government when his madness came back and put a stop to all his efforts.
For many years the chief thing that happened in France was the great dispute as to who should have the power which the poor king could not hold. The chief persons in the kingdom, next to the king, were his uncles and his brother. One of his uncles had died, and of the other three there was one more ambitious — that is, fond of power — more brave, and more clever than the others, named the Duke of Burgundy. He was called Philip le Hardi, or the Bold, and was the man who, when he was a boy, had ridden by his father, King John, all through the battle of Poitiers, and been taken prisoner with him to England afterwards. This was one of the people who wished for power in the State; the other was the king's only brother, the Duke of Orleans. This young man is said to have had all the faults of the king, but was, unlike him, clever and fond of power. He and the Duke of Burgundy struggled for power for many years, and sometimes one sometimes the other got the better in the dispute. Scarcely anything else happened in France during this time; and as the princes never could make up their minds to a regular battle, the people of the country went on planting their fields, and carrying on their usual business, without being much disturbed; so that the country was not in so bad a state as might have been feared during the first years of the king's madness. The people improved in many ways; new inventions were made, men wrote poetry and other works, and thought about many important matters of which they had never before taken any notice. They loved the poor mad king, who, whenever he had any sense, showed a great wish to make good laws, and do something useful for his people, and they called him Charles le Bien-Aimé or the Well-beloved.
The Duke of Burgundy usually had on his side the northern parts of France, and the Duke of Orleans the southern parts. Sometimes one and sometimes the other made friends with the English, and tried to get help from them. When the Duke of Burgundy died, his son, who became duke after him, carried on the quarrel, and at last, by his orders, the Duke of Orleans was murdered in the street. It shows into what disorder the country had by this time fallen, that no one tried to punish the Duke of Burgundy for this wicked deed, except the wife of the murdered man, the Duchess of Orleans, and her three sons, who were still boys. They soon found that no help could be hoped for from the nobles, and that they must wait till they were of an age to avenge their father.
The king tried to persuade the young princes of Orleans to make peace with their father's murderer. A meeting was held two years after the death of the duke, at which the Duke of Burgundy confessed that it was he who had ordered the murder, and though he showed no signs of repenting of what he had done, asked both the king and the children of the Duke of Orleans to forgive him. The young princes wept, and for some time would not answer him; but they were at last persuaded to say that as the king ordered them to do so, they forgave him for their father's death. But their feelings were not at all changed by what they had thus promised. Some years after this, the Duke of Burgundy was himself murdered by his enemies of the party of Orleans, who had gained over to their side the Dauphin, the eldest son of the king. The Duke of Burgundy was invited to come to a meeting with the Dauphin to talk over the affairs of the country. The meeting was to be at the middle of a bridge, where a little house was built for them with a door on each side, through which the prince and duke were to go in with a few servants each, and then fasten the doors behind them, so that no strangers could hear what they might say to one another. As soon as they were in this house, a dispute began; one of the Dauphin's friends cried out, "It is time !" and struck the Duke of Burgundy with an axe, killing him afterwards with a sword. All his friends except one were also killed.
Towards the end of the reign of Charles VI., a new war broke out with England. Richard II. of England had been driven from the throne by his cousin, Henry IV., and had died in prison, it was supposed by poison. Some of the French princes had taken the side of Henry, others had wished to go to war to save Richard while he was alive, and to revenge him when he was dead. But the war did not begin till after the death of Henry IV., in the reign of his son, Henry V. This prince was brave and warlike, and easily found an excuse for beginning a war with France. He went into the country with a large army, and finding no one to resist him, for the French had no ships, no money, and no one to lead their soldiers, he besieged and took the large town of Honfleur, the first which came in his way. The English afterwards marched farther through the country, till they met a large French army, which had at last been gathered together, and which came to stop Henry's way. The armies met each other near a village named Agincourt, and passed a night face to face.
The English having rolled up their flags and carefully stored away their armour, that it might not be hurt by the damp, sent to fetch straw from the villages near at hand, and lay down on it to pass the night comfortably. They had also made ready their bows, and prepared the sharp stones that they usually put in front of their army to stop the horses of the enemy; they confessed their sins to the priests who were with them in the army, and slept with good consciences. Above all, they were perfectly quiet, as the king had ordered. The French spent their time chiefly in being knighted; they had large fires, by whose light the English could see all that happened in their camp, and they were calling to each other and running backwards and forwards all night. Some of the knights sat on horseback all night through for fear of spoiling their armour in the mud, and in the morning were almost dead of cold and fatigue.
The French army was placed in a small narrow plain with a wood on each side, where its great size was of but little use; between it and the English army was ploughed land soft from the rain. The English began the attack by rushing against the enemy, (giving)<making> loud cries. The French could not move for some time, so deeply had they, on their heavy horses, sunk into the soft earth. At last they came forward, but their horses could not make their way through the mud. Many fell with their riders underneath them. Others, which came (far)<near> enough to be hit by the English arrows, were frightened, turned round, and galloped back upon the rest of the French army, throwing them into great confusion. The battle went on as it had begun, the heavy-armed Frenchmen, shut up in a narrow space, and moving over ground into which their horses sank at every step, had no chance against the light, active, English foot-soldiers, who rushed upon them with whatever weapons they had; often only hatchets and axes, for the English army was not well armed, but made up of men who had come together hastily. They killed many of the French soldiers who were lying on the ground, quite unable to do anything to save themselves. At one time Henry V. was told that a body of Frenchmen were attacking his camp from behind. He gave orders to his soldiers to kill the prisoners, thinking that if his men were to defend themselves against another attack, the prisoners would be in their way, and hinder them from fighting their best. Thousands of prisoners were then put to death, who had given themselves up on the promise that their lives should be spared.
More Frenchmen were killed at this battle than even at Cressy or Poitiers. It is known as the battle of Agincourt, and caused great joy in England. It is mentioned in Lord Macaulay's poem on the "Defeat of the Spanish Armada," where, speaking of the lion on the English flag, he says - "So glared he when at Agincourt in wrath he turned to bay; And crushed and torn beneath his claws the princely hunters lay." Still, though "crushed and torn," the French could not give up their quarrels among themselves, and soon after Henry V. took the town of Rouen, after a siege of seven months, without any one trying to prevent him. The people of Rouen had suffered terribly before they would agree to yield and give up their town. They soon came to an end of their proper food, and then ate horses, dogs, cats, and at last everything that could be swallowed. King Henry's soldiers rode through the country outside the walls, carrying off all the food they could find, for fear it should, in any way, be sent into Rouen. Some of these soldiers were wild Irishmen, of whom the French were specially afraid, because of their strange looks and their wildness. They went about half naked, having very few clothes, and as they had no horses, they usually rode on the cows of the villagers. One of their plans was to carry off babies in their cradles, which they rested upon the necks of the cows. They made the parents pay them large sums either in money or food, before they brought back the children; and even then there must have been some danger of the babies being taken to the wrong mothers.
The poor people in Rouen were at last obliged to send out of the city all the old men, the women, and the children, keeping in the town only the fighting men. The English would not allow these poor creatures to pass their lines; they had to live in the trench outside the walls of Rouen. They had nothing to eat but what they could find there, chiefly grass. Yet some of them passed the winter in this way. Some of the women had little babies born there. "When this happened, the people inside the town let down a basket, in which they drew the baby up into the town, and had it christened; they then let it down to its mother again. At last the town was obliged to yield; Henry became master of Rouen, and soon after of all Normandy.
The French people who had seen wars first among their own princes, and then against the English all through the reign of Charles VI., wished for peace at almost any price, and at last an agreement was made by which it was settled that Henry should marry a daughter of Charles VI., and that when Charles died, Henry should succeed him as king both of England and France, after which the two countries should always be governed by the same king, though each should keep its own laws and customs, and neither should be subject to the other. The son of Charles VI. would not agree to this treaty, and still kept up the war with a small army in the north of France; but his mother and the nobles kept their word to Henry, and he married the French Princess, and ruled in Paris, as regent for Charles VI. Two years after he died in France, leaving a little son ten months old, to be king both of France and of England. A few weeks afterwards died Charles VI., whose reign had brought such misfortunes upon himself and his country.
