cester, and re-assembled at
Westminster on the Octaves of St. Martin, 18th November 1414. The most
gratifying record of this great council of the realm is that which
informs us of the restoration of Henry Percy to his estates and
honours. The most important subject to which the thoughts of the peers
and commons were drawn was the King's determination to recover his
rights in the realm of France.

The motives which influenced Henry to undertake this extraordinary
step can be known only to the Searcher of hearts. Some writers, in
their excessive zeal for Protestantism, anxiously bent on stamping
upon Henry the character of an ambitious tyrant and a religious
persecutor, employ no measured language in their condemnation (p. 024)
of his designs against France. Milner thus gives his summary of the
proceedings of this reign at home and abroad. "Henry Chicheley, now
Archbishop of Canterbury, continued at the head of that see from
February 1414, to April 1443. This man deserves to be called the
firebrand of the age in which he lived. To subserve the purposes of
his own pride and tyranny, he engaged King Henry in his famous contest
with France, by which a prodigious carnage was made of the human race,
and the most dreadful miseries were brought upon both kingdoms. But
Henry was a soldier, and understood the art of war, though perfectly
ignorant of religion; and that ardour of spirit, which in youth[26]
had spent itself in vicious indulgences, was now employed under the
management of Chicheley in desolating France by one of the most unjust
wars ever waged by ambition, and in furnishing for vulgar minds matter
of declamation on the valour of the English nation. While this scene
was carrying on in France, the Archbishop at home, partly by exile,
partly by forced abjurations, and partly by the flames, domineered
over the Lollards, and almost effaced the vestiges of godliness in the
kingdom."

[Footnote 26: When his determination to recover his
rights was announced in parliament, he was
twenty-seven years of age.]

These are very hard words, much more readily written than justified.
Such sentences of condemnation require a much clearer insight (p. 025)
into the workings of the human heart than falls to the lot of any
human being to possess, when he would examine into the motives of a
fellow-mortal. It is very easy by one sweeping clause to denounce the
war as unju