successive terms, that
he could not hold his previous benefices with the bishopric, and that,
spite of the maxim _Papa potest omnia_, a papal bull could not supersede
the law of the land (_Year-book_ ii. H. iv. 37, 59, 79). Accordingly he
had to resign livings and canonries wholesale (April 28, 1410). As,
however, he had obtained a bull (August 20, 1409) enabling him to
appoint his successors to the vacated preferments, including his nephew
William, though still an undergraduate and not in orders, to the
chancellorship of Salisbury, and a prebend at Lichfield, he did not go
empty away. In May 1410 he went again on an embassy to France; on the
11th of September 1411 he headed a mission to discuss Henry V.'s
marriage with a daughter of the duke of Burgundy; and he was again there
in November. In the interval Chicheley found time to visit his diocese
for the first time and be enthroned at St David's on the 11th of May
1411. He was with the English force under the earl of Arundel which
accompanied the duke of Burgundy to Paris in October 1411 and there
defeated the Armagnacs, an exploit which revealed to England the
weakness of the French. On the 30th of November 1411 Chicheley, with two
other bishops and three earls and the prince of Wales, knelt to the king
to receive public thanks for their administration. That he was in high
favour with Henry V. is shown by his being sent with the earl of Warwick
to France in July 1413 to conclude peace. Immediately after the death of
archbishop Arundel he was nominated by the king to the archbishopric,
elected on the 4th of March, translated by papal bull on the 28th of
April, and received the pall without going to Rome for it on the 24th of
July.

These dates are important as they help to save Chicheley from the
charge, versified by Shakespeare (_Henry V._ act i. sc. 2) from Hall's
_Chronicle_, of having tempted Henry V. into the conquest of France for
the sake of diverting parliament from the disendowment of the Church.
There is no contemporary authority for the charge, which seems to appear
first in Redman's rhetorical history of Henry V., written in 1540 with
an eye to the political situation at that time. As a matter of fact, the
parliament at Leicester, in which the speeches were supposed to have
been made, began on the 30th of April 1414 before Chicheley was
archbishop. The rolls of parliament show that he was not present in the
parliament at all. Moreover parliament was so far