seduced, by his address, Charles, the king of France's eldest
son, a youth of seventeen years of age, who was the first that bore the
appellation of "dauphin," by the reunion of the province of Dauphiny to
the crown. But this prince, being made sensible of the danger and folly
of these connections, promised to make atonement for the offence by the
sacrifice of his associates; and in concert with his father, he invited
the king of Navarre, and other noblemen of the party, to a feast at
Rouen, where they were betrayed into the hands of John. Some of the most
obnoxious were immediately led to execution: the king of Navarre was
thrown into prison;[*] but this stroke of severity in the king, and of
treachery in the dauphin, was far from proving decisive in maintaining
the royal authority. Philip of Navarre, brother to Charles, and Geoffrey
d'Harcourt, put all the towns and castles belonging to that prince in
a posture of defence; and had immediate recourse to the protection of
England in this desperate extremity.

* Froissard. liv. i. chap. 146.

The truce between the two kingdoms, which had always been ill observed
on both sides, was now expired; and Edward was entirely free to support
the French malecontents. Well pleased that the factions in France had at
length gained him some partisans in that kingdom, which his pretensions
to the crown had never been able to accomplish, he purposed to attack
his enemy both on the side of Guienne, under the command of the prince
of Wales, and on that of Calais, in his own person.

Young Edward arrived in the Garronne with his army, on board a fleet of
three hundred sail, attended by the earls of Avesbury, p. 243. Warwick,
Salisbury, Oxford, Suffolk, and other English noblemen. Being joined by
the vassals of Gascony, he took the field; and as the present disorders
in France prevented every proper plan of defence, he carried on with
impunity his ravages and devastations, according to the mode of war in
that age. He reduced all the villages and several towns in Languedoc to
ashes: he presented himself before Toulouse; passed the Garronne, and
burned the suburbs of Carcassonne; advanced even to Narbonne, laying
every place waste around him; and after an incursion of six weeks,
returned with a vast booty and many prisoners to the Guienne, where he
took up his winter quarters.[*] The constable of Bourbon, who commanded
in those provinces, received orders, though at the head of a superio