e of the Earl of March, and by the solemn burial of Richard the
Second at Westminster. The suppression of the Lollard revolt was followed
by a demand for the restoration of the English possessions in France, and
by alliances and preparations for war. Burgundy stood aloof in a sullen
neutrality, and the Duke of Orleans, who was now virtually ruler of the
French kingdom, in vain proposed concession after concession. All
negotiation indeed broke down when Henry formally put forward his claim on
the crown of France. No claim could have been more utterly baseless, for
the Parliamentary title by which the House of Lancaster held England could
give it no right over France, and the strict law of hereditary succession
which Edward asserted could be pleaded, if pleaded at all, only by the
House of Mortimer. Not only the claim indeed, but the very nature of the
war itself was wholly different from that of Edward the Third. Edward had
been forced into the struggle against his will by the ceaseless attacks of
France, and his claim of the crown was little but an afterthought to
secure the alliance of Flanders. The war of Henry on the other hand,
though in form a mere renewal of the earlier struggle on the close of the
truce made by Richard the Second, was in fact an aggression on the part of
a nation tempted by the helplessness of its opponent and galled by the
memory of former defeat. Its one excuse lay in the attacks which France
for the past fifteen years had directed against the Lancastrian throne,
its encouragement of every enemy without and of every traitor within.
Henry may fairly have regarded such a ceaseless hostility, continued even
through years of weakness, as forcing him in sheer self-defence to secure
his realm against the weightier attack which might be looked for, should
France recover her strength.

[Sidenote: Agincourt]

In the summer of 1415 the king prepared to sail from Southampton, when a
plot reminded him of the insecurity of his throne. The Earl of March was
faithful: but he was childless, and his claim would pass at his death
through a sister who had wedded the Earl of Cambridge, a son of the Duke
of York, to her child Richard, the Duke who was to play so great a part in
the War of the Roses. It was to secure his boy's claims that the Earl of
Cambridge seized on the king's departure to conspire with Lord Scrope and
Sir Thomas Grey to proclaim the Earl of March king. The plot however was
discovered and the