nry had won the Church by his
orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike prowess, the whole people by his
revival of the glories of Crecy and Poitiers. In France his cool policy
had transformed him from a foreign conqueror into a legal heir to the
crown. The King was in his hands, the Queen devoted to his cause, the Duke
of Burgundy was his ally, his title of Regent and of successor to the
throne rested on the formal recognition of the estates of the realm.
Although southern France still clung to the Dauphin, the progress of Henry
to the very moment of his death promised a speedy mastery of the whole
country. His European position was a commanding one. Lord of the two great
western kingdoms, he was linked by close ties of blood with the royal
lines of Portugal and Castille; and his restless activity showed itself in
his efforts to procure the adoption of his brother John as her successor
by the queen of Naples, and in the marriage of a younger brother,
Humphrey, with Jacqueline, the Countess of Holland and Hainault. Dreams of
a vaster enterprise filled the soul of the great conqueror himself; he
loved to read the story of Godfrey of Bouillon and cherished the hope of a
crusade which should beat back the Ottoman and again rescue the Holy Land
from heathen hands. Such a crusade might still have saved Constantinople,
and averted from Europe the danger which threatened it through the century
that followed the fall of the imperial city. Nor was the enterprise a
dream in the hands of the cool, practical warrior and ruler of whom a
contemporary could say, "He transacts all his affairs himself, he
considers well before he undertakes them, he never does anything
fruitlessly."

[Sidenote: John of Bedford]

But the hopes of far-off conquests found a sudden close in Henry's death.
His son, Henry the Sixth of England, was a child of but nine months old:
and though he was peacefully recognized as king in his English realm and
as heir to the throne in the realm of France his position was a very
different one from his father's. The death of King Charles indeed, two
months after that of his son-in-law, did little to weaken it; and at first
nothing seemed lost. The Dauphin at once proclaimed himself Charles the
Seventh of France: but Henry was owned as Sovereign over the whole of the
territory which Charles had actually ruled; and the incursions which the
partizans of Charles, now reinforced by Lombard soldiers from the Milanese
and by four