England at this epoch enjoyed the proudest station in European affairs.  John the Fearless, after having caused the murder of his rival, the duke of Orleans, was himself assassinated on the bridge of Montereau by the followers of the dauphin of France, and in his presence.  Philip, duke of Burgundy, the son and successor of John, had formed a close alliance with Henry V., to revenge his father’s murder; and soon after the death of the king he married his sister, and thus united himself still more nearly to the celebrated John, duke of Bedford, brother of Henry, and regent of France, in the name of his infant nephew, Henry VI.  But besides the share on which he reckoned in the spoils of France, Philip also looked with a covetous eye on the inheritance of Jacqueline, his cousin.  As soon as he had learned that this princess, so well received in England, was taking measures for having her marriage annulled, to enable her to espouse the duke of Gloucester, also the brother of Henry V., and subsequently known by the appellation of “the good duke Humphrey,” he was tormented by a double anxiety.  He, in the first place, dreaded that Jacqueline might have children by her projected marriage with Gloucester (a circumstance neither likely nor even possible, in the opinion of some historians, to result from her union with John of Brabant:  Hume, vol. iii., p. 133), and thus deprive him of his right of succession to her states; and in the next, he was jealous of the possible domination of England in the Netherlands as well as in France.  He therefore soon became self-absolved from all his vows of revenge in the cause of his murdered father, and labored solely for the object of his personal aggrandizement.  To break his connection with Bedford; to treat secretly with the dauphin, his father’s assassin, or at least the witness and warrant for his assassination; and to shuffle from party to party as occasion required, were movements of no difficulty to Philip, surnamed “the Good.”  He openly espoused the cause of his infamous relative, John of Brabant; sent a powerful army into Hainault, which Gloucester vainly strove to defend in right of his affianced wife; and next seized on Holland and Zealand, where he met with a long but ineffectual resistance on the part of the courageous woman he so mercilessly oppressed.  Jacqueline, deprived of the assistance of her stanch but ruined friends,[1] and abandoned by Gloucester (who, on the refusal of Pope Martin V. to sanction her divorce, had married another woman, and but feebly aided the efforts of the former to maintain her rights), was now left a widow by the death of John of Brabant.  But Philip, without a shadow of justice, pursued his designs against her dominions, and finally despoiled her of her last possessions, and even of the title of countess, which she forfeited by her marriage with Vrank Van Borselen, a gentleman of Zealand, contrary to a compact to which Philip’s tyranny had forced her to consent.  After a career the most checkered and romantic which