and two hours afterwards Duke John arrived with his men-at-arms.  “My dearest cousin,” said the queen to him, “I ought to love you above every man in the realm; you have left all at my bidding, and are come to deliver me from prison.  Be assured that I will never fail you.  I quite see that you have always been devoted to my lord, his family, the realm, and the common-weal.”  The duke carried the queen off to Chartres; and as soon as she was settled there, on the 12th of November, 1417, she wrote to the good towns of the kingdom,

“We, Isabel, by the grace of God Queen of France, having, by reason of my lord the king’s seclusion, the government and administration of this realm, by irrevocable grant made to us by the said my lord the king and his council, are come to Chartres in company with our cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, in order to advise and ordain whatsoever is necessary to preserve and recover the supremacy of my lord the king, on advice taken of the prud’hommes, vassals, and subjects.”

She at the same time ordered that Master Philip de Morvilliers, heretofore councillor of the Duke of Burgundy, should go to Amiens, accompanied by several clerics of note and by a registrar, and that there should be held there, by the queen’s authority, for the bailiwicks of Amiens, Vermandois, Tournai, and the countship of Ponthieu, a sovereign court of justice, in the place of that which there was at Paris.  Thus, and by such a series of acts of violence and of falsehoods, the Duke of Burgundy, all the while making war on the king, surrounded himself with hollow forms of royal and legal government.

Whilst civil war was thus penetrating to the very core of the kingship, foreign war was making its way again into the kingdom.  Henry V., after the battle of Agincourt, had returned to London, and had left his army to repose and reorganize after its sufferings and its losses.  It was not until eighteen months afterwards, on the 1st of August, 1417, that he landed at Touques, not far from Honfleur, with fresh troops, and resumed his campaign in France.  Between 1417 and 1419 he successively laid siege to nearly all the towns of importance in Normandy, to Caen, Bayeux, Falaise, Evreux, Coutances, Laigle, St. Lo, Cherbourg, &c., &c.  Some he occupied after a short resistance, others were sold to him by their governors; but when, in the month of July, 1418, he undertook the siege of Rouen, he encountered there a long and serious struggle.  Rouen had at that time, it is said, a population of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, which was animated by ardent patriotism.  The Rouennese, on the approach of the English, had repaired their gates, their ramparts, and their moats; had demanded re-enforcements from the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy; and had ordered every person incapable of bearing arms or procuring provisions for ten months, to leave the city.  Twelve thousand old men, women, and children were thus expelled, and died either