There was now no check upon the Burgundian power.  In the worst days of English occupation of her land, France had been in less danger from Edward III. than she now was from the Duke of Burgundy, champion and defender of the people!  The immediate object of the Burgundian or people’s party, and the Orleans and aristocratic party, was the possession of the person of the king, and control of his acts during his few lucid moments.

There was civil war in a land divested of every vestige of government.  England would have been blind had she not seen her opportunity; but, too much occupied with her own revolution, she had to wait.  And when Henry IV., the first Lancastrian, was king, he needed both hands to hold his crown firmly on his head.  But when the young Henry V. came to the throne, with the energy and ambition of youth, the time was ripe for the recovery of the lost possessions in France.

The battle of Agincourt (1415) reopened the war with a great defeat for the French chivalry, which represented the Orleanist party.  The wholesale slaughter of princes, bishops, and knights on this fatal day was clear gain for the traitor Burgundy, the champion of the people!  The climax of his villainy was at hand.

Henry V., at Rouen, was openly holding his court as King of France.  John, Duke of Burgundy, accompanied by Queen Isabella, presented himself to the invading king, and formally pledged his support and that of his followers to the cause of the English!

The infamous treaty of Troyes was signed, 1420.  It provided that Henry should act as regent to Charles VI. while he lived; that upon the death of that unhappy being he should be Henry V. of England and Henry II. of France; and that the two kingdoms should thereafter exist under one crown.  The romantic marriage of Henry with the Princess Katharine, daughter of Charles and Isabella, which was part of the agreement, was solemnized in that old palace on the island in the Seine.  And the same vaulted ceilings which we may see to-day, looked down upon this historic marriage, as they also did upon the condemnation of Marie Antoinette, three and a half centuries later.  We know of this union of Henry and the fair Katharine chiefly through the pen of Shakespeare, in his play of Henry V.

But Henry was destined never to wear the crown of France, nor even to see his own land again.  There were only two more years of life for him.  His death occurred in his palace of the Louvre, a few weeks before that of Charles VI., and the crown he expected to wear upon this event passed to his infant son, who was by the Burgundian party recognized as King of France.

A careless, pleasure-loving dauphin, just twenty, apparently indifferent to the loss of a kingdom, was a frail support at such a time.  Only a fragment of the country was held by his followers, the Orleanists; Scotland had come to his aid with a few thousand men, but what did this avail with the greater part of the kingdom held by the Burgundians, while town after town was declaring its allegiance to the English Duke of Bedford, whom his dying brother, Henry V., had named as regent for his infant son.