It is almost with relief that we read of the slaughter of these knightly savages at Agincourt.  If the shipwreck of a mighty kingdom was to be averted, two things must be done.  The decaying corpse of feudalism must be thrown overboard, and the Church must be purified.  Both had fallen from the ideals which created them; the ideal of truth, justice, and spotless honor, and the ideal of divine love and mercy.  Even the semblance of truth and justice and honor had departed from the one; and unspeakable corruption had crept into the other.  From the day of the Albigensian cruelties, the heart of the Church had turned to stone, and the spark of life divine within seemed extinguished.  Once the guardian of the helpless, it had deserted the people and made common cause with their oppressors.  One pope at Rome, and another at Avignon, was a heavy burden to carry.  But when three infallible beings were hurling anathemas at each other, the University of Paris led Christendom in rejecting them all.

So the two great classes for which the State existed were overweighting the ship at a time when it was being torn and tossed by a storm of gigantic proportions.

Well was it for France that Charles VII., as king, developed unexpected firmness and ability.  The creation of a standing army, and the disbanding of all military organizations existing without the king’s commission, at one sweeping blow completed the wreck of feudalism.  It only remained for Charles’s cold-blooded son, Louis XI., to finish the work, and mediaevalism was a thing of the past in France.

The reign of Charles was imbittered by the conduct of this unnatural son, whose undisguised impatience to assume the crown so alarmed him that it is said he shortened his own life by abstaining from food in the fear that the dauphin might lay the guilt of parricide upon his soul.

This heart-broken, desolate old man died in 1461.  And Louis XI. was King of France.

The son of Charles VII. was a composite of the wisest and the worst of his predecessors.  Indeed, it is to the Roman emperors we must look for a parallel to this monster on a throne.  And yet, to no other king does France owe such a debt of gratitude.  His remorseless hand placed a great gulf between the new and the old, in which were forever buried the men and the system which had fed upon her life.

The antagonism between the son and the father aroused great hopes of a reversal of policy and a rehabilitation of feudalism.  These hopes were soon undeceived.  So inscrutable and so tortuous was the policy of this strange being, so unexpected his changes of direction, so false and inconsistent his words and acts, and so unspeakably cruel the means to his ends, that a cowed and bewildered nation was soon crouching at his feet, not knowing whither he was leading them.