King of England, and fell gloriously. Towards the
end of the struggle, some hundreds of peasants of
Picardy, commanded by two gentlemen of the country,
believing that the English were vanquished, came to
plunder their camp. Henry, fancying that he was
about to be attacked by a reinforcement, whose
march had been concealed from him, ordered the
massacre of the prisoners, and only excepted the
princes and generals. This barbarous order was put
into execution, and tarnished his victory."]

The inference, then, which the facts, as they are delivered by English
and French writers, compel us to draw, coincides with the professed
sentiments of all contemporaries. Those, on the one hand, who shared
the glory and were proud of the day of Agincourt, and those, on the
other, whose national pride, and wounded honour, and participation in
the calamities poured that day upon the noblest families of France,
and in the mourning spread far and wide throughout the land, caused
them to abhor the very name of Agincourt, all sanction our adoption of
that one inference: _Henry did not stain his victory by any act of
cruelty_. His character comes out of the investigation untarnished by
a suspicion of his having wantonly shed the blood of a single
fellow-creature.

To enable the reader to judge for himself how far the view taken (p. 177)
in the text is justified by the evidence, the Author has thought it
desirable to cite from different writers, French as well as English,
the passages at length in which they describe the transaction.

The Chaplain of Henry V, an eye-witness, who was himself
stationed with the baggage, and whose account is contained in the
fasciculus known as "MS. Sloane, 1776, p. 67," thus reports the
transaction:

"When some of the enemy's foreranks were slain, those behind
pressed over the dead, and others again falling on them were
immediately put to death; and near Henry's banners so large was
the pile of corpses, and of those who were thrown upon them, that
the English stood on heaps which exceeded a man's height, and
felled their adversaries below with swords and axes. And when, at
length, for the space of two or three hours, that powerful body
of the first ranks had been broken th