eft
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 o