t anxiety to enter
on the campaign. He liked to go aboard his ship, saying, "I am very
eager to be off; I think I shall be a good sailor, for the sea does me no
harm." But everybody was not so impatient as the king, who was waiting
for his uncle, the Duke of Berry, and writing to him letter after letter,
urging him to come. The duke, who had no liking for the expedition,
contented himself with making an answer bidding him "not to take any
trouble, but to amuse himself, for the matter would probably terminate
otherwise than was imagined." The Duke of Berry at last arrived at Sluys
on the 14th of October, 1386. "If it hadn't been for you, uncle," said
the king to him, "we should have been by this time in England." Three
months had gone by; the fine season was past; the winds were becoming
violent and contrary; the vessels come from Treguier with the constable
to join the fleet had suffered much on the passage; and deliberations
were recommencing touching the opportuneness, and even the feasibility,
of the expedition thus thrown back. "If anybody goes to England, I will,"
said the king. But nobody went. "One day when it was calm," says the monk
of St. Denis, "the king, completely armed, went with his uncles aboard of
the royal vessel; but the wind did not permit them to get more than two
miles out to sea, and drove them back, in spite of the sailors' efforts,
to the shore they had just left. The king, who saw with deep displeasure
his hopes thus frustrated, had orders given to his troops to go back,
and, at his departure, left, by the advice of his barons, some men-of-war
to unload the fleet, and place it in a place of safety as soon as
possible. But the enemy gave them no time to execute the order. As soon
as the calm allowed the English to set sail, they bore down on the
French, burned or took in tow to their own ports the most part of the
fleet, carried off the supplies, and found two thousand casks full of
wine, which sufficed a long while for the wants of England."

Such a mistake, after such a fuss, was probably not unconnected with a
resolution adopted by Charles VI. some time after the abandonment of the
projected expedition against England. In October, 1388, he assembled at
Rheims a grand council, at which were present his two uncles, the Dukes
of Burgundy and Berry [the third, the Duke of Anjou, had died in Italy,
on the 20th of September, 1384, after a vain attempt to conquer the
kingdom of Naples], his