their shoulders, and flocked out in
crowds to welcome him in every town through which he passed, and hung
rich carpets and tapestries out of the windows, and strewed the streets
with flowers, and made the fountains run with wine, as the great field of
Agincourt had run with blood.

SECOND PART

That proud and wicked French nobility who dragged their country to
destruction, and who were every day and every year regarded with deeper
hatred and detestation in the hearts of the French people, learnt
nothing, even from the defeat of Agincourt. So far from uniting against
the common enemy, they became, among themselves, more violent, more
bloody, and more false--if that were possible--than they had been before.
The Count of Armagnac persuaded the French king to plunder of her
treasures Queen Isabella of Bavaria, and to make her a prisoner. She,
who had hitherto been the bitter enemy of the Duke of Burgundy, proposed
to join him, in revenge. He carried her off to Troyes, where she
proclaimed herself Regent of France, and made him her lieutenant. The
Armagnac party were at that time possessed of Paris; but, one of the
gates of the city being secretly opened on a certain night to a party of
the duke's men, they got into Paris, threw into the prisons all the
Armagnacs upon whom they could lay their hands, and, a few nights
afterwards, with the aid of a furious mob of sixty thousand people, broke
the prisons open, and killed them all. The former Dauphin was now dead,
and the King's third son bore the title. Him, in the height of this
murderous scene, a French knight hurried out of bed, wrapped in a sheet,
and bore away to Poitiers. So, when the revengeful Isabella and the Duke
of Burgundy entered Paris in triumph after the slaughter of their
enemies, the Dauphin was proclaimed at Poitiers as the real Regent.

King Henry had not been idle since his victory of Agincourt, but had
repulsed a brave attempt of the French to recover Harfleur; had gradually
conquered a great part of Normandy; and, at this crisis of affairs, took
the important town of Rouen, after a siege of half a year. This great
loss so alarmed the French, that the Duke of Burgundy proposed that a
meeting to treat of peace should be held between the French and the
English kings in a plain by the river Seine. On the appointed day, King
Henry appeared there, with his two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, and
a thousand men. The unfortunate French King,