thousand Scots under the Earl of Douglas, made with fresh
vigour across the Loire were easily repulsed by Duke John of Bedford, the
late king's brother, who had been named in his will Regent of France. In
genius for war as in political capacity John was hardly inferior to Henry
himself. Drawing closer his alliance with the Duke of Burgundy by marriage
with that prince's sister, and holding that of Britanny by a patient
diplomacy, he completed the conquest of Northern France, secured his
communications with Normandy by the capture of Meulan, and made himself
master of the line of the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre. In 1424 the
Constable of Buchan pushed from the Loire to the very borders of Normandy
to arrest his progress, and attacked the English army at Verneuil. But a
repulse hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left a third of the
French knighthood on the field: and the Regent was preparing to cross the
Loire for a final struggle with "the King of Bourges" as the English in
mockery called Charles the Seventh when his career of victory was broken
by troubles at home.

[Sidenote: Humphrey of Gloucester]

In England the Lancastrian throne was still too newly established to
remain unshaken by the succession of a child of nine months old. Nor was
the younger brother of Henry the Fifth, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whom
the late king's will named as Regent of the realm, a man of the same noble
temper as the Duke of Bedford. Intellectually the figure of Humphrey is
one of extreme interest, for he is the first Englishman in whom we can
trace the faint influence of that revival of knowledge which was to bring
about the coming renascence of the western world. Humphrey was not merely
a patron of poets and men of letters, of Lydgate and William of Worcester
and Abbot Whethamstede of St. Albans, as his brother and other princes of
the day had been, but his patronage seems to have sprung from a genuine
interest in learning itself. He was a zealous collector of books and was
able to bequeath to the University of Oxford a library of a hundred and
thirty volumes. A gift of books indeed was a passport to his favour, and
before the title of each volume he possessed the Duke wrote words which
expressed his love of them, "moun bien mondain," "my worldly goods"!
Lydgate tells us how "notwithstanding his state and dignyte his corage
never doth appalle to studie in books of antiquitie." His studies drew him
to the revival of cl