Page:Historyoffranc00yong.djvu/94

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70 niSTOR V OF FRANCE. [chap the place, with fatal injury to his own heaUh, so that in the summer of 1422 he died at Vincennes. He had been kinder to the poor madman king Charles VI. than ever wife or children had been ; and at the tidings of his death the worn-out old man hid his face from the light, and never ceased weeping and wailing for his "good son Henry" till he died, a few weeks later, after one of the most miserable reigns France had known. 24. Regency of Bedford, 1422. — As Henry died before Charles, he never became king of France under the Treaty of Troyes. His infant son Henry VI. suc- ceeded his grandfather in France and his father in England. By a strange chance, Charles and Henry were buried on the same day ; and over two open graves, at St. Denys and at Westminster, the young Henry was proclaimed king of his two kingdoms. His uncle, John Duke of Bedford, was Regent of France, and followed the • policy of his brother ; Henry's other uncle, the dauphin Charles, was indeed proclaimed king wherever the Ar- magnacs prevailed, but by the whole Burgundian party and the city of Paris he was reviewed as a proscribed traitor and murderer. He was called in mockery King oftBourges. Paris and Rouen, with the whole north and west, save a few scattered towns and castles, acknow- ledged Henry. The war was chiefly carried on in Anjou, where the chief supporters of Charles were Gascons and Scots, with knights from all quarters who hated the English and clung to the direct line, all under the com- mand of yohn Slcwart, earl of Buchati, who had been made Constable of France. With Henry's death the mercy and good discipline he had enforced came to an end ; the war had as usual demoralized the soldiery, and great ferocity prevailed on both sides. 25. Jacqueline of Hainault, 1423. — Jacqueline, the widow of the second of the short-lived dauphins, was heiress of the four counties of Holland, Zealand, Hain- ault, and Friesland. On the death of the dauphin she had been married to the J^i/ki' of Brabant, like herself, child to a sister of the Duke of Burgundy. Both were rude and coarse ; they quarrelled violently, and Jacque- line declared her marriage void, and fled to the protection of Henry V'. After Henry's death, his youngest brother, J-iutnfrcy, duke of Gloucester, wedded her, and began a war with the Uuke of Brabant. The pope, Martin IV., maintained the first marriage, and, as the Duke of