The death of a brave plebeian, one Badby a smith, accused of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, was also the work of Arundel the primate. When fire was laid to the dry wood

that rose around the huge tun in which the martyr 1410 stood, the Prince of Wales (afterwards Henry the Fifth), melting at the cries of the sufferer, offered him a pension of threepence a day if he would recant; but he chose rather his present pain and speedy death than life and money bought with denial of his faith. This martyrdom stained the year 1410.

1413

The most illustrious Englishman of the Lollard sect was Sir John Oldcastle, who obtained by marriage the higher title of Lord Cobham. Thoughtful beyond all the soldiers and courtiers who surrounded the throne, this man found his truest pleasure in books, and clung with especial love to the books of John Wyclif. He became a Lollard-the central spirit of the sect. Arundel marked him as a noble quarry, and began to hunt him down. Henry the Fifth, assuming the crown in 1413, had soon the unpleasant task of choosing between an old comrade whose nobleness of mind he could partly value, and a torch of persecution like Primate Arundel. Touched with a weakness for theological argument, the royal amateur tried to shake the noble Wyclifite in his faith. tried in vain; and when the Fiery Statute became the royal standpoint of controversy, Oldcastle went down to Cowling, his place in Kent. Arundel's summons to the heretic to appear before his court met with a stout refusal. Soldiers only could drag the illustrious Lollard to the Tower. The sentence of fire was pronounced; and had not the king allowed respite for fifty days, it would have been carried promptly into execution. Politics had probably already begun to leaven this religious movement. Round their escaped leader crowds of Lollards drew eagerly and fondly, mingling a design on the freedom of the king with their original schemes for the reform of the

He

Church. A projected midnight muster in the meadow of St. Giles, then lying some distance outside London gates, came to the ears of the watchful and resolute king, who, marching in the dead of a winter night to the place of 1414 rendezvous, took the precaution of shutting the city gates behind him. A few score Lollards were caught lurking in the fields, or gathering at certain points on the roads; the barred gates held those within the city fast in a trap: probably a revolution was nipped in the bud (1414). But Oldcastle, who cannot have been far away, got safely off to Wales. Four years later, when a movement of the Scottish nobles, Albany and Douglas, toward the strongholds of the Border, seemed to favour the Lollard cause, Oldcastle, in the hope of reviving his scattered and frightened party, hovered around London and was seen. The retreat of the Scottish army forced him to flee to Wales; but he was overtaken and caught. Doomed by the Lords to death, he was burned as a heretic in St. Giles's Fields. Even Horace Walpole, who believed in very little, speaks of him as one "whose virtue made him a reformer, and whose courage made him a martyr." The literary talent of Oldcastle marks him out specially among the men of his day. He edited the works of Wyclif, and wrote, besides several religious tracts and sermons, a pamphlet called Twelve Conclusions addressed to the Parliament of England.

1418

Arundel had died long before the execution of Cobham, and his successor Chicheley, formerly Bishop of St. David's, burned with even fiercer zeal against the Reformers. The Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace, built by Chicheley, still overlooks the Thames, with cruel rings of iron, its wainscot scratched with noble names. The fires of persecution continued to burn as thickly as before. The natural result followed. With the faith of the Lollards, which struck deeper and stronger roots after every fresh attack, there mingled a bitter vindictive feel

ing, a growth of human weakness which has often stained the best of causes.

Oxford was among the first to show symptoms of reaction. In 1441 twelve members of the university which Wyclif had once adorned examined by appointment the works of the Evangelical Doctor, as he had been called, and pronounced the bulk of them to be only worthy of the flames. The backward tide then set strongly in. Luxury and vice ate into the vitals of the Church. Matters were in this frightful state, when the storm of civil war burst upon England to cleanse or to destroy. The immediate effect of that great national convulsion-the struggle between the rival Roses-was to cause a lull in the persecution of the Lollards, who sink out of sight during the whirl of battle-fields that come thick in the annals of the time. But Lollardie did not perish. From its seeds sprang the Protestant Reformation of the next century.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AGINCOURT.

Henry the Fourth and France-An old claim-Southampton-Siege of Harfleur-March by the shore-Looking for a ford-St. Crispin's DayHomeward-Visit of Sigismund-Siege of Rouen-Burgundy murdered-Treaty of Troyes-Death of Henry the Fifth.

WHE

HEN Charles the Well-beloved of France became imbecile (1392), a keen and protracted struggle for the supremacy arose between the Princes of Orleans and Burgundy. Both sides courted the aid of Henry the Fourth. In 1411, he sent a force to assist the Burgundians in the capture of Paris; but in the following year, tempted by the promised restoration of Aquitaine, Poitou, and Angoulême, he flung the weight of his aid on the Armagnac or Orleanist side. He gained little from his interference in this civil strife, for soon afterwards the rival factions combined against the English.

Henry the Fifth saw in the shattered and disorganized state of France a most tempting spectacle. In 1415, the conqueror of Owen Glendower laid claim to the crown of the Capets, reviving the old arguments of Edward the Third. The clergy and the nobles of England, assembled in a "Great Council," approved of his ambitious design; but, if we may judge from his having recourse to the pawning of jewels and to similar expedients for raising money, the Commons of England did not at first think well of this foreign move.

A muster of men and ships at Southampton displayed the

serious intention of the king to invade the land he claimed. The discovery of a plot to raise the son of the Earl of March to the English throne stopped him on the eve of embarkation. He wept when he found that his friend and bed-fellow Lord Scrope had joined the Earl of Cambridge and Sir Thomas Gray in this conspiracy; but that did not prevent him from putting him to death along with the other conspirators. At last his great fleet of fifteen hundred vessels spread their wings, and made for the mouth of the Seine, where stood the great fortress of Harfleur,* selected as the first point of attack.

Aug. 11, 1415

Had his approach been less sudden, a few Frenchmen might have successfully disputed his landing on that difficult shore; for the rocks and marshes which naturally guarded the beach had been strengthened by great ditches and earthworks of enormous thickness. † Passing these unhindered, he found

himself before the key of Normandy. For thirty-eight days the English army plied the siege of Harfleur with all the resources at their command. One barbican, standing in front of the principal gate, bore the hottest brunt of the attack. Stone balls flew thick from cannon and balistæ; mines and trenches honeycombed the earth outside the walls; fagots to fill the moat and ladders to scale the walls were made in vast numbers by the carpenters of the English camp. defence unworthy of a nation of cavaliers. Every night witnessed swarms of the besieged working to repair the breaches made during the day by the English engines. Baskets filled with earth and sand, and huge layers of soft mud, in which the balls of the enemy sank harmlessly, filled every gap, while pots of sulphur, quicklime, and burning fat stood ready to be cast

Nor was the

*Harfleur, now a village of Seine-Inférieure, lies on the right bank of the Seine, within a short distance of Havre. A mile of marsh separates it from the river, and its former harbour is dry.

One authority makes the place where Henry landed Kydcause, about three miles from Harfleur. Another says it was the harbour between Harfleur and Honfleur.