History of the English People, Volume III | Page 6

send his son James for

training to the court of France, but the boy was driven to the English
coast by a storm and Henry refused to release him. Had the Scots been
friends, the king jested, they would have sent James to him for
education, as he knew the French tongue quite as well as King Charles.
Robert died of grief at the news; and Scotland fell into the hands of his
brother, the Duke of Albany, whose one aim was that his nephew
should remain a prisoner. James grew up at the English Court; and,
prisoner though he was, the excellence of his training was seen in the
poetry and intelligence of his later life. But with its king as a hostage
Scotland was no longer to be dreaded as a foe. France too was
weakened at this moment; for in 1405 the long-smouldering jealousy
between the Dukes of Orleans and of Burgundy broke out at last into
open strife. The break did little indeed to check the desultory hostilities
which were going on. A Breton fleet made descents on Portland and
Dartmouth. The Count of Armagnac, the strongest supporter of Orleans
and the war party, led troops against the frontier of Guienne. But the
weakness of France and the exhaustion of its treasury prevented any
formal denunciation of the truce or declaration of war. Though Henry
could spare not a soldier for Guienne Armagnac did little hurt. An
English fleet repaid the ravages of the Bretons by harrying the coast of
Britanny; and the turn of French politics soon gave Frenchmen too
much work at home to spare men for work abroad. At the close of 1407
the murder of the Duke of Orleans by the order of the Duke of
Burgundy changed the weak and fitful strife which had been going on
into a struggle of the bitterest hate. The Count of Armagnac placed
himself at the head of the murdered duke's partizans; and in their
furious antagonism Armagnac and Burgundian alike sought aid from
the English king.
[Sidenote: Prince Henry]
But the fortune which favoured Henry elsewhere was still slow to turn
in the West. In the opening of 1405 the king's son, Henry Prince of
Wales, had taken the field against Glyndwr. Young as he was, Henry
was already a tried soldier. As a boy of thirteen he had headed an
incursion into Scotland in the year of his father's accession to the throne.
At fifteen he fought in the front of the royal army in the desperate fight

at Shrewsbury. Slight and tall in stature as he seemed, he had outgrown
the weakness of his earlier years and was vigorous and swift of foot; his
manners were courteous, his air grave and reserved; and though wild
tales ran of revels and riots among his friends, the poets whom he
favoured and Lydgate whom he set to translate "the drery piteous tale
of him of Troy" saw in him a youth "both manful and vertuous." There
was little time indeed for mere riot in a life so busy as Henry's, nor
were many opportunities for self-indulgence to be found in campaigns
against Glyndwr. What fitted the young general of seventeen for the
thankless work in Wales was his stern, immoveable will. But fortune as
yet had few smiles for the king in this quarter, and his constant
ill-success continued to wake fresh troubles within England itself. The
repulse of the young prince in a spring campaign in 1405 was at once
followed by a revolt in the north. The pardon of Northumberland had
left him still a foe; the Earl of Nottingham was son of Henry's opponent,
the banished Duke of Norfolk; Scrope, Archbishop of York, was
brother of Richard's counsellor, the Earl of Wiltshire, who had been
beheaded on the surrender of Bristol. Their rising in May might have
proved a serious danger had not the treachery of Ralph Neville, the Earl
of Westmoreland, who still remained steady to the Lancastrian cause,
secured the arrest of some of its leaders. Scrope and Lord Nottingham
were beheaded, while Northumberland and his partizan Lord Bardolf
fled into Scotland and from thence to Wales. Succours from France
stirred the king to a renewed attack on Glyndwr in November; but with
the same ill-success. Storms and want of food wrecked the English
army and forced it to retreat; a year of rest raised Glyndwr to new
strength; and when the long-promised body of eight thousand
Frenchmen joined him in 1407 he ventured even to cross the border and
to threaten Worcester. The threat was a vain one and the Welsh army
soon withdrew; but the insult gave fresh heart to Henry's foes, and in
1408 Northumberland and Bardolf again appeared in the north. Their
overthrow at Bramham Moor put