JOAN OF ARC. 339 would be brought home wounded and bleeding. Such was the all- pervading bitterness of discord throughout the kingdom.* Even the death of the brilliant Henry V.., in 1423, had seemed to check in no degree the progress of the English arms. Under the able regency of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, seconded by such captains as Salisbury, Talbot, Scales, and Fastolf, the infant Henry VI. appeared destined to succeed to the throne of his grandfather, Charles VI., as provided in the treaty of Troves. In 1424 the victory of Verneuil repeated the triumph of Agincourt. From Dauphine alone three hundred knights were left upon the field, and but for the fidelity of the provinces won by the Albi- gensian crusades, Charles VII. would already have been a king without a kingdom. Driven beyond the Loire, he was known by the nickname of the Eoi de Bourges. Vacillating and irresolute, dominated by unworthy favorites, he hardly knew whether to retreat farther to the south and make a final stand among the mountains of Dauphine, or to seek a refuge in Spain or Scotland. In 1428 his last line of defence on the Loire was threatened by the leaguer of Orleans. He was powerless to raise the siege, and for five months the heroic city resisted till, reduced to despair, it sent the renowned knight, Pothon de Xaintrailles to the Duke of Burgundy to ask him to accept its allegiance. The duke was nothing loath, but the acquisition required the assent of his English ally, and Bedford scornfully refused — he would not, he said, beat the bush for another to win the bird. Two months more of weary siege elapsed: as the spring of 1429 opened, further resistance seemed useless, and for Charles there appeared nothing left but ignominious retreat and eventual exile.f Such Avas the hopeless condition of the French monarchy when the enthusiasm of Joan of Arc introduced a new factor in the tangled problem, kindling anew the courage which had been ex- tinguished by an unbroken series of defeats, arousing the sense of
- Journal cTun Bourgeois de Paris arm. 1431. — Epist. de Bonlavillar (Pez,
Thesaur. Anecd. VI. in. 237). — Proces de Jeanne d'Arc, p. 474. (When not other- wise defined, my references to this and other documents concerning Joan are to the collection in Bnchon's Choixde Chroniques et Memoires, Paris, 1838.) t Thomassin,Registre Delphinal (Buchon, p. 536, 540). — Gorres,Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, Trad. Bor6, Paris, 1886, p. 108. — Chronique de la Pucello (Buchon, p. 454).
