Henry VI.—(1422-1471).

Henry V. was succeeded by his son, Henry VI., a child eleven months old. During his minority all the advantages of a monarchical regency were powerfully illustrated. He grew up a perfect imbecile. From time to time he lost his reason altogether. The war in France continued, but in time the tide turned against the English invaders.

At last appeared on the scene that unique figure in history, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Her achievements require no recital. She saved France at the cost of her own heroic life. She fell into the hands of the English, by whom she was treated with incredible brutality. Though a mere girl of twenty, she was placed in an iron cage, and so bound with iron chains by neck, waist, feet, and hands that she could not move. She became ill, and the Earl of Warwick sent physicians to her with this royal injunction, "The king would not have her by any means die a natural death. He has bought her dear, and is desirous that she should die by justice, and be burned. Visit her therefore and cure her." The pure-souled girl met her dreadful doom as became the liberator of her country. The king's secretary, who saw her end, wrote with prophetic foresight. "We are all lost. A holy person has been burnt, but her soul is in the hands of God,"

In this wretched reign the nation, for the second time, tasted to the full all the horrors of a disputed succession. Constitutional writers insist that the hereditary principle gives stability to governments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dynastic wars have from the first deluged the world in blood. Nor are they over. The last terrible death-grapple between France and Germany was, in reality, a dynastic war. It was caused by Hohenzollern succession intrigues in Spain, and the need of military prestige to give the son of Eugenie a chance of the imperial inheritance. How two civilised peoples could ever have permitted themselves to rend each other over such issues is inexplicable, except on the hypothesis that men in the mass may go mad exactly as individuals at times go mad.

If I were King of France, or, what's better, Pope of Rome,
I'd have no fighting men abroad nor weeping maids at home;
All the world should be at peace; let kings assert their right,
And those that make the quarrels be the only men to fight,

In the Wars of the Roses the old Norman aristocracy took sides—York v. Lancaster—to a man, and, like the swine in the Gospel, rushed headlong down a steep place into the sea, where, happily, they nearly all perished. Of "our old nobility" who "came over at the Conquest" hardly a dozen specimens were left alive. The struggle lasted for thirty years from the first battle of St. Alban's 1455, to Bosworth Field, 1485.