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Throne and Regent of France—Isabeau cheerfully claiming that the Dauphin was a bastard by one of her lovers. Henry was to marry Charles’s daughter Catherine, the wedding taking place at Troyes within twelve days. (According to the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, the couple were enthusiastic : ‘It was plainly to be seen that King Henry was desperately in love with her’, while the black-haired Princess of France ‘had longed passionately to be espoused to King Henry’; even so the honeymoon was spent besieging Sens.) In return Henry was to conquer all territories currently occupied by the ‘pretended Dauphin’ and the Armagnacs. When he became the French King he was to incorporate his Duchy of Normandy into the Kingdom of France, though while Charles VI lived Henry was to keep Normandy and receive the ‘homage’ of Brittany. Overjoyed, he sent the news of his ‘good conclusion’ to England, where there was a procession at St Paul’s in thanksgiving. It was a grim irony that he would not live to wear the French crown. The Treaty of Troyes was one of the greatest humiliations in French history, comparable to that of 1940, yet as Perroy points out : ‘North of the Loire no voice was raised against the treaty.’

Henry and Philip of Burgundy at once continued with the conquest of northern France, to the delight of those dispossessed by the Armagnacs. The allies besieged Montereau where Philip’s father had been murdered, Henry hanging some prisoners before the walls to encourage the garrison to surrender. The town fell and Duke John’s body was exhumed and taken to Dijon. The campaign’s principal aim was to reduce any centres of enemy resistance between Normandy and Paris. An especially important obstacle was Melun to which Henry and an Anglo-Burgundian army of 20,000 men laid siege in July. Although the town was garrisoned by only 700 troops, the courageous Gascon commander, Arnaud Guillaume de Barbazan, was determined to make good use of its excellent defensive position ; it straddled the Seine, with its centre and citadel on an island, each of the town’s three sections forming a separate walled stronghold linked to its neighbour by a bridge. The English tried mining, often knee-deep in water, but the French counter-mined and there were murderous struggles by torchlight in the tunnels, in which Henry himself took part, actually crossing swords on one occasion with Barbazan.

The English heavy guns—Including one which was called London, a gift from loyal citizens—had no more decisive effect than the mines ; the defenders swiftly plugged the breaches with barrels of earth. Dysentery broke out among the besiegers, who suffered many casualties. Henry sent a message to Barbazan to obey Charles VI, whom he had brought to the camp, but the fiery Gascon retorted that while he might be loyal to his sovereign he would never recognize any English King. Provisions failed at last, and on 18 November Melun was forced to surrender after a siege of eighteen weeks. Henry wanted to hang Barbazan, but the Gascon escaped by appealing to the laws of chivalry; he could not be executed because, having fought the King hand-to-hand, he was a brother-in-arms. Henry contented himself with putting Barbazan in an iron cage. However, Henry did succeed in hanging a score of Scottish soldiers on the thin pretext that they were traitors to their King who was his captive and theoretical ally. The Bourgeois of Paris tells us that while the English army was at Melun it devastated the country round about for more than twenty leagues.

On 1 September 1420 Henry V, Philip of Burgundy and Charles VI made a ceremonial entry into Paris to begin an English occupation which would last for fifteen years. The Parisians cheered Charles’s ‘true son’ and priests chanted Te Deums in the streets, while the States-General ratified the Treaty of Troyes and the Parlement declared the Dauphin incapable of succeeding to the throne because of his ‘horrible and dreadful crimes’. Monstrelet relates how Henry lodged at the Louvre for Christmas with great splendour, in contrast to Charles’s dismal