CHAPTER II. Henry prosecutes the war against the Dauphin—Katherine remains in England— Her disobedience—Jiirth and baptism of her son, Henry the Sixth—Site returns to France—Meets her husband and her parents—Goes with them in grand state to Paris—Discontent of the Parisians—Death of Henry the Fifth—His pompousfuneral—Katherine follows—liaises his tomb—His ejfigy broken—Henry the Sixth proclaimed—Katherine brings him to London—Me is taken from her charge — Warrant to his governess, and to his guardian—His childish freaks—Katherine retires from court—Is requested to pi-event a duel between the Dukes of Gloucester and Burgundy—Site marries Owen Tudor—Her childrm by him—His career—Her closing years—Death—Burial—Body exhumed—Exhibited to the curious for three centuries—Epitaph. FTKR raising a powcrful army, and placing his fair Queen under the charge of the Duke of Bedford, whom he had named Itcgent during his absence, Henry returned to France on the tenth of June. Before departing, he charged the Queen, then enceinte, on no account to give birth to her heir at Windsor. for ill would befall the monarch born in that fortress. Katherine, however, being a stranger to superstition, laughed at the prediction, and disobeyed the injunction of her royal lord. On the sixth of December, 1421, she gave birth to the unfortunate King Henry the Sixth ; and when her royal husband, who was then besiegingMeaux, heard that Windsor was the birth-place of the child, he exclaimed, with a sigh— Λ " All the Klory that I, Henry of Monmouth, have won, Will be lost by this my first, My truly ill-starred eon! My reign will he but short— His, Henry of Windsor, long :— But, as God has willed it, So lot it he done." ι The infant was christened with great pomp by the name of his father; the of Bedford : the King's brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, being appointed Warden of England in Bedford's place. At Bois de Yincennes she was met by her husband, her father and mother, King Charles and Queen Isabella, and many English and French nobles, who " received her as if she had been an angel sent from God," and conducted her with great pomp to Paris, where she and her warlike lord took up their abode at the Louvre ; and King Charles and his Queen were lodged in the Hôtel de St. Pol. ''King Henry and his consort Katherine," says Mezerai, "kept open court in grand state at the Louvre upon the feast of Pentecost, each crowned with their royal diadems. The leading princes and nobles of England and France partook of the sumptuous banquet ; but the people that went to see the ceremony had cause to regret the munificence of their former monarch, and to detest the pride or parsimony of the English, who, instead of bestowing good cheer on all comers, neither proffered them a scrap of food nor a drink of wine." The citizens also gazed with envious eyes on the magnificence of Henry, and at the same time pitied and resented the comparative insignificance to which their own sovereign had been reduced. Kcither by shows nor pageantries could their mur Duke of Bedford and the Bishop of; murs be stifled ; little dreaming that Winchester standing godfathers, and j what they so ardently desired was about Jaqueline, Countess of Hainanlt, god-;to be accomplished, they sighed for the mother. Katherine tarried at Windsor | power to deprive England of the royal till the month of April, when, she emdignity of France. Nor did Henry, barked, with her infant, at Hampton, then at the summit of his greatness, anand landed at Harfleur, with powerful ticipate that long ere another year had forces, under the command of the Duke