Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset

But although the English administration in France was good, although the peasantry were treated with consideration and the middle classes were encouraged in trade and in self-government, yet the forces of nationality, even in distracted, divided feudal France, were too strong.

When the romantic figure of Joan of Arc appeared with her devoted and religious passion to free France from Talbot and the English, she became a focus for all the vague national and patriotic aspirations of the people whom neither the craft and pertinacity of the Dauphin nor the valor of the professional generals had till then been able to rouse.

The strong ally of the English in France was Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.

His father had been murdered by some of the Dauphin's supporters at the bridge of Montereau on the Seine in 1419.

In October 1423 he set out from Calais to Hainaut, which was then in the possession of Jacqueline's former husband, the Duke of Brabant.

Gloucester had with him 5,000 men raised in England.

This was fully up to the numbers of the armies usually employed by the English generals in France in the reign of Henry VI.

Gloucester won Hainaut, but then found himself opposed by the Duke of Burgundy to whom Jacqueline's former husband had appealed for help.

For two days at Tewkesbury he had dreamed about securing the crown for himself, but he reflected this would certainly involve the renewal of civil war, and that, if successful, he could only establish his rights as a conqueror and incur the hatred of the whole nobility, as Richard had done.

And, after all, as he confessed to Morton, it suddenly occurred to him that he was not the true representative of the Beaufort line, for he was only descended from Edmund Duke of Somerset, who was a younger brother.

How he came to overlook this rather material fact he did not inform his prisoner, but he was very frank in stating how he was reminded of it.

While I was in a maze, he said to Morton, that is to say, while he was indulging in his daydream, as I rode between Worcester and Bridgnorth, I encountered with the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, now the wife of the Lord Stanley, which is the very daughter and sole heir to Lord John Duke of Somerset, my grandfather's eldest brother.