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After a consultation with the leaders of the University of Paris, Cauchon arrived at the Burgundian camp before Compiègne on the 14th of July, and claimed Joan of Arc as prisoner from the keeping of the Duke of Burgundy. Cauchon justified his demand by letters which he had obtained from the doctors of the University, and he made the offer in the name of the child-king of England.

The child-king then changed his dress for another suit of clothes for his brothers to admire, and I retired, much annoyed, as he would neither give pombe for myself, nor plantains for my men: and I was further annoyed on my arrival at home, to find the Wanguana mobbing my hut and clamouring for food, and calling for an order to plunder if I did not give them beads, which, as the stock had run short, I could only do by their returning to Karague for the beads stored there; and, even if they were obtained, it was questionable if the king would revoke his order prohibiting the sale of provisions to us.

The dukes were constantly waging war against each other, and these internal dissensions greatly weakened the central government. At the same time the empire was exposed to the incursions of the Magyars or Hungarians, whose wholesale depredations and cruelties so dismayed the child-king that he concluded a treaty of peace with the invaders and consented to pay them a ten-years' tribute.

The letter from his chief was hidden against his breast; he would study it anon in the privacy of his own apartment so as to commit every word to memory that related to the measures for the ultimate safety of the child-King. After that it would have to be destroyed, lest it fell into inimical hands. Soon he bade Marguerite good-night.

The document quoted above is a very powerful and no doubt also violent assault upon the Hamiltons, especially called forth by the murder of the Regent Murray, the slackness of the succeeding Government in the punishment of his assassin, and the powerful reasons there were for destroying a measure which Buchanan thought imperative both for the safety of the realm and the child-king that powerful family, the head of which was next in succession to the Scotch Crown, and had been popularly believed to be ready for any crime to obtain it.

Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king! When he left the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with the theatre, saluted him respectfully.

Then the office for the dead was recited; the Domine salvum fac regem chanted in an undertone that went to the hearts of the faithful Royalists, for they thought how the child-King for whom they were praying was even then a captive in the hands of his enemies; and a shudder ran through the stranger, as he thought that a new crime might be committed, and that he could not choose but take his part in it.

I have been told that the child-king is being reared, as it were, in a cloister, so strict are mother and guardian. My only fear for Hyacinth is the troubled state of the city, given over to civil warfare only less virulent than that which has desolated England. I hear that the Fronde is no war of epigrams and pamphlets, but that men are as earnest and bloodthirsty as they were in the League.

Violent as his acts had been, Richard's career had as yet jarred little with popular sentiment. The Woodvilles were unpopular, Hastings was detested as the agent of Edward's despotism, the reign of a child-king was generally deemed impossible.

When they were arrived there, they laid down their earthly state; and in emulation of the poverty and humility in which they had found the Lord of all power and might, they distributed their goods and possessions to the poor, and went about in mean attire, preaching to their people the new king of heaven and earth, the CHILD-KING, the Prince of Peace.