The money levied by the fifteenth was not to be put into the king's hands but to be kept in religious houses; and if the expedition into France should not take place, it was immediately to be refunded to the people.

After these grants, the parliament was dissolved, which had sitten near two years and a half, and had undergone several prorogations; a practice not very usual at that time in England.
{1475.} The king passed over to Calais with an army of one thousand five hundred men at arms and fifteen thousand archers, attended by all the chief nobility of England, who, prognosticating future successes from the past, were eager to appear on this great theatre of honor.[*] But all their sanguine hopes were damped when they found, on entering the French territories, that neither did the constable open his gates to them, nor the duke of Burgundy bring them the smallest assistance.

That prince, transported by his ardent temper, had carried all his armies to a great distance, and had employed them in wars on the frontiers of Germany, and against the duke of Lorraine: and though he came in person to Edward, and endeavored to apologize for this breach of treaty, there was no prospect that they would be able this campaign to make a conjunction with the English.

This circumstance gave great disgust to the king, and inclined him to hearken to those advances which Lewis continually made him for an accommodation.
That monarch, more swayed by political views than by the point of honor, deemed no submissions too mean which might free him from enemies who had proved so formidable to his predecessors, and who, united to so many other enemies, might still shake the well-established government of France.

It appears from Comines, that discipline was at this time very imperfect among the English; and that their civil wars, though long continued, yet, being always decided by hasty battles, had still left them ignorant of the improvements which the military art was beginning to receive upon the continent.[**] * Comines, liv.iv.chap.5.This author says, (chap.