him to reach Königsberg with all possible speed. From thence he was to proceed under the guidance of Engelhard Rabe, the Marshal of the Order, against Lithuania, which had been allied with Poland; the object of the expedition being to reinstate the banished Duke Witowd. They now only waited for the arrival of the foreign volunteers from Germany, France, and England, and when all were assembled, the baggage and supplies were sent by ship along the Haff, while the knights and their retinue set forth in the latter end of August, through the desolate districts of Kau on the Memel, where they appear to have had a hot engagement with the enemy on Saturday, the 27th. The fortress of Wilna was beleaguered all the month of September, until the bad season of the year brought the campaign to a close without any special result. The English Earl returned to Königsberg on the 20th of October, and we learn from accounts which he had to settle there for the transport and keep of his men, that at least one of his men had been killed in battle, that three youths, the sons of a Lithuanian nobleman, had fallen into the hands of the English prince, and that two Prussian knights were by order of their Marshal in attendance upon the Earl.

Henry spent the next three or four months in Königsberg, and seems to have installed himself regularly there for the winter season. We find that the interval between Christmas and the Epiphany was spent in accordance with the English custom, in feasting, sports, and merriment of every kind. He would not, however, undertake a second expedition against the heathens, but devoted several weeks to travelling through the country. It was in the course of this journey, in February 1391, that he passed through Braunsberg and Elbing to Marienburg, whence he went to Dirschau, and then down the Vistula, to Danzic. He did not see the aged Grand Master, Zöllner von Rotenstein, for he had died of some lingering disease in the month of August. His successor, Conrad von Wallenrod, was not chosen till the 12th of March, when his election by the knights took place at Marienburg, and he lost no time, in accordance with the usual custom, of making a present of several falcons to the foreign prince, who after fighting so bravely for the Order was now about to leave Prussia. Henry spent the whole of March at Danzic, where he was probably detained by illness, as we infer from an indication given us by the keeper of his accounts, from whom we learn other things still more worthy of notice. The Earl of Derby's herald had been despatched to demand from Wladislav Jagello, the King of Poland, the restitution of two English knights, who had fallen into his hands during the war. An English herald also arrives with a message from Henry's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who had started in the same year on a similar crusade, but who had gone no further than Norway, from whence he had returned home; and lastly, the Earl receives the news, through an English sea-captain, that his consort has given birth to her fourth son, Humphrey, the future Duke of Gloucester.

Henry spent the Easter at Danzic, on which occasion he gave rich alms to the four principal churches of the town, in return for which Pope Boniface IX. granted him absolution from his vow to take part in the Crusades. Soon afterwards he embarked on his homeward voyage, and after having safely landed at Hull, he hastened to his castle at Bolingbroke.

When this prince ten years afterwards became King of England, he displayed a thorough acquaintance with the condition of public affairs in Prussia, during the many very complicated negotiations which arose between his own country and the districts on the Baltic. He was also the last prince of any reputation who made a voyage to the North Sea, and on this account special attention is due to the relations which subsisted between Henry IV. and the Prussian authorities.

The strong material basis of these international relations was not therefore wholly deficient in some elements of romance; for the people of these two countries were early united together, and long maintained a reciprocal intercourse, such as Austria, from her position on the southern boundary of Germany, where she had to maintain a defensive attitude in respect to the Slavonic nations, was never able to establish with regard to England. It was not until many ages afterwards that the bonds of a family union, which Rudolf and Edward had once been so anxious to cement, were united between these royal houses; although from an early period of the middle ages we find different ancestors of the Hohenzollern family, as if in anticipation of the closer union that was to be effected at a future period between their descendants, brought into close contact with the policy and personal interests of the Kings of England. Thus Burggrave Albert the Handsome, of Nuremberg, was one of the German nobles who helped Edward III. to gain his splendid victories over the French; while at the court of Henry V. and of his son Henry VI., no foreign prince was better known than Frederick I., Elector of Brandenburg, whose far-sighted policy had raised him to the rank of the first politician in the Empire of Sigismund.

V.

THE EMPEROR LOUIS IV. AND KING EDWARD III.

THE remarkable degree of development which the nations of Europe attained during the fourteenth century clearly manifests the extent to which the fate of two nations, such as Germany and England, who are allied by race, may differ from one another, and the points at which the consciousness of a unity of origin may again revive long dormant associations of affinity.

When the two brightest lights of Christendom, the Pope and the Emperor, had begun to pale amid the dark storms of the agitated period that had just passed, and the brightness of the one had long dimmed that of the other, states which had hitherto revolved like stars of lesser magnitude round their primary planets, now necessarily acquired pre-eminence and significance of their own. France and England had successfully taken the lead in opposing the unbounded pretensions of Rome, advanced by Boniface VIII., and the former of these powers had even reduced the papal chair to temporary dependence by forcing it into a state of Babylonish exile at Avignon. The greatest emperors of ancient times never succeeded in effecting such a result as this. The imperial dignity had, however, been thrown completely in the background