They found Charles d'Orléans alive at Agincourt — unwounded, pinned underneath a heap of dead men. He was twenty, and he had already inherited a war: his father Louis had been murdered in a Paris street eight years earlier on the orders of John the Fearless of Burgundy, the killer was never punished, and Charles had sworn the oath of vengeance at thirteen. What came next was not vengeance but twenty-five years in England. The Tower of London, Bolingbroke, Pontefract, and finally a house in Wiltshire, because Henry V had left instructions that this particular prisoner was never to be ransomed — he was too dangerous to put back into French politics. So he wrote instead. More than five hundred of his poems survive, in French and in English, made across a quarter of a century of waiting; one of them begins in the forest of long awaiting. He was released on 3 November 1440 by his old enemies Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, for eighty thousand saluts d'or down and a promise of a hundred and forty thousand crowns to come. He was forty-six, and he spoke better English than French.

Tradition of London mount him in the arms of his house — blue strewn with gold fleurs-de-lis beneath a white label of three points, the mark that distinguished Orléans from the crown itself — with mace raised and the horse fully barded to match. Muster him with the French command at Agincourt, Charles d'Albret, Constable of France, who died there, and Jean de Boucicaut, who like Charles was taken alive and unlike him never came home. Face them with King & Country's English Archer Set for the men who did the damage, and give Joan of Arc a place nearby — she lifted the siege of his city in 1429 while he sat in an English castle, unable to do anything about it at all. He went home to Blois in the end, kept a small literary court there that drew François Villon, and fathered the future Louis XII at sixty-seven.

Model: mk02 / Tradition of London / 54mm (1/32) scale / 1 piece set

All hand painted Toy Soldier sets packed in the Classic Tradition Red Boxes. All Toy Soldiers cast in quality white metal, and individually hand painted in gloss enamels.

Please allow 2-3 weeks delivery.