1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

by Mortimer, Ian

  It was a particularly nationalistic letter, but, in reading it, we can see how Hus’s misguided and stubborn but conscientious refusal to conform had unleashed forces that were set to wrench apart the whole of Christendom.

  We declare unto your fatherhoods and to all faithful Christians … that any man of whatever estate, pre-eminence, degree, condition or religion who says that in the kingdom of Bohemia heresies have sprung up that have infected us and other faithful Christians … lies falsely upon his head as a wicked traitor and betrayer of the said kingdom …

  Henry V and his advisors, and the French king and his, might all have been trying to bring about a Catholic kingship, in which heresy was treason and treason a religious crime as well as a secular one. John the Fearless might have been doing his best to separate the two at Constance, making a clear distinction between treason and heresy. But the Hussites in Bohemia had taken things a stage further, creating a form of nationalist kingship in which one could argue that, if a religious act was popular, and was not treasonable, it was not heresy. Jan Hus’s death was going to have a profound effect on the development of Europe. Today’s letter gives a hint as to why he was already widely regarded as a martyr.

  *

  Henry’s decision to send the sick back to England was forced upon him. To leave them at Harfleur would have been counter-productive, in respect to both the likelihood of infecting others and their consumption of food and other resources. To take them with him on a march across France would have been impossible. As the sick were returning without their horses and stores, they required relatively few ships – perhaps twenty large vessels sufficed. The ships from Holland had returned to their own country shortly after the landing, and a number of English ships had returned to their ports on 12 September, but enough remained for the task.

  The sailing started today. The earl of Arundel was put aboard a vessel with a guard of five healthy men-at-arms and many of his sick followers. One of his men-at-arms died in the process. Other important lords who were carried on board the ships included Thomas, duke of Clarence; Edmund Mortimer, earl of March; and John Mowbray, the Earl Marshal. A significant proportion of the high-ranking lords who had undertaken to come to France had been lost. A total of twelve dukes and earls had mustered at Southampton in July: two earls were now dead (Suffolk and Cambridge) so, with a further three earls and a duke lost to ill-health, Henry had lost half of the original contingent of magnates. Furthermore, Henry had decided to leave his uncle Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, in charge at Harfleur, and to send the earl of Warwick directly to Calais by ship, to defend the town and receive the prisoners.56 At a time when rank meant so much in terms of the structures of command, Henry was running out of leaders. Apart from Beaufort, there were only four members of the pre-campaign royal council with him: his youngest brother, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; the duke of York; Lord Fitzhugh; and Sir Thomas Erpingham.

  Sunday 29th: Michaelmas

  In England, the regent John, duke of Bedford, sent out a writ to all the sheriffs, prelates and lords proroguing parliament from 21 October to 4 November.57 He had received a message from Henry, who seems to have expressed a desire to be present at the said parliament. Henry had allowed himself five weeks to make the journey back to Westminster.

  What was his strategy at this juncture? He had appointed his uncle Thomas Beaufort lieutenant of Harfleur, so clearly he did not intend to stay there to command personally. This accords with the information about his intended march through Montivilliers, Dieppe, Rouen and Paris, mentioned in Bordiu’s letter of 3 September. It also tallies with his letter to the dauphin challenging him to a duel, which stated that he was going to stay at Harfleur for eight days – implying that he was going to leave shortly afterwards. Clearly he never intended wintering in the town but was planning to march through France. But where was he heading? Rouen and Paris, as Bordiu stated – or Calais?

  As we have seen, and as Henry knew, the French army was gathering in Rouen. To attack it would be risking disaster. English longbow armies were most successful when they managed to force an enemy to attack them when they themselves were in a static position; then they cut down the troops charging towards them, using the first fallen ranks as a means to slow up the ranks behind while they shot at them. Henry might have gone looking for a fight, and tried to attract the French to attack him near Rouen but, had he done so, he would have had no escape plan, being too deep within Normandy. If the French failed to be drawn into the attack, they could slowly strangle his army by withholding supplies – besieging the English in the field, as it were. And they could call up more and more men; Henry could not call up reinforcements. Thus there was a good strategic reason why he was not intending to head to Rouen. This part of Bordiu’s letter was probably deliberate misinformation, in case it fell into French hands. By the time it arrived in Bordeaux, it would not have mattered what it said about Henry’s strategy.

  Calais, on the other hand, did offer an escape route, for it was a port. Henry had been fortifying and provisioning the town all year for this very reason. For his troops to embark anywhere else, he would have needed to arrange for a fleet to go to that place, and wait there in fear of being attacked. He would then have to lead his men to the waiting ships, and make sure that they all embarked without being attacked by a following French army. Disembarking had taken three whole days before; it was a risky operation. Thus Calais was his only realistic option – it was his only safe port of embarkation. All the English-held alternatives were in Gascony, hundreds of miles to the south. In addition de Gaucourt, d’Estouteville and the other French prisoners from Harfleur had been instructed to make their way to Calais, and to surrender there to Henry in person or, if he was not there – if he had already departed for England, for example – then a specially appointed deputy. This deputy would have had to be someone of high status, probably the earl of Warwick (the lieutenant of Calais), who was sent directly there by ship.58 There is no doubt that Henry was sticking steadfastly to the plan to march to Calais that he had developed many months earlier.

  Although it seems clear that marching to Calais was, and always had been, his intended strategy, we have to ask whether this destination was chosen in order to attract the attention of the French army gathering at Rouen. In short, did he intend to do battle? Answering this question is a developmental process. As Henry proceeded towards Calais, he could have expected his circumstances to change. So it is worth attempting to answer this difficult question at various stages, including the outset, to see whether the answer changed as the march altered course and ran into difficulties.

  The answer at this initial juncture is yes. He did intend to fight the French. There are several reasons for this conclusion. First, Henry wanted a battle because his religious outlook demanded it. He had come to France to put God’s will to the test, and that could only properly be done by a conflict in which he might lose his life. Second, he had come with an army that was too large for just a siege; it was an army designed to fight a pitched battle. Although he had lost many men, he still had the majority, and so could stick to his original plan. Third, he was determined to follow a path previously trodden by Edward III’s army to Blanchetaque, a point at which the River Somme could be forded. Edward III’s march, which culminated in the battle of Crécy, had been chosen specifically to encourage the French to attack the English in Ponthieu. Henry, having sent Raoul de Gaucourt with William Bruges to deliver the challenge to the dauphin, knew that the dauphin would have learnt from de Gaucourt that the English were marching to Calais. He had even told him roughly the time he was going to depart – after eight days. Telling all 260 gentlemen prisoners to meet him in Calais was similarly a guarantee that the French would know where he was going. He was thus encouraging the French to come after him and attack him. In his instructions to the 260 prisoners he even referred overtly to the likelihood of a battle. Thus he was not just following Edward III’s route, he was adopting similar tactics.59

  A
fourth reason can be seen in the personal nature of Henry’s decision to march to Calais. It is clear from several sources that the majority of the leaders still with the army at this point were strongly opposed to the idea of the march precisely because a battle would be too dangerous. One source claims that even the warlike duke of Clarence was in favour of bringing the campaign to an end – a division with Henry that perhaps led to his departure from the English army as much as his suffering from dysentery.60 Leaving this aside, another well-informed chronicler, writing some time after 1446, stated that ‘the majority of the councillors were of the opinion that a decision should be made not to march on’, due to the shortage of fighting men following the ravages of dysentery.61 The author of the Gesta wrote very much the same thing:

  although a large majority of the royal council advised against such a proposal as it would be highly dangerous for him in this way to send his small force, daily growing smaller, against the multitude of the French which, constantly growing larger, would surely enclose them on every side like sheep in folds, our king – relying on divine grace and the justice of his cause, piously reflecting that victory consists not in a multitude but with Him … who bestows victory upon whom He wills, whether they be many or few – with God affording him His leadership, as it is believed, did nevertheless decide to make that march.62

  The later source gives a similar justification for the decision, stating that Henry said ‘he would rather throw himself and his men on the mercy of God in determining the outcome of events, not shirking the dangers, than offer himself to the enemy as grounds for elevating their pride, diminishing the reputation of his honour by flight’.63 From these accounts it is clear that Henry went against the consensus and took what his councillors considered to be a great gamble – deliberately risking a battle. This contrasts with his considerable aversion to taking any risks in the course of landing in August. What made him switch from being so risk-averse then to being so risk-taking now? It can only have been a defiance of the very risk that so worried his council – a chance to do battle. Thus his decision to march to Calais was not just a testing of God’s will, and it was not just a strategic calculation based on Edward III’s success in 1346, it was also a matter of pride.

  The above motivations – religious fanaticism, a confident strategy based on a historical precedent, and pride – are not particularly edifying. Looking at Henry at the end of September, one would hardly call him a great man. He had obtained one small town – a key target – but had destroyed it in the process. He had lost a good proportion of his fighting force and left the remainder perilously situated in a hostile kingdom with a large army gathering in the field. As far as any reckoning of God’s judgment went at the moment, his cause had been cast into doubt by the death of Bishop Courtenay and the sicknesses of his brother and heir, Thomas, and his great friend, the earl of Arundel. The dissent revealed by the earl of Cambridge’s plot had not added to his glory, nor had the continued activities of the Lollards. Yet it was at this moment that he stepped out from the clouds of fallibility and made the decision that made him, and changed him, and altered the balance of European politics in England’s favour. Through it he set himself on the path ‘to acquire the approbation of God and the praise of the world’. If Henry had shown any sign of greatness up until this point, it was as an organiser and a man convinced of his own infallibility, arranging for the circumstances of this march to be as promising as possible. But in going against the council’s decision now he showed that he was far more than just an organiser and a facilitator. It must have taken complete determination – after all the delays, and after losing so many men to dysentery – to give the order to march on. And in so doing he took on all the responsibility, and all the danger. He knew that he was himself a far greater prize than the ruins of Harfleur – he knew the French would think they could retake the town any time and so they were bound to come after him. Then Henry and his army would lead the enemy away from the near-defenceless Harfleur, like a lioness leading a predator away from her cubs.

  At this moment in time, we can see Henry V throwing everything behind his faith. This is the moment when, having mapped out a path to greatness, he actually set foot on it. Like Jan Hus, he was prepared to die in pursuit of what he believed he had to do. Historians have sometimes called this ‘the madness of unreasoning pietism’; but they forget that, if a man truly believes God is on his side, no reasoning is necessary – or even possible. For him, God really is on his side, and it would be madness to pretend otherwise.

  That is what is so frightening about Henry V at the end of September 1415.

  October

  Wednesday 2nd

  SIR JOHN PHELIP DIED TODAY, aged thirty-one. He was one of the household knights, the head of a company of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers, and a trusted advisor – one of the men who had spied on Harfleur at the start of the year. When he travelled through the port then, little can he have imagined what a heap of rubble it would become, or that he would die there. His death is another reminder of the personal losses Henry was suffering. Phelip had been a witness of the king’s last will in July. His wife was Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, whom Henry would have remembered from the poet’s twilight years at the court of Richard II. In tribute to his friend, Henry ordered Sir John’s body to be boiled, and his bones sent back to England.1

  Thursday 3rd

  In Paris, orders were issued to repair the walls and defences of the city. Not against the English but against John the Fearless, as the enthusiasm for his return was inflaming the people to riot.2 The very idea that John might return to the capital and seize control prevented the king and the dauphin from moving down the Seine, and taking control of the army, for their worries were focussed as much on the city as on the English. Parisian officers who showed Burgundian sympathies were replaced with Armagnac men. No city troops were to leave – not even to fight the English. They were required to defend Paris against the Burgundians. In effect, the French were fighting a two-front war within their own borders: a civil war and an invasion.

  The civil war was not confined to France. In Constance John the Fearless’s principal representative, Martin Porée, bishop of Arras, was defending his lord’s reputation with every weapon at his disposal. Silver, wine and jewels had already been issued by the various ambassadors as bribes. Threats and violence had aided the duke’s cause. Bishop Porée had already forced the original condemnation of Jean Petit’s Justification to be reconsidered, and the duke himself had sought the reinvestigation of its supposed heresy by the University of Paris. Now it was Porée’s intellect that forced the council to cower at the duke’s name. For Porée was not just defending Jean Petit; he was attacking possible heresies in the works of the great man Gerson himself. The most influential theological thinker of the council was coming under attack.3 From this point forward Porée would prove himself to be a great advocate for his master, defending Jean Petit so ruthlessly that the nine charges originally laid against him by Gerson at the University of Paris, and repeated at Constance in June, were all called into question. Eventually, on 15 January 1416, the condemnation of Jean Petit by the bishop of Paris was annulled.4 In defiance of the king of France, the council only condemned tyrannicide in general terms: they refused to condemn the murder of the duke of Orléans and they passed no resolution directly condemning Jean Petit for writing his Justification of the duke of Burgundy.

  Friday 4th

  The eight days Henry had told the dauphin he would wait at Harfleur were now up. It was time to act.

  Of the 11,248 or more fighting men with whom Henry had landed on 14 August, he had approximately 9,600 left.5 Thus he did not have a great deal of flexibility as to how many men he should assign to the defence of Harfleur. He knew from his experiences in Wales that small garrisons proved costly in the long term, and so he had to leave enough men to make the town defensible; on the other hand he could not leave so many as to render the rest of his army weak.<
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  He decided to leave 1,200 men, in his usual proportion of three archers to every man-at-arms. Thus nine hundred archers and three hundred men-at-arms (including about thirty knights) prepared to remain at Harfleur to defend it, along with the majority of the carpenters and masons. In charge of these, under the overall command of Thomas Beaufort, were a number of captains, including Lord Botreaux, Lord Clinton, Sir John Fastolf and Sir Edward Hastings.6 Everyone else would march to Calais. This would involve between ten and eleven thousand men: 1,500–1,600 men-at-arms, a similar number of pages, 6,600–7,000 archers, and a few dozen chaplains, clerks, surgeons and royal servants, plus any of the reinforcements who had arrived since 15 August.7 They would start to set out from the following Monday or Tuesday.

  Saturday 5th

  A storm was brewing in the Harfleur area. Although most of the English ships had by now departed, and the hired vessels had long since returned to Holland, there were still a number in the waters at the mouth of the Seine. Some were being loaded with cannon to return to England; others were shipping the last of the dysentery victims back home.8 Others were arriving, bringing grain and reinforcements. Perhaps some vessels owned by the fishermen of Dover and the Cinque Ports remained. All were now in danger, unable to take shelter in the ruined harbour at Harfleur. A number of them were dashed to pieces before the end of the day. As the chronicle of Ruisseauville has it, ‘the navy of England was partly or completely lost at sea by the exceptionally heavy rain that had fallen as a result of a storm’. Nor did all of the ships that survived the tempest make it back to their home ports: some were captured over the subsequent days by Breton pirates, laying in wait for the stragglers.9