This is a personal view, however, and while it might excite further discussion, it raises an important question that requires prior consideration. If my view of Henry V is so very different from those of McFarlane, Allmand and Curry, and many other equally well-informed scholars and writers, should I not simply admit that I am wrong and bow to their decades of experience? How can I vary so much from them in judging this icon of English patriotism?
The lazy answer to this question would be that I am not alone in my views. T. B. Pugh, writing in 1988, declared that Henry was ‘a man of limited vision and outlook and it is difficult to endorse McFarlane’s dictum’.5 A contemporary view, written by Jean de Waurin after the king’s death, was that
he was a wise man, skilful in everything he undertook, and of very imperious will. In the seven or eight years that his reign lasted he made great conquests in the kingdom of France, indeed, more than any of his predecessors had done before, and he was so feared and dreaded by his princes, knights, captains and all kinds of people that there was no one, especially among the English, ever so near or favoured by him that dared disobey his orders; and likewise the people of the kingdom of France under his domination, whatever their rank, were likewise reduced to the same state; and the principal reason was that he punished with death without any mercy those who disobeyed or infringed his commands.6
But one could go on like this, piling up affidavits of greatness, wisdom and cruelty, and agreeing or not as the case may be, and not say anything original. The fact is that my stance has nothing to do with other people’s verdicts. Rather, it is because I have employed a different form of history from that previously used to describe Henry V and Agincourt. To be specific, I have chosen to use a different narrative framework – the calendar for 1415 – and considered how the evidence relates to it.
This ‘new framework’ has been one of my main reasons for writing this book: a concern with the form as well as the substance of history. Historians hardly ever discuss literary form. Indeed, it could be said that most historians do not realise that history has a literary form. But the entire genre of historical non-fiction is straight-jacketed by rules, prescribed by educational and heritage-related rituals, institutional procedures and traditions. Academic journals, for example, expect a completely flat, ‘objective’, neutral stance, with no drama, no pathos, and a minimal display of literary technique. There is no scope to experiment with strict day-by-day narratives in an academic journal; it simply is not done. It is as if academic historians are only interested in what they have to say – not the variety of ways in which it can be said. If a leading scholar were to present his knowledge in the form of a pseudo-autobiography of a historical person, he would be criticised heavily for blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, and for stepping outside the prescribed limits of academic history. Yet the exercise would undoubtedly raise new questions, and might actually reveal many of the challenges the historical subject faced. As that example suggests, and as I hope this book has shown, the various ways in which we say something can also be revealing of historical meanings.
Here is not the place to explore why this exclusion of form has come to be the norm. Suffice to say that it has something to do with the educational orientation of historical scholarship in the modern world. But this is an appropriate place to consider how the narrative form adopted in this book is different from the traditional ‘life of Henry V’, or books about Agincourt. Thus this conclusion first tackles the question of form, in an attempt to understand why it is possible to have a reaction so contrary to the approbation of the scholars mentioned above.
THE FORM
Different structures of historical thought are likely to yield very different insights and interpretations. This book does not cover the full lifespan of the king, nor even his full reign, so its verdict cannot be as full as that of Professor Allmand on Henry’s whole life or Professor Curry’s on Agincourt. But it is far more detailed on the year 1415 than most biographies of the king. Also, because it is not specifically about Agincourt, it incorporates many religious and social details that would be disregarded as peripheral by the student of that battle. Thus it is more concerned with the interplay of all the aspects of Henry’s life at any one time than any other study. This interplay is a hugely important element in coming to understand a historical individual. To present Henry the warrior in isolation from Henry the pious Christian would be misleading, and vice versa. Likewise to consider Henry’s lawmaking and law enforcement activities with no reference to his plans for fighting in France would be misrepresentative. The Statute of Truces, which has been held up as an example of his desire for fairness and good government, was not enacted principally for the sake of fairness or good government – and still less for the benefit of foreign princes with whom Henry had truces. It was passed to make sure that, when he had diplomatically isolated the French, he would not see that diplomatic isolation jeopardised by a reckless act of English piracy. It thus appears not so much a quest for justice as a means of social control. In this way the integration of the king’s various concerns in this year reveal him in a different light – as a ruthless planner and a brilliant organiser but less concerned with justice than previously thought.
This integration of the various aspects of Henry’s life is most valuable when it brings together events which were close in time. For example, the gift of money to Glendower’s representatives on the same day as the Burgundians ratified the Peace of Arras and the English diplomats were waiting in Paris, comes across as a deliberate diplomatic snub. John the Fearless’s letter to Sigismund about the capture of the French envoys to the council of Constance, when compared with events in their geographical context, reveals inconsistencies in the dissemination of information that point conclusively to his guilt. Similarly the promise that John the Fearless had no treaty with Henry, made on 13 March by John’s representatives (including his sister Margaret of Holland) reveals John’s diplomacy to be nothing short of outright duplicity when juxtaposed with Henry’s payment of £2,000 to his agents to obtain a fleet from Holland. The realisation that Henry maintained diplomats at the courts of both the duke of Burgundy and the duke of Brittany throughout his campaign in France, and that these lords had themselves sent ambassadors to one another in this period, sets a different context to the agreements of non-hindrance that Henry had with both of these dukes. We realise the same with Henry’s intention to go to war: every official statement that he did all he could to avert war rings hollow. Direct juxtapositions like these need no conclusion; they place the facts in the hands of the reader so that the reader can make up his or her own mind as to Henry’s intentions, or those of John the Fearless. If any reader seriously believes that Henry had not resolved to go to war long before the negotiations had ceased then they have not read this book properly. Presented within a rigid chronological framework, it is as plain a fact as the black and white of the print.
Another consequence of the strict chronological form employed in this book is the inevitable inclusion of more evidence than is normally considered necessary in books about Henry or Agincourt. Any historian constructing a narrative or argument selects his or her evidence and discards certain details as superfluous to requirements. In a book like this, in which we are trying to explore as many days as possible, it would be wrong to discard some days and not others. The consequences are significant. Consider Henry’s pawning of religious artefacts and relics from the royal chapels from 1 June. Pawning relics to pay soldiers’ wages does not accord with the traditional image of Henry as a pious man. Nor does his dissolution of more then fifty priories. Historians – especially English writers – have tended to present Henry in the best possible light, and have accordingly downplayed or ignored these details. But their place in the calendar structure forces us to confront the apparent inconsistency head-on. It cannot be downplayed or eliminated without distorting our understanding of the man.
This tendency towards comprehensiveness has a literary
side-effect. Henry’s chief characteristics are repeated with ongoing force. No one can read this book and not be struck by the number of references to his piety. Similarly, no one can fail to notice the extraordinary degree of organisation and planning required to make the whole Harfleur expedition happen. In a normal history text we would remark on these aspects once or perhaps twice; they would not be repeated so many times. The journal form, highlighting the potential importance of the timing of every reference, forces their repetition. Thus Henry’s main personality traits are amplified in the narrative. The whole picture is thus proportional to the reality of the man’s daily life (as far as it can be determined from the sources). The references to the difficulties on the march from Harfleur clearly underline the depth of the king’s determination. Similarly the continued paucity of references to women, coupled with the repetition of Henry’s ordinances concerning prostitutes and rape, hammer home the fact that Henry wanted his men to be like him and to love chastity more than the attractions of the fair sex. The result is a behaviour study that represents historical reality in a very different way from a thematic overview.
The form of the chronological year has two further methodological implications. Sometimes it simply is not possible to account for his actions over a period of days. When this happens in a normal history book, it tends not to be obvious; indeed, the historian may not even realise there is a gap – especially if he or she is writing an interpretative account, with a non-narrative structure. In this book, any chronological lacuna is immediately apparent, and it behoves the historian to try and explain it, whether through looking around for the significance of the day (a saint’s feast, perhaps), or by considering circumstantial evidence. Hence the speculation that Henry visited Southampton in advance of the army gathering; we have evidence that he went there not long before May 1415, and we have a gap in the evidence for his stay in London in March. It seems logical to suggest the two might be connected. In this way a precise historical form is valuable for it reveals a gap in the data, and accordingly forces us to consider previously unconsidered questions.
The other methodological implication is chronological precision. The rigid date structure forces the historian to be far more exact about dates, plans, orders, logistics, and the time it took to travel or to send a messenger. Although one often reads in history books that two members of Henry’s council met in London in early February and then led an embassy into Paris on 9 February, this seems impossible when considered in a strict calendar form. Ambassadors habitually took at least fifteen days to go from London to Paris in winter. Similarly it is not reasonable to assume that all the people who apparently witnessed royal charters in the year 1415 were present at the time of sealing or even at the time of granting these documents, for there is incontrovertible evidence that some of them were at Constance. We repeatedly find that the evidence is conflicting and misleading, and this sometimes includes contemporary records. We cannot simply ignore such documents where they do not accord with convenient or long-accepted interpretations. In a calendar-based book readers can see for themselves that there are glaring inconsistencies in the records and chronicles. Precision of dating is therefore not only possible in this book but structurally built into it to a greater extent than in other studies.
In some cases, the precise calendar-aligned arrangement of events results in small refinements of detail (the date of the above-mentioned embassy’s arrival in Paris is a good example). In others, it reveals significant errors of interpretation that have led to flawed narratives being circulated and widely accepted. For example, in his book The Medieval Archer, Jim Bradbury declares that
Agincourt was far from being a battle that Henry planned and sought … In the agreements that Henry made before the campaign in order to obtain the force he needed, it is clear that an expedition to the south figured in Henry’s plans. Frequently the agreements specify what wages will be paid should the soldiers be called upon to go to Southern France.7
On a study of the contemporary evidence in isolation Bradbury is right; many of the indentures for service, which are almost all dated 29 April 1415, give wage rates for fighting in Gascony as well as France. So did the proclamation regarding wages on the third day of the great council of that year (18 April). But as this book shows, this dual wage rate announcement was a smokescreen, created so no French spies would discover where the army was heading. Precise attention to the dating of payments in the Issue Rolls reveals that the decision to head to Harfleur had been made by 16 April at the very latest. Thus we can see that Henry’s deliberate ambiguity on the 18 and 29 April has misled Bradbury into thinking that Agincourt was an unplanned and unsought conflict, fought on the back foot. The exact site of battle may have been unplanned, and obviously the ground conditions were beyond Henry’s control, but the general policy of fighting a battle between Harfleur and Calais, massacring French men-at-arms with longbows, was very carefully planned.
The above shows that there are a number of advantages in the calendar form, and collectively these go some way to explaining why I have a different reading of the man’s character from other writers. The integration of simultaneous aspects of Henry’s life, the tendency to be comprehensive with regard to the evidence, and the repetition of personal characteristics in proportion to the historical evidence are all key elements explaining why readers of this book may join me in disagreeing with the post-Agincourt, hero-worshipping verdict on Henry adopted by fifteenth-century chroniclers, Shakespeare, and most historians since the sixteenth century.
Having said this, there are certain disadvantages to the form that should not pass without notice. The key one is the literary challenge, mentioned in the prologue. As stated there, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the calendar is a non-literary structure, so the more details one includes in their correct historical place, the more inflexible the narrative becomes. It reminds me of the often-repeated question, ‘How do you stop the facts getting in the way of a good story?’ To this question a historian instinctively replies, ‘the facts are the good story’. However, the facts make for a much better story when the author can deploy them at will, and use them within a looser temporal framework. It may be that the more historians meet the challenges of accuracy, fullness and precision, the more difficult it is for them to create a ‘story’, or work of literature, out of the characters and events of the past.
A second disadvantage lies in the limited scope of textual criticism. By discussing the battle of Agincourt within an entry for a single day – 25 October 1415 – it is not possible to include all the varying narratives. While modern scholars describe the various stages by stating that ‘Chronicler X says this, while Chronicler Y claims the opposite’, this style of textual criticism deflates the value of seeing events unfolding. We lose focus on history as a matter of past reality (the goal of historians outside the lecture hall) and become subsumed within history as the analysis of evidence (the prime purpose of history within the lecture hall). Fortunately, given the many detailed contributions from so many academics concerned with Agincourt to date, this is not a problem; those wishing to understand all the various accounts of the battle can make recourse to books by specialists on the battle, especially Anne Curry’s The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations.
A third problem of this detailed chronological form is simply the lack of evidence. While certain aspects of Henry’s life are given weight in this book due to their frequent appearance in the contemporary written record, other aspects do not appear at all. We have no chamber accounts for the year 1415, nor any household or great wardrobe accounts (with the exceptions of those concerning military expenditure). One has to ask, therefore, is there a side to Henry that is missing in this book due to the lack of source material for this year? A comparison of the Issue Rolls payments under Henry V with those made under Henry IV does not suggest that there was. Although Henry IV was a similarly serious, religious, dutiful and committed king, he paid for organising jousts, bo
ught hunting birds, enjoyed sword fighting, bought new clothes for his fool, and ‘paid a certain woman 20d for undertaking certain affairs for the king’, which, even if it was wholly innocent, reminds us that he had an illegitimate son.8 In the Issue Rolls of the second and third years of the reign of Henry V there is nothing that approximates to such fun – just the one reference to the dining chamber in the lake at Kenilworth Castle. Nevertheless, questions still remain. There are no references to royal hunts taking place in this year; yet we know Henry V enjoyed hunting. There are no references to his reading either – even though we know that he regularly borrowed books from other people. These aspects of his life are therefore probably under-represented in this book. The same must go for his other interests that are not reflected in the evidence for 1415.
The final problem worth mentioning is a technical one. When were these documents actually drawn up? This question normally presents no significant problem in a less chronologically precise study, but here it matters. Consider the king’s orders to close the ports on 3 July: were these delivered before or after he had heard about the way discussions with the French ambassadors were going? Or had he actually given the orders some time before, perhaps days before, and this was simply the date of enrolment? Doubts about the timing of certain documents might lead to certain inaccurate juxtapositions. We know that some documents were dated long after the events to which they relate. This applies to many entries in accounts, which were settled in retrospect, as well as charters that were supposedly witnessed by people who were not even in England on the stated day. For this reason, precision does not always guarantee correctness.
1415: Henry V's Year of Glory Page 61
