1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

by Mortimer, Ian

  From the above it emerges that Henry was one of the most ambitious, lucky and pious kings that England has ever had. But one would not rank him among the kindest. That severity in his demeanour was ruthless, and he was capable of great cruelty. As Waurin said in the passage quoted above, ‘he was so feared and dreaded by his princes, knights, captains … and the principal reason was that he punished with death without any mercy those who disobeyed or infringed his commands’. The instances to which Waurin was referring mainly date from after 1415; but in the year under study there are three instances that stand out: the massacre of the prisoners at Agincourt, the persecution of Lollards, and the killing of Lord Scrope. Historians have traditionally exonerated Henry on this last point by confusing Scrope’s role in the plot and regarding him as guilty. As for the policy of burning Lollards, two methods have been used to exonerate him: firstly, by removing him personally from the position of judge in such matters, and making it a legal process; secondly, by claiming that his attitude was orthodox for the time. Nevertheless, it is worth remarking that no men were burnt for heresy under Edward III or Richard II, and Henry IV’s reign saw only two men executed in this way. Henry’s reign saw seven burnt alive in the first year alone. That the mayor of London felt the need to write to Henry about burning John Claydon in 1415 directly connects the king with the policy. As for his cruelty in killing the prisoners at Agincourt, it was at best an ungodly decision made in a moment of panic. And such acts paved the way for grosser acts of cruelty in later years. In 1417, at Caen, he gave orders for 1,800 men to be slaughtered in cold blood. The following year at Louviers, he ordered eight gunners to be hanged. Waurin’s verdict – that Henry ‘punished with death without any mercy those who disobeyed or infringed his commands’ – seems borne out in these incidents. In 1422 he had a trumpeter killed merely because the man made him angry.13 A full biography of Henry V would trace the development of his intoxication with his own power up until his death. Obviously he fell far short of the charming hero of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and the overseer of such murderous acts hardly deserves to be considered as a candidate for the title ‘the greatest man who ruled England’.

  Henry’s cruelty has been remarked on before by other historians but the near-total exclusion of women from his society, as far as I know, has not previously been remarked upon. The form of this book allows us to use negative evidence in building a picture of his life, and there is a notable absence of any sign of warmth towards any women not intimately connected with his childhood. As mentioned in the prologue, this was partly a result of Henry being an unmarried king. But the complete failure to mention women in his will except two senior members of his family, or to make any grants to any women in their own right who had not looked after him in childhood, or to associate himself with any other women (except in relation to their husbands), cannot be ignored. Even the two women who submitted petitions for him to consider on Good Friday were dismissed and told to pursue their claims in the law courts.

  This lack of any closeness towards females other than those ‘safe’ women from his past or his family, coupled with his separately evidenced lack of indulgence in sexual intercourse, suggests at least a deliberate avoidance of women in 1415, and perhaps even a fear of them. Further evidence for this is to be noted in the homecoming celebrations in London: all the various sets of girls were dressed in virginal white, with signs of chastity and virginity around them. If we also consider the cruelty of the extreme punishment that Henry ordered to be meted out on any women who came within three miles of his army – having their left arms broken – we may read signs of a man who had a difficult relationship with women. Bishop Courtenay’s remark to Fusoris – that Henry had not had carnal relations with a woman since becoming king – implies that he had had such relationships before his accession. That Henry turned against that aspect of his life seems beyond doubt. Whether an unfortunate experience left him fearing women as sexual beings, or whether he regretted his pre-accession philandering on moral grounds, is not so clear. Either way, Henry excluded almost all women from his life in this year, with very few exceptions, notably his grandmother and his stepmother; and the latter of these two he later accused of being a witch and treated extremely badly. The outlook for the girl he had decided to take for a bride – the pubescent Katherine of France – was not rosy.

  NATURE AND NURTURE

  The above description of Henry points to an extraordinary individual: ambitious, tenacious, courageous, ruthless, pious, severe and sometimes cruel. So it is fair to ask, what made him like this? Can we discern any formative influences that will help us understand him?

  Henry’s innate, serious nature cannot but have been affected by several early developments in his life. Two months short of his eighth birthday, his mother died in childbirth. One indication that this profoundly affected him is his closeness to her mother, his grandmother, Joan Bohun, the dowager countess of Hereford. As noted in the text, she was a very pious woman, to whom Henry gave gifts of land; he also mentioned her in his will. A second indication that his mother’s death had an impact on him is his commissioning an effigy to be placed on her tomb at Leicester not long after his accession, twenty years after she died. Her death would have coincided with the beginning of Henry’s education in a noble household – so at a time of traumatic changes. He and his brother Thomas were transferred to the household of their grandfather, John of Gaunt. When not with John they stayed with their grandmother, the dowager countess of Hereford, or the even more elderly countess of Norfolk. Thus Henry did not grow up with his sisters or two youngest brothers, and for most of his youth his one constant companion of a similar age was his brother Thomas, whom he did not like very much. In John of Gaunt’s household, his companions were mostly knights and grown men-at-arms; and when he was with his grandmother or the countess of Norfolk, his companions were old pious women. On being taken into Richard II’s household at the age of twelve, following John of Gaunt’s death, he again found himself surrounded exclusively by men, as Richard’s ten-year-old wife did not live at court.

  Just as much of a loss to Henry was the refusal by Richard II to acknowledge the entail of Edward III. It has been remarked that Henry was so far from the throne at the time of his birth that no one bothered to record the event. This statement is wrong on both accounts. The date and even the time were recorded – 11.22 a.m. on 16 September 1386.14 Henry would have been brought up by his father to believe that, if Richard II died without an heir, then the line of succession would pass to the Lancastrians, and one day he would inherit. Richard II made his first overt moves to overturn this in 1394, the same year as Henry’s mother died. The year was thus a turning point in his life. Not only did he lose his mother, and find himself shuffled between households, but his position in the line of succession also started to slip. At seven this would have meant little to him, but by the time of his father’s exile in 1398, when he was twelve, he would have understood only too well that he was no longer seen as a likely future king of England. Before his father returned from France and ousted Richard II, Henry saw his position in the line of succession obliterated. As a boy who had been brought up to believe he was a potential heir to the throne, that had grave implications for his identity. Was he God’s chosen sovereign or not?

  His sense of vulnerability, and his determination to overcome it, probably dates from this early period of his life. The diminution of his importance must have damaged his esteem. His rivalry with his brother Thomas, who was almost the same age but who was his father’s favourite son, must have increased his determination to stand out, to prove himself. His father gave him the opportunity to do just that, when he appointed him to his Welsh command at the age of fourteen. This separated Henry from his brother and gave him a position of respect and independence. His command might at first have been purely nominal, under the tutelage of Henry Percy, but nevertheless he was head of his own household and the only royal person in North Wales.

  This start in life
does perhaps explain why Henry was as he was in 1415. The ambition and the desire to prove himself in this year correspond with his experiences as a boy: realising that his position in the royal family was being ignored, that he was losing respect from non-family members, and that his father preferred his more martial brother, Thomas. The piety he displayed in 1415 can be traced in the influence of his grandmother, the countess of Hereford, as well as his father. The young Henry may also have felt the need to prove that he deserved to be an anointed king, chosen by God, as his position in the line of succession slipped. In his background, isolated from girls, we might also see why he showed no signs of warmth to any females except those he had known since childhood. As for his other traits of cruelty and the fear of disloyalty, these may be connected with his experiences in Wales (as noted at the start of this book). The disloyalty of those involved in the Epiphany Rising in 1400 and the Percy family’s rebellion in 1403 can only have heightened Henry’s sense of vulnerability, and made him very sensitive to plots and discussions outside his control.

  The last set of formative experiences that needs to be mentioned in an attempt to understand Henry in 1415 is his relationship with his father. As his father’s favouritism of Thomas suggests, Henry and his father were never close. They were very alike – determined, headstrong, courageous and tenacious and pious in the extreme – but they disagreed on many issues. There were also some fundamental differences between them. Whereas Henry IV argued the philosophy of rebellion and religion with his enemies, Henry V did not waste words on those who disagreed with him. Whereas Henry IV regarded himself as a king whose piety supported his kingship, Henry V was more fervent, to the point of seeing things the other way around: his kingship supported God’s work. Perhaps Henry V saw his father’s discussions with his enemies as a sign of weakness. Perhaps he saw his father’s long illness as a sign of God’s disapproval of his reign. By the time of his regency, Henry V was forming his own ideas about kingship, and his vision so far eclipsed his father’s policy of merely steadying the political boat that he can have had little respect for the dying man. In everything he did, he wanted to be seen to eclipse his father’s achievements: in spirituality, religious buildings, attention to royal dignity, the suppression of heresy, and leading an army into France.

  Such experiences in childhood and youth, and in particular his struggle to maintain self-esteem, royal identity and public respect, gave Henry his declared aim: to win ‘the approbation of God and the praise of the world’. It was in the humiliations of his youth, I feel, that his ideas about what it meant to be a divinely anointed king and the advantages of invading France were conceived.

  ACCOUNTING FOR 1415: FAILINGS AND SHORTCOMINGS

  Henry did not win ‘the praise of the world’. There were plenty of men and women in Europe who saw him as a tyrant, and quite a few in England too. Such a view was an inevitable consequence of his kingship, which he saw as being both divinely authorised and justified in its authoritarianism, as indicated by the original Homeric context of his motto une sanz pluis:

  … As for having several lords, I see no good therein; let one and no more be the master, and that one alone be the king

  That Henry believed this was his role – and believed that the torrent of good luck he received was confirmation of the sanctity of all his acts – was bound to result in his own power growing too great for him to control. It overwhelmed him. Yet there was a book that justified exactly this all-powerful approach to kingship: the De Regimine Principum by Giles of Rome, a text which was well known at the court of Richard II. This exhorted kings to take complete control of their subjects and to demand absolute obedience in all things. The chances of Henry or any other man wielding such enormous power, unchecked, for the benefit of all his subjects, all the time, were nonexistent.

  Consider the example of Ireland. From Henry’s point of view, he had done little there; but what he had done, he had done well. He had appointed a strong soldier-governor to be King’s Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir John Talbot. English historians often praise him for this appointment. But from the Irish point of view, the appointment was disastrous. Talbot proved to be utterly ruthless. His method of governing the Irish was to put all the rebels to the sword and to take away their children. Having arrived in November 1414 he had spent almost the whole of 1415 in arms. He attacked Fachtna O’More of Leix, plundered his cattle and horses, and captured his castle. O’More himself was forced to serve in Talbot’s army, leaving his son as a hostage with Talbot, and joining him in his relentless pursuit of the native Irish and their English allies. Soon afterwards, O’Reilly of Breifna and O’Farrell of Annaly submitted to Talbot, and another native lord, MacMahon, was forced to surrender. So there was a destructive element to Henry’s Irish government. There was also an administrative failure. Talbot was unable to administer or secure the land without money; and in this respect Henry let him down badly. Henry had promised him 4,000 marks per year – and then failed to pay him. In order to keep the loyal English on his side, Talbot alienated much of the royal income, allowing his people to cream off the revenues at source rather than pay it into the Irish treasury. In addition, he had to plunder continuously, thereby creating no stable relationships with the men he brought back under English command but rather causing lasting grudges. In February 1416 he had to leave Ireland to come to England to ask the king for payment of his own salary – a process which delayed him in England for months, allowing his military achievements in Ireland to be undone. When he left Ireland it was said by an English writer that ‘he left with the curses of many, because having run much into debt, he would pay little or nothing at all’. A Gaelic writer went so far as to declare that Talbot was ‘the wickedest man to have lived since Herod’. In short, in 1415 Henry V brought terror upon the Irish, and showed no will to try and control it.15

  Henry placed such a high value on his own authority that he frequently committed acts of high-handedness himself, some of them verging on tyranny, and turned a blind eye to such acts committed in his name. The imprisonment of Italian merchants for not paying towards his expedition to France is one example. His support for his brother’s refusal to allow the elected mayor of Lynn to exercise office is another. Restoring the Flemish ships to the men who illegally captured them, in contravention of his own Statute of Truces, is a third. His treatment of the earl of March is a fourth. Indeed, considering Henry placed such a high value on ‘justice’, it is disquieting how little justice he showed the earl of March – forcing him to seal a recognisance that he would remain loyal, on pain of forfeiting 10,000 marks, and then imposing the full fine on him for simply marrying without permission. Another example of his high-handedness in 1415 is his alteration of the terms of surrender which de Gaucourt and the other knights from Harfleur had to accept. After Agincourt it suited him to insist that they all subject themselves to imprisonment again, regardless of what his officers had previously told them. A sixth example is the baseless charge of conspiring to murder the king and his brothers which he levelled at Scrope, Cambridge and Gray. In fact, a seventh, eighth and ninth are wrapped up in his treatment of Scrope – attempting to try him before a jury (and not before his peers), executing him for a crime he had not committed, and disinheriting his brothers. With regard to this last issue, it is a signal failure that Henry confessed that it troubled him much and yet he never did anything about it.16

  The complication we have in judging the above high-handed acts is that of the historical correlative, as outlined in a previous section. These acts seem high-handed to us, but did they appear so to contemporaries? And if so, did all contemporaries think alike? Perhaps some people saw Henry’s actions against the Italian merchants as justifiable, for it was arguably in the kingdom’s interest. Similarly the problems of local government in Lynn had dragged on long enough; a decisive move by the king was perhaps what was needed to bring the men of the town to their senses. The majority considered that the process against Scrope was lawful – even before
Henry’s post-Agincourt propaganda machine had blackened his name – although Scrope’s own household seem to have considered it an act of tyranny. De Gaucourt clearly thought Henry had behaved most unfairly to him. But the fact is that these and almost any other high-handed act could be justified by the majority of contemporaries. High-handedness and even tyranny could be tolerated in a strong king; it was a price worth paying in order to preserve peace among the magnates.

  If we have trouble judging Henry for his high-handedness, we have less difficulty when it comes to his outright failures. Stepping away from the propaganda-oriented chronicles has revealed a number of areas where Henry’s record falls well short of the glorious, unblemished career we have been led to believe in by traditional historians. He never captured Glendower. Sir John Oldcastle remained at large until Edward Charlton, Lord Powys, captured him in 1417. Henry failed to sort out the mayoral disputes in Lynn. His failure to remedy the state of Berwick Castle, despite the warnings of his council in February 1415, left the north dangerously unprotected.17 There were more significant failures too. He made mistakes in attacking Harfleur, almost destroying the defensibility of the town; he also made errors on the march to Calais, which resulted in his army becoming weak, hungry and dispirited. The expedition was only saved from complete disaster by a number of strokes of good fortune.