The night before Agincourt Henry did what he had always done ever since he was a young commander: he slipped from group to group under the dripping trees, quietly rallying the men. Then he made an electrifying last speech which was talked about by old campaigners for years to come. If the genius of Shakespeare transformed his words, much of its content was derived from contemporary accounts. In particular, the democratic themes that the playwright puts in Henry V’s mouth had a basis in reality. It was a fact that the English archer was more valuable in battle than his social superior the knight, as his skill at archery was responsible for the storms of arrows which protected the knight and which fell so thickly that they reminded observers of snow showers. In the French army strict notions of caste prevailed, just as they did in France itself: the higher social class of the knight segregated him from the peasant archers. But the English knights dismounted before battle and sent their horses to the back. Then they and archers fought side by side on foot. Even if Henry did not precisely say that ‘he today that sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile this day shall gentle his condition’, it was clearly implied.
Not only was the small force of English outnumbered by nearly five to one, they also looked outlandish and wild compared to the exquisitely caparisoned French knights. Practicality determined the English costume. The longbowmen had all taken off one shoe and ripped one stocking so that they could have greater purchase in the oozing mud and grip with their naked toes. They had also torn off one sleeve of their sword arm for greater freedom of movement. We may imagine that half naked, they looked an unkempt and inefficient enemy to take on the French. The French knights’ armour, on the oher hand, shone brightly from ceaseless polishing. The English and Welsh must have seemed almost as savage as in the days of Boudicca.
But, despite the contrast in the appearance of the two armies, the French knights were not fooled. The English longbowmen continued to be such a source of dread that during battles French knights would swoop by the archers waving their swords to try to cut off the archers’ two drawing fingers. In return the English longbowmen would hold up two fingers, a gesture of defiance which continues to be used today.
When battle commenced, Henry ordered the archers at the front to move forward towards the French so that their arrows would not fall short. The French turned to one another in delighted disbelief at the English stupidity before advancing to ride down the longbowmen. But unknown to them sharpened stakes had been planted in the ground in front of them, and there was a huge pile-up of warhorses, their unseated knights thrashing uselessly beneath them as their heavy armour caused them to sink into the mud. At once the English archers ran forward and in their usual cold-blooded fashion set about slitting their enemy’s throats.
Many of France’s greatest nobles were killed that day in the broken cornfields. One of the reasons for the enormous numbers of French casualties–perhaps 6,000 versus fewer than 300 English dead–was that Henry ordered that all the French prisoners of war should have their throats cut, because the rumour had gone round that there was a danger of attack from the rear. That was where the royal baggage train held the royal crown of England, the Chancery seals without which no official document was complete and the sword of state. Even though permanent government departments had grown up at Westminster, like his predecessors Henry V went to war accompanied by all the visible signs of his office and majesty. His prompt if unchivalrous action in killing the prisoners caused much grumbling in the English ranks–not on humanitarian grounds, but because dead knights would not elicit the lucrative ransoms that made so many English fortunes in the Hundred Years War.
The way was now open for Calais and London. The hero king was chaired by the crowds when he landed on English soil and was accompanied by exulting citizens all the way to London, where Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, celebrated Mass. Agincourt was a sign that God was on the side of the English, and the king paid for a Mass to be said in perpetuity on St Crispin’s Day, the day of the battle. The mood of national ecstasy continued with Parliament surrendering to Henry V–and to him only–their right to discuss taxation with him and granting him the customs for life.
It was the climax of the love affair between the Lancastrian king and Parliament. Henry became the greatest prince in Europe, so influential that his support of the Emperor Sigismund brought to an end the papal schism which had been plaguing Christendom for over a hundred years: the two popes had become three and were now reduced to one, Martin V. Meanwhile to demonstrate its commitment to orthodoxy, the General Church Council burned at the stake the heretical Jan Hus, a follower of Wyclif’s in Bohemia. For the next few years, buoyed by taxes and by loans, the king concentrated on returning Normandy to the English crown. By 1419, after a series of gruelling sieges, he had achieved his objective, and Normandy was once more under English rule. The English were back in force on the lower Seine, as threatening to the French as their Viking ancestors had been 500 years before.
At last the warring Burgundians and Orleanists realized the danger they were facing. They made overtures of peace to one another, but even at this moment of peril the feud between them took precedence. At a meeting on the bridge at Montereau on the Yonne between the dauphin (the name given to the eldest son of the French king), who was head of the Armagnacs or Orleanists, and Jean Sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, the duke was assassinated. The feud blazed into life again. But Burgundian anger at the Orleanists was to England’s lasting advantage, for Jean Sans Peur’s son, the new duke, Philip the Good, allied himself comprehensively with the English. In order to prevent the Orleanist dauphin ruling France, by the 1420 Treaty of Troyes with the Duke of Burgundy Henry V was to marry the French king Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and become regent during his mad father-in-law’s lifetime. Last and best, under the treaty Henry and his heirs were to be the next kings of France, though France was to remain a distinct kingdom, maintaining her separate French laws and a French council.
The dual monarchy promised by the Treaty of Troyes proved hard to enforce. North of the Loire and round the Paris area, the French might hate the Orleanists and welcome the English king presiding over a session of the Estates General and English garrisons manning the Louvre and the Bastille; south of the Loire, however, was a different story. There the dauphin was viewed as France’s rightful ruler and future king. When in 1421 Henry V’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, was killed attempting to enlarge England’s French realm further south, Henry left his infant son and wife Catherine in England and returned to France himself.
A year later the hero-king was dead. The dysentery which was a hazard of those long campaigns had killed him, and he left as heir that unlucky thing for England, an infant. Worse still, despite his superb sire, little Henry VI had inherited many more genes from his French side. The madness of his grandfather Charles VI was very much to the fore.
What would have happened if Henry V had lived to be an old man is one of the great hypotheticals of history. Those dissatisfied with the few rather solemn paintings of the king and who wish to see some remnant of his spirit should visit his chantry tomb in Westminster Abbey. There, high up, is a most unsacred image of the king on his warhorse charging full tilt at Agincourt.
Henry VI (1422–1461)
By strange coincidence the French king Charles VI died in 1422 within months of Henry V, leaving the infant Henry VI king of both England and France. In practice both countries were ruled by his royal uncles. Henry V’s able soldier brother John, Duke of Bedford became regent. But he returned to France to try to enforce the Treaty of Troyes and left the task of governing England to his ambitious younger brother Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in tandem with the King’s Council.
Bedford was as far-sighted as his brother Henry V and he saw that the only way to rule France was through the goodwill of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. His support was vital as the Burgundians controlled most of the northern part of the country, especially around Paris. Bedford s
hored up his nephew’s kingdom by establishing an Anglo-Burgundian alliance and signing a treaty with the Duke of Brittany. This left him free to extend the Anglo-French kingdom south of the Loire into the Orleanist–Armagnac territory of central and southern France, where the dauphin was acknowledged as king.
Bedford’s campaigns were constantly interrupted by the need to return home to sort out the King’s Council, in which the jealousies and intrigues between Duke Humphrey and the baby king’s equally ambitious great-uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, often brought government business to a standstill. By 1429 Duke Humphrey was demanding that Beaufort be expelled from the Council as an agent of the pope following his election as cardinal. Bedford therefore deemed it more sensible to crown the seven-year-old Henry VI king than allow Duke Humphrey to remain as protector. From then on Cardinal Beaufort’s influence in the royal Council became paramount.
Bedford had already begun a more serious attempt at rooting out the dauphin by laying siege to the town of Orleans, which controlled one of the few bridges on the fast-flowing Loire river and was considered the key to the south. Had he succeeded in taking Orleans, the Anglo-Burgundian forces could have swarmed into central France. However, at this point the fortunes of France were transformed by Jeanne d’Arc or, as the English call her, Joan of Arc, a young peasant girl from Domremi between Champagne and Lorraine in the north-east.
Although Domremi was separated by many miles from Orleanist France in the south, Joan of Arc made her way across enemy country to reach the dauphin at his castle at Chinon, desperate to tell him of her vision that he was to be crowned King of France at Rheims in the heart of English-occupied France. Having pushed her way into his presence she proceeded to put steel into this self-indulgent man. No greater contrast could be imagined than that between the gorgeously dressed and cynical veteran of the French court and the naive Joan in her wooden sabots and home-made woollen garments. But her conviction that France’s greatest saints had appeared to her while she was watching her father’s sheep and thinking of the suffering of her divided country was so overwhelming that the dauphin too was swept away by her astonishing prophecy.
In an age of symbolism and allegory Joan of Arc, clad in the suit of white armour the dauphin had had made for her and with her hair shorn, seemed the embodiment of a holy angel descended to earth to fight for France. She changed the army’s mood from pessimism to inspired patriotism. On a horse from the royal stables, Joan of Arc was allowed to lead a brigade of French soldiers to relieve the defeatist garrison at Orleans. To the Orleanists’ astonishment, she managed to fight her way through the English besiegers and clambered within the battlemented walls of the city. Soon after she drove off the English by capturing one of their siege forts.
The siege of Orleans was lifted, and the townsfolk claimed Joan as their own, with the result that ever since she has been known as the Maid of Orleans. Shortly after, she won a pitched battle against the English at Patay, and a new determination was restored to the Orleanist army. It enabled the Maid to lead the dauphin north through Anglo-Burgundian France and have him crowned at Rheims as his ancestors had been since time immemorial. Although the dauphin had to escape south again as soon as the ceremony was over, something had happened to him in the echoing cathedral. When he received the sacred oils of kingship as the Archbishop of Rheims traced the sign of the cross on his forehead, the new king Charles VII was transformed into the Lord’s anointed for whom no sacrifice was too great.
Urged on by Joan, who had stayed in the north with the Orleanist troops, even the French inhabitants of the Anglo-Burgundian regions began openly to resist their foreign overlords. For though the Maid had accomplished her first purpose and the dauphin was now the figurehead for an increasingly united France, she had yet to achieve her second objective: that was to drive the English out of France.
It was then that the Maid’s luck turned. Her great merit had been the strength of her faith, but she was no trained general. She became over-confident and marched on Paris. When she utterly failed to take it, the mutterings against her grew louder among the dauphin’s advisers, who were already jealous of her influence. In May 1430, against military advice, she rashly tried to relieve the town of Compiègne, a former Burgundian possession on the dukedom’s western border which had rebelled against its overlord and which Duke Philip of Burgundy had surrounded. Having been wounded, she was on her way back to camp when she was captured by Duke Philip’s men-at-arms. Her white armour had made her all too visible.
Joan was thrown into prison, while the English and Burgundians considered ways of eradicating her with the least fuss. In her absence her enemies prevailed over the weak dauphin. In the end it was a French ecclesiastical court at Rouen under the Bishop of Beauvais that did the dirty work. The heroine of France was condemned to be burned to death for witchcraft. The dauphin did nothing to save her. Refusing to alter anything she had said about her visions the Maid of Orleans, weak and pale from captivity, was led out from her underground dungeon and tied to a stake in the market square at Rouen in Normandy. Logs were piled around her and set alight. St Joan, as she was to become, quietly muttered prayers to herself and never cried out during her final agony. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.
However, the spirit of patriotism that Joan had released lived on after her. Twenty years later the English presence in France had been reduced to the port of Calais. Though Bedford brought Henry VI to France to be crowned in the year of her death, anti-English feeling prevented the ceremony being performed at Rheims. Instead he had to make do with Paris. But the coronation had little effect–in fact, it only encouraged the growth of French patriotism, and even the Burgundian-ruled northern towns turned against the English.
The process was made swifter by the death of Bedford’s wife, who was the Duke of Burgundy’s sister. Anglo-Burgundian relations had been strengthened by their personal ties, but they never really recovered after Bedford married Burgundy’s vassal Jacquetta of Luxembourg without his former brother-in-law’s permission. Was England planning to control Luxembourg too? From now on Burgundy allied himself to Charles VII, and threw his influence behind him to establish the French king at Paris.
Though fighting continued sporadically in France, marked by longer and longer truces, Bedford’s death in 1435 allowed a peace party to flourish in England, led by Cardinal Beaufort, and the Truce of Tours in 1444 was cemented by Henry VI’s marriage to the strong-willed Margaret of Anjou, a cousin of the French royal family. However, Beaufort’s wise policy did not jibe with the national mood, which was vehemently anti-French. When he died in 1447 his follower the Duke of Suffolk became a lightning rod for public opinion. As ever Duke Humphrey–though he had been exiled from court, disgraced by his wife’s alleged attempts to use witchcraft to bring about Henry VI’s death–continued to exercise his populist touch speaking out against the French marriage. His death under suspicious circumstances after he had been arrested by Suffolk created a public outcry.
But that was nothing to what was felt to be the national humiliation of the loss of Normandy and Gascony three years later. By now Suffolk was Henry VI’s chief minister. One of his principal councillors was Cardinal Beaufort’s nephew, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who held the position of governor of Normandy. Somerset disgraced Suffolk’s administration by failing to make sure of Normandy’s defences and by 1450 the duchy had passed back into French hands for good. Even in Gascony the patriotism Joan of Arc had first inspired finally prevailed. When French soldiers invaded, none of the Gascons took up arms against them. Even those towns with strong trade links to England, Bordeaux and Bayonne, went over to the French.
However, the Gascons were used to a greater degree of independence than their new masters were willing to allow, so in 1451 the elderly but distinguished commander John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, whose war service stretched back to the Welsh wars of Henry IV, was despatched to aid the Gascons round Bordeaux. Unfortunately, in the half-century since O
wen Glendower’s revolt there had been a few military developments which had passed the gallant Talbot by, and one of them was artillery. French artillery accordingly won the Battle of Castillon in the Dordogne in 1453, the engagement which at last ended the Hundred Years War. The once unbeatable longbow was finally outclassed. Perhaps because of his age, Talbot made a textbook error, leading a cavalry charge uphill against a fortified camp defended by 300 cannon. One in ten of his troops was killed before they reached the palisades, including Talbot himself. From that day the only English possession left in France was the staple town and port of Calais.
But the initial loss of Normandy and Gascony, even before Castillon had been fought, was enough in 1450 to get Suffolk impeached. There were suspicions that he intended to engineer the succession to the throne for his son, that he was in collusion with the French and that Somerset too was a traitor. So furious was the public mood that Henry VI was forced to banish Suffolk to prevent him being imprisoned. Even so, the duke was murdered on his way to exile in Calais. His headless body was washed up days later on the English coast.
Worse was to come. Only weeks later, Henry VI, who was said to be utterly at the mercy of his fierce French wife Margaret of Anjou, was forced to flee from the capital to escape an invasion by the men of Kent, led by an obscure Irishman named Jack Cade. Rebellion was their response to the government’s attempts to punish them, for they were commonly believed to have been behind the murder of Suffolk. They camped out on Blackheath and when they had defeated the king’s soldiers sent to round them up they went into London and exacted summary justice on royal favourites. It was only when wilder elements began to loot the fine shops that Londoners turned against Cade. Soon afterwards he was murdered, and the king returned from Kenilworth where he had been hiding.
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