Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Then in 1418-1419 came Rouen, downstream on the river Seine, where the English king deliberately starved the inhabitants, refusing to allow several thousand hungry civilians to pass the lines, instead letting them die in the ditch between besiegers and besieged. Henry hanged prisoners in front of the city walls, and when he took the city its survivors were described as looking like the skeletons of funeral effigies. Afterward, Henry took part in an extended religious ceremony and gave a meal to every citizen who had defied him all that time. Several more cities in Normandy suffered the same fate, with prisoners hanged and civilians starved relentlessly. The country was once again overrun by routiers, or “rutters,” groups of armed soldiers-cum-bandits, although King Henry at least placed some limits on the amount his troops could rob from the French, and he made efforts to prevent his troops from drinking, aware of what this could bring.

  Despite the horror in Normandy, France’s leading aristocrats hated each other too much to do anything. On September 10, 1419, Jean the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy and leader of one faction, walked onto a bridge over the River Yonne for a meeting with the Dauphin Charles when the barriers closed behind him and on a pre-arranged signal he was cut down by Armagnac men. After this murder by trickery there could be no peace between the two French factions now, and Jean’s successor Philippe now allied formally with Henry, offering him the crown. At Troyes on May 21, 1420 a peace was made, providing for marriage between Henry and Catherine, the daughter of the Mad King Charles, to the exclusion of her brother, the Dauphin. The poor king did not even know who Henry was, this man who had come to destroy his land and deny his son his patrimony.

  And so Catherine Valois watched in December 1420 as her brother was formally disinherited, and on February 1 she set sail for England to prepare for her coronation. Here eels, prawns, shrimp, trout, and salmon were served, meat being prohibited during Lent, and for the honeymoon Henry took her to the siege of nearby Sens where he romantically ordered for musicians to play for her every evening as night fell around the starving city. Meanwhile Henry went to recuperate in English-controlled Paris, now witnessing a bitterly cold winter, the coldest anyone could remember. As the corpses multiplied, wolves were seen swimming across the river to feed on the human meat and desperate men turned houses into firewood.

  The fanatical English king had brought horror to northern France, but his feats would become immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V, part of the Henriad series that also told the stories of Richard II, and Henry IV. The play Henry IV, in particular, invented the character of Young Hal, a prince who was riotous and boozy and fun, great drama that had little relation to real life. Among those it inspired were George R.R. Martin, who based Robert Baratheon partly on one of Shakespeare’s characters, Falstaff—the later King Robert, as Jon Snow puts it, “a fat man, red-faced under his beard, sweating through his silks” who “walked like a man half in his cups.”2

  Falstaff is a comic figure who nonetheless expresses some hard truths, perhaps more cutting because he is a drunk and a coward. He spends his time with thieves and rascals in the Boar’s Head Inn in Eastcheap, a real tavern in the city of London at the time of Shakespeare, although perhaps not yet during the life of King Henry. Falstaff was based on the real historical figure Sir John Oldcastle, a friend of Henry V who was imprisoned because of his heretical beliefs. Oldcastle had fought with Henry IV against Owain Glyndŵr and become a member of Parliament and later High Sheriff of Herefordshire. His third marriage, to Joan of Cobham, a wealthy three-time widow, had also brought him numerous manors across the country and from 1409 he was styled as Lord Cobham.

  However, by 1410 Oldcastle had accepted Lollardy. The Lollards were a heretical group who arose after the Black Death and were attacked because they used to “make and write books” and “wickedly instruct and inform people.” Led by John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian, the Lollards believed that the Catholic Church needed to return to the scriptures rather than follow the hierarchy in Rome. Members of the sect began translating parts of the bible—at the time forbidden—and Wycliffe had himself transcribed large parts of it. They called themselves Wycliffites, the name Lollards being an insult, either from their habit of mumbling or a generic term for an uneducated person who could speak English but not French or Latin. Although tolerated at first, after the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the threat of Wycliffe’s increasingly radical ideas, these aristocratic supporters melted away.

  Lollards had also condemned luxury and believed that the Church had become corrupt. They had a point, of course, but there was also something fanatical in their beliefs that alarmed many people and offered the promise of future violence. After the Brethren of the Cross had imploded, the Lollards were one of several new groups that contained the zealotry of the Sparrows or the Faith Militant, especially its desire for a return to early religious simplicity. The phrase Faith Militant is borrowed from Church Militant—Ecclesia Militans—which is less confrontational than it sounds, but rather a concept whereby Christians are divided between three different groups: those still struggling on earth, the Church Militant; the Church Triumphant, that is those already in heaven; and the Church Penitent, those in purgatory. The phrase denotes the concept that to be a good Christian is a struggle, similar to the inner jihad of Islam, which also carries unfortunate connotations to most people.

  Another heretical group, the Hussites of Bohemia, launched an armed rebellion starting with the 1419 “Defenstration of Prague,” wherein they threw their Catholic rulers out of windows. Defenstration is a particular Czech tradition, this being only the first of three such events in their history where the leaders there were thrown out of windows.

  Faced with growing religious discontent, the authorities across Europe were becoming less tolerant. In 1401, Parliament had passed De Haeretico Comburendo (On Burning Heretics), which introduced burning at the stake for the first time; in 1410, tailor John Badby became the first layman executed for heresy. Oldcastle was charged with the crime in 1413 but was initially saved by his friendship with the new king; the zealously Catholic Henry, even as he escalated the persecution, tried to persuade his old friend to recant, but to no effect.

  Nothing could be done to persuade him, so the king asked for forty days respite, during which time Oldcastle escaped, and now on the run plotted to overthrow Henry, arrest the royal family, and replace the system of government so that the monarch was restrained by the leading knights, a plan considerably ahead of its time. He was captured on the Welsh borders in November 1417 and the following month in St Giles’s Field he was hanged and roasted in chains as he swung from a gibbet, promising to rise on the third day (he didn’t).

  It is believed that Shakespeare had originally called his character Oldcastle but that the Oldcastle family of his time had objected to the louche portrayal of their ancestor. Oldcastle’s Tudor descendent Henry Brook, eleventh Baron Cobham, was a powerful man, holding the title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (like his ancestor, he’d end up in jail for plotting against the king, in this case James I). To make matters more complicated, the character of Falstaff was also partly based on Brook or Brook’s father William, the tenth baron, who was a common figure of satire in the period and also appeared in a Ben Jonson play. And by the time the Henriad was being made, Henry Brook was father-in-law to secretary-of-state Robert Cecil, the second most powerful person in England, so Shakespeare was forced to change it. Instead it became Falstaff, after Sir John Fastolf, another soldier of the time who had fought in the Hundred Years War, but who was in every way unlike the Shakespearean fool; indeed he was a cunning and tough old soldier known for his bravery.3 And Shakespeare’s play contains puns on the name “old castle” which would only make sense if it was written with that name in mind.

  Henry and Catherine’s marriage was soon blessed with a son, christened Henry and destined to be king of England and France. The messianic king was now avidly studying maps of Palestine and reading about the Crusades; still only thirty-five
, he had conquered vast amounts of territory, founded a dynasty to rule both England and France, and, with three brothers beside him, seemed unassailable.

  And yet fortune’s wheel was always turning, and the biggest killer of the war was neither the longbow nor the sword, but the bloody flux, as dysentery was called. Now in May 1422, on campaign in Meaux, the king contracted the illness. Lingering in bed, it soon became clear to his followers that he would not make it, and he died in August, followed a month later by the King of France.

  After the king’s death his brother John, Duke of Bedford, was declared regent with particular focus on the war in France while youngest Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, became lord protector and guardian to his nephew, the infant Henry VI. (The second oldest brother, Thomas, had been killed months before Henry.) And yet from the start of Henry’s long and tragic reign there was bitter factionalism; Gloucester had hoped to become regent but in the inevitable power struggle this was denied him by his many enemies, chief among them his uncle, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.

  Resistance to English rule continued in France. In 1424, the disinherited Charles of France, son of the last king and referred to by the English as “he who calls himself the dauphin,” raised an army—a mixture of French, Scottish, Spanish, and Lombards, the latter the most feared soldiers in Europe largely on account of their Milan-made armor and their powerful horses. However in 1424 the English won yet another great victory, at Verneuil. They were led by Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, at thirty-six one of the most famous soldiers in Christendom. Despite the absence of their king, the English still had the advantage in warfare with their archers. Although plate armor could now withstand the most advanced arrow fire, the sheer volume of missiles caused soldiers to cluster in the center and disrupt their formation. As the French began to flee from the field their Scots allies found themselves outnumbered two to one, and since they had rejected quarter before the battle they had to fight to the death, the carnage ending with not one Scot left alive. Among the seven thousand French and Scots troops killed were the earls of Buchan and the veteran Archibald Douglas, having lost an eye and then a testicle and finally his life at the hands of the English.

  By late 1428 the English were outside Orléans, south of Paris on the river Loire and a crucial junction offering control of France’s largest river; the English controlled the west and the Burgundians the north and if the Duke of Bedford’s forces could take the city then all French resistance would collapse. Bedford was opposed to besieging Orléans, thinking it could not be taken, but was persuaded otherwise by military commander Thomas Montagu. Montagu’s father had been executed for plotting against Henry IV, but the young earl had had most of his father’s lands returned before joining Henry V in his campaign in 1415. He was one of the most respected soldiers of the war, as well as being immensely wealthy.

  A lengthy siege followed, now led by William de la Pole, the thirty-two-year-old Earl of Suffolk and grandson of Richard II’s crony. By the end of October, after prolonged and vicious fighting, the besiegers had captured part of the bridge and the city looked doomed.

  So the English were completely unprepared for what happened next. Late in February in Chinon, where the neurotic pretender Charles was holed up, now in desperate trouble, six armed men arrived with a curious looking young girl, dressed as a boy, with hair cut short and a fierce determination in her eyes. To the French she was a savior, a virgin who would liberate them from her occupation; to her enemies she was a witch who could only be cleansed with fire. They called her “the Maid,” but she is better known today as Joan of Arc.

  28

  “I AM A KNIGHT, I SHALL DIE A KNIGHT”

  I’ve burned away my years fighting for terrible kings . . . a man of honor keeps his vows—even if he’s serving a drunk or a lunatic.

  —SER BARRISTAN SELMY

  Childhood was short, and adolescence is a modern idea. Children were married at twelve and were ready to join the world of men and women. At that age John Marshal’s fourth son William had been sent away from his Wiltshire home to live with relatives in Normandy, which must have dented an otherwise loving father-son bond. William trained as a knight first under his mother’s cousin, William de Tancareville, and then her brother Patrick of Salisbury, a rival landowner to John Marshal who was also a star of tournaments. William Marshal would grow up in Chateauroux in Berry, a lawless part of central France desired both by the House of Capet and the Plantagenets, but controlled by a troublesome family, the Lusignans of Poitou.

  Earl Patrick had gone into service with Eleanor, Queen of England, but in 1168 was killed by the Lusignans, and the twenty-one-year-old Marshal found himself without a patron or income. Being a younger son, William had no money and so instead he made his living as a professional jouster, earning a fortune by taking the armor of his defeated opponents. At a tournament at Eu in Normandy in 1178 or 1179 Marshal seized ten victims; over a ten-year period, he and a partner captured 103 knights, earning a huge fortune, and so his fame spread. Indeed, Marshal even employed a servant called Henry Norreis whose job it was to go around proclaiming his celebrity, a sort of medieval PR man.

  Over the course of his career Marshal became a heroic benchmark of knighthood, the man others compared themselves to, just as people in Westeros talk of Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, or Ser Barristan Selmy, “Barristan the Bold,” the “greatest knight in Westerosi history.”

  But he was lucky to have such a patron in Queen Eleanor, who found employment for him in the service of her eldest son Henry, eight years his junior; the two became as close as brothers, even as Henry went to war with his real family. Eleanor was the most impressive woman of the period—a schemer, and later a politician-grandmother—but in her youth she was the most desired lady in Christendom. After presenting King Henry with eight children she moved onto to become a patron of the arts and a diplomat well into her seventies.* Eleanor was the ultimate mother-politician, indeed grandmother-politician, respected across Europe as a tough and powerful figure; but she was also a poisoner, most likely eliminating Rosamund, her husband’s mistress.1 She also had a monster of a son who she defended, however murderous and cowardly his behavior.

  To the north of Iberia and to the south of the Frankish heartland the region of Aquitaine long retained a distinctive culture, as well as its own language. It was also the home of courtly love and romance. Like the Reach, its people were “brave, gallant and susceptible to the charms of women,” and proud of their region’s great fertility and its wine. Aquitaine is supplied by two giant rivers flowing into the Atlantic to the west, the Loire at its northern frontier and the Gironde further south, on the banks of which are vineyards producing the most expensive wine on earth.

  The language of the south, the lenga d’oc or Occitan, so called because southerners said oc where northerners say oui, is distinctive enough even to an untrained English speaker. A study by linguist Mario Pei in 1949 comparing the degrees to which Romance languages differed from Latin found that Italian was 12 percent different to Latin and Occitan just 25 percent, while for French the figure is 44 percent. (Sardinian was the closest to Latin.) This division between the north and south of France remained pronounced until recently.

  The south of France had come under the domination of the north, but the cultural influences flowed the other way, too, particularly the romantic tradition of Aquitaine expressed through its poems.

  Duke Guilhèm (William) IX of Aquitaine (1071–1127) was “one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his attentions to ladies, and an accomplished composer and singer of songs. For a long time, he roved the world, bent on the deception of ladies”’2 Like the Moors of Spain, the men of Aquitaine wrote love poetry, Guilhèm’s including one about pretending to be deaf-mute so he could visit the wives of “lords Guarin and Bernard.”

  Guilhèm’s granddaughter Eleanor was in turn married to the two most power
ful men in western Europe, King Louis of France and then the much younger Henry of England. By doing so she helped introduce the troubador tradition to both countries.

  Eleanor and Louis’s marriage proved explosive, and only got worse after he took her on crusade where, it was rumored, she began a romance with her dashing uncle Ramon. By the time the royal couple were journeying back to Europe she was already threatening him with annulment. Despite their two daughters—who could not inherit the throne—the Church agreed to dissolve their marriage, and on her way back home she agreed to a match with the Empress Matilda’s son Henry—at nineteen, a whole decade her junior.*

  As disastrous as her first marriage was, her second was arguably worse. Henry II was a highly intelligent man but renowned for his temper, appetite, and lust; his reign was marred by conflict, first with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and later with his four surviving legitimate sons Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, who spent a turbulent decade and a half fighting their father and each other. The true-born sons were encouraged in this rebellion by their mother, who was imprisoned by her husband for sixteen years; after Henry’s death in 1189 Eleanor enjoyed huge political power in her old age. Henry was also close to one of his bastard sons, Geoffrey of York, who remained loyal to his father even as his other sons rebelled.

  During Henry II’s reign the first proper legal records began, the birth of a civil service, and later the government would settle permanently in Westminster; yet throughout this period, and for much longer, the court was mobile, travelling from one part of the kingdom to another, much to the dread of the people, for just as in Westeros royal entourages always brought misery with them.

  Accounts from one castle from June 1293 record the arrival of the king’s nephews: “There came to dinner John of Brabant, with 30 horses and 24 valets, and the two sons of the Lord Edmund, and they stay at our expenses in all things in hay, oats and wages.” Four days later it only reports, sadly, Morantur—they remain. A few days later and the record laments: “They remain until now, and this is an onerous day.”3