by Helen Castor
It was the wretched day of victory, and France lay broken on a field of blood.
PART ONE
Before
1
This war, accursed of God
God had spoken. That, at least, was what the English said. In the circumstances, it was hard for the French to argue. Or, rather, it would have been, had they not been too busy arguing among themselves.
For the English, it was simple. Their king’s claim to the throne of France – and, for that matter, his dynasty’s contested right to wear the crown of England – had been utterly, gloriously vindicated by his astonishing victory at the battle they called ‘Agincourt’. Only God’s will could explain how so few Englishmen had vanquished so many great knights of France, and how it was that so little English blood had been spilled when so much death had been visited on their adversaries. This was heaven’s mandate in action: the triumph of another David over the might of an arrogant Goliath, as one of the royal chaplains who had formed the spiritual corps of the English army now solemnly noted in his account of the campaign. These clerical conscripts had sat behind the English lines as the fighting raged, praying furiously for divine intervention, and its undeniable manifestation in ‘that mound of pity and blood’ in which the French had fallen could lead to only one conclusion. ‘Far be it from our people to ascribe the triumph to their own glory or strength,’ wrote the anonymous priest with palpable fervour; ‘rather let it be ascribed to God alone, from Whom is every victory, lest the Lord be wrathful at our ingratitude and at another time turn from us, which Heaven forbid, His victorious hand.’
Clearly, the English king was waging a just war. He had given his French subjects every chance to acknowledge his rightful claim to be their ruler by descent from the French mother of his royal ancestor Edward III. Outside the walls of Harfleur, following the prescription for the conduct of righteous war laid down in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, he had patiently explained that he came in peace, if only they would open the gates and submit to his authority as their duty demanded. Their obstinate refusal meant that he had no choice but to take up the sword of justice to punish their rebellion. In doing so he was, explained his chaplain, the ‘true elect of God’ – ‘our gracious king, His own soldier’ – at the head of an army that, thanks to the king’s stern instructions, conducted itself soberly and piously, without resorting to pillage or indulging in vengeful or wanton violence.
The exposition of this analysis by the anonymous royal chaplain in his Gesta Henrici Quinti, ‘The Deeds of Henry V’, was intended in part to persuade an international audience of the merits of the king’s cause: specifically, the great Council of the Church then meeting in the German city of Constance. There was also a domestic constituency that needed reminding of the imperative to lend practical support to Henry’s divinely sanctioned project – the representatives of English boroughs and shires in parliament, and the representatives of the English Church in convocation, whose responsibility it was to assent to the taxes that would pay for the king’s future campaigns in France.
But heaven’s judgement had been made so plain that it seemed a source of irritation, in some quarters at least, that such campaigns would have to be fought at all. The bishop of Winchester, England’s chancellor, in his opening address to the parliament that gathered in March 1416, noted testily that God had, in fact, already spoken three times over: once in England’s great naval victory over the French fleet at Sluys in 1340; then in 1356, when France’s king had been captured at Poitiers; and now, on the killing field of Agincourt. ‘O God,’ remarked the royal chaplain as he recounted the tenor of the chancellor’s speech, ‘why does this wretched and stiff-necked nation not obey these divine sentences, so many and so terrible, to which, by a vengeance most clearly made manifest, obedience is demanded of them?’
The wretched and stiff-necked nation itself, however – while accepting that God had indeed spoken – was much less certain of what He had actually said. Clearly, the English cause was not just. After all, the English king had no lawful right to the throne of France, since claims through the female line had no validity in the most Christian kingdom, and the French had no wish to be his subjects, which made his attempt at conquest an act of unwarranted aggression and his proposed rule a tyranny. The conflict between the two kingdoms would hardly have lasted so long, nor would it have encompassed French successes as well as English ones, had God’s judgement been quite so overwhelmingly obvious as the English king was pleased to suggest. The inference of the accursed day of Azincourt, therefore, was not that God supported England’s unjust claims. Instead, He had chosen to use England’s unjust claims as an instrument with which to punish France for its sins.
Sin was the heart of the matter, that much was clear; but exactly what sin, and committed by whom, were questions on which it was more difficult to agree. Perhaps, suggested the chronicler Thomas Basin half a century later, the blessed saints Crispin and Crispian had abandoned the French to the carnage unleashed on their feast day at Azincourt because their town of Soissons had been sacked and their shrines plundered only a year before, in the course of the civil war between Burgundians and Armagnacs. ‘Everyone’, he said with sorrowful resignation, ‘can think what they will.’ For himself, Basin preferred to stick to the facts, ‘leaving the discussion of the arcane workings of the divine will to those who presume to do so’.
There were plenty of them. The monk who chronicled the events of 1415 from the abbey of Saint-Denis outside the walls of Paris attempted a pass at the same kind of historical humility – ‘I leave it to those who have given the matter careful consideration’, he said, ‘to decide if we should attribute the ruin of the kingdom to the French nobility’ – but he could restrain himself only momentarily from a thunderous verdict of his own. It could hardly be denied that the great were no longer good. The lords of France had fallen into sybaritic luxury, into vanity and into vice, and their impious abuse of Holy Mother Church was matched only by their mortal hatred of each other. ‘All these crimes’, the chronicler of Saint-Denis declared, ‘and others worse still, to put it briefly, have justly stirred up the wrath of God against the great men of the kingdom, so that He has taken from them the power to defeat their enemies, or even to resist their attack.’
But even if it could be agreed that divine retribution was patently at work, questions still remained. Were all of France’s sinful noblemen equally guilty in the eyes of God, or were some among them more reprehensible – and therefore more responsible for the desperate straits in which the kingdom now found itself – than others? Supporters of the Armagnac cause knew that one crime above all had cast a shadow dark enough to blot out the light of heaven’s grace: the bloody murder of Louis of Orléans by his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. That unnatural act had precipitated a civil war which not only turned the realm upon itself, but opened the door to English aggression. John of Burgundy, the Armagnacs were well aware, had had dealings with the king of England both before and after Henry had inherited his father’s throne. Now, the fact that the duke had not taken the field at Azincourt provided proof positive that Burgundy had entered into secret negotiations with the English, and – with horrifying treachery – had agreed not to resist their invasion. About the dreadful outcome of the battle and the slaughter of the duke’s countrymen, the Armagnac chronicler Jean Juvénal des Ursins reported, ‘it was commonly said that he did not seem angered in the slightest’.
Pierre de Fenin, on the other hand – a writer whose noble family came from the Burgundian-dominated region of Artois – was no less confident that Duke John had been ‘much enraged by the French loss when he was told of it’. Those who supported the duke in his efforts to secure the stake that was rightfully his in the government of the kingdom knew that he had wanted nothing more than to fight at Azincourt, until he had been refused permission in the name of the king himself. The deaths of the duke’s two brothers, Anthony of Brabant and Philip of Nevers, had been a shattering blow which s
truck at the heart of his family and his dynasty. And to Burgundian eyes, it was remarkable how many of those who had escaped with their lives, if not their honour, from that field of blood were members of the Armagnac confederacy; chief among the English prisoners, after all, was young Charles, duke of Orléans.
What, then, should John of Burgundy do, as he surveyed the devastation that the crimes of his Armagnac enemies had wrought on the kingdom? From the safety of his duchy of Burgundy, he contemplated his options and calculated his odds. To his French followers, the duke was a distinctively imposing figure, his shrewd brain working behind languorously hooded eyes, the long nose sketching an inimitable profile beneath the rich black folds – piled forward and pinned with a ruby of extraordinary price – of his trademark chaperon hat; all in all, as unlike their beloved but pitiful king as it was possible to imagine. But the frontiers of France, as the Armagnacs well knew in accusing him of treachery, were not the limits of the arena across which Duke John now aimed to manoeuvre.
Great prince of France though he was, the territories of Burgundy itself extended his political reach beyond the bounds of the kingdom. As the duke of Burgundy he was a vassal of the French king, sworn to serve and obey; but as the count of Burgundy – holding the lands immediately to the east of his duchy, a fief which lay outside the French king’s dominions – he owed allegiance and homage to the Holy Roman Emperor. Nor were the ‘Two Burgundies’, as they were known, his only stake in the complex, shifting geography of western European power. From his mother, the heiress Margaret of Male, he had also inherited the rich counties of Flanders and Artois, territories which made him a force to be reckoned with in the Low Countries.
The colossal figure of the Burgundian duke, towering over the French political landscape, therefore had one foot planted within the kingdom and the other without – a separation of powers which, at times, required him to perform spine-twisting acts of political contortionism. Back in 1406, for example, he had been appointed as the French king’s captain-general to command an assault on the English-held port of Calais. He mustered his forces, ready to begin the campaign – and at the same moment, even as he buckled on his armour and rode out to review his troops, his ambassadors were busily negotiating a treaty with the English in which their master guaranteed that his Flemish fortresses would offer no military support of any kind to the French attack that he himself was about to lead.
But, despite the dark suspicions of the Armagnacs, this was not treachery, or even duplicity, in any unequivocal sense. As count of Flanders, the duke had a duty, and a political imperative, to support the economic interests of the wealthy Flemish towns of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres – and that required him to maintain a relationship with England close enough to safeguard the supply of English wool to those who produced fine Flemish cloth, and to protect commercial shipping in the waters between England and Flanders. It did not mean that, as duke of Burgundy, he was any the less a prince of France. In 1406, his outrage had been unmistakable when the order to attack the English at Calais was countermanded from Paris at the eleventh hour for lack of funds: ‘My lord has been and is as saddened and angered by this as it is possible to be in all the world, and no one can placate him,’ the duke’s treasurer told his colleagues in Burgundy. And in 1415 – whatever the insinuations made in the aftermath of the slaughter at Azincourt – he had come to no accommodation with the English invaders.
Instead, in the weeks and months after the battle, Duke John’s sights were fixed as firmly as they had ever been on the prize that still eluded him: control of the government of France. During November 1415 he advanced on Paris, ‘very distressed by the deaths of his brothers and his men’ (explained the anonymous and by now pro-Burgundian Parisian who kept a journal throughout these years), but prevented from reaching the helpless king by the Armagnac ‘betrayers of France’. For the Armagnacs who controlled the capital, meanwhile, the duke’s distress was less immediately striking than the heavily armed troops at his back. The gates of the city were closed against him; and his hopes were dashed in December by the death of the dauphin Louis – a young man with a reputation for indolence and self-indulgence who had nevertheless exerted himself in the search for a lasting settlement with the duke, to whose daughter he was married. A year earlier, Louis had attempted to forbid ‘the use on either side of injurious or slanderous terms such as “Burgundian” or “Armagnac”’. But now that the dauphin was dead, the count of Armagnac himself was appointed constable of France: a man of wisdom and foresight, said the monk of Saint-Denis; as cruel as Nero, exclaimed the Parisian journal-writer. And by February 1416, the latter reported in horror, he was ‘in sole charge of the whole kingdom of France, in spite of all objections, for the king was still not well’.
As the Armagnac grip on government tightened, the duke of Burgundy had little choice but to withdraw his forces northward to his strongholds in Flanders and Artois. His castle at Hesdin, thirty miles west of Arras, lay only seven miles from the field at Azincourt where the English had killed his brothers, and where the Armagnacs – he believed – had failed to defend France. Hesdin was not only a fortress and a ducal residence but a curiosity, housing a suite of rooms filled with ingenious contraptions, finely wrought automata and galumphing practical jokes. Visitors to the castle’s gallery might be distracted by a misshapen reflection in a distorting mirror, only to find themselves drenched in jets of water triggered by a footfall or squirted from an innocently impassive statue. Those who avoided the buffets of a mechanical contrivance that dealt unexpected blows to the head and shoulders at the gallery’s exit found a room filled with rain and snow, thunder and lightning, ‘as if from the sky itself’, and beyond that a wooden figure of a hermit, an uncanny presence that became truly unnerving when it began to speak.
This cabinet of wonders had been part of the fabric of the castle at Hesdin for more than a hundred years. By the spring of 1416, however, John of Burgundy could have been forgiven for thinking that life was beginning to imitate artifice. The gathering of international opinion at the Council of the Church in Constance was fast becoming a hall of mirrors: every theological and political dispute in Europe was reflected there – often in ludicrous disproportion, at least in relation to the council’s ostensible task of seeking an end to the long-running schism in the papacy. The delegates sent by the Armagnac government in Paris expended a great deal of energy in the attempt to deny any kind of hearing to their English adversaries, but their assault on their French enemy, the duke of Burgundy, was equally vitriolic. The formidable chancellor of the university of Paris, an eminent theologian named Jean Gerson, railed against the justification of the murder of the duke of Orléans proposed in 1407 by Jean Petit, demanding that it now be formally condemned with the full weight of the Church’s authority; but the duke of Burgundy had sent a delegation of his own to the council, and his men – led by the bishop of Arras, with the support of Pierre Cauchon, another Paris-trained theologian, and as passionate a Burgundian as Gerson was an Armagnac – railed back, meeting every attack with a blistering compound of argument, bribery and barely disguised threats.
While the ecclesiastics wrangled, Duke John tested his footing on uncertain ground by entering into a diplomatic dance with the ‘elect of God’ himself, Henry of England. In July 1416 duke and king agreed a treaty by which they promised not to make war against one another in the duke’s northern territories of Picardy, Flanders and Artois, and a face-to-face meeting in English-held Calais was planned for the autumn. The situation was so delicate and the lack of trust so grave that elaborate arrangements were put in place to guarantee the duke’s safety. On 5 October, he left his town of Saint-Omer to arrive at Gravelines, near Calais, at low tide, where the river Aa flowed into the sea as a shallow stream. With his household men and an armed escort, he took up position on one bank of the river; on the other, similarly attended, was the duke of Gloucester, the English king’s youngest brother. After a moment, both men advanced, until their horses stood s
ide by side in the middle of the water. The two dukes shook hands and exchanged the kiss of peace, before Humphrey of Gloucester rode on, a lavishly entertained hostage, to Saint-Omer, while John of Burgundy made his way to Calais to meet the king.
By 13 October, when the exchange was effected in reverse, the duke had successfully negotiated both this ad hoc water feature and a week of English hospitality without obvious mishap. But if King Henry had hoped that their private discussions would persuade the Burgundian duke to support his divinely sanctioned claim to the throne of France, he was to be sadly disappointed. ‘What kind of conclusion these enigmatic talks and exchanges had produced went no further than the king’s breast or the reticence with which he kept his counsel,’ reported Henry’s chaplain in some frustration; ‘… the general view was that Burgundy had all this time detained our king with ambiguities and prevarications and had so left him, and that in the end, like all Frenchmen, he would be found a double-dealer, one person in public and another in private.’
The difficulty was indeed the duke’s French identity, albeit not quite in the way the royal chaplain suggested. Tempting though the acquisition of such a powerful ally against his French enemies might be, and necessary though it always was to protect Anglo-Flemish trade, a military pact with England would vindicate the Armagnacs’ allegations of Burgundian treachery and spell the end, once and for all, of the duke’s claim to be the rightful defender of his king and country. He turned instead to a French ally who would serve to bolster that claim: the new dauphin, eighteen-year-old Jean of Touraine, who – as it happened – was married to his niece Jacqueline, heiress to the rich and strategically vital counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland in the Low Countries, where the young couple lived at her father’s court. In November 1416 the duke followed his inconclusive English conference at Calais with another at Valenciennes in Hainaut, and this time a definitive agreement was the result: Burgundy and Hainaut would work together to establish Dauphin Jean – naturally, with his wife’s uncle of Burgundy at his side – at the head of government in Paris.
