A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  For eight years after 1405, Henry IV retreated to the shadowed edges of English government. Various suggestions have been made as to the nature of his malady: mental illness, leprosy, ague, dropsy. Despite the bloated features displayed on his tomb effigy at Canterbury (itself carved from ultra-fashionable English alabaster), Henry IV himself had always been an ill-defined figure: keeping his own counsel, working from within the circle of his family and affinity rather than craving the theatre of public display. Whatever his personal feelings towards King Richard, for more than twenty years he had been schooled, blooded and closeted in the company of his royal cousin before, in 1399, springing his trap.

  The sense of a mind moving in the dark, of hidden secrets, of beliefs at odds with received opinion, may have contributed to the suspicion with which the Church, after 1399, regarded Henry’s court. As the chief price for continued backing of Henry’s regime, Archbishop Arundel demanded royal support in the prosecution of heresy. The King himself, whatever his own opinion, had little alternative but to acquiesce. At moments of crisis meanwhile, Henry himself seems to have been quite happy to entertain calls for the disestablishment of the Church, the seizure of its revenues and their application to his own pressing financial needs. Another cry heard on these occasions was to have an equally long posterity: ‘resumption’, the demand that patronage unwisely distributed by earlier kings be clawed back to fill the gaping hole in public finance.

  To judge from his own posterity, Henry IV was a highly capable man: all four of his sons, the future Henry V, Thomas of Lancaster, John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester, were well-educated and active in politics or military affairs. It was to them, rather than to the usual run of place-men and ministers, that a great deal of the business of government was entrusted. In 1405, in a bizarre reversal of the history of the 1320s in which another, rather more famous Thomas of Lancaster had been put to death at Pontefract, it was to his half-brother, Thomas, son of John of Gaunt and a veteran of the battle of Shrewsbury, that Henry had entrusted the trial and execution of Archbishop Scrope. Thomas’ brother, Henry Beaufort, bishop in turn of Lincoln and then Winchester, was accepted as a leading figure within Henry IV’s counsels. This was the politics of family and affinity imported to the very heart of royal government: a practical demonstration of the ways in which such family harmony, only dreamed about by Edward III, might tame discord and power the great engines of state. Between 1407 and 1410, the council ruled without once summoning Parliament.

  Royal Family Tree

  The problem was that to many, after 1399, no matter what harmony might reign within the house of Lancaster, this was simply the wrong family to lay claim to government. At the time of Richard II’s deposition, the Beauforts – Thomas, Henry and their elder brother John – were the rankest of parvenus, illegitimate children born to John of Gaunt’s liaison with a low-born governess, Katherine Swynford, legitimized and promoted as recently as 1397 as a result of pressure brought to bear by Gaunt upon a weakened papacy. More seriously for Henry IV, even if it had been agreed in 1399 that King Richard, the only surviving offspring of Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince, must go, there were other members of the royal family considered to have equal or indeed superior claims to those of Henry Bolingbroke. To understand why this was so, we must take a painful but necessary glance at the royal family tree. If what follows seems all too much like the plot of a Verdi opera without the charm of the music, or indeed like a list of the characters assembled from a Dickens novel, with no real sense of what these people said or did, then such is the price that has to be paid for an understanding of English politics in the fifteenth century. This was the politics of the gang boss, or the Godfather, in which everybody was related to everyone else and God help the person who forgot that their enemy was someone’s else cousin or friend. It was also a period in which noblemen shunned autobiographical disclosure. Just as mafia bosses tend not to write their memoirs, so there is a risk that, lacking personal details or disclosures, the great aristocrats of fifteenth-century England fade into a monochrome blur: so many Percys, Beauforts or Somersets, accumulating wealth and notoriety but with precious little, save dull dates and events, to distinguish between them.

  Even so, we must at least attempt to set out the dynastic problems here. Henry IV’s father, John of Gaunt, was the third of Edward III’s five sons to have survived infancy. The fourth and fifth such sons, Gaunt’s younger brothers, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, both had offspring including Edmund Langley’s son, the future Edward, Duke of York. Edmund Langley himself was still alive in 1399, and had defected to Henry IV’s cause almost immediately on Henry’s landing. Being descended from sons of Edward III junior to Gaunt, neither line of descent via York or Gloucester immediately overshadowed Henry IV’s claim to the throne. More worrying was the figure of John of Gaunt’s elder brother, Henry IV’s uncle, Lionel of Antwerp, the second of Edward III’s sons, created Duke of ‘Clarence’, his new title itself redolent of English history, derived from the castle, town and honour of Clare in Suffolk, home to an Anglo-Norman dynasty which had gone on to acquire vast estates in Wales and Ireland, much of which now came to Lionel. Lionel had died in 1368, when the future Henry IV was not yet two years old, but he had left a child to succeed him, a daughter, Philippa, married to Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, a great-grandson of the Mortimer who in the 1320s had been the favourite and lover of Queen Isabella, Edward III’s mother.

  Edmund Mortimer died in 1381. His son by Philippa, Roger Mortimer, did not come of age until 1394. Even so, given that King Richard II had no children to succeed him, there was already discussion as to the rights that this Roger, as the direct descendant of Lionel of Antwerp, the second eldest of Edward III’s sons, might have to be considered heir to the throne. The fact that his claim had passed through the female line counted for relatively little in a realm whose kings had led England into the Hundred Years War on the basis of the claims of a woman, Queen Isabella, might transmit rights to the throne of France.

  Roger Mortimer died in 1398, on the brink of arrest, leaving a seven-year-old son, Edmund Mortimer, in no position to lay claim to the throne when Richard II was deposed. Even so, the wealth of the combined Mortimer and Clare estates rendered their holders potentially powerful. Both in 1397, when Roger Mortimer had been acclaimed on his return from Ireland by followers wearing his colours of red and green, and in 1403 when the followers of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, himself married to Roger Mortimer’s sister, had apparently shouted ‘Henry Percy King’ at the height of the Battle of Shrewsbury, there were signs that the Mortimers might be promoted as rivals to the Lancastrian line, if not by themselves then by those who sought to exploit their claims for factional advantage. A brother of Roger Mortimer, captured in Wales by Glyn Dwr, even proposed to kidnap Edmund, the Mortimer heir, then in the custody of Henry IV and to carry him off as a figurehead to launch a Mortimer claim to the throne. The plot was foiled before the boy had been taken further west than Cheltenham. Even so, Edward, Duke of York, the King’s cousin, was briefly imprisoned for his failure to disclose what he had known of such plots against the crown. Throughout his reign, Henry IV had to keep careful watch not only over Church and state but over the incubus within his own family, the Mortimer claim, that threatened to reveal all his own, or his sons’ claims to legitimacy as mere artifice.

  Young Prince Henry and the French Crisis

  This in turn helps to explain why Henry IV’s eldest son and heir, Henry V, was so anxious to prove both his legitimacy and his close relationship with God. If not the closest heir to Edward III, then Henry V could at least prove himself the claimant whom the Almighty was keenest to promote. Trained up in the wars against Glyn Dwr, wounded in the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Henry was already an experienced commander by the time that his father fell ill in 1405. Perhaps not the favourite amongst his father’s sons, he nonetheless stepped forwards to play a significant ro
le in the council that over the next few years attempted to reform royal finance, to deal with the situation that arose when the heir to the throne of Scotland, the future James I, was fortuitously captured by English sailors at sea, and to consider the options in France that opened up as the result of the emergence of serious factional fighting between supporters of the Duke of Burgundy and the Armagnac party that had previously gathered around the Duke of Orléans. These disputes themselves reflected the fact that the King of France, Charles VI, was incapable of governing himself let alone his realm. First seized with the symptoms of madness in the early 1390s, Charles had since suffered episodes in which he believed himself to be made of glass, fearful of sitting down for fear of breaking, able to recognize no one and capable of no serious work save for looking at picture books.

  As early as 1411, Prince Henry was proposing to lead an English expedition to France in support of the Burgundian faction. To this end, and so that Henry IV might himself join his son, ‘an old streamer of worsted worked with the arms of the King, St Edward and St George’ was prepared for the King’s sailing to Calais, a sailing which in the event did not take place. In the same year, spurred on by his uncle, Henry Beaufort, the Prince may even have suggested that Henry IV abdicate in his favour. If so, this was a suggestion that merely fuelled discord between father and son, with Henry IV’s last years perhaps dominated by his rivalry with the Prince.

  Henry V

  We must beware taking our view of Henry V from William Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier or the music of Sir William Walton. In all probability, the last years of the old King were nothing like so gloomy, nor the breach with his eldest son anything like so serious, as Shakespeare’s history plays suggest. When Henry IV died in 1413, Henry V nonetheless chose to look to other role models than his father. Those that he selected not only set the tone for a renewal of warfare in France but for his own much vaunted orthodoxy in all matters relating to the Church. There were to be no Lollard knights at Henry V’s court, as revealed, almost immediately after his succession, by the disgrace and flight of Sir John Oldcastle and his fellow conspirators. The wounds of the past were, in so far as was possible, to be healed. In 1413, the year of his accession, Henry V removed the body of Richard II from its exile at King’s Langley and had it reinterred in the royal mausoleum at Westminster where it had originally been intended to lie.

  To France

  Warfare, meanwhile, supplied a convenient means both to test God’s favour and to distract his critics from the severe political and financial crises with which the Lancastrian dynasty was still plagued. Henry IV had left so little money in his treasury that his executors initially refused to serve in the execution of his will. In warfare, Henry V could hope to revive the spirit of Edward III, his great-grandfather. By transforming the Anglo-French dispute into something approaching a crusade by Englishmen against the forces of French evil, he might even revive the spirit of the longvanished Richard I, by this time considered the very paragon of Christian knighthood, author of near-mythical feats including a propensity for eating the flesh of his Saracen foes. Above all, in a peculiar reversal of the circumstances of 1066, Henry V might emulate the success of William ‘the Conqueror’, through military victories demonstrating that his right to rule came directly from God.

  Unlike his father, Henry V’s appearance is not certainly known to us. The closest that we come is a sixteenth-century panel portrait that historians suggest is based upon a contemporary study from the life. What is most striking here is the haircut: a ‘pudding bowl’, shaved clear above both ears and at the back of the skull, that would lead most modern youths to sue their barber but which, in days gone by, was meted out to schoolboys, like prunes and cold baths, as one of the penalties of a classical education. The last time that a haircut like this had been worn by a potential king of England was in the Bayeux Tapestry, when it was precisely the shaving clear of their ears and neck that had proclaimed the spartan qualities of England’s Norman conquerors. Now, rather than a Norman conquering England, an English King, similarly shaved, would take an army of English conquerors into Normandy.

  Moving with a combination of diplomacy and skilful propaganda, already displayed in the presentation of the Oldcastle rebellion as something hydra-headed and frightful rather than the sad piece of incompetence that it actually was, by the end of 1414, Henry had proclaimed his intention to act as the hammer of all heretics and hence as a Christian ruler every bit as loyal to the Church as the King of France. He next had to provoke a reaction from France. Like Bismarck in the 1860s, he had to start a war without appearing to have done so. Ambassadors were sent to France to demand the proper implementation of the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny agreed more than fifty years before, the restoration of territories which the Treaty had in theory guaranteed to the English, the payment of more than £250,000 still owing from the ransom of King Jean II captured at Poitiers (who had died still in English captivity in 1364), and, most outrageously of all, the marriage of Henry himself to Catherine of Valois, Charles VI’s youngest daughter. When the French replied with an offer of partial compliance, Henry demanded the whole deal, which was inevitably refused. He could thus pose as the injured party, and from November 1414 persuade Parliament to grant the subsidies necessary to restart the war.

  His strategy at this stage was so bold as to defy common sense. He would allow God and history to decide the righteousness of his cause. In other words, he would simply repeat the campaign of Edward III that had culminated in the first of the great English victories, at Crécy in 1346. He would land in Normandy and from there lead a great ‘chevauchée’ in arms across northern France in the direction of Calais, trusting that this would provoke the French king to a full-scale confrontation in which, as at Crécy, God would once again prove himself an Englishman. Like all the greatest generals, Henry not only had a bold plan, but the good fortune to unfold that plan more or less exactly as proposed. Landing at Harfleur on 14 August 1415, late in the campaigning season, within six weeks Henry had used his cannon to pound the town into surrender. Contrary to various retellings of the story, he allowed no massacre of the local population. On the contrary, having hoisted the royal standard and the banner of St George, the red cross symbolizing his crusading intentions, he ordered all women and children rounded up and sent under conduct to the French garrison at nearby Lillebonne. There they were indeed raped, but by their fellow Frenchmen, not by Henry’s soldiers. Harfleur itself was to be turned into a base for future operations, and to this end its records were systematically burned in the public square, so that no one might know who had owned what. The history of Normandy itself was to be rewritten by fire. The parallels here to the Peasants’ Revolt and the deliberate burning of manorial records are obvious and worth pondering.

  Agincourt

  From Harfleur, with barely a glance at Rouen, the ducal capital to the south, Henry marched his army, by now already depleted by the effects of dysentery, across country in the direction of Calais. There was no need for this march, other than to re-enact the Crécy campaign, and to provoke a response. The army might just as easily have returned to England from Harfleur as from Calais. Throughout September and October, ships arrived at Harfleur to disembark the cannon used in Henry’s siege. Nor was pillage a motive: the ordinances that Henry laid down for his army strictly prohibited any looting save for food. Provocation was clearly the chief intention. It succeeded. A fortnight’s march by more than 10,000 men, hurried along to begin with at the rate of nearly twenty miles a day, forced by the French presence on the north bank of the Somme to march inland a full twenty miles to the north-east of Paris before a crossing of the Somme could be effected, most of their nights spent camping in the open regardless of the weather, brought Henry and his men on 24 October near to the small hamlet of Agincourt, only a day or two’s march from Calais itself. Here, they encountered the French army commanded by the twenty-one-year-old Duke of Orléans. Scenting a defeated enemy, and just as keen to wipe
clean past humiliations as the English were keen to reinflict them, the duke determined upon battle.

  That night it rained, transforming the recently ploughed fields into a quagmire. Either side of the fields lay woods, filled with English and Welsh archers. Not surprisingly, the French were in no hurry to attack. A large part of the morning was spent in parleys and reconnaissance. Growing impatient with the delay, and defying all of the tactics by which English armies had previously triumphed against the French, at around ten in the morning Henry ordered his army go on the offensive. The eight thousand or so English men-at-arms were outnumbered by the French, by quite what proportion has never been agreed, probably more like two-to-one than the six-to-one or even thirty-to-one that various of the chroniclers allege. Urging his troops forward through the sticking mud, Henry nonetheless ensured that his archers came within range of the French cavalry before the French themselves had made preparations for defence let alone for a charge. The outcome was panic, as the French vanguard was forced back into a packed melée of horses and men which itself then came under assault from English archery.