A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  This was far from the battle portrayed by Shakespeare or Laurence Olivier: no French cavalry charge, no sudden unleashing of thousands of bowstrings, merely a grim half-run, half-stumble by men in armour from one pile of corpses to the next. The Duke of Suffolk, who had only succeeded to his titles on the death of his father a few weeks earlier, was killed in the fighting, as was the Duke of York, the King’s cousin. Terrified by what might be waiting for them over the next few clods of earth, the English waded up the field, pole-axing Frenchman after Frenchman as they went. There was little thought of prisoners or ransoms. At around 1pm, during a lull in the slaughter, just as the English began to consider the possibility of ransoming survivors, a rumour went round that the French planned to counterattack. The King ordered the killing of whatever prisoners remained. The rumour was false. By modern historians, who most definitely were not there, the King’s order has been branded a war crime. In reality, like Richard I at Acre, Henry V had little alternative but to think of the consequences should he face a hostile and regrouped army with large numbers of his own men guarding prisoners rather than free to fight. The battle was bloody enough on both sides, without our needing to view it through a prism of twentieth-century correctitude. By the same token, attempts entirely to exonerate Henry, by suggesting that the massacred prisoners numbered only a few hundred rather than the thousands claimed by his critics, are equally futile. All told, the battle lasted between two and three hours. As soon it was over, the rain came down once more.

  Agincourt concludes the great trio of English victories in the Hundred Years War, ranking with Crécy and Poitiers as proof that it was the English who won the battles, even though it was the French who eventually won the war. In this stark paradox lies a fundamental truth. No matter how many times the French were defeated in battle, the war itself was not to be decided by a few brief hours of slaughter. At Agincourt, Henry V proved that his cause was just and that God was on his side. His victory was greeted with general celebration in England. By Parliament he was accorded the unprecedented honour of a lifetime grant of the customs on wool. Bishop Henry Beaufort, his cousin, proclaimed the invincibility of the English nation (unconsciously echoing claims that had been made earlier about the Normans after Hastings), comparing Henry to David and the great heroes of the Biblical Old Testament. In reality, in France, little else had changed. Normandy, save for Harfleur, was still in French hands. None of the demands made in 1414 had been met.

  Normandy

  The real genius of Henry V, and the real story of his success revealed itself not at Agincourt, but two years later, in 1417, when, using Harfleur as his base, he launched a campaign to conquer Normandy from the French. Agincourt was incidental to this great achievement. To launch a proper conquest, extraordinary efforts had to be made. As early as February 1417, orders went out that six wing feathers be plucked from every goose in twenty English counties and sent to the Tower of London for the flighting of arrows. In Parliament, to raise taxation, Henry Beaufort compared the King’s labours over the past six Parliaments to God’s creation of the world in six days. Even then, the crown jewels had to be pawned to secure loans, the greatest of them from Beaufort himself, the start of a process by which Beaufort, and his resources as bishop of Winchester, came to underwrite crown finance. By the 1430s, it was the bishop who in effect controlled the purse strings and hence the strategy of the Hundred Years War. In Normandy itself, Henry won a series of great victories. His cannon beat down the walls of the city of Caen. The city’s population was deliberately massacred, in accordance with Biblical precedent, and to warn other towns against resistance. Within a year, the port of Cherbourg had fallen, with Cherbourg and Caen in 1418, as in 1944, crucial to the supply of English troops operating in Normandy. The duchy’s capital, Rouen, was besieged from July 1418 and in January 1419 surrendered, offering an indemnity of £50,000.

  The engines of the 1060s had been put into reverse. An English King now seized the places of William the Conqueror’s birth and burial. The surrender of Caen to Henry V was itself effected by a monk of the abbey of St-Etienne, William the Conqueror’s great Benedictine foundation, who is said secretly to have shown the English how to penetrate the town’s defences. From the moment that Rouen fell, Henry V began to invite the reissue of charters granted by his Norman and Plantagenet ancestors to Norman beneficiaries. Such large numbers of monasteries and private individuals queued up to have their ancient charters confirmed that Henry V’s ‘Norman Rolls’ remain one of our richest sources of information for grants made in the eleventh and twelfth, not just in the fifteenth century. Once again, history loomed large.

  Yet, rather than attempt to rebuild the landholding patterns of the twelfth-century, to restore such families as Beauchamp or Neville or Fitzalan to their ancestral estates, the King encouraged an entirely new bonanza of land grants and land grabbing amongst his captains and associates. As in other colonial situations, most obviously as in the Roman conquests of antiquity, Norman estates were bundled up and handed over wholesale to the victors of 1418. The profits here were immense. It was from these spoils of war, in part from rents newly granted in Normandy, in part from his ransoming of French prisoners, that a man like Sir John Fastolf, future patron of the Paston family, acquired the resources to build a moated castle for himself at Caister in Norfolk, to patronize scholars and the Church, to establish himself as a Knight of the Garter and as a great man within his county, and to build up his collections of manuscripts and carpets, tapestries and jewels: a vast pile of bling purchased with the more than £20,000 that he is estimated to have gained from the conquest and colonization of Normandy and Maine. Fastolf’s profits were exceptional even by the standards of a kleptomaniac age. Nonetheless, they speak of the wealth that might be made from England’s old world colonies: a colonial land grab taking place across the English Channel, only seventy years before the rulers of Spain instituted a rather more famous land grab of their own, in the new worlds opening up across the Atlantic.

  Dissolution of Alien Priories

  At the same time as this new pattern of landholding in Normandy and the regions southwards towards the Loire was being established by English soldiers and settlers, an older pattern, lingering from the time of the Norman Conquest of the 1060s, was finally cleared away. From the eleventh century through to 1415, despite many alarms along the way, large numbers of Norman and French religious houses had retained property in England, the endowment of ‘alien’ priories which had continued to look to France for guidance and the appointment of their heads. Fears had long been expressed that such houses harboured spies and the enemy within, but it was left to Henry V to order their final destruction. Henry V’s conquest of Normandy not only reversed the patterns of 1066, allowing an English army now to plunder the lands of the original plunderers of the eleventh century, but was accompanied by the deliberate obliteration of the last vestiges of Norman domination in England.

  From the great disendowment of alien priories which followed, significant resources were redistributed to new collegiate foundations: to Winchester College, to Wykeham’s New College at Oxford, to Archbishop Chichele’s All Souls. Henry VI’s great colleges at Eton and at Cambridge were endowed with a large part of the English estate formerly controlled by the Norman abbots of Bec, cradle of Lanfranc, Anselm and most of the Norman archbishops of Canterbury in the century after 1066. Henry V’s own foundation of a Charterhouse for Carthusian hermits at Sheen in Surrey was granted the English estate of the Norman abbey of St-Evroult, once home to the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis, first celebrator of William the Conqueror’s union between England and Normandy. This dissolution of the alien priories, which was bitterly resented in France, marked a highly significant break with the past. Like the King’s decision from 1417 to address all of his private correspondence in English rather than French or Latin, it suggests a new, chauvinistic approach to the relations between England and France.

  Where once the Normans had colonized E
ngland, it was now Englishmen who filled the role of sahibs and proconsuls, directing an enterprise in France organized for English rather than mutual Anglo-Norman benefit. Henry V’s dissolution of the alien houses also paved the way to other disendowments of Church land: to the closure of failing small priories in the 1480s from which new religious foundations such as Magdalen College Oxford reaped significant gains, and ultimately to a far more dramatic dissolution of religious houses, when Henry VIII and the reformers of the 1520s turned their attention not just to alien but to English monasteries, beginning with what remained of the small fry, later laying hands on the greater prizes, in all cases merely continuing a process that had already begun under Henry V. In this way, as in his personal puritanism, Henry V supplied an important model for the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. Once again, the fifteenth century emerges as Janus-faced, looking both forwards and backwards in time, its own identity never entirely secure.

  On to Paris

  Henry V’s victories did not cease with the conquest of Normandy. By July 1419, the King’s brother, Thomas of Lancaster, had reconnoitered the gates of Paris itself. In all previous Anglo-French warfare, even in the twelfth century when the Plantagenets had pushed their authority far up the Seine, Paris itself had remained inviolate. Now, even Paris trembled. On 10 September 1419, the French dauphin, heir to King Charles VI, met with Duke John of Burgundy at Montereau, south-east of Paris. During their parley, the duke was assassinated, stabbed through the head, clearly with the dauphin’s connivance, in a continuation of the Armagnac– Burgundian dispute. As a monk displaying the duke’s remains to a later French king is said to have remarked, ‘it was through the hole in this skull that the English entered France’. With the dauphin now disgraced at the French court, and with Burgundy forced into alliance with the English, Henry was able to negotiate an extraordinary conclusion to his wars. By the Treaty of Troyes, in May 1420, it was agreed that Henry would marry Catherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI. On Charles’ death, Henry or his son by Catherine would inherit the French crown. Meanwhile, he would serve as regent of France.

  After besieging the dauphin’s forces at Sens and Melun, on 1 December 1420, Henry entered Paris. Even the death of his brother, Thomas of Lancaster, killed fighting at Baugé in Anjou, the following March, could not disguise the extent of Henry’s triumph. Baugé itself was a Scots rather than a French victory, fought by 4,000 Scots soldiers only newly arrived to assist their allies in France.

  Henry’s Marriage

  For Henry, meanwhile, there was a brief period of honeymoon with his new bride. Harps, the traditional instrument of the Welsh and of Monmouth where Henry had been born, were ordered for Henry and Catherine to play. From a court and from camps that had been entirely male-dominated, Henry spent a few brief days, perhaps the first since his early childhood, in feminine society. Even here, his thoughts remained focussed upon dreams of empire and an imperial destiny. From the abbey of Coulombs near to Chartres, and as an aid to the conception of a son to succeed him, he borrowed a relic of Christ’s foreskin, long treasured as a rather grisly aid to mothers who feared themselves barren.

  Birth of an Heir and Death of the King

  It remained only to deal with the last outposts of resistance in France, and to await the death of his father-in-law, Charles VI. In October 1421, Henry lay siege to Meaux. His son and only child by Catherine, the future Henry VI, was born at Windsor on 6 December, during the course of this siege, auspiciously enough at a castle from which it was prophesied that a new King Arthur would one day arise and on the feast day of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children. Meaux fell the following May. But the hardships of that winter, the effects of dysentery and his inability to ride, left Henry prostrate at Vincennes outside Paris where, on 31 August 1422, he died, ironically enough in the same château that, in the twentieth century, was to house the archives and hence the history of the modern French army. Charles VI of France died less than three months later, on 21 October. Had Henry V lived those extra fifty days he would have achieved the ambition of every English king, to be recognized not just as ruler of England but as legitimate heir to the throne of France. Instead, this honour passed to his son, Henry VI, barely ten months old. From an English perspective, defeat had only narrowly been snatched from the jaws of victory.

  Henry V was the first English king since Richard I to have died on French soil. Like Richard I’s, the reign of Henry had been brief but glorious: a mere seven years to set against Richard’s ten. Richard had been only forty-one at his death, Henry an even more remarkable thirty-six, dying at the same age as Mozart and, by popular understanding, as Jesus Christ. From the time of Alexander the Great, a mere thirty-three years old at his death, all great heroes were expected to die young. Like Richard I, Henry had transformed his wars into a struggle between good and evil, to all intents as a crusade now fought against the French. As with Richard, the chaos that engulfed Henry’s realm after his death, has tended to cast a roseate glow over his own reign and reputation, the last truly great king of England before the fall of night. Even in Henry’s lifetime, the so-called Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘The Deeds of Henry V’) had sought to portray the King in heroic terms, as propaganda to recruit support for further war in France. By the 1430s, a life of Henry written at the request of his younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was fostering a myth of the invincible warrior king. Henry V, like Richard I, had ascended from history into myth.

  Problems caused by the King’s Death

  Yet as with Richard I, the problems that followed from Henry’s reign were in many cases of the late King’s making. Unlike Richard who left no children, Henry fathered a son, but a son barely ten months old and who was in no position to rule at the time of his father’s death. Like Richard, Henry had spent the majority of his reign in foreign adventures, leaving England in the hands of regents and ministers. Whilst he lived, this council had governed effectively, far better indeed than had been the case with the council left to govern England during Richard I’s crusade. Nonetheless, like Henry IV before him, Henry V had depended heavily upon his own Lancastrian family to prop up his regime. With his death, the tensions within this family for the first time began to spill over into open competition. Those who praise ‘family values’ should remember that families can prove not only supportive or benevolent institutions but destructive and bitterly divisive.

  The reasons for the breakdown in Lancastrian harmony are clear enough. Henry left no written instructions for the government of either England or France after his death. Instead, it was taken for granted that his son, the young Henry VI, would be cared for by his uncles, Henry V’s brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. They in turn would govern with the assistance of their Beaufort kinsman, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter. Bedford took charge of France. Gloucester and Henry Beaufort were left to squabble over who should have the greater say in England. The outcome was confusion, self-serving malice and a series of disputes within the council fit to rival any of those which had split the councillors of Richard I in the 1190s. Historians of the reign of Henry VI have frequently cited the warning rehearsed by Thomas of Walsingham (in fact directed towards the early years of Richard II): ‘Woe unto thee, oh land whose king is a child’, ultimately taken from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 10:16). They have not noticed that this same passage is followed in scripture by an equally significant warning against ‘princes who dine together in the morning’, in other words against counsellors whose squabbling or self-indulgence takes precedence over the national interest.

  After 1422, the King’s counsellors were far more of a threat to the stability of England than the tender age of the King himself. By 1425, Gloucester and Henry Beaufort were literally at daggers drawn, their armed retinues confronting one another on London Bridge. Bedford, who in France secured great victories against the dauphin, including a battle at Vernueil in 1424, which in some ways deserves to rival
Agincourt, was forced to return to England to make peace. There were further disturbances in 1427 when the King’s mother, Catherine of Valois, Henry V’s widow still only in her mid-twenties, displayed an inclination to remarry. No mother of a ruling English king had remarried for the past four hundred years, for rather obvious reasons. Such a remarriage risked producing a second family which itself might have a claim to the throne. On the last occasion when a queen had taken a second husband, when Emma, the widow of King Aethelred, had been betrothed after Aethelred’s death to the Danish usurper Cnut, this was precisely what had happened, with Cnut’s offspring claiming precedence over Emma’s sons by Aethelred, including the future King Edward the Confessor. Catherine of Valois’s choice was definitely no King Cnut. As early as 1425, there were rumours that she was the lover of Edmund Beaufort, nephew of Henry Beaufort. Gloucester scotched any prospect of a Beaufort marriage by a statute in Parliament insisting that the King alone could consent to the remarriage of a dowager queen. Since Gloucester was the King’s guardian, no such consent would be forthcoming. Instead, Catherine’s attentions turned elsewhere.