Henry V as Warlord

by Seward, Desmond

  apart from the dense crowd of men standing still or hurrying along the streets and the great number of those, men and women together, gazing from windows and openings, however small, along the route from the bridge, so great was the throng of people in Cheapside, from one end to the other, that the horsemen were only just able, although not without difficulty, to ride through. And the upper rooms and windows on both sides were packed with some of the noblest ladies and womenfolk of the kingdom and men of honour and renown, who had assembled for this pleasing spectacle, and who were so very becomingly and elegantly decked out in cloth of gold, fine linen and scarlet, and other rich apparel of various kinds, that no one could recall there ever having previously been in London a greater assemblage or a more noble array.2

  What gave particular pleasure was the sight of the captured French noblemen being paraded behind the king.

  A famous carol, or song of rejoicing, was written to celebrate this wonderful day:

  Owre Kynge went forth to Normandy,

  With grace and myght of chivalry;

  The God for hym wrought

  marvelously,

  Wherefore Englonde may calle, and cry

  Deo gratias:

  Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria.

  The carol goes on to glory in his having

  made a fray

  That Fraunce shall rywe tyl domes day

  and to exult in the humiliation of the traditional enemy:

  Ther dukys, and erlys, lorde and barone,

  Were take, and slayne, and that wel done,

  And some were ledde into Lundone

  With joye, and merthe and grete renone.

  There is an unmistakeable note of xenophobia.

  Amidst all the gaiety of this triumph, the author of the Gesta was struck by Henry’s odd expression. He looked strangely sober and pensive, and he was dressed in purple – the colour which English monarchs normally wore when in mourning. He may well have been contemplating his plans for the conquest of France and for seizing its crown. However most spectators who watched him seem to have attributed his restrained bearing to his known piety and humility.

  Henry’s delighted subjects did more than simply welcome him with a pageant. On 24 November, 200 prominent Londoners, Witless Nick at their head, presented him with £1,000 in gold coin at a special ceremony; the gift came in two gold basins worth another £1,000. Even before he had returned to the capital, at a Parliament presided over by the Duke of Bedford, the Commons had granted the king for life a subsidy of 4 marks (£2 13s 4d) on wool-sacks, of 3s on wine-tuns and poundage of 1s on other goods. The clergy in convocation had agreed that he should levy two extra ‘tenths’. The Agincourt carol was speaking for the entire nation in saying that England ought to thank God for so marvellous a victory.

  Henry’s reputation now stood very high indeed, and not just in his own country. England had acquired an important role in European diplomacy, one which its ruler knew how to exploit to the full. His principal object was to ensure the Duke of Burgundy’s neutrality during any future invasion of France and he was well aware that the Duke’s nightmare was an anti-Burgundian alliance between the Kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. At the same time Henry was anxious to impress world opinion of both the justice of his claim to France and his moderation – world opinion being embodied by the council of the Church then meeting at Constance. The emperor was the most promising instrument for his purpose.

  Sigismund of Bohemia was a brother of the deposed Emperor Wenzel the Drunkard, and therefore an uncle of Richard II’s first wife. Elected King of the Romans in 1410, proclaiming himself emperor in the following year, formerly King-Consort of Hungary, he was now King of Bohemia in his own right and, from his capital of Prague, eager to enhance his prestige as titular overlord of western Christendom. He was a cruel and violent-tempered man, primarily a soldier – although a disastrous commander – and a lover of pleasure whose time was spent in womanizing and jousting. He nonetheless had a good intellect and was a fine Latinist and patron of letters. His plan was simple and not ignoble; to heal the schism in the Church by ending the scandal of a disputed papacy, and then to unite Christendom in a revived Crusade. However, his debauchery and dishonesty undermined his credibility.

  Henry had considerable sympathy with Sigismund’s plan, which appealed to his own pious ideals. For over thirty years there had been two popes, one at Rome and the other at Avignon. This number increased to three in 1410 – Benedict XIII at Avignon, Gregory XII at Rome and John XXIII at Pisa. The council which met at Constance from 1414–17 was determined to end a situation in which some countries recognized one pope and others another, by making all three resign. Bishop Hallum of Salisbury told Pope John – the former Baldassare Cossa, a professional condottiere – that he disgraced his office. John had been deposed in 1415. In Gibbon’s words, ‘the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.’ Eventually the council secured the removal of all three pontiffs (pausing only to burn Oldcastle’s correspondent, the Bohemian heresiarch Huss) and the election of a universally acceptable pope, Martin V (Colonna). Sigismund enjoyed great prestige since it was he who had forced Pope John to summon the council. Where the English king differed from the emperor was on how to achieve the next stage of the plan – securing peace between European rulers – even if he was as enthusiastic an advocate of a new crusade.

  Sigismund had been urging an alliance between himself, England and France since 1414, an alliance against the rising power of Burgundy which was encroaching on imperial territory. In pursuit of his aim the emperor travelled all over Europe. He arrived in Paris early in 1416 with the avowed intention of making peace between France and England. The Armagnac faction, which still controlled Charles VI, regarded Agincourt as a temporary setback and expected the fall of Harfleur any day. They were irritated by the emperor’s pretentions, disgusted by his dirtiness, his heavy drinking and his even heavier whoring; on one occasion he invited 600 ‘ladies’ to dinner. (A sixteenth-century legend claims that in hell the Holy Roman Emperor was endlessly bathed in a red-hot bath and put to bed in a red-hot bed by ladies whom he had led astray during this life.) They did not relish paying his bills.

  After several weeks at Paris, Sigismund decided to further his mission in England. The French encouraged him, hoping he might secure the release of the magnates who had been taken prisoner at Agincourt. Accompanied by 1,500 knights he crossed the Channel in 300 ships provided by Henry. As his fleet sailed into Dover on May Day 1416 he was met by the Duke of Gloucester and a large entourage who all rode into the waves with drawn swords, refusing to let him land until he had formally denied any claims to jurisdiction over the realm. As he journeyed towards London he was greeted at each halting place with increasing splendour until finally, a mile outside the capital, he was met by the king and 5,000 persons of quality. After a splendid progress through the City the ‘most Christian and most superillustrious [superillustrissimus] prince’ was given the royal palace of Westminster as a residence during his stay in England. This lasted four months, in which time he received every honour in Henry’s power. The emperor was formally welcomed by Parliament in the name of the English people. (This was less empty a gesture than it sounds since in theory Sigismund was the sword temporal of Christendom and the ultimate monarch. Until 1964 Catholic missals contained a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor with, however, the proviso that it was no longer said; ‘the empire being vacant’.) The king presented him with his own collar of gold ‘S’s, something worn by all English magnates, and invested him as a Knight of the Garter at Windsor. It was particularly gratifying that Sigismund gave the Order’s chapel the actual heart of St George which he had brought with him. He was entertained in the most lavish way possible – his normally frugal host putting the French to shame. Sigismund succumbed to these blandishments, signing a treaty of offence and defence at Canterbury which recognized
the English king’s right to the French throne.

  During September and October Henry, the emperor and the Duke of Burgundy met at Calais to conclude a mutual alliance. Sigismund’s role was largely ceremonial, since the English monarch had extracted every public gesture he required of him. Burgundy was a different matter. After elaborate ceremonies – and the surrender of the Duke of Gloucester as a hostage – Burgundy was ‘engaged with the king alone, until the dusk of the evening in secret consulation’, later followed by an official banquet. The author of the Gesta writes of Duke John that ‘in the end, like all Frenchmen, he would be found a double-dealer [duplex], one person in public and another in private’.3 John agreed in a secret treaty to recognize all Henry’s claims, promising that as soon as the English had conquered enough French territory he would pay homage to Henry as his sovereign. Whether the treaty represented Duke John’s real intentions or not, it certainly demonstrated the English king’s skill as a diplomat, convincing the Burgundians that Henry had to be taken very seriously indeed and not just as a soldier.

  There was still a thoroughly hawkish war party in France, led by Bernard, Count of Armagnac, newly appointed as constable and leader of the realm’s military forces. The constable-count, a ferocious Gascon, out-manoeuvred the Dukes of Anjou and Berry – who cravenly favoured peace – and secured control of the pitiful King Charles who had slipped into madness yet again. He had very little opposition. The Dauphin Louis died in December 1415 and his brother John who succeeded him was a prisoner of his father-in-law the Duke of Burgundy. Armagnac was strong enough to keep Burgundy at bay while the other leaders of his own faction, the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, were prisoners in England. Their ransoming had been forbidden by King Henry. He concentrated on recapturing Harfleur. The garrison commander there, the Earl of Dorset (the former Sir Thomas Beaufort), had been feeding his men by raiding deep into the countryside round about, almost to the gates of Rouen, and doing considerable damage. In March 1416 – alerted by the flames from plundered farmhouses which were an infallible sign of the presence of English troops – Armagnac intercepted Dorset and his army, taking him by surprise at Valmont with a charge and riding down his men-at-arms and his archers. Although the English extricated themselves, eventually routing their pursuers, it was only with great difficulty and after suffering many casualties. Dorset did not dare continue his raids and Harfleur began to starve. Armagnac besieged the town, hiring nine carracks and eight galleys from Genoa to blockade it. The Genoese did more than blockade, they devastated Portland Bill, raided the Isle of Wight and threatened both Portsmouth and Southampton – though an attempt to fire the King’s Ships in Southampton Water was beaten off. No English merchantman dared to put to sea since the Genoese made the Channel too dangerous. A single vessel laden with provisions managed to slip into Harfleur by flying the fleur-de-lys, relieving its beleaguered defenders but only for the moment. The French had every reason to hope that they would soon starve it into surrender. It became a focus of English national pride – the Commons ‘groused full sore’ at the mere suggestion that it might be used as a bargaining counter.

  In August 1416 the Duke of Bedford sailed with the King’s Ships to succour the famished garrison. He was joined by a fleet from the Cinque Ports. On 16 August the duke engaged the Franco-Genoese warships in the mouth of the Seine, opposite Harfleur. A notably bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, vessels lashed gunwale to gunwale, during which Bedford was severely – though not fatally – wounded. The English were disadvantaged by the superior height of the carracks’ fighting castles fore and aft, from which the enemy shot down at them with crossbows, and hurled flaming tow to set their ships alight. They also threw quicklime into their eyes. The English replied with bows and small cannon. After five hours of carnage the enemy were routed and the English sailed triumphantly into Harfleur. When they sallied out from the walls next morning they found the French had abandoned the siege.

  Henry believed that the French enemy and its Genoese carracks were nonetheless still a danger, and steadily increased his own fleet.4 By the summer of 1417 he had eight square-rigged, two-masted carracks, the best fighting ships of the day (among them being those captured by Bedford from the Genoese), six smaller square-rigged cogs, nine of the indispensable ballingers and a large sailing barge. He also possessed three square-rigged nefs or ‘great ships’, which he had had specially built; the Jesus, the Trinity Royal and the Holigost. Most were surprisingly big: the carracks were 500 tons each, the Trinity Royal and the Holigost 750 tons, and the Jesus (recently laid down for the King at Smallhythe in Kent) was 1,000 tons. Eventually there would be as many as thirty King’s Ships, some even larger than the Jesus, such as the Grace Dieu. An account has been left of her by a Florentine seaman who saw her at Southampton in 1430. He says, ‘truly I have never seen so large and magnificent a construction, I had the mast measured on the first deck and it was about twenty-one feet in circumference and 195½ feet high. From the gallery of the prow to the water was about fifty feet and they say that when she is at sea another corridor is raised above this. She was about 176½ feet long and about ninety-six feet in the beam.’ As has been seen, the advantage of such height in medieval sea battles was that it enabled archers to fire down on the enemy; such vessels could carry a crew of eighty and up to 250 fighting men. Skippers were not particularly well paid, the master of the Jesus receiving ten marks (£6 13s 4d) a year while the master of a ballinger got only five marks. The King’s Ships were to prove their worth again and again. In June 1417 the Earl of Huntingdon engaged a Franco-Genoese fleet commanded by the Bastard of Bourbon off La Hogue at the end of the Cherbourg peninsula in a battle which lasted all day. He was victorious, capturing four carracks and the Bastard himself – who had with him his men’s pay for an entire quarter – while the remaining five enemy carracks ran for shelter in the Breton harbours. Henry’s ships continued to patrol the Channel but met with no more opposition. Not only was the sea free from privateers (whether French, Genoese, Castilian or Scots) so that English merchantmen could trade in safety, but the king now commanded the sea routes which he needed for his invasion.

  When Parliament met in March 1416 the Chancellor, Beaufort, preached what can only be called an invasion sermon. After complaining of the ‘unjust’ French refusal to recognize Henry’s claim to be their ruler – ‘Why do not these miserable and hardhearted men see by these terrible divine sentences that they are bound to obey’? – he exhorted the assembled Lords and Commons to help the king with money. Many contributed, no doubt not just from indignation at the spectacle of Henry being deprived of his ‘rights’ but out of sheer national pride.

  The king was tireless in his attention to finance, obtaining £136,000 from taxes, a remarkable achievement. He also raised loans wherever he could. He borrowed 21,000 marks (£14,000) from Beaufort on the security of his best crown, and another large sum from the City on a jewelled collar. Lesser sums, some very small, were secured from prelates and abbots, from magnates and squires, from city corporations and merchants, on the security of anything precious in the royal coffers, whether crowns, jewels, relics or altar plate. He had learnt this technique during the Welsh war. There were the usual problems of provisions, munitions and logistics. Early in 1417 the sheriffs were instructed to have six wing feathers plucked from every goose in their county and sent to depots, while bow staves and arrows were ordered by the barrel.

  During the king’s absence England had remained astonishingly peaceful under the regency of John, Duke of Bedford. Henry’s restoration of law and order had held up very well, and after Agincourt his reputation ensured its survival. Such a hero no longer had anything to fear from Ricardians or Lollards, even though a pseudo-Richard was still alive in Scotland and though John Oldcastle still roamed the Welsh border. The Scots regent was not going to give trouble when his king was a prisoner in England while Wales was a cowed and broken land. Henry felt sufficiently secure to restore the Earl of Northumberland to all his honours an
d estates. He had no cause to worry about leaving his realm for a second time in the hands of so capable a regent as Bedford.

  Nevertheless there was an incident in 1416 which, if scarcely dangerous, must have been extremely distasteful to the king. In April in the Court of King’s Bench a canon of Wells Cathedral, Richard Bruton, was charged with treasonable talk. He had told one of his tenants that Henry was not the real King of England and that his father had had no right to the crown. Bruton had also said that he thoroughly approved of what Scrope and his friends had tried to do, and that he himself was ready to contribute £6,000 towards deposing Henry. Admittedly this conversation had taken place on 14 October 1415, before Agincourt, but it was an uncomfortable reminder that many Englishmen had reservations about the right of the House of Lancaster to rule over them.5

  Henry’s brothers ranked first in his team of commanders though their capabilities varied considerably. Aggressive and impetuous, Thomas of Clarence was the team’s Murat – essentially a dashing cavalryman who was ideal for the attack or spearheading unexpected thrusts into enemy territory, but whose grasp of strategy and tactics was faulty. His only interest other than soldiering and the tournament was heraldry for which he had a passion. The Duke of Bedford, a big fleshy man with a huge hook nose, very unlike the handsome Clarence, was a far more gifted, if less enthusiastic, soldier; his attention to detail and steadiness won major battles on both land and sea. He was also a remarkably effective administrator, of such high calibre that the king never hesitated in entrusting him with the regency, the ‘home front’. Jean Favier emphasizes the extraordinary co-operation and support he gave to his royal brother.6 The most striking quality of this unusually good-natured man, one which Henry did not share, was that he understood and liked the French, a liking they reciprocated. Gloucester, youngest of the brothers and the family intellectual, was least useful – vain, opinionated and headstrong, adequate if given limited tasks under strict supervision. The other member of the family to belong to the team was Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Exeter (Thomas Beaufort, formerly Earl of Dorset, created a duke for life in 1416). He was a superb fighting soldier as he had showed by his defence of Harfleur and by snatching victory from defeat at Valmont. A thoroughly dependable workhorse, he was often given immense responsibility.