Henry V as Warlord

by Seward, Desmond

  The Parisians quickly had good cause to curse the heir and regent. Medieval currency was based on bimetallism and on a bewilderingly complex structure of monies of account – the pound sterling, the pound Scots, the pound tournois, the pound bordelais and the pound parisis, the exchange rate between them fluctuating from place to place. Throughout the century the amount of gold and silver available for coinage diminished steadily, with an accompanying rise in the value of both metals. There was a constant temptation for governments to lower the weight of coins, altering exchange rates to their own advantage. Almost as soon as Henry secured control of Paris the rate was altered to the detriment of the pound parisis, producing soaring inflation; within a week of his arrival there food prices more than doubled. The effect of endemic warfare on an agricultural economy always on a knife-edge – so finely balanced that Paris’s entire food supply could be endangered by a heat wave or a cold snap, let alone an influx of refugees – had already been disastrous. Soon corn, flour and bread were beyond the purchasing power of the poor.1

  It is from the Bourgeois of Paris that we know that Parisians blamed the rise in food prices on the new exchange rates at Rouen. His journal has been described as a chronicle of nourishment – or, rather, of under-nourishment. By Christmas, Paris was in the grip of full-scale famine. Everywhere one heard little children crying, ‘I’m dying of hunger.’ Boys and girls, in bands of twenty or thirty, rooted for scraps on the city’s rubbish tips as they died from starvation and cold. Those who pitied them had nothing to give. There was no corn, no wood and no coal, and it was the coldest winter for forty years. People ate pigswill and cabbage roots, even the tripes from dead dogs. Thousands died, and wolves swam the Seine to eat the unburied corpses lying in the street.2

  Meanwhile Henry and Charles presided over a meeting of the States General, which obligingly endorsed the Treaty of Troyes, and also agreed to a calling-in of the present currency and a re-coinage. This resulted in the coining of the beautiful Anglo-Gallic gold salut, which bore the arms of England and France held by an angel and the Virgin. On one side was the inscription Henricus Dei Gratia Rex Angliae, Heres Franciae and on the other the presumptuous Christus Vincit. (This fresh devaluation made the famine still worse.) Later the Duke of Burgundy’s filial desire for revenge was partly assuaged by Charles VI obediently holding a lit-de-justice at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. The ‘heir of France’ sat with him on the great cushions, to hear the Parlement of Paris pronounce the dauphin and his principal henchmen guilty of Duke John’s murder. They were summoned to Paris where they were to make the amende honorable and be drawn in a tumbril through the public places of Paris bearing lighted torches. When, not unexpectedly, the dauphin and his friends failed to appear within three days, he was banished from the realm of France and debarred from inheriting the French crown by reason of his ‘horrible and dreadful crimes’.

  Although cowed by years of massacre and famine, and also leaderless, the Parisians could not entirely repress their dislike of the English and their icy arrogance, nor of the foreign king who was to be imposed on them when Charles VI should die. The latter began to be held in considerable affection, according to the Bourgeois of Paris, by the ordinary people of Paris – ‘le menu peuple’ – who were to throng the streets in tears when he died. They did not enjoy the occupation of their city by foreigners. Although certain modern English historians claim that it is anachronistic to speak of ‘national’ feelings at this date, there is at least one contemporary witness who tells us just what the French thought about the English presence in their city.

  If Georges Chastellain was a Flemish noble by birth, born at Ghent in 1405, he regarded himself as ‘a loyal Frenchman’ and always wrote his verses and his history in French. No doubt he suffered from the fashionable pessimism of the age – ‘I, man of sadness, born in an eclipse of darkness, and amid thick fogs of lamentation’ he says in the foreword to his chronicle – yet his testimony has unusual insights, even if it is occasionally inaccurate. A squire to Duke Philip the Good and Herald of the Order of the Golden Fleece he met all the famous people of his day and was very well-informed. He writes of 1420:

  The city of Paris, ancient seat of France’s royal majesty, then seemed to have changed in both name and location, because this king and his great English people [son grant peuple anglais] made a new London of it no less by their rude and proud manner of talking as by their language, going everywhere through the city all of which they held as masters. And they went with their heads high like stags, staring all around them, glorying at the shame and ill-fortune of the French, whose blood they had shed in such quantities at Agincourt and elsewhere, and so much of whose heritage they had taken from them by tyranny …

  For he [Henry V], and also the English lords who were there in much pomp, and more arrogant than can be imagined, had no respect whatever for any lords of France who were present so that it seemed indeed to the English lords and knights that the heritage of the French belonged to them, that the latter’s rule and lordship should be taken away by those of English name, whether they liked it or not. Thus did it appear, in truth, since from that time on all the realm and its business was governed and guided by the hand of the English king, and all its places and charges were bestowed and changed at his pleasure, turning out even those men put in place by the two dukes of Burgundy, father and son, and in their stead putting in Englishmen and people of that nation, foreigners unsuited to the nature of the country …

  Such changes in places and charges did the King of England make on his coming to Paris that in secret many French hearts were sore stricken with sadness, had they dared show it, alas! Watching he who came upon them [Henry] as he was entering Paris they cried ‘Noel! Noel!’ and rejoiced since they hoped for peace, yet they knew only too well their misfortune and their servitude. And I call to mind often how men came to Jerusalem and stole the ark of the covenant, arcam foederis, and violated the temple and the holy places, and how the people there were treated and served scurvily, all their glory and past happiness abased and turned to shame and wretchedness. So it was with the English king and the French. For them every road led to sadness, and it gave him great joy to have done this.3

  There is other testimony besides that of Chastellain.

  The Burgundian nobles, most of whom were Frenchmen, found Henry’s coldness and stiff pride repellent. He rebuked Jehan de l’Isle Adam, a valiant marshal of France, for appearing in his presence in a rough grey coat and for then daring to look him in the face when explaining why. (l’Isle Adam had been the garrison commander at Pontoise when it was surprised and captured by the English in 1419.) The king was ill-pleased by the marshal’s proud answer that Frenchmen thought it unmanly to lower their eyes when speaking to anyone however high his rank might be. ‘That is not our way!’ he retorted angrily.4 Even in those days Frenchmen considered English manners cold and unnatural, and must have thought them peculiarly detestable in invaders. Yet they could do little to express their burning resentment while the Burgundians and Armagnacs hated each other more than they did Englishmen.

  Peeresses crossed the Channel to wait on Queen Catherine – and to share in their menfolk’s spoils. An anonymous Norman chronicler records: ‘The king of England kept his Christmas at Paris in the Hôtel des Tournelles; and there were there the ladies of England who had come to the queen, namely the Duchesses of Clarence and York, the Countess of March, the countess marshal and other noble ladies from the realm of England.’5

  Parisians were ashamed by the contrast between the splendour of the English king and his court at the Tournelles and Charles VI’s miserable condition at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. They were strangely devoted to their crazed monarch, perhaps partly because he was a focus for anti-English feelings and partly out of pity for his madness. The Hôtel de Saint-Pol was a fine enough palace but the French king, madder and dirtier than ever, was ‘poorly and meanly’ served by a scant and shabby staff according to Monstrelet, who comments how this must have been
‘disgusting for all true and loyal Frenchmen’.6 Queen Isabeau, no doubt to her fury, had to stay by his side, while every French noble of importance was either with the Duke of Burgundy or the dauphin or else dancing attendance on the ‘heir and regent’ at the Hôtel des Tournelles. No doubt many cynical French courtiers fully expected that, in view of Charles’s age, anyone so much younger, as the Englishman, must soon enter upon his ‘inheritance’.

  Yet, for all Henry’s ability it was undoubtedly usurpation. In 1435 the legal faculty of Bologna gave their verdict that the Dauphin Charles’s succession to the throne had been guaranteed by his investiture with the Dauphine in 1417, that Charles VI was not entitled to disinherit him simply on account of Duke John’s murder, that the king had been of unsound mind when he did so, that a father could not be both judge and accuser. However, the House of Lancaster had already shown in England that it knew both how to usurp and how to keep a throne.

  Admirers of Joan of Arc – whether hagiographers or Bernard Shaw – have given an impression that Henry’s brother-in-law was a poor creature, at best a late maturer. Even Edouard Perroy subscribed to this view of him. ‘Physically and morally, Charles was a weakling, an unpleasant degenerate,’ he writes. ‘Puny in size, spindly, [he had] a face devoid of expression in which little frightened eyes, cunning if somnolent, lurked behind a great long nose … Roaming gloomily from palace to palace, silent, underhand, superstitious, this retarded adolescent would need to be buffeted much more by misfortune before he could show that he was a man and become a king.’7 Such a portrait verges on caricature. Admittedly, by comparison with, for example, the flamboyant figure of Philip of Burgundy, it is not easy to obtain a strong impression of the dauphin’s personality across the centuries. Undoubtedly he had an unimpressive physique and was fearful to the point of paranoia. A patron of astrologers and the occult, he was a solitary, bookish person who disliked fighting, hunting, tournaments and the normal amusements of fifteenth-century noblemen. The runt of Isabeau’s litter, whose two elder brothers had died young, he had never been intended for a throne. Nevertheless there are indications that he matured sooner rather than later. Chastellain, who had considerable respect for him, remarks that ‘what he lacked in courage, which was not in his nature, he made up for in shrewdness’.

  Like Henry V, the future Charles VII grew up early. Born in 1403 he began presiding over royal councils in 1417 when still only fourteen. A year later he took the title of Lieutenant-General of France (the old French term for regent) and at once became a rallying point for opposition to the looming Anglo-Burgundian domination. He attracted an extremely able and distinguished following. If he was inscrutable he knew very well how to charm – he was said to have a very pleasant voice. Chastellain describes him as being extraordinarily subtle. If he did not care for war he could be both ruthless and violent, as he showed by his complicity in the murder of Duke John on the bridge at Montereau.

  In his own way, despite his diffidence and lethargy, this cynical and highly intelligent young man was extremely formidable. However, during his early years he allowed incompetent favourites too much control of policy while his supporters were dangerously unruly; consequently he had difficulty surviving the sinister intrigues of the court of Bourges. He possessed no standing army and no money to pay one, although it has been estimated that the potential revenues from his territories, comparatively undevastated, amounted to at least three times those of Lancastrian France; monies were not properly collected or else embezzled. One day new officials would collect his taxes more efficiently and he would build an army. In the meantime he faced two opponents of genius: Henry and later Bedford. But one should not make the mistake of underestimating the Dauphin Charles.8

  The dauphinists made much of Henry not being the rightful heir of Richard II, which must have infuriated the king. (As late as 1435 Jean Juvénal was still referring to the usurpation.) In the spring of 1421 Henry had an unpleasing reminder that opposition to the House of Lancaster was not yet dead in England. A close kinsman of the Earl of March, Sir John Mortimer, was arrested on suspicion of treason and sent to the Tower; it can only have been that he was plotting to place his cousin on the throne. The alarm was taken so seriously that he was incarcerated in a dungeon underground. Sir John escaped early in 1422 but was recaptured and again imprisoned in the Tower. He was to escape for a second time in 1424, to be recaptured once more, whereupon he was legally murdered – hanged, drawn and quartered – on the specious charge that his escape had been ‘treason’. Throughout Henry’s reign, the House of Lancaster remained nervous about public attention being drawn to March’s claim to the throne.

  News from home that his presence was required there, after three years away, persuaded the heir of France that he must return to England even though it was the sacred season of Christmas. En route he could inspect his duchy of Normandy. On 27 December he left Paris for Rouen, leaving the Duke of Clarence in charge of France, and Exeter in charge of his new city of Paris, both ably supported by his best commanders. On the road to his Norman capital he caught up with Queen Catherine and her ladies who had left some days previously – when her farewell to her mumbling father had deeply moved spectators. With them rode the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of March and Warwick, and the captive King of Scots.

  XV

  Lancastrian Normandy

  ‘une longue calamité’

  Robert Blondel,

  Complanctus bonorum Gallorum

  ‘les povres compaignons des frontieres’

  Jean Juvénal des Ursins

  The Duke of Normandy and his duchess kept the feast of the Epiphany, always a day of celebration and banqueting, at their beautiful new palace castle of Rouen. The building was not only the symbol of English occupation. It was also a symbol of the impoverishment of the citizens since its gleaming magnificence was in striking contrast to the rest of the city.

  For the Norman capital remained largely in ruins throughout the English occupation. Its suburbs, together with any buildings outside the main walls, such as abbeys and churches, which might be used for offensive purposes, had been demolished by the Rouennais themselves in 1418 before the beginning of the siege. Others inside the walls had been destroyed by cannon fire during the siege. Some buildings were requisitioned by the English and not restored to their proper use; among these was the badly damaged abbey of Saint-Ouen, much of which served as a barracks. The citizens were crippled financially by the enormous collective ransom which Henry was still extorting from them. Even he realized they could not find 300,000 gold crowns at once and, after painful wrangling over the value of a crown, it was agreed that it should be paid in annual instalments of 80,000 crowns. After eleven years only 260,000 had been extracted, despite the seizure of hostages. The Earl of Warwick, who negotiated the compromise, was merciless in hunting down those who ran away to neighbouring towns to avoid paying their share, seeing that they suffered ‘imprisonment of their bodies and sale and exploitation of their goods on account of the debts they properly owe to the king’. The impoverishment and depopulation of the local countryside, and of many Norman towns and villages, did not make for prosperity. Above all, the miserable state of occupied Paris (so graphically recorded by the Bourgeois) deprived Rouen of much of the former market for its luxury goods.1

  Henry presided over a meeting of the three estates of Normandy – nobles, clergy and bourgeois – which he convened at Rouen. It was also attended by representatives from the estates of the other ‘lands of the conquest’, territory conquered before the Treaty of Troyes. We do not know how many attended. The king-duke exhorted them to be faithful to the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes, explained he was well aware of the lamentable state of the coinage, and asked for advice on the general state of Normandy. Supposedly as a result of their advice, he announced the imposition of a silver levy in order to strike better coins. He also announced the welcome introduction of a uniform standard of weights and measures throughout the duchy, adopting Rouen’s sta
ndard for grain. The Earl of Salisbury paid ceremonial homage for his county of Perche, to remind everyone that there was now a new social hierarchy.

  The military establishment was exclusively English, from the lieutenant-general down. All captains and lieutenants (commanders and deputy commanders) of garrisons were Englishmen. Besides the towns, there were no less than sixty castles with garrisons. It seems that there were probably about 5,000 English troops in northern France at the time of Henry’s visit to the duchy (a handful of rank and file being renegade Frenchmen). Some 1,600 of them were on the new state’s southern frontier from Avranches to Verneuil, another 1,600 on the eastern frontier from Pontoise up to Eu, and a further 950 in the Seine valley; of the rest 1,400 were distributed among the castles of the English seigneurs, while there were perhaps 150 more along the road leading from Cherbourg through Caen to Evreux. For the moment they had an extremely energetic leader in the king’s lieutenant, Clarence.

  A substantial number of garrisons were in towns or castles on the rivers. Not only were these of vital importance for defence, but their barges provided the chief means of travel and trade; the Seine and the Oise played a part in the life of northern France comparable to that of the Missouri and the Mississippi in the old American South, if on a smaller scale. It was essential to control them. Castles along their banks, particularly those which guarded crossings, were occupied by the English who rigorously checked the credentials and cargoes of every boat passing and extracted tolls. At the same time those versatile craft, ballingers, patrolled the river, looking out for enemies on the banks as well as afloat. Reinforcements could be brought very quickly to any fortress under attack. This was of the utmost help to such a small occupying army, whose men had to be dispersed in penny packets. The average strength of the lesser garrisons was a mere three men-at-arms and nine archers – though at the little castle of Pont d’Oue which guarded the bridge over the River Vire there were only eight men under a captain in 1421. The garrisons of privately owned strongpoints were even smaller.