The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

  The siege, which had lasted nearly six weeks in the heat of summer, took its toll on the English, too, and not just because of accurate shooting by the defenders’ cannon and crossbows. Bad wine and cider and dirty water contributed. ‘In this siege many men died of cold in nights and fruit eating, eke of stink of carrion’, wrote Friar Capgrave, who says that casualties from disease (which meant dysentery and malaria) included the king’s friend Bishop Courtenay of Norwich, and the Earl of Suffolk, while the Duke of Clarence and the Earls of March and Arundel were so ill that they had to be sent home.14 In all, 2,000 Englishmen died, with 2,000 sick shipped back to England as hospital cases.

  The garrison’s leaders and sixty hostages were forced to kneel in shirts with halters round their necks for several hours until admitted to Henry’s presence. In cloth of gold, seated on a throne, for a time he ignored them, then delivered a tirade of abuse for trying to stop him taking ‘our town of Harfleur’. Finally, the king entered the town barefoot to give thanks at the main church. The Host was borne before him through the streets, to demonstrate that God was on his side. (Had he lived, he would have been outraged by the Maid of Orléans’s similar claim.) Sixty knights and 200 gentlemen were ordered to present themselves at Calais for ransom, while rich bourgeois were sent to England until they bought their freedom. The ‘poorer sort’ of men, women and children were expelled, so their dwellings could be given to English settlers, and they were forbidden to take goods or valuables with them; these were shared out among Henry’s troops. Houses were allotted as rewards, while a man who had brought two shiploads of provisions to the siege obtained ‘the inn called the Peacock’. The king’s uncle, the Earl of Dorset, was appointed governor.

  Instead of sailing back to England, the king decided to take his battered army to Calais and show the enemy was powerless to stop him. He marched out on 6 October with supplies for eight days. Most of his archers and not just his men-at-arms were mounted. ‘Marvel it was, that he with so few durst go through all the thick woods in that country’, comments Capgrave.15 It was not the forests that threatened, however, but a French army. The English did not realize this until they were attacked 2 miles from Harfleur. Then they found the bridges over the Somme demolished and fords guarded, only managing to cross waist deep near the source on 19 October. The rain beat down, while they ran out of food, living on walnuts and a little dried meat. Many suffered from dysentery, riding or marching with their breeches down, which grew worse when they plundered stocks of wine. They struggled on, archers taking care to keep their bow strings dry. Despite insisting God was on his side, Henry was desperate to avoid a confrontation with the French.

  Agincourt

  However, on 20 October French heralds came to Henry, announcing that their masters would intercept him and take revenge for Harfleur. He warned them to get out of his way. But four days later the Duke of York’s scouts sighted the French army, ‘an innumerable multitude’,16 which meant there was no chance of avoiding a battle against alarming odds. Starving and terrified, the English spent the night in fields near Maisoncelles beneath pouring rain. Apart from confessing their sins, they were ordered to stay silent, under pain of forfeiting arms and armour if gentlemen or an ear if of lesser rank (the reality behind Shakespeare’s ‘touch of Harry in the night’).

  Rain was still falling on the morning of 25 October. The English took up a position east of the village of Agincourt, halfway between Abbeville and Calais, in a huge field of new sown wheat that narrowed to about 1,000 yards where there was a small wood on each side. They had about 800 dismounted men-at-arms in the centre and a little under 5,000 archers on the flanks, who planted a line of stakes in front of them. Henry commanded the centre, the Duke of York the right and Lord Camoys the left.

  After hearing three Masses and taking communion, the king mounted a grey pony and, wearing a gold-plated helmet with a diadem of pearls, rubies and sapphires, addressed his men. He told them he had come to France to recover his lawful inheritance, adding that the French had sworn to cut fingers from every captured English archer’s right hand. ‘Now it is a good time, for all England prayeth for us’, he told them. ‘And in remembrance that God died on the Cross for us, let every man make a cross on the earth and kiss it, and in [so] tokening that we will rather die on this earth than flee.’17 ‘Sire’, they yelled back. ‘We pray God will grant you a long life and victory over our enemies.’18

  Led by Charles d’Albret, Constable of France, and Marshal Boucicault, their opponents were 9,000 dismounted men-at-arms in plate armour, who included the greatest names in France, with 3,000 crossbowmen. Because of their number, the French front was twice as wide as Henry’s. The constable wanted the smaller English army, weakened by hunger and dysentery, to attack him, but had no control over his blue-blooded troops. For several hours each side stood waiting for the other’s onslaught. Finally, Henry advanced to within 300 yards of the enemy so that his archers could shoot. Seeing the archers’ weariness as they trudged across the field, and infuriated by being shot at, the French, who lacked any proper command structure, could no longer be restrained. A preliminary cavalry charge against the English bowmen by their mounted men-at-arms disintegrated, the horses becoming unmanageable and bolting beneath the arrows. The field was too narrow to deploy their crossbowmen.

  Grasping sawn-off lances, dismounted French men-at-arms forced their way through soft soil churned into knee-deep mud towards the English, whose archers kept on shooting. Heads down to avoid arrows penetrating the eye-holes of their helmets and unable to see, their wide front narrowing into an inchoate mass when they reached the two woods, they crashed into the line of the English men-at-arms, almost knocking them over.

  The attackers were so tightly packed that they could not use their lances. More and more of them were pushed off their feet into the liquid mud from which, weighed down by heavy armour, they were unable to rise – many drowned or were suffocated by the bodies on top. In contrast, the comparatively few English men-at-arms stayed on their feet, swinging pole-axes. Even unarmoured English archers had an easy advantage over the French who remained standing, before finishing off those on the ground. John Hardyng, a former squire of Hotspur’s who was there, tells us ‘more were dead through press than our men might have slain’.19 Some, however, were lucky enough to be taken prisoner.

  Within half an hour a second mass of the enemy lumbered forward, to die the same way. Waiting for a third French onslaught, Henry heard shouting from the rear and, assuming he was being charged from behind – in reality, it was peasants trying to loot his baggage – ordered that the prisoners should be killed, detailing 200 archers. All except those worth valuable ransoms were, in the words of a Tudor chronicler, ‘sticked with daggers, brained with pole-axes, slain with mauls [mallets]’.20 One group was burned alive in a shed.

  The remaining French men-at-arms were so demoralized that they remounted and rode off the battlefield. In four hours the English had defeated an enemy force twice as large. Among the 8,000 French dead were the constable d’Albret and three dukes, with ninety other great nobles and over 1,500 knights. The English lost only 500 men – including the Duke of York, an immensely fat man who fell down and was trampled to death. Henry had won a great victory. He saw it as confirmation that God recognized his right to the thrones of England and France.

  The king reached Calais without further trouble, but had a stormy voyage to Dover, landing amid a blizzard. At London, on 23 November, he was welcomed ecstatically. Adam of Usk says ‘the City wore its brightest appearance, hearts leaping for joy’.21 Henry rode to give thanks at St Paul’s, where the next day he had a requiem sung for those on both sides who had fallen at Agincourt. There was an unmistakably xenophobic atmosphere. Adam quotes a poet whose verses praising the king refer to the ‘odious might of France’ and ‘the invidious race of French’, while a huge effigy on a tower of London Bridge bore the words:

  A giant that was full grim of sight

  To teach the
Frenchmen courtesy.22

  No longer did anyone question Henry’s right to be king.

  In summer 1416 the King of the Romans, Sigismund of Hungary, who was the future emperor, came to England to persuade Henry to make peace. Instead, he recognized Henry’s claim to the French throne. Henry also hoped that Sigismund would obtain an endorsement of his claim by the council currently meeting at Constance to end the Great Schism, but here his guest could not help him.

  The diplomatic offensive distracted Henry’s attention from Harfleur, which he nearly lost by leaving insufficient food. The Count of Armagnac blockaded it by land and sea, and it was about to surrender when in August the king’s brother John, Duke of Bedford arrived with a fleet. After a sea-battle lasting seven hours, Bedford routed the enemy’s carracks despite a hail of quicklime and flaming tow from their tall superstructures, and relieved the beleaguered port. The next year, the Earl of Huntingdon sank the remaining French warships off the Chef-de-Caux.

  Henry prepared to subdue his new kingdom. Subsidies were granted by parliament, and loans obtained from City corporations and merchants, upper clergy and rich landowners by pawning everything in the royal coffers, whether jewels or plate – Bishop Beaufort lent £14,000 against the royal crown. Foodstuffs and munitions were collected, cannon, rock-throwing catapults, siege-towers, leather bridges, scaling-ladders, spades, shovels, picks, sheafs of bows, tubs full of arrows. The invasion force consisted of 12,000 men-at-arms and archers. There were miners, engineers, armourers and farriers, with gunners and masons who were not only demolition experts but quarried gun-stones. (Newly developed artillery could fire 800 lb missiles as far as 2,500 paces.) The king’s brothers – Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester – and his uncle the Duke of Exeter, formerly Earl of Dorset, provided the senior commanders, together with the Earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Huntingdon.

  Henry had expanded his navy to more than thirty vessels, not only the usual cogs but square-rigged nefs or ‘great ships’ (one of over 1,000 tons) and two-masted carracks – three captured from the Genoese. There were also nine ballingers, oared, shallow-draughted sailing barges that could sail up rivers and move troops fast along the French waterways. Transport vessels for men and horses were collected from every port in England.

  He began his Norman conquest in reverse by landing on 1 August 1417 at the mouth of the Touques, between what are now Deauville and Trouville. Burgundian and Armagnac feuding ensured there was no one to oppose him. After a fortnight Caen, whose walls had been breached by his artillery, fell on 4 September. Herded into the marketplace, its inhabitants were massacred in an orgy of rape and looting, but he ordered the killing to stop when he saw a baby sucking at the breast of its headless mother. Terrified, city after city, town after town, surrendered, so that by early the next year half Normandy was in his hands.

  The king recommenced in spring 1418, taking Louviers in June. When it surrendered, he hanged eight enemy gunners for firing at his tent – one source says he crucified them. Pont de l’Arche fell in July after the English crossed the Seine in what seem to have been portable Welsh coracles, cutting off Rouen downstream.

  The siege of the Norman capital began at the end of July. Well fortified, with large stocks of food, it was defended by 22,000 men under veteran commanders, who outnumbered their besiegers. At first, the Rouennais were defiant. The vicar-general of Rouen excommunicated Henry from the walls, while when he hanged prisoners from gibbets in front of them, the captain of the crossbowmen, Alain Blanchard, hanged English captives from the ramparts with dead dogs tied round their necks. But by October its citizens were eating horseflesh and 12,000 useless mouths, old folk or nursing mothers, were driven out into the city’s ditch. Henry refused to let them leave it. ‘I put hem not there and that wot ye’, he reminded the Rouennais,23 and they died in the ditch. Envoys were told, ‘Rouen is my heritage’.

  When the city surrendered on 19 January 1419, after kissing each one of forty-two crosses borne by the clergy the king attended a Mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral of Saint-Maclou. Among those excluded from the terms of surrender, the vicar-general who had excommunicated Henry spent five years in chains while the captain of the crossbowmen was hanged on the spot. The surviving inhabitants looked like funeral effigies, deaths from hunger continuing for days despite the arrival of food carts. The English quickly conquered the rest of Normandy, which saw no chance of rescue.

  In May a hell-fire Dominican preacher, St Vincent Ferrer, came to Caen and in a sermon rebuked Henry for killing Christian men and women who had never done him any harm. After it, he told Vincent, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish people for their sins’. Emerging from their meeting, Vincent assured everybody that while he had once seen Henry as the worst tyrant in Christendom, he now believed him to be the most pleasing to God of all rulers. He added, ‘His quarrel is so just and true that undoubtedly God is and shall be his aid in these wars.’24 The story conveys some idea of the impact of Henry’s personality.

  Meanwhile, the political situation turned upside down. In 1418 the Burgundians had captured Paris, slaughtering the Armagnacs and their count, whose surviving followers became known as Dauphinists. In September 1419 John, Duke of Burgundy was hacked to death as he knelt in homage before the new dauphin, dividing the French irreparably. John’s successor, Duke Philip the Good, wanted revenge and in December allied formally with Henry, promising to help him conquer France.

  In July Henry had already taken the first step towards capturing Paris, his men storming Pontoise which they sacked brutally. The little city commanded the River Oise, so its new English garrison was able to cut off the capital’s food supplies. Led by Clarence, they terrorized the area around, robbing, raping, killing, seizing landowners and bourgeois for ransom. St Germain fell to them in September.

  In the meantime the king isolated Dauphinist France diplomatically, allying with Emperor Sigismund and the Rhineland elector-archbishops and with the republic of Genoa. He tried – unsuccessfully – to marry Bedford to the Queen of Naples, and Gloucester to the King of Navarre’s daughter, while his ambassadors visited the King of Poland and the Teutonic Knights. The most important treaty of all came in May 1420 when at Troyes in Champagne he met Queen Isabeau, who controlled the insane Charles VI. On his way there, he took a circular route, riding within view of the walls of Paris and praying at St Denis – burial place of the French kings. Isabeau declared that the dauphin was a bastard, while Henry became ‘Heir and Regent of France’ and married Charles’s nineteen-year-old daughter Catherine.

  The king spent his honeymoon besieging Montereau on whose bridge John of Burgundy had been murdered. As at Rouen, he hanged prisoners in view of the ramparts to encourage their comrades to surrender. Next, he invested Melun on the Seine, which took eighteen weeks to capture. When it surrendered Henry wanted to hang the garrison commander, Arnaud Guillaume de Barbazan, who escaped by appealing to the laws of chivalry – as he had crossed swords with the king in the siege-mines beneath the walls, he was a brother-in-arms. Instead, Henry placed him in an iron cage, but he hanged twenty Scottish prisoners on the grounds that they were technically his subjects. He was ‘much feared and dreaded by his princes, knights and captains, and indeed by people of every class’, the chronicler Waurin (a veteran of Agincourt) tells us, ‘as he put to death anyone who disobeyed his orders’.25

  On 1 September, accompanied by Charles VI and the Duke of Burgundy, Henry rode into Paris, cheered by the Parisians, who were relieved they would not suffer the fate of Rouen. They were miserable enough. It was a bitterly cold winter and the price of bread had doubled – houses were pulled down for their beams to make firewood while many of the poor starved to death, wolves regularly swimming the Seine to devour corpses in the street. The English king spent the twelve days of Christmas of 1420–1 in splendour at the Louvre, in contrast to his mad old father-in-law, who, dirty and unkempt, was all but deserted at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. Burgundian noblemen did not care for Henry’s arr
ogance – he had Jehan de l’Isle-Adam, Marshal of France, arrested for daring to look him in the face when answering a question – but saw no alternative. Philip of Burgundy, who besides the duchy and county of Burgundy and the entire Low Countries ruled large areas of northern France, thought only of revenge on the dauphin who had murdered his father.

  Before returning to England to raise money, Henry presided over a meeting at Rouen of the estates of ‘our duchy of Normandy’ – nobles, clergy and bourgeois. There were representatives from other conquered provinces which, with Normandy, formed a separate entity from the Lancastrian kingdom of France. Since 1417 the king had been distributing lands, castles and titles to adventurers as well as great lords, bringing in English settlers. While replacing the Norman nobility, he tried to win over bourgeois, reducing the gabelle, the hated tax on salt. The military establishment was English, however, with strategically sited garrisons in towns or castles near rivers which were patrolled by ballingers so that garrisons could be rushed in quickly. (A garrison’s average strength was three men-at-arms and nine archers, all mounted.) After announcing there would be a new Anglo-Norman currency, he travelled to Calais from where he and his new queen set sail for England.

  They went straight to London for Catherine’s coronation. While he was away, Bedford and then Gloucester had ensured there was no trouble. Richard II’s supporters abandoned the struggle, the Welsh remained cowed and the Lollards were crushed, Sir John Oldcastle having been caught in 1417 to be roasted in chains as he swung from a gibbet, promising to rise on the third day. Even so, shortly after Henry’s return a kinsman of the Earl of March, Sir John Mortimer, was arrested for treason and sent to the Tower. The unspecified charge can only have been scheming to put March on the throne.