by Teresa Cole
The muster of men took place on 1 July, and on 6 July Henry moved his quarters to Portchester Castle, overlooking the harbour from which he would sail. On 24 July the king made his will, and on the 29th he finally gave the order for embarkation. This whole mass of men, animals and equipment were to be loaded and ready to sail on 1 August.
And then, on 31 July, came the most sudden and unexpected interruption that would stop the whole operation in its tracks. On the evening of that day Edmund Mortimer, newly restored to his freedom and honours as Earl of March, came to the king and told him of a plot to depose him and put Edmund on the throne in his place.
The leading conspirator was Richard, Earl of Cambridge, younger brother of the Duke of York who just for once seemed to have no part in or knowledge of the affair. Equally implicated were Henry, Lord Scrope, and a northern magnate, Sir Thomas Grey. Allegations were also made against a number of others, including Sir Robert Umphraville, who had so recently served the king by putting an end to the Scottish invasion.
Instantly arrested by the king, Grey confessed at once closely followed by Cambridge, but had they not done so the whole affair would have seemed little short of a fantasy. Every rebel from the last twenty years was supposed to play a part, from Glendower to the Scottish lords Douglas and Murdoch, to Oldcastle and the Lollards, and not forgetting Henry Percy. The Earl of March was to be carried into Wales and there proclaimed king as the true successor to Richard. Then Wales, Scotland and the north of England would rise to support him. The weakest of all the weak links in this wild scheme was the Earl of March, who, having spent most of his life as a prisoner, had clearly no intention of risking that or worse again. In fact, freed and pardoned by Henry as an innocent victim of the plot, he then served the king loyally for the rest of his life.
On 1 August the three main conspirators were tried before a jury. Cambridge and Grey were found guilty of treason and Grey was executed. Scrope was found guilty of misprision of treason in that, knowing of the plot, he had failed to reveal it to the king. Scrope and Cambridge then claimed the right to trial by their peers, which trial was rapidly arranged since a large number of their fellow lords were present at Southampton. On 5 August this second court, headed by Thomas, Duke of Clarence, had Cambridge’s confession read to them while Scrope pleaded not guilty on the basis that he had intended to tell the king when he had full possession of all the details of the plot. Both were once again convicted, and executed the same day outside the north gate of Southampton. No charge was ever brought against Umphraville, and given his response to the only possible action that might have been interpreted as part of the plot, it may be that he had in fact played the role that Scrope had claimed for himself.
Finally, on 11 August, leaving behind his brother John, Duke of Bedford, as his lieutenant in England, Henry boarded his flagship, the Trinity Royal, and gave the signal for his fleet to set sail for France.
7
HARFLEUR & THE ROAD TO AGINCOURT
13 AUGUST – 20 OCTOBER 1415
Of course, the French were not completely in the dark as to Henry’s intentions. Ambassadors, merchants, even spies crossed the Channel continually and they would have had to be blind not to see the steady accumulation of the invasion force. From the spring of 1415 Henry was announcing to all and sundry that he needed money to finance his expedition as he was now setting out on his ‘voyage’, and the French would have been in no doubt as to where that voyage would take him.
With Charles VI of France still incapable, the governing council appointed his eighteen-year-old son, the Dauphin Louis, as his lieutenant and at least nominal commander of all resistance to the English. Orders were given for towns and castles to look to their fortifications and for men to be prepared to fight for their country. The most immediate action, however, was the levying of heavy taxes to pay for all this, which were bitterly resented by those lower down the social scale on whom the burden of payment actually fell.
The failure of the last diplomatic delegation must have suggested that invasion was imminent, and on 28 July Charles d’Albret, Constable of France and a career soldier, was appointed commander in chief of the French army. The Constable of France was the chief officer of the Crown, in theory at least outranking all the nobility and subject only to the king. In practice the fact that d’Albret was not himself of the nobility would prove a serious drawback. On the same day Jean Le Maigre, better known as Marshal Boucicaut, was appointed captain-general. He too was a skilled professional soldier, the title ‘Marshal of France’ being recognition of his achievements rather than a military rank.
As for the forces that would fight under them, though the French had an indenture system similar to that in England, it was not so well developed and, especially for home defence, the feudal levy system, the ‘arriere-ban’, was heavily relied on. This could produce large numbers of men, but it was generally slow to activate and the resulting army lacked the skills and discipline of professional soldiers.
Knowing that an invasion was due was a very different matter from knowing where it would arrive, and in this at least Henry did manage a degree of secrecy. With the whole long coastline of France to defend, and, at least to begin with, minimal forces at his command, d’Albret had to guess, and he guessed very nearly correctly. Disregarding the possibility that the English might launch an attack from their own territory, from Calais or from Gascony, he decided Normandy was the most likely place, and even more correctly that the mouth of the Seine would be the key. This mighty river led into the very heart of France, through Rouen, chief city of the dukes of Normandy from whom Henry himself was descended, on to Paris where waited the unhappy King of France. D’Albret, therefore, set up his headquarters at Honfleur, the major fortified town on the south side of the river. With him were 1,500 men, while the rest of the forces presently assembled were sent with Marshal Boucicaut to guard the first place inland where the Seine might be crossed, some twenty-five miles away.
It was, however, not Honfleur to the south but Harfleur on the northern side of the river which was Henry’s immediate target. Consequently, when in the early evening of Tuesday 13 August his fleet came to anchor at a place called Chef de Caux, there was no one there to oppose him. This might have been seen as a second good omen for the success of the expedition, the first being a flock of swans (the swan being Henry’s personal heraldic device) that had passed through the fleet as it set sail, raising a cheer from those on board. Nevertheless the king immediately gave orders that no landing was to be attempted until the following day. Then, under cover of darkness, he himself sent out a scouting party.
The honour of first setting foot ashore went to the king’s cousin, Sir John Holland, another grandson of John of Gaunt, through his daughter Elizabeth. Though only a young man, Holland was accompanied by others who were older and more experienced, including his step-father, Sir John Cornwaille, Elizabeth’s third husband and a well-respected Knight of the Garter. These two men were to figure prominently in the coming campaign. For the time being, however, their first task was to discover what resistance there might be to any landing at that place, and then to seek out the general lie of the land and the best way to approach the town of Harfleur which lay at a few miles distance from their anchorage.
They found that the people of the area had not been idle in looking to their defences. Behind the shingle beach a system of earthworks and ditches had been prepared but they were completely unmanned. It has been suggested that Henry’s delay in setting out and the time taken to gather the fleet together and cross the channel may have worked in his favour here. It is possible that a series of false alarms had led to slackness in the defenders, so that when the real danger materialised they were caught napping. An account by an eyewitness suggests that, had even a small number of resolute men opposed the landing, the campaign might have turned out very differently. As it was, not a single blow was struck, and over the next three days Henry was able to disembark the whole of his army and its equipmen
t, and even to dispatch some vessels back to England to pick up a number of men who had had to be left behind due to lack of transport.
It is clear from the forces assembled and the specialist men and materials he had brought with him that Henry was drawing on all his experience in the Welsh wars when planning his campaign. To take and fortify a secure base before moving on; this was what he had learnt of the way to conquer and hold a large area. Harfleur was to be the beginning, a second Calais from which to conquer France itself – but it was not to be achieved as quickly as he had expected.
The town lay in a valley where the waters of two small tributary rivers, the Lezarde and the Leure, came together before emptying into the Seine about a mile away. Strong walls surrounded it, punctuated by more than two dozen towers, giving defenders a line of sight along their entire length. A river ran through the middle of the town, culminating in a large, fortified harbour that gave the town its prosperity. No doubt merchants and others passing through this port had been able to give Henry a general idea of the town and its fortifications, but it was also from here that ships had issued forth to harass and capture English merchant fleets on their way across the channel – another reason why the king might have felt it necessary to begin his campaign at this place.
For more than half its circumference, on the north, west and south, the town walls were protected by a moat filled by waters from the rivers. A deep, wide dry ditch held attackers away from the walls on the north-eastern side. There were three gates, the Leure gate to the south, the Rouen gate to the east and the Montvilliers Gate to the north.
The approach to the south of the town was through salt marshes containing more or less water depending on the state of the tide. On hearing of the approach of the English forces, a similar water hazard was achieved to the north-west by closing the sluices on the river where it entered the town, thereby damming it and flooding all the land above. At the same time great bastions of timber and earth were built before each of the gates, while heavy chains were hung across the harbour entrance, and sharpened stakes driven into the ground all around there, to deter any assaults by water.
Inside the town its commander, Jean, sire d’Estouteville, had barely a hundred men in his garrison, but while Henry was slowly bringing up his forces and establishing his camp on a hill to the south d’Albret was rapidly sending reinforcements. Weapons, supplies and cannon were sent, and more importantly a new commander, Raoul, sire de Gaucort, and another three hundred men. This de Gaucort was an experienced soldier who had fought with Marshal Boucicaut at Nicopolis and in Italy. Just in the nick of time he arrived with his men at the Rouen gate, while Henry, marooned on the far side of the flooded marshes, could do nothing to prevent him. This was to be the last such entry, however. That same day the king sent his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a large force of men around to the far side of the town, where they camped on another hillside commanding both northern and eastern roads into Harfleur.
With the town now surrounded or ‘invested’ by the English it was time for Henry to obey the rules of war accepted at the time, taken from chapter 20 of the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible. Verse 10 declares, ‘If at any time thou shalt go against a city to overcome it, first thou shalt proffer peace.’ Furthermore, if the people then opened the gates to receive the besiegers, ‘all the people that is there shall be saved’. If, on the other hand, they refused this offer and the city was taken by force, ‘thou shalt smite by the sharpness of the sword all things of male kind which is therein’. Women, children and all the property of the town could then be taken as booty, to do with as the besiegers pleased. Despite this stark choice laid before them, de Gaucort and d’Estouteville instantly rejected the offer of peaceful surrender and the siege of Harfleur began.
Now Henry brought into action all his war machines, both the traditional siege engines and the new cannon. Through all the daylight hours, all day, every day the bombardment continued. With the blast of the cannon and the shattering of stone on stone, the noise must have terrified the stoutest hearted within the town, and little by little the defences and the buildings within were smashed and broken. Despite this the garrison kept up their own onslaught on their attackers, so that great wooden shields had to be constructed to protect those operating cannon and catapult alike.
Clarence’s attempt to fill the dry ditch with bundles of sticks had to be abandoned when it became clear the garrison were just waiting for his men to advance over this before setting it alight and fuelling the fire with all manner of combustible material. Nevertheless he managed to throw up an embankment topped with stout timber and close enough to the walls to bring his own war machines forward and, behind the protection of this bank, to launch a bombardment on this side too.
Then, at night when the cannon were silent, the besieged under de Gaucort’s instructions crept out to try and shore up the defences by any means to hand. Clay was laid in the streets to prevent the shattering of cannon stones as they hit the ground, which would have an effect like shrapnel, causing death and destruction all around.
Nor was this bombardment the only method of attack. Sir John Greyndor, a knight from the Welsh Marches, had brought in his retinue some 120 miners, and these were now set to work to undermine the town walls and so bring down the defences. This mining was a recognised method of assault during a siege, and was opposed by equally energetic countermining by the defenders, intended to undercut and so to collapse the mine prematurely upon the attackers. Sometimes the two parties came face to face. Unlike a narrow coal mine, these shafts would easily allow a man to stand upright, and fighting in the mines was regarded as a chivalric battle carried on not only by the lower orders but by fully armed and armoured knights.
There are basically only two ways for such a siege to end – either the town will surrender or it will be relieved by a force from outside driving away the besiegers. By the first week in September neither of these had happened. Though d’Albret and Boucicaut had regrouped at Rouen, the general order from the king’s council calling men to arms was only issued on 28 August, and there was no sign yet of any large-scale muster. Some local nobility were engaged in minor skirmishes with English foraging parties, and d’Albret had managed on one or two occasions to smuggle a messenger and a few supplies into the besieged town. Apart from that, de Gaucort and his men were on their own.
Nor, despite all King Henry’s energies, were Harfleur’s defences yet ready to crack. Letters written on 3 September suggesting that the king expected the town to fall within eight days proved to be overly optimistic. The men of the garrison still manned the bastions outside the gates, and the gates themselves held firm. Nor was the mining at Harfleur particularly successful. Mines on the king’s side were soon abandoned due to the difficulty of the marshy terrain and the river-fed moat. On Clarence’s side several mines were begun but none achieved its objective. Instead the king turned to another engineering project designed to speed up the town’s surrender. According to the account of one of his clerks he dammed the river higher up the valley, thereby cutting off the supply of fresh water to the town. It may well be that this contributed greatly to his victory, but it was victory won at a high price, both to the besieged and the besiegers.
There is no exact record of when the sickness began. On 3 September Henry was writing to Bordeaux that all were ‘in good health and disposition’, but certainly within a week of that date strong men both within the town and without were succumbing at an alarming rate. The accounts vary in their explanations – too greedy eating of oysters from the estuary, or unripe fruit – but there is no doubt that it was dysentery that was spreading so rapidly.
The insanitary conditions in a camp of large numbers of men and animals, based on swampy ground in hot summer weather, would be a perfect breeding place for such a disease. The closing off of the river’s freshwater supply may simply have been the final straw. Nor was it any respecter of persons. Rich as well as poor were struck down by the ‘bloody flux’ as i
t was called, while the symptoms of violent and bloody diarrhoea, together with high fever, made it easily spread through such a multitude. Within the town the situation was just as bad or even worse.
On 10 September the thirty-five-year-old Bishop of Norwich fell ill and, despite all care, died five days later. A close friend and advisor of the king, he was a senior member of the royal household, and Henry himself was present at his deathbed.
Perhaps taking advantage of this distraction, on the same day de Gaucort launched a surprise raid out of the Leure Gate, temporarily displacing those investing the area who included Sir John Holland and his stepfather Sir John Cornwaille. Before they could be driven back the French had set fire to the English forward position and siege weapons, causing little real damage but forming a provocation that could not be ignored.
The very next day Holland and Cornwaille spearheaded a final determined assault on the bastion before the gate. Already weakened by regular bombardment, it was now fired by the English and overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers following Holland’s standard. A great melee of hand-to-hand fighting now took place before the French were at last forced to abandon the position and retreat within the town gate. Although this was rapidly reinforced with whatever timber and stone were to hand, English guns could now be brought significantly closer and it was apparent to all that the endgame was fast approaching.
On 17 September, the following day, Henry once again attempted to persuade the town to surrender. De Gaucort and a number of leading burgesses were given a safe conduct to come to meet the king, who once again recited his ancient right to ‘his’ duchy of Normandy. De Gaucort replied that he did not recognise Henry’s authority, that he had been sent by the French king to hold Harfleur and he was confident that a relieving army would be appearing any day. This last must have been sheer bravado on his part for he would have been aware that the messengers he had managed to send to the Dauphin had brought no such news – some, indeed, had received no answer at all to his desperate requests for assistance.
