1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

by Mortimer, Ian

  As for the Scottish Marches, Henry’s brother, John, had written to him about the state of the north in May 1414. Men loyal to Henry were suffering, John declared, because there had been a ‘lack of good governance’ for many years. Even though the king of the Scots was still a prisoner in the Tower, the Scottish lords had made frequent incursions into their lands. The gates, walls and drawbridges of Berwick, the border town, were in ruins. No gunpowder or cannon were available for its defence. The finances of the East March were more than £13,000 in arrears. John had had to melt down some of his plate to pay his men. He had also pawned his jewels and borrowed heavily from his friends to try to make ends meet. As with Ireland, this was a situation bordering on desperation, similar to the circumstances that had lost Henry possession of the castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth in 1404.

  The situation in Gascony was similar. There were too many enemies and not enough men or supplies to guarantee the safety of the region. The financial situation there was chaotic, with taxes not agreed, let alone paid.47 The only help that Henry’s Gascon subjects had received since his accession was his authorisation of a campaign into the Saintonge area in 1413 under his uncle, Thomas Beaufort. Thomas had captured a number of small places quickly, and did manage to control access to the Charente for a few months, but ultimately he succeeded only in attracting more French troops and cannon to the area. A truce was agreed at the end of January 1414, which was to last until 2 February 1415. After that, war could be expected again. On 15 October 1414 Henry wrote to the Jurade – the mayor and jurats – of Bordeaux apologising for having done so little for them, and promising he would soon send them some artillery and a master gunner. The letter did not arrive for another eight months. Soon he was writing to the Jurade asking them to send him siege engines and cannon. His policy towards the defence of Gascony was chaotic – in fact, he seems to have had no policy at all.48

  On top of all this, there was the situation in France.

  Henry’s alliance with John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, had proved to be problematic. He had pursued it firmly, believing that it not only represented the best way to destabilise the French kingdom but also justified involving England in the French civil war. However, following the Cabochien revolt in Paris in late April 1413, the Armagnacs had gradually seized the initiative. On 23 August that year John the Fearless had fled from the city.49 It left him in a desperate condition, prepared to enter any agreement to bolster his position, even entertaining the idea of swearing allegiance to Henry as king of France.50 At the same time he had no qualms about agreeing with Henry’s enemies that he would send troops to fight in Scotland against the English. Partly because of this duplicity, Henry’s alliance with Burgundy was unstable. But Charles VI of France was no more reliable. He refused even to recognise Henry as the rightful king of England, describing him as ‘our adversary of England’. From Henry’s point of view, a more decisive intervention was necessary.

  Henry sent an embassy to France in July 1414. Through his spokesmen he issued outrageous demands for the settlement of the war. He demanded the restitution of all the lands settled on Edward III by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, sovereignty over the duchies of Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany and Flanders, and over the counties of Touraine, Maine and Anjou, half the county of Provence, and the repayment of 1.6 million crowns (£266,666) still owing from the ransom of John II of France (who had died in England in 1364). As if that were not enough, they also demanded the hand in marriage of the French king’s daughter, plus a further two million crowns as a dowry.

  Obviously the French could not have agreed to such demands. But they did not simply reject them. They offered to restore the whole of the duchy of Aquitaine to English control, in line with the illegal Treaty of Bourges in 1412.51 They declared that a marriage between Henry and a French princess was acceptable in principle, and that her dowry might be as much as 600,000 crowns (£100,000). Provence was not a French lordship, but part of the kingdom of Sicily; so that was not within their gift. As for the outstanding portion of King John II’s ransom, they declared that payments should be deferred, but it was not out of the question.

  It was, on the face of it, a huge step towards what Henry wanted. But still he was not happy. He demanded satisfaction of his terms in full, even though they were so far beyond reasonableness that many people scoffed at them. The reality was that he wanted the French to fail. He wanted to restart the war.

  There is no doubt about Henry’s willingness to renew hostilities. He had been amassing money, armour, munitions and weapons ever since his accession. In June 1413 he had written to the people of Salisbury asking for money to aid his ‘forthcoming expedition’.52 In September that same year he had hired oxen and horses to bring heavy guns from Bristol to London. Smiths were commissioned to help make cannon in the Tower in February 1414.53 In September 1414 he had commissioned Nicholas Merbury, master of the ordnance, to enlist stonemasons, carpenters and other workers to provide necessaries for the king’s guns.54 The same month he had prohibited the export of gunpowder. According to a contemporary chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, royal agents were scouring the country, looking for guns.55 Another contemporary chronicler, John Strecche, noted that Henry was accumulating ‘hauberks, helmets, shields, corslets, bucklers, lance-heads, gauntlets, plate-armour, swords, bows, many thousands of arrows, casks full of bowstrings, axes, saws, wedges, hammers, forks, mattocks, hoes, spades, caltrops and other tools for felling and splitting wood and mining walls’.56 In October 1414 he had paid the expenses of those who had gathered and shaped 10,000 stone cannonballs.57 It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the reason why Henry had issued such outrageous demands in 1414 was precisely so they would be rejected. He did not want terms; he wanted the French to break off negotiations and to appear unreasonable.

  However, Henry could not just dismiss the generosity of the French ambassadors; he had to acknowledge their diplomatic readiness to compromise. So he summoned a council of lords and knights within days of hearing the news from France. The council recommended that he send ambassadors to ‘every party’ to state his case, stipulating that he wanted the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny satisfied in full. In the meantime, they said, he should continue preparations for his voyage, and take measures for the safety of the realm.58 Henry took this as a sign to summon a parliament to arrange a grant of taxation to cover the expenses of the forthcoming war.

  There was no ambiguity about the purpose of the parliament that followed in November 1414. In his opening speech the chancellor, Henry Beaufort, declared

  our most sovereign lord the king desires especially that good and wise action should be taken against his enemies outside the realm, and furthermore he will strive for the recovery of the inheritance and right of his crown outside the realm, which has for a long time been withheld and wrongfully retained, since the time of his progenitors and predecessors kings of England, in accordance with the authorities who wish that ‘unto death shalt thou strive for justice’.59

  Obviously Henry had no wish to await the outcome of further – negotiations. There was no provision to return any of the tax if war did not ensue. Members of Parliament thus knew that they were being asked to decide whether England should go to war or not. Although many were reluctant, and the Speaker, Thomas Chaucer, had considerable difficulty in persuading those present to voice support for the war, there were sufficient lords and knights who were convinced of the need to defend the realm for Henry to be granted his tax. If the ambassadors whom Henry had sent to ‘every party’ failed in their mission, as Henry knew they would, then he could take military action.

  This determination to go to war explains why he rejected the most generous terms he could have possibly expected from the French – something which has long confused historians. It had always been his intention to go to war, even before he became king. His father had intended to lead an army into France and had failed to do so. Invading France was a chance for Henry to go a step further than
his father. This ambition did not change with his accession; in fact it seems to have grown more profound, becoming more of a religious responsibility to complete the work that Edward III had left unfinished, which God had clearly blessed through delivering so many English victories. Hence Henry’s military preparations did not slow down. Eight days after the parliament in which he declared that he was going to war in France he commissioned William Woodward, founder, and Gerard Sprong, to take ‘copper, brass, bronze and iron and all other kinds of metals for making certain guns of the king’ as well as pots, bowls and other vessels relating to the king’s kitchen; and timber, saltpetre, stone for the guns, and coals for making the guns, and workmen.60

  It was not a situation that boded well for peace.

  *

  This was the state of the realm that Christmas Day. Not only was Henry’s kingdom being frayed at the edges, and fractured by internal religious dissent, it was on the very brink of a full-scale war with France, a kingdom with a population of about sixteen million people – more than five times as many as in England. The security of the realm was precarious, to say the least, and the fault for that lay partly with the king.

  What did Henry have to show for his reign by Christmas 1414? He had started rebuilding Sheen, the palace on the Thames that Richard II had destroyed after the death of his first wife there.61 He had reburied Richard II’s body at Westminster, in his proper tomb, and had commissioned the completion of the unfinished nave of the abbey church.62 He had begun a process of reconciliation with the heirs of lords who had rebelled against his father’s rule.63 He had opened negotiations with Scotland for the return of their captive king, James I. He had issued commissions to try and restore law and order in Wales.64 These were all positive moves, but none was especially impressive. His French diplomacy had been dramatic and dangerous, but had yielded no positive results.

  To date his most significant achievement had been the passing of three statutes in the Leicester parliament of April 1414. These were the Statute of Lollards, which placed responsibility for revealing religious dissenters and heretics upon all royal officers; the Statute of Riots, which increased the powers of the chancellor to enquire into the causes of riots and to fine those involved; and the Statute of Truces, which sought to eradicate piracy against ships of kingdoms whose sovereign lord had a truce with the king of England. This hardly amounted to greatness. Henry commanded huge respect amongst the peers of the realm for his conscientiousness and virtuous character, and he had begun to show that he was keen to maintain law and order, and to uphold the dignity of the Church, but that was all.

  However, had you been present at the feast, you would have realised that the situation on the ground and the situation in the king’s mind did not match. For Henry was motivated by the most powerful vision. It amounted to a sort of compact with God to deliver a perfect religious kingship. He would eradicate heresy, as God surely wished, and reform the Church in conjunction with the Holy Roman Emperor. He would end the civil war in France and the war between France and England by subjecting both kingdoms to the rule of one spiritually enlightened monarch – himself. He would end the string of disasters that had befallen France by challenging something which he felt was displeasing to God: namely the refusal of the French to accept the divinely sanctioned, ‘rightful heir’, Edward III, as king of France. In setting about this he would himself emulate King Edward, his great-grandfather. Men were talking about that reign as a golden age; but he did not aspire to become a second Edward III just for the benefit of the English nation; it was more for the purpose of doing God’s work. If he could combine military endeavour with the exercise of God’s will, and be seen to win divine approval as the saviour of both England and France, then he would achieve more even than his semi-legendary great-grandfather. Then Scotland, Gascony, Wales, Ireland and Lollardy would all appear like trivial issues, quibbles that he could silence with a word.

  This was the true state of the realm at Christmas 1414. It was not the unsatisfactory small-scale conflicts around the periphery that mattered so much as the awe-inspiring spiritual vision of the man at the centre. It was not the long shadow of the last reign but the new king’s intensity and commitment, and the support he enjoyed in the men around him. It was not Henry’s sense of vulnerability that would direct policy but his means of overcoming it. But at that moment, as he lifted the wassail cup and saluted all the lords, bishops, knights, men-at-arms, officers and servants with the traditional shout of ‘Wassail!’, very few men inside or outside that hall understood what his vision really meant. And no one – not even Henry himself – could have predicted the outcome.

  January

  Tuesday 1st

  THE LANDSCAPE WAS bleak in winter. Every tree stood with its branches stark against the sky. No evergreens lifted the colour except here and there a sparse Scots pine, and the occasional holly or yew tree, and the ivy found growing around leafless oaks. There were few trees at all near Westminster; there was little impression of natural renewal. The long roads approaching the abbey and palace were muddy and rutted with the wheels of carts and wagons, and the hooves of pack-horses. The wide fields were frozen hard, or flooded after the heavy rains. Piles of logs stacked outside houses were crested with snow. So too were barrels, their wooden sides icy to the touch. Long icicles hung from the eaves of houses, especially where the roofs were thatched.

  Even before dawn there had been activity. In the choir of the church of the abbey, just a hundred yards from the palace, the monks had been singing in the early hours. The clock in the palace yard chimed the hours with a deep, resonant dong on the great bell called ‘the Edward’. In the privy palace – the king’s private quarters within the palace of Westminster – the marshal of the hall had made sure the servants were up and about their duties. Fires were lit, servants removed their mattresses from the hall floors; fresh rushes were strewn.

  The silent flame of a cresset lamp illuminated the gold and red tapestries of Arras work which lined the royal bedchamber.1 Figures of royal and biblical history looked down on the sleeping king: mottoes spoke to the silence. ‘I am Nature,’ declared one of the tapestries in the privy palace – a piece of Arras work 66ft long and 16ft high showing the seven ages of Man.2 ‘Here begins a tournament’, declared another, showing knights jousting. Another, 45ft long, depicted the lives of the Roman emperors. Others showed scenes from hunting and tournaments. Below his chamber windows, the water of the Thames lapped at the stonework, sighing with the tide.

  The king himself lay in a large feather bed surrounded with curtains, his head resting on feather-filled pillows. Perhaps it was the ‘bed of the cherries’, enclosed by a canopy embroidered with shepherds.3 Or maybe it was his black satin bed, enclosed within three curtains of black tartarin which were stamped with gold and silver lions. Some of his pillows were scented with lavender. Elsewhere in the room, apart from the tapestries and a flickering lamp, were a silver ewer and a basin full of rosewater on a wooden stand, and chests of the king’s possessions. These held the clothes which his chamber ushers had put away carefully the night before. They also held items of treasure, faith and superstition, such as his astrolabes, relics, jewels, books of devotion and his rock-crystal and jasper bowls and cups. Perhaps his clock – in the shape of a ship – ticked slowly and quietly in the corner of the chamber.4

  The king would have been woken by the ushers before dawn, when they came into his chamber to light the fire. According to John Russell, who was an usher to Henry’s youngest brother, the king would have expected them to hold the basin and water while he washed his face and hands. They should have had a clean and warm linen shirt ready for him, and clean underwear, and well-brushed hose. Seated on a cushioned chair, he would have had his hair combed and, when all his dressing was finished, his shoes put on.5

  Putting on the king’s shoes was an important moment today, 1 January. It was the signal for the trumpets to sound outside the king’s chamber. With that loud, brass sound, a line of
servants entered bearing New Year’s gifts from the king’s closest companions and family members.6 All of the important men who had been at the Christmas feast would have sent a present – an item of costly jewellery or similar goldsmith’s work.

  Having received his presents, and thanked their bearers, the king left his chamber. He might have had a small breakfast of bread and cheese or cold meat before going into the royal chapel to hear Mass. This would have been either in the royal chapel adjacent to his chamber in the privy palace, which had been altered and extended by his father, or in the great chapel of St Stephen, next to Westminster Hall. After that, his time was his own until dinner; perhaps to look over his falcons and hunting dogs at Charing, or to receive guests and important dignitaries, or to watch a mumming or a play. As 1 January was part of the feast of Christmas – the eighth day – the mood about the palace would still have been relatively relaxed. Henry probably feasted in the White Hall, or Lesser Hall, which was directly south of Westminster Hall itself. The amount spent on food for the household was around £90 – a little more than the other days of the twelve-day feast, except Christmas Day itself, which could easily see expenditure of more than £220.7