A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  Meanwhile, in France, the descent into civil war had prevented effective action to capitalize on Henry of England’s problems. Had France been united, then, given Henry’s financial problems, the French might easily have taken Aquitaine, but, with the ever more frequent outbreaks of Charles VI’s insanity, power was increasingly being garnered by the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans, who, as we have seen, had very different agendas. Their enmity came to a very public head when, on the night of 23 November 1407, only a few days after a supposed reconciliation between the two, the duke of Orléans was set upon in a Paris street and bludgeoned to death, his hand having first been cut off to prevent it casting spells on the attackers. The assassination was widely believed to have been at the instigation of the duke of Burgundy, and he is said to have admitted it some days later.

  France now split into two armed camps. The cause of the late duke of Orléans was taken up by his son’s father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, who gave his name to the Orléanist faction. This group controlled, in broad terms, most of France south of the River Loire, less of course English Aquitaine, while the Burgundians held the north – including, crucially, Paris – Flanders and most of the Low Countries. Brittany was generally neutral and Normandy too, with divided loyalties, managed to avoid taking sides. The duke of Burgundy had already signed a trade agreement with Henry IV, and the threat to Calais from Flanders was now lessened, the English wool trade picked up, and the English treasury began to look a little healthier.

  In 1411, Paris was under siege by an Armagnac army and the duke of Burgundy appealed to Henry IV for help. At this stage, the Prince of Wales was leader of the king’s council during his father’s illness, and in September an English army of 800 men-at-arms and 2,000 archers, under the command of the thirty-year-old Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel and nephew of the archbishop of Canterbury, landed at Calais. They then marched to Arras, joined with the Burgundian relieving army, and headed for Paris. On 9 November 1411, Arundel stormed the besiegers at the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud and, having lifted the siege, marched back to Calais and sailed to England.

  The following year, with the king recovered and the prince sidelined, English support went instead to the Armagnacs, who promised in return for military assistance against the Burgundians to support the annexation of Aquitaine to England (as opposed to it being a separate overseas province) – something which had already been enacted by the English parliament. Four thousand men were despatched under Thomas of Lancaster, King Henry’s second son and recently created earl of Aumale and duke of Clarence, who landed at La Hougue in Normandy. The landing was opposed by what the Brut Chronicle describes as 7,000 men-at-arms, but was probably a great deal less, under a Lord Hambe, and, having defeated them and taken prisoners for ransom, the English moved south to link up with the Armagnacs in Poitou. By the time they got there, the two French dukes, young Orléans and Burgundy, had come to uneasy and temporary terms, so Clarence led his army on a burning and looting spree through southern France to English Bordeaux, and only agreed to go home when he was bought off by the Armagnacs. The short peace between the two opposing French factions brought the professed agreement by both to the English annexation of Aquitaine, but, as neither Armagnac nor Burgundian could speak for the Valois king nor for the French parlement, the agreement was illegal and worthless. In any case, the peace was soon shattered when in 1413 Burgundians in Paris fell upon Armagnac supporters and began to slaughter them and set fire to their houses and buildings. Rioting was widespread and only quelled by the arrival of an Armagnac army and the nine-year-old dauphin Charles. Burgundy was forced to yield Paris to the Armagnacs and flee to Flanders, where he began negotiations for English support to regain his power.

  Then, on 20 March 1413, Henry IV of England died, aged forty-seven. His tomb in Canterbury Cathedral is opposite that of the Black Prince, whose son Henry had put to death – a touch of irony presumably not intended at the time. His effigy shows a face old and bloated, and indeed it is almost as if Henry were two different people. Vigorous, an accomplished jouster, well educated, articulate and sociable as Henry Bolingbroke, he had been supported by the vast majority of those who mattered in his unseating of Richard II, and admired, as the Brut Chronicle puts it, ‘for his worthy manhood that often times had been found in him’. Once king, however, he faced uncooperative parliaments and at least eight rebellions during his fourteen-year reign. Increasingly suspicious and dogged by ill health, he survived by compromise and thus allowed much royal prerogative to be subsumed by Parliament – powers that it would be reluctant to give back. Although Henry maintained the English claim to the French throne – which Richard would have given up – he did little to advance it, and the war during his reign was one of raids, piracy and blockade. Militarily, Henry’s main preoccupation was the Welsh rising of Owain Glyn Dŵr, and with that and the need to quell rebellion elsewhere there was no money for major expeditions to Europe. Henry did little to change the organization and tactical deployment of English armies – there was no need – but he did promote the development of cannon, which, while present in most armies since the middle of the fourteenth century, had had little effect so far on the outcome of a battle.

  Although the Welsh troubles rumbled on until after Henry’s death, even before Northumberland’s last rebellion they were in decline. Owain Glyn Dŵr had the support of many, perhaps most, of the native Welsh princes, but not of the common people nor of the Anglo-Welsh and the English settlers, and he controlled only limited areas of the country. The English commanded the seas and, with the exception of a few minor French landings, no reinforcement could come by that means. Most castles held out, and those few that did fall to the rebels were relatively swiftly recovered. The English fortified the Marches, hemming the rebels in and preventing sympathizers from England reaching them, and, while the Welsh could and did mount raids over the border into Shropshire, detachments of English mounted troops were on standby to pursue them. English supply routes into and out of Wales were secured, while English soldiers severed those of the Welsh. Many of Glyn Dŵr’s own family, including his wife, were taken prisoner and lodged in the Tower, and at least one of his sons was killed, as were increasing numbers of his senior commanders. Above all other factors, perhaps, there was that of finance. As the English exchequer grew healthier, English soldiers could be paid and supplies purchased, while Glyn Dŵr had to rely on ransom money and, when that ran out, on looting his own countrymen – not a policy guaranteed to maintain support for his cause. That the rebellion lasted as long as it did was due to the very sensible Welsh policy of not being drawn into a conventional battle, but to harry, ambush, snipe and raid and then fade away into the hills. But guerrillas cannot win a war all by themselves, and in the end a dogged English policy of attrition, control of the coastline, defence of the Marches and ensuring that even in times of financial difficulties sufficient money was always found to continue the campaign was bound to win in the end, and that it did was very much to the credit of Henry IV. Glyn Dŵr’s own fate remains a mystery. He was never captured and is thought to have died sometime in 1415, but by what cause and where his body lies is unknown.

  Nor was Scotland to be a problem once Northumberland’s last foray from there was defeated. It was good intelligence and skilled seamanship in March 1406 that allowed the English navy to capture the heir to the throne of Scotland, James Stewart (later James I of Scotland), off Flamborough Head on his way to school in France; and it was good luck that his father Robert III died a month later, allowing the English to install yet another king of Scotland in the Tower. James was well treated but remained a prisoner for eighteen years, thus ensuring that England’s back door was reasonably secure.

  Henry IV may not have been able to pursue the French war, but his son and successor certainly would. By the time he came to the throne, Henry of Monmouth had already proved himself as a soldier – at Shrewsbury, where he may have been following the guidance of more experienced commanders but where h
e nevertheless showed great courage and understanding of battle management; and subsequently in the Welsh wars, where, as his father’s health declined, the defeat of the insurrection was more and more left to him. He learned how to keep an army in the field in an underdeveloped country and how to conduct sieges, and he fully understood the importance of mobility and sound logistics, all of which would stand him in good stead for his future campaigning. He is generally considered to have been something of a lad during his apprenticeship – to have been rather fond of wine, women, song and dubious companions – and he certainly fell out with his father on numerous occasions, sometimes over foreign policy, more often when his father was concerned that young Henry was building an alternative court. But by the time his father died, he seems to have put such misbehaviour behind him.

  In twenty-first-century Britain, the queen is head of the Church of England, but in truth religion no longer has a major influence, either in government or in most people’s daily lives. That was not the case in the medieval world, and any consideration of government and kingship then must take account of the position of the church. It is not easy in this secular, cynical, sceptical age of ours to fully comprehend the influence of religion on our medieval ancestors. Religion was a powerful instrument of social control.77 In medieval England, an instruction from the king was persuasive; that it was also an instruction from God made it doubly so. There were, of course, men who engaged in something approaching what we would today call the scientific method – nobody with any education thought the world was flat – but witchcraft and sorcery were largely tolerated until well into the sixteenth century. (The Inquisition, which equated witchcraft with heresy and burned practitioners at the stake, was never allowed into England – as much because it was foreign as for any theological reason.) The common man was, however, intensely superstitious. He believed that when he died he would either go to heaven, provided that he had prayed hard enough and had obeyed the dictums of the church, or otherwise would go to a very unpleasant eternity in hell, something that he was continually reminded of every time he glanced at the tympana above the churches’ doors. Things that were unexplained – a sudden storm, an earthquake, disease – were either expressions of God’s displeasure or the work of the devil.

  The uneducated and the untravelled in any age are superstitious and religious fundamentalism thrives among the ignorant, but whether the great men of the realm similarly believed in the reality of a personal god and heaven and hell is more difficult to answer. They certainly said they did, and the number of chantries founded, benefices subsidized and donations to religious orders made by the nobility would seem to indicate that they did, as would the number of recorded death-bed statements of belief – although many donations and declarations may have been made in the hope of a favourable mention in the history books. While we might question whether some aspects of religious belief were more than skin-deep, at least among the wealthy and the educated, there is no doubting the power and influence of the church. Although it no longer had a monopoly of education – and there was an increasing demand for men who could read, write and do sums for the civil service of an increasingly complex government administration – the church had a finger in most royal and state pies. Archbishops were chancellors, bishops could lead armies, local government in the shires often went with religious appointments, and the church was one of the great landowners of the realm as well as being fabulously wealthy. Unlike in our present day, when the origin of most British bishops is lower middle class, bishops then were members of great families and would have had standing and influence in the church or out of it. Much international diplomacy was carried out by clerics, while the pope, whether in Avignon or Rome, had huge transnational influence.

  It was, of course, in the interests of the church to maintain the status quo, and in the interests of the secular power – the king – to keep the support of the spiritual arm, hence the fear of heresy and the enthusiasm shown in its suppression.78 Clearly, some esoteric arguments contrary to accepted teachings could be tolerated, and much energy was expended on arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,79 or about the relative poverty of Jesus Christ, but anything that struck at the church’s power and influence had to be stamped on hard.

  Ever since the first outbreak of the plague, strange cults and odd beliefs had been springing up, and one of the most prevalent English heresies of the time was Lollardy, which claimed to follow the teachings of John Wyclif, an academic born around 1330. Wyclif questioned the authority of the pope, produced a written English translation of the Bible, and objected to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Opposing the pope was something that many Englishmen and not a few English clergy would have had sympathy with, but translating the Bible into the vernacular was a different matter altogether. If the common people could read the Bible for themselves, then not only would priests – who were there to interpret, in all senses, the Latin of the Bible – be out of a job, but also people would see the inconsistencies inherent in the scriptures and perhaps question their whole validity. The doctrine of transubstantiation, meanwhile, taught that the bread and wine consumed in the mass turned into the actual flesh and blood of Christ once the supplicant had eaten them. While the validity of this could be debated and rests on faith rather than medical science, it was widely believed then and is still believed, or at least taught, by some Christian churches today.80 Wyclif said that the change into flesh and blood was symbolic, not actual, and in doing so he was questioning a basic tenet of the church’s teaching. Eventually, he was condemned by the pope, but he survived to die in his bed in 1384, partly through the protection of John of Gaunt and partly through reluctance on the part of the University of Oxford to admit that its doctors could be disciplined by the church.

  The Lollards – so called from the mumbling sound of their prayers – went a little further than Wyclif might have wished. They opposed the pope’s practice of taxing the English clergy – and here they simply echoed the views of most Englishmen including Edward III – and they railed against corruption in the church and against the authority of the pope. Had they stopped there, they might have got away with it, but, when they extended their manifesto to declaring the pope the anti-Christ, calling for the abolition of the hierarchy of the church and, from around 1380, sending unlicensed preachers around the countryside with their English Bibles to spread their views, they became a direct threat to the established order and were declared heretics. Wyclif himself would not have supported the Peasants’ Revolt, but many of his followers did; and, although most would have done so anyway, whether Lollards or not, they were now seen as seditious as well as heretical.

  Up to this point, heresy was not a civil crime but a clerical one, to be tried in clerical courts which could impose fines but not the death penalty or imprisonment. In 1401, however, Archbishop Arundel persuaded the recently crowned Henry IV to make heresy a secular crime, which meant that a man found guilty by a clerical court could be handed over to the civil power and executed – by the rather unpleasant method of burning. Only two Lollards were actually burned during Henry IV’s reign – it was only obdurate heresy that got a person burned: recantation brought a pardon, and many accused did recant at the last moment, sensible fellows that they were. One of these executions, of one John Badby, who was due to be burned to death in a barrel if contemporary artists are to be believed, was attended by Henry of Monmouth when Prince of Wales. The fire was lit, the victim began to scream. Henry ordered the fire to be put out and the man taken out of the barrel, and offered him a pardon and a pension for life if he would recant. The man refused, so Henry ordered him back in the barrel and the fire to be relit. The obdurate heretic duly burned to death.

  While all kings expressed support for the church, even if they might be opposed to some of its practitioners from time to time, all the contemporary accounts of Henry V stress his religious piety as king. Partly this may be sycophantic, but, as Henry’s faith is mentioned more frequ
ently than that of his predecessors or successors, we may assume that it played a significant part in his thinking. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether his frequent insistence that he was under the protection of God was what he genuinely believed, or mere propaganda to reinforce his claims and encourage a population and army which did believe, but throughout his reign Henry remained a strong supporter of religious orthodoxy – indeed, to some he was a religious fanatic. Fanatics do not, however, command a mass following, at least not in England, and on balance it is likely that, while Henry was certainly a believer, he was an astute enough politician to realize the importance of not alienating so powerful a bastion of the establishment as the church.