A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  Otherwise, Henry of Monmouth was described as being tall, slim and well muscled, with hazel eyes and thick brown hair; in character he was said to be single-minded – and, if he was to pursue the English claims in France, he would have to be. Unusually for the time, he had no mistresses as king, although there is no suggestion that his sexual proclivities were anything but normal. Henry V was crowned at Westminster on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, and the day marked by an unseasonal fall of heavy snow, seen by many as an omen, but of what no one was quite sure. Henry’s first task was to assure Parliament and the magnates that he intended to govern justly and to heal divisions. While he brought some of his own followers into government – chiefly Thomas Fitzalan, Thomas Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, and as chancellor his half-uncle, Bishop Beaufort, the son of John of Gaunt out of his third wife and ex-mistress, Katherine Swynford – he retained many of his father’s officials, although he did dismiss the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Sir William Gascoigne.81 In seeking to heal old sores, he released the earl of March, the Ricardian candidate for the throne, from house arrest and had Richard II’s body exhumed from King’s Langley and reburied with much reverence, pomp and ceremony in the tomb that Richard himself had commissioned in Westminster Abbey.

  Almost immediately, however, the new king became embroiled with the Lollard heresy in the shape of Sir John Oldcastle and his followers. Oldcastle, who was thirty-five in 1413, had been a loyal crown servant and was an experienced soldier who had served in the Scottish wars, in France with the English army sent to aid the duke of Burgundy in 1411, and against the Welsh rebels under Henry V when he was Prince of Wales. He had been summoned to Parliament as a knight of the shires and had served as sheriff of Herefordshire. It is probable that Oldcastle had long held unorthodox views – Herefordshire was notorious for religious radicalism – but it was only after the accession of Henry V that Archbishop Arundel felt able to challenge him openly, and Oldcastle was the first eminent layman to be tried for the Lollard heresy.82 Condemned out of his own mouth when he launched into a tirade against the pope and his prelates, he was handed over to the civil authority which, at the behest of the king, who had no wish to see an old friend brought low, sent him to the Tower to give him an opportunity to recant. He then escaped, went on the run and attempted to organize a revolt with the aim of kidnapping the king. It was hardly a revolt; indeed, far from being a serious attempt to overthrow the existing secular and religious establishment, it was more the desperate reaction of a man who sought revenge for the way he had been treated. The active participants – no more than a few hundred – were asked to rendezvous at St Giles’s Fields, outside London, on the night of 9/10 January 1414 in preparation for a march on London and the arrest of the king. However, the plot was betrayed to the authorities and, when the rebels arrived, they ran into an ambush. Oldcastle escaped, but most of his followers were rounded up. Over forty were executed and another seven, who were Lollards, were burned as heretics. Although his revolt died in the St Giles’s Fields trap, despite several offers of pardon Oldcastle would not give himself up, and while a number of those who sheltered him were punished, and in at least one case executed, he himself would not be captured until November 1417, after which he was executed by burning on 15 December of that year. It was the last serious internal threat to Henry V, who, having restored order within the kingdom, pacified Wales and defused doubts over the legitimacy of the Lancastrian succession, could now devote all his considerable energies to restoring English rights in France.

  King Henry V. This is generally said to be the most lifelike portrait of the king, but as it was painted at least 150 years after his death it could only be so if the artist had access to earlier portraits now lost.

  9

  ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH . . .

  King at twenty-five, slaughterer of the French nobility at twenty-seven, regent and acknowledged heir to the throne of France at thirty-two and dead at thirty-four: if Henry V had lived, the history of Europe might have been very different. There cannot be many Englishmen, even today, who do not feel a frisson of pride when they think of Henry V; he shaped English history and what he did and who he was affects Anglo-French relations to this day. He was a king who deliberately fostered a feeling of Englishness, the first to write his letters in English and to prefer conversing in that language rather than in Norman French; a natural and charismatic leader who, if he did not invent English nationalism, certainly encouraged it and, along with it, a pride in nation and in race. While he was a master of propaganda and knew how to use the tricks of oratory, his repeated declaration that his chief concern was for the well-being and good governance of his realm and its people was genuinely meant. Of course, despite his oft-noted piety, he was not always a paragon of Christian virtue. He could be cruel and inflexible, ruthless, brutal, devious, short-tempered, frequently unreasonable and always convinced that he was under the personal protection of God, but nice men do not win wars and withal Henry V must rank as one of our great kings, if not our greatest.

  Well before he became king, Henry was determined to revive the English claims in France and to pursue them. Once he was king, embassies were sent to France and French embassies came to England. Initially, he asked only for recognition of Aquitaine as English in full sovereignty, but, as each request was turned down, the demands became stronger: everything agreed by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 was added, then the payment of the rest of Jean II’s ransom, then the duchy of Normandy, until by March 1415, in the requirements placed before the dauphin, Henry was stipulating the return of all the French lands lost by King John 200 years before, the hand of one of Charles VI’s daughters in marriage and the revival of the English claim to the French throne. Throughout, Henry emphasized that he only wanted what was his by right, but no French government, of whatever hue, could possibly agree to a restoration of King John’s Angevin empire. Although negotiations were allowed to drag on, Henry had already realized by the spring of 1414 that the French were merely playing for time and had no intention of even coming to an acceptable compromise. It is probable that, whatever the French might have offered, Henry would have wanted more: he had long since determined that he would take an army to France and the negotiations can only have been window-dressing.

  From early 1414, Henry began to prepare for war. Ships were impressed and purveyors travelled all over the kingdom buying up stores and equipment while captains and individuals were arrayed and indentured. By now, the system was that captains and leaders of retinues contracted either with a magnate or directly with the crown to provide a certain number of men of a certain type (archers, men-at-arms, gunners, artisans) at an agreed rate of daily pay. This had not changed in fifty years: thirteen shillings and fourpence for a duke; six shillings and eight pence for an earl; four shillings for a knight banneret; two shillings for a knight; one shilling for an untitled man-at-arms; and sixpence for an archer. As the shilling-a-day man-at-arms did exactly the same job as a two-shilling knight – stand in line with the infantry – there was a powerful incentive to do well and get knighted. For the first six months of a campaign, the rule was that the captain was paid half the total sum for his contingent on sealing the indenture – a piece of parchment on which the agreement was written twice and then torn across, with the captain keeping one part and the employer the other. Subsequent disagreements or accusations of forgery could be resolved by matching up the tears. It would then be agreed how subsequent six-month periods would be funded. In this campaign, indentures were for one year to begin with, which indicates that Henry expected a long war, but in 1414 the crown did not have the funds for more than a few months, never mind the initial six months; and even when in November 1414 Parliament granted the king a double subsidy – in effect, agreeing that the country would go to war – some of the leaders of retinues and captains were given jewels from the royal treasury as security, while the soldiers were paid from the contingent commander’s own pocket. Presumably, Henry was hoping f
or an early victory, or at least enough loot and ransom money to redeem his jewels and fund the campaign beyond the first six months – a considerable gamble by the ruler of around three million going to war against sixteen million. But then Henry had right, and God, on his side.

  Although neither Richard II nor Henry IV had changed the basic structure of English armies, the proportion of archers to men-at-arms had steadily increased since Crécy in 1346. Archers had shown their worth. They were flexible and could act as light infantry if necessary, while, when mounted, they could act as light cavalry and reconnaissance troops – and they were, of course, considerably cheaper than men-at-arms. By now, the accepted order of battle was three archers to one man-at-arms, and, although not every retinue or contingent was composed of soldiers in that proportion, the king’s officials ensured that overall the mix was the right one. Altogether, there were around 250 persons who contracted to provide a retinue of troops, varying in size from those of the great magnates such as the dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, brothers of the king, who were to produce 960 and 800 respectively, down to the more humble gentry, who might provide ten men or less, and in some cases just the contractee himself and one archer.

  In addition to the retinues – themselves far more numerous than in any previous English army – there were large numbers of men, mainly archers, who enlisted directly with the crown, rather than joining a retinue. These men would, of course, have to be formed into sub-units under selected commanders and would have to train together and be instructed in the army’s standard operating procedures. The assembly area for the army was laid down as being Southampton, and ships for the voyage were collected there and in other southern English ports, while the retinue commanders held their own musters and then marched to Southampton when ordered. Originally, the king had intended to concentrate the army by 1 July 1415, but inevitably things took longer than hoped. The duke of Gloucester held his muster near Romsey on 16 July and took under command 190 men-at-arms and 610 archers from fifty-six sub-retinues, while the duke of Clarence in the New Forest enlisted his 800 from sixty-nine separate units.39 Altogether, there were probably around 12,000 soldiers – 9,000 archers and 3,000 men-at-arms – ready to embark for France, the largest English army assembled since the time of Edward III, but the total number would have been much greater than just the combat troops. Henry had also enlisted a company of 120 miners from the Forest of Dean, and there were seventy-five artillerymen, numerous bowyers, fletchers, farriers, blacksmiths, armourers, bakers, butchers, and a plethora of servants, grooms, clerks and pages, to say nothing of churchmen and surgeons.

  The chroniclers generally say that 1,500 ships were needed to transport the force, although some historians consider that to be yet another exaggeration. Altogether, the number of men to be embarked may have been in the region of 14,000, not counting the ships’ crews, and in addition there were horses, baggage carts, stores, rations for both men and horses, siege engines, cannon, ammunition for the guns and resupplies of arrows for the archers. Stores included large numbers of tents, and rations included salted meat and fish, ale, flour for bread, and beef on the hoof, along with their drovers. Given the number of men, horses, cattle and all the accompanying baggage to be transported, a huge number of ships would indeed be needed; and, given also that both Thomas of Walsingham, generally recognized to be one of the most accurate of contemporary historians, and the anonymous writer of Gesta Henrici Quinti,40 who accompanied the expedition, give a figure of 1,500, there seems no reason to doubt it, particularly as the vagaries of wind and weather would preclude any idea of shuttling the force to France using fewer ships.

  With such huge numbers of men, animals and ships being concentrated, it was impossible to hide that these were warlike preparations, and the French embassies that were still coming and going almost to the last moment were fully aware of what was going on and reporting everything back to their masters. If Henry could not hide the fact that he was assembling an invasion force, then he had to conceal its destination. Apart from a very few trusted senior commanders and one or two ships’ captains, nobody knew where the invasion force was headed. Most observers and participants, French and English, assumed that the landing would be at Calais, which was strongly held by the English and represented the shortest way across the Channel; others thought the king might repeat the route of Edward III’s expedition of 1346 and land somewhere on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, or that of the Black Prince in 1356 and launch the invasion from Bordeaux. It was not until very late in the day that ships’ crews were informed of their destination, and that only when all troops and stores were on board.

  Meanwhile, the last opposition to the Lancastrian inheritance was snuffed out. When the king was at Portchester, supervising the final arrangements for the expedition, the young earl of March sought an audience and reported the existence of an assassination plot by unreconstructed Ricardians. As the beneficiary of Henry’s murder would presumably have been the earl, the rightful successor to Richard II by strict primogeniture, this seemingly selfless act was probably motivated by March’s realization that the plotters were incompetent, had no chance of succeeding, and would have been considered to have shown very bad form indeed at the outset of an expedition against the hated enemy, France. The ringleaders of the Southampton Plot, including yet another disaffected Scrope, were rounded up and executed after a hasty trial presided over by the king’s brother.

  The embarkation of the men and the loading of stores took three weeks, and, on 7 August 1415, King Henry and his immediate staff boarded Le Trinite, the largest ship in the fleet at 500 tons with a crew of 300, and hoisted a signal for all ships to concentrate off Southampton. Four days later, on Sunday, 11 August 1415, the fleet set sail for France. The destination: Harfleur.

  Today, there is very little left of medieval Harfleur, and the odd section of crumbling wall and the sluggish stream of the River Lézade that remain are subsumed in the suburbs of the sixteenth-century port of Le Havre. It was a sensible choice for Henry and his army. Harfleur was situated at the north of the mouth of the River Seine and its capture would allow the king the options of striking up the Seine straight for Paris, or west and then south for Rouen and Normandy, as well as giving him a port through which to receive reinforcements. It would also allow him to blockade a major French trading route and – equally important, given that the balance of power at sea had tilted towards the French – would eliminate a nest of pirates and prevent French galleys from getting out to sea from the shipyards at Rouen. Good choice it certainly was, and Henry hoped to capture it without too much delay, but in the event it would not be as easy a task as he thought.

  The crossing from Southampton took three days and, on 14 August, the first ships hove to off what the English still called Saint-Denis Chef du Caux,83 on the coast six-and-a-half miles due west of Harfleur. An amphibious operation, whether of the fifteenth or twenty-first century, is at its most vulnerable during the landing phase, but the French made no attempt to oppose Henry. They must have known from fishermen that the invasion force was on its way, and, had they had any sort of coastal watch like that in England, they could easily have identified the landing area and caused carnage among both the disembarking troops as they struggled up through the surf and the horses and cattle as they were winched over ships’ sides and then swam to dry land. As it was, Henry’s men went unmolested for the three days that it took to get the force ashore. It was at this time that the king issued strict orders concerning the behaviour of the troops. The usual practice of slaughtering, burning and looting was to cease: Henry was the legitimate king of France and he was not going to ill-treat his own subjects. No man of the cloth or any woman was to be molested unless they had a weapon and were obviously of aggressive intent, and churches and other sacred places were to be respected. Prostitutes were forbidden to approach the army’s encampment and, if found in the lines, were to have their left arms broken before being expelled. The prohibition was presumably a se
curity measure rather than a moral stricture.

  On 18 August, an advance party under the duke of Clarence marched off to surround Harfleur, just too late to prevent a reinforcement of 400 men-at-arms from slipping in through the south-eastern gate, but in plenty of time to intercept a slow-moving convoy of gunpowder and crossbow quarrels from Rouen. Harfleur was around three miles in circumference. It was surrounded by a thick, high wall in good repair with a number of towers, and the three gates, on the north-east, south-east and south-west corners, were well protected by stout barbicans that had been reinforced by tree-trunks, driven into the ground and lashed together, with packed earth behind.84 There was a deep, stone-lined moat, two spear lengths wide (twenty feet) according to one chronicler,41 to make mining difficult, and a series of banks and ditches on all approaches. The land round about was flat and marshy, and the French soon broached the ditches and flooded much of the countryside. The garrison, now of 700 men-at-arms, was led by a competent commander, the sire de Goucourt, who had commanded the reinforcements and who had ample guns and sufficient rations to withstand a siege of at least a month, by which time he would surely be relieved from Rouen, only fifty miles or two days’ forced march away.

  As we have seen, cannon had made no great impact during the campaigns of Edward III and the Black Prince: they may have been used at Crécy and there were some present at the siege of Calais, but they had contributed little to the end results. Under Henry IV, however, the science of artillery had progressed, and indeed both defenders and attackers at Harfleur used guns. Eventually, guns and gunpowder would force the abandonment of the entire medieval system of defence and fortification, one which relied on high walls and moats, and, although that time was not yet, guns were to play an increasingly important part in the war from now on. Henry V had appointed the first Master of Ordnance,85 whose duty it was to supervise the manufacture of cannon and the storage of guns and ammunition in the Tower of London. At this stage, most shot was still stone balls, to be replaced by iron later in the war, and cannon barrels were still made of bars of iron held together by hoops of the same material. The powder was unreliable as the type of saltpetre used was slow-burning and the practice of ‘graining’ – whereby the right combination of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal was mixed, liquefied and then dried out to produce a faster-burning propellant and hence a higher muzzle velocity – was not yet standard. Guns were still dangerous to their crews and there were some spectacular self-inflicted disasters, when the gunners put in too much powder and only succeeded in bursting the barrel and killing themselves. But, if all went well, they could discharge projectiles of up to 200 pounds in weight and knock holes in walls (eventually); and they could, if correctly positioned, fire over walls and cause considerable damage to houses and people within. Guns were still heavy, awkward and of limited range, so, while useful in a siege, they had yet to fully develop as field artillery.