Henry was well aware that his only hope was to make the French attack him. If he could panic them into a precipitate attack, so much the better, and the means to do just that was at hand. The overall commander of the archers was the sixty-year-old Sir Thomas Erpingham. A native of East Anglia, he had been a soldier from the age of thirteen, when he had accompanied his father to Aquitaine in the service of the Black Prince; he had campaigned with John of Gaunt in Spain and with the future King Henry IV in Lithuania, Prussia and Palestine; he had fought the Scots, the Welsh and the French: Erpingham was a true professional and there was little that he did not know about soldiering. He had directed his archers to their positions, supervised the hammering in of stakes, the stringing of bows and the placing of each archer’s arrows in the ground in front of him, cantering from one flank to another as he ensured that his men knew what they had to do. Now, at a signal from the king, Sir Thomas trotted out ahead of the English line and hurled his baton in the air. It was the signal for the archers to unloose hell.
In the first thirty seconds, 25,000 arrows fell upon the French. The target area was such that no archer needed to pick a specific target; he just had to ensure that his arrow fell anywhere on the French army. The result was chaos, horror and surprise. Shot at extreme range, the heavy war arrows falling out of the sky were far too many to dodge, even if the packed ranks of men-at-arms gave any room for ducking and diving, and the only option – or so it seemed to someone on the French side, probably one of the royal dukes – was to order an immediate assault by the leading division, which began to move down the slight slope towards the English line. What should have happened now was for the French crossbowmen and archers to provide missile support until their line closed with the English, and for the cavalry then to attack the archers. It did not happen. The mounted knights on the flanks, stung by clouds of arrows to which they had no reply, bundled the crossbowmen out of the way, or rode over them, and launched a headlong charge against the English flanks. Headlong it may have been to start with, but over newly ploughed land on which rain had been falling all night, it soon slowed to a procession through the mud, with horses sinking to their fetlocks and soon barely out of a trot. Those riders that did cover the 300 yards between the armies found their horses blown and their way barred by a hedge of stakes. In the one-and-a-half minutes that the French heavy cavalry would have taken to reach the English, the archers would have discharged 75,000 arrows, not all at the horsemen, but enough to wound and kill men and madden and cripple horses.
A horse will not normally bolt, whatever the situation, and the medieval bit would have pulled up a charging elephant. But these horses were terrified and in great pain; arrows were stuck in their rumps, breasts and necks, and blood was streaming from their wounds. Heads thrown in the air, riders sawing ineffectually at their mouths, they panicked and charged wherever they could to escape the hail of arrows, and in many cases this meant bursting through their own infantry still plodding down the slope. The infantry, already seriously disorganized and disorientated by the arrow storm and exhausted by struggling through the mud in their full armour, were now even more disrupted, but they did, at last, slipping and sliding, hit the English line. Even if only half the leading French division survived to close with their enemy, they still outnumbered the English men-at-arms by two-and-a-half to one, and at first numbers told and the English began to give ground. The fighting was intense, particularly around the centre of each division where the commanders and their banners were. The duke of York was killed on the right, the king himself stood over the stunned body of his brother, the duke of Gloucester, and sustained a severe blow to the head that dented his helmet in the process, but then the archers changed roles and became light infantry.
Over the last fifty yards or so of the advance of the French, the archers had been shooting directly at them, and at that range the narrow bodkin arrowhead would go through plate armour, causing yet more death and destruction. Once the lines closed, however, the archers had done their duty and no more might have been expected of them. Unlike the French missile arm, however, these were not cowed foreign mercenaries but free-born Englishmen, and, dropping their bows and drawing their long knives, the archers stepped out from behind their protective stakes and attacked the French in flank. Normally, an armoured knight would have nothing to fear from such a lightly armed opponent, but, faced by English men-at-arms in front and the knifemen at flank and rear who stabbed though visors and severed hamstrings from behind, the French could take no more and the tide of battle quickly turned. Those in front tried to retreat but could not do so in the press of men from the second battle coming behind them, and soon knights and men-at-arms began to surrender, first in ones and twos and then in whole sub-units.
It was at this stage that the English baggage-train came under attack. When the army moved forward from Maisoncelle in the morning, the baggage followed so that the runners bringing the resupply of arrows had less distance to travel. It is uncertain who actually attacked the wagons. It was probably not the third, mounted French battle, many of whose members, seeing how the wind blew, or did not blow, had wisely left for home; it may have been the local landowner with a levy of his tenants, who would have known the paths through the woods, enabling them to get behind the English without being seen. Whoever it was, the balance could now swing back in favour of the French: the unblooded third battle might come back, the large number of surrendered knights, outnumbering their captors in many cases, might decide to reconsider their surrender, and there were plenty of weapons lying about the field for them to pick up. The only way to ensure that the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of prisoners could not renege and restart the battle was to kill them, and that is what Henry ordered. The men-at-arms demurred: not only was this extremely bad form but also the prisoners represented very large sums of money in the shape of ransoms. The archers had no such inhibitions, and the butchering of the prisoners began. The attack on the baggage-train was beaten off, those French who could do so fled and the third battle made no attempt to return. The Battle of Agincourt was over.
It was a great and stunning victory, ranking with Blenheim in 1704, Waterloo in 1815 and Amiens in 1918. The French dead included Eduard, duke of Bar, Antoine, duke of Brabant, Jean, duke of Alençon, Charles d’Albret, constable of France, nine counts, ninety barons, 1,500 knights and several thousand lesser nobility, although how many were killed in battle and how many as prisoners is not known. The dukes of Orléans and Bourbon were taken prisoner, as were the counts of Richemont, Vendôme and Eu, and the marshal of France.95 It was the greatest slaughter ever of the French nobility, from which it never really recovered. Today, the killing of the prisoners would be regarded as murder and a war crime, but Henry had little option. Many of the prisoners had surrendered many times and had then slipped away when no one was looking. If they were allowed to re-enter the fray, Henry’s tiny army could yet be defeated. He did what he had to do, and no one at the time – not even the French – criticized him for it. On the English side, casualties were few, although probably more than were admitted to, with only the duke of York, the earl of Suffolk and two newly dubbed knights mentioned in the Gesta. If we assume that a French estimate of 600 English dead and wounded is too high, then the real figure is probably between 300 and 400.
There was little time to celebrate, for the army still had to get to Calais. The dead bodies were stripped of anything wearable, for the English army’s clothing was falling apart, and left for the local peasants first to plunder and then to bury. Four days later, on Tuesday, 29 October, the army had covered the forty-five miles to Calais; and, on 16 November, having received the Harfleur prisoners with their ransoms, Henry and his army sailed for Dover.
Statue of Bertrand du Guesclin in Dinan, near his birthplace. Hardly qualifying as a hero, he was the nearest the French could get to one. Essentially a Breton mercenary, he rose from humble origins to be Constable of France, from a very small pool of candidates.
10
THE PRIDE AND THE FALL
Agincourt was the high-water mark of English military supremacy. England possessed a mobile army of professional soldiers who dismounted to fight on foot supported by longbowmen and were commanded by an experienced and capable officer class; the combination had proved unbeatable. Furthermore, with a popular and successful king, there was little incentive for internal strife or rebellion, and there was a parliament that was happy to fund English ambitions. If only Henry had lived.
As it was, Henry’s crossing to Dover on 16 November 1415 took all day – the weather was appalling and the chroniclers remark on his immunity to sea-sickness. From Dover he went to Barham, then to Canterbury, on to Eltham and eventually, on 23 November, to London. The citizens of London, and indeed of the realm as a whole, had heard nothing after the siege of Harfleur; they knew that the army was heading for Calais, but that was all and rumours of disaster and defeat abounded. When on 29 October the news of the great victory of Agincourt reached London and was carried to all parts of the kingdom by heralds on fast horses, joy knew no bounds. The king’s welcome by the Londoners was rapturous: he was escorted into the city from Blackheath, the streets were hung with flags and bunting, the mayor and aldermen paraded in full fig, as did the clergy and the city guilds; and on London Bridge he was greeted by a troupe of dancing virgins while the common people lined the route and cheered.
Agincourt was a great boost to English prestige and it terrified the French, who, for the time being at least, would avoid facing the English in open battle, preferring instead to lock themselves up in castles and fortified towns. It was not, however, a great strategic, as opposed to tactical, victory. Had the English army been larger, it could have struck for Paris immediately after Agincourt and won the war, but a professional army is necessarily a small army, and the huge disparity in populations meant that, to have any realistic chance of subduing the whole of France, Henry would need to find allies. In the meantime, the French had appointed Bernard of Armagnac as constable of France in succession to Charles d’Albret, who had been killed at Agincourt, while in the same year the ineffectual dauphin Louis died, to be replaced as heir apparent by his almost as ineffectual brother, Jean of Tourraine.
Henry spent most of 1416 in England while the French attempted to regain Harfleur. They managed to ambush a foraging party under the captain of Harfleur, Thomas Beaufort himself, and very nearly captured him, but were finally beaten off near the outskirts of the town. Meanwhile, peace negotiations dragged on, with both the Holy Roman Emperor and the count of Hainault attempting to mediate. The emperor, the German Sigismund, was trying to finally heal the schism in the church: the existence of two popes, each supported by different warring factions, made mediation by the Holy See impracticable. If he could broker a peace between England and France, then together they could resolve which pope was the legitimate one. Sigismund arrived in England in April 1416, to be sharply reminded on landing by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester – the brother of the king who, having recovered from his near-death experience at Agincourt, was even more xenophobic than most Englishmen – that the imperial writ did not run in England. Sigismund tried to arrange a meeting at Calais between Henry V and the new dauphin, but the new constable of France convinced his master that he could defeat the English and the meeting never happened. In the end, Sigismund realized that he could not achieve peace between England and France – the French would not offer more and Henry would not demand less. He seems to have broadly accepted the merits of Henry’s claims, and in August the emperor and the king signed the Treaty of Canterbury, which, while giving England little of significance, did further isolate France.
As Sigismund was deliberating with Henry and his council in England, the French made another attempt to recapture Harfleur, by blockading the port with their fleet. On 15 August, John, duke of Bedford, another brother of the king, set sail with a relieving army said to number around 4,000 archers and 3,000 men-at-arms. The troops were transported mainly in balingers – small, single-masted and square-rigged boats of around 100 tons, equipped with oars for inshore work and able to carry forty soldiers – and probably two or three carracks, the ocean-going ancestors of the galleon, each with three or four masts and high platforms front and rear, and able to carry 200 or so men. The chronicles say that Bedford had 100 ships and, if three of them were carracks, then the size of the army would probably have been around 5,000. As this was going to be a sea battle, the ratio of archers to men-at-arms was less than it would be on land, as what was needed was men to board and fight hand to hand, with less reliance on missile support. The French had obviously forgotten the lessons of Sluys (which had admittedly been fought a long time ago): although outnumbered, had they come out to sea, the greater manoeuvrability of their galleys might have given them a fighting chance, or at least allowed them to withdraw unmolested. But, as it was, they stayed in the mouth of the Seine and allowed the English fleet to close. Once the grappling irons had pulled the ships together, the French had no chance: the English men-at-arms stormed aboard and the massacre began. The French were said to have lost around 1,500 men killed, the English less than half that. The remnants of the French fleet fled across the estuary to Honfleur, where shoals and sandbanks prevented the English from following.
In November 1416, Parliament met and agreed with the king that another expedition would be necessary to force the French to see justice. This time Henry would subdue France piece by piece, beginning with Normandy. The money was voted, taxes imposed, loans raised, and in the spring of 1417 recruiting of soldiers and impressment of ships began. Henry was well aware that after Agincourt no French army would face him in open field. If he was to bring Normandy back to its true allegiance, he would have to do it by capturing the cities, and that meant large quantities of siege engines and cannon with the requisite ammunition. Cannon-balls were still mostly of stone, but a primitive form of incendiary shell had been developed consisting of a hollow iron ball stuffed with tow soaked in pitch.
In June 1417, the earl of Huntingdon was despatched with a naval squadron to chase off some Genoese ships in French service based in Honfleur. Once he had sunk, captured or caused them to flee, the main army of around 10,000 all ranks, in the rough proportion of three archers to one man-at-arms, embarked at Southampton on 30 July and landed at the mouth of the River Touques, just north of Deauville, on 2 August. Progress was swift and Henry was aided by a resurgence of civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions. The Armagnacs, supporting the dauphin, would not treat with England, but Jean the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, was ambivalent: he would not openly side with Henry but he would not attack him either, unless it looked as if his interests were threatened. From the bridgehead at Touques, the English navy ferried men, stores and siege engines along the coast and up the River Orne, and the siege of Caen began in mid-August 1417.
Long sieges did not suit the English way of waging war. England relied on mobile, rapidly moving armies that could march out of trouble if faced by far larger but ponderous enemies, and in any case being static for long periods attracted sickness. English siege commanders cut corners – they had to – and, as soon as there seemed to be the slightest chance of success, they tended to order an assault, always assuming that the garrison could not be persuaded to surrender first. After blocking all routes in and out of Caen and bombarding the city, the English army assaulted over the walls on 4 September. Then began the usual horror suffered by a civilian population in a town stormed by English soldiers, as the men, fired up by the lust of battle and the adrenalin of the attack, took revenge for the dangers they faced and the death of their comrades on anyone who was foolish enough to be on the streets. If there was nobody on the streets to rape, plunder and kill, then the houses were broken into and anything movable was appropriated and anyone resisting (and many who were not) slaughtered. The garrison had evacuated the town and taken refuge in the citadel and, once the English army had been brought under control once
more, that too was invested. On 21 September, the garrison, bereft of any hope of help from Paris, surrendered.
There was always a problem with English soldiers, who, once they had stormed a town, saw plunder and rapine as their right. As, however, Henry maintained that the citizens of France were his subjects, he had no wish to make war upon them. Those citizens who resisted, on the other hand, could be considered traitors and dealt with accordingly, and that formed the basis of some sort of excuse, albeit a rather feeble one, for the treatment meted out to civilians. The fate of Caen was, however, salutary: other towns smaller or less well fortified drew the obvious inference and surrendered before they were invested. By November, a wide swathe of territory between Verneuil and Alençon had been taken; in the middle of the month, the dukes of Brittany, Anjou and Maine signed a treaty of neutrality with Henry, to last for ten months. Falaise, the well-fortified birthplace of the Conqueror, held out but fell after a three-month siege on 16 February 1418. By the end of March, Bayeux, St Lô, Coutances, Avranches and Pontorson had either surrendered or been captured, and Cherbourg, at the end of the Cotentin peninsula, capitulated after a five-month siege on 27 September. During all this time, the Armagnacs were far too busy with the Burgundians to offer any respite to their embattled and besieged compatriots, while Henry studiously avoided any provocation to the duke of Burgundy and was careful not to appear to be threatening Paris, which was held by the Armagnacs but coveted by the Burgundians.
In June 1418, Louviers fell, a siege personally supervised by the king himself, and as a cannon-ball from the defenders had gone right through the royal tent, the gun crew responsible were duly hanged. The capital of Normandy, Rouen, still held out. It was not only a political objective but also an enormously rich town which housed the main French shipyards, and, although mastery at sea was now firmly in the hands of the English, it was important to keep it so and this meant the capture or destruction of the yards. In late July, Henry took Pont-de-l’Arche, just upstream of Rouen, and established an outpost there with a huge chain stretched across the river. With the English already controlling the mouth of the Seine, this meant that Rouen was cut off from any relief by water. The town was the strongest yet tackled by the English: the walls were five miles in circumference, the gates were well fortified by barbicans in good repair, and there were towers housing cannon at regular intervals. The garrison, said to be 4,000 men-at-arms – probably a lot less but still a very powerful force – was commanded by Guy Le Boutellier, an experienced and determined soldier. Well aware of what was happening in the rest of Normandy, he had ample time to prepare the city for a siege. He had levelled the suburbs outside the wall to offer no cover for the besiegers, the ditch around the walls had been deepened and the excavated earth used to construct a bank along the inside of the walls to absorb the shock of cannon fire, and rations and water had been stockpiled. So confident was he of holding out that refugees from all over Normandy had been allowed in, and many of the civilian population had been armed with crossbows.
A Great and Glorious Adventure Page 28