The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  Catherine’s marriage to this energetic young warrior-king represented the culmination of this audacious foreign policy. Kings of England had been fighting their French cousins for centuries, but only rarely with real success. Since 1337 the two kingdoms had been engaged in a period of particularly bitter hostility, which we now call the Hundred Years War. Many territorial claims, counter-claims and squabbles were folded into this complex and long-running dispute. Underpinning them all was a claim first made by Henry’s great-grandfather, Edward III, to be the rightful king of both realms. Not even Edward, a superb campaigner and wily politician, had managed to realise this aim, but in marrying Catherine, Henry was about to come tantalisingly close. With the treaty of Troyes, sealed in the city’s cathedral on 21 May, Henry had not only secured for himself a French bride. He also became, as he announced in a letter he dictated, ‘Henry by the Grace of God, King of England, Heir and Regent of the Realm of France, and Lord of Ireland’.2 The treaty of Troyes redirected the French succession, disinheriting Catherine’s seventeen-year-old brother Charles, the last surviving son of Charles VI and Queen Isabeau, in favour of Henry and his future children. The French crown would pass for the first time into English hands.

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  The treaty of Troyes and the royal marriage that followed were made possible by the woeful condition of the French crown. For nearly thirty years Charles VI had been suffering from a combination of paranoia, delusion, schizophrenia and severe depression, which came in bouts lasting for months at a time. He suffered his first attack while leading an army through the countryside near Le Mans on a hot day in August 1392. Dehydrated, highly stressed by a recent assassination attempt on one of his close friends, and frightened by a local madman who had shouted out that he faced treachery on the road ahead, he had been overcome by a violent fit and had attacked his companions with his sword, killing five of them in an hour-long rampage.3 It took him nearly six weeks to recover, and from this point his life was dogged by psychotic episodes.

  Physicians at the time blamed Charles’s mental abnormality on an excess of black bile, the ‘wet’ or melancholic humour which was thought to make men susceptible to stress and illness. It was also speculated that his weak constitution was inherited: Charles’s mother, Jeanne de Bourbon, had suffered a complete nervous breakdown following the birth of her seventh child, Isabelle. 4 Whatever the diagnosis, the political effects of the king’s condition were catastrophic. Incapacitating bouts of madness returned every year or so, crippling him physically and mentally. He would forget his own name and the fact that he was a king with a wife and children. He treated the queen with suspicion and hostility and tried to destroy plates and windows bearing her arms. At times he trembled and screamed that he felt as though a thousand sharp iron spikes were piercing his flesh. He would run wildly about the royal residence in Paris, known as the Hôtel St Pol, until he collapsed from exhaustion, worrying his servants so much that they walled up most of the palace doors to stop him from escaping and embarrassing himself in the street. He refused to bathe, change his clothes or sleep at regular intervals for months on end; on at least one occasion when servants broke into his chambers to attempt to wash and change him they found him mangy with the pox and covered in his own faeces. A regency council was established to rule France during his increasingly frequent periods of indisposition. Yet even when Charles was deemed sane enough to rule, his authority was debilitated by the fact that he might at any moment relapse into lunacy.

  The madness of King Charles had caused a power vacuum in France. All medieval crowns relied on a sane and stable head beneath them, and Charles VI’s derangement was responsible for – or at the very least severely exacerbated – a period of violent unrest and civil war which erupted in 1407 between two powerful and ruthless groups of French noblemen and their supporters. The initial protagonists were Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and Louis de Valois, duke of Orléans, who was the king’s brother. They quarrelled over land, personal differences and – above all – their relative influence over the regency council. When Louis of Orléans was stabbed to death in the streets of Paris on 23 November 1407 by fifteen masked men loyal to Philip the Bold’s son and heir John the Fearless, murder and treachery became the defining characteristics of French politics. Louis’s eldest son, Charles, built an alliance with his father-in-law, Bernard count of Armagnac, and France swiftly divided into two rival power blocs as the leading men of the realm split their allegiance between the warring parties. The stand-off between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs had begun.

  Henry V had played the two sides of the French civil war against one another with startling success. In 1412 he signed a treaty with the Armagnacs, offering them his support in return for a recognition of English lordship over several important territories in south-west France: Poitou, Angoulême and Périgord, all of which had ancient connections to the English crown. The treaty did not last long. By 1415 Henry had increased his demands to include English sovereignty over Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Brittany. This was no arbitrary clutch of estates: he was claiming the lands once controlled by his twelfth-century Plantagenet ancestors, Henry II and Richard the Lionheart. When the Armagnacs refused, Henry invaded Normandy and besieged and conquered Harfleur, the port town at the mouth of the Seine. He then raided his way across the French countryside before finally engaging an enormous French army at Agincourt on St Crispin’s Day, Friday 25 October 1415.

  The two armies met on a ploughed field, the mud beneath their feet thickened by heavy rain. Despite the size of the French army, which was perhaps six times as large as Henry’s, superior tactics and outstanding generalship gave the English the advantage. Henry relied heavily on the use of longbows, which were capable of causing havoc on a crowded battlefield. The king protected his archers from cavalry attacks by driving sharpened stakes into the ground around them. And the bowmen repaid him: firing volley after volley through the air towards the French and their horses, and the men-at-arms who attempted to cross the battlefield on foot. Numerical advantage meant nothing when the sky rained arrows, and a terrific slaughter ensued. In the words of one eyewitness, ‘the living fell on the dead, and others falling on the living were killed in turn.’ The deaths were disastrously one-sided: more than 10,000 Frenchmen were killed for the loss of perhaps as few as 150 English.5

  To prevent any threat of the enemy regrouping, Henry ordered thousands of prisoners and casualties to be killed when the battle was over, with only the highest-ranking spared for ransom. Yet despite this unchivalrous and ruthless command, he had won an astonishing victory, and was hailed as a hero. When the news of Agincourt reached England, wild parties broke out, and when Henry returned to London following the battle he was greeted like a new Alexander. Girls and boys dressed as angels with golden face-paint sang ‘Hail flower of England, knight of Christendom’, and huge mock-castles were erected in the streets. ‘It is not recorded’, wrote one admiring chronicler, ‘that any king of England ever accomplished so much in so short a time and returned to his own realm with so great and glorious a triumph.’6

  In the years that followed Agincourt, Henry returned to France to make even more spectacular gains. In July 1417 he launched a systematic conquest of Normandy, landing in the mouth of the river Touques, before besieging and brutally sacking Caen, followed by the important military towns of Exmes, Sées, Argentan, Alençon, Falaise, Avranches and Cherbourg, along with every significant town and castle in between.7 Rouen, the capital of the duchy, was besieged and starved inhumanly into submission between July 1418 and January 1419: refugees cast out of the city were refused passage through the English lines and simply left to die of hunger in no-man’s land. By the late summer Henry had become the first English king effectively in command of Normandy since his ancestor King John had been chased out by Philip II of France in 1204. Paris lay within his sights.

  With the English menacing their way down the Seine towards the French capital, all of France descended into terri
fied chaos. Had the Burgundians and Armagnacs been able to resolve their differences and oppose Henry as one, the realm might have been saved. They could not. At a crisis meeting held between the factions on a bridge in the town of Montereau on 10 September 1419, John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy – who had claimed control of the king, queen and court – was murdered by an Armagnac loyalist who smashed his face and head with an axe. (Many years later the duke’s skull was kept as a curiosity by the Carthusian monks at Dijon; the prior of the monastery, showing the skull to the visiting King François I, explained that it was through the hole in his cranium that the English had entered France.) Queen Isabeau and the Burgundians now viewed any other end to the war as preferable to making peace with the detested and treacherous Armagnacs. They sued for peace with Henry, offering him the greatest gift in their possession: the French crown.8 Charles VI was so far gone that he was quite unfit to take part in the negotiations pertaining to the future of his own crown. The peace was sealed in the cathedral of Troyes on 21 May 1420. Its very first clause provided for the marriage of the princess Catherine and Henry V, king of England and now ‘Heir and Regent of the Realm of France’.

  Catherine’s marriage was therefore momentous for both royal houses. French princesses had married Plantagenet kings before: indeed, it was the union between Edward II of England and Isabella of France in 1308 that had mingled rival royal blood sufficiently to provoke the Hundred Years War in the first place. Never before, however, had an English and a French dynasty come together with the specific aim of settling their two crowns on a single king, as would now be the case whenever the merciful death of the poor, demented, fifty-one-year-old Charles finally came.

  The ceremony had its moments of splendour. One later chronicler recorded that on their betrothal Henry had given Catherine a beautiful and priceless ring as a token of his esteem.9 He certainly gave a generous cash gift of two hundred nobles to the church in which they were married. French protocol was followed, so a procession would have made its way on the night of the wedding to the couple’s chamber, where the archbishop blessed the royal bed and gave them soup and wine for their supper.10

  When Henry’s English guests wrote newsletters home, they referred to the celebrations in only the most cursory fashion. There were more important matters at hand. Immediately after the couple were married, the king told the knights in his company that they would be leaving Troyes directly the next day to lay siege to Sens, a day’s march to the west, where Catherine’s brother Charles, now a pretender to the throne, was ensconced with his Armagnac supporters. There would be no ceremonial jousting held to mark the royal wedding. According to a Parisian diarist of the times, Henry told his men that fighting for real at Sens was of infinitely greater value than the mock-battle of the tournament field: ‘We may all tilt and joust and prove our daring and worth, for there is no finer act of courage in the world than to punish evildoers so that poor people can live.’11

  As Henry and his followers marched off to pursue their long and bloody war, Catherine was allowed to travel with her mother and father. She spent the winter watching her husband’s men move from town to town, laying sieges and either starving or slaughtering their enemies into submission. On 1 December 1420 she watched as her father accompanied Henry on his first formal entry into Paris, where the treaty of Troyes was formalised and the official process of disinheriting her brother – referred to in official English documents as ‘Charles, bearing himself for the Dauphin’ – was completed.12 Two months later Catherine set sail from Calais for Dover, leaving behind the country of her birth to begin a new life across the sea. She landed on 1 February 1421 and immediately prepared for her coronation.

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  The England in which Catherine arrived early in 1421 was a strong, stable realm, more politically united under Henry’s leadership than perhaps at any time in its history.13 During the long centuries of Plantagenet rule, English kings had steadily increased the scope of their power, governing in (usually) fruitful consultation with their great magnates, barons, the commons in parliament and the Church. England was unmistakeably a war state, taxed hard to pay for adventure overseas, but in the aftermath of Agincourt and the steady succession of victories that followed, the realm endured its financial burdens buoyed by a strong sense of triumph. Although Thomas Walsingham, a monastic chronicler based in St Albans, Hertfordshire, wrote that the year preceding Catherine’s arrival had been one ‘in which there had been a desperate shortage and want of money … even among the ordinary people scarcely enough pennies remained for them to be able to lay up sufficient supplies of corn’, he noted that it was also ‘a year of fertile crops and a rich harvest of fruit’.14

  The most common medieval analogy for a state was the literal body politic, with the king as the head. ‘When the head is infirm, the body is infirm. Where a virtuous king does not rule, the people are unsound and lack good morals,’ wrote the contemporary poet and moralist John Gower.15 In this respect, England and France could not have been more different. Henry was without doubt a virtuous – perhaps even a virtuoso – king and his realm had accordingly flourished. He had enjoyed a thorough political education in adolescence that in adulthood manifested itself in strong and capable kingship based confidently on his birthright. He was personally charismatic, liked and trusted by his leading nobles, and successful enough in war to create a tight-knit military fraternity. He had three loyal and able brothers: Thomas duke of Clarence, John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester, all of whom were of great value both in governing the realm and in pursuing the war abroad. Henry met with the approval of the English Church for his vigour in hunting out Lollards, a heretical sect who followed the teachings of the scholar John Wycliffe and held unorthodox views about the dogma of the Catholic Church and the validity of her teachings. He taxed his realm relentlessly, but his personal household expenses were markedly frugal, his exchequer competently run and his war debts relatively controlled. He pleased the people in the shires of England with a tough but impartial drive to re-establish the rule of royal law and stamp out the disorder that had bedevilled his father’s reign. Criminals were often drafted into military service, where their violent instincts could be safely satisfied pillaging and burning among the villages of France.16

  May gracious God now save our king,

  His people and his well-willing;

  Give him good live and good ending,

  That we with mirth may safely sing,

  Deo gracias! [Thanks be to God!]17

  So went a popular song of the time – and with good reason, for the prosperous kingdom of England reflected all the virtue of its mighty ruler.

  Catherine’s place in her new realm was established immediately on her arrival. The French chronicler Monstrelet heard that she was ‘received as if she had been an angel of God’.18 The nineteen-year-old queen was provided with a personal staff of her husband’s choosing. The information that reached Walsingham from court was that the queen’s household consisted almost entirely of noble Englishwomen. ‘Nor did any Frenchman remain in her service except for three women of good birth and two maidservants.’19 On 24 February she was crowned at the church of St Peter in Westminster, and celebrated with a feast attended by most of the English nobility and James I, king of Scotland, a long-term captive at the English court. ( James had been seized by pirates off the English coast in 1406 when he was twelve and had inherited the crown during his captivity, over the course of which he also received a full education and was generally treated as an honoured guest.) The feast was a showcase for English cuisine. Since it was Lent, no meat was served, but the tables groaned with eels, trout, salmon, lampreys, halibut, shrimps and prawns, great crabs and lobsters, whelks, jellies decorated with fleurs-de-lis, sweet porridges and creams. The ‘subtleties’ – non-edible but visually extraordinary dishes that announced each course of the meal – featured pelicans, panthers, and a man riding on the back of a tiger. In each subtlety the new queen was represented a
s St Catherine with her wheel, defending the honour of the Church.20

  After the coronation, Catherine left Westminster and joined the king on a tour of the midlands. She travelled through Hertford, Bedford and Northampton on her way to Leicester, where she celebrated Easter with Henry. She found England a profitable and hospitable country. ‘From the cities thus visited the king and queen received precious gifts of gold and silver from the citizens and prelates of each town,’ wrote the chronicler John Strecche.21 But Henry did not tarry long in England. Shortly after Easter he received news that his eldest brother, the duke of Clarence, his deputy and lieutenant in France, had died fighting in Normandy. The war would not wait, and in June 1421 the king and queen crossed the channel again for Calais. Catherine was three months pregnant.

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  The queen’s condition meant that she did not stay long in France. She left Henry campaigning against her brother and returned to England to give birth to a rival heir to the French crown. For good fortune on the perilous journey through childbirth Catherine brought with her a treasured relic: the foreskin of the Holy Infant, which was known to be a valuable aid to women in labour.22 With its help she delivered a healthy baby boy in the royal palace at Windsor on 6 December, the feast day of St Nicholas. Every bell in London was rung at once to celebrate the news, and Te Deums were sung in the city’s churches.23 Inevitably, the child was named after his father. But the two Henries were never to meet.

  Henry V’s heroic victories on the battlefield had enabled him to manufacture a situation in which he could claim to be the rightful king of two realms. The task of turning this into a political reality, however, strained every fibre of his formidable being. His intervention in French politics had deepened the rift between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, since to the latter the war now appeared to be nothing less than a struggle for existence. Forces loyal to the dauphin dug in, garrisoning castles wherever they could, determined to resist Henry at any cost. Conquest, it was clear, would be a slow and increasingly draining endeavour.