Agincourt

by Juliet Barker

  Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r’s revolt began as a private property dispute between himself and his Anglo-Welsh neighbour Reginald Gray, lord of Ruthin, but it swiftly escalated into a national rebellion because it tapped into both anti-English sentiment in Wales and hostility to the new Lancastrian monarchy in England. Perhaps the most dangerous point came in 1403 when the greatest and most powerful family in the north of England, the Percys, joined forces with Glyn Dw?246-136?r. The Percys had been among Henry IV’s closest allies and had played a major role in helping him to the throne. Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, had been rewarded with the posts of constable of England and warden of the west march of Scotland; his son, the Harry “Hotspur” later made famous by Shakespeare, had been made warden of the east march and justiciar (chief minister) of north Wales; and Henry’s brother Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, became admiral of England, steward of the royal household, king’s lieutenant in south Wales and governor to the prince of Wales. This formidable alliance now determined to depose Henry IV and replace him with the twelve-year-old Edmund Mortimer, earl of March. (Mortimer’s claim to the English throne was better than Henry IV’s, since he was descended from an elder son of Edward III; the Mortimers had twice been recognised formally by the childless Richard II as his heirs, but when Richard was deposed in 1399, the earl was a child of eight whose rights were as easily swept aside as those of the young French princesses in 1316 and 1321.)18

  The alliance between the Percys and Glyn Dw?246-136?r gave Prince Henry his first experience of what was a relatively rare event, even in medieval times: a full-scale pitched battle. It was to be a salutary experience. A force of some four thousand rebels, led by Hotspur, took up a defensive position on a ridge three miles outside the town of Shrewsbury; the king and his son marched out of the town with an army some five thousand strong. Last-minute negotiations having failed to avert conflict, the battle began about midday on 21 July 1403 with a hail of arrows from the veteran bowmen of the prince’s own county of Cheshire. Unfortunately for him, they had taken the rebel side and he was on the receiving end. As the royal army struggled up the slope, the Welsh and Cheshire archers drew “so fast that . . . the sun which at that time was bright and clear then lost its brightness so thick were the arrows” and Henry’s men fell “as fast as leaves fall in autumn after the hoar-frost.” An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince full in the face but he refused to withdraw, fearing the effect it would have on his men. Instead he led the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that continued till nightfall, by which time Hotspur was dead, his uncle Thomas, earl of Worcester, was a prisoner and the Percy rebellion was over.19

  Henry had survived his first major battle but his powers of endurance were to be tested further. A way had to be found of extracting the arrow that had entered his face on the left side of his nose. The shaft was successfully removed but the arrowhead remained embedded six inches deep in the bone at the back of his skull. Various “wise leeches” or doctors were consulted and advised “drinks and other cures,” all of which failed. In the end it was the king’s surgeon, a convicted (but pardoned) coiner of false money, John Bradmore, who saved the prince and the day. He devised a small pair of hollow tongs the width of the arrowhead with a screw-like thread at the end of each arm and a separate screw mechanism running through the centre. The wound had to be enlarged and deepened before the tongs could be inserted and this was done by means of a series of increasingly large and long probes made from “the pith of old elder, well dried and well stitched in purified linen cloth . . . [and] infused with rose honey.” When Bradmore judged that he had reached the bottom of the wound, he introduced the tongs at the same angle as the arrow had entered, placed the screw in the centre and manoeuvred the instrument into the socket of the arrowhead. “Then, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead.” He cleansed the wound by washing it out with white wine and placed into it new probes made of wads of flax soaked in a cleansing ointment, which he had prepared from an unlikely combination of bread sops, barley, honey and turpentine oil. These he replaced every two days with shorter wads until, on the twentieth day, he was able to announce with justified pride that “the wound was perfectly well cleansed.” A final application of “dark ointment” to regenerate the flesh completed the process.20

  The pain the prince must have suffered in the course of this lengthy operation is unimaginable: basic anaesthesia, based on plasters of opium, henbane, laudanum or hemlock, was understood and practised in medieval times but it was unpredictable and inefficient. It says something for Henry’s constitution that he survived the operation and avoided septicaemia afterwards. A wound of such magnitude in such a prominent place would surely have scarred the prince for life, but no mention of any blemish of this kind is made by contemporaries, though it is possibly the reason why Henry’s only surviving portrait shows him in profile, rather than in the three-quarter-face position favoured by all other medieval English kings.21

  If nothing else, the battle of Shrewsbury must have taught Henry the value of archers and surgeons; both would be deployed in numbers at Agincourt. Nevertheless, Shrewsbury was an exceptional event, and for most of the best part of a decade that Henry spent campaigning in Wales, he was preoccupied with the far more mundane and tedious business of besieging castles, routing out rebels and, worst of all, ensuring that his men were paid and supplied. Letters written to his father at this time reveal that the prince had become a competent, if battle-hardened, veteran, who thought nothing of burning and laying waste rebel-held territory, pausing only to comment, without irony, that it was “a fine and populous country.” When a rebel chieftain was captured and offered to raise five hundred pounds within a fortnight for his ransom, Henry casually informed his father that “we couldn’t accept it, so we killed him.” The authentic voice of the pious victor of Agincourt also rings out in his announcement of a defeat inflicted by his household on a superior force of rebels: “it is proof that Victory does not depend on a multitude of people but, as was well demonstrated in that place, on the power of God.”22

  In the longer term, victory required not only military success but also the establishment of peace. Here, too, the prince showed his mettle, building up around him a tightly knit group of tried and trusted councillors, retainers and servants, most of whom were to serve him for the rest of his life. Foremost among these were two young soldier-aristocrats who had much in common with the young prince and became his loyal retainers. Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was five years older, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, four: both, like Henry himself, were sons of the so-called Appellant earls, who had challenged Richard II’s autocratic style of government and reaped a bitter harvest in consequence. Arundel’s father had been executed, Warwick’s sentenced to life imprisonment, Henry’s exiled: all had had their estates forfeited by Richard II and, after his deposition, restored by Henry IV. Arundel and Warwick had distinguished military lineages, their ancestors having fought with Henry’s at Crécy and Poitiers, and both were knighted with Prince Henry on the eve of Henry IV’s coronation. As they each owned extensive estates in Wales, they were involved in the military campaigns against Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r from the start, and Warwick, who distinguished himself at the battle of Shrewsbury, was rewarded by being made a Knight of the Garter at the age of twenty-one. Arundel, as we have seen, was entrusted with the leadership of the expedition to France in aid of the duke of Burgundy in 1411; Warwick accompanied him and both men were present at the battle of St Cloud. The two earls would play important roles in the Agincourt campaign but, by an ironic twist of fate, would both be deprived of the opportunity to take part in the greatest military victory of Henry’s reign.23

  Aristocrats like Arundel, Warwick and Edward, duke of York, who all had landowning interests in Wales and on its borders, were Henry’s natural allies, but he did not neglect the lesser men, the knights and esquires from Herefordshire and Shropshire, who also had an interest in pacifying the
ir troublesome neighbour. His appointments to key offices in Wales were usually made from this highly experienced group of soldiers-cum-administrators, whose local knowledge was invaluable, but he was also prepared to promote Welshmen who had proved their worth and loyalty, despite parliamentary enactments to the contrary. Royal finances in Wales were restored by two equally judicious appointments which reflect the prince’s willingness to draw on expertise wherever he found it. John Merbury, who would recruit twenty men-at-arms and five hundred archers from south Wales for the Agincourt campaign, was a self-made Herefordshire esquire who had a history of long and loyal service to both John of Gaunt and Henry IV. Thomas Walton, on the other hand, was a clergyman, a young Cambridge graduate and honorary canon of St John’s at Chester, whom Henry plucked from obscurity.24 Talent, rather than status or connections, was the key to advancement in Henry’s administration.

  Victory also depended on money, but this was in short supply. Henry IV seems to have had little grasp of financial affairs and, despite having promised to avoid the profligacy that had made Richard II so unpopular, he could not afford to “live of his own,” especially when he had to reward his supporters and suppress rebellion out of his personal income. This meant that he had to go cap in hand to an increasingly irritated Parliament to seek taxes and subsidies, which did nothing to improve either his popularity or his credibility as a reformist monarch. His reluctance, or inability, to commit enough money to the Welsh wars was one of the principal reasons why they dragged on for so long.

  Prince Henry’s campaigns in Wales were constantly hampered by shortage of funds. Repeated requests for more men, supplies and money were never met in full, and the prince and his officers complained incessantly that their forces were on the brink of mutiny or desertion because their wages had not been paid. In 1403 Henry pawned his own stock of “little jewels” to aid the besieged castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth and in 1405 Lord Grey of Codnor was so short of money to pay his soldiers’ wages that he had to pawn his own armour. Edward, duke of York, the prince’s justiciar of south Wales, tried to raise funds to pay his men at Carmarthen by obtaining loans, but was refused by everyone he approached because they had not yet been repaid earlier loans made to the crown; to keep his men in place he had to promise them on his word “as a true gentleman” that, if no other means could be found to pay them, he would put the revenues from his Yorkshire estates at their disposal. At times the prince was even reduced to threatening that he would have to abandon the country to the rebels: “without man-power we cannot do more than any other man of lesser estate,” he warned his father.25

  The lessons of this hand-to-mouth existence were obvious and Henry was swift to learn them. In complete contrast to his father, financial prudence, economy and strategic planning were to be his watchwords. As early as 1403 he embarked on a series of measures to increase his revenues from his duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester, increasing rents, taking back under his own management lands that had been rented out and substantially reducing the number of annuities he paid from local revenues. The gradual reconquest of his lands in Wales also made a steady and increasing contribution to his purse, so that after 1409 he could look to an annual income of some eighteen hundred pounds from south Wales and thirteen hundred from north Wales, compared to a paltry five hundred pounds from each when he first received the principality.26

  Such financial wisdom could not help but endear the prince to the same parliaments that groaned over his father’s mismanagement of money. Parliament was under no obligation to grant the monarch any taxation, except in exceptional cases for the defence of the realm. In practice, it was the decision of the House of Commons whether to grant taxation or not; it also decided at what level taxation should be set. As Henry V’s reign would show, its members were not always reluctant to do so and they could be generous. What they expected in return was value for money or, as they termed it, “good governance.” In this respect, Henry IV repeatedly drew down their ire by assigning money they had voted for the defence of Calais or Aquitaine or the war in Wales to other ends, such as the payment of annuities for his supporters. To an unprecedented degree, the Commons was outspoken in its criticism, insisting that taxes should be spent on the purpose for which they had been granted, demanding that the king should reduce the size and reform the character of his household and requiring oversight of his appointments to his council. Henry IV’s response to this hectoring was counterproductive: he promised compliance and did nothing, thereby adding untrustworthiness to the list of grievances against him. The Commons reacted by attaching increasingly stringent conditions to its grants, not only bypassing the royal exchequer by appointing special treasurers for war, but also insisting that their accounts should be audited and presented for parliamentary approval.27

  The genuine fear that the monarchy would go bankrupt was not without basis, as we have seen from the extraordinary measures to which Prince Henry and his officers in Wales had been obliged to resort to finance the war there. Nor was royal insolvency without precedent. In 1340 the strains of financing the war against France had bankrupted Edward III and ruined the two Florentine banking houses on whose loans he defaulted.28 In granting Henry IV a subsidy in 1406, Parliament inflicted its severest humiliation yet on the king, the appointment of a council with powers to oversee royal government and control its expenditure. It is a telling indication of the high opinion in which Prince Henry was already held that he was appointed to its head. A year later the council had done its job so effectively that the Commons passed a vote of thanks to the prince for his service in Wales, where the end of the rebellion was in sight, and, more pragmatically, granted a further half-subsidy.29

  As Henry’s presence in Wales became less necessary, he was able to devote more time to the council and acquire that early experience in the workings of government which Christine de Pizan had recommended. Despite the fact that the appointment of the council had been forced upon the king by Parliament, it was composed almost entirely of his friends. It included at least two men who had shared his exile: Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, who had crowned him king and was now chancellor of England; and Sir John Tiptoft, one of his household knights, who had served as a Member of Parliament for Huntingdonshire since 1402 and speaker of the House of Commons in 1405-6, who became treasurer of England. The new council also included the king’s closest family, upon whom he had relied heavily when his own sons were too young to take an active role in politics. These were his three half-brothers—John Beaufort, earl of Somerset; Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset; and Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester—and their cousin and retainer Thomas Chaucer, the son of the poet, who was speaker of the House of Commons in the parliaments of 1407, 1410 and 1411. (The Beauforts, together with their sister Joan, who was married to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, were the illegitimate children of John of Gaunt and his mistress Catherine Swynford, whom Gaunt belatedly married in 1396. Their offspring were then legitimised by the papacy and by a royal patent approved in Parliament, though they were formally excluded from succession to the throne.30)

  Apart from Archbishop Arundel, with whom Prince Henry seems to have quarrelled irrevocably, probably over their differing attitudes towards France, and John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, who died in 1410, all these men were to remain trusted advisors of the future king. The Beauforts’ influence, in particular, was extremely important in helping to shape Henry’s priorities and his role as both prince and king. John and Thomas Beaufort were active soldiers and veterans of the Welsh campaigns; perhaps more importantly, both men served as admiral of England and captain of Calais, roles which made them passionate advocates for the defence of the seas and for the protection of English trading interests with Flanders. This alone was sufficient to recommend them to the House of Commons, where there was a powerful merchant lobby, but their success in performing their duties also earned them parliamentary approval. Their brother Henry Beaufort was an extraordinary man whose wealth, pow
er and influence were matched only by his ambition, energy and ability, enabling him to straddle the secular and ecclesiastical worlds with equal success. At the age of twenty-two he had been elected chancellor of Oxford University, a year later he obtained his first bishopric (which did not stop him fathering a bastard on Archbishop Arundel’s widowed sister) and in 1409, when he was still only thirty-two, he was appointed a cardinal a latere by the schismatic pope in Rome, Gregory XII. An assiduous attender of royal council meetings, he served his first stint as chancellor of England in 1402-5 and paved the way to his future role as moneylender-in-chief to the crown with a loan of two thousand marks for the defence of the seas and Calais. The identification of the Beauforts with the concerns of the House of Commons gave them both an ear and a voice in the lower house, but because they never lost the confidence of the king they were able to act as intermediaries between the two. The more receptive prince gained proportionately, being fully informed on opinions within the Commons and also acquiring friends and advocates there.31

  Through his close association on the council with the Beauforts and the two speakers of the House of Commons, Tiptoft and Chaucer, Prince Henry managed to achieve the amicable working relationship with Parliament which had eluded his father (and, indeed, Richard II). He had effectively demonstrated his capacity to rule wisely, particularly during the two years when he had enjoyed complete control of the council. In that period he had re-established the royal finances by a mixture of retrenchment, prioritised and targeted expenditure and careful audit work. The security of the kingdom had been enhanced by the suppression of the Welsh revolt and by strengthening the key garrisons in that principality, at Calais and in the northern marches with men, ordnance and supplies. The alliance with the duke of Burgundy, which had resulted in Thomas, earl of Arundel’s expedition into France, had demonstrated that he appreciated the value of English trading interests in Flanders. On a different level, but almost as important as these practical proofs of Prince Henry’s abilities, was his determination to dissociate himself publicly from the “fair words and broken promises”32 that had characterised his father’s dealings with Parliament and to establish a reputation for himself as a man who did not give his word lightly but, when he did, took pride in keeping it.