Agincourt
Page 23
It is equally difficult to establish how many died of the disease at Harfleur. In addition to Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, and Michael, earl of Suffolk, the names of at least eight knights who brought their own retinues are known: William Beaumond from Devonshire, Roger Trumpington from Cambridgeshire, Edward Burnell from Norfolk, John Marland from Somerset, John Southworth, Hugh Standish and William Botiller from Lancashire and John Phelip from Worcestershire.28 Sir John Phelip, too, had been a close associate of the king. He had been a member of Henry’s household when he was prince of Wales and was one of the select few chosen to be made a Knight of the Bath at his coronation in 1413. He had taken a leading role in the earl of Arundel’s expedition to France in 1411 and was in the Anglo-Burgundian force that defeated the Armagnacs at St Cloud; for the Agincourt campaign he had brought a substantial retinue of thirty men-at-arms and ninety foot archers. Phelip, who was a nephew of Sir Thomas Erpingham, the steward of the king’s household, was married to Alice Chaucer, the only child of Thomas and granddaughter of the poet, though she was only eleven years old when she was widowed. Phelip himself was thirty-one when he died. His body was taken back to England and interred at Kidderminster under the proud, if ungainly, Latin epitaph: “Henry V loved this man as a friend; John was bold and strong and fought well at Harfleur.”29
Few names of the less eminent victims of dysentery have survived—and these only because their deaths were recorded on the muster rolls so that the exchequer did not have to continue paying their wages. The exchequer clerks attempted to make a distinction between those who “died” of the disease and those who were “killed” as a result of enemy action, though it is unclear how reliable their efforts were; combined with the incomplete nature of the records themselves, this makes it difficult to reach any firm conclusions as to how many died. Monstrelet hazarded a guess at two thousand, a figure that was taken up and repeated as fact by other chroniclers. This may be accurate. If modern rates of mortality among untreated victims of dysentery are taken as a guide, it is likely that Henry lost between 10 and 20 per cent of his army, which translates as something in the region of 1200-2400 men. Whatever the actual numbers, the chroniclers on both sides of the conflict were all united in one belief: more men died from disease at Harfleur than from the fighting throughout the campaign.30
Occasionally we get a glimpse of the scale of the loss in terms of death and sickness to individual companies. Arundel’s retinue, as one might expect, given the contagious nature of the disease, was badly hit. Out of a total of 100 men-at-arms, two died at Harfleur and twelve (or possibly eighteen) were invalided home; of the original 300 archers who also accompanied him, thirteen died and a further sixty-nine were sent home sick, together with three of his minstrels. In other words, almost exactly a quarter of his retinue were casualties of the siege. Mowbray’s company was even harder hit: death and sickness reduced it by almost a third. Of the fifty men-at-arms he brought with him, three died during the siege and thirteen, including the earl himself, were sent home ill; of his 150 archers, as many as forty-seven were invalided back to England. Similarly, John, Lord Harington, who had brought a retinue of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers, had to return home sick from Harfleur himself on 5 October, together with ten of his men-at-arms and twenty of his archers. The effect on smaller retinues was equally devastating. Sir Ralph Shirley also lost a third of his men: he had originally mustered only six men-at-arms and eighteen archers; three of the former, including himself, and six of the latter were invalided home. Sir Rowland Lenthalle, a Herefordshire knight, brought a retinue of twelve men-at-arms, of whom two died at Harfleur and three more were sent home sick; his thirty-six archers fared much better, with only two of them dying during the siege. Thomas Chaucer, as we have seen, brought twelve men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; two of the former died of dysentery at Harfleur and Chaucer himself was invalided home, but all of his archers survived unscathed. Dysentery was not, as one might have expected, a disease that always afflicted the lowest ranks hardest.31
If such figures can be taken as a general trend—and there must have been retinues that suffered both more and less—then we can assume that, in total, the king lost between a quarter and a third of his men to dysentery as a result of the siege. There were other casualties, including, of course, those who were killed in action, and those like Nicholas Seymour, brother of the lord of Castle Cary, who was captured at Harfleur and was still believed to be alive and a prisoner in France at the end of December. Additionally, as the chaplain pointed out, there were those who, to the king’s great indignation, “out of sheer cowardice, leaving or rather deserting their king in the field, had stealthily slipped away to England beforehand.”32
The need to garrison Harfleur was a further drain on manpower. Having gained the town at such cost, it was critically important that it should stay in English hands. It was therefore necessary to ensure that it was adequately manned to prevent its recapture the moment the main English army departed. Henry decided that the earl of Dorset should have a force of 300 men-at-arms and 900 archers to safeguard its defences—a garrison that was almost two and a half times the size of that at Calais. How the men were chosen is not known, but it is likely that it was on a volunteer basis. This is suggested by the fact that, rather than simply assigning certain whole retinues to the task, which would probably have been the simplest method, men were drawn, apparently indiscriminately in terms of numbers, from a variety of different companies: Michael de la Pole, whose father died during the siege, provided two men-at-arms and five archers, and Thomas, Lord Camoys, a single man-at-arms, for example, while eight of the fifty Lancashire archers brought by Sir Richard Kyghley were also selected.33 A muster roll for the winter of 1415-16 reveals that the 300 men-at-arms included four barons, the lords Hastings, Grey, Bourchier and Clinton, and twenty-two knights (Sir Thomas Erpingham and Sir John Fastolf among them). This was an unusually high proportion of senior members of the nobility, reflecting the importance Henry attached to keeping the town, but also providing the earl of Dorset with a ready-made council of experienced and reliable soldiers and administrators in the event of an emergency. For some of them, this appointment proved to be a turning point in their careers. Fastolf, for example, saw the focus of his activity shift from England to France. Within a few months he had acquired the life grant of a manor and lordship near Harfleur that had belonged to Guy Malet, sire de Graville, and his profits of war would be so great that he was able to spend the next thirty years investing £460 annually (over $305,900 at today’s values) in the purchase of lands in England and France.34
The English garrison was to benefit from the protection of a small fleet that was ordered to patrol and guard the coastline close to Harfleur. A number of cannon were also installed in the town, together with eighteen gunners to operate them. Additionally, forty-two carpenters and twenty masons were to remain behind to restore the broken fortifications of the walls and towers. It was not until December that additional masons and tilers were to be recruited for the restoration of the houses and other buildings within the town. The cost would be phenomenal. Their wage bill, claimed by Harfleur’s new treasurer for the first five months alone, amounted to just over £4892 (more than $3,250,000 at today’s values), and that did not include exceptional sums such as the £800 paid to one Thomas Henlemsted, a “dyker” from Southwark, for removing a mound and making a ditch outside the town walls.35
Once the arrangements for the security of Harfleur had been completed, Henry had several choices before him. He could return to England with a short but successful campaign behind him having established a bridgehead for any future attempt to reconquer his heritage in Normandy. He could follow in his brother Clarence’s footsteps, and make a chevauchée, or armed raid, plundering and burning his way down through the south and west of France to his duchy of Aquitaine. He could extend his area of conquest by besieging another neighbouring town, such as Montivilliers, or Fécamp or Dieppe, which were both furt
her up the coast towards Calais, or even Rouen, which would take him a major step further inland up the Seine.
There were good reasons why Henry adopted none of these alternatives. A five-week campaign, even one that resulted in the capture of a place as important as Harfleur, was not enough to justify the expense, effort and time he had put into the preparations. Nor would it do anything to advance his claim to the crown of France. If he were to force any greater concessions from the French, or, indeed, keep the support of his own people for further campaigns, then he needed to make a grander gesture.
A chevauchée to Bordeaux had its attractions: plenty of plunder on the journey for his men, a safe haven at the end, a chance to visit his duchy and perhaps carry out a campaign in the region. Indeed, Master Jean de Bordiu, in his letter of 3 September to the duchy, had stated categorically that it was the king’s “intention” to go to Bordeaux “before he returns to England.”36 On the other hand, this was written when the fall of Harfleur was expected imminently and before dysentery had made its appearance in his army. It was a month further into the campaigning season before Henry was ready to set off and Bordeaux was over 350 miles away—a very long way to travel for a depleted army that was not in the best of health. The lateness of the season, combined with his reduced numbers and the uncertain state of health of his men, made another siege out of the question, so the guns and siege engines were either put into Harfleur or shipped back to England.
Although rumours were rife all over Europe about the king’s intentions, Henry had already made up his mind what he was going to do. The great army he had assembled at Southampton was now reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. Excluding those in the garrison at Harfleur, he probably had only nine hundred men-at-arms and five thousand archers able to draw sword or fit to fight, as the chaplain put it. Even with this comparatively small number, he did not have enough shipping available to him at Harfleur to send them home directly, since he had dismissed most of his invasion fleet before the town capitulated.37 Nor did he have enough victuals to enable them all to remain indefinitely in the town.
Henry had arranged to meet his prisoners at Calais on 11 November and it was to Calais that he intended to go. He could have travelled there easily and safely by sea. Instead, he chose to follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, and march through what he claimed were “his” duchy of Normandy and “his” county of Ponthieu to “his” town of Calais. He even intended to cross the Somme at the same place, in the full knowledge that it was on a similar expedition, in 1346, that Edward III had won a famous victory over the French at Crécy. Although he would follow a route close to the coastline, it would inevitably bring him within easy striking distance of the French army at Rouen. He probably calculated that his diplomatic efforts of the previous year would ensure that neither John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, nor Jean, duke of Brittany, would move against him. In that case, the “French” army would actually be a much smaller and weaker Armagnac army. He had failed to draw the dauphin into battle at Harfleur or to give him trial by battle in person. Perhaps this deliberate act of provocation would finally rouse him to action.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MARCH TO CALAIS
Henry’s decision to march his army overland to Calais was a calculated risk. It was also very much a personal one. A large majority of his council advised against it, fearing that the dwindling English forces would be an easy prey for the French multitudes that had been gathering at Rouen for over a month.1 In the meetings that took place after the fall of Harfleur, Clarence argued that the English should return home immediately by sea as being “the next and surest way”: they had lost too many men, both to the sickness and death wrought by dysentery and to manning the garrison, to run the risk of a journey to Calais overland, “and most especiallie considering the greate and infinite multitude of theire enemies, which then were assembled to prevent and hinder the King’s passage by land, whereof by theire espies they had knowledge.” In anyone else’s mouth this would have appeared sound enough reasoning—and there were plenty of others who shared his view—but coming from Clarence this reluctance to engage with the enemy was open to sinister interpretation. His well-known sympathy for the Armagnac cause cast a shadow of suspicion, long and dark, over his motives, his advice, his actions.
Clarence could not have openly defied his brother by refusing to go—that would have been an act of high treason—but he was reckless enough to make his feelings known. If he was not prepared to run the risk of the march to Calais, thus causing a very dangerous confrontation with the king, or would only go with a bad grace that might affect the morale of the men and provide a focus for discontent, then it was in everyone’s interest that an honourable exit should be found for him. Clarence’s name duly appeared on the rolls of the sick and at the beginning of October he received his licence to leave the army and return home. Though it is true that his retinue had been severely affected by dysentery, Clarence’s own actions do not suggest a man suffering from a debilitating disease. Instead of going straight home, he took ship for Calais, where his arrival with “such a great number of men” caused panic in neighbouring Boulogne, which immediately sent off a messenger to Abbeville to inform Constable d’Albret. Fears that Clarence was about to launch a second invasion from Calais were unfounded, but the author of The First English Life, who did not know that Clarence was supposed to be ill, assumed that he had been sent back to England to take charge of the fleet, perhaps because the admiral, the earl of Dorset, had been left to captain Harfleur.2
Though he lacked his brother’s intellectual qualities, Clarence was still every inch the soldier. As noted earlier, Jean Fusoris had contrasted Clarence’s martial character with that of Henry V, whom he thought more suited for the Church than for war. This opinion must have struck a chord with many of the other royal councillors who advised against the proposal to march to Calais. In response to their protestations about the inequality of the size of the respective armies, Henry serenely countered by “relying on divine grace and the justice of his cause, piously reflecting that victory consists not in a multitude but with Him for Whom it is not impossible to enclose the many in the hand of the few and Who bestows victory upon whom He wills, whether they be many or few.”3 It was an argument that Henry had advanced before,4 and, in an age of faith, it was unanswerable. What is more, it was not simply unthinking piety. Henry was well aware that every military treatise since classical times had expounded the view that a small, well-trained army could defeat a larger one. Christine de Pizan, for instance, discussed the subject at length in The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry.
One finds that many armies have been thrown into disarray by their own greater number rather than by enemy forces. And why is this so? Certainly there are good reasons, for a great multitude is more difficult to maintain in good order and is often in trouble because it requires more provisions, is more quarrelsome, and is subject to more delays on the roads . . . For this reason . . . the ancients who had mastered such things useful in battle, knowing the perils from experience, placed a higher value on an army well taught and well led than a great multitude.5 As Vegetius himself had said, rather more succinctly: “Bravery is of more value than numbers.”6
Orders were issued for those selected for the march to equip themselves with enough provisions to last for eight days. It has often been suggested that this was a serious miscalculation and that Henry had been overly optimistic about the length of time it would take to get to Calais. In the light of hindsight, this was clearly the case. On the other hand, without the benefit of that future knowledge, Henry and his advisors had to plan reasonably and appropriately. It was important for the men to have enough supplies to get them to Calais, but they also needed to be able to travel lightly and not be weighed down with unnecessary baggage.
The eight-day figure was not simply plucked out of the air. Despite the fact that he had no maps to calculate his route, Henry knew he would need to cover an average
of just under nineteen miles per day, which was perfectly reasonable given that nineteen miles was the acknowledged medieval standard for travelling by land. The ever-reliable Vegetius had stated that an army marching on foot should be able to cover at least twenty miles in only five hours in summertime; had Henry been able to achieve this, his eight days would have taken him well beyond Calais. The English army was disciplined and mostly mounted, but it was not a Roman legion accustomed to long route marches, and it could travel only as fast as its slowest members. Even so, given a longer travelling day, it should have been able to cover the same distance within the eight days for which supplies were allotted, especially as it would be possible to supplement these rations along the way.7