Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  1. Now known as Azincourt.

  to the west a waterlogged morass; but there had been no reply to Henry's offer of terms, and both sides now prepared for battle. The King drew up his army in three divisions, line abreast. He himself, wearing his surcoat on which the three leopards of England were quartered with the fleurs-de-lys of France, his helmet encircled by a slim gold crown, took command of the centre. The right wing he placed under his father's cousin Edward, the former Earl of Rutland and later of Albemarle, who had succeeded to the Duchy of York in 1402; the left was entrusted to one of his most faithful generals, Lord Camoys. All three wings, in which the men-at-arms fought dismounted, were supported on each flank by companies of archers.

  The French commanders, the Constable of France Charles d'Albret and Marshal Jean Boucicault, followed a different plan. For an army as large as theirs, the limited space between the two woods on each side - some 1,200 yards - made a line formation impossible: they accordingly formed a column, deployed in three ranks one behind the other, similarly dismounted but with a body of heavy cavalry on each side of the front rank. Between the three were companies of crossbowmen — despite the lessons of the previous century, the longbow had never been generally adopted in France — and there seem also to have been a few light cannon, though these too were hardly used. Basically the French were putting their trust in their far superior strength, and in the impetus of the outflanking cavalry attack with which they intended to open the Battle.

  Oddly enough, they seem to have taken no account of the recent weather. A knight in full armour imposes a formidable weight on the strongest of horses, and for a successful cavalry charge hard ground was essential. At eleven o'clock the Constable gave the signal for the attack, and the chargers moved forward; but they soon sank up to their fetlocks in the soft mud, and the dismounted men-at-arms did very little better. Meanwhile the English archers loosed a deluge of arrows and took a fearsome toll of cavalry and infantry alike, before exchanging their bows for short swords, axes and clubs, with which they quickly accounted for the relatively few Frenchmen who managed to reach the English line. The second wave of the attack, under the Duke of Alencon, was no more successful than the first, the English scrambling over the piles of dead and wounded to continue the slaughter. The third wave, seeing the fate of its predecessors, turned tail and fled.

  It was at this point, with victory already assured, that the King gave the order which in the eyes of posterity has been the darkest stain on his reputation. Only the highest-ranking noblemen - for whom valuable ransoms could be expected - were to be spared; all other prisoners, he commanded, were to be instantly put to death. What prompted such a reaction, utterly contrary as it was to all the traditions of medieval warfare? Was there, as it was later claimed, some sudden movement on the part of the French cavalry which led Henry to fear an attack from the rear? It is possible, though no such attack took place. Many of his men refused point-blank to obey the order, even after he had threatened to hang all those who held back; he was at last obliged to designate 200 of his own archers specifically for the task. Such was the aftermath of the victory that has gone down as one of the most glorious in English history.

  By mid-afternoon there was nothing to do but to count and, where possible, to identify the dead. The French losses were enormous: out of some 20,000 men well over a third - some 7,000 — were gone, including the Constable, the Dukes of Alencon and Bar, and two brothers of the Duke of Burgundy, Anthony Duke of Brabant and Philip Count of Nevers. With them were some 1,560 knights, perhaps 5,000 men-at-arms and an unknown number of irregulars. Marshal Boucicault, with the Dukes of Orleans and of Bourbon, was a prisoner. By contrast the English losses were at the most 1,600, and probably a good deal less; some estimates suggest no more than a quarter of that figure. Only two noblemen lost their lives: the young Earl of Suffolk - whose father had been killed at Harfleur - and the forty-two-year-old Duke of York, who was seriously overweight and whose heavy armour seems to have brought on a heart attack. His body was subsequently taken back to England and buried at the castle of Fotheringhay.

  Given the state of the ground and the tactics chosen by the French, the victory of Agincourt was a foregone conclusion; but there were other reasons too why the battle ended as it did. The English army was united under a single commander, who had already proved himself a superb leader of men and who fought like a tiger throughout the battle, personally saving the life of his brother the Duke of Gloucester. The French on the other hand were split, with none of their generals in undisputed control and their command structure, such as it was, riven by divided loyalties. Moreover — and this must be repeated since to us in retrospect it seems well-nigh inexplicable - despite their experience at Crecy and Poitiers they had still not accepted the superiority of the longbow and were consequently powerless against the English archers. For this alone they deserved to lose - though they certainly did not deserve the unspeakable brutality with which they were treated after their defeat.

  The news reached London four days later, on 29 October, and was received with jubilation. The church bells rang all over the city as the Mayor led the citizens first to the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey and then to St Paul's for a service of thanksgiving. On the same day King Henry V entered Calais with what was left of his victorious army. It took him a fortnight to muster a sufficient fleet to transport it back to England, during which time the men were obliged to exchange many of their prisoners - for whom they had expected large ransoms - for the bare necessities of life; but finally on the morning of 16 November he was able to set sail, landing the same evening at Dover, where the local magnates waded into the water and carried him triumphantly ashore. The next day he reached Canterbury, and from there rode by easy stages to the capital, where he arrived on the 23rd to a hero's welcome.

  London had never witnessed such a procession as that which escorted the King from Blackheath to Westminster. It was led by the Mayor and Corporation, who were followed by all the principal merchants of the city and members of the guilds and crafts, carrying aloft their identifying banners and standards; the numbers involved have been estimated at well over 15,000. London Bridge was scarcely visible for flags and triumphal arches, which continued as far as St Paul's itself, and the conduit in Cheapside is said to have flowed with wine instead of water. After a brief ceremony at the cathedral Henry rode along the river to Westminster Abbey for another, longer, service at the shrine of the Confessor; all the way the streets were lined with excited crowds, cheering him to the echo.

  One man only seemed unable to take part in the general rejoicing: the King himself. Just as he had at his coronation, he seemed withdrawn and preoccupied: not once during the five-hour journey from Black-heath to Westminster was he seen to smile. He had made it clear from the outset that he would accept no credit for the victory, which belonged to God alone - he would not even allow his battered helmet and armour to be displayed to the crowds - but there was more to his grimness than mere modesty. Was he perhaps wondering how much he had really achieved, what had been the true value of the prize for which the crown jewels were in pawn and some 3,000 men, at Harfleur and at Agincourt, had given their lives? He had won a great battle, certainly; but he had not won the war. The force that he had destroyed, considerable as it might have been, was by no means the whole French army: several thousand men remained at Rouen under the command of the Duke of Berry. Meanwhile John the Fearless of Burgundy had contrived to keep his own forces intact; he had not declared himself one way or the other, and if he chose he could prove a deadly enemy. As for the English army, it was now little more than a ghost of what it once had been. So far Henry had proved luckier than he had either expected or deserved; how long, however, would his luck hold?

  The End of the Adventure

  [1415-1422]

  BURGUNDY.

  . . . let it not disgrace me

  If I demand before this royal view What rub or what impediment there is Why that the na
ked, poor and mangled peace, Dear nurse of arts, plenties and joyful births, Should not in this best garden of the world, Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage? Alas, she hath from France too long been chased, And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, Corrupting in its own fertility.

  KING HENRY V

  The months that followed the battle of Agincourt seemed to justify the King's worst fears. On 29 November 1415 Charles VI and the Dauphin entered Paris; almost immediately, however, the Duke of Burgundy advanced with his army on the city and in little more than a fortnight had reached Lagny, only sixteen miles away. Then, on 18 December, Henry received a report that changed the entire situation: after a long illness aggravated by his excesses, the Dauphin had died in his twentieth year. His brother and successor, John, was married to the Duke's niece and living in Burgundian territory; the Duke, his position immeasurably strengthened, withdrew at once to Flanders. Three months later in March 1416 the Earl of Dorset, who had been left in charge at Harfleur, set off on a raiding expedition along the coast and was almost trapped by the Count of Armagnac — now Constable of France in succession to d'Albret—at Valmont, near Fecamp. Though himself badly wounded, he and his men succeeded in marching the twenty miles back to the port, and even in inflicting a small though dramatic defeat on the French cavalry who caught up with them at dawn, just outside the walls; but the incident had very nearly ended in disaster, and gave yet further proof of the precariousness of the English hold on Normandy.

  Furious at this last-minute reversal, Armagnac now acquired a number of ships from Genoa and Castile and, having first launched for good measure one or two raids on Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, established a total blockade of Harfleur by land and sea. Before many weeks had passed famine began to threaten the town and Henry, now seriously alarmed, sent offan expedition of 10,000 men under his brother the Duke of Bedford, who on 15 August, in an extraordinary seven-hour naval battle at the mouth of the Seine, soundly defeated the blockading fleet. Four of the huge Genoese carracks were sunk, and five other vessels were taken as prizes.

  The King had not led this last expedition himself for a very good reason: he was entertaining the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund of Luxemburg.1 Sigismund - the uncle of Richard II's first wife Anne of Bohemia - despite his reputation for cruelty and an insatiable appetite for women, took his imperial responsibilities seriously: he was determined on the one hand to heal the papal schism - to which end he had called a General Council of the Church at Constance - and on the other to settle the differences between France and England in preparation for a united front against the infidel. Henry, ever ambitious to cut a dash on the European stage, had had a representative at Constance from the start. (He had, incidentally, raised no protest when Sigismund, having promised John Hus safe conduct to the city, had had him arrested, condemned and burnt at the stake.) Where the Emperor's second objective was concerned, he was still more interested: with careful handling, Sigismund might be converted into a valuable ally. Three hundred English ships were sent to welcome him at Calais and, on 30 April, to escort him across the Channel; and the King himself, with a retinue of 5,000, received him a mile outside London and accompanied him to the Palace of Westminster, which had been put at his disposal for the duration of his visit.

  The Emperor remained in England for no less than four months,

  Technically a Holy Roman Emperor could not be so described until he had been crowned by the Pope in Rome; before that time his official designation was King of the Romans. Sigismund's coronation, however, had been delayed by the papal schism; he had therefore adopted the imperial title by declaration. He was eventually crowned Emperor by Eugenius IV on 31 May 1433.

  during which Henry achieved all that he could have hoped, persuading him of the justice of the English claims on France and concluding with him an offensive and defensive alliance which was sealed at Canterbury on 15 August - the very day of the battle of the Seine. In a final effort to preserve the peace, the two monarchs then invited both the Armagnacs and the Burgundians to a conference at Calais in September. Little was achieved - there was too much distrust among all the parties - but to Henry it hardly mattered: the imperial alliance had greatly strengthened his hand, and he returned home at the end of October well satisfied with what he had done.

  He was fully aware, however, that this was only the beginning; for by now he had decided on a new expedition into France, compared with which that of 1415 would seem little more than an exploratory raid. His objective would be Paris, his prize the French throne. Once more the crown jewels were put in pawn; once more carpenters and shipwrights — some of them as far away as Barcelona and Bayonne — were put to work. Those soldiers who had fought at Agincourt were summoned back to the colours; thousands more, rallied by promises of even greater glory and still more copious plunder, hastened to join them. To provide sufficient arrows for the longbowmen, six wing-feathers were demanded from every goose in England. The French and Genoese were still making trouble in the Channel; but a special squadron of eleven warships was prepared to deal with them and on 29 June 1417 John Holland, the young Earl of Huntingdon, defeated a combined fleet off La Hogue. A month later on 1 August, some 1,500 ships landed an army of perhaps 10,000 fighting men - with about three times that number of non-combatants and 20,000 horses - at Touques, on the left bank of the Seine a few miles beyond Honfleur.

  This second expedition, though it led to no great military victory, was indeed to be of infinitely greater significance than the first. Caen — far smaller than Rouen, but larger than any English city except London - fell in a fortnight, thanks largely to the English artillery. The guns themselves, mounted high on the two great abbeys just outside the city walls,1 were

  The two abbeys - Saint-Etienne (the Abbaye aux Hommes) and La Trinite (the Abbaye aux Femmes) - were founded respectively by William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda. They still stand today, having miraculously survived two months of fighting during the summer of 1944.

  relatively small and primitive, but had considerable psychological effect on a population who had never seen - or, more importantly, heard -such things before. Henry as usual showed no mercy after the surrender, ordering the massacre of the entire secular male population. The lesson was not lost on the neighbouring towns, and it was no surprise when, shortly afterwards, Argentan and Alencon gave in without a struggle. Falaise, however, proved a harder nut to crack. The town held out for a month, the castle - virtually impregnable on its towering cliff - for a further six weeks before its garrison was forced to submit. This time at least there was no massacre. By the spring of 1418 Henry was in effective possession of all Lower Normandy.

  Meanwhile in France as a whole the situation was growing daily more chaotic. The Dauphin John had died in April 1417, little more than a year after his brother, and had been succeeded by the third brother, Charles; but whereas John's wife was Burgundian and he himself had been a virtual hostage of Burgundy, Charles had been married in childhood to the daughter of the Duke of Anjou and belonged firmly to the Armagnac faction. In May the Armagnacs had consequently felt strong enough to take action against Charles VI's Queen Isabella1 - who had consistently intrigued against them - and banished her to Tours; but Isabella immediately appealed to John the Fearless of Burgundy, who had her rescued and brought to join him at Chartres. There she proclaimed herself Regent, shortly afterwards appointing Duke John 'Governor' of France; and the two of them settled down together to plan the capture of Paris. On 12 June 1418, as a result of their machinations, the Duke of Armagnac was murdered by the Paris mob; and on 14 July Isabella and John together entered the capital, where they received a warm welcome from the hopelessly demented King - though not from the Dauphin, who had fled the city to join the Armagnacs at Melun. The political pendulum had swung once more, so that when Henry crossed the Seine at Pont de l'Arche and marched on Rouen, it was to discover that the city's defenders were no longer the Armagnacs that he had expected: they were now Burgundians to a man.
>
  1. The German form of her name is retained here, not only because she was the daughter of Duke Stephen of Bavaria but also to avoid confusion with her daughter Isabelle, the second wife of Richard II who was now married to Charles, Duke of Orleans.

  But they did not defend the greatest city in Normandy any the less stoutly for that. The huge castle - built in the twelfth century by King Philip Augustus - had been strengthened and painstakingly provisioned, while the fields for miles around had been deliberately devastated to the point where every scrap of food for the besieging army had to be brought from England; so confident were the defenders of their success that they had even welcomed into the city thousands of refugees from Lower Normandy. Henry, however, was not discouraged. Surrounding the city with no less than five different camps, he closed the Seine with chain booms and ships roped together across the river. Then - making no attempt to take Rouen by storm — he settled down to wait. The siege began on 31 July 1418 and lasted nearly six months, the weather growing steadily colder until English and French alike found themselves in the grip of one of the most savage winters that any of them could remember. As food began to run short, the defenders attempted the occasional sortie; but they were always beaten back, the King playing his full part — as he always did — in the hand-to-hand fighting. For the rest of the time, we are told, he was constantly on the move between the camps, inspecting the armaments and weaponry, talking to his men, and 'passing menie a long wynter night without sleepe or repose'.

  Some time in mid-December the captain of the garrison, Guy le Bouteiller, realizing that he could no longer feed those refugees who were unable to play an active part in the defence, turned some 12,000 of them out of the city. When Henry categorically refused to allow them through the English lines they were simply left in the surrounding fosse, there to die of cold or starvation - though a few days later he allowed a little food through so that those who were still alive could celebrate Christmas. Not till 19 January were the keys of Rouen finally surrendered, Henry making his formal entry on the following day for a thanksgiving mass at the cathedral and looking - as always on such occasions - pensive and sad. The citizens and garrison were treated sternly, but with none of the savagery he had shown to the people of Caen. They were made to pay a fine of 300,000 crowns at the rate of 80,000 a year, and to surrender their arms, armour and other military equipment, including horses. The Normans in the garrison were all taken prisoner: had they not, the King demanded, been resisting their rightful lord? The others were free to go.