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Henry spent two months in Rouen, reorganizing both city and duchy, while his generals mopped up the few surviving pockets of resistance. Now in a strong position for negotiation, he arranged a meeting with the sixteen-year-old Dauphin in March 1419, and was furious when on the appointed day the young man failed to appear. Somewhat more successful was the meeting, held under a two-month truce, outside Meulan on 29 May, with Queen Isabella and the Duke of Burgundy. (Charles VI had come as far as Pontoise but was in no condition to go any further.) At last Henry was able to discuss terms personally with those in authority. He was, he told them, prepared to renounce his claims to the French throne; the price, however, would be all those territories ceded to Edward III at Bretigny in 1360, together with those that he himself had conquered since his landing at Touques. The agreement would be sealed by his own marriage with the Princess Katherine, whom he now met for the first time and by whom he seems to have been genuinely struck. Her family offered a dowry of 800,000 crowns - minus, however, the 600,000 which they maintained should have been returned to France with Richard II's widow, Queen Isabelle. Both sides had in fact overplayed their hands and the meeting ended in stalemate; but the ice had been broken, both knew where they stood, and the ground was now satisfactorily prepared for the more detailed negotiations that were planned for the following year.
By then, Henry's position was to be stronger still. The moment the truce expired after the Meulan meeting, his army attacked the Burgundian headquarters at Pontoise in an early-morning operation which took the garrison completely by surprise. The town was sacked, yielding provisions and stores valued at two million crowns and bringing the King within twenty miles of Paris. For the French, everything now depended on a united front. If the Burgundians and the Dauphinists could reach agreement between each other, there might yet be a hope of driving back the English; and it was finally agreed that Duke and Dauphin should meet on Sunday 10 September on the bridge at Montereau, some forty miles south-east of Paris, where the river Yonne flows into the Seine. Such was the mutual distrust that a special enclosure for the two of them was built in the middle of the bridge, with barricades at each end to restrain their followers; but the precautions proved useless. Hardly had the conversation begun when John the Fearless was felled by a battleaxe.
Who wielded the weapon, whether the assassination was the result of a premeditated plot, and if so whether the young Dauphin was a party to it, we shall never know. From the French point of view, however, it was a disaster, destroying as it did the last chance of uniting the country against the English invaders and playing straight into their hands. The Dauphin and his followers, after leaving a garrison in Montereau, retired south to Provence, Languedoc and Gascony, where they enjoyed the strongest support; meanwhile John's son and successor, the twenty-three-year-old Philip — later to be known as 'the Good' — swore vengeance on the Dauphinists and, six months afterwards on Christmas Eve, concluded an alliance with England against them, to be sealed by the marriage of one of his sisters to a brother of the King.1
To Henry, the truth was now unmistakable: ever since his landing at Touques he had known that God was on his side, and the murder of John the Fearless had proved it beyond all doubt. With Burgundy now firmly bound to him, there could no longer be any obstacle to the long-awaited alliance with France itself; and on 21 May 1420, at Troyes — despite a strong Dauphinist presence in the whole region of Champagne - the treaty was signed at last. It was agreed that Henry should immediately be appointed Regent of France, and that on the death of Charles VI the French throne should pass to himself and his heirs in perpetuity, the Dauphin being disinherited and hunted down. The two crowns, however, would remain separate: England and France would retain their own laws and customs, neither being subject to the other. King Charles, as usual, was absent from the negotiations; the Queen and the Duke took the oaths in his name. The treaty was proclaimed in Paris on 30 May; and on Trinity Sunday, 2 June, in the parish church of St Joan in Troyes - which still stands today - Henry and Katherine were declared man and wife.
But the fighting was not yet over. The return journey to Paris was held up for a week at Sens until the Dauphinist garrison surrendered; the town of Montereau was stormed, and the body of John the Fearless removed from its temporary grave to be reburied in all solemnity in the Charterhouse at Dijon;2 and at Melun the royal party was delayed
It was in fact another three and a half years before John, Duke of Bedford, married Philip's sister Anne at Troyes.
The Charterhouse, built by Philip the Bold in 1383 to serve as a family mausoleum, was destroyed during the Revolution. The tombs themselves, however, were saved and can now be seen in the Salle des Gardes of the Musee des Beaux-Arts, formerly the ducal palace.
no less than four and a half months, the garrison eventually capitulating on 18 November. It included a small detachment of Scots mercenaries, whom Henry hanged - technically for having refused to obey orders to surrender given them by King James I of Scotland, who was his prisoner and whom he had brought over expressly for that purpose.1 The remainder of the garrison were all taken prisoner and held to ransom, 600 of them being sent by river to Paris, where many died, being unable to raise the ransom money. That tendency towards cruelty - even brutality - which we see all too often throughout Henry's career had not, it seemed, been improved by success and marriage.
On 1 December the two Kings rode into Paris, Henry being the first - and indeed the last - English monarch to be welcomed in the French capital as a conqueror. With his wife and brothers, he occupied the most sumptuous apartments in the Louvre: accommodation which the French were not slow to compare with the relative squalor which Charles VI and Isabella were obliged to endure in the Hotel de Saint-Pol. He remained there over Christmas; then, on the 27th, he and Katherine set off together for England. They delayed three weeks in Rouen -Henry was never less than deeply conscientious in the administration of his new duchy - before continuing their journey, finally arriving on 1 February 1421 at Dover, where the barons of the Cinque Ports waded once again into the waves to carry them safely ashore. Three weeks later the pair were officially welcomed by the City of London, and on the 23rd the young Queen was crowned at Westminster.
It says much for the stability of Henry's government that he had dared to remain abroad for three and a half years; his father, once King, could never have contemplated such an extended absence. His country needed him, and he would probably have done better to remain at home for the rest of his short life. But his work in France was not quite over. In March 1421 his younger brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence — whom he had appointed Captain of Normandy and Lieutenant of France -marched south with about 4,000 men against the Dauphinists, meeting
1. James had been captured by the English - probably in 1406, at the age of twelve - but had always been well treated and had received an excellent education. He was eventually to return to his kingdom in 1424, when on 21 May he was crowned at Scone.
them at Beauge, some twenty-five miles east of Angers. Clarence may or may not have known that his enemy included a substantial contingent of Scots, recently arrived at the invitation of the French to help their old allies; in any event, in his eagerness for a victory to set beside Agincourt, he attacked at once, giving his archers no time to catch up with him. Not surprisingly, such rashness ended in disaster. He himself was killed — it was said, by the Scottish Earl of Buchan;1 the Earls of Somerset and Huntingdon were captured. The effect of the Battle on French morale was immense: the English, it seemed, were not invincible after all.
It was primarily in an attempt to minimize the damage done at Beauge that, on 10 June 1421, Henry embarked for France on his last campaign. He brought with him a smaller army than on either of the two previous occasions - some 4,000 in all - having left a sizeable force in Normandy the previous year. By the end of the summer English prestige was restored; not, however, English popularity, for Henry now fell prey to some mysterious disease and, as his
health declined, so his cruelty towards those who resisted him seemed to increase. After his capture of the castle of Rougemont he burnt it to the ground, hanged every member of the garrison and drowned every fugitive he caught. And Rougemont was not alone: the surrender of Meaux, after a siege which lasted throughout the winter and spring, provided opportunities for further inhumanity. Two weeks later, at the end of May 1422, Queen Katherine joined him in France, leaving behind at home their five-month-old son Henry, whom his father was never to see.
By now the King was clearly dying. Though no longer able to sit his horse, he made a last heroic effort to lead his army against the Dauphin, who was besieging the town of Cosne; but even by litter the journey proved too much for him. He was rowed down the Seine to Charenton and thence carried to Vincennes. There, on 31 August, he summoned his councillors and urged them to maintain the Burgundian alliance; then he begged them to forgive him for any injustices, took communion for the last time and died. Had he lived just six weeks longer he would have been King of France, for on 11 "October his rival - the poor demented Charles VI - followed him to the grave. His body
1. It was perhaps in recognition of this that Buchan was appointed Constable of France in the following year.
lay in state at Saint-Denis, after which on 15 September the magnificent funeral procession started for home, arriving in London on 5 November. Two days later King Henry V was buried in Westminster Abbey, his three favourite chargers being led up to the altar with him. He was thirty-four years old.
Henry's tomb of Purbeck marble, at the far end of St Edward's Chapel just to the east of the crossing, has lost, alas, much of its splendour. It was originally surmounted - at the expense of his widow - by an effigy in oak, with the head, hands, sceptre and other regalia moulded in solid silver and the rest plated in silver gilt; but all the precious metal was stolen in 1546, and the new head of polyester resin, added in 1971, can hardly be considered an adequate substitute. For Henry, however, the tomb was only a beginning. He was the first English monarch also to insist on a chantry chapel, in which masses could be said in perpetuity for his soul; and this tremendous edifice towers above the tomb in a breathless display of arrogance, completely overshadowing not only the Plantagenet tombs below but even the shrine of the Confessor himself. It is covered with elaborate sculptures of remarkably high quality, including two representations of Henry on his charger and two more depicting his coronation. Most moving of all, on a wooden beam high above, are a shield and saddle, with a helmet which - although manifestly designed for tilting - is traditionally believed to have been worn by him at Agincourt.
And what of Katherine? In their tomb effigies, his two predecessors both He beside their wives; Henry is alone. He had made no provision for his Queen, who some three years after her husband's death married the Welshman Owen Tudor and bore him a son, Edmund, the future father of King Henry VII. When she died in 1437, she was given a tomb in the Lady Chapel; and when her grandson demolished that chapel to make way for the one which now bears his name, her body was placed in a coffin of loose boards and laid beside Henry V's tomb, where it was regularly exposed to curious visitors.1 Only in 1776 were the bones, still 'firmly united, and thinly cloth'd with flesh, like scrapings
1. 'Here did we see, by perticular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 year old, that I did first kiss a Queen.' (Samuel Pepys, Diary, 23 February 1669).
of tann'd leather' at last removed from public view; and in 1878 they were laid beneath the altar slab in Henry's chantry chapel, where they remain today.
King Henry V
[1414-1420]
CHORUS.
Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursued the story, In little room confining mighty-men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
KING HENRY V
At the end of King Henry IV Part II, Henry V is already King of England. The play that bears his name consequently begins with the second year of his reign, and continues until the peace with France is sealed in 1420 and Henry marries the Princess Katherine at Troyes. We are told nothing of his second and third campaigns in France, for the excellent reason that after Agincourt even the second would have been an anticlimax, while the third proved to be little more than a prelude to his not particularly glorious death. King Henry V is primarily a celebration - of patriotism, of military glory and, in its last act, of true love as a means of reconciliation - and Shakespeare selected his material accordingly.
Perhaps in order to point up the difference between the play and its historical predecessors, he also gave it a Chorus - rather on the lines of Greek tragedy - who speaks directly to the audience. This Chorus provides not only a prologue and epilogue, together with separate introductions to each act after the first, but also two extremely significant clues as to dating. One of these is given in the opening lines:
But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France?
Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
There had been no apologies of this kind before the representation of the battle of Shrewsbury; and it has been plausibly suggested that these lines refer to the opening by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, of their new playhouse, the Globe, on the Bankside in Southwark in 1599. This would certainly have been an event important enough to have deserved special mention if possible, and the presence of the Chorus would have provided a perfect opportunity.
The second clue lends strength to the first. In the introduction to Act V, we are given - for the only time in all the plays - a direct reference to current events:
But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th'antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in;
As, by a lower but as loving likelihood,
Were now the General of our gracious Empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on the sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him!
It is nowadays almost universally agreed that the General referred to here is Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. On 27 March 1599, as Lieutenant and Governor-General of Ireland, Essex had left London to put down the rebellion by the Earl of Tyrone, and had been given a rousing send-off by the people. He was to return prematurely in September, having concluded an unjustifiable truce and in something very like disgrace; this would mean - if the basic supposition is correct - that King Henry V had its first performance some time between March and September 1599, in which case the play would have been written immediately after Henry IV Part II, which as we know was first performed in the previous year.
After the Prologue we have the conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely about a proposed bill, first mooted under Henry IV, for the appropriation of Church lands by the Crown. The details of this bill are taken almost word for word from Holinshed; essentially, however, they are no more than a peg from which to hang a discussion - for the benefit of those of the audience who have not seen Henry IV Part II - of the King himself, and his extraordinary change of character since his accession. This first scene is thus in a sense an additional prologue; it is only with the entrance of the King in the second that the play really begins. At Henry's invitation, the Archbishop then launches into a long and almost ridiculously intricate justification of the English title t
o the throne of France — omitting, oddly enough, any reference to Edward II's Queen Isabella, sister of the French King Charles IV, on whom the whole case rested - and ending with an exhortation to the King, echoed by the Bishop of Ely and the assembled nobles, to claim his own. Henry needs no further encouragement:
Now are we well resolved; and by God's help
And yours, the noble sinews of our power,
France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe
Or break it all to pieces.
The arrival of the French embassy with the barrel of tennis balls only strengthens this resolve; Henry's answer to the ambassadors falls somewhere between a threat and a curse. When the curtain falls on the first act we are already on our way to the climax of Agincourt.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 23