'A mean dialogue for princes' is how Dr Johnson described it; how right he was.
the fault
My father made in compassing the crown.
Seen from the historical point of view Henry V is, like its three predecessors, surprisingly accurate as far as it goes - seldom straying far from the available sources, and then nearly always for perfectly justifiable dramatic reasons. Its principal sins are those of omission, and there again the Chorus is swift to apologize:
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th'accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass.
In his closing lines, however, he has one more task: to admit, for the first time in the play, that all Henry's achievements are to be set at nothing. Under his son England will be made to bleed as never before - and France will be lost.
King Henry VI: His Childhood and Youth
[1422-1445]
EXETER.
But howsoe'er, no simple man that sees
This jarring discord of nobility,
This shouldering of each other in the Court,
This factious bandying of their favourites,
But sees it doth presage some ill event.
'Tis much when sceptres are in children's hands;
But more when envy breeds unkind division:
There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.
KING HENRY VI PART I
England had never had so young a King. Henry VI had been born at Windsor on 6 December 1421; when he was proclaimed on 1 September of the following year - the day after his father's death, the concept of a seamless succession being still unknown - he was not quite nine months old. The dying wishes of Henry V had been to entrust the regency to Philip of Burgundy if he were to claim it - which, fortunately, he did not - and otherwise to his own brother John, Duke of Bedford; and it was Bedford who, in one of his first ceremonial duties as Regent, attended the funeral of Charles VI in Saint-Denis, a naked sword being carried before him as a symbol of his royal authority. Now thirty-three and strikingly handsome, he possessed none of Henry's meteoric brilliance, nor the wide culture of his younger brother Humphrey; but he was more reliable than either—intelligent, prudent, blameless in his private life and in battle a fearless fighter.
Since it was clear that for the foreseeable future the Regent would be obliged to spend most of his time in France, Humphrey of Gloucester was confirmed as Warden of the Realm and Protector, with overall responsibility for English affairs. This appointment was a good deal less well advised. 'The good Duke Humphrey' — as he was universally known - seemed on first acquaintance to be the nonpareil of princes: courteous and charming, a patron of the arts with a genuine love of literature and a library which was to provide the nucleus of the Bodleian at Oxford. Shakespeare's portrait of him follows, in the main, this popular conception; there is little indication of the faithlessness and irresponsibility which Humphrey was to show throughout his life, or of the dissipation and debauchery that were to ruin his health before he was thirty, or of the overriding personal ambition for which he was repeatedly to sacrifice the nation's interests.
The guardianship of the infant King, meanwhile, was entrusted to a nobleman of the older generation: Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, the youngest of the three sons of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford. But Exeter was already an old man by the standards of the time - he was to die when his charge was still only five years old - and his character was anyway largely eclipsed by that of his elder brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester and after 1426 a cardinal of the Church. The richest man in England - he was an active dealer in wool - and one of the most influential figures in Europe, in 1417 the bishop had been seriously considered as a candidate for the papacy; he would certainly have been a far better choice as Warden than his nephew Humphrey of Gloucester, whom he cordially detested and opposed at every opportunity. His haughty arrogance was bound to antagonize many of his contemporaries; but he was to remain absolutely loyal to the young King, not only giving him wise and disinterested advice but also helping him with substantial loans whenever the need arose.
Where France was concerned, Henry V had left to his successors an impossible situation. The kingdom was on its knees: not only politically after Henry's victories, but economically and morally as well. The war had already been continuing sporadically for the best part of a century, and much of the north and west lay depopulated and desolate. Bedford did his best, and for the first few years after Henry's death achieved a fair measure of success. In 1422 the line of English garrisons had stretched from the border of Brittany to Abbeville and thence south to Paris; by the end of 1425 it embraced Champagne and Maine and extended as far as the Meuse. Conscientious governor that he was, Bedford was not personally unpopular in any of these conquered territories. He was careful to maintain French institutions and, wherever possible, to appoint Frenchmen to key positions; he also reformed the administration of justice, and even on occasion struck a strong coinage. But like most of his compatriots he knew full well that the cause was ultimately hopeless. England - also exhausted by war, neglected by her major landowners (many of whom had spent the better part of their adult lives fighting in France), her agriculture and population alike ravaged by successive visitations of the Black Death, could never wholly conquer France, far less hold it if conquered.
And the French knew it too. For many of them - and particularly the aristocracy - the death of Charles VI had radically changed the situation. Charles had bid them give their loyalty to Henry V, but now both he and Henry were dead. His son and namesake the Dauphin had grown up a weak and feckless youth; he had, however, been crowned after his father's death at Poitiers, and was now widely acknowledged south of the Loire as far as the borders of Guyenne. It was therefore hardly surprising that more and more French noblemen should have rallied to his banner: so many indeed that early in 1423 an increasingly anxious Bedford ordered a re-proclamation of the Treaty of Troyes, obliging many Frenchmen to swear allegiance to 'le Roy Henri II' -an oath which many of them took, we are told, only with extreme reluctance.
The boy King, meanwhile, was growing up fast. On the last day of April 1425, at the age of three and a half, he opened Parliament and then rode through London in triumph, being 'judged of all men to have the very image, lively portraiture and lovely countenance of his famous father'; and on 6 November 1429, St Leonard's Day, he was crowned at Westminster. The ritual seems to have been impressive enough, as was the banquet that followed; but none of the principal witnesses saw it as being much more than a necessary preliminary to the infinitely more important ceremony that was becoming ever more imperative: Henry's coronation in France, where the situation had once again been transformed - this time by a girl of seventeen.
The story of Joan of Arc has been told too often in the past for anything but a short summary to be necessary here; but her curious appearances in King Henry VI Part I make some reference to her essential. Born of peasant stock at Domremy in Lorraine, she first heard her Voices' at the age of thirteen; and four years later, in the early spring of 1429, she left her home village - first for the neighbouring fortress of Vaucouleurs and thence, against formidable opposition, for the Dauphin's court at Chinon. On 8 March, having been instantly identified by her as he hid among a group of courtiers, he granted her an audience, in the course of which she informed him of her divine mission: to raise the siege of Orleans and to escort Charles to his true coronation at Rheims. Still unconvinced, he sent her to Poitiers for examination by a body of senior ecclesiastics; only after they had given her their unqualified approval did he dispatch her to Orleans.
Orleans had been under siege since the previous October by an English army initially under the command of Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, who had recently returned to France with a private army of 2,700 men raised at his own expense. (Bedford, who had had his doubts about the wisdom of the operation - though he had not fo
rbidden it - had remained at his headquarters at Chartres.) In November, however, Salisbury had been killed by a French cannon ball as he stood at a window; his place had been taken by two joint commanders, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who had determined to starve out the city. The winter that followed had not been uneventful. An armed convoy of provisions led by Sir John Fastolf had been attacked on 12 February by 4,000 French and Scots. The assailants had been repelled, but not before their cannon had shattered the supply casks, which had spewed vast quantities of salted fish all over the field. Shortly after this 'Battle of the Herrings' the defenders of Orleans, now running seriously short of food, suggested the surrender of the city to the Duke of Burgundy, who had joined the siege with an army of his own; Bedford not unnaturally refused,1 but Burgundy took grave offence and immediately withdrew with all his men.
It was at this point, or very soon afterwards, that Joan arrived in the city. Her appearance put new spirit into the citizens, and on 4 May the counter-attack began. She herself, though wounded in the neck by an arrow, refused to leave the battle till it was won. A day or two later the English were in full retreat, the French in pursuit. Suffolk was taken prisoner during fierce street fighting in the nearby village of Jargeau,
1. 'The Regent answered the dukes ambassadors, that it was not honorable nor yet consonaunte to reason, that the kyng of England should beate the bushe and the duke of Burgoyne should haue the birdes' (Hall, 147).
Talbot a few days later at Patay. Joan, now believed on all sides to be invincible, met Charles at Tours and pressed him no longer to delay his second coronation at Rheims - where, by long and hallowed tradition, all French Kings were crowned. This ceremony took place, in her presence, on 17 July 1429. Her work done, her voices now silent, her mission accomplished, she longed to return to her village, and had she been allowed to do so it might well have saved her life; but the people refused to let her go and she bowed, disastrously, to their will, urging Charles to march on Paris. He did so in September, but his attempt to capture it was unsuccessful and Joan was wounded for the second time.
All was not yet lost; the English, still in retreat, had already evacuated the Loire valley, most of the Ile-de-France and virtually all Champagne; a concerted French push into Picardy might yet have driven them back to Calais. But the chance was thrown away. The French commander La Tremouille (who detested Joan) now took it upon himself to disband the army, giving Bedford the perfect opportunity to regroup and recover - and finally to bring his young sovereign over to France for his own coronation. Henry, by now nine years old, reached Calais in April 1430 in the company of Cardinal Beaufort and 10,000 men, but such was the prevailing anarchy that he was forced to remain there for a further three months; not till the end of July was he able to travel, and then only as far as Rouen. He was lodged in the castle, and was still there five months later when Joan arrived, in chains. She had been taken prisoner on 23 May during an attempt to relieve Compiegne, which was under siege by the Burgundians; but she had spent the interim in several other prisons while her captor John of Luxemburg haggled over her price with Philip of Burgundy and the Duke of Bedford. Finally she had been handed over to the English for 10,000 francs. Did she and Henry ever meet? They certainly could have; but Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick - who had succeeded Exeter as the King's guardian and tutor, and who happened also to be Governor of the castle, kept her guarded day and night by five English soldiers. He is unlikely, to say the least, to have permitted his young charge to come in contact with a woman whom he believed to be an evil witch, 'the disciple and limb of the Fiend'.
Joan's examination began on 21 February 1431; five weeks later, on 27 March, she appeared at her trial, during which she was allowed no defence counsel or spiritual adviser; and on Wednesday 30 May she was declared excommunicated and a heretic and burnt at the stake in the market place of Rouen - the pyre having been prepared well in advance of the sentence. Her ashes were cast into the Seine. But she had done her work well. She had delivered Orleans; she had had the Dauphin crowned, as his ancestors had been crowned before him, in the cathedral of Rheims; above all, she had given her compatriots a new spirit, and a new strength. From the moment of her first appearance English fortunes had begun to decline. They were never to recover. True, the ten-year-old Henry VI finally reached Paris where, alone of all the English monarchs, he was crowned in the French capital - by Cardinal Beaufort, according to the English liturgy, in Notre Dame on 16 December; but if Bedford had hoped to impress the French by this ceremony, he failed. The service was poorly attended, the subsequent banquet proved a fiasco, no amnesty was declared, no alms were distributed to the poor, and two days after Christmas the King was slipped almost furtively out of Paris to return to England.
By now there were few people on either side of the Channel who had much stomach for the war. To the pious young King, hostility between fellow Christians was a cause of continual grief; Bedford, knowing that the cause was hopeless, longed to put an end to the fighting and found strong support in Parliament, which actually presented a petition to that effect. The Burgundians, too, were increasingly eager for peace. Only Humphrey of Gloucester - who had been steadily building up his position ^during the long absence in France of his enemy the Cardinal - continued to argue furiously for a continuation of the war, sabotaging every attempt at negotiation. Finally, in 1435, Philip of Burgundy lost patience and convened, on his own initiative, a peace conference at Arras.
The English, whose delegation was led by the Archbishop of York but was strongly influenced by Duke Humphrey, refused to renounce the royal title to France and ultimately withdrew altogether from the negotiations. Almost at once, however, they had reason to regret this departure. A week later, on 21 September, they were horrified to learn that France and Burgundy had effected a reconciliation. King Charles had agreed to make a public apology for the assassination of John the Fearless and to surrender those responsible; Philip had then been formally absolved by the attendant cardinals from his oath of allegiance to the
English King. When Henry heard the news, he wept; for Humphrey of Gloucester and his militants, on the other hand, there was a great wave of support as the people of London expressed their anger at the Burgundian betrayal by firing and looting the houses of all the Flemish merchants in the city.
Bedford, too, would have shed tears to see much of his life's work brought to nothing; but a week before the Franco-Burgundian peace, on 14 September 1435, he had died aged forty-six at Rouen — where, a day or two later, he had been buried in the cathedral. He had served his father, his elder brother and his nephew with unswerving loyalty, never once - in marked distinction to his brother Humphrey - putting his own interests before his duty: if his life ultimately ended in failure, it was no fault of his. His wisdom and selflessness were sorely to be missed in the years that followed.
At the time of Bedford's death, King Henry VI was three months short of his fourteenth birthday and - as was by now painfully clear to all who knew him — totally unfitted for the crown. Though never particularly intelligent, in his youth at least he was by no means simple-minded, as has occasionally been claimed; on the contrary he was well educated and exceptionally well read, and from an early age took a precocious interest in political affairs. His piety was unusual, even by the standards of his time. He attended divine worship often two or three times a day, said grace 'like a monk' before each meal, and on the great feasts of the Church invariably wore a hair shirt beneath his robes of state. At all other times he dressed simply, paying no heed to style or fashion. His chief fault was that he was impressionable and almost pathetically easily led, putty in the hands of men like Cardinal Beaufort or Duke Humphrey; more dangerous still, he soon showed himself to be alarmingly lacking in political judgement, using such power as he enjoyed with a recklessness and irresponsibility that caused serious concern. After the departure - without replacement - of his guardian, the Earl of Warwick, to France in 1437, he
began to play a steadily more important part in the administration, with almost invariably disastrous results. His mindless generosity made ever greater demands on the exchequer, as did his continual remission of fines and penalties; few petitioners were sent empty away, however unscrupulous their characters or unfounded their claims. At the same time the steep decline in wool exports, combined with the dishonesty of most of the tax collectors, had resulted in a dramatic decline in the revenue, while the exceptionally rainy weather which marked the three years between 1437 and 1440 led to the worst famine for well over a century.
And still the war dragged on. In April 1436 Bedford had been succeeded by Richard, Duke of York, now twenty-four,1 who was accompanied by his brother-in-law Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury since the death of his father-in-law, killed before Orleans. Barely fourteen months later York had been replaced by Warwick, but had been reappointed after the latter's death in 1439. Meanwhile Charles VII had made his triumphal entry into Paris in November 1437, and a somewhat half-hearted peace conference near Calais in 1439 had come to nothing. The following year saw the release of Charles of Orleans, who had been taken prisoner at Agincourt and held in comfortable captivity for the past quarter of a century. His ransom of 80,000 ecus, with a further 160,000 within six months, was largely paid by Philip of Burgundy, who gave him his fourteen-year-old niece, Mary of Cleves, in marriage.2
That same year, 1440, saw a sharp decline in the fortunes of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He had violently opposed giving freedom to the captive Charles of Orleans, despite the latter's oath on the sacrament never to bear arms against England; and Charles's subsequent release had been a bitter blow, not only to Humphrey's personal self-esteem but to his national prestige. He had also ill-advisedly brought quite unfounded charges of treachery and dishonesty against Cardinal Beaufort and the Archbishop of York, John Kemp, who had recently joined his friend Beaufort in the College of Cardinals. By now, in consequence, the Duke was generally discredited; and a further blow to his fortunes came in 1441 when his second wife Eleanor Cobham — 'a handsome,
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