by Amy Licence
The battle was a milestone in English culture long before Shakespeare was writing. ‘The Agincourt Carol’, composed soon after the events of October 1415, recorded how Henry fought with ‘grace and myght of chyvalry’, with God on his side, causing ‘affray’ that France would ‘rewe tyl domesday’. Typical of the medieval chivalric code, the ‘manly’ king achieved his victory ‘marvelsuly’.4 A second contemporary song, ‘King Henry V’s Conquest of France’, has the thickets and swamps of the battlefield ‘choked with knights dead in their armour’, with archers ‘face down as if sleeping’.5 Henry himself received an axe blow to the head, striking off the decorative ‘crown’ of his helmet, yet survived to seize the moment and name the battle after the nearby castle of Agincourt. Welsh chronicler Adam of Usk describes Henry ‘as a very lion’, committing ‘himself to God and the fortunes of the sword’. In these accounts, the victory over the annihilated French seems absolute, easily won, with the English king emerging as something akin to a medieval superhero, striding across swathes of his victims, surviving a rain of mortal blows.
The reality was less glamorous. The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet estimated the French numbers to be around six times those of their opponents, but that Henry’s secret deployment of 200 archers to the rear of the enemy forces was a significant factor in their defeat. More English archers, totalling 13,000, advanced with the king. Their arrows hit the French horses, sending them ‘smarting with pain’ into a ‘universal panic’.6 George Chastellain’s Chronicle of Normandy echoes this account, with a thick ‘shower of arrows’ forcing the French to retreat ‘amongst their own people’. This broke the line of their waiting troops, who foundered in the soft ground, allowing the English to wade in with their swords, mallets, hatchets and billhooks. The French were ‘more and more defeated’ and soon the place was scarred by the ‘pitiful sight’ of the ‘dead and wounded who covered the field’.7 Gregory’s Chronicle for 1415 has Henry making ‘hys way thoroughe the thyckyste of alle the batayle’ and listed the English dead at no more than eighteen ‘personys’, in comparison with considerable French losses.8 The imbalance in numbers was partly due to the order, recounted by Monstrelet, that Henry gave his men to ‘massacre’ all their prisoners. When Henry found himself ‘master of the field’, he ‘made a circuit of the plain’ and announced that it was not him but God who had made this ‘great slaughter … as punishment for the sins of the French’.9 Then, he and his armies returned to London where he was received both ‘worthily and ryally’.10 His return, and the news it brought, would have great significance for Cecily’s future.
The London to which a victorious king returned would have been almost unrecognisable as today’s city. In 1415 it was home to around 50,000 people.11 Thus it was almost 160 times smaller, in population terms, than the 8 million recorded as being resident in the census of 2011. Of course, it was also physically much smaller in the fifteenth century. Surviving maps from before and after Cecily’s time show a squat, uneven semicircle, enclosed by thick walls, roughly centred on the modern square mile. Practically the entire city sat on the north bank of the river, stretching as far as Cripplegate in the north, although Moorfields and Spitalfields, or St Mary Spital, lay outside its thick walls. A few houses clustered on the south, including the Tabard Inn, frequented by Chaucer’s pilgrims, but most of the land there was still open countryside and marshes. The Thames was wider than in the twenty-first century, at least twice as wide, maybe more. It was the reason that the Romans had founded the city where they did, providing an essential thoroughfare, salmon and oyster to grace the table and water for cooking and washing.
Fifteenth-century London was also a centre of international trade. Towards the east, just past the solid stone bastion of the Tower, sailing ships unloaded their cargoes. Spices, bolts of cloth and precious gems came from as far afield as Oslo, Constantinople and Kiev, Alexandria, Algiers and Cadiz. There was only one bridge, London Bridge, top-heavy with buildings and frequently under repair. Rental accounts from 1420 list a fishmonger and butchers among its residents as well as the tolls paid by carts crossing from one side to another. A sum of 2 shillings and 8 pence was paid weekly to feed ‘the bridge dogs’.12 In the middle of the bridge perched a chapel, dedicated to St Thomas Becket. A new key was bought for the vestry door that year, at a price of 3 pence.13 Travellers would kneel there to give thanks on their safe arrival in the city or ask protection for their imminent departure.
Below London Bridge, life was less harmonious. Small craft were sucked dangerously through the bridge’s arches, briefly losing control in the rushing white water. Many must have been damaged or lost vital equipment. In 1420, the bridge accounts show two new pairs of sculls, or oars, were purchased for a boat named Thomas, as well as two new chains, shavehooks and a bead hook.14 Beyond the bridge lay the calmer stretch of river, flowing west past Blackfriars, the location where Cecily’s future London home, Baynard’s Castle, would soon be rebuilt from an existing medieval town house. From there, the river ran on to Bridewell, Whitefriars and the ruins of the Savoy Palace. Once the grandest of all London’s fine houses, it had been owned by Henry V’s grandfather, John of Gaunt; his employee Geoffrey Chaucer had worked there before it was destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. At that point, the Thames turned south, past York Place, which would later become Whitehall, and on to the royal region of Westminster. Over half a century after Henry V’s victorious return, Cecily would visit it as the queen mother.
At the dawn of the fifteenth century, London was a mosaic of greys, browns and greens, a tableau of steep roofs, muddy thoroughfares and the leafy oases of gardens, fields and orchards. Within the walls, rich and poor lived closely together. Some houses were large and grand, built of red brick, with windows of glass and gates of iron. These sat amid acres of garden, surprisingly large for an urban setting, with lawns running down to the riverfront or spreading out to the walls. Other homes spilled out in complex units, like jigsaw pieces, with new rooms and courtyards added one by one, over time. Poorer dwellings, dark and unstable, rose up shoulder to shoulder down dark alleyways. Made from wood and straw, they were the constant fodder of rapacious fires and deadly epidemics. Almost every year there were new cases of plague. Inside there was little to steal, but the wild pigs that roamed the city might nose their way in, smelling the broth or cabbage boiling in a pot on the hearth. No one could touch them, as they were owned and protected by the Hospitallers of St Anthony. All a mother could do was be vigilant and chase them away if they approached the makeshift cradle where her child was sleeping.
The physical city, like its people and their businesses, underwent a constant process of reinvention. Walls fell down and boundaries were disputed. Drains got blocked and waste found its way into the many little tributaries of the Thames, which ran through and under the streets like veins. In the 1360s, Edward III had complained that when travelling downriver he ‘beheld dung and … stools and other filth accumulated in divers places’.15 Yet the city was as varied and complex as it was dangerous. The contemporary poem ‘London Lickpenny’ (or ‘Lackpenny’) describes marketplaces that offer velvet and silks, felt hats and spectacles for sale, while stolen goods are resold at the Cornhill. Drinkers in East Chepe clatter their pewter pots to the accompaniment of street songs such as ‘Julian and Jenkin’.16 The air may have been acrid with smoke and the stench of latrines and tanneries, but it resonated with the peals of bells from dozens of churches too, summoning the pious to prayer. Henry V’s capital was also a place where a man could be burned alive for commissioning a heretical religious text. Only that August, Lollard John Cleydone, an illiterate leather worker, lost his life for owning a copy of the anti-Papist tract ‘The Lanterne of Light’.
Life and death sat close together in fifteenth-century London. King Henry left France during the season of killing, the old blood month from the Anglo-Saxon calendar. The date 11 November marked Martinmas Day, the feast of St Martin, when animals were traditionally slaughtered t
o prepare for the winter ahead. This had been such a problem in the past, with carcasses mounting in the streets, even in the shadow of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, that since 1369 it had been illegal to butcher them within the City walls. Anyone dumping rubbish in the street could expect a hefty fine. By 1415, the main meat market was at Smithfields, or the smooth field, which also acted as a site of execution and an arena for jousting. The busy thoroughfares leading to and from it were witness to sickness, dirt and disease, as well as human and animal waste. When word arrived of the king’s imminent arrival, his route was swept and washed, lined with sand or rushes and the crowds kept at bay.
The victorious Henry V landed at Dover on 23 November amid stormy weather. When news reached the city, its representatives set out en masse to meet him at Blackheath. They formed themselves into a reception committee, ordered by spiritual and temporal hierarchy, waiting for the first lookout to bring news. The king was coming home; the King of England, Henry V, drenched in the glory of his victory at Agincourt, was on his way back to his capital. They made a colourful procession, with the city’s mayor and aldermen in ‘orient-grained scarlet’17 followed by 400 citizens dressed in clothing dyed with murrey, a purplish-red, mounted on ‘well-trimmed’ horses.18 Adam of Usk puts the number closer to 10,000, adding that they also wore striking particoloured hoods, half white and half black, and were ‘exulting in heart’. With them was a mass of England’s clergy, dressed in their ‘sumptuous copes’19 and carrying heavy, shining crosses. Some carried censers that trailed the rich scent of religion in their wake.
But the king himself scorned celebration. Riding slowly towards them, Henry appeared ‘grave and sombre’, displaying little regard for the ‘vain pomp and shows’, or the preparations ahead, designed to honour his arrival in the city.20 In 1415, he was a tall, slim young man of twenty-nine, reputed to stand at 6 feet 3 inches, with dark hair cropped in the French style above his ears. His face was lean and his nose thin and long, with eyes flashing ‘from the mildness of a dove to the brilliance of a lion’.21 Modest and pious, he requested that his helmet, with its ‘blows and dints’ from battle, should not be carried with him for the common people to see, nor should any songs be sung about the victory, because ‘the praise and thanks should altogether be given to God’.22 According to the poet Lydgate, the king was ‘truli a gracious man’ known for his military prowess, who had done ‘godly’ work ‘through God’s hand’ in France.23 Adam of Usk related how the king was keen to pass through the secular celebrations and make ‘much reverence and giving of alms’ at the tomb of St Erkenwald in St Paul’s. Later, Henry would arrange solemn funerals for the slain and go on pilgrimage on foot from Shrewsbury to St Winefride’s Well in North Wales, where he gave thanks for his victory.24
Yet Henry could not avoid the pageants made in his honour by his grateful subjects. They were recorded in Latin by the scribes of the Lord Mayor of London and have survived in the Cottonian Collection, now in the British Library. Approaching London Bridge, the procession drew to a stop. Across the towers of the bridge, banners of the royal arms had been hung and a placard bore the legend ‘the City of the King of Righteousness’. Trumpets played along with other wind instruments, perhaps the shawm, crumhorn, pipe and recorder, cutting through the November air. Ahead of them, on the bridge’s tower, was mounted a ‘gigantic figure’ holding the keys to the city, beside an equally tall female, ‘intended for his wife’. On either side, towers were erected, made from wood covered in linen. One was decorated with a marbled effect, the other painted to look like green jasper, and on top sat the king’s heraldic beasts, the antelope and lion.25 Across it hung a banner bearing the words ‘glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God’.26 Further along, a pavilion had been built with battlements and turrets, housing a figure of St George, which Gregory’s Chronicle describes as being ‘royally armed’. His head was adorned with a laurel crown studded with jewels, and his coat of arms featured on a crimson tapestry that hung behind. Little boys dressed in white, with angelic wings, sang from the windows of a house, representing the heavenly host extending God’s blessing to the victorious English king. The crowds cheered triumphantly as he paused to hear them sing.
Then the procession reached the Cornhill, where the conduit was draped in crimson and emerald silk and hung with coats of arms. White-haired prophets in golden coats released sparrows and small birds on the king’s approach, some of which flew and settled upon him.27 There were also actors dressed as the Twelve Apostles, kings of England, martyrs and confessors, who chanted sweetly on the king’s approach. Wine and wafers borne on silver leaves refreshed the party. From there, the progress was slow. At the famous cross of Chepe a temporary castle had been built, of timber covered with linen, also painted to depict blocks of white marble, with red and green jasper. Before it, on a stage, ‘was moche solempnyte of angelys and virgenys syngyng’ merrily.28 More boys showered down gold coins and laurel leaves upon the king’s head as he passed beneath them and virgins blew gold leaves from ‘cups in their hands’.29 A canopy, painted to represent the sky and clouds, with each corner supported by an angel, fluttered above a magnificent throne. It was occupied by a glittering figure representing the sun, over two centuries before the birth of Louis XIV of France, the most famous monarch in history to employ that device. The sun in splendour had been used as a heraldic device by Richard II but now, returning to his capital, fresh from the legendary field of Agincourt, Henry V was England’s new sun king.
Yet not everyone who had fought in 1415 returned triumphantly. Very few Englishmen fell on St Crispin’s Day, but one of them was Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, another grandson of Edward III. Gregory’s Chronicle recorded that ‘thorowe Goddys grace the kynge made hys way thoroughe the thyckyste of alle the batayle; and ther was slayne on the kyngys syde the Duke of Yorke’. Some sources cite that he was killed by a head wound, while others claim he was crushed to death amid the press of bodies. York was the highest-ranking English nobleman to die that day, and his death raised the question of where his title would pass. Despite being married twice, he had not fathered an heir. He had first been wed at the age of eight and his second wife was twenty years his senior. His childless life, and the manner of his death, would secure Cecily’s future.
York’s brother, the Earl of Cambridge, had predeceased him by two months. Yet he had not died a hero’s death; quite the opposite. He had been a traitor, seeking to reverse the line of succession back to a senior royal line. Only that August he had been beheaded for his part in the Southampton Plot, which aimed to replace Henry V with his cousin, the Earl of March. Yet he left a son, a four-year-old, still under the jurisdiction of women in the nursery. The boy’s mother had died in the process of giving him life, so now he was an orphan. Perhaps the king was moved by his plight. The child was judged incapable of being tainted by his treasonous activities; in fact, he was considered to have been betrayed by his father. After Agincourt, the young Richard Plantagenet was permitted to take his uncle’s title and become Duke of York. It was by this small boy’s new status that Cecily and her children would come to be known.
2
‘Rose of Raby’
1415–1429
Off birth she was hihest of degree
To whom alle aungelis did obedience1
Raby Castle stands amid a large deer park about 18 miles to the south-west of Durham. On summer afternoons, the gates of this family home are thrown wide to admit the public who come to see its walled gardens and medieval rooms, and to sip tea amid the old stables of the coach house. But the castle had been attracting admiration from visiting historians and artists long before the horses were retired and their former stalls filled with the aroma of freshly baked scones.
In 1817, the Romantic landscapist J. M. W. Turner perched on the surrounding hills and sketched Raby’s fortifications and feathery trees. His drawings show a panorama of towers, façades and turrets with a little blue wisp of smoke escaping to the sky. For it i
s indeed a romantic landscape, steeped in legend and history. With its solid stone walls topped with impressive crenellations, Raby seems to fit the image of a fairy-tale castle, sheltering fair maidens and repelling intruders. And, like any building with a significant past, it has undergone stages of development, making it a jigsaw of its different owners and influences, something of an historical hybrid, marked by the ghostly imprints of past owners. Visitors might peer across its landscape and call, hesitantly, like Margaret Schlegel in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, ‘Saxon or Celt?’
The castle was very popular with Victorian visitors. They swished through the rooms in their crinolines and frock coats clutching a brand-new hardback guidebook. Published in 1857 by Whittaker & Co. of London, it was written by an anonymous author known only by the initials ‘F. M. L.’ Its job was to steer the mid-Victorian couple through centuries of life inside the grey stone walls. There was much to cater for the plush, heavy tastes of the day, with descriptions of furnishings, the library, engravings and portraits. The writer was also interested in the passage of time his generation had witnessed. He understood that progress was inevitable and that the past should not be lamented; in his lifetime, the stagecoach had vanished and horse-drawn carts were being replaced by the ‘iron mammoth’, the spreading railway which had such an impact on Victorian England. ‘We must not regret them,’ the preface prompts the reader, ‘they have had their day.’2
The Victorian lady and gentleman approached the castle in their barouche, driving through the park towards the ‘noble pile’,3 a ‘baronial manor of former times’.4 The building appeared on ‘elevated ground’, with nine towers glimpsed ‘from between the waters’, crenelated and imposing.5 Above the shimmering lake, a typical fairy-tale castle appeared, perhaps already familiar to the nineteenth-century eye from the extensive sketches made by J. M. W. Turner in 1817. Entrance was through an impressive gatehouse flanked by two towers, each with its own stone guardian staring out across a moat that had been dry for a century. But, by the time the barouche rattled across the causeway, the days of siege and civil war were over, so the iron portcullis and drawbridge were no longer needed. They drove on to the Neville Gateway, the main entrance, where one door still bore the insistent marks of an ancient battering ram, a reminder of the family that occupied the castle during the turbulent medieval period.6