With his almost modern instinct for public relations, on 22 September Henry wrote to the mayor and aldermen of London announcing Harfleur’s capture – and also asking them to send him news of themselves from time to time. This was a correspondence he kept up throughout his campaigns in France.
Harfleur was a valuable acquisition, which would prove its worth in later years. Yet the fact remains that the siege was a disastrous start to Henry’s campaign; he had lost over a third of his troops. In a carefully composed letter to the mayor of London he says that he has won a great victory, even though his counsellors were begging him to go home as quickly as possible and not to march into France lest the French hem them all in ‘like sheep in pens’. Nonetheless, although he abandoned his original plan of advancing on Paris, the king insisted on marching up to Calais with his sadly depleted troops, many of them still suffering from dysentery.
Much ink has been wasted on trying to explain this foolhardy adventure. There was seemingly little to be gained by it, in terms of reconnaissance, plunder or reputation, while it was obviously a considerable gamble since the French were known to be gathering in great strength. Why did so coolly objective a soldier take so unprofitable a risk? He hints why in words to his Council: ‘Even if our enemies enlist the greatest armies, my trust is in God, and they shall not hurt my army nor myself. I will not allow them, puffed up with pride, to rejoice in misdeeds, nor, unjustly against God, to possess my goods. It cannot be too much emphasized that, for all his use of the latest military technology, Henry’s mind was fundamentally medieval. During the siege he had sent a challenge to the Dauphin Louis to a single combat which would decide who was to inherit Charles VI’s throne – ‘to place our quarrel at the will of God between Our person and yours’. Louis, a fat and sluggish nineteen-year-old, wisely declined. The march up to Calais was intended to be a divinely protected military promenade which would demonstrate that God not only recognized his claim to the crown of France but, far more important, to the crown of England.
VII
‘That Dreadful Day of Agincourt’
‘Starkly the left arm hold with the bow
Draw with the right, and smite and overthrow’
A fifteenth-century translation
of Vegetius’s De Re Militari
‘Agincourt is … a school outing to the Old Vic, Shakespeare is fun, son-et-lumière, blank verse, Laurence Olivier in battle armour; it is an episode to quicken the interest of any schoolboy ever bored by a history lesson, a set-piece demonstration of English moral superiority and a cherished ingredient of a fading national myth. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.’
John Keegan, The Face of Battle
On 6 October Henry V marched out from Harfleur. Calais was 160 miles away and he expected to reach it in eight days’ time. He had approximately 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, grouped in three ‘battles’ with skirmishers on the wings. The king and the Duke of Gloucester led the main army, Sir John Cornwall the advance guard, and the Duke of York and the Earl of Oxford the rearguard. Henry was plainly anxious to make all speed possible, travelling without artillery or baggage wagons, his troops bringing only what they could carry on pack-horses – mostly the men-at-arms ‘harness’ and provisions for the eight days. He intended to march north to the River Somme, then south-east along its bank until he reached the ford of Blanche-Taque and then go straight on to Calais. To ensure a safe crossing he had sent orders for a force from Calais to seize the ford. (It had been used by his great-grandfather Edward II in 1346 on his way to Crécy.) No doubt he hoped for a minor engagement en route from which he could extract some semblance of a victorious trial by battle.
As was customary, the English slew and looted as they went, their passage announced by columns of black smoke from burning farmhouses. The abbey of Fécamp also went up in flames, women who had taken refuge in its church being dragged out and raped. Most of the archers were mounted so that the English were able to average nearly twenty miles a day, though such a pace must have been gruelling for those on foot with quivers holding fifty arrows. When fired on by the garrison at the castle of Arques as they were about to cross the River Béthune, Henry threatened to burn the town, extracting supplies of bread and wine for not doing so – it was the same story at Eu when crossing the Bresle. The army looked forward to an easy road over the Somme, which the king expected to reach by midday on 13 October.
Only six miles from the river a prisoner captured by English scouts reported that the tidal ford at Blanche-Taque was blocked by sharp stakes, and that Marshal Boucicault was waiting on the other side with 6,000 troops. (The force from Calais had been intercepted and driven off.) Henry personally interrogated the prisoner, telling him he would lose his head if he did not tell the truth but the man stuck to his story. In the meantime the tide came in and made the ford impassable. The king marched on eastward along the southern bank of the Somme to look for another ford. An eye-witness, the author of the Gesta, records the dejection of the army:
Expecting to have no alternative but to go into parts of France higher up and at the head of the river (which was said to be over sixty miles away) … at that time we thought of nothing else but this: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food and at the head of the river if God did not provide otherwise, would with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.1
Every ford appeared to be held by the French, who kept pace with the English from the other bank. There was a real danger of discipline breaking down. At Boves they drank so much wine, extorted from the castellan by the usual threats, that Henry forbade them to drink any more – when an indulgent commander told the king that they were simply filling their bottles, Henry snapped, ‘Their bottles indeed! They’re making big bottles of their bellies and getting very drunk.’ By now they had eaten their rations apart from a little dried meat, which they supplemented with nuts and what vegetables they could dig up in the fields.
The king took advantage of a loop in the river to make a short cut and outdistance the enemy who had to go the long way round. He still managed to enforce discipline, hanging in full view of the army a man caught sacrilegiously stealing a cheap copper gilt pyx from a church. (During later campaigns he would not be so particular.) Then on 19 October two unguarded fords were found at Voyennes and Béthencourt near Nesle. They could only be reached through the marshes over causeways which had been destroyed by the French; 200 archers, bows on backs, struggled through a quagmire at Béthencourt to wade waist deep across the river and establish a bridgehead on the far bank; a similar operation at Voyennes was also successful. Henry was not disposed to be merciful to the local peasants who had hung red clothes and blankets out of their windows, as a symbol of the Oriflamme (the sacred battle banner of the kings of France) and of defiance; he ordered every house whose occupants were unhelpful to be burnt to the ground. The causeways were repaired with window-frames, doors, roof-timbers and staircases from their hamlets as well as with hurdles, tree-trunks and straw. As soon as the causeway at Béthune could support a horse, Sir Gilbert Umfraville and Sir John Cornwall crossed at the head of 500 men-at-arms, just in time to drive off an attack on the archers’ bridgehead. By an hour after nightfall the entire English army was over the Somme and in much better spirits. They did not yet know that the main body of the French was only six miles away at Péronne.
Estimates of the number of French troops vary considerably but they almost certainly outnumbered the English by four to one and may have been as many as 30,000, of whom 15,000 were men-at-arms. Their leaders, Marshal Boucicault and the Constable d’Albret – Constable of France – were cautious veterans who wanted to leave Henry alone and let him go back to England while they c
oncentrated on recovering Harfleur. They were overruled by more pugnacious, less experienced spirits. Among the latter were not only the Armagnac Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon but Burgundian magnates like the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Nevers, who were the brothers of Duke John. Although he himself still vacillated, his son, the future Duke Philip, regretted for the rest of his life that he had not fought in the campaign. Even Burgundians could not stomach an English invasion. However, Charles VI, momentarily sane, and the Dauphin Louis stayed away; they did not wish to be taken prisoner, as Charles’s grandfather, John II, had been at Poitiers.
On 20 October, a Sunday, three French heralds arrived at Henry’s camp. They remained on their knees, keeping silence until given permission to speak. ‘Right puissant prince, great and noble is thy kingly power,’ began their spokesman. ‘Our lords have heard how you intend with your army to conquer the towns, castles and cities of the realm of France and to depopulate French cities. And because of this, and for the sake of their country and their oaths, many of our lords are assembled to defend their rights; and they inform you by us that before you come to Calais they will meet with you to fight with you and be revenged of your conduct.’ Henry replied calmly, ‘Be all things according to the will of God.’ Yet there was a hint of uneasiness in his answer to the heralds’ enquiry as to what road he would take. ‘Straight to Calais, and if our enemies try to disturb us in our journey, it will not be without the utmost peril. We do not intend to seek them out, but neither shall we go in fear of them either more slowly or more quickly than we wish to do. We advise them again not to interrupt our journey, nor to seek what would be in consequence a great shedding of Christian blood.’2 Then he sent the heralds back to their masters, each with a hundred gold crowns. He realized that he had been outmanoeuvred and expected to be attacked the next day. He ordered his men to take up positions, anticipating an onslaught from the direction of Péronne where the enemy had their camp. But it became clear that the French were not going to attack, so he gave orders for everyone to get a good night’s rest before continuing the march.
They awoke to a morning of drenching rain, beneath which they set out. For some days there were no serious incidents though ominous signs were not lacking, such as the road being churned up as if by the feet of ‘an unimaginable host’. The rain was unrelenting, driven into their eyes by the wind; they had to sleep in it. Many of them were weakened by dysentery and kept their breeches down. They were all famished. Morale sank very low indeed.
On 24 October a terrified scout reported to the Duke of York that he had sighted the enemy through the drizzle. The English had just forded the ‘river of swords’, the little River Ternoise. The chaplain tells us that ‘as we reached the crest of the hill on the other side, we saw emerging from further up the valley, about half a mile away from us, hateful swarms of Frenchmen’. They were marching in three great ‘battles’ or columns, ‘like a countless swarm of locusts’,3 towards the English to intercept them. For the French commanders had decided to make Henry stand and fight, and there was no hope of escape. He had been out-generalled. The English trudged on through the mud and the wet to the hamlet of Maisoncelles, where they bivouacked, preparing to spend yet another night under torrential rain. Even the king was shaken, releasing his prisoners and sending some of them into the French camp with a message that, in return for a safe passage to. Calais, he was ready to surrender Harfleur and pay for any damage he had done. The offer was rejected. A Somerset knight, Sir Walter Hungerford, told Henry that they could do with 10,000 more archers, at which the king rounded on him, retorting that he was a fool since the troops they had ‘are God’s people’. He added, again with a hint of uneasiness, that no misfortune could befall a man with faith in God so sublime as his own.
A set-piece confrontation was the last thing he wanted. He had only seen one before, at Shrewsbury, where he had very nearly been on the defeated side and had almost lost his life. He shared Vegetius’s opinion: ‘a battle is commonly decided in two or three hours, after which no further hopes are left for the worsted army … a conjuncture full of uncertainty and fatal to kingdoms.’ In any case he was more of a gunner, a sapper or a staff officer, than an infantry commander, and this was going to be an infantry battle. It was clearly with the utmost misgivings that he prepared for a general engagement.
According to English sources the French passed the night dicing for the English lords they expected to capture and for the rich ransoms they would demand. Later it was said that they were so confident that they had brought a painted cart with them in which to bring Henry back to Paris as a prisoner. They had plenty of wine and provisions and the sound of their feasting could be heard in the English camp. The Picard squire, Monstrelet, (born in 1390 and a contemporary) tells us, however, that the French passed a depressing night during which not even their horses neighed. He also says that, ‘The English played their trumpets and other musical instruments, so that the whole neighbourhood resounded with their music while they made their peace with God.’4 For, as all sources agree, the English were understandably terrified, confessing their sins to each other if the queues for priests were too long. The king ordered them to keep silent during the night, under pain of forfeiture of horse and armour for a gentleman, and of the right ear for a yeoman and anyone of inferior rank. (The reality behind Shakespeare’s ‘touch of Harry in the night’.) Armourers were kept very busy servicing weapons, as were the fletchers and bowyers. All were exhausted after their gruelling eighteen-day trek, all were sodden and starving, and all must have dreaded the next morning. Henry had got his trial by battle with a vengeance.
The chaplain, a fearful eyewitness, records how ‘in the early dawn the French arrayed themselves in battle-lines, columns and platoons and took up position in that field called the field of Agincourt, across which lay our road towards Calais, and the number of them was really terrifying’. It was a vast open field sown with young corn, two miles long and a mile wide but narrowing in the middle to about a thousand yards, where a small wood hid the village of Agincourt to the west and another small wood hid that of Tramecourt to the east. The King had spent the night in the village of Maisoncelles to the south, the French in and around that of Ruisseauville to the north. The site, off the road from Hesdin to Arras, remains miraculously unchanged, preserved by the re-planting of trees in the same clumps for generation after generation. On that particular day, because the corn was newly sown and because the rain had been falling for several days, the field had turned into a sea of mud which was bound to be churned up by large bodies of men and horses.
Most of the French were men-at-arms in full plate armour. There were three lines of them, each six deep, the first two lines dismounted and carrying sawn-off lances. A third line remained mounted, as did two detachments of 500 men-at-arms who were on the wings. They had some cannon and even some catapults together with a few crossbowmen and archers but there was no room to deploy them. The French plan – if plan it can be called – was for the horsemen on the wings to dispose of the English archers, while their men on foot got to grips with the English men-at-arms and overwhelmed them. They hoped that the English would facilitate this simple operation by attacking. Even the Constable d’Albret and Marshal Boucicault took their places in the front rank of the first line. The French therefore left themselves without any proper command structure, let alone any room to manoeuvre.
There was another eye-witness besides Henry’s chaplain who has left an account. This was ‘Messire Jehan, bastard de Waurin, sieur du Forestal’, a Picard nobleman born in 1394 who fought on the French side and whose father and younger brother were killed in the ensuing combat. Waurin recalls what it was like for the French nobles to prepare for battle:
And the said Frenchmen were so heavy laden with armour that they could not support the weight nor easily go forward; firstly they were armed in long steel coats of plate down to the knee or even lower and very heavy, with armour on their legs below, and underneath that white harn
ess [felt], while most of them had on basinets with chain-mail; the which weight of armour, what with the softness of the trampled ground … made it hard for them to move or go forward, so that it was only with great difficulty that they might raise their weapons, since even before all these mischiefs many had been much weakened by hunger and lack of sleep. Indeed it was a marvel how it was possible to set in place the banners under which they fell in. And the said Frenchmen had each one shortened his lance that it might do more execution when it came to fighting and dealing blows. They had archers and crossbowmen enough but would not let them shoot, since so narrow was the field that there was room only for men-at-arms.5
The English also took up their positions at dawn. They were by now down to 800 men-at-arms at most and probably slightly under 5,000 archers. The former, dismounted and carrying sawn-off lances like the French, were grouped four deep in three ‘battles’, each one flanked by a projecting wedge of archers four or five deep; on both wings there was a horn-shaped formation of archers curving gently forward so that they could shoot in towards the centre. By the king’s orders every archer stuck an eleven foot long stake, sharpened at both ends, into the ground in front of himself as protection against enemy cavalry. There were not enough troops for a reserve, so great was the disparity in numbers, the baggage train behind being guarded by ten men-at-arms and thirty archers. However, the English front did at least cover the entire centre while the flanks were protected by the woods.
Descriptions of Agincourt omit to comment on the relatively advanced age of the men whom the twenty-six-year-old monarch chose as his key commanders for this critical confrontation. The right was under his cousin, Edward, Duke of York, who at forty-two was the senior member of the royal family; fat and extremely cunning, once a favourite of Richard II, he was a natural survivor and by medieval standards in advanced middle age. The left wing was under Lord Camoys, married to Hotspur’s widow, who had seen service against the French as long ago as the 1370s. A still more reassuring figure was ‘old Sir Thomas Erpingham’, Knight of the Garter, who had charge of the archers. Born in 1357 he had been a household man of both John of Gaunt and Bolingbroke, accompanying the latter into exile in 1397 and on his march from Ravenspur to seize the crown. He had become Steward of the Royal Household in 1404 and was someone whom the king had known for most of his life. Henry, as overall commander, took the centre himself. It is significant that he did not entrust one of the main commands to his brother Humphrey – he was plainly anxious to have the coolest and most reliable heads available.
Henry V as Warlord Page 10