Henry V as Warlord

by Seward, Desmond

  ‘The wars in France turned the higher nobility into professional soldiers,’ says G. L. Harriss.7 Foremost among these soldier noblemen were the Earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Huntingdon, and Lord Talbot. Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, a year younger than the king and the son of Richard II’s favourite, was the most brilliant commander of the entire Hundred Years War after Henry himself. Henry had total trust in him – although to begin with he may have had reservations because of his parentage. A complete professional, he was a daring raider into enemy territory who could extricate his men from the most dangerous situations; at the same time he was a skilled artilleryman and expert in siegecraft, like the king, and no less sound on staffwork or in finding supplies. Above all, he had a shrewd grasp of strategy and tactics. Although a ferocious disciplinarian he was popular with the troops. He was dreaded by the enemy. Shakespeare probably conveys accurately enough what the French thought about him:

  Salisbury is a desperate homicide;

  He fighteth as one weary of his life.

  His ways with prisoners did not endear him to the French – after capturing the château of Orsay in 1423 he brought the garrison back to Paris with ropes round their necks.

  Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, was five years older than Henry and had campaigned with him against Glyn Dŵr. He was an avaricious knight errant with a taste for the spectacular; in 1408 he had performed a long, roundabout pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a species of grand tour during which he stayed with Charles VI at Paris, with the Doge of Venice and with the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, fighting in tournaments whenever possible – most notably a ferocious duel on foot against Pandolfo Malatesta. At the same time he was a steady and resourceful commander in the field and an excellent administrator. The king had so much respect for Warwick that he appointed him a governor and tutor of his son. There was, however, an extremely unpleasant side to the earl, who was basically a hard, cold and ruthless politician-soldier; one day he would burn Joan of Arc.

  Another well-tried commander, four years older than Henry, who had also done good service in Wales, was Gilbert, Lord Talbot. The youngest of the team was John Holland, the son of Richard II’s stepbrother, to whom the king only restored his father’s earldom in 1417. From a military point of view he was undeniably precocious; born in 1396, he had distinguished himself during the 1415 campaign, leading the first landing at Harfleur and fighting with outstanding gallantry at Agincourt.

  Almost as useful as these four were Sir John Cornwall (the future Lord Fanhope), Sir Gilbert Umfraville (styled ‘Earl of Kyme’), Sir John Grey (soon to become Count of Tancarville), Sir Walter Hungerford (the first Lord Hungerford) and Lord Willoughby d’Eresby. Cornwall was a ‘left-handed’ Plantagenet, being descended through a bastard line from Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans – Henry III’s brother – and having married as his third wife Henry IV’s sister, Elisabeth, who fell in love with him after a dazzling performance at a tournament. (He was also Huntingdon’s stepfather, by his second marriage.) A specialist in the assault, with Huntingdon he had been the first to land at Harfleur, and he was the first to force his way over the Somme on the march to Agincourt, where he had fought magnificently. Although by now well into his forties he was to prove one of the most aggressive of all the king’s soldiers. Umfraville, a Northumbrian from Redesdale, was another extremely able commander – a young man who was popular with the men and whose attractive personality can be sensed over the centuries. Sir John Grey of Heton (brother of Sir Thomas of the Southampton Plot) was another dashing Northumbrian who was a natural soldier. Sir Walter Hungerford of Farleigh Hungerford in Somerset, who became Steward of the Royal Household, was a former MP for Wiltshire and Somerset and a former Speaker of the House of Commons. Despite his legendary loss of nerve at Agincourt he was a sound fighting man who made a fortune out of ransoms and loot during the war. Willoughby d’Eresby who, although thirty-two by 1417 had not been at Agincourt, spent the rest of his long life fighting in France and was yet another dedicated commander.

  There was a host of lesser talent from outside the ranks of the upper nobility. Like Hungerford, some had profited from ransoms won at Agincourt, and all hoped for opportunities for fresh plunder in France. Even though unattracted by the prospect of arduous and dangerous campaigning, every prominent landowner must have been aware that he risked Henry’s displeasure if he failed to obey the royal summons to serve abroad. The king also wanted men to administer the territories he was going to conquer; gentlemen such as Sir John Assheton (a former MP for Lancashire), Sir Thomas Rempston (Knight of the Garter and a former MP for Nottinghamshire), Sir Rowland Lenthall from Herefordshire, Sir John Radcliffe from Westmorland, and many others. They came to fight, however advanced in years, bringing their own men-at-arms and archers with them, though, as will be seen, more often than not other duties awaited them. Not just the peerage but the entire landed gentry of England, including thirty MPs, were to be mobilized for conquest across the Channel. Most would serve as simple men-at-arms.8 They have been called the most bellicose squirearchy in Europe.

  Henry did more than prepare to mobilize. He secured the Duke of Brittany’s neutrality. Brittany stood in relation to France rather as Scotland did to England. Even though the French king was technically the duke’s overlord, there was an ancient, long-established sense of a separate identity which verged on separate nationality. Breton lawyers claimed that ‘the country (pais) of Brittany is a country separate and distinct from others’. Not only were its dukes consecrated in a coronation ceremony at the Breton capital of Rennes, but they possessed their own order of chivalry, the Knights of the Ermine (named after the ermine fur which was the ducal coat of arms and the banner of Brittany).

  The duke at that time, John V (1399–1442), a cunning and faithless politician, had little cause to favour Henry, who had taken his brother prisoner at Agincourt. The king disliked him intensely and had neither forgotten nor forgiven the ferocious activities of Breton privateers in the recent past. Nevertheless the duke was invited to England and apparently visited Southampton in April 1417. Henceforth the English and the Bretons signed a series of truces pledging themselves to refrain from acts of war against each other. John V did so most unwillingly and many Breton contingents served unofficially with the French armies. However, the duke was a realist. Although he far preferred the Valois to the Plantagenets he was determined to be on the winning side and was obviously impressed by the English king. It was vital for Henry that Brittany should stay out of the conflict and he somehow succeeded in maintaining peace. It was a considerable diplomatic achievement.

  In November 1416 the author of the Gesta recorded ‘the king’s unbreakable resolve to go overseas in the following summer to subdue the stubborn and more than adamantine obduracy of the French, which neither the tender milk of goats nor the consuming wine of vengeance, nor yet the most thoroughgoing negotiations, could soften’. He adds that Henry’s aim was that ‘the two swords, the sword of the French and the sword of England, may return to the rightful government of a single ruler’.9 He may well have been echoing the king’s own words, since Henry frequently put his case in similar terms.

  IX

  The Fall of Caen

  ‘Down goeth the wall; in and upon them then!’

  A fifteenth-century translation

  of Vegetius’s De Re Militari

  ‘This storm of war raised up against us by the people of England’

  Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII

  By March 1417 the king was gathering ships and troops. As before, many vessels were hired from the Low Countries; in addition a number of Venetian merchantmen were commandeered and, despite having lost so many carracks to the English, the Genoese also supplied some boats. Henry left London for Southampton at the end of April. There were the same massive preparations as in 1415. The assembly of men, livestock, food, tools, and weaponry, was, if anything, on a larger scale than before. The Brut of England sp
eaks of ‘guns, trebuchets, engines, sows, bastilles, bridges of leather, scaling ladders, mauls, spades, shovels, picks, pavises, bows and arrows, bowstrings, shafts and pipes full of arrows’ and that ‘thither come to him ships laden with gunpowder’.1 (Trebuchets were rock-throwing catapults, sows and bastilles were armoured shelters for attacking walls and siege-towers, while pavises were standing shields for protecting archers as they shot.) Probably as many as 12,000 men-at-arms and bowmen mustered, with perhaps 30,000 supernumaries – miners, engineers, armourers, farriers, gunners, masons (to make gunstones) etc. The fleet in which they were to embark numbered not less than 1,500 sail. The invasion was delayed until the late summer, till Lord Huntingdon had eliminated any danger from the Genoese carracks in France’s service; even then, the Earl of March was ordered to ‘skim the sea’ and guard against any further naval threat, though none would be forthcoming. The king had a healthy respect for warships. The embarkation began on 23 July. On 30 July his second armada set out for France. His own ship was distinguished by a mainsail of purple silk which bore the royal arms.

  Henry intended not just to invade but to conquer Normandy – a full-scale Norman Conquest in reverse. The duchy was to be another Guyenne. Territory would be held by occupying strongholds – cities, towns or châteaux – at strategic key points. It was essential to reduce every one of these in the areas invaded since even a small enemy garrison behind the lines could, if led by a skilled commander, disrupt communications and supplies. The king must have had maps of a sort, although none have survived – otherwise he could never have planned the forthcoming campaigns with such brilliant precision.

  As a soldier Henry V is generally thought of as the victor of Agincourt, who used archers to mow down the French chivalry. Yet he was first and foremost an artilleryman whose campaigns in France were spent in siege warfare as they had been in Wales. The impact of his cannon on the French was comparable to that of Guderian’s tanks in 1940. After the ravages of Edward III and the Black Prince, cities and towns throughout northern France – hitherto often largely unwalled, as at Caen – had fortified themselves massively, though only against stone-throwing catapults, sappers and scaling ladders. Just at the moment when the tide turned against the English in France during the 1370s the revolution in gunnery began. Previously cannon had only been able to fire stone or metal balls which weighed three pounds at most and were of negligible importance in siegecraft – suddenly it became possible to discharge missiles of up to 800 pounds. The English had employed the new weaponry to devastating effect in Wales. A treatise on war, dedicated to Lord Berkeley in 1408, speaks of ‘great guns that nowadays shoot stones of so great piece that no wall may withstand them as hath been well showed both in the north country and in the wars of Wales.’ The use of such artillery for sieges had not yet been experienced in France – as Henry was almost certainly aware. English bows might be evaded successfully, as the great French leader Bertrand du Guesclin had shown when fighting the Black Prince in Aquitaine, but not English siege guns.

  If his victory at Agincourt had settled nothing with regard to his claim to the French throne, it at least meant that Henry could be sure the French would never again dare face him in a head-on battle. On this certainty he based his plan for conquest. Essentially a strategist, he knew the importance of time and timing, how to make the most use of very limited manpower; it has been estimated that during his reign England’s total effective fighting force was no more than 15,000 men. His method was to capture as quickly as possible a line of strongholds facing the direction from which the French counterattack would come. He would then overrun the territory behind the line by taking every enemy town and fortress which it contained. Since the French would not dare to penetrate his line of strongholds to relieve them, he could bombard, mine, and blockade them into surrender at his leisure – there was no need for costly assaults. The process was completed by installing small English garrisons in the captured towns and castles, often only a bare handful of men. He could then extend the area of conquered territory by seizing another line of French strongholds further forward. A network of spies, operating at first apparently from Calais, seems to have been sent out to discover enemy troop movements and objectives. All this was accompanied by a ceaseless diplomatic offensive. In Jean Chartier’s words, Henry was truly a ‘subtil conquérant’.2

  The French must have been aware of the military build up across the Channel, and the imminent arrival of an armada. They were deeply apprehensive, just as the English would be when awaiting the Spanish armada in 1588, but since their defeats by Bedford and Huntingdon they had no ships left to intercept the invasion fleet. Understandably, they expected the English to land at Harfleur, though a few thought they might land somewhere in the vicinity of Boulogne. Again as before, Henry kept his destination secret until the very last minute. Instead of Harfleur and the north bank of the Seine, it was the mouth of the little river Touques (between the modern resorts of Deauville and Trouville), landing on the south bank. A small enemy force of 500 horses was quickly brushed aside. After disembarking the king had Mass said in thanksgiving, dubbed forty-six new knights and appointed Clarence the army’s official commander-in-chief. He then set up camp and dispatched Huntingdon and Salisbury to capture the castles of Bonneville and Auvillers – the two nearest strongpoints, both of which surrendered almost at once – and sent a scouting party up the Touques to reconnoitre. His overall strategy was to overrun Lower Normandy (Normandy south of the Seine) and his first objective was its capital, Caen, the duchy’s second city. Within three days of landing Clarence had advanced up the Touques and taken the town of Lisieux, inspiring such terror that its entire population fled, leaving only two aged cripples behind. By 14 August Clarence had occupied the suburbs of Caen.

  Thomas Basin is a particularly useful source of information about the English invasion. A Norman, born at Caudebec in 1412, he studied in Paris during the English occupation and was appointed Bishop of Lisieux in 1442, being nearly forty before he became a subject of the French king and having worked as an English official. He wrote a history of Charles VII and of his son and successor, Louis XI, being commissioned by the latter to report on the poverty in the provinces devastated by the war and to suggest ways of relieving it. He records of 1417:

  It is not easy to convey what terror was inspired among the inhabitants [of Normandy] by the name of Englishman alone – fear so sudden that nobody, or almost nobody, thought that there was any safety other than in flight. If in most of the towns and fortresses those captains who had garrisons had not shut the gates, and if the inhabitants had not been restrained by force as well as by fear, it is beyond question that many would have been left totally deserted as certainly happened in some places. Indeed the people, unnerved by a long period of peace and order, simple as they were, generally thought that the English were not men like everyone else but wild beasts, gigantic and ferocious, who were going to throw themselves on them and then devour them.3

  The experience of Basin and his own family in that year must have been one shared by very many Norman families, rich and poor. Basin’s father was a prosperous bourgeois of Caudebec. On the approach of the English in 1417 he fled to Vernon with his wife and children but was driven out of there by the plague and famine which was brought by the influx of refugees. They then sought shelter in Rouen, then at Falaise, before returning to Rouen. They escaped from here before it was cut off by the English, fleeing to Nantes in Brittany. In 1419 the Basin family returned to Caudebec. However, the neighbourhood had became so dangerous by 1431 that the elder Basin again took refuge in Rouen where he died a pauper. These constant flights before the enemy with what possessions could be carried (if one was lucky) on pack-horses or in carts paralleled those of the French in 1940 during the German invasion. The difference was that there was far more danger for the population from English troops in the fifteenth century than from German in the twentieth. Off the battlefield medieval troops had very little discipline. In any cas
e, despite issuing orders that women and clergy were not to be molested, Henry wanted to cow the Normans during the opening stages of his campaign.

  The Normans had already been given a taste of the invaders’ savagery on several occasions in the recent past. English raiders had devastated part of the Pays de Caux in 1403, burnt Fécamp in 1410, and again laid waste the Pays de Caux in 1413. Since the occupation of Harfleur in 1415 the garrison there had launched a series of minor but vicious raids into Normandy. Norman fishermen and merchants went in terror of English privateers, especially since the ‘King’s Ships’ had wrested control of the Channel from the French. The Monk of St Denis confirms Basin: ‘Everyone thought of nothing else but finding refuge in a place with strong fortifications, as if trying to escape from a storm of lightning.’4

  The new dauphin, Charles, was known to be at Rouen so the English kept a wary eye on him – presumably through spies as well as scouts – while they marched towards Caen. However, the dauphin was distracted by the knowledge that the Duke of Burgundy had seized Troyes at the end of June and was now advancing in the direction of Paris. Since the dauphin’s advisers and all the experts considered Caen impregnable he decided to return to the capital to face what appeared to be the more immediate danger. No doubt his military council were somewhat surprised that Henry had not gone to besiege Rouen straight away – the obvious if potentially disastrous course for an invader.