Henry V as Warlord

by Seward, Desmond

  In March 1420 King Henry marched through enemy territory to Troyes in Champagne where King Charles, Queen Isabeau and their daughter Catherine were waiting for him with their cousin, Duke Philip. Henry was accompanied by Clarence and Gloucester, since the Armagnacs were within striking distance with a string of fortresses stretching from south of Paris along the Seine and the Yonne. Henry went by way of St Denis, where he paused to pray, and under the walls of Paris, whose citizens cheered him from the walls – presumably in the belief that he would bring peace rather than from affection. When his army entered Champagne the king issued the remarkable order that no man should drink the local wine ‘so famous and strong’ (The First English Life’s wistful description) without watering it. Just before he reached Troyes he was met by the Duke of Burgundy and a host of Burgundians on horseback, who escorted him into the city. Philip and his court were in black armour with black horsetrappings – the duke’s swept the ground – and squires bore black banners seven yards long.

  At Troyes Henry knelt before the mad French king who was seated on his throne. For some time Charles VI could not be made to understand who Henry was, but finally muttered, ‘Oh, it’s you! You are very welcome since it is you. Greet the Ladies.’ The English king then greeted Queen Isabeau and at last Catherine of France, spectators observing that the kiss ‘gave him great joy’.

  On the following day the treaty was solemnly ratified in the cathedral of Troyes in the presence of King Henry and Queen Isabeau – though not of Charles VI – its articles being read out before the assembly. Charles was to remain King of France for as long as he lived, but at his death his crown would pass in perpetuity to Henry and his heirs. Henry, henceforward to be styled ‘heir of France’ was also to be regent of the realm advised by the French estates; he promised to bring to obedience those areas of France still ruled by the ‘self-styled dauphin of Vienne’. Furthermore ‘considering the horrible and enormous crimes’ perpetrated by the latter, Charles VI, Henry and Duke Philip agreed never to negotiate separately with the dauphin. The English king was to marry the Princess Catherine who, instead of having to bring a French dowry with her, would receive that of an English queen to the amount of 40,000 French crowns per annum, the cost to be borne by the English exchequer. Queen Isabeau was to be maintained as a queen for as long as she lived. Any Burgundian whose lands had been appropriated by the English was to be compensated out of territories to be conquered from the dauphin.

  Henry also pledged himself to guarantee France’s traditional laws and institutions and to appoint Frenchmen to French offices. There was to be perpetual peace between England and France, and after Charles VI’s death their sovereign was to be one and the same man. The peace would extend to a defensive alliance and to a measure of free trade. ‘All hatreds that may have existed between England and France shall be put an end to, and mutual love and friendship take their place.’ Moreover, Henry promised that with regard to King Charles and Queen Isabeau, ‘We shall regard them as Our father and mother, and honour them as such, and as it fitteth such and so worthy a prince and princess, to be honoured especially before all other temporal princes of this world.’ (His blatant failure to observe this clause caused genuine resentment even among Burgundians.)

  In January the following year the dauphin (and his advisers) were to issue a manifesto against ‘the damnable treaty for which Henry of England has asked’. It stated that ‘the honour of the fleur-de-lys and the right to the crown of France cannot and must not be given away to foreigners, especially those who are our ancient enemies.’ More subtly, it claimed that the treaty would subject the clergy, nobles and commons of France to ‘shameful servitude’. This claim was designed to offset Henry’s carefully calculated campaign to assure the French that nothing in their laws, customs or privileges would change – which was why he had abandoned the old Plantagenet claim in return for adoption by Charles VI.

  In Troyes Cathedral, on the same day that he signed the treaty, the new ‘heir and regent of France’ was betrothed to Catherine, after which there were twelve days of feasting until the marriage on 2 June. His bride had been born in 1401, the youngest daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria – and sister to Richard II’s little Queen Isabel. She was therefore half German. One does not receive the impression of a strong personality. She seems to have been attractive, to judge from her husband’s well-attested raptures at the portrait of her which her mother had sent him (which has not survived) and Monstrelet assures us that she was ‘very handsome’. She may have inherited Isabeau’s legendary sensuality, while she undoubtedly transmitted her father’s schizophrenia to her only child by Henry. After the king’s death she fell besottedly in love with a humble gentleman-in-waiting from Anglesey, Owain Tudur, her Clerk of the Wardrobe, whose father was the Bishop of Bangor’s butler. (She had four children by him, apparently after a secret marriage, one of whom was to be Henry VII’s father.) As will be seen, it is likely that the king’s true feelings for her were essentially dynastic, and that he felt little affection for her.

  A folk song, the Mariage anglais, commemorates the wedding. It tells how Catherine begged her brothers to stop Henry taking her away – ‘I would rather have a French soldier than an English king’ – and how there was not a lady in all Paris who did not weep to see their king’s daughter leave with an Englishman. When serenaded by his musicians she cried out scornfully that the ‘maudit anglois’ could not sound like ‘the hautbois of the King of France’. At supper she told the king when he tried to help her to the dishes, ‘I can neither eat nor drink when I look upon you.’ When English ladies tried to undress her, she ordered ‘the accursed English’ to leave her – ‘I have plenty of folk from my own country to serve me.’ Yet when it came to midnight she was still awake and yielded to her husband.

  The seal of Queen Catherine

  Retourne-toi, embrasse-moi,

  Mon cher Anglois!

  Puisque Dieu nous a assemblés,

  Faut nous aimer.1

  Perhaps the Mariage anglois really does convey what Catherine of Valois felt about Henry. It certainly provides a clue to how some Frenchmen thought of him. The Monk of St Denis’s comment on the king was, ‘If he is the strongest, all right then! Let him be our master, just so long as we can live in the lap of peace, safety and plenty.’2 Both song and chronicle preserve a sense of hopelessness induced by unending civil war. However, the Lancastrian monarchy brought none of these things to its ‘kingdom of France’. Henry had promised ‘good governance’ and an end to corruption and extortion. In the event he was able to do nothing against the entrenched interests of the Burgundian officials who ran the kingdom. Nor was he able to rid it of dauphinist raiders, who often threatened Paris itself.

  Having spent a honeymoon of only two days, Henry left Troyes with Duke Philip to march on the dauphinist city of Sens, which quickly surrendered. The Anglo-Burgundian army then laid siege to Montereau, where the duke’s father had been murdered nearly a year before. English and Burgundians, the latter roaring for revenge, stormed Montereau on 24 June. The governor, the Sieur de Guitry, and most of the garrison took refuge in the heavily fortified castle which adjoined the town but eleven of them were caught. Monstrelet recounts what then took place:

  The King of England sent the prisoners from the town under strong guard to parley from the ditches with the men in the castle and persuade the governor to surrender the place. When they were within hearing they fell on their knees and begged him piteously to yield, for by doing so he would save their lives and in any case he could not hold out much longer against such a large force. The governor replied that they would have to look after themselves as he was not going to surrender. Abandoning all hope of life, the prisoners then asked to speak with their wives, friends and relatives in the castle and everyone said goodbye with tears and lamentations. When they were brought back to the army the English king had a gallows erected and hanged them in full view of the castle. The king also hanged a running footman who
always followed him when he rode out, holding the bridle of his horse. He was a great favourite of the king but, having killed a knight in a quarrel, was punished.3

  The fact that the knight had been killed accidentally made no difference whatever to Henry. Meanwhile in the town Duke Philip had his father’s corpse disinterred, ‘a melancholy sight, for he was still in his pourpoint and drawers’. After it had been suitably clothed and placed in a leaden casket packed with salt and spices, it was sent to the Burgundian family mausoleum at Dijon for reburial. The Sieur de Guitry surrendered on terms on 1 July, marching off with his garrison.

  The Anglo-Burgundian army, 20,000 strong, marched to Melun nearby, investing it on 9 July. Here both defences and defenders were unusually strong. The city centre and citadel were on a small island in the Seine, linked to the rest of the city on either bank by fortified bridges, each section forming a separate stronghold. The captain of Melun, the Sieur Arnaud Guillaume de Barbazan, was more than just a fire-breathing Gascon: he was a leader of magnetic personality who inspired his 700 troops (who were clearly ‘picked men’), enthusiastically supported by armed citizens. Henry pitched his camp on the west side of the river, Duke Philip on the east. The king built a pontoon bridge over the Seine, screened his gun emplacements with earth ramps and timber stockades, and protected his lines from enemy sorties by trenches. As usual his artillery fired night and day. It included a particularly large cannon, a gift from the City, and named in consequence the ‘London’, which had arrived unexpectedly. However, the English gunnery had little effect on the walls of Melun. The Burgundians became so exasperated that they launched an assault by themselves, despite a warning from Henry, and were bloodily repulsed; they began to squabble with their allies, the Prince of Orange taking his contingent home in disgust. The Duke of Burgundy stayed; indeed many of his leading supporters were most anxious to wage war at the side of the English king, since it was their sole hope of recovering estates appropriated by the Armagnacs.

  Henry and his Burgundian allies tried mining. The miniature paintings of medieval sieges in the illuminated manuscripts show cannoneers in gleaming armour and smartly clad archers shooting gracefully at some fairy-tale castle, their commanders watching from gorgeous silk pavilions. The reality was not quite so elegant. Usually, as at Melun, mining was needed to help the guns smash a breach in the defences; this entailed tunnelling beneath the foundations, frequently from a long distance away, then propping the tunnels up with pit props, and finally firing the props to bring the walls above crashing down. At Melun the soil was unsuitable because the river was so near and the miners had to dig knee deep in mud and water. The defenders countermined to break into the tunnels and attack the besiegers. These desperate hand-to-hand combats in fetid darkness lit by guttering torchlight between half-naked men slipping in the mire must have been indescribably brutish, far removed from the chivalrous combats recorded in the chronicles. The king himself went down into the mines to take part. On one occasion he crossed swords over a wooden barrier in a dimly-lit tunnel with an unusually tough adversary, who turned out to be Barbazan, the enemy commander – when Barbazan realized whom he was fighting he insisted on withdrawing.

  Henry had his wife installed at Corbeil nearby, then in a house which he had specially built near his headquarters. Each day his minstrels serenaded her with an hour’s concert at sunrise and another at sunset. He also kept in his camp Charles VI and James I, the captive King of Scots. He made the former summon the garrison to surrender but it shouted back that while it honoured a French sovereign it would never kneel to an English king. A similar appeal by James to Scotsmen in the garrison met with a similar response.

  After four months’ resistance there was good reason for the English to grow alarmed, even if the walls were by now no more than mounds of rubble barely higher than the ditches. More and more Burgundians were deserting (although the duke was able to obtain reinforcements), dysentery had broken out among the English, and it was known that the dauphinists were assembling a relief force. Even if they could not save Melun they might well cut off the Anglo-Burgundian army, which was now seriously depleted. An epidemic broke out among the English. There was gloomy news from across the Channel. In Venice the diarist Antonio Morosini received a letter from London dated 8 September 1420 reporting that the plague was raging there, with 400 people dying every day.

  The defenders had to live on horseflesh for three months, but at last, when they had gone without any meat and drink for nearly a week, Barbazan gave up hope and surrendered, on 18 November. The garrison’s lives were spared but both soldiers and civilians were to remain prisoners until ransomed and anyone remotely associated with the murder at Montereau was to be handed over bound. Everything in Melun became the spoils of the victors. Umfraville was made its captain.

  There was a marked lack of magnanimity in Henry’s implementation of the terms. He had been irritated rather than impressed by the heroism of the defence. Boat-loads of the more valuable prisoners, some 600, were sent down the Seine to Paris: many who could not organize payment in time died in confinement.4 He wanted to execute Barbazan, who only escaped by invoking the laws of chivalry and claiming that since he had crossed swords with the king in the tunnel he was his brother-in-arms. Henry contented himself with condemning Barbazan to perpetual imprisonment and incarcerated the man in an iron cage, first at the Bastille and then at Château Gaillard (where he remained for many years). Large numbers of Armagnacs were executed on the non-proven grounds that they had been involved at Montereau. The king also hanged twenty Scots on the even more specious pretext that they had disobeyed their captive monarch’s summons to surrender. He had two monks in the garrison put to death for having brought messages to it.

  Henry was ‘much feared and dreaded by his princes, knights and captains, and by people of every degree’, Waurin informs us, ‘because all those who disobeyed his orders or infringed his edicts he would put to death without mercy’.5 The pitiless ferocity of his letter-of-the-law justice was in evidence at Melun. Shortly after it fell Bertrand de Chaumont, a northern Frenchman who had fought by the king’s side at Agincourt and had since loyally served in his household, was accused and found guilty of helping Armagnac friends from the garrison to escape; the Armagnacs had been at Montereau during Duke John’s murder and, even if blameless, had faced certain death if they fell into Henry’s hands. The Duke of Clarence interceded for Bertrand, pleading for his life. ‘By St George, fair brother, had it been you yourself We should have done likewise,’ answered the king, who had Bertrand beheaded immediately. Jean Juvénal, recording how the man was executed without a trial, comments ‘but then Henry was an Englishman’ (‘mais il estoit Anglois’).6

  As for the prisoners, Jean Juvénal tells us that, ‘the hostages and anyone else whom they had captured were brought back to Paris by boat. Some were confined in the Bastille of St Antoine, others in the Palais, the Châtelet, the Temple and in various other prisons.’ Here ‘several of them were put in deep ditches, especially at the Châtelet, and left there to die of hunger. And when they asked for food and screamed from hunger, people threw straw down to them and called them dogs. Which was a great disgrace to the king of England.’7

  XIV

  The Fall of Paris 1420

  ‘Come on! With us ye shall go see the King!’

  A fifteenth-century translation

  of Vegetius’s De Re Militari

  ‘Hélas, doulce France, doulce ville de Paris.’

  Jean Juvénal des Ursins

  The Anglo-Burgundian army, pausing to collect King Charles at Corbeil, returned to Paris. Henry rode in beside his dazed father-in-law while behind them rode the Dukes of Burgundy, Clarence and Bedford at the head of a glittering cavalcade which nonetheless had some sombre notes – the English king’s squire bearing his strange ensign of a fox’s brush on the tip of a lance, Duke Philip and his knights all in black. The heir and regent went at once to Nôtre Dame to pray at the high altar, before installi
ng himself in the Louvre. Within hours of their arrival English troops had seized all strongpoints in the French capital, which they were to occupy for seventeen years; they captured the Bastille with a simple subterfuge; a knight engaged the Burgundian castellan in conversation until the soldiers were able to creep up and rush the drawbridge. Led by clergy, dons from the university and lawyers from the Parlement, the Parisians greeted the visitation with seeming joy, singing Te Deum, encouraged by the wine flowing from the public fountains which the city fathers had prudently provided to sweeten their mood. However alien, this terrifying foreign king might at least bring peace, rescue them from an unending nightmare of civil war and bloodshed. Next day Isabeau and Catherine arrived in their litters, the fountains flowing this time with rose water as well as wine.