But Henry’s first problem came from nearer home. Sir John Oldcastle, Baron Cobham, was a seasoned warrior who had fought in Wales and France and was personally known to the king. He was a substantial landowner in Herefordshire and Kent, and he was also a convinced Lollard, one of a small group of shire knights who formed a sort of ‘aristocracy’ in the largely working-class world of English heresy. Archbishop Arundel and his agents were still enthusiastic about tracking down suspected Lollards, and in the early days of the reign they discovered a cache of heretical tracts belonging to Oldcastle. Arundel, cautious about proceeding against one of the king’s associates, informed Henry, who ordered a ‘cooling-off period’ while he personally tried to reason with the unorthodox knight. Oldcastle refused to budge from his criticism of the papacy and Catholic doctrine, and after several months Henry gave Arundel permission to instigate proceedings in his own court. Oldcastle was lodged, reasonably comfortably, in the Tower of London.
On 23 September the prisoner was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral for his trial. The case had provoked enormous interest, and the church was packed with spectators, among whom were several men and women who shared Oldcastle’s beliefs. The knight was duly found guilty and handed over to the secular arm. Once again, Henry intervened to allow the prisoner more time for reflection. Plans had probably already been made to rescue him, and on the night of 19 October Oldcastle escaped from the Tower (perhaps with the connivance of sympathetic guards). He was hidden by his friends in the city, and there he hatched a rash plot to seize London while a band, posing as mummers, would go to Eltham Palace, where the court was staying, and take the king prisoner. What the rebels intended to do if their plan succeeded is not clear; perhaps they had not thought that far ahead. Certainly, like the peasants who had risen a generation before, they underestimated the difficulty of taking control of London. On the other hand, their confidence suggests that Lollardy was strong in the capital and that Arundel was right to fear it, though what was afoot was not as extreme as some contemporary chronicles reported.
Oldcastle’s agents travelled the country in the closing days of 1413, whipping up support. Recruitment was well organized, and it appears that various lures were employed to attract supporters – a brewer from Dunstable, for example, appeared wearing gold spurs and with gilded trappings for his horse because he had been promised the governorship of Hertfordshire and was determined to present himself in a style befitting his new station. On the night of 9–10 January several hundred Lollards converged on St Giles’s Fields, northwest of the city beyond Temple Bar. There Oldcastle was to meet them with a band of well-armed retainers. However, too many people were in the conspiracy for it to remain secret, and too few to carry it off successfully. The plot was betrayed, and the king’s men were already in waiting as the groups of conspirators began to arrive. Most of the rebels fled and escaped in the darkness, but 36 were subsequently hanged, ‘upon new gallows made for them upon the highway fast beside the same field where they thought to have assembled together’. Seven of their number were also burned.1 Oldcastle was among those who escaped, and he managed to remain at large until November 1417, when he was captured in Wales and executed as a traitor.
Henry V’s overmastering passion was making good his claims in France. The existing truce was set to expire on 1 May 1415, and the king hoped to put a permanent end to the long-running war. But he was also determined to have peace on his own terms. In the spring of 1414 he sent ambassadors to Charles VI to present his case. He required recognition as heir to the French crown or, at least, the complete restitution of all those lands in the southwest traditionally claimed by his predecessors. To cement friendship between the two nations he proposed his own marriage to Charles’s youngest daughter, Catherine. And he asked for a huge dowry. Such extravagant demands doubtless were made as the opening gambit in diplomatic bargaining, but Henry had already decided that he would need to back it up with force. He borrowed large sums of money from the bishops and London merchants, including the wealthy mercer Richard Whittington. Yet as late as December 1414 parliament was urging him to reach an accord with Charles VI by peaceful means.
1415–16
As Anglo-French talks continued, the two sides grew further apart. In March 1415 the dauphin, having reached an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy not to support Henry’s claims, sent a defiant message. Its insolence may have become exaggerated in the telling and retelling, but according to some sources the king of England was sent a case of tennis balls because playing games was more suited to his youth and inexperience than waging war. What may have stung Henry even more than such a rebuff was the charge that he should not lay claim to the crown of France when he was not even the rightful king of England.
While Henry gathered his army and prepared to cross the Channel there were still signs of disaffection at home. Sir John Oldcastle was still at large in the West Country, where he enjoyed not inconsiderable support, and in March 1415 his London associates fixed notices to church doors in the city warning that their revenge for the St Giles’s Fields fiasco was imminent. There was some overlap with a Yorkist plot that blew up in the summer of 1415. Richard, Earl of Cambridge, and Sir Thomas Grey devised a plan to reunite all those parties that had been involved in the dynastic challenges of Henry IV’s reign. While the king was out of the country they would negotiate Henry Percy’s return to England, reactivate the old anti-Lancastrian alliance, stage a military coup and place the Earl of March on the throne. The conspirators were joined, somewhat surprisingly, by Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, who had served Henry IV as treasurer, taken part in diplomatic missions for Henry V and was engaged to cross to France with the royal army. It is doubtful that the rebellion could have raised sufficient support to succeed even if (as some suspected) it was backed by French money, but it never got off the ground because the Earl of March revealed the details to the king on 31 July in Southampton, where the army was assembling. Cambridge, Grey and Scrope were swiftly tried and executed.
On 14 August Henry landed on the French coast near the town of Harfleur, on the north side of the Seine estuary, with some 10,500 troops. His immediate plan was to gain control of the river as a preliminary to capturing Rouen and invading Normandy. This would give him access to Paris and enable him to threaten the capital. Having unloaded all his men and equipment, the king laid siege to Harfleur on 17 August. But the town was well provisioned and Henry did not gain the quick initial victory he had hoped for. Moreover, the marsh estuary was a breeding ground for fever-bearing insects, and English numbers were rapidly diminished by disease, as the Chronicle of the Grey Friars recorded: ‘there died many of his people, as the Earl of Surrey, the Bishop of Norwich, Sir John Philpot, and many other knights and squires, and a great many of the common people.’2 Harfleur did not fall until 22 September.
With time lost and his army much diminished, Henry abandoned the planned ravaging of Normandy and, having sent home the sick and wounded, set out for Calais, where he could rest and provision his men and take stock of the situation. Including recent reinforcements, his army now numbered between 6,500 and 7,000 men. The French had assembled their own army and moved to intercept the invaders. With difficulty Henry got his men across the Somme. Many of them were weak with hunger, fever and long marching, and they did not relish the prospect of the pitched battle that now became inevitable.
On 25 October, the feast-day of Saints Crispin and Crisp-inian, Henry’s small force of Englishmen faced 36,000 of the best knights and foot soldiers in France. The first three hours of daylight saw no action at all, for despite their overwhelming numerical superiority, the French were in no hurry to begin the engagement. They were blocking the road to Calais and were content to let the enemy try to break through. For his part, Henry knew that his only hope of success was fighting a defensive battle on a site of his own choosing. He positioned his main array in a broad defile between woodland close to the villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt, with archers on the flanks and in the
front rank to fire into the expected charge of mounted knights as they were forced by the terrain to shorten their lines. The French chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet provides a vivid account of the battle. The English, he explained:
Were shortly after drawn up in battle array by Sir Thomas Erpingham, a knight grown grey with age and honour, who placed the archers in front, and the men-at-arms behind them. He then formed two wings of men-at-arms and archers, and posted the horses with the baggage at the rear … When all was done to his satisfaction he flung into the air a truncheon … crying out, ‘Nestrocque!’ and then dismounted, as the king and others had done. When the English saw Sir Thomas throw up his truncheon, they set up a loud shout, to the great astonishment of the French.3
If this was meant to provoke the French knights into a charge, it failed. Henry, therefore, moved his battle line forward to a more exposed position. It is not clear from contemporary accounts exactly how the English bowmen were positioned. What is clear is that their contribution was decisive.
The archers who were hidden in the field, re-echoed these shouts, while the English army kept advancing on the French. Their archers … let off a shower of arrows with all their might, and as high as possible, so as not to lose their effect … Before … the general attack commenced, numbers of the French were slain and severely wounded by the English bowmen … others had their horses so severely handled by the archers that, smarting from pain, they galloped on the van division and threw it into the utmost confusion, breaking the line in many places … horses and riders were tumbling on the ground, and the whole army was thrown into disorder, and forced back on some lands that had been just sown with corn.4
Heavy overnight rain made things difficult for mounted knights and dismounted men-at-arms in heavy armour. The English soldiers were better dressed for the hand-to-hand fighting that now began: ‘They were, for the most part, without any armour, and in jackets, with their hose loose, and hatchets or swords hanging to their girdles. Some, indeed, were barefoot and without hats.’5 The French came on in divisions too closely packed to wield their weapons to best effect. The English absorbed the first impact, then made progress against the disorganized enemy: ‘The English … kept advancing and slaying without mercy all that opposed them, and thus destroyed the main battalion as they had done the first.’6 Meanwhile, some 600 French troops circuited to the rear of the English lines and attacked the undefended baggage train.
This distressed the king very much, for he saw that, though the enemy had been routed, they were collecting on different parts of the plain in large bodies and he was afraid they would renew the battle. He therefore caused instant proclamation to be made by sound of trumpet that everyone should put his prisoners to death, to prevent them from aiding the enemy, should the combat be renewed. This caused an instantaneous and general massacre of the French prisoners.7
The slaughter was not quite as ‘instantaneous’ as the chronicler intimated. Many captors were reluctant to give up the prospect of collecting ransoms for their prisoners, and the king had to enforce his order with a threat of execution for any who disobeyed. French losses at Agincourt amounted to some 12,000 or 13,000, including three dukes, five counts, more than 90 barons and almost 2,000 knights. The English dead amounted to less than a thousand.
The English army travelled on to Calais from where Henry returned to England. On 23 November he made a triumphal entry to London amid scenes of great rejoicing.
Harfleur gave Henry a new bargaining counter with France and diplomacy was resumed, and this time the king was assisted in the negotiations by the Emperor Sigismund, who paid a long state visit to England in the summer of 1416. Sigismund was acting as the peace-maker of Europe. He was intent on solving the problems of the divided church and wished to unite all Christian monarchs in this enterprise. However, the French king was mentally incapable, and the dauphin could think of nothing but casting off the humiliation of the recent defeat. As for the Duke of Burgundy, Henry’s supposed ally, he was too duplicitous to be trusted.
French land and sea forces blockaded Harfleur and had every expectation of depriving Henry of this prize. In August the king’s brother, John, Duke of Bedford, led a fleet to the mouth of the Seine and broke the blockade, and at the same time Henry and Sigismund signed a treaty of mutual defence. In October 1416 Henry, having exhausted all diplomatic means, obtained from parliament a grant of taxation to resume the war.
1417–20
In August 1417 Henry was back in France with a new army equipped with cannon to reduce any towns or castles that resisted him. In September he seized Caen and made it the centre of his administration of the province. Other major towns were taken over the following months. On 31 July 1418 he began the siege of Rouen, which held out until the following 19 January.
Thereafter, the king moved his headquarters to the conquered city and began to distribute lands in Normandy to his more trusted followers. He was making it clear that he had come to stay. He now controlled Paris’s outlet to the sea, and this put him in a strong bargaining position. Still the dauphin declined to meet Henry and discuss his claims, so it was without the dauphin that Henry met with Burgundy, Queen Isabel and Princess Catherine at Meulan at the end of May. The king was enraptured by Catherine but refused to modify his claims. Meanwhile, Burgundy continued to play his double game. On 10 September he went to Montereau for more talks with the heir to the French throne. There he was murdered, doubtless on the dauphin’s orders.
The moral outrage stirred by this act worked in Henry’s favour. It was later said that the English entered France through the hole in the Duke of Burgundy’s skull. To Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, Henry proposed that he should marry Catherine and assume the throne of France for himself and his heirs on the death of Charles VI. In the meantime he would govern the country as the deputy of the mad king. By Christmas 1419 these terms had been accepted, and on 20 May following they were formally incorporated in the Treaty of Troyes. Henry and Catherine were married on 2 June, and on 1 December the couple entered Paris to general rejoicing. A week later the French parliament endorsed the Treaty of Troyes and pronounced the dauphin incapable of inheriting the crown as a result of his refusal to answer charges relating to the murder of the Duke of Burgundy.
1421–2
The court returned to England in February, and Catherine was crowned at Westminster on the 24th of that month. Henry had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, as his deputy in France, but he was killed in a skirmish on 22 March. Supporters of the dauphin were still holding out, and it was clear that Henry would have to take the field against them in person. He crossed the Channel again in June, and in October he began to besiege the dauphinist stronghold of Meaux, to the east of Paris. The town held out longer than he had expected, obliging the king and his men to endure the rigours of a winter campaign, but it eventually capitulated on 11 May 1422. On 6 December 1421 the queen, who was at Windsor, gave birth to a son who was christened Henry. At the end of May she joined her husband, though without the baby. The court travelled to the Loire, but Henry, weakened by his recent ordeal, fell ill, probably with dysentery. On 31 August he died at Vincennes.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES 1422–71
HOUSES OF LANCASTER and YORK
The ‘Wars of the Roses’ was a term invented in the 19th century to describe the contest for the English crown between two rival factions, the houses of Lancaster and York. The Lancastrians (the red rose faction) were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. The Yorkists (who occasionally sported a white rose badge) had as their ancestor Edmund, Duke of York, Edward III’s fifth son.
Strictly speaking, the rivalry began with Henry IV’s usurpation of the throne from Richard II in 1399, but the real fighting did not begin until 1455. However, two major factors contributed to the baronial conflict: the accession of a king who became incapable because of mental illness, and the loss of all England’s continental possessions except Calais, which allowed ambitious mag
nates to turn their armies of retainers against each other. Therefore, the Wars of the Roses really equate with the tumultuous affairs of the 15th century and can best be understood by studying the reigns of the two rival kings who occupied the throne between 1422 and 1483. The Lancastrian Henry VI reigned from 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471. The Yorkist Edward IV dispossessed his rival in 1461 but was then overthrown in 1470 and returned to power in 1471.
1422–37
Henry VI became king when he was just nine months old. Thanks to the reputation of the crown that his father had established, there was no challenge to his claim to the throne and the succession was peaceful. On 21 October 1422 Charles VI died, and the baby Henry thus became king of France as well as of England. His eldest uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, was appointed as his ‘protector’ or guardian, but Bedford soon left to assume the government of France, and his position at the king’s side was taken by another uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. A third member of the ruling triumvirate was the king’s great-uncle, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. These three men dominated the royal council that ruled in the king’s name during his minority, and despite personality clashes and major differences of opinion among the royal uncles, this system initially worked surprisingly well.
The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain Page 15