Henry V

by Teresa Cole

  His career as soldier and diplomat went back to the time of Richard II, though sprinkled with a startling number of conspiracies against the Crown. In each case it seems to have been Edward who betrayed the conspirators and who was forgiven surprisingly soon afterwards. One writer has referred to him as a ‘serial marplot’, though perhaps nowadays those wedded to conspiracy theories might question whether he was performing something of the role of a secret double agent. His absence from the Cambridge plot of 1415 is only one of the odd features of that conspiracy.

  The next most prominent casualty was the twenty-one-year-old Michael de la Pole, who had been Earl of Suffolk for just over a month since his father died of dysentery at Harfleur. His title was inherited by his younger brother, William, who had been seriously injured in that same siege and invalided back to England.

  Besides these few others were named, one notable exception being Daffyd ap Llewelyn, more commonly known as Davy Gam, a Welshman with lands in Brecon who is believed to have been the model for Shakespeare’s Fluellen. Even before this he had led a colourful life, remaining loyal to Henry IV both before and after his accession and being taken prisoner by Owain Glendower for his pains, and later ransomed. He had been knighted on the battlefield but then was killed along with his two sons-in-law.

  Of the English dead who were identified roughly two-thirds were archers, many on the flank of the Duke of York’s wing. No doubt they were buried nearby but the bodies of the duke and earl would be carried back to England for burial. The usual procedure in such cases, since there was no way of preserving the corpse, was to boil the dismembered body down until the flesh left the bones, and then to carry these home in a casket for interment according to the wishes of the dead man. In the case of the Duke of York his bones were buried in the newly begun church of St Mary and All Saints at Fotheringay, and the church then built around them.

  The French dead were not so easily disposed of. Some were claimed by family or retainers and carried away for burial. The local churchyards were quickly full, and even some of the minor lords found themselves sharing a tomb. For the vast majority, however, the only answer was a mass grave on land specially consecrated for the purpose by the local bishop. Many thousands were buried together there without name or rank or mourners. A large calvary erected in the nineteenth century may or may not mark their final resting place.

  Nor were the dead the only, or even the main French losses. The most frequently quoted figures put the numbers of French prisoners at between 1,500 and 1,600. These would all have been nobility of various ranks since no one else would be worth holding for ransom, and again included some of the highest in the land. Charles, Duke of Orleans, headed the list, along with Jean, Duke of Bourbon, the counts of Eu and Vendome, Arthur, Count of Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany) and Marshal Boucicaut. Most of these had been rescued from the heaps of bodies and most were injured, so the stories of Henry having the leading prisoners wait on him at table that night are likely to be fanciful. As a believer in chivalric ideas, the counterclaims that he had their wounds tended and then dined with them seems more probable.

  The following day the English army set out again for Calais. By necessity the first part of their journey, prisoners and all, took them across the battlefield little more than twelve hours after they had left it. The awful debris of battle was as yet uncleared, and probably the English chaplain best sums up the thoughts of most. ‘I truly believe there is not a man with a heart of flesh or even of stone who, had he seen and thought on the horrible deaths and savage wounds of so many Christian men, would not have fallen to weeping time and again for grief.’

  They travelled slower now. We are told most were on foot, the horses no doubt being used for prisoners and the wounded. With so many of each it would have been impossible to hurry. The more severely injured, possibly Humphrey of Gloucester among them, would have been carried in a litter – a more comfortable way to travel than in a cart with no suspension.

  It took three days to cover the forty-five or so miles to Calais, and though the king was joyfully received by his friend and captain Richard, Earl of Warwick, and by the populace, the army he led was not so welcome. The heroes of Agincourt were not allowed to enter the town, and, camping outside, found they had to bargain hard for every morsel the citizens were prepared to provide, treatment which has befallen many returning heroes since then.

  This was a time, too, for prisoner exchange. Many a man with a prisoner worth ransoming sold him now for cash to a greater lord who would be better able to feed and shelter him in the time it took for the ransom to be raised. Some would be set free at once on their own parole to better enable them to collect their own ransoms. Others would be held in and around Calais, and only the more valuable would be transported to England and held at the expense of their captors. Some would be there for many years and others would never return, Marshal Boucicaut, for instance, died in Yorkshire in 1421.

  Nor would the victorious army return together in triumph. The indentures required only that their passage should be paid for and this was begun at once. Little by little, then, the army made its way home to England, where news of their victory had been broken by Bishop Henry Beaufort from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral on the very day the king had entered Calais.

  The king himself, however, remained at Calais, waiting for the day appointed for all the prisoners he had taken before Agincourt to surrender themselves according to their oaths. It is perhaps surprising to the modern mind that, on 11 November, the appointed day, every single one of them did so, Raoul de Gaucort even rising from his sickbed to get himself there.

  On 16 November the king and his prisoners sailed for home, and after a notably rough crossing landed at Dover in a snowstorm. Then, stopping at Canterbury to give thanks for his victory at the tomb of Thomas Becket in the cathedral, he proceeded to his royal manor of Eltham, and finally on 23 November to his triumphant entry into London itself.

  They had had almost a month to prepare for this and it seems no expense had been spared. The king was first met at Blackheath by the lord mayor, twenty-four aldermen and some thousands of others, all in their finery and bearing the badges of their guilds. Then his route through the city was decorated with the grandest effigies, tableaux and other flights of fancy that the medieval imagination could conceive. Lions, antelopes (the king’s personal badge), singing virgins, Old Testament prophets, apostles, wooden castles and representations of heaven complete with golden-faced angels singing appropriate psalms; all these and more greeted the king. In all things, though, it was emphasised that victory was due to God’s blessings rather than man’s endeavours, and we are told that the king rode throughout with sombre face, first to St Paul’s and then to Westminster Abbey to make an offering at the tomb of Edward the Confessor. No doubt all this pomp and triumphalism had more of an effect on his noble prisoners, forced to follow behind the king in this procession. It was the day before the twenty-first birthday of young Charles of Orleans.

  The French experience of defeat is perhaps best illustrated by a long poem, Le Livre des Quatres Dames, written shortly after the battle, and referring to it as ‘the awful day’. In it four weeping ladies reveal that they all lost their lovers on that day. One was slain in battle, one taken prisoner. The fate of the third is unknown – he is clearly among the unnamed dead – but the fourth, the cause of the bitterest sorrow, is the one who put on his armour only to run away from the battlefield.

  Recriminations of this kind were heard all over France in the weeks following the battle, and it might be thought that, having sunk their differences to fight and die together, the disparate factions might be further united to present a solid opposition to the English invader. In fact the opposite was true as each blamed the other for the defeat.

  In place of d’Albret, Bernard, Count of Armagnac was appointed constable, and since he was the implacable enemy of John of Burgundy this meant there was no possibility of a reconciliation there. The duke began
to advance threateningly towards Paris and then, abruptly, on 18 December the Dauphin Louis died, possibly of dysentery. This changed the balance of power completely. The new Dauphin, John, was seventeen years old, married to the niece of John the Fearless, and had been brought up at his father-in-law’s court in Hainault, fully sympathetic to the Burgundian cause, since the age of eight.

  Nevertheless the appointment of Armagnac as constable was confirmed, and, with one eye on the Burgundians, he began to take steps to recover what had been lost to the English. In January 1416 French ships, together with those of their Genoese allies, began to blockade the mouth of the Seine while an army moved up to the landward side of Harfleur. This was not a siege as such, but it did cut off Thomas, Earl of Dorset, and his garrison from supplies from England, forcing him to forage in the surrounding countryside where he was likely to come under attack.

  Exactly that happened in March when, near Valmont, some twenty miles north-east of Harfleur, he and his foraging party comprising most of his garrison met with a large French force led by Armagnac himself. Fierce fighting took place with casualties on both sides until, as darkness fell, the English managed to secure themselves in what has been described as an orchard or a walled garden. Then, with honour satisfied, they slipped away in the night to make their way to the coast and return along the seashore towards Harfleur. Before they got there, however, the French, having guessed their aim, came upon them again close to the site of the original English landing at Chef de Caux. Further fighting ensued with the victory of Dorset’s men being assisted by reinforcements from nearby Harfleur. Perhaps it is not surprising that, the following month, a letter urgently requesting supplies and assistance was sent by Dorset to the council in England.

  Henry, meanwhile, had not been idle. Even before his return from France planning had begun for his next expedition, originally scheduled for the summer of 1416. With considerable shrewdness Parliament had been summoned by John, Duke of Bedford, to sit from 4 to 11 November. In those heady days following Agincourt they were happy not only to bring forward payment of the second part of the subsidy already approved for February 1416, but also to add to it a new one. Some of this money was to be spent to great effect on the building of ships.

  His experiences in Wales had shown Henry the value of ships. There had been, at the time, nothing in the way of a royal fleet, still less a royal navy. Nothing had prevented the French from landing an army in Pembrokeshire to assist Glendower. Later, nothing had stopped their raiding on English south coast towns, and preying on English ships going to and from Gascony. With ships of his own, on the other hand, he had helped to enforce the sieges of Aberystwyth and Harlech. Little wonder, then, that one of his first concerns on taking charge of the royal council as Prince of Wales had been the strengthening of England’s sea defences and the building up of a fleet of his own ships.

  Some of these would be built from scratch and others rebuilt from existing or captured vessels, and not only the numbers but the size and structure of the ships was changing. The old cogs, single-masted ships, the largest of which would have been around two hundred tons, were being replaced by the much larger carracks of five hundred-plus tons, with high, rounded sterns, three or four masts and a high forecastle and aftcastle. Henry commissioned four of these ‘great ships’, the Trinity Royal, the Jesus, the Holy Ghost (rebuilt from a captured Spanish ship) and the Grace Dieu. The latter, at 218 feet long and 1,400 tons, was the biggest ship yet built at Southampton and somewhat of a failure. It only put to sea once, whereupon the crew mutinied. It made it as far as the Isle of Wight and back, and thereafter remained laid up in the River Hamble until some years later it was struck by lightning and entirely consumed by fire. The others, though, along with many smaller vessels, all saw active service.

  These new fighting ships carried men-at-arms and archers, actively seeking out enemy vessels to capture or sink. In between they patrolled the Channel (skimming the seas, as it was called) making it safe for merchant vessels as well as for the passage of armies. Indentures would be signed for service at sea, usually for several months at a time, with the instruction that they should come into port only when it was necessary to take on fresh water or supplies.

  Although the Earl of Dorset was nominally admiral, in 1416 he was busy commanding the garrison at Harfleur so it was John of Bedford who was dispatched in August at the head of a sizeable fleet to break the blockade of the Seine and to resupply the town and garrison. The French fleet that put out to meet them off the mouth of the river had eight Genoese carracks against the English four, and in addition had eight galleys and many smaller craft, probably outnumbering the English. On the other hand it is likely Bedford had more fighting men at his disposal since some thousands of these had been assembling at Southampton ready for the king’s next expedition which had had to be postponed.

  French tactics, too, seemed purely defensive. One writer has commented that they seemed to have learned nothing from the Battle of Sluys three-quarters of a century before. Once again their major ships were chained together, making a solid battlefront almost as if they were on land. Overtopping the English ships by some way, this gave an advantage to their Genoese crossbowmen, of whom they had some six hundred, shooting down from the heights of these ‘sea castles’ onto the English below. This was, however, at the expense of any manoeuvrability among the sandbanks at the river mouth.

  The battle began at nine in the morning and was fiercely fought for five or six hours, ‘man to man, lance to lance, arrow to arrow’. Unsurprisingly in the cramped conditions casualties were high on each side but in the end the English prevailed, boarding some of the enemy vessels while others broke loose and fled back towards Honfleur. In all, three of the carracks were captured, one sank and one ran aground on a sandbank while trying to escape.

  This battle, fought on 15 August, not only broke the blockade and enabled Harfleur to be reprovisioned, but also gave a first success for Henry’s new policy of clearing the Channel of enemy ships and making it effective both as a line of defence and as a passageway to further conquests in France.

  The same day saw a milestone in another of his policies, with the signing of the Treaty of Canterbury with the Emperor-elect Sigismund. The visit of this august person to England had been the cause of the postponement of Henry’s summer expedition, but that was counted a small price to pay if he could be persuaded to ally himself with the English claims to the French crown. In fact, though the treaty was seen as a great achievement and a solid blow against France, neither side got exactly what they had hoped for from it.

  By the spring of 1416 the Council of Constance, Sigismund’s pet project, had achieved only a limited amount of what it had set out to do. The heretical works of the Lollards had been condemned and at least one of their leaders burnt, but this was, in a sense, the least important of the aims of the council. There was as yet no unity of the Church behind one pope, and the reform of the suspect practices of recent times had hardly been touched on.

  With two of the three popes disposed of Sigismund had spent some time trying without success to persuade Benedict to resign. His only achievement was in getting the Spanish kingdoms to abandon their support of him, which they had done in December 1415, promising to join with the council instead.

  Sigismund had then turned his attention to peacemaking between France and England, reasoning that only by reaching some unity among the ‘nations’ could progress be made on what, to him, was the most important of the council’s aims, the reform of Church practices. ‘How perilously,’ he wrote, ‘is the power of Christianity divided by these wars and lessened by these divisions.’

  He began with France, being naturally sympathetic towards them, arriving on 1 March 1416, but soon discovered the difficulties of dealing with a country divided among itself. Moving on to Calais he was warmly welcomed by the Earl of Warwick and soon embarked for England.

  Henry had determined to put on the greatest possible show for this potential ally a
nd to woo him with honours and courtesies. Thus it was that he was met at Dover on 1 May by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, passed on to Canterbury where he was received by Archbishop Chichele, and thence progressing in order of seniority up the chain of royal brothers (John of Bedford at Rochester, Thomas of Clarence at Dartford) until he met Henry himself with a great entourage of knights and nobles at Blackheath.

  During his stay he was lodged at the palace of Westminster in Henry’s own apartments, the king moving out to the archbishop’s residence at Lambeth for the duration. Then for the next four months a great programme of feasts and entertainments was laid on for his benefit. On 24 May he was accorded the greatest honour, being admitted to the Order of the Garter at Windsor. It has been suggested he did not fully appreciate the significance of this, but certainly he wore the Garter insignia, together with the Lancastrian SS collar given by Henry, on many formal occasions later. When he returned to the Council of Constance this display of English honours caused some consternation among the other contingents.

  Henry’s aim in all this was to secure the Emperor as an ally, thereby at least ensuring that the eastern border of France would be held in friendly hands, and at best obtaining active support and assistance in his claim for the French throne. Sigismund, on the other hand, was looking for an ally at the council, to press home his plan for reform of the Church before the election of a new pope.

  Though from time to time Henry tore himself away to visit the forces now assembling at Southampton and to view the progress of work on his great ships, still it became obvious that the renewal of the war in France would have to be postponed, more especially since he was anxious to impress on Sigismund that he was seeking peace. At the end of May William, count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault, and father-in-law of the new Dauphin, came to England to join the talks. Gradually, though, Sigismund came to accept Henry’s claims as legitimate and to view the French as the obstacles to peace.