1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (63 page)

Henry halted the advance. He ordered his heralds to remove their cote-armour, to address the townsmen in a friendly manner, and to present themselves at the main gate.
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He knew he was in a strong position, with ten thousand men behind him, so he proposed a deal. If the men of Arques would let the English pass through the town, and if the townsmen would provide them with a fixed quantity of bread and wine, then he would not harm the town or any of its suburbs, nor allow his men to burn the vicinity. The townspeople agreed. According to the
Gesta
, they gave up hostages to guarantee the safety of the English as they passed through the town.
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The tension must have been great when the English walked into Arques. As they did so, they saw the trunks of large trees that had been felled and dragged to the town in a rudimentary attempt to defend the gates. One imagines the frightened people of the town peeping out of their windows with their shutters ajar as the enemy troops passed, almost holding their breath as they watched them, hoping that the fragile agreement would hold.

It did hold. And when the English soldiers had passed through, they did not turn towards Dieppe, as Jean Bordiu had stated they would in his letter of 3 September. Nor did they turn towards Rouen, where he had said they would head next. In line with Henry’s original plan, and his clearly expressed desire to get to Calais within eight days, they kept on going – riding and marching north.

The king and dauphin could now join the troops gathering at Rouen and start to chase Henry out of the kingdom. They knew exactly which road he was taking – they too had history books to inform them. Messengers rode hard for Boulogne to inform them that Henry was following the path of his great-grandfather Edward III. The English were heading for the ford across the Somme, at Blanchetaque.
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And so were the French.

Saturday 12th

Arques had been a small town, only too ready to let the English pass by peacefully. Eu was a different matter. It was well defended by high
walls and steep slopes, standing above the River Bresle, with a population of about a thousand.

Henry must have arrived in the evening.
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There were bodies on the ground before the walls. He heard that, as his outriders and scouts had approached, bearing the standards of the English, the garrison of Eu had made a sortie on horseback and ‘attacked them with much noise and aggression. There was loud battle on both sides but the French did not restrain the Englishmen for long, and being forced back to the gates, they defended themselves with arrows and missiles’.
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Both sides suffered fatalities. One of the French dead was Lancelot Pierre, ‘a valiant and much renowned man of war’ and a companion of the count of Eu. An Englishman had driven his lance through the plates of armour protecting Pierre’s stomach – but Pierre’s own lance had similarly gone right through his assailant’s body, killing him too.
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But individual acts of valour like these – although they impressed the chroniclers – could not hold up the approach of the English vanguard. Before long the French had withdrawn to defend the town.

Although the temptation to storm the town must have been great after the hostile reception, Henry decided to follow the same course of action as at Arques. He sent heralds to the gates to offer the inhabitants peace in return for food and drink. If they would supply bread and wine, and send hostages for the safe conduct of the garrison, Henry would not burn the town and the villages nearby. If on the other hand they refused, he would destroy everything.

While the men of Eu were considering this offer, the English made camp at a little distance. It was not an easy night. By this stage they had heard that a great army had gathered ahead, at Blanchetaque, the very crossing point to which Henry was heading. Frenchmen who had been taken captive were saying that there would be a battle the following day, or on Monday. The author of the
Gesta
was unsure what to think. Some of those with him thought that the French would be unlikely to come up from the interior of the country so quickly. After all, the French could not be sure that the duke of Burgundy would not attack Paris, or even join Henry. On the other hand, there were those who pointed out that the noble kingdom of France could not be expected to withstand the indignity and dishonour of an English army marching through Normandy and into Ponthieu. They were bound to attack.

What Henry himself thought is not known. He was probably placing
his hopes in getting to Blanchetaque before the French. He knew the dauphin and the royal dukes were still a long way behind him. If he had to face an army, it would be composed of men gathering with Boucicaut and Charles d’Albret, the marshal and constable of France, on the north side of the river, and not the full array of the royal dukes.

As the sun went down over Eu, everything still seemed to be on course for a relatively safe passage for the English through to Calais. The chances of this were further enhanced when the men of Eu agreed to offer hostages and sustenance to the army.

It was eighteen miles to Blanchetaque. The English would get there the following day.

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John the Fearless had spent the early part of October at Chalon. On the 10th, he had made his way to Germolles.
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From there he despatched an embassy to the French king, supporting what his son the count of Charolais had declared two days earlier – that he intended to mobilise his forces and join the king very soon.
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Despite this, he did not set out. He remained at Germolles for the next seven days. His vassals in Picardy, however, were responding to his summons. They were not joining the army at Rouen but the separate French army now gathering north of the Somme, under Boucicaut and d’Albret. The French king might have been mad and the dauphin inexperienced but Boucicaut and d’Albret knew what they were doing. The English would soon find themselves sandwiched between two armies – and forced to fight.

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Other French magnates were riding to the aid of the French king. Today the old duke of Berry, the dauphin’s great uncle, arrived at Rouen, where he had mustered one thousand men-at-arms and five hundred archers.
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The king himself also arrived at Rouen today, accompanied by the dauphin. Other French lords were already there; so now the army had a direct chain of command. This was important, for it was being rumoured today that the duke of Clarence had landed at Calais with another large army.
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Which way were the French in Normandy to turn their attention? To Henry? To the defence of the towns? To the
river crossings, to the Marches of Calais, or to the defence of Boulogne?

About this time, the newly gathered French royal family and the other members of the council drew up a battle plan, probably with the intention of stopping Henry at Blanchetaque. The vanguard was to be commanded by Boucicaut and Charles d’Albret. They would be followed by a second battle, under the duke of Alençon, the count of Eu, and other lords. On each wing of the army there would be a battle of foot soldiers, the one on the right commanded by the count of Richemont, and the one on the left by the count of Vendôme and Guichard Dauphin. David, seigneur de Rambures, would command a contingent of heavily armoured cavalry, with the mission to charge into and break up the ranks of English archers; and a separate squadron of several hundred mounted men-at-arms under Louis de Bosredon was given charge of attacking the English baggage.
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The anticipated army would be composed of the troops gathering at Rouen as well as those waiting beyond the Somme, gathering at Abbeville and Péronne.
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Wherever the English positioned themselves – whether their backs were against the Somme or elsewhere – the French were prepared to attack.

Sunday 13th: the Feast of St Edward the Confessor

The feast of St Edward the Confessor had special significance for the Lancastrian dynasty. Not only was it the feast of the principal English royal saint; Henry’s father had been sent into exile on this day in 1398 by his cousin Richard II. Exactly one year later he had been crowned king of England, in Richard’s place. As a result Henry IV had built a chapel in Canterbury Cathedral dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. Henry V had shown himself to be no less fond of the English king-saint than his father: one of the banners he was carrying now bore the arms of St Edward.

The English army must have set out for Blanchetaque shortly after packing up their tents, at first light. Already there had been worrying reports from prisoners taken along the way that there was a huge French army waiting to intercept the English at the ford.
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These reports received confirmation late this morning, when the army was still six miles away from the crossing point. According to Monstrelet, a Gascon gentleman serving in the company of Charles d’Albret was arrested. Waurin’s
chronicle describes him as being mounted and armed; Monstrelet’s refers to him as a devil. As a Gascon it may be that he crossed the Somme and came to the English purposefully – out of a greater loyalty to Henry, as the duke of Aquitaine, than to his feudal lord (the d’Albret family having been once subjects of the English kings).

The man was taken before the duke of York, the leader of the vanguard, and questioned. He said that he had left Charles d’Albret at Abbeville. When asked about the ford at Blanchetaque, he told them it was very heavily guarded. Guichard Dauphin and Boucicaut were both there, with six thousand fighting men.
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If all this was true, it meant that the English were trapped between two armies: one under d’Albret and Boucicaut between Abbeville and Blanchetaque, and the ducal retinues gathering at Rouen.

The duke of York realised the significance of this information, and sent the Gascon to the king. There he was questioned again. Henry heard everything he had to say. Then he dismissed him, halted the advance, and called an immediate meeting of his council.

The meeting lasted two hours. We cannot know for certain what was said but it proved to be a turning point for Henry – a breaking point, even. Everything he had done all year had been carried out with the greatest resolution. There had been those who had said he should have cancelled the campaign when the earl of Cambridge’s plot had been revealed; he had ignored them and pressed on. The siege of Harfleur had hugely sapped the strength of his army, and there had been those who had said he should not have started on this march. Nevertheless he had ignored them and set out, determined to make his way to Calais. He was equally determined to meet the French in battle – even to the point of telling them exactly where he would be. And now he was being forced to acknowledge that he had been outmanoeuvred. His resolution to march on regardless, and to test his cause against God’s will, had only succeeded in endangering the tired and hungry survivors of the long siege. If at this point he tried to persuade his councillors otherwise, he failed to win them over. Their advice was that the army should find another crossing.

No doubt Henry had already sent scouts ahead to examine the conditions at the ford and they had probably come back with information that many French troops were stationed there. The number of six thousand men was probably not a huge exaggeration. If Boucicaut, d’Albret
and the seigneur de Rambures had been joined by the duke of Alençon, as was likely, then there would have been at least four thousand fighting men north of the Somme.
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By now Henry may have learned that the three hundred men-at-arms who had left Calais to take control of the crossing had been annihilated by a Picard army.
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Henry’s strategy was falling apart. His council were sensible to put their faith in avoiding battle rather than deliberately seeking it.

It must have been a depressing meeting. It was not possible to advance by way of Blanchetaque. Retreat was out of the question. And if they marched inland, along the Somme, there was a good chance that the enemy troops north of the Somme and those gathering at Péronne would starve them in the field. It seemed that the French had indeed ‘enclosed them on every side like sheep in folds’, as several councillors had warned they would before they had set out. And the eight days’ rations were almost all used up – this was the seventh day of what was supposed to have been an eight-day march to Calais. The bread and wine the men had received at Arques and Eu had not gone far, and most men had been drinking unhealthy river water for the last week. Some of them were carrying festering wounds; others were still suffering from dysentery.

Henry probably considered advancing his men to the ford and trying to fight his way across. He knew that Edward III had done so in 1346 – and, on that occasion, as if by a miracle, the tide had come in after the last of the English were across and stopped the French from crossing. Surely God would work some similar miracle for him? But if he suggested this, the councillors would have countered that Edward’s army had fought a way across the Somme against no more than three thousand men. According to the Gascon informer, the ford was further defended now with sharpened stakes driven into the bed of the river, allowing the French crossbowmen to rip the English apart in midstream. Fighting against six thousand in these conditions, including crossbowmen, would be very difficult.

Thus it was, at this point, six miles short of the ford, that Henry abandoned his original plan. He ordered the army to head inland, following the banks of the Somme.