Henry V as Warlord (27 page)

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

T
he 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 installing 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.

The Parisians quickly had good cause to curse the heir and regent. Medieval currency was based on bimetallism and on a bewilderingly complex structure of monies of account – the pound sterling, the pound Scots, the pound
tournois
, the pound
bordelais
and the pound
parisis
, the exchange rate between them fluctuating from place to place. Throughout the century the amount of gold and silver available for coinage diminished steadily, with an accompanying rise in the value of both metals. There was a constant temptation for governments to lower the weight of coins, altering exchange rates to their own advantage. Almost as soon as Henry secured control of Paris the rate was altered to the detriment of the pound
parisis
, producing soaring inflation; within a week of his arrival there food prices more than doubled. The effect of endemic warfare on an agricultural economy always on a knife-edge – so finely balanced that Paris’s entire food supply could be endangered by a heat wave or a cold snap, let alone an influx of refugees – had already been disastrous. Soon corn, flour and bread were beyond the purchasing power of the poor.
¹

It is from the Bourgeois of Paris that we know that Parisians blamed the rise in food prices on the new exchange rates at Rouen. His journal has been described as a chronicle of nourishment – or, rather, of under-nourishment. By Christmas, Paris was in the grip of full-scale famine. Everywhere one heard little children crying, ‘I’m dying of hunger.’ Boys and girls, in bands of twenty or thirty, rooted for scraps on the city’s rubbish tips as they died from starvation and cold. Those who pitied them had nothing to give. There was no corn, no wood and no coal, and it was the coldest winter for forty years. People ate pigswill and cabbage roots, even the tripes from dead dogs. Thousands died, and wolves swam the Seine to eat the unburied corpses lying in the street.
²

Meanwhile Henry and Charles presided over a meeting of the States General, which obligingly endorsed the Treaty of Troyes, and also agreed to a calling-in of the present currency and a re-coinage. This resulted in the coining of the beautiful Anglo-Gallic gold
salut
, which bore the arms of England and France held by an angel and the Virgin. On one side was the inscription
Henricus Dei Gratia Rex Angliae, Heres Franciae
and on the other the presumptuous
Christus Vincit
. (This fresh devaluation made the famine still worse.) Later the Duke of Burgundy’s filial desire for revenge was partly assuaged by Charles VI obediently holding a
lit-de-justice
at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. The ‘heir of France’ sat with him on the great cushions, to hear the
Parlement
of Paris pronounce the dauphin and his principal henchmen guilty of Duke John’s murder. They were summoned to Paris where they were to make the
amende honorable
and be drawn in a tumbril through the public places of Paris bearing lighted torches. When, not unexpectedly, the dauphin and his friends failed to appear within three days, he was banished from the realm of France and debarred from inheriting the French crown by reason of his ‘horrible and dreadful crimes’.

Although cowed by years of massacre and famine, and also leaderless, the Parisians could not entirely repress their dislike of the English and their icy arrogance, nor of the foreign king who was to be imposed on them when Charles VI should die. The latter began to be held in considerable affection, according to the Bourgeois of Paris, by the ordinary people of Paris – ‘
le menu peuple
’ – who were to throng the streets in tears when he died. They did not enjoy the occupation of their city by foreigners. Although certain modern English historians claim that it is anachronistic to speak of ‘national’ feelings at this date, there is at least one contemporary witness who tells us just what the French thought about the English presence in their city.

If Georges Chastellain was a Flemish noble by birth, born at Ghent in 1405, he regarded himself as ‘a loyal Frenchman’ and always wrote his verses and his history in French. No doubt he suffered from the fashionable pessimism of the age – ‘I, man of sadness, born in an eclipse of darkness, and amid thick fogs of lamentation’ he says in the foreword to his chronicle – yet his testimony has unusual insights, even if it is occasionally inaccurate. A squire to Duke Philip the Good and Herald of the Order of the Golden Fleece he met all the famous people of his day and was very well-informed. He writes of 1420:

The city of Paris, ancient seat of France’s royal majesty, then seemed to have changed in both name and location, because this king and his great English people [
son grant peuple anglais
] made a new London of it no less by their rude and proud manner of talking as by their language, going everywhere through the city all of which they held as masters. And they went with their heads high like stags, staring all around them, glorying at the shame and ill-fortune of the French, whose blood they had shed in such quantities at Agincourt and elsewhere, and so much of whose heritage they had taken from them by tyranny …

For he [Henry V], and also the English lords who were there in much pomp, and more arrogant than can be imagined, had no respect whatever for any lords of France who were present so that it seemed indeed to the English lords and knights that the heritage of the French belonged to them, that the latter’s rule and lordship should be taken away by those of English name, whether they liked it or not. Thus did it appear, in truth, since from that time on all the realm and its business was governed and guided by the hand of the English king, and all its places and charges were bestowed and changed at his pleasure, turning out even those men put in place by the two dukes of Burgundy, father and son, and in their stead putting in Englishmen and people of that nation, foreigners unsuited to the nature of the country …

Such changes in places and charges did the King of England make on his coming to Paris that in secret many French hearts were sore stricken with sadness, had they dared show it, alas! Watching he who came upon them [Henry] as he was entering Paris they cried ‘Noel! Noel!’ and rejoiced since they hoped for peace, yet they knew only too well their misfortune and their servitude. And I call to mind often how men came to Jerusalem and stole the ark of the covenant,
arcam foederis
, and violated the temple and the holy places, and how the people there were treated and served scurvily, all their glory and past happiness abased and turned to shame and wretchedness. So it was with the English king and the French. For them every road led to sadness, and it gave him great joy to have done this.
³

There is other testimony besides that of Chastellain.

The Burgundian nobles, most of whom were Frenchmen, found Henry’s coldness and stiff pride repellent. He rebuked Jehan de l’Isle Adam, a valiant marshal of France, for appearing in his presence in a rough grey coat and for then daring to look him in the face when explaining why. (l’Isle Adam had been the garrison commander at Pontoise when it was surprised and captured by the English in 1419.) The king was ill-pleased by the marshal’s proud answer that Frenchmen thought it unmanly to lower their eyes when speaking to anyone however high his rank might be. ‘That is not our way!’ he retorted angrily.
⁴
Even in those days Frenchmen considered English manners cold and unnatural, and must have thought them peculiarly detestable in invaders. Yet they could do little to express their burning resentment while the Burgundians and Armagnacs hated each other more than they did Englishmen.

Peeresses crossed the Channel to wait on Queen Catherine – and to share in their menfolk’s spoils. An anonymous Norman chronicler records: ‘The king of England kept his Christmas at Paris in the Hôtel des Tournelles; and there were there the ladies of England who had come to the queen, namely the Duchesses of Clarence and York, the Countess of March, the countess marshal and other noble ladies from the realm of England.’
⁵

Parisians were ashamed by the contrast between the splendour of the English king and his court at the Tournelles and Charles VI’s miserable condition at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. They were strangely devoted to their crazed monarch, perhaps partly because he was a focus for anti-English feelings and partly out of pity for his madness. The Hôtel de Saint-Pol was a fine enough palace but the French king, madder and dirtier than ever, was ‘poorly and meanly’ served by a scant and shabby staff according to Monstrelet, who comments how this must have been ‘disgusting for all true and loyal Frenchmen’.
⁶
Queen Isabeau, no doubt to her fury, had to stay by his side, while every French noble of importance was either with the Duke of Burgundy or the dauphin or else dancing attendance on the ‘heir and regent’ at the Hôtel des Tournelles. No doubt many cynical French courtiers fully expected that, in view of Charles’s age, anyone so much younger, as the Englishman, must soon enter upon his ‘inheritance’.

Yet, for all Henry’s ability it was undoubtedly usurpation. In 1435 the legal faculty of Bologna gave their verdict that the Dauphin Charles’s succession to the throne had been guaranteed by his investiture with the Dauphine in 1417, that Charles VI was not entitled to disinherit him simply on account of Duke John’s murder, that the king had been of unsound mind when he did so, that a father could not be both judge and accuser. However, the House of Lancaster had already shown in England that it knew both how to usurp and how to keep a throne.