The Hundred Years War (19 page)

France, and especially Paris, divided into two armed camps-Burgundians and Armagnacs. The latter took their name from their leader, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, whose daughter had married Louis’s son, Charles of Orleans. The Burgundians drew their strength from the Parisian bourgeoisie and academics, while the Armagnacs were what might be called the party of the establishment and included the greater royal officials, a few of the richer bourgeoisie, most of the nobles outside John’s territories and the other Princes of the Blood. In 1408, having hired a theologian from the Sorbonne to justify his cousin’s assassination-on the grounds that he had been a tyrant-John returned to Paris and extracted a pardon from the King. He then set up as a champion of reform, promising to reduce the high taxes imposed by Louis, and secured the execution of the Chancellor of the royal finances. By 1411, after purging the administration and by well-placed gifts, especially to the important Guild of Butchers, Burgundy had won control of Paris. The Armagnacs assembled an army and with the Duke of Berry (Charles V’s last surviving brother) blockaded the capital.

John of Burgundy then had recourse to Henry IV, offering the hand of his daughter for the Prince of Wales, four towns in Flanders (including Sluys) and help in conquering Normandy, in return for troops. In October 1411, 800 English men-at-arms and 2,000 archers marched out from Calais under the Earl of Arundel. Henry had meant to lead them himself, but was prevented by chronic ill-health. The English expedition soon joined John and 3,000 Parisian militia at Meulan. The combined force stormed the Armagnac strongpoint at Saint-Cloud and broke the blockade. Arundel and his men then went home.

Led by old Berry, the Armagnacs now made their own bid for English aid. In May 1412, in return for the use of 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers for three months, they offered the eventual cession of all Aquitaine as it had been in 1369, with the immediate surrender of twenty fortresses on the Guyenne border. In August Henry’s second son, the Duke of Clarence, landed in the Cotentin and marched down towards Blois. Here, however, he received news that Burgundian troops had invaded Berry’s territory and forced the Armagnacs to surrender, and that all the French Princes including Burgundy were declining any sort of military assistance from England. Undeterred, Thomas of Clarence crossed the Loire and went through the wild and marshy Sologne and down the Indre valley. The English were only bought off by the Princes with a promise of 210,000 gold crowns (over £34,000), 75,000 of which were to be paid immediately, together with seven important hostages as surety for the balance. The English leaders also extracted individual payments. Clarence asked for 120,000 crowns and received 40,000 and a gold crucifix worth 15,000 (with a ruby as the wound in the side and three diamonds as the nails in the hands and feet). His cousin the Duke of York wanted 40,000 crowns and was given 5,000 together with a gold cross of Damascus work valued at 40,000. Sir John Cornwall, King Henry’s brother-in-law was paid in full 21,375 gold crowns. (It must have been this money which paid for Sir John’s new house at Ampthill in Bedfordshire ; it was built ‘of such spoils as it is said that he won in France’, recorded Leland.) Nothing could have been better calculated to excite the greed of the English aristocracy and put them in mind of those wonderful sums extorted from the French by their fathers and grandfathers. Clarence and his army then went on to winter in Bordeaux, burning and slaying en route in the good old style.

Meanwhile in northern France the Calais garrison had taken advantage of Clarence’s
chevauchée
to attack and capture Balinghem. It provided yet another fortress in the March of Calais to add to the ring of strongpoints which defended the precious English bastion.

Even John of Burgundy now became nervous about the possibility of a full-scale English invasion. He summoned the Estates to meet in Paris to grant new taxes to pay for defence. When the Estates began to criticize his government, John retaliated by unleashing his Paris butchers who, led by their leader Caboche, began a reign of terror which lasted for several weeks and was aimed as much against the rich as the Armagnacs. So murderous were their excesses that many bourgeois turned against Duke John and invited the Dauphin and Princes to come and save them. In August 1413, after a vain attempt to kidnap Charles VI, John the Fearless of Burgundy had to abandon Paris to the Armagnacs and Count Bernard’s ferocious Gascons, and went home to spend the next few years in his own semi-kingdom. Already he and the Armagnacs had ruined France. For on 20 March Henry IV had breathed his last in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey and there was a new King of England—Henry V.

7

Henry V and Agincourt 1413—1422

In the national legend Henry V remains the most heroic of English Kings. He is the glorious conqueror who broke the French chivalry at Agincourt and won the throne of France for his son’s inheritance. In reality he displayed a number of markedly unheroic qualities and, in a gentlemanly, medieval sort of way, he had more than a little in common with Napoleon and even Hitler.

Henry of Monmouth, son of Henry IV and grandson of John of Gaunt, was twenty-five years old when he ascended the throne in March 1413. Even if some of what Shakespeare says about a riotous youth seems to be justified, the young King was already experienced in statecraft ; he had put down the Welsh rising with considerable bloodshed, and had acted as President of the Council during his father’s illness. He was tall and muscular, wearing his armour as though it were a light cloak. Under a brown pudding-basin crop—the military haircut of the day—he had brown eyes and a long nose in a long, high-coloured face. In manner he was aloof but courteous. He had no mistresses, at least not when he was King. Indeed a Frenchman who saw Henry at Winchester in the spring of 1415 thought he looked more like a churchman than a soldier, and undoubtedly he had a churchman’s tastes ; he liked books and often wrote his own letters, he was a patron of sacred music, and he took a keen interest in theology and ecclesiastical affairs. Furthermore before his accession he played an active role in suppressing heresy ; on one occasion he personally superintended the burning of a Lollard blacksmith in a barrel. When the man began to scream Henry had him pulled out and offered him a pension if he would recant—the man (who had denied transubstantiation) refused and was promptly put back in the flaming barrel.

Ruthless authority and cold cruelty were marked characteristics of this frugal, puritanical Plantagenet, yet he also possessed what is nowadays called charisma and could inspire genuine devotion. Shakespeare discerned grandeur and perhaps megalomania. A Victorian historian summed up Henry as ‘hard, domineering, over-ambitious, bigoted, sanctimonious, priggish’, but added ‘take him for all in all, he was indisputably the greatest Englishman of his day’. Yet there was something else which was not English. A modern historian (E. F. Jacob) sees an Italianate quality about Henry V, something of an Este or a Gonzaga, while Perroy considers that he ‘belongs to the age of the Italian tyrants’.

Henry’s brutal single-mindedness hints at inner tensions. Perhaps these derived from an unwilling or unconscious recognition of how very questionable was his right to the throne; he was only descended from a third son of Edward III, while the Earls of March were descended from a second son through the female line. One Lord March had actually been proclaimed heir presumptive by Richard II, and descent from the March heiress would one day be the basis of the claims of the House of York. Everyone in England knew that the Plantagenet title to France came through a female line. Although Henry was confident enough to release the current Earl of March from prison and to rebury King Richard in his magnificent tomb at Westminster, this element of doubt and insecurity may well have induced what was at times an almost hysterical insistence on his rights-even, most illogically of all, in France-together with a fanatical conviction that God was on his side.

In any case it was inevitable that Henry V would cross the Channel and attack the Valois. Only domestic troubles followed by ill-health had stopped his father doing so. But now the Welsh were broken and the new King was confident he could quell any trouble in England ; he had little difficulty in smashing Sir John Oldcastle’s pitiful Lollard conspiracy before it got under way. He discounted invasion by the Scots whose young ruler, James I, was an unwilling guest in the Tower of London. Probably Henry hoped that a renewal of the War would unite England. Above all, France continued to be in disarray, torn between the rival factions of Armagnac and Burgundy. It was an opportunity which no ambitious English King could afford to miss.

By 1413 the Armagnacs, led by the Count of Armagnac and the Constable Charles d’Albret, had won control of most of France including the capital. Duke John of Burgundy sulked in his own domains, while elsewhere his French supporters were being persecuted and murdered. A Burgundian army failed to retake Paris early in 1414, whereupon the Armagnacs announced their intention of invading Burgundy and deposing the Duke. Both sides negotiated with King Henry.

Duke John’s agents arrived in England in the spring of 1414. He wanted only 2,000 English troops, promising that when he had defeated the Armagnacs Henry would be given the Gascon lands of their leaders together with the Angoumois. But in the autumn the English horrified the Duke by asking for all the territories they had received at Brétigny, with Berry in addition, and for the recognition of Henry as King of France.

All this time Henry had also been negotiating with the Armagnacs, asking for Charles VI’s daughter as his bride with a dowry of ten million crowns ; his envoys argued fluently in favour of succession to the French crown through the female line. From the beginning the English King demanded more than the Brétigny settlement, stepping up his terms at each meeting. Far from offering tennis balls as Shakespeare suggests, the Armagnacs were only too willing to supply a French Princess and were even prepared to restore Aquitaine as it had been in 1369—though not its sovereignty—besides paying the remainder of King John’s ransom. But Henry insisted on sovereignty and on having Normandy. The Armagnac envoys made a last try, until at Winchester in midsummer 1414 the Chancellor, Bishop Beaufort, told them that unless his master received not merely Aquitaine and Normandy but Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, Maine and Ponthieu as well he would come and take them himself at the point of the sword. The envoys went home reluctantly, no doubt infuriated by Henry’s insistence that they were responsible for the ensuing war : they knew very well that he had been arming since the year before.

As with Edward III, finance was Henry V’s biggest problem. It has already been seen that normal royal revenues in the preceding reign were far less than in Edward’s time. Nothing testifies more to the enthusiasm of the English for the War than the readiness with which Henry’s subjects lent him money. In November 1414, in response to an appeal by Bishop Beaufort, Parliament voted the King a most generous subsidy. It was still not enough, so commissioners were dispatched throughout England to borrow money, a practice which continued for the rest of the reign. Loans without interest were raised from prelates and abbeys, from nobility and gentry, from city corporations and individual burgesses ; Dick Whittington, the rich London merchant, eventually contributed no less than £2,000, while some small tradesmen advanced sums as small as iod. Unlike Edward III’s loans, most of Henry V’s were repaid.