The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (29 page)

Though Henry V inherited his father’s strong religious convictions, in the new king’s case they served to reinforce his sense of himself as a born ruler. Unlike his father, he had no blood on his hands. A deep inner conviction of the rightness of any cause he adopted, such as his grandfather’s claim to the French throne, gave boldness to a decisive and obsessively disciplined character. His wiry physique had been honed in the saddle since the age of thirteen in the Welsh campaigns. Though his reputation when he became king was that of an outstanding warrior who had got the better of Hotspur, in the best-known portrait of him he more resembles a priest with his cropped hair and solemn, austere look. Although numerous legends suggest a wild youth as Prince Hal, including an incident in which he is said to have struck his father’s chief justice Sir William Gasgoigne, many of them seem to have been invented after his death.

What can be said for sure is that Henry V had the ability to move his audiences to follow him anywhere. Oratorical gifts and outstanding military abilities, which enabled him to recapture the ancient English territory of Normandy and make his son the next King of France, inspired feelings of profound devotion among the English. Like his father, Henry had only a short reign, but those nine years were exceptionally glorious, and his victories in France attracted the enthusiastic support of the House of Commons, which raised taxes for each new war without argument. The unique popularity of the hero-king gave the Lancastrian dynasty an emotional sanction and legitimacy it had previously lacked.

The new Lancastrian king had succeeded to the throne without a hitch, but his first task was to restore peace at home. To this end he mollified his potential opponents, granting a free pardon to Owen Glendower and his supporters, releasing the Earl of March from prison and putting up a magnificent tomb to Richard II at Westminster Abbey. Although Henry V had replaced his enemy Archbishop Arundel as chancellor with one of his Beaufort relations, the king shared Arundel’s conservative views.

Under Henry V the Lollard heresy was pursued far more strenuously than before. Even his old friend and fellow campaigner the Welsh marcher knight Sir John Oldcastle, a keen follower of Wyclif who may have been the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was tried and arrested for heresy in the second year of his reign. After attempting to lead a rising known as the Oldcastle Plot, intending to take the king prisoner at his palace at Eltham in south London, Oldcastle escaped to his hereditary lands in the Welsh marches. With his subsequent recapture and execution at the Tower of London, the Lollard threat to orthodoxy was extirpated, and the doctrines of the Catholic Church were not to be challenged again for over a hundred years. Henceforth Lollardy became an underground movement with a considerable following in the West Midlands and among some better-educated artisans. Though something of its independent spirit dripped quietly into the English bloodstream, it no longer had a following within the establishment.

With peace at home, Henry V turned his energies abroad, convinced of the need for a just war on behalf of his royal patrimony. In 1360 by the Treaty of Brétigny Edward III had agreed to give up his claim to the French throne in return for Aquitaine. Yet the treaty had never been fulfilled–Aquitaine had never been returned, while its rump Gascony was being reduced, so the English claim to the French throne remained in place. Henry was determined to have the whole of Aquitaine at the very least, and if possible Normandy as well, and now was a good moment to act.

The intermittent madness of Charles VI, which had been afflicting him for over thirty years, had badly weakened the French administration. It was made more ineffective still by the internecine rivalry within the royal family, in particular between the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans, and the king’s cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, known as John the Fearless or Jean Sans Peur. In 1407 Orleans was murdered at Burgundy’s behest, and a civil war erupted. On one side were the Armagnacs, the Orleanist party headed by the Count of Armagnac, whose home was in southern France near Aquitaine; on the other side were the Burgundians, whose power base lay in the north east of Paris.

Embassies came and went between England and the two French parties, but in terms of territory returned to the English little progress was made. By 1414 Henry V’s patience was wearing thin, and he soon concluded that the only way to break the deadlock was to send an English invasion force to France. There was considerable support for war. The City of London with its Gascon trade raised large loans for Henry, and Parliament granted extra taxes to help recover his rightful possessions from Normandy down to Aquitaine–both Houses had been convinced by an address he gave them that his claim to the French throne should be enforced. A new fleet was assembled at Southampton, and the truce which had begun with Richard II’s marriage came to an end–the Hundred Years War resumed. By the summer of 1415 the ships and the guns, the heralds and the trumpeters, the drummers and the minstrels, were ready, and in early August the king and his troops sailed for Harfleur in Normandy, the gateway to northern France. This force of 9,000 men was intended only to open the campaign–it was not a full-scale invasion. But things did not go according to plan, and it was not until late September that the port yielded. Food was always hard to come by in enemy territory, and the effort of besieging and an epidemic of dysentery had greatly weakened the men.

As a result the campaign had to be abandoned in favour of making for the greater safety of the English port of Calais. But to reach it the English had to march through hostile territory. Following the course that his grandfather Edward III had taken before Crécy, Henry V and his exhausted army made their way north. After crossing the Ternoise river at Blangy they found their way to Calais blocked by a great French army, at least 40,000 strong. It was drawn up at a little village named Agincourt. In those late October days the odds were against the English. But the French commanders made one significant mistake which would give the English the advantage: they had chosen to fight on a very narrow plateau surrounded by hedges which did not allow them enough room to manoeuvre their formidable forces.

Despite Henry V’s personal austerity, he took the greatest care of his soldiers. He introduced surgeons into the army, his archers had horses to ride and, in imitation of Caesar, pontoons or portable bridges were always carried so that English soldiers stayed dry and comfortable crossing rivers. Unlike other armies English besiegers were housed in weatherproof wooden huts built by the siege train of engineers, carpenters and joiners. Henry always personally oversaw the victualling, to ensure that his men were well fed. Wherever the English army marched, on the nearest sea a flotilla of boats groaning with provisions followed. For the king knew, as Napoleon is said to have remarked centuries later, that an army marches on its stomach. He also took steps to prevent his vital longbowmen running out of arrows. Geese were specially reared on common land throughout England in order to provide the feathered tips for the million arrows the royal armies ordered each year. And it was forbidden by royal decree to use ashwood for the wooden clogs that most country dwellers put on against the mud. This was because ash provided the best wood for the arrows’ shafts.

The night before Agincourt Henry did what he had always done ever since he was a young commander: he slipped from group to group under the dripping trees, quietly rallying the men. Then he made an electrifying last speech which was talked about by old campaigners for years to come. If the genius of Shakespeare transformed his words, much of its content was derived from contemporary accounts. In particular, the democratic themes that the playwright puts in Henry V’s mouth had a basis in reality. It was a fact that the English archer was more valuable in battle than his social superior the knight, as his skill at archery was responsible for the storms of arrows which protected the knight and which fell so thickly that they reminded observers of snow showers. In the French army strict notions of caste prevailed, just as they did in France itself: the higher social class of the knight segregated him from the peasant archers. But the English knights dismounted before battle and sent their horses to the back. Then they and archers fought side by side on foot. Even if Henry did not precisely say that ‘he today that sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile this day shall gentle his condition’, it was clearly implied.

Not only was the small force of English outnumbered by nearly five to one, they also looked outlandish and wild compared to the exquisitely caparisoned French knights. Practicality determined the English costume. The longbowmen had all taken off one shoe and ripped one stocking so that they could have greater purchase in the oozing mud and grip with their naked toes. They had also torn off one sleeve of their sword arm for greater freedom of movement. We may imagine that half naked, they looked an unkempt and inefficient enemy to take on the French. The French knights’ armour, on the oher hand, shone brightly from ceaseless polishing. The English and Welsh must have seemed almost as savage as in the days of Boudicca.

But, despite the contrast in the appearance of the two armies, the French knights were not fooled. The English longbowmen continued to be such a source of dread that during battles French knights would swoop by the archers waving their swords to try to cut off the archers’ two drawing fingers. In return the English longbowmen would hold up two fingers, a gesture of defiance which continues to be used today.

When battle commenced, Henry ordered the archers at the front to move forward towards the French so that their arrows would not fall short. The French turned to one another in delighted disbelief at the English stupidity before advancing to ride down the longbowmen. But unknown to them sharpened stakes had been planted in the ground in front of them, and there was a huge pile-up of warhorses, their unseated knights thrashing uselessly beneath them as their heavy armour caused them to sink into the mud. At once the English archers ran forward and in their usual cold-blooded fashion set about slitting their enemy’s throats.

Many of France’s greatest nobles were killed that day in the broken cornfields. One of the reasons for the enormous numbers of French casualties–perhaps 6,000 versus fewer than 300 English dead–was that Henry ordered that all the French prisoners of war should have their throats cut, because the rumour had gone round that there was a danger of attack from the rear. That was where the royal baggage train held the royal crown of England, the Chancery seals without which no official document was complete and the sword of state. Even though permanent government departments had grown up at Westminster, like his predecessors Henry V went to war accompanied by all the visible signs of his office and majesty. His prompt if unchivalrous action in killing the prisoners caused much grumbling in the English ranks–not on humanitarian grounds, but because dead knights would not elicit the lucrative ransoms that made so many English fortunes in the Hundred Years War.

The way was now open for Calais and London. The hero king was chaired by the crowds when he landed on English soil and was accompanied by exulting citizens all the way to London, where Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, celebrated Mass. Agincourt was a sign that God was on the side of the English, and the king paid for a Mass to be said in perpetuity on St Crispin’s Day, the day of the battle. The mood of national ecstasy continued with Parliament surrendering to Henry V–and to him only–their right to discuss taxation with him and granting him the customs for life.

It was the climax of the love affair between the Lancastrian king and Parliament. Henry became the greatest prince in Europe, so influential that his support of the Emperor Sigismund brought to an end the papal schism which had been plaguing Christendom for over a hundred years: the two popes had become three and were now reduced to one, Martin V. Meanwhile to demonstrate its commitment to orthodoxy, the General Church Council burned at the stake the heretical Jan Hus, a follower of Wyclif’s in Bohemia. For the next few years, buoyed by taxes and by loans, the king concentrated on returning Normandy to the English crown. By 1419, after a series of gruelling sieges, he had achieved his objective, and Normandy was once more under English rule. The English were back in force on the lower Seine, as threatening to the French as their Viking ancestors had been 500 years before.

At last the warring Burgundians and Orleanists realized the danger they were facing. They made overtures of peace to one another, but even at this moment of peril the feud between them took precedence. At a meeting on the bridge at Montereau on the Yonne between the dauphin (the name given to the eldest son of the French king), who was head of the Armagnacs or Orleanists, and Jean Sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, the duke was assassinated. The feud blazed into life again. But Burgundian anger at the Orleanists was to England’s lasting advantage, for Jean Sans Peur’s son, the new duke, Philip the Good, allied himself comprehensively with the English. In order to prevent the Orleanist dauphin ruling France, by the 1420 Treaty of Troyes with the Duke of Burgundy Henry V was to marry the French king Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and become regent during his mad father-in-law’s lifetime. Last and best, under the treaty Henry and his heirs were to be the next kings of France, though France was to remain a distinct kingdom, maintaining her separate French laws and a French council.

The dual monarchy promised by the Treaty of Troyes proved hard to enforce. North of the Loire and round the Paris area, the French might hate the Orleanists and welcome the English king presiding over a session of the Estates General and English garrisons manning the Louvre and the Bastille; south of the Loire, however, was a different story. There the dauphin was viewed as France’s rightful ruler and future king. When in 1421 Henry V’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, was killed attempting to enlarge England’s French realm further south, Henry left his infant son and wife Catherine in England and returned to France himself.