The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (21 page)

Were shortly after drawn up in battle array by Sir Thomas Erpingham, a knight grown grey with age and honour, who placed the archers in front, and the men-at-arms behind them. He then formed two wings of men-at-arms and archers, and posted the horses with the baggage at the rear … When all was done to his satisfaction he flung into the air a truncheon … crying out, ‘Nestrocque!’ and then dismounted, as the king and others had done. When the English saw Sir Thomas throw up his truncheon, they set up a loud shout, to the great astonishment of the French.
³

If this was meant to provoke the French knights into a charge, it failed. Henry, therefore, moved his battle line forward to a more exposed position. It is not clear from contemporary accounts exactly how the English bowmen were positioned. What is clear is that their contribution was decisive.

The archers who were hidden in the field, re-echoed these shouts, while the English army kept advancing on the French. Their archers … let off a shower of arrows
with all their might, and as high as possible, so as not to lose their effect … Before … the general attack commenced, numbers of the French were slain and severely wounded by the English bowmen … others had their horses so severely handled by the archers that, smarting from pain, they galloped on the van division and threw it into the utmost confusion, breaking the line in many places … horses and riders were tumbling on the ground, and the whole army was thrown into disorder, and forced back on some lands that had been just sown with corn.
⁴

Heavy overnight rain made things difficult for mounted knights and dismounted men-at-arms in heavy armour. The English soldiers were better dressed for the hand-to-hand fighting that now began: ‘They were, for the most part, without any armour, and in jackets, with their hose loose, and hatchets or swords hanging to their girdles. Some, indeed, were barefoot and without hats.’
⁵
The French came on in divisions too closely packed to wield their weapons to best effect. The English absorbed the first impact, then made progress against the disorganized enemy: ‘The English … kept advancing and slaying without mercy all that opposed them, and thus destroyed the main battalion as they had done the first.’
⁶
Meanwhile, some 600 French troops circuited to the rear of the English lines and attacked the undefended baggage train.

This distressed the king very much, for he saw that, though the enemy had been routed, they were collecting on different parts of the plain in large bodies and he was afraid they would renew the battle. He therefore caused instant proclamation to be made by sound of trumpet that everyone should put his prisoners to death, to prevent them from aiding the enemy, should the combat be renewed. This caused an instantaneous and general massacre of the French prisoners.
⁷

The slaughter was not quite as ‘instantaneous’ as the chronicler intimated. Many captors were reluctant to give up the prospect of collecting ransoms for their prisoners, and the king had to enforce his order with a threat of execution for any who disobeyed. French losses at Agincourt amounted to some 12,000 or 13,000, including three dukes, five counts, more than 90 barons and almost 2,000 knights. The English dead amounted to less than a thousand.

The English army travelled on to Calais from where Henry returned to England. On 23 November he made a triumphal entry to London amid scenes of great rejoicing.

Harfleur gave Henry a new bargaining counter with France and diplomacy was resumed, and this time the king was assisted in the negotiations by the Emperor Sigismund, who paid a long state visit to England in the summer of 1416. Sigismund was acting as the peace-maker of Europe. He was intent on solving the problems of the divided church and wished to unite all Christian monarchs in this enterprise. However, the French king was mentally incapable, and the
dauphin could think of nothing but casting off the humiliation of the recent defeat. As for the Duke of Burgundy, Henry’s supposed ally, he was too duplicitous to be trusted.

French land and sea forces blockaded Harfleur and had every expectation of depriving Henry of this prize. In August the king’s brother, John, Duke of Bedford, led a fleet to the mouth of the Seine and broke the blockade, and at the same time Henry and Sigismund signed a treaty of mutual defence. In October 1416 Henry, having exhausted all diplomatic means, obtained from parliament a grant of taxation to resume the war.

1417–20

In August 1417 Henry was back in France with a new army equipped with cannon to reduce any towns or castles that resisted him. In September he seized Caen and made it the centre of his administration of the province. Other major towns were taken over the following months. On 31 July 1418 he began the siege of Rouen, which held out until the following 19 January.

Thereafter, the king moved his headquarters to the conquered city and began to distribute lands in Normandy to his more trusted followers. He was making it clear that he had come to stay. He now controlled Paris’s outlet to the sea, and this put him in a strong bargaining position. Still the dauphin declined to meet Henry and discuss his claims, so it was without the dauphin that Henry met with Burgundy, Queen Isabel and Princess Catherine at Meulan at
the end of May. The king was enraptured by Catherine but refused to modify his claims. Meanwhile, Burgundy continued to play his double game. On 10 September he went to Montereau for more talks with the heir to the French throne. There he was murdered, doubtless on the dauphin’s orders.

The moral outrage stirred by this act worked in Henry’s favour. It was later said that the English entered France through the hole in the Duke of Burgundy’s skull. To Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, Henry proposed that he should marry Catherine and assume the throne of France for himself and his heirs on the death of Charles VI. In the meantime he would govern the country as the deputy of the mad king. By Christmas 1419 these terms had been accepted, and on 20 May following they were formally incorporated in the Treaty of Troyes. Henry and Catherine were married on 2 June, and on 1 December the couple entered Paris to general rejoicing. A week later the French parliament endorsed the Treaty of Troyes and pronounced the dauphin incapable of inheriting the crown as a result of his refusal to answer charges relating to the murder of the Duke of Burgundy.

1421–2

The court returned to England in February, and Catherine was crowned at Westminster on the 24th of that month. Henry had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, as his deputy in France, but he was killed in a skirmish on 22 March. Supporters of the dauphin were still holding out, and
it was clear that Henry would have to take the field against them in person. He crossed the Channel again in June, and in October he began to besiege the dauphinist stronghold of Meaux, to the east of Paris. The town held out longer than he had expected, obliging the king and his men to endure the rigours of a winter campaign, but it eventually capitulated on 11 May 1422. On 6 December 1421 the queen, who was at Windsor, gave birth to a son who was christened Henry. At the end of May she joined her husband, though without the baby. The court travelled to the Loire, but Henry, weakened by his recent ordeal, fell ill, probably with dysentery. On 31 August he died at Vincennes.

THE WARS OF THE ROSES 1422–71

HOUSES OF LANCASTER and YORK

The ‘Wars of the Roses’ was a term invented in the 19th century to describe the contest for the English crown between two rival factions, the houses of Lancaster and York. The Lancastrians (the red rose faction) were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. The Yorkists (who occasionally sported a white rose badge) had as their ancestor Edmund, Duke of York, Edward III’s fifth son.

Strictly speaking, the rivalry began with Henry IV’s usurpation of the throne from Richard II in 1399, but the real fighting did not begin until 1455. However, two major factors contributed to the baronial conflict: the accession of a king who became incapable because of mental illness, and the loss of all England’s continental possessions except Calais, which allowed ambitious magnates to turn their armies of retainers against each other. Therefore, the Wars of the Roses really equate with the tumultuous affairs of the 15th century and can best be understood by studying the reigns of the two rival kings who occupied the throne between 1422 and 1483. The Lancastrian Henry VI reigned from 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471. The Yorkist Edward IV dispossessed his rival in 1461 but was then overthrown in 1470 and returned to power in 1471.

1422–37

Henry VI became king when he was just nine months old. Thanks to the reputation of the crown that his father had established, there was no challenge to his claim to the throne and the succession was peaceful. On 21 October 1422 Charles VI died, and the baby Henry thus became king of France as well as of England. His eldest uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, was appointed as his ‘protector’ or guardian, but Bedford soon left to assume the government of France, and his position at the king’s side was taken by another uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. A third member of the ruling triumvirate was the king’s great-uncle, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. These three men dominated the royal council that ruled in the king’s name during his minority, and despite personality clashes and major differences of opinion among the royal uncles, this system initially worked surprisingly well.

In November 1423 the infant king was taken from his residence at Windsor to Westminster to receive the homage of parliament. Every effort was made to bond the leading families of the realm with the child-king – they were ordered to send their own young sons to the royal court to be brought up in what was, in effect, a noble academy – and at every possible opportunity Henry was shown to his subjects. For example, in April 1425 Henry was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘led upon his feet between the Lord Protector and the Duke of Exeter unto the choir, whence he was borne to the
high altar’. After the service, he was ‘set upon a fair courser and so conveyed through Cheapside and the other streets of the city’.
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But there was a different mood abroad the following November when Henry was paraded through London once again. This time he was being used as a pawn in the quarrel between Gloucester and Beaufort. Only days before there had arisen, ‘a great dissention between the Duke of Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester, that was to be Chancellor, for the which all London rose with the Duke against the foresaid bishop’.
²
Beaufort, acting as president of the council during the absence of the king’s two uncles, had offended the chief men of the city by not taking action to curtail the privileges enjoyed by foreign merchants. This was such a bone of contention that a mob threatened to duck the bishop in the Thames if they could lay hands on him.

When Gloucester returned from France he accused his uncle of trying to usurp his position, and in October 1425 the two men confronted each other on London Bridge, Beaufort with some of his armed retainers and Gloucester with a posse of armed men drawn from the city and the inns of court. Intermediaries prevented the spilling of blood, but Gloucester claimed a victory, which was why he ostentatiously rode through the streets of London days later with his nephew. Bedford did his best to resolve the family feud, and it was he who brought Henry, at the age of four, to Leicester in February 1426, to preside over the opening of parliament.

In France there was political stalemate. The English and
their Burgundian allies controlled the country north of the Loire, while the dauphin, now recognized by his followers as Charles VII, ruled south of the Loire. Neither rival king had been crowned at Rheims, which lay within the English sphere of influence, and so was not recognized as the divinely consecrated monarch. Military action had not changed the situation since Henry V’s death when, in 1428, Bedford laid siege to Orleans. That was when one of the most remarkable events in history occurred. A 17-year-old peasant girl from a village in eastern France gained an audience with Charles at Chinon and convinced him that she had been selected by God to lead his armies to victory against the English. Joan of Arc had an aura about her that inspired Charles and his nobles to believe that she really did hear angelic voices and might be the saviour of the nation. She was provided with a horse and armour and accompanied an army sent to raise the siege. The siege of Orleans was successfully raised, and, emboldened by this victory, Charles broke through English lines to travel to Rheims, where he was crowned on 17 July 1429.