1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (2 page)

As a result of this extreme adulation even the most scholarly historians have found it difficult to maintain their historical objectivity. The most famous example is the declaration by the English historian K. B. McFarlane that Henry V was, ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’.
¹
Many other writers have presented Henry as the typical medieval warrior-hero, regardless of his solemnity and profoundly religious nature. So, although this book is about a man and his time, it is also about challenging certain assumptions that we make about him. I do think he was an extraordinary man, in that he demonstrated phenomenal organisational skills, focus, determination, resilience, leadership
and – above all else – religious conviction; but I also feel he was a deeply flawed individual. He lacked the simpler qualities of compassion, warmth, and the understanding of human frailty that one naturally looks for in all men – yeomen and paupers as well as kings. McFarlane, preaching from a pulpit of academic prejudice against historical biography, failed to draw attention to these shortcomings of his character.
²
Thus my verdict on Henry’s supposed ‘greatness’ is very different from Mr McFarlane’s.

There are already dozens of books on Henry V and dozens more on Agincourt – many of them by academic specialists who have devoted decades to the study of Henry and his battles. So it is fair to ask: what can I hope to do historically, over and above their collective efforts? What are the aims of this book?

First, it is a continuation of my examination of the nature of personality and political ambition in the middle ages, continuing these themes from my earlier books about Roger Mortimer, Edward III and Henry IV. It is thus the fourth volume of my ‘biographical history’ of later medieval England. Second, I have tried to give a fuller and more representative view of Henry’s non-military activities in this year, especially his religious deeds, which tend to be very briefly noted as examples of his spirituality in full-length biographies and books about Agincourt. Third, I have paid much more attention than usual to the characters and social movements that formed the backdrop to Henry’s ambitions in 1415, especially with regard to the papal conflicts and the burning of Jan Hus at the council of Constance. It is important to remember that, at the same time as Henry was trying to reunite the ‘kingdom of England and France’, many people were trying to reunite the Church, and Henry himself drew parallels between the two unifying movements. Fourth, I have tried to show how Henry’s activities were part of a wider attempt to unite religious and political authority at the time – a European-wide movement towards establishing the divine right of kings, and in many ways the basis for the shift towards absolutism in the following century.

The most significant innovation in this book is its calendar structure. One might call this an experiment in historical form. I have asked whether we can arrive at a different view of a historical subject through presenting well-known historical facts in a radically different way. As will be seen, a calendar-based form does permit many new insights.
It forces a greater degree of accuracy with regard to dates and developmental processes. Repetition of key aspects of Henry’s behaviour appear in proportion to the evidence, and juxtapositions of important events go a long way to explaining some of his decisions. Above all else, the integration of all the various aspects of his life – the religious and the social, the judicial and the political – allow a vision of Henry that is very different from the patriotic stories with which we grew up. The book therefore is a demonstration of how a different framework may be used to see the past differently, and how we may obtain a new ‘projection’ (to borrow a term from geography) of the past by presenting historical events in a more chronologically precise way.

Having said that, the calendar form has its complications. Describing a whole year in a man’s life, day by day, is a huge literary challenge. I do not think that it has been attempted previously for a medieval or early modern individual. This is a very different book from
1599
by James Shapiro, for example, which is not a day-to-day study of Shakespeare. It is impossible to avoid the fact that the calendar is a non-literary structure, like the Periodic Table of the Elements, and creating a literary work out of the Periodic Table
in atomic order
would be a challenge for anyone (even Tom Lehrer had to change the order of the elements in his famous song). The author has to maintain a balance between the facts on the one hand and readability on the other. This balance pivots around the question: which details should be included in their proper place, and which might be safely excluded or mentioned elsewhere? Normally historians resolve this question silently, through excising anything that is not relevant to their thesis or theme, and this process of selection is concealed within the structure of their books. However, in this study, which has no structure except the days of the year,
everything
relating to the king and his challenges is relevant. To exclude or change the position of anything would partially distort the picture of Henry V in 1415. Moreover, it is only by including everything that we can start to go beyond the evidence and to remark on aspects of normal medieval behaviour that do
not
feature in Henry’s life – his lack of relationships with women, for example, or the lack of references to jousting. Herein lies the problem: to include every fact in its proper place would result in a massive book, full of repetitive lists of apparently inconsequential details; yet to cut
or remove anything would distort our image of the man in this year, and ruin the experiment.

In trying to reconcile these problems of information, chronology and readability I have tended towards fullness and precision. I have included almost everything I can find relating to the king’s decision-making, even such routine things as the confirmation of episcopal elections, warrants for arrest, commissions of inquiry, and the granting of royal pensions. In most cases these have been included under the heading of the day specified in the document. I have not included everything known for the year, however; I have excluded regular appointments and payments that were routinely made by the bureaucrats at Westminster (unless the nature of the grant suggests that Henry was personally involved). Some matters of accounting detail from May to August have been relegated to the notes section, to avoid tedious repetition. I have ignored administrative clarifications, such as confirmations of earlier royal grants by chancery officials, which would distract from the main purpose of the book. On the whole, I have tried to use as many facts as possible to give a full and multi-dimensional view of Henry – as a warrior, organiser, devoted Christian, patron, statesman and king – and I have sought to show how he behaved in relation to priests, subjects, women, diplomats, brothers and friends, as well as those who fought for him and those who fought against him.

At the heart of this book – at the heart of all historical endeavour – there is one overarching purpose: to satisfy an instinctive desire to understand our race in other ages and in different circumstances, with regard to both individuals and communities, and to see how we have changed over the intervening centuries. For this reason I make no apology for wanting to go beyond patriotic hagiography and to look for the ‘real’ Henry
V
, as opposed to the charismatic Shakespearian hero or McFarlane’s ‘greatest man’. I have tried to draw attention to the complexities within Henry as an individual as well as the complexities of generally understanding men in a violent, God-fearing age. As I stressed at the end of my study of Edward III, it is in the inconsistencies of a character that one gets close to knowing the man. It is not in the bland generalisations that we find truth, but in the apparent irregularities that demand explanation. If I have alerted people to the fact that a man may be a hero and yet a monster, that he can be seen
as blessed by God and yet be a wanton destroyer of lives, and that even a king might set himself on the path to his own self-destruction and the negation of his humanity in order to win recognition as something that people associate with ‘greatness’, then I will have succeeded.

This book is, therefore, not just a book about a man and his time, and not just about the significance of this year in his life. Nor is it just about reversing any assumptions made about him. It is about the way we understand people in the past and, by implication, the way we understand ourselves.

Introduction

It was about eight o’clock in the evening of 23 November 1407. In her rented rooms upstairs in the rue Vieille du Temple in Paris, the thirty-four-year-old Jacquette Griffart was putting her young child to bed. She was anxious because her husband, Jean, a shoemaker, had not returned home. She went to the window to see if he was coming but the narrow street outside was too dark. Some of her child’s clean bedclothes had been drying on a pole outside the window, so she lifted the pole and began to draw it back into the room. In the darkness she noticed two or three torches coming down the narrow street, carried by footmen; and by their light she briefly saw their master. He was playing with his gloves as he rode, singing to himself. With him were three or four other men on horseback. Thinking nothing more about it, she turned back into the room, crossed over to the cot, and lifted her child.

‘Kill him!’ shouted a voice in the street; ‘kill him!’.

Jacquette stepped back anxiously to the window, holding her child in her arms. She saw the singing nobleman on the ground below, on his knees, desperately holding on to his saddle. He had been dragged from his horse by seven or eight armed men. His companions had fled. The attackers were gathered around him, some of them holding torches while others brought their swords down on his shoulders. He tried to fend them off with a flailing arm. ‘What is this?’ he yelled, clinging with one hand to the saddle of his horse. ‘Who does it come from?’ Not one of his assailants spoke. An axe severed the hand holding the saddle and he fell. The horse bolted. The men immediately stepped forward to beat down on his body with their weapons, stabbing him repeatedly.

To Jacquette it looked as if they were beating a mattress, so hard
were their blows. Shocked, she found the word ‘Murder!’ and screamed it across the dark street.

‘Shut up, you damned woman,’ shouted back one of the men, just below her. ‘Shut up!’

One of the assailants lifted his axe and cleaved the head of the dying lord in two. His brains spilled out on to the ground. Seeing this, a large man wearing a red hood stepped out from the shadows of the house opposite.

‘Put out the lights,’ he ordered, looking down. ‘He’s dead. Let’s go. Take heart.’ The men immediately followed him around the corner into the rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

When they had gone Jacquette noticed another man on the ground beside the dead lord, one of the man’s valets. He too had been attacked. Dying, he crawled to his master’s corpse. ‘My master!’ he called out before he too succumbed to his wounds.

Then there was quiet. A single torch burnt on the ground near the corner of the street, one of the attackers having failed to extinguish it in his haste.

Jacquette yelled out ‘Murder!’ again, several times. Another woman who lived in the rue des Rosiers arrived on the scene and took up the cry. It was not long before people gathered to view the appalling spectacle, and to see who was lying in the pool of blood.

It was Louis, duke of Orléans, the only brother of Charles VI, king of France. The king himself was suffering from an illness that left him often deranged. To all intents and purposes, the man who lay dead in the street was the ruler of France.

*

The late duke of Orléans was no saint. He had assumed control of his brother’s government shortly after the death of their uncle, Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, in 1404. His taxes were unpopular with the people of Paris. So too were his morals. Not only was he believed to have fathered several children by the queen, had also seduced or raped several knights’ wives, humiliating their husbands in the process. It was said he had a gallery of pictures of all the wives he had slept with. One cuckold, Albert de Chauny, not only had to suffer the indignity of all Paris knowing his wife had lain beneath the duke, but was rumoured
also to have been forced to describe the beauty of her body when the duke had paraded her naked before an assembly, with her face covered. For this reason suspicions fell upon de Chauny as the murderer. But it soon emerged that he had not been in Paris for many months.

Other lines of enquiry were pursued. One of the Parisian water-carriers told the investigators that a man who had supplied water to the house where the killers had been waiting was being sheltered by John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, the son of Philip the Bold. The investigators could not arrest him without the duke’s permission. So on 26 November they sent word to John the Fearless, who was at the duke of Berry’s house, the
hôtel de Nesle
.

When he was asked for, John’s guilt showed in his face.

Seeing his expression, the duke of Anjou asked him directly what he knew of the murder. John confessed. He had paid the man in the red hood, Raoul d’Anquetonville, to organise the assassination of the duke of Orléans.

The duke of Anjou was astonished. John was a member of the royal family. He was the king’s first cousin, and thus the dead man’s first cousin. He had attended the memorial service the very day after the murder. How could he have done such a thing? The duke of Berry, who was also present, wept at the enormity of the deed. Both men were left speechless, unable to act. John the Fearless simply got up, left the room, went downstairs, and rode out of Paris with a handful of retainers.
¹

The realisation that John the Fearless had murdered his cousin came as a profound shock to the whole kingdom of France. When the king of England, Henry IV, had secretly murdered his cousin and rival Richard II seven years earlier, the French had condemned him in the most uncompromising language. Now they had seen a member of their own royal family commit the same crime. But the repercussions of the French royal murder were far more serious. The English one had been perpetrated by the anointed and crowned monarch, who was technically above the law. In contrast, the duke of Burgundy was a vassal of the king of France, and in no way above the law. Richard II’s murder had largely been a precaution, in case he was restored to his throne as the result of a treasonable plot. The greater purpose was the stability of the kingdom. There was no comparable ‘greater purpose’ with regard to the killing of the duke of Orléans; it could only destabilise the kingdom. From its brazen manner to its political
implications, the assassination of the duke of Orléans was more horrifying to contemporaries than any other murder in living memory.