1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (3 page)

There is another reason why the French royal murder was more serious than the English one, and it is the reason why a book about Henry V in the year 1415 has to begin with a description of this event. England was a kingdom in which the king reigned supreme: it was, in many respects, like a modern nation. Only at the margins of his realm – in Wales, Ireland, and the Marches of Scotland – could the king’s authority be questioned with impunity. If a great lord committed a crime, then the king summoned an army and punished him. Edward II had done so several times in the early fourteenth century and Henry IV had done likewise several times in the early fifteenth. But the kingdom of France was different. A far larger and richer country, the principle members of the French royal family ruled semi-autonomous dukedoms that were primarily loyal to their duke, not the king. Hence, when John the Fearless fled from Paris after being found out, he went to Burgundy and then to Flanders. Here he met his brothers, Anthony, duke of Brabant, and Philip, count of Nevers, and his brother-in-law, William, duke of Holland. This coalition was very strong – no king of France could have simply marched an army into Burgundy or Flanders and brought the duke to heel. It would have resulted in a civil war. In addition, King Charles VI was mentally unstable and incapable of leading an army against anyone, let alone John the Fearless, who was an experienced battlefield commander. The king and his council had no option but to negotiate with John. This they did, reluctantly, at Amiens in January 1408.

If both sides had genuinely wanted peace, things might have ended there. But high-profile murders tend to be the start of things, not the end, and this was no exception. Having secured his position at the end of February 1408, John the Fearless rode back into Paris in triumph. He was feted as a hero by the Parisians, who had despised the interfering, philandering, high-taxing duke of Orléans. On 8 March a manifesto commissioned by John the Fearless was read out by its author, Jean Petit, declaring that the duke of Orléans had been a tyrant and that, because it was ‘permissible and meritorious to kill a tyrant’, John had done a good deed in butchering him. Jean Petit read this in the presence of King Charles himself – the dead man’s brother – and the rest of the assembled royal family. This was shocking, distressing, unforgettable and unforgivable.

Petit outlined the basis of the late duke’s tyranny. The duke had resorted to black magic to try to kill the king, having his sword, dagger and a ring consecrated by two devils. He had ‘acquired a cherry branch that had been dipped in the blood of a red cockerel and a white chicken, which possessed such magic powers that no woman could resist the advances of its owner’. He had plotted with the duke of Milan to kill the king, and had tried to poison the late dauphin, Charles, with an apple thrown into the chamber where he had been playing. He had wilfully set fire to the king’s clothes at a fancy-dress ball in 1393. He had made a pact with Henry of Lancaster – before he became Henry IV of England – that they should help each other usurp their respective thrones. He had tried to persuade the queen to leave France with him in order to control her. He had plotted with Pope Benedict XIII to declare the king and his children unfit to hold the throne, so he might become king himself. Finally he had taken control of the government by stationing his men in strategic castles, and had levied punitive taxes – supposedly to defend the kingdom against England but in reality to further his own ambitions. In his final summing-up, Jean Petit declared that ‘my lord of Burgundy is not deserving of any blame whatever for what has happened to the criminal duke of Orléans. Nor ought the king our lord to be dissatisfied with him but, on the contrary, he should be pleased with what he has done, and requite him for it in three ways: in love, honour and riches.’
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European politics has rarely seen such a great insult thrust on to such a devastating injury. If the assassination itself had strained relations between the lords, Jean Petit’s
Justification of the duke of Burgundy
gave further attempts at peaceable dialogue the character of a series of diplomatic manoeuvres prior to an outright declaration of war. The widowed duchess of Orléans looked on in disgust as her brother-in-law the French king absolved John the Fearless of any blame and forgave him the assassination of her husband. It was more than she or her sons could bear. Lawyers were summoned to refute Jean Petit’s
Justification
. A defence was drawn up against the charges of treason and necromancy, and a long list of demands was read out before the court in September 1408. A meeting and reconciliation between John the Fearless and the new duke of Orléans, Charles, took place at Chartres in March 1409, but this was merely a plaster over a very deep wound. It only allowed John the Fearless to secure his position
and to make the rest of the French royal family resent him even more bitterly.

John’s own tyranny soon followed. A key officer of the royal court, Jean de Montagu, Grand Master of the king’s household, was arrested, condemned to death and executed. His brother the archbishop of Sens was forced to flee for his life. Other royalists were thrown into prison or ousted from court. John the Fearless drew up a treaty with the king of Navarre, in which they agreed to support each other in the event of war with the duke of Orléans. John further secured his position by taking possession of the eleven-year-old dauphin, and establishing himself firmly in Paris, where his popularity could not be challenged. He built a strong tower for himself in his town house, the
hôtel d’Artois
, in which his strongly defended bedroom and a bathroom were at the very top, with nothing but huge stone supports beneath, so he could not be killed by the house being burnt.
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He took every precaution he could to ensure that the brutal assassination of his cousin would not be visited back on him.

The young duke of Orléans was not alone in hating his father’s killer. The duke of Berry, the king’s uncle, was of the same opinion. So too was the king’s maternal uncle, the duke of Bourbon. But both these men were old. The real political force supporting the young duke of Orléans was Bernard, count of Armagnac. When on 15 April 1410 the League of Gien came into existence, it consisted of all these lords, plus the counts of Alençon and Clermont, and the younger sons of the late duke of Orléans: Philip, count of Vertus, and John, count of Angoulême. The count of Armagnac and the duke of Orléans, in confirmation of their wholehearted support for the League, sealed the agreement with a marriage. The duke took as his wife Bonne, the count’s daughter. Thus the League collectively came to be known as the Armagnacs. Against them stood the Burgundians: John the Fearless, his two brothers, his brother-in-law who ruled the Low Countries, and the king of Navarre.

France stood on the very brink of civil war.

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Any sensible leader, when facing the prospect of war, reaches out for allies. This is true of civil wars too, not only international conflicts.
Thus it is meaningless to speculate on whether the events of 1415 would have turned out differently if neither the Burgundians nor the Armagnacs had sent ambassadors to England – there was never any doubt that one or both of them would do so. Technically speaking, England was still at war with France over the sovereignty of Gascony – as it had been for the last seventy years – and no peace was likely to prove acceptable in England until the French honoured the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), by which the whole of the ancient Angevin Empire was to return to English control. Thus both Burgundians and Armagnacs had to negotiate with the king of England just to ensure they were not attacked while settling their own domestic dispute. Obviously, if the English were a potential third force in the ensuing conflict, it made sense for both the Burgundians and the Armagnacs to try to secure the support – not the neutrality – of the English.

French ambassadors were regularly in negotiation with their English counterparts at this time, renewing the truce between the two countries for a year or so at each meeting. Burgundian negotiators also often dealt with English ambassadors to continue a separate truce operating in Flanders, England’s principal trading partner, which fell within the domains of John the Fearless. However, with civil war looming, John realised that any advantageous offer he elicited from the English could be wrested from him – if he were to lose his influence over the king, then he would lose his English alliance. There could be no ambiguity as to which side the English were supporting. So, in the summer of 1411 he sent his own Burgundian ambassadors to England.
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They were empowered to hand over four Flemish towns, as well as to agree for the duke’s daughter to marry the eldest son of Henry IV. This was Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester – the future Henry V.

For Henry IV the news of the arrival of the Burgundian ambassadors and the prospect of civil war in France was sadly ironic. Once he would have jumped at the opportunity of involving himself personally in a French war. It would have allowed him to pursue his dream of re-enacting the chivalric kingship of Edward III, his grandfather – the most successful form of kingship that anyone could remember. Edward III had demonstrated that, through successful overseas campaigning, a king could guarantee his kingdom domestic peace, national unity, strong government and foreign glory. Thus Henry IV
had proclaimed his intention of leading an army into France on numerous occasions. But he had never done so. Within a few months of his coronation he had come under attack from friends of the late King Richard. From then on he was forced to confront a unique and hugely challenging series of political disasters which he endured magnificently but which cost him his health. The very nature of his accession meant that, far from Edward III’s glorious kingship, his reign had become a period of domestic unrest, national disunity, financial insecurity and foreign antipathy. Now he was a spent force – suffering from a disease that resulted in his baldness, festering of his flesh, dehydration of the eyes, and the rupture of his internal organs.
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He had fallen into a coma on at least one occasion. He was barely able to stand, let alone ride a horse. However much he might have longed to lead an army into France, he did not have the strength.

The irony did not end there, however. Such had been the decline in Henry IV’s health that even this political decision was not wholly within his control. In many respects he was king in name alone. Since the end of 1409 real power had lain with his eldest son, Prince Henry, and the royal council. Moreover, relations between the king and his son’s council were strained. The prince had assumed certain royal prerogatives that the king felt were prejudicial to his dignity. These included the enactment of a certain article in a statute that severely curtailed the king’s power. The prince’s council had also suspended the payment of annuities to the king’s supporters – a measure that smacked of failure in the king’s eyes. Another cause of the strained relations was the rivalry between Prince Henry and his brother, Thomas of Lancaster, the king’s favourite son. Prince Henry ruled the council with the close advice of his uncle, Henry Beaufort, who was a rival of both Thomas of Lancaster and the king’s closest confidant, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury. So when the Burgundian messengers arrived, there were two sources of royal authority in England. On one hand there was the king, supported by his son Thomas of Lancaster and Archbishop Arundel; and on the other there was the prince of Wales, supported by Henry Beaufort and the rest of the council.

The Burgundian ambassadors initially approached the king but he refused to entertain them.
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Henry IV did not like John the Fearless. Nor did he trust him. In 1399 he had sealed a mutual defence agreement
with the murdered duke of Orléans, which could have entailed him taking action against John the Fearless.
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Although Orléans turned against Henry IV in 1402, it seems the king of England was no fonder of the duke of Burgundy after this date than he had been before. John had attacked Calais on more than one occasion. Also, the duchess of Orléans was the daughter of the duke of Milan, a personal friend of Henry IV’s from the 1390s.
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And Henry IV had always been much closer to the old duke of Berry, now one of the Armagnac lords, than to the Burgundians.

Prince Henry had several reasons to listen to the Burgundians. The most obvious was that the safekeeping of Calais was his responsibility, and in that capacity his men already had experience of negotiating with John’s ambassadors. Indeed, they were engaged in negotiations regarding infractions of the truce throughout the first half of 1411.
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Henry could not easily agree to talk to them about a truce in one arena and refuse to entertain the idea of a truce in another. But he probably also had the long-term strategic implications in mind. To refuse to deal with the Burgundians over intervention in the French civil war meant having to deal with the Armagnacs (or losing the opportunity to capitalise on the civil war altogether). If he wanted to play one off against the other – in the hope of encouraging them to bid competitively for his friendship – then he had to parley with both sides.
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And if a full-scale civil war were to break out in France, then an alliance with John the Fearless was an effective way of destabilising the kingdom, forcing the French king to agree to his demands. The ultimate target was the implementation of a peace treaty favourable to England, along the lines of the Treaty of Brétigny, ‘The Great Peace’, agreed between the kings of England and France in 1360, but which the French had torn up in 1369.

The king’s and the prince’s respective points of view resulted in a compromise. The king would not deal with the Burgundians himself, but he authorised Prince Henry to do so. This was good enough for John the Fearless, who could see outright hostilities coming ever closer, following the capture and torture of one of his officers by the duke of Orléans in January 1411. Orléans wrote to the University of Paris in March that year demanding that Jean Petit’s
Justification of the duke of Burgundy
should be formally condemned.
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Finally, at the end of July, Orléans sent John a letter in which he declared he would do everything in his power to harm him. With that, the negotiations between
the ambassadors of John the Fearless and Prince Henry shifted from being merely precautionary to preparations for war against the Armagnacs.