1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (48 page)

According to Scrope’s own testimony, he spoke to Edward Courtenay, who was brother-in-law to the earl of March, and to Lord Clifford, the earl of Cambridge’s brother-in-law. He tried to show them what folly the rising would be, and to put them in fear of taking action against the king, or helping those that did. On the way home from seeing Lord Clifford he met Cambridge and Gray at the Itchen ferry. They told him they had just been to see the earl of March, and asked him when the ships would set sail. Scrope said he was not sure but said ‘I believe our tarrying should lose us all’. He left it at that, supposing that once the men had set sail, and Gray and Cambridge found themselves with the army on enemy soil, they would see the danger of taking up arms against the king.

Before Cambridge and Gray left him, they urged Scrope to call on the earl of March. He agreed to do so, if the earl was not yet in bed. As it happened, the earl was still up, so Scrope talked to him about the plot. Once again he tried to persuade the earl not to go through with any of Gray’s and Cambridge’s plans, whatever they might be.
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In all this, Lord Scrope’s behaviour and testimony concerning his own actions is consistent with the way that Edward, duke of York, had gathered information about the Epiphany Rising in 1400. York had attended the secret meetings of the conspirators without telling the king for more than two weeks; and when they had been about to act, York had sent an urgent message to the king, warning him.
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Scrope’s evasive and ambiguous answers were clearly designed to lead Cambridge and Gray into revealing more information about their plans. Apart from Gray’s assertion that Scrope thought it best to ‘break the voyage’ and had suggested burning the ships, Scrope was consistently a receiver of information fed to him by others – and someone who warned others about the implications of what they were doing. Even if he had suggested burning the ships, this may have been no more than an attempt to win the trust of the plotters. Still there were things that Scrope did not know, as the earl of Cambridge later pointed out; and so he still had good reason to stay in with the conspirators. But he was not one of them. Why otherwise did he try to dissuade the
earl of March and Walter Lucy from rebelling? And why did Cambridge hold back some crucial details about the plot?
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Friday 26th

Archbishop Boisratier and the other envoys who had left Southampton on 7 July arrived back in Paris. They went straight to the
hôtel de St Pol
and delivered their report to the dauphin and the rest of the council. It cannot have been well received. They had found Henry intractable and, despite his honeyed words of peace, they had themselves seen thousands of troops pouring into the Southampton area, as well as cattle for victuals on the campaign, and carts and wagons full of bows, arrows, armour and supplies. There was now not the slightest doubt that Henry meant to follow up his attack on Fécamp with a full-scale onslaught on France.
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Some Englishmen were not waiting for the invasion to start. About this time the garrisons of the castles around Calais prepared to raid the Boulogne region as soon as the truce came to an end.
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*

John the Fearless could see the mood at Constance shifting against him. The French had been successful in their attempts to have Jean Petit condemned as a heretic.
The Justification of the duke of Burgundy
looked as if it was going to go the way of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus’s writings. But Duke John still had some cards to play. He had to lift this condemnation, otherwise he too could be classed a heretic, and all hope of regaining influence in France would be lost. So he authorised his ambassadors in Constance to start bribing the cardinals – with good Burgundy wine.
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Saturday 27th

At Southampton the king was growing desperate. Already late setting out, he was paying the wages of the crews manning the ships that had arrived from Flanders and Holland, and yet he was still short of
vessels. So Henry ordered John Acclane and John Scadlock to seize all the ships they could find in the port of London, regardless of whether they were English or foreign, and to bring them straightaway to Southampton. He did not have enough arrows either, and a second commission was issued to John Acclane to acquire bows, arrows, bowstrings and artillery.
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*

In Bordeaux, the mayor and jurats of the city wrote back to Benedict Espina, their agent in London, telling them that one of the two siege engines called ‘brides’ that Henry had asked for was now ready, and that they would send it whenever he required it. As for the other, it would be ready when Benedict Espina arrived in person, in several weeks’ time.
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Sunday 28th

Sir Jean le Maingre – better known as Boucicaut – had once been the most feared jousting champion in Christendom. He had fought at the famous St Inglevert tournament of 1390, when he and two other knights had faced more than a hundred knights one by one, all of them jousting with sharpened steel lances – including Henry’s father. He had attended his first battle at the age of twelve, had been knighted at sixteen, and had fought on crusades and campaigns from Prussia to Nicopolis. Now all his experience was to be put to the test. He was commissioned to serve as the King’s Lieutenant and captain general of the French, with responsibility for the defence of Normandy, among other places.

Unfortunately the duke of Alençon had previously been appointed captain general for Normandy. The division of responsibilities was now unclear. It was also a mistake to fail to consider the duke’s pride: he did not take kindly to being overlooked in this way.
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*

Henry ordered a final letter to be drawn up to send to the king of France. As it is one of the most remarkable documents of the year
– indeed, in all English medieval history – it justly deserves to appear here in full:

Most serene prince, our cousin and adversary, the two great and noble kingdoms of England and France, formerly joined as one but now divided, have been accustomed to stand proud through all the world by their glorious triumphs. The sole purpose of their unification was to embellish the house of God, that holiness might reign and peace be established throughout the Church, and to join their arms by a happy accord against her adversaries, to subdue the public enemies. But, alas! The discord that plagues families has troubled this harmony. Lot, blinded by an inhuman feeling, pursued Abraham: the honour of his brotherly union is buried in the tomb, and hatred – the sickness inherent in human nature and the mother of fury – comes to life once more. Nevertheless, the judge of all, who is susceptible neither to prayers nor to corruption, is the witness of our sincere desire for peace; we have done in conscience everything within our power to achieve it, even to the extent of an imprudent sacrifice of legitimate rights that we have inherited from our ancestors, to the prejudice of our posterity. We are not so blinded by fear that we are not ready to fight to the death for the justice of our cause. But the law of Deuteronomy commands that whoever prepares to attack a town begins by offering it peace; thus, since violence, the enemy of justice, has ravished for several centuries the prerogatives of our crown and our hereditary rights, we have done out of charity everything within our power to re-enter possession of our rights and prerogatives, so that now we are able by reason of the denial of justice to have recourse to the force of arms. Nevertheless as we wish to be confident of a clear conscience, we now address you with a final request, at the moment of setting out to demand from you the reason for this denial of justice, and we repeat to you in the name of the entrails of Jesus Christ, following the example shown us by the perfection of evangelical doctrine: friend, give us what we are owed and by the will of the Almighty avoid a deluge of human blood, which has been created according to God; restore to us our inheritance and our rights that have been unjustly stolen, or at least those things that we have demanded earnestly and repeatedly by our various ambassadors and deputies, and with which we would be contented in respect of God and in the interests of peace. And you will find us disposed on our part to forego 50,000 crowns of gold of the sum that we have been offered as dowry, because we prefer peace to avarice, and because we would prefer to enjoy our paternal rights and this great patrimony which we have been left by our venerable predecessors and ancestors with your illustrious daughter Katherine, our very dear cousin, than to acquire guilty treasures in sacrificing to the idol of iniquity, and to the disinheritance of the posterity of the crown of our realm, which would not please God, to the eternal prejudice of our conscience.

Given under our privy seal in our town of Southampton, upon the coast, 28 July.
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‘Upon the coast:’ Henry was on the brink. But the most interesting thing about this extraordinary letter is the line concerning the law of Deuteronomy: ‘whoever prepares to attack a town begins by offering it peace’. This explains Henry’s approach to the peace initiatives since the start of his reign: he was always offering peace while moving to war, as if he was a king before the walls of a town who felt bound to offer the citizens peace first before destroying them and their town – not for their benefit but to justify his actions in the eyes of God. Herein lies the philosophy he was following: he was only offering peace, and sending and receiving ambassadors, because that was what he believed a warrior of God should do prior to attacking.

Before Henry could set sail there were still some administrative issues to deal with. He made a grant for life to John Sutton of Catton, yeoman of the chamber of the duke of Bedford.
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John Waterton, who had now left Southampton with the Aragonese envoys, had to be given formal instructions as to what he might or might not offer, especially with regard to Henry’s brothers’ marriages; these were now issued. At the same time Dr John Hovingham and Simon Flete were empowered to treat for a continuation of the alliance with the duke of Brittany.
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It was important not to let the diplomatic isolation of France weaken.

*

The earl of Cambridge and Sir Thomas Gray met at Otterbourne, a village a few miles north of Southampton. The earl showed Gray
a letter from the earl of March, written in his own hand. It stated how March had been to the king and how badly he had been treated by Henry in connection with the business of his marriage, being fined 10,000 marks. According to Gray, the letter stated that March saw no solution to his jeopardy but to ‘undo’ the king; and therefore he wished the earl of Cambridge to come to him on the following day, or else to suggest how he should act, for he was now ready to do so.

Monday 29th

Henry decided the time had come to set the date for embarkation. From Portchester Castle he sent a writ to the sheriff of Hampshire to ensure, on pain of ‘the king’s grievous wrath,’ that all those encamped in the area should be ready to board on Thursday 1 August at the latest. The term ‘grievous wrath’ is repeated in several letters at this time – a note of desperation, one feels, after all the various delays.
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A number of letters and orders were issued from Portchester at the same time. Henry settled his personal inheritance from the late earl of Hereford, his grandfather, on his executors. He named as his trustees the same sixteen men he had with regard to his settlement of the duchy of Lancaster on 22 July – including Lord Scrope.
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The confiscated estates of the French priories that had been intended to endow the abandoned Celestine monastery at Sheen were also granted to trustees.
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And lastly the mayor and bailiffs of Southampton were ordered to put three men in prison until further notice. Presumably they were among the thousands mustering around the town, waiting to sail and fight, who were causing disturbances in their hungry boredom.
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*

Sir Thomas Gray and the earl of Cambridge rode to Hamble in the Hook to see the earl of March. It was there that the final plans were made. Lord Scrope was not present. It was decided that Sir Walter Lucy would join the earl of Cambridge on the morrow, and then the earl of March would meet them at Cranbury on 31 July – the night before the voyage set out. After supper they would ride to Beaulieu.
And there they would proclaim the earl of March and call those who would stand with them to that place. If enough men from the army joined them, they would fight Henry; if not, they would take the earl of March into Wales until Henry Percy had been released, and start a rising in the north. To this end the earl of Cambridge had sent a man to Sir Robert Umphraville to enquire how he might take custody of Percy and the pseudo-Richard II (if he was still alive) without offering the recently recaptured Mordach in return.
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Tuesday 30th

In Paris it had long been a bone of contention that John the Fearless had not sworn to observe the terms of the Peace of Arras. His representatives had done so on 13 March, and had promised that he would do so too. But he had delayed, claiming that if his five hundred supporters were not also pardoned, then he would not swear. Further procrastinations had followed, forcing the government to take further action. First they had sent three ambassadors to the duke; but these men arrived shortly after John had heard that the dauphin had sent away his wife in order to spend more time with his mistress. As the dauphin’s wife was John’s own daughter, John had rebuked the dauphin, stating he would not help the French royal family against the English if he did not mend his ways.
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Recently the dauphin had sent two more diplomats to John asking him to swear to abide by the peace.