1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (55 page)

Sunday 25th

The siege had now been underway for a week, and the siege engines and cannon had continued bombarding the town, day and night. The author of the
Gesta
remarked that

within a few days, when by the violence and fury of the stones the barbican was in the process of being largely demolished, the walls and towers from which the enemy had discharged their offensives were rendered defenceless with their ramparts destroyed; and truly fine buildings, almost as far as the middle of the town, were either totally demolished or threatened with inevitable collapse or, at least, their framework falling apart.
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For Henry, this was now becoming a problem. He wanted to take Harfleur and hold it; but if the inhabitants and soldiers under Raoul de Gaucourt held out until the town was destroyed, he would not be able to defend it against the French counter-attack, whenever that might come. Then he would find himself defending nothing but a pile of rubble, and trapped against the coast. The truth was that his strategy of taking the town quickly was likely to leave the town in ruins long before the inhabitants’ food supplies ran out. The effect on his nerve and the nerves of his fellow councillors cannot be known; but it would be foolish to suppose that the situation was anything but deeply worrying.

The destruction of the town was not Henry’s only concern. Raoul de Gaucourt was rallying the defenders to fight with crossbows, guns, catapults, and siege engines of their own. From the barbican outside the
Porte Leure
they shot and fired at the attackers, and also from behind screens erected in the openings of shattered walls and broken towers. In addition, by night, when it was difficult for the archers to pick off the defenders, they started to rebuild the damaged walls and the barbican, re-laying the stones and placing large tubs filled with earth, dung, sand and stones. Walls teetering or collapsing they shored up in a similar way, using bundles of faggots set solid with clay, earth and dung. They also lay clay, dung
and earth over the streets and lanes to soak up the impact of crashing stones and masonry, so that projectiles would not bounce off the hard ground into buildings but would get swallowed up in the mud.

For Henry the obvious next step was a full-scale assault on the walls with scaling ladders, or through the breaches he had made. Overcoming the defenders in this way would preserve what remained of the defences. But his first attempts to overwhelm the walls proved futile. The defenders had filled jars with a compound made from sulphur and quicklime to throw in the eyes of the men who attacked. They had also gathered barrels of inflammable powders, oils and fat; if any siege equipment came close – such as a wooden tower to launch an onslaught on the walls – then they set light to the barrels and poured them over the wooden apparatus. The author of the
Gesta
remarked that ‘people under siege could not have resisted our attacks more sagaciously, or with greater security to themselves, than they did’.
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*

Raoul le Gay had languished in Thomas Beaufort’s camp for a whole week now. In that time he had been practically famished; no one wanted to waste good food on a Frenchman. His predicament was that he had been taken illegally and yet no one wanted to let him go, given how much he had seen of the English quarters. He continually asked to be released but this request was denied. In the end he was taken before the king. Henry demanded to know whether he had been taken in arms – in which case his imprisonment did not contravene Henry’s military ordinances. Raoul protested that he had not. Henry seems to have paid little attention otherwise to the man but ordered that he be taken to Bishop Courtenay’s tent, which was close to the king’s pavilion, and quartered there.
⁸⁴

Wednesday 28th

The French council sent out letters summoning forces to assemble at Rouen. The actual form of the summons was a
semonce des nobles
, to be proclaimed in Normandy and the surrounding areas. This stated that, although the king of France had sent envoys to England
in the hope of avoiding the bloodshed and inconvenience of war, the English had invaded and laid siege to Harfleur. So the king had directed the dauphin as lieutenant to gather an army at Rouen. All the nobles and men-at-arms of the region, and all the archers and crossbowmen, were to gather there as soon as possible. As they journeyed, men were to wear a white cross – in contrast to the English red one – and were under strict instructions not to pillage any places through which they passed, nor to stay anywhere longer than one night. All those attending would receive protection for six months from any legal cases in the courts against them, and they would be paid. King Charles himself would join the army soon, in order to raise the siege and lead his subjects in the fight against the English, in the eyes of God.
⁸⁵

One lord was exempted from this
semonce des nobles
: John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. Perhaps his agreement with Henry V was suspected. Perhaps it was just too dangerous to the Armagnacs to allow the duke to ride at the head of an army across Normandy. Either way, it was a diplomatic gamble, for it gave a clear message that the duke was out of favour.

*

Bishop Courtenay attended Mass in his tent at about nine o’clock this morning. Afterwards he took Raoul le Gay and went to hear a religious service in the king’s chapel. Raoul was astonished to hear such beautiful music. One of the more incongruous images of the siege is Henry V listening to his choristers singing pious anthems while his cannon boomed out in the valley below, blasting at the walls of Harfleur day and night.

After the service, Courtenay spoke to Raoul about Jean Fusoris. He explained that Fusoris was a canon of Notre Dame in Paris, and a famous astronomer. If Raoul would carry a message to Fusoris, the bishop would set him free. Raoul had never been to Paris himself, and so he refused. But when Courtenay threatened to ship him back to England to be imprisoned, he accepted the mission. Courtenay would give him the letter to Fusoris tomorrow.

*

Down in the valley, the men of Harfleur were taking the fight to the English. As Henry tried new tactics to break their defences, so they devised new methods of defeating him. When Henry planned to fill in the ditches on both sides of the town with bundles of faggots ten feet long, the defenders simply got ready to pour burning oil into the same ditches and set light to the faggots and the men laying them. So Henry abandoned that plan. Instead he decided to try to fight his way into the town by having two mines built, to tunnel beneath the walls’ foundations and then bring them crashing down by setting light to the pit props. A ‘sow’ or protective shelter was built for each mine and digging started. Raoul de Gaucourt knew exactly how to tackle that threat. He ordered counter-mines to be dug, in which the besieged men dug towards the miners and fought for control of the mine, and then filled it in. Such measures were hard work and terrifying; it was a race in great heat, darkness and barely any air – conducted with the sole intention of breaking through and meeting a desperate, murderous enemy. On both occasions the defenders proved the better miners and managed to thwart the attackers, breaking through and bringing down their shaft before the walls could be pulled down. The sole English achievement as a result of the mines was that the watchmen guarding one of the mines saw an opportunity to attack the outer ditch on the king’s side, and managed to capture it. From there they could bring the siege engines a little closer to the walls, and use the ditch as protection while they attacked the defences.
⁸⁶

On the east side of the town, Thomas, duke of Clarence, was having his men-at-arms and archers dig ditches. Thomas had impressed everyone with the ferocity of his onslaughts on the walls; but he was in a very dangerous position. He was on the exposed side of the town – open to attack from companies of Frenchmen. His messengers had to run the gauntlet of crossing the flooded area north of the town in small boats in order to get to the king, and then get back. And having fewer men than Henry at his command, he was also prone to attacks from the town itself, from guns as well as crossbows and sallies of men-at-arms. Nevertheless he kept up the pressure, following Henry’s initiatives and keeping up the bombardment. Now his men were constructing a long defensive ditch in front of his own lines, copying the Harfleur townsmen’s own method of driving tree trunks into the
ground, and heaping up earth from the ditch against them, to protect his men while they continued the assault.

Thursday 29th

In his tent near the king’s pavilion, Courtenay wrote his letter to Jean Fusoris. He wrote with his own hand, in Latin, and said how he recalled their previous conversations, and how a clerk who knew Fusoris had recently passed on news of him. He asked that Fusoris write back with news within the next eight or ten days but not to mention either of their names in the correspondence, as no one knew of it except the king, ‘who is very close, as you know’. He then sealed the letter and handed it to Raoul le Gay, together with a purse containing twenty half-nobles, which Raoul hid beneath his shirt. Another man in Courtenay’s service handed Raoul a letter to take to Paris, to a friend of his. Courtenay himself gave Raoul a small parchment list of fruit, pumpkins and other things he wanted from the prior of the Celestines in Paris, and promised to pay for them on delivery. He also told Raoul to tell Fusoris that Henry had landed with fifty thousand men, four thousand barrels of wheat, four thousand casks of wine, sufficient supplies for a six-month siege of Harfleur, and twelve large cannon. Probably all of this was exaggerated; he had fewer than a third as many men, and had only ordered food for three months. Besides, according to Monstrelet, many of his supplies had been damaged at sea.
⁸⁷
But the instruction fits with what we know about Courtenay’s relationship with Fusoris on previous occasions – he fed him misinformation in the hope that it would be passed on to the French court, while seeking intelligence of his own.
⁸⁸

There was one particular question that Courtenay did not put in writing but asked Raoul to put to Fusoris: whether the duke of Burgundy was responding to the call to arms. This seems to have been a genuine area of concern for the bishop. Despite the agreement between Henry and John the Fearless, the latter had proved duplicitous throughout his career, and still was not wholly trusted. Henry and Courtenay suspected he might break the terms of his agreement and fight on the French side simply because the enormity of fighting against his fellow French subjects on behalf of an English claimant to the throne was too great. As it
happened John the Fearless was still at Argilly, where he had been since he himself had entertained the ambassadors of the duke of Brittany, who had arrived there on the 15th.
⁸⁹
John the Fearless’s ambassadors were no doubt discussing the implications of the English invasion with their Breton counterparts, and reviewing possible strategies. Courtenay would not have known this, of course, but the English council was very eager to know which way the two dukes with English treaties would choose to act.

Saturday 31st

Raoul le Gay had left Bishop Courtenay’s camp on the 29th with letters of safe conduct, so he could pass through the English lines. He had set out as intended in the direction of Paris. But later that night he turned back and made his way in the moonlight to Montivilliers. At sunrise, when the gates to the town opened, he passed into the town. The French guards demanded to know who he was and where he had come from. He said he had come from the English army, and showed them his English safe conduct. The guards tore it up, but they allowed him into the town. He wandered around until he found some friends of his, and went to a tavern and had a drink with them; but later, as he walked in front of the town hall, he was pointed out to the town officials as having come from the English camp with English letters of safe conduct. He was arrested and locked up in a chamber in the abbey.

Today Raoul was brought out of his prison and taken to the town hall. A French Benedictine monk, who had also been arrested by the English, detained and then released, recognised Raoul and said he was carrying a secret letter. Raoul admitted it, and, realising the gravity of his situation, declared that he had no intention of delivering it. But of course he had to produce the said letter. When the recipient was identified as Jean Fusoris, it seemed to the authorities that they had discovered one of Henry’s spies: a trusted astrologer, right in the heart of the city with access to the court. A message was despatched to Paris straightaway.
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*

In Paris the French king’s councillors were facing a crisis. The taxation they had levied on 14 March was not going to be sufficient to pay for an army strong enough to counter the English. They therefore decided they needed 24,000
livres tournois
(about £4,000) as soon as possible. Of course this was unpopular; one writer in Paris described it as ‘the heaviest tax that had ever been seen in the whole age of man’. Many Parisians began to recall the duke of Orléans and his high taxes and lax morals, and saw the return of them both in the new taxation and the dauphin’s immoral lifestyle.
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As Pope Benedict had not yet been forced to resign, the French government set about obtaining permission from him to levy a tax for the war on all the clergy throughout France. And all this was to pay the expenses of an army of just six thousand men-at-arms and three thousand archers. The French government was having difficulty even raising a mediocre force to resist the English. There was a failure to recognise the gravity of the situation.
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