1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (56 page)

One development in France’s favour did take place today. The five hundred Cabochien supporters of John the Fearless were granted an amnesty, in accordance with the conditions of John swearing to uphold the Peace of Arras. With this measure in place, the oath should have held firm. There should have been no doubt in French minds that John the Fearless would oppose the English, and the dauphin indeed issued a letter today declaring him a good and loyal subject.
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As for what John actually intended to do, no one knew. On the one hand, he was promising to support the dauphin. But on the other, the dauphin’s failure to include him among those who received the summons of the 28th, and another on 1 September, was an insult that he could use diplomatically to his advantage – to the point of refusing to fight.

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At Harfleur the bombardment continued. The siege was now two weeks old, and still there were few signs that the inhabitants were prepared to give up. Some chronicles suggest that Raoul de Gaucourt had held negotiations with the English, offering to surrender the town; but these are equally likely to have been malicious rumours circulated in the wake of the defeat, when the various noble families in France all sought to blame each other for the failure to resist the English invasion. Just as likely to be true are the references to sorties from Harfleur,
as the inhabitants sought to carry the fight to the English. What is certain is that a third mine was commenced about this time, in the hope of bringing the siege to a speedy end with no further destruction to the fabric of the town. It too was bound to fail, like the others. The approach to the centre of the town from the
Porte Leure
was now a broken mass of stone and timber; and yet still the inhabitants were determined to hold on. No matter what Henry threw at them, Raoul de Gaucourt and his fellow defenders held out. And they were in turn inflicting serious injuries on Henry’s men. Thomas Hostell, a man-at-arms in Sir John Lumley’s company, later recalled how at Harfleur he had been hit by a crossbow bolt, which had entered his head, destroying one eye and his cheek.
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Incredibly, he went on to fight at Agincourt.

One cannot fault Henry’s personal resolution in all this, nor that of his brother Thomas in commanding the second army on the eastern side of the town. The king continued to make nightly inspections of his lines, encouraging his men and making sure that watches were in place and the shift pattern for firing the guns was maintained.
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But several strategic miscalculations were now obvious. One has already been mentioned – that in order to bring about a swift end to the siege using guns, Henry was having to destroy the defences he hoped to gain. So he had miscalculated the determination of the townsmen. But another, worse problem was becoming apparent. His army was too big for its purpose. An army suitable for fighting a battle was far larger than the size of force one needed for a successful siege. He could not risk a full-scale attack as he would lose too many men whom he would need later to fight a French army. But all the men with him needed food. They needed wine and ale. They needed money, and they needed clean accommodation. And although that last aspect might seem a minor one, it was actually very important. For now another obstacle in Henry’s path emerged – not from the defenders but recognisable from the foetid hot air of the drying flooded valley north of the town, and the ever-present effluent of fifteen thousand men camped in a small area with no sanitary provision.

Dysentery.

September

Sunday 1st

EXPLANATIONS OF HOW
and why people fell ill were confused in 1415. Sometimes astrological predictions were put forward for contagious diseases – planetary alignments leading to a miasma, or a polluted environment, which in turn led to pollutants entering the body through the pores of the skin and upsetting the balance of the four humours. Sometimes a miasma was associated with a particularly noxious smell. Alternatively diseases were attributed to God’s will: either as punishment for a sinful act – as in the diseases heaped upon Henry IV for ordering the judicial murder of the archbishop of York – or as a means of attaining redemption from such sins. In the latter case, God was supposed to have visited sufferings on people so that they might atone for their behaviour and, through dying an agonising death, repent by bearing it well and thereby enter Paradise.

In the case of dysentery, people realised that large camps of soldiers attracted diseases, and that men chose to assemble large armies, so therefore the astrological explanation did not apply. Obviously God’s will did apply, and it could be understood that, through disease, God sought to demonstrate to men that He did not approve of some sieges. In that sense, however much Henry claimed to be fighting a just war, and acting as an agent of God’s will, the appearance of dysentery in the camp could be seen as a sign that God did not, after all, approve of Henry’s war or his cause. Those who were loyal to Henry therefore looked for other explanations, and hit on other polluting factors. One contemporary chronicler, John Strecche, presumably writing on the basis of information sent back by combatants, pointed to the eating of unripe grapes and bad shellfish as the cause. Another writer, Thomas
Walsingham, gave a vivid explanation for the causes of the stomach diseases and dysentery. He claimed

These deaths were caused by eating fruit, the cold nights, and the foetid smell from the bodies of different animals that they had killed throughout the English lines but which they had not covered with turf or soil, or had thrown into the waters of the river so they were forced to endure their decaying stench.
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Certainly the presence of rotting animals cannot have helped, especially considering it was an uncommonly hot summer.
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The sixteen-year-old Lord Fitzwalter, serving in the company of the duke of Clarence, became one of the first casualties of the siege, dying today.
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Another factor contributing to the hardship of the besiegers was that they were beginning to run short of food. Although Henry had ordered that each man bring sufficient food for three months, in reality supplies had only lasted three weeks. In London today one Richard Bokeland was ordered to provide two ships to convey victuals, including fish, to the army at Harfleur. And over the next two days 700 marks was assigned to Richard Whittington to repay him for his expenses in maintaining the siege of Harfleur, and two men from Henley were ordered to provide one hundred quarters of wheat for the king’s household at the siege.
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For those in the town, things were even harder. They had even less food, could not sleep for the fear and the noise of the incessant destruction, and water-borne diseases were beginning to spread within the town too. Knowing this, Henry sent a herald about this time to invite Raoul de Gaucourt and the other leaders in Harfleur to discuss terms. They came, under safe conduct, and met the king. Henry attempted with ‘sweet words’ to persuade them to surrender the town. He had his title to the throne of France repeated to them too, and his claim to the duchy of Normandy. But Henry had underestimated the townsmen’s resolve. De Gaucourt insisted that the king of France would not leave the town to fend for itself for long but would soon arrive with an army. So he refused Henry’s invitation. Instead of
surrendering, he sent a messenger to the dauphin urging that he send an army as soon as possible to relieve the town.
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*

The dauphin left Paris this morning and journeyed to St Denis, the royal abbey just north of the city. Here he prayed for victory. He also sent out letters to the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy, and the count of Nevers (brother of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy) requiring each of them to send five hundred men-at-arms and three hundred archers. John the Fearless was requested not to come in person but to send his son, Philip, count of Charolais, in his place. This was no doubt intended to avoid the risk of the duke leading an army that might suddenly turn and fight against the dauphin, on the side of the English. Nevertheless, John was bound to take offence.

Tuesday 3rd

Henry wrote a letter to the mayor and jurats of Bordeaux telling them that he and his company were in the best of health, for which ‘in all humility, we give thanks to our lord God the Almighty, hoping that by His grace, He will give us in pursuit of our right, the fulfilment of our desire and undertaking, to His pleasure, and for the honour and comfort of us and you …’ With God’s help, he said, the enemy would be less capable of doing harm to his Gascon subjects in future, alluding to the danger of Norman ships attacking the Gascon wine trade. He asked them to assist Sir John Tiptoft in guarding against any French assault in Gascony. As for himself, he stated he was in need of wine and other victuals, which he asked them to send straightaway, promising payment in full on delivery.
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At the same time, Dr Jean Bordiu, archdeacon of Médoc, who was with the king at Harfleur, wrote a more detailed letter to the Jurade. He noted that the king himself had just written, and gave much more detail regarding the real state of affairs at Harfleur. He stated that, although the fields were still providing the army with sufficient corn, they could not be expected to meet the future requirements of the army, especially as more men were coming from England ‘every day’.
This alerts us to the fact that reinforcements were arriving – a fact that is supported by careful analysis of the accounts relating to some of the companies with Henry.
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Bordiu mentioned that Henry had asked for more wine to be sent; in this respect he specified that the king required between five hundred and seven hundred tuns. And he urged the townsmen to look to this with diligence, stating that Henry wished to come in person to Bordeaux before he returned to England.

Bordiu went on to say that, ‘with the help of the Holy Spirit’, he expected the town to fall within eight days. This was because the defences on the landward side and on two flanks had now been ‘well and truly breached’. The town within the walls was ‘totally destroyed’. The English had now managed to cut off the water supply below Montivilliers, thereby diverting the River Lézarde, draining the flooded area and cutting off the town’s water supply. When the town finally fell, the king was not going to enter it but ‘stay in the field’ meaning he meant to continue his planned march through France. On this Bordiu was quite specific: ‘he intends to go to Montivilliers, and from there to Dieppe, afterwards to Rouen and then to Paris’.
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Much of this was wishful thinking. Regardless of how long the town held out, it was now surrounded by thick, stinking mud, suffused with inedible fish and animal entrails, bones and excrement … It could only grow more dangerous – especially as the English troops had to trudge through it to get closer to the breach in the walls. The dysentery was not going to go away, and the town would require a substantial workforce to rebuild it as well as to maintain it. And the food was running out. About this time Henry issued an order, via his brother the regent in England, to the constable of Dover Castle and the warden of the Cinque Ports, to send each and every fisherman with his boat and tackle to Harfleur, there to provide fish for the king’s army.
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The chances of Henry marching on Paris in the near future were non-existent.

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The messenger who had left Harfleur two days earlier had travelled through the night to Paris, and then on to St Denis, to convey de Gaucourt’s plea for help to the dauphin. At first the dauphin was reluctant to receive him, having other business to attend to; but after
the urgency of the situation had been established, the messenger was granted an audience.
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He can have left the dauphin in no doubt as to the conditions in the town, and pleaded for a relieving army. If none was forthcoming then the town would soon have to surrender, to the detriment of the throne of France.
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The dauphin was able to say that a large army was already gathering: the summons of 28 August and the letters to the royal dukes of 1 September would result in a large force assembling at Rouen. If the town could hold out for a little while longer, the French would drive the English into the sea.

There was just one problem. Henry had declared that, after he had taken Harfleur, he would march on to Rouen. We do not know if this news was publicly being circulated – it only appears in the letters sent to Bordeaux. But if the French did know, then it would have soon become apparent that both sides were going to converge on the same town.

Saturday 7th

The letter from Richard Courtenay to Jean Fusoris, carried by Raoul le Gay and confiscated in Montivilliers, arrived in Paris yesterday. On receipt, Fusoris was arrested and thrown into the prison known as the Little Châtelet. He was taken out today and led before the president of the
parlement
, Jean de Vailly, and charged with high treason.
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Poor Fusoris had been duped by Courtenay. His presence in England that summer, coupled with the incriminating evidence supplied by Raoul le Gay, did not help his case. The old astrologer-clockmaker must have been in fear of his life from the moment the men-at-arms knocked on his door.

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In London, Richard Gurmyn, the baker accused of Lollardy in the trial of John Claydon, was led before the authorities in St Paul’s. His trial probably took much the same form as Claydon’s, involving the declaration that he was a manifest heretic. The sentence of burning was inevitable. Some protested that he had taken advantage of the king’s offer of a pardon, made on 9 December 1414. Thomas Falconer,
however was having none of it. When the church authorities turned over Gurmyn to him for punishment he did not allow any time for the guilty man to locate his letters of pardon – if indeed he had them. Nor did he bother writing another letter to Henry. He simply had the pyre built at Smithfield, had Gurmyn dragged there, and burned him to death.
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