1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (59 page)

Nor can this be dismissed as an extreme form of retribution in war, from which Henry wished to distance himself. Just as his father had done, Henry lauded the Black Prince as a great warrior and a firm believer in the Holy Trinity. And Henry himself was more than capable of ordering just such a massacre. He did so two years later, in 1417, at Caen, after his men forced their way into the town. On that occasion he ordered that no priests or women were to be killed; but all their menfolk were to be slaughtered. Eighteen hundred men were put to death.

When de Gaucourt, d’Estouteville and the others had handed the keys of the town to the Earl Marshal, Henry told them that their lives would be spared. He ordered two standards – the royal standard and another standard bearing the cross of St George – to be hoisted over the gates, and appointed Thomas Beaufort lieutenant of the town. He invited the prisoners to dine with him. Later, he had his secretary write a letter in French about the success of the siege to the mayor of London.

Very dear, trusted and well-beloved. We greet you, letting you know for your consolation that we are personally in very good health, thanks be to God who grants this to us. After our arrival on this side, we came before our town of Harfleur on Saturday the 17th day of August last past, and laid siege thereto, in the manner described before now in our other letters sent to you. And by the good diligence of our faithful lieges at this time in our company, and the strength and position of our cannon and our other ordnance, the people within the town urgently tried to negotiate divers agreements with us; yet notwithstanding this, we decided to make an assault upon the town on Wednesday 18 September; but those within the town had realised this, and made great efforts to confer with us, over and above their earlier attempts. And to avoid the effusion of blood on both sides, we inclined to their offer. Thereupon we answered them, and sent to them the final terms of our intent; to which they agreed, and for this we do render thanks to God, for we thought that they would not have so readily assented to the said final terms.

On the same Wednesday there came out of the said town the seigneurs de Gaucourt, d’Estouteville, de Hacqueville, and other lords and knights who had governance of the town, and delivered hostages; and all the lords and knights as well as the hostages (of whom some are lords and knights and some notable burgesses), swore upon the body of Our Saviour that they would deliver our town to us and submit the persons and goods therein to our grace unconditionally, if they should not have been rescued, by one o’clock on the following Sunday, by battle given to us by our adversary of France or his eldest son, the dauphin. Thereupon we gave our letters of safe conduct to the said seigneur de Hacqueville and twelve other men to go to our said adversary and his son to inform them of the treaty so made. The seigneur de Hacqueville and others of his company returned today at eight o’clock in the aforenoon into our said town without any rescue being offered by our said adversary, his son, or any other party. And the keys of the town were then fully delivered and put in our hands; and all those within were submitted to our grace without any condition, as above stated, praised be our Creator for the same. And we have put in our said town our very dear uncle the earl of Dorset [Thomas Beaufort] and have made him captain thereof with a sufficient staff of people of both ranks. And we will that you render humble thanks to our Lord Almighty for this news, and do hope by the divine power and the good labour and diligence of the people on this side to do our duty still further in gaining our right in these parts; and we do desire also that, by way of those passing between us, you will certify us from time to time as to news regarding yourselves. And may our Lord have you in His holy keeping. Given under our signet in our said town of Harfleur, 22 September.
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Monday 23rd

Henry had apparently not wanted initially to enter the town of Harfleur. Presumably he felt it was beneath his dignity to confront the wreckage of the homes of merchants, families and clergymen. However, he needed to enter the city, if only to gauge the scale of the destruction for himself. Only by seeing the place with his own eyes could he assess how many men he would have to leave in order to guard and rebuild it. And only by seeing the town for himself would he understand its future strategic potential.

The gates, surmounted with the royal banner and the flag of St George, were thrown open to receive their new lord. The envoys and commissioners riding with Henry entered the town; but Henry dismounted right in front of the
Porte Leure
. He took off his shoes and socks and walked barefoot through the streets to the parish church of St Martin. Buildings on either side of the main street were smashed: timbers at odd angles, stone walls crumbled into the road. When he saw the church of St Martin, he could see for himself that his ordinances against damage to church property had not stopped his cannon wrecking it. The steeple and tower had collapsed, and the bells within had crashed to the ground.

Henry walked around the town with his closest friends. After surveying the damage, he ordered all the women and children to be rounded up, and all the poor too. As for the men: those who were prepared to swear fealty to Henry as their liege lord could stay in Harfleur. Those who were not would be imprisoned and ransomed for as large a sum as they could pay. The clergy were also gathered together. They would learn their fate on the following day.

According to Monstrelet, the two towers on either side of the water gate refused to surrender, holding out for a further ten days. This is unlikely – the English sources do not mention it – but it does suggest that there were disagreements within the town about whether or not to surrender.
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These too could have contributed to the vacillation of the night of the 17th, which saw the first serious discussions. Either way, the defenders had acquitted themselves with great honour. They certainly did not deserve to be blamed for the fall of the town, when the rest of France had failed to come to their aid.

Tuesday 24th

Where the women, children, priests and paupers who had been gathered spent the night is not known; presumably they had been lodged in secure barns, halls or other large buildings. Today they were greeted by armed guards and led through the gates of the town. Given 5 sous each to buy food, the women were told they were free to go wherever they wished, taking their clothes and as much as they could carry in their arms. There were said to be about two thousand of them, including their children. Many – fifteen hundred according to one source – were accompanied in a convoy by the English guards to Lillebonne, where they were handed over to Marshal Boucicaut and placed under his protection. Their menfolk, including their teenage sons, had to remain behind. One French chronicle notes that the women from Harfleur – whether those handed over to Boucicaut or those who went their own way – were systematically rounded up, robbed and raped by French soldiers. Other French chroniclers attest to how badly the French troops treated their own countrymen and women; however, it is possible that this story of pillage and rape was just another result of the culture of blame and incrimination that developed in France over the subsequent months.
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Of course, all the English sources point to the expulsion of the women from Harfleur as an act of mercy by the king, as they considered he had every right to ‘enjoy’ or slaughter them all. Such an attitude overlooks the actual degree of misery that these people must have endured, and how little the people of Harfleur had done to deserve such treatment. For a full month they had suffered from a lack of sleep and food; they had lived in fear that the English siege engines would destroy their homes and families. Then, at the end, after a month of hellish torment, they were driven away from their homes and husbands and sons, losing all they owned. And it needs to be remembered that in medieval times, it was a far worse fate to be driven out of your hometown than it would be today. It did not just mean you lost your friends and family – you also lost those who would defend you physically and those who would defend your good name. For many of the women forced to walk to Lillebonne, life can hardly have seemed to have improved since the end of the siege. What lay
before them was hardship, penury, alienation from their husbands, and the unknown. ‘It was pitiful to see and hear the sorrow of these poor people, thus driven away from their dwellings and property,’ wrote Monstrelet. The eyewitness who wrote the
Gesta
agreed, noting that the women left ‘amid much lamentation and grief, and tears for the loss of their customary habitation’.
⁴³

Henry’s plan was to turn Harfleur into a military base. All the town records were burnt in the square, thereby removing any knowledge of who owned what.
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The houses needed to be repaired and then granted out to those who had followed Henry. Other Englishmen would follow in due course, invited to settle in the town. Burghers who did not swear loyalty were told they would be shipped across to England, where they might be ransomed, if they were lucky enough to have wealthy friends.
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Those who did swear fealty were allowed to remain in the town but they were not allowed to own property. Young men were conscripted into the defence of the town – though presumably this was just to serve as boys and pages.

The first and main object was to make Harfleur defensible once more. As the boys would be of little use and even the men who swore fealty were bound to be of dubious loyalty, Henry needed to give the town a significant garrison. In this he had an important decision to make: did he make the town his headquarters for the winter, and keep his whole army there? Or should he leave a garrison there while he himself led the army through France, as he had planned and as Bordiu had stated in his letter of 3 September? The French king’s letter, requiring that siege engines be brought up to Rouen, clearly anticipated that Henry would remain there through the winter. Bordiu’s letter stating that Henry intended not to enter Harfleur but to remain in the field, suggests the plan was still to march through France, presumably to Calais. It was a tricky problem. If he remained in Harfleur he would be trapped, and he could expect no mercy from the French king. If he left the town then he would be compromising the security of both the town and the army, for Harfleur itself would require a large contingent of men to defend it, and so many men were ill with dysentery – perhaps as many as two thousand men were incapable of fighting – that he did not have enough men or supplies to stuff the town with defenders. If he wished to march on
Rouen as he had announced, he would be taking an enormous risk, marching against the forces of a larger and richer kingdom, with no escape route.

*

John the Fearless had been at Argilly for over a month now. Four days ago, on the 20th, the ambassadors of the French government, led by the duke of Lorraine, had arrived. Their mission was to try to persuade John to send men to help the dauphin in his struggle against the English and, at the same time, to keep John away from Paris. With Paris in a heightened state of anxiety, and experiencing a particular cynicism with regard to the government, the appearance of John the Fearless in the city threatened to cause mayhem, if not an insurrection.

Today the ambassadors were given three letters, one of which had been written by John the Fearless himself. Of course, the duke revelled in the chance to cause more upset in Paris, and saw the slight to himself in the earlier letters as being the perfect excuse to push the dauphin into a corner. John professed his deepest loyalty to the kingdom of France but complained bitterly about the request that he remain at home, and not come to the rescue of France in her hour of need. Was he not the dauphin’s father-in-law? Why had all the other lords of Northern France been summoned and he had not? It was nothing more than an attempt to belittle him, and to undermine his honour, which ‘he valued higher than everything else in the world’. Instead of the paltry five hundred men-at-arms he had been asked to send, he would attend in person with a far larger number, as it was his duty to save the kingdom in its current peril.
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Another of the letters that went back with the duke of Lorraine was written by vassals of John the Fearless on behalf of their lord. They complained that John had not been given command of his own men. This was most unfitting; the men of Burgundy saw their prime loyalty being to the duke of Burgundy, not the king of France. The lords also supported the tenor of the duke’s own letter. How come the dauphin required so few troops? Why had there been such a delay in requesting them from the duke of Burgundy? Why had the duke himself been asked not to fight for the kingdom? Had not the seriousness of the English threat been registered by the government?

For the envoys who had to carry these letters back to the dauphin, the menace of John the Fearless must have seemed as dangerous as that of Henry V. And although the duke’s own letter seemed to suggest he was wholeheartedly on the side of the French, they could not be sure he would not switch at the last moment and side with the English. They could not be certain that he would not simply take his soldiers and ride into Paris, betraying both the king of France and the king of England. The only thing they could be certain of was that no one could trust him.

As it happened, John the Fearless had already started to gather his forces together. He might have spent four days arguing against the king’s order of 1 September to send more troops, but in fact he had issued orders to his marshals on 15 September to start gathering the men required.

Wednesday 25th

The losses to the English army did not end with the fall of Harfleur. In fact it seems likely that the majority of the casualties from the siege died after its capitulation. The end of September saw several prominent men expire. Today, Sir John Chidiock, Lord Fitzpayn, succumbed.
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His is just one of the many names that do not appear noted in the chronicles as casualties of Henry’s campaign; those writing such works had no wish to commemorate anything but the glory of Henry’s victories and the paucity of the English casualties. As a result, many men who gave their lives for Henry were simply ignored. References to their deaths made for uncomfortable reading.