1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (60 page)

Thursday 26th

As noted several times already, Henry repeatedly followed the pattern of Edward III’s Crécy campaign of 1346. Now he chose to enact another of Edward’s wartime measures: a challenge to a duel. Edward III had first offered to fight a duel with his rival King Philip of France – with the prize being the kingdom of France – in 1340.
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The idea was that the king could parade his courage and his Christian
virtues – offering to fight alone to avoid shedding Christian blood – while at the same time being very sure that his rival would not actually meet him in battle. Today he issued a challenge to the dauphin, to be carried to him at Vernon by the English herald William Bruges and Raoul de Gaucourt.
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Henry by the grace of God, king of England and of France, and lord of Ireland, to the high and puissant prince, the dauphin, our cousin, eldest son of the most puissant prince, our cousin and adversary of France. From the reverence of God and to avoid the effusion of human blood we have, in many times and in many ways, sought peace; and although we have not been able to obtain it, our desire to possess it increases more and more. And well considering that the effects of our wars are the deaths of men, destruction of countries, lamentations of women and children, and so many general evils that every good Christian must lament it and have pity, and us especially, whom this matter particularly concerns, we are minded to seek diligently all possible means to avoid the above-mentioned evils, and to acquire the approbation of God and the praise of the world.

Whereas we have considered and reflected that, as it has pleased God to visit our said cousin your father with infirmity, in us and you lies the remedy. And so everyone may know that we do not prevent it, we offer to place our quarrel at the will of God between our person and yours. And if it should appear to you that you cannot accept this offer on account of the interest that you think our said cousin your father has in it, we declare that if you are willing to accept it and to do what we propose, it pleases us to permit that our said cousin shall enjoy that which he has at present for the term of his life, out of reverence for God and considering he [King Charles] is a sacred person, whatever it may please God to see happen between us and you, as it shall be agreed between his council, ours and yours. Thus, if God shall give us the victory, the crown of France with its appurtenances shall be immediately rendered to us as our right, without difficulty, after his decease; and that all the lords and estates of the kingdom of France shall be bound to accept this, as shall be agreed between us. For it is better for us, cousin, to decide this war forever between our two persons than to suffer the unbelievers by means of our quarrels to destroy Christianity, our mother the Holy Church to remain in division, and the people of God to destroy one another …
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Here we see all the familiar arguments: that really all Henry wanted was peace, that he was simply doing God’s will, and that the unification of England and France was desirable in the eyes of God as it would help heal the schism in the Church. Perhaps the most interesting line it contains is the overt statement that Henry sought ‘the approbation of God and the praise of the world’, which seems a neat summing up of what truly motivated him.

Bruges and de Gaucourt were told to inform the dauphin that Henry would wait for eight days at Harfleur for the reply. The implication was that he would not wait much longer than that before leaving. But then where would he go?

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Sir William Butler of Warrington died today.
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He had been made a Knight of the Bath at Henry IV’s coronation, alongside Henry V’s three brothers. Thus, although he does not figure prominently in this book, he was a man whom the king had known for many years and whose loss would have mattered to him personally. Henry ordered that Sir William’s body should be dismembered and boiled, and sent home in the same ship that was carrying the bones of the earl of Suffolk. There was also the matter of who was going to take charge of his retinue. Butler had led a party of fifty Lancashire archers to Harfleur, in addition to his own retinue of four men-at-arms and twelve archers.
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His death was a strategic blow to Henry, as well as a personal loss.

Friday 27th

Another knight, Sir John Southworth, died today. Coming straight after the deaths of Sir John Chidiock and Sir William Butler, it causes us to ask how many Englishmen were sick at this point? And how many men had actually died or were dying?

When Henry had landed on 14 August, he had had a minimum of 11,248 fighting men, of whom 2,266 were men-at-arms. In addition
there were the servants, pages and support staff, resulting in at least 15,000 men with the king, excluding mariners. As shown in Appendix Three, the long-accepted method of assessing the proportion of sick men is based on the assumption that the whole army was equally infected, and all at the highest rate. This has normally been followed by historians in their keenness to justify the long-established figure of just 5,900 Englishmen at Agincourt, with the implication that the magnitude of the victory was as great as English legend and Henry V’s propaganda claims. A less nationalistic and more considered approach – using the lists of those invalided back to England – allows us to establish an accurate minimum of 1,693 for those sent home. Unfortunately these lists are incomplete, and we do not know how many names might be missing. However, as we know the army was divided into three battles – under the command of the king, Clarence and York – we can estimate casualty rates in all three areas where the English army was camped. This gives us a level of infection of about 17% across the whole army. The total number of men sent home was very probably between 1,693 and 2,550, of whom between 1,330 and 1,900 were fighting men, with the greatest concentration among the men situated in close proximity to the king.

As for the number of deaths, there were actually very few deaths at Harfleur. One chronicler, Monstrelet, states that two thousand Englishmen died at Harfleur but it seems that, writing thirty years later, he confused two thousand ‘lost’ (i.e. invalided home) with two thousand dead. A close examination of the surviving accounts shows there is only evidence for thirty-seven English deaths, including those who died from attack as well as disease. Probably fewer than fifty Englishmen perished at Harfleur.

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Raoul de Gaucourt was given leave to depart today, possibly in the company of William Bruges. But what was Henry to do with the other knights and men of honour who had surrendered at Harfleur?

He decided to release them temporarily, after they had sworn an oath to present themselves at Calais at Martinmas (11 November). There they were to surrender themselves to the king himself or his lieutenant, or a specially appointed deputy. Sixty knights (including de
Gaucourt) and more than two hundred other gentlemen were thus released in the expectation that they would voluntarily give themselves up into custody in just over six weeks’ time.
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If a battle had already taken place, he told them, they were simply to pay their ransoms. If no battle had taken place, they were to submit themselves to imprisonment.

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The people of Paris were in confusion. Some did not believe that Harfleur had yet fallen. Others thought that there must have been some betrayal – that it had been sold to the English. Others said that Henry had already admitted this publicly. And still more were in despair that the royal family was dealing with the war so badly. They bitterly resented the new taxation, and openly sang songs in praise of the duke of Burgundy.
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Around this time a Frenchman called Colin de la Vallée, one of the Burgundian faction who had been exiled from Paris, wrote a letter to his wife telling her to meet him at a certain town on 20 October, and to bring with her twenty crowns, for John the Fearless was planning to be there by that time with a large army. Not having the money, she went to a friend to borrow it. Unfortunately she left the letter with the said friend, who was an Armagnac supporter. In no time at all the streets of Paris were seething with this news about an intended Burgundian rising. The gates were barricaded, and everyone in Paris was preparing for the city to be attacked – not by Henry V but by John the Fearless.

Saturday 28th: the Feast of St Wenceslas

St Wenceslas was the patron saint of Bohemia. At Sternberg today, fifty-four noblemen of ‘the famous marquesdom of Moravia’ in the kingdom of Bohemia put their seals to a savage attack on the council of Constance for the illegal burning of Jan Hus. They refused to accept that Hus had been anything other than a good man, or that the charges against him had been anything but false and malicious. ‘And being thus unmercifully condemned, you have slain him with a most
shameful and cruel death, to the perpetual shame and infamy of our kingdom of Bohemia … in reproach and contempt of us.’
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It was a particularly nationalistic letter, but, in reading it, we can see how Hus’s misguided and stubborn but conscientious refusal to conform had unleashed forces that were set to wrench apart the whole of Christendom.

We declare unto your fatherhoods and to all faithful Christians … that any man of whatever estate, pre-eminence, degree, condition or religion who says that in the kingdom of Bohemia heresies have sprung up that have infected us and other faithful Christians … lies falsely upon his head as a wicked traitor and betrayer of the said kingdom …

Henry V and his advisors, and the French king and his, might all have been trying to bring about a Catholic kingship, in which heresy was treason and treason a religious crime as well as a secular one. John the Fearless might have been doing his best to separate the two at Constance, making a clear distinction between treason and heresy. But the Hussites in Bohemia had taken things a stage further, creating a form of nationalist kingship in which one could argue that, if a religious act was popular, and was not treasonable, it was not heresy. Jan Hus’s death was going to have a profound effect on the development of Europe. Today’s letter gives a hint as to why he was already widely regarded as a martyr.

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Henry’s decision to send the sick back to England was forced upon him. To leave them at Harfleur would have been counter-productive, in respect to both the likelihood of infecting others and their consumption of food and other resources. To take them with him on a march across France would have been impossible. As the sick were returning without their horses and stores, they required relatively few ships – perhaps twenty large vessels sufficed. The ships from Holland had returned to their own country shortly after the landing, and a number of English ships had returned to their ports on 12 September, but enough remained for the task.

The sailing started today. The earl of Arundel was put aboard a vessel with a guard of five healthy men-at-arms and many of his sick followers. One of his men-at-arms died in the process. Other important lords who were carried on board the ships included Thomas, duke of Clarence; Edmund Mortimer, earl of March; and John Mowbray, the Earl Marshal. A significant proportion of the high-ranking lords who had undertaken to come to France had been lost. A total of twelve dukes and earls had mustered at Southampton in July: two earls were now dead (Suffolk and Cambridge) so, with a further three earls and a duke lost to ill-health, Henry had lost half of the original contingent of magnates. Furthermore, Henry had decided to leave his uncle Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, in charge at Harfleur, and to send the earl of Warwick directly to Calais by ship, to defend the town and receive the prisoners.
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At a time when rank meant so much in terms of the structures of command, Henry was running out of leaders. Apart from Beaufort, there were only four members of the pre-campaign royal council with him: his youngest brother, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; the duke of York; Lord Fitzhugh; and Sir Thomas Erpingham.

Sunday 29th: Michaelmas

In England, the regent John, duke of Bedford, sent out a writ to all the sheriffs, prelates and lords proroguing parliament from 21 October to 4 November.
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He had received a message from Henry, who seems to have expressed a desire to be present at the said parliament. Henry had allowed himself five weeks to make the journey back to Westminster.

What was his strategy at this juncture? He had appointed his uncle Thomas Beaufort lieutenant of Harfleur, so clearly he did not intend to stay there to command personally. This accords with the information about his intended march through Montivilliers, Dieppe, Rouen and Paris, mentioned in Bordiu’s letter of 3 September. It also tallies with his letter to the dauphin challenging him to a duel, which stated that he was going to stay at Harfleur for eight days – implying that he was going to leave shortly afterwards. Clearly he never intended wintering in the town but was planning to march through France.
But where was he heading? Rouen and Paris, as Bordiu stated – or Calais?

As we have seen, and as Henry knew, the French army was gathering in Rouen. To attack it would be risking disaster. English longbow armies were most successful when they managed to force an enemy to attack them when they themselves were in a static position; then they cut down the troops charging towards them, using the first fallen ranks as a means to slow up the ranks behind while they shot at them. Henry might have gone looking for a fight, and tried to attract the French to attack him near Rouen but, had he done so, he would have had no escape plan, being too deep within Normandy. If the French failed to be drawn into the attack, they could slowly strangle his army by withholding supplies – besieging the English in the field, as it were. And they could call up more and more men; Henry could not call up reinforcements. Thus there was a good strategic reason why he was not intending to head to Rouen. This part of Bordiu’s letter was probably deliberate misinformation, in case it fell into French hands. By the time it arrived in Bordeaux, it would not have mattered what it said about Henry’s strategy.