1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (71 page)

By the time the men of Hesdin attacking the baggage wagons had been driven off, it was too late. The French line of defence was breaking up. The army was in flight. Those still mounted probably got away quite easily, as their opponents could not chase them and the archers had run out of arrows. But many – probably the majority – had lost their horses. Hundreds were lying under the huge piles of dead men, their limbs broken, or bleeding heavily from arrow wounds, or simply unable to extricate themselves from the piles or from under their dead horses. Those in armour knew their part was done. They could await discovery, and would in due course agree a ransom. For them there was no danger. Any wounded infantry on the battlefield knew their fate would be quite different; those who could still walk were no doubt trying to flee, or hide themselves as well as they could.

*

In London, shocking news reached the capital today, ‘replete with sadness and cause of endless sorrow’: there had been a great battle in which the English army had been defeated.
¹⁴⁷
The particulars were shrouded in mystery; it was not even known whether the king had been killed or taken prisoner. No doubt Henry’s brother, the duke of Bedford, and his uncle, Chancellor Beaufort, enquired of the mayor-elect what he had heard from merchants coming from France. But no further information was available.

*

It was about one o’clock in the afternoon. Henry was still anxious, lest the many men-at-arms who had fled managed to regroup and launch another attack; but most of the French had dispersed. Attention now turned to the piles of dead and wounded. The English pulled corpses off the piles, looking for lords trapped alive underneath. They checked the men lying in the mud. Lords and men-at-arms were dragged to their feet and forced to relinquish their weapons, their gauntlets and helmets; then placed under guard, to be led away by their captors. In this way, the marshal of France, the great Boucicaut, was captured by a humble esquire called William Wolf, and the bellicose duke of Bourbon was taken prisoner by Ralph Fowne esquire. Sir John Gray took the count of Eu; Sir John Cornwaille captured the count of Vendôme. Ghillebert de Lannoy, chamberlain of the count of Charolais, was found amid a pile of dead men with a wound in his knee and another to his head. The duke of Orléans was pulled out from under a pile of dead men by Sir Richard Waller. The young count of Richemont had been covered in so much blood from the dying men on top of him that no one recognised the arms on his surcoat.
¹⁴⁸

These were the lucky ones. Those of no great value would have had their throats sliced open with a sword, or had a final vision of an axe suddenly coming down into their face. There were some exceptions. Two of the prisoners claimed by Lord Fitzhugh were a man-at-arms called Jean Garyn and his servant. The servant would normally have been despatched with a knife through his windpipe – but in this case his master was prepared to pay a ransom for him.
¹⁴⁹
Some men managed to escape from the battlefield despite their wounds. Even then they had to hide themselves: they were liable to be killed by the local men, who hated the Armagnac army on account of the pillaging and rapes they and their communities had endured. If they found a defenceless man-at-arms they killed him and stripped him of his clothes and possessions.
¹⁵⁰

Suddenly, while the English were occupied taking prisoners, there was a shout of alarm: the French were about to launch a new attack. The chronicle of Ruisseauville claimed that this was due to Clignet de Brabant having rallied the remaining French men-at-arms. Basset’s chronicle states the men had been rallied by Guillaume de Tybouville. Des Ursins’ account states the new threat was not a case of men being
rallied but the appearance of a wholly new force, led by the duke of Brittany. While we know this last suggestion is wrong – for the duke was still at Amiens – it was quite credible at the time; indeed we know that the seigneur de Longny was just three miles from the battlefield with the duke of Anjou’s six hundred men-at-arms. Other writers assumed it was the arrival of the duke of Brabant that caused the alarm; and although the duke himself was probably already a prisoner, the rest of his men might have been spotted approaching the battlefield. What is certain is that the new threat was sufficient to cause Henry to panic. He ordered all the prisoners who were not of the royal blood to be killed immediately.
¹⁵¹

Of all the events connected with Agincourt, this massacre is by far the most controversial. It causes anger and division among English and French historians even today.
¹⁵²
Some have suggested Henry’s order amounted to a war crime – and although the modern concept of war crimes did not exist in 1415, Henry’s order was against contemporary morality, against the law of chivalry (which demanded that one spare one’s prisoners), against Henry’s own ordinances of war, and against Christian teaching. These prisoners were, after all, unarmed, fellow Christians, and had given themselves up. On the other hand, many historians have wanted to stress that Henry had no choice; he had to ensure that he won the battle and protected his men. This self-defence argument has two dimensions: first, that Henry could not spare the men to guard the prisoners because he needed every hand to fight the enemy; second, if he had not killed the prisoners they could have started to fight for their fellow Frenchmen. For the majority of English historians, still wedded to the post-Shakespearian ‘great-man’ view of Henry, this is the only way of presenting him: he made a hard decision in the nick of time, and saved his army.

In determining which line to tread between these two extremes – or, indeed, whether to accept one of the extremes – a number of points need to be carefully considered. The first is that we may dismiss the often-repeated notion that it was the attack on the baggage wagons that caused Henry to order the massacre. Although this is to be found in some fifteenth-century chronicles, this reflects an attempt in later years to shift the blame for the massacre on to the French looters. The vast majority of early accounts point to a second or regrouped army as the cause of alarm.
¹⁵³
In addition, there is a logical point
ruling it out. Ghillebert de Lannoy wrote a memoir in which he described being taken to a house with ten or twelve other prisoners, after being pulled out of one of the piles of dying men.
¹⁵⁴
There was thus a considerable delay between the taking of prisoners and the massacre: long enough to take the prisoners back to Maisoncelle to lock them up in houses. As the baggage wagons were also still in Maisoncelle, an attack by several hundred local men here cannot have occurred so late in the day without considerable fighting: there would have been enough armed Englishmen around to fight them off. Certainly Isambard d’Agincourt and his men would not have had unfettered access to the men-at-arms’ horses and the king’s jewels. The attack on the English baggage belongs to the earlier phase of the battle, while the main fight was still in progress, long before Henry ordered the massacre.

How significant was the new threat? Three years after the battle, Thomas Elmham wrote, ‘there was indeed a great throng of people. The English killed the French they had taken prisoner for the sake of protecting their rear. Praise was given to God.’
¹⁵⁵
Tito Livio Frulovisi, writing many years later, also referred to large numbers of new men, claiming that

Henry immediately prepared to fight another army of the enemy, no less than the first. Considering that the English were exhausted by so long and hard a fight, and because they saw that they held so many prisoners – so many that they came to the same number as themselves – they feared they might have to fight another battle against both the prisoners and the enemy. So they put many to death …’
¹⁵⁶

These English statements about the arrival of a substantial new army do not tally with the English and Burgundian eyewitness accounts. They also clash with the French accounts, which associate the massacre with the arrival of new forces. De Lannoy and Thomas Basin both mention the arrival of the duke of Brabant in person as the cause – though how much de Lannoy could have known, being locked in a house in Maisoncelle at the time, is doubtful. And as we have seen the duke of Brabant did not bring a numerous army; he had travelled too fast for more than a few dozen men to accompany him on his thirty-mile dash from Lens. It cannot have been the remainder of
his men who were arriving, as they can hardly have travelled the thirty miles so quickly. However, even if it was the rest of the duke’s men, then we must remember that he had undertaken to bring a total of 1,400 men-at-arms and six hundred crossbowmen in total – and some of them had travelled with the duke and some were already at Agincourt. So the largest new force that can have been seen approaching must have been considerably less than two thousand men, accompanied by fewer than a thousand pages. As the English had lost no more than six hundred men, the ‘new army’ cannot have amounted to more than a third of the English army. The same argument applies to the men of the duke of Anjou. If Henry ordered the massacre because of intelligence that the seigneur de Longny had a force of six hundred men-at-arms three miles away, then his decision was clearly an over-reaction. To constitute an imminent threat, the French ‘new army’ would have had to be both substantial and visible; but if any large, new force actually appeared
on the battlefield
, the majority of chroniclers would have noted its appearance. Not one does. Thus we may be confident that any ‘new army’ was distant from, as well as much smaller than, the English force, and did not push Henry into ordering the massacre.

The majority of accounts, including those of eyewitnesses, state that it was the regrouping of French men-at-arms that caused Henry to kill the prisoners. This is a far more credible explanation. A large body of men gathering on the actual battlefield would have constituted an immediate and serious threat. That it was a snap decision – albeit one taken in conjunction with leading members of the council – is made clear by the fact that it eventually proved an unnecessary precaution. In the end there was no second French attack. Nor can the massacre itself be said to have prevented that second attack, as it took place out of sight of the regrouping Frenchmen, in and around Maisoncelle.
¹⁵⁷
It was thus a decision made suddenly, and unfortunately, in the face of a perceived imminent risk.

According to the author of the
Gesta
, the order to kill the prisoners was made as a result of the French ‘rearguard’ re-establishing their position and line of battle in order to attack. The official French chronicle, written by a monk of St Denis, vaguely parallels this, stating that a group of warriors on the edge of the vanguard made a movement to the rear to withdraw from the blind fury of the fighting, and that
their withdrawal triggered the massacre. Clearly this does not fit with the time needed to take prisoners like de Lannoy from under the piles of dead and remove them to a house to lock them up; but it tallies in referring to a regrouping of men-at-arms at the rear of the French army. If the Ruisseauville chronicler was correct in stating that it was Clignet de Brabant who organised the regrouping, then this also tallies with the official chronicle, as Clignet had led one of the first attacks on the archers and must have withdrawn to re-organise his men. Finally, and most crucially, the two Burgundian eyewitnesses, le Fèvre and Waurin, state that the rearguard and ‘centre division’, which had previously been put to flight by Henry’s main battle, regrouped and showed signs of wanting to fight: ‘marching forward in battle order’.
¹⁵⁸

In this last statement we have a version of events that is both supported by the eyewitness accounts and consistent with the chronology of events and the scale of imminent threat necessary to provoke a sudden and (as it turned out) unnecessary massacre. But if the above analysis leads us to an understanding of the circumstances in which Henry made his decision – reacting to a large number of men marching towards him across the battlefield, not a small second army three miles away – it still does not allow us to say it was wholly justified. How many men had regrouped? How many prisoners were there? How real was this threat?

The key word in the account of Waurin and le Fèvre is ‘marching’. The French could no longer use their horses due to the large piles of dead and dying men and horses that littered the battlefield. The narrow shape of the field prevented the regrouped men from riding around the piles of the dead in formation. One might add that, if the regrouped men
had
been able to charge, there would have been no time for the killing of the prisoners to be carried out. Thus we may be sure that the regrouped force was on foot. It must have been numerous too, to consider attacking the English again – at least as many men-at-arms as the 1,500 on the English side. But many French men-at-arms were dead, many had been taken prisoner, and many had fled (the seigneur de Longny encountered some of the latter, and they persuaded him also to flee). The best-informed French chronicles mostly agree with the number of fatalities around the four thousand mark – a figure that includes the prisoners now killed by the English. Even if three thousand men-at-arms had actually fled, this still left two or three thousand men-at-arms possibly
rallying, and perhaps they still had some vestiges of the infantry and crossbowmen with them. Although the English had lost relatively few men – the chronicles of Ruisseauville and Monstrelet suggest six hundred English fatalities, and only le Fèvre and Waurin give a higher number (1,600) – they had run out of arrows. Hence, the advance of two or three thousand men-at-arms was a very serious matter.