1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (72 page)

The problems with this line of argument are the manner and scale of the killing. According to le Fèvre and Waurin, the Englishmen at first did not want to kill their prisoners, as that would render them worthless. This would be in line with English military tradition. At St-Cloud, when John the Fearless ordered all the prisoners to be executed for treason, the English had refused, saying that ‘they had not come as butchers, to kill the folk in market or in fair’ but to ransom them.
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However, the very reluctance of the Englishmen to kill their prisoners at Agincourt suggests that a number were not convinced of the danger. As some of the prisoners were locked up in houses, like de Lannoy, this is not surprising. But when Henry realised his men had lost focus, and were more mindful of profit than their strategic position, he assigned the task to an esquire and two hundred archers, who set about cutting the prisoners’ throats. Two hundred: if the action had to be done hastily, then two hundred men could not have quickly cut the throats of a much larger number of men in armour without risking being overpowered. That the matter was indeed a matter of urgency is clear from the account of de Lannoy – the house in which he and his companions were being held was simply set alight, so his fellow prisoners were burnt alive.
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If, say, a thousand prisoners had been divided to be killed separately or in small groups, this itself would have taken time; in which case the two hundred archers might as well have guarded the prisoners as killed them. Unless le Fèvre and Waurin were completely wrong in their estimate of two hundred archers being assigned to the job, then it is simply not credible that there were more than three or four hundred prisoners at this stage of the battle – at the very most. The suggestion that there were thousands massacred is not only without direct evidence, it conflicts with the eyewitness evidence that we do have. In all probability, the majority of the four thousand dead Frenchmen were lying in the mud on the battlefield, and were not slaughtered in cold blood by the English; and lying there among them
were the majority of the prisoners who were later found alive and eventually ransomed.

On this basis we can start to evaluate the second of the key strategic decisions that Henry made during this battle (the first being the order to advance). A mass withdrawal by the French men-at-arms took place, allowing the English tentatively to think they had won the day, and to start to take prisoners. They had gathered a few hundred French men-at-arms, who were disarmed and taken back to Maisoncelles – a process that must have taken at least half-an-hour, if not longer. The English were thus taken by surprise when the French, who had been regrouping on the far side of the field, perhaps in the vicinity of their camp, began to advance on foot in formation towards them. Realising the sudden danger, and probably aware that other French armies were in the vicinity, Henry had the task of bringing his arrowless archers to order, and found they were more mindful of profit than strategy. When they failed to respond to his immediate order to put the prisoners to the sword, Henry delegated the task to an esquire and two hundred men, while having the trumpets sound for the remainder to form up once more. The esquire and his men did their duty as quickly as possible, going to Maisoncelle and burning some men alive and cutting other men’s throats. While the killing was in progress, it seems that Henry sent heralds to the advancing army asking them whether they meant to fight or whether they would leave the field.
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It is likely that Henry told the advancing French that he had killed the prisoners, thereby removing one profound reason for them to renew the fighting, for many of the men-at-arms would have felt obliged to try to rescue their fellow men. As it was, they were too few in number to overwhelm the regrouping English, and lost the element of surprise in their long march over the fields. When told of the deaths of the prisoners, their resolution to continue the fight must have dissolved, and they dispersed.

The above allows us to understand the closing phase of the battle, and why Henry gave the order to kill the prisoners. It was not that there were so many he feared they might constitute a second front; it was because the regrouping French took him by surprise and he suddenly needed his men to concentrate once more on the battle, not on the value of their prisoners. There was also a strategic advantage in killing them. But although we may thus understand
his decision, and why he made it, there can be no getting away from the fact that it was made in haste and was to his everlasting shame. If telling the advancing French that he had killed the prisoners was of strategic advantage, then he could have told them this without actually killing them. Better still he could have threatened to kill them. By all the standards of the time, the killing was an ungodly act, and no way to win the love or respect of the people whom he sought to rule as king.

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The battle was over. According to Monstrelet, Henry summoned the French heralds to him, to ask them to whom the day belonged. The French and English heralds agreed that it was an English victory. Henry then delivered a speech, thanking God, and asking the name of the castle nearby. On being told it was Agincourt, he named the battle after the site – a scene famously repeated in Shakespeare’s play. However, this dialogue was probably a literary device. The herald le Fèvre, in his account of the naming of the battle, fails to mention the presence of any heralds, French or English. He states Henry asked his fellow lords for the name of the castle, and named the battle after it. And even this detail is open to question. Henry would have known the name of the castle – he had been controlling the movements of thousands of men in the immediate area for the last twenty-four hours. Had he not known the name of the only visible castle, the most significant landmark near the battlefield, that would not have filled his commanders with confidence.

How long had the battle taken? Sources on the whole are keen to stress how little time it took. One chronicle – Ruisseauville – states that it was all over in half an hour; another, that of the count of Richemont, suggests less than an hour.
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The author of the
Gesta
, who had been watching the whole battle from the back of the English lines, stated that it took two or three hours for the English to put the vanguard to flight.
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The arrival of the duke of Brabant ahead of his men is perhaps the best indicator. Having heard about the battle at prime, and ridden thirty miles at the fastest speed possible, with men in armour along muddy roads, he cannot have arrived much before noon, even if he and his men had
a change of horses. If the English advance took place at ten o’clock, and the vanguard had not quite been put to flight at noon, then probably another few minutes passed before the French were in flight, and it was not until one o’clock at the earliest that the regrouped French advanced and Henry gave the order for the prisoners to be killed.

It then began to rain again.
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Still Henry held his men in formation. Probably not until four o’clock did he return to Maisoncelle to dine.
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His reason for holding his men there, in the rain, was not just defensive. He wanted them to be silent, and to reflect on the day, and to listen to him. He gave a speech – or again, more probably several speeches – in which he thanked them for their courage, and encouraged them to remember that day as a sure sign of the justice of his cause, and of the efforts he was making to recover the lands of his ancestors. He also told them not to be blinded by pride, or to attribute the victory to their own strengths but to acknowledge that all the credit for the victory belonged to God, who had given their small number victory over a larger army and laid low the French lords in their pride. Finally he urged them to be grateful that they had lost so few men.
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He ordered that the bodies of the duke of York and the earl of Suffolk be boiled that evening, and their bones sent home to England to be buried in the places specified in their wills – York at Fotheringay and Suffolk at Wingfield. As for the rest of the English dead, which probably numbered six hundred, he ordered their bodies to be gathered and placed in houses and barns in Maisoncelle, and there burnt.
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The army would march towards Calais in the morning. He did not have time to give the few hundred Englishmen who had died in his cause a Christian burial.

After Henry returned to Maisoncelle, and the army was told to stand down, archers crossed the battlefield stripping corpses of their armour. Where living men of rank were found, they were hauled back to the village as prisoners. In this way, although the soldiers had lost their first few hundred ransoms, they replaced those with almost everyone they could find alive. Contemporary English estimates of the total number of prisoners taken were between seven and eight hundred. The names of nearly three hundred prisoners are known.
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As they searched for prisoners, they found the bodies of the French lords, their ostentatious armour covered in mud, rivulets of rain
running over the metal and their cold limbs. The most impressive suits of armour were the first to be looted. Very soon the corpses of the great lords of France were lying almost naked, in nothing but their linen underwear, soiled with mud and the contents of their bowels. Here lay the duke of Bar and his brother John; there the duke of Alençon. Here lay the counts of Vaudémont and Roucy; there lay the count of Marle and the seigneur of Grandpré. The archbishop of Sens had taken arms and fought with the secular lords: he too lay lifeless in the mud. The constable of France, Charles d’Albret, lay dead, and the seigneur de Bacqueville. So too did the seneschal of Hainault. The duke of Brabant lay some distance away from the battlefield, stripped of the armour borrowed from Gobelet Vosken. No one had recognised him; wearing a torn trumpet banner as a surcoat had made him appear most unlike a duke. Vosken too was dead. The duke’s younger brother, Philip, count of Nevers, was also dead. All eighteen of the men of the seigneur de Croy who had sworn to knock the crown from Henry’s head had died in the attempt. David de Rambures was dead, lying near the corpses of his three sons. Oudart, the seigneur de Renty, lay dead with two of his brothers. Four sons of Enguerrand de Gribauval were dead. Four thousand men were being stripped of their armour, their clothes and their dignity, and left naked in the mud. About 1,400–1,500 of them were lords, knights and esquires, including one hundred knights banneret. Probably half the French men-at-arms who fought in the battle did not leave it alive or were led away as prisoners of the English.
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At supper that evening, Henry directed that he should be waited on by the captured French princes. According to the chronicle of Ruisseauville, he asked them how the situation appeared to them. They had no option but to admit it constituted an English victory. On which note Henry began to preach about it not being an English victory but the work of God and the Virgin Mary, and of St George, because of the sins of the French, who had gone to war proudly, and raped both married women and young girls in the process, and stolen from the countryfolk and robbed churches. ‘Look at my men,’ declared Henry, ‘they never mounted on women, nor robbed men or the Church’.
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Another account has him saying that it was a great wonder that the French had not fared worse because

it was evil and sin to which they had abandoned themselves. They had not kept faith or loyalty with any living soul in their marriages or in other matters. They had committed sacrilege in robbing and violating churches. They had taken by force all kinds of people, nuns and others. They had robbed the whole population and had destroyed them without cause …
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In the course of the evening some emissaries came to him from the French who had not been captured. They asked for permission to go among the dead and look for their lords and friends. Henry said that, because of the late hour, they could not; but they might the following day. According to the Ruisseauville chronicle, when this answer had been given, Henry ordered five hundred men to go among the dead with axes, to kill anyone who remained alive and to remove what armour they could.
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This latter point may well be propaganda; for le Fèvre states that Henry, when told that his archers were taking the armour from the battlefield, ordered that no one should take more than he needed. The rest was to be placed in a barn with the collected bodies of the English dead, and burnt.
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Quite what the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon thought of this, as they waited on Henry at his table, stretches the imagination. That morning they had been preparing for a straightforward clearing up of the weakened English forces. The duke of Bourbon had been looking forward to this fight all year. The duke of Orléans had been appointed commander of the army. Then they had seen their army crushed, they had seen their friends, family and companions killed and the laws of chivalry flouted in a massacre of unarmed men. They had heard Henry lecture them on the morality of the French troops – as if he was doing God’s work in invading the kingdom of France, destroying Harfleur, sending diseases throughout his own army, killing Frenchmen and leading his own people into battle in pursuit of a claim that they did not believe was justified. And on top of all this they must have wondered, why them? Where was the duke of Brittany? Where was the duke of Burgundy and his son the count of Charolais? Where were the king and the dauphin? Where was Tanneguy du Chastel? All of these men had purposely avoided the battle. The count of Charolais had been taken to Aire on his father’s orders, and prevented from fighting. For the young duke of Orléans in particular it must have been a very bitter pill. The defeat would be portrayed by John the
Fearless as an Armagnac failure. He would be blamed. The rift in the kingdom of France, which had opened with John the Fearless’s murder of Orléans’ father eight years earlier, had culminated in a disaster of such magnitude that reconciliation was now impossible.