1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (73 page)

For Henry, the message of the day was a confirmation that God approved of him. If the French had died because of the mud, then it was so because God had made it rain, so he could show favour to Henry and punish the lustful, greedy, proud French. And although the army had not been exactly a royal one – the king of France had not been present, nor the dauphin – God had delivered him the victory over many members of the French royal family, Burgundians as well as Armagnacs. It served to justify his claim to the throne of France. Thus the day marked a turning point in his life for he was able to portray his victory as a miracle. It was later said that St George was seen at the height of the battle, fighting on the English side.
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Men who were too weak to draw their bows before the battle miraculously found themselves able to draw and shoot with ease.
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Chroniclers were encouraged to exaggerate the size of the French army and the numbers of dead, and to minimise the size of the English army. No English chronicler wrote about the hundreds of English dead – most state that fewer than forty Englishmen died. Their numbers were downplayed to enhance the miraculous dimension of the victory, and the names of many of those killed – even some of the knights – were erased in order to enhance the miraculous nature of the victory. So sure was Henry that the victory represented the benevolence of God that he ordered that the names of St Crispin and St Crispinian should be repeated to him in a Mass every day for the rest of his life.
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But when at the end of this long day, he finally slept, something essential had changed. Henry had demonstrated to his contemporaries that he had God’s blessing in ruling by the sword. His divinely sanctioned victory meant that to carry on fighting was not only justifiable, it was God’s work. He had to do it. He was God’s instrument.

Saturday 26th

This morning Henry was up very early. He walked across the battlefield, looking at all the corpses. Where his men found Frenchmen
alive, they either took them prisoner or killed them. Many Englishmen were amazed that so many of the corpses had already been stripped of all their armour and clothing. Between the pilfering of the local people and the looting of the English, the nobility of France had been left ‘naked just like those newly born’ in the mud.
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After the battlefield had been scoured for any more French lords who had survived the night, and who could be taken prisoner and ransomed, the battlefield was abandoned, and the naked bodies left where they were. Henry ordered the army to move out. It was forty-five miles to Calais. The loss of a large number of horses during the raid by Isambard d’Agincourt and the men of Hesdin meant that many men had to walk. Many of the lesser prisoners also had to walk. For those on foot, it was a three-day journey to Calais.

Sunday 27th

After the battle the servants and friends of the Frenchmen who had been killed returned to the scene. The duke of Brabant’s body was found some way from the battlefield. It was naked and showed he had been wounded in the face and neck. He was one of the prisoners killed when the French had regrouped. Those who found the body were amazed that such an important man could be butchered in such a fashion. It seemed like an unchivalric, godless act. Sorrowfully they lifted his body and took it to Saint-Pol, where it was embalmed, ready for transportation to Brussels, to be buried.
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News of the defeat reached the king and dauphin at Rouen. The old king, despite his illness, must have recognised instantly that this was the most terrible news of his thirty-five years on the throne. He asked who had died. Seven royal cousins, he was told. The duke of Bar and his brother, the duke of Brabant and his brother, the duke of Alençon, the count of Marle and Charles d’Albret. One can imagine the silent moment of disbelief that followed, as each man came to the king’s mind and then was acknowledged as dead. The messengers then told him the full extent of the tragedies – the deaths of the seigneur de Bacqueville, bearer of the Oriflamme, and Guichard Dauphin. The messengers went on to describe the particularly heavy casualties among the men of Hainault. The total of the
French dead, they told him, was four thousand men-at-arms, including 1,400 knights and esquires.
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Then they told him about the captured dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, and the counts of Vendôme and Richemont, and all the royal and noble prisoners.

Monday 28th

In London, news about Agincourt had yet to arrive. It was still believed that the English had been defeated, and the fate of the king was as yet unknown. Thus it was in a solemn mood that the people of London prepared to swear in their new mayor, Nicholas Wotton.

The campaign looked to have been a disaster. It had been costly and had succeeded only in taking one town, which could be expected soon to be retaken by the French. Many men had fallen ill. The earl of Arundel was not the only one to have died since being sent home sick. Sir John Daubridgecourt, a Knight of the Garter and a close friend of Henry’s, who had attended the siege of Harfleur in the company of the incapacitated duke of Clarence, had also died.
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If this news about an English defeat was true, and the king was dead, what was it all for? Henry had gambled with the legitimacy of his entire dynasty – everything his father and the Lancastrian family’s retainers and supporters had risked their lives for – and lost. The thought must have occurred to many people at Westminster that, if the king had been killed in battle, it was to be expected that the Southampton plot would be praised and the earl of Cambridge seen as a martyr. In time someone else would try to rid England of its dubious dynasty.

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Henry arrived at Guines, the English-held castle to the south of Calais, and there took up his quarters with his close companions and the most noble French prisoners. Here he held a council meeting to determine whether he should press on and try to extend the war. It occurred to him that, as he had a fully mobilised army with him, he might use it to attack the town of Ardres, which was not far away. There were
other French-held forts in the Marches of Calais too; these perhaps were now vulnerable? But his councillors strongly advised him to desist from any further warfare. They told him that such victories as he had received, miraculous as they were, should suffice for his honour for the time being.
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Tuesday 29th

Early this morning a messenger arrived in the city of London, tired after riding all night from Dover. He had come from the English army. Far from being defeated, Henry had won a great victory over the French. Countless French men-at-arms lay dead, and the king was marching triumphantly, gloriously, through Northern France to Calais.

This amazing news – an incredible turn-around after the dismal news of four days earlier – was a cause for exultation. It was proclaimed publicly on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral that same morning. Chancellor Beaufort himself preached in the cathedral on the theme of the king’s safe delivery. Throughout the city the bells were rung. Joyously the new mayor and aldermen, together with an immense number of the freemen of the city of London, went in procession on foot to Westminster, as if in a great pilgrimage, to give thanks at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor for the safe delivery of the king and the great victory he had won.
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Queen Joan, who attended the Westminster service, must have been torn. Her stepson the king had won a glorious victory; but her own sons, the duke of Brittany and the count of Richemont, had been on the opposing side. So too had her cousins, the duke of Brabant and the count of Nevers, and the dukes of Orléans and Anjou. What of them? She cannot have known whether her eldest son, the duke of Brittany, had observed the terms of his agreement with Henry and stayed away from the battle. Nor whether her younger son, the count of Richemont, had fought. So many of her French and Burgundian cousins had died, she was now told, as the bells rang out joyfully over Westminster.

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The people of Calais had come a long way out of the town to greet Henry, so great was their joy at his victory. The priests and clerks of the town processed behind him as he approached the gates, singing
We praise you, O Lord
. The streets were filled with women and children as well as the men of the town, all shouting ‘Welcome, our sovereign lord!’ as he passed them with his councillors, leading the captured great lords of France.

Few of his men received such a cheerful reception. The archers were barred entry. The fear was that they would not pay for their food in Calais, and start looting. So they were forced to camp outside the walls. They were desperate for food. Those who had taken prisoners, hoping to ransom them for large sums, were forced to sell them to the men of the town or their social superiors in return for nourishment. Otherwise they could not find enough sustenance to keep themselves alive, let alone their prisoners. It was a bitter stage of the journey for ‘the few’ who had helped Henry to his victory.
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Wednesday 30th

In Bordeaux, the news of the victory was still far off: it would be another three weeks before they heard. The mayor and jurats of the city were still considering Henry’s request for siege engines and cannon, contained in a letter he had sent them in June, which they had received on 20 August.
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It is probable that they had only recently heard of the fall of Harfleur, and so were rethinking their decision to send the guns. After due deliberation, they decided that it was now too late in the season for them to respond helpfully, since the winter would soon be upon them and Henry’s campaign would be halted for the winter months.
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Thursday 31st

The archers starving outside the walls of Calais were not the only unfortunate English victims of Henry’s success. Recently a payment had been made for arresting and bringing John Foxholes (former chaplain of Lord Scrope), Thomas Blase (formerly Scrope’s steward) and
other men who had served in the household of the late Lord Scrope to Westminster.
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Today they were led before the king’s council to be questioned regarding the goods of the executed traitor. Henry’s miraculous victory only heightened the sinful context of Scrope’s actions in June. If some of the goods described in Scrope’s will had been disposed of in accordance with Scrope’s instructions, and not delivered to the king, then the lord’s crime of treason had been compounded by his servants’ disobedience.

The bishop of Durham and Chancellor Beaufort demanded to know from Foxholes and Blase into whose hands the goods and chattels of their late master had come. They said on oath that they knew nothing of the goods. They said that John Bliton wrote the late lord’s will, and that he was now a clerk in the kitchen of the duchess of York. But they did not know what the will said or even where it was. The two bishops continued to interrogate them, knowing that men in Lord Scrope’s service had concealed portions of his wealth from the royal coroner. They asked Thomas Blase how many vessels of silver Scrope had possessed. Six dozen and no more, he replied. Another man, Robert Newton, a canon of the king’s chapel at Westminster who had previously served in Lord Scrope’s chapel, was brought in and questioned as to how many copes Scrope had possessed. One hundred and twenty, he replied.
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The upshot of these interrogations is not known. Some of Scrope’s possessions were later located at Pontefract Castle, and an order for them to be confiscated issued three weeks later.
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Others had been found in London by yeomen of the king’s chamber at the time of his arrest and handed over to the mayor.
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But the difficulty in tracking the rest of Scrope’s possessions suggests that some of his household servants kept their master’s belongings, or disposed of them in their own way, rather than render them to the king. Later an enquiry would be made in Yorkshire as to the whereabouts of goods concealed from the king’s officers.
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In Paris it was said that John the Fearless was pleased by the English victory at Agincourt, for this was a defeat for the Armagnacs.
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The reality was nowhere near so straightforward. He had tried to play
the kings of England and France off against each other and in one sense had succeeded: the Armagnacs had been defeated and humiliated in the most public way possible. But in another sense he had lost terribly, for he had lost both of his brothers: the duke of Brabant and the count of Nevers. Only five days earlier he had attended the christening of the count of Nevers’ son. Many more Burgundians, including his vassals from Picardy and Flanders, lay dead in the mud at Agincourt.

Those who saw Agincourt as the work of God must have suspected that the deaths of both of John’s brothers was divine retribution for John’s murder of the old duke of Orléans in 1407. Medieval chroniclers and moralists liked to trace such full turns of the wheel of fortune. It was an obvious conclusion. It had been that killing that had started the whole civil war and had left France without clear leadership and vulnerable to Henry’s ambitions. We have no way of knowing what Jacquette Griffart – the woman who had witnessed the murder – thought of the news of the battle and the deaths, but, if she was still alive these eight years later, the whole period probably struck her as a protracted and sickening bloody mess.

November

Friday 1st: Feast of All Saints