Agincourt (12 page)

The conspiracy—aptly described as “an epilogue to the story of the reign of Henry IV,”
¹⁸
rather than a reaction to that of Henry V—was in many respects a replay of the Percy rebellions of 1403 and 1405 and a typical medieval aristocratic revolt. Edmund Mortimer had long been a focus for disaffection, simply because of his birth and his standing as the acknowledged heir of Richard II. Grey, Clifford and Scrope were all related to both Cambridge and Percy by marriage, and Scrope was also the nephew of the archbishop of York, whom Henry IV had executed for treason in 1405. Family networks and loyalties clearly played their part in drawing men into the conspiracy, but they cannot explain why they were prepared to risk their lives and fortunes to overthrow the Lancastrian regime that had been in power for sixteen years. Some contemporaries, baffled especially by Scrope’s involvement, believed that they had been corrupted by French gold. This was not impossible, for both Cambridge and Grey were in severe financial difficulties that their expenditure on preparations for the Agincourt expedition could only have compounded. What is more, the French ambassadors were still in England in July and knew of rumours that there might be a rebellion in favour of either the earl of March or the duke of Clarence once Henry V had left the country.
¹⁹
Supporting such a rebellion—and such rumours—was in France’s interest, even if it only temporarily delayed or diverted Henry from his purpose.

Henry’s reaction on learning of the plot was characteristically swift and ruthless. He at once ordered the arrest of Cambridge, Scrope and Grey, and before night fell all three were imprisoned in the new tower at Southampton Castle and a ten-strong commission, led by John Mowbray, the earl marshal, who was responsible for military discipline, had been appointed to investigate the allegations. Two days later, on 2 August 1415, the three men were indicted for high treason. The principal charge against them, however, went far beyond the treasonable acts of which Cambridge and Grey were undoubtedly guilty. They were accused specifically of having plotted to assassinate the king, his brothers and other subjects of the king in Southampton. Though the death of the king, and perhaps his brothers, might have been inferred from a successful usurpation, their assassination does not appear to have featured in any of the conspirators’ plans, and was probably an invention designed to secure a swift conviction. Cambridge and Grey pleaded guilty, but Scrope demonstrated greater courage and probity. He denied absolutely any involvement in an assassination plot, or indeed any other plot, and claimed that his only crime had been that he knew about the conspiracy but had failed to tell the king.

On the strength of his confession, Grey was condemned to death and beheaded the same day. Both Cambridge and Scrope claimed their legal right to be tried by their peers. This was quickly and easily arranged, for most of the aristocracy were in Southampton, waiting to embark for France. On 5 August twenty peers, including the king’s brothers Clarence, who presided over the court, and Gloucester, gathered in Southampton Castle to pass judgement on the accused men. (Cambridge’s elder brother, the duke of York, should have had a place on the tribunal, but was excused.)

The verdict was a foregone conclusion and unanimous. Cambridge and Scrope were condemned to be drawn, hanged and beheaded. Henry graciously remitted the sentence of hanging and spared Cambridge, as he had Grey, the humiliation of being drawn, or dragged through the public streets to his place of execution.
²⁰
Cambridge wrote a grovelling letter after his condemnation, addressed to “Mine most dreadful and sovereign liege Lord,” beseeching the king to spare him. He even had the temerity to borrow his brother-in-law’s excuse, claiming that all the offences he had committed were caused “by the stirring of other folk egging me thereto.” It availed him nothing, and on 5 August Cambridge paid for his treason with his life. Two days later Edmund Mortimer received a royal pardon, on the grounds that the conspirators had taken advantage of his innocence.
²¹

Scrope, however, had to suffer the full rigour of the law. The reason for this is not entirely clear. Henry may not have believed his professions of innocence: if French gold had underwritten the plot, then Scrope, who had played a crucial role in delicate diplomatic missions abroad, was the obvious person to have negotiated a treasonous deal. His disloyalty certainly caused the king the greatest personal pain, and as a Knight of the Garter (the most illustrious order of knights) he also deserved greater punishment for betraying the high standards of his order. Alternatively, the reason may have been that he alone refused to confess to having committed high treason. Concealing treason fell outside the provisions of the Statute of Treasons and was therefore effectively a new category of crime.
²²

The Cambridge plot could easily have jeopardised the entire Agincourt campaign. Nevertheless, all those involved on the fringes of the plot escaped investigation, punishment or even recrimination. Henry had made his point in his usual way, making an example of the leading figures and giving the benefit of the doubt to the rest, who were thus enabled to redeem themselves on the campaign to come.
²³

CHAPTER SIX

“HE WHO DESIRES PEACE, LET HIM PREPARE FOR WAR”
¹

Throughout the entire period of diplomatic negotiations between England, France and her allies, Henry V had been steadily preparing for war. The castles on the northern borders had all been repaired, reinforced and regarrisoned at Henry’s accession. Calais, too, underwent a major programme of rebuilding in anticipation of the role it would inevitably play during an English invasion of France. In 1413 commissioners were appointed to investigate the state of the defences of the town and the other fortresses in the Pas-de-Calais. New orders were issued to ensure that all houses were roofed with slate or tiles, rather than the cheaper thatch of straw or reeds which was so vulnerable to fire, especially during a siege. The king’s carpenter in Calais was ordered to hire men, and by August he had a master-carpenter and thirty-two ordinary carpenters on his books, the latter being paid eight pence a day for their work. At Guînes, the moat and a ditch were cleared of the debris that always accumulated in such places in times of peace, the defences were reinforced and a new watch tower was built.
²

The appointment of one of Henry’s most trusted lieutenants, the earl of Warwick, as captain of Calais in 1414 marked a second stage of increased activity. A commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate alleged frauds committed by the four men responsible for supplying Calais with arms, building materials and victuals during the reign of Henry IV. The new supplier immediately applied himself to building up stockpiles of all these necessary items, including massive quantities of Gascon and Portuguese wine, salted beef, pork and herrings, which could all be kept for long periods of time if the town found itself under siege or its supply lines cut.
³
On his appointment, the earl had undertaken to ensure that the Calais garrison was manned, in time of war, by 240 men-at-arms and between 274 and 334 archers, at least half of whom, in both categories, were to be mounted. Additionally, he was to have four mounted scouts, forty crossbowmen, thirty-three carpenters, twenty masons, a plumber, a tiler, an artillery specialist and a “purveyor of stuff,” or quartermaster. More troops were also stationed within the town of Calais, though these were not the responsibility of the captain of the castle.
⁴

Similar activity had also been taking place in England, where the coastal defences of towns such as Portsmouth and Southampton were strengthened with new towers. A major programme of rebuilding at Southampton had started in the 1380s, when there was a threat of a repeat of the French raid of 1338, which had destroyed almost half the town. Southampton had then been vulnerable to attack from the sea, because its city walls had been built only on the landward side. As a consequence of such disasters and the growing commercial prosperity of ports and market towns, a change in defence strategy had been required. It was no longer acceptable for the civilian population of a town to have to flee with their families and animals into the safety of a castle when threatened. The new generation of wealthy citizens, merchants and burghers, who had invested heavily in valuable goods and substantial properties, demanded that they too should be protected and that the town itself should be fortified. Thus, by the end of the fourteenth century, Southampton was completely encircled, not just with moats, ditches and embankments, but with stone curtain walls, behind the battlements of which archers could shelter and take fire. Towers defended the key sites and, in response to the increasing importance of artillery, arrow-slits were converted to take small cannon; one new tower even had a vaulted ceiling so that it had the potential to take the weight of heavier cannon on its roof. (Similar conversions for guns were also undertaken nearby at Portchester Castle, Winchester and Carisbrooke Castle.) That artillery was starting to make a substantial contribution to defence is indicated by the somewhat startling appointment of a chaplain, Thomas Tredington, “to serve the king in his new tower of Southampton, both to celebrate the divine services and to keep the armour, artillery, victuals and guns for its garrison and defence. He is retained for this service expressly because he is an expert in guns and the management of artillery.”
⁵

Recognising the importance of Southampton’s new fortifications because the town was “so near the enemy,” Henry V contributed to them both indirectly and directly. In the December parliament of 1414, he heard a petition from the mayor and burgesses complaining that they could not afford the cost of their new defences and seeking a reduction in the rents they had to pay to the king’s stepmother Joan of Navarre. Acknowledging the justice of their case, Henry offered either to persuade Joan to remit most of the rents or take them into his own hands and reduce them himself if she would not. He also built another new tower, the God’s House Tower, which became the residence of the town gunner and his arsenal; projecting out of the town wall, it was built primarily to protect the sluices beneath it, whose function was to control the water levels in the moats that were the first line of defense.
⁶

Although most major towns and ports had their own gun and weapon stores, the national arsenal was housed in the Tower of London. Preparations for restocking this had begun almost from the very moment Henry V had succeeded to the throne. On 10 May 1413 he had forbidden the sale of bows, arrows, arms and artillery to the Scots and other foreign enemies, and a month later he appointed a fletcher, Nicholas Mynot, to be keeper of the king’s arrows in the Tower. Mynot himself set to work making arrows, and orders were placed with other London fletchers, such as Stephen Seler, who was paid £37 10s (just under $25,000 at current values) in August 1413 for supplying twelve thousand arrows.
⁷
This was but one of many commissions over the next two years.

Arrows were produced in sheaves of twenty-four. Each archer was normally armed with between sixty and seventy-two arrows, carrying two sheaves in his canvas quiver and the rest stuck in his belt, ready for immediate action. Additional supplies were carried on wagons and boys were employed to act as runners to bring more arrows to the archers on demand. Though a spent arrow might be recovered and reused,
⁸
this was both dangerous and impractical during combat, especially given that the archer’s greatest strength was his speed of fire: an archer who could not fire ten aimed arrows per minute was not considered fit for military service. In a battle situation therefore the arrows he carried were only enough to keep him supplied for a seven-minute bombardment at most. Since the normal rate of fire by professional archers could rise as high as twenty per minute, his supply might last him for only half that time. The scale of the demand and the sheer logistics involved in providing sufficient arrows for an entire military campaign were thus enormous, hence the need to begin stockpiling early.
⁹

There were two types of arrow in common use for military purposes at the time of Agincourt. The first was for long-range use, had a wooden shaft over thirty inches long made from a light wood, such as poplar, and an iron arrowhead shaped almost like an aeroplane, its “wings” bent back to form barbs, which lodged in the victim’s flesh. It was highly effective against unarmoured men and horses up to a distance of around three hundred yards, especially in a co-ordinated volley. The second kind of arrow had been developed in response to the introduction of plate armour. It had a slightly shorter and heavier shaft, often made from ash, and a fearsome arrowhead called a bodkin, which, as its name suggests, was like a long, thick needle with a hardened and sharpened point. Fired at a closer range of less than 150 yards, these arrows could even penetrate the thickened steel of a helmet.
¹⁰

Arrowheads intended for use in war were forged with a surprising degree of sophistication, the hardened steel of the tips and the edges enclosing a softer iron core which absorbed the shock of impact and made the shaft less likely to split or break off. Military arrows used flights made out of goose feathers, which were fixed to the shaft with glue and bound in place with thread. At times of crisis, the king would send an order out to the shires to provide goose feathers and, though no such order is extant for the Agincourt campaign, in December 1418 Henry V commanded his sheriffs to find him 1,190,000 by Michaelmas. A similar exercise in February 1417 was limited to the twenty southern shires and to six feathers from every goose, but these had to be at the Tower within six weeks of the command going out.
¹¹

In England and Wales, the preferred bow for military purposes was the longbow, as distinct from the crossbow. The latter never gained any great popularity in England, except for hunting animals, though it was extensively used in Europe from at least the mid-eleventh century. The Genoese, in particular, were renowned crossbowmen and regularly served as mercenaries in French armies. The advantages of the crossbow were threefold. It required comparatively little training and physical strength to be operated, it could be put into the shooting position and held there till needed, and its highly effective use of the power of torque—a winding mechanism was used to bend the bow—produced greater impact over a longer range, especially after the introduction of steel crossbows in the fifteenth century. Its great disadvantage was that it was slow and cumbersome in action: the ability to draw a weight of a thousand pounds did not compensate for being able to shoot only two quarrels or bolts a minute, especially in the heat of battle.
¹²