Agincourt (21 page)
Four days after making his will, Henry wrote for the final time to Charles VI of France. Ostensibly it was a last-ditch attempt to avert war: a personal appeal from one man to another, prompted by the dictates of conscience and, in particular, a wish to avoid bloodshed. Henry pleaded for a settlement of their quarrel and the restoration of peace between two great nations which were “once united, now divided.” Charles should know, he declared, that “we call to witness in conscience the Supreme Judge, over whom neither entreaties nor bribes can prevail, that, in our sincere zeal for peace, we have tried every way possible to obtain peace. If we had not done so, we would have rashly given away the just title of our inheritance, to the eternal prejudice of posterity.”
52
For many modern commentators this letter is simply another example of Henry’s hypocrisy: he was mouthing platitudes about peace and justice but, in reality, “whatever the cost, he wanted war.”
53
Such an interpretation misses the point. It is true that the king had no intention of abandoning his campaign at this late stage and that this “last request” was pregnant with threat—it was written “at the very moment of making our crossing” and dated from “our town of Southampton on the sea shore”—making it clear that invasion was imminent. It is also true that he did not expect to extract any further concessions from the French that would be substantial enough to persuade him to call off the expedition. It is even true that the letter was a useful tool in the propaganda war because it could be copied and distributed to allies of both sides as evidence of the English willingness to compromise. (It was no accident that transcripts of it were to appear in many contemporary chronicles.)
54
Nevertheless, this “last request” was not a cynical, empty gesture. Henry was, with his customary attention to detail, following precisely the code of conduct that governed the medieval laws of war. If Henry V’s war to recover his rights in France was to be accepted as morally justified in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, of God, it was crucial that every step he took along the path was correct and followed the prescribed form. He had already consulted the “wise men” of his kingdom both in Parliament and in his great council. More recently, he had taken the second step of consulting impartial international opinion on the justice of his cause, ordering notarised transcripts to be made, under the seal of the archbishop of Canterbury, of the 1412 Treaty of Bourges, in which the Armagnac princes had recognised English sovereignty in Aquitaine. He had sent these copies to Constance (now in Switzerland), where the general council of the Church was in session, and to European princes, including the Holy Roman Emperor, “to this end: that all Christendom might know what great acts of injustice the French had inflicted on him, and that, as it were reluctantly and against his will, he was being compelled to raise his standards against rebels.”
55
The third and final step in this quasi-judicial process was to set out the case before the adversary himself and ask for the restitution of his rights. Henry’s letter to Charles VI had taken precisely this form. In it he made a point of citing the twentieth chapter of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, which formed the basis of the medieval laws of war and commanded that “when you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.”
56
It was a quotation that would appear repeatedly on Henry’s lips and dictate his actions throughout the coming war with France.
There was now nothing left to be done except to begin the enterprise that had been so long in preparation. On 29 July Henry gave the order for everyone engaged in his service to embark upon the ships allocated to them and to be ready to sail by 1 August at the latest. The discovery of the Cambridge plot and the necessity of dealing with the culprits caused an unexpected delay, but six days later Henry left Portchester Castle on board a barge, which took him out into the deeper waters between Southampton and Portsmouth, where his flagship, the
Trinity Royal
, was waiting for him. As soon as he was on board, the signal was given for all the ships of the fleet in the various ports and harbours along the south coast to make haste to join him. All he needed was a favourable wind as he prepared to set sail for France.
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THE AGINCOURT CAMPAIGN
“FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE”
1
On Sunday, 11 August 1415, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, Henry V gave the signal that launched the invasion of France. Fifteen hundred ships—a fleet twelve times the size of the Spanish Armada
2
—now weighed anchor, hoisted sail and made their way into the Channel from the shelter of Southampton Water and the Solent. Unlike the huge Spanish galleons of the sixteenth century, these were not purpose-built warships but a motley collection of privately owned merchant vessels: great ships that braved the Atlantic to bring wine from Aquitaine and carry the highly prized heavy woollen broadcloth to the continent; smaller coastal traders importing salt from Bourgneuf Bay in Brittany and exporting salted herring from Yarmouth to the Low Countries and the Baltic; even river boats, the freight carriers of the inland waterways, supplying everything from stone and marble for building cathedrals to hides for making leather boots, gloves and saddles.
3
There were ships of every size and shape: cogs and carracks, galleys and balingers. Most were built in the distinctive northern style of clinker construction—their hulls composed of a series of overlapping planks from the keel upwards—with a single mast and one square or rectangular sail, but some were lighter Mediterranean vessels, double-masted, with triangular sails and banks of oarsmen. Those ships that had been converted into fighting vessels sported small wooden castles at both prow and stern; others had been fitted with rows of stalls to carry horses, a small ship like a cog having the capacity to carry only thirty, at a time when transport for some twenty-five thousand was needed.
4
Many of the ships had gaily painted hulls, carried rows of white shields bearing the red cross of England along their sides, and flew sails, pennons and banners decorated with heraldic beasts and coats of arms. Some were privately owned by retinue commanders, like the four carracks provided by Sir John Holland, but most were impressed, like the four vessels, two each from Bayonne and Dartmouth, which conveyed the 180 men in Sir Thomas Carew’s company. Frustratingly, a number of men who had mustered at Southampton had to be left behind for lack of shipping, and approximately one hundred ships also failed to join the fleet, either because they could not catch the tide or because they were not ready to sail. Three more were lost when they caught fire, a routine hazard of life on board ship, which was probably an accident but may have been connected with the Cambridge plot, since burning the fleet to prevent the expedition sailing had been one of the options discussed by the conspirators.
5
At the head of the fleet, escorted by the admiral, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, and a convoy of fifteen ships carrying 150 men-at-arms and 300 archers, sailed the
Trinity Royal
. At 540 tons, this was one of the largest ships in northern Europe.
6
She had just returned to sea after a two-year refit and there was now no mistaking whom she carried on board, or the purpose of his voyage. The royal coat of arms, a shield quartered with the three lions of England and the three fleurs-de-lis of France, was painted on her sail. A golden crown adorned her top-castle and a gilded sceptre, worked with three fleur-de-lis, decorated the capstan. At the deckhead stood the carved wooden figure of a crowned leopard, another heraldic beast associated with the kings of England. Painted and gilded, it carried six shields, four of which bore the king’s arms within a collar of gold, and two the arms of the patron saint of England, St George, within the Garter, the emblem of the English order of chivalry. At the mast and on the rear deck flew four of the banners that would also be carried at Agincourt: the royal arms; the arms of St George; the arms of Henry’s royal ancestor, St Edward the Confessor; and the curious cipher representing the Trinity.
7
This display of heraldry was not simply the unavoidable ragbag of inheritance. It was deliberately chosen, a carefully thought-out piece of visual propaganda, whose meaning would be as clear to anyone connected with the profession of arms as that of the religious paintings and artefacts in medieval churches. Even the royal coat of arms made a provocative statement. The ancient arms of England, borne by every king since Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century, had been three golden lions on a red background. This had changed only at the start of the Hundred Years War when Edward III made a symbolic statement of his claim to the throne of France by quartering them with the French royal arms, the golden fleurs-de-lis scattered on a blue background.
8
Edward III had also, at about the same time, unilaterally adopted St George as the patron saint of England. The significance of this gesture was that St George had previously been recognised throughout Europe and the Christian east as the patron saint of all knighthood. By making him exclusively English, Edward III identified himself and his country as the embodiment of the treasured chivalric values that the saint represented. The seemingly miraculous English victories at Crécy, in 1346, and Poitiers, a decade later, could therefore be seen as indisputable proof that the saint had withdrawn his favour from the French (with whom the very concept of chivalry had originated) and become a partisan of England.
9
The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III after Crécy and dedicated to St George, was a celebration of English military supremacy, and its twenty-six members were admired and envied throughout Europe. When Jehan Werchin, the young seneschal of Hainault who would later be killed at Agincourt, was seeking to establish a reputation for prowess in 1408, he did it by issuing a jousting challenge to the Knights of the Garter, whom he regarded, quite literally, as the heirs of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table and therefore the champions of England. (His offer to fight them all at once brought a mild reproof from Henry IV, who said such a thing was unheard of in the ancient chronicles of the Round Table, and was therefore inappropriate; he should fight against a single representative.) Likewise, the greatest honour Henry V could bestow on Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose alliance he was seeking in the war against France in 1416, was the Order of the Garter. The insignia and the ceremonies associated with the order were highly prized as the visible symbols of a knightly reputation won by outstanding courage and loyal service. It was no accident that Garter knights, such as Sir John Cornewaille (who had independently accepted another of the seneschal of Hainault’s challenges to a feat of arms), were to play a prominent role in the Agincourt campaign, deliberately seeking out the most dangerous—and therefore the most honourable—exploits to perform.
10
The heraldic displays on the
Trinity Royal
were visual assertions of Henry’s royal status, his claim to the throne of France, and English military supremacy; the religious banners declared that this earthly army also enjoyed the patronage and protection of the heavenly hosts. At least three other ships, all members of Henry’s embryonic royal navy, bore his personal devices painted on their sails: the
Katherine de la Tour
and the
Nicholas de la Tour
displayed an antelope and a swan respectively, and the third, an unnamed vessel, the ostrich feathers, which had been his badge as prince of Wales. Given the importance of these symbols, and the medieval weakness for anything that smacked of prophetic insight, the appearance of a flock of swans swimming through the fleet as it left the Isle of Wight was guaranteed to gladden every English heart as the perfect omen.
11
Most of those on board had no idea whether they were heading straight across the Channel for France or taking the much longer sea voyage that would eventually bring them to Aquitaine. Speculation as to their ultimate destination must have intensified as they saw the white cliffs of the Normandy coastline looming. Would they land, as Clarence had done three years earlier, at St-Vaast-la-Hougue on the Cotentin peninsula? Or would they attack one of the prosperous seaports to the east—Boulogne, perhaps, or Dieppe or Fécamp?
Two days after they had put to sea, about five o’clock in the afternoon, the fleet sailed into the bay that lies at the mouth of the river Seine. There they dropped anchor in the lee of the Chef-de-Caux (now Cap de la Hève), the westernmost tip of the great chalk headland that is the Roman nose on the face of upper Normandy. It was not an obvious place for a landing, even though the cliffs here rose less steeply and were more accessible than their precipitous and crumbling neighbours on the Channel coast. The gentler wooded slopes of the southern shore of the bay were more vulnerable to invasion—which is why Constable d’Albret was lying in wait for them there with a force of fifteen hundred men.
12
Henry V was almost certainly unaware of their presence, but he had chosen his landing site, in the small bay of Sainte Adresse, with care. Only a few miles away, hidden from view on the landward side by a wooded bluff, lay his objective: the royal town and port of Harfleur.
Henry’s first action after dropping anchor was to unfurl the banner that was the signal to his captains to attend a meeting of the council on board the
Trinity Royal
. Knowing that his knights and esquires would be vying with each other to achieve the honour of being the first to set foot in France, he then gave orders that no one, on pain of death, was to land before he did and that everyone should prepare to disembark the following morning.
13
Discipline, strictly enforced, was to be the watchword of his entire campaign.