Agincourt (3 page)

Had Richard survived and had children by Isabelle, peace with France might have been a genuine option, but in 1399 he was deposed in a military coup by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, and died in prison suspiciously soon afterwards. As the son of John of Gaunt and grandson of Edward III, Henry IV inherited the claim to the French throne, but he had neither the means nor the leisure to pursue it. His first priority was to establish his rule in England in the face of repeated conspiracies and rebellions. Nevertheless, it was clear from the start that there would be no long-lasting peace. The French refused to recognize Henry as king of England, and the king of France’s brother Louis, duke of Orléans, twice challenged him to a personal duel over his usurpation. French forces invaded Aquitaine and threatened Calais and there were tit-for-tat raids on either side of the Channel in which undefended towns were burnt and plundered and enemy shipping was seized.
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Henry IV’s usurpation also sealed the fate of Richard II’s poor child-widow. Like so many medieval women bought and sold into marriage as hostages for political alliances, she had served her purpose and, at ten years of age, was now redundant. Henry toyed with the idea of marrying her to one of his own sons (raising the interesting possibility that the wife of the future Henry V could have been the older sister of the woman who eventually did become his queen), but there was more to be gained from keeping the English princes available on the international marriage market. Isabelle was therefore sent back to France, where she was promptly betrothed to her cousin Charles, son and heir of Louis d’Orléans; married for the second time at sixteen, she died, aged nineteen, shortly after giving birth to his daughter.
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Louis d’Orléans took advantage of Henry’s preoccupation with his domestic problems to invade Aquitaine in alliance with Jean, count of Alençon, and two disaffected Gascons, Bernard, count of Armagnac, and Charles d’Albret, who, as constable of France, held the highest military office in that kingdom. Though they failed to take the principal towns, they succeeded in annexing large areas of the duchy and there was every possibility that English rule in Aquitaine would come to a premature end.
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It was at this juncture that an event took place which was to transform the fortunes of both England and France. In November 1407 Louis d’Orléans was assassinated. His murderer was his cousin John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, one of the richest, most powerful and, in an age not noted for the delicacy of its morals, most unscrupulous of all the princes of France.

The murder was the culmination of a bitter personal feud between the two dukes, both of whom had been ambitious to fill the vacuum at the heart of power in France caused by the intermittent madness of Charles VI.
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Louis, as we have seen, had married his eldest son to Charles’s daughter Isabelle; John the Fearless secured a double alliance, marrying his only son to another of Charles’s daughters, and his own daughter Margaret of Burgundy to the dauphin. Nevertheless, for some years before his murder, Louis d’Orléans had possessed the upper hand, controlling the king’s person, diverting royal revenues into his own pocket and, it was said, enjoying the queen too. (“Monsieur le duc d’Orléans is young and likes playing dice and whoring,” a contemporary remarked.)
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John the Fearless was determined to acquire these benefits, including, so it was said, the queen’s favors, for himself. When his political machinations failed to achieve the desired objects, he resorted to murder, hiring a band of assassins who ambushed the duke one evening as he made his way home through the streets of Paris after visiting the queen. They struck him from his horse, cut off the hand with which he tried to stave off their blows and split his head in two, spilling his brains on the pavement.

The action was so blatant and the murderer himself so shockingly unrepentant that the remaining French princes were reduced to paralysis. The duchess of Orléans demanded justice, but the only person in a position to enforce punishment against so powerful a magnate was the king and he was incapable. The dauphin, who might have acted in his father’s place, was son-in-law of the murderer and, in any case, a child of ten. As there was no one willing or able to take a stand against him, John the Fearless was literally able to get away with murder. He swept unopposed into Paris and by the end of 1409 he was king of France in all but name.
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This monopoly of power would not go unchallenged for long; Burgundy had removed one opponent only for another, more fearsome, to rise in his place. Charles d’Orléans had been a day short of his thirteenth birthday when his father was assassinated. Though he had then been compelled to swear publicly on the Gospels in the cathedral of Chartres that he would forgive the murder, revenge was never far from his thoughts and actions. Within two years he had signed a military pact with Bernard, count of Armagnac, and within three he had not only engineered an anti-Burgundian alliance with the dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Brittany and the counts of Armagnac, Alençon and Clermont but also led their combined armies to the gates of Paris to remove the king and the dauphin from John the Fearless’s control.
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This was merely a preliminary skirmish in what was to become a major civil war, pitting the Burgundians and their allies against the Orléanists or Armagnacs, as they were called by their contemporaries after Charles d’Orléans married the count’s daughter in 1410. The two sides were irreconcilable. This was not just a struggle for power but a bitter personal quarrel in which nothing less than the trial and punishment (preferably by death) of John the Fearless would satisfy the Armagnacs for the murder of Louis d’Orléans; such an outcome was, of course, unthinkable to the Burgundians. Their hatred of each other was so great that in their search for allies, both sides were prepared to overlook their shared dislike of the English. Indeed, they were even prepared to buy the support of the king of England at the price of recognising his “just rights and inheritances,” including, eventually, his title to the throne of France.

Such an opportunity was irresistible to the English, though deciding which party to aid was more difficult. In 1411, when the duke of Burgundy formally sought English assistance for the first time, Henry IV and his council were by no means unanimous in their opinion. Alliance with the Armagnacs offered the possibility of regaining through negotiation those areas of Aquitaine which had been lost to Louis d’Orléans, Charles d’Albret and the counts of Armagnac and Alençon in 1403-7. On the other hand, alliance with John the Fearless, whose Burgundian dominions included the Low Countries, might achieve the same object (though by military means) and would certainly give additional protection and advantages to vital English trading interests in Flanders, Brabant and Hainault.

The decision was complicated by the fact that Henry IV, like Charles VI of France, was not in a position to exercise personal rule. Though he was not insane, like Charles, he had suffered many bouts of debilitating illness since 1405. What was actually wrong with him is a subject of speculation and it says much for the medieval frame of mind that whatever the diagnoses, contemporaries all agreed that his sickness was a divine punishment for having usurped the throne. The king himself seems to have thought so too, beginning his will with the self-abasing words, “I, Henry, sinful wretch” and referring to “the life I have mispended.”
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As a result of his incapacity, his eldest son, the future Henry V, had gradually come to assume a dominant role on the royal council. In the light of his later campaigns in France, it is significant that in 1411 it was his decision to intervene on behalf of the duke of Burgundy.

Exactly what John the Fearless offered as an inducement is not clear, though Armagnac propaganda was quick to suggest that he had promised to hand over four of the main Flemish ports to the English, which would have been an attractive proposal if it were true. All that is known for certain is that negotiations were begun for a marriage between Prince Henry and one of the duke’s daughters, and in October 1411 one of the prince’s most trusted lieutenants, Thomas, earl of Arundel, was dispatched with a substantial army to France. These English forces played an important part in the successful campaign to lift the Armagnac blockade of Paris, participated in the Burgundian victory at the battle of St Cloud, and before the end of the year had entered Paris with a triumphant John the Fearless.
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Having achieved so much militarily, it might have been thought that the English would reap the diplomatic and political benefits of their alliance with the duke. Yet before Arundel’s expedition had even returned home, Henry IV’s council had performed a quite astonishing volte-face and thrown in their lot with the Armagnacs. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the increasingly desperate Armagnac princes now made a better offer than the duke of Burgundy: they agreed to reconquer, with their own troops and at their own expense, the whole duchy of Aquitaine as defined by the Treaty of Brétigny, to hand it over to Henry IV in full sovereignty and to do homage to him for the lands they themselves held there. In return, the English were to send an army, four thousand strong, at French expense, to help them defeat the duke of Burgundy and bring him to justice.
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The magnitude of what was on offer might well have been sufficient temptation to persuade the English to change their alliance, but there was a second reason that influenced the decision. Prince Henry’s domination of the royal council had come to an abrupt end in the winter of 1411 because, it would seem, the ailing Henry IV now suspected the loyalty and ambition of his eldest son. Colourful tales were certainly in circulation. According to one contemporary chronicler, the dying king told his confessor that he repented his usurpation but could not undo it because “my children will not suffer that the kingship goes out of our lineage.”
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Another story, which was later taken up by Shakespeare, was first reported by the Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet in the 1440s. The prince, he said, had removed the crown from beside his father’s bed, thinking that Henry IV was already dead, only to be caught red-handed when his father awoke from sleep and challenged him for being presumptuous.
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Whether or not such incidents actually took place (and it is difficult to see how either chronicler could have obtained his information), they were anecdotal versions of an undoubted truth, which was that in 1412 the prince felt compelled to issue an open letter protesting his innocence and loyalty in the face of rumours that he was plotting to seize the throne.
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Was there any substance to these rumours? Henry IV’s prolonged ill-health had already prompted the suggestion that he should abdicate in favor of his eldest son and he clearly resented Prince Henry’s popularity and influence at court, in Parliament and in the country. The prince, for his part, may have feared that, one way or another, he might be disinherited in favor of his next brother Thomas, for whom their father appears to have had a decided preference. Thomas, supported by Henry IV’s oldest friend and ally Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, now replaced Prince Henry as the key figure on the royal council, effectively excluding the heir to the throne from government and completely overturning his policies. Henry’s natural place as leader of the military expedition to France on behalf of the Armagnacs was first allotted to him, then taken away and given to his brother; shortly afterwards, Thomas was created duke of Clarence and appointed the king’s lieutenant in Aquitaine, even though Henry had been duke of Aquitaine since his father’s coronation. To add insult to these not insignificant injuries, Henry was also falsely accused of having misappropriated the wages of the Calais garrison.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the prince suspected that there was an orchestrated campaign at court to undermine him and perhaps settle the succession on Clarence. Rumours that he had been plotting to seize the throne may have been deliberately circulated as part of that campaign, and the fact that the prince felt the need to deny them at all, let alone publicly and in writing, suggests that he was fully alive to the seriousness of his situation. In his open letter, he demanded that his father should seek out the troublemakers, dismiss them from office and punish them, all of which Henry IV agreed to do, but did not. Yet despite all the provocation, Prince Henry did not resort to violence. Always a patient man, he had no need to grasp by force what would eventually come to him in the course of nature. In the meantime, he could do nothing but await with trepidation the outcome of his brother’s expedition to France. A brilliant success would enhance Clarence’s reputation and might threaten his own position further; an abject failure might vindicate his own decision to side with the Burgundians but would have serious repercussions at home and abroad.
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Clarence sailed from Southampton on 10 August 1412 with one thousand men-at-arms and three thousand archers and landed at St-Vaast-la-Hougue in Normandy. Among his commanders were three members of the extended royal family who were to play a leading role in the Agincourt campaign three years later: his father’s cousin Edward, duke of York; his father’s half-brother Sir Thomas Beaufort, newly created earl of Dorset; and his uncle by marriage Sir John Cornewaille,
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who was one of the greatest knights of his generation. Such a prestigious army should have carried all before it, but Clarence was never the luckiest of leaders. Even before he set foot on French soil, the Armagnacs and Burgundians had secretly come to terms with each other and there was no need for his services. By the time he learnt that the Armagnac princes had unilaterally renounced their alliance it was too late; he was already at Blois, their appointed rendezvous, and he angrily demanded that they honour their obligation. To buy him off the Armagnacs had to agree to pay a total of 210,000 gold crowns, offering as immediate security plate, jewels and seven hostages, including Charles d’Orléans’ unfortunate twelve-year-old brother, Jean, count of Angoulême, who was to remain a prisoner in English hands, forgotten and unredeemed, until 1445. Clarence then marched his army, unopposed and living off the land, to Aquitaine, where he spent the winter negotiating alliances with the local Armagnac leaders and preparing for the possibility of another campaign the following spring.
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