Agincourt (44 page)
This pattern was repeated on a national scale, with the significant difference that there were plenty of men waiting to step into dead men’s shoes—especially from the Burgundian faction. Most of the important royal officers of state died or were captured at Agincourt. Inevitably, the military contingent was particularly hard hit. In addition to the constable Charles d’Albret, France lost her admiral, Jacques de Châtillon, and her grand-master of the crossbowmen, David de Rambures. Her
prévôt
of the marshals, Galois de Fougières, who is still remembered as the inspiration for the foundation of the French
gendarmerie
, was also killed; his body was found on the battlefield and buried in the nave of the abbey church at Auchy, but was exhumed at the request of the Gendarmerie Nationale in 1936 and reburied in the mausoleum of Versailles-Le Chesney.
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Marshal Boucicaut was captured and would die in an English prison.
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The king’s household officers were also cut down in huge numbers. Among the casualties were two of its most senior members, Guichard Dauphin, the grand-master of the household, and Guillaume de Martel, sire de Bacqueville, bearer of the oriflamme, and two of the latter’s sons. As the monk of St Denis lamented, Dauphin (a nephew of Charles d’Albret) and de Bacqueville were not young hot-heads, but “veteran knights, renowned for their high birth and military experience, who had guided the kingdom with their wise counsel”; their deaths were among those most to be regretted because although they had argued against giving battle, they chose to fight in the mêlée, whatever the outcome, rather than retreat with dishonour.
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Louis de Bourbon, count of Vendôme, and Charles d’Ivry, the former ambassadors to England, were both taken prisoner, though the latter was reported dead, with his eldest son, another Charles d’Ivry, who had indeed met his end in the battle.
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As is already apparent from the examples of local men who died at Agincourt, the third most striking aspect of the French list of the dead is that so many of them came not just from the same class but from the same families. From the greatest to the least, almost every family in the north of France with any pretension to nobility of birth lost at least one relative, and in some particularly tragic cases whole families were wiped out. Even the king of France himself was not exempt. Charles VI lost seven of his closest blood relatives in the battle: Jean, duke of Alençon; Edouard, duke of Bar, his brother, Jean de Bar, viscount of Pulsaye, and their nephew, Robert, count of Marle; Charles d’Albret; and finally, perhaps most ironically, both the younger brothers of John the Fearless, Antoine, duke of Brabant, and Philippe, count of Nevers.
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Time and again, the roll-call records brothers or fathers and sons who died together on the field of Agincourt. There are so many examples of these that to list them would be overwhelming, but it is worth pointing out that it is not unusual to find two or even three brothers who lost their lives in the battle. Jehan de Noyelle, a chamberlain of the duke of Burgundy, was killed there with his brothers Pierre and Lancelot, as were Oudart, sire de Renty, and his brothers Foulques and Jean; three brothers of Regnault de Chartres, the archbishop of Reims and chancellor of France, were also among the dead.
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Worse still, Enguerrand de Gribauval and Marie Quiéret lost all four of their sons at Agincourt, and were left with only their daughter, Jeanne, as the sole survivor and heiress to the family estates near Abbeville. It is likely that this was not the end of their suffering, for the Quiérets also lost several other members of their family, including Hutin de Quiéret, who was killed, and Bohort Quiéret, sire de Heuchin, and Pierre Quiéret, sire de Ramecourt, who were both captured. A fourth Quiéret, Jean, escaped with his life.
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A similar tale of unimaginable loss was sustained by David de Rambures, master of the crossbowmen of France, who came from an ancient family of Ponthieu, which traced its ancestry back to a knight who had been on the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. A Burgundian by allegiance, he had been a member of the king’s council since 1402 and helped to negotiate the Leulinghen truces with England in 1413. As we have seen, he had also been very active in securing local defences in preparation for the English invasion. In 1412 he had embarked on a grand scheme to build a chateau de Rambures, which was to be the future family seat for himself and his heirs. The building work had to be temporarily suspended when de Rambures was summoned to help organise resistance to the English; it would be another half-century before it recommenced. Not only was David de Rambures himself killed at Agincourt, but three of his five sons, Jean, Hue and Philippe; a fourth son, another Jean, was a clergyman and therefore did not take part in the battle. The eldest son, André, survived but lost his inheritance, which was confiscated during the English conquest of Normandy, and it was not until after their withdrawal in 1450 that the family recovered the fledgling chateau and their lands. Like the de Gribauvals, the de Rambures brothers also lost members of their mother’s family, including Philippe d’Auxy, sire de Dampierre, and his son.
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Terrible though it must have been to lose two generations of a single family, there were those unfortunate enough to lose three. Robert, sire de Boissay, was one of the grand old men of French chivalry. He had been a companion of Bertrand du Guesclin, the simple Breton squire who rose to be constable of France and became a national hero for leading the French recovery after the defeat at Poitiers, and he was at du Guesclin’s side when the great man died during the siege of Châteauneuf-de-Randon in 1380. Nine years later, he was one of twenty-two knights who jousted at St Denis before the king, whose councillor and chamberlain he later became. Such was his reputation that, when he was arrested in 1404 and charged with various crimes committed in connection with a conflict of authority between the
prévôt
of Paris and the grand-master of the king’s household, he was entirely cleared of any wrongdoing: “the said Boissay, whose nobility is known to all, who has served the king so well, and who is wise, rich and an outstanding knight, so steadfast, . . . never accused or convicted of any crime.”
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Inevitably, de Boissay became caught up in the political struggle between the Armagnacs and Burgundians; he and his sons were among those Armagnacs who were violently seized from the dauphin’s household by the Cabochiens and thrown into prison during the revolt of 1413. Despite his advanced age, Robert de Boissay took up arms once again to resist the English invasion. He was killed at Agincourt, together with his two grandsons Colart and Charles. His son-in-law Thibaut de Chantemerle was captured at the battle and apparently never returned home,
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dying while still a prisoner in England. Like the de Rambures family, the de Boissays were dispossessed during Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, and it was many years later before another grandson Laurent de Boissay was able to regain the family lordship of Mesnières.
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Such stories could be told many times over, but one more is worth relating, if only because it gives us a rare glimpse of one of the women who lost so much in the battle. Perrette de la Rivière was the fourth child of Bureau de la Rivière, the friend and confidant of Charles V. Her two brothers Charles and Jacques both attached themselves to the Armagnac cause; Jacques, who was chamberlain to the dauphin, was arrested and imprisoned during the Cabochien revolt of 1413. A report that he had committed suicide in prison was circulated, but in fact he was murdered by the new Burgundian captain of Paris, who hung his body on a scaffold and put his decapitated head on public display. Perrette’s sister Jeanne, a celebrated beauty, married Jacques de Châtillon, the Armagnac admiral of France, and in 1409 Perrette herself married another Armagnac, Gui de la Roche-Guyon, a chamberlain of Charles VI, whose hereditary right it was to bear in battle the “Draco normannicus,” the dragon standard of the dukes of Normandy.
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At the battle of Agincourt, Perrette’s husband and her brothers-in-law Philippe de la Roche-Guyon and Jacques de Châtillon were all killed. Gui had been one of the leaders of the left wing, under the count of Vendôme, which suffered particularly heavy casualties. As bearer of the “Draco normannicus” it was his proud duty never to retreat before the English and it was understood that he would die in its defence. Jacques de Châtillon, who, with Raoul de Gaucourt, had been one of the founder members of the Order of the Prisoner’s Shackle, had taken his place as admiral of France in the vanguard and died there.
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Perrette’s brother, Charles de la Rivière, count of Dammartin, survived the carnage but there was little consolation in his escape: as one of the leaders of the rearguard, he was accused of having fled the field without ever having raised his sword.
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Bereft of almost all the adult males in her family, Perrette had now to take charge of her husband’s estates and bring up her four infants on her own. In her husband’s place, she became
châtelaine
of La Roche-Guyon, “the most inaccessible and the most impregnable of the castles of Normandy.” When Henry V invaded Normandy a second time, in 1417, one of the first places he occupied was Roncheville, which had belonged to the Roche-Guyons for half a century. As the other castles and towns of the duchy fell to him, La Roche-Guyon stood firm, Perrette having taken the precaution of restocking the fortress with men, arms and supplies. After the fall of Rouen in January 1419, Henry V could no longer afford to leave La Roche-Guyon in enemy hands and sent Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, to capture it.
Despite being one of Henry’s most able captains, the earl met with such decided resistance that he was unable to make any headway. Gui le Bouteiller, the turncoat captain of Rouen and “a person full of experience and resourcefulness,” then advised him to mine the fortress walls from the caves that riddled the neighbourhood. Having held out for several months, Perrette was forced to capitulate to save the lives of her garrison. According to the monk of St Denis, Gui le Bouteiller had his eyes on both the castle and its
châtelaine
: as a reward for his advice, Henry V granted him the castle and its dependencies in perpetuity for himself and his heirs, and gave his permission for him to marry Perrette. But both men had underestimated the courage and obstinacy of the lady herself. She flatly refused to marry le Bouteiller, not just because she considered him “a disloyal traitor” for taking the oath of allegiance to Henry V after the fall of Rouen, but because she had no intention of disinheriting her two sons by Gui de la Roche-Guyon, the elder of whom was not yet eight years old.
On 2 June 1419 she and her children, with all their moveable goods, left La Roche-Guyon under the king’s safe-conduct, and were brought before him at Mantes. Henry offered to pardon her rebellion against him, if she accepted Gui le Bouteiller as her husband and took the oath of allegiance to him as “the legitimate heir to the throne of France.” Once again, Perrette refused, declaring that ruin was less odious to her than marriage with “the most vile of traitors” and that she recognised only the dauphin as the true heir of France. Unusually, Henry V allowed this defiance to go unpunished and gave the redoubtable Perrette and her brood permission to leave Normandy unmolested and go wherever they pleased.
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In a macabre way, Perrette de la Rivière was more fortunate than some of the other women who lost husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in the battle. At least she knew they were dead, for the bodies of Gui de la Roche-Guyon and Jacques de Châtillon were among the very few to be identified by their servants and recovered from the field.
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For many women there was no such certainty, and for months afterwards they were left in limbo, not knowing the fate of their loved ones or whether they themselves were wives or widows. The emotional distress this caused was exacerbated by the financial problems that the complex situation created.
The sisters of Charles, sire de Noviant, for example, knew that he was killed in the battle because his body was found, but the fate of Jean, his brother and heir, was still not known at the beginning of December. No ransom demand had been received, but the possibility remained that he was still alive and a prisoner somewhere in England. Until Jean’s death was also confirmed, his sisters could not legally inherit the family estates. Though they were granted permission to administer and enjoy the use of them, they could not make any permanent settlement or disposal, and even the most basic transaction was complicated by the inability to pinpoint legal ownership. Ysabeau la Mareschalle, Charles’s childless widow, even had to look to her sisters-in-law to pay her widow’s dower.
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Worse still was the case of the unfortunate Jeanne de Gaillouvel, wife of Pierre de Hellenvillier, the
bailli
of Evreux, in Normandy. As late as 9 May 1416, almost six months after the battle, she had not yet discovered what had happened to her husband and she and her seven children were in severe financial straits. Pierre de Hellenvillier had held many of his lands, lordships and revenues in chief from the king, but the royal officials had taken them back into the king’s hands, saying that her husband must be dead. Jeanne had clung to the belief that her husband was still alive and made diligent efforts to learn news of him. “She heard some say that her husband was a prisoner of a knight of England called Cornwall, by which she hopes at the blessing of the Lord to have good and certain news soon, hopefully that her husband is living rather than dead.” It would, she pleaded, “be a very hard, costly and damaging thing,” if she were to be deprived of so much of her husband’s income on the mere assumption that he was dead. Jeanne’s request to be allowed to keep the revenues until she had certain news of her husband’s fate was temporarily granted, but it seems likely that it was a lost cause. Sir John Cornewaille was indeed an indefatigable collector of ransomable prisoners, but the name of Pierre de Hellenvillier does not occur among them. He probably lay where he had fallen, unrecognised on the field of Agincourt.
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