Agincourt (49 page)

Henry’s clerical subjects were just as eager to acclaim his achievement and prove their loyalty. The northern convocation voted him a tax of one-tenth on the value of all benefices in that province and the wealthier southern convocation voted him two. Important steps were also taken to ensure that Henry’s victory could not be forgotten or passed over. At the king’s personal request, Henry Chichele, the archbishop of Canterbury, decreed that henceforth 23 April, the feast of St George, “the special patron and protector of the [English] nation . . . by whose intervention, we unhesitatingly believe, the army of the English nation is directed against enemy attacks in time of wars,” was to become a double festival in the Church calendar. This meant that, like other saints’ days, it would remain a public holiday but additionally it would now become a day when people ought to go to church, as they did at Christmas. Less well known than this enhancement of the status of England’s patron saint was a similar order enforcing the holding of public holidays on the festivals of three Welsh saints, Winifred, David and Chad. This was a gracious and politically astute acknowledgement of the role played by the Welsh archers and their patron saints in achieving the victory of Agincourt.
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Henry and his archbishop also ensured that the anniversary of the battle would be publicly celebrated with special masses and Church services. Since the cobbler saints of Soissons, Crispin and Crispinian had failed to exert themselves on behalf of the French at Agincourt and therefore might be considered to have given their blessing to their opponents, their feast day was shamelessly appropriated by the English. The king himself had immediately incorporated a mass in their honour into his daily religious observance, but as the preparations for a second campaign began the archbishop now ordained that their feast should be celebrated with increased reverence throughout the realm. Three masses were to be dedicated to each of the two saints on every anniversary of the battle, together with a further three in honour of the very English St John of Beverley.
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The shrine of St John at Beverley Minster in Yorkshire had been a centre of pilgrimage since Anglo-Saxon times and his banner, like the French oriflamme, had been carried into battle by Yorkshire recruits to the royal army since 1138. (It is not known whether it accompanied Henry V to France in 1415.) In more recent years (perhaps to counterbalance a growing cult at York surrounding Archbishop Scrope, who had been executed by Henry IV in 1405 for his part in the Percy rebellion and was therefore revered by those hostile to the new king), St John, himself a former bishop of York, had been promoted as a Lancastrian patron. His shrine was said to have exuded holy oil when Henry IV landed in England to usurp Richard’s throne, a miracle which, Archbishop Chichele informed convocation, had been repeated even more spectacularly on 25 October during the very hours that the battle of Agincourt was raging. As that day also just happened to be the Feast of St John’s Translation, it was self-evident that the saint had striven on behalf of the English and should be venerated accordingly.
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Agincourt had become part of the English Church calendar and no one in England or Wales would be allowed to forget either the anniversary of the battle or the part that God and his saints had played in securing their victory.

Significantly, these innovations were not introduced in the immediate heady aftermath of victory but months later, in the midst of preparations for a second campaign whose objective was no less than the reconquest of Normandy. Instead of being purely pious acts of gratitude and thanksgiving for past support, they therefore became important tools in the propaganda war preceding a far more ambitious and long-term campaign. The king’s subjects were not merely being reminded that God and his saints favoured their cause, but also being taught that it was their religious duty, as it was the king’s, to carry out the divine plan to recover England’s lost rights and inheritances.

The English chaplain’s eyewitness account of the Agincourt campaign was also part of this propaganda offensive. Written in the winter months preceding the launch of the second expedition in July 1417, it portrayed Henry as the humble instrument of God’s will and his victory as the culmination of God’s plan. It ended with a prayer for the success of the new campaign that was nothing short of a rallying cry to the king’s own subjects and his allies in Europe. And may God of His most merciful goodness grant that, just as our king, under His protection and by His judgement in respect of the enemies of his crown, has already triumphed twice, so may he triumph yet a third time, to the end that the two Swords, the sword of the French and the sword of England, may return to the rightful government of a single ruler, cease from their own destruction, and turn as soon as possible against the unsubdued and bloody faces of the heathen.
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The chaplain’s
Gesta Henrici Quinti
has been aptly described by its editors as both “an illustration and a justification” of Henry’s aims as king. It follows the party line to such an extent that it frequently echoes the arguments and phraseology of the official documents by which Henry sought to woo other rulers into supporting his war in France. The idea that a united England and France could lead the way for a new crusade, for instance, was one that appealed to Henry personally, but also had extra resonance at this particular time because the council of Constance was still in session. The principal objectives of this gathering of clerical and lay representatives from all over Europe were to remove the rival claimants to the papacy from office and end the thirty-year schism that had caused so much damage to the Church.
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Christian unity was the theme of the moment. The council also provided Henry with a ready-made forum in which to make his case. Before embarking on the Agincourt campaign, and again when preparing for his conquest of Normandy, he circulated copies of the treaties of Brétigny and Bourges, together with transcripts of the diplomatic negotiations that had taken place in his own reign, “that all Christendom might know what great acts of injustice the French in their duplicity had inflicted on him.” In February 1416 letters written under the privy seal on “affairs intimately concerning the king” were also dispatched to the Emperor Sigismund and various German dukes, earls and lords. Henry knew the value of choosing an appropriate messenger and it was no coincidence that the person appointed to carry those letters through Europe was the man who held the newly created post of Agincourt herald.
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Although Henry’s intention to invade France for a second time had been announced even before his return from his first campaign, it would take him eighteen months to complete his preparations. In this respect, the organisation for the Agincourt campaign provided a blueprint for the much larger operation that would culminate in the invasion of Normandy in 1417. It was particularly important to the king that he had the continuing support of those who had rallied to his banner two years earlier: in the build-up to renewed war, he could not afford to have the veterans of Agincourt feel disappointed or aggrieved. Henry was never lavish in the granting of titles, but two loyal servants received promotions for their good service. Sir John Holland, who had served with a courage and distinction beyond his years, was rewarded by having the final vestiges of his father’s attainder for treason swept away.
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Within a year of Agincourt, he had been restored by the king’s grace to the title of earl of Huntingdon, been made a Knight of the Garter and been appointed lieutenant of the fleet. Henry’s confidence in him would be amply repaid by decades of loyal and successful military service as one of the chief defenders of English interests in France. The king’s half-uncle Sir Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, who had commanded the fleet during the invasion and held Harfleur, despite French attempts to retake it in 1416, was elevated to the rank of duke of Exeter.
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There was bureaucracy to conquer, too. The payment of wages was a potential bone of contention between the king and his soldiers because the accounting process was unavoidably complex. According to the terms of the indentures of service, all wages were supposed to have been paid quarterly in advance, but the situation was complicated by the fact that the first half of the first payment was made before the expedition set sail and its objective had been secret. The king had therefore paid his retinue leaders at the Gascon rates, which were half as much again as those for France. Their payments for the second half of the first quarter therefore had to be adjusted accordingly. To add to the confusion, jewels and plate, rather than cash, had been pledged for the payment of the second quarter’s wages, and most of the army had returned to England before the end of that quarter and at different times. The retinue leaders had not only paid their men for the first quarter, but had also, in most cases, advanced the wages due for the second quarter in cash from their own funds. To recoup this money, the leaders had to present their paperwork at the exchequer. By this means, the king’s clerks could compare the numbers they had promised in the original indentures against the actual numbers they had produced, as revealed by the muster lists drawn up at various points in the campaign and by the official lists of the sick who had received permission to return home from Harfleur. Together with the certified lists drawn up by each captain, noting who had been killed, captured, fallen sick or left behind in the garrison of Harfleur, this evidence theoretically made it possible to work out the wage bill proportionately to the length of service performed.
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In order to settle the thorny question of how this could all be arranged fairly and amicably, the king held a meeting in his secret chamber at the Tower of London with his treasurer, the keeper of the privy seal, the archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Walter Hungerford. In answer to a series of questions put to him on behalf of the exchequer, the king decided to ignore the different dates at which the retinues had mustered and disbanded and fix the dates for the start and end of the campaign at 6 July and 24 November 1415. This created an accounting period of 140 days, which conveniently meant that each man-at-arms would receive a round £7 and each archer £3 10s for his services on the campaign. All those who had been killed, died or fell sick and returned home (but only so long as they did so with the royal licence) during the first quarter were to receive their wages for the whole of that quarter. Similarly, all those who had been killed at the battle of Agincourt were to be paid in full as if they had taken part in the entire campaign. The only ones not to receive wages were those who had mustered in England but had been left behind for lack of shipping.
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Though it is tempting to see these rulings as an attempt to impose a relatively simple accounting solution to a complex financial problem, there is no doubt that the king’s decisions were also dictated by a wish to be generous to those who had served him well and, in some cases, had paid for it with their lives.

Still, those who had indented to serve directly with the king soon discovered that they could not always expect full and prompt repayment of the money they had expended in his service. Eight years after the battle and a year after Henry V himself had died, Sir John Holland, despite being high in the king’s favour, was still owed £8158 (the equivalent of $5,437,633 today) for wages for the Agincourt campaign. And he was by no means alone. In 1427, for example, the duke of Gloucester and the earl of Salisbury petitioned Parliament, claiming that they had suffered “very great personal loss and damage” because they had paid their men in full for the whole of the second quarter, whereas the Exchequer had knocked forty-eight days’ pay off their own payments in line with the king’s decision that the campaign had ended early.
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In other words, they were having to stand the loss themselves.

Although it was expected that the higher nobility would, to a certain extent, bankroll the king’s military campaigns, those lower down the social scale also sometimes found themselves with unpaid wage bills. Sir Thomas Strickland, who carried the banner of St George at Agincourt and served continuously in France from 1417 to 1419, claimed to have received no wages at all, except for the first half-year, and had therefore sold off the silverware that the king had given him in pledge to help fund his continuing military service. In 1424 he petitioned, “for the sake of God, and as an act of charity,” that he should be allowed the £14 4s 101/4d value of the silver against the arrears he was owed, a plea that was granted. Ten years later, the widow of John Clyff similarly claimed for £33 6s in outstanding wages due to him and his company of seventeen minstrels for the Agincourt campaign. Unlike Strickland, she had returned the king’s jewels, which were valued at more than £53, to the crown; nevertheless, she received only £10 towards her claim.
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The problem extended further down the chain of command, especially when it was unclear who was ultimately responsible for paying wages. The leader of each retinue was legally bound by the terms of the indentures he had signed with his men to pay them their due, but what of those companies who, through no fault of their own, had lost their leaders before the campaign began? The men who had indented to serve with Richard, earl of Cambridge, and Henry, Lord Scrope, for instance, had no redress against the estates of their executed leaders because these had been forfeited to the crown. The difficulty of establishing responsibility for payment was illustrated by the case of Henry Inglose, a man-at-arms who had indented to serve with Sir John Tiptoft. In March 1417 Inglose was driven to sue Tiptoft in the Court of Chivalry, accusing him of having refused to pay him the wages due to himself and his men for the Agincourt campaign “against his own express promise and against the whole noble custom of arms.” On the face of it, relying on the indentures, Tiptoft’s obligation was clear. The difficulty arose because, having recruited his thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers, Tiptoft was then appointed seneschal of Aquitaine and departed for Bordeaux before the campaign began. Henry Inglose, Sir John Fastolf and others of his retinue did not go with him but were ordered by the king to join his invasion of France. Who, then, was responsible for paying their wages? Inglose could have pursued his case through the ordinary courts but chose instead to go before the Court of Chivalry, which was presided over by the constable and marshal of England and had jurisdiction over all disputes concerning arms. Although this choice was probably determined by the technical nature of the case, Inglose was taking a substantial personal risk: if he was unable to prove his case by means of witnesses and evidence, the constable could compel him to do so in person by fighting a judicial duel to the death.
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