Agincourt (8 page)

Henry was also prepared to intervene personally to resolve disputes before they spiralled out of control. A revealing anecdote in an English chronicle proves that it was a far more terrifying experience to have to answer to the king in person than to his courts. Two feuding knights from Yorkshire and Lancashire were ordered before the king when he was just sitting down to dinner. Whose men are you? he asked them. Yours, they replied. And whose men had they raised to fight in their quarrel? Yours, they replied again. “& what authority or comaundement had ye, to raise up my men or my peeple, to fyght & slay eache othyr for your quarel?” Henry demanded, adding that “in this ye are worthy to die.” Unable to answer, the two knights humbly begged his pardon. Henry then swore “by the feith that he owed to God and to Seint George” that if they could not resolve their quarrel before he had finished his dish of oysters, “they should be hanged both two.” Faced with such a choice, the knights were immediately persuaded to settle their differences, but they were not yet off the hook. The king swore his favourite oath again and told them that if they, or any other lord within or without his realm “whatsomeever they were,” ever caused any insurrection or death of his subjects again, “they should die, accordyng to the lawe.”
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By sheer force of personality, Henry succeeded in establishing and keeping the king’s peace to a degree that was unprecedented, especially for a monarch who spent much of his reign absent from his kingdom. In doing so, he earned himself a reputation that extended far beyond the shores of England and even eclipsed his military successes in contemporary eyes. “He was a prince of justice, not only in himself, for the sake of example, but also towards others, according to equity and right,” wrote the Burgundian chronicler, Georges Chastellain; “he upheld no one through favour, nor did he allow wrong to go unpunished out of kinship.”
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Given Henry’s determination to promote reconciliation and restore peace and order to the country, it is ironic that the first serious challenge to his authority came not from one of his father’s enemies but from a trusted member of his own household. Sir John Oldcastle was a veteran of the Welsh wars who had served as a Member of Parliament for, and sheriff of, his home county of Herefordshire. It is a measure of Henry’s confidence in him that in 1411 Oldcastle had been chosen as one of the leaders of Arundel’s expedition to France to aid the Burgundians.
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Like many of the wealthy, literate and intelligent knights attached to the royal court under Richard II and Henry IV, Oldcastle had strong Lollard sympathies, and it was these that brought him into trouble. Lollardy was a precursor of the Protestant faith. Its roots lay in anticlericalism—anger and frustration at the wealth and privileges enjoyed by the Church and the inadequacy and corruption of its ministers—which had been strengthened by the growth in literacy among the gentry and urban middle classes. Knights, esquires, merchants, tradesmen and their wives who were capable of reading their own Bibles and, increasingly, owned or had access to a copy in English, were inclined to be more critical of the Church’s failure to measure up to the apostolic standards of the New Testament. More importantly, instead of simply looking to reform the Church, they were also starting to develop an alternative theology that made the Bible the sole authority for the Christian faith, rather than the Church and its hierarchy. They began to question, and even to deny, the central teachings of the Church. The most extreme among them believed that the Church had no valid role to play as an intermediary between the individual and God. They therefore rejected the seven sacraments performed by priests (baptism, confession, eucharist, confirmation, marriage, ordination and extreme unction) and anything which relied on the intercession of saints, such as praying to them, venerating their images or even going on pilgrimage. In the forthright words of Hawisia Mone, a convicted Lollard in the diocese of Norwich, going on pilgrimage served no purpose except to enrich priests “that be too riche and to make gay tapsters and proude ostelers.” On the evidence of his
Canterbury Tales
, one feels that Chaucer might not have entirely disagreed with this statement.
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The problem with identifying Lollardy as heresy was that it included many shades of opinion, not all of which fell outside the pale of orthodoxy. Even the new king’s loyalty to the Church could not be taken for granted. His grandfather, John of Gaunt, had been an early patron of John Wycliffe, the Oxford theologian who is regarded as the father of English Lollardy, and employed him to write tracts attacking papal supremacy and clerical immunity from taxation. The Lollards themselves believed that they had enjoyed the support of Henry IV, and Thomas, duke of Clarence, owned a copy of the Wycliffite Bible.
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Oldcastle’s heretical views were not in doubt. He was the “principal receiver, patron, protector, and defender” of Lollardy in England and was in touch with similar movements abroad: he had even offered the military support of his own followers to King Wenceslaus, who was carrying out a programme of seizure of Church lands in Bohemia.
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Tried and convicted of heresy, Oldcastle refused to renounce his faith and was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. At the king’s express request, a stay of execution was granted so that Henry could try to persuade his friend to submit, but before the forty days’ grace had elapsed, Oldcastle escaped from the Tower of London.
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It was at this point that what should have been a purely religious affair became a political one. Instead of going into hiding or fleeing abroad, Oldcastle decided to stage a
coup d’état
.
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The plot was to capture the king and his brothers by disguising himself and a group of his fellow conspirators as mummers for the annual Twelfth Night celebrations at Eltham Palace in January 1414. At the same time, Lollards from all over the country were to gather in St Giles’s Field, just outside the city gates, ready to take London by force. These plans were foiled by Henry’s spies, who discovered the plot and forewarned the king. (They, and two informers, were swiftly and generously rewarded by the king.)
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The court removed from Eltham and as the little bands of Lollards, armed with swords and bows, drifted into St Giles’s Field from as far away as Leicestershire and Derby, they were ambushed and overpowered. Oldcastle’s predictions that one hundred thousand men would rally to his cause were hopelessly exaggerated. Some seventy or eighty were captured, of whom forty-five were promptly executed as traitors; significantly, only seven were burnt as heretics.

It rapidly became apparent that Oldcastle’s revolt had little popular support, and having reacted swiftly and harshly to the initial threat Henry was now prepared to be merciful to the individuals involved. On 28 March 1414 he issued a general pardon to all rebels who submitted before Midsummer and in the following December he extended this to include those still in prison and even to Oldcastle himself, who had escaped capture and gone into hiding.
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Oldcastle’s revolt had precisely the opposite effect to the one that he had intended. Lollardy did not become a national state-endorsed religion, nor could it be any longer regarded as purely a Church affair that was irrelevant to the secular authorities. Instead, it had now become synonymous with treason and rebellion. One of the first acts passed by the next parliament which met at Leicester in 1414, just after the revolt, required all royal officials, from the chancellor right down to the king’s bailiffs, to investigate heresy and assist the ecclesiastical courts in bringing Lollards to justice. This resulted in a significant increase in heresy trials, convictions and burnings at the stake. Lollardy did not die out altogether, but it was disgraced, discredited and driven deeper underground.
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The crushing of Oldcastle’s revolt marked the victory of orthodoxy over heterodoxy. It was also a personal triumph for Henry V. He had survived an attempted coup by acting decisively, and in the process he had placed the Church under an obligation to himself which he did not hesitate to call in. The Agincourt campaign would be financed from the coffers of the English clergy and supported by the Church’s prayers, blessings and propaganda. The new king had demonstrably fulfilled his coronation oath to defend the Church and would continue to do so. Even Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, was forced to admit (perhaps through gritted teeth) that Henry V was “the most Christian king in Christ, our most noble king, the zealous supporter of the laws of Christ.”
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It was an accolade that would be repeatedly bestowed by many contemporaries and it was a significant one: it was yet another title that Henry V had taken from the king of France.
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CHAPTER FOUR

THE DIPLOMATIC EFFORT

Henry V had been king of England for only a few weeks when there was a dramatic turn of events in France. The uneasy peace that had existed between Armagnacs and Burgundians since the previous autumn exploded in the sort of mob violence which would be a hallmark of the French Revolution in the 1790s. On 28 April 1413 a Parisian rabble burst into the dauphin’s palace, the Hôtel de Guienne, overcame his guards and seized the dauphin himself. Not long afterwards the same fate befell his parents, and the king, again in a scene that strikingly anticipated the 1790s, was forced to put on the revolutionary emblem, the white hood.
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The revolt was led by one Simon Caboche, who, aptly enough, was a butcher by trade. It rapidly emerged that like most Parisians he was also a Burgundian by sympathy. All the Armagnacs who held senior positions in the royal households, including Edouard, duke of Bar, Louis, duke of Bavaria (who was the queen’s brother), and thirteen or fourteen of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, were thrown into prison; some were murdered, others were executed, all were replaced by Burgundians. It was, as one Burgundian sympathiser coolly remarked, the best thing that had happened in Paris for the past twenty years.
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John the Fearless may have instigated these events because he felt he was losing control of his sixteen-year-old son-in-law, the dauphin, who was showing increasing signs of independence and had just dismissed his Burgundian chancellor. If he did, he was soon to reap the whirlwind. The dauphin bitterly resented the public humiliation that he had been forced to endure and determined to ally himself more firmly with the Armagnacs. And in May, his father, Charles VI, unexpectedly recovered his sanity. It was only a temporary reprieve, but it was enough to allow him to take advantage of a reaction against the bloodiness of the Cabochien coup to impose an equally temporary peace.
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By August, it was clear that the Armagnacs, with the help of the dauphin, were regaining control of Paris. Their device, or badge, emblazoned with the words “the right way,” began to reappear throughout the city and was again worn openly on their supporters’ clothing. The dauphin ordered the arrest of some of the most prominent Cabochiens and began replacing Burgundian officials with Armagnacs once more. In the face of growing rumours that John the Fearless himself would be seized and made to stand trial for the murder of Louis d’Orléans, the duke decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took flight for Flanders. He did so without seeking the king’s permission to leave, as he was obliged to do, and, as his chancellor wrote with barely disguised pique to the duchess, “without telling me or his other officials, whom he has left in this town you can imagine in what peril.”
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For the moment, the Armagnacs enjoyed the sweet taste of victory again. Charles, duke of Orléans, made a triumphal entry into Paris, riding side by side with the dukes of Anjou and Bourbon and the count of Alençon. They were joined a little later by the two Gascons who had proved such a thorn in the side of the English in Aquitaine, Charles d’Orléans’ father-in-law, Bernard, count of Armagnac, and Charles d’Albret, who was now restored to his post as constable of France. Although peace was officially proclaimed, all Paris was full of armed men, and every single official appointed by the duke of Burgundy was ousted and replaced by an Armagnac.
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On 8 February 1414 John the Fearless appeared before the gates of Paris at the head of a large army. He claimed that he had come at the dauphin’s request and flourished, as proof, letters from his son-in-law begging to be rescued from the Armagnacs. The letters were forgeries but they fooled most contemporary chroniclers (and some later historians). They did not, however, spark the uprising in Paris that the duke needed to gain entry to the city. Even though the terrified citizens, unable to go out to work in the fields as they usually did, were struck down with a fever and cough so severe that men were made impotent and pregnant women aborted, the gates of Paris remained firmly shut against him. After two weeks of frustration, the duke abandoned the siege and decamped back to Arras.
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Flushed with this success, the Armagnacs decided to take the war out to the enemy. The king had once more relapsed into a madness that was probably more comfortable than the insanity going on around him. Royal letters were therefore issued in his name, laying open the way for the prosecution of Louis d’Orléans’ murderer, and on 2 March 1414 war was declared on the duke of Burgundy. The Armagnacs marched out of Paris, taking with them the king and the dauphin.

With the king, who was once more wearing the badge of the Armagnacs, went the oriflamme,
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the sacred standard of France, which was only ever carried when the king himself was present in battle. With the dauphin, who was “in a jovial mood,” went “a handsome standard covered in beaten gold and adorned with a K, a swan [
cigne
] and an L,” a punning reference to La Cassinelle, a very beautiful girl in the queen’s household, who was “as good-natured as she was good-looking,” and with whom the dauphin was passionately in love. Since being “good-natured” was a medieval euphemism for being of easy virtue, the dauphin’s jovial mood is easily explained. What is more, by riding out under a device referring to his mistress he was able to combine paying lip-service to the chivalric ideal of fighting for the love of a woman with the altogether more satisfying notion that, in doing so, he was also insulting both his wife and his father-in-law. (The duke of Burgundy did not have much luck with his sons-in-law. Another daughter, Catherine, who had been offered as a potential bride to both Philippe d’Orléans [Charles’s younger brother] and Henry V of England, was married at the age of ten to the son of Louis, duke of Anjou, and sent to live at the Angevin court. Three years later, in the wake of John the Fearless’s flight from Paris and having spent all the dowry she brought with her, the duke of Anjou decided to join the Armagnacs. Catherine was therefore surplus to requirements and was unceremoniously and humiliatingly returned to her father “like a pauper.” As her husband was even younger than she was, it was likely that the marriage was unconsummated and therefore not legally binding, but it made her position difficult with regard to future marriages. Though she bore the family burden of being extremely ugly—a Burgundian would be punished for describing her and her sister as looking like a couple of baby owls without feathers—her repudiation was an extreme and unusual act of cruelty aimed at her father, rather than herself. The innocent victim of these politically motivated posturings was said to have died of grief and shame soon afterwards; it was certainly true that she never remarried.)
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