Agincourt (9 page)

The dauphin’s enthusiasm for making war on his father-in-law was not, apparently, shared by the royal military officers: the constable of France, Charles d’Albret, managed to break his leg and the admiral, Jacques de Châtillon, was similarly immobilised by a fortunately timed attack of gout. The first objective of the Armagnac army was to recover the towns of Compiègne and Soissons, which John the Fearless had seized on his way to Paris earlier in the year. Compiègne was taken relatively easily, but Soissons, where the Armagnac sympathies of the town were held in check by a Burgundian garrison in the castle, proved to be an altogether more bloody affair.

The garrison was commanded by Enguerrand de Bournonville, “an outstandingly good man-at-arms and a great captain,” who had carried out many “fine deeds of arms against the enemies of my lord of Burgundy.” He was a veteran of the battle of Othée in 1408, in which Burgundian forces had defeated the men of Liège, and of St Cloud in 1411, in which he had commanded a division against the Armagnacs. Bournonville had only a small force of men-at-arms from Picardy and Artois, reinforced with a group of English mercenaries, with which to defend both castle and town, but he refused to surrender. Faced with a besieging army and a hostile town, Bournonville carried out a heroic defence that ultimately proved futile. Soissons was taken by storm; Bournonville himself was captured and immediately executed. Though Burgundian partisans depicted this as a breach of chivalric conventions and an act of private vengeance by Jean, duke of Bourbon, whose bastard brother was killed by a crossbowman during the siege, Bournonville had been captured in arms against his king and was technically a rebel. According to the laws of war, therefore, his execution was entirely justified. His courage and loyalty on the scaffold nevertheless ensured him a deserved place in the history books. Bournonville asked for a drink and then declared, “Lord God, I ask your forgiveness for all my sins, and I thank you with all my heart that I die here for my true Lord. I ask you, gentlemen, to punish the traitors who have basely betrayed me, and I drink to my lord of Burgundy and to all his well-wishers, to the spite of all his enemies.”
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Bournonville’s execution was just the beginning. Despite the fact that some of the citizens of Soissons had colluded with the Armagnacs and actively assisted in its capture, the city was sacked with a savagery that became almost legendary. The men were slaughtered, the women, including nuns, were raped, and churches were ransacked for their treasure. The Armagnacs, it was said, behaved worse than Saracens, and more than one chronicler would conclude that the defeat at Agincourt, which was inflicted on the feast day of the cobbler-saints of Soissons the following year, was divine retribution for their crimes against the city. It would become a common refrain that nothing the English inflicted on the long-suffering inhabitants of northern France would exceed the miseries enacted upon them by their own fellow-countrymen.
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After the brutal sacking of Soissons, the Armagnacs swept into the heartlands of the duke of Burgundy’s territories and laid siege to Arras, “the shield, the wall and the defence of Western Flanders.”
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This time, however, they found a rock-solid defence and no traitors within the city’s walls. The siege petered out amidst a failure of money, supplies and will, exacerbated by an outbreak of dysentery, the scourge of besieging armies. But John the Fearless was sufficiently alarmed to be persuaded of the need to come to terms again. On 4 September 1414, acting through his brother Antoine, duke of Brabant, and his sister Margaret, wife of William, count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, he agreed the Peace of Arras, which was to end all military activity, offer an amnesty to those involved on both sides and prohibit all partisan behaviour. Neither side had any intention of keeping the treaty, but it allowed another temporary cessation of hostilities without loss of face for either party. Indeed, John the Fearless managed to avoid swearing to keep the peace in person for almost ten months and when he eventually did so, on 30 July 1415, it was so hedged about with conditions that it was almost meaningless.
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As John the Fearless was well aware, by the time he actually put pen to paper the Peace of Arras was an irrelevance. Just across the Channel, Henry V had gathered one of the biggest invasion fleets ever seen and was poised to set sail for France.

English military intervention in France had been likely ever since Henry V’s accession; after all, he had been intimately involved in the earl of Arundel’s expedition of 1411 and also, as the French mistakenly believed, in Clarence’s expedition the following year. What no one, except perhaps Henry himself, expected was that this time the English would not be invited in to assist one or other of the warring parties, but would invade independently, unannounced and entirely for their own ends. So intent were the French princes on pursuing their own private quarrels that this simply did not occur to them. They would pay dearly for their lack of imagination.

Henry had been waiting and preparing for just such an opportunity from the moment he ascended the throne. Although the establishment of law and order in his own kingdom was a priority, it was not the only one and would constantly vie for his attention with foreign policy. Unlike his father, Henry did not simply react to events on the continent but actively sought to influence them. The new king had two objectives: to neutralise those maritime nations that had traditionally allied with France against England and to protect English merchant shipping and coastal towns from attack.

The Spanish kingdom of Castile had consistently aided the French against the English, despite the fact that its co-regent, the widowed Queen Catherine, was Henry IV’s half-sister.
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Castilian galleys had frequently preyed on English shipping as it made its way to and from Aquitaine, and a small Castilian fleet under the command of “the unconquered knight” Don Pero Niño had made a series of raids on Bordeaux, Jersey and the south-west coast of England in the early 1400s, stealing ships, looting and burning the towns and killing their inhabitants. The new king now signed truces with Castile, appointing arbitrators to settle disputes and claims arising from both sides and holding out the prospect of a final peace in continuing negotiations. It was typical of Henry V that he did not allow breaches of the truces to go unchallenged, even if they were committed by his own side. As early as 17 May 1413 he ordered the release of two Spanish ships, the
Seynt Pere de Seynt Mayo en Biskay
and the
Saint Pere
, together with their cargoes, which had been captured and taken to Southampton by his own ship, the
Gabriel de la Tour
.
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This conciliatory policy achieved its short-term objective of preventing any Castilian intervention in English affairs.

“The greatest rovers and the greatest thieves,” according to a contemporary political song, were not the Spanish but the Bretons. Although geographically part of France, Brittany was virtually an independent state, with its own administrative and judicial systems, a small standing army and its own currency. For centuries the duchy had enjoyed close political ties with England. Henry II’s son Geoffrey had been count of Brittany in the twelfth century, young Breton princes had been brought up in the English royal household in the thirteenth century, English soldiers and mercenaries had played a decisive role in the Breton civil wars of the fourteenth century and as recently as 1403 Henry IV had married Joan of Navarre, the widow of Jean V, duke of Brittany. Despite these close links and English dependence on the importation of salt from Bourgneuf Bay,
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relations between the merchants and seamen of the two nations had been distinctly adversarial. The rich pickings to be had from the commercial shipping ploughing regularly up and down the Channel were a great temptation to Breton and Devonshire pirates and the retaliatory seizure of ships and cargoes by both sides in pursuance of unpaid debts threatened to spiral out of control.

Henry V was determined to clamp down on piracy. Negotiations with the duke of Brittany resulted in January 1414 in a renewal and extension of the ten-year truce that had been agreed two years earlier. Keepers and enforcers of the truce were appointed on either side, with the result that English prisoners from London, Fowey and Calais were released and English ships from Bridgewater, Exeter, Saltash, Bristol and Lowestoft were returned, as were Breton ships held at Hamble, Fowey, Winchelsea and Rye.
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This was all standard practice, but Henry V was prepared to go a stage further in demonstrating his determination to enforce the treaty. In Devon alone, some 150 indictments for piracy were brought and around twenty ship-owners were charged. Among them were some of the most important and influential people in the county, including three former mayors of Dartmouth, all of whom had sat as Members of Parliament, and one of whom was deputy admiral for Devon. Like those convicted of criminal offences in the shires, they would also be given a second chance. They were allowed to sue for pardon and, with a nice irony, at least one would later lend his king an ex-pirate vessel, the
Craccher
, to patrol and help safeguard the seas during his campaigns in France.
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The unusual vigour with which Henry prosecuted those individuals guilty of breaking his truces was a clear indication of the depth of his commitment to keeping the peace with his maritime neighbours,
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but his reasoning was not entirely altruistic. The keeping of the seas was not just a matter of preserving order: it could have serious diplomatic consequences. Breaches of truces and safe-conducts threatened good relations with the Bretons, the Castilians and the Flemish which he needed to cultivate in the hope of detaching them from their traditional alliances with France. The newly negotiated truces with Brittany provided an excuse for the inclusion of clauses in which the duke unilaterally agreed not to receive or help any English traitors, exiles or pirates, and, more significantly, not to receive or help any armed enemies of Henry V, nor to allow any of his own subjects to join the king’s enemies. These undertakings would have serious implications for the role of Brittany during the Agincourt campaign.
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The same thinking guided Henry’s negotiations with the duke of Burgundy, which were intimately connected with his separate discussions with the king of France and the Armagnacs. The greater significance of the relationship with Burgundy was reflected in Henry’s choice of ambassadors. Instead of the relatively humble knights and clerks who had negotiated the truces with Castile and Brittany, he employed a glittering array of some of the most eminent in the land. Richard, earl of Warwick, and Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, were both veterans of important diplomatic embassies abroad, Henry Chichele, the future archbishop of Canterbury, was an expert in civil law and drafting treaties, and William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, was lieutenant of Calais. All were tried and trusted members of the king’s inner circle, and each of them brought experience and special skills to the negotiating table.

That such high-powered envoys should be sent to Calais merely to arbitrate and settle any disputes arising from the existing truces between England and Flanders, as they were nominally empowered to do, aroused suspicion. The fact that the English envoys chose to spend a considerable amount of time in the duke of Burgundy’s company—and that he actually paid out more than seven hundred pounds for them to travel between Calais and Bruges—added to the rumours. The Armagnacs now in control of Paris believed that an alliance had already been concluded between the duke and the English. If any secret deal was reached, however, there is no official record of it, though at least one contemporary chronicler got wind of discussions about a proposed marriage between Henry and one of the duke’s daughters.
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In fact, while English commercial interests in Flanders were a powerful argument for siding with John the Fearless, Henry was not yet ready to commit himself to a formal alliance with either party. The short-term aim of his policy towards France was simple, even though his methods were not: he wanted to exploit the divisions between Burgundians and Armagnacs to obtain the best possible outcome for himself. In this he was not very different from his predecessors, except that the focus of their attention since the 1370s had always been Aquitaine. Henry was more ambitious. When his ambassadors met those of the king of France at Leulinghen, near Boulogne, in September 1413, they began a lengthy lecture on Edward III’s claim to the throne of France and the unfulfilled terms of the Treaty of Brétigny. They even produced a selection of “most beautiful and notable books” to back up their demands with documentary evidence. (One can see the lawyer Chichele’s guiding hand in this reliance on historical text.) The French responded by quoting Salic Law and denying that the kings of England were even legitimate dukes of Aquitaine, let alone kings of France. In the stalemate that followed, all that could be agreed was a temporary truce to last for eight months.
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An interesting side-light on these abortive negotiations was the English insistence that all the conversations and subsequent documentation should be conducted in Latin, even though French was the customary language of diplomacy. Already, it would seem, the English were asserting their Anglo-Saxon superiority and pretending that they did not understand French.

Before the year was out, a batch of Armagnac ambassadors, headed by Guillaume Boisratier, archbishop of Bourges, and Charles d’Albret, constable of France, had arrived in London. This time, the English appeared more conciliatory and a new truce was agreed to last for one year from 2 February 1414 to 2 February 1415. Although the English had previously insisted on their right to help their own allies despite the truces—which the alarmed Armagnacs must have interpreted as evidence of a secret arrangement with the Burgundians—they now agreed that all the allies and subjects of England and France should also be bound by these agreements. (The list included the duke of Brittany and also the duke of Burgundy’s subjects, the count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, and the duke of Brabant, but not the duke of Burgundy himself.) The spat over whether the proceedings should be recorded in Latin or French was repeated but resolved with the decision that, in future, all treaties between the two nations should be in both languages.
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