Henry V as Warlord (12 page)

Munitions and provisions required organization on a truly massive scale. The king’s experience of planning such sieges as that of Aberystwyth must have been invaluable. He spent many weeks during the summer of 1415 at Porchester Castle, on the coast near the embarkation point of Southampton, directing operations. The munitions included siege engines (towers, scaling ladders and battering-rams), gunpowder and its ingredients, stone shot, bow staves packed in canvas, arrows in tuns, bow strings, collapsible boats of wood and greased leather, mining tools, masons, armourers and all the other craftsmen. Provisions included bread, dried fish, salted meat, flour, beans, cheese and ale, which came into the depots from all over England. To ensure that they had as much fresh meat as possible, cattle, sheep and pigs were driven from as far away as Yorkshire and the West Country. Clothing and shoes were also collected at the depots. All this had to be loaded onto the ships. In addition there were vast numbers of horses to feed and water.
⁸

Some sources say that the invasion fleet was as large as 1,500 vessels, though no doubt many were very small craft indeed. The transports were either hired – including 700 from the Low Countries – or requisitioned with their masters by the royal admirals. They also press-ganged men to crew them. Some of the vessels were adapted for carrying horses, with doors cut in their sides and stalls constructed by using hurdles as partitions. The ships were also fitted for combat, having large bridges or ‘castles’ built fore and aft from which the archers could shoot down on attackers. Their unfortunate owners lost a great deal of money, having their cargoes unloaded compulsorily and being paid only a small sum for each quarter year that their vessels were in the king’s service. They came from the West Country, from the Cinque Ports, from East Anglia, from the North Sea ports. It took three days to assemble such an armada, filling Southampton Water and every small bay and inlet down the coast as far as Gosport.

The cog
   This clinker-built cog is a small example of the ships which carried Henry V’s troops. A few were as large as 1000 tons and had doors cut in their hulls to facilitate the transport of horses.

Ships were also needed to patrol and guard the sea, so that the French would be unable to intercept the invasion. These were the ‘King’s Ships’ – Henry’s navy, which was one of his most remarkable achievements. When he came to the throne there were seven King’s Ships; by 1415 there were fifteen and by 1417 there would be thirty-four. William Catton was appointed Keeper of the King’s Ships in July 1413. Early in the following year a wealthy Southampton merchant, William Soper, was engaged to assist him. A programme of buying and building vessels began at once. Soper built a dock and a store house at Southampton, and at nearby Hamble he constructed other storehouses, together with fortified moorings where the ships could shelter from enemy raiders. As well as building ships he refitted them. Under his direction the port grew into a full-scale naval base. War at sea was basically an extension of war on land and warships were no more than fighting troop carriers. Those which carried the largest complement of archers and men-at-arms were considered the most formidable. Accordingly, Soper’s priority was to provide the king with vessels of between 500 and 1000 tons – a vast size at the time – with two masts.

Even so, most of Henry’s warships in 1415 were those long-forgotten craft, ballingers. The French, and to a lesser extent the English, had tried using galleys in the Channel but being designed for the Mediterranean they were ill-suited to such choppy water. The ballinger was apparently developed by the English during the late fourteenth century as an answer to the galley. It was a big clinker-built sailing barge of around fifty tons, perfectly at home in English waters, while being additionally equipped with up to fifty oars. Shallow draughted, it could penetrate into the narrowest anchorages or up rivers without difficulty. It was also ideal for cross-Channel raids or privateering – becalmed French merchantmen were at its mercy. It was manned by forty sailors, ten men-at-arms and ten archers. By 1415 the king possessed ten of these versatile craft. They and his big sailing ships ensured that his invasion was untroubled by enemy warships.
⁹

For all his confidence in his ‘right’, Henry was far from sure that he would return from his adventure, that God would give judgement in his favour. He had a will drafted, in which he trusts that he will be received into Abraham’s bosom through the prayers of the Virgin, the saints and his special patron, John of Bridlington. It contains directions for his burial in Westminster Abbey and many bequests – though interestingly Clarence is left nothing. He signed it at Winchester on 24 July, writing on it in English; ‘This is my last will, subscribed with my own hand, R.H. Jesu Mercy and Gramercy Ladie Marle help.’

The armada to recover the king’s ‘right’ set sail on the fine and sunny afternoon of Sunday 11 August. Henry had been on board the
Trinity Royal
since the day before, but the fleet was delayed by three ships catching fire and burning down to the water line – which was widely regarded as a sinister omen. However, the chaplain who wrote the
Gesta
and was on board with the king remembers that, ‘As we were leaving the coast of the Isle of Wight behind, swans were seen swimming about among the fleet, and they were spoken of as a happy augury’.
¹⁰
No one except Henry and his principal commanders knew the armada’s destination save that it was somewhere in France – some of his troops may well have thought they were bound for Guyenne. His security was almost modern in its thoroughness.

Henry V had never had any intention of securing his inheritance across the Channel by peaceful means. He had employed diplomacy purely to discredit French sincerity in the eyes of the world. Whatever the cost, he wanted war – a war which would justify the House of Lancaster’s deposition of Richard II and disinheritance of the Earl of March. If his ‘right’ in France should be confirmed by God giving him the victory in battle, such a victory would simultaneously establish his right to the throne of England beyond all dispute. As the
Gesta
makes clear, he was hastening ‘to seek a ruling from the supreme judge’.

VI

‘
Our Town of Harfleur
’

‘We have many times, and in many ways, sought peace … And well considering that the effect of Our wars are the deaths of men, destruction of countries, lamentations of women and children, and so many general evils … We are induced to seek diligently for all possible means to avoid the above-mentioned evils, and to acquire the approbation of God, and the praise of the world.’

Henry V’s challenge to the dauphin

‘They put out alle the French people both man woman and chylde and stuffed the town with English men.’

The Brut of England

A
t five o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 13 August the English fleet sailed into the Seine estuary. They anchored off the chalk headland of the Chef de Caux, three miles from Henry’s objective – the port of Harfleur. He forbade his troops to land before him under ‘pain of death,’ going ashore at a spot where Le Havre now stands, between six and seven o’clock in a beautiful dawn. On landing the king fell on his knees and prayed God to give him ‘justice’. By Saturday the disembarkation was completed. He issued orders, again under ‘pain of death’, that there must be no arson, that churches and church plate were to be left alone and that women and priests must go unmolested. No harlots might come within three miles of the camp; after a first warning any harlot who did so would have her left arm broken. Nor must there be any swearing. In the words of the late Professor E. F. Jacob, Henry meted out ‘that mixture of firmness and humanity which has always been the mark of the good English regimental officer’.
¹
He established his camp on a hill about a mile north-west of the unfortunate little town, and ‘when all the tents and pavilions and halls [marquees] were erected and set up, they seemed a right great and mighty city’.

Clarence established a second English camp under his command on a hill on the other side of the town, to the east in the direction of Rouen. When ‘at dawn in clear sunlight’ he and his men suddenly appeared over the brow of the hill, the sight caused ‘real fear and dread’ among the besieged. In addition, the English fleet blockaded the harbour. By 19 August the English had surrounded Harfleur and had enclosed it with a stockade, so that no one could get in or out.

Nevertheless, the beleaguered town had formidable defences. Its wall was unusually strong – polygonal, two-and-a-half miles in circumference and with twenty-six towers. Its three gates could only be reached across drawbridges from barbicans on the other side of a wide moat. Each barbican was strengthened by a circular bastion or ‘bulwark’ built around it, consisting of tree-trunks bound together by iron chains, reinforced by baulks of timber and covered by turf, with embrasures for guns and crossbows to fire through. In addition, an earth rampart had been thrown up between the wall and the moat. To the north the town was protected by the flooded valley of the river Lézarde, ‘a quarter as wide again as is the Thames at London’, to the south by the Lézarde itself and to the east by marshes. To seaward the harbour was guarded by two tall towers, by chain booms and by huge stakes on the seabed. It had an extremely competent commander in Jean d’Estouteville. Admittedly the garrison was under-strength though Raoul de Gaucourt, a redoubtable fighting man who lived near by, slipped into the town with 300 men-at-arms just before it was sealed off from the world outside.

Henry was determined to have Harfleur. The ‘key of the sea of all Normandy’ (the
First Tudor Life
’s description), it was also an ideal bridgehead from which to overrun Normandy and threaten Paris. The king saw it as another Calais, but better placed strategically. No doubt his spies had reported to him that the town contained few troops and the arrival of Gaucourt’s force at the last moment may well have thrown his plans out. It certainly put fresh heart into the defenders. When Henry summoned them to surrender ‘his’ town to the rightful Duke of Normandy, Estouteville sent a sardonic refusal; ‘You left us nothing to look after, and we’ve nothing to give you back.’

The English first attempted to tunnel underneath the moat to mine the walls. However, the French dug counter-tunnels and attacked the miners underground. The moat made it impossible to get close enough to use battering rams. Henry had recourse to his artillery which included cannon he had had in Wales, such as the ‘Messenger’ and the ‘King’s Daughter’. In all he possessed twelve heavy guns, but it took time to move them into position beneath the walls as they were impeded by the garrison firing at them from the ramparts, where they had mounted cannon of their own. The enormous English siege guns slowly trundled forward on vast wooden platforms until they were within range, then began to fire from behind protective wooden screens which tilted up; the gunners were also shielded by trenches and earthworks. The barrage continued day and night.

Henry’s cannon, of a size they had never seen before, terrified the French. Stone shot as big as millstones knocked wide holes in the walls while, so the
Gesta
informs us, ‘really fine buildings almost as far as the middle of the town were totally demolished or threatened imminent collapse.’
²
The king supervised the bombardment tirelessly, spending whole nights in loading and laying his guns. Although the French managed to fill the breaches with palisades and tubs of earth, Henry was optimistic. On 3 September, writing to Bordeaux to order 600 casks of wine, he says that it will take only another eight days to reduce Harfleur, after which he intends to march towards Paris by way of Montivilliers, Dieppe and Rouen before going south to Guyenne. But at the end of eight days the town was still holding out.

Disease struck the English camp. ‘In this siege many men died of cold in nights and fruit eating; eke of stink of carrions,’ records Friar Capgrave.
³
They were killed by the bloody flux, dysentery, induced by unripe fruit, sour new wine and local shellfish; a consignment of food contaminated by the sea may have been partly responsible. According to Monstrelet not less than 2,000 Englishmen perished, and another 2,000 were so ill that they had to be shipped home. Casualties included the Earls of Arundel and Suffolk and also Bishop Courtenay of Norwich, the king’s valued servant and close personal friend, who died in his arms; among those invalided back to England were the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of March. There were also many deserters. Yet nothing could deflect Henry.

The English cannon bombarded remorselessly the south-western bastion, which was the key to the siege. At the same time the English miners tunnelled forwards to undermine the walls, setting fire to the props which they placed beneath the foundations. By 16 September the bastion and the barbican which it had defended were in ruins, the moat on either side being filled in. The garrison made a sortie, setting fire to the English stockade. A second sortie ended in disaster. The English shot gunstones covered with flaming tow into the bastion where the tree-trunks and timber baulks caught fire, burning for two days. The French abandoned both the bastion and barbican to the besiegers.