Henry V as Warlord (13 page)

By now the garrison was starving and there was no sign of any attempt to relieve it. Like the besiegers it had been stricken by the bloody flux. Nevertheless it refused the severe terms offered by Henry, though it could see the English pushing bridges across the moat, wheeling siege towers towards the walls and bringing up scaling ladders. On 17 September the king gave orders for a general assault on the following day and launched an even more intensive bombardment – including volleys of fire arrows. On 18 September the weary, sleepless defenders despaired and sent envoys to treat with Henry; they agreed to surrender if relief had not come by 22 September. No relief came. Accordingly on the day specified, a Sunday, the garrison’s leaders and sixty-six hostages walked out between rows of armed English to where the English king was waiting for them. By his orders they wore only shirts and had halters round their necks; they were forced to remain for several hours on their knees before being admitted to the royal presence. He was in a great silken pavilion, clad in cloth of gold and seated on a throne, while at his right stood Sir Gilbert Umfraville bearing his helmet with its crown, and his pole-axe. Even then it was some time before Henry deigned to look at them. He then upbraided them for withholding
his
town of Harfleur, ‘a noble portion of his inheritance’, from him ‘against God and all justice’.
⁴

Then the Cross of St George was hoisted over the town gates, together with the leopards and lilies of the royal standard. Next day the king went barefoot to the half-destroyed parish church of Harfleur to offer up thanksgiving for his victory. His terms were that Gaucourt, together with sixty knights and 200 gentlemen in the garrison, were paroled and ordered to present themselves as ‘faithful captives’ at Calais at Martinmas (11 November) when they would be taken into custody for ransoming. The richer bourgeois were immediately sent to England to await ransoming. Some 2,000 of the ‘poorer sort’ were expelled ‘amid much lamentation, grief and tears for the loss of their customary although unlawful habitations’. As Henry explained, none of them, rich or poor, had any right to their houses, for they belonged to him ‘by right’. Only a few of Harfleur’s inhabitants were allowed to stay, on condition they took an oath of allegiance. Any goods or money found in the city were shared out among the troops, while a certain Richard Bokelond was granted ‘the inn called the Peacock’ as a reward for bringing two provision ships to the siege. On 5 October the king ordered a proclamation to be made in London and the greater English cities, offering houses in Harfleur, with cash subsidies, to all merchants and artisans who would come over and settle. Eventually, over a period of several years at least 10,000 English colonists arrived in Harfleur. Henry had the former townsmen’s title deeds publicly burnt in the market square. He was determined to turn Harfleur into a second Calais, another English town on the French littoral. However, the king received much praise from earlier English historians for not sacking the place, in accordance with the letter of the law, and for providing the poor whom he expelled with five sous a head to help them on their way.
⁵

With his almost modern instinct for public relations, on 22 September Henry wrote to the mayor and aldermen of London announcing Harfleur’s capture – and also asking them to send him news of themselves from time to time. This was a correspondence he kept up throughout his campaigns in France.

Harfleur was a valuable acquisition, which would prove its worth in later years. Yet the fact remains that the siege was a disastrous start to Henry’s campaign; he had lost over a third of his troops. In a carefully composed letter to the mayor of London he says that he has won a great victory, even though his counsellors were begging him to go home as quickly as possible and not to march into France lest the French hem them all in ‘like sheep in pens’. Nonetheless, although he abandoned his original plan of advancing on Paris, the king insisted on marching up to Calais with his sadly depleted troops, many of them still suffering from dysentery.

Much ink has been wasted on trying to explain this foolhardy adventure. There was seemingly little to be gained by it, in terms of reconnaissance, plunder or reputation, while it was obviously a considerable gamble since the French were known to be gathering in great strength. Why did so coolly objective a soldier take so unprofitable a risk? He hints why in words to his Council: ‘Even if our enemies enlist the greatest armies, my trust is in God, and they shall not hurt my army nor myself. I will not allow them, puffed up with pride, to rejoice in misdeeds, nor,
unjustly against God, to possess my goods
. It cannot be too much emphasized that, for all his use of the latest military technology, Henry’s mind was fundamentally medieval. During the siege he had sent a challenge to the Dauphin Louis to a single combat which would decide who was to inherit Charles VI’s throne – ‘to place our quarrel at the will of God between Our person and yours’. Louis, a fat and sluggish nineteen-year-old, wisely declined. The march up to Calais was intended to be a divinely protected military promenade which would demonstrate that God not only recognized his claim to the crown of France but, far more important, to the crown of England.

VII

‘
That Dreadful Day of Agincourt
’

‘
Starkly the left arm hold with the bow

Draw with the right, and smite and overthrow
’

A fifteenth-century translation
of Vegetius’s
De Re Militari

‘Agincourt is … a school outing to the Old Vic, Shakespeare is fun, son-et-lumière, blank verse, Laurence Olivier in battle armour; it is an episode to quicken the interest of any schoolboy ever bored by a history lesson, a set-piece demonstration of English moral superiority and a cherished ingredient of a fading national myth. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.’

John Keegan,
The Face of Battle

O
n 6 October Henry V marched out from Harfleur. Calais was 160 miles away and he expected to reach it in eight days’ time. He had approximately 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, grouped in three ‘battles’ with skirmishers on the wings. The king and the Duke of Gloucester led the main army, Sir John Cornwall the advance guard, and the Duke of York and the Earl of Oxford the rearguard. Henry was plainly anxious to make all speed possible, travelling without artillery or baggage wagons, his troops bringing only what they could carry on pack-horses – mostly the men-at-arms ‘harness’ and provisions for the eight days. He intended to march north to the River Somme, then south-east along its bank until he reached the ford of Blanche-Taque and then go straight on to Calais. To ensure a safe crossing he had sent orders for a force from Calais to seize the ford. (It had been used by his great-grandfather Edward II in 1346 on his way to Crécy.) No doubt he hoped for a minor engagement en route from which he could extract some semblance of a victorious trial by battle.

As was customary, the English slew and looted as they went, their passage announced by columns of black smoke from burning farmhouses. The abbey of Fécamp also went up in flames, women who had taken refuge in its church being dragged out and raped. Most of the archers were mounted so that the English were able to average nearly twenty miles a day, though such a pace must have been gruelling for those on foot with quivers holding fifty arrows. When fired on by the garrison at the castle of Arques as they were about to cross the River Béthune, Henry threatened to burn the town, extracting supplies of bread and wine for not doing so – it was the same story at Eu when crossing the Bresle. The army looked forward to an easy road over the Somme, which the king expected to reach by midday on 13 October.

Only six miles from the river a prisoner captured by English scouts reported that the tidal ford at Blanche-Taque was blocked by sharp stakes, and that Marshal Boucicault was waiting on the other side with 6,000 troops. (The force from Calais had been intercepted and driven off.) Henry personally interrogated the prisoner, telling him he would lose his head if he did not tell the truth but the man stuck to his story. In the meantime the tide came in and made the ford impassable. The king marched on eastward along the southern bank of the Somme to look for another ford. An eye-witness, the author of the
Gesta
, records the dejection of the army:

Expecting to have no alternative but to go into parts of France higher up and at the head of the river (which was said to be over sixty miles away) … at that time we thought of nothing else but this: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food and at the head of the river if God did not provide otherwise, would with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.
¹

Every ford appeared to be held by the French, who kept pace with the English from the other bank. There was a real danger of discipline breaking down. At Boves they drank so much wine, extorted from the castellan by the usual threats, that Henry forbade them to drink any more – when an indulgent commander told the king that they were simply filling their bottles, Henry snapped, ‘Their bottles indeed! They’re making big bottles of their bellies and getting very drunk.’ By now they had eaten their rations apart from a little dried meat, which they supplemented with nuts and what vegetables they could dig up in the fields.

The king took advantage of a loop in the river to make a short cut and outdistance the enemy who had to go the long way round. He still managed to enforce discipline, hanging in full view of the army a man caught sacrilegiously stealing a cheap copper gilt pyx from a church. (During later campaigns he would not be so particular.) Then on 19 October two unguarded fords were found at Voyennes and Béthencourt near Nesle. They could only be reached through the marshes over causeways which had been destroyed by the French; 200 archers, bows on backs, struggled through a quagmire at Béthencourt to wade waist deep across the river and establish a bridgehead on the far bank; a similar operation at Voyennes was also successful. Henry was not disposed to be merciful to the local peasants who had hung red clothes and blankets out of their windows, as a symbol of the
Oriflamme
(the sacred battle banner of the kings of France) and of defiance; he ordered every house whose occupants were unhelpful to be burnt to the ground. The causeways were repaired with window-frames, doors, roof-timbers and staircases from their hamlets as well as with hurdles, tree-trunks and straw. As soon as the causeway at Béthune could support a horse, Sir Gilbert Umfraville and Sir John Cornwall crossed at the head of 500 men-at-arms, just in time to drive off an attack on the archers’ bridgehead. By an hour after nightfall the entire English army was over the Somme and in much better spirits. They did not yet know that the main body of the French was only six miles away at Péronne.

Estimates of the number of French troops vary considerably but they almost certainly outnumbered the English by four to one and may have been as many as 30,000, of whom 15,000 were men-at-arms. Their leaders, Marshal Boucicault and the Constable d’Albret – Constable of France – were cautious veterans who wanted to leave Henry alone and let him go back to England while they concentrated on recovering Harfleur. They were overruled by more pugnacious, less experienced spirits. Among the latter were not only the Armagnac Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon but Burgundian magnates like the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Nevers, who were the brothers of Duke John. Although he himself still vacillated, his son, the future Duke Philip, regretted for the rest of his life that he had not fought in the campaign. Even Burgundians could not stomach an English invasion. However, Charles VI, momentarily sane, and the Dauphin Louis stayed away; they did not wish to be taken prisoner, as Charles’s grandfather, John II, had been at Poitiers.

On 20 October, a Sunday, three French heralds arrived at Henry’s camp. They remained on their knees, keeping silence until given permission to speak. ‘Right puissant prince, great and noble is thy kingly power,’ began their spokesman. ‘Our lords have heard how you intend with your army to conquer the towns, castles and cities of the realm of France and to depopulate French cities. And because of this, and for the sake of their country and their oaths, many of our lords are assembled to defend their rights; and they inform you by us that before you come to Calais they will meet with you to fight with you and be revenged of your conduct.’ Henry replied calmly, ‘Be all things according to the will of God.’ Yet there was a hint of uneasiness in his answer to the heralds’ enquiry as to what road he would take. ‘Straight to Calais, and if our enemies try to disturb us in our journey, it will not be without the utmost peril. We do not intend to seek them out, but neither shall we go in fear of them either more slowly or more quickly than we wish to do. We advise them again not to interrupt our journey, nor to seek what would be in consequence a great shedding of Christian blood.’
²
Then he sent the heralds back to their masters, each with a hundred gold crowns. He realized that he had been outmanoeuvred and expected to be attacked the next day. He ordered his men to take up positions, anticipating an onslaught from the direction of Péronne where the enemy had their camp. But it became clear that the French were not going to attack, so he gave orders for everyone to get a good night’s rest before continuing the march.

They awoke to a morning of drenching rain, beneath which they set out. For some days there were no serious incidents though ominous signs were not lacking, such as the road being churned up as if by the feet of ‘an unimaginable host’. The rain was unrelenting, driven into their eyes by the wind; they had to sleep in it. Many of them were weakened by dysentery and kept their breeches down. They were all famished. Morale sank very low indeed.