Henry V as Warlord (2 page)

Introduction

‘I am the scourge of God’

Henry V

‘I am an Englishman, and am thy foe’

Thomas Hoccleve,
The Regement of Princes

O
n 19 October 1449 a cheering mob opened the gates of Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and Charles VII of France – once disinherited dauphin, now ‘King Charles the very victorious’ – rode in to wild rejoicing. Rouen had been occupied by the English for thirty years. Within less than a year they would be driven out of Normandy altogether. It was the end not only of an English Normandy but of an Anglo-French dual monarchy. In particular it was the end of one man’s dream. The man was Henry V, who left an unhappy legacy when he died in 1422, a legacy that is still with us.

No one would deny the uneasy relationship between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. The former tend to distrust anyone who speaks English. Among the earliest and not the least reasons why this ingrained suspicion developed was the behaviour of English troops in France during the second half of the Hundred Years War, a war revived by Henry. No doubt French troops behaved as badly – but they were in France as Frenchmen, not as invaders who spoke a foreign tongue. The English had taken advantage of a civil war to conquer all north-western France. It was as if a French king had allied with the Yorkists during the Wars of the Roses, occupied south-eastern England, installed a French garrison at London and had himself declared heir to the throne, while at the same time turning Kent into a separate Anglo-French principality where he confiscated 500 estates and gave them to Frenchmen, besides settling 10,000 colonists at Dover. The humiliation and the atrocities would never have been forgotten. The French have long memories too.

Henry V is one of England’s heroes. The victor of Agincourt was idolized during his lifetime, his memory inspired one of Shakespeare’s most stirring (if scarcely greatest) plays, and the Victorians considered him a perfect Christian gentleman: ‘He was religious, pure in life, temperate, liberal, careful and yet splendid,’ says Bishop Stubbs, ‘merciful, truthful, and honourable, discreet in word, provident in counsel, prudent in judgement, modest in look, magnanimous in act, a true Englishman.’ In our own century Sir Winston Churchill could write of ‘the gleaming King’.

That brilliant historian of the medieval English, the late K. B. McFarlane, thought Henry ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England.’ His achievements were remarkable. At home not only did he tame the Welsh, destroying Owain Glyn Dŵr, but he restored law and order to a hitherto strife-torn realm; across the Channel he conquered a third of France, married the French king’s daughter and was recognized as heir and regent of France. So powerful is his spell that almost every English historian who studied him succumbs, bemused by his genius and dynamism, blind to any shortcomings. They attribute any criticism by French scholars to anglophobia.

Nevertheless his conquest of France was as much about loot as dynastic succession, accompanied by mass slaughter, arson and rape – French plunder was on sale all over England. It was very like the Norman conquest of England in reverse although lasting a mere thirty years. Just as William the Bastard had done, he seized the lands of the great nobles, and of many lesser nobles too, giving them to his soldiers. For three decades English interlopers, often sporting French titles, lorded it over hundreds of French estates – some great counties, others modest manors. They were, however, always in danger, dependent on English archers for survival. He not only evicted noblemen from castles but ordinary people from their homes. Countless Frenchmen of all classes emigrated from the territory conquered by him. When reproached with killing so many Christians in France, he answered, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins.’
¹

The misery inflicted on the French by Henry’s campaigns is indisputable. Any local historian in north-western France can point to a town, a château, an abbey or a church sacked by his men. Life in the countryside became a nightmare. When the English raided enemy territory they killed anything that moved, destroyed crops and food supplies and drove off livestock, in a calculated attempt to weaken their opponents by starving the civilian population. Occupied areas fared little better because of the
pâtis
or protection racket operated by English garrisons; villages had to pay extortionate dues in food and wine as well as money, failure to deliver sometimes incurred executions and burnings.

Yet Henry’s ambition was inspired by something more complicated than mere desire for conquest. It was a need to prove that he really was King of England. His father had usurped the throne and, as the Yorkists would demonstrate during the Wars of the Roses, there were others with a better right to it in law. If he could make good his great-grandfather Edward III’s claim to France he would show in trial by battle that God confirmed his right to the English crown.

During the nineteenth century French ‘patriotic’ historians reacted violently to the Hundred Years War, producing a portrait of Henry as distorted as the English icon. They saw fifteenth-century Anglo-Saxons as the first ‘Boches’. English historians responded to this xenophobic outburst with equal chauvinism, together with a cool assumption of objectivity (although few writers can have taken less pains to hide their dislike of the French than the venerated Wylie and Waugh in their massive study of the king’s reign). Even today English and French differ in their judgement. Harriss believes Henry had ‘grasped’ that the French crown ‘could only be securely held by one whom the French people accepted as King in the same measure as Englishmen did … given the years, energy and luck, he might have reshaped the development of both nations just, as in brief space, he had restored the fortunes of England.’
²
By contrast Edouard Perroy thought that Henry’s successes, ‘his premature death at the height of unprecedented glory, have raised him very high, perhaps too high, in the estimation of posterity’. He refers to his ‘hypocritical bigotry, his double dealing, his pretence of observing the law and redressing wrongs when he merely sought to gratify his own ambition’. It remains to strike a balance.
³

English studies of the king tend to discount French chroniclers, save for tributes to him when he died. Admittedly some borrow from each other and several wrote years after his death. Nevertheless all were alive during his reign (Jean Juvénal des Ursins, the monk of St Denis and Monstrelet being already in their thirties when he died), while all of them had spoken to people who had experienced the events of which they write. If they were prejudiced against him, then English chroniclers were biased in his favour. One prefers the testimony of the occupied to the occupiers – just as one accepts French rather than German versions of what happened in France between 1940 and 1944.

In England historians refuse to see the fifteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War as a conflict between French and English. They argue that while the English had a sense of nationality no such people as Frenchmen existed, only inhabitants of regions of France with no common identity. Yet if France was not seen then as she is now, almost as a person, there was nevertheless a concept of a French realm symbolized by the phrase ‘the honour of the fleur-de-lys’. By the fifteenth century the French had developed quite enough nationalism to consider their neighbours over the Channel hereditary enemies. If Henry did not think in national terms – for him France was ‘my inheritance’ – his subjects did and definitely tended to xenophobia. Many of France’s miseries during this period were due to Frenchmen yet all French chroniclers unite in seeing the English as the worst of their foes. The French may have possessed only a vague sense of nationality when Henry invaded their country but they quickly developed one in fighting him. They took the king at his own word – ‘I am the scourge of God’ – save that to them he was the Devil’s scourge rather than God’s.

I

The Usurpers

‘
Heaven knows, my son
,

By what by-paths, and indirect crook’d ways
,

I met this crown; and I myself know well
,

How troublesome it sat upon my head
.’

Shakespeare,
King Henry IV

‘[Henry IV] in order to come into the honour and glory of the crown of the said realm of England had in time past by certain strange and dishonourable means deprived of that rank his first cousin Richard, king of England.’

Enguerrand de Monstrelet,
Les Chroniques

T
here is a legend that in September 1387 Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford – the future Henry IV of England – hurried from Windsor to Wales to be present at the birth of his first child. When he crossed the River Wye near Walford the ferryman told him that his wife had borne a son. So delighted was the earl by the news that he at once gave the man the right to all the ferry’s dues and tolls.

The boy was delivered in the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle in South Wales. (It is ironical that someone who was to inflict so much misery on the Welsh should have been born in Gwent.) His father was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was himself the third son of King Edward III; in consequence Bolingbroke was first cousin to the king, Richard II, whose father had been the Black Prince. Edward’s eldest son. Yet the child was not christened Edward or Richard but Henry, like Bolingbroke. Almost certainly this was because of Gaunt’s marriage to the heiress of the earls of Lancaster. They were a younger branch of the Plantagenets, descended from Henry III, who, so Gaunt claimed in private, were the rightful heirs to the throne of England.

Little Henry’s mother, Mary Bohun, was one of the two immensely rich co-heiresses of the last Bohun earl of Hereford. Originally she had been destined for a convent but Gaunt would not let so rich a prize slip through his hands and obtained her hand in marriage for his son, who secured his late father-in-law’s title. Mary gave Bolingbroke three more sons and two daughters before her death in 1394 aged only twenty-four.

She belonged to one of the most august of medieval England’s noble families. The Bohuns were of Norman descent, having come with the Conqueror and originated from Bohon in Normandy. They intermarried with the Plantagenets on several occasions and Mary was descended from Edward I. Her father, hereditary High Constable (leader in battle) of England, besides being Earl of Hereford, had been Earl of Northampton and Earl of Essex. He had married a daughter of the Earl of Arundel and was closely related to every noble house in the land. Her sister and co-heiress had been married to Gaunt’s younger brother, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester – her husband’s uncle. The vast Bohun inheritance had been divided between the two girls, the Welsh estates going to Mary, which was why Bolingbroke was Earl of Hereford and why Henry was born at Monmouth. Her son’s memories of her must have been slight but when he became king – perhaps in response to the magnificent effigy of his step-mother which lay beside that of his father in Canterbury Cathedral – he immediately commissioned a figure of her to be erected over her tomb at Leicester.

Apart from the king himself, the most important kinsfolk of the ‘House of Lancaster’ as it would soon be called, were the Beauforts. These were a left-handed branch of the family, Gaunt’s children by his third wife Catherine Roelt (usually referred to as Catherine Swynford) who arrived in this world long before their parents’ had been married and who took the name of ‘Beaufort’ from a castle of Gaunt’s in France. They numbered three exceptionally able sons – John, Henry and Thomas – and a daughter, Joan, who married the rich, powerful and ambitious Earl of Westmorland.

Henry of Monmouth’s life was tranquil enough during the ‘Quiet Years’ of King Richard’s stormy reign. He shared a bedroom and a governess with his brothers, though later the boys usually lived apart from one another. He had a nurse to whom he was devoted; as soon as he came to the throne he settled a generous pension on her. He visited his grandmother Joan, Countess of Hereford, who lived until 1419 and of whom he was clearly very fond; in the will he was to make in 1415 he twice describes her as ‘our dearest grandmother’. It is reasonable to suppose that he was made miserable by the death of his mother when he was only seven. We know that he had at least one dangerous illness during childhood, being taken seriously ill at Leicester when he was eight. Otherwise we have very few details about his early years since no one saw him as a future king of England. The exception may perhaps have been Gaunt, that slightly sinister grandfather who despite careful marrying and constant scheming had failed to secure the throne which he coveted for himself in either Castile or Portugal.

No doubt Gaunt was visited fairly frequently by his grandson at his country palace in the Midlands, Kenilworth in Warwickshire. The duke had recently rebuilt this massive red sandstone castle out of his vast wealth. Although partly demolished during the Civil War enough of its once magnificent dining hall remains for one to obtain an idea of what it looked like in Henry’s day. However, the timbered banqueting room known as ‘The Plesaunce’, next to a lake in the grounds, has long since vanished. During his reign he would frequently hold his court at Kenilworth which was clearly a favourite residence.

Henry’s principal tutor was his formidably gifted young uncle, Henry Beaufort. However, there seems to be no justification for the claim that he was at Oxford when Beaufort was chancellor of the university. According to the Monk of Westminster’s chronicle the boy enjoyed the usual amusements of the nobility of the period, especially hunting and falconry – for both of which he developed a passion which lasted all his life. Obviously he was taught the military arts. He learnt to play the harp – the duchy of Lancaster’s accounts include an item of 8
d
for harp strings for him – and also the gittern, which may have begun his love of music. (He is known to have played the harp later in life, when campaigning in France.)
¹
He learnt to read and write French and English, and also some Latin which he began to study when he was eight. One presumes that like most boys of his class he saw little of his father.