Henry V as Warlord (30 page)

Henry and Catherine rode out from their Norman capital on 19 January. They were accompanied by the Duke of Bedford, the Earl Marshal, the Earls of March and Warwick, many knights and gentlemen and the great ladies, and King James, their escort consisting of a force of picked men-at-arms and archers. There were loyal greetings and ceremonial gifts as they progressed through Amiens and other towns on their way to Calais. The king was particularly pleased at the compliments paid to his queen by his French subjects – though these may secretly have been inspired more by Catherine being the daughter of their lawful Valois sovereign than by her beauty. At Calais they received a wildly enthusiastic, and no doubt genuinely sincere, welcome from its inhabitants before setting sail.

XVI

‘
Rending of Every Man Throughout the Realm
’

‘The sieges hath … consumed innumerable goods of his finance, both in England and in France, and in Normandy.’

Sir John Fastolf

‘
What king that doth more excessive despenses

Than his land may to suffice or attain
,

Shall be destroyed
.’

Thomas Hoccleve,
The Regement of Princes

T
he royal party landed at Dover on 1 February 1421. A huge crowd had assembled on the beach to greet it, barons of the Cinque ports carrying the king and queen ashore on their shoulders through the shallows. Henry was received by his English subjects, in Monstrelet’s phrase, ‘as one of God’s angels’. He at once went to Canterbury with his wife, cheered every step of the road, to offer thanks at St Thomas’s shrine and be welcomed by Archbishop Chichele. He then rode up to London to organize Catherine’s reception, leaving her to follow by litter. They were reunited at Eltham on 21 February, entering London the same day.

The mayor, Will Cambryge, aldermen, sheriffs and officials of the City guilds, together with a whole host of Londoners dressed in their best, met them at Blackheath to escort them in. They were welcomed by pageants and tableaux no less splendid than those which had greeted the king after his return from Agincourt. As in 1415, everyone was edified by Henry wearing purple, the colour of Christ’s Passion, when he went to give thanks at St Paul’s.

Two days later Catherine, in white, was crowned and anointed Queen of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey. Afterwards she presided in her crown over her coronation banquet in Westminster Hall – Henry being absent, according to custom. Since it was Lent the menu consisted of countless dishes of fish and sweet puddings, the former ranging from sturgeon, salmon and sole to whelks, conger and porpoise. The royal cooks had surpassed themselves in creating ‘subtleties’ – pastry tableaux which appeared between courses – though a tigress led on a chain by St George might have been liable to misinterpretation. Throughout, the queen was served on bended knee by her brothers-in-law, Bedford and Gloucester.
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After three-and-a-half years’ campaigning Henry was no longer the smooth-faced youth of the National Portrait Gallery. His crowned effigy on a stone screen at York Minster, begun about 1425, has recently been identified as a portrait. Unexpectedly, he wears a small forked beard like Richard II. Beneath a thick crop of elaborately curled hair his face is handsome and commanding, but undeniably tense and careworn.
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The beard (also shown on the obverse of his Great Seal) provides the clue to another unsuspected likeness. A miniature of St George in the
Bedford Book of Hours
not only depicts the saint in the gilded armour, Garter cloak and pudding-basin crop affected by the king but with a small forked beard. In the present writer’s view this too is a portrait of him.

During Henry’s absence overseas his régime had held up very well, partly because of Bedford’s effectiveness as regent, partly because of pride in his triumphs over the French. There was no trouble from Lollards, now a hunted remnant; Sir John Oldcastle had been caught in 1417 and roasted alive as he swung in chains from a gibbet. Supporters of King Richard and the Earl of March had all but given up the struggle (even if March’s kinsman Sir John Mortimer was still plotting). The Welsh had stayed cowed while the ‘Foul Raid’ by the Scots under the Duke of Albany and the Earl of Douglas had met with the usual fate of Scottish invasions, having been routed with contemptuous ease by the Duke of Exeter. The restoration of law and order had also survived apart from certain outbreaks of violence in the north of England and on the Welsh border, but that was only to be expected in those chronically unruly areas. Coastal and merchant shipping remained free from the threat of privateers which had been such a menace in the decades before Henry’s accession. Not only had the French privateers been put out of action completely but the Castilians had been deprived of their bases in French ports by his occupation of Normandy and alliances with Burgundian Flanders and Brittany, while the ‘King’s Ships’ patrolled coastal waters with reassuring efficiency.

Nonetheless, there were noticeable tensions. Not everyone had profited from ‘spoils won in France’ and all too many people associated the war with high taxation. In 1416–18 Archbishop Chichele had referred more than once to clerics who were growing tepid in their prayers for the king’s success; the clergy disliked paying taxes as much as anybody else and were seemingly less than enthusiastic about unending campaigns which drained their pockets. The Parliament of 1419 had voted smaller sums than ever before for the war, while that of December 1420, just before Henry’s return, had complained of its petitions always being sent abroad for the king’s consideration (although he was meticulous in answering them, even during the most demanding campaigns) and showed itself so unwilling to vote any further war taxation that he had waived his demands.

As McFarlane pointed out, ‘Henry does not seem to have bothered his head over much about the financial soundness of his enterprise; he needed money but was quite indifferent to the means by which it was procured … Modern estimates, based on an imperfect understanding of the principles of medieval book-keeping, have unfortunately disguised the real gravity of the position.’
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Every government department was deep in debt and, with hindsight, it can be seen that unless the war ended soon the monarchy faced inevitable bankruptcy. The king’s scheme to pay for his campaigns with money from his conquered French territories was simply not working; it is known that during the last year of his reign the Norman revenues brought in only £10,000 despite his steep increase in taxation. His English subjects would have to foot most of the bill, as they were beginning to realize with growing irritation.

By 1421 Henry’s financial situation was already desperate. Almost £40,000 of his father’s debts and his own personal debts were unpaid, he had not yet reimbursed several senior commanders for their very considerable outlay during the 1415 campaign and he owed wages to most if not all of the garrison captains in France. The Calais garrison’s pay was in arrears to the tune of £28,710 (it would mutiny in 1423). At home he owed nearly £7,000 (10,000 marks) to the Earl of Northumberland for policing and defending the eastern stretch of the Scots border. A general loan approved by Parliament in 1419 had produced derisory sums since he had not been in England to extract it. The City of London, which had advanced over £6,000 in 1415 and again in 1417, would now lend only £2,000 for a fresh campaign. It was unlikely that Parliament would grant more taxes and even he dared not override it.

He decided to make a fund-raising tour of the kingdom. The ostensible reason for the ensuing royal ‘progress’ was to show Queen Catherine her new country and to visit holy shrines. Commissioners were to follow in his wake to extort loans by whatever means they could from noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses, even from yeomen and artisans, although the sums extracted from the latter might amount to no more than a few pence.

However, France was never out of his mind for one moment. On 27 February 1421 he wrote to his officials across the Channel:

We have understood by your letter to us, sent desiring to wit if ye should ordain masons and carpenters for repairment of our castle of Pontorson. Wherefore we will and charge you that you ordain that it be repaired and amended as well as the two towers at the bridge … and we have certified our cousin of Suffolk how that we have charged you therewith. And also we have charged our foresaid cousin that the governance of Avranches and of the country thereabout be amended.
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Before embarking on the tour Henry went to Bristol and then to Shrewsbury to investigate reports of disturbances on the Welsh border. Then he joined Catherine at Leicester where they celebrated Easter. We know the way that they travelled on their tour from the chronicle of John Strecche, the canon of Kenilworth, who immortalized the story of the dauphin’s tennis balls. First they visited Nottingham, then Pontefract and then York. The king did not forget to visit the shrines of his two favourite Yorkshire saints, John of Bridlington and John of Beverley. The bones of the second, who died in 721, had been translated (ceremonially reinterred) at Beverley Minster on 25 October 1037. Since Agincourt was fought on a 25 October, Henry attributed his victory to John’s intercession, making the Church in England alter the day in the Sarum and York rites from the feast of the Gallo-Roman Crispin and Crispinian to that of an Anglo-Saxon bishop’s translation. After this he and his queen went to Lincoln for the consecration of a new bishop.

At Lincoln news came from France. His brother Clarence, after a most successful raid into Maine and Anjou during which he stormed many castles, had been defeated and killed at Baugé near Angers by a force of French and Scots. The ‘Marshal of France’ (Gilbert Umfraville), the ‘Count of Tancarville’ (John Grey) and Lord Roos had died with him while the Earls of Huntingdon and Somerset, Lord Fitzwalter and Sir Edmund Beaufort had been taken prisoner. At midnight two Scots earls, Buchan and Douglas, wrote from the battlefield to tell the dauphin of his victory, sending Clarence’s banner with their letter. For a moment it seemed that the entire English conquest was threatened. The king did not reveal the dispatch’s contents to his courtiers until the following day. They marvelled at his self-control.

Baugé had been lost by Clarence’s foolhardiness in charging 5,000 enemy troops with 150 men-at-arms. Umfraville and Huntingdon had tried to dissuade him but he wanted a victory to rival Agincourt. The English had been beaten, a contemporary wrote, ‘by cause they wolde nott take with hem archers, but thought to have doo with the ffrenshmen them selff wythoute hem. And yet whan he was slayne the archers come and rescued the body of the duke … god have mercy a pon his soule, he was a valyant man.’

Salisbury, who brought up the archers, extricated what remained of the English force with considerable difficulty. To cross the Loire he had to construct a bridge out of carts and fencing. He found an even more ingenious way of bridging the River Sarthe. He made his men wear white crosses like dauphinists and, having convinced some local peasants that he was a Frenchman, ordered them to build a bridge for him. Once over he had the peasants put to death.
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The French had killed the head of the English government in France – heir to the throne of England – besides eliminating half the king’s best commanders. Had the French caught Salisbury, the English might have been driven out of France thirty years earlier than they were. Although he had escaped, the dauphinists were understandably elated. Wild rumours spread throughout France; it was even believed that Henry himself had been killed. A tactful astrologer consulted by John Stewart of Darnley prophesied that both the English king and Charles VI would die in the very near future.

It is clear that Henry had given the strictest instructions never to offer battle without archers, and understood perfectly why his brother had been routed. Basin says the king commented that if Clarence had escaped with his life he would have suffered the death penalty for disobeying orders. Nevertheless it was a fearful blow to Henry and not just because he had lost a brother. (Clarence and he had never been very close, even if his succession to the throne put an end to their rivalry. Significantly, he had omitted the duke from his will in 1415.) So disastrous a defeat gave the lie to his loudly proclaimed conviction that his cause had the Divine approval, that God invariably fought on his side.

He travelled back to London by himself, by way of King’s Lynn, Walsingham – where he prayed at the shrine of the Virgin – Norwich, and other East Anglian towns. Catherine took a different route, through Leicester, Stamford, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Colchester before rejoining her husband at the capital. It seems that commissioners accompanied both of them. Strecche informs us that, ‘From the cities thus visited the king and queen received precious gifts of gold and silver from citizens and prelates … Moreover the king demanded and received from the more powerful men of the realm, such as merchants and bishops, abbots and priors, a great deal of money.’
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Together with his efforts in London, the tour produced loans amounting to some £9,000, an enormous sum for such an operation at that period.

This ‘rending of every man throughout the realm, be he rich or poor’ – Adam of Usk’s description of fund raising – did not enhance the war’s popularity. Adam adds that the king’s unceasing demands for money for his campaigns were beginning to infuriate his subjects – ‘the grievous taxation of the people to this end being unbearable, accompanied by smothered curses’. While the English admired, even revered, the man, they were growing alarmed by his ambitions overseas.
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