Henry V as Warlord (37 page)

His bed was in his chamber over the great hall in the donjon tower, built by Charles V some forty years previously, in which a single elegant column supported a high, vaulted ceiling. As a medieval king he had to die in public; courtiers thronged the room, though it is likely that to some extent he was shielded from curious eyes by screens placed around the bed.

Late in the evening of 20 August Henry asked his doctors how long he had to live, brushing aside soothing suggestions that God might still heal him. Then they told him the truth. ‘Sire, think you on your soul. For, saving the mercy of God, we judge not that you can live more than two hours.’ At this he summoned his confessor, Friar Netter, and together they recited the seven penitential psalms and the litany. After finishing the psalm
Miserere mei, Deus
he broke in, ‘O good lord, thou knowest that if thy pleasure had been to have suffered me to live my natural age my firm purpose and intent was, after I had established this realm of France in sure peace, to have gone and visited Jerusalem and to have re-edified the walls thereof, and to have expulsed from it the miscreants thine adversaries [the Turks].’

The king received Communion and was anointed. At the very end, his iron self-righteousness faltered and for a moment he feared for his salvation. Suddenly he screamed, as though replying to some evil spirit, ‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion is with the Lord Jesus Christ!’ Did he suspect that, as a usurper who insisted on being the rightful heir to England and France, he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, that persistent denial of the known truth for which there is no forgiveness? Even so, he died peacefully in Netter’s arms at the end of the two hours given to him by the doctors, just before midnight. His last words were ‘
in manus tuas, Domine, ipsum terminum redemisti
’. He was not quite thirty-five. Had he lived another six weeks he would have survived Charles VI and inherited the crown of France.

There followed the grisly ceremonies which attended the death of a medieval king. His entrails were removed and buried in the church of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés at Vincennes (where they came to light in the early 1980s), his body was dismembered and then boiled down in the castle kitchens to remove the flesh from the bones, both being embalmed and sealed in a lead casket. In September his funeral chariot, drawn by four great horses, set out on its journey to England. ‘Above the dead corpse [in the caskets] they laid a figure made of boiled hides or leather representing his person as to the similitude of a living creature, upon whose head was set an Imperial diadem of gold and precious stones, and in his right hand he held a sceptre royal, and in his left hand a bowl [orb] of gold; and in this manner adorned was his figure laid in a bed in the said chariot, with his visage uncovered towards the heavens.’ Beside the chariot walked mutes in white holding burning torches, behind came his household men gowned in black, behind them rode the Dukes of Bedford and Exeter and the King of Scots and, for part of the way, the Duke of Burgundy; and behind the princes rode 500 men-at-arms on black horses, their black lances reversed. Last of all came Queen Catherine in the white mourning of a king’s consort. Whenever the cortège passed through a town of substance ‘a canopy of marvellous great value such as is used to be borne over the Blessed Sacrament on Corpus Christi Day was borne over the chariot by men of great worship’.

The cortège did not reach London until 5 November, going by way of St Denis (the burial place of the Kings of France where Henry’s effigy sat for a time in state), Rouen, Abbeville, Montreuil, Boulogne, Calais, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester and Dartford before it was met at Blackheath by the mayor, aldermen and guildsmen of London. As it processed to St Paul’s there was a man standing outside the door of every house on the route holding a burning torch. After lying in state for two days the king’s remains were taken to Westminster Abbey to be interred with a pomp memorable even by the standards of medieval England.

His magnificent tomb in the abbey, and the chantry chapel which houses it, were completed in the 1440s. The tomb was surmounted by his silver gilt effigy, with hands and head of solid silver. Above hung his tilting helm, sword, shield and saddle. The effigy has long since lost its silver and silver gilt, and the wooden core alone remains. But his helm, sword, shield and saddle still hang there.

Charles VI died on 11 October, living just long enough to cheat the ancient enemy of France of his throne. Jean Chartier records that a few time-servers cheered when the one-year-old Henry VI was proclaimed ‘
Henry, roy de France et d’Angleterre
’. He adds: ‘But the more genuine wept and made moan because of the great kindness which had been in the said king of France [Charles VI] named Well Beloved, thinking on the many evils that might come upon them by changing their natural lord and how the said lordship was to be governed by foreign nations and customs, which was and is against reason and right, to the total destruction of the people and realm of France.’
⁵
No doubt Chartier, as historiographer to the dauphin, is biased. Yet the Bourgeois of Paris, who was also there and watched the crazy old king’s cortège pass through the streets, is clearly telling the truth when he says that the ordinary people of Paris wept and cried, ‘Most dear of princes! Never shall we find another prince so kind! Never shall we see you again! Cursed be death! We shall have nothing but war now that you have left us. You will find rest while we shall live among tribulations and miseries of every kind. For we are doomed to be captives like the children of Israel when they were led away to Babylon.’ The Bourgeois adds that those in the streets or at the windows wept and cried as though the person each one loved most had died.
⁶
It was not the most promising way to greet the accession of France’s first Lancastrian king.

Meanwhile in England, so Waurin admits, everyone continued to weep and lament and was in much sadness. He and Monstrelet, both writing in the 1440s, recount of Henry V how ‘even now as much honour and reverence is paid at his tomb as if it were certain that he was a saint in heaven’.
⁷
The
Brut of England
records of 1422 that ‘in that same year died most of the laurel trees in England’.
⁸

The French writers of the day, including the most hostile, concede that though Henry had been their enemy he had been very great indeed. Waurin says of him; ‘a most clever man and expert in everything he undertook’,
⁹
Jean Chartier; ‘a subtle conqueror and a skilful warrior.’
¹⁰
Chastellain too is magnanimous: ‘It is not my intention to detract from or diminish in my writings either the honour or the glory of that valiant prince the English king, in whom valour and courage shone forth as befitted a mighty conqueror … of this King of England may high and glorious tales be told notwithstanding that he was the foe of France.’
¹¹

No one can deny that Henry V was a very great soldier and a very great king. Yet he was fortunate to die young. At his death there still remained two thirds of France to conquer, and had he lived he would have worn himself out in an unending series of sieges for which it would have become increasingly impossible to find the money. He was incapable of seeing where his wonderful gifts as a soldier and a diplomatist were leading him. Even with Henry V, even without Joan of Arc, the English could never have succeeded. The Burgundians were bound to turn against them. The king was basically an opportunist, albeit an opportunist of genius. As E. F.Jacob, one of his greatest admirers among modern historians, writes: ‘In the last analysis he was an adventurer, not a statesman; the risk he took in the creation of a double monarchy was too great, depended on too many uncertainties, and fundamentally misread the nature of France.’
¹²
Waugh, another admirer who forces himself to be objective if not always successfully, has to concede that: ‘His will was doubtless set on purposes unworthy of a great or good man.’
¹³
McFarlane, the most fervent admirer of all, admits: ‘It is the tragedy of his reign that he gave a wrong direction to national aspirations which he did so much himself to stimulate, that he led his people in pursuit of the chimera of foreign conquest.
¹⁴
French historians have less difficulty in reaching the same conclusions.

The question may be asked why the Lancastrian conquest had no hope of enduring like that of William the Conqueror. But Anglo-Saxon England had been a much smaller country with a much smaller population in a more primitive age, while William had had no serious rivals after Hastings. In contrast Henry conquered a mere third of France, and that only because the kingdom was temporarily divided between two powerful factions with their own armies. Above all, the emergence of articulate French nationalism doomed his would-be dual monarchy.

Whether the king’s brutality in war was simply in keeping with the military conventions of the age or the expression of an unusually savage nature is not easy to decide. What is indisputable is his impact on the French. They suffered more from his invasions than from any between the Vikings and the Nazis.

It is hard to pass judgement on Henry as a man, but it is generally agreed that his reputation is based on admiration and not on affection. He was ruthless in subordinating his feelings to his ambition; he was only speaking the truth when he said that had Clarence survived Baugé he would have had him executed for disobeying orders. The kindest thing that can be said is that those who worked with him (except Lord Scrope) seem to have been devoted to the king and to his memory. But, beyond question, the man always gave place to the warlord – there was something a little inhuman about him.

The admirers of Henry (and they include most people in the English-speaking world) ascribe any imperfections in him to his having been a ‘late medieval man’ since late medieval men were prone to superstition and violence. Unfortunately for this argument there was a ‘late medieval man’ who is a perfect yardstick by which to judge the king, his successor as ruler of Lancastrian France – his brother Bedford, regent at Rouen and Paris from 1422 until his death in 1435. He too ‘shed the blood of Frenchmen piteously’ and won his own Agincourt; at Verneuil in 1424 he cut a Franco-Scots force to pieces, inflicting 7,000 casualties of whom 1,000 were dauphinists. ‘Brave, humane and just,’ Basin says of him, ‘so much so that Normans and French men who lived in his part of the realm had great affection for him.’
¹⁵
The Bourgeois of Paris is no less complimentary – ‘his nature was quite un-English, for he never wanted to make war on anyone, whereas in truth the English are always wanting to wage war on their neighbours. Which is why they all die an evil death.’
¹⁶
No contemporary French writer speaks of Henry in such terms. He was undoubtedly feared by his unwilling new subjects but he was certainly not loved by them.

In Henry’s own brutal words, ‘war without fire is like sausages without mustard.’ Not only emergent French nationalism but French local loyalties were outraged by his invasions and campaigns of conquest. The horror unleashed by him was unforgiveable, and also unforgettable. No account tells the whole harrowing story, conveys how widespread and how savage was the misery which he inflicted on the French people. In the midst of all his hero worship Shakespeare somehow discerns the sheer callous cruelty of the king:

What is it to me, if impious war

Array’d inflames, like to the prince of fiends

Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats

Enlink’d to waste and desolation?
¹⁷

But on the whole even Shakespeare succumbs to the legend. He could not know what had happened in France.

XX

Epilogue

‘All the time of war during these forty year betwixt England and France, wist I not scant three or four men which wolden accord throughout, in telling how a town or a castle was won in France, or how a battle was done there.’

Bishop Reginald Pecock
¹

‘For there may no king conquer a great realm by continual sieges.’

Sir John Fastolf
²

A
t Formigny on 15 April 1450, six months after recapturing Rouen, the French under the command of a veteran of Agincourt annihilated an English army. It had just crossed the Channel in a desperate bid to relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Normandy; ironically, its archers were deployed in the same formation as at Agincourt. Caen fell in June. In August William Paston wrote, ‘And this same Wednesday was it told that Cherbourg is gone and we have not now a foot of land in Normandy.’ King Charles’s men went on to conquer Guyenne, an operation completed by the autumn of 1451, Bordeaux having surrendered in June. A final English attempt to regain the duchy was humiliatingly defeated at Castillon in 1453. The only French soil remaining in English hands was Calais and the Channel Islands.

Hatred of the invader from across the Channel had united the various French
pays
, making them forget their regional differences. The revival of French morale had been begun by Joan of Arc, after whose brief, meteoric career the English failed to conquer more territory. Then in 1435 Philip of Burgundy deserted them, recognizing Charles VII as King of France and his overlord. Henceforward the English increasingly suffered military and diplomatic reverses. Their occupation was doomed even though it took a reunited France another fifteen years to drive them out. To some extent they were defeated by the new French field cannon and handguns which, while still primitive, proved more effective than English bows.