Henry V as Warlord (38 page)

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Authors: Desmond Seward

BOOK: Henry V as Warlord
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Yet it was not just military technology which defeated the English. What broke them was lack of money. Henry VI’s total annual revenue at this period was only £30,000 when his household alone was costing £24,000 a year; his father’s pernicious practice of borrowing was continued so that the Crown’s debts grew to nearly £400,000. In consequence there was no cash for military operations, nothing with which to pay ever smaller forces in the field or in the garrisons, arrears of pay causing mutinies, desertion and still more plundering of the local French population. The King’s Ships were either sold off or left to rot at their moorings, while most of the English fortresses in France were allowed to grow so ruinous that it was impossible to defend them. All this came of embarking on a programme of overseas adventure and foreign conquest beyond England’s resources.

When the French possessions were lost there was an outcry in England, which had come to regard Normandy as English territory, Rouen as much an English city as Bordeaux. Henry VI’s three principal ministers were lynched. The kingdom sank rapidly into bloody anarchy. The nobility and gentry had been turned into professional soldiers by the wars in France; after being driven out, they and their followers were only too ready to use at home – and, if necessary, on each other – the lethal professional skills they had acquired abroad. What were later to be called the Wars of the Roses began in 1455, English veterans fighting each other instead of the French. Henry VI was deposed in 1461, to be murdered ten years later, less than three weeks after his only son had been killed at Tewkesbury. It was the end of the Lancastrian usurpation.

Yet the House of Lancaster might have survived the incapacity of its last king, even the madness which by a bitter irony he had inherited from his Valois grandfather, had it not been for his father’s bequest of ‘Lancastrian France’. For all his brilliance, Henry V’s ambition ended by bankrupting and discrediting his son, and by ruining his dynasty.

Looking back from the end of the fifteenth century, Philippe de Commynes (not a Frenchman but a man of Flanders), although he can refer to ‘the wise, handsome and very brave king Henry’, clearly believes that the destruction of the House of Lancaster was God’s judgement on it for what it had done in France. Writing of the fate of the dynasty, together with its Beaufort and Holland cousins and Yorkist kindred, he says:

All have been killed in battle. Their fathers and their followers had pillaged and destroyed the kingdom of France and possessed the greater part of it for many years. But they all killed each other … And yet people say, ‘God doesn’t punish men as he was accustomed to in the days of the children of Israel and tolerates wicked princes and men!’ … In the long run there is no lordship, and certainly no strong one, where the country does not remain in the possession of its own people. As may be seen from the example of France, where the English held much territory for 400 years, but now hold only Calais and two little castles which cost them much money to maintain. The rest they lost more quickly than they had conquered it since they lost more in a day than they had gained in a year.
1

It is clear that he has no doubts that Lancastrian France had been doomed from the start.

In 1475 Edward IV rode out from Calais at the head of 12,000 troops, accompanied by almost every English peer who was fit enough to climb into a saddle. Once styled Earl of March, he had been born at Rouen when his father was lieutenant-general of Lancastrian France. The English army marched confidently towards the Somme, killing, burning, and looting in the traditional style. But, unlike Henry V, Edward realized that he could not afford a long war of conquest while, again unlike Henry, as a womanizer running to fat he could never have stood the strain of lengthy campaigning. He let himself be bought off by Louis XI for 75,000 gold crowns down and annual instalments of 50,000. Commynes observes that no one should be surprised at Louis paying such sums ‘considering the great evils the English have committed in this realm all too recently’. In the event it was the last full-scale English invasion of France. Nonetheless Commynes tells us that even in the 1490s the French still regarded their neighbours over the Channel as a threat:

All the English nobles, commons and clergy are ready at any moment to fight against this realm on the pretext of spurious claims to it, in the hope of winning profit here since God allowed their forebears to win several great battles … they carried off great plunder and wealth to England, taken from both the poor people and the lords of France whom they imprisoned in large numbers.
2

As late as 1525, when François I was defeated at Pavia, Henry VIII thought he had a good chance of reconquering what had been Lancastrian France. Calais was lost only in 1558.

For centuries the north-western French celebrated the expulsion of the English. Until 1735 the liberation of Paris in 1436 was celebrated annually by the ‘Procession of the English’. The Earl of Warwick’s banner, captured at Montargis in 1427, was borne in triumph through that town on the
Fête des Anglais
every year till 1792. Mass was said twice annually in every important church in France until the Revolution in thanksgiving for the freeing of Cherbourg in 1450 and the end of the occupation of Normandy; it continued to be said in some parishes of the Cotentin throughout the nineteenth century. Even now the occupation’s memory lingers. In Maine, farmers near Lassay still refer to the ‘time of the English’ (or did till a few years ago), while further west within living memory country people spoke of ‘going into England’ when crossing what had once been the frontier of the conquest.

After Waterloo in 1815 and after Sedan in 1870, when Alsace-Lorraine had to be surrendered, the French were again invaded and occupied by foreigners. It revived ancient but nonetheless bitter folk memories in the French people of what they had endured at the hands of the English. The cult of Joan of Arc embedded their ancestors’ sufferings still more firmly in the popular mind. No doubt two world wars have done much to make them forget the Hundred Years War. Yet it is no exaggeration to claim that by reviving the war Henry dug a chasm between French and English, a Chasm which has grown deeper down the centuries’.

Henry V’s truest and most lasting monument is not the beautiful chapel at Westminster, not Shakespeare’s play, not the tale of Agincourt and Crispin’s Day. Nor is it the Wars of the Roses. It is that antipathy and distrust which, sadly, all too many Frenchmen feel for those who speak English as their first language. That is the king’s legacy for those of us who live in the last years of the twentieth century. Other men and other wars have deepened it but he was one of its original architects.

Glossary

 

 

 

 

 

apanage

royal lands granted by a French king to a younger son for his maintenance, with the title of duke or count.

bailli

royal officer responsible for the administration of justice and of revenue in a baillage or district.

ballinger

English sailing barge usually with from forty to fifty oars, shallow-draughted and clinker built.

barbican

fortified gatehouse with tower above or flanked by towers.

bassinet

conical helmet with ‘hounskul’ (or ‘pig-face’) pointed visor.

bastard

title borne by acknowledged eldest natural son of a noble.

bastille

wooden tower on wheels for assault, used in siege warfare.

bastion

round or polygonal tower projecting from walls.

blanc

French equivalent of groat but mainly of base metal instead of silver.

bombard

heavy cannon used in siege warfare, firing gunstones or metal cannon balls of up to 1,000 lb.

bowyer

bow maker.

brigantine

defensive jacket of metal plates on cloth.

brimstone

sulphur.

calthrop

small metal ball with four (angled) projecting spikes placed on battlefield to maim horses.

captal

Gascon title for captain of a castle.

carrack

large square-rigged sailing vessel of Genoese origin, clinker built.

chambres des comptes

accounting office for French royal finances at Paris or for Norman ducal finances at Caen.

champion

officer charged with defending his lord’s cause in trial by battle.

châtelet

principal criminal court at Paris.

close-helmet

round-topped helmet attached to neck armour.

cog

main type of square-rigged sailing vessel in use in north European waters, clinker built.

crown

French gold coin weighing 3.99 gm (though weight fluctuated), worth 20½ sols.

culverin

light cannon firing lead or bronze bullets – mounted on portable rest and the ancestor of the hand gun and the harquebus.

curtana

the sword ‘curtana’ was the pointless sword of mercy (as opposed to the pointed sword of justice) borne before the English king at his coronation.

destrier

warhorse.

donjon

keep of a castle.

estates

consultative assembly of representatives of the three estates of nobles, clergy and bourgeois.

fletcher

arrow maker.

gabelle

tax on salt – a commodity which could only be bought at royal (in Normandy, ducal) depots.

haro

cry to a lord for rescue.

havoc

the word announcing permission for troops to plunder.

jack

defensive leather coat, either of several layers or quilted, often reinforced with metal studs or small plates.

jupon

short leather tunic worn over chain mail.

lit de justice

plenary session of the
parlement
presided over by the king of France at which a royal edict was forcibly registered or a peer of France tried.

mangonel

siege engine firing stone shot.

march

borderland – a ‘marcher lord’ was lord of a frontier territory, as in Wales where he had considerable independence.

maul

or mallet – a hammer-type weapon, with a heavy leaden head on a five-foot wooden shaft.

mine

tunnel dug under foundations to undermine walls or towers.

misericorde

‘mercy’ dagger, so called from being used to dispatch enemy wounded.

morning star

form of mace, consisting of a spiked metal ball attached by a chain to a short metal shaft.

noble

principal gold coin of English currency, worth 6
s
8
d
.

pantler

master of the pantry.

parlement

supreme court of appeal in the kingdom of France, situated at the Palais de Justice in Paris.

pâtis

protection money levied by troops on local population.

pavise

large, free-standing shield on hinged support used by archers and crossbowmen as protection when shooting.

pole-axe

combined axe and half-pike, with axe blade balanced by hammer head on five-foot metal shaft.

poundage

customs duty on weight of all imports and exports save bullion.

pourpoint

quilted doublet.

president

principal judicial officer of the
parlement
at Paris.

provost

royal officer responsible for overseeing administration of justice.

ribeaudequin

cart mounting several small culverins discharged together.

sallet

type of helmet, unattached to neck armour and with or without visor.

saltpetre

potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder.

salut

Lancastrian French equivalent of the gold crown.

sol

silver or base metal coin (later known as
sou
) subdivided into 12 deniers.

sollerets

articulated armour for feet.

sow

a mobile shelter used in siege warfare, with a strong timber roof and covered in damp hides to make it fireproof.

trebuchet

siege engine or catapult hurling rocks or barrels of flaming tow, the principal form of heavy artillery before the bombard and afterwards used to supplement cannon.

tunnage

customs duty on wine imported in casks, levied at so much per tun.

vicomte

Norman administrative official equal or junior in rank to a
bailli
.

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