The Demon's Brood (32 page)

A giant that was full grim of sight

To teach the Frenchmen courtesy.
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No longer did anyone question Henry's right to be king.

In summer 1416 the King of the Romans, Sigismund of Hungary, who was the future emperor, came to England to persuade Henry to make peace. Instead, he recognized Henry's
claim to the French throne. Henry also hoped that Sigismund would obtain an endorsement of his claim by the council currently meeting at Constance to end the Great Schism, but here his guest could not help him.

The diplomatic offensive distracted Henry's attention from Harfleur, which he nearly lost by leaving insufficient food. The Count of Armagnac blockaded it by land and sea, and it was about to surrender when in August the king's brother John, Duke of Bedford arrived with a fleet. After a sea-battle lasting seven hours, Bedford routed the enemy's carracks despite a hail of quicklime and flaming tow from their tall superstructures, and relieved the beleaguered port. The next year, the Earl of Huntingdon sank the remaining French warships off the Chef-de-Caux.

Henry prepared to subdue his new kingdom. Subsidies were granted by parliament, and loans obtained from City corporations and merchants, upper clergy and rich landowners by pawning everything in the royal coffers, whether jewels or plate – Bishop Beaufort lent £14,000 against the royal crown. Foodstuffs and munitions were collected, cannon, rock-throwing catapults, siege-towers, leather bridges, scaling-ladders, spades, shovels, picks, sheafs of bows, tubs full of arrows. The invasion force consisted of 12,000 men-at-arms and archers. There were miners, engineers, armourers and farriers, with gunners and masons who were not only demolition experts but quarried gun-stones. (Newly developed artillery could fire 800 lb missiles as far as 2,500 paces.) The king's brothers – Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester – and his uncle the Duke of Exeter, formerly Earl of Dorset, provided the senior commanders, together with the Earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Huntingdon.

Henry had expanded his navy to more than thirty vessels, not only the usual cogs but square-rigged nefs or ‘great ships' (one of over 1,000 tons) and two-masted carracks – three captured from the Genoese. There were also nine ballingers, oared, shallow-draughted sailing barges that could sail up rivers and
move troops fast along the French waterways. Transport vessels for men and horses were collected from every port in England.

He began his Norman conquest in reverse by landing on 1 August 1417 at the mouth of the Touques, between what are now Deauville and Trouville. Burgundian and Armagnac feuding ensured there was no one to oppose him. After a fortnight Caen, whose walls had been breached by his artillery, fell on 4 September. Herded into the marketplace, its inhabitants were massacred in an orgy of rape and looting, but he ordered the killing to stop when he saw a baby sucking at the breast of its headless mother. Terrified, city after city, town after town, surrendered, so that by early the next year half Normandy was in his hands.

The king recommenced in spring 1418, taking Louviers in June. When it surrendered, he hanged eight enemy gunners for firing at his tent – one source says he crucified them. Pont de l'Arche fell in July after the English crossed the Seine in what seem to have been portable Welsh coracles, cutting off Rouen downstream.

The siege of the Norman capital began at the end of July. Well fortified, with large stocks of food, it was defended by 22,000 men under veteran commanders, who outnumbered their besiegers. At first, the Rouennais were defiant. The vicar-general of Rouen excommunicated Henry from the walls, while when he hanged prisoners from gibbets in front of them, the captain of the crossbowmen, Alain Blanchard, hanged English captives from the ramparts with dead dogs tied round their necks. But by October its citizens were eating horseflesh and 12,000 useless mouths, old folk or nursing mothers, were driven out into the city's ditch. Henry refused to let them leave it. ‘I put hem not there and that wot ye', he reminded the Rouennais,
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and they died in the ditch. Envoys were told, ‘Rouen is my heritage'.

When the city surrendered on 19 January 1419, after kissing each one of forty-two crosses borne by the clergy the king attended a Mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral of Saint-Maclou.
Among those excluded from the terms of surrender, the vicar-general who had excommunicated Henry spent five years in chains while the captain of the crossbowmen was hanged on the spot. The surviving inhabitants looked like funeral effigies, deaths from hunger continuing for days despite the arrival of food carts. The English quickly conquered the rest of Normandy, which saw no chance of rescue.

In May a hell-fire Dominican preacher, St Vincent Ferrer, came to Caen and in a sermon rebuked Henry for killing Christian men and women who had never done him any harm. After it, he told Vincent, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish people for their sins'. Emerging from their meeting, Vincent assured everybody that while he had once seen Henry as the worst tyrant in Christendom, he now believed him to be the most pleasing to God of all rulers. He added, ‘His quarrel is so just and true that undoubtedly God is and shall be his aid in these wars.'
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The story conveys some idea of the impact of Henry's personality.

Meanwhile, the political situation turned upside down. In 1418 the Burgundians had captured Paris, slaughtering the Armagnacs and their count, whose surviving followers became known as Dauphinists. In September 1419 John, Duke of Burgundy was hacked to death as he knelt in homage before the new dauphin, dividing the French irreparably. John's successor, Duke Philip the Good, wanted revenge and in December allied formally with Henry, promising to help him conquer France.

In July Henry had already taken the first step towards capturing Paris, his men storming Pontoise which they sacked brutally. The little city commanded the River Oise, so its new English garrison was able to cut off the capital's food supplies. Led by Clarence, they terrorized the area around, robbing, raping, killing, seizing landowners and bourgeois for ransom. St Germain fell to them in September.

In the meantime the king isolated Dauphinist France diplomatically, allying with Emperor Sigismund and the Rhineland elector-archbishops and with the republic of Genoa. He tried
– unsuccessfully – to marry Bedford to the Queen of Naples, and Gloucester to the King of Navarre's daughter, while his ambassadors visited the King of Poland and the Teutonic Knights. The most important treaty of all came in May 1420 when at Troyes in Champagne he met Queen Isabeau, who controlled the insane Charles VI. On his way there, he took a circular route, riding within view of the walls of Paris and praying at St Denis – burial place of the French kings. Isabeau declared that the dauphin was a bastard, while Henry became ‘Heir and Regent of France' and married Charles's nineteen-year-old daughter Catherine.

The king spent his honeymoon besieging Montereau on whose bridge John of Burgundy had been murdered. As at Rouen, he hanged prisoners in view of the ramparts to encourage their comrades to surrender. Next, he invested Melun on the Seine, which took eighteen weeks to capture. When it surrendered Henry wanted to hang the garrison commander, Arnaud Guillaume de Barbazan, who escaped by appealing to the laws of chivalry – as he had crossed swords with the king in the siege-mines beneath the walls, he was a brother-in-arms. Instead, Henry placed him in an iron cage, but he hanged twenty Scottish prisoners on the grounds that they were technically his subjects. He was ‘much feared and dreaded by his princes, knights and captains, and indeed by people of every class', the chronicler Waurin (a veteran of Agincourt) tells us, ‘as he put to death anyone who disobeyed his orders'.
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On 1 September, accompanied by Charles VI and the Duke of Burgundy, Henry rode into Paris, cheered by the Parisians, who were relieved they would not suffer the fate of Rouen. They were miserable enough. It was a bitterly cold winter and the price of bread had doubled – houses were pulled down for their beams to make firewood while many of the poor starved to death, wolves regularly swimming the Seine to devour corpses in the street. The English king spent the twelve days of Christmas of 1420–1 in splendour at the Louvre, in contrast to
his mad old father-in-law, who, dirty and unkempt, was all but deserted at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. Burgundian noblemen did not care for Henry's arrogance – he had Jehan de l'Isle-Adam, Marshal of France, arrested for daring to look him in the face when answering a question – but saw no alternative. Philip of Burgundy, who besides the duchy and county of Burgundy and the entire Low Countries ruled large areas of northern France, thought only of revenge on the dauphin who had murdered his father.

Before returning to England to raise money, Henry presided over a meeting at Rouen of the estates of ‘our duchy of Normandy' – nobles, clergy and bourgeois. There were representatives from other conquered provinces which, with Normandy, formed a separate entity from the Lancastrian kingdom of France. Since 1417 the king had been distributing lands, castles and titles to adventurers as well as great lords, bringing in English settlers. While replacing the Norman nobility, he tried to win over bourgeois, reducing the gabelle, the hated tax on salt. The military establishment was English, however, with strategically sited garrisons in towns or castles near rivers which were patrolled by ballingers so that garrisons could be rushed in quickly. (A garrison's average strength was three men-at-arms and nine archers, all mounted.) After announcing there would be a new Anglo-Norman currency, he travelled to Calais from where he and his new queen set sail for England.

They went straight to London for Catherine's coronation. While he was away, Bedford and then Gloucester had ensured there was no trouble. Richard II's supporters abandoned the struggle, the Welsh remained cowed and the Lollards were crushed, Sir John Oldcastle having been caught in 1417 to be roasted in chains as he swung from a gibbet, promising to rise on the third day. Even so, shortly after Henry's return a kinsman of the Earl of March, Sir John Mortimer, was arrested for treason and sent to the Tower. The unspecified charge can only have been scheming to put March on the throne.

Welcomed joyfully, the royal couple went on progress through the West Country, the Midlands, East Anglia and the north country, visiting the richer towns – including Bristol, Coventry, Lynn, Nottingham and York – as it was a fundraising tour. While in Yorkshire they visited the shrine of St John of Bridlington and that of St John of Beverley – to whose intercession Henry attributed his victory at Agincourt. In March news came that on the day before Easter the English had suffered a defeat at Baugé during which the ‘Regent of France', Clarence, had been killed. ‘To avenge it as thoroughly as he can, the lord king is busy fleecing everyone who has any money, rich or poor, all over the kingdom, in readiness for returning to France with as many troops as possible', wrote Adam of Usk on the last page of his chronicle. ‘I fear the kingdom's entire manpower and money will be wasted.'
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England was war weary. Even so, the king raised £38,000 from clergy, landowners, burgesses, artisans and yeomen, and despite complaining of poverty, parliament confirmed the Treaty of Troyes, granted further subsidies and gave the royal council power to act as security for debts incurred by the king. His financial dealings could be devious, as when he confiscated lands legally entailed on Lord Scrope's children. In autumn 1419 he arrested his stepmother, the queen dowager Joan of Navarre, for trying to kill him with sorcery and employing a necromancer to do so. Never brought to trial, she was imprisoned at Leeds Castle, in luxury with a large allowance. Joan was entitled to a dowry of more than £6,000, when his government's basic income was rarely over £56,000, and he wanted it.

Henry struck a godly attitude before returning to France, listening sympathetically to a group of monks who denounced relaxations in the Benedictine way of life. After consulting a Benedictine who had joined the Carthusians, the most austere religious order, he summoned 400 brethren from monasteries all over England to Westminster Abbey in May 1421 and read out a list of criticisms, urging them to reform. Among his
motives may have been an awareness that support for Richard II had survived longest at several famous abbeys.

The next month he landed at Calais with 4,000 troops. Learning that Paris was threatened by raids from two Dauphinist strongholds, Dreux and Meaux, the king besieged and captured Dreux. Before marching to Meaux, he took the castle of Rougemont, whose garrison he hanged, drowning those whom he caught later.

On a bend of the Marne, Meaux was guarded on three sides by the river and on the fourth by a canal. Although a bloodstained brigand, its garrison commander, the Bastard of Vaurus, was a fine soldier. Henry invested the city in mid-October and the siege dragged on through the winter, his camp waterlogged as rain fell incessantly and the Marne burst its banks. The king went down with dysentery, a physician being sent from England to attend him. By Christmas a fifth of his army had deserted. The defenders felt so confident that they took a donkey up on to the wall, flogging it until it brayed, shouting that it was the King of England who spoke.

Henry held on, with draconian discipline, ordering a man who ran away during an ambush to be buried alive. His troops plundered the entire area for miles around the city, which even then was famous for its mustard. When a delegation of local dignitaries came to complain to him about the burning of farms, he made his only recorded joke. ‘War without fire is like sausages without mustard.'
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From his tent he ran the entire war effort as well as affairs at home and abroad, issuing edicts and ordinances, sending a stream of letters. The supply of guns, gun-stones, saltpetre, coal and sulphur, of bows, arrows and remounts, needed watching, so a king's clerk of the ordinance was in attendance, to keep Henry in close touch with the artillery depot at Caen and the arsenal at Rouen. Like a modern staff officer, the king paid special attention to food and transport. He also found time to answer a stream of petitions, whether from England or Normandy.