The deposition, then mysterious death, of Richard II in 1399 brought about a crisis in Bordeaux. The new king, Henry IV of the house of Lancaster, the son of John of Gaunt, the former – and unpopular – Duke of Aquitaine, had to impose his authority in England against the supporters of the king he had replaced. Bordeaux showed no less a tendency to maintain Richard II’s cause: after all, he had been born within its walls, and had heaped privileges on his birthplace. For a time, the Bordelais resisted Henry IV as a usurper. He won them over, however, by renewing their ancient privileges, and affirming that the city would never be separated from the English crown.1
The Duchy of Aquitaine had been greatly reduced in area by this time. The Bordelais, the Médoc peninsula, the coastal strip of the Landes, the Bayonnais and some towns on the River Adour, were the only remaining elements of the Anglo-Gascon duchy which had been agreed upon with the French by Edward III’s ambassadors at Brétigny in 1360. The extent of Aquitaine agreed at that time comprised not only Gascony, but also Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumois, Perigord, Limousin, Quercy, and Rouergue, besides lands in the Pyrenees.2 It resembled the duchy held by Henry II in virtue of his marriage to Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, at his accession in 1154. John Lackland did not lose it in 1204 when the rest of his Angevin heritage was assumed into the kingdom of France. Louis IX reduced it greatly after he had humiliated Henry III at the battle of Taillebourg in 1242 and imposed the River Charente as the boundary between Aquitaine and his kingdom in the treaty of Paris in 1259. In the century and a half between then and the seizure of the throne of England by Henry IV, the frontier was constantly being modified, and the latest incursion had been in 1377 by the Duke of Anjou and General du Guesclin, meaning that the Brétigny agreement was a dead letter.
The duchy was still a viable entity, however, sustained by the production and export of wine and the import and entrepôt trade in dyes from the Toulosain. There was the great port at Bordeaux on the River Garonne where it is 600 metres wide, approached from the Gironde Estuary by two great convoys of English ships that each year took the new wine for immediate use. English traders had commercial contacts with Gascon winegrowers. Similar conditions operated in the port at Bayonne and the transport of trade goods from there was dominated by its own ships and mariners. The system worked well for the landowners, vinegrowers and traders of the duchy. The king/duke continued to command their loyalty because he kept his distance in the matter of government and paid properly for the regional product. The English monopoly was by no means resented. Besides, English armies arrived from time to time at need to repulse French encroachments from the north and east. Usually, the conditions prevailing during the Hundred Years War – though, of course, nobody called it that at the time – of alternate warfare and truces did not disrupt the established pattern of trade.
Henry IV achieved a certain ‘precarious strength’3 in the duchy by making concessions to the outlook of its ruling classes, while maintaining his support for the English nominated officials, and assuring the various communes that he did not intend to rule in the overbearing way that his father John of Gaunt had in the previous century, for which the older men among the clergy, the nobles and the powerful bourgeoisie, still harboured resentment.
Two days after Henry IV’s coronation, in October 1399, his son, the Prince of Wales, future Henry V, was named as Duke of Aquitaine. Since he would inherit the throne, the Gascons could not complain that they had been separated from the king as they had previously done when Richard II had made his uncle John of Gaunt the Duke, who never felt welcome enough to take up residence in the Ombrière Palace. It was even possible that the prince would soon lead a military expedition there while his second cousin, the Earl of Rutland was seneschal,4 though it was his brother, Thomas, just before he was created Earl of Clarence, who would actually be sent by Henry IV as lieutenant on an expedition in 1412 after the king had become suspicious of his heir’s precocious ambition as a member of his council.5
There were several incursions into Gascony by the French: attacks from its northern frontier with the Saintonge, to the western towards the Perigord and the southern in the Agenais, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. From 1406 to 1407 the Duke of Orleans’ expedition to the southern extremity of the Gironde Estuary proved abortive,6 but a passing glance at how those who lived there reacted to it will lift the lid on assumptions they made about the need to defend themselves.
Preparations for the Duke of Orleans’s invasion began in June 1406. Several French nobles expressed confidence that the English could not maintain their duchy and that several Gascon lords were keeping an open mind about their own continued loyalty – men like Archimbaud de Grailly, Count of Foix, who said that he was always loyal to the king of England, but would never write it down in case the paper fell into French hands.7 Louis of Orleans, King Charles VI’s brother, began his journey south, bearing the Oriflamme – the French battle standard that denoted a major offensive operation – in the second half of September. He raised this standard at Saint-Jean d’Angély on 15 October accompanied by 5,000 men-at-arms and a plethora of noblemen. A French fleet, including a squadron from Brittany, was already at La Rochelle. Orleans’ plan of campaign was to attack towns and fortresses on the north bank of the Dordogne, with ready access for naval operations on the wide reach of the Gironde. One target was the huge fortress of Fronsac which dominates the valley and was recognized as the key to taking Bordeaux. His proclamation to the people of Libourne, Saint-Emilion and Bourg claimed that ‘they owed no allegiance to their regicide king’8 who was responsible for Richard II’s death. This makes us sit up and take notice because Louis of Orleans was one of the French lords who befriended the future Henry IV in France when he was exiled by Richard II nine years before.9
The invaders hoped that Blaye, the town upon the east bank of the Gironde where the estuary begins to narrow for its approach to the Dordogne and the Garonne, would allow them to pass unopposed. The chatelaine there was a young woman called Marie de Montaut, daughter of the lord of Mussidan,10 whose relations were, for the most part, supporting the duke’s invasion if not actually taking part in it. As would happen later also, it was hoped that a relief force from England was on its way but, when it was evident that it was not, Marie avoided committing herself to the French or the Anglo-Gascons, refusing equally an oath of allegiance to Henry IV and support to the Duke of Orleans.
Blaye was garrisoned from Bordeaux with troops under the command of Bertrand de Montferrand, an associate of the seneschal, Gaillard de Durfort. Marie shut Montferrand out from the town and sought protection from the count of Foix who, on condition that she should marry his third son, also called Archimbaud, so as to gain her lands, sent the freebooting captain Jeannot de Grailly to protect her and the town. Orleans knew that the loyalty of the Grailly family was doubtful, and began negotiations with Dame Marie and Jeannot. Seneschal Durfort crossed the Gironde on 23 October with men-at-arms, crossbowmen and English archers and occupied the town for five days, but Jeannot did not let him into the castle, or allow him directly to approach Mlle de Montaut. So she continued to negotiate with the Duke of Orleans.
Eventually, Durfort and Marie de Montaut did meet, and Durfort’s attitude to her was uncompromising, demanding that she swear allegiance to the king/duke, which she refused on the advice of her council. Durfort threatened to burn the town if she did not accept his offer that she could exchange her seigneurie for that of Blanquefort, on the Bordeaux side of the Gironde. He ordered Jeannot to desist from his negotiations, but Marie left the town, riding pillion on the Count of Armagnac’s saddle, and was taken to Orleans’s headquarters in a nearby abbey. Durfort, so as to escape being trapped on the wrong side of the estuary, returned to Bordeaux.
Marie de Montaut made a bizarre agreement with the French commander. She agreed to surrender the town and the castle to the count of Foix, but only while Orleans’ campaign lasted, and Jeannot was to continue to hold the castle. If Bourg, the next town on the estuary, were to fall to the French, then they should have Blaye as well. For the moment, her town was to remain neutral. She reaffirmed her agreement to marry Archimbaud. The French commanders were optimistic about their eventual success, and moved on to Bourg.
Bourg resisted stalwartly under the command of the seneschal and the municipality of Bordeaux. Bordeaux raised the necessary funds to pay mercenaries and shipping, as well as for provisions already brought from England, and cannon and ships’ guns from resources previously stocked in the city. Bertrand de Montferrand led the operations with the garrison of regulars in Bourg and the Bordeaux militia.11 Despite Louis of Orleans’ energetic siege action, Bourg resisted and his repeated attacks were repulsed. The effects of a prolonged siege were soon apparent. The attackers could not be provisioned, the weather turned cold with the approach of winter, their camp was waterlogged; then dysentery broke out and troops began to desert. The Gascons took advantage of all this, and when the count of Foix came to his castle at Cadillac to marry his son to Mlle de Montaut, he waited in vain for her to arrive.
The La Rochelle fleet was prevented from supporting the attackers when the annual English wine fleet arrived, heavily armed against Breton raiders. They kept the access open to Bourg from Bordeaux by the waterways, in company with the ships and barges already in the port. Their patrols up the estuary to Talmont prevented the French fleet from approaching Blaye or Bourg. The seneschal was in charge of all these movements.12
Orleans ordered the Admiral of France to be more aggressive in December, and he did take action. But the English merchantmen, ready to leave laden with the year’s wine, put it ashore again and, together with other ships from Bordeaux and Bayonne under Bernard de Lesparre, confronted the eighteen French supply ships in the mist among the sandbanks, which they knew and the French did not, on 23 December. The Anglo-Gascon naval victory was complete, and the French survivors retreated. Two of their captured ships were set alight in front of Bourg. After trying to negotiate with Bertrand de Montferrand, Louis of Orleans gave up and dismantled his camp on 14 January. Jeannot de Grailly handed Bourg over to English officers, Marie de Montaut married someone else, towns and strongholds on the Dordogne were recovered. ‘The most serious threat to the duchy since 1377 had failed.’13
Certainly, the wine fleet had turned into a vital military force, but there had been no specifically military expedition from England to meet Orleans’ challenge to the duchy. The Anglo-Gascons had managed their own resistance – even the seneschal at this time was Gascon born and bred. The claim made in 1452, after the French conquest, by the Bordelais delegation to Charles VII, that taxation for the armed security of the province of Guyenne was unnecessary because the Gascons could defend themselves, had some basis of truth in the light of this episode from nearly half a century before. Moreover, the importance of this incident was to demonstrate that, six years after Henry IV had usurped Richard Plantagenet’s throne, the substitute king/duke could count upon the loyalty of the Gascons.
* * *
Before we go any further, some aspects of tensions existing in France have to be considered. We have to look backwards to the onset of King Charles VI’s mental illness in the last decade of the fourteenth century to understand how French internal politics had come to be so detrimental to the national interest by the opening years of the fifteenth century.
Charles VI came to the throne in 1380 at the age of twelve, in succession to his father, Charles V. His uncle Philip, Duke of Burgundy, held the reins of power before he came of age. With the king’s mental illness preventing his own assumption of power even when he had attained his majority, Philip became not only the power behind the throne, but the power instead of it. The king’s younger brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, challenged his position, and the conflict between the two dukes came out into the open. Burgundy appealed to the Paris Parlement for an arbitration, since the body of magistrates was then in process of assuming more authority over legal decisions concerning state policy.14
From 1392 onwards, Charles VI’s instability, most likely inherited from the consanguineous marriage of his great-grandfather, Philippe VI with Jeanne of Burgundy,15 showed itself in a crisis after he had been ill with either typhoid or encephalitis and in what appears to be a clinically obsessive state. He left Paris with a retinue to take revenge upon the Duke of Brittany, one of whose protégés had unsuccessfully plotted the assassination of his favourite adviser, Olivier de Clisson. He was approaching the forest of Le Mans near a leper colony, when a roughly dressed man emerged from the trees, took hold of his horse’s bridle and shouted that he must turn back or be destroyed. The king was visibly disturbed by what had been said. As the cavalcade emerged from the forest into the hot open plain, one of the king’s pages, half asleep because of the heat, dropped his lance which made a noise as it fell on someone else’s helmet. The king drew his sword, shouting, ‘Forward against the traitors! They wish to deliver me to the enemy!’ He struck out at those around him and continued in this delusion until he was exhausted. His madness was plain for all to see.16 Other incidents followed to demonstrate his suffering from schizophrenia. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who was to become Pope Pius II, wrote that ‘he sometimes believed that he was made of glass and could not be touched; he inserted iron rods into his clothes and in many ways protected himself lest he broke in falling.’ Sometimes he did not recognize Queen Isabeau, though he had had twelve children with her in twenty-one years. Eventually, she left his bed and was replaced by Odette de Champvilliers, a horse-dealer’s daughter, whom he called his little queen, and their daughter Marguerite de Valois was legitimized later on by Charles VII in the same way as he also legitimized his own daughters by Agnes Sorel.17
From 1404 onwards, the king’s brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans (whom we have already seen being worsted by the Anglo-Gascons at the towns of the southern end of the Gironde), and his nephew, John the Fearless, now Duke of Burgundy, both born within a year of each other, vied for domination over the incapacitated monarch as much as they had when he was a minor. The inheritance of the former comprised the duchies of Valois and Luxembourg together with the counties of Blois, Porcien and Vertus, while that of the latter was increased by the counties of Flanders and Artois. Neither of them could replace the king, since the rules of succession were well understood, and Charles VI had three sons in their way at the time. That did not, however, stop them from vying with each other for a claim on the royal finances.
John the Fearless (so-called because of his reputation gained at the disastrous battle of Nicopolis against Sultan Bajazet I in 1396 when he was in his early twenties) was looking for support from the great bodies of the state, from the University of Paris and from the leaders of the bourgeoisie, in the cause of political reform. On 26 August 1405 in the Paris Parlement in the presence of the Dauphin Louis of Guyenne and the Duke of Berry, he announced his intention to treat Charles VI in the most honourable manner, but to re-establish justice, and to govern the royal domain and military expenses better than was being done at present. He warned that if the royal administration were not improved ‘a very great commotion’ would ensue. An urgent priority was that the king be better advised.
His proposals amounted to offering himself as the defender of the crown and its subjects. A few days later, the Duke of Orleans made a counter-claim, opposing Burgundy’s ‘brutal conduct’ by officially presenting himself instead as the defender of the king and the royal family. John the Fearless in turn countered this move by resorting to the weapon of a marriage alliance. Since Louis of Guyenne was already engaged to his daughter Marguerite, he arranged the engagement of another daughter, Agnes, with the three-year-old count of Ponthieu, who would, after his brothers’ deaths, become the Dauphin Charles and then Charles VII.
Then Louis of Orleans was set upon and murdered by a gang of armed men as he went home from the queen’s lodgings on the evening of 23 November 1407 in the vieille rue du Temple. All fingers pointed to John the Fearless as the instigator of this crime. He had not been in Paris when the murder happened, so he arranged for a scholastic conference to be held in the hall of the Hôtel de Saint-Pol, the royal residence, on 8 March 1408 in order to exonerate himself. During it, a Norman theologian whose name was Jean Petit, argued that Orleans had been disposed of in an act of justifiable tyrannicide.
By August, according to the future archbishop of Reims Juvenal des Ursins, it was the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria who presided in the council and had become the actual government of the kingdom. John the Fearless returned to the capital on 28 November, covered in glory after his victory over the Liegois at Othez on 23 September. The result was ‘intestinal strife’, as the contemporary commentator Christine de Pisan called it.
Attempts at reconciliation between the Orleans faction and the Burgundians were unsuccessful, but they were part of the of the six-year-old Charles of Ponthieu’s political education. He would have been present when Charles VI, enthroned in Chartres Cathedral on 9 March 1409, attended by Queen Isabeau, Louis of Guyenne, then dauphin, Louis II of Anjou, the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon, and count Charles of Albret, then constable of France, tried to smooth away the enmity between the late Duke of Orleans’s heir, the seventeen-year-old Duke Charles, and John the Fearless. John’s son-in-law, the Dauphin Louis of Guyenne, in spite of his sympathies with Orleans, spontaneously offered him the kiss of peace.
Queen Isabeau had already formed the pact of Melun in November 1409 with John the Fearless, and brought him to the threshold of power by making him guardian to Charles of Ponthieu, housed in his fortress of Loches. A clear-cut division was from then on made between the two factions of the ruling class. Charles Duke of Orleans married Bernard VII of Armagnac’s daughter. In a recent historian’s words:
It was in 1410–1411 that, in a derisory manner, the Duke of Burgundy’s adversaries were called Armagnacs by his supporters: ‘foreigners,’ with an incomprehensible language, a despicable way of conducting themselves, more brigands than military men. This injurious label came into being … and it was carried on, with highs and lows, until 1445.18
Charles Duke of Orleans, along with his brothers, Philippe, count of Vertus, and Jean, count of Angoulême, met at Jargeau on 18 July 1411 to send letters of defiance to the Duke of Burgundy as their father’s murderer. The Duke of Burgundy ignored them and entered Paris on 3 November to enjoy his popularity there. Pope Pius II, the renaissance intellectual, sided with the Burgundians to denounce the bands of Armagnacs as illegal and impious assemblies.
Orleans was accused of wanting to oust the king completely. During violent outbreaks, the Abbey of Saint-Denis was pillaged by the Armagnacs, and Bernard VII would gladly have made his son-in-law king. Burgundy had Berry’s château at Bitrex pillaged at the same time as he opened relations with Henry IV of England and so it came about that Henry IV and the Prince of Wales, the future Henry V, became involved in French civil strife. In 1411, the Prince was a leading member of his father’s royal council with a certain autonomy of action.
The prince and his father agreed on the importance of persuading the government of France to implement the terms of Edward III’s 1360 treaty of Brétigny with France. This treaty had taken advantage of the weakened state of France after the English victory at Poitiers in 1356, with the capture of the French king, Jean II and his gilded incarceration in London at the Savoy Palace until his death in 1364, the bids for power made by Charles of Navarre against his son the regent the future Charles V, and the insurgence of rural France in the Jacquerie and the ravaging of the countryside by freebooting soldiers known as routiers.
By not asserting his claim to the throne of France again, Edward III had gained the assent of the French negotiators, at their meeting place near Chartres, to great sacrifices against their own interests. France would give up Guyenne, Gascony, Saintonge, Angoumois, Poitou, Limousin, Quercy, Rouergue, Périgord, Bigorre, and Agenais in the south-west, Ponthieu, Calais, Guines, Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the north, and all the islands off the Atlantic coast, without the need to pay homage for them. This, had it been maintained, would have brought about a mutilation of France, since it would have lost its maritime frontier and the mouths of all its rivers except the Seine. Could that be a viable France?
Once Charles V had eventually become king, however, he overcame the problems of his time as regent of France. With the aid of his formidable Constable, Bertrand du Guesclin, he was able to renounce the treaty and pay off his late father’s enormous ransom.19 However, as we have seen, the regency for, and reign of, Charles VI followed from 1380, with further disaster for the Valois monarchy. We return now to the conclusion of the reign of Henry IV of England.
John the Fearless offered a marriage alliance with his fifth daughter to Prince Henry, and this made sense, since Burgundy at present controlled Charles VI and was effective ruler of Flanders (which could help resolve commercial disputes resulting from trade with Calais). The prince was warden of the Cinque Ports and captain of Calais, the latter often being threatened by the Duke, and so, for him, Burgundy was preferable as an ally than an adversary.
An English delegation was in discussion with Burgundy to ascertain whether Burgundy would help the English to recover lands held by the Armagnacs which they were claiming as theirs under the terms of Brétigny. It was planned that Henry IV would lead an expedition to recover the larger Aquitaine. Ships were prepared to transport it, but the king’s illness prevented him from leading it. The commander sent instead was Thomas, Earl of Arundel, but without the king’s authorization. Arundel was a close associate of the prince.20
The Brut Chronicle records that ‘The same year, came the ambassadors of France into England from the Duke of Burgundy, unto the prince of England, King Harry’s son and his heir, for help and succour of men of arms and archers against the Duke of Orleans.’21 The Chronicle of London is more explicit:
Also in that year came ambassadors to the king from the Duke of Burgundy for to have men out of England to help him in war against the Duke of Orleans; but the king would no men grant, for which the ambassadors spoke thereof to the prince; and he sent to the Duke of Burgundy the Earl of Arundel and Lord Cobham with other lords and gentlemen with a fair retinue and well-arrayed people … also in this year the Duke of Burgundy, with the help of Englishmen, slew much people of the Duke of Orleans at the battle of Saint-Cloud.
In this way a precedent was set for Henry, once he was king, to associate himself more closely with the Burgundians and to impose the settlement he opportunistically made concerning the future government of France in 1420.
Nevertheless, it was the Duke of Berry for the defeated Armagnacs who took a new initiative towards the house of Lancaster after the king had dismissed the prince from the council, desiring to reassert his own authority after his son had acted independently in supporting the Burgundians. What Berry offered him was Aquitaine in free sovereignty, the cession to him of twenty named towns and castles while the French should hold several fiefs on their own territory from him. There was even talk of yielding Poitou to him if he were to do homage for it to the Duke of Berry. Under the power of these blandishments, Henry IV elevated Prince Henry’s younger brother Thomas as Duke of Clarence, thus outmanoeuvring Prince Henry,22 and sent him, via Cherbourg, accompanied by Edward, Duke of York, with 1,000 English men-at-arms and 3,000 archers, in support of Berry and the Armagnac faction.23 These troops were established as far south as Blois on the Loire, and were given concessions of land by Berry and Orleans.
John the Fearless, bringing Charles VI with him, laid siege to Bourges, Berry’s capital, in June 1412. A sort of peace was established, however, by the middle of July. A royal mandate was issued on 7 September to put an end to disorders and divisions. The king’s council met at Chartres, with both Orleans and Burgundy present, and called the nobles of France to arms on 8 October in order to resist the English, hatred for whom on the part of Charles VI was deeply rooted. Financial straits prevented this happening, however, and Clarence was persuaded to leave only when Orleans gave him his brother Angoulême as a hostage, not to be freed until thirty-three years afterwards. Clarence did not take the shortest route home after he had been handsomely paid to go away (the sum offered was 210,000 gold crowns with immediate security in jewels and plate): he had been appointed the king’s lieutenant in Guyenne on 11 July 1412 and, taking his time, being unopposed, he reached Bordeaux on 11 December where he took up residence in the archbishop’s palace. He threw his weight about a bit, raising a special tax on wine to feed his troops because no one else in Bordeaux offered to do it. This journey ‘had demonstrated the weakness of a divided France and that it was possible for an English army to march unscathed and without resistance from Normandy to Aquitaine. If nothing else, he had provided his more able brother with a model for the Agincourt campaign.’24
Clarence summoned Bernard VII of Armagnac to do homage to him as Henry IV’s representative while he was in Bordeaux for the four castellanies which he held in the Rouergue. There is no confirmation that he actually did so, but an alliance was made between Clarence, Bernard of Armagnac and Charles of Albret on 14 February 1413 witnessed by the English lords accompanying Clarence, Gaillard of Durfort, still in office as seneschal, Bertrand de Montferrand, and one Fortaner de Lescun (a small town in the approaches to the Pyrenees), seneschal of the Landes. If they were to be attacked by France, English aid would be forthcoming. Furthermore, any aid England might in future offer to the Duke of Burgundy was not to be funnelled through Gascony, which underscores the short-lived nature of the Armagnac/Burgundian reconciliation that had just taken place back in Paris.25
The Estates-General met at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol, the king’s residence, on 13 January 1413, during which remonstrances drawn up by the university of Paris identified ‘dysfunctionality, inefficiency and corruption’ in the government. Programmes for reform were set in hand, in which the heir to the throne, the Duke of Guyenne, and the Duke of Burgundy assumed leading roles. But Paris descended into the chaos of the Cabochien movement which took its name from its leader, Simon le Coutlier, known as Caboche, a skinner and son of a merchant who sold tripe in the parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Burgundy tried to profit from this murderous disorder by issuing an ordinance in Parlement on 26–27 May, but it bounced back at him, when the Armagnacs and Paris bourgeoisie united against him. He left the capital on 22 August, and did not return there for five years, though he did try to.26
Henry V’s coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on 9 April 1413 with unseasonable snow falling outside. He was twenty-six years old, ‘an intelligent and unscrupulous politician in the full force of his age, endowed with an iron determination, a remarkable capacity for work and a great deal more experience of war and government than most newly crowned monarchs’. All this after what amounted to a conversion experience which led him to renounce the wildness of his youth in order to become a private man who kept his own counsel deliberately concealing his personal life and parting company from his former companions. From now on, he had a ‘forbidding public presence’, even known to rebuke close associates from looking straight at him. Like his son after him, he had ‘a certain prim rectitude,’ and a French diplomat thought the king ‘fitter to be a priest than a soldier’.27 Because Henry V already understood the prevailing political situation in France from his membership of his father’s council until he was dismissed from it a year before his accession; he was able to insert himself as king into its tensions and exploit them.
In November 1413, Louis of Anjou, titular king of Sicily and Jerusalem, changed sides from Burgundy to Armagnac, ostentatiously breaking off the engagement between his son and John the Fearless’s daughter. Instead, his daughter Marie was betrothed to Charles of Ponthieu, the future Charles VII who was not yet dauphin, since his two elder brothers were still alive. Thus began Charles’s lasting association with the Angevins which was to stand him in good stead for years to come. The ten-year-old prince moved with his fiancée and his influential mother-in-law Yolande of Aragon, from Loches to their capital at Angers.28
Henry V took advantage of having kept the door open between himself and Duke John of Burgundy after the military action of 1411 for which he had been responsible. In August 1413, the Duke was banished from Paris and an alliance with Henry V against his Armagnac rivals would suit him. Besides, commercial cooperation between England and the Low Countries under Burgundian rule was mutually desirable. Henry had been captain of Calais since 1410, and the hinterland of Calais needed a friendly Burgundy for its security. This was a reversal of the father’s policy by the son once he had inherited the crown. The keeping of the seas was an important consideration too. The Armagnacs had used the French northern ports, Harfleur and Dieppe, to dispatch aid to Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion when Henry as Prince of Wales was campaigning against him ten years before. Harfleur in particular had been the port from which English shipping could be continually threatened. Restriction of its piratical activity was about to become a priority for Henry V.
Henry V sent Bishop Chichele of St David’s and Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, to make an alliance of perpetual friendship with Burgundy as well as to conclude a truce to avoid conflict with the Armagnac government of France. The truce was made at Leulinghem, on the outskirts of Calais on 23 September 1413 and renewed into 1415, the eve of hostilities.
When John the Fearless of Burgundy had been expelled from the capital he met Henry’s ambassadors at Bruges for four days of negotiation after which, he offered a marriage alliance between Henry V and one of his daughters, but this excited no interest in London. There was a similar lack of interest in England on the part of the Armagnacs now that they were back in power. They were intent only on preventing an alliance between England and Burgundy by making Charles VI’s remaining unmarried daughter, the thirteen-year-old Catherine, attractive as a future marriage prospect for Henry. At the same time, the Duke of Bourbon – one of their number – went south to the Saintonge and Poitou on the marches of Bordeaux to expel the English occupants from towns of which they had allowed Henry IV to take possession. All three parties, Armagnacs, Burgundians and English were devising double games around each other.
By now a pretext for war was being found behind the appearance of a desire for peace. This was represented as ‘a matter of justice’, inasmuch as the terms of Brétigny were still the basis of negotiation and there was still the ransom for King John II, captured at Poitiers, outstanding. A marriage alliance with Catherine of France would have been a way for Henry to integrate himself into the French ruling class without the need for war and was being discussed: he undertook not to marry elsewhere until a given date, but made sure he was taken seriously by looking towards a different alliance with an Aragonese princess as well. Then he entrusted several courtiers with exploring the offered Burgundian marriage, before renewing the undertaking not to marry except with Catherine. Further diplomacy was carried on to neutralize Brittany for ten years by means of a truce. Ambassadors were also sent to the emperor-elect, Sigismund, to make a pact with him. These approaches on Henry V’s part ‘constituted an attempt to rally some of France’s closest allies to himself should he ever choose to attack that country’. An additional consideration was that it might turn out that by allying himself with John the Fearless he might end up by losing his freedom of initiative.29
John of Burgundy was eager to return to Paris and the seat of power which was always in the anointed king’s presence. He tried to negotiate his way back to Paris but was on a hiding to nothing. When emissaries from Charles VI made impossible demands upon him at Lille on 14 November 1413, he took horse and rode away without replying and broke utterly with the Armagnac party. A month later, at Antwerp, he produced successive authentic looking letters purporting to come from the queen and the Duke of Guyenne (then dauphin) calling upon him to bring an army to Paris to free them and the king from the captivity in which they were held in the Louvre Palace by the Armagnacs, though there was no discoverable evidence for that being true. John the Fearless made it true, however, and he gathered troops to do what he claimed had to be done.
Charles VI was suffering from a recrudescence of his mental incapacity and Queen Isabeau of Bavaria had assumed authority in his place, presiding over a meeting at which the Armagnac princes and the dauphin, the chancellor and representatives of the university and the city were present. The chancellor assumed that the letters upon which Burgundy was taking action were genuine and said so in public. The queen confronted the seventeen-year-old dauphin in private and found that they had been written and given the appearance of authenticity by young men who were Burgundian sympathisers in his household, one of whom, Jean de Croy, was put in prison, while the rest were sent away. The dauphin soon overcame his resentment at his privacy being invaded by his mother, and joined in preparing the capital against an attack from his father-in-law John the Fearless and his army. He repudiated the letters.
Charles VI’s incapacity came and went several times during 1414 as he moved about between the Paris basin and Picardy in Bernard of Armagnac’s shadow. English delegations were sent to both parties before Henry V decided for certain upon his expedition to Harfleur in early 1415. On 4 March 1414, three English ambassadors, Lord Scrope, Hugh Mortimer and Henry Ware were welcomed at the Saint-Denis gate by the Armagnacs with great ceremony, but all that interested them was the year’s truce that they had already obtained, because they did not want the English interfering in their civil war. The ambassadors stayed for long enough to take stock of how things were, with the king once more relapsing into folly, and they could plainly see the preparations being made for combat as they made their way back to Calais afterwards.
John the Fearless made overtures to Henry V requesting a military alliance with troops sent to aid him at English expense, in return for his own military support for any English action taken against the count of Armagnac in the south-west, in his own territories, or those of Charles d’Albret in the county of Foix, or in Angoulême, a fief of Charles of Orleans, all of which had frontiers with English Guyenne. Then he could attack lands held by Berry and Bourbon north of the Loire to disengage the king and the dauphin from them. The spectre of being compromised arose again for Chichele and Scrope, the English negotiators on that occasion. There could be no agreement with John the Fearless on the basis of the terms he was offering.
Scrope and a different colleague, Hugh Mortimer, arrived in Calais to negotiate again with Duke John, who met them at Ypres in July 1414, but then left immediately for Lille to discuss his next moves with the Duke of Brabant his brother and the countess of Hainault his sister. The siege of Arras by the Armagnacs began, while John returned for his meeting with Scrope and Mortimer, whom he had restricted to Ypres, knowing full well that other English ambassadors were talking to the Armagnacs, as he was himself. His own people were talking to the dauphin’s at Douai and Lille. He agreed nothing with the English and they returned home to see what would happen, while another set of English ambassadors came in processional pomp into Paris from Saint-Denis where they had been met by Armagnac counterparts. The Duke of Berry was the only Armagnac prince left in Paris, and they were to confer with him. Bishop Courtenay of Norwich made conciliatory noises, but Brétigny was still Henry V’s agenda, without feudal obligations of homage to the French king. There was still the question of King John’s ransom at 1,600,000 écus (he had been dead for fifty years by then) and a dowry for Catherine of 2,000,000. Berry dismissed most of what was asked, saying he had no authority to negotiate, but told the English that the ransom would be linked to any territorial settlement that might be made, and that Catherine’s dowry would be a more realistic 600,000. Courtenay went home.30
Archbishop Guillaume Boisratier of Bourges in Berry’s fief was sent to negotiate again when the English preparations for an expedition somewhere in France were known about, hoping to delay the channel crossing until it was too late in the year to sail. Henry made his final demands through his spokesmen Archbishop Chichele (promoted to Canterbury) for the territories he wanted and the hand of Princess Catherine, and said if they were not met, he would achieve them by invasion. When this did not produce the required result, he continued his preparations, keeping the French archbishop’s delegation in England so that they could not inform the Armagnacs until it was too late for them to know where he was going to land (whether at a northern port or at Bordeaux) and take additional defensive measures. It was important for Henry not to lose the initiative. At the same time the future cardinal archbishop, John Kemp, at present bishop of Rochester, was sent to the court of Aragon to continue negotiations for a marriage alliance there with Princess Mary to keep the Armagnacs guessing.31
Invasions are costly affairs. From early 1415 onwards, at the time that the decision to attack France from Normandy rather than Gascony was made, the king issued indentures to captains for the implementation of his plans, and made many pledges from the royal treasury of plate and jewels so that they would be able to pay the men-at-arms and the archers they undertook to bring with them for the second quarter of the campaign. The treasury would pay the money value of these pledges at a later date and the valuables would be returned. The leaders of large retinues, like Edward, Duke of York, were pledged elaborate pieces of precious metals and jewels, in York’s case ‘a great gold alms dish in the shape of a ship (a nef), known in England as the Tiger because of the miniature tigers in the castles at prow and stern’. The irony was that this piece had been the gift of the Duke of Berry to Charles VI in 1395, who had given it to Richard II of England the year after, whence it had passed into the Lancastrian kings’ treasury. York was killed at Agincourt, and it took until 1437 to afford to recover the nef for the treasury. On the other hand, the esquires who were indentured for a handful of archers received much less in the way of bejewelled pledges, sometimes, even, a broken piece of plate with a jewel or two clinging to it. In this way the king provided himself with a war chest of ‘around £33,000 and very likely much more.’32
Before the king could give the sailing orders, a plot to assassinate him led by Richard Earl of Cambridge was uncovered. All sorts of suggestions were made for the origin of the plot: something conceived by the Armagnacs, or by the Lollards, or by the northern lords who did not like the Lancastrian settlement, or a dynastic plot by the Mortimer family? It was too complicated a plan to be kept secret, and, once it had been uncovered, the king acted swifty to arrest the conspirators at Porchester Castle. After judgement by the Duke of Clarence, Cambridge and his associate Lord Scrope were executed despite the latter’s loyalty to the king as a soldier and diplomat for which he had been made a Knight of the Garter. In fact, the king’s vindictiveness towards Scrope ‘went beyond the law’.33
A week later, the fleet sailed and the closely guarded secret of the choice of landing place was revealed as Harfleur on the Seine Estuary, energetically defended by Raoul de Gaucourt against Henry’s cannon, until dysentery decided the inevitable surrender on 22 September. The colonization of Normandy began, with Henry’s uncle, Thomas Beaufort, being appointed as captain of the town backed up by an English garrison of 2,000.
If Henry were to make good his claim to be king of France, then he had to treat the people of Harfleur with justice and mercy, so his English troops were kept under strict discipline. He expelled a great many of the population to Rouen, but he provided them with an escort. These people had denied him entry and therefore they were rebels and their goods and property were confiscated. For contemporaries this was part of the laws of war, and it seems that professed ideals of chivalry did little to soften such blows. English merchants and victuallers were invited to live in Harfleur and take over the empty houses, becoming permanent residents to develop the port as a second Calais or a replacement for Cherbourg which Richard II had abandoned twenty years before. The taking of Harfleur was the first stage in an occupation which was meant to be permanent.34
* * *
Henry V’s hundred-and-fifty-mile march from Harfleur in October 1415 to return home via Calais need not take up much space in a book whose intention is to tell the story of the English loss of Gascony. Agincourt has received so much attention from so many dedicated scholars35 down the six centuries that have succeeded it and it too can be rapidly passed over.
The dauphin and the Armagnacs had held back at Rouen, as they gathered their army from all over France, to see what the English would do once Harfleur had fallen. They most likely expected a set-piece progress, known as a chevauchée, on the model of those conducted from Bordeaux by the Black Prince through the Midi towards Carcassonne in 1355 and the Auvergne towards Bourges in 1356. In these marches over considerable distances the invader’s purpose was to demonstrate to the local populations, by destroying their homes, farms, livestock and harvests, that their own rulers were not taking appropriate steps to defend them.
Henry V intended instead to conquer and settle the duchy of Normandy, expelling those of the indigenous population who would not take an oath of allegiance to him, and then governing it with high officials appointed from England, the church establishment being respected. It was to be self-financing by local taxation so as not to be a drain on the English exchequer subsequent to conquest. This was what would begin after he had returned to England to prepare for it.
His brother, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, did not agree with this proposed return to England via Calais and, after discussions in the council of war, was given permission to return directly to England by sea with the many wounded. When Henry used his usual argument that his march to Calais was God’s will and that He could save by many or by few, ‘in an age of faith it was unanswerable’.36 It was estimated that it would take eight days to complete the march if there were no obstruction, and the troops had to take adequate provisions with them, under strict instructions not to pillage the countryside which it was intended should soon become territory loyal to the English Duke.37 The grape-harvest was in progress, wine was plentiful (the new vintage was always available for drinking straight away, not laid down to mature in casks), and ‘with wine, the English soldier could march to the end of the world.’38
There had been an accord patched up between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians in a peace treaty made at Arras in September 1414, but it was precarious since John the Fearless objected to the 500 Cabochiens arrested in Paris by the Armagnacs after their revolt being unilaterally excluded from a general amnesty. He accepted the treaty only after the English had begun their siege of Harfleur in July 1415. The Armagnacs had their justifiable suspicions that Duke John had agreed with the English not to resist their invasion. The treaty was ratified, but no one on the Armagnac side could be sure that the Burgundians were committed to it. When the former took Soissons from the latter in May 1414, it was an English contingent that was accused of letting them in. John wrote to the nobles of Picardy instructing them to take up arms against the invader, but only if the final order were given by him and he were to be in command of them in person. ‘If the Duke really had made a noninterference pact with Henry V, then he needed to to prevent his own men from rising in defence of their homeland.’39
Henry V and his army reached the Somme, hoping to cross it between Abbeville and the estuary by a ford with a wide causeway previously used by Edward III at Blanche Taque. It was learned from a captured Gascon gentleman that Charles of Albret, in his capacity as constable of France (commander-in-chief) was already there with 6,000 men, along with Marshal Boucicaut, the count of Vendôme, the admiral of France, and Arthur of Richemont, and had obstructed the causeway with sharpened stakes. Henry decided to march upstream to look for another crossing which was found on 19 October, having repaired causeways broken down by the passing French. The day after, they were visited in their encampment by heralds from Albret, Orleans and Bourbon who issued their challenge to battle. It was remarkable that the challenge came from them and not from the Dauphin Louis of Guyenne, but he had not responded to Henry V’s challenge to personal combat and, for the French army commanders to do so was a matter of honour. Albret and Boucicaut had gone from Peronne to choose a site for battle. They found it and blocked the way to Calais with the huge force that had assembled from Rouen.40 It was only after the battle that Henry V gave the battlefield its name from a nearby fortress.
The archers prepared the stakes that they had been carrying with them for days to protect themselves from the expected cavalry charge. This technique was a Turkish invention found by the international European force on the occasion of their overwhelming defeat at Nicopolis in 1396. The report of it was widespread among western military commanders originated by – guess whom – Jean the Fearless who was a combatant in the battle and received his sobriquet there.41
Then followed the rain on the night before, the waterlogged battlefield that slowed down the French cavalry charge, the mêlée, the captures, the attack on the baggage waggons, the order given by Henry to kill most of the prisoners, the burning of the stripped bodies, the attribution of the victory to the judgement of God. The main problem for the French army was that they did not have a unified command against a force that was, in tactical terms, ‘supremely well led’.42
English patriotism has regarded Henry V’s victory at Agincourt as representing the glory days of the second Lancastrian king’s reign. This is a view strongly held among some British historians. Malcolm Vale, the historian of English Gascony, for example, in his review of the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s all-encompassing study of the Hundred Years War,43 objects to ‘recent (and not so recent) attempts by historians to cut the victor of Agincourt down to size, to make him yet another “common man”’, and asserts that they ‘have failed.’ Dr. Vale’s own recent book about the king emphasises his innovative skill in administration, his support for the adoption of the English language in official documents, his concern for the arts – especially for music, and his capacity to deal with a heavy workload.44 From this point of view, Henry V’s treaty of Troyes, with its establishment of the Lancastrian dual monarchy, is admirable, because, as long as Henry V lived, it represented an ideal of ‘a durable Anglo-French peace settlement’.45
This was understandably not the view of historians on the other side of the English Channel. Edouard Perroy’s academic stability had been interrupted by the 1939–45 War and he wrote his book in which Henry V had a rôle to play ‘in a single burst,’ as he said in the preface, ‘thanks to precarious periods of leisure … during hide and seek with the Gestapo’.46 Professor Perroy (he taught history at the university of Lille), after speaking well of Henry V’s undoubted abilities, had this to say of him:
His bigoted hypocrisy, the duplicity of his actions, the claim to serve justice and put wrongs right when he sought solely to to serve his own ambition, the cruelty of the vengeance he took, all that announced a new age. Henry is certainly of his own century, the century of Italian tyrants and of Louis XI, a thousand leagues away from the chivalric kings whose inheritance he claimed or whose projects he made his own.47
Perroy stood within his own inherited tradition. Jules Michelet, the ‘father’ of modern French history-writing in the 1840s, made the same criticism of Henry V in his account of what happened after the battle at Agincourt, reproducing information from the chronicler Monstrelet, who was a contemporary of the events he related – and participant in some of them – as an adherent of the house of Burgundy. The worst thing for the French prisoners after the battle was to endure the moralizing of this ‘king of priests’.48 Standing amid the bodies of the slain – many of whom had been slaughtered on his orders after they had surrendered because he heard that the French had revived the battle – Henry pointedly announced to Montjoie herald of France that the victory belonged to God who had pronounced judgement on the sins of the French.
On the road to Calais, Henry heard that one of his principal prisoners, Duke Charles of Orleans who, the day before, had been pulled out from under a pile of his dead countrymen, had not eaten anything. He rode alongside him and asked him why not. The Duke replied that he was fasting. This – Michelet quotes Le Febvre de Saint-Rémy, a Burgundian knight who was a participant in the battle – evoked the hardly sensitive observation from the king:
Good cousin, don’t trouble yourself. I know well that, if God has had the grace that I should win the battle against the French, it is not because I am worthy, but it is, I firmly believe, because he intended to punish them … It is said that he has never seen such disorder, such voluptuousness, such sinfulness and bad vices that are seen nowadays in France. It is pitiful to hear, and horrifying for those who hear it. If God is incensed at it, no wonder.49
K.B. McFarlane’s lecture on Henry V delivered to the Oxford branch of the Workers’ Educational Association in 1954 puts a hand on the other side of the scales. He cites the passage from Edouard Perroy translated above and demolishes it, referring to it as a ‘baseless immoderate indictment’ coming from ‘a determination to judge Henry by standards inapplicable to his time’. He denies the idea that the king’s piety was a pretence, citing his reforming spirit as an orthodox churchman and his determination to eradicate the views professed by the Lollards while he did his best to limit the consequences for them. But the most telling riposte is over his diplomacy where Perroy compared him to the universal spider, Louis XI.
Henry’s diplomacy was thoroughly tortuous and those who were deceived cannot escape the jibe of being fools. But he was not the one Macchiavelli in an innocent world; he merely played the usual game with unusual skill. In war one hopes to deceive.50
The riposte also asserts that, while modern French writers are not prepared to admire Henry, his contemporaries among French chroniclers did. The killing of the prisoners at the end of the battle was an instant decision taken to prevent them escaping when a new attack seemed likely to develop, and it was ‘condemned neither by contemporaries nor by the laws of war’. French chroniclers in particular emphasize the king’s respect for justice ‘and their admiration is ungrudging. This justice may have been roughly applied, but it was fairly and indifferently at the disposal of the conquered.’ For them he was ‘an honourable opponent’, ‘an honest man, upright in his dealings, temperate in his speech and action, brave, loyal, uncomplaining in adversity, God-fearing. This judgement is universal, and coming from his victims has greater force than when it came from his fellow-countrymen who agreed with it.’51
Yes, but from the point of view of those who were booted out of Normandy in 1450 and Bordeaux three years later, is it the French historians or the English ones who hold the balance of the argument about the success or failure of Henry V’s great design for the dual monarchy of England and France which he engineered out of the raw material of a French power vacuum five years after Agincourt? Was the treaty of Troyes of 1420 statecraft, or was it opportunism?