4

Heir and Regent of France

In the Cathedral of Troyes, on 21 May 1420, Henry V was acknowledged by Charles VI, King of France, as heir to the French crown. In the opening passage of the treaty sealed on that day, Charles noted how several previous treaties had been made between his predecessors and those of ‘the most high prince and our very dear son, Henry, king of England and heir of France’ but none had brought the ‘fruit of peace so desired’. Mindful of ‘how much damage and sorrow had been caused by the division of the kingdoms to this point, not only for the kingdoms but also for the church’, Charles was now making peace with Henry (even if, in reality, it had been Henry who had called the tune in the preceding negotiations). The thirty-one main clauses which follow give the terms of this peace. Henry was not to hinder Charles’s possession of the French crown while he lived, but at his death the crown of France was to remain perpetually with Henry and his heirs. From that point on, the two crowns were always to be held by the same person, even though the two kingdoms would retain their liberties, customs, usages and laws.

It was not the Treaty of Troyes which made Henry heir to France: he was already that by virtue of the long-standing claim of English kings to the French crown. The crucial importance of Troyes was that a French king was now on record as having formally acknowledged that claim. What was more, while retaining his crown, Charles effectively passed his rule immediately to Henry: ‘because we are hindered in such a way that we cannot personally attend to the disposition of the business of our realm, the faculty and exercise of governing and ordering “la chose publique” [everything concerning the good of the kingdom and its people] shall be vested in our son Henry’.¹ Over the next few weeks, we see Henry dropping his title of King of France and replacing it with ‘heir and regent of France’.

To understand such an amazing and unexpected settlement, we need to return to the events of the previous autumn. The murder of John the Fearless by the dauphin’s supporters at the bridge of Montereau on 10 September 1419 removed all hope of French unity and forced the Burgundians to ally with Henry. At this point, the French king and queen remained at Troyes, where they had been placed by Duke John in order to keep them under his control; the new Duke of Burgundy, John’s son Philip, was in Lille; while most of the royal council was still under the control of Burgundian officials in Paris. The citizens of Paris, always a pro-Burgundian and powerful lobby, were alarmed that the murder might embolden Henry to make an attack on the capital. On 19 September 1419, the royal council, with the support of Paris, approached Henry for a truce, and to discuss revenge for the murder. Henry’s response, five days later, was to empower his ambassadors to negotiate a final peace. Three days later, they made a declaration to the royal council which emphasized Henry’s right to the French throne but, in wording presumably intended to reassure the French, stated that he had no intention that ‘his French crown, kingdom or people should be subject to his English crown, or that the people of France should become or be called “English” ’.² Once again, he proposed marriage to Catherine, and although the declaration did not explicitly mention that Charles would remain king for the rest of his life, it promised that Henry would treat his prospective royal in-laws with the honour they deserved.

Henry was undoubtedly the originator of the terms later enshrined in the Treaty of Troyes. He realized that it was to his advantage to stake his claim before the French government and the new Duke of Burgundy had time to develop their own response to the murder of Duke John. When the council at Paris responded by saying the declaration was not what Henry had been asking for in July, the king replied bluntly: ‘things are different now’.³ Over the following week he developed his plans further, proposing Charles remain king until death. In a flurry of diplomatic activity with Paris, Lille and Troyes, the full terms of a final peace were negotiated. Duke Philip gave his agreement on 2 December. For him, revenge against the dauphin – hitherto the unquestioned Valois heir to the crown of France – for his father’s murder was paramount: his adherence to Henry’s terms brought the promise of English military support. Meanwhile, Henry ordered a closer watch be kept on Charles, Duke of Orléans, who had been a prisoner in England since his capture at Agincourt: after all, what Henry was proposing was effectively the disinheritance of the whole of the Valois dynasty, and the duke was the next male heir after the dauphin. Henry had Louis Robessart, a close associate since 1403, sent to Troyes to help persuade Charles and his wife, Queen Isabeau, to accept English terms. With Duke Philip joining the king and queen at Troyes on 23 March, the full treaty was agreed on 9 April 1420 between the English, headed by the Earl of Warwick, and the French.

Henry moved from Pontoise on 8 May to the Abbey of Saint-Denis, the necropolis of French kings, where he paid his obligations as heir, before arriving at Troyes. On the same day the treaty was sealed, Henry and Catherine were betrothed; they were married less than two weeks later, on 2 June. The treaty was announced immediately in France and its terms sent back to England to be proclaimed so that ‘al oure peuple may have verray [true] knowledge thereof for their consolacion’.⁴

Negotiations had added many clauses to the basic terms in order to serve the various parties involved. For instance, although Henry promised that any further conquests he made would be for the benefit of the French crown, he kept Normandy under his personal control until he became king, at which point it would be reintegrated into France: he realized that he could not draw back immediately from his encouragement of the Norman separatism which had facilitated his conquest. But the Burgundians were to have restoration of lands he had taken from their supporters in the duchy. Charles and Isabeau were reassured that they would only have French servants. Catherine’s dowry was to be paid from English revenues: Henry’s keenness led him to dispense with a requirement for a French dowry until he died, at which point his widow was henceforward to have 20,000 francs per annum. The Burgundian desire for revenge against the dauphin was guaranteed by a ban on any party included in the treaty negotiating with ‘Charles, who calls himself Dauphin’, and by a commitment on Henry to ‘labour with all his might, and as soon as can profitably be done, to put into our obedience all the … places and persons within our realm disobedient to us, and rebels … of the party commonly called that of the Dauphin or Armagnac’.⁵

Henry’s idea of allowing Charles VI to remain king may have come to his mind much earlier in the reign. When after the fall of Harfleur in 1415 he summoned the dauphin, Louis, to personal combat, Henry proposed that the victor should succeed Charles at his death. Yet it is hard to believe that Henry ever dreamed that the prospect of his being accepted as Charles’s heir would become a reality. He drove a hard bargain in 1420, but was astute enough to know that much more was to be gained by negotiation than by conquest. Only through formal recognition by a king of France did a king of England have any chance of his claim to the French crown being recognized and implemented.

Meanwhile, the people of France were to take an oath to observe the treaty, with allegiance to Henry

[as] governor and regent of the kingdom of France, to obey him in all matters concerning the government which is subject to the king of France, and, after the death of Charles, to continue as liegemen and true subjects of Henry king of England and his heirs forever, to accept and obey the same as sovereign lord and true king of France without opposition, contradiction or difficulty, coming to his aid as soon as requested.⁶

As regent and heir, Henry had access to all of the resources of the French kingdom, and all that he did was in the name of Charles VI.

A couple of days after his wedding, accompanied by Charles VI, Catherine and Philip of Burgundy, Henry went to besiege the Burgundian city of Sens, then under the control of the dauphin. This was an essential step towards recovering the town of Montereau, which Henry did in short order on 1 July, and with it the body of Duke John for burial in the Burgundian capital of Dijon. The siege of Melun followed. On the Seine near Paris, the town had held out against Henry: according to the chronicler Enguerran de Monstrelet, the inhabitants’ refusal to surrender led Henry to bring Charles VI to receive their surrender as ‘leur naturel seigneur’ (‘their natural lord’).⁷ The Treaty of Troyes had not ended war. Rather, war had mutated, becoming a rather different conflict in which Henry and his troops, in the name of the French king, collaborated with the Burgundians in their conflict with the Armagnacs.

Inevitably, not all Frenchmen accepted the Treaty of Troyes. Although the dauphin had fled south, his supporters were prepared to fight for his interests: Melun did not surrender to Henry until 1 November. Only then was it possible for Charles and Henry to make a ceremonial entry to Paris on 1 December. The choice of Advent Sunday was deliberate and the delay also allowed ample time for the streets to be decorated and the population to be clad in red to symbolize their rejoicing. The event was orchestrated to provide a visual representation of the treaty terms. The kings entered the city side by side with Charles on the right as the anointed King of France.⁸ When relics were presented for the kings to kiss, Charles motioned for Henry to go first, but the latter touched his cap and gestured that Charles should precede him. The kings then entered Notre-Dame side by side, paying their devotions at the high altar.

On the following day the two queens, Catherine and Isabeau, entered Paris and were greeted by English lords and Duke Philip of Burgundy. The fact that they entered later and after their royal husbands reflected not only the lower status of queens but also the careful handling by Henry to avoid any suggestion that France had come to him through his marriage. Henry was already heir when he married; indeed, part of the reason that Catherine’s dowry was to be paid from English revenues was to remove any notion that she brought France with her as her dowry to her husband. The marriage, although mentioned in the Treaty of Troyes, was given neutrally and simply there as being ‘for the benefit of peace’. (Later, back in England, this was emphasized at the banquet on 24 February 1421 following Catherine’s coronation in Westminster Abbey as Queen of England – which Henry did not attend – by a sotelte, a table decoration, labelled ‘par marriage pur, ce guerre ne dure’: ‘by pure marriage, war shall cease’.)⁹ The treaty did not require the kings of the double monarchy to be Henry’s heirs by Catherine or even the heirs of his body, but simply his heirs general. That was why, immediately behind him on his entry into Paris, walked the two eldest of his brothers, Thomas and John, the Dukes of Clarence and Bedford. Henry had ensured that all elements of his rights and of the future of the English-held double monarchy had been covered.

The Treaty of Troyes had already effectively disinherited the dauphin by not recognizing him in this title, since to do so was to undermine Henry’s own claim to the French throne. His formal disinheritance came on 23 December 1420 by a lit de justice – a formal session – in the parlement of Paris, France’s principal law court, following French legal form. Meanwhile, shortly after the entry into Paris, Duke Philip and a representative of his mother made formal complaint against the dauphin for his role in the murder of Duke John. His petition was heard by Charles VI and Henry sitting side by side on the same bench, with the preservation of French institutions, as stipulated in the Treaty of Troyes, symbolized by the Chancellor of France and the first president of the parlement sitting at Charles’s feet. The king, through his chancellor, promised that with the advice of Henry, King of England, regent and heir of France, justice would be done. The dauphin was duly found guilty and declared disinherited and an outlaw.

Although Henry’s time as regent of France was being dominated by military activity, his influence on French government was substantial, as might be expected from a monarch who took his responsibilities seriously, and in a situation where Charles VI continued to suffer from ‘absences’, as royal documents called the periods when his mental state deteriorated, which made his active involvement in government inconsistent and minimal. Henry even issued some royal letters in his own name as heir, although the majority were in the name of Charles VI ‘by the advice and deliberation of our beloved heir and regent the King of England’.¹⁰ When in Paris, Henry held councils in person, as he did on 3 June 1422, and we find him consulted by the parlement and other bodies. He was also responsible for making appointments, always being careful, save for the higher military commands in Paris (to which he appointed his brother Thomas and subsequently the Duke of Exeter), to use Frenchmen of the Burgundian persuasion. His influence in ecclesiastical appointments was as influential as in England: in December 1420, the chapter of Notre-Dame elected Jean Courtecuisse as Bishop of Paris, a choice opposed by both Henry and Duke Philip. Although the appointment was confirmed by the pope, Henry remained recalcitrant and his influence was decisive: Courtecuisse was eventually appointed by the pope on 12 June 1422 to the bishopric of Geneva instead.

On 6 December 1420, Henry was present alongside Charles at the meeting of the Estates General in Paris as it ratified the Treaty of Troyes, welcoming it as being ‘to the honour and praise of God as well as the public good and benefit of this kingdom of France and all its subjects’.¹¹ At Henry’s behest, the Estates also discussed taxation, the outcome of which was an ordinance granting Henry the fruits of various sales taxes and a gabelle (salt tax) for one year from 1 February 1421. Such income was intended for military action against the dauphin. Concern was expressed at the Estates about the state of the currency: Henry’s reforms as regent, including re-coinings and limitations on tax exemptions, did much to reverse the depreciation of the French currency and address other problems that had beset the economy ever since Agincourt. Such measures, as well as the reopening of trade with England, made Henry’s regency synonymous with good government.

Despite the pockets of resistance, to many in France the treaty came as a welcome relief, representing as it did a resolution to years of civil unrest and division. It was especially welcome to the Burgundians, needless to say, who regarded it as a sure means of revenge against the Armagnacs. Henry rose to the challenge of ruling France, a testimony both to his ability to learn quickly and to immerse himself in French administration. Yet he could hardly overlook the fact that he was also King of England. The treaty marked a volte-face in English policies towards France. Hitherto Henry had encouraged a hostile stance, even xenophobia, especially in his dropping from the summer of 1417 onwards of Anglo-Norman in favour of English in his communications back home, which some have seen fit to call a ‘language policy’.¹² Previously, he had emphasized Englishness and English supremacy, but that now sat uneasily with the terms of the treaty. While the English were happy supporting a war against the French, would they be quite so content with supporting the war which Henry was now waging as heir to the French throne against one faction in France? The treaty, moreover, reduced the prospect of land gains for soldiers and administrators now that the French were allies rather than conquered peoples, and required commanders and troops to collaborate with those who had previously been their enemies. For all that England had celebrated Henry’s conquest of France, concerns about the new arrangements started to bubble up – and nowhere more so than in Parliament.

On 2 December 1420, at the opening of a new session of Parliament, the chancellor informed the assembled Lords and Commons that the king could not be present in person since he was ‘busy overseas making good the situation there and working for the greater security of himself and his lieges of England’.¹³ In another discussion, Parliament acknowledged that as heir and regent and, in time, King of France, Henry would inevitably ‘sometimes be on this side of the sea and sometimes on the other, as seems best to him at his discretion’. A note of anxiety crept into debate on the matter, with the Commons putting forward five petitions relating to it. The first, indeed, stated simply that the king and queen should be encouraged to return to England soon ‘for the comfort, relief and support of the Commons’. Despite the chancellor’s assurances in his opening speech, the Commons were concerned that the king knew his personal presence in England was greatly desired, and – given the rival claim on his attention – wanted to know that Henry himself desired above everything else ‘the prosperity and good governance of this kingdom’.¹⁴

But while Parliament had been encouraged to believe the king would soon be returning to England, given that 1 December was set for Henry’s formal entry into Paris, and the Estates General and lit de justice were arranged for later in the month, such assurances were apparently disingenuous. Perhaps the Commons were annoyed at being misled. They petitioned successfully that should the king return during this or any future parliament, there would be no need for a dissolution or the calling of a new assembly: they were concerned that Henry would disrupt and undermine arrangements already made. Wider concerns are revealed in their request, also granted, that the statute of Edward III made in the parliament of 1340 following his adoption of the title King of France should be confirmed: this statute granted that the English should never be subjects of the King of England as King of France. While they spoke obsequiously of the king’s acquisition of his new titles ‘through the grace and powerful aid of God, and through his chivalrous, diligent and difficult labours’,¹⁵ their petition indicates that they did not think the Treaty of Troyes was explicit enough on guaranteeing English independence – and it was, undoubtedly, more concerned with the preservation of French liberties and identity.

There were two further issues on which the Commons expressed their concerns but were rebuffed. Early in the parliament, the keeper of the realm in the king’s absence, Henry’s brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, told the Commons that petitions submitted to him would not be engrossed (ratified and enrolled) until they had been sent to the king overseas. In other words, Henry had not been prepared to delegate authority in his absence from the kingdom, something which for the Commons could only lead to delays in doing business. Replying to the Duke of Gloucester, they asked that all petitions should be ‘answered and determined within the kingdom of England during the course of this same parliament’, an arrangement that should apply to all future parliaments. Unsurprisingly, the answer came that the king’s views should be sought.¹⁶ The Commons, almost invariably protectionist by inclination, then put forward the ingenious argument that, now that Henry had both sides of the Channel in his hands, foreigners wishing to sail through should pay a toll. This was also rejected, as was their request for the upholding of a supposed ancient treaty that only English wool should be accepted for importation into Flanders. Measures like these could only lead to the alienation of the Duke of Burgundy, something the English crown could in no way afford now that he was a key ally.

Such were the Commons’ anxieties over the Treaty of Troyes that no effort was made to have it ratified in Parliament, as its terms required, until the king was back in England. Similarly, it was deemed wise not to ask the Commons for a tax grant at this parliament. The chancellor admitted in his opening speech that bullion was in short supply because so much had gone overseas to pay for England’s foreign wars. The years between 1415 and 1419 had been exceptionally heavily taxed, and Henry’s desperate search for funds had led him to leave no stone unturned: it no doubt played a role in his treatment of his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, who was accused of witchcraft, thereby forfeiting her lands to the crown. In England, there were other signs of war weariness. Recruitment of men for expeditions was no longer as easy as it had been since the opportunities for profits were reduced. Efforts to raise troops in Norfolk in 1419 and Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in 1420 had elicited a variety of excuses as to why they did not want to serve: poverty, lack of horse and equipment, gout, dropsy. In Yorkshire only five out of ninety-six approached were willing: two men from Holderness said simply that they would do any service within the realm of England but would not go outside it.¹⁷ Law and order was also emerging for the first time since 1414 as an issue, as revealed by a riot in Suffolk in July 1420.¹⁸

In theory, the king could rule England as an absentee. The machinery and practices of government were bureaucratic enough to allow this, but Henry tended to insist on matters being referred to him for approval. By the end of 1420, he had been absent from England continuously for over three years – something unparalleled in recent memory – which brought with it a real danger of a resentful country seeing itself as simply the milch cow for Henry’s overseas ambitions. Reassurances had been given to the previous parliament in October 1419 that ‘the king has a strong affection for his realm of England and wishes to know how the peace and the laws of the land and his officers there were managed in his absence; and if any of these things need amendment let this be provided by good and wise advice in this parliament’. But at the same time, immersed in initial discussions with the French following the murder at Montereau, Henry had the chancellor express to Parliament the point that if the war was discontinued because of lack of funds, the result would be disaster. Support had to be provided for the king ‘so that he can feel that his people here look upon him and his estate at present with love and complete affection’.¹⁹ The Commons on that occasion had been generous, granting a subsidy to be collected by 2 February 1420 and a third of a subsidy by the following 11 November. But we must wonder what the Commons at the parliament of December 1420 thought of the chancellor’s opening speech which, while stressing Henry’s achievements across his whole career and his concerns for the weakness and poverty of England, placed the onus on solving the problems completely on them: ‘the wise Commons should invest all their labour so that through their actions … the means of providing effective solutions to the troubles and increasing the common benefit of the realm might be found’.²⁰

It was becoming essential for Henry to return home, despite an equally pressing need for him to stay in France. A document detailing the careful preparations he made to cover his return to England shows his understanding of the issues as well as his attention to detail. He stipulated, for instance, that oaths to the Treaty of Troyes should be taken in Burgundian areas, including Flanders – indicating, perhaps, that he did not fully trust his allies. He was also interested in the security of the garrisons of Montereau and Melun, and the powers which the Dukes of Clarence and Exeter were to have in his absence. That the document, in French, was carefully scrutinized by Henry is indicated by the addition in his own hand of two notes in English: ‘also to send to court for the abbot of Westminster’, and ‘also thither for the render of the Charterhouse’.²¹ Such entries remind us again of his attempts to keep a close watch even on apparently small matters in England.

Henry and his queen finally landed at Dover on 1 February 1421. Following Catherine’s coronation at Westminster, writs were sent out on 26 February for a parliament to meet on 2 May. That done, the king set out on progress. This was a significant decision on his part, revealing his awareness that not all his subjects saw the Troyes settlement as the outcome they had hoped for in the wars with France. While in England earlier in the reign, Henry had not itinerated as much as other kings, choosing to stay in the London area most of the time. Nor, save for the entry to London after Agincourt, had he sought opportunities for public spectacle. In late February 1421, Henry visited, initially alone, Bristol, Hereford and Shrewsbury, and then moved on to Kenilworth where Catherine joined him on 15 March.²²

The Lancastrian Kenilworth Castle had been a special place for Henry ever since his childhood and became all the more special by virtue of his only royal building project, the creation of the Pleasance, a double-moated enclosure one hectare in extent, with living accommodation and gardens, on the edge of the Great Mere and half a mile to the north-west of the castle. Here ‘in the marsh, where foxes hid among the prickly bushes and thorns, the king established a pleasure garden for his relaxation’.²³ This secret place could be accessed only by boat and could not be seen save from the tallest towers of the castle. It is highly significant that he should have Catherine meet him there. Based on the date of birth of their son, it was probably the place Henry VI was conceived. The king and queen moved on to Leicester together, then to Coventry, before coming back to Leicester for Easter. The couple then visited Nottingham and Pontefract, where the Duke of Orléans, Catherine’s cousin and brother-in-law, was held.

Alone again, Henry then visited the shrines of St John of Beverley and St John of Bridlington. The former was connected with his victory at Agincourt – 25 October being his feast of translation – as it had been rumoured that oil had oozed from his tomb on the day of the battle, just as it had on the day Henry Bolingbroke had landed at Ravenspur in 1399. Passing by Newark, King’s Lynn and Walsingham, Henry was back in Windsor by 28 April for the feast of the Order of the Garter.

As such progresses were designed to do, Henry’s tour was an opportunity to show himself to his people and to emphasize his style of kingship: he heard petitions from the poor and distributed alms. But it was also a fundraising effort. On 8 April, when Henry was returning from Beverley to York, bad news came from France – his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence had been defeated and killed in battle at Baugé in Anjou on 22 March – which not only made the king’s early return to France more likely, but also prompted the appointment of commissioners to summon those who had not yet made loans to the crown. The Receipt Rolls show that £36,840 was raised, ‘the highest combined loan of the century’ and worth around the same as a full lay subsidy.²⁴ Over 530 lenders were involved, many from the areas through which Henry had passed, although half of the sum came from the immensely wealthy Henry Beaufort.

While such loans indicated continued public support for the war, Henry considered it wise not to ask the Commons in the parliament of May 1421 for a tax grant. With the king present, the Treaty of Troyes was ratified at a special meeting of the ‘three estates of the realm’ held during the parliament.²⁵ A bargain was struck with Parliament: in return for not being asked for money, the Commons would be prepared to vote a tax grant at the following parliament. The parliament also rubber-stamped Henry’s annexation of the most valuable parts of the Bohun inheritance to which he had a claim through his mother, Mary de Bohun. Since she was co-heiress with her sister, Eleanor, who had married Thomas of Woodstock, the fifth son of Edward III, there needed to be a division of the lands, which Henry as king was able to exploit to his advantage.

While in England, Henry’s thoughts never strayed far from France, and on progress he still played characteristically close attention even to the most specific of issues there. On 27 February, while at St Albans, he sent a letter responding to a query on whether masons and carpenters should be employed on the castle of Pontorson, in Lower Normandy, noting in the same letter that he had sent to the Earl of Suffolk instructions concerning the government of Avranches and its region.²⁶ Henry was equally wide-ranging in his scrutiny of matters in England. At Leicester he wrote to the monastic houses of the Benedictine Order in England ordering them to summon a meeting of monks at Westminster in early May, at which he appeared in person, berating the order for its laxity and urging reform.²⁷ Such a step reminds us that his regard for religion led him to intervene in Church matters, including the shaping of the monastic landscape, appointing bishops and repressing heresy, essentially acting, ‘in all but name, as the supreme governor of the Church of England, more than a century before the title could be used’.²⁸

On 10 June 1421, Henry landed at Calais with an army of 4,100 men, drawn largely from his personal estates in Cheshire and Lancashire. In the months that followed, he continued to fight and govern energetically. After a campaign that went as far south as Orléans, to assist the Duke of Burgundy’s siege of Chartres, which had begun on 23 June but which the dauphin had abandoned on 5 July after hearing of the imminent arrival of the English king, Henry turned to the last remaining dauphinist stronghold near Paris, the well-fortified town of Meaux. The siege there proved longer than the one at Rouen, dragging on from 6 October 1421 to 10 May 1422. Henry was furious at the level of resistance put up first by the town and subsequently the area known as the Marché, and when it finally fell, was harsh in his treatment of its defenders, executing them rather than allowing the usual terms of ransom and honourable departure from the town. He also took 110 books from Meaux’s religious establishments which he distributed to his monastic establishments in England.²⁹

Catherine had become pregnant during the progress in the Midlands and did not return to France with her husband. On 6 December 1421, she gave birth to the desired male heir at Windsor, the news being celebrated in Paris with the ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires. As she travelled back to France in May 1422, she was welcomed at Mantes by streets strewn with sweet-smelling herbs.³⁰ The future did indeed seem rosy for the double monarchy. Catherine joined Henry in Paris on 29 May, but within a few weeks Henry’s health was causing grave concern. From 7 July he was seriously ill, yet he continued to push himself: at Charenton he tried to reassure his followers that he was fit enough to play an active role by showing that he could still ride but the effort was too much. On 13 August, he arrived at the castle of Vincennes. He would never leave it.

The king was struggling with a serious intestinal condition – diagnosed by the French chronicler the Religieux of Saint-Denis as ‘a disease of the flux of the belly’; for Monstrelet it was St Anthony’s fire, or erysipelas, an acute infection which causes distinctive red inflammations of the skin and lymph nodes as well as fever and vomiting.³¹ Henry continued to attempt to deal with business, fully aware that he was about to die. On 26 August, he made a codicil to the will he had drawn up just before he returned to France in June of the previous year, which superseded the one he had made before the Agincourt campaign. This new will gave the ‘protection and defence’ (‘tutelam et defensionem’) of his young heir, Prince Henry, to his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester; however, it made the Duke of Exeter the prince’s governor, also stipulating that his long-term and much trusted associates Henry, Lord Fitzhugh and Sir Walter Hungerford should be in the prince’s household and about his person.³² The vagueness of the powers accorded to the Duke of Gloucester was to cause problems during Henry VI’s minority. Henry also laid down that the Duke of Orléans and the Count of Eu, two of the prisoners taken at Agincourt, should only be released with a large ransom and if they were willing to swear to accept the Treaty of Troyes.

As he lay close to death, chroniclers suggest, Henry gave further deathbed instructions to those gathered around him (who seem to have included the Duke of Exeter, the Earl of Warwick, his brother John and Louis Robessart), urging the continuation of the war until all of France accepted the Treaty of Troyes. There should be no treaty with the dauphin unless Normandy remained in English hands.³³ Finally, on 31 August, he died.

So shattering and unexpected was Henry’s death, at the age of thirty-five, and such were the ramifications for England and English France – his heir was just shy of nine months old – that, according to one French writer, Perceval de Cagny, the English kept Henry’s death secret for fifteen days, such was their fear of the effect it would have on loyalties.³⁴ Some claimed that Henry was cursed because he had moved religious relics from their rightful place; others that he had been inflicted by leprosy because of his policies. The Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain offered an alternative explanation for Henry’s premature demise. According to him, a hermit had come in 1421 to ask Henry to stop afflicting the French, telling him that God had only allowed him to be so successful in his conquests because as prince he had been wounded in the forehead fighting heretics in England. But now it was God’s will that if he did not stop he would die.³⁵

Henry’s body was eviscerated according to the usual practice, with his entrails being buried at Saint-Maur-des-Fossées. His corpse was taken to Calais via Saint-Denis and Rouen, where it was joined by Catherine, who would accompany it back to England. Its passage across northern France saw outpourings of grief as well as much ceremonial: at Rouen, the city he had starved into surrender, 200 townsmen all in black and each holding a torch, accompanied the horse-drawn hearse into the cathedral. Indeed, Henry’s premature death was lamented in France since his wise and firm rule had offered a contrast with the anarchy caused by the divisions between Burgundians and Armagnacs and the mental incapacity of Charles VI. Reflecting on his demise, the Religieux of Saint-Denis called him ‘magnanimous, valiant in arms, prudent, wise … well regarded by the people’.³⁶ Mourning was equally great in England: the chronicler Thomas Walsingham spoke of Henry’s subjects as being ‘unspeakably distressed’ that such a strong king and author of such remarkable deeds had been taken from them by God and that his successor was not yet a year old.³⁷

Landing at Dover on 31 October 1422, the hearse was taken on the customary route through Canterbury to London, where it was received formally at Southwark on 5 November by the mayor, corporation and clergy, with 31 guilds paying for 211 torches. After procession to and display in St Paul’s, it was escorted on 6 November to Westminster Abbey, with every house it passed displaying a torch in its honour. Henry was buried on 7 November in the location behind the high altar and close to the shrine of Edward the Confessor which he had specified as long ago as his first will of July 1415.³⁸ In his second will of June 1421, he had added a donation to the abbey of up to £4,000 for the completion of the ‘new work’ – the rebuilding of the nave. He had also added a donation of an altar cloth to the recluse of Westminster, asking him to pray especially for the king’s soul.³⁹

Although, in the few months between his death and his interment there had been some preparation of his tomb, the chantry chapel laid down in his will was not constructed until the 1430s. It displayed the king’s religiosity – his constant emphasis on the Virgin, the Trinity, St George, St Edmund and St Edward the Confessor, supplemented by St Denis as a reflection of his French successes: the codicil to his will made five days before he died had added bequests of precious objects and a great cross which he had used on the altar in his own chapel.⁴⁰ The carvings placed on the sides of the chantry chapel also reflected the ways in which the king was recalled in the generation after his death. We see him portrayed in full motion on horseback in the field, before a fortress and crossing a river, representing his military successes. We also see two portrayals of his crowning, the double representation perhaps imagining the French crowning which he so nearly achieved. The scenes epitomize his own strong concepts of active and sacral kingship, and link back to his personal transformation at his accession. His wooden effigy on the tomb chest, portraying the king in parliament robes, lost its silver plating to robbery in the mid 1540s, and at some point its head and hands also disappeared. In the 1970s, these were both replaced by modern replicas, the head based on the well-known early Tudor portrait of Henry, the hands allegedly on those of Lawrence Olivier.

A cynical view might be that Henry was assisted in terms of his reputation by his premature death. Had he lived he might have faced difficulties at home as much as in France, since it was by no means certain that the English would have been keen to pay for what had become, by the Treaty of Troyes, essentially a French civil war. His reign had seen eleven parliaments over nine years, the frequency reflecting his need for money: his reign was one of the most intensively taxed, paralleled only by the years 1377 to 1381 which triggered the Peasants’ Revolt. But given his achievements to date, and his single-minded determination to succeed, who knows what might have happened? Had a double monarchy of England and France persisted, the future history of Europe would have been very different.