The cause of all the poor in ’93:
The Cause of all the world at Waterloo;
The shouts of what was terrible and free
Behind the guns of Vengeance and her crew;
The Maid that rode so straightly and so true
And broke the line to pieces in her pride –
They had to chuck it up; it wouldn’t do;
The Devil didn’t like them, and they died.
‘Ballade of Unsuccessful Men’, Hilaire Belloc
THE NEW REIGN started well enough. Charles VI was only eleven years old; the government was consequently entrusted to a Council of Regency, which comprised perhaps half a dozen of the leading nobles, led by the king’s uncles Philip (‘the Bold’) Duke of Burgundy and Louis Duke of Orléans. There was no love lost between the brothers, but they concealed their mutual hostility as best they could; only after the regency ended did their fateful struggle for power begin.
The first sign of trouble came in August 1392, when the king – now twenty-three – was riding through a forest with a group of knights; a young page, overcome by sleep, dropped the royal lance. Charles suddenly went berserk, drawing his sword and shouting: ‘Forward against the traitors! They want to deliver me to the enemy!’ whereat he laid about him indiscriminately to left and right. At last he was unhorsed and disarmed, but not before several of his own knights lay dead at his feet. From that time forward he was regularly visited by fits of insanity. The symptoms varied; sometimes he forgot who he was and had no idea that he was king, sometimes he believed he was St George, sometimes he was convinced that he was made of glass and would shatter at the slightest impact. He could not legitimately be removed from the throne, since there were prolonged periods when he appeared perfectly sane; but it was obvious that there must be a new regency – one which would have to continue, in all probability, for the rest of his reign.
The new council was presided over by the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria. Once again it inevitably included the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy, but this time their relative positions had changed. Whereas the earlier council during the king’s minority had been dominated by Philip of Burgundy, his influence had decreased; it was now Louis of Orléans who was the driving force. Married to Valentina Visconti, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Duke of Milan, Louis was highly intelligent and deeply versed in the arts and culture of Italy; but his debauches were notorious and he was almost certainly the lover of the queen; it may well be that some of her twelve children were his. After a few years he was given the official guardianship of the dauphin and his siblings, a post which still further increased his power at court. Duke Philip, as may easily be imagined, watched these developments with mounting fury; but matters finally came to a head only after his death in 1404 and his succession by his son John, generally known as the Fearless. Relations between the houses of Burgundy and Orléans now broke down altogether, and the two entered into open conflict. The king’s uncle, John Duke of Berry, persuaded them on 20 November 1407 to make a solemn vow of reconciliation, but just three days later Louis of Orléans was struck down by a bunch of assassins in a Paris street. John the Fearless made no attempt to deny responsibility; the murder, he claimed, was a totally justifiable act of ‘tyrannicide’. He wisely slipped out of Paris for a short spell until the fuss died down, but only sixteen months later, by the Treaty of Chartres, he was officially absolved of the crime and restored to royal favour, his guardianship of the royal children confirmed.
By then, however, there had broken out what amounted to a civil war between the two rival houses. At the time of the assassination Louis’s heir Charles of Orléans, though only fourteen, was determined to recover all the properties that the Burgundians had managed to confiscate from his father over the past years. To do this he needed powerful allies, chief among whom was his future father-in-law, Bernard VII Count of Armagnac.* Thus it was that the Orléans party came to be known as the Armagnacs. France was again deeply and dangerously divided.
All this was welcome news to the young Henry V of England when in 1413 he succeeded his father Henry IV as king. It seemed that France, torn apart by civil strife, headed by a mad monarch and governed by a young and friendless dauphin, was his for the taking. In fact, as the son of a usurper – Henry IV had deposed his predecessor, Richard II – he had little enough claim to the French throne, but he hoped to strengthen his case by marrying the king’s daughter Princess Catherine. Early in 1415 he sent his uncle Thomas Beaufort to the French court, at the head of an impressive company of high ecclesiastics and noblemen and armed with a list of formidable demands. It was a tactic as old as diplomacy itself: deliberately to ask of a weaker nation more than it could possibly perform, and then to use its inevitable refusal as an excuse for war. First on the list was the crown of France. When this was denied – as it clearly would be – Beaufort was to demand Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and all the territories ceded to France by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. Next he was to claim half of Provence, with the castles of Beaufort and Nogent, as being part of the Lancastrian inheritance through Henry’s grandfather John of Gaunt. These demands accounted for much of the French kingdom; but they were not all. Henry further insisted on the immediate payment of all the arrears of the ransom of John II – 1.6 million gold crowns. Finally he required the hand of the Princess Catherine, for whom he would be ready to accept a dowry of 2 million crowns.
France was not ready for war and was willing to pay heavily to avoid it; but such demands were beyond the bounds of reason. The French negotiators, led by the Duke of Berry, offered a considerable territorial addition to the English Duchy of Aquitaine and, for Catherine, an unprecedented dowry of 600,000 crowns, later increased to 800,000; but beyond that they could not go. Unhesitatingly Beaufort rejected the offer and returned to England to inform his master. Henry could not conceal his satisfaction. It was exactly what he had expected. Diplomacy could have gained him valuable territory, but only war could win him a crown. He now began his preparations in earnest. In less than six months he had some 1,500 vessels lying at anchor along the coast between Southampton and Portsmouth. Meanwhile he contracted for about 2,500 fully armoured knights with their attendant esquires, pages and horses, and some 8,000 archers, together with gunners, sappers, armourers, grooms, surgeons, cooks, saddlers, smiths, fletchers, chaplains and even minstrels. The cost, inevitably, was enormous: huge cash loans were raised from the wealthier private citizens, with virtually everything of value that the king possessed – including most of the crown jewels – being offered as security.
While this immense force was assembling, Henry set off on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Winifred at Holywell in Wales – a return journey of some 400 miles – before making his way to the south coast, stopping briefly at Winchester to receive a delegation from the French court, sent in a desperate last-minute attempt to avert the coming invasion. He received the ambassadors with all the honour due to their high rank and loaded them with presents; but he rejected their improved offer of 900,000 crowns for Catherine’s dowry. The expedition, he explained, was on the point of departure; there could be no turning back now. And so, on Sunday 11 August 1415, carrying such of the crown jewels not in pawn together with a hefty piece of the True Cross, he boarded La Trinité Royale and crossed the Channel to Harfleur.
Harfleur, lying on the estuary of the Seine a mile or two to the east of Le Havre, was generally believed to be impregnable. Its walls ran for two and a half miles, protected by a broad, deep moat and twenty-six towers. The fleet anchored in the estuary safely out of range of its cannon, while the army landed on the soft, marshy terrain a little to the east of the town and trundled its siege engines into position. On the following day the operation began. It was to continue for the next five weeks – weeks which, to the besieging army, rapidly became a nightmare. The marshes, unhealthy at the best of times, swarmed with flies in the August heat; and the only available food supplies, consisting largely of rotten fruit and dubious shellfish washed down with raw Normandy cider, led to fever and dysentery which quickly spread through the whole army. Within a month the Bishop of Norwich and the Earl of Suffolk were both dead, together with many of the leading knights and some two thousand men; another five thousand, including the king’s brother the Duke of Clarence, were sent back to England on stretchers.
But life was no easier for the people of Harfleur. They were by now running seriously short of food; and on 18 September the commander of the garrison sent a messenger to the king asking for terms. Henry’s first reaction was to insist on unconditional surrender; then, realising that his own army could not continue in its present condition, he relented and gave permission for a delegation from the town to appeal for help to the dauphin in Rouen, on the understanding that if this were not forthcoming within four days Harfleur would capitulate. The delegation set off, only to be informed that the French army was nowhere near ready for action; and on the 22nd, as promised, the garrison surrendered. There followed a ceremonial entry into the town, with all the pomp and panoply that the king could muster; however, he dismounted at the gates, removed his shoes and went barefoot into the church of St Martin to give thanks.
His treatment of the townspeople was severe rather than savage. Harfleur was not put to the sack, as it might easily have been. The chief citizens were captured and held to ransom. For the rest, those who agreed to swear allegiance to the English crown were allowed to remain; those who refused – numbering perhaps two thousand, including women and children – were driven out. (Most of them were later picked up by the French army and resettled in Rouen.) Henry meanwhile sent an envoy to the dauphin bearing a challenge to single combat, the crown of France to go to the winner after the death of Charles VI; but this was rather a matter of form than anything else. The nineteen-year-old dauphin, a confirmed debauchee who had already contracted the disease that was to kill him within the year, was hardly likely to measure himself against a professional soldier eight years his senior, in the prime of life and the pink of condition.
Harfleur had been, in a sense, a victory; but it had also been a catastrophe. Death or disease had deprived the king of almost a third of his men. Of the 2,500 men-at-arms who had sailed with him to France, only 900 remained, together with perhaps 5,000 archers. The planned advance on Paris was now plainly out of the question; the only sensible course for Henry would have been to return directly to England, leaving a strong garrison in the conquered town. But for him the adventure was not yet over. He now announced to his surviving captains his intention of marching on Calais.
To most of them, such a plan must have seemed little short of insane. Calais was separated from Harfleur by 150 miles of difficult country, studded with hostile castles and fortified towns and crossed by a number of rivers, many of which might soon be flooded by the autumn rains. The French army, meanwhile, was known to have received the Armagnac reinforcements it had long been expecting; it now easily outnumbered the sadly depleted English force and could confidently be expected to block its path. Of all this the king was well aware, but his mind was made up. On 8 October he gave the order to march.
The army had not gone far beyond the River Somme when the French heralds rode up and informed the king that their army was only a short distance ahead; the English must prepare to face it in pitched battle, on ground – for such were the rules of medieval chivalry – equally favourable to both sides. In fact the expected encounter did not occur for another three days; but at last, on the morning of 24 October, the coming of dawn revealed the French army encamped on the opposite bank of the little River Ternoise. After some difficulty in securing the existing bridge, the English crossed in safety; but the king knew that he would not get much further without a fight, and it soon became clear just where the battle was to be fought – in the open country some thirty miles north-west of Arras, between the neighbouring villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt.* As he watched the French army preparing for the fray, Henry at last seems to have realised the gravity of his situation. He was, first of all, overwhelmingly outnumbered – perhaps by as many as five or six to one. Moreover the enemy was fresh and rested, while his own men were near exhaustion after two weeks on the march. And so he took a decision that has usually been overlooked by British historians (and of course by Shakespeare): he sued for peace, offering the restoration of Harfleur and all his other gains, with full compensation for all the damage caused by his troops, in return for their safe passage to Calais. There was little hope, as he well knew, that his offer would be accepted; but at least it might delay the start of the battle, giving his soldiers the night’s rest they so desperately needed.
For a week there had been almost incessant rain. All day the storm clouds had been gathering again, and as evening fell there came yet another downpour, which continued for much of the night. Lying – as most of the English were – out in the open, few of them could have got much sleep. Fewer still could have realised, however, that where the coming battle was concerned this almost unremitting rain was the best thing that could possibly have happened and would be seen, in retrospect, as a gift from God.
By the morning of Friday 25 October – it was the Feast of St Crispin and St Crispinian – the rain had stopped, leaving the recently ploughed meadows between the woods of Tramecourt to the east and Agincourt to the west a waterlogged morass; but there had been no reply to Henry’s offer of terms, and both sides now prepared for battle. The king drew up his army in three divisions, line abreast. He himself, wearing his surcoat on which the three leopards of England were quartered with the fleur-de-lys of France, his helmet encircled by a thin gold crown, took command of the centre. All three divisions, in which the men-at-arms fought dismounted, were supported on each flank by companies of archers.
The French commanders, the Constable of France Charles d’Albret and Marshal Jean Boucicault, followed a different plan. For an army as large as theirs, the limited space between the two woods on each side – some 1,200 yards – made a line formation impossible: they accordingly formed a column deployed in three ranks one behind the other, similarly dismounted but with a body of heavy cavalry on each side of the front rank. Between the three were companies of crossbowmen; despite the lessons of the previous century, the longbow had still not been generally adopted in France. Basically the French were putting their trust in their far superior strength, and in the impetus of the outflanking cavalry attack with which they intended to open the battle.
Oddly, they seem to have taken no account of the recent weather. A knight in full armour imposes a formidable weight on the strongest of horses, and for a successful cavalry charge hard ground was essential. At eleven o’clock d’Albret gave the signal for the attack and the chargers moved forward; but they soon sank up to their fetlocks in the soft mud, and the dismounted men-at-arms did very little better. Meanwhile the English archers loosed deluges of arrows and took a fearsome toll of cavalry and infantry alike, before exchanging their bows for short swords, axes and clubs, with which they quickly accounted for the relatively few Frenchmen who managed to reach the English line. The second wave of the attack, under the Duke of Alençon, was no more successful than the first, the English scrambling over the piles of dead and wounded to continue the slaughter. The third wave, seeing the fate of its predecessors, turned tail and fled.
It was at this point, with victory already assured, that the king gave the order which in the eyes of posterity has constituted the darkest stain on his reputation. Only the highest-ranking noblemen – for whom valuable ransoms could be expected – were to be spared; all other prisoners, he ordered, were to be instantly put to death. What prompted such a reaction, utterly contrary as it was to all the traditions of warfare? Was there, as it was later claimed, some sudden movement on the part of the French cavalry that led Henry to suspect an attack from the rear? It is possible, though no such attack was ever made. Many of his men refused point-blank to obey the order, even after he had threatened to hang all those who held back; at last he was obliged to designate two hundred of his own archers specifically for the task. Such, alas, was the aftermath of the victory that has gone down as one of the most glorious in English history.
By mid-afternoon there was nothing to do but to count and where possible to identify the dead. The French losses were enormous: out of some 20,000 men, well over a third – some 7,000 – were gone, including d’Albret, the dukes of Alençon and Bar, and two brothers of the Duke of Burgundy, Anthony Duke of Brabant and Philip Count of Nevers. With them were 1,560 knights, perhaps 5,000 men-at-arms and an unknown number of irregulars. Marshal Boucicault, with the dukes of Bourbon and Orléans, was a prisoner. By contrast the English losses were at the most 1,600, probably a good deal fewer. Only two English noblemen lost their lives: the young Earl of Suffolk – whose father had died at Harfleur – and the forty-two-year-old Duke of York, who was seriously overweight and whose heavy armour seems to have brought on a heart attack.
Given the state of the ground and the tactics chosen by the French, the victory of Agincourt was a foregone conclusion; but there were other reasons too why the battle ended as it did. The English army was united under a single commander, who had already proved himself a superb leader of men and who himself fought like a tiger throughout the battle, personally saving the life of his brother the Duke of Gloucester. The French on the other hand were split, with none of their generals in undisputed control and their command structure, such as it was, riven by divided loyalties. Moreover – and this must be repeated, since to us in retrospect it seems well-nigh inexplicable – despite their experience at Crécy and Poitiers they had still not accepted the superiority of the longbow and were consequently powerless against the English archers. For this alone they deserved to lose – though they certainly did not deserve the unspeakable brutality they suffered after their defeat.
Agincourt added fuel to the flames of the hatred – for it was nothing less – which now existed between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. In May 1418 John the Fearless – who had kept his troops well clear of the battle – captured Paris and proclaimed himself protector of the mad king; the dauphin was forced to flee for his life. John was careful not to ally himself openly with the English for fear of losing his immense popularity among the common people of France, but it was by this time obvious where his sympathies lay: when the English took Rouen in 1419 he did not lift a finger to defend it. With almost the whole of northern France in English hands and Paris in Burgundian, the dauphin saw that his only hope lay in reconciliation, and it was agreed that he and the Duke of Burgundy should meet on 10 September 1419 on the bridge at Montereau, at the confluence of the Seine and the Yonne. John arrived in all good faith, but within minutes of his arrival was assassinated by a misguided friend of the dauphin.* His son and successor, to be known as Philip the Good, stepped up the civil war and in 1420, by the Treaty of Troyes, allied himself with England – an alliance which was to be confirmed three years later after Henry’s death when Philip’s sister Anne was married to John Duke of Bedford, Henry’s brother and regent for the infant Henry VI. But the treaty had another consequence, far more immediate and important: Henry’s marriage to Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and his recognition by her poor, mad father as the legitimate successor to the French throne.
France’s situation had never been more desperate. As a free nation, she had almost ceased to exist. The civil war showed no sign of stopping: Burgundians and Armagnacs were still at each other’s throats. Through his marriage, Henry had become not only regent, but heir to the throne. The dauphin was effectively in exile at Bourges; Bedford was governor in Paris. And when, in 1422, Henry and Charles died within three months of each other, it was the eight-month-old Henry VI of England who was proclaimed King of France. Certainly the country still had a French king: young Charles VII, now nineteen. He was deeply pious, always firmly maintaining his innocence over Duke John’s assassination, but tormented always by doubt: was he truly the heir to the House of Valois? His mother Isabeau had – perhaps forgivably – been serially unfaithful to her husband. He knew that the vast majority of his subjects – if subjects they were – would welcome him; they had no desire to be ruled by a foreigner. But how was he to make good his claim? The English, already masters of northern France, were now laying siege to Orléans, which was resisting bravely but had little hope of defeating them.
At this point, in March 1429, there appeared on the scene France’s beloved heroine, Joan of Arc. Born of peasant stock at Domrémy in Lorraine, she had first heard her ‘voices’ at the age of thirteen; and four years later, in the early spring of 1429, she left her home village, against formidable opposition, for the court of the dauphin* at Chinon. On 8 March, having been instantly identified by her as he hid among a group of courtiers, he granted her an audience – in the course of which she reassured him ‘that he was the true heir of France and son of the King’ and informed him of her divine mission: to raise the siege of Orléans and to escort him to his coronation at Reims. Still unconvinced, he sent her to Poitiers for examination by a body of ecclesiastics; only after they had given their unqualified approval did he despatch her to Orléans.
The city had been under siege since the previous October by an English army initially under the command of Thomas Montagu Earl of Salisbury, who had recently returned to France with a private army of 2,700 men raised at his own expense. In November, however, Salisbury had been killed by a French cannonball as he stood at a window; his place had been taken by two joint commanders, William de la Pole Earl of Suffolk and John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, who had determined to starve out the city. The winter that followed had not been uneventful. An armed convoy of provisions had been attacked on 12 February by 4,000 French and Scots. The assailants had been repelled, but not before their cannon had shattered the supply casks, which had spewed vast quantities of salted fish all over the field. Shortly after this ‘Battle of the Herrings’ the defenders of Orléans, now running seriously short of food, suggested the surrender of the city to the Duke of Burgundy, who had joined the siege with an army of his own. Bedford – who had remained so far in his headquarters at Chartres – naturally refused,* but the duke took grave offence and immediately withdrew with all his men.
It was at this point that Joan arrived in the city. Her appearance put new spirit into the citizens, and on 4 May the counter-attack began. She herself, though wounded in the neck by an arrow, refused to leave the battle till it was won. A day or two later the English were in full retreat, the French in pursuit. During the fierce street fighting Suffolk and Talbot were both taken prisoner. Joan, now believed on all sides to be invincible, met Charles at Tours and pressed him no longer to delay his coronation at Reims. The ceremony took place, in her presence, on 17 July 1429. Her work done, her voices now silent, her mission accomplished, she longed to return to her village. Had she been allowed to do so, it would have saved her life; but the people refused to let her go and she bowed, disastrously, to their will, urging Charles now to march on Paris. He did so in September, but his attempt to capture the city was unsuccessful and Joan was once again wounded, this time in the thigh.
All was not yet lost: the English, still in retreat, had already evacuated the Loire valley, most of the Ile-de-France and virtually all Champagne; a concerted French push into Picardy might have driven them back to Calais. But the chance was thrown away. The French commander George de la Trémoille – who detested Joan – now took it upon himself to disband the army, giving Bedford the perfect opportunity to regroup and recover, and to bring his young sovereign over to France for his coronation. Henry, by now nine years old, reached Calais in April 1430 in the company of Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and 10,000 men, but such was the prevailing anarchy that he had to remain there for another three months; not till the end of July was he able to travel, and then only as far as Rouen. He was lodged in the castle, and was still there five months later when Joan arrived, in chains. She had been taken prisoner on 23 May during an attempt to relieve Compiègne, which was under siege by the Burgundians; but she had spent the interim in several other prisons while her captor John of Luxembourg haggled over her price with Philip of Burgundy and the Duke of Bedford. Finally she had been handed over to the English for 10,000 francs. Did she and Henry ever meet? They certainly could have; but Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick – the king’s guardian and tutor, who happened also to be governor of the castle – kept her guarded day and night by five English soldiers. He is unlikely, to say the least, to have permitted his young guest to come in contact with a woman whom he believed to be an evil witch, ‘the disciple and limb of the Fiend’.
Joan’s examination began on 21 February 1431. Five weeks later, on 27 March, she appeared at her trial, during which she was allowed no defence counsel or spiritual adviser; and on Wednesday 30 May, excommunicated and declared a heretic, she was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen – the pyre having been prepared well in advance of the sentence. Her ashes were cast into the Seine. She was only nineteen, but she had done her work well. She had delivered Orléans; she had seen the dauphin crowned, as his ancestors had been crowned before him, in the cathedral at Reims; from the moment of her first appearance, English fortunes had begun to decline. They were never to recover. True, the ten-year-old Henry VI finally reached Paris where, on 26 December, alone of all the English monarchs, he was crowned in Notre-Dame – by Cardinal Beaufort, and according to the English liturgy; but if Bedford had hoped to impress the French by this ceremony, he failed. The service was poorly attended, the subsequent banquet proved a fiasco, no amnesty was declared, no alms were distributed to the poor, and two days after Christmas the king was slipped almost furtively out of Paris to return to England.
By now there were few people on either side of the Channel who had much stomach for the war. To the pious young king, hostility between fellow-Christians was a cause of continual grief; Bedford, knowing that the cause was hopeless, longed to put an end to the fighting and found strong support in Parliament, which actually presented a petition to that effect. Burgundy, too, was increasingly eager for peace. Only Humphrey Duke of Gloucester – another brother of Henry V – continued to argue fiercely for a continuation of the war, sabotaging every attempt at negotiation. Finally in 1435 Philip of Burgundy lost patience and convened, on his own initiative, a peace conference at Arras.
The English, whose delegation was strongly influenced by Duke Humphrey, refused to renounce the royal title to France and ultimately withdrew altogether from the negotiations. Almost at once they had reason to regret their departure. A week later, on 21 September, they were horrified to learn that France and Burgundy had effected a reconciliation. King Charles had agreed to make a public apology for the assassination of John the Fearless and to surrender those responsible; Philip had then been formally absolved by the attendant cardinals from his oath of allegiance to the English king. When young Henry heard the news, he wept; for Humphrey and his militants, on the other hand, there was a great wave of support as the people of London expressed their anger at the Burgundian betrayal by looting and firing the houses of all the Flemish merchants in the city.
Bedford, too, would have shed tears to see much of his life’s work brought to nothing; but a week before the Franco-Burgundian peace, on 14 September 1435, he had died aged forty-six at Rouen and been buried in the cathedral. He had served his father, his elder brother and his nephew with unswerving loyalty, never once – in marked distinction to his brother Humphrey – putting his own interests before his duty. If his life ultimately ended in failure, it was no fault of his. His wisdom and selflessness were sorely to be missed in the years that followed.
In 1436 King Charles VII made his solemn entry into Paris. Normandy was recovered in 1450, Guienne in 1453. The English retained Calais, and nothing more. The Hundred Years’ War had been a heavy price to pay for it.
* Charles of Orléans was to marry Bernard’s daughter Bonne in 1410. Meanwhile Valentina’s brother Carlo had married Bernard’s sister Beatrice.
* The village is now known as Azincourt.
* Many years later a monk in Dijon showed Francis I the hole in John’s skull. ‘Here, sire,’ he said, ‘is the hole through which the English entered France.’
* Though Charles VI had now been seven years in his grave, Charles VII was still known as the dauphin, not yet having been consecrated or crowned.
* Bedford answered the duke’s ambassadors that ‘it was not honourable nor yet consonante to reason, that the kyng of England should beate the bushe and the duke of Burgoyne should haue the birdes’; (Edward Hall).