Henry V as Warlord Read online

  Henry V As Warlord

  Desmond Seward

  Copyright © 2013, Desmond Seward

  This edition first published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  For Michael and Daphne Dormer

  Contents

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Genealogical tables

  Chronology

  Introduction

  I

  The Usurpers

  II

  Prince Henry and Prince Owain

  III

  ‘He Would Usurp the Crown’

  IV

  ‘No Lordship’

  V

  The English Armada

  VI

  ‘Our Town of Harfleur’

  VII

  ‘That Dreadful Day of Agincourt’

  VIII

  ‘To Teach the Frenchmen Courtesy’

  IX

  The Fall of Caen

  X

  The Fall of Rouen

  XI

  The Norman Conquest – In Reverse

  XII

  The Murder of John the Fearless

  XIII

  ‘Heir and Regent of France’

  XIV

  The Fall of Paris 1420

  XV

  Lancastrian Normandy

  XVI

  ‘Rending of Every Man Throughout the Realm’

  XVII

  Meaux Falls

  XVIII

  Lancastrian France

  XIX

  Death

  XX

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Henry V, from a screen at York Minster begun about 1425. Like the statues of his immediate predecessors on the screen, this is undoubtedly a portrait.

  (The Mansell Collection)

  Henry V as a youth. From an early sixteenth-century copy of a lost original.

  John, Duke of Bedford, kneels before St George, from the Bedford Books of Hours c. 1423. The small forked beard makes it highly probable that St George is a portrait of Henry V.

  (The British Library)

  Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury – Henry’s most formidable commander – with fashionable military haircut. Note his poleaxe.

  (The British Library)

  Henry V’s father-in-law, King Charles VI of France, with his counsellors.

  (François Martin)

  Henry V’s brother-in-law the Dauphin, when King Charles VII, as one of the Three Magi. From a miniature by Jean Fouquet.

  (Photographie Giraudon)

  A room well known to Henry V – the ruins of the dining hall of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire.

  (John Cooke Photography)

  The château of Lassay in Maine. Destroyed in 1417 to stop it being used as a base by the English, it was rebuilt in 1458 with cambered walls designed to resist siege artillery of the type used by Henry V.

  (S. Mountgarret)

  A hunting scene of a sort very well known to Henry V. In the background is his favourite French residence, the castle of Bois-de-Vincennes. From the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry.

  (Photographie Giraudon)

  Henry V’s official residence in Paris, the Louvre, as it was in his time. From the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry.

  (Photographie Giraudon)

  Line Illustrations

  p. 34 Henry’s seal as Prince of Wales and p. 147 The seal of Queen Catherine. (Sandford, F, A genealogical history of the kings of England monarchs of Great Britain, London 1671)

  p. 194 Vincennes in 1576, still just as it had been in Henry V’s time. The donjon (or keep) within the inner moat is where the king died in 1422. (Jacques Androuet du Cerceaux, Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France).

  Acknowledgements

  It was Mr Michael Dormer who first suggested that I write this book. I am most grateful to him.

  I am indebted to Count and Countess Pierre de Montalembert, and Count Artus de Montalembert, for valuable information about memories of the Hundred Years War in Normandy and Maine and for permission to reproduce the photograph of their château of Lassaye. I owe special thanks to Susan, Viscountess Mountgarret for help with research, for reading the typescript, for much photography, and for driving me to many sites in France associated with Henry V and his campaigns. I am also indebted to Peter Drummond-Murray of Mastrick for reading the proofs.

  In addition I would like to thank the staffs of the British Library and the London Library for help and guidance on innumerable occasions, and also the honorary librarians of Brooks’s, Mr Piers Dixon and Mr John Saumarez Smith.

  Chronology

  1387

  Born at Monmouth on 16 September.

  1394

  Death of mother.

  1398

  His father, Bolingbroke, is banished.

  1399

  Accompanies Richard II to Ireland.

  Bolingbroke deposes Richard II and ascends throne as Henry IV.

  Becomes heir to throne and is created Prince of Wales.

  1400

  Richard II is murdered.

  Campaigns with father in Scotland.

  Owain Glyn Dŵr revolts and proclaims himself Prince of Wales.

  Campaigns with father in Wales.

  1402

  He and Hotspur recapture Conwy in spring.

  Campaigns with his father in Wales in autumn.

  1403

  Appointed King’s Lieutenant on the Marches of Wales.

  Campaigns in Wales in spring, burning Owain’s houses.

  Wounded in battle of Shrewsbury against Hotspur on 21 July.

  Campaigns in Wales in autumn.

  1405

  Plot to place Earl of March on throne.

  Archbishop Scrope’s rising is crushed.

  Franco-Welsh army invades England.

  Campaigns in Wales in autumn.

  1406

  Appointed Lieutenant of Wales.

  Campaigns in Wales in summer.

  Besieges Aberystwyth.

  Campaigns with father in Scotland in autumn.

  1408

  Earl of Northumberland defeated and killed at Bramham Moor.

  Aberystwyth surrenders.

  1409

  Harlech surrenders.

  1410

  Becomes head of the King’s Council during father’s illness.

  1411

  Father recovers and dismisses him from the Council.

  English expedition to France to help Burgundians.

  1412

  English expedition to France to help Armagnacs.

  Suspected of plotting to depose his father.

  1413

  Henry IV dies in March and he becomes king.

  1414

  Lollard rising crushed in London.

  1415

  Southampton Plot to murder him and place March on throne.

  Invades Normandy in August.

  Harfleur surrenders to him in September.

  Defeats French at Agincourt on 25 October.

  1416

  Emperor Sigismund visits Henry in England.

  1417

  Invades Normandy in August.

  Takes Caen by storm in September.

  1418

  Captures Falaise in February.

  Commences siege of Rouen in July.

  1419

  Rouen surrenders in January – English overrun all Normandy.

  Negotiations with Duke of Burgundy and French queen in June.

  Captures Pontoise i
n July.

  Duke John of Burgundy murdered by Armagnacs in September.

  Alliance between England and Burgundy in December.

  1420

  Treaty of Troyes with Charles VI and Philip of Burgundy – recognised as ‘Heir and Regent of France’.

  Marries Charles VI’s daughter, Catherine of Valois, in June.

  Occupies Paris, installing English garrison.

  Besieges Melun from July till its fall in November.

  1421

  Spends January in Normandy.

  Returns to England with Catherine in February.

  Duke of Clarence defeated and killed by French at Baugé.

  Returns to France in June and relieves English at Paris.

  Commences siege of Meaux in August.

  Birth of his son, the future Henry VI.

  1422

  Continues siege of Meaux which surrenders in May.

  Falls seriously ill in June.

  Dies at Vincennes on 31 August.

  Introduction

  ‘I am the scourge of God’

  Henry V

  ‘I am an Englishman, and am thy foe’

  Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes

  On 19 October 1449 a cheering mob opened the gates of Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and Charles VII of France – once disinherited dauphin, now ‘King Charles the very victorious’ – rode in to wild rejoicing. Rouen had been occupied by the English for thirty years. Within less than a year they would be driven out of Normandy altogether. It was the end not only of an English Normandy but of an Anglo-French dual monarchy. In particular it was the end of one man’s dream. The man was Henry V, who left an unhappy legacy when he died in 1422, a legacy that is still with us.

  No one would deny the uneasy relationship between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. The former tend to distrust anyone who speaks English. Among the earliest and not the least reasons why this ingrained suspicion developed was the behaviour of English troops in France during the second half of the Hundred Years War, a war revived by Henry. No doubt French troops behaved as badly – but they were in France as Frenchmen, not as invaders who spoke a foreign tongue. The English had taken advantage of a civil war to conquer all north-western France. It was as if a French king had allied with the Yorkists during the Wars of the Roses, occupied south-eastern England, installed a French garrison at London and had himself declared heir to the throne, while at the same time turning Kent into a separate Anglo-French principality where he confiscated 500 estates and gave them to Frenchmen, besides settling 10,000 colonists at Dover. The humiliation and the atrocities would never have been forgotten. The French have long memories too.

  Henry V is one of England’s heroes. The victor of Agincourt was idolized during his lifetime, his memory inspired one of Shakespeare’s most stirring (if scarcely greatest) plays, and the Victorians considered him a perfect Christian gentleman: ‘He was religious, pure in life, temperate, liberal, careful and yet splendid,’ says Bishop Stubbs, ‘merciful, truthful, and honourable, discreet in word, provident in counsel, prudent in judgement, modest in look, magnanimous in act, a true Englishman.’ In our own century Sir Winston Churchill could write of ‘the gleaming King’.

  That brilliant historian of the medieval English, the late K. B. McFarlane, thought Henry ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England.’ His achievements were remarkable. At home not only did he tame the Welsh, destroying Owain Glyn Dŵr, but he restored law and order to a hitherto strife-torn realm; across the Channel he conquered a third of France, married the French king’s daughter and was recognized as heir and regent of France. So powerful is his spell that almost every English historian who studied him succumbs, bemused by his genius and dynamism, blind to any shortcomings. They attribute any criticism by French scholars to anglophobia.

  Nevertheless his conquest of France was as much about loot as dynastic succession, accompanied by mass slaughter, arson and rape – French plunder was on sale all over England. It was very like the Norman conquest of England in reverse although lasting a mere thirty years. Just as William the Bastard had done, he seized the lands of the great nobles, and of many lesser nobles too, giving them to his soldiers. For three decades English interlopers, often sporting French titles, lorded it over hundreds of French estates – some great counties, others modest manors. They were, however, always in danger, dependent on English archers for survival. He not only evicted noblemen from castles but ordinary people from their homes. Countless Frenchmen of all classes emigrated from the territory conquered by him. When reproached with killing so many Christians in France, he answered, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins.’1

  The misery inflicted on the French by Henry’s campaigns is indisputable. Any local historian in north-western France can point to a town, a château, an abbey or a church sacked by his men. Life in the countryside became a nightmare. When the English raided enemy territory they killed anything that moved, destroyed crops and food supplies and drove off livestock, in a calculated attempt to weaken their opponents by starving the civilian population. Occupied areas fared little better because of the pâtis or protection racket operated by English garrisons; villages had to pay extortionate dues in food and wine as well as money, failure to deliver sometimes incurred executions and burnings.

  Yet Henry’s ambition was inspired by something more complicated than mere desire for conquest. It was a need to prove that he really was King of England. His father had usurped the throne and, as the Yorkists would demonstrate during the Wars of the Roses, there were others with a better right to it in law. If he could make good his great-grandfather Edward III’s claim to France he would show in trial by battle that God confirmed his right to the English crown.

  During the nineteenth century French ‘patriotic’ historians reacted violently to the Hundred Years War, producing a portrait of Henry as distorted as the English icon. They saw fifteenth-century Anglo-Saxons as the first ‘Boches’. English historians responded to this xenophobic outburst with equal chauvinism, together with a cool assumption of objectivity (although few writers can have taken less pains to hide their dislike of the French than the venerated Wylie and Waugh in their massive study of the king’s reign). Even today English and French differ in their judgement. Harriss believes Henry had ‘grasped’ that the French crown ‘could only be securely held by one whom the French people accepted as King in the same measure as Englishmen did … given the years, energy and luck, he might have reshaped the development of both nations just, as in brief space, he had restored the fortunes of England.’2 By contrast Edouard Perroy thought that Henry’s successes, ‘his premature death at the height of unprecedented glory, have raised him very high, perhaps too high, in the estimation of posterity’. He refers to his ‘hypocritical bigotry, his double dealing, his pretence of observing the law and redressing wrongs when he merely sought to gratify his own ambition’. It remains to strike a balance.3

  English studies of the king tend to discount French chroniclers, save for tributes to him when he died. Admittedly some borrow from each other and several wrote years after his death. Nevertheless all were alive during his reign (Jean Juvénal des Ursins, the monk of St Denis and Monstrelet being already in their thirties when he died), while all of them had spoken to people who had experienced the events of which they write. If they were prejudiced against him, then English chroniclers were biased in his favour. One prefers the testimony of the occupied to the occupiers – just as one accepts French rather than German versions of what happened in France between 1940 and 1944.

  In England historians refuse to see the fifteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War as a conflict between French and English. They argue that while the English had a sense of nationality no such people as Frenchmen existed, only inhabitants of regions of France with no common identity. Yet if France was not seen then as she is now, almost as a person, there was nevertheless a concept of a French realm symbolized by the phrase
‘the honour of the fleur-de-lys’. By the fifteenth century the French had developed quite enough nationalism to consider their neighbours over the Channel hereditary enemies. If Henry did not think in national terms – for him France was ‘my inheritance’ – his subjects did and definitely tended to xenophobia. Many of France’s miseries during this period were due to Frenchmen yet all French chroniclers unite in seeing the English as the worst of their foes. The French may have possessed only a vague sense of nationality when Henry invaded their country but they quickly developed one in fighting him. They took the king at his own word – ‘I am the scourge of God’ – save that to them he was the Devil’s scourge rather than God’s.

  I

  The Usurpers

  ‘Heaven knows, my son,

  By what by-paths, and indirect crook’d ways,

  I met this crown; and I myself know well,

  How troublesome it sat upon my head.’

  Shakespeare, King Henry IV

  ‘[Henry IV] in order to come into the honour and glory of the crown of the said realm of England had in time past by certain strange and dishonourable means deprived of that rank his first cousin Richard, king of England.’

  Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Les Chroniques