John the Fearless had not gone to the assistance of Henry V at Harfleur, as some Armagnacs had suspected he would. Yet rumours were rife throughout Europe that, while the dauphin and the Armagnacs were preoccupied in resisting the English, the duke intended to raise his own force and march on Paris. As we have just seen, there were those in the English army who believed this would happen as soon as the dauphin moved from Rouen to engage them in battle. In Paris itself, where the duke had always enjoyed great popular support, the citizens were in a state of high excitement anticipating his return. The wife of one of the exiled Cabochiens received a letter from her husband the very week that Harfleur fell, telling her to get twenty crowns and meet him at a certain town on 20 October because the duke of Burgundy would be there with a large army. Not having the money herself, she borrowed it from a relative, who promptly informed the authorities. Terrified of another bloody revolt, they did not wait for the king’s order but immediately changed all the city’s officers, barricaded the gates and made preparations for a siege. Though this proved to be a false alarm, it was a credible enough threat to be reported as a fact in Venice that the duke had indeed entered Paris again.
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In this highly charged and deeply distrustful atmosphere, it was not surprising that the dauphin and his advisors had tried to persuade the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans to send their men to the muster at Rouen, but to remain at home themselves. John the Fearless penned a caustic reply. It was addressed to the king rather than the dauphin, and though it was couched in the deferential terms due from a faithful subject, it was pregnant with menace. Despite his deep loyalty to the crown, the duke declared he could not forget the insult proffered to him by asking him to remain at home when every other prince of the blood had been summoned to the assistance of France. His honour, which he valued more than anything else on earth, was impugned by this request. Nevertheless, it was the duty of all good friends and subjects to lend a hand in this crisis, so he intended to save the kingdom from its peril and uphold his own position as the premier duke of France by sending far more than the five hundred men-at-arms and three hundred archers who had been requested. The letter was accompanied by two others, written in a similar vein, by the duke’s leading vassals.
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In the meantime, the duke had also written to all his subjects, in Picardy and elsewhere, ordering them to make themselves ready to accompany him when he sent for them, but also specifically forbidding them from going “at the command of any other lord, whoever he might be.”
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This order could be interpreted two ways. Either it was intended to ensure that, if those of the Burgundian allegiance did go to war, it was only under his personal command or, alternatively, that they did not go to war at all. If the duke really had made a non-interference pact with Henry V, then he needed to prevent his own men from rising in defence of their homeland. Whatever the reason, his order put the nobility of Picardy in an impossible situation. They would have to choose between obeying their king or their duke.
Since they had failed to respond to the issuing of the general call to arms, a number of nobles from Picardy received personally addressed royal commands to come with all their forces to assist the dauphin, on pain of incurring the king’s indignation.
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When this, too, failed to bring them to heel, the royal orders were reissued on 20 September in terms that left their recipients in no doubt that they had incurred the king’s grave displeasure. “Through the negligence and delays you and others have made in executing our orders and for lack of help and aid, our noble and good and loyal subjects within the town of Harfleur, despite making a very great and notable defence, have been compelled to render the town by violence, because they could no longer resist the oppression and force of our enemies.” The blame for the fall of Harfleur was thus placed squarely on the shoulders of the local nobility, despite the rather poignant fact that the town had not yet formally surrendered and its defenders were still forlornly waiting the answer to their final plea for aid.
The new order commanded, “on the faith and loyalty that you owe us and on pain of all that you can forfeit,” that proclamations were to be made everywhere and “so often that no one can pretend ignorance”; anyone who refused to go to the dauphin immediately, armed and ready to fight, should be imprisoned, have their goods seized and have men billeted upon them at their expense. Any town which could spare any “engines, cannon and artillery” was to send them also, without delay.
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The fall of Harfleur did what the English invasion had failed to do: it galvanised French officialdom into action. Men who had been torn between their loyalty to the king and to the duke now rose in defence of their homeland. As the English made their way across Normandy into Picardy, the great French army rumoured to be gathering at Rouen became a reality.
CROSSING THE SOMME
Henry had intended to cross the Somme in exactly the same place as had his great-grandfather, Edward III, in 1346, on the campaign that culminated in the spectacular English victory at Crécy. The old Roman ford at Blanche Taque lay between the mouth of the river and the town of Abbeville, nine miles inland. The waters here were tidal, but the great advantage was that the ford itself was wide enough for twelve men to cross at one time. Unfortunately for the English, the French knew their history too and had anticipated that their opponents would take this route. Two days before the English reached Blanche Taque, the news that they were heading there had already spread as far north as Boulogne, and preparations for their reception were well advanced.
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On Sunday 13 October, when Henry’s army was still some six miles away from Blanche Taque, the men of the vanguard captured a French prisoner, who was brought before Sir John Cornewaille for interrogation. He turned out to be a Gascon gentleman in the service of Charles d’Albret, whom he had left earlier that day at Abbeville. Further questioning revealed that d’Albret had a force of six thousand men with him and was waiting to obstruct their passage; what is more, the ford itself had been barricaded with sharpened stakes to make it impassable.
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The prisoner was hastily brought before the king himself and reinterrogated, but he stuck stubbornly to his story and even pledged his life on its truth. Convinced of his honesty, Henry called an immediate halt to the march and summoned his barons to an urgently convened council meeting. After two hours of debate, the decision was taken to abandon the attempt to cross at Blanche Taque. They would have to find a safer, unguarded crossing further upstream. If necessary they would have to go to the very head of the river, which was said to be sixty miles away.
This was the first major setback of the entire campaign, and morale among the rank and file, which had been high as they marched unopposed through Normandy and into Picardy, now began to falter. Ever since they had left Fécamp they had seen tantalising glimpses of the long vista of white cliffs lining the Norman coast as far as Cap Gris-Nez, knowing that the safety of Calais was a mere thirteen miles beyond that point. Never was the old adage “so near, yet so far” so true. Now, instead of the swift, straight road to their destination, they faced a long and uncertain journey, in the knowledge that their rations could not last out and that battle was becoming increasingly likely. It is not difficult to imagine the despair that the sight of the bay of the Somme must have instilled in the English. It was not just its width (more than a mile across at its narrowest point between le Crotoy and St Valery), but the vast and desolate expanse of marshland stretching as far as the eye could see to the west, north and east. As they were about to discover, these marshes were as impenetrable a barrier as the river itself.
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There was no point in lingering at Blanche Taque, so Henry gave the order to move and the army set off again, turning east and taking the south bank of the Somme towards Abbeville. In preparation for their approach, this ancient capital of Ponthieu, which had already twice suffered English occupation, in 1340 and 1369, had powerfully reinforced its defences: 12 cannon, almost 2200 gun-stones and vast quantities of gunpowder had been installed, together with a large contingent from the army gathering at Rouen. This was no simple garrison like that at Harfleur. Some of the greatest names in France were now stationed at Abbeville, headed by Constable d’Albret, Marshal Boucicaut, the count of Vendôme, who was grand-master of the king’s household, Jacques de Châtillon, sire de Dampierre, who was the admiral of France, Arthur, count of Richemont, who was the duke of Brittany’s brother, and Jean, duke of Alençon. Forewarned of this by their Gascon prisoner, the English duly maintained a respectful distance, skirting round Abbeville and settling for the night at Bailleul-en-Vimeu three miles to the south.
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Next morning, they changed tack, cutting north-eastwards in the hope of using the bridge at Pont Rémy. There they not only found that the bridge and the various causeways across the Somme had been dismantled by the local garrison, but, for the first time, they saw a sizeable force of Frenchmen gathered on the opposite bank. Though the English did not know it, they were facing a company led by the father and brothers of Raoul de Gaucourt, and in their eagerness to avenge the shame inflicted on him they were drawn up in full battle order, “as if prepared to engage us there and then.” Even the chaplain, who was timid by nature, could see that this was merely posturing: “the fact that the river at that point had a broad marsh on both sides prevented either of us from coming any closer, so that not one of us, even had he sworn to do so, could have inflicted injury on the other.”
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There now began a deadly game of cat and mouse. As the English pushed on further and further into the interior of France, searching with increasing desperation for somewhere to cross the river, they were shadowed on the opposite bank by a French force, led by Boucicaut and d’Albret, which was determined to prevent their passage. “At that time we thought of nothing else but this,” the chaplain wrote: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead and laying waste the countryside in advance, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food, and at the head of the river, if God did not provide otherwise, would, with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few as we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.
On 15 October—the eighth day of their march and the day that they should have reached Calais—the English were almost thirty-five miles away from their planned coastal route and every step was taking them further away from their destination. Tired, hungry and dispirited, the English could only pray that the Blessed Virgin and St George, under whose banners and protection they marched, would intercede for them with the Supreme Judge, and deliver them from the swords of their enemy. Dreams of achieving glory, conquest, plunder had all been forgotten. Only one hope remained: that they would eventually get safely to Calais.
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That day they made another detour to avoid the great Burgundian city of Amiens, capital of Picardy, with its network of little canals and its garden suburbs set in the midst of fens. Did Henry V recall, as he observed the soaring white walls and pinnacles of its glorious thirteenth-century cathedral, that his own great-grandfather, Edward III, had once done homage for Aquitaine to Philippe VI of France in that very place? If he did, the irony that it was the same unresolved quarrel that had brought him to Amiens eighty-six years later cannot have escaped him.
The following day, they pushed on as far as the little town or village of Boves, almost five miles south-east of the centre of Amiens. The town, with its all-important bridges over the river Avre, a tributary of the Somme, lay at the foot of a chalk cliff that was crowned by the white walls of a great twelfth-century castle belonging to Ferri, count of Vaudémont, a younger son of the duke of Lorraine. Although he was a Burgundian by allegiance, he was one of the local nobility who had belatedly responded to the king’s summons to arms and, with a force of three hundred men, was now stationed with Boucicaut’s army on the other side of the Somme.
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Boves was small enough for Henry V to be able to hold it to ransom, as he had done the towns of Arques and Eu; again, there was a military imperative to do so, as he needed to cross the Avre over the town bridges. Once more he sent his messengers to a parley and it would appear that, whatever the loyalties of Ferri de Vaudémont, the captain he had left in charge of the castle garrison was more favourably inclined to the English than his master. Not only did he agree to ransom the village and its surrounding vineyards from burning by meeting the usual demands for bread and wine, he even allowed the army to be billeted within the village overnight.
The garrison was only able to provide eight baskets of bread to feed the six thousand, though the baskets were large enough to need two men to carry each one. There had been a plentiful harvest of grapes, however, so the place was overflowing with wine. The English would not have been human if they had been able to resist such a temptation. They made straight for the winepresses and the barrels full of new vintage, and started to help themselves to this unexpected bounty. While some of his commanders regarded this behaviour with indulgence, believing it to be a much-deserved reward after all their labours and privations, the king eventually called a halt. When someone asked him why, and remarked that the men were only trying to refill their bottles, Henry replied that he did not mind the bottles, but that most of the men were making bottles out of their own stomachs, which did concern him. In the heart of hostile territory and living daily, if not hourly, under the threat of attack, he could not afford to have his army incapacitated through drink. They were vulnerable enough as it was.
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