The Demon's Brood (31 page)

Had they succeeded, they would have found supporters. The French astrologer Jean Fusoris, who accompanied Archbishop Boisratier's embassy, heard that many Englishmen would have preferred the Earl of March. The next year a canon of Wells Cathedral, John Bruton, was charged with telling one of his tenants that, like his father before him, the king possessed no right to the throne. Scrope and his accomplices had been right, said the canon, adding that he was ready to give £6,000 to help depose Henry V.

Bruce McFarlane considered Henry V ‘a paragon and a hero, a Bayard and a Solomon in one . . . a faithful exponent of the
chivalric ideal'.
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This has not been every historian's opinion, however. In the 1960s E. F. Jacob thought the traditional picture owed too much to biased Tudor historiography, and that in the last analysis Henry was an adventurer and not a statesman.
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The popular image of Henry is the National Gallery portrait (a sixteenth-century copy) of a prim young man with a high-coloured, clean-shaven face, long nose, full-lipped mouth and hazel eyes beneath brown hair cut in pudding basin style. This was how he appeared on coming to the throne – Jean Fusoris, who met him in 1415, says he looked more like a bishop than a warrior. But a miniature of St George in the
Bedford Book of Hours
, painted a few years later and modelled on the king, shows him with a small forked beard like that worn by Richard II. His effigy on a stone screen at York Minster from about 1425 also shows a forked beard, with thick, elaborately curled hair over a handsome if frowning face. He was lean and slightly built, and all sources agree that he was very good-looking, with a terrifying presence.

Henry had a first-class mind, iron self-control and inflexible determination. His administration cannot be faulted nor his statecraft. Militarily, he demonstrated that he was a superb strategist and tactician, an inspiring leader on the battlefield. A man who never rejoiced even when he won a battle, he was without either optimism or pessimism. ‘The fortunes of war tend to vary', he told troops who had been defeated. ‘If you want to make sure of winning, keep your courage at exactly the same level, regardless of what happens.'
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‘From the death of the king his father until the marriage of himself, he never had knowledge carnally of woman.'
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He saw his queen Catherine of Valois as a tool for becoming King of France rather than a wife. ‘I shall honour and love my brothers above all men, as long as they be to me true, faithful and obedient', he had told his father. ‘But any of them fortune to conspire or rebel against me, I assure you I shall as soon execute justice upon any one of them as I shall upon the worst and most simple
person.'
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In early years, he had friends, although not in his later. However, he gave lavish rewards to men who served him well on the battlefield, such as the Earl of Salisbury.

An athlete when a boy, a runner and jumper, as an adult Henry had no taste for hunting or hawking, although he enjoyed watching wrestlers and mummers. Like his father, he took pleasure in songs and musical instruments, spending large sums on choirs and singing men, even composing motets himself. He was fond of reading, constantly adding to his library, which included histories of the Crusades, treatises on hunting, books of devotion, some Seneca and Cicero, the works of Gregory the Great and contemporary productions such as Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde
, Lydgate's
Life of Our Lady
and Hoccleve's
De Regimine Principum
– the last two dedicated to him. While he spoke, read and wrote French and Latin, his preferred language was English. He was the first king since the Conquest to use it for business, in terse letters and directives. Some experts see his letters on the progress of the war in France as the beginning of Standard English.

On the night his father died, Henry ‘called to him a virtuous monk of holy conversation to whom he confessed himself of all his offences'.
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Almost immediately, he founded two monasteries for austere orders, one next to the palace he rebuilt at Sheen that was for the Carthusians – where nobody was allowed to interrupt him when he was hearing Mass. Like his father, he was always visiting shrines, developing a devotion to St John of Bridlington, a Yorkshireman who had supposedly cast out evil spirits, walked on water and changed water into wine. His choice of the Carmelite friar Thomas Netter as confessor reflected his orthodoxy. Netter was a famous scourge of heretics, who when Henry came to the throne preached a sermon at St Paul's accusing him of laxity in persecuting them. Understandably, Lollards called Henry ‘the prince of priests'.

Sometimes the king's religion degenerated into superstition, as when he ordered the prosecution of all sorcerers. No English monarch was more terrified of warlocks and necromancers.

On 13 August 1415 the English armada entered the Seine estuary. Within days Henry's troops were besieging the port of Harfleur, isolating it with stockades so that no one could get in or out, while his ships blockaded the harbour. Harfleur had strong walls and deep moats, however, and a determined commander, Raoul de Gaucourt, who had brought in 300 experienced men-at-arms.

Battering rams could not be used so the king employed artillery, as he had learned to do in Wales. Although his primitive cannon needed to be trundled within range on huge wooden platforms and took several minutes to load and fire, their stone cannon balls, which were as big as millstones, demolished masonry and burst like shrapnel. Whole sections of the town walls came crashing down, even buildings in the centre, while fires were started by flaming arrows or cannon balls wrapped in flaming tow. Eventually enough damage was done for the English to push siege towers across the moats, capturing the barbican that defended the main gate. Starving, with no hope of relief, the defenders surrendered on 22 September.

The siege, which had lasted nearly six weeks in the heat of summer, took its toll on the English, too, and not just because of accurate shooting by the defenders' cannon and crossbows. Bad wine and cider and dirty water contributed. ‘In this siege many men died of cold in nights and fruit eating, eke of stink of carrion', wrote Friar Capgrave, who says that casualties from disease (which meant dysentery and malaria) included the king's friend Bishop Courtenay of Norwich, and the Earl of Suffolk, while the Duke of Clarence and the Earls of March and Arundel were so ill that they had to be sent home.
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In all, 2,000 Englishmen died, with 2,000 sick shipped back to England as hospital cases.

The garrison's leaders and sixty hostages were forced to kneel in shirts with halters round their necks for several hours
until admitted to Henry's presence. In cloth of gold, seated on a throne, for a time he ignored them, then delivered a tirade of abuse for trying to stop him taking ‘our town of Harfleur'. Finally, the king entered the town barefoot to give thanks at the main church. The Host was borne before him through the streets, to demonstrate that God was on his side. (Had he lived, he would have been outraged by the Maid of Orléans's similar claim.) Sixty knights and 200 gentlemen were ordered to present themselves at Calais for ransom, while rich bourgeois were sent to England until they bought their freedom. The ‘poorer sort' of men, women and children were expelled, so their dwellings could be given to English settlers, and they were forbidden to take goods or valuables with them; these were shared out among Henry's troops. Houses were allotted as rewards, while a man who had brought two shiploads of provisions to the siege obtained ‘the inn called the Peacock'. The king's uncle, the Earl of Dorset, was appointed governor.

Instead of sailing back to England, the king decided to take his battered army to Calais and show the enemy was powerless to stop him. He marched out on 6 October with supplies for eight days. Most of his archers and not just his men-at-arms were mounted. ‘Marvel it was, that he with so few durst go through all the thick woods in that country', comments Capgrave.
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It was not the forests that threatened, however, but a French army. The English did not realize this until they were attacked 2 miles from Harfleur. Then they found the bridges over the Somme demolished and fords guarded, only managing to cross waist deep near the source on 19 October. The rain beat down, while they ran out of food, living on walnuts and a little dried meat. Many suffered from dysentery, riding or marching with their breeches down, which grew worse when they plundered stocks of wine. They struggled on, archers taking care to keep their bow strings dry. Despite insisting God was on his side, Henry was desperate to avoid a confrontation with the French.

However, on 20 October French heralds came to Henry, announcing that their masters would intercept him and take revenge for Harfleur. He warned them to get out of his way. But four days later the Duke of York's scouts sighted the French army, ‘an innumerable multitude',
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which meant there was no chance of avoiding a battle against alarming odds. Starving and terrified, the English spent the night in fields near Maisoncelles beneath pouring rain. Apart from confessing their sins, they were ordered to stay silent, under pain of forfeiting arms and armour if gentlemen or an ear if of lesser rank (the reality behind Shakespeare's ‘touch of Harry in the night').

Rain was still falling on the morning of 25 October. The English took up a position east of the village of Agincourt, halfway between Abbeville and Calais, in a huge field of new sown wheat that narrowed to about 1,000 yards where there was a small wood on each side. They had about 800 dismounted men-at-arms in the centre and a little under 5,000 archers on the flanks, who planted a line of stakes in front of them. Henry commanded the centre, the Duke of York the right and Lord Camoys the left.

After hearing three Masses and taking communion, the king mounted a grey pony and, wearing a gold-plated helmet with a diadem of pearls, rubies and sapphires, addressed his men. He told them he had come to France to recover his lawful inheritance, adding that the French had sworn to cut fingers from every captured English archer's right hand. ‘Now it is a good time, for all England prayeth for us', he told them. ‘And in remembrance that God died on the Cross for us, let every man make a cross on the earth and kiss it, and in [so] tokening that we will rather die on this earth than flee.'
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‘Sire', they yelled back. ‘We pray God will grant you a long life and victory over our enemies.'
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Led by Charles d'Albret, Constable of France, and Marshal Boucicault, their opponents were 9,000 dismounted
men-at-arms in plate armour, who included the greatest names in France, with 3,000 crossbowmen. Because of their number, the French front was twice as wide as Henry's. The constable wanted the smaller English army, weakened by hunger and dysentery, to attack him, but had no control over his blue-blooded troops. For several hours each side stood waiting for the other's onslaught. Finally, Henry advanced to within 300 yards of the enemy so that his archers could shoot. Seeing the archers' weariness as they trudged across the field, and infuriated by being shot at, the French, who lacked any proper command structure, could no longer be restrained. A preliminary cavalry charge against the English bowmen by their mounted men-at-arms disintegrated, the horses becoming unmanageable and bolting beneath the arrows. The field was too narrow to deploy their crossbowmen.

Grasping sawn-off lances, dismounted French men-at-arms forced their way through soft soil churned into knee-deep mud towards the English, whose archers kept on shooting. Heads down to avoid arrows penetrating the eye-holes of their helmets and unable to see, their wide front narrowing into an inchoate mass when they reached the two woods, they crashed into the line of the English men-at-arms, almost knocking them over.

The attackers were so tightly packed that they could not use their lances. More and more of them were pushed off their feet into the liquid mud from which, weighed down by heavy armour, they were unable to rise – many drowned or were suffocated by the bodies on top. In contrast, the comparatively few English men-at-arms stayed on their feet, swinging pole-axes. Even unarmoured English archers had an easy advantage over the French who remained standing, before finishing off those on the ground. John Hardyng, a former squire of Hotspur's who was there, tells us ‘more were dead through press than our men might have slain'.
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Some, however, were lucky enough to be taken prisoner.

Within half an hour a second mass of the enemy lumbered forward, to die the same way. Waiting for a third French onslaught,
Henry heard shouting from the rear and, assuming he was being charged from behind – in reality, it was peasants trying to loot his baggage – ordered that the prisoners should be killed, detailing 200 archers. All except those worth valuable ransoms were, in the words of a Tudor chronicler, ‘sticked with daggers, brained with pole-axes, slain with mauls [mallets]'.
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One group was burned alive in a shed.

The remaining French men-at-arms were so demoralized that they remounted and rode off the battlefield. In four hours the English had defeated an enemy force twice as large. Among the 8,000 French dead were the constable d'Albret and three dukes, with ninety other great nobles and over 1,500 knights. The English lost only 500 men – including the Duke of York, an immensely fat man who fell down and was trampled to death. Henry had won a great victory. He saw it as confirmation that God recognized his right to the thrones of England and France.

The king reached Calais without further trouble, but had a stormy voyage to Dover, landing amid a blizzard. At London, on 23 November, he was welcomed ecstatically. Adam of Usk says ‘the City wore its brightest appearance, hearts leaping for joy'.
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Henry rode to give thanks at St Paul's, where the next day he had a requiem sung for those on both sides who had fallen at Agincourt. There was an unmistakably xenophobic atmosphere. Adam quotes a poet whose verses praising the king refer to the ‘odious might of France' and ‘the invidious race of French', while a huge effigy on a tower of London Bridge bore the words: