The Great Turning Points of British History (12 page)

At the same time, Henry’s enterprise put great strains on England, its men, money and loyalties, especially because he might be absent for as long as a year. These strains showed themselves during 1414–15; the way in which they were managed helped to ensure astonishing successes for the English that continued even after the king’s early death in 1422.

The army of 1415 was mostly recruited in central and southern England, and the king’s lands in Lancashire, Cheshire and South Wales provided its mainstay, archers. Though the Welsh revolt petered out after 1409, Glyn Dŵr was at large until 1416 and there was resentment that had to be overcome if the king wanted to impose war taxation in Wales and raise Welsh soldiers. Thus, soon after he became king, Henry aimed to draw a line under the revolt. He even made overtures to Glyn Dŵr in July 1415, a month before embarkation. Service in France and loyalty to the king benefited Welsh soldiers on their return and, in the longer term, reconciled Welsh families to English rule.

The crown’s second dominion, Ireland, was also a problem. Glyn Dŵr tried to ally with independent Irish chieftains who resented Anglo-Irish lords and English governors in Dublin, and might assist England’s French and Scottish enemies. Moreover Ireland, more so than Wales, was a drain on English resources; when Henry V gave priority in men and money to the French war, the lordship of Ireland gradually fell under the control of Anglo-Irish lords. This detached Ireland from effective English rule during the rest of the century.

The separate kingdom of Scotland was a greater threat. From the fourteenth century, the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland gave every English king who planned to campaign in France pause for thought that the Scots might launch raids, or worse, across the border. Henry V inherited one advantage from his father: King James I of Scotland had been a prisoner in England since 1406. Yet this did not deter the Scots, for the duke of Albany, the regent of Scotland, was not keen to negotiate James’ return, even though his own son, Murdach, was also imprisoned in England. In November 1414 Parliament took steps to defend Berwick and the borders, and Henry tried to come to terms with Albany by exchanging Murdach for Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, who had been in Scottish hands since 1402. This agreement would have been a useful insurance in 1415, but the exchange was postponed and shortly before Henry embarked for France, French envoys arrived in Scotland (22 June); a month later a Scottish force crossed the border and the English retaliated. The French war increased tension between England and Scotland, and Scots even served in French armies after 1419.

Of course, Henry had to stamp his authority on England if he were to campaign in France – especially so early in his reign. His father Henry IV had seized the crown from Richard II in 1399 but this act, which founded the Lancastrian dynasty, did not go unchallenged and he spent much of his reign fighting rebellions. When Henry V succeeded in 1413, some claimed that the deposed Richard II was still alive, and others believed that Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, was his rightful heir. Henry also faced trouble from Lollard heretics inspired by John Wycliffe (died 1384), whose calls for Church reform were regarded as traitorous, especially when, in January 1414, the king’s friend, Sir John Oldcastle, joined a rising. Parliament passed anti-Lollard legislation, and early in 1415 the execution of heretics in London gripped the public and the city chroniclers – and helped Henry harness the Church in support of his war.

Oldcastle escaped and by August 1415 was causing trouble in the Welsh borderland, just when a plot against the king was being hatched. These threats to Lancastrian rule were not coordinated but Henry V’s war preparations gave them focus. The plot aimed to kill the king at Southampton and place the young earl of March on the throne; but it was nipped in the bud, and the Agincourt victory ended for a generation all serious challenges to Henry and his son Henry VI that had used the revolution of 1399 as justification. The leading plotters were the earl of Cambridge, Lord Scrope of Masham and Sir Thomas Grey of Northumberland, hoping that March would attract support in Wales and Scotland. At the last moment (31 July), March himself revealed all to the king and the leaders were summarily executed; Henry left it to Parliament in his absence to endorse what he had done. The treatment of the plotters and the presence of most nobles in the English army reflect Henry’s success in mastering his enemies and reconciling dissidents. Victory at Agincourt induced Church and Parliament to support future campaigns.

Agincourt entered English (and Welsh) mythology because contemporaries celebrated it, exaggerated Henry’s achievement and saw God’s hand in it all, and because Shakespeare’s vision has been compelling drama ever since. But it was close run. Henry’s army left Southampton on 11 August, late in the season for a long campaign. It made for Harfleur on the river Seine, rather than English Calais, presumably ‘to stuff the town with Englishmen’ so Normandy could be overawed, the Channel secured and communications with Aquitaine established.

The army found the town of Harfleur heavily fortified, however, and the siege was long and disease-ridden; a third of the army either died or was invalided home with dysentery. The town eventually surrendered on 22 September after heavy bombardment. The decision to march through Normandy to Calais turned out to be dangerous. Henry’s exhausted army, perhaps 9,000 men, mostly archers, had difficulty in finding a safe crossing of the river Somme, so that instead of covering 150 miles, they marched 250 miles in seventeen days, allowing a larger French army to overtake them. In the heat of battle at Agincourt, moreover, Henry flouted chivalric convention by slaughtering many captives. But his victory on 25 October swept all criticism aside.

To an English observer, the French seemed ‘like a countless swarm of locusts’, but they were not led by their king or his heir, and most of the royal dukes were absent. Henry donned his helmet with ‘a very rich crown of gold encircling it like an imperial crown’, and delivered a speech to his men: ‘In the name of Almighty God, and of St George, Forward Banner! And St George this day thine help.’ The French cavalry was dislocated by English and Welsh archers and the hand-to-hand fighting was ferocious. The French dead were piled to the height of a man’s head; the losses on the English side were astonishingly small. To the English, this seemed God’s work.

Agincourt was not a decisive battle, although Harfleur’s capture was important. For the French, the battle was devastating to morale. For the English, it became the stuff of patriotic propaganda focused on Henry V and binding nobles, churchmen and Parliament to his causes. He was reportedly carried ashore at Dover on the shoulders of exultant subjects; in London on 23 November pageants proclaimed, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ Agincourt helped to create a regal myth that sustained the king and his French enterprise – and made subsequent defeats seem all the more scandalous.

On the Continent, the reputation of England and its king was transformed. At the Church Council at Con-stance (1414–18), English envoys lauded ‘our victorious king of England, Henry V, faithful soldier of Christ and strongest striver after peace’. Sigismund, emperor of Germany, visited Henry in May 1416 to make peace between England and France, and went away his ally. In Italy the king was known as Il Magnifico. Agincourt’s memory spurred Henry to renew hostilities in 1417, leading to the conquest of Normandy and the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, which recognized him as heir to the French throne. The year 1415 was when the Lancastrian dynasty was stabilized at home and set out on extraordinarily ambitious paths abroad.

1400
Henry subdues the Scots
. After seizing Richard II’s crown, Henry IV faced serious difficulties. A conspiracy to assassinate him at Windsor was thwarted at the last moment, and the nobles involved were killed at Cirencester (January). Richard II’s murder at Pontefract (February) outraged many; in the summer Henry led an army to subdue the Scots; and in September Owain Glyn Dŵr declared himself prince of Wales, prompting Henry to lead his first expedition against the Welsh.

1401
Licence to burn
. The statute ‘on the burning of heretics’ enabled the first English Lollard, William Sawtre, to be burned at Smithfield (March). It authorized relapsed heretics to be punished by a government that feared insurrection as well as criticism of the Church.

1403
Battle of Shrewsbury
. By quick and decisive action, Henry IV defeated Henry Hotspur and his father Northumberland, who had Welsh and Scottish support, at the battle of Shrewsbury (July). This marked the beginning of the king’s long but successful campaign to quell rebellion against him.

1412
The first Scottish university is founded
. Scotland’s first university was founded at St Andrews and received authorization from Pope Benedict XIII. Before this, Scottish students went to continental (especially French) universities for their education and religious training during the wars with England.

1420
Henry V becomes duke of Normandy
. The notable Treaty of Troyes between Henry V and Charles VI of France (May) was the pinnacle of Henry V’s achievement. It recognized him as duke of Normandy and heir to the French throne, and in June he married Charles’ daughter Catherine. The dauphin was disinherited and Henry and Charles entered Paris together on 12 December. Henry V died two months before Charles VI (in 1422), so that the ‘dual kingdom’ was inherited instead by the nine-month-old Henry VI.

1429
The right to vote is defined
. A statute of the English Parliament defined the qualification for voting in county elections: it was limited to freeholders with property worth forty shillings net per annum and was probably designed to raise the standing of MPs and to avoid disputed elections. The statute remained in force until the 1832 Reform Act.

1440
Eton and King’s College, Cambridge are founded
. Henry VI founded Eton College for twenty-five poor scholars, the first English king to found a public grammar school with educational and religious objectives. Four months later (February 1441) he also founded King’s College, Cambridge. They were among a number of such foundations in mid-fifteenth-century England.

England in 1450 was a much-governed country. Kings could raise large sums for war by taxation, they took responsibility for law and peacekeeping and were becoming involved in economic and moral regulation. There was a sizeable and expert central bureaucracy but most government was done by local amateurs, usually gentry, the local nobility playing a large part in coordinating their activities. One effect of the extended period of crisis was to reduce the regional authority of the nobles, putting kings more directly in command of governance in the shires. This is no longer seen as the replacement of a corrupt system of government, loosely referred to as ‘bastard feudalism’, by something more ‘modern’ and it is now understood that direct and indirect rule both had their strengths and weaknesses.

The European-wide economic depression, caused by plague-induced demographic decline and a bullion shortage, was at its worst in 1450. In England prices and agrarian incomes were low. Towns, after a period of expansion, were mostly in decline, as was international trade. However, late in the century, the cloth trade, England’s principal export, recovered. For the lower classes, though, times were good: real wages had risen significantly in town and country, serfdom had virtually disappeared, land was available cheaply and on good terms. Enterprising yeoman farmers, exploiting the more buoyant parts of the agrarian market, could prosper. Despite all this decline, London continued to grow as an economic, political and cultural centre.

Full literacy was the norm among the middling and upper classes, while there were enough readers among the lower classes for even the illiterate to have access to the written word. Certainly, the English populace was politically well informed. The religion of the English, however, was conventional, there were very few heretical Lollards, and, from top to bottom of society, gifts were made to religious institutions, most often to the parish church.

Defeat in 1453 ended the Hundred Years War, despite Edward IV’s failed efforts to restart it in 1475. That made it easier to neglect Scotland, France’s traditional ally, and political upheavals in England diverted attention from the British Isles in general.

By 1450 Wales was becoming Anglicized, with its own squirearchy, but the political crisis affected Wales as well as England and there was a descent into disorder, halted only under Edward IV. Much of Ireland was already out of English control but, from the 1470s, Edward and then Henry tried to restore some order, especially in making the remaining core of English settlement, the Pale, more secure. This was done by a combination of alliances with great Anglo-Irish nobles, like the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds, and periodic expeditions from England, the trend being towards greater external intervention. Perhaps partly because of the absence of English attacks, Scotland in this period was peaceful compared with England – just one king, James III, was violently removed and that was by his son – and kings usually won in confrontations with their nobles. Apart from offering half-hearted support for the Lancastrians in the early 1460s, Scottish kings in this period generally preferred diplomacy to war in dealing with England.

*  *  *

Not so long ago, everyone would have agreed that the turning point of this period was 1485, when Henry VII won the crown at the battle of Bosworth and the Tudor dynasty began. This used to be seen as the point when the modern history of England started, as the struggle between Yorkist and Lancastrian factions in the Wars of the Roses came to a close. More recently, however, historians have been noting the similarities between the rule of the Yorkists (the dynasty that controlled the country from the accession of Edward IV in 1461 to the death of Richard III in 1485) and of Henry VII (reigned 1485– 1509). Moreover it has become clear that the economic, social, religious and cultural history of England from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries shows considerable continuity. There is thus a good case for the date that has increasingly become the starting point for the new periodization: 1461, when the Yorkists came to the throne.