Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (51 page)

He was crowned on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, a day of hail and snow. The weather was said to presage a reign of cold severity. There can be no doubt that Henry V was driven by a sense of divine right as well as of duty. All was changed. He abandoned his youthful pursuits and almost overnight, according to the chroniclers, became a grave and serious king. He acquired a reputation for piety and for the solemn observance of ceremonies; until his marriage, seven years later, he remained chaste. He established several monastic foundations of an ascetic nature, where the daily exhalation of prayer was meant to support the Lancastrian dynasty. His devotion also had an aesthetic cast. The annalist, John Stowe, recorded that ‘he delighted in songs, metres and musical
instruments; insomuch that in his chapel, among his private prayers, he used our Lord’s prayer, certain psalms of David, with diverse hymns and canticles’. When he went to war in France, he took with him organists and singers.

He spoke English naturally, unlike his father, and in that respect set the standard for the written records of the country. He was something of a martinet, peremptory and commanding. One of his letters to an ambassador, Sir John Tiptoft, opens succinctly with ‘Tiptoft, I charge you by the faith that you owe me . . .’ ‘Tiptoft’, that brief salutation, is of the essence. ‘A king’, Thomas Hoccleve wrote, ‘from mochil speche him refreyne.’ He was clipped and precise. He was also an efficient administrator, who looked to the details of his policies; he demanded much in taxation from his kingdom, but he never squandered money unwisely. He maintained cordial relations with the most important nobles, and worked well with the parliament house. He proved that, with firm oversight, medieval governance was not inherently unstable or incoherent.

The test of his religious commitment came a few months after his coronation, when he was obliged to confront the forces of heresy. The activity of the Lollards has been examined in earlier pages, but it reached a point of crisis in the early months of 1413. During the king’s first parliament a proclamation was pinned to the doors of the London churches stating that, if the brethren were to face persecution and outlawry, 100,000 men would rise up to protect them. In the consequent state of alarm and insecurity one of the king’s own friends, Sir John Oldcastle, was accused of harbouring and promoting heretics. It is a matter of some irony, therefore, that the original name of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s play of
Henry V
, written almost 200 years after the events related, was Oldcastle. Shakespeare had portrayed him as Henry’s boon companion in the years of the alehouse and the brothel.

The proclamations fixed to the church doors were traced back to this now earnest man. One of his chaplains was preaching Lollardy, and Oldcastle himself had been caught in possession of certain heretical tracts. The king tried to argue with him, and to persuade him to recant, but he refused to do so. He was taken to the Tower in the autumn of 1413 and, at his subsequent trial, repeated the Lollard disregard for confession and the doctrine of
transubstantiation. He was judged to be a heretic and passed over to the secular arm for burning. The king intervened once more and granted him forty days for the further searching of his conscience, but in this period Oldcastle managed to escape from his confinement.

He spent two months in hiding, somewhere in the purlieus of London, during which period he conceived a plot to kill the king and his brothers before leading a general insurrection of Lollards. Messages were secretly conveyed to the brethren, asking them to meet at St Giles’s Fields just outside the city. But the secret was revealed to someone in authority. On the evening of 9 January 1414, the king moved with his forces to the fields. As the Lollards marched towards the city, they were dispersed and consigned to Newgate Prison. Thirty-eight of them were drawn on hurdles from Newgate and hanged in the fields, on gallows newly built for that purpose.

It had not in any case been a popular insurrection, with perhaps no more than a few hundred participants. Yet it did effectively destroy any sympathy with the Lollard movement among the general population; heresy itself was now considered to be equivalent to rebellion.

Oldcastle himself evaded capture for almost four years; he was eventually seized in the neighbourhood of Welshpool and taken to London where he was hanged above a burning fire that consumed the gallows as well as the victim. In his last words before this painful death he declared that he would rise again after three days. In truth his resurrection took a little longer. In the sixteenth century he became celebrated as a proto-martyr of Protestantism; that is one of the reasons why Shakespeare felt obliged to change his name to Falstaff.

In a sense, however, the insurrection was a distraction. The young king’s reign was primarily defined by war. He gathered around him a group of young men who saw in battle and victory the foundations of glory. Principal among them were his three brothers, wholly committed to the success of the dynasty. War was considered to be the highest duty, and greatest achievement, of any king. It was this fervour, or lust, that effectively reopened the Hundred Years War after the interval of the previous two reigns.
Almost at once the new king moved against France. He had been made duke of Aquitaine in 1399, as part of his patrimony; now he wished to reclaim the lands of Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu that had been granted to the English Crown in the treaty of 1360.

By the summer of 1415 all was ready for the French endeavour. The parliament house had furnished the necessary funds without any of the usual misgivings; the troops and the ships were requisitioned efficiently, and it seems that the nation supported this show of strength and determination by the young king. Yet not all of his subjects were ready to pay fealty to him. Some still questioned the legitimacy of the house of Lancaster and, in the days before the launching of the military expedition, certain nobles tried to organize a rebellion. They were forestalled, and swiftly executed. No one else would ever again threaten the reign of Henry V.

He sailed to France with an army of 8,000 men. There were archers, both mounted and on foot; there were ‘men-at-arms’, knights and esquires in full body armour complete with lance, sword and dagger. There were foot soldiers, fletchers, bowyers, carpenters, priests, surgeons, gunners and engineers. The two latter were needed for the prosecution of siege warfare, a technique for which Henry had trained himself in Wales. A royal officer, known as ‘the grand sergeanty’, was also on board; his sole job was to hold the king’s head in case of seasickness. It has been calculated that approximately 15,000 horses were transported to France. No female followers of the camp were allowed to sail. The punishment for any prostitute found among the soldiers was for all her money to be taken and for one of her arms to be broken before her being driven off with staves.

The expedition left Southampton on 11 August, accompanied by a flock of swans, and set sail for the coast of Normandy; the duchy belonged to Henry’s family, or so he claimed, and to land there was itself an act of proprietorship. He laid siege to the town of Harfleur, at the mouth of the river Seine, but it did not prove to be an easy victory; the town held out for five weeks, in which period Henry’s men suffered dysentery from the eating of unripe fruit. Yet he prevailed; the leaders of the town surrendered, and Henry promptly laid plans to turn it into an English colony. Since
Harfleur was connected to Rouen and to Paris by the river, it was in a desirable position.

In his campaigns he was a rigid and severe disciplinarian; that is why he was successful. He planned meticulously, while retaining his command over the court administration at Westminster. Above all else he was possessed of great energy; whether in a tournament, or at a hunt, or in the field of battle, he was swift and unrelenting. He gave the impression of always being in a hurry, as if he had some strange presentiment of his early death.

From Harfleur he led his men north-east towards Calais, a distance of some 120 miles (75 kilometres); but then he received the unwelcome news that the French army was waiting for him on the right bank of the Somme. He was obliged to make a detour, marching along the left bank of the Somme until he could find a place of safe passage. The trek to Calais was supposed to have taken eight days, but only two weeks later did the English army cross the river. The king’s men were exhausted and hungry but, despite the presence of a French army shadowing them closely, he ordered them to march on to Calais. Everyone knew that he would have to confront the enemy before reaching the town.

On 24 October, he saw them; they were gathered, according to the author of
The Deeds of Henry V
, like a swarm of locusts near the village of Agincourt. One of the English commanders prayed aloud for 10,000 more archers, but the king told him that they had the more certain protection of God. He rested his men that night, and ordained a strict silence; the songs and music of the French could clearly be heard. At dawn he attended three Masses before mounting his horse; he wore a gold crown upon his helmet. Then he ordered his army into position. He had approximately 8,000 men against a French army of 20,000. Another crucial difference was in place; the English combatants included 6,000 archers or longbowmen, while the French had very few. They were relying upon the force of their armour. So the English were placed in a thin line across the field of battle, in the same posture as the shield wall of the Anglo-Saxons or ‘the thin red line’ at the battle of Balaclava in 1854. The heavy rain of the previous night had rendered the terrain muddy and treacherous. For three hours, from
nine in the morning to midday, the two armies faced each other without moving.

Henry then took the initiative, fearing that the enemy were waiting for reinforcements. ‘Now is good time, for all England prays for us,’ he shouted, ‘and therefore be of good cheer, and let us go to our journey!’ He continued with an invocation. ‘In the name of Almighty God and St George, advance bannerer! And St George, this day your help!’ His soldiers prostrated themselves upon the ground, each of them putting a small piece of earth into his mouth to remind him that he was mortal and must one day return to dust; it was a different form of holy communion. The English archers advanced some 700 yards (640 metres), stopped, and rammed sharp pointed stakes into the soft earth as a form of protection from horses and armed knights alike. Then they took aim and fired at the massed French host with a great storm of arrows, causing immediate carnage in its ranks. The French cavalry charged, but the men and horses were wounded or impaled upon the stakes.

The body of the French army moved forward, but their great numbers made them unwieldy and confused. The arrows of the English archers continued to do their deadly work, and the riderless horses created further alarm among the men. The bodies of the dead already lay in piles upon the muddy ground, and the more nimble English soldiers were able to turn in upon the groaning mass of the enemy. Two-thirds of the remaining French army now fled. Henry was not yet certain of the victory; a third part of the army still remained on the field, and many unarmed French prisoners were held in the rear of the action. He ordered these men to be put to death, to avoid any threatening movement on their part. This was in defiance of the rules of chivalry, which forbade the execution of unarmed prisoners, and was also to the detriment of the English who could have been expected to earn sizeable ransoms from their captives. Yet Henry ordered 200 archers to carry out the work of killing. It can only be said that in the blood and heat of battle some pressing reason must have suggested itself to him. What that was, we do not know. His command was not wholly carried out, however, and many hundreds of noble prisoners survived the ordeal of the battle of Agincourt.

The king now marched unimpeded to Calais from where, after a few days’ respite, he sailed back to England. His reception in London on 23 November was a great occasion of state. 20,000 citizens met him at Blackheath, where he was hailed as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’. Two giant figures, of a man and a woman, were erected on London Bridge to welcome him; effigies of the lion and the antelope wearing the royal arms, with a choir of angels singing ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord’, greeted his progress. Other giant figures, and pageant wagons, and fanciful castles, decorated the route to St Paul’s Cathedral; the king, in a simple gown of purple, was greeted by groups of singers holding garlands. In this year, also, Henry began to wear an arched or imperial crown modelled upon that worn by the Holy Roman Emperor; it was an ‘imperial diadem of gold and precious stones’, adverting to the fact that he had regained an imperial kingship.

The victory was not immediately followed by an advantageous truce. No overwhelming victory has ever had such tenuous result. The sinews that had been stiffened were now relaxed again, and the blood summoned was permitted to subside. Yet the reputation of the king was greatly strengthened; he did now seem to be one favoured and protected by God, and the right of his dynasty to rule was manifestly confirmed. At a stroke he had become the leading figure in the royal politics of Europe. On a more practical level the parliament house bestowed on him a new grant of taxation, and guaranteed him for life the excise on exports of wool and leather.

The French attempted to recapture Harfleur both by land and by sea, but a decisive naval battle in the summer of 1416 proved their undoing. Henry prided himself on his navy; he was the first king since Alfred to create a national force at sea, and by the end of 1416 he possessed six great ships, eight barges and ten single-masted sailing vessels known as balingers.

With these he launched his second invasion of France in February 1417. He had come to claim the throne of France ‘
de facto et realiter
’; it was his by right. He undertook a sequence of sieges, beginning with the town of Caen, slowly moving southwards until he arrived at Falaise, best known as the birthplace of William the Conqueror. He was returning to the land of his now remote
predecessor, and in the process had effectively seized Normandy. Then he moved on to the capital of the duchy, Rouen; the siege lasted for almost six months, creating intense misery for the citizens. According to a popular verse of the period: