A Great and Glorious Adventure (38 page)

Statue of Bertrand du Guesclin in Dinan, near his birthplace. Hardly qualifying as a hero, he was the nearest the French could get to one. Essentially a Breton
mercenary, he rose from humble origins to be Constable of France, from a very small pool of candidates.

Agincourt was the high-water mark of English military supremacy. England possessed a mobile army of professional soldiers who dismounted to fight on foot supported by
longbowmen and were commanded by an experienced and capable officer class; the combination had proved unbeatable. Furthermore, with a popular and successful king, there was little incentive for
internal strife or rebellion, and there was a parliament that was happy to fund English ambitions. If only Henry had lived.

As it was, Henry’s crossing to Dover on 16 November 1415 took all day – the weather was appalling and the chroniclers remark on his immunity to sea-sickness. From Dover he went to
Barham, then to Canterbury, on to Eltham and eventually, on 23 November, to London. The citizens of London, and indeed of the realm as a whole, had heard nothing after the siege of Harfleur; they
knew that the army was heading for Calais, but that was all and rumours of disaster and defeat abounded. When on 29 October the news of the great victory of Agincourt reached London and was carried
to all parts of the kingdom by heralds on fast horses, joy knew no bounds. The king’s welcome by the Londoners was rapturous: he was escorted into the city from Blackheath, the streets were
hung with flags and bunting, the mayor and aldermen paraded in full fig, as did the clergy and the city guilds; and on London Bridge he was greeted by a troupe of dancing virgins while the common
people lined the route and cheered.

Agincourt was a great boost to English prestige and it terrified the French, who, for the time being at least, would avoid facing the English in open battle, preferring instead to lock
themselves up in castles and
fortified towns. It was not, however, a great strategic, as opposed to tactical, victory. Had the English army been larger, it could have struck
for Paris immediately after Agincourt and won the war, but a professional army is necessarily a small army, and the huge disparity in populations meant that, to have any realistic chance of
subduing the whole of France, Henry would need to find allies. In the meantime, the French had appointed Bernard of Armagnac as constable of France in succession to Charles d’Albret, who had
been killed at Agincourt, while in the same year the ineffectual dauphin Louis died, to be replaced as heir apparent by his almost as ineffectual brother, Jean of Tourraine.

Henry spent most of 1416 in England while the French attempted to regain Harfleur. They managed to ambush a foraging party under the captain of Harfleur, Thomas Beaufort himself, and very nearly
captured him, but were finally beaten off near the outskirts of the town. Meanwhile, peace negotiations dragged on, with both the Holy Roman Emperor and the count of Hainault attempting to mediate.
The emperor, the German Sigismund, was trying to finally heal the schism in the church: the existence of two popes, each supported by different warring factions, made mediation by the Holy See
impracticable. If he could broker a peace between England and France, then together they could resolve which pope was the legitimate one. Sigismund arrived in England in April 1416, to be sharply
reminded on landing by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester – the brother of the king who, having recovered from his near-death experience at Agincourt, was even more xenophobic than most Englishmen
– that the imperial writ did not run in England. Sigismund tried to arrange a meeting at Calais between Henry V and the new dauphin, but the new constable of France convinced his master that
he could defeat the English and the meeting never happened. In the end, Sigismund realized that he could not achieve peace between England and France – the French would not offer more and
Henry would not demand less. He seems to have broadly accepted the merits of Henry’s claims, and in August the emperor and the king signed the Treaty of Canterbury, which, while giving
England little of significance, did further isolate France.

As Sigismund was deliberating with Henry and his council in England, the French made another attempt to recapture Harfleur, by blockading the port with their fleet. On 15 August, John, duke of
Bedford, another brother
of the king, set sail with a relieving army said to number around 4,000 archers and 3,000 men-at-arms. The troops were transported mainly in
balingers – small, single-masted and square-rigged boats of around 100 tons, equipped with oars for inshore work and able to carry forty soldiers – and probably two or three carracks,
the ocean-going ancestors of the galleon, each with three or four masts and high platforms front and rear, and able to carry 200 or so men. The chronicles say that Bedford had 100 ships and, if
three of them were carracks, then the size of the army would probably have been around 5,000. As this was going to be a sea battle, the ratio of archers to men-at-arms was less than it would be on
land, as what was needed was men to board and fight hand to hand, with less reliance on missile support. The French had obviously forgotten the lessons of Sluys (which had admittedly been fought a
long time ago): although outnumbered, had they come out to sea, the greater manoeuvrability of their galleys might have given them a fighting chance, or at least allowed them to withdraw
unmolested. But, as it was, they stayed in the mouth of the Seine and allowed the English fleet to close. Once the grappling irons had pulled the ships together, the French had no chance: the
English men-at-arms stormed aboard and the massacre began. The French were said to have lost around 1,500 men killed, the English less than half that. The remnants of the French fleet fled across
the estuary to Honfleur, where shoals and sandbanks prevented the English from following.

In November 1416, Parliament met and agreed with the king that another expedition would be necessary to force the French to see justice. This time Henry would subdue France piece by piece,
beginning with Normandy. The money was voted, taxes imposed, loans raised, and in the spring of 1417 recruiting of soldiers and impressment of ships began. Henry was well aware that after Agincourt
no French army would face him in open field. If he was to bring Normandy back to its true allegiance, he would have to do it by capturing the cities, and that meant large quantities of siege
engines and cannon with the requisite ammunition. Cannon-balls were still mostly of stone, but a primitive form of incendiary shell had been developed consisting of a hollow iron ball stuffed with
tow soaked in pitch.

In June 1417, the earl of Huntingdon was despatched with a naval squadron to chase off some Genoese ships in French service based in Honfleur. Once he had sunk, captured or caused them to flee,
the main
army of around 10,000 all ranks, in the rough proportion of three archers to one man-at-arms, embarked at Southampton on 30 July and landed at the mouth of the
River Touques, just north of Deauville, on 2 August. Progress was swift and Henry was aided by a resurgence of civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions. The Armagnacs, supporting the
dauphin, would not treat with England, but Jean the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, was ambivalent: he would not openly side with Henry but he would not attack him either, unless it looked as if his
interests were threatened. From the bridgehead at Touques, the English navy ferried men, stores and siege engines along the coast and up the River Orne, and the siege of Caen began in mid-August
1417.

Long sieges did not suit the English way of waging war. England relied on mobile, rapidly moving armies that could march out of trouble if faced by far larger but ponderous enemies, and in any
case being static for long periods attracted sickness. English siege commanders cut corners – they had to – and, as soon as there seemed to be the slightest chance of success, they
tended to order an assault, always assuming that the garrison could not be persuaded to surrender first. After blocking all routes in and out of Caen and bombarding the city, the English army
assaulted over the walls on 4 September. Then began the usual horror suffered by a civilian population in a town stormed by English soldiers, as the men, fired up by the lust of battle and the
adrenalin of the attack, took revenge for the dangers they faced and the death of their comrades on anyone who was foolish enough to be on the streets. If there was nobody on the streets to rape,
plunder and kill, then the houses were broken into and anything movable was appropriated and anyone resisting (and many who were not) slaughtered. The garrison had evacuated the town and taken
refuge in the citadel and, once the English army had been brought under control once more, that too was invested. On 21 September, the garrison, bereft of any hope of help from Paris,
surrendered.

There was always a problem with English soldiers, who, once they had stormed a town, saw plunder and rapine as their right. As, however, Henry maintained that the citizens of France were his
subjects, he had no wish to make war upon them. Those citizens who resisted, on the other hand, could be considered traitors and dealt with accordingly, and that formed the basis of some sort of
excuse, albeit a rather feeble one,
for the treatment meted out to civilians. The fate of Caen was, however, salutary: other towns smaller or less well fortified drew the
obvious inference and surrendered before they were invested. By November, a wide swathe of territory between Verneuil and Alençon had been taken; in the middle of the month, the dukes of
Brittany, Anjou and Maine signed a treaty of neutrality with Henry, to last for ten months. Falaise, the well-fortified birthplace of the Conqueror, held out but fell after a three-month siege on
16 February 1418. By the end of March, Bayeux, St Lô, Coutances, Avranches and Pontorson had either surrendered or been captured, and Cherbourg, at the end of the Cotentin peninsula,
capitulated after a five-month siege on 27 September. During all this time, the Armagnacs were far too busy with the Burgundians to offer any respite to their embattled and besieged compatriots,
while Henry studiously avoided any provocation to the duke of Burgundy and was careful not to appear to be threatening Paris, which was held by the Armagnacs but coveted by the Burgundians.

In June 1418, Louviers fell, a siege personally supervised by the king himself, and as a cannon-ball from the defenders had gone right through the royal tent, the gun crew responsible were duly
hanged. The capital of Normandy, Rouen, still held out. It was not only a political objective but also an enormously rich town which housed the main French shipyards, and, although mastery at sea
was now firmly in the hands of the English, it was important to keep it so and this meant the capture or destruction of the yards. In late July, Henry took Pont-de-l’Arche, just upstream of
Rouen, and established an outpost there with a huge chain stretched across the river. With the English already controlling the mouth of the Seine, this meant that Rouen was cut off from any relief
by water. The town was the strongest yet tackled by the English: the walls were five miles in circumference, the gates were well fortified by barbicans in good repair, and there were towers housing
cannon at regular intervals. The garrison, said to be 4,000 men-at-arms – probably a lot less but still a very powerful force – was commanded by Guy Le Boutellier, an experienced and
determined soldier. Well aware of what was happening in the rest of Normandy, he had ample time to prepare the city for a siege. He had levelled the suburbs outside the wall to offer no cover for
the besiegers, the ditch around the walls had been deepened and the excavated earth used to construct a bank along the inside of the
walls to absorb the shock of cannon
fire, and rations and water had been stockpiled. So confident was he of holding out that refugees from all over Normandy had been allowed in, and many of the civilian population had been armed with
crossbows.

By now, the English were expert at siege-craft, even if they would much rather not get tied down in doing it. The king’s army surrounded the city with the siege lines divided into sectors,
seven on the northern side of the river and one on the south, each commanded by a senior officer. Four main redoubts were dug and connected by trenches, and the English engineers threw a pontoon
bridge across the river downstream. All routes in and out were cut off and the bombardment began. Le Boutellier was confident that, even if he could not be relieved by river, an army from Paris
would surely move across country to his aid. Unfortunately for him, nobody in Paris was in the slightest bit interested in his plight, or, if they were, they were unable to do anything about it. In
1417, Dauphin Jean had died, to be replaced by another, as yet unprepossessing, brother Charles. There was still no strong single central authority, and, in 1418, the Burgundians had managed to
spark off a popular uprising in Paris that threw out the Armagnacs and lynched the new constable. The French chroniclers say that by the autumn the occupants of Rouen were reduced to eating
horses,
⁹⁶
and, when these were all gone, dogs and cats, followed by rats, were next.