Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (4 page)

’Sir,’ he said,’to mine and all men’s judgement, you seemed dead in this world. So I, as your next heir apparent, took that
as mine own.’

’What right could you have to the crown,’ retorted Henry wryly,‘when I have none?’

Richard’s usurper never lost his sense of guilt — nor his
sense of humour. Looking round the room, the King asked where he was, and was told that he had been brought to the Jerusalem
Chamber.

’Praise be to God,’ he said,for it was foretold me long ago that I would die in Jerusalem.’

T
HE NEW KING HENRY V WAS A TWENTY
-five-year-old in a hurry. He had been impatient with his disabled father, and he was impatient with just about everyone else.
Watching a Lollard blacksmith suffering the recently introduced penalty of being burned at the stake, he had the man dragged
out of the flames, then invited him to recant. When the blacksmith refused, the prince thrust him back on to the pyre.

Henry saw himself as God’s soldier, and he had a soldier’s haircut to match: shaved back and sides with a dark-brown pudding-basin
of hair perched on top. This pallid young warrior, with his large, fiercely bright, almond-shaped eyes,
brought intense religious conviction to England’s long-running quarrel with France.

’My hope is in God,’ he declared as he stood with his troops in the pouring rain on the night of Thursday 24 October, 1415.
If my cause is just I shall prevail, whatever the size of my following.’

He was addressing his small, damp and beleaguered army outside the village of Agincourt in northern France. Here the English
had been disconcerted to find their route back to Calais blocked by an immensely larger French army. Modern estimates put
the English at 6000, facing as many as 20,000 or even 25,000. Henry’s cause looked hopeless. A large number of his men were
suffering from dysentery, the bloody diarrhoea that was a major hazard of pre-penicillin warfare. The French were so confident
that night that they threw dice, wagering on the rich ransoms they would be extorting for the English nobility they would
capture next day.

In contrast to the rowdy chatter and singing around the French campfires, there was silence in the English ranks, where Henry
walked among his intimidated little army, doing his best to raise their morale.

’He made fine speeches everywhere,’ wrote Jehan de Wavrin, a French knight who fought in the battle and collected eyewitness
accounts of how Henry set about encouraging his men:

They should remember [the King said] that they were born of the realm of England where they had been brought up, and where
their fathers, mothers, wives, and children were living; wherefore it became them to exert themselves that they might return
thither
with great joy and approval… And further he told them and explained how the French were boasting that they would cut off three
fingers of the right hand of all the archers that should be taken prisoners, to the end that neither man nor horse should
ever again be killed with their arrows.

Archers made up nearly four thousand of the English force — double the number of men-at-arms — and the English archers were
crucial to what happened next day.

The French had chosen the ground on which they wished to fight — an open field, bordered by thick woods. But as their knights
advanced in their heavy armour, the effect of the woods was to funnel them into the English bowmen’s line of fire. The torrential
rain the night before had turned the ground into mud, so the French slithered and stumbled, falling in their dozens beneath
the fusillades of arrows. The white-feathered quills littered the battlefield, protruding from the bodies of both horses and
men. It looked as if snow had fallen, according to one observer.

At the end of the encounter the English casualties were minimal, no more than two hundred. By contrast, more than seven thousand
French lay dead, though many of their nobility died in circumstances their descendants would not forget. Under the pressure
of a surprise counterattack, Henry ordered the summary execution of several hundred French noblemen who had surrendered but
had not been disarmed. He considered them a threat. But in France to this day, the Battle of Azincourt — as the French call
it — is remembered for this shaming betrayal of the traditional rules of chivalry. Modern visitors to the area are told that
the
battle saw the death not just of thousands of men, but of
’un certain idéal de combat’
— a foretaste of modern mass warfare.

For England, Agincourt has inspired quite a different national myth. London welcomed Henry home with drums, trumpets and tambourines
and choirs of children dressed as angels. Flocks of birds were released into the air and gigantic carved effigies spelled
out the meaning of the victory — a David defeating Goliath.

’We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’, were the words with which Shakespeare would later enshrine Agin-court’s model
of bravery against the odds — the notion that the English actually do best when they are outnumbered. This phenomenon came
to full flower in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, when Britain faced the might of Germany alone and Churchill spoke so
movingly of the‘few’. To further fortify the bulldog spirit, the Ministry of Information financed the actor Laurence Olivier
to film a Technicolor version of Agincourt as depicted in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
’Dedicated to the Airborne Regiments’, read a screen title in medieval script as the opening credits began to roll.

Henry V’s own patriotism was deeply infused with religion. Dreaming of England and France unified beneath God, he had crusader
ambitions similar to those of Richard the Lionheart, the warrior king he so resembled in charisma and ferocity. Like the Lionheart,
Henry could not keep away from battle and, like him, he was struck down, young and unnecessarily, by a hazard of the battlefield
when besieging a minor castle in France. Gangrene claimed Richard. Henry was felled by dysentery, contracted at the siege
of Meaux. His boiled and flesh-free bones were borne back to England
in a coffin topped with his effigy — a death mask of his head, face and upper body that had been moulded in steamed leather.

Just before he died Henry had called for charts of the harbours of Syria and Egypt, and was reading a history of the first
Crusade. He was getting ready for his great expedition to Palestine. His wish to link England and France in this pious joint
venture went beyond the simple jingoism of a modern soccer or rugby crowd. But one thing that modern fans might share with
holy Henry is the two-fingered,‘Up yours’V-sign, directed derisively at the enemy. Possibly originating from the gesture presumed
to have been made by fifteenth-century archers who wished to demonstrate that their bowstring fingers had not been cut off,
it is known today as‘the Agincourt salute’.

J
OAN OF ARC WAS THREE YEARS OLD WHEN
Henry V won his famous victory in the mud of Azincourt. She was the daughter of a prosperous farmer whose solid stone-built
house can still be seen in the village of Domremy, near the River Meuse in Lorraine, France’s eastern border country.

Today the border is with Germany. In 1415, it was with the independent and ambitious Duchy of Burgundy, whose territory stretched
down from the prosperous Low Countries towards Switzerland. Joan’s village was right in the path of the Burgundians when they
came raiding, often in alliance with the English, as the two countries carved out conquests
from the incompetently governed territories of France.

Henry V’s famous victories, which continued after Agincourt, owed much to the weakness of France’s rulers. The French king
Charles VI suffered from long periods of madness, when he would run howling like a wolf down the corridors of his palaces.
One of his fantasies was to believe himself made of glass and to suspect anyone who came too near of trying to push him over
and shatter him. His son Charles, who bore the title of Dauphin, had a phobia about entering houses, believing they would
fall down on him (as one once did in the town of La Rochelle).

The title of Dauphin, meaning literally‘dolphin’, is the French equivalent of Prince of Wales, a title relating to the heir
to the throne. England’s heir had three feathers on his crest — the banner of France’s sported a playful dolphin. But in the
early 1400s the shifty and hesitant Dauphin of France did no credit to the bright and intuitive animal whose name he bore.
The Dauphin’s court was notorious throughout Europe for harbouring such undesirables as the paedophile Gilles de Rais — the
model for the legendary Bluebeard — in whose castle were found the remains of more than fifty children.

France degenerated into civil war. King and Dauphin were at loggerheads, and England reaped the benefit in 1420 when the unstable
Charles VI disinherited his equally unbalanced son. On 20 May, in the Treaty of Troyes, the French king took the humiliating
step of appointing England’s Henry V as‘regent and heir’ to his kingdom, marrying his daughter Catherine to the English warrior
monarch. So five years after
Agincourt, Henry V had within his grasp the glorious prospect of becoming the first ever King of both France and England —
only to die just six weeks before his father-in-law, in August 1422, leaving his title to the long-dreamed-of double monarchy
to his nine-month-old son.

It was three years later that the thirteen-year-old Joan first heard God talking to her in her home village of Domremy

And came this voice,’ she later remembered,‘about the hour of noon, in the summertime, in my father’s garden… I heard the
voice on the right-hand side, towards the church, and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. This brightness comes from
the same side as the voice is heard. It is usually a great light.’

Anyone today who reported hearing voices would probably be sent to a psychiatrist and might well be diagnosed as schizophrenic.
But Joan had no doubt who was talking to her. After I had thrice heard this voice, I knew that it was the voice of an angel.
This voice has always guided me well and I have always understood it clearly.’

The fascination of Joan’s story is that a teenage girl should have persuaded ever-widening circles of people to agree with
her‘You are she,’ said her angel,’whom the King of Heaven has chosen to bring reparation to the kingdom.’

It was just what a divided and demoralised France needed to hear. After months of badgering, Joan finally won an audience
with the Dauphin, and she galvanised the normally melancholic prince, who was now technically Charles VII but had so far lacked
the push to get himself crowned.
Dressed in men’s clothes, Joan had been led into court as a freak show. But the Dauphin was inspired. After hearing her, recalled
one eyewitness, the would-be king‘appeared radiant’. He sent the girl to be cross-examined by a commission of learned clerics,
and she confronted them with the same self-confidence.

’Do you believe in God?’ asked one theologian.

’Yes,’ she retorted,’better than you.’

The practical proof of Joan’s divine mandate came in the spring of 1429 when, aged seventeen, she joined the French army at
the town of Orleans, which the English had been besieging for six months. Her timing was perfect — the English, weakened by
illness, had been deserted by their Burgundian allies. Within ten days of Joan’s arrival they had retreated.

What the English saw as a strategic withdrawal on their part, their opponents interpreted as a glorious victory inspired by
’La Pucelle
—‘the Maid’, as the French now called her. Joan symbolised the purity that France had lost and was longing to regain. Her
virginity was a curious source of pride to her fellow-soldiers, among whom she dressed and undressed with a remarkable lack
of inhibition. Several later testified that they had seen her breasts‘which were beautiful’, but found, to their surprise,
that their‘carnal desires’ were not aroused by the prospect.