Henry IV (101 page)

Although the prince no longer attended the council once parliament ended, he did not withdraw from public affairs, for Burgundy had no intention of letting his advantage slip. Early in 1412 he sent another embassy to England, headed by the bishop of Arras, to pursue the question of a marriage alliance.
²⁰
Meetings were held in February with both the king and the prince, and when they returned to Paris in March, full of optimism following the welcome they had received, an English delegation led by Henry Chichele went with them.
²¹
Yet already the ground was being cut from under Duke John's feet, for on 24 January the chief Armagnac lords – the dukes of Orléans, Berry and Bourbon and the counts of Armagnac and Alençon – had sealed a joint letter to Henry recognizing him as king of England and offering to do whatever was in their power to restore the duchy of Guyenne to him in return for military support against Burgundy.
²²
Inevitably, their offer was seen by many in France as treason, which may explain why the duke of Brittany, who a few months earlier had been attached to the Armagnac cause, now opened separate negotiations with the English king.
²³
Yet the Armagnacs were in a corner: they had all been proscribed as traitors; Burgundy controlled Paris, the king and the dauphin; and even a small force such as Arundel's had shown what a difference English military help might make. Any hope that the Armagnacs' approach could be kept secret proved futile. Rumours reached Paris within a few weeks, and shortly before Easter one of their envoys was captured in Normandy and the documents he was carrying read out to the French king's council. Burgundy sent ships to intercept the Armagnac envoys, but Henry despatched Lord Grey to escort them safely across the Channel. By the time the Anglo-Armagnac talks began in earnest at the beginning of May, the enraged Duke John was planning a more robust response.
²⁴

Despite the alarm expressed by some chroniclers at the apparent English volte-face in the spring of 1412, and despite the warnings of Emperor Sigismund, Prince Henry and, apparently, Queen Joan not to become embroiled in France,
²⁵
there is nothing surprising about Henry's reaction to the Armagnac offer. The bottom line of his policy towards France had always been to maintain English lordship in Guyenne and to keep control
of Calais and its hinterland. He had no interest in leading a
chevauchée
through France in the manner of Edward III. Whenever he announced his intention to campaign abroad, it was either to ‘rescue’ Calais or to ‘recover his right’ in Guyenne. Around Calais and its marches, despite much skirmishing, his reign had seen the English successfully maintain their lines, but in Guyenne the French assaults of 1403–7 had led to a steady erosion of the territory under English control. The support of the Armagnac lords – including Berry, the French king's lieutenant in Guyenne – now presented Henry with the opportunity to reverse these losses. Speed was of the essence, however, for Burgundy's reaction to what he saw as his betrayal by the English was to plan his own expedition to Guyenne.
²⁶
Even as the talks were in progress, Henry was preparing to go to the duchy in person. On 10 April he issued orders in London and Calais prohibiting his subjects from going to France to fight for either side, since he would soon need all the men he could muster for his own campaign; three weeks later ships were requisitioned, and on 16 May the king's annuitants were summoned to join him by 15 June to recover Guyenne and reduce its inhabitants to obedience.
²⁷

On 18 May the Anglo-Armagnac Treaty of Bourges – actually negotiated in London – was concluded. Sworn on the French side by the envoys of the dukes of Berry, Orléans and Bourbon and the count of Alençon, and on the English side by Henry and his four sons, it provided for the duchy of Guyenne to be restored to the English king and his heirs ‘as fully and freely as any of his predecessors had held it’, together with around 1,500 strongholds which the Armagnac lords and their vassals held in the duchy. Twenty named castles were to be handed over at once, the rest they would either conquer or ‘aid in the conquest thereof’ at their own expense. The dukes of Berry and Orléans would continue to hold the counties of Poitou, Angoumois and Périgord until their deaths, whereupon they would revert to Henry or his successor; the count of Armagnac (who also swore to abide by the treaty) would continue to hold four castellanies in Rouergue in perpetuity, but would do homage for them to the English king. In addition, the French lords offered their children and other relatives in marriage according to Henry's discretion, with their lands, treasure and goods to help prosecute his quarrel, and their friends – ‘well nigh all the nobility of France’, they declared – as his well-wishers and abettors. Both sides
forswore any confederacy or alliance with Burgundy or his kinsmen, and Henry agreed to provide an English force of 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers to resist Duke John; it was to proceed as soon as possible to Blois, its wages for the first two months paid by Henry and for the next three by the Armagnacs.

Territorially, therefore, the treaty more or less reverted to the terms agreed at Brétigny, but it differed crucially from what had been agreed in 1360 in that nothing was said about Guyenne being separated from the French crown, or about the French king resigning his sovereignty and
ressort
. This was what allowed the Armagnac lords to insist at the outset that they recognized Henry's hereditary right to the duchy, but ‘by helping to deliver the same to him and his heirs they do not in any way break or renounce their fealty (
in nullo offendunt seu laedunt eorum fidelitatem
)’ – that is, their fealty to Charles VI. By omitting any mention of the French king they were implicitly recognizing his continued sovereignty over Guyenne; as a consequence, were they unwilling to refer to Henry as king of France? Disagreement over this issue was reflected in the different texts of the treaty. The ‘Final Concord’ preserved in the English archives described Henry as king of England and France. It was said to have been sealed at Bourges on 18 May, but this could not have been possible, since on that day the Armagnac envoys were in London swearing to a different copy which they took back with them. This referred to Henry only as ‘king of England and duke of Guyenne’. The Final Concord was clearly copied from the latter and ‘king of England and France’ inserted by a chancery clerk, either through habit or – more likely – because this was the royal style on which Henry insisted.
²⁸
The English king expressed delight with the treaty: ‘How welcome is this moment, the day we have longed for,’ he told Archbishop Arundel. ‘Let us enjoy God's bounty and go to France to obtain with a little negotiation the land that is ours by right!’
²⁹
The truth, as he well knew, was that only by agreeing to sweep under the carpet the most intractable issue in Anglo-French diplomacy of the past fifty years – not the English claim to the French throne, but sovereignty over Guyenne – had it proved possible to draft terms to which both sides could put their seals.
³⁰
Neither party can
have believed that the Treaty of Bourges would stick, but it suited their short-term interests to pretend that it might, and, as it turned out, both drew some profit from it.

Even before the treaty was sealed, the king had been persuaded that his body would not bear the strain of a military campaign and had instead appointed Prince Thomas to command it.
³¹
Yet his commitment to the recovery of Guyenne was undimmed, for this is what he had seen from the start as the prize for intervention in the French civil war – ‘to cross the sea, God willing, to the parts of Guyenne, there to recover and retain our heritage of our duchy of Guyenne from the hands of our enemies, adversaries and rebels who for a long time have held it against us’.
³²
All was now directed to this end, beginning with the neutralization of the threat from other potentially hostile powers, which meant taking steps to ensure that truces were in place. The duke of Burgundy was clearly a lost cause, but that did not mean that his allies and dependants were, and on 16 May Henry wrote to the burgomasters of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres asking them not to break the Anglo-Flemish truce, despite the differences between him and their lord. The Flemings replied cautiously that they had no intention of doing so, but must obey Duke John; although not entirely satisfied with this, Henry was able on 11 June to announce that the truce had been renewed for five years.
³³
John V of Brittany, eager to avoid war in his duchy, was by now as keen as Henry to convert the annual truces in place for the last five years into something more permanent. Embassies thus passed regularly between England and Brittany during 1411, resulting in the agreement of a ten-year Anglo-Breton truce from 1 January 1412. This was reissued on 23 April, and efforts made during the spring and summer to
enforce it.
³⁴
Scotland also needed to be removed from the equation. Anglo-Scottish relations had eased since the upsurge of violence in late 1409 and 1410, partly because, like Henry, the duke of Albany had more pressing matters to cope with. On 24 July 1411, the long-simmering feud between Albany and Donald, Lord of the Isles, came to a head at the battle of Harlaw (Aberdeenshire), where Donald inflicted heavy losses on the regent's men, led by the earl of Mar.
³⁵
Although the outcome of Harlaw was not conclusive, a lengthy cessation of hostilities now suited both England and Scotland, and in December 1411 a truce ‘from the river Spey to the Mount of St Michael’ was agreed to last until Easter 1418. The day before the Treaty of Bourges was sealed, Prince John and Westmorland were told to make sure it was once again proclaimed in the borders.
³⁶
This did not stop the earl of Douglas from seeking to challenge English pretensions if he could, but it did oblige him to find new ways of doing so: in the spring of 1412 he was in Paris, negotiating to lead 4,000 Scotsmen to fight with the Burgundians.
³⁷

With truces in place for five years with Flanders, six years with Scotland and ten years with Brittany, the English administration worked at full pace to ensure the success of Prince Thomas's expedition. Of the promised 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers, half were recruited by Prince Thomas himself, the other half roughly equally by his two fellow commanders, the duke of York and Thomas Beaufort, former and future
lieutenants of Guyenne.
³⁸
All those who could be were persuaded to loan sums for shipping and advance wages, and by 9 July at least £16,600 had been raised, even though it meant mortgaging the final instalment of the lay subsidy due in November. Nearly a third of this sum (£6,666) came from Londoners, the rest mainly from bishops, heads of religious houses, royal clerks and towns. Archbishop Arundel led the way with a loan of 1,000 marks, an example to all.
³⁹

That the archbishop and Prince Thomas supported the king's policy is beyond doubt. Not so Prince Henry. His responsibilities as captain of Calais, constable of Dover, and Warden of the Cinque Ports meant that his priorities and strategic vision differed from the king's, while his experience in office in 1410–11 gave him an understanding of the importance of the Flemish wool trade to English crown finances. He was, naturally, as keen as his father or brother to recover Guyenne, but in his view an alliance with the Armagnac lords was more likely to endanger the duchy by inciting Charles VI and Burgundy to attack it (for, as the Treaty of Bourges made clear, the Armagnac lords held much land there), while the chances of an Anglo-Armagnac pact delivering on its promises were not high. Irritated as he was by the events of the past few months, the prince was not simply being obstructive: he genuinely believed his father's policy in the spring of 1412 to be wrong-headed, and between January and March 1412 he remained closely involved in the negotiations with Burgundy, doing what he could to persuade the king to conclude an alliance with Duke John. However, the argument went against him. He did not, as one chronicler claimed, react by immediately withdrawing from court and setting off on a tour of the country to recruit supporters.
⁴⁰
On 20 May, two days after the Treaty of Bourges was concluded, he and his three brothers (but especially he) promised, in the presence of the Armagnac envoys at Westminster, to uphold its terms and to refrain from making any alliance with Burgundy, his children or his kinsmen.
⁴¹
However, he could not hide his disappointment,
or indeed his shame, and on 31 May he wrote to Duke John explaining that the offer made by the Armagnac lords had simply been too good for the king to refuse, and although he himself had been eager to pursue the idea of a Burgundian marriage (as he had told the duke's envoy Jean Kernezn when he saw him), he now had no choice but to disengage from any alliance with the duke; indeed he was obliged, in the interests of recovering the rightful heritage of the English in Guyenne, to defend the Armagnacs against anyone who opposed them. The earl of Arundel, equally if not more embarrassed (for Duke John's treatment of him and his men had been exemplary), wrote on the same day in much the same terms. He reminded Duke John of the speed with which he and the prince had reacted to his plea for help the previous autumn, thanked him for his generosity and assured him that he had done what he could to promote the marriage of his daughter. However, like the prince, his lord and master (
domini mei singularissimi
), he was now irrevocably bound by the king's treaty with the Armagnacs and could not enter into any agreement without the approval of his superiors.
⁴²
Both prince and earl had been whipped into line.

Despite the prince's disappointment at the outcome of the negotiations, it seems that during the initial planning stages of the 1412 campaign, when his father still hoped to lead it in person, he either intended or was encouraged to accompany him.
⁴³
However, by 26 May at the latest it had been decided that Prince Thomas would lead the English army, and in early June Prince Henry left Westminster, perhaps in frustration, perhaps to seek support. Walsingham said that the king's friends were sowing discord between father and son, at which he took offence. There could obviously be no question of the heir to the throne serving under his younger brother's command, but whether Prince Henry requested, or was at any point offered, command of the expedition is not clear.