Henry V as Warlord (28 page)

Admirers of Joan of Arc – whether hagiographers or Bernard Shaw – have given an impression that Henry’s brother-in-law was a poor creature, at best a late maturer. Even Edouard Perroy subscribed to this view of him. ‘Physically and morally, Charles was a weakling, an unpleasant degenerate,’ he writes. ‘Puny in size, spindly, [he had] a face devoid of expression in which little frightened eyes, cunning if somnolent, lurked behind a great long nose … Roaming gloomily from palace to palace, silent, underhand, superstitious, this retarded adolescent would need to be buffeted much more by misfortune before he could show that he was a man and become a king.’
⁷
Such a portrait verges on caricature. Admittedly, by comparison with, for example, the flamboyant figure of Philip of Burgundy, it is not easy to obtain a strong impression of the dauphin’s personality across the centuries. Undoubtedly he had an unimpressive physique and was fearful to the point of paranoia. A patron of astrologers and the occult, he was a solitary, bookish person who disliked fighting, hunting, tournaments and the normal amusements of fifteenth-century noblemen. The runt of Isabeau’s litter, whose two elder brothers had died young, he had never been intended for a throne. Nevertheless there are indications that he matured sooner rather than later. Chastellain, who had considerable respect for him, remarks that ‘what he lacked in courage, which was not in his nature, he made up for in shrewdness’.

Like Henry V, the future Charles VII grew up early. Born in 1403 he began presiding over royal councils in 1417 when still only fourteen. A year later he took the title of Lieutenant-General of France (the old French term for regent) and at once became a rallying point for opposition to the looming Anglo-Burgundian domination. He attracted an extremely able and distinguished following. If he was inscrutable he knew very well how to charm – he was said to have a very pleasant voice. Chastellain describes him as being extraordinarily subtle. If he did not care for war he could be both ruthless and violent, as he showed by his complicity in the murder of Duke John on the bridge at Montereau.

In his own way, despite his diffidence and lethargy, this cynical and highly intelligent young man was extremely formidable. However, during his early years he allowed incompetent favourites too much control of policy while his supporters were dangerously unruly; consequently he had difficulty surviving the sinister intrigues of the court of Bourges. He possessed no standing army and no money to pay one, although it has been estimated that the potential revenues from his territories, comparatively undevastated, amounted to at least three times those of Lancastrian France; monies were not properly collected or else embezzled. One day new officials would collect his taxes more efficiently and he would build an army. In the meantime he faced two opponents of genius: Henry and later Bedford. But one should not make the mistake of underestimating the Dauphin Charles.
⁸

The dauphinists made much of Henry not being the rightful heir of Richard II, which must have infuriated the king. (As late as 1435 Jean Juvénal was still referring to the usurpation.) In the spring of 1421 Henry had an unpleasing reminder that opposition to the House of Lancaster was not yet dead in England. A close kinsman of the Earl of March, Sir John Mortimer, was arrested on suspicion of treason and sent to the Tower; it can only have been that he was plotting to place his cousin on the throne. The alarm was taken so seriously that he was incarcerated in a dungeon underground. Sir John escaped early in 1422 but was recaptured and again imprisoned in the Tower. He was to escape for a second time in 1424, to be recaptured once more, whereupon he was legally murdered – hanged, drawn and quartered – on the specious charge that his escape had been ‘treason’. Throughout Henry’s reign, the House of Lancaster remained nervous about public attention being drawn to March’s claim to the throne.

News from home that his presence was required there, after three years away, persuaded the heir of France that he must return to England even though it was the sacred season of Christmas. En route he could inspect his duchy of Normandy. On 27 December he left Paris for Rouen, leaving the Duke of Clarence in charge of France, and Exeter in charge of his new city of Paris, both ably supported by his best commanders. On the road to his Norman capital he caught up with Queen Catherine and her ladies who had left some days previously – when her farewell to her mumbling father had deeply moved spectators. With them rode the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of March and Warwick, and the captive King of Scots.

XV

Lancastrian Normandy

‘
une longue calamité
’

Robert Blondel,
Complanctus bonorum Gallorum

‘
les povres compaignons des frontieres
’

Jean Juvénal des Ursins

T
he Duke of Normandy and his duchess kept the feast of the Epiphany, always a day of celebration and banqueting, at their beautiful new palace castle of Rouen. The building was not only the symbol of English occupation. It was also a symbol of the impoverishment of the citizens since its gleaming magnificence was in striking contrast to the rest of the city.

For the Norman capital remained largely in ruins throughout the English occupation. Its suburbs, together with any buildings outside the main walls, such as abbeys and churches, which might be used for offensive purposes, had been demolished by the Rouennais themselves in 1418 before the beginning of the siege. Others inside the walls had been destroyed by cannon fire during the siege. Some buildings were requisitioned by the English and not restored to their proper use; among these was the badly damaged abbey of Saint-Ouen, much of which served as a barracks. The citizens were crippled financially by the enormous collective ransom which Henry was still extorting from them. Even he realized they could not find 300,000 gold crowns at once and, after painful wrangling over the value of a crown, it was agreed that it should be paid in annual instalments of 80,000 crowns. After eleven years only 260,000 had been extracted, despite the seizure of hostages. The Earl of Warwick, who negotiated the compromise, was merciless in hunting down those who ran away to neighbouring towns to avoid paying their share, seeing that they suffered ‘imprisonment of their bodies and sale and exploitation of their goods on account of the debts they properly owe to the king’. The impoverishment and depopulation of the local countryside, and of many Norman towns and villages, did not make for prosperity. Above all, the miserable state of occupied Paris (so graphically recorded by the Bourgeois) deprived Rouen of much of the former market for its luxury goods.
¹

Henry presided over a meeting of the three estates of Normandy – nobles, clergy and bourgeois – which he convened at Rouen. It was also attended by representatives from the estates of the other ‘lands of the conquest’, territory conquered before the Treaty of Troyes. We do not know how many attended. The king-duke exhorted them to be faithful to the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes, explained he was well aware of the lamentable state of the coinage, and asked for advice on the general state of Normandy. Supposedly as a result of their advice, he announced the imposition of a silver levy in order to strike better coins. He also announced the welcome introduction of a uniform standard of weights and measures throughout the duchy, adopting Rouen’s standard for grain. The Earl of Salisbury paid ceremonial homage for his county of Perche, to remind everyone that there was now a new social hierarchy.

The military establishment was exclusively English, from the lieutenant-general down. All captains and lieutenants (commanders and deputy commanders) of garrisons were Englishmen. Besides the towns, there were no less than sixty castles with garrisons. It seems that there were probably about 5,000 English troops in northern France at the time of Henry’s visit to the duchy (a handful of rank and file being renegade Frenchmen). Some 1,600 of them were on the new state’s southern frontier from Avranches to Verneuil, another 1,600 on the eastern frontier from Pontoise up to Eu, and a further 950 in the Seine valley; of the rest 1,400 were distributed among the castles of the English
seigneurs
, while there were perhaps 150 more along the road leading from Cherbourg through Caen to Evreux. For the moment they had an extremely energetic leader in the king’s lieutenant, Clarence.

A substantial number of garrisons were in towns or castles on the rivers. Not only were these of vital importance for defence, but their barges provided the chief means of travel and trade; the Seine and the Oise played a part in the life of northern France comparable to that of the Missouri and the Mississippi in the old American South, if on a smaller scale. It was essential to control them. Castles along their banks, particularly those which guarded crossings, were occupied by the English who rigorously checked the credentials and cargoes of every boat passing and extracted tolls. At the same time those versatile craft, ballingers, patrolled the river, looking out for enemies on the banks as well as afloat. Reinforcements could be brought very quickly to any fortress under attack. This was of the utmost help to such a small occupying army, whose men had to be dispersed in penny packets. The average strength of the lesser garrisons was a mere three men-at-arms and nine archers – though at the little castle of Pont d’Oue which guarded the bridge over the River Vire there were only eight men under a captain in 1421. The garrisons of privately owned strongpoints were even smaller.

On the civil side, pre-conquest institutions had been taken over as far as was feasible, and traditional privileges were respected. Henry tried to woo the poorer classes, the lesser bourgeoisie and the country people. In 1419 he had issued an ordinance allowing all whose houses were of small value to return to them. He also reduced substantially the gabelle, the hated tax on salt. On the other hand noblemen, whether knights or squires, who had left the duchy were still being shown scant mercy. The king ordered his
baillis
to discover the names of those nobles who had gone off to join the Armagnacs or the ‘brigands’; it appears that some had entrusted their châteaux or manors to their wives while they themselves were away fighting the English – their estates were now confiscated. The duchy remained so troubled that between May 1421 and September 1422, 386 brigands were captured and hanged. Probably in consequence of this situation Henry had to change his attitude towards the recalcitrant Norman nobility; at the end of 1421 he offered men of all classes a full pardon so long as they returned and took the oath of allegiance before Candlemas (2 February) 1422 in the presence of the nearest
bailli
or garrison commander on the frontier. However, during his visit at the beginning of 1421, Norman nobles if discovered to be absent were still being expropriated as rebels, and ‘voluntary absence’ was deemed an act of rebellion against the king-duke. He continued to use this as a pretext to obtain lands for his grants to English settlers.

The fate of the exiled nobles was grim, as we know from Robert Blondel. As a young man (he was born about 1390) Blondel had fled in 1418, at the latest, from the Cotentin where his grandfather, the squire Guillaume Blondel, was Seigneur of Ravenoville near Valognes. He took refuge in Paris, where he studied at the university and entered the Church. He wrote three works denouncing the English conquest of Normandy. All are especially interesting in that they describe what happened to the refugees. In the
Complaint of All Good Frenchmen
of 1420, Blondel laments how, ‘Captive Normandy lies under the yoke of the leopard [of England]. Some are laden with chains while others are dying under torture. There are those who have been killed by the sword, those who have fled the soil of their fathers, those who have despaired and died, ground down by the sheer weight of tyranny. The unhappy exiles lack everything, even somewhere to find a refuge.’
²
Looking back from 1449 – ‘soon thirty-five years will have gone by’ – he complains how:

Before the war we were renowned, rich and powerful. Today, broken and crushed by want, we lead the life of beggars. Many among us who are noblemen are forced to take up the most menial employment; some work at the tailor’s trade, others serve in inns, while English cowherds and yokels from the scum strut through our country, grown rich on our inheritances and sporting stolen titles of duke, count, baron or knight.
³

He also refers to ‘my country’s incredible devastation’.

Devastation certainly existed in Henry’s time. In December 1421 he issued instructions to the wolf-hunters of the Pays de Caux:

It has come to Our knowledge that, since these our present wars began and because of them, wolves, she-wolves and other ravening beasts have greatly increased in Our said duchy and especially in the bailliwick of Caux, that they have piteously devoured several human creatures at which Our suppliant subjects are so sore affrighted in their simplicity that they dare not stay in their houses in unfenced towns or villages or leave their children, and neglect their labour; so that the said cruel beasts have very much diminished the livestock and produce of the said land, which is nearly devoid of people.

Similar missives of the same date were addressed to wolf-hunters at Carentan, Cherbourg, Bayeux, Gisors and other Norman towns.

Most of the devastation was caused by the English garrisons rather than by wolves. For the troops, whether
baillis
, captains, men-at-arms or humble archers, were paid erratically. We know that the Earl of Suffolk and Sir Thomas Rokeby received six months’ pay for their men in 1417 but nothing more until mid-1418 and then only enough money for a single quarter. In January 1418 Sir John Pelham wrote from Caen ‘I am here without wages’. In the summer of the same year a soldier at the siege of Cherbourg complains in a letter of ‘the long time we have been here, and of the expenses that we have had at every siege that we have come to, and have had no wages since that we came out of England, so that we have spent all that ever we had, wherefore I beseech you heartily to send me £20’. At the end of 1419 Sir Gilbert Halsale, captain of Evreux, complained he had received neither pay nor provisions since Michaelmas and warned that his men were going to desert, a warning he repeated in 1420 – they were at last paid sometime during the summer.
⁴
Inevitably the troops supported themselves by robbing the peasants.