Henry V as Warlord (36 page)

The Burgundians would have been uncomfortably aware of the reputation for ferocity enjoyed by Henry and his subjects. Even during the previous century Froissart considered that ‘underneath the sun there is no race more dangerous or more cruel than the English’. In 1411 Jean de Montreuil alleged that for a hundred years they ‘have killed or caused the death of more Christians than any other nation’.
²³
Robinet, the contemporary translator of the Norman refugee, Blondel’s
Complaint of All Good Frenchmen
, described them as having ‘eyes gleaming as treacherously as the devil’s, foam flecking their teeth like a wild boar in rut’. He adds that wherever they found themselves they were not slow to shed blood.
²⁴
At the end of the fifteenth century so restrained an observer as Philippe de Commynes commented that the English were extraordinarily savage tempered, especially those who had never been out of England.
²⁵

As always, the English were quite oblivious of what foreigners thought. In any case, unlike the French, the war did not affect their day-to-day lives at home. A modern historian has written: ‘even a casual reading of the Paston Letters would suggest that it was as remote from the consciousness of English shire society in the fifteenth century as the Napoleonic wars and nineteenth century India are in the novels of Jane Austen.’
²⁶
However, everyone must have met neighbours who had served in France and all admired their hero king, no doubt much in the way that their descendants would admire Nelson or Wellington.

Meanwhile there were many matters which demanded King Henry’s urgent attention. Dauphinists on the Oise were threatening to cut one of the main links between Flanders and Paris. Jacques d’Harcourt, the dispossessed Norman magnate, was raiding throughout Picardy and into Normandy. The Duke of Brittany was proving tardy in ratifying the Treaty of Troyes and in recognizing Henry as his overlord. Down in the Pyrenees the Count of Foix, having extorted money to fight the dauphinists who were troubling the borders of Guyenne, was prevaricating before doing so. The Emperor Sigismund was far too busy coping with the nightmare menace of the terrible Hussite armies – Slav Lollards – in his new kingdom of Bohemia to spare the troops which he had once promised Henry, sending a polite but final refusal.

Moreover, although a brilliant piece of siegecraft, the capture of Meaux had solved nothing. No doubt it was an exceptionally strong town with an unusually strong garrison and generally recognized as such, so that a considerable moral victory had been won, and no doubt a number of other dauphinist fortresses had been cowed into surrendering. Nevertheless its possession was not of decisive importance. The heir and regent of France was faced by the prospect of an unending series of similar sieges, which were likely to last a lifetime if he persisted in trying to reduce his stubbornly hostile new subjects to obedience.

Such obedience was an impossibility. Amazingly, there are still modern English historians who believe Lancastrian France might have become an enduring reality had Henry lived. Yet nearly 150 years ago Pierre-Adolphe Chéruel, one of the much decried ‘patriotic’ school of French historians, published a history of Rouen under the English occupation. It contains the following letter:

We have recently learned from the great and piteous clamour that within the duchy of Normandy many who call themselves our officers, baillis, captains and etc. have committed and are committing great wrongs, excesses and abuses, taking advantage of their position to do so, to the prejudice of public welfare, such as: breaking into churches and stealing the goods therein; seizing and raping women, married and unmarried; cruelly beating the poor people, carrying off their horses with other beasts of burden and their seed corn; occupying the houses of churchmen, nobles and others against their will, demanding heavy tolls and quantities of merchandise at the city gates which they are supposed to guard; extorting levies of food from towns and parishes with law-abiding subjects; forcing men to perform more guard duties at towns and fortresses than is their obligation and making them pay huge sums if they go absent; seizing our poor subjects, beating them, judging them without trial and confining them in prisons or in their homes, robbing them of their goods, or seizing the same either without payment or else fixing the price. And, moreover, it is said that the baillis and captains do not keep the troops in their garrisons as they should do, that the baillis, often being at the same time captains of the [strong] places in their bailiwicks, farm out their clerkships, seals and lieutenancies to unworthy persons, and abuse the taking of provisions and other goods at their own price and pleasure.
²⁷

This letter is not fabricated by Chéruel. It was written by John, Duke of Bedford, the new ‘Regent of France’, on 31 January 1423 – a mere five months after his brother’s death. If the dauphinist and Burgundian armies robbed, at least they spoke the same language. The people of Lancastrian France simply wanted the English to go away.

Henry’s tools, his troops, were an insuperable barrier between him and his ‘subjects’. His army doomed his regime from the very start. He knew that relations with the conquered population must be improved, and even the most ‘patriotic’ of France’s nineteenth-century historians acknowledge that his efforts to do so were not far short of incredible. But it was all in vain. ‘If the expression “bled white” was at any time accurate it best describes the state of the conquered provinces of France under the English garrisons’ is McFarlane’s comment.
²⁸

Even so, just after he died and his body had been taken back to England for burial, a French nobleman would joke grimly (so Monstrelet heard) that the king had left his boots behind.
²⁹
The borders of Lancastrian France continued to expand for some years after his death. As late as 1433, when in reality the tide had turned against them, Bishop Jean Juvénal des Ursins could say in a notably gloomy and despairing letter that the English ‘are waging a fierce war, gaining more territory in which no one stays or even makes a pretence of staying, save for the poor companions of the frontier [
les povres compaignons des frontières
] who love honour’.
³⁰
Lancastrian France would take a surprisingly long time to die, outliving its creator by nearly thirty years.

Chastellain has a strange story – ‘told me by a high and noble baron, the Seigneur de La Trémonille’ – about a holy man who visited Henry sometime during 1421. He was the hermit of Sainte-Claude in Flanders, John of Ghent, famous for his gift of second sight. (Later he prophesied the birth of Louis XI.) He warned the king to change his ways since God was growing displeased at the way he was treating the Christian people of France ‘whose cries beneath your scourge have aroused his pity’. He explained that Henry had enjoyed divine favour because he had persecuted heretics so ardently when Prince of Wales, but that if he went on scourging the French like this he would have a very short life. At first Henry was somewhat shaken. Then he laughed.
³¹

XIX

Death

‘
Glory is like a circle in the water
,

Which never ceases to enlarge itself
,

Till, by broad spreading, it dispenses to nought
.

With Henry’s death, the English circle ends
.’

Shakespeare, Joan la Pucelle in
King Henry VI
, part I

‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion lies with the Lord Jesus Christ!’

Henry V on his deathbed

O
n 7 July 1422 there were public prayers in Paris for the health of King Henry, heir and regent of France. Waurin writes, ‘I have since been truly informed … that it was an inflammation which seized him in the fundament, which is called the disease of St Anthony.’
¹
(‘St Anthony’s Fire’, which is erysipelas.) We know from the Bourgeois of Paris that smallpox was raging in and around the capital, that many important Englishmen had caught it and that some people believed that the King of England was among them. One chronicler reports that Henry could not keep any food in his belly, which might imply a duodenal ulcer. Basin tells us that: ‘many say he was smitten with this illness because he had ordered, or had allowed, his troops to sack and devastate the oratory of St Fiacre and its glebe near Meaux. Indeed one often calls his disease, which swells the belly and legs hideously, St Fiacre’s Evil.’
²
Plainly it was an internal malady, and on balance the most likely diagnosis is dysentery – the scourge which had killed so many of his troops during the siege of Meaux – eventually resulting in a fatal internal haemorrhage. It was certainly not leprosy, as some contemporary Frenchmen thought hopefully. Whatever it was, it was some time before the king would admit to himself that he was seriously, dangerously, ill.

Suddenly the Burgundians found themselves threatened by a totally unexpected dauphinist offensive. Duke Philip’s town of Cosne on the upper reaches of the Loire, fifty miles from Orleans, was besieged in such overwhelming force that its garrison agreed to surrender if not relieved by 12 August. Should Cosne fall to the dauphinists they would be able to strike through the Nivernais at Dijon, the Burgundian capital. Philip force marched every man at his disposal towards Cosne, begging Henry to lend him archers. Not only did the king agree but he promised to come in person.

Henry set out for Cosne but soon had to substitute a litter for his horse. When he reached Corbeil, fifteen miles south of Paris, he took to his bed and handed over command to Bedford. He was forced to spend a fortnight at Corbeil. Learning that the dauphinists had beaten a hasty retreat from Cosne he decided to return to Paris. Although he felt a little better, he took his physicians’ advice and travelled by barge down the Seine. However, he landed at Charenton and mounted his horse, but collapsed. He was carried back to the barge and taken to the castle of Bois-de-Vincennes, which he reached on or about 10 August.

The king must have known by now that he was dying. He was surrounded by the men whom he trusted most: his brother John, Duke of Bedford; his uncle Thomas, Duke of Exeter; his closest lieutenant Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; his standard-bearer Sir Lewis Robsart; and, his confessor again for the last eighteen months, Friar Thomas Netter. Among his intimate male companions Salisbury alone was absent, harrying the French.

The strangest absence was that of Queen Catherine. What is so curious is that she was within easy reach of Vincennes, at Paris only three miles away, and it was the normal custom even for medieval kings to have their wives by them when they were dying. It was not that she could not leave her baby; she had already done so and the child was in England. If her husband had summoned her she would have had to go to him. Plainly he did not summon her. The inference is that his feelings for Catherine were not quite so romantic as Shakespeare makes out, that he did not really think she had ‘witchcraft’ in her lips. Henry might well have anticipated Napoleon’s jibe at his own dynastic match – ‘It’s only a womb I’m marrying.’

‘I exhort you to continue in these wars until peace is gained,’ he told those round his bed. He continued, on a familiar note, that he had been perfectly justified in invading France. ‘It was not ambitious lust for dominion, nor for empty glory, nor any other cause that drew me to these wars, but only that by sueing of my right, I might at once gain peace and my own rights.’ The disinheritor of the heirs of Richard II and Charles VI added: ‘And before the wars were begun I was fully instructed by men of the holiest life and the wisest counsel that I ought and could begin the wars, prosecute them and justly finish them without danger to my soul.’ However, he begged forgiveness from his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, for his ill treatment of her and also from Lord Scrope’s children for having illegally confiscated entailed lands from them.

He provided for the government of the two kingdoms with his habitual thoroughness. The Duke of Gloucester was to be Lord Protector of England, but under the ultimate authority of the Duke of Bedford who was to be the future Henry VI’s principal official guardian; the baby’s other guardians were to be Bishop Beaufort, the Duke of Exeter, and the Earl of Warwick. Bedford, who was also to be governor of Normandy, must offer the regency of France to the Duke of Burgundy, to commit him more fully to the establishment of a Lancastrian dynasty in the land over which his forebears had reigned; if Philip declined, then Bedford was to take the regency himself – but at all costs he must preserve the alliance with Burgundy. Should the tide turn against the English, Bedford was to concentrate on saving Normandy. None of the higher ranking prisoners in England, especially the Duke of Orleans, was to be freed – to stop them organizing opposition to the English conquest.

The most recent French historian of the Hundred Years War, Jean Favier, commenting on Henry’s instructions to Bedford about saving Normandy, thinks that he was tacitly admitting the dauphin’s right to succeed to the French throne.
³
It was certainly extraordinary advice to come from someone who had always claimed that God supported his own right to the throne of France. It may indicate a loss of nerve induced by physical weakness.

According to the Arthurian tale told to Chastellain by M. de La Trémouille, the hermit, John of Ghent, came unexpectedly to the king’s bedside. Henry was overjoyed to see the holy man. He asked him if he was going to recover from his illness. ‘Sire,’ answered the hermit, ‘you are at your end.’ Henry then inquired if his son would reign over France in his place. ‘Never, never, shall he reign nor abide,’ was the reply.
⁴
However fantastic this story may appear, it really does seem that as he lay dying the king began to lose some of his confidence in the future of Lancastrian France.