The Hundred Years War (24 page)

On 1 September 1420 Henry V, Philip of Burgundy and Charles VI made a ceremonial entry into Paris to begin an English occupation which would last for fifteen years. The Parisians cheered Charles’s ‘true son’ and priests chanted Te Deums in the streets, while the States-General ratified the Treaty of Troyes and the
Parlement
declared the Dauphin incapable of succeeding to the throne because of his ‘horrible and dreadful crimes’. Monstrelet relates how Henry lodged at the Louvre for Christmas with great splendour, in contrast to Charles’s dismal court at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol where the mad and now dirty and unkempt old King was ‘poorly and meanly served‘, deserted by all save a few broken-down servants and some hangers-on of low degree. His courtiers were all at the Louvre. It was a hard winter and since food was scarce and expensive-the price of bread had doubled-the ordinary Parisians suffered accordingly. The city rubbish-tips were filled with the bodies of children who had died looking for something to eat among the refuse. The Bourgeois of Paris says that people began to devour swill which pigs disdained, while wolves swam the Seine to disinter and gnaw newly-buried corpses. Amid this misery the arrogance of the English invaders was peculiarly repellent. A Burgundian chronicler, Georges Chastellain, lamented that they had turned Paris into a new London ‘as much by their language as by their rude and proud manner of conversation and behaviour. And they went with their heads high, like a stag ...’ In particular the Burgundian nobles disliked King Henry’s cold and haughty manner; he rebuked the Marshal of France, Jehan de L’Isle-Adam, for daring to look him in the face when answering a question.

Leaving behind the Duke of Exeter and an English garrison of 500 men, Henry and his Queen soon rode out of Paris, to spend Epiphany at Rouen and to demand more money from the Norman Estates. At the end of January they travelled to Calais and embarked for Dover.

The King had been out of England for three and a half years, and he received a rapturous welcome wherever he went, with the customary pageants and conduits flowing with wine. On 23 February 1421 the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned Queen Catherine in Westminster Abbey. Afterwards the royal couple went on progress, travelling to St Albans, Bristol, through Herefordshire to Shrewsbury, Coventry and Leicester. In the North they visited York and Lincoln, in East Anglia Norwich and King’s Lynn. The real purpose of the progress was to raise more money for the War ; commissioners travelled after Henry raising loans from the clergy, the landowners, the burgesses and even villagers and artisans. By the beginning of May these monies amounted to some £38,000, of which £22,000 had been contributed by Bishop Beaufort, the King’s uncle. Parliament, meeting at Westminster that month, spoke of poverty and distress among Henry’s subjects but nonetheless granted further subsidies—a fifteenth, together with a tenth from the clergy. The King needed every penny. When he died a year later the government had to face a deficit of £30,000 together with debts of £25,000 : this was largely due to the expense of the War which not even the revenue from conquered territories could defray, because of constant raiding and unrest.

In April 1421 the King received news of the defeat and death of his brother Clarence, the heir to the throne. The Duke, although an experienced soldier who had been campaigning in France since 1412, was impulsive and envious of his elder brother’s glory. On 22 March 1421, an Easter Saturday, while he was at dinner at Pont de l‘Arche in Normandy after returning from a raid across Maine and over the Loire, Clarence was informed that there was an Armagnac army at Baugé nearby. When Sir Gilbert Umfraville—Henry’s ‘Marshal of France‘—and the Earl of Huntingdon advised him to wait until his archers arrived, the Duke told them scornfully : ‘If you are afraid, go home and keep the churchyard.’ Clarence then set off with less than 1,500 men-at-arms, galloping the nine miles to Baugé. As soon as he was there, crossing the bridge over the river Couesnon, he made contact with the enemy and at once charged them up-hill, although they outnumbered his troops two to one and he had to attack over boggy ground. The Armagnacs, who included a Scots force under the Earls of Buchan and Wigtown, counter-charged down the slope on to the English who, having been beaten back, were reforming on the bank of the river. Clarence, easily identified by the coronet on his helmet, was quickly cut down and most of his men fell with him or were taken prisoner; Umfraville and Lord de Roos died with the Duke, while the Earls of Huntingdon and Somerset were captured. The Earl of Salisbury, who came up shortly afterwards, managed to retrieve Clarence’s corpse—which had been put in a cart to take to the Dauphin—and extricated the survivors.

The defeat demonstrated that the English still had to rely on their traditional combination of archers and dismounted men-at-arms. As a contemporary Englishman wrote, his fellow-countrymen had been beaten ‘By cause they wolde nott take with hem archers, but thought to have doo with the ffrenshmen them selff wythoute hem. And yet whan he was slayne the archers come and rescued the body of the Duke.’ The victory was a marvellous encouragement to the Armagnacs ; even if it gained them no lasting advantage, it showed that the invaders were not invincible. The Dauphin joked to his courtiers : ‘What think ye now of the Scottish mutton eaters and wine bibbers ?’—there had been some unfavourable comment about these valiant allies. He made the Earl of Buchan Constable of France.

Henry returned in June 1421, landing at Calais with 4,000 troops and marched to Paris to relieve Exeter. Paris was threatened by a chain of Armagnac forces on three sides, based on Dreux in the north, Meaux in the east and Joigny in the south. Dreux, the King quickly besieged and captured. He then marched south into the Beauce, capturing Vendôme and Beaugency and going on to camp in front of Orleans. He was too short of supplies to invest so well-fortified a town, and after three days he swung north and captured Villeneuve-le-Roy. He was in an ugly mood ; when he took the Armagnac castle of Rougemont he hanged the entire garrison, demolishing the building and then drowning other of the defenders who had escaped and whom he caught later on. He marched on Meaux.

This town, on a bend of the Marne and forty miles east of Paris, was defended on three sides by the river and on the fourth by a canal, all in flood because of heavy rains. The King began the siege in October, building a camp and bringing up cannon and provisions. Mining and bombardment soon began to break down the walls, yet the defenders under the Bastard of Vaurus, who was a cruel and evil man but a brave commander, held out despite famine. Outside the walls the ground was waterlogged by rain and floods, and then a sharp frost set in, while there was more than the usual amount of disease ; it has been estimated that a sixteenth of the English army died from dysentery and small-pox. Henry himself fell ill and a physician was sent from England. Yet despite sickness and the misery of another harsh winter, Henry insisted on staying with his men even during Christmas. His sole encouragement was that Queen Catherine had given birth to a son and heir at Windsor on 6 December. (The gloomy legend that he commented : ‘Henry born at Monmouth shall small time reign and get much, and Henry born at Windsor shall long reign and all lose, but as God wills so be it,’ was invented at least a century later.) In early March a few Armagnac troops succeeded in getting into the city at night, but most of them were captured after their leader fell into the ditch with a splashing which woke the English. Disheartened by the failure of this attempt at relief, the garrison withdrew to the Market which was a fortified suburb, taking the remainder of the food with them. The rest of the town surrendered on 9 March 1422, but the garrison still held out. Henry’s artillery, mounted under wooden shelters on an island in the river, battered them relentlessly and eventually they too surrendered on 10 May, after a siege of eight months. The Bastard was beheaded, his body being hanged from the tree where he had gibbeted his own victims. Henry also beheaded a trumpeter called Orace who had jeered at him ; while some of the defenders who had mocked him by beating a donkey on the wall until he brayed and saying that it was the King speaking, were incarcerated in particularly nasty prisons. The rich captives were sent back to England to await ransom, and all plate, jewellery and valuables were collected for Henry’s use.

Such sieges caused misery which was not confined to the defenders and the townspeople. When the English were before Meaux they pillaged far and wide throughout the local countryside, the Brie. According to the Bourgeois of Paris, many peasants there abandoned their farms and families in despair, saying: ‘What can we do ? Let us put everything into the hands of the Devil for it cannot matter what becomes of us ... They cannot do more to us than kill us or take us prisoner, for by the false government of traitors we have had to leave our wives and children and flee into the woods like wandering beasts.’

Henry returned to Paris. By now he was an ill man, and prayers were being offered for his recovery. His illness was probably a form of dysentery, no doubt contracted during the siege of Meaux. En route for Cosne-sur-Loire, a key point on the road to Dijon which was besieged by the Armagnacs, he suddenly found himself unable to ride and had to be taken back by litter to the castle of Vincennes which he reached on 10 August. Plainly he was dying. He made arrangements for the government of the two kingdoms with his customary thoroughness. He appointed his brother Bedford provisional Regent of France and guardian of the baby Henry VI, while Gloucester was to be Regent of England. He told Bedford that he must preserve the alliance with Burgundy at all costs, and that he should only keep the Regency if Duke Philip declined it. He also ordered that if things went badly the English should concentrate on saving Normandy. In addition he claimed he had invaded France not from any desire for glory but simply because his cause was just and would bring lasting peace. That he genuinely believed that he might have succeeded in conquering France is borne out by his claim that if God had spared him he would have gone on to Jerusalem to expel the infidels. However at one point he seems to have feared for his salvation ; suddenly he shouted : ‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion is with the Lord Jesus Christ !’ as though replying to an evil spirit. Henry V died peacefully at Vincennes on 31 August 1422. He was only thirty-five.

8

John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France 1422-1429

For the English the seven years after Henry V’s death were some of the most successful of the entire War. They continued their advance southward, down into the Loire Valley, and appeared to have a real chance of bringing the rest of the country under the rule of the infant Henry VI who was also ‘Henri II’ of France, King Charles having died only six weeks after his son-in-law. The dual monarchy (anticipating Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime fantasy of a Franco-English state) worked surprisingly well ; on occasion even Parisians fought loyally for it. All this was due to two men—the Regent Bedford and his great general the Earl of Salisbury.

John of Monmouth, Duke of Bedford, was thirty-three years old in 1422. He had been the Admiral who won the sea fight off Harfleur, and had twice been Guardian of England during his brother’s campaigning abroad, besides seeing some hard fighting in France. A big, florid, fleshy man, beneath his cropped brown hair he had an eagle’s beak of a nose with an oddly receding forehead and chin (to judge from the miniature in
The Bedford Book of Hours).
If hot-tempered, he was nevertheless more human and amiable than Henry V ; and though no genius he was an excellent soldier, administrator and diplomatist, and possessed a rugged determination. His most agreeable quality was the loyalty proclaimed by his motto, a loyalty which he gave devotedly to his nephew Henry VI. Although he believed uncompromisingly in the Plantagenet right to the throne of France, he also genuinely loved the French and their country, where he was eventually Duke of Alençon and Anjou, Count of Maine, Mortain and Dreux, Viscount of Beaumont and Lord of many other seigneuries besides, and where he possessed delightful
hôtels
and chateaux. Dutifully, he offered his Regency to the Duke of Burgundy and was no doubt much relieved when Philip declined it.

Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury and Count of Perche, was—after Henry V—the most distinguished commander produced by England during the entire Hundred Years War. Henry’s favourite general, he had been made a Knight of the Garter and in 1419 Lieutenant-Governor of Normandy. A strategist as well as a tactician, he was always original and imaginative yet practical and patient at the same time. The Bourgeois of Paris calls him ‘the knightly, skilful and subtle Comte de Salisbury’. Furthermore, he was an all-round soldier, as good at staff work as he was at fighting, while he was probably the first English commander (after King Henry) to be a gunnery expert. His men liked and trusted him, though fearful of his strict discipline. Above all, he worked well with Bedford. The French dreaded the Earl, who was known to drag his captives back to Paris at the end of a rope. In
King Henry VI
Shakespeare makes the Duke of Anjou say :