Recordings & Info 164. King Henry Fifth's Conquest
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index (Part 1-Part 5)
3) Child Collection Index
4) Excerpt from The British Traditional Ballad in North America by Tristram Coffin 1950, from the section A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 251: King Henry Fifth's Conquest (32 Listings)
Alternative Titles
The Fency King and the English King
Henry's Tribute
The Tennis Balls
Traditional Ballad Index: King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164] part 1
DESCRIPTION: The English king sends to the French king a reminder of tribute due. The French king says our king is too young to be a threat and sends tennis balls instead. Our king takes an army, excluding married men and widows' sons, and succeeds against the French
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: before 1820 (broadside, Bodleian Harding B 25(1028)); many undated manuscript copies predate this [for example, Bodleian Harding B 1(38)], and D'Urfey had something similar
KEYWORDS: war royalty battle
HISTORICAL_REFERENCES: 1413 - Accession of Henry V
1415 - Henry V attacks France, captures Harfleur, and wins the Battle of Agincourt
1415-1421 - Continuing campaigns in France
1421 - Henry marries Catherine (the youngest daughter of Charles VI "the Mad," the king of France) and is declared the heir of France
1422 - Death of Henry V
FOUND_IN: Britain(England,Scotland(Aber)) US(Ap,NE,SE)
REFERENCES: (7 citations)
Child 164, "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France" (1 text, 2 tunes) {Bronson's #6, #1}
Bronson 164, "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France" (10 versions)
Flanders-Ancient3, pp. 145-148, "King Henry the Fifth's Conquest of France" (1 text, 1 tune) {Bronson's #2 a/b, although the three transcriptions are all slightly different musically}
Leach, pp. 463-466, "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France" (2 texts)
Niles 49, "King Henry Fith's Conquest of France" (3 texts, 1 tune)
BBI, ZN305, "As our King lay musing on his bed"
DT 164, HENRYV*
Roud #251
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 25(1028), "King Henry the Fifth's Conquest of France" ("As our king lay musing upon his bed"), J. Pitts (London), 1802-1819; also Harding B 1(38), "King Henry V. his Conquest of France"
CROSS_REFERENCES:
cf. "The Agincourt Carol" (subject)
ALTERNATE_TITLES:
The Fency King and the English King
Henry's Tribute
The Tennis Balls
NOTES: The career of Henry V marked the high point, for the English, of the Hundred Years' War. That war, fought between England and France with some participation by other countries, was a long, incredibly complex business (as you'd expect for a war that lasted from 1437 to 1453 -- though with many long periods of truce).
Because this is so complicated, I ended up with what is (as of this writing) the third-longest entry in the Ballad Index. I have therefore broken it up into the following sections, divided among four different entries in the Ballad Index. which you can search for if you don't want to read the whole thing. These aren't really chapters; the note is meant to be read continuously. But it may help you to find the part you most want.
Contents:
*** Included in this entry:*
* Full References for the song
* Bibliography
*** Included in the Entry "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 02 (File Number Link C164A):*
* The Causes of the War
* The Reign of Edward III
* Strengths and Weaknesses of France and England
*** Included in the Entry "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 03 (File Number Link C164B):*
* Edward III, Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers, and Bretigny
* The Failure of Bretigny; Richard II and Henry IV
*** Included in the Entry "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 04 (File Number Link C164C):*
* The Reign of Henry V
* 1415: Harfleur and Agincourt
* The Second Invasion and Troyes: Henry the Heir of France
* The Death of Henry V and the Regency of Bedford
* Orleans
*** Included in the Entry "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 05 (File Number Link C164D):*
* The Death of Bedford and the Loss of France
* England After the Wars: the Overthrow of Lancaster
* The Historical Content of the Ballad
>>BIBLIOGRAPHY<<
Allmand: Christopher Allmand, _Henry V_, University of California Press, 1992
Ashley-GB: Maurice Ashley, _Great Britain to 1688_, University of Michigan Press, 1961
Ashley-Kings: Mike Ashley, _British Kings and Queens_, Barnes & Noble, 2000 (originally published as _The Mammoth Book of British Kings and Queens_, 1998)
Ashley-Stuart: Maurice Ashley, _The House of Stuart_, J. M. Dent, 1980
Barker: Juliet Barker, _Agincourt_,2005 (I use the 2007 Back Bay paperback edition)
Bennett: Michael Bennett, _The Battle of Bosworth_, St. Martin's Press, 1985
Burne: Lt-Col. Alfred H. Burne, _The Crecy War_, Eyre & Spottiswoode,1955 (I use the 1999 Wordsworth paperback reprint)
Butler: Raymond Reagan Butler, _Is Paris Lost? The English Occupation 1422-1436_, Spellmount, 2003
Christie-Murray: David Christie-Murray, _A History of Heresy_, Oxford, 1976
Dockray: Keith Dockray, _Edward IV: A Source Book_, Sutton, 1999
Doherty: Paul Doherty, _Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II_, Carroll & Graf, 2003
Earle: Peter Earle, _The Life and Times of Henry V_, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972
Featherstone: Donald Featherstone, _The Bowmen of England_, Clarkson N. Potter, 1968 (I used the 2003 Pen & Swoard paperback edition)
Gillingham: John Gillingham, _The Wars of the Roses_, Louisiana State University,1981
Goodman: Anthony Goodman, _The Loyal Conspiracy: The Lords Appellant under Richard II_, University of Miami, 1971
Guerard: Albert Guerard, _France: A Modery History_, University of Michigan Press, 1959
Harvey: John Harvey, _The Plantagenets_, 1959 (I used the 1979 Fontana edition)
Hutchison: Harold F. Hutchison, _Edward II: 1284-1327_, 1971 (I use the 1996 Barnes & Noble edition)
Jarman: Rosemary Hawley Jarman, _Crispin's Day: The Glory of Agincourt_, Little Brown, 1979
Keegan: John Keegan, _The Face of Battle_ Viking Press, 1976 (I use the 1993 Barnes & Noble edition)
Keen: Maurice Keen, _The Pelican History of Medieval Europe_, Pelican, 1968
Lander: J. R. Lander, _The Wars of the Roses_, 1965; revised edition 1990 (I use the 1997 Grange edition).
Magnusson: Magnus Magnusson, _Scotland: The Story of a Nation_, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
Myers: A. R. Myers, _England in the Late Middle Ages_, being volume 4 of _The Pelican History of England_, eighth edition, 1971 (I use the 1979 Pelican paperback printing)
Ormrod: W. M. Ormrod, _The Reign of Edward III_, updated edition, Tempus, 2000
OxfordCompanion: John Cannon, editor, _The Oxford Companion to British History_, Oxford, 1997
Perroy: Edouard Perroy, _The Hundred Years War_, Capricorn, 1965 (a translation by W. B. Wells of Perroy's French original _La Guerre de Cent Ans_, 1945)
Powicke: Sir Maurice Powicke, _The Thirteen Century, 1216-1307_, Oxford, 1962 (I use the 1998 Oxford paperback edition. And if you're wondering how the thirteenth century came do be defined as 1216-1307, it is the reigns of Henry III and Edward I)
Prestwich: Michael Prestwich, _The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272-1377_, 1980; I use the 2001 Routledge paperback edition
Renouard: Yves Renouard, _The Avignon Papacy: The Popes in Exile 1305-1403_, translated (and with some additional content) by Denis Bethell, 1970 (I use the 1994 Barnes & Noble editin)
Ross: Charles Ross, _The Wars of the Roses_, Thames and Hudson, 1976
Royle: Trevor Royle, _Lancaster Against York: The Wars of the Roses and the Foundation of Modern Britain_, Palgrave, 2008
Rubin: Miri Rubin, _The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages_, Penguin, 2005.
Saul: Nigel Saul, _Richard II_ (part of the Yale English Monarchs series), Yale, 1997
Saunders: Frances Stonor Saunders, _Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman_, Faber and Faber, 2004
Sedgwick: Henry Dwight Sedgwick, _The Black Prince_, no copyright date (I use the 1993 Barnes & Noble reprint)
Seward: Desmond Seward, _The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453_, Atheneum, 1978
Sumption: Jonathan Sumption, _The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle_, University of Pennsylvania Press 1990
Wilkinson: B. Wilkinson, _The Later Middle Ages in England, 1216-1484_, Longmans, 1969 (I use the 1980 paperback edition)
Wolffe: Bertram Wolffe, _Henry VI_, 1981 (I use the 2001 paperback edition in the Yale English Monarch series with a new introduction by John L. Watts)
King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164] --- Part 2
DESCRIPTION: Continuation of the notes to "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of FranceÓ [Child 164]. Entry continues in "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 03 (File Number C164B)
NOTES: >>THE CAUSES OF THE WAR<<
The Hundred Years' War started with a dispute over land. Under Henry II (reigned 1154-1189), England had controlled most of western France: Henry had inherited Normandy from his great-grandfather William the Conqueror; Anjou, Maine, and Touraine from his father Geoffrey of Anjou; and had gained Acquitaine (Guyenne and other lands) by marrying its Duchess Eleanor. He would also manage to gain working control of Brittany by marrying one of his sons to the heiress. (For a map of all this, see e.g. Ashley-Kings, p. 519.)
Over the next century and a half, those possessions were nibbled away by the French government. A large part of the problem was that, while the English King was the Duke or Count of the French territories, he still owed homage to the King of France for them. Petty nobles were always appealing to the French government for redress, and the French king often seized the land as a result. The English were usually unable to reclaim the land.
Sometimes the French captured more than just a border strip. In 1204, they recaptured the whole Duchy of Normandy in one great campaign (Harvey, p. 82). It was King John who lost the Duchy, and people said it was because he was too involved with his young wife Isabella of Angouleme -- but the real problem was that John's older brother Richard had left England bankrupt with his crusades and his temper and his ransom after he had been captured by the Austrians.
John tends to get blamed for a lot of things, these days I think mostly because of his role in the Robin Hood legends, and there is no question that he was a very violent man. Most monarchs of the time were. Many historians still condemn him as a disaster. But it seems to me that the balance has shifted somewhat: He was no worse than other kings of the time, merely much more unlucky -- his brother had left him with a lot of enemies and a lot of problems, and no money to deal with them.
Still, John's reign left England so weak that the French actually invaded -- at the time John's son Henry III was crowned, there was "no organized government, no exchequer, no royal seal. London and half the shires were held by Louis of France and the baronial rebels" (Powicke, p. 1).
Amazingly, the death of John brought most of the barons (who the year before had forced the Magna Carta upon him) back to the side of the new king. A major victory for the English at Lincoln (Powicke, pp. 9-11) and a series of smaller engagements freed England of the French invaders.
But an England distracted by invasion could hardly counter-attack in France. The French had invaded England before completing the conquest of the English territory in Gascony, but even after they were driven out of Britain, they continued to nibble away at the English property in the south of France. This continued through the reign of John's son Henry III (reigned 1216-1272). Henry III in 1258 agreed to the Treaty of Paris, in which he formally gave up his claim to Normandy, Anjou, and other northern territories, in return for being confirmed in Guyenne; he even picked up a few additional districts at the borders (Perroy, p. 61). The treaty, however, did not cause the French to stop nibbling.
The next king, the energetic Edward I (reigned 1272-1307) tried to turn things around. He stayed at peace with France for two decades (Wilkinson, p. 98), but French lawyers continued to press claims against the English domain (Wilkinson, p. 99). And, in 1294, the French king declared all English territory in France forfeit.
Edward was far the better soldier of the two monarchs; had he been fighting only the French, he might have been able to regain the territory directly (since it is believed the Gascons for the most part preferred English to French rule). But he was already fighting Wales, and the situation with Scotland was also heating up. He simply didn't have the resources to pull off all the things he was trying (Prestwich, p. 18, notes that he never found the money to complete Beaumaris Castle in Wales, and at one point apparently resorted to paying his masons with leather coin-shaped IOUs because he had not the ready coin to pay them). The three-way wars, and perhaps Edward's increasing age, seems to have left him far less able to deal with problems after about 1290 (Prestwich, pp. 26-27).
The English might have lost their foothold in France completely had not the French been badly beaten at Courtrai by the Flemings in 1302. This gave Edward the strength to negotiate things back to the situation as it had been before the confiscation (Wilkinson, pp. 101-102). Still, that left the English with only a rather precarious hold on their southern territory. (And would cause the future King Edward III to be "conditioned" to fighting with France over his holdings there; Ormrod, p. 17.)
And then came the disastrous Edward II. Most of us will know him for losing the Battle of Bannockburn, or for being deposed in 1327, but he also oversaw the loss of additional land in France. By the time his son Edward III took the throne, English possessions in France amounted to little more than a coastal strip from Bordeaux to Bayonne. (And even that had been confiscated again a few years before, and once again given back.) As Sedgwick notes on p. 23, this was only about an eighth of the original Angevin dominion. It's not really fair to blame Edward II for all the English problems -- Edward I's biggest single defect was his financial incompetence (Prestwich, p. 41), and he left the problem for Edward II to solve -- but he failed utterly to improve the situation, and he faced baronial revolts throughout his reign (Prestwich, pp. 83-85, etc.); these can only have weakened the crown.
>>THE REIGN OF EDWARD III<<
Edward III came to power in two uncomfortable stages. After the most recent French takeover of Guyenne, Edward II had sent his wife Isabel (called the "she wolf of France"on p. 17 of Sedgwick, though Shakespeare saved that name for Margaret of Anjou, who deserved it even more; cf. 3 Henry VI I.iv.111) and his son to try to negotiate with their cousin Philip. But by letting her take their son, Edward II had given Isabel the key player in the English political situation. She scorned her husband, and the fact that she had her son meant that could stay in France until Edward II was put aside -- or she could start her own conspiracy (Prestwich, p. 96). She chose the latter, strengthening her hand by marrying Edward to Philippa of Hainault; soldiers from the Low Countries enabled her to invade England.
In 1326, when Edward III was fourteen, his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer made their move (Prestwich, p. 97). Edward II failed to respond in any useful way, and was deposed in early 1327 (Prestwich, p. 98). He was killed later in the year (Perroy, pp. 58-59). Edward III was now theoretically king, but his mother and Mortimer ran things -- with great brutality, and without much success; their attempts to fight Scotland, e.g., resulted in an unfavorable treaty in 1328 (Ormrod, p. 14).
In 1330, Edward rebelled III against his own mother, killing Mortimer and taking power into his own hands. He found himself in a very interesting situation. For one thing, he could make a very strong case that he should be King of France. France had no real succession law at this time; Perroy, p. 71, notes that for more than three centuries, every King had had sons to succeed him, so none had been needed -- the crown just naturally passed to the King's son (who often was crowned before his father died).
But that suddenly changed. The old king Philip IV "the Fair" (i.e. "Handsome," not "Just" or "Unbiased"), who had died in 1314, had had three sons. Louis X had died in 1316. He left a posthumous son who died within days and an infant daughter Joan who was set aside (Perroy, p. 72, seems to think that Joan of Navarre would have had a better chance of succeeding had it not been for the brief life of John the Posthumous, since there would have been no chance for people to sit around waiting). Louis's brother Philip V, who perhaps used the time between the old king's death and the baby's birth to improve his position, reigned 1316-1322. There had been some dissatisfaction when he succeeded (Perroy, p. 73), but when he died, leaving only daughters, the throne apparently went to his brother Charles without serious protest. Charles IV reigned 1322-1328 and left one daughter and a pregnant wife (Perroy, p. 74). The child was a daughter, and based on the recent precedents, was set aside.
In better times, the Pope might have intervened at this point. But the Papacy was under the French thumb. Philip the Fair had actually called a Pope to stand before a church council (Renouard, p. 13), and since 1305 the Popes had resided at Avignon, and were all French (Renouard, p. 15). Not all Avignon popes were entirely worthless, as is sometimes claimed; Urban V would eventually be sainted (Renouard, p. 55). But the French king definitely was in a position to pressure them (Dante, in fact, called the early popes of this period the French king's "whore"; Saunders, p. 35. Another wit of the time called Avignon a "bawdy house"; Sedgwick, p. 22. On pp. 123-124, Saunders notes an instance where Urban V was forced to deny Edward III's son Edmund a dispensation to marry a rather distant cousin because the French feared the match). It was not until 1365, when England and France were theoretically at peace, that the Pope decided to go back to Rome (Renouard, p. 58), and it didn't arrive until 1367, and even then, much of the administration was left in Avignon (Renouard, p. 60).
It is deeply ironic that this Papal ineffectiveness came about because the Pope elected in 1305, Clement V, was a Gascon who truly wanted peace between France and England; Renouard, p. 20. But Clement V -- who had helped arrange the marriage of Edward II to Isabella of France; Renouard, p. 21 -- died in 1314. And his successor, though he thought about returning to Rome, was comfortable in Avignon and feared the political situation in Italy (Renouard, pp. 27-28). (This was the political situation underlying Dante's _Divine Comedy_, which, if you study Dante, you will know was extremely unsettled).
The next Pope, Benedict XII, decided it was time to build a palace in Avignon (Renouard, p. 41), and the Pope after that, Clement VI, built an even fancier dwelling, and that was that. For much of the war, there simply was no impartial pope to mediate. Benedict XII was still Pope when the Hundred Years' War started, and though Renouard declares he had "fundamental good sense," few of the other authors I've read think much of him. And Innocent VI, who succeeded Clement VI in 1352, had so many burdens due to demands by the cardinals and the poverty caused by Clement VI's excesses that he could do nothing (Renouard, p. 49).
This was the situation when Charles IV died. With his daughter out of the running, there were three candidates left for the crown of France. One was Isabel, the sister of Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV -- or, if the French insisted on a male king but would allow succession in the female line, her son Edward III. A second possibility was Count Philip of Evreuex, who was himself of the French royal family (he was the son of Philip the Fair's younger half-brother Louis) and who by this time had married Joan of Navarre, the daughter of Louis X (in later centuries, they might have been proclaimed joint monarchs, like William and Mary or Ferdinand and Isabella, but that apparently never occurred to anyone). The third candidate was Philip of Valois, the son of Philip the Fair's full brother Charles of Valois and hence the first cousin of the three recently deceased royal brothers (Perroy, p. 74).
Perroy notes that Philip of Valois, already the regent of France, was an adult, of known competence and no great moral disqualifications, and he was the senior prince to be descended from Philip III entirely in male line. In contrast, Isabel (who had shown up in France in 1325 with her lover Mortimer) was regarded as an appalling degenerate; Edward her son was still very young; and Philip of Evreuex was also young and also had a questionable character.
It was an odd situation. If one ignored Joan, the daughter of Louis X (which everyone did, since she was only a little more than twelve years old and at this time had no supporters though she did became Queen of Navarre; in any case, she had *already* been passed over), then under English law, which permitted succession in the female line; Isabel was the rightful Queen of France and Edward her heir. The French, however, managed to dig up a law -- the so-called "Salic Law" -- that said that the throne of France could only be passed on through a male line (no one really believed this law was relevant, but the French didn't want an English king, and to they used what came to hand).
(We might note that Joan of Navarre ended up with a really raw deal. Apart from being the legitimate Queen of France, she was Queen of Navarre, Countess of Champagne, and overlord of Brie. She was eventually allowed to succeed in Navarre, but only after the French monarchy had enjoyed it its revenue for some time, and she never got the French counties, since they were traded off for lesser lands; Perroy, pp. 80-81. In the end, this was to hurt the Valois monarch, since the heirs of Navarre would often side with the English; Joan's son Charles the Bad was truly a thorn in the French side until finally suppressed; Perroy, pp. 127-129.)
Guerard, p. 100, sums up what happened after Charles IV died: "For the third time the king had no son. The rule adopted in 1316 was applied: women could not inherit the throne, nor transmit rights which never were theirs. So a cousin of the late three kings, Philip of Valois, received the crown instead of their nephew, soon to be Edward III of England. The decision was neither absurd nor inevitable. Authority was still linked with leadership in battle, but on the other hand, women, like Eleanor [of Acquitaine], had been suffered to inherit vast feudal domains. To give this practice the prestige of antiquity, it was later called 'the Salic Law." But the French royal house had forgotten for many centuries that there ever were Salian Franks." (So much so that I've head the name "Salic Law" linked with laws governing salt. Butler, p. 14, goes so far as to declare the whole thing an invention).
Perroy, p. 71, notes that every other fief in France could pass in female line, and that the French even had rules for how female vassals could meet military obligations to their feudal overlords. But he adds that the French nobility universally accepted the accession of Philip of Valois (p. 76).
Keen, p. 245, thinks that the fact that Edward III was still a minor was significant; the French didn't want an underage King.
(Incidentally, there is a folkloric twist to the tale of the deaths of the last French kings of the Capetian line, according to Barker, pp. 12-13 and Doherty, pp. 57-58. Philip IV had plundered the Knights Templar, on the grounds that they were no longer defending the Temple, long lost to the Saracens -- accurate as far as it went, but it should have been the Pope's decision. Philip seized their rich treasury, and covered it up with confessions under torture. He eventually had the Grand Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, burned as a relapsed heretic -- relapsed because he denied a confession given under torture! De Molay cursed the Pope, Philip, and Philip's descendents. The Pope and Philip of course died, and Philip's male line died out, and the female lines never regained the throne of France.)
Despite his disappointment, Edward might have accepted the French decision regarding the kingship if he had been treated fairly -- in his early weakness, he actually paid homage to Philip VI in 1329 for his territory in Guyenne (Seward, p. 24). For a time, Edward even considered going on crusade with Philip (Perroy, p. 88). Perroy, pp. 84-85, sums up the situation in 1330 as follows: "So it had taken no more than three years for the diplomacy of the Valois, again, employing all the [bullying] methods used by the last Capetians and covering all the tracks already beaten by them, to win a victory of the highest importance over their Gascon vassal. Edward's homage at Amiens, and his subsequent declaration which put it on the same footing as liege homage, would seem to have set aside the dynastic pretensions of the Plantagenets forever. Beaten in every round of this close conflict, Edward was back in a position more humiliating than ever in relation to his suzerain. Acquitaine remained diminished by a partial occupation and weakened by the greater subjection of its duke to the French monarchy."
Several false moves changed Edward's attitude toward Philip. Edward had taken all he was going to take in France. He had unwillingly offered homage, but he had his own terms -- he wanted to keep what he had; no more French nibbling at the border! The French had never really restored what they took from Edward II in 1325, leaving Guyenne far too small to be defensible. But Philip not only kept up the pressure, he even opened up a sort of second front by demanding that the Scots would be part of any peace (Perroy, pp. 87-88). Edward, who was as tired of fighting the Scots as he was of being cheated by the French, was in the process of trying to put Edward Balliol on the Scots throne (Ormrod, p. 18), and he wanted a free hand against them.
Edward, tired of shooting at a moving target, promptly started working on building a coalition against France. Parliament voted him subsidies for war in 1336 (Perroy, p. 91). Negotiations were still going on, mediated by the Pope, but the Pope was trying so hard to prevent war that he actually made it harder for the participants to address the real issues. Perroy, p. 90, says that "From December 1334 onwards, the policy of Benedict XII ended by precipitating the conflict which it aimed at avoiding." The crisis of 1336 came about because it appeared that Philip would be sending reinforcements to Scotland, now in desperate straits in its war against Edward.
A peaceful resolution became impossible in 1337; in that year, the French once again declared Guyenne forfeit to the French crown (Seward, p. 35; Ashley-GB, p. 130; Barker, p. 12). Perroy, p. 66, suspects this may have been simply another dodge used by the French to bring the English to heel; after all, it had worked twice before in the reigns of the last two kings! But, Perroy notes, both Edward I and Edward II had been distracted. What the French had really accomplished was to convince the English that they wanted to retake Guyenne. And Edward III didn't have to take this as tamely as his predecessors; he was not distracted, as Edward I had been in 1294, or facing revolt, as Edward II had in 1324. Edward therefore declared war on his first cousin once removed.
The war which followed was not expected to last long (indeed, both parties thought they had ended it in 1360). They didn't even get down to serious fighting immediately. In this whole first phase of the war, there were only three major battles.
Although Hundred Years War is generally held to have lasted 116 years (1337-1453), the serious periods of combat were only 1337-1360, 1414-1436, and 1449-1453. The reigns of Richard II (1377-1399) and Henry IV (1399-1413) were especially quiet. Some have proposed to split the war into three conflicts, called something like the "Crecy War" (1337-1460), the "Agincourt War" (1415-1422), and the "Reconquest." There is some validity to this (especially since 1453 did not actually end the English attempts to invade -- Edward IV and Henry VIII also mounted invasions). But the whole conflict from 1337 to 1453 was all about the same two issues: Who would control Gascony, and what would be the English King's relationship with the French. Edward III, in starting the war, probably wanted simply to get full control of Gascony, without having to answer to the French king.
Interestingly, though Edward had earlier stopped treated Philip as King of France (Perroy, p. 93), it wasn't until 1340 that Edward formally claimed the throne of France -- presumably partly as a bargaining chip, but mostly to make it possible for the Flemish to ally with him (Burne, p. 51). The cities of Flanders officially acknowledged the French King as their suzerain, so rebelling against Philip would have caused them to be punished by the Church. But once Edward claimed to be King of France, the Flemish could acknowledge *him* and be free from those sanctions. Of course, they would still have to face French wrath if the French won....
Edward probably never expected to become the actual King of France; indeed, when he dictated something approaching a victor's peace in 1360, he asked for far less. But he had made his claim (and the Kings of England would in fact continue to call themselves Kings of France for centuries), and that started a chain of events that would take half a century to work out.
>>STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND<<
The French actually had one advantage over what they had had in the time of Edward I: France was a more united country, meaning that the French could bring more pressure to bear. And France had a far larger population base than England -- at least three times the total population (Perroy, p. 51). Even more important, it had greater financial resources, meaning a greater ability to pay an army (Edward III, who had to keep his army together long enough to gather, invade, fight, and come home, repeatedly went bankrupt, and even drove his bankers bankrupt; Seward, p. 33. Renouard, p. 44, notes that between 1342 and 1346, the majority of Florentine banking firms -- the source of credit to all of Europe -- crashed. England's population was large enough to supply plenty of soldiers, but unless Edward could pay them, they wouldn't fight. It is interesting, though futile, to speculate how much of the economic crisis of 1348-1350 was due to the Black Death and how much due to the collapse of international credit).
But Edward III had at least *six* advantages over his grandfather for the contest with the French.
One of them was, in fact, the result of Edward I's own campaigns. Wales was now firmly in English hands. There was no possibility at all that Edward III would be seriously distracted by the Welsh -- indeed, he would have some Welshmen in the armies he took to France, and derived at least a little revenue from Wales.
Second, Edward did not have to worry too much about the Scots. He had loosed Edward Balliol upon them as a shadow king, causing several years of civil war (Magnusson, pp. 197-198). When the Scots had invaded England in 1333, Edward III faced then in his first great battle, at Halidon Hill. It was a complete English victory (Magnusson, pp. 198-199), which in fact set the pattern for the later battles of Crecy and Agincourt. Scotland was devastated. They did not manage another serious attack on the English until Neville's Cross in 1346. And even in 1346, Edward III didn't even have to show up in the north.
Third, the French, though they had money, found it almost impossible to collect. Their tax system was incoherent. The French monarchy had spent years devaluing its coinage, making it almost impossible to value or spend. By the time of the Agincourt campaigns, it was little more than pot metal (Perroy observes on p. 127 that the currency was devalued 70% in *just six years* after Crecy! Butler, p. 44, says that there were 64 devaluations under Philip VI, 104 under Jean II, and 41 under Charles V, though how this is possible is beyond me, and adds on p. 62 that there were times when no one would accept *any* money because they didn't know what the coins would be worth. Prestwich, p. 170, notes that one of the things Edward III had promised if he became King of France was a stable currency).
The British, though they too had trouble raising money, at least had a meaningful coinage which did not decline significantly over the years (Perroy, p. 124, argues that lack of finances was the chief reason the war lasted so long: Both sides had more big ideas than they had cash); Perroy, p. 56, says that "after a century of exhausting war [the pound] had not been devalued by more than 20 per cent." (The English did, however, play around with the French coinage -- Butler, p. 44 -- though some of this is the fault of Burgundians.)
Fourth, Edward had a new way of raising armies, and new tactics for the army raised. The new tactic was the _chevauchee_, the plundering raid (Seward, p. 28). It was the ancestor of Sherman's March to the Sea: A fast-moving force doing as much destruction as possible. (Walsingham summed up one of Edward III's _chevauchees_ with the Caesaresque, "Cepit, spoliavit, combussit" -- "he came, he despoiled, he burned"; Sedgwick, p. 36.) It could inflict extreme economic damage and spread great misery, though it could not defeat an enemy outright. He also had the contract ("indenture") system for raising troops.
Historians have called indentures the most significant military development of the Middle Ages (Burne, p. 31). In the old days, the King called on his retainers to bring out their servants for brief military service (a system that went back to Anglo-Saxon times); the result was often to bring out a useless, unarmed rabble -- villages would often send the men for whom they had the least use (Prestwich, pp. 63-66). Edward I had first experimented with paying soldiers to serve, and by the time Edward III took the throne, this was the standard method. It cost dearly -- it was the single biggest reason why Edward III was constantly broke -- but it brought in solid armies. They were also more disciplined, according to Burne, p. 35; a man who has to give satisfaction if he wants to be paid has to obey orders. It was not a true standing army (the French would in fact invent that later in the war), but it was closer to a professional army than anything which had existed to that time (Featherstone, p. 36).
Plus, because declines in the power of the aristocracy and the failure of some families, Edward was able to appoint more "professional" commanders -- Prestwich, p. 190, notes that Edward was able to appoint his own Marshal and Constable of England, instead of having the offices handed down by heredity. The French, by contrast, still had hereditary high officers. It is unlikely that they could have employed men such as the brilliant knights Thomas Dagworth, John Chandos, and Walter Mauny in such high posts as Edward did.
Edward also could call out men the French would never have dared to employ. Many of his soldiers were convicts given conditional pardons in return for service (Prestwich, p. 193). John Hawkwood himself was seemingly one of these; in 1350-1351, we find records of him brutally attacking a man, and soon after he was charged with stealing a horse (Saunders, p. 46). A Frenchman guilty of the sorts of crimes these men committed would likely have deserted. An Englishman in France would be less likely to do so, since he was far from home -- and even if he did desert, he would probably start preying on the French, making him a de facto ally even if not part of the army.
Fifth, Edward had the sympathy of the people of the Low Countries, many of whom were technically subject to the French but whose industries depended on English wool. Edward was to use this as something of an economic lever, selling wool to the counties that were on his side and denying it to the pro-French areas (Perroy, p. 95). This proved a mixed blessing, however, since it put the English wool production system into a severe recession -- and Edward depended on that revenue.
Edward's biggest advantage, in any case, was the longbow.
Oh, Edward I had had longbowmen, too, but not as many (indeed, the Welsh invented the longbow, so they potentially had the advantage against him -- except they never used it). By Edward III's time, practice with the bow was mandatory for the lower classes. So Edward III could assemble much larger, better armies of bowmen.
Today we tend to sneer at any weapon of the pre-firearms era. We should not. The longbow (and oriental composite bow) were the best weapons known to man until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Minie bullet made relatively rapid-fire rifled guns possible. (Indeed, Featherstone, p. 177, lists several authors who argued the English should give up arquebuses and other early firearms and return to longbows. On pp. 189-191, he actually details a case of a longbow being used in World War II!) A longbow, in the hands of a trained archer, had a greater range than a smoothbore musket, and greater accuracy than a musket, and a higher rate of fire than a musket -- a brilliant musketeer might get off five shots in two minutes, and the average would have been somewhat less than four. In two minutes, a truly excellent archer could get off more than a dozen arrows.
Prestwich, p. 70, describes the bow as follows: "[T]he classic longbow was two ells in length, or about seven feet six inches... was the thickness of four thumbs, and fired a 'clotharrow' a yard long.... It is likely that the heaviest bows had a range of up to four hundred yards, though real accuracy was unlikely beyond two hundred. A rate of fire of ten flights per minute was possible; a constantly reiterated simile of fourteenth century chroniclers is that arrows fell like snow on the battlefield; but, unlike snow, arrows produced a terrifying noise." It has been estimated that perhaps half a million arrows were shot at Crecy (Saunders, p. 3). We don't know just how much time the archers spent firing at that battle, but if we assume 20 French charges (higher than any estimate I've seen), and that the attackers were in range for four minutes per charge (which is also mathematically high), that would mean that, during the charges, a hundred arrows landing per second. Even if all they did was stick up in the dirt, they would he a fair obstacle to the attackers!
Burne, p. 28, gives slightly different statistics: "The longbow could be discharged six times a minute: It had an effective range of 250 yards and an extreme range of about 350 yards." Featherstone, p. 40, gives identical numbers, but elsewhere claims that there are instances on record of a bowshot travelling a third of a mile, although these were unaimed shafts fired solely for distance. (And I frankly don't believe it. Saunders, p. 62, says that trained twentieth century archers "achieved a range of 180-200 yards," though to be sure they did not grow up with the bow.)
Seward, p. 53, says bowmen "could shoot ten or even twelve [arrows] a minute, literally darkening the sky, and had a fighting range of over 150 yards with a plate-armour-piercing range of about sixty." Barker, p. 88, states that the bows of the period had an astonishing pull of 150-160 pounds, giving them a range of about 240 yards, though Featherstone, p. 61, claims the standard pull was 100 pounds, which matches what I have read elsewhere. Jarman, pp. 73-74, makes perhaps the most extreme claim: that the bow could pierce chain mail at 275 yards! Ross, p. 111, believes the "effective" range to have been 165 yards with a rate of fire of 10-12 arrows per minute.
Some of those range citations may actually be inspired by Shakespeare; in Henry IV, Part 2, Act III, scene ii, about line 45, Shallow claims that an archer named "Double" could shoot direct fire to a range of 280-290 yards, while implying a normal archer could shoot 240 yards. Of course, any data on anything taken from Shakespeare should be viewed with extreme suspicion. All of this is hard to prove, since no longbows of the Agincourt era have survived, according to Featherstone, p. 59. Bows eventually wore out, after all -- plus, since the best bows were made of imported yew, the supply was somewhat limited; Featherstone, p. 62. The Yorkist kings, in fact, passed laws forcing importers to bring them bowstaves; Featherstone, p. 64
Other differences in the figures may be attributed partly to the fact that different archers had different abilities, plus the fact that an arrow can be fired on either a straight or a falling trajectory, with the latter having much greater range but far less accuracy. Also there was the question of how much damage it was supposed to do when it arrived. Though national feeling also seems to have caused different assessments -- the one French historian I've studied, Perroy, claims on p. 97 that the longbow was not especially accurate and that it had a rate of fire only three times that of a crossbow. Prestwich, p. 198, says by contrast that the longbow could fire five times as fast. Featherstone says it fired four times as fast.
Different arrows may also play a part; Barker, p. 86, notes that there were two standard types of arrows in use by the time of Agincourt. One had a longer shaft of a lightweight wood, with a leafed or barbed head that was hard to extract; the other, designed to penetrate plate, had a shorter, lighter arrow with a "bodkin point" that was extremely sharp, with a narrow point, for maximum penetration. Barker states that this sort of arrow could pierce plate at 150 yards, though it will be evident that it would not be as stable in flight and so was less likely to hit. Featherstone, p. 48, quotes a contemporary account which describes a sheaf of arrows as containing two-thirds heavy and one-third light shafts; the latter of course did less damage but could be fired farther.
A clothyard arrow could go six inches into the flesh, and the barbed head made extraction difficult (Saunders, pp. 4-5). Such wounds were very difficult to treat using fourteenth century techniques.
To put this in perspective: Keegan, p. 95, estimates that a knight on a trained destrier could charge at 12 to 15 miles per hour. Let's use 15. That's 26400 yards per hour, or 440 yards per minute. If a bowman could begin firing at 150 yards, and could fire eight arrows per minute, then he could get off three arrows while the knight was charging him, and the last one at least could pierce armor. If he could keep calm, he could certainly stop any individual knight charging him -- and, because bowmen could stand closer together than knights on horseback, there would typically be two to four archers firing at each horseman. The longbow was about as close as the fourteenth century came to a terror weapon -- especially against horsemen; although a clothyard arrow could not at long range penetrate plate mail (which was becoming common by the time of Crecy, and was almost universally used by the time of Agincourt), it could bring down a horse, and if a charging horse fell, it was just about sure to knock out the rider as well. And, in the crush, a man who fell to the ground was likely to suffocate or be killed by the pressure (Saunders, p. 3).
Edward III seems to have made his archers even more effective by mounting them. They still fought on foot, just like his knights -- but they were mobile while on campaign. This gave him much more operational flexibility.
And the longbow was exclusively English. The French had none. They did have archers -- crossbowmen. A crossbow was in many ways an easier weapon than a longbow; it gave the arrow a higher initial velocity than a longbow, so a crossbowman could aim straight at the target; no fancy training about angles-of-flight needed. That higher velocity also meant that it had somewhat longer range in the hands of a true expert. But it took the better part of a minute to crank it up to prepare to fire the thing. (Seward, p. 55, says that an expert could fire four quarrels per minute. It would have taken an exceptional expert; Barker is more nearly correct when she says on p. 87 that the standard was two shots per minute -- after all, the thing had to be loaded, then aimed. A good longbowman could load and aim in one gesture. Plus crossbows were heavy and complex enough to break down fairly frequently. A longbow, being just a well-shaped piece of wood and a string, didn't have nearly as many parts that could go wrong, though it did need maintenance to retain its strength.)
A crossbowman faced with longbowmen would rarely get off a first shot; he almost never got off a second shot. And while a crossbowman didn't require as much training as a longbowman, he required some, so the French couldn't just overwhelm the English with numbers. On a man-for-man basis, longbowmen remained the most deadly soldiers in the world until the nineteenth century. (Well, apart from artillerymen, anyway.) The English lost the Hundred Years War primarily because the French eventually managed to develop a useful individual firearm. It didn't make French men-at-arms equal to English longbowmen -- but it was easy enough to use that the French could finally give all their soldiers a weapon that could hit at a distance. The English could not match that; a good longbowman had to be trained from birth (Burne, p. 220n, claims that one can still see the marks on some church walls where archers sharpened their arrows on their way to Sunday archery practice), and needed to be physically strong as well.
King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164] --- Part 03
DESCRIPTION: Continuation of the notes to "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of FranceÓ [Child 164]. Entry continues in "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 04 (File Number C164C)
NOTES: >>EDWARD III, SLUYS, CRECY, POITIERS, AND BRETIGNY<<
Edward III's war, as mentioned, involved three major battles. He had hoped for more, but the first phase of the war, from 1337-1341, was a complete failure on land. Edward and his Flemish allies were constantly chasing around in Flanders and northern France, but they accomplished little. The French usually had an army in the vicinity, but it consistently refused to fight -- e.g. Burne, p. 45, notes an instance early in the war where French and English armies were only twelve miles apart, but the French avoided battle; on pp. 47-49 we hear of the French and English actually coming to a battlefield, but the French still refusing to fight -- and the English couldn't go on the offensive because all their allies quit.
Gradually Edward started trusting more in his own nation and less in the allies. By 1341, his grand coalition in Flanders had dissolved and he had lost his appointment in the Holy Roman Empire (Burne, p. 63). Meanwhile, Edward was firing his ministers at home because they hadn't come up with the money he needed to keep paying off his allies. (Perroy, p. 96, remarks, "In May 1337, th[e English] set up at Valenciennes a regular market for alliances, which were bought for hard cash. It cost a great deal, for the princes of the Empire were grasping." Buying them off in fact drove Edward to bankruptcy and destroyed his bankers -- Edward's third son was called John of Gaunt because he was born in Ghent (=Gaunt). And he was born there, rather than in England, because Edward had had to leave his wife in Ghent as security for what he owed the various lords in the low countries; Perroy, p. 105.)
So high were the taxes that they must have severely damaged the English economy (Ormrod, p. 20, details the exactions made in this period -- and on p. 22 notes that Edward still spent more than he was able to collect). The French were planning invasion, and had they managed it, I suspect an exhausted England would have fallen. Ormrod, p. 24, compares the situation in 1340 to that under Edward II, implying that he thinks Edward III was in danger of deposition. In 1344, a parliament called for an end to the war, though they covered it by asking that the end be by "battle or an honorable peace" (Sedgwick, p. 28).
Yet Edward actually did better on his own than when he had with the support of the Flemish. The first big fight of the war was the naval battle of Sluys, in 1340. The English fleet attacked the fleets of their enemies at anchor off Flanders, inflicting tremendous damage and ending the threat of a French invasion (Seward, pp. 43-46; Burne believes that the English captured 190 ships, though there are no accurate estimates of casualties). The French still had enough ships to raid England, but England was now clearly stronger at sea. Edward then took the army that had won at Sluys into the Low Countries -- where it accomplished nothing. Perroy, p. 113, comments that "the period of great enterprises seemed over." On the face of it, Edward had lost the Hundred Years War after only three years.
Luckily for him, he managed to find a way to redirect the war. A succession crisis in the County of Brittany let England open a new front (Ormrod p. 26, calls this the "provincial strategy" -- ironically, something rather like it would be used against the English when they were on the defensive). When Duke John III died, the French recognized his niece Joan as heir (Burne, p. 66). This was proper under English law, since Joan was the son of John's younger full brother. The English responded by supporting John, the half-brother of the dead Duke (Burne, p. 67, notes the irony that the French followed the English law of inheritance, while the English supported the candidate who was the heir if women were excluded -- thus reversing their positions with regard to the throne of France).
Joan, who in addition to being female was apparently not physically sound (she was called "Joan the Lame"; Perroy, p. 114), could not entirely control the duchy. Brittany ended up in chaos -- the civil war became deadly serious in 1342 -- and the English were able to exploit to their own ends (Prestwich, p. 174). It didn't really do much to damage the French monarchy, but it let the English practice their tactics at a price they could afford.
By 1345, Edward was planning a fight on many fronts (Ormrod, p. 26). The French tried to counter by inciting the Scots to attack England -- but Edward III didn't let that distract him. The 1346 campaigns opened on the already active battlefields of Brittany and Guyenne, where his deputies Sir Thomas Dagworth and Henry Earl of Lancaster (often called the Earl of Derby at this time, because his father was still alive and held the Lancastrian titlewhen the campaign began) had been perfecting the English tactics for archers and men-at-arms. Derby in particular was absolutely brilliant, winning several battles against extreme odds and regaining much land for the English (Burne, pp. 101-117; he adds on page 128 that Derby should be considered one of England's great captains and laments that he is nearly forgotten).
Those campaigns offered a real opening for Edward III, because the French sent all their troops to defend those fronts (Burne, p. 120). The rest of the country was almost undefended. So Edward III in 1346 mounted the first all-English invasion of the war -- and did it amphibiously, landing on the almost-undefended coast of Normandy (Prestwich, p. 176). This was a brilliant success, since Edward had no opposition in Normandy but the French response lessened the pressure on other fronts.
Edward did a massive amount of damage to the Norman countryside (Sedgwick, pp. 35-37). He sacked Caen (Prestwich, p. 177), which had been at peace for so long that its defences were almost useless (Sumption, p. 507) but which nonetheless defied him because part of it was protected by rivers and a castle (Burne, pp. 144-145). He made a feint at Paris itself (Seward, p. 60; Burne, p. 150, thinks that this was forced upon him because he had to get across the Seine, and the one major crossing-place near his path, at Rouen, was too strongly defended, so he had to go upstream. He then rebuilt a bridge under the French noses by distracting them with small raids; Burne, p. 152). It was this army which beat the French decisively at Crecy, and which went on to capture Calais.
At first glance, the English seemed to be in great danger at Crecy. They were far from their bases, and had had much difficulty crossing the Seine and the Somme (Seward, p. 60). His army was nearly worn out, and needed rest. This was probably why Edward fought at Crecy rather than continuing to Flanders (Seward, p. 61), though Sedgwick, pp. 44-45, quotes Froissart's explanation that Crecy was in Ponthieu, a territory which belonged to Edward; supposedly Edward didn't want the French invading it..
Seward, p. 61, estimates that the English at this time had about 11,000 men -- 7000 archers, 2000 men-at-arms, and 2000 others. Sumption, p. 497, estimates that the ships which took his army to France had a capacity of 7,000 to 10,000, and believes that over half were archers. Perroy, also based on the ship capacity, argued for 8,000 riders (including both men-at-arms and mounted archers) plus 2,000 infantry. Burne, p. 138, agrees with Seward's figure of 2000 men-at-arms but estimates the whole invasion force at 15,000; on p. 167 he gives the even more amazing figure of 16,500 (neither of which I find credible, even though he uses shipping capacity as a cross-check); allowing for losses along the way, he argues for 12,000 to 13,000 Englishmen at Crecy (p. 170).
Sedgwick, p. 33, by estimating the size of the entourage of the "typical" nobleman, thinks Edward started with 20,000 men, and on p. 47 says he had 18,900 at Crecy. On p. 284 he lists some other historians' estimates: 18,900 or 19,000 or even 25,000 -- but these are patently impossible; there would have been no way to feed them; clearly these people were paying too much attention to Froissart.
We have very little knowledge of French numbers, since of course no fleet transported it and it was not a contract army in the same way as the English. One French historian, according to Burne, p. 186, actually estimated that they were fewer than the English (i.e. not even 9000 men). But just the casualty count makes this extremely unlikely, and almost every other authority accepts that the French had superior numbers; the only question is *how* superior. Burne himself, p. 176, admits he is guessing when he gives its numbers at 40,000; he seems more confident in estimating that it outnumbered the English by three to one or more. Seward, p. 63, estimates the French army at about 30,000, of whom 20,000 were men-at-arms. Sedgwick, p. 50, again has the highest total, guessing 30,000 to 60,000. However, these forces straggled up during the battle, so it would never have been possible for the French to attack with their entire strength.
Edward had chosen an excellent position, on a slight rise, with a wood and small river to guard his right flank. And the French, it appears, would have had to march all the way across his front to attack his left flank, so that was probably safe too, at least in practice, though the only defensive feature was a small hamlet.
That French straggling added to their troubles. King Philip wanted to halt, sort out the troops, and attack the next day (Burne, p. 177). But the army was restless, and were coming up so fast that the ones in the rear were pushing forward the soldiers who had arrived first; finally, around evening, he gave the order to attack.
First to go in were the French (properly Genoese) crossbowmen -- who promptly learned that an army of longbowmen could demolish an army of crossbowmen. Especially since the situation meant that they had to deploy and then change the angle of their line before attacking -- a difficult maneuver indeed under the circumstances (Burne, p. 178). To top it all off, their shields and most of their bolts were still with the baggage, and their bowstrings may have been wet (Sedgwick, pp. 52-53).
Seward, p. 63, speculates that the crossbowmen may have been routed within a minute. And their rout caused the first line of French chivalry to charge (Burne, p. 180, thinks the knights thought the crossbowmen cowards, and were actually attacking their own troops), and the horsemen were just as thoroughly massacred.
In the end, the French knights may have mounted as many as fifteen charges (Seward, p. 66; Burne, p. 177), lasting well into the night. Unfortunately for them, the charges were not continuous, letting the English gather the arrows needed to halt the next attack (Burne, p. 182). One did make it among the English men-at-arms, forcing the young Prince Edward and his guard to fight, but most were broken up by the archers.
The blind king of Bohemia was killed (in an extreme case of chivalric stupidity, he had insisted on charging the English even though he couldn't see them!), and Philip of France suffered an arrow wound and lost a horse. The French army was all but destroyed -- Burne, p. 181, says 1500 knights were lost just on the part of the line in front of the Prince of Wales and reports on p. 184 that the English army claimed to have found 1542 bodies of knights and men-at-arms; he makes what he admits is a very rough estimate of 10,000 "communes" killed. Seward, p. 67, seems to be following these figures; he guesses French losses at more than 10,000, including 1,500 lords and knights. Perroy, p. 119, gives no numbers and names only a few names but says that the "flower of the French nobility" was destroyed.
As Sedgwick says on p. 56, "The victory was won by the English archers, but the primal cause was the disorder in the French army, for French bravery was as conspicuous as ever."
Burne, p. 183, and Sedgwick, pp. 56-57, observe that King Philip had lost his brother, his brother-in-law, and his nephew.
(Crecy incidentally is considered to be the first battle at which artillery was used, though it is not thought to have made any real difference; Burne, p. 28; rates of fire were low and accuracy was pitiful. Barker, p. 90, notes that, as late as Agincourt, a gunner who managed to hit three targets in the course of a day was suspected of having made a pact with the devil!)
The biggest effect of Crecy was to show that the English, who until then had not been considered very good soldiers, were now some of the best in the world. The longbow had completely changed the military equation. Some historians have argued that Edward should have attacked Paris at that time -- but, as Burne, p. 205, points out, Edward probably did not realize the completeness of his victory, and in any case was running out of supplies; he needed to get back in touch with his fleet (though Burne, pp. 206-207, also argues that Edward should have tried to capture Paris). But not even Edward III had that much daring. Hence the decision to head for the coast and besiege Calais.
The moral effect of Crecy was quickly seen. The French in early 1347 brought up a relieving army -- but were afraid to fight another battle (Prestwich, pp. 178-179; Perroy, p. 120, says that Philip of Valois "seemed to have lost all energy"; Burne, pp. 214-215, says that Philip assembled 50,000 men but messed up his negotiations with the Flemings and then stuck himself in a strategically untenable spot and had to retreat). Calais was strong enough that Saul, p. 9, estimates that half the English nobles and knights eventually took part in the siege, and even so, the defenders held out until 1347. But Edward had the answer to the usual problems of a siege; he built a town for his own soldiers, to keep them safe from disease (Burne, p. 210). Calais eventually had to capitulate, with the entire French population being forced to leave, replaced by English settlers (Seward, p. 70). Calais would remain in English hands for more than two centuries -- indeed, for a full century after every other French possession was lost.
In the aftermath, Edward III would found the famous Order of the Garter, mostly of veterans of Crecy (Sedgwick, pp. 78-79, though he omits the rather tawdry story of why it was given the name it did -- most accounts say that Edward III picked up a garter dropped by Joan "the Fair Maid of Kent," and when questioned about why he was so quick to pick up a garter from a woman not his wife, said "Hone suit qui mal y pense," which is usually translated, rather loosely, "Evil to the one whom evil thinks." Joan seems to have had quite a collection of suitors, according to Sedgwick, p. 82, and others; the Earl of Salisbury and Sir Thomas Holland fought over her; the Black Prince married her after Holland died, and supposedly Edward III wanted her himself). The order endures to this day, and is still considered one of the most exclusive orders of knighthood.
The French in 1347 tried to plan a counterattack (Perroy, p. 121). They prepared an army, and also induced the Scots to attack northern England. That proved a fiasco; Edward didn't even have to send a senior noble to fight them. The Scots were defeated at Neville's Cross, and King David was captured in the process (Burne, p. 218; Seward, p. 69; Magnusson, pp. 202-204). The Scots, for almost a decade, were out of the war.
Before the French could come into action, the Black Death struck, reducing the population of both France and England dramatically. In France, both the King's wife and the dauphin's wife died. The English royal family fared better -- Edward III and all of his sons lived. But one of his daughters died, and so of course did many ordinary people (Sedgwick, p. 86). That, and lack of money, meant that the English could do little for the next few years. The French in turn were incapacitated by the plague, lack of money -- and the death of Philip of Valois in 1450. (Seward, p. 74, and Perroy, p. 107, make the ironic note that, despite being accounted a failure, Philip had actually enlarged France -- though he lost some ground in the west, he managed to gain much in the east.)
The Plague hit both countries hard; lands went vacant, buildings fell into decay, food production dropped. The governments on both sides of the channel saw their tax revenues decline dramatically. But England recovered somewhat faster -- with its lower population, it may have suffered less in the first place, and it also had the advantage that there were no "Free Companies" of brigands ("routiers") laying the nation waste (Perroy, p. 123; Seward, p. 105).
The war was quiet from 1350 to about 1355 (Seward, p. 78, though Burne, p. 224 notes that there were plenty of skirmishes; he points out on p. 230 that Sir Thomas Dagworth was killed at this time and on pp. 233-234 mentions English attempts to add to their property around Calais; it's just that there were no major campaigns). There was even a provisional peace made in 1354 (one which, amazingly, gave the English more than they would gain in 1360; Perroy, p. 129). But it collapsed when the French realized what they were giving up, and by the mid-1350s, the English were again leading armies in France. 1355 was supposed to bring a three-front campaign (Burne, p. 246), but the front in Normandy collapsed when Charles the Bad of Navarre changed sides. Edward III's campaign from Calais was aborted by a Scottish raid which caused him to return home (Burne, p. 248. Edward went on to pillage Edinburgh -- the so-called "Burnt Candlemass"; Burne, p. 250 -- but that brought him no closer to defeating France).
That left the southern army, led by Edward the Black Prince, the son of Edward III, which defeated another French army at Poitiers. This campaign followed a raid that took the Prince's forces almost to the Mediterranean (Burne, pp. 252-254). The Prince wanted to mount another such raid -- but, this time, the French were actually prepared to fight, and they also controlled his path by blocking river crossings (Burne, p. 278). Poitiers was a much, much closer thing than Crecy -- the French thought they had the Prince trapped, and were so sure of victory that they refused the Prince's offer of the release of prisoners, return of castles, and a promise that the he would not fight in France for seven years (Prestwich, p. 181; Seward, pp. 87-88).
As usual, the French seem to have had an overwhelming superiority in numbers; Seward, p. 86, estimates that the French had some three times the 6000 or so soldiers in the English army, and that the Prince didn't have a high enough proportion of archers (or, at least, they did not have enough arrows to fight as long as needed; this seems to be what Burne is saying on p. 302, followed by Featherstone on p. 129, though Burne's figures on p. 313 imply that the number of bowmen was very small -- perhaps based on Baker's chronicle, which credited the English with 4000 men-at-arms, 2000 archers, and 1500 others; Sedgwick, p. 296. Froissart also says 7500 men, but with mor archers). Burne, p. 298 and repeated in more detail on pp. 313-314, has similar numbers: 6000 English, 20,000 French. Featherstone, p. 126, agrees with the figure of 20,000 for the French, and credits the English with 6000, of whom only 2000 were archers. Sedgwick, who has a bad tendency to follow the exaggerated chronicles of the time, suggests on p. 122 that the English had 7,000-8,000 men, and on p. 126 suggests that the French had at least a three to one edge.
There is much about Poitiers that is confusing, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we have twenty or so near-contemporary sources (Burne, p. 310). The available records disagree on what was going on -- was the Prince trying to fight, or to escape? (Burne, pp. 280-281). Burne, p. 285, thinks he wanted to fight, and had been maneuvering to prevent two French forces from joining against him. Arguing against this is the fact that the Prince probably knew by this time that reinforcements led by the Duke of Lancaster could not join him, so he would be more heavily outnumbered than he expected.
Burne, pp. 290-291, seems to split the difference: The Prince stayed in position to fight, but sent his baggage train away so that he could rapidly head for Bordeaux if the French declined to attack him. This, I must say, seems an extremely risky strategy. Sedgwick, p. 133, has a variation on this which seems a little more sensible: The English expected the French to attack but were afraid they might instead try an encirclement. The English sent enough forces to the rear to give him some protection against this.
Seward, pp. 88-91 thinks that the English were trying to retreat from the field, and the French, surprised by this, launched the part of their forward division (he thinks they had four divisions in all) in an attempt to halt their escape. Its disorganized charge was halted, and the rest of the division failed to do much damage in the chaos as the main English force returned to the field. The second division was barely turned back. The third French division, that of Orleans, simply dodged the battle. (Sedgwick, p. 142, doesn't acknowledge that there was such a group.)
That left the final French division, led by the King himself. It was perhaps slow to come into action due to Orleans's misbehavior (Sedgwick, p. 142, thinks it was positioned much too far from the leading divisions.) Still, it outnumbered the remaining English, and it was fresh, but a tiny English reserve showed up at just the right time and put the French in panic. (Burne, p. 306, thinks the exhausted English actually *attacked* at this stage, though it's hard to imagine them having the strength for it. Reading the flowery speeches quoted on p. 144 of Sedgwick, my guess is that the English simply moved forward as the French came on, to assure the French did not have the advantage of momentum.) King Jean himself tried to hold his division together -- and, as a result, was captured. As an individual, he had fought very hard; as a general, he had been a disaster. (Perroy, p. 125, says that when Jean had come to the throne, he had "given proof of nothing but gallantry and military incompetence." Attaining the crown did little to change that.)
It is interesting to note that the French historian, Perroy, devotes only two paragraphs to the battle (pp. 130-131), and attributes the English victory to "stratagems unworthy of knights" (meaning that they took advantage of the terrain). Even more than Crecy, the loss at Poitiers seemed to really *bother* the French. Perhaps it is because, as Sedgwick says on p. 127, "this French army was very similar to that at Crecy, a mob of gentlemen who fought with brilliant valor and dazzling stupidity."
Featherstone, p. 134, concludes that 2500 French were killed, 2000 captured, and 4000 wounded. Seward, p. 93, reports that the French had lost 2500 men-at-arms, and that 17 counts were captured. Sedgwick says that the King, a younger son, 17 counts, and "unnumbered barons" were taken. The government was in ruins, with the Estates refusing to grant taxes unless there were reforms (Perroy, p. 133) -- which, however, were implemented in a fairly arbitrary fashion. (Keen, p. 251, goes so far as to suggest that France was on the verge of coming apart, and was saved only by a peasant revolt that so frightened the nobility that they decided to keep working with the monarchy.) The Dauphin was being "terrorized" by rival factions (Perroy, p. 134), and the peasantry was revolting (Perroy, p. 135).
In that situation, the French had little choice but to negotiate. They made a dramatic offer: A large ransom for Jean (so large that Jean would be accused of selling his daughter on the marriage market to raise it; Saunders, pp, 118-119). All of Acquitaine (not just Guyenne) turned over to the English in full sovereignty -- in other words, it would be *theirs*, not a holding they had from the King of France. Plus other territories -- said to total a third of France.
Edward III blew it. The ransom was slow in coming, and Edward was the one who declared the provisional agreement violated (Perroy, p. 137). He made one last try, diplomatic and military, to gain the French throne in 1359 (Prestwich, p. 182; Burne, p. 334, notes that his destination was Rheims, where French kings were crowned).
The French, having survived Philip of Valois and now being stuck with his even worse son Jean, the former Duke of Normandy, might arguably have been better off had they taken the deal. But the army Edward led in 1359, even though it may have been the largest he ever assembled (Burne, p. 331, says it was the largest army to leave England prior to 1513) got bogged down in unsuccessful sieges, and was plagued by bad weather (Burne, p. 345). Saunders, p. 23, says that "Black Monday" was so bad that knights were actually electrocuted on their horses by lightning. One report has it that the storm was so severe that it caused Edward to make a vow that he would accept terms of peace in gratitude for surviving it.
Edward started out the 1359-1360 campaign on his best behavior, but ended up getting so disgusted that he turned the thing into a _chevauchee_ (Burne, p. 343). This had its usual lack of effect; the whole thing was a fiasco. But the French sent negotiators even as Edward started to pull back (Burne, p. 345), perhaps fearing that the English King had another trick up his sleeve. The English, who obviously didn't, agreed to go back to the bargaining table (Perroy, pp. 138-139; Seward, pp. 98-99; Burne, p. 347, speculates that there was already an agreement made in secret but that the French were not willing to announce it while one of their cities was under siege).
The result was the Treaty of Bretigny, which was settled in 1360. It gave the English rather less than the proposal of 1358. They would get a reduced but still large ransom for King Jean, and would be given all of Acquitaine in full sovereignty. In return, Edward III would renounce the French throne. (Note: Some, including Perroy, call the final treaty the "Treaty of Calais," since that was where it was formally ratified, using the name "Treaty of Bretigny" only for the preliminary draft. But the changes in the broad outlines are too small to make it worthwhile to differentiate -- e.g. Burne, p. 348, mentions the "Treaty of Calais" only in a two-line footnote. Unfortunately for England, one change in the details proved substantial: the renunciation of titles was postponed for a time. As it turned out, the French would never formally renounce their control over Acquitaine.)
>>THE FAILURE OF BRETIGNY; RICHARD II AND HENRY IV<<
Ironically, although the French at once started turning land over to the English, the victorious Peace of Bretigny almost immediately resulted in a turn for the worse for the English. The single biggest reason was probably money. England had "won" the war, but even with the extra revenue that brought it, she was financially exhausted. They never saw most of the money from Jean's ransom; after months in luxurious captivity (he actually grew fat while in England; Saunders, p. 24), he was set free to raise it, could not get his people to pay it, and had one of the hostages he had given escape to visit his young wife. This was a technical violation of the treaty, and caused Edward to ask a slight modification of the treaty. The Estates balked, and Jean went back into English custody, where he died in 1364, at the age of about 45 (Perroy, p. 142), perhaps of partying too much (Seward, p. 200).
The English leaders, meanwhile, were starting to wear out. Edward III at the time of Bretigny was pushing fifty, and though he was still competing at tournaments as late as 1359 (Prestwich, p. 205), he was starting to lose his energy; by the time he died in 1377, he was a non-entity even though he was still only 65 (Ashley-Great, p. 134). When the French used a legal quibble to claim that the treaty need not be fully implemented, he was stuck (Barker, p. 15; Perroy, p. 116, claims that the French had not the right to concede sovereignty of Acquitaine, but this argument is silly; it would make us all pretenders to be king of somewhere).
Edward's younger sons, such as John of Gaunt, were not particularly good leaders (Prestwich, p. 189). Sir Thomas Dagworth had been killed a decade earlier. Henry of Derby and Lancaster died in 1361. Sir John Chandos was killed in 1369 (Seward, p. 111) or 1370 (Saunders, p. 4, who tells an embarrassing tale of him slipping on ice as he got off his horse and being killed; compare Sedgwick, pp. 269-270, who says he suffered the fatal blow as a result of being blind on one side from an earlier war injury).
Plus England was still suffering the after-effects of the Black Death. There were still more than enough men to fight France (French booty was all over England, and the money from ransoming French prisoners had made many a low-born man rich, according to Prestwich, pp. 202-203; attacking France seems to have attracted men the way gold rushes attracted prospectors a few hundred years later), but they weren't as restless, simply because there was now enough land for all.
An attempt by the English to open a second front by gaining a foothold in Italy promptly failed; Edward III's second son Lionel was married to 13-year-old Violante Visconte in 1368 (Saunders, pp. 133-135), but died in October that year, causing the potential alliance to unravel (Saunders, pp. 136-137. There were no children of the marriage.)
To top it all off, the Black Prince, who should have been in his prime, was ruined -- he had engaged on an expensive campaign to restore king Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile. This, like the attempt to gain a foothold in Italy via Lionel, was almost a proxy war between England and France, but the English expended far more troops and money -- and wasted them, because they demanded so many concessions from their side of the conflict that Pedro's government was unable to hold together (Prestwich, p. 183).
The Black Prince won a great battle at Najera in 1367, and Pedro was temporarily restored -- but Pedro was so vicious that he was soon re-expelled (Perroy, p. 156, says that Pedro was "intelligent, brave, and self-assertive, but so brutal that he estranged most of his subjects" -- and this in an age when brutality was the norm, not the exception! Pedro lasted only two years after that, according to Perroy, p. 157).
Pedro obviously could not pay the costs of the campaign (about all he paid was a large ruby which begame part of the British Crown Jewels; Jarman, p. 52), which left the Black Prince to pay for it from the revenue of Acquitaine -- and it bankrupted him (Seward, p. 107; Perroy, p. 159; Sedgwick, p. 261, says that he had to dismiss his army unpaid, causing them to go raiding in France, disturbing the peace with French, and adds on pp. 262-263 that he ended up imposing extreme taxation).
The cost of the invasion was not just cash. It cost lives as well. The English army, which should have been guarding the French frontier, had been devastated by disease.
The Prince himself came back with some sort of bug; according to Saul, p. 10, it started with dysentery, but he never recovered; Sedgwick, p. 22, mentions the suggestion that it was dropsy, i.e. an edema, but does not describe the source of the excess water. Sedgwick, p. 284, mentions frequent haemorrhages. By 1370, he had to be carried on campaign in a litter (Seward, p. 112). He was so weak that he went home to England in 1371 (Sedgwick, p. 273), and though he recovered a little, he only once, very briefly, was able to go on campaign again (Sedgwick, p. 275), and that expedition never arrived due to bad weather (Seward, p. 114).
The Prince left the war in France to his less effective brother John of Gaunt, who was not a good enough general to win on his own account and was too unpopular to be able to help someone else fight. Prince Edward died in 1376, a year before his father (Seward, p. 108). That meant that Edward III's heir was his grandson, Richard II, who was still a boy; the Black Prince had married relatively late, and Richard was his second son -- the elder boy, Edward, had died young (Sedgwick, p. 272) -- so Richard II was only ten when he succeeded.
It would have been a wonderful time for the Pope to step in to end the war, but there still wasn't much the Papacy could do to control the situation. In the aftermath of the Anglo-French peace of 1360, the _routiers_ who had previously raided western and northern France turned their attention to Provence (Saunders, p. 30) and even Avignon (Renouard, p. 52), causing perhaps as much trouble as the political unrest in Italy, but by that time, the Papacy was settled in Avignon. (The "Great Company," which would come to dominate Italy, formed seemingly spontaneously in late 1360; Saunders, p. 30. It went on to attack Avignon; Saunders, p. 48. There were suggestions that Edward III encouraged this rather than take such scoundrels back to England.) The Papacy remained under French influence during the period when the consequences of Bretigny were worked out.
Meanwhile, the French changed their approach. There was unrest in Paris (Guerard, p. 103), which convinced the Dauphin, the future Charles V, that things could not continue as they were.
It helped that Jean II died soon after. The French from that time decided that there would be no more big battles for them! Charles V, physically weak and inclined to intellectual rather than physical pursuits, could hardly hope to lead an army anyway -- Seward, p. 103, notes that he was called "Charles the Wise," but the title was meant in the sense of "Charles the Learned" or "Charles the Bookish." Perroy, p. 132, says he was "worthless as a soldier" and had fled the field at Poitiers -- slightly ironic in that Perroy had said earlier that King Jean should have done the same. Saunders, p. 147, describes him as "handsome, but thin and pallid, weakened by an obscure illness that left him easily exhausted"; she speculates that he suffered from arsenic poisoning, perhaps based on the fact that his hair and nails fell out in 1360.
When the Pope called a crusade, Charles ignored him -- "all his efforts were bent on not fulfilling his obligations under the treaty of Bretigny" (Renouard, p. 56). But if Charles could not lead, he could organize an army, and get the royal finances into better shape (Seward, p. 109) -- far more important than mere generalship.
Similarly Bertrand du Guesclin, the new Constable of France, had proved a poor general in the Castilian campaign; Perroy, pp. 148-149, declares him a "mediocre captain, incapable of winning a battle or being successful in a siege of any scope," but admits that the new French King Charles V "found [in him] a fitting leader for the commonplace tasks which alone remained within [France's] power."
Du Guesclin did manage to get many of the "routiers," or independent raiders, out of France -- but he did that by luring them to the war in Spain; Perroy, p. 156. Others left for Italy -- it is noteworthy that Sir John Hawkwood, who later became a very strong force in Italian politics, went to Italy in 1361 (Saunders, p. xvii). Keegan, p. 80, refers to this time as the "Duguesclin war" and calls it a "Fabian" policy (a word also used by Seward, p. 110): Avoid battle, take a weak little property here and there, eventually putting a strong point under enough pressure that it had to give in. There was no "glory" in it -- but there was no risk of a major defeat, and it slowly but steadily undercut the English position.
The war officially resumed in 1369 (Prestwich, p. 184) when the French started again hearing complaints from Gascon nobles against the English administration (Seward, p. 110; Perroy, p. 160, thinks that Charles V felt "embarrassment and hesitation" when the nobles of Acquitaine appealed to him, but the English historians pretty consistently disagree, and certainly Charles V was not slow to take advantage. Even Perroy admits that Charles kept his plans very secret until he could spring his trap). In that same year, Edward III again started claiming the title King of France (Saunders, p. 147).
And, yet again, the Pope was unable to act as a moderator -- Urban V, who had tried to move back to Rome in 1367 (Saunders, p. 109, says that France, and King Charles V, were "appalled"), headed back to Avignon in 1370 to try to deal with the situation, and died there three months later (Saunders, pp. 152-153), before he had any chance to influence things (Renouard, p. 61. Urban almost certainly intended to return to Rome if possible, but he didn't live long enough, and because he died outside Italy, the Italians feld betrayed). And, without his energy, the papal entourage again set up camp in Avignon, under French influence. The next Pope, Gregory XI, was held in Avignon for years by the renewed war (Renouard, p. 64). Having condoned a massacre to rebuild his power (Saunders, pp. 216-221), he finally returned to Rome in 1377 -- and died there just over a year later (Renouard, p. 66).
Nearly everything else was turning to French advantage, too. In 1366, the French had paid enough of King Jean's ransom that most of the major hostages went free (Perroy, p. 158). To be sure, some were supposed to come back if the ransom payments halted -- but the English no longer had any hold on them. And, in fact, the hostages never went back into custody once the money stopped.
Even this proved an advantage to the French government. Charles V cut off the money to England -- but, because he hadn't actually paid off the ransom, he was able to continue the taxes which had been levied to raise the ransom! -- Perroy, p. 162.
And England was in a bad state in 1369. The plague was back, and horrible weather caused severe shortages of food (Saunders, p. 149. There would be several famines in the mid-1370s also; Saunders, p. 195). There was no way Edward could raise a major army at the time. He couldn't even induce the Free Companies of _routiers_ back from Italy; Hawkwood and others found the pickings there too rich (Saunders, pp. 149-150. Saunders thinks Edward III wanted Hawkwood to stay in Italy to distract the Pope, but this is hard to believe -- if he wanted to distract the Pope, he'd go to Avignon!).
Early in the period, the English at least found a way to punish the French for their betrayal -- they would more regularly "wage the _chevauchee_." This was an early version of the "scorched earth campaign" such as William T. Sherman would use in marching across Georgia. An English band would set out to bring fire and sword to as large an area of France as possible. This had been a part of the English policy from the beginning (the army that won at Poitiers had set out expecting simply to wage the _chevauchee_). Now it was the main strategy. Since the French would not fight, there was little danger to the English, and they did the French economy significant harm. But there was no winning the war that way. And, eventually, even raiding proved economically difficult for the English.
By the time Edward III died in 1377 (Seward, p. 116), English possessions in Gascony were about the same as they had been fifty years earlier, when Edward came to the throne: the coastal strip from Bordeaux to Bayonne (Prestwich, p. 184). Strategically, their situation may even have been worse, since the French had driven a salient into the middle of the coastal strip (Perroy, p. 165; Seward, p. 115), so Bordeaux and Bayonne were no longer mutually supporting. The allies of the English also lost control of most of Brittany. In 1377, the Forty Years War (the name it might have been given had not Henry V come along) looked like a strategic draw, despite the fact that the English had won all the major battles and had gained Calais.
As Prestwich says on pp. 186-187, "The reversal of English fortunes in Edward III's declining years was almost as remarkable as the earlier successes. The lack of firm direction by the ageing king was revealed in a want of coherent planning. The earlier grand strategies of simultaneous attacks from various fronts had been abandoned in favour of what appeared to be aimless raids, often launched too late in the year to do much damage." In 1376, the so-called "Good Parliament" tried for reforms, but the Black Prince died before it ended (Sedgwick, p. 283), and Edward III was senile, and little could be done to rescue the decrepit government.
Ormrod, p. 10, notes that "Edward III is now often seen as a rather second-rate ruler, stubborn and selfish in his foreign ambition, weak and yielding in his domestic policies." There is much truth in this; Edward III did little to strengthen the government of his nation (and his grandson would pay for it). But he did start a tradition -- of chivalry, and of expansionism. We may call this bad. But it clearly inspired Henry V.
The Crecy war had one noteworthy effect which is rarely mentioned in the military histories: To make the whole thing work, Edward III needed the consent of the people being taxed to pay for it. Edward consulted regularly with his nobles -- thus forming the first true parliaments. Ormrod, pp. 193-194, counts 48 parliaments in Edward's fifty year reign, and another nine quasi-parliamentary councils.
Edward's assemblies were a far cry from the modern form of parliamentary government (few, according to Ormrod, lasted more than a month, and 17 lasted ten or fewer days; some were only four days long), but they were a major step. England, and England alone, has had parliamentary government ever since -- with the result that descendents of Edward III still sit on the English throne, two centuries and more after the last descendent of the Valois were set aside in France. The fact that England had a strong parliament also made it easier for Henry V to assemble his armies in 1415. The government was still stronger than parliament -- OxfordCompanion, p. 426, notes that the reforms of the Good Parliament (which lasted an amazingly long 73 days) were overturned within about a year -- but it was a step in the right direction.
For fifty years -- from shortly after 1360 to 1413, during the latter part of the reign of Edward III and the whole reigns of Richard II (1377-1399) and Henry IV (1399-1413), the English made no serious attempt to defeat the French. Perroy, p. 169, seems to imply that they would have lost all of Guyenne in 1377 had not John Neville of Raby won enough small successes to make the French temporarily stop spending money on reconquest (followed soon after by the death of Charles V, which changed the whole equation).
Richard II, in fact, wanted to end the French conflict altogether; he raised no armies, floated offers to turn Guyenne over to the French if they would allow an English duke to rule it (Saul, p. 211, who notes that Richard made John of Gaunt Duke of Acquitaine, though of course when Gaunt's son Henry IV ascended, that eliminated the whole idea since the Duke of Acquitaine was once again King of England), and made noises about supporting the French Pope during the schism (though Saul, p. 232, notes that this was really dependent on a peace with France). Richard and his government also refused to give any serious help to the anti-French forces in Flanders, meaning that these firm (if only intermittently effective) English allies were brought under French domination (Saul, pp. 138-140). Plus, in the early 1390s, he and the French negotiated for years, and according to Saul, p. 218, no one really even knows why the negotiations finally failed.
It's easy to see why Richard wanted out: The French came very close to winning the war in the first few years of his reign, attacking Calais,picking up more land in Gascony, and heavily raiding the English south coast (Saul, pp. 33-34, though on p. 208 he argues that Richard's real reason was that he wanted to go on crusade. Possible, but the idea of Richard II on a crusade strikes me as pretty scary -- for the other crusaders).
By the mid-1380s, the situation was so bad that England was afraid of an all-out invasion. Perroy, p. 191, has no explanation for what happened next: "For some obscure reasons, the expedition was called off. Was the adventure found to be too risky, the strength available too small? Or did Philip [of Burgundy] put on a costly act simply to frighten England, and was he satisfied when he obtained the reopening of the wool trade between England and Flanders? We do not know." (Saul's explanation, p. 156, is that the French lacked the money to put their armada to sea.
Whatever the explanation, it was lucky for England that the invasion was cancelled; Richard's government had little real plan to fight it (Seward, pp. 133-134). In the whole reign, there were no great land battles, and only one major sea battle, in which the Earl of Arundel defeated a larger French convoy in early 1387 (Saul, p. 168). Even this was minor enough that I have never seen the battle given a name.
The boy-king's council at first didn't even have money from parliament to fight the threat (Saul, p. 47, notes that there were *six* parliaments in the first four years of Richard's reign, most of which voted money, but somehow the cash never accomplished anything). And when they tried to mount a counter-offensive, it was late and accomplished nothing except to show that England was short on quality generals at this time (Saul, pp. 35-36). Their one major success in the early period was taking over Cherbourg, but the English obtained that by diplomacy with Charles of Navarre, not by conquest (Saul, p. 41).
Taxes in these early years were so heavy (Saul, p. 56) and Richard II's administration was so inefficient, that he in fact faced the first great peasant revolt in English history, Wat Tyler's rebellion (Ashley-Great, pp. 146-147. It is interesting to note that there were only two really major peasant revolts in English history -- Tyler's of 1381 and Jack Cade's of 1450 -- and both came during the Hundred Years War, and both came at a time when the English were clearly losing and desperate to try to fight back. Of the two, Tyler's was the more dangerous, and came about when attempts to evade an exorbitant poll tax failed; Saul, p. 57. The common people, with their population still much reduced by the Black Death, simply couldn't pay what was asked; Saul, p. 60). Perroy also blames Lollard agitation (p. 182), but Perroy (who after all was French and seems to have little knowledge of non-Catholic faiths) didn't understand Wycliff or Lollardy; the revolt did have some "communist" elements, but they almost certainly were not Lollards.
The 14-year-old King Richard did much to calm and control Tyler's rebels -- but the rebellion's failure just meant that the abuses which caused the rebellion went unchecked. Indeed, Richard had temporized during the negotiations (Saul, pp. 67-69), and it led to a reign of terror and perhaps was a foreshadowing of what Richard would become. Richard never did manage to promote meaningful reforms; it's doubtful that he ever realized how messed-up his government was. (To be fair, when the Lords Appellant forcibly took charge in the late 1380s, they proved just as incompetent. But not even having control taken out of his hands knocked any sense into Richard.)
Richard's only attempt at a foreign adventure was two visits to Ireland, which were part invasion and part progress to awe the locals. Even there, he didn't want much responsibility; his main goal in the first was to create a palatine territory for his favorite Robert de Vere (Saul, p. 274). His response to the French invasions was to seek a truce. This was agreed to in 1389, and Richard held to it for the rest of his life (Seward, p. 138), doing his best to negotiate a lasting peace (Perroy, p. 198). To calm tensions, he gave away Brest and Cherbourg, leaving England with only Calais in northern France and the remnants of Guyenne in the south. This was the period when the king tried to give Guyenne to his uncle John of Gaunt, in effect washing his hands of the whole area.
Richard eventually married as his second wife a daughter of the French king (Seward, p. 139, Barker, pp. 15-16) -- though Isabella of France was only a quarter of his age (she was six when the French offered the marriage; Saul, p. 226), and pre-pubescent even when he died; they of course left no children. After Richard's deposition and death, Henry IV used her as a bargaining chip against France (Perroy, p. 214), but in 1400 allowed her to go back to France, where she remarried at 16 and died in childbirth at 19 (Barker, p. 17). It seems Richard and his government tried to secure a true treaty with France, but couldn't come up with a deal that both the French government and the English parliament would accept -- but, in return for the French marriage, they did secure a 28 year truce, which in many ways was better than a peace since it didn't cause the sort of wranglings over precise interpretations that had spoiled earlier treaties (Saul, p. 227). In practice, the truce lasted less than two decades -- but Richard was long gone by them.
Shortly before Richard's first truce, John of Gaunt's son Henry of Bolingbroke's wife, Mary de Bohun, bore her first surviving son, Henry. (There had apparently been an earlier pregnancy resulting in a boy who died at birth, perhaps because the mother was so young -- only 11 or 12, according to Allmand, p. 8.) A record from the reign of Henry VI documents his birth near Monmouth (Allmand, p. 7), so he was called "Henry of Monmouth."
The young man was a member of the royal family, but with half a dozen people senior to him (including Richard II, who as yet was too young for anyone to know that he would die childless; Allmand, p. 8). No one realized that the young man would be particularly significant(Jarman, p. 32), so the date of his birth is not firmly known (Earle, p. 12). Allmand notes that references to his age make it possible that it was 1386 or 1387. The likely dates are August 9 or September 16. Allmand notes that his parents were in Monmouth in 1386, and so favors that year; the majority of other sources I have checked seem to prefer 1387 (e.g. Jarman, p. 32 says September 16 1387).
Mary de Bohun died in 1394, at the age of 24, bearing her sixth child (Earle, p. 12; Allmand, p. 9). She ended up with four sons and two daughters -- seemingly a fine flock, but three of the boys (Henry, the eldest; Thomas, the second, and John, the third) would die well before the age of fifty, and neither Thomas, nor John, nor Humphrey (the fourth boy) would leave a legitimate child.
Henry was considered significant enough that a marriage into the ducal house of Brittany was considered in 1395 (Allmand, p. 10), but this fell through -- and, in an "I'm My Own Grandpa" touch, Henry IV later married the girl's mother.
(Shakespeare fans please note: Although Shakespeare made Henry V and Harry "Hotspur" Percy contemporaries, Hotspur was a generation older. In 1388, just a year or two after Henry's birth, Hotspur -- already a young adult -- would command at the Battle of Otterburn. Hotspur was killed in 1403, a seasoned veteran of about forty, at a time when Henry of Monmouth was still in his mid teens. Allmand, p. 19, in fact notes that, initially, Hostspur was appointed to lead the council that managed Wales for the young Prince!)
Perroy, p. 255, declares that Henry was "the first King of England [since the Norman conquest, presumably] who had some English blood in his veins." This is not quite true -- Henry II and all succeeding kings were descended from Saint Margaret of Scotland, the sister of Edgar the Atheling, the last scion of the dynasty of Wessex who was briefly chosen King after the Battle of Hastings. And Richard II's mother was Joan "the Fair Maid of Kent." Still, Perroy is right in that Mary de Bohun brought some blood of the English nobility into the family. This meant that Henry was culturally English, even if his ancestry was mostly from Normandy and other European monarchies.
Prince Harry was born soon after a "changing of the guard." The late 1370s was a bad period for deaths of kings and noble. Just one year after Edward III died in 1377, Pope Gregory XI, who had taken the Papacy back to Rome, followed him into the grave (Renouard, p. 66).
If the Papacy had been a poor peacemaker during its stay in Avignon, things now became far worse. Gregory had done a terrible job of managing Italian affairs; most of the Papal States had rebelled (Saunders, pp. 206-207) and Italy was almost completely out of control. The 16 cardinals who met to choose Gregory's successor were besieged by a Roman mob which wanted an Italian Pope (Renouard, p. 68). They chose an Italian -- but one who promptly made himself disliked by many; Urban VI, according to Renouard, p. 69, "showed himself to be coarse, rude and tactless to an extraordinary degree." The disgusted French cardinals declared the election invalid and chose another Pope, Clement VII. The result was the "Great Schism" (not to be confused with the real Great Schism of 1054 which split Orthodoxy from Catholicism; this one simply split Catholic Christianity, without producing any doctrinal differences).
It is ironic to note that Clement VII, whose election was certainly more irregular, had probably more and stronger supporters (Renouard, p. 69). Being the "French" Pope had clear advantages; he certainly had more revenue (Renouard, p. 73), though both Papal pretenders came in with empty treasuries. The split lasted through the next several reigns (Saul, pp. 84-85; Seward, p. 123). France and England naturally supported rival Popes, so there was now no available mediator. It would be difficult even to call in a third party, since one side or the other would claim the mediator supported the wrong Pope. The Schism, for instance, killed plans for Richard II to marry an Italian noblewoman (Saul, p. 84. We might note that Geoffrey Chaucer had been one of the negotiators who set up the preliminary arrangements). It was not until 1415, at the Council of Constance, that a real attempt was made to heal the schism, and even that did not convince the deposed Benedict XIII, who claimed the Papal title until his death in 1422 (Renouard, p. 78). The last successors of this anti-Papal line were not put aside until 1431 (Renouard, pp. 136-137).
If the English managed to retain some land in Guyenne in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, it was only because the French were distracted. The French constable du Guesclin was killed in 1380, and three months later Charles V died (Seward, p. 125). Charles was only in his early forties, but of course he had always been sickly. He had still done a brilliant job of reviving France after the disastrous reign of his father (Perroy, p. 145).
Charles V made perhaps only two mistakes: On his deathbed, he bankrupted his son's government by abolishing the hated hearth tax (Perroy, p. 174). And he started the process which created the mighty Dukedom of Burgundy (Perroy, p. 148) -- though, to be fair, his only other real alternative was to give a smaller Duchy of Burgundy to Charles the Bad of Navarre, who had been fighting him off and on for years. Charles the Bad had been cheated many times -- he should have been king of France! -- but this final insult led him into a rebellion which at last ended his pretensions. And Edward III, who felt bound by his treaty with France, was unable to intervene; Perroy, pp. 151-152. Charles V's diplomacy had the peculiar effect of making a Flemish heiress wife of two consecutive Dukes of Burgundy -- and of founding the dynasty which nearly overthrew France.
Most English historians seem to be amazed that the French did not win the war in the period immediately after Charles's death. The Frenchman Perroy, p. 177, has a different take: "During his sixteen years' reign, at once healing and exhausting, Charles V had accomplished a great task: the destruction of the Treaty of Calais [=Bretigny], which was the master-thought of this persistent and crafty man. But he had rekindled the war, and his slender resources did not enable him to end it. The dilemma in which he had placed the kingdom was not removed by his death. Unable to win the war, France was forced to continue it, without hope of a definite success.... By fits and starts the two countries had outrun their strength. Neither one nor the other could achieve a decision." He notes on p. 189 that tax revolts continued even after the hearth tax was abolished.
In addition, the death of Charles V turned loose the royal dukes, many of whom spent their strength on ventures irrelevant to the reconquest of France -- several, e.g., started meddling in Italy (Perroy, pp. 204-205).
Charles V was succeeded by Charles VI, who went mad early on (he actually killed four of his own attendants before being restrained; Seward, p. 143. This is based on Book IV, section 44 of Froissart's _Chronicles_, though much of it is corroborated elsewhere). The disease was at first intermittent (Perroy, p. 194), but the problem became worse and worse over time. His genes for madness would, in time, come close to destroying both France and England.
(I really wish we could go back and do genetic testing on the family of Charles VI -- among them Henry VI of England, who went catatonic in the 1450s, leading to the first Yorkist protectorate and then to the first battle of Saint Albans when he recovered [Wilkinson, p. 176]; Henry VII, the majority of whose children died young and whose uncle Jasper was childless; Henry VIII; who left no legitimate grandchildren and whose partners suffered many miscarriages; aand Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, who managed to bear an heir to the King of Scotland but later suffered her own miscarriage.)
(Seward, p. 144, suggests that Charles VI's problem was porphyria, which is often said to be the afflicted George III of England; this is probably based on the fact that Charles suffered his first bout on a bright, hot day -- Earle, p. 79 -- and light and heat can bring on porphyria. Charles also had the sort of delusions typical of porphyria; Jarman, p. 24, says that he was "a gibbering figurehead who sat unwashed in a threadbare palace convinced that he was made of glass and would shatter at a touch"; compare Gillingham, p. 75. But I must admit that I think there is more involved; though Charles VI does sound very much like a victim of porphyria, too many of Charles VI's descendents had problems which do not fit the disease.)
Nor were the Charles VI's sons able to help; the first two Dauphins died young (Seward, p. 179), and the third, the future Charles VII (Jean Darc's Dauphin, Charles the Well-Served) was still young (born 1399) and completely lacking in energy.
With the King unable to rule, the reign of Charles VI turned France over to the factions led by his relatives. Guerard, p. 105, describes the situation this way: "Charles VI (1380-1422) was a child of twelve showing but little promise. Power fell to his uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon. The royal system, as organized under Philip the Fair, was still so precarious and so ill-understood, it had proved so oppressive and at time[s] so incompetent, that there was a demand for... a complete return to feudal custom.... [T]he royal dukes proceeded to ransack the treasury for ambitious purposes of their own, Naturally, the bourgeois counselors of Charles the Wise, contemptuously called the _Marmousets_, were dismissed.
"In 1389, on attaining his majority, the young king thanked his uncles and recalled the _Marmousets_. But three years later, Charles VI, whose frail wits had not been able to stand a mad pace of pleasure, went insane; and, although he had lucid moments, he was unfit to rule for the remaining thirty years of his life."
Throw in the monetary crises in France, and the French government was unable to accomplish much for the next several decades. Even without the hearth tax, the burden on the peasants was very high, partly due to the potmetal currency (Perroy, p. 189) but mostly due to the fact that different factions, when they came to power, had to bring in their own office-holders, and scoop up every cent of cash to pay them (Perroy, pp. 222-224). In effect, the population was paying for two governments rather than one, and neither one any good.
(There were some curious parallels between England and France in this period. Both were ruled by underage kings, neither of whom was very effective. Both had trouble with uncles and councils. Richard II at least didn't leave any children with genes for madness; he seems to have left no children either legitimate or illegitimate, and no extramarital affairs; Saul, p. 94. Though he does seem to have loved his wife Anne of Bohemia genuinely; her death was very hard on him. The problem with Richard's otherwise exemplary sexual conduct was that he left no heir -- which in turn led to the succession quarrels which occupied England, off and on, for a century.)
It is interesting to note that the precipitating event for Richard II's deposition was his treatment of Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, whom Richard exiled. Yet Richard kept the young Henry of Monmouth at his court and treated him well; Earle, p. 31 -- though he also took him to Ireland during the invasion of that country (Allmand, p. 14), just possibly as a hostage.
Richard II, in the late 1380s, had been brought to heel by the "Lords Appellant" -- Humphrey of Gloucester, Richard's uncle; the Earl of Arundel; the Earl of Warwick, the Mowbray Earl of Nottingham (later Duke of Norfolk), and Henry of Bolingbroke. The latter two eventually came over to Richard's side, and the former three were eliminated in the 1390s (though Goodman, p. 186, argues that they had created a precedent for opposing a monarch which came back into play in 1399.) Then Nottingham/Norfolk and Bolingbroke had a falling-out. It came to the point where they were about to hold a trial by combat in 1398 -- when Richard stepped in and exiled *both*, even though at least one of them was certainly on Richard's side (Allmand, p. 11).
Mowbray, who was banished for life, would die in exile. Not Bolingbroke. Initially his exile was supposed to be temporary -- but when, in early 1399, Bolingbroke's father John of Gaunt died, Richard II made the exile permanent (Allmand, pp. 11-12), probably so Richard could take over the Duchy of Lancaster that Bolingbroke should have inherited.
Richard seemed completely oblivious to his danger. He actually went to Ireland with an army to try to settle the messy situation there. Bolingbroke invaded England in Richard's absence -- and quickly gained enough support to overthrow the King (Allmand, p. 13, though on p. 14 he describes how it was made legally to appear an abdication).
Even without his treatment of Bolingbroke, it's possible that Richard would have eventually been deposed anyway, because he was clearly attempting to create an absolute monarchy. Indeed, a semi-divine monarchy; Perroy, p. 200, notes that Richard actually petitioned the Pope to canonize his great-grandfather Edward II (who, no matter how badly he was mistreated by his subordinates, was no saint!). But Bolingbroke's invasion meant that the crown went to the House of Lancaster, rather than to the youth of the Mortimer family who was Richard's proper heir (at least if succession in the female line was allowed in England -- which it was generally agreed that it was). The key effect of Bolingbroke's invasion was to make Henry of Bolingbroke into King Henry IV, and to make his son Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V, the Prince of Wales.
Allmand, p. 15, makes an interesting point here: "Richard [II] might be said to have destroyed himself, politically at least. None the less there remained the uncomfortable fact that the new king's de facto possession of the throne was his only true claim to power. He might be the head of by far the richest family in England.... [y]et his possession of the throne of England had stemmed from a decision to use force to secure it. Early on the young man whose right to the title 'Prince of Wales' depended on his acceptance, albeit tacit, of his father's usurpation had learned that a legal claim was always rendered stronger if military might was there to support it. As his father had done in England in 1399, so the future Henry V would do in France some twenty years later."
Henry of Monmouth quickly became a major landowner: As heir to the throne, he became Prince of Wales (a title which still meant something in 1399 --Henry would spend much of his father's reign fighting Owen Glendower and other Welsh rebels), Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Chester. Those titles were standard for the king's heir. But Henry IV also made him Duke of Lancaster and Duke of Aquitaine (Allmand, pp. 16-17). This at once gave Prince Harry a lot of responsibility and an interest in the French conflict.
It is ironic to note that, in 1406 when Parliament officially acted on the succession, it officially declared that "heirs general" could succeed to the English throne -- that is, that females counted in the succession. Thus Henry IV, whose claim to the throne -- insofar as it was not rule by conquest -- was due to being Richard II's heir male, declared that the succession should not be by heirs male! (Allmand, ppp. 30-31).
In France, by this time, the leading contenders for power were the Dukes of Burgundy, the first of whom (Philip the Bold) was the uncle of Charles VI, and the Dukes of Orleans, the first of whom was the king's brother. The Queen, who had much influence, initially supported the Burgundian faction, but when Philip of Burgundy died in 1404 and was succeeded by his son John the Fearless, Isabel instead gave her attention to the Orleans faction (so much so that she was accused, possibly accurately, of sharing his bed). The rivalry soon became war to the knife; John the Fearless (who succeeded Philip the Bold in 1404; Seward, p. 148) assassinated Orleans in 1407 (Guerard, p. 106; Perroy, pp. 226-227).
The assassination was twice fortunate for the English, since Orleans, though not a very good soldier, had been pushing back the English in Guyenne; his death may have saved the remaining English territory (Barker, p. 17; Seward, p. 145), and Henry IV (who was always broke because of the rebellions against him; Seward, p. 144) had no means to fight back. The French became particularly hostile to the English after the deposition of Richard II in 1399 -- since Richard was married to a French princess, and had not pursued the war, his overthrow was regarded as a hostile act (Ashley-Stuart, p. 35. The French were about the only ones who still liked him -- Seward, p. 142, comments that Richard had become "almost insanely tyrannical" and notes that he had very little support from the barons at the end).
Even better for the English, from the time Orleans was assassinated, France was split into two factions, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs (the latter named for the Count of Armagnac, whose daughter would marry the son of Orleans a few years after the assassination). The mad king of course could not intervene, so there was nothing to keep the factions from each others' throats. The Burgundians took control of Paris in 1409 (Barker, p. 18), but it did not last. The Armagnacs drove them out -- only to spoil their prospects by inaugurating a reign of terror (Barker, p. 60, notes an instance of the Armagnacs slaughtering a city full of their own supporters, and doing so with great cruelty). Even when the government managed to produce useful legislation, the power of the factions meant that it could not be enforced (Perroy, p. 229).
Talk about an opportunity for an outsider! The English did not intervene at first, partly because Henry IV was still not secure on the throne (Perroy, p. 213, notes that at one point Henry IV actually tried to rewrite history to make his ancestor, the younger brother of Edward I, an older brother, since that would strengthen Henry's claim; seemingly to support this argument, Henry halted the regular maintenance King Edward I had ordered for his tomb; Hutchinson, p. 54), partly because the king was in poor physical condition (suffering from an undiagnosed by extremely debilitating disease; Earle, p. 69) and partly because they couldn't figure out which French faction would offer the better deal (Barker, p. 19).
It is possible that this issue caused some friction between Henry the father and Henry the son; both, according to Allmand, p. 48, wanted to regain the large Acquitaine promised by the Treaty of Bretigny, but the son probably wanted a more activist policy. Indeed, two English forces landed in 1411 and 1412 -- and supported different sides in the French struggle (Perroy, pp. 230-231; Allmand, p. 54, thinks that the 1411 intervention, on behalf of Burgundy, was arranged by Prince Henry, while teh 1412 intervention was set up by Henry IV when the Armagnacs offered far better terms.).
This seems to have led to a distinct coolness between father and son. Henry IV, perhaps with the support of parliament, dismissed his entire council, including the prince (Allmand, pp. 50-51). There was talk that the prince might be disowned entirely, with his younger brother Thomas of Clarence being declared heir to the throne (Clarence, not the prince, was given command of the 1412 intervention in France). It appears two factions were forming: Henry IV and his second son Thomas, and Prince Henry and his half-uncles the Beauforts. From 1411, the Prince's faction was entirely out of power (Allmand, p. 53).
King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164] --- Part 04
DESCRIPTION: Continuation of the notes to "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of FranceÓ [Child 164]. Entry concludes in "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164]" --- Part 05 (File Number C164D)
NOTES: >>THE REIGN OF HENRY V<<
Then Henry IV died in 1413, and Henry of Monmouth, now Henry V, decided to play for bigger stakes. The rebellions that had plagued Henry IV were mostly quiet (Earle, pp. 101-104, notes that there were 17 higher nobles in England at the time Henry V succeeded, and 14 of them were adult and physically fit, and all 14 fought for Henry in France at some time or another. Incidentally, we should remind people that Shakespeare is not to be trusted *at all* on this count. Plays such as _Henry V_ are not nearly as false as, say, the Henry VI trilogy or _Richard III_, but Jarman, p. 64, looks at the list of leaders Shakespeare claimed were at Agincourt and finds that half of them were not. Shakespeare here at least had contact with reality -- but not much). The British economy had largely recovered from the Black Death and the exactions of Edward III and the inefficiency of Richard II. The exchequer was empty (Barker, p. 24) -- but how better to fill it than with foreign loot?
Henry V is often portrayed as a humorless crusader, and there is no question but that he was single-minded in his pursuit what he considered his "rights" in France. Ashley-Great, p. 155, describes him as "much more like Oliver Cromwell than the chivalrous Tudor hero of Shakespeare's plays"; he quotes other historians who called Henry a fanatic and a bigot. Earle, p. 99, while admitting his rigid orthodoxy, thinks he wanted to reform the papacy -- but offers no specifics.
What we can say specifically is that Henry watched heretics being burned (the burning of alleged Lollards, many of whom were probably not heretics but political enemies -- Rubin, pp. 188-190 -- had been introduced under Henry IV; Rubin, p. 187), and that Henry V once sent a friend (Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham), whose opinions were slightly theologically shaky, to the stake (Earle, p. 99, though Oldcastle escaped custody just long enough to be taken and burned by a churchman without Henry himself being present; Earle, p. 101. Royle, p. 74, says that Oldcastle's opinions on the Pope and on transubstantiation were heretical, but there were multiple Popes at this time, and while transubstantiation had become official doctrine two hundred years earlier at the Fourth Lateran Council -- Christie-Murray, p. 99 -- it wasn't strongly established. A less bigoted king would surely have understood the difference between a questioner and a true heretic).
Once, when burning a heretic, John Badby, he had the fellow pulled out of the fire, asked him to repent -- and, when Badby refused, had the fires re-lit (Royle, pp. 65-66). Seward, p. 164, mentions "Ruthless authority and cold cruelty," says he was "puritanical," and speaks of "brutal single-mindedness."
Perroy, who of course writes from a French perspective, refers to his "hypocritical devoutness, the duplicity of his conduct, his pretence of defending right and redressing wrongs when he sought solely to satisfy his ambitions, [and] the cruelty of his revenge" (p. 235). This strikes me as a little exaggerated -- I don't think Henry was a hypocrite; I think he was badly messed up emotionally. But the effect is the same. It was eventually costly, too -- as Allmand notes on p. 438, since Henry said his victories were God's will, his successors could hardly negotiate with the French, since that was against Henry's version of God's desires.
Henry was well-educated, speaking and writing English, French, and Latin. There is some dispute over whether he had a lighter side. He certainly owned a harp (Earle, p. 28), and is believed to have been able to play it; he supposedly took one with him to France (Barker, p. 26); he also took an 18 minstrels along (Barker, p. 134). Jarman, p. 38, claims he also played cithera and gittern, without listing a source.
But the claim that he read Chaucer is somewhat dubious. It is true that one of the sixteen surviving substantial manuscripts of Chaucer's _Troylus and Criseyde_ (Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M 817) is imprinted with his arms as Prince of Wales. But this does not prove that he read it; his grandfather John of Gaunt was one of Chaucer's patrons, so the family may have handed him a copy whether he wanted it or not. (There was a strong literary tradition in the family. Henry IV also seems to have supported Chaucer, and he definitely supported John Gower, who dedicated an edition of the Confessio Amantis to him; Goodman, p. 156. Henry IV passed his love of books on to his fourth son Henry, one of the greatest collectors of the era, but we do not find much evidence of Henry V as patron of literature.)
What's more, Mauldwyn Mills, in the introduction to the Everyman edition of _Troylus and Criseyde_, which is based on the Morgan manuscript, notes that it contains a significant number of uncorrected errors (_Troylus and Criseyde_, Everyman; original edition 1953; revised edition, 2000; p. xxxv). Despite its very early date (one of the two earliest manuscripts, written within a dozen years of Chaucer's death), most critical editions do not use it as a copy text. The strong sense I get, in reading the notes, is that it was too poorly corrected to be a copy that was actually regularly read. Also, it is thought by many to have been taken from a not-final draft of the book, and would Henry V have accepted that if he really cared about the volume?
It should be remembered that this period was relatively impoverished in the arts. The reigns of Edward III and Richard II had been graced by Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and John Gower. The era of the Lancastrian kings had nothing -- the only author from this period you're likely to have encountered is Sir Thomas Malory. I checked three literary anthologies, and in poetry, all skipped directly from Chaucer (died 1400) to Skelton (born c. 1460). Several books on literary history comment sourly on how barren the fifteenth century was. If Henry V patronized any writers, they certainly weren't worth what he spent on them.
Allmand, p. 42, notes that Thomas Chaucer (the son of Geoffrey) was three times speaker of parliament (1407, 1410, 1411), and thinks that this is a sign that Henry of Monmouth had great power and support in parliament, because Allmand thinks Chaucer was Henry's ally. But these three parliaments were during Henry IV's reign; I see no reason to think either Chaucer was a close ally of Henry V as opposed to Henry IV.
Henry was clearly physically tough; Barker, pp. 31-32, describes how he had taken an arrow in the face in one of his Welsh campaigns as Prince of Wales, it was said that it penetrated six inches into his head, and required extraordinary surgery to extract. (I can't recall anyone ever saying so, but I wonder if perhaps he may not have suffered minor brain damage resulting in his emotional rigidity.)
It was during the Welsh campaigns that he apparently got to know many of his later associates, such as the Earl of Warwick and the John Talbot, later to be known as "Old Talbot." Of course, he also got to know John Oldcastle, whom he would burn as a heretic (Allmand, p. 32).
The reports of a misspent youth are largely false, according to Barker, p. 43; she declares that they "acquired a veneer of historicity because they were taken up by Shakespeare" -- but of course the amount of actual history in Shakespeare is only slightly greater than the amount of quantum chromodynamics. (My guess is that the stories arose from the conflicts between Henry IV and Henry V before the latter's death; Barker, p. 21, reports that the younger Henry may have feared being disinherited by his father, and Earle, p. 69, observes that parties started forming about King and Prince as early as 1406. To be fair, Earle, p. 86, thinks it is "quite clear that there was some truth in [Henry's] reputation [for wildness]."
Jarman, p. 31, declares that "Although such Shakespearean stories as that of young Hal strking Judge Gascoigne... or Stowe's chronicle depicting him 'mugging' London citizens by night in company with his friends can largely be discounted, he evidently led something of a playboy life before his accession." But what was the usual evidence of wild escapades? Illegitimate children. And Earle, p. 87, admits that Henry "left no bastards from a riotous youth," though were are told that he "followed the services of Venus as well as Mars." Yet it is unlikely that Henry was infertile; once he married, he quickly got his wife pregnant. Even Earle confesses, "For details readers will have to join Shakespeare in using their imagination."
It is interesting to note that a French observer, who saw Henry and his brother Thomas of Clarence just before the start of the Agincourt campaign, Clarence looked like a soldier -- but Henry gave the impression of being a priest (Allmand, p. 438).
Henry V seems to have been unusually good at handling money; Barker, p. 102, reports an instance of him actually auditing some of his own books (Allmand, p. 2, implies that he was the first king before Henry VII to do so), and also notes on p. 114 that he actually kept detailed records of the men serving under him, which was largely unheard of at the time; Earle, p. 127, notes his careful attention to collecting his share of ransoms for prisoners taken by his subordinates. These were skills he perhaps learned by having to survive in penury during the poverty-stricken administration of his father (Barker, p. 34).
Henry V succeeded his father in 1413. He instantly turned things around in England. His father had never been secure on the throne. Henry V was in complete control within months. He also managed to get more money out of parliament than any other king of the time -- perhaps in history (Barker, pp. 104-105; Seward, p. 156; Earle, p. 105, quotes Stubbs as saying Henry's ability to raise money from parliament was "little less than miraculous."). Like many kings before him, he had to resort to forced loans -- but he was careful to borrow against money he new he would receive in the next tax year, and the loans were promptly repaid (Barker, pp. 108-110). He also offered many of the crown jewels as security to some of the nobility (Earle, p. 111; Jarman, p. 51, says that the need to pay retainers was so extreme that at least one crown was broken up by a subordinate).
The strength of the English economy probably helped. Henry came at a very fortunate time: The country had largely recovered from the Black Death, but the population had still not reached pre-plague levels, so the productivity of the land was not eroded by the relative overpopulation of the early fourteenth century (Earle, p. 96). And Henry had not engaged in the mass giveaway of crown properties which would bankrupt his son Henry VI.
Plus Henry knew where the power lay. Henry IV had tried to ally with the "men of lesser rank," according to Allmand, p. 62. This was not a very successful strategy in the fifteenth century; Richard III also tried to build a faction of common people plus a few nobles, and it failed spectacularly. Henry V would rely on the great lords such as the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Salisbury.
Having put his country, and his army, on a firm financial footing, he sent envoys to Paris demanding "his" property in France. The best guess (Ashley-Great, p. 156) is that he wanted to regain Normandy and all of Acquitaine. (The English still controlled perhaps a third of the latter, none of the former). He also wanted to marry a French princess so there would be no more nibbling (Barker, p. 71). He asked for even more than that: The hand of Catherine, plus a close approximation of full empire of his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry II, two and a half centuries earlier: Aquitaine, Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, Maine, and Ponthieu (Barker, p. 121). The French, naturally, were not interested -- and probably didn't think that England, which had been weak for half a century, could pose any threat. Jarman, p. 47, reports that the French ambassadors went so far as to declare him not the rightful king of England -- though I doubt that any sane negotiator would try such a ploy.
And Henry's military reputation was not established; despite much campaigning in Wales, he could be called an inexperienced general, since most of his time had been spent on sieges and controlling hostile territory (Earle, pp. 64-65). At the time he took the throne, he had been involved in only one pitched battle (Earle, pp. 58-60), and he was not in command. The battle was at Shrewsbury, in 1403; it was part of the civil war that year between Henry IV and rebels led by the Earl of Northumberland, his son Hotspur, Owen Glendower, and members of the Mortimer faction. Henry IV attacked Hotspur, and won a very close battle, and since that put him between the Welsh and Northumbrian factions, that particular rebellion was over. Henry V was to fight only one more pitched battle in his career -- at Agincourt. Everything else was sieges.
Henry very quickly proved those who doubted him wrong. He reached an agreement with Brittany (Barker, p. 63), resulting in a reduction of the piracy which had distracted the two countries for years (Allmand, p. 69), and also giving him a clear supply line from England to France. He also leashed the Scots -- he had in his custody both the new young king James I and the son of the regent Albany (Barker, p. 73). This meant that, if Albany tried anything, Henry could punish his son, but if the Scots tried to overthrow Albany to bring back James, he had control of James and could sic the younger Albany, who was third in line for the throne behind James and his father, on them. Scotland was unable to do anything except the usual border raids (and Albany the elder frankly seems to have liked it that way). By 1415, Henry had largely managed to negotiate an end even to those; he left the border entirely in the hands of the northerners (Barker, pp. 76-78).
Soon after, he crushed a revolt on behalf of the Mortimers, the proper heirs of Richard II (Barker, pp. 78-81). There was now no threat to him from within the British Isles. In the long term, the main effect of all this was to eliminate Richard of Cambridge, the younger brother of the Duke of York, whose son was Richard, the father of the future Edward IV and Richard III. The significance of the execution was that it made the infant Richard the heir to the York dukedom should his uncle die. And young Richard would in time become the Mortimer heir -- a pedigree which could spell trouble if Henry V's line ever failed.
Allmand, pp. 76-77, thinks Cambridge may have been the ringleader, perhaps because he had been given an earldom but not enough endowed land to sustain it. He also suggests that the trials proceeded illegally -- an interesting perspective on Henry's management of the country.
For a time, Henry V continued to negotiate with France, but prepared for war -- indeed, he told London officials to prepare to invade well before the French had made their final offer (Barker, p. 70). He even induced the church to muster their clergy to see who could fight (Barker, p. 128). Henry probably meant them to suppress heresy -- he was offensively orthodox (he was quite happy burning Lollard "heretics," according to Earle, p. 29 -- ironic for the grandson of John of Gaunt, who had had Lollard tendencies, and actually arrested his own stepmother on a charge of witchcraft, according to Rubin, p. 212). But they could also serve as a sort of national guard in the event of a French invasion.
Henry also seems to have tried to hire the most professional specialists he could -- e.g. he imported gunners from Germany (Barker, p. 132). Although he did ban one other sort of specialist -- he banned prostitutes (Jarmin, pp. 79-80, says that he ordered whores who approached the camp to have their left arms broken). He also tried to ban swearing. In an army!
In 1415 Henry appointed his brother John to have charge of England (it is interesting to note that John was the third brother; the second brother, Thomas of Clarence, was given no power and left out of Henry's will -- Barker, pp. 140-141 -- even though he was then heir to the throne and was brought along on the Agincourt expedition. Barker strongly suspects there was no love lost between the brothers!). Henry told his soldiers to wear the Cross of Saint George as a sort of token of recognition atop their ordinary livery (Barker, p. 131), then set sail for Normandy.
Supposedly he needed 1500 ships to transport his army (Barker, p. 147), though of course they were mostly quite small -- and he probably had two to three horses for every man (Jarman, p. 72, estimates 25,000 horses), calling for much greater carrying capacity. It took them three days to make their landing, but they got ashore unopposed (Barker, p. 157). After a brief period of looting, Henry got the army back under control -- and, from then on, discipline was strict (Barker, p. 163; on p. 240, she reports an incident of a man being hanged for stealing a cheap but theoretically holy object from a church). The soldiers doubtless grumbled, but they probably fought better.
This may have been an indication that Henry V really did want to take control of France. He didn't want to damage a country he regarded as "his." We'll never know.
>>1415: HARFLEUR AND AGINCOURT<<
The first English objective was the port of Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine -- at that time, before its harbor silted up, a very strategic point. (It had been used as a staging point for raids on England; Barker, p. 168, and was used for attacks on English shipping; Allmand, p. 67. It was at the time the most important port in Normandy, according to Allmand, p. 79, and of course could control traffic to Rouen and Paris.) Undermanned until the French managed to sneak in reinforcements (Barker, pp. 172-173), it nonetheless possessed extremely strong defences on both land and sea sides.
Those strong defences nearly led to disaster for the English. The siege was one of the first to really depend on artillery -- but it was still a long, difficult operation, taking most of a month. That was at least ten days longer than Henry expected (Barker, p. 180). During that time, much of the army came down with bloody dysentery (Barker, p. 181). Casualties were extremely heavy -- probably about a third of their numbers (Ashley-Great, p. 156). Among them was one of the king's best friends, the Bishop of Norwich (Barker, pp. 183-184). It is rather frightening to wonder what might have happened had the English been held before the town much longer. It might perhaps have happened -- the town eventually surrendered, but details are rather lacking; Barker, pp. 191-193, thinks that perhaps the town's residents quit fighting, undercutting the still-determined garrison. It appears the garrison reached a deal with Henry, agreeing to give in if the French government had not sent an army by a certain date. And, of course, the government did nothing (Barker, pp. 193-195).
Henry was severe with the garrison, humiliating them and berating them for fighting against their lawful King (Jarman, p. 109). It was not the last time he would take such a high-handed approach. He also reportedly expelled the aged and the crippled, allowing only the healthy and prosperous to stay (Jarman, p. 111), assuming of cource they accepted him as King.
Losses from disease were so severe (Allmand, p. 80, cites a chronicler who claimed 5000 Englishmen were afflicted, though the source blames the disease on eating unripe fruit. Jarman, p. 106, believes over 2000 men were lost, which seems the minimum possible) that Henry decided not to undertake an additional major offensive that year (Barker, p. 197. Allmand, p. 84, argues that Henry had never had a plan beyond taking Harfleur but intended to respond to conditions when the town fell, though Jarman, p. 114, believes he had considered an attack on Rouen or Paris or a drive toward Guyenne).
Most of Henry's advisors apparently thought he should go directly home (Seward, p. 161). Henry wasn't willing to give up quite that easily -- he still wanted to at least wage a _chevauchee_. But he decided on a short one, choosing the shortest route to Calais and safety. Even that was a difficult maneuver to undertake in October (the exact date they left Harfleur is somewhat uncertain, due to inconsistent information in the chronicles. Barker, pp. 214-218, says that every date from October 6 to 9 is possible, but thinks the most likely is October 8. This is also the date given by Keegan, p. 82). And the French had been roused from their torpor by the fall of Harfleur (Barker, p. 231).
The French of course had a decision to make: They could try to retake Harfleur, or attack Henry, or split their forces and do both. The experienced military officials apparently favored the former, but most of the nobility, their pride stung, felt that Henry had to be punished. The decision was to pursue him (Jarman, p. 123).
The French almost managed to cut off the English by blocking the passage of the Somme. The famous ford of Blanchetaque which Edward III had used was blocked off (Barker, p. 220; Jarman, p. 129). Other crossings were either guarded or were unusable because the bridges had been destroyed (Jarman, p. 131). Some of the junior officers argued for going back to Harfleur rather than hunt for a crossing they might not find (Jarman, p. 129), but the King ignored the suggestion. Henry had to go far upstream before he found a crossing point (Allmand, p. 86), while the army grew increasingly tired and sick and short of supplies. Henry was so rushed that he made no attempts at taking seriously defended towns along the way. Even so, it looked for a time as if the French might trap him.
In fact, they *did* trap him (Seward, p. 163). There is some question about whether Henry's forces were mounted (Seward, p. 163, thinks the archers were on foot, but given how fast they moved, it seems likely that Henry's entire army was mounted), but heavy rain slowed them down. Henry had made it across the Somme -- the biggest single obstacle in his way -- but it took him far out of his way, and on October 24, when the English army was only two or three marches from Calais and safety (the field of Agincourt is in what we would now call Belgium, not France -- in fact, it's near the great World War I battlefields of the Somme; Jarman p. 178), the French army arrived (Keegan, p. 82). They stood between Henry and Calais, and even if Henry had had the provisions to make it back to Harfleur (which he didn't), they could have hit him in rear. All the French had to do was win the battle, and Henry V and his pretensions would be one with every other pretender in history.
And the French had a substantial superiority in numbers -- so much so that Barker, p. 268, reports that they sent some soldiers home! Keegan, p. 88, believes that Henry had perhaps 5000 archers and a thousand men-at-arms (knights, squires, and others who wore armor and carried short-range weapons); this is also the figure in Featherstone, p. 145, and Allmand, p. 88. Barker, p. 218, suggests 5000 archers, 900 men-at-arms, and unknown but numerous others such as surgeons, heralds, and chaplains -- though many of them were so sick with dysentery that they had had to cut the seats out of their clothing to reduce the fouling (Barker, p. 276). Rubin, p. 218, implicitly supports the figure of 5000 archers and 900 men at arms.
Numbers for the French are far less certain, with English chroniclers coming up with numbers on the order of 60,000; one managed to suggest 150,000 (Barker, p. 263). French estimates were smaller, but no one offered a figure of fewer than 8000, with most guesses far larger; they went as high as 50,000. Keegan suggests 25,000, most of them men-at-arms, some with horses, some not. Barker, after listing the evidence, seems to prefer the figure of 36,000, based on the contemporary estimate of Jehan Waurin (which is the most detailed account). Rubin, p. 218, suggests the French army was "almost three times larger" -- i.e. probably 15,000-17,000 soldiers. Certainly there were plenty of nobles -- four royal dukes (with a fifth on his way), a dozen counts, and "innumerable lords" (Barker, p. 264). Allmand, p. 88, believes the English were outnumbered three or four to one, giving the French probably on the order of 20,000 soldiers. It also probably had the edge in artillery (Allmand, p. 89, thinks the English had no artillery at all, and this seems logical -- Henry had had artillery at Harfleur, but he was using siege guns, too big to carry in the field).
What they didn't have was a real commander (Barker, p. 251; Seward, p. 165). Charles VI and the dauphin were not present, and there was no real boss appointed in their place. Both the Marshall and Constable of France were present, but they couldn't really control their juniors, especially since many of those men stood higher in the feudal hierarchy (Barker, p. 261; Allmand, p. 90, notes that the Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon, and Alencon -- all of whom had been allied with Henry VI in 1412! -- were young men in favor of fighting as soon as possible).
To top it all off, every high lord wanted to be in on the fight, so most of them ended up in the front line, leaving their troops leaderless (Barker, p. 266).
In accordance with the standards of the time, there was one last parley before the battle. What happened is uncertain. French chroniclers have claimed Henry found the French host daunting, and offered to give back all his gains if allowed to avoid battle (Barker, pp. 273-274; Jarman, p. 150; Seward, p. 163, though this sounds suspiciously like the story of the Black Prince at Poitiers). If Henry made the offer, it is certain that the French, believing in their numbers, refused, or demanded impossible terms (Jarman's version is that they demanded Henry renounce the crown of France), and the battle became certain (Earle, pp. 137-128). The French may even have tried to insult the English at the final parley; one of the commissioners was a man who had been an English prisoner and had broken parole (Barker, p. 273).
Having lost the chance for peace, Henry refused to show any sign of fear, declaring that he would not allow himself to be captured and ransomed (Jarman, p. 156); he would win or he would die in the field (Barker, p. 257). With a leader like that, there was no question of command structure on the English side! (Allmand, p. 90).
Henry is also supposed to have addressed his troops before the battle (Jarman, p. 156). Of course, with a line at least half a mile long, already in formation, the majority could not hear a word he said. Presumably this is just another instance of chroniclers putting their words in his mouth. Similarly, there are a few reports of Saint George (England's patron saint) being seen over the field. This probably says more about the chroniclers than conditions during the battle.
It is interesting to note that Henry defied convention to a significant extent in organizing his forces -- no doubt thereby avoiding the command problems the French experienced. He had enough high nobility that he could have placed an earl in charge of each division, but he chose to entrust the left wing to Lord Camoys (Barker, p. 261). Henry himself commanded the center (though he also fought in line himself; Seward, p. 168, reports that a French knight actually damaged the crown he wore upon his helmet). The right was entrusted to the Duke of York, the senior noble to die in the battle (supposedly of suffocation when he fell over, since he was very heavy; Earle, p. 143; Featherstone, p. 151; Jarman, p. 175, calls him "fat and scheming", though Barker, p. 303, declares this a "Tudor invention," and I suspect this is correct -- the Tudors wanted to discredit anyone associated with the House of York).
Seward, p. 169, reports that the other high casualties were the Earl of Suffolk and half a dozen knights. There were, of course, many wounded, including the King's younger brother the Duke of Gloucester. The wound was said to be "in the hammes," which makes me wonder if this might not have had something to do with his childlessness. Of course, his three older brothers combined to have one child between them, so maybe not.
Although Earle, p. 137, says that the field of Agincourt was "almost perfect for the formality of a medieval battle," Henry had chosen what was, for him just about an ideal position (Jarman, p. 140). (There is a map on p 83 of Keegan , one on p. 147 of Featherstone, and another in Seward, p. 165, a fourth on Jarman, p. 159. These differ substantially -- Seward's map shows a much larger field than Keegan's and has the axis of the field, and hence the French attack, coming from northwest to southeast; Featherstone agrees with this construction. Seward's narrative, interestingly, says that the French were directly north of the English. Keegan, whom I would normally consider more reliable, shows the field pointing from northeast to southwest. Jarman's map is almost straight north to south, but angles slightly northeast-southwest. But all agree on the basic formations, and in all of them, the French are the to the north, the English to the south).
It is said that Henry ordered the army to be very quiet on the night before the battle. It is not clear what his reason was; perhaps he wanted to confuse the French or make them think the English weaker or more demoralized than they were. He seems to have succeeded (Jarman, p. 146).
Henry picked a field that was narrow enough that he could extend his line all the way across it (though wide enough that he was left with only a single line; Barker, p. 260). There was no reserve except a few dozen men guarding the baggage (Barker, p. 271; Earle, p. 139; Featherstone, p. 146), but the field had forest on either side and the towns of Azincourt/Agincourt and Tramecourt beyond the woods. This meant the French could not attack his flanks -- men-at-arms, whether mounted or not, simply weren't mobile enough to go through the woods. The only way the French could attack him was by charging down the field in the face of his arrow fire. And, with the ground so muddy from the recent rain, any attack, whether on foot or on horseback, would proceed very slowly (Barker, p. 259).
The French did not cooperate. Unlike the wars of the previous century, they did not immediately charge the English. Impetuous charges had cost them at Crecy, so they decided not to risk it. After all, to this point the longbow had served mostly at a defensive weapon. If they didn't attack, what could Henry do except try to retreat -- which would give the French the opportunity to attack with the English at a disadvantage. As a result, both sides spent several hours adjusting their lines and preparing (Barker, p. 254).
Henry outsmarted the French. After waiting long enough to be sure they would not advance (Keegan, p. 89), he ordered his army to move forward (Allmand, p. 91, estimates they moved forward 700 yards) so that they were just barely within longbow range of the French, and had his archers start firing (Earle, p. 141). They probably did not injure many knights at that range, but they irritated them and hurt their horses (Keegan, p. 94). The French should perhaps have tried a cavalry charge during Henry's advance (Barker, p. 279), but they didn't, and so blew perhaps their last chance to win the battle. No doubt the disorganization of their large force, and the fact that all the commanders had come to the front, contributed to the tactical ineptitude (Barker, p. 279).
(There was a little luck for the English, we should note: Although Agincourt was fought on a rather cold day, it was not raining, as it had been earlier in the campaign; the archers could string their bows. What would have happened had the French caught the English in a rainstorm would have been altogether another matter -- though they might have been unable to *reach* the English in the mud.)
The English archers each carried a stake, which they set in front of them to slow attacking horses. Featherstone, p. 148, says that this was a new technique invented for the Agincourt war (though this seems a bit odd, since even the French were mostly fighting dismounted by this time). It has usually been assumed that they set up a line of stakes all across the front, but Keegan, pp. 91-92, notes that this fence would have been so thick (he estimates the stakes would have been five inches apart) that the English themselves could not maneuver around the line. He suggests that they were in a checkerboard, one stake in front of each archer whether in the front rank or farther back. This would have interfered with the movement of horsemen but not the dismounted archers. This makes sense but cannot be proved.
It should be remembered that the English knights by this time always fought dismounted. Sure, they had horses, and they still practiced with the lance, at least sometimes (even half a century later, tournaments and jousting were popular), but they fought their actual battles on foot. Thus, Agincourt was essentially a contest of mounted French knights against archers and armored footmen. It is true that most of the French also fought dismounted -- but the mounted men often pushed the others forward. The French forces were so jammed together that it actually slowed their advance and reduced their effectiveness -- problems the mud made even worse (Allmand, pp. 92-93).
At least one French charge, probably the first, did reach the English line (Earle, p. 141). But it was uncoordinated and under-strength (Barker, p. 280), and the mud again cost the French: Their men-at-arms were almost immobile in their armor, but the English bowmen could move about and come to the aid of their armored comrades (Seward, p. 167). It is likely that relatively few of the dismounted Frenchmen died from arrows (which rarely penetrated at long range); they died of exhaustion or drowning in mud or falling and being unable to rise and being killed while helpless. The only way they could have avoided this was by charging on horseback -- but the longbows had no trouble killing the horses.
The bottom line was a complete disaster for the French: Nearly their only success was that some robbers had managed to lift much of Henry's personal possessions from the baggage (Barker, p. 295), but that was no help. The English had about 300 losses (Seward, p. 169); Seward guesses French casualties at 10,000. This may be high, but we have little to go on; we can't even count graves (the bodies mostly went in mass graves, and these have not been firmly identified; Barker, p. 317). Rubin, p. 218, says the English lost 500, the French 7000, with more losses from suffocation as the soldiers were buried in mud than from arrow fire.
All this from a battle that lasted only about three hours (Jarman, p. 175).
Our information on the French nobility is more definite: Casualties were three dukes, seven counts, and 120 barons. (In an irony that would become sharper over the next decade, the list included the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Nevers, brothers of the Duke of Burgundy, even though there was no Burgundian contingent in the army; Barker, p. 308.) The French would never again dare fight Henry V in an open battle (Earle, p. 148).
Many of the French dead were never identified, leaving a large number of widows who never knew their husbands' fates (Barker, pp. 312-313).
The local gentry, according to Barker, p. 306, was particularly hard-hit; Agincourt village itself lost Renaud, sire d'Azincourt, and the other nearby village, Tramecourt, lost Jean and Renaud de Tramecourt. This loss of so many locals made further resistance to Henry just about impossible at this time, and (according to Barker, p. 364) made the 1417-1419 conquest of Normandy much easier.
So deeply did the battle embed itself into English consciousness that to be "with King Harry on St. Crispin's day" was still a metaphor for being in the thick of battle half a millennium later. (Of course, the fact that this similar to a Shakespeare quote probably helped.)
The English committed one unquestioned atrocity, though Barker, p. 289, considers it "the only [action] possible" and Jarman, p. 174, justifies it as "a case of medieval expediency." Even after the battle, the French outnumbered the English, and when Henry thought they were about to attack him again, he ordered his prisoners killed; he felt he needed their guards in the line (Seward, p. 168; Earle, p. 142; Keegan, pp. 108-111, discusses the matter but argues at the end that it was not carried out on a large scale and suggests that Henry was simply trying to scare the prisoners to keep them out of mischief; Allmand, p. 95, also thinks the massacre exaggerated). This was definitely against the rules at the time, and many troops refused to do it (though probably out of desire for ransoms rather than higher motives).
One report, unconfirmed, is that Henry forced the most noble of his captives to wait on him at his meal that night (Barker, p. 321; Jarman, p. 178). It's hard to know what to make of this. It obviously would make the captives resent him,perhaps making them less likely to acknowledge him -- but it would also emphasize their vassal status. And it certainly fits Henry's extreme view of his own importance. Barker, p. 322, nonetheless thinks the story untrue.
Agincourt is almost always held up as the high point of Henry's campaigns; the Agincourt Carol, for instance, was composed about it. But, as Seward, p. 170, points out, it was really just an incident in another _chevauchee_. Perroy (admittedly prejudiced on this point) dismisses it in a couple of sentences on page 239, and declares that "the campaign of Agincourt meant nothing decisive." This is exaggerated -- if nothing else, it meant that Parliament voted Henry a huge subsidy to finance future campaigns (Barker, p. 341), which was a big deal indeed. Also, since the Constable of France had been killed, a new Constable was needed -- and the man appointed was Bernard d'Armagnac (Allmand, p. 102), making the conflict between Burgundians and Armagnacs more bitter.
Still, it is true that, despite Agincourt, Henry so far had made no real progress on conquering France (apart from Harfleur). The next two years were relatively quiet, though the French would try and fail to retake Harfleur (Allmand, pp. 102-103). In 1416-1417, Henry's navy gained naval superiority in the channel (Seward, p. 171); control of Harfleur definitely helped with this (Allmand, p. 99. Allmand, pp. 106-107, calls this battle "the most telling" naval conflict of the Hundred Years' War, but most sources brush it off in a few words). The papal schism healed. Henry managed to gain theoretical recognition as King of France (though no military help) from the Emperor (Perroy, p. 240; Allmand, pp. 104-105 notes that Sigismund made a long and very expensive visit) But Henry made no major moves until 1417.
>>THE SECOND INVASION AND TROYES: HENRY THE HEIR OF FRANCE<<
The political situation in this period was very fluid. Originally, Henry seems to have had no deal with Burgundy. He invaded and fought at Agincourt on his own -- though there were few Burgundians in the defeated French army. But the Burgundians,having seen their enemies slaughtered, occupied Paris and killed every Armagnac they could find (Guerard, p. 106). Eventually they made peace gestures to the Armagnacs -- and then, in 1419, the Armagnacs assassinated John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy (Allmand, p. 135; Earle, p. 172; Seward, p. 180). For one act of petty revenge, they opened France to a joint English/Burgundian conquest. It came to be said that the English entered France through the hole in John's skull (Butler, p. xiii; Earle, p. 177).
Henry by then was invading Normandy. His second campaign began in 1417 (Seward, p. 171). Allmand, p. 113, thinks the forces involved were slightly smaller than in the Agincourt campaign, but in practice it was probably a stronger force because it didn't suffer as badly from disease. Their first stop was Caen, Normandy's second city. (Allmand, p. 116, hints that Henry might have been trying to set up a separate Norman administration, since Rouen was too strong to capture at this time, and Caen was easier to support from the sea.) Caen had been heavily fortified since Edward III had attacked it (Earle, p. 157), but apparently the walls were not designed to resist artillery (Earle, p. 158). Henry took the town by assault on September 4, and stayed in Normandy over the winter, capturing Bayeux, Argentan, Alencon, Falais, Cherbourg, and other towns (Allmand, p. 120; Seward, p. 173).
By 1418, Henry was besieging Rouen, which was the hardest operation he had attempted so far; the citizens had gathered much food and also destroyed anything the Englisn could use outside the walls (Allmand, p. 123). It was a brutal siege -- Henry, being the sort of man he was, when the garrison expelled useless mouths, would not let them pass through his lines, but left them outside the walls of the city to starve (Allmand, pp. 124-125, who declared that he had not put them there; this by contrast to Edward III, who had allowed the refugees expelled from Calais during the siege of that town go free; Sedgwick, p. 63). He also staged a mock battle to raise the hopes of the besieged, and perhaps lure them out of the walls (Allmand, p. 124). The city surrendered in early 1419 (Seward, pp. 175-177). That gave him control of effectively all of Normandy.
Unfortunately for him, he could not really colonize it, as he had hoped to; while England was prosperous due to the Black Death, it no longer had surplus population eager to leave home (Seward, p. 178). Henry supplied such colonists as he could, but the Normans remained mostly French -- even the government, although organized as a separate province entirely independently of the old French system (Perroy, p. 249), consisted mostly of Normans, with only a few thousand English troops and a few dozen English officials.
The war was affecting England significantly by this time; it appears no troops were sent to Henry in 1419 (Allmand, p. 130). Still, with the French unwilling to fight, Henry had no trouble conquering more and more territory: Every time he started a siege, he had a local superiority in numbers, and the garrison never had help from outside. (Henry may not have realized that they were afraid of him, but he certainly knew that Armagnacs and Burgundians were so bitter against each other than they would never be able to turn against him; Earle, p. 150.)
It was in 1419 that negotiations started again. Henry apparently saw his future wife Katherine for the first time in that year. At this stage, it appears that Henry was demanding, at minimum, a marriage to Katherine, money, and Normany and a large Acquitaine in full sovreignty (Allmand, pp. 131-132). These conditions remained unacceptable to the French. So Henry went back to trying to take the whole country. By the end of the year, his raiders were appearing outside Paris and the French court had retreated to Troyes (Allmand, p. 134).
Then came the murder of Burgundy mentioned above. Suddenly, the dauphin was discredited, and there was no chance of peace between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions. Allmand, pp. 136-137, thinks that this is the point at which Henry decided unequivocally that he would try to become King of France.
Guerard, p. 108, points out that there was no really inherent reason why the crowns of England and France could not be united. The monarchs had intermarried many times. It was only in the last few decades that the English kings had ceased to speak French as their native language (though, as Perroy comments with a rather French disdain on p. 60, it was "a peculiarly bastard dialect of that language, Anglo-Norman, full of English words and queer twists"); they might easily have gone back to speaking French. Dual monarchies had managed in the past to combine into single nations, though it would be more common in the future (think Great Britain, made up of England and Scotland, or Spain, made up of Castile and Aragon). England itself had incorporated Wales as recently as the time of Henry V's great-great-great-grandfather Edward I, and England itself been built up from smaller nations in the century and a half before the Norman Conquest.
To be sure, Perroy, p. 248, declares that "the 'dual monarchy' was doomed to failure." But Perroy -- who, after all, wrote during the German occupation of France -- has as his one fault an extreme aversion to the idea of enemies on French soil. The fact was, the French didn't have much resistance left, and would find it hard to develop any as long as the Armagnacs and Burgundians remains more hostile to each other than they were to the English.
Certainly the Armagnac court was powerless. The mad king Charles VI had lost several sons, but there was still one left, the future Charles VII. It might, however, be possible to have him declared illegitimate. (Given the behavior of his mother Isabeau of Bavaria, who went along with the story, it might even be true; certainly it was believable, because she had probably had the Duke of Orleans at least into her bed, and maybe others.) That meant that one of the daughters of Charles VI was arguably the heir (so much for the Salic Law). The eldest daughter had already been married to Richard II, but she was now dead. Some of her younger sisters were also married, but the youngest, Katherine, was still available (Perroy, p. 243; Allmand, p. 68, notes that Henry had been negotiating for her hand as early as the beginning of his reign, though balancing that off by discussing a Burgundian wife as well.).
By 1420, the French government was forced to negotiate. And, in the negotiations, Henry gained more than he had probably ever dreamed possible: He became heir to the Kingdom of France (Seward, p. 182). He would marry Katherine, the youngest daughter of Charles VI; the Dauphin was disowned and declared a bastard by his own mother (according to Earle, pp. 191-193, she needed some persuading -- apparently she never actually declared her son illegitimate, and certainly never said who was the father -- but eventually agreed to his abandonment when it was clear she had no other choice, and as a result the Dauphin almost decided to give up his throne).
It was agreed that Henry would follow Charles VI on the throne (Earle, p. 191, thinks that this clause was inserted so that the Duke of Burgundy, who of course was deeply involved in the negotiations, would not be guilty of deposing his own king). Henry would have to conquer the rest of France, but at the rate things were going, it seemed perfectly possible; after all, most of the north was in his hands, and the fighting there was almost over. Burgundy was on his side. Paris would take *anything* in preference to a return of the Armagnacs (Earle, p. 190). And Henry was already acting as regent (Perroy, p. 243). The English king looked unstoppable.
Formally, it was not a union of the two nations of France and England; it was simply a Union of the Crowns (Allmand, p. 149), such as happened when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The French would keep their national identity. (I would love to know what the fallback plan was should Henry have died without heirs. Allmand, p. 150, says that Henry's English heirs were supposed to be heirs of France also, but they weren't married to French princesses!)
The whole agreement, which took eight months to negotiate (Butler, p. xiii), was known as the Treaty of Troyes. Henry ratified the treaty at Troyes on May 20-21, 1420 (Earle, pp. 193-194; Butler, p. xiv), though it was not until September 1 that he formally entered Paris, along with Charles VI (who by now was barely able to ride a horse) and Duke Philip of Burgundy (Seward, p. 183; Earle, p. 196; Butler, p. xv).
The Troyes agreement is usually called a "Treaty," which is the same term as is used for Bretigny. But as Allmand notes on p. 145, it was really quite different. Troyes was a victor's preace, negotiated less by the French government than by the Burgundians, and the meeting at Troyes was not a negotiation but simply a ratification. (Some Frenchmen would in fact claim that it was improperly agreed to; Allmand, p. 149. But all the forms were followed; technically, it was the French, not the English, who violated the treaty.)
It is interesting to note that Troyes gave France a written constitution for the first time (Butler, p. 2). Naturally it was thrown out when the Lancastrian dynasty was expelled. Perroy, p. 247, declares that it contained flaws of "both form and substance," which is doubtless true (the French at this time were much better lawyers than the English, as the Treaty of Bretigny had shown) -- but it was a deal between conquered and conqueror; in practical terms, it was an agreement by which Henry would govern France; it might well have worked had he survived.
Troyes was a substantial accomplishment, because potentially Henry would actually merge the two countries. Edward III had probably not contemplated that (Perroy, p. 209, thinks Edward would have given France to one of his younger sons after his death, re-separating the crowns, though this strikes me as highly unlikely. Earle, p. 190, declares that Henry was specifically after a "personal union of the two crowns").
On the other hand, Allmand, p. 441, concludes that Troyes was a mistake on Henry's part. He bit off more than England could chew -- and as a result, England eventually lost not just the throne of France but even the English territories in Guyenne. Allmand admits that any settlement would have eventually been challenged, but thinks that Henry would have been more realistic to take only Normandy and an enlarged Guyenne -- in other words, the territories he initially demanded. In other words, success corrupted him.
It will tell you what sort of person Henry was that, only two days after his marriage, he rode back to war (Earle, p. 194; Butler, p. xiv). (I have to insert a side note here, which is rather curious. Henry, as we see, quickly left his wife. Later, he would take no part in her English coronation; Allmand, p. 157. Nor would she be present when he died; Allmand, p. 175. Yet she quickly became pregnant. After Henry's death, she would take Owen Tudor as a secret lover -- possibly a secret husband as well, but this was never proved. Given the seeming sterility of Henry's three brothers, is it possible that she cuckolded her husband? I have never seen this discussed elsewhere; here is yet another instance where DNA testing would be interesting.)
Ironically, the English suffered the first real bad news of Henry's career soon after, when his brother Thomas of Clarence, the heir to the throne, was killed in an impetuous and useless skirmish at Bauge in 1421 (Seward, pp. 185-186; Butler, p. xv. It's easy to understand why he was doing it, though -- Earle, p. 165, notes how Henry during the Normandy campaign "subcontracted" conquest to his lords, granting them French land if they could conquer it. Allmand, p. 159, also notes that Clarence was upset because "he had not yet won honor in battle"; he had missed Agincourt due to illness). Bauge, apart from costing some hard-to-replace troops, did little to change the strategic situation -- but it boosted the morale of the French, meaning that Henry's grip on the country was much weakened; the local lords who had submitted to him started to change their minds. Henry had to hurry back to France to redress the situation (Earle, p. 200-204; Perroy, p. 268).
Later in that year, at Windsor, Queen Katherine bore the child who was to be sole heir to the thrones of France and England, the future Henry VI (Seward, p. 187). It was a significant boost to English morale (Allmand, p. 167), but father and son would never know each other. French towns continued to hold out for the Dauphin, and Henry V was growing increasingly cruel in his methods -- e.g. he hanged the entire garrison of Rougemont (Seward, p. 186). Toward the end of the year, he began the siege of the well-fortified town of Meaux.
It took almost half a year, and once again much of the English army was afflicted by disease. Among them King Henry himself. By the summer of 1422, he could no longer ride a horse and had to be carried on a litter (Earle, p. 212). Still, it looked as if the Dauphinists were on the brink of defeat and France and England on the verge of union. Unfortunately for the world, which was doomed to see another three and a half centuries of conflict between Britain and France, several things went wrong.
For starters, Henry V died.
>>THE DEATH OF HENRY V AND THE REGENCY OF BEDFORD<<
It is likely the cause of death was the dysentary Henry contracted at the siege of Meaux (Butler, p. xvi, and Jarman, p. 187, specifically mentions amoebic dysentary, although Allmand, p. 173, says that the precise cause of death cannot be determined), though he managed to take the town (Seward, p. 188). By the time he made it back to Paris, it was clear that he would not survive. He became the first English king since Richard I in 1199 to die outside England, meaning that he could not give final directions to his English council (Allmand, p. 173). And he had not lived long enough to succeed to the throne of France; Charles VI was still alive (though he would not live much longer, dying two months later after a reign of 42 years; Barker, p. xvii).
Henry from his deathbed made arrangements for the government of England and France, appointing his irresponsible youngest brother Humphrey of Gloucester to head a conciliar English government (Perroy, p. 268) and the more reliable John of Bedford to be regent of France (though Bedford was supposed to offer to the job of the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundy turned it down; Butler, p. xvi; Perroy, pp. 269-270). Henry then died, at the age of 35, on August 31, 1422 (Earle, p. 213). His heir, who was now Henry VI of England, was nine months old.
I frankly suspect that the death of Henry was good. He was getting power-mad, and vengeful. At the siege of Meaux, e.g., he demanded -- and got -- the execution of a French trumpeter who had razzed him (Allmand, p. 168). This was not the action of a chivalrous king of France; it was the act of a petty tyrant. It is frightening to think what he might have been like in another twenty years. But it left the question of whether his achievements could stand in other hands.
Had Henry conquered France? No. He had taken over the government, but only the regions north of the Loire acknowledged him, and not all of those. And only the Burgundian alliance made it all possible. Perroy, p. 249, considers that France was actually divided into three parts at this time: Lancastrian France, Anglo-Burgundian France, and Dauphinist France -- and Lancastrian France, the only area from which the English could really gather revenue, was very small (Perroy, p. 253); it really consisted of little more than Normandy.
As Wolffe says on p. 26, "Henry V, in claiming the French crown and then dying, undefeated and unspotted by failure, with the necessary conquest of France half achieved, left behind him a glorious legend, but a task impossible to fulfill."
Perroy, p. 267, suggests that, at this time, the English should have gone all-out to try to catch the Dauphin, even though it would have meant raiding deep into unconquered territory and risking being trapped. Clearly it would have ended the war one way or another. Henry V might have managed it. Bedford, with half a country to hold together without the prestige of kingship, didn't risk it; he tried to slowly bring more and more territory under his control.
Still, the English had control of Paris through the Burgundians (and even, to a large extent, the support of the Parisians, who wanted an end to civil war above all else; Perroy, p. 247. The English garrison was only about a hundred men, according to Butler, p. 27 -- far too few even to stop a riot if on had started). The English had direct control of Normandy, and portions of Guyenne; and Henry VI could at least claim to be a descendant of the beloved French monarch Saint Louis on both his father's and mother's side (something English propaganda made much of; Rubin, p. 225); given enough additional troops and money, Bedford might be able to complete the conquest of France. The death of Henry did not immediately end the war; indeed, for a short time, the English continued to win. It was almost all due to Bedford, the Regent of France. "It was soon clear to all that there was no better person to carry on the task left by the late King Henry. Lacking his brother's harshness (and his religious fanaticism), John of Bedford possessed to the full King Henry's flair for diplomacy and his strong sense of justice. To these he added a sincere desire to establish enlightened government in France" (Butler, p. 5).
In 1423, Bedford managed to forge an agreement between England, Burgundy, and Brittany (Seward, p. 196). To cement this, he married Anne, the favorite sister of the Duke of Burgundy (Butler, pp. 19-20), though she is said to have been rather ugly. (They apparently became very fond of each other even so, though the marriage was childless; Burgundy did not desert the alliance until she died.) If the agreement had been maintained, it would almost certainly have been the end of France. Also in 1423, the brilliant Earl of Salisbury won a medium-sized battle at Cravant (Butler, pp. 24-25; Seward, pp. 196-198), which prevented a French counter-offensive and showed that English tactics could be used by someone other than the dead King.
The French made one last attempt at an offensive in 1424. A large number of Scots had come to join the French armies (Butler, p. 33), and they wanted to fight, and were apparently causing trouble while they waited to do so (Perroy, p. 263). Bedford assembled what was surely the largest army he had ever led. In the confrontation which followed, the Scots wanted to fight, the French did not (Butler, p. 35). The Scots would have been well advised to listen.
Bedford and Salisbury met the French at Verneuil. As usual, the English were outnumbered (two to one, according to Butler, p. 39; on p. 40 he estimates English numbers at eight or nine thousand, French numbers at fifteen to seventeen thousand). It was a much closer thing that Agincourt -- the French managed to get into Bedford's baggage train, and also managed to attack part of his army before the archers had managed to fully dig in their defensive stakes (Butler, p. 38). Much of the long battle consisted of direct battle between the men-at-arms on each side. Yet, somehow, the English drove off the French wing, and then turned to encircle the Scots, who had earlier rejected quarter and were given none (Butler, p. 39). Although a very near-run thing, it ended with a complete victory for the English. This eliminated the last real army of the Dauphin (Seward, pp. 198-201; Perroy, p. 272) and left him too poor to field another (Butler, p. 40). It also caused tension between the French and the Scots; they would not actually fight together for many years after that (Seward, p. 202).
It was the last great English victory of the war.
Interestingly, the newest book I've seen on the subject, Butler's, argues on pp. 41-42 that the English might have won the war if, in 1424 after Verneuil, they had gone straight after the French court-in-exile at Bourges. This is similar to Perroy's suggestion that they should have gone after Charles VII in 1420. It was their last real chance for victory -- the Dauphin might well have been ready to give in.
The English didn't try. Probably they didn't realize how close the Dauphin was to defeat, and they recalled what had happened after Clarence had been killed. A defeat when pursuing the Dauphin would probably have meant the end of Lancastrian France. Better to continue the slow round of sieges and incremental gains. The problem was, of course, that it gave the French time to rebuild. The failure to follow up Verneuil did not automatically mean that the English would be defeated, but it did mean that the long, costly occupation had to continue -- and the money had to come from somewhere.
Which in turn meant that Verneuil was a hollow victory. France had been devastated (Seward, p. 194, comments that "Lancastrian France eventually became a wilderness laid waste by its garrisons, by deserters, by [robbers], and by Dauphinist raiders"), and England was broke (Perroy, p. 255). There was so little silver in Lancastrian France that it was almost impossible even to strike coins (Butler, pp. 40-41). Bedford would never get another chance for a knockout blow -- he couldn't afford to raise a big enough army. Normandy, which had to provide most of the money for England's war, was not up to the task -- Perroy, p. 257, notes that Bedford summoned the Norman Estates more than twenty times in thirteen years, but there was only so much that could be collected. Perroy, p. 262, estimates the revenue available in Dauphinist France to have been five times that which could be raised in Normandy.
Paris in particular was troublesome. The citizens were not rebellious, exactly, since they didn't want the Armagnacs back, but their enthusiasm was limited. Bedford used circus stunts to try to keep the citizens of Paris happy (Butler, p. 51, tells of a contest in which four blind men were engaged to try to kill a pig using hammers), but it couldn't hide the high taxes. Worse, the Parisians were often starving; bad harvests and brigands made it very hard to acquire food (cf. e.g. Butler, pp. 65-68,142-143. Almost every year of his history brings similar reports).
And it was proving difficult to keep the Duke of Burgundy, on whom everything depended, happy. In 1424, Humphrey of Gloucester married the Countess of Hainault, who had first been dubiously married to the Duke of Brabant (Wolffe, pp, 38-39) and then even more dubiously divorced (knowing she couldn't get a divorce from the regular pope, she had gone to an anti-Pope; Perroy, pp. 270-271). Gloucester, who now claimed her lands, led a private expedition into the low countries (Barker, p. 19; Butler, p. 45; Seward, p. 202), which were in the Burgundian sphere of influence. By doing so, he angered a lot of people and distracted the English war effort; Bedford had to spend the period from 1425 to 1427 in England trying to calm things down and raise money and troops (Butler, p. 55). Bedford managed to pick up a little money, but few troops, and meanwhile, the war languished.
(To top it all off, the expedition was a failure and the Countess of Hainault walked out on Gloucester; Perroy, p. 271; Butler, p. 47, points out that Gloucester's disaster was good news for Bedford, since it meant he didn't have to directly intervene militarily.)
The French, meanwhile, had finally found a decent general in Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, who made his name beginning in 1427. More would be heard from him later.
>>ORLEANS<<
Simple economics meant that the war would soon slow down. The question was whether the English could win before the collapse. They would find out at Orleans.
Butler, p. 4, calls Orleans the "real center" of Dauphinist France, though the actual government was carried on elsewhere. If Orleans it fell, it might well cripple the Dauphinists. The Earl of Salisbury, the best English general, therefore pressed hard to attack the city. Bedford finally gave in, even though he had wanted to campaign in Anjou (Butler, p. 78).
It wasn't going to be easy for the English, who had only a small army. Orleans was too large for the besiegers to encircle, and too strong to take by assault (Seward, pp. 209-210). Myers, p. 124, calls it "a travesty of a siege." Still, Salisbury was a genius, who if he could not invest the town was at least cutting off the roads and river passages which led to it (Butler, pp. 78-81). Many think he might have taken the city had he lived. But some sort of artillery, fired "at a venture" (as 1 Kings would put it), injured him fatally (Myers, p. 275; Butler, p. 81, says it was fired by the child!); Salisbury died October 27, 1428, and was replaced by the Earl of Suffolk (so Butler, p. 82, and Seward; Wilkinson, p. 261, says it was Lord Talbot; but Talbot was merely the most famous of the junior officers there and, if we are to believe Butler, p. 82, the one who caused the most fear among the defenders). Suffolk simply sat down to grind out the fight.
(If you want a picture of what Suffolk was like, consider this: When the French attacked Suffolk's army at Jargeau, and Suffolk was captured, he thought it so unbecoming to be captured by a mere squire that he insisted upon knighting him on the spot, even though he was an enemy; Butler, p. 98.)
One attempt to break the siege was defeated by Sir John Fastolfe at the so-called "Battle of the Herrings" (so-called because French artillery damaged the casks containing English Lenten provisions; Featherstone, p, 162 calls it the "Battle of Rouvray," but no one else uses that title), but that just meant the siege dragged on (Butler, pp. 86-87).
Guerard calls Orleans the Verdun, or the Stalingrad, of the Hundred Years War (p. 109). And it was at Orleans that Jean Darc appeared.
The lack of troops meant that the English perimeter around the city was insufficiently manned (Perroy, p. 283); it might be better to call it a blockade. But even that was loose; food could still get in at times -- especially by river, since Suffolk had not done anything to block off the Loire (Butler, p. 94). Plus Suffolk had for a time pulled back his outposts in the fall, allowing the defenders to lay in supplies and improve their defences (Butler, p. 82). And Bedford and Burgundy had a disagreement at this time, resulting in Burgundy pulling his troops out of the siege and from the supply routes leading to it (Butler, pp. 88-89). As a result, those inside the walls were not only more numerous but often in better health than those outside. Perroy, p. 275, thinks the city still would have fallen eventually, but the English historians mostly disagree. The porous encirclement also lead Jean enter the city on April 30, 1429 (Seward, p. 212). And Bedford had no hope of bringing in reinforcements, due to lack of money -- he was already being forced to cut his officials' pay (Butler, p. 91), a problem made worse by significant English casualties during an Armagnac raid toward Paris.
Jean Darc, or Joan of Ark, will always be controversial -- in part because we know so little about her. A peasant girl from Domremy, we don't even know the year she was born; Wilkinson, p. 261, says "probably in 1412." Butler, p. 96, mentions the sort-of-traditional date of January 4, 1412, but admits uncertainty. Perroy, p. 282, says her career began when she was between 16 and 20, which would allow birth dates between 1409 and 1413. Seward, p. 213, says her visions began when she was about 17, before her public career, implying a birth date of perhaps 1411. Keen, p. 257, seems to place her first visions much earlier, "just after the treaty of Troyes," which would hint that the hormonal changed caused by menarche might have caused them.
Her first communication to the English was a letter to Bedford, dated March 22, 1429, calling on the English to withdraw from France or suffer divine punishment (Butler, p. 93).
A modern presented with a list of her behaviors would almost certainly describe her as a schizophrenic; even Perroy, whose attitude on this is not very rational, admits on p. 282 that "In our skeptical days people would be inclined to regard Joan as mad, mentally deficient, visionary, or even bogus. Her contemporaries simply wondered whether she was sent by God or the devil." Butler, while seeming to have a lot of respect for her, on p. 93 calls her letter "highly illiterate." In due time, the English would burn her as a heretic; the French would revere her as a saint. The English were surely wrong; she was an orthodox Catholic. I'm not convinced the French are right, either; she was a nut case. But she had the right message for France. As Guerard comments on p. 109, "For posterity she imparted a mystic prestige to the cause of that sorry personage Charles VII."
And, after she arrived, the English siege of Orleans -- managed by relatively weak officers and conducted by insufficient forces -- failed. It wasn't exactly that Jean Darc had worked magic -- even Guerard, with a Frenchman's inflated opinion of her, admits that "the material and moral aid brought by Joan was sufficient to turn the tide" (p. 111). Wilkinson, p. 260, says that moderns have "magnified... [her] contemporary significance." Perroy, p. 283, concedes, "She knew nothing of the art of war, and thought that abstaining from oaths and brothels was enough to ensure victory for the soldiers." (The claim that she died a virgin seems to have been true; Butler, p. 138.) At least one of her suggestions, if carried out, might have led to the fall of Orleans, since it would have given the English an easy chance to capture a major supply convoy (Butler, p. 94). It was captains, such as Dunois, who led the actual fighting, often refusing to accept her suggestions.
Despite Jean's manifest failings, somehow, her presence was sufficient. A raid on the English fortifications captured a key strong point, and the English were no longer in position to guard all the entrances to the city (Butler, pp. 95-96). They tried to get the French to come out and fight. The French refused, and the English were out of ideas.
On May 8, 1429, the English gave up the siege of Orleans (Seward, pp. 216-219). Jean went on to have Charles VII formally crowned at Rheims, at last giving France a legitimist King. The English responded by finally crowning the seven-year-old Henry VI in England (Butler, p. 119), though it was not until 1431 that they sent him across the channel to be crowned King of France (Butler, p. 148, who notes on p. 149 that this was the first time he ever met his maternal grandmother).
Unfortunately, Rheims -- the place where French Kings were crowned -- was in Dauphinist hands. Henry VI was crowned King of France in Paris -- which was not considered an official coronation; Perroy, p. 287. (Perroy, p. 285, gives the crowning of Charles VII a mystic significance which it clearly did not have, but it definitely improved the anti-English position.)
o make matters worse, Henry's coronation was done in English style, apparently by Cardinal Beaufort rather than a French prelate (Butler, p. 150). The French naturally considered this a significant insult. Plus the whole banquet and celebration was completely mishandled, losing a chance to make the Parisians like their new monarch; he came off as ungenerous and inept (Butler, pp. 150-153). Admittedly the Lancastrian government was broke -- but, at this stage, they really needed to invest in keeping Paris happy, and they didn't.
The French found much encouragement in the fact that the Dauphin was now, finally, King, and when they caught up with Lord Talbot and Sir John Fastolfe at Patay, Jean pushed her soldiers into a quick attack, which proved a significant success; Talbot and several others were captured, though Fastolfe managed to keep a portion of the English army intact (Butler, pp. 103-104). It didn't change the fact that the French had finally won a victory in the field.
In one sense, Orleans, and Patay, and even the crowning of Charles VII was not decisive. The English expansion had been stopped, but they still controlled almost everything they had before, including Paris.
Jean wanted to change that; her next goal was Paris (Butler, p. 113). She failed in an assault (Seward, p. 221; Perroy, p. 285), and a crossbowman put a bolt in her thigh (Butler, p. 114). She lived, but her reputation for invincibility was broken -- she had apparently declared that the attackers would enter Paris that day, and of course they didn't (Butler, p. 115). She had actually weakened Lancastrian hold on the metropolis (the English turned it over to the Burgundians, and the suburbs became even more subject to raiders; Butler, pp. 119-120), but that wasn't even close to capturing the city.
The Burgundians by now were negotiating with the Dauphinists. But Charles VII was not yet willing to make sufficient concessions, and the negotiations broke down (Butler, p. 121).
Somewhat later, Jean was captured by the Burgundians (Perroy, p. 286; Seward, p. 219; Butler, p. 130, says she was wearing a "gorgeous gold and scarlet surcoat" when she was hauled from her horse, implying that she wasn't exactly dressing in poverty as was generally expected of prophets). She was turned over to the English (Perroy, p. 287, says she was sold by John of Luxembourg for 10,000 livres; Butler, p. 133, notes that the need to have her in custody was so urgent that the government actually had to get English gold for it).
Once in English hands, she was accused of heresy. The English did not invent these charges; apparently the University of Paris -- which was entirely French -- was the first to bring charges against her. Butler, pp. 131-132, thinks it was because they were "deeply suspicious of the female sex" and thought her behavior unnatural -- plus it was an era of visionaries, and far too many of those visionaries were women (Saunders, pp. 140-141, lists several examples, though a lot of these, like Catherine of Siena, sound to me more like manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder than anything else. Some probably did see visions, though; on the other side of the English Channel, and without the crazy rituals, think of Julian of Norwich). In the end, though, it appears Jean was called a witch less because she heard voices than because she cut her hair in a man's style and dressed like a man (cf. Perroy, p. 282; Rubin, p. 228) and rode astride a horse (cf. Butler, p. 138). Had she not engaged in those allegedly-masculine behaviors, she might simply have been called a nut.
The English subjected her to the sort of abuse inflicted on all suspected heretics (Seward, p. 219; Perroy, p. 288, notes that "[t]he cruelty of the procedure shocks our conscience as modern men. But it was simply that of the Inquisition, which was daily applied, without offending anyone, to any number of poor wretches..."). And she was only one uneducated girl trying to defend herself against legions of canon lawyers. The trial is popularly treated as a farce, but even Perroy, p. 288, admits that the judges had not "sold their consciences"; they were simply prelates who accepted the English cause. Naturally the court convicted her.
The English may not have been too happy, though -- the court did not condemn her to death out of hand. She confessed, and was sentenced to life imprisonment (Perroy, p. 289). But Jean, certainly foolish and very probably mentally disturbed, could not hold to the terms she had agreed to. Only a week after her confession, she was declared to have relapsed. Two days later, on May 30, 1431, she was shown to the crowd in Rouen, still dressed in men's clothing (Butler, p. 143, though it is not clear whether that was her idea or her captors'). After the display and some preaching, she was burned at the stake in Rouen, perhaps not yet twenty years old.
(A French-dominated re-trial in 1456 would overturn her conviction. Again Perroy, p. 280, is forced to admit that this tribunal "tried to prove too much"; already legend was displacing fact. It will tell you something about contemporary politics that her visions were considered by the English as evidence of heresy, by the French as evidence of inspiration, rather either regarding them as being evidence of mental disturbance. And don't even get me started on the fact that she was canonized centuries later -- what was canonized was not Jean Darc, peasant girl who crowned Charles VII, but Joan of Arc, pious fiction hardly even "based on a true story.")
(Incidentally, this was not the only time a woman was burned during the English occupation. Butler, p. 7, observes that Bedford had a woman in Paris burned after she took part in a conspiracy to remove English control of Paris. Butler regards Bedford's tendency toward excessive punishment as one of his few faults. More significant for our opinion of Jean is the burning of a woman named Pieronne, who claimed to have conversed directly with God; Butler, p. 136. Even though she claimed to do much the same thing that Jean Darc did, but in slightly more explicit form, no one has canonized her....)
Guerard, p. 112: "[Jean] was burned in the Old Market Place, at Rouen, on May 30, 1431, with the name of Jesus on her lips. Charles VII had not stirred a finger to save her; the Holy Chrism had made a king of him, but not a man."
Little wonder that Charles was nicknamed "the Well-Served." In himself, he was almost helpless -- "Stunted, knock-kneed, blank-faced, epileptic and suspicious," according to Earle, p. 180. Seward, pp. 214-215, tells that his court included a Satanist who was also a child-murderer, and the king himself suffered from phobias and dabbled in astrology and similar foolishness. At this time, he was almost as useless as his younger contemporary Henry VI of England. But, somehow, France eventually rallied around him.
The tide might have turned even without Jean. Bedford managed by 1431 to recapture all ground lost in 1429-1430 (Seward, p. 221; Butler, p. 105, observes that "During the seven weeks following this calamity for the English and their allies, the Duke of Bedford acted with extraordinary judgment and energy" and adds on p. 134 that 12 fortresses were taken just in the first half of 1430). They even took the brigand captain La Hire soon after Jean was burned -- something taken as a sign that she had not been divinely inspired (Butler, p. 144). Somewhat later the Earl of Warwick captured another major leader, Poton de Xantrailles (Butler, p. 146).
Had the economy been stronger, or the fields more fertile, the war might have been won. But it was the Little Ice Age; the English had nothing to spare, and Paris was starving and ready to give up on Lancaster (Seward, p. 222), and the Burgundians -- the only ones who were actually profiting from all this -- were wavering. And Jean has "forced the French military and political class out of a sense of inevitable defeat" (Rubin, p. 228). Charles VII still refused to fight the English in the field (Butler, p. 108), but as Charles V's reconquest of Acquitaine had shown, there were more ways to win a war than with set-piece battles.
Ironically, the French tried to develop a new Jean in the form of "William the Shepherd," whom Butler, p. 145, calls a "poor idiot." He didn't amount to much (the English captured him, displayed him to the Parisians, and caused him to disappear; Butler, p. 148) -- but he didn't need to. The tide was turning. Even Charles VII was starting to devote some energy to ruling (though Keen, p. 257, considers this due to the influence of a mistress).
1432 was a very bad year for the English. As usual, Paris was starving. The French actually made a raid on Lancastrian Rouen, though it failed spectacularly (Butler, pp. 1156-157). A difficult fight at Lagny was regarded as a moral defeat for the invaders, and Seward, p. 225, thinks that Bedford may have damaged his health. Later in the year, his wife, Anne of Burgundy, died in an epidemic of some kind, though she was only 28 (Butler, pp. 161-162) -- weakening the tie between the English and Burgundians, since the Duke of Burgundy was very fond of his sister. It probably also worsened relations with the Parisians, since the Duchess was popular there (Butler, pp. 43, 162).
In practical terms, her death may well have spelled the end of Lancastrian France, because Burgundy had been talking covertly with Charles VII for some time. With Anne gone, Burgundy lost his chief link to the Lancastrians.
The English government was going bankrupt; a detailed audit in 1433 (the first one known to us) showed that revenues were not sufficient to handle even ordinary expenses, let alone the cost of war. King Henry was actually placed in a monastery for a time to reduce expenses (Wolffe, pp. 73-74). We don't know how much this really influenced his later behavior (more than one person has suggested it would have been better had he stayed there), but it was certain that his expenses would go up as he married and built his own household. Under existing financial arrangements, there was simply no way for England to pay for the ongoing war.
In 1433, Bedford rather hastily remarried, to Jacquetta of Luxembourg, daughter of the Count of St. Pol (Butler, p. 166). She was 17 and very pretty (her children by her second husband, the Woodville clan, were among the most beautiful people in England, and her daughter Elizabeth Woodville would snag the future King Edward IV with her looks). Bedford and his wife had no children in their brief time together, and it may have caused further problems for the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, since Philip of Burgundy didn't want the English to increase their influence in the Low Countries (Butler, pp. 166-167). To add to his problems, the English parliament was starting to question the conduct of the war (Butler, p. 168). Admittedly it was going badly -- but they were the ones who failed to supply either adequate troops to win or adequate money for Bedford to finish it off with soldiers from the continet. In the end, Parliament in effect asked Bedford to act as regent for both France and England (Butler, p. 170), which inevitably meant that he would devote less attention to France.
By 1434, Bedford's younger brother Humphrey of Gloucester was offering to take over the war. His proposals, when examined, amounted to very little (Butler, pp. 174-175), But no one else had a better idea. As usual, nothing much was done.
Not surprisingly, the English position continued to decay. There was a rising in Normandy in 1434 (Butler, p. 176), and the garrisons in Paris were going unpaid. Yet when Philip of Burgundy suggested negotiations, Bedford unwisely turned the idea down. In 1435, as Burgundy applied more pressure, the parties actually held peace negotiations -- but they went nowhere (Butler, p. 181). Bedford apparently participated only because he was pressured by Burgundy (Butler, p. 182). He seems to have hoped the French government would fall apart due to lack of money. According to Perroy, p. 294, the best offer Bedford was willing to make to Charles VII was in effect to let him keep what he still held if he would acknowledge English overlordship. This offer was understandably rejected. It is true that,when the English gave up on the talks, the French tried to get them back -- but they really didn't need to. They were winning.
In February 1435, Bedford left Paris (Butler, p. 182) -- for the last time, as it turned out (Seward, p. 230). Soon after, a force under the Earl of Arundel was destroyed while fighting raiders in Normandy, and Arundel suffered a fatal injury from a cannonball -- a foretaste of events in 1453 (Butler, p. 183). The French meanwhile were building works they would use to besiege Paris.
The English still might have salvaged something had they been willing to compromise; Burgundy worked hard to bring this about (Butler, pp. 185-186). But Burgundy was going to have peace no matter what. The moment the peace talks failed, the Burgundians turned about and agreed to the Treaty of Arras, reconciling them to the French monarchy (Myers, pp. 124-125; Perroy, pp. 292-294, Butler, p. 187). In the long run, it was a disastrous move for Burgundy (Seward, p. 234) -- Louis XI would swallow the French portions of it in the 1480s when the male line of dukes failed. But the Burgundian dukes had a record of not thinking very clearly; Perroy, p. 291, suggests that Duke Philip thought he could dominate Charles VII and the French monarchy. He was wrong, but before he realized it, he had rendered the English position impossible. He also blew the chance to create an independent Burgundy, though he gained a great deal of (temporary) power in France itself (Perroy, p. 295). To top it all off, Charles VII never implemented many of his promises to Burgundy (Perroy, p. 332).
King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France [Child 164] --- Part 5
DESCRIPTION: Conclusion of the notes to "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France" [Child 164].
NOTES: >>THE DEATH OF BEDFORD AND THE LOSS OF FRANCE<<
Bedford had blown any chance of keeping a position in France, and he seemed to know it, for he seemed to fall into despair. He would not live to see Lancastrian France destroyed. Shortly before the Treaty of Arras was formally announced, Bedford died on September 14 at Rouen (and was buried there, one of the few great English nobles buried in France); Seward, p. 231. According to Butler, p. 187, so deep was his despair that he literally turned his face to the wall and died. He was only about 46. His only offspring was a bastard son; he left most of his property to the monarchy (Butler, p. 188).
The English, minus Bedford, quickly discovered how important the Regent had been at controlling their hotheads. The Burgundians were willing to stay at peace with the English, but the English insisted on treating them as enemies from this time forward (Butler, p. 190). This may well have been the young King Henry's idea -- his first serious foray into government (Wolffe, pp. 80-83). Naturally this made their problems worse. A few of the wiser English leaders, such as Cardinal Beaufort, gave in and started thinking about a real peace (Butler, p. 191). They had very little time.
Paris was already in a panic by late 1435 (Butler, p. 191). They sent to the government in England, which scraped up a few troops but did not get them moving in time; they seem to have promptly disbanded (Butler, p. 192).
In 1436, the French captured some small ports in Normandy (Butler, p. 195). Lord Talbot, realizing that Paris could not be held, seems to have withdrawn most of his inadequate force before the French surrounded the town (Butler, p. 196). That left the city commander, Lord Willoughby, with only a token defensive force when the French began their blockade. Even this was whittled down as the garrison was pushed into raids on areas outside the walls, and some of the raiders were captured . Although several bishops wanted to fight on, the townsfolk proved unwilling to defend the walls of Paris (Butler, pp. 200-201), and the English garrison was overwhelmed on April 13. Happily, there was no sack of the city (Butler, p. 203, though he notes on p. 204 that Charles VII would not be so gentle in future), and the besiegers even brought in food.
Lord Willoughby and his troops took refuge in the citadel, but soon had to retreat to Rouen (Seward, p. 235). This hardly brought peace to France -- the war had loosed many brigands who continued to destroy the countryside (Perroy, p. 303) -- but it meant that English revenues fell even more. Seward, p. 234, suggests that some in England were wise enough to realize that they could not win, and would have been willing to settle for Normandy and Guyenne in full sovereignty. But, as usual, there was a war party which made such a settlement impossible. They deluded themselves mostly by looking at the success of Lord Talbot, who actually managed a raid on Paris in 1437 (Butler, pp. 207-208.)
By this time, Henry VI was old enough that he might have been able to influence things. But he was about as unlike his fearsome father as it was possible to be. Although Wolffe, p. 83, describes him as formulating a belligerent policy, he is forced to admit that Henry was "no practical soldier." Wilkinson, p. 257, declares, "[N]o earlier monarch after Ethelred the Unready had been so lacking in the attributes necessary in a medieval king.... Henry VI had only scholarly learning, piety, and good intentions to commend him at a moment in history that demanded heroic virtues, the capacity for great decisions, and inflexibility of purpose." He could not run a war; he couldn't even run his own court! As Ross says on p. 21, "Unfortunately, comments on Henry's character by people writing before the Yorkist usurpation of 1461 are few and meagre, but they lend some support to the notion that he was indeed a man of limited mental capacity who was too much influenced by those around him."
We do know that, by the time he was in his mid-twenties, arrangements were being made to control his impulses -- a set of measures were taken to reduce the amount of crown property he gave away and to ensure that, if he must give it away, he at least did not give it away to more than one person! (Wolffe, p. 114).
From then on, the war in France was all rearguard action: A few _chevauchees_, a few raids and sieges, the latter led mostly by Lord Talbot, who was turning into "Old Talbot" -- a legendary figure in England but one who lost the only major battles he led (Seward, p. 236-237). The Earl of Warwick, the last of Henry V's great officers, died in 1439 (Seward, p. 239). Various officials were put in charge in France in the next dozen years, including the Duke of York and the Earl of Somerset. York, assisted by Talbot, managed to mostly hold his ground; the English held off attacks on Normandy and Guyenne in 1441 and 1442 (Seward, pp. 240-241). But York was spending his own money to do it (Rubin, p. 271; Lander, p. 29, prints evidence that by 1446 York was owed over 38,000 pounds); it was not something that could last long. And Somerset was a disaster who took a large force to France and accomplished nothing except to bring the government closer to bankruptcy (Seward, p. 242).
It was not yet a civil war in England, but with Bedford dead and Henry VI unable to control the factions, things were moving that way. On one side was Henry V's last brother, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who favored escalating the French war though he had no real plan for how to do so. On the other was Henry's half-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort. Beaufort was more realistic; Gloucester had more popularity with the commons. Beaufort had control of the court, but could do little with it.
So bitter was the hatred that Humphrey in the 1420s had accused Beaufort of treason (Butler, p. 63). Bedford had soothed that over -- but with him gone, things got much, much worse. In the early 1440s, Humphrey's latest wife Eleanor Cobham (who had replaced Jacqueline of Hainault) was convicted of witchcraft by the Beaufort party (Wilkinson, p. 265). In 1447, they arrested Humphrey himself, and he died in custody (Gillingham, p. 60). Gillingham thinks he died of a stroke (which was the report of one contemporary chronicler), but most contemporaries apparently regarded it as murder, and in this they are followed by Wilkinson, p. 266. Rubin, p. 231, says the death took place in "mysterious circumstances."
Gloucester's death produced a real political crisis, since he was heir to the throne. With him dead, and Henry VI still childless, who was heir? Henry VI was the only true "Lancastrian" Plantagenet alive. For the first time, the question of a Beaufort succession had to be faced (Perroy, p. 336, thinks their leader, Somerset, "might aim at the succession to the King"). The Beauforts were partially legitimized descendents of John of Gaunt, Henry VI's great-grandfather; if they were fully legitimized, they were the heirs to the throne in male line. But if they were not considered legitimate, then the Duke of York was heir in male line (Lander, p. 34), and actually senior to the Lancastrians in female line. In 1450, a motion was made in parliament to have York declared Henry VI's heir. The court responded by having the petitioner arrested (Rubin, p. 272; Wilkinson, p. 278). There is much dispute over the extent of York's ambitions, and his abilities (Ross-Wars, p. 28, thinks he had "little capacity or inclination to seek and win support from his fellow-noblemen or from the wider public," while admitting that he tried to provide honest government while regent) -- but it is certain that he was a better leader than Henry VI or his wife Margaret (anyone would be), and that he had been utterly mistreated by the government.
The court party, being so weak, had repeatedly tried to buy support with grants of titles and annuities; by the 1450s, due in no small part to massive grants of land to new peers (Gillingham, p. 56), Henry VI's government had revenues of less than 30,000 pounds per year, household expenses of 24,000, and a debt of 400,000 (Myers, p. 126; based on Gillingham, pp. 66-67, more than 10% of this was owed to the Duke York alone!). With no money available to pay soldiers, naturally garrisons dwindled to almost nothing. Lancastrian France was a hollow shell.
In 1444, the Earl of Suffolk (who took charge of the court party when Cardinal Beaufort retired from his public role) tried to negotiate a peace. So bad was the English situation, and so incompetent was Suffolk, that in return for a royal marriage (Henry VI to the utterly disastrous Margaret of Anjou) and a two year truce, he had to agree to the surrender of the county of Maine (Seward, p. 244; Myers, p. 126, says that Margaret had to talk Henry into giving up Maine; Gillingham, p. 57, suggests that Henry VI made the concession on his own to assert his independence and in a sort of Munich-like attempt at peace through weakness; Wilkinson, p. 271, points out that Henry himself wrote a 1445 letter agreeing to the surrender). Other than the brief truce, Margaret brought no dowry at all (Gillingham, p. 59) -- indeed, she had to be given land in Lancashire to pay her expenses (Rubin, p. 231).
(The above, at least, is the English view. Perroy, pp. 310-311, says that it was only a ten month truce with an option for an extension, and thinks that it was a good deal for both sides, because the marriage of Henry and Margaret was a "promising prospect." Promising it was -- but only for the French.)
In one sense, the surrender was realistic: The English had to give up some lands. The mere fact that they were treating with Charles VII shows that they had abandoned hope of ruling France. But I have to agree with the anti-Margaret faction: they should at least have gotten value for what they gave up! Gillingham, p. 56, notes that they still had a strong position: Guyenne, Calais, Normandy, much of Anjou, and Maine -- the latter well fortified for the defence of Normandy. They were giving up the key to this position -- and all they got for it was a truce too short to do any good, and a Queen who would cause England to fight the Wars of the Roses starting just 11 years later.
To make matters worse, the French used the truce to improve their situation, even as the English sat and twiddled their thumbs. After most past truces, the French soldiers had been cut loose to become brigands, weakening the economy even as it ruined the army. Charles VII cleverly took the best of the soldiers into his peacetime army, strengthening his forces for the next showdown and avoiding the unpopularity the soldiers would have caused in the countryside (Perroy, p. 304). It meant taxes stayed high -- but the centralized French government no longer worried about that.
Margaret was now the real ruler of England, through her husband, but she was "a domineering and uncompromising woman. She had no understanding of English traditions and not much more of English politics, and was soon hated by the _plebs_ as representing an unpopular policy in both foresight and domestic affairs" (Wilkinson, p. 270). Her primary ally was Somerset, the leading Beaufort -- in other words, with Humphrey of Gloucester dead, he probably though of himself as Henry VI's heir unless Margaret bore a child (Gillingham, p. 68). Little wonder there were court conflicts!
Even Perroy, pp. 335-336, admits "Margaret of Anjou was a foreigner, ambitious, active, and intense, and she knew nothing about English affairs. Brought up in the kingdom of France, where no one opposed the royal authority, she wanted to rule without the counsel of the barons and the advice of Parliament.... French at heart, she stood for peace [with France] and did nothing to wrestle from the Valois the provinces recently lost by England.... This was another source of her unpopularity, since public opinion unanimously demanded revenge for these defeats, though it was unready to bear the cost of a fresh war. The more isolated she felt, the more enthusiastically Margaret committed herself to the party that had put her on the throne. This was the clan of the Beauforts... led by Someset, vanquished at Caen but now Constable and all-powerful counselor."
The French meanwhile were building a true standing army (Seward, p. 247; Perroy, p. 300; Keen, pp. 257-258 credits this to the "great ordinance of 1439") -- not even Henry V had really had that, though he had controlled his forces well enough that he might as well have. But lesser English lords had only their household troops -- tough as any regulars, to be sure, but not as numerous. Charles VII also managed to gain control over revenues -- he now simply set the tax rates, and the people had to pay (Perroy, p. 302. I can't help but wonder if the people who fought against the English knew what they were getting themselves into).
In 1449 the French moved on Normandy, given an excuse by some sharp dealings involving the surrender of Maine (Gillingham, p. 61; Perroy, p. 317, notes the extreme folly of the situation, in which allies of Somerset attacked the pro-French Duchy of Brittany). At once, the English house of cards collapsed (Seward, p. 248). Within three months, Rouen was under siege -- and the townsfolk admitted the French, forcing the English back into the citadel. Somerset, who had distributed his forces into penny-packet garrisons that the French could easily swallow, promptly had to surrender -- and to leave Talbot, the last noteworthy English general, in French hands (Seward, p. 249).
The English finally managed to scrape up a few reinforcements in 1450, led by a mere knight, Sir Thomas Kyriell. These blundered into battle at a small town called Formigny (Guerard, p. 113). As usual, estimates of their number vary; Perroy, p. 318 suggests that there were 5000 from England and 2000 from the remaining Norman garrisons, but most sources seem to give estimates in the 4000-4500 range. Featherstone, pp. 168-169, suggests 4000 men but makes it even weaker in practice, since there were only 1500 archers, and a few hundred men-at-arms, meaning that half the army was billmen -- surely the weakest type of soldier for this sort of fight.
What is certain is that the English were decisively defeated; supposedly the French counted over 3700 dead. Perroy, p. 319, says that English casualties, killed, wounded, and captured, were "nearly 5000." Featherstone, p. 171, declares that 80% of the English army was killed. Kyriell himself was among those captured (Seward, pp. 250-251). Caen fell soon afterward. On August 12, 1450 -- supposedly one year to the day after the campaign started (Perroy, p. 319) -- Cherbourg surrendered (Seward, p. 252). English Normandy -- the territory Henry V had apparently wanted above all else -- was gone.
The government by then was completely bankrupt; the officers of state were going unpaid (Rubin, p. 65). There was no possibility of mounting a major counterattack.
Suffolk, who had the support of Queen Margaret, was made a Duke in 1448, but so great was the unrest that Parliament impeached him (Wilkinson, p. 275; Lander, p. 38, notes that most of the charges were false or exaggerated, but in any case the real crime was making such a bad agreement with France). Henry VI tried to save him by exiling him, but before he could escape the country, he was murdered in 1450 (Gillingham, p, 63; OxfordCompanion, p. 758; Seward, pp. 254-255). Two others who had large roles in Henry's government were killed at about the same time (Wilkinson, pp. 273-274; Lander, p. 35). The disaster also led to Jack Cade's rebellion, which didn't really accomplish much but which scared a lot of people. So pig-headed was the court party that the de facto role of Prime Minister now went to Somerset, who had been in charge of the loss of Normandy (Perroy, p. 319).
The popular resentment didn't change the situation. In 1451-1453, the French threw the English out of Guyenne, which they had ruled since 1154. The initial occupation took only a few months in 1451 (Seward, pp. 256-257). It needn't have been final; the Guyennese actually preferred remote English rule to direct French control, and the imported French officials proved harsh masters (Perroy, p. 320). When the English scraped together an army in 1452, Bordeaux rebelled and admitted them (Seward, p. 258); much of the rest of the province followed.
But the general the English sent, "Old Talbot," while a genius in leading raids, was not a great commander at set-piece battles, and was now very old (Perroy, p. 321, says over eighty, though most sources say he was in his seventies; OxfordCompanion, p. 173, says he was 65). And the French had finally found a new weapon to combat the longbow: Artillery. Guns let them destroy Talbot and his troops at Castillon on July 17, 1453 (Myers, p. 127; Perroy, p. 321; Ros, p. 122; Keen, p. 255, calls it the battle of "Chastillon") when Talbot impetuously tried to attack the French artillery park head-on (Seward, pp. 260-262) and without examining the position (OxfordCompanion, p. 173).
The castles and towns of Guyenne promptly gave in to the French. Bordeaux, the last, surrendered only three months after Castillon (Seward, p. 262). This time, they were treated as conquered territory, and suffered badly (Perroy, p. 321). But there was no going back. As Perroy says, the great fief of Acquitaine, and the Angevin Empire, was gone.
The Hundred Years' War was over. It was "the final, though as yet unbelievable, severance of England from the last remnants of the continental empire of Henry II" (Harvey, p. 190). Except for Calais, which the English held for another century, the invaders had been driven from France. Henry V's "conquest" was lost at a time when he would still have been alive had he lived out a normal life (he would have been 66).
No peace treaty was ever signed, and England's Edward IV actually invaded France at one point, to be bought off with a subsidy (Perroy, p. 347). Henry VIII would would fight in France as well, from 1512-1524. Perroy, p. 348, sums it up: "As late as 1487 there was talk of a possible English landing in Guienne.... But to pursue our story further would be playing on words. Though no peace ratified its results, the Hundred Years' War was long since over. It was true that Calais did not become French again until 1553 and that for centuries longer the English sovereigns continued to bear the empty title of King of France. But these were belated survivals of no importance. When the Burgundian State was dismembered, a fresh factor in the history of Europe relegated the old Anglo-French dispute to the background" (because England no longer had an ally within France).
>>ENGLAND AFTER THE WARS: THE OVERTHROW OF LANCASTER<<
Even Calais would have been lost much sooner had Henry V's dynasty endured longer; when Margaret of Anjou fled to France in 1462, she promised to turn the town over to Louis XI in return for help (Perroy, p. 344).
But Margaret could not fulfill her promise, because she never regained power; the loss of France was to deal the Lancastrians a fatal blow. The response in France to the end of the war was an attempt to rehabilitate Jean Darc (Perroy, p. 323). The response in England was to seek a scapegoat. Suffolk had not been enough of a sacrifice. It might have been better if Henry VI had put Somerset out of the government. Lander thinks that Somerset, unlike Suffolk, was honest (p. 44). That doesn't mean the populace trusted him, however. But even had Henry wanted to change ministers, he could not -- because he went catatonic (Gillingham, pp. 74-75).
The cause is unknown; Wolffe, pp. 271-272 n. 13, observes that we have almost no actual data about the King's illness. What we do have could fit depressive stupor, schizophrenic stupor, or an organic brain disease -- but, since Henry apparently recovered eventually, the latter two are difficult. It would have to be a severe case of depression to knock him out for more than a year, though.
Margaret and Somerset tried to cover up Henry's madness (they didn't formally make arrangements until the Chancellor died, leaving the government incapable of functioning; Wolffe, p. 279), but eventually their enemy the Duke of York was appointed Protector. Somerset went into the Tower, but he was not executed, and York has "made an effort to rule the country with the help of a fairly broad-based council and administration" (Gillingham, p. 84). There might have been peace -- if nothing had changed.
But "If Henry's insanity had been a tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster" (Gillingham, p. 84, quoting an unnamed source). The Protectorate seems to have been set up on the understanding that it might last for a very long time -- one of the provisions allowed that the new-born Prince Edward would have the option to assume the Protectorate once he was old enough! (Wolffe, p. 280). But he came out of his trance a few months later -- to an extent. Henry, though again capable of speech, was no longer fit to rule (Ross, p. 52, calls him a "useful political vegetable"; on p. 118, Ross notes that Henry was taken prisoner *three times* during the Wars of the Roses; no other pretender to the throne was captured with such ease. Wolffe, pp. 338-339, suggests that, during his half decade of Yorkist imprisonment in the 1460s, he did nothing at all -- it was almost as if he did not exist).
Once Henry was able to mke the motions of Kingship, Somerset and Margaret again took charge -- and immediately turned on York, his allies the Nevilles, and others who had opposed their narrow government. York and the Nevilles, who clearly needed to defend themselves, took to arms. The first major fight of the Wars of the Roses, the First Battle of Saint Albans, took place in 1455, only a year after Henry recovered from his madness.
It wasn't a big battle -- Lander, p. 53, thinks only sixty men died. But it set a pattern for the Wars of the Roses: That few soldiers were killed but many leaders disposed of. St. Albans finally got rid of Somerset, who was executed on the field (Gillingham, p. 89). The Yorkists, for the moment, were still willing to accept Henry VI as king (Lander, p. 55; Gillingham, p. 90, thinks Somerset was killed because "York and the Nevilles had therefore pushed themselves into a position where they could either depose the king or kill the king's [councilors]"; these were the only possible ways to reform the government. And they remained loyal to the King).
There followed four years of relative peace in which the Yorkists exercised greater control over the biddable King Henry (Ross, p. 32). But it was fragile -- Margaret of Anjou was still around, and she would not accept anything she viewed as an infringement on her rights. After a few months of relatively non-partison government (Wolffe, p. 302, thinks Henry realized his own incapacity and tried to form a unity council), Margaret asserted herself -- Wolffe, pp. 302-303 goes so far as to suggest she kidnapped her own husband!
Ross, pp. 37-40, discusses several reasons why the situation flew so far out of control, including economic difficulties and a large number of local feuds -- but ultimately it was that a weak king was ruled by a partisan wife. Wolffe, p. 312, considers the government completely ineffective starting in 1456 -- it had no ability to control the kingdom or breaches of the peace. Margaret in June 1459 called something that was almost a parliament -- but she excluded York, the Nevilles, and York's allies such as the Bourchiers (Gillingham, p. 102); the Yorkists expected to be indicted (Ross, p. 37). At this point, though York still hesitated to claim the throne, true peace became impossible. Later in 1459, Margaret scattered the Yorkist princes, and seemed to have won a complete victory (Gillingham, p. 105); the Yorkists fled to Ireland and Calais.
It is ironic to note that Charles VII of France thus found himself strongly backing Henry VI (Dockray, p. 54), the king with whom he had contested his own throne and territory for more than thirty years! But Margaret managed to blow her advantages by her abominable behavior. In 1459 the so-called "parliament of devils," which she dominated, passed 27 bills of attainder (Gillingham, p. 106), condemning among others the Duke of York, his sons the Earls of March and Rutland, and the Neville Earls of Warwick and Salisbury. For the Yorkists, it was now win or die.
And Margaret was unable to consolidate her position, because the government was once again bankrupt (Gillingham, p. 108). And her generals and admirals were completely inept; Warwick apparently sailed right past the superior fleet of the Duke of Exeter to invade (Gillingham, pp. 109-110). He captured King Henry (but not Margaret) at the Battle of Northampton (Gillingham, p. 114).
It appears the Yorkists hadn't really worked out what came next. Warwick probably still hoped to rule through King Henry. But the Duke of York himself came to Parliament and, somewhat hesitantly, claimed the throne (Gillingham, pp. 116-117; Ross, pp. 47-49). The uncommitted Lords, though they were tired of the Lancastrian regime, were not ready to go that far. Eventually a compromise was reached: Henry VI would retain his throne (presumably with a new ministry), but York was declared Henry's heir, and York's heirs after him (Gillingham, p. 117). It was a logical compromise; York might never take the throne (since he was about a decade older than Henry), but it did restore the rightful line.
It also meant that Margaret of Anjou's son Edward was cut out of the succession. That she would never allow. It was she, not the Yorkists, who really ramped up the Wars of the Roses.
The Wars, though they resulted in the overthrow at one time or another of four different kings, were ultimately struggles between noble factions over who would rule England (Perroy, pp. 338-339). The first monarch to go was Henry VI, who was overthrown in 1461. The single biggest reason for his downfall was surely the loss of the territories in France -- and the behavior of the Frenchwoman, Margaret. Henry was not captured until 1464 (to spend the next half dozen years in the Tower), but he hardly mattered anyway; it was Margaret who was fighting -- less on behalf of her husband than on behalf of her disinherited son.
In 1470-1471, an attempt was made to bring Henry VI back, but it was made by a coalition of allies who distrusted each other utterly (Dockray, p. 66). The Earl of Warwick, who organized the "re-adaption," had to try to keep everyone happy, and seemingly failed (Dockray, p. 68). When the displaced King Edward IV invaded, the Lancastrian government lost the two battles of Barnet (where Warwick was killed) and Tewkesbury (where Edward the son of Henry VI was killed) and the regime collapsed (Wilkinson, p. 293). In the aftermath, Henry VI was executed. The Lancastrian line was extinct; all of Henry V's other close relatives were dead by then. Henry V's brothers had all died without issue -- Clarence in 1421, Bedford in 1435, Gloucester in 1447. The closest surviving relations of the Lancastrian kings were the Beaufort family, the descendents of the illegitimate half-brothers of Henry IV. The future King Henry VII was descended from that line, but it took a lot of luck....
It is true that, when King Edward IV invaded France in the 1470s, he implicity invoked the memory of Henry V -- but one of his parliaments declared Henry V "late in ded and not in right Kyng of Englond" (Allmand, p. 432). But Henry was already becoming a legend in the sixteenth century, as shown by books such as Fabyan's Chronicle (whose author died in 1513) and Edward Hall's 1547 "history" (Allmand, p. 434) -- a work containing far more propaganda than genuine history. And Shakespeare, of course, strengthened this unhistorical legend (so much so that authors such as Jarman seem to have bought into it almost completely).
Even Allmand, p. 443, concludes, "A careful consideration of his whole achievement reveals much regarding Henry's stature both as man and king. From it he emerges as a ruler whose already high reputation is not only maintained but enhanced." But, on the previous page, he had admitted a more troubling truth: "He therefore passed on to his son an inheritance which may justly be termed 'damnosa hereditas.'''
Henry VII would later try to have Henry VI declared a saint. Many English citizens certainly revered him as such. A long list of miracles was compiled (Wolffe, pp. 351-354). These were the typical sorts of coincidences ascribed to saints at the time -- e.g. a ship escaped pirates because they called on Henry's name (oh, plus the wind came up). It is actually possible that Henry would have been canonized had it not been for Henry VIII's break with Rome (Wolffe, p. 355). But, as Wolffe points out on p. 356, Henry may have been saintly, but he was lousy at his work. And Francis Bacon pointed out that "the pope had to make a distinctin between saints and fools if the honor was not to be cheapened" (Wolffe, p. 355). Henry VI was a failure, and his failure more than offset his father's success.
For the aftermath of the Agincourt War, see especially the notes to "The Children in the Wood" (The Babes in the Woods)" [Laws Q34].
>>THE HISTORICAL CONTENT OF THE BALLAD<<
As far as historical accuracy is concerned, this ballad ranks pretty near the bottom. Child's single short text (collated, to be sure, from multiple broadsides) appears to be late, and has few details. And most of those are wrong:
"A tribute that was due from France Had not been paid for so long a time." The French did not owe tribute to the English under any reckoning. They had agreed to a ransom for John II -- but had been unable to pay (Henry V at the start of his reign apparently claimed arrears of 1.6 million ecus; Allmand, p. 68), so John II had gone back into English custody. He died there, so there were no arrears on the ransom. Of course Henry could claim to be overlord of France, and due its revenues -- but the fact that the song recognizes a king of France (since Henry sends to him) means that, in the song, that claim is not being made.
"Your master's young and of tender years." Henry V in 1413 was about 26 years old. Charles VI of France was about 45, but he had been intermittently insane for two decades, and his children were all younger than Henry (Barker, p. 69); the future Charles VII was only ten years old. There was no one in France in position to insult Henry's intelligence or experience.
"Three tennis-balls." The story about the tennis balls is widely told (including in some old chronicles; Shakespeare has it from Holinshed, according to Jarman, p. 47, and Allmand, p. 427, says it was mentioned by Audeley early in the reign of Henry VI), but there is no real reason to believe it true. As mentioned above, the then-Dauphin (not Charles VII but an older brother) was a decade younger than Henry and could hardly taunt the English king about his youth (and, to repeat, King Charles was insane and couldn't order such a thing). Some have suspected that this incident derives from a story of Darius III of Persia and Alexander the Great: Darius sent Alexander children's toys. Barker and Jarman in fact note that Henry continued to negotiate for some time after the alleged incident, which would be quite unlikely had the incident actually happened.
Allmand, noting that the story is very widespread, thinks it unlikely that the tale is pure fiction, but suggests (p. 71) that someone in France *discussed* such a move and was overheard by an English envoy, who then blew the idea out of proportion. He says, "The most telling and most contemporary account, that of John Strecche, canon of Kenilworth, written probably soon after Henry's death, records the Frenchmen's pride and arrogance, and, as an illustration of this, that they would send Henry balls with which to play and cushions upon which to lie, the implication clearly being that the king was too much inclined to love his creature comforts and too inexperienced in war to do any harm."
In any case, it wasn't modern lawn tennis back in the fifteenth century; lawn tennis is a nineteenth century invention, based only very loosely on the older game of Court Tennis (or Royal Tennis, or Real Tennis). As a matter of fact, it was not until the late 1420s, according to Butler, p. 73, that the French first saw it played with a racquet -- until then, players used their hands. Though the sport seems to have been reasonably well-established on both sides of the Atlantic; Dockray, pp. 55, tells of a top tennis player being executed for political reasons in the 1460s.
"Recruit me Cheshire and Lancashire, and Derby Hills... No marryd man nor no widow's son...." There is no evidence for a special callup of the counties cited, and the claim of exemptions is impossible; we know that married lords, and sons of widows, fought at Agincourt. If there is a basis for it at all, it may have been suggested by the fact that Henry was Duke of Lancaster and Earl of Chester. Or, perhaps, it may have derived from an earlier event in Henry's career; Allmand, p. 18, refers to a time when Henry, as Prince of Wales, led troops from Cheshire to fight against Scotland. The bit about married men and orphans may just be based on the Bible's restrictions on having such men fight.
I will offer one wild speculation: The Stanley family, who eventually became Kings of Man and Earls of Derby, began its rise under Sir John Stanley, who had recruited a Cheshire guard for Richard II in the late 1390s, then gained in power in the area under the early Lancastrians (Bennett, p. 75). The Stanleys spent the next century gradually increasing in power -- and becoming a by-word for trimming. We also know that they had a fairly efficient propaganda machine which churned out a number of songs ("The Ballad of Bosworth Field" certainly comes from one of their supporters, and "The Song of the Lady Bessy" likely does as well; see the notes to "The Children in the Wood" (The Babes in the Woods)" [Laws Q34]). Since the Stanleys would have been responsible for recruiting Cheshire and Derby in this era, might this be from another of their propaganda songs?
"The first shot that the Frenchmen gave, they killd our Englishmen so free; We killed ten thousand of the French." The ten thousand figure may actually be accurate, but note that the English, not the French, fired the first arrows at Agincourt.
"And the finest flower that is in all France, To the Rose of England I will give free." The French did eventually agree to marry the princess Katherine to Henry V -- but not until well after Agincourt. The English did not even march on Paris at that time. - RBW
Child Collection- Child Ballad 164: King Henry Fifth’s Conquest of France
Child --Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length ---Have
164 E.C. Green King Henry the Fifth's Conquest The Helen Hartness Flanders Collection No
164 John Jacob Niles The Fency King and the English King The Ballads of John Jacob Niles 1960 4:05 Yes
164 Margaret MacArthur King Henry the Fifth's Conquest of France Ballads Thrice Twisted 1999 6:08 Yes
164 Richard Thompson King Henry V's Conquest of France 1000 Years of Popular Music 2003 4:35 Yes
164 Richard Thompson King Henry 1000 Years of Popular Music [DVD] 2006 4:53 Yes
164 Sam Harmon King Henry's Conquest of France The Library of Congress No
Excerpt from The British Traditional Ballad in North America
by Tristram Coffin 1950, from the section A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America
164. KING HENRY THE FIFTH'S CONQUEST OF FRANCE
'Texts: BFSSNE, II, 5; IV, 10 / Flanders, Cntry Sgs Vt, 36 / Flanders, New On Mt Sgstr, 193 / Henry, F-S So Hghlds, 108 / JAFL, XLV, 17 / N. J. Journal of Educ, XX, #s 3-4, 6-7 / PMLA, XLVIII, 307.
Local Titles: King Henry the Fifth's Conquest of France.
Story Types: A: King Henry decides to collect a tribute from the King of France. He sends a page abroad, and the messenger brings back some tennis balls as the French monarch's reply. Henry then musters an army of men, none married, none sons of widows. He attacks France, and, after withstanding the first onslaught, triumphs. With a bribe of the French princess and a large amount of gold he returns to England.
Examples: Flanders, New Gn Mt Sgstr; Henry, F-S So HgHds.
Discussion: The American stories differ little from Child or from each other. The ballad is extremely rare in this country, although the discovered texts have been frequently reprinted.
For an analysis of the relation of this ballad to the Alexander romance see Child, III, 322 and Flanders, New Gn Mt Sgstr, 195. The parallel between Alexander's insult from Darius and his marriage to Roxanna to the events in the ballad is stressed. The balls and the references to the eventual victor's tender years are in both stories.