Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (52 page)

Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419. The way to Paris now lay open. Some inconclusive negotiations took place between the two sides; facing Henry was the king of France, Charles VI, together with his son and successor known as the ‘dauphin’. These two men were joined by the duke of Burgundy, who had formed an unlikely pact with the dauphin in an effort to repel the English. But the allies fell out; at a meeting arranged upon a bridge, one of the dauphin’s retinue killed the duke. It may have been a plot or, as was claimed, an accident; the result was the same. With his enemies in disarray Henry came up to the gates of Paris and demanded the French crown. Who could now deny it to him? The new duke of Burgundy was inexperienced, the dauphin was in disgrace, and the king of France was intermittently insane.

After much debate a treaty was agreed in the spring of 1420 in which it was confirmed that Charles VI would disinherit his son and declare the English king to be his successor. Henry V would marry the king’s daughter Katherine, so that any male child would then automatically become king of France as well as of England. It was on the face of it a great victory; Henry had won more than any of his predecessors. Subsequent events, however, would prove that the concord was ultimately unstable. Why should the French agree to be ruled by a king at Westminster? Serious misgivings also existed, in some quarters of the English parliament, about the wisdom of the English domination of France; the costs of war were very large. The price of maintaining power would also be high. It was unwise to tangle with the affairs of the French.

At the early date of 1417 the clergy had ceased to pray for the king’s success in foreign warfare; the parliaments of 1420 and 1421 reverted to their former ways and refused to grant money for the enterprise. The chronicler of the period, Adam of Usk, finished his
narrative with the exclamation, ‘but, woe is me! Mighty men and treasure of the realm will be most miserable foredone about this business.’ Some compensations were available, most notably for the great knights and the soldiers of fortune who brought back treasure and booty. Thomas Montague, the earl of Salisbury, wrote to the king that ‘we broughten home the fairest and greatest prey of beasts as all those saiden that saw them that ever they saw’. He returned with riches, in other words. Whether this heartened the clergy and the yeomen of England is another matter.

Fears existed about English sovereignty itself. What if one treasurer, for example, were to superintend the revenues of both countries bound in an intricate embrace? What if the king, or his successor, appointed a French noble to that task? These may have been groundless fears, but nonetheless they existed. It had become obvious that the king was already spending more time in France than in England, to the detriment of national interests.

The proof is to be found in the fact that Henry was obliged to consolidate his gains in France with further military campaigns. He possessed, or occupied, the duchy of Normandy together with the area known as Vexin – the region of north-west France on the right bank of the Seine. But there were still provinces ruled by the duke of Burgundy, and others governed by the dauphin. There could be no peace in a divided land.

Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.

Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.

No king won such plaudits from his contemporaries as Henry V. The misgivings about his wars in France were forgotten for the sake of celebrating his martial valour. He was devout as well as magnificent, chaste as well as earnest. He was as generous to his friends as he was stern to his enemies; he was prudent and magnanimous, modest and temperate. He was the very model of a medieval king. Yet there are some who have doubted that verdict. Shakespeare’s play
Henry V
can be interpreted in quite a different spirit as an account of a military tyrant who staked all on vainglorious conquest in France. What did he finally achieve? Once his French conquests were dissipated, and the dream of a dual monarchy dissolved, very little was left to celebrate. All was done for the pride of princes.

One more elusive and unintended consequence, of the revival of the Hundred Years War by Henry V, can be recorded. The language of England was now spoken by all the king’s subjects. The letters of the king were always written in English, and the writer of
The Deeds of Henry V
invoked
Anglia nostra
or ‘our England’. The first document of royal administration written in English is dated in 1410. The London Guild of Brewers began to record its proceedings in English from the early 1420s, citing the fact that ‘the greater part of the Lords and the trusty Commons have begun to make their matters be noted down in our mother tongue’.

The archbishops of Canterbury now spoke routinely of ‘the Church of England’ as an identifiable element of the Universal Church, and at a Church council in 1414 it was declared that ‘whether a nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity, or by peculiarities of language . . . England is a real nation’. The fact that the matter had to be asserted suggests that in previous periods this nationhood had not been self-evident. In the fifteenth century, too, there were persistent attempts to contrast the prosperous kingdom of England with the parlous state of France. It was a way of escaping from the inheritance of the French-speaking royalty and a French-speaking court that had shaped the governance of the three previous centuries.

The first surviving letter written in English dates from the
winter of 1392. A slightly later epistle, also written in English, is of more human interest. It was ‘written at Calais on this side the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote noon and all our household cried after me and bade me come down. Come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them ye know it of old.’ You can hear the voices. Come down! Come down!

30

How others saw us

The English were pronounced by other nations to be guilty of the sin of pride; that was their most prominent characteristic. The fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart described ‘the great haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than their own’. A German knight, Nicholas von Poppelau, visited the country in 1484 and complained that ‘the English think they are the wisest people in the world’ and that ‘the world does not exist apart from England’. Fifteen years later a Venetian traveller stated that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them’. Whenever they see a handsome stranger, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.

Other nations were sure that the English had tails. The Greeks of Sicily, who were obliged to entertain the presence of English crusaders in 1190, referred to them as ‘the tailed Englishmen’. At the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish forces, besieged in Dunbar Castle, shouted from the battlements, ‘You English dogs with long tails! We will kill you all and cut off your tails!’ It is possible that the offence was originally that of long hair, worn down the back like a tail, and gradually became a term of general opprobrium.

The French accused the English of being drunken and perfidious; the notion of
la perfide Albion
, current in the late eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries, has a long history. They were aloof; they were phlegmatic; they were insensitive to their own suffering, and to the sufferings of others. They were not afraid of death. That is why they quarrelled with so much ferocity; they robbed and murdered one another quite openly. Sometimes they even killed their king. So they were known for their violence.

The English themselves admitted many faults. The author of
Vita Edwardi Secundi
, writing early in the fourteenth century, maintained that his countrymen excelled ‘in pride, in craft and in perjury’. Ranulf Higden of Chester, in the same period, described his compatriots as drunken, greedy and dishonest. Their drunkenness was a common cause of complaint, so often described and condemned that it became almost a caricature. A papal envoy to England wrote in 1473 that ‘in the morning they are as devout as angels, but after dinner they are like devils’. Certain national characteristics may never change.

31

A simple man

If Henry’s son had been declared king immediately on the death of his father, he would have been crowned in his swaddling clothes. It was deemed prudent, therefore, to wait until he had reached the age of understanding before he was anointed. Nothing spells disaster so much as a child king, however, surrounded by magnates who consult no interest but their own. Indeed in the course of his long reign, lasting for almost forty years, the fortunes of the ruling houses of England went through so many bewildering vicissitudes – so many reversals and surprises, so many victories and defeats – that the nineteenth-century critic, William Hazlitt, described the country as a ‘perfect beargarden’. This was the era in which were fought the series of battles that have become known as the Wars of the Roses.

Three brothers supervised the minority of the infant king. They can be introduced as the
dramatis personae
. The first of them, the duke of Gloucester, was his younger uncle; it was he to whom Henry V had entrusted the life and safety of his son. His older uncle, the duke of Bedford, had been chosen by the dying king to protect and enlarge the conquered territories of France; the war continued as before. Henry Beaufort, the child of John of Gaunt and therefore the king’s great-uncle, was bishop of Winchester; he became chancellor of England and therefore its principal officer.
He had been born illegitimate but the subsequent marriage of John of Gaunt to his mother, Katherine Swynford, rendered him legitimate.

Brothers, legitimate or illegitimate, may fall out. Gloucester wished to be given the title of ‘regent’, effectively assuming control of the country. Instead at Bedford’s request he was only named as ‘protector’, obliged to yield precedence whenever his elder brother returned from France to England. Gloucester also quarrelled with Beaufort over the direction of the kingdom, and their rivalry reached such a pitch that in 1425 it precipitated them almost into internecine war. Beaufort gathered his army of retainers in Southwark, where his palace lay, and Gloucester ordered the mayor of London to close London Bridge against them. Bedford had to come over from France in order to arrange a compromise between them. They were dogs fighting over the bone of power.

The new king, Henry VI, was formally crowned in the winter of 1429. The eight-year-old boy was carried into the abbey in the arms of his tutor; this suggests that he was a little frail, but he managed to survive the strain of the lengthy ceremony and walked down the aisle unaided at its conclusion. It has been said that he remained a child all his life. At the end of 1431 he was taken to France, according to the treaty agreed by his father, where he was crowned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. On the head of this young boy the lines of Valois and Plantagenet royalty had come together. At barely the age of ten he was the only male monarch ever to be king both of England and of France.