Agincourt (48 page)
Queen Eleanor’s stone cross in Cheapside, which had been erected as one of a series across the country to mark the places where her coffin had rested on its final journey to Westminster Abbey in 1290, was masked entirely by an elaborate wooden castle, three storeys high, complete with towers and a bridge leading to a gatehouse. A vast archway had been built on either side to link the castle with the buildings on each side of the street, and over both arches were inscribed the words “Glorious things of thee are spoken, city of God.” As the king approached, a choir of singing maidens, clad in white and dancing to the sound of drums and stringed instruments, emerged from the castle, just like the ones who had greeted David on his return from slaying Goliath. The chaplain approved mightily of this display, noting with satisfaction that Goliath was a highly appropriate representation of the arrogant French. The virgins hailed Henry with a specially written song of congratulation, beginning, “Welcome Henry ye fifte, Kynge of Englond’ and of Fraunce.” This was particularly significant for two reasons: it was the only piece in the entire pageant to be performed in English and it was also the only one to address the king himself as the conquering hero. Every other tableau had relied on quotations in Latin from the Bible, especially the Psalms, and had ascribed the victory to God. Lest even this moderate bit of praise for the king’s role be considered blasphemous, it was tempered by the singing of the
Te Deum
by a second host of little boys, dressed as angels and archangels, who showered the king with gold coins and laurel leaves.
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The “castle” contained one more surprise for the king. “Six citizens, magnificently dressed, came out of its iron gates carrying two basins made of gold and filled with gold, which were offered to the king.” The basins themselves were said to have been worth five hundred pounds, and between them they held a thousand pounds, a most acceptable gift from the Londoners to a king whose campaign had left his cup of glory overflowing, but his coffers decidedly empty.
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More virgins were waiting at the other end of Cheapside, standing in a series of niches contrived out of the tower encircling the other water cistern. Crowned with laurels and wearing girdles of gold, these maidens held golden chalices from which they gently blew roundels of gold leaf upon the king’s head. At the very top of the tower stood the figure of a golden archangel, surmounting a canopy painted to resemble a cloud-bedecked sky, beneath which sat a sun, enthroned in splendour, and emitting dazzling rays.
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And . . . so great was the throng of people in Cheapside, from one end to the other, that the horsemen were only just able, although not without difficulty, to ride through. And the upper rooms and windows on both sides were packed with some of the noblest ladies and womenfolk of the kingdom and men of honour and renown, who had assembled for this pleasing spectacle, and who were so very becomingly and elegantly decked out in cloth of gold, fine linen, and scarlet, and other rich apparel of various kinds, that no one could recall there ever having previously been in London a greater assemblage or a more noble array.
At the epicentre of this maelstrom of extravagant pageantry and noisy demonstrations of popular joy rode the quiet, almost incongruous figure of the king. He had deliberately dispensed with all the usual trappings of triumph and royalty, just as he had done when making his formal entry into Harfleur. He wore no crown and bore no sceptre; his only concession to his regal status was his gown of purple, a colour associated only with emperors, kings and prelates. He was accompanied by just a small personal retinue and followed by a group of his most important prisoners, including Charles d’Orléans, whose twenty-first birthday would fall the following day, the duke of Bourbon and Marshal Boucicaut. Not one of them could, or would, have adopted a similarly humble attitude if their situations had been reversed.
A lesser man might easily have been seduced into joining the celebrations, if only by acknowledging the excitement and gratitude of the crowds, but Henry remained impassive throughout. “Indeed, from his quiet demeanour, gentle pace, and sober progress, it might have been gathered that the king, silently pondering the matter in his heart, was rendering thanks and glory to God alone, not to man.”
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The celebrations drew to an appropriate end with services at both St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, where the king made offerings at the shrines of St Earconwald and Edward the Confessor, respectively, before retiring to his palace at Westminster. The following day, Sunday 24 November, in accordance with the king’s command, a solemn requiem mass was held at St Paul’s for all those, on both sides, who had been killed in the battle of Agincourt.
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The remains of the duke of York were then carried to Northamptonshire and interred, as he had requested, in the choir of his new foundation, the collegiate church of St Mary and All Saints at Fotheringhay; building work had only just begun, under the supervision of Stephen Lote, the king’s chief master mason, so the duke’s premature end meant that his church would be built around the simple marble slab, with his figure engraved in brass upon it, which marked his final resting place. It would be left to his heir, several decades later, to complete the rebuilding of the church he had begun.
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Similar obsequies were taking place in towns and villages, churches and abbeys all over France. Despite the scale of the disaster, news of the defeat had been relatively slow to filter out to the regions. Disbelief must have played a part. The people of Abbeville, for instance, were so sure of a French victory that they prematurely held a celebratory civic feast as soon as the expected news reached them: a sad little marginal note was later added in the town accounts against the sum expended that the rumour “was not true.” At Boulogne, where the whole town had been in a state of high tension for weeks and had deployed messengers throughout the vicinity to pick up any news they could find, they knew on 25 October that battle had been joined but had to wait till the following day to learn its outcome. Their first response was to protect themselves, for Boulogne lay on the English route to Calais and the garrison had been severely depleted when, on the orders of Constable d’Albret, the sire de Laurois had led a large force to join the French army. Letters were immediately dispatched to neighbouring Montreuil begging for crossbowmen to reinforce the town, to the king, the dauphin and the duke of Berry at Rouen, asking for provision to be made to secure the frontier, and to Philippe, count of Charolais, at Ghent, seeking “comfort and aid.” Perhaps surprisingly, reinforcements did pour into Boulogne not only from Montreuil but also from as far afield as Amiens, Hesdin, St Riquier and St Laleu, continuing to arrive for several days after Henry had sailed for England.
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Other reactions to the French defeat were less altruistic. At Mantes, for instance, which lay between Rouen and Paris, guards were posted at the town gates so that “the men fleeing and returning from the host of the king should not pass through the town save in groups of 20 to 30 at a time.” The town of Amiens was equally pragmatic in looking after its own. Messengers were sent to the battlefield to recover as much as possible of the town’s property, which had been requisitioned for the army’s use by their
bailli
. Among the items they managed to retrieve were three large cannon, two smaller ones, some battered shields belonging to their crossbowmen and scraps of tents. The town elections, which were traditionally held on 28 October, had to be abandoned in the general chaos caused by the influx of wounded and dying.
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All the towns of the region now looked to the king and the dauphin to provide them with some sort of leadership in the aftermath of the disaster. They were still at Rouen, together with the dukes of Berry and Anjou, and the large force that had been held in reserve to protect them. Now, more than at any other time, the dauphin should have provided a rallying point for those who had survived the battle, but when the shocking news was brought to him, he proved incapable of taking any decisive action. His paralysis was unhelpful but understandable. Until he knew for certain that Henry V had left France, there was every possibility that further military action might take place; his councillors were urging him to retake Harfleur, not merely to restore French pride, but to pre-empt its governor, the earl of Dorset, carrying out a strike against Rouen.
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On the other hand, no one knew how John the Fearless would react in this crisis.
In the end, the dauphin’s fear of the duke of Burgundy proved greater than his fear of the English. Ten days after the battle, the duke had at last set out from Dijon at the head of the Burgundian army that he had promised to send against the English. He had no intention of avenging the deaths of his two brothers at Agincourt, or even of belatedly going to the aid of his country. He was heading for Paris. The English had wiped out the Armagnac leadership for him and there was now no one standing between him and the control of the government of France. It was a chance not to be missed. In a further act of defiance, he took with him the Parisian leaders of the bloody pro-Burgundian coup in 1413, including Simon Caboche himself, all of whom were still under royal interdict. The dauphin responded by ordering that no prince of the blood should be allowed to enter Paris with an army and that all the bridges and ferries into the city should be removed.
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By 21 November the duke was at Troyes, some eighty miles south-east of Paris, with an army whose ranks were daily swelling as they were joined by the Burgundian veterans of Agincourt. The dauphin could no longer ignore the threat. Abandoning Rouen and the northern regions to their fate, he fled back to Paris, taking his father and the duke of Berry with him. Even now this hapless young man managed to offend his natural supporters by passing through St Denis without paying his respects at the abbey, as custom demanded. Bereft of his Armagnac councillors and protectors, most of whom had died or been captured on the field of Agincourt, he sent an urgent summons to Charles d’Orléans’ father-in-law, Bernard, count of Armagnac, inviting him to come to Paris and take up the late Charles d’Albret’s role as constable of France. Confident that his champion would soon arrive from Aquitaine with a host of seasoned Gascon men-at-arms in his train, the dauphin defied John the Fearless’s demands for a personal audience and declared his intention of taking up the reins of government himself.
It was not to be. Although Bernard d’Armagnac set off promptly, by the time he arrived in Paris on 27 December, the eighteen-year-old dauphin had been dead and buried for more than a week. Although he had been persuaded to effect a perfunctory deathbed reconciliation with the wife he had abandoned, she left Paris almost immediately to return to her family. Her father, the duke of Burgundy, learnt of his son-in-law’s death only when he heard the Parisian bells tolling for his passing.
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The shock of the disaster at Agincourt had failed to unite France, so it is perhaps not surprising that the death of Louis de Guienne also had no impact on the internal quarrels that were tearing the kingdom apart. His successor as dauphin was his seventeen-year-old younger brother Jean de Touraine, who had been brought up in the court of the duke of Burgundy’s sister Margaret, countess of Hainault, and had recently married her fourteen-year-old daughter. The duke was determined that this dauphin would not reject his authority. Ignoring demands from Paris that the new heir to the throne should be returned to the capital, John the Fearless temporarily disbanded his army and withdrew to Brabant and Flanders, where he could keep a watchful eye on the dauphin and issue orders in his name.
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He was, however, merely biding his time before launching another and more deadly assault on Paris. And in Bernard d’Armagnac, to whom the standard of Armagnac leadership had passed from the captive Charles d’Orléans, he had found an opponent as implacable, ruthless and opportunistic as himself. The civil war between Burgundian and Armagnac was by no means over. It was as if the battle of Agincourt had never taken place.
THE REWARDS OF VICTORY
For Henry V, Agincourt was just the beginning. The euphoria that had greeted his victory did not start or end with the London pageant. Even before the king returned to England, his brother John, duke of Bedford, acting as his lieutenant, had summoned a meeting of Parliament at Westminster. Since many of those who would normally have taken their places in either the House of Lords or the House of Commons were still with the English army in France, it was a severely depleted gathering that met in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster on Monday, 4 November 1415. The king’s half-uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, gave a rousing opening address on the theme “as he has done to us, so let us do to him,” reminding those present that Henry had laboured continually to preserve peace, law and justice, but that he had been unable to regain his rights in France except by going to war. God had given him victory to the exaltation of his crown, the comfort of his lieges, the fear of his enemies and the perpetual profit of his realm. Now it was the duty of his subjects to enable him to complete what he had begun by granting him aid for a second expedition.
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Parliament responded with a generosity that was unparalleled in its history. The collection of the second of the two-tenths and -fifteenths that had been granted in 1414 was brought forward from February 1416 to December 1415, so that the king could pay his returning troops and redeem the jewels he had pawned as security for their wages. Yet another new tax of a tenth and fifteenth was approved for collection in November 1416. And, most extraordinary of all, the House of Commons granted Henry customs duty on all imports and exports, including wool and wine, for the rest of his life. This was a remarkable public demonstration of trust in, and approval of, Henry’s kingship, for the right to grant taxes was a privilege that the Commons guarded closely as its main bargaining counter for receiving concessions from the king. There was only one precedent for a life grant of the wool levy and that had been extracted under duress by the autocratic Richard II. Though there may have been some arm-twisting by Henry’s ministers in the background, and it was arguable that this depleted Parliament lacked proper authority since large swaths of England were unrepresented, there was no denying the fact that the Commons had made the life grant voluntarily, confident in the knowledge that Henry V would spend the money wisely and in the furtherance of their own best interests. It was, in effect, a vote for the continuation of the war in France.
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