Agincourt (51 page)

Another of Henry’s prisoners who later played a leading role in the restoration of the French monarchy was Arthur, count of Richemont. Prior to his capture at Agincourt, and despite his brother the duke of Brittany’s alliances with England, he had been an active supporter of the Armagnac cause. While in captivity, he was persuaded by Henry V to change his allegiance so that he then became an active supporter of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. He agreed to become an ally and vassal of the English king and, as we have seen, was therefore permitted to return to France on parole, so long as he remained in the company of the earl of Suffolk. Absconding after Henry’s death, he married Margaret of Burgundy, John the Fearless’s daughter and widow of the dauphin Louis de Guienne, a year later. In 1425 the dauphin Charles, as yet uncrowned and unanointed, offered him the post of constable of France, and in a second spectacular political volte-face the count of Richemont returned to his Armagnac roots. His reforms of the French army and his victories over the English at the battles of Patay (1429) and Formigny (1450) paved the way for the reconquest of Normandy.
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The brother and stepson of the duke of Bourbon—Louis de Bourbon, count of Vendôme, and Charles d’Artois, count of Eu—similarly took up arms against the English after their respective releases in 1423 and 1438. After twenty-three years in captivity, and now aged forty-five, Charles d’Artois had his revenge for his lost youth by becoming the French king’s lieutenant in both Normandy and Guienne.
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The duke of Bourbon himself never had that opportunity. In July 1420 he was offered terms that might have obtained his release, though Raoul de Gaucourt’s experience did not augur well. He was allowed to return to France on licence to find a hundred thousand gold crowns for his ransom, on condition that he also persuaded his son, the count of Clermont, to join the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, and provided important hostages, including his second son. All his efforts to meet these terms proved unavailing and although Henry V died while he was still at liberty, unlike the count of Richemont he did not consider his obligations at an end. He returned to England, where his captivity did not prevent him fathering an illegitimate daughter, and died at Bolingbroke in 1434. Even in death he did not return home, for he was buried in the Franciscan church of London.
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Marshal Boucicaut, too, would never see France again. At forty-eight years of age when he was captured at Agincourt, he was already one of the oldest prisoners and, having spent all his life from the age of twelve in arms, he was now forced to end his days in involuntary retirement. This most pious of men, who reserved hours each day for his devotions, and every Friday wore black and fasted in memory of Christ’s passion, had commissioned a Book of Hours in 1405-8. Twenty-seven miniatures of saints with special relevance to his life adorn the book. Ironically, the first and most important was dedicated to St Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners. Though it had been included in memory of the marshal’s brief captivity after Nicopolis, it proved to be a prescient choice. All Boucicaut’s efforts to obtain his release were in vain. He offered Henry V sixty thousand crowns as a ransom, but this was rejected out of hand. The pope tried to intervene on his behalf, sending ambassadors to England to offer forty thousand crowns and promising that Boucicaut would give his oath never to fight against the English again. Henry remained obdurate. Despairing of ever obtaining his freedom, Boucicaut added a codicil to his will a few weeks before he died, leaving a few tokens to his fellow-prisoners and the rest of his small estate to his brother Geffroi. On 25 June 1421, this internationally famous paragon of chivalry died in the obscurity of Robert Waterton’s manor house at Methley in Yorkshire. It was the passing of an age and of the great Boucicaut name. The marshal’s wife had died while he was in prison, he had no children and both his nephews, who inherited the estate from their father, died childless, too. His body, however, was taken back to France and buried, with honour, close to his father, the first marshal Boucicaut, in the chapel of the Virgin behind the choir of the Church of St Martin at Tours.
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The fate of Henry V’s most important prisoner was equally pathetic. Charles d’Orléans was still legally a minor when he was captured at Agincourt. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday within days of landing in England and would spend the next twenty-five years of his life in captivity. His younger brother Philippe died in 1420, his only child Jeanne in 1432 and his wife Bonne of Armagnac at about the same time. Helpless to aid either his own cause or that of France, he could only watch from the sidelines as Henry V invaded France and conquered Normandy. The assassination of his father’s murderer, John the Fearless, by the dauphin in 1419 might have been a cause for rejoicing, but it was short-lived. As a sixteenth-century prior remarked, when showing John the Fearless’s skull to François I, “It was through this hole that the English entered into France.”
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The murder drove Philippe, the duke of Burgundy’s son and heir, into open alliance with the English and led directly to the Treaty of Troyes, by which the dauphin was disinherited for his crime and Henry V, having achieved his long-held ambition of marrying Catherine of France, was legally recognised by Charles VI as the rightful heir to his crown.

Ironically, Henry V never became king of France, for Charles VI outlived his son-in-law by almost two months. Henry V’s son was only nine months old when he inherited the crowns of England and France, and it was in neither the English nor the Burgundian interest to procure Charles d’Orléans’ release. Until 1435, when Philippe, duke of Burgundy, abandoned his English alliance and made his peace with the dauphin, whom he now recognised as Charles VII, the only people who actively championed Charles d’Orléans’ cause were his bastard brother Jean, count of Dunois, and Joan of Arc. It would take another five years before all sides came to the conclusion that Charles was more valuable as a potential peacemaker between England and France than as an impotent prisoner. He was formally set free in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 28 October 1440.

A month later, aged forty-six, he married for the third and last time. His fourteen-year-old bride would give birth to three children, one of whom would eventually succeed to the throne of France as Louis XII, but Charles himself had lost his appetite for politics. He retired to live quietly at his chateau at Blois, where he spent his time much as he had done in captivity in England: reading his impressively large library of books on philosophy, theology and science, pursuing his interest in clocks and other mechanical devices and writing the urbane and witty love poetry of which he had become a master craftsman during his years of enforced leisure.
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Though most of Charles d’Orléans’ poetry belonged firmly in the courtly love tradition and should not be read as autobiographical, his personal plight surfaced occasionally. Seeing the coastline of France while on a visit to Dover, for instance, inspired a plea for the peace that would allow him to return home:

Peace is a treasure which one cannot praise too highly.

I hate war, it should never be prized;

For a long time it has prevented me, rightly or wrongly,

From seeing France which my heart must love.
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In another of his poems, “Complainte,” he looked back to the causes of the French defeat at Agincourt and regretted that France, which had once been a pattern to all other nations for honour, loyalty, courtesy and prowess, had sunk into pride, lethargy, lechery and injustice. He urged his countrymen to return to the virtues that had once inspired its great Christian heroes, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver and St Louis, so that the saints would forgive them and once more rally to their cause.
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Charles d’Orléans’ poetry was part of an enormous literary response generated by the battle. The defeat was such a cataclysmic event that contemporaries often could not bear to refer to it by name. In fifteenth-century France “la malheureuse journée” (the unhappy or unfortunate day) was understood to mean Agincourt and needed no further explanation.

Alain Chartier’s long poem,
Le Livre des Quatre Dames
, for instance, was written within two years of the battle and in direct response to it, but never mentions it by name. Disguised as a courtly love lyric, the poem is in fact a thinly veiled attack upon those whom Chartier considered responsible for the defeat. In it he describes meeting four ladies, all weeping copiously, who ask him to judge which of them is the most unhappy. All of them have lost their lovers at Agincourt. The first lady’s was killed “on that accursed day,” the second’s was captured and now languishes in an English prison. The third lady claims that her fate is worse still: she waits in suspense, like a tower which has been mined but must fall in due course, for she does not know what has happened to her lover or whether he is dead or alive. Each one blames those who fled the field for the defeat and their personal loss. It is obvious that the fourth lady, whose lover survived, is the most unhappy. She bewails having given her heart to “a disgraced and cowardly fugitive, who stands condemned for dishonourable conduct”: in his selfish anxiety to preserve himself, he had abandoned his comrades to death and imprisonment. “He polished up his bascinet and put on his armour, only to run away,” she complains. “Alas! What a day!”
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Chartier was a Norman cleric and lifelong Armagnac who became secretary to the new dauphin, Charles, in 1417. Like Charles d’Orléans, he also wrote a number of works denouncing French knights for their moral failings and urging them to practise the ancient chivalric virtues so that victory against the English would one day be theirs:

One ought to consider more worthy of honour and praise the military commander who has the wisdom to know when, if necessary, to withdraw his army and keep it intact rather than risking its destruction through excessively rash contempt for danger, neglecting moderation and caution in the vain hope of acquiring a reputation for chivalric valour. I do not need to look for ancient examples from times past to prove what I am saying; something we have seen recently and in our own day serves as a better lesson. Let us remember in our hearts the case of the unhappy battle of Azincourt, for which we have paid dearly, and grieve still for our woeful misfortune. All the weight of that great disaster presses upon us and we cannot free ourselves from it, except by acting promptly, showing a wise perseverance and reining in our rash impatience with the safety of caution.
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In her
Letter Concerning the Prison of Human Life
, which she finished on 20 January 1417, Christine de Pizan also advised patience and fortitude, doling out measured words of comfort to Marie, duchess of Bourbon, whose son-in-law and cousins were killed at Agincourt, and whose husband, son and brother-in-law were all English prisoners. The French dead, she declared, were all God’s martyrs, “obedient unto death in order to sustain justice, along with the rights of the French crown and their sovereign lord.” After Henry launched his second campaign and the English advance through France appeared unstoppable, Christine’s resignation gave way to indignation and a nationalism that was all the more ardent for being the adopted identity of this Italian-born writer. Her growing hatred of the English culminated in her premature celebration of Joan of Arc’s successes. “And so, you English . . . You have been check-mated,” she crowed. “You thought you had already conquered France and that she must remain yours. Things have turned out otherwise, you treacherous lot!”
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In England, the delight that greeted the victory at Agincourt found expression in a host of political songs and popular ballads. Adam of Usk, for instance, introduced an eight-line Latin epigram into his chronicle with the words, “This is what one poet wrote in praise of the king.” Though obviously a scholarly production, the tone was unashamedly populist.

People of England, cease your work and pray,

For the glorious victory of Crispin’s day;

Despite their scorn for Englishmen’s renown,

The odious might of France came crashing down.
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This Latin epigram was one of many produced after the battle and comes from a long tradition of such work in chronicles. There is, however, a piece that stands out from the rest not only because it survives in an independent manuscript, complete with musical notation, but also because the verses were composed in English. The Agincourt carol was written in Henry V’s lifetime for three voices: the six verses were to be sung in unison by two voices, but the Latin chorus, “To God give thanks, O England, for the victory,” opened with a single voice, progressed to two-part harmony for the second phrase and was then repeated with variations by all three voices. Like the English verses sung at the London pageant, it managed to lavish praise on the king while attributing his success to God.

Deo gracias, anglia, redde pro victoria

Our king went forth to Normandy, with grace and might of chivalry;

There God for him wrought marv’lously,

Wherefore Englond may call and cry:

Deo gracias, Anglia, redde pro victoria.

Deo gracias, Anglia, redde pro victoria.

He set a siege, forsooth to say,

To Harflu town with royal array;

That town he won and made affray,

That France shall rue till Domesday:

Deo gracias.

Then went him forth our King comely;

In Agincourt field he fought manly;

Through grace of God most marvellously

He hath both field and victory:

Deo gracias.

There lordës, earlës and baron

Were slain and taken and that full soon,

And some were brought into London