THE ROYAL FAMILIES OF ENGLAND
Henry the Fifth
HENRY V ascended the throne amidst the acclamation of his subjects. Dismissing his former profligate companions he collected men of talent and experience around the throne, set the Earl of March at liberty, and after a short time restored the son of Hotspur to his hereditary honours and estates. The first trouble Henry was doomed to experience was from the Lollards. In the wildness of their fanaticism they affixed papers to the church doors, declaring that if the crown interposed with its authority against them, one hundred thousand men were ready to draw the sword in their defence. Investigation was provoked by so daring an act of defiance. It appeared that their principal leader was Sir John Oldcastle, called from his wife’s inheritance the Lord of Cobham From respect to Henry, whose intimate companion he had once been, the convocation, instead of calling him before the usual tribunal, denounced him to the king, who undertook his conversion with more zeal than wisdom. When argument failed, the royal teacher had recourse to threats, and the disciple, not liking that mode of proselytizing, fled from Windsor to his own residence at Cowling. The spiritual arms of the archbishop were equally ineffectual, and he was delivered over to the civil magistrate, but at the primate’s intercession a respite was granted to him of fifty days, during which he assembled his partizans and formed a plan to surprise the king at Eltham. This was defeated by Henry’s sudden departure for Westminster, and they then resolved to bring together all their adherents in St. Giles's Fields on the eve of the Epiphany. Again they were anticipated and baffled by his vigilance.
Having thus restored internal tranquillity, the monarch could turn his whole attention to France. Charles, unable in the distracted state of his kingdom to cope with so powerful an enemy, obtained a succession of short truces, which were granted by Henry solely that he might have time to provide troops and money for his projected invasion. No sooner were his preparations completed, than he made such demands upon the French king as would have stripped him of half his power, and when these were refused, assembled his army at Southampton. At the very moment of his intended embarkation, he was delayed by the intelligence of a Conspiracy formed against his throne and life. His cousin, Richard, a brother to the Duke of York, but recently created Earl of Cambridge, was at the head; his chief accomplices were Sir Thomas Grey, of Heton, a Northumbrian knight, and Lord Scroop, of Masham. By an inquest of twelve jurors it was found that their intention was to collect troops and proclaim the Earl of March, and that he had solicited the assistance of Henry Percy and of several Scottish lords, in carrying out their purpose. Scroop pleaded that his only object had been to learn and defeat the plans of the conspirators; the rest acknowledged their guilt; all were executed, while March, in whose favour they had plotted, received from Henry a general pardon. As soon as the wind would permit, the king set sail with his troops for the mouth of the Seine, and immediately invested Harfleur, which was in a short time surrendered without conditions. In the opinion of Henry this place was a second Calais, but it had been dearly purchased. From the casualties of the siege and a general dysentery, he had lost one half his army, so that there was little hope of a prosperous result to any important undertaking. Henry, however, resolved to proceed to Calais through the hostile provinces of Normandy, Picardy, and Artois, and after a difficult march the vanguard reached Blanchetaque on the Somme. Here he found the ford intersected with lines of palisades, behind which were posted strong bodies of archers and men at arms. Become sensible of his danger when too late, he proceeded along the left bank of the river to Bailleul. But as he advanced he found every bridge broken down, every ford defended, and the enemy observing his motions from the opposite side of the river. Despair had begun to seize the English, when in the very crisis, as it seemed, of their fate, an unguarded ford was discovered, by which they hastily established themselves at Monchy la Gauche, upon the right bank, and the disappointed constable fell back to Bapaume and St. Pol, whither he ordered up his expected reinforcements. The French then, in the confidence of superior numbers, resolved to hazard an engagement, and according to the fashion of those days, heralds were sent to Henry to announce their purpose and to inquire which way he meant to go. Henry at once replied, “by the straightest road to Calais.” The heralds were dismissed with a present of one hundred crowns.
By good fortune the English reached the bridge over the Ternois before the enemy found time to destroy it, and crossed without molestation. In a short time large masses of the French were seen marching from Azincourt. Having reconnoitered them from an eminence, Henry drew up his men in battle order, and kept them so till dark, when, as no enemy approached, he advanced by a white road in front, which led to Maisoncelies. Here they found an ample supply of food and better accommodations than they had known for many weeks; still the night could not be other to them than one of intense anxiety. Wasted by disease, fatigue, and privations, they were in presence of a gallant and far superior enemy, if numbers were to be considered, who had taken up a strong position in front of the village of Azincourt, through which they must cut their way or surrender. Numerous watch-fires blazed in the fields around them, and though the first part of the night was dark and stormy, the shouts of revelry that burst from the hostile camp showed that the French were more elated by the assurance of victory than depressed by the roughness of the weather.
At sunrise Henry, who had taken little repose, summoned his soldiers to attend at matins and mass. From prayer he led them to the field, forming them after his common practice in three divisions and two wings, but in such close connection as to be in appearance but a single body. In advance of the men at arms he placed the archers, whose savage appearance, no less than the recollection of their former deeds, might well alarm the enemy. Many had stripped themselves naked, others only bared their arms and breasts to give greater freedom to their limbs in action; all, in addition to their bow and arrows and battle axe or sword, carried on their shoulders a long stake, sharpened at either end, which they were taught to fix obliquely before them in the ground so as to afford a rampart of pikes against the attack of cavalry. Riding from banner to banner on his gray palfry, the king sought to inspire the troops with his own indomitable spirit, and chancing to hear one of them express a wish to his comrade that some of the good knights who were sitting idle in England could be transported by a miracle to the field of battle, he exclaimed, “No, I would not have a single man more. If God give us the victory, it will be plain that we owe it to his goodness. If he do not, the fewer we are the less will be the loss to our country. But fight with your usual courage, and God and the justice of our cause will protect us.”
Such was the advantage of numbers on the side of the French, that while the English files were but four deep, theirs were thirty. The armies were separated by little more than a quarter of a mile of wet spongy ground, and the constable, with very obvious policy, resolved to await his enemy’s attack. Though in some measure disconcerted by this plan, Henry availed himself of the opportunity to distribute food among his soldiers, and sent away two detachments unperceived by the French, one of which was ordered to lie in ambush in a meadow at Tramecourt on their left flank, the other to alarm them during the battle by setting fire to the houses in their rear. Nothing could be gained to the English, much might be lost, by farther delay. Henry, stepping forward, exclaimed, “Banners, advance !“ and at the same moment Sir Thomas Erpingham threw his warder into the air, whereupon the men, having knelt and bit the ground in token of receiving the sacrament, rushed forward; their shouts were re-echoed by the detachment in the meadow, which fell upon the left flank of the French. The archers then planted their stakes, and having delivered a flight of arrows retired again behind their palisade, and so true as well as rapid was the discharge, that of eight hundred men at arms destined to break this formidable body, not more than seven score came into close action. These were quickly despatched. The others shrank from the galling flights of arrows, and lost the command of their horses, which, plunging into the close ranks of the first division, produced irremediable confusion. This opportunity was seized by the archers to end with the sword or battle-axe what they had so well begun with the shaft. Slinging their bows behind them, they burst upon the opposed masses, killed the constable with his principal commanders, and put to rout the whole body. Henry, following with the men at arms, ordered them to re-form, and charged the second division, which, however, received the attack bravely, and for two hours maintained a doubtful conflict. The king himself was more than once in peril. He had saved the life of his brother Clarence, by striding across him when he lay wounded on the earth, and by repelling his assailants, but was now fallen upon by a band of eighteen French knights, who had sworn to kill or take him prisoner. With a stroke of his mace one of them brought him upon his knees, when he was rescued by his guard, and his adversaries were slain. The Duke of Alençon then fought his way to the royal standard, struck down York with one blow, and with a second clove the crown on the king’s helmet. In an instant every hand was raised against him, and though Henry would have saved his gallant enemy, he was too late—Alençon had fallen, and upon his death the rest took to flight. The king now prepared to attack the third division, when he was alarmed by false intelligence of a powerful force in the rear of his army. To meet this new peril, he ordered his prisoners to be slain, and the order was executed in most cases before the mistake could be discovered. The force, thus magnified, consisted only of a few hundred peasants, who had entered Maisoncelles, plundered the baggage, and driven away the horses.
At length the third division began to waver. The flames kindled in their rear by the English detachment completed their confusion, and the few who could be persuaded to follow their leaders in a last charge, were either killed or taken prisoners. Luckily for the fugitives their conquerors were in no condition to pursue them. They were worn out with the fight, and of their small number had lost sixteen hundred men with the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of York. On the other hand France had to mourn the death of eight thousand knights and esquires, more than a hundred bannerets, seven counts, and the three dukes of Bar, Brabant, and Alençon, with the constable and admiral, while Orleans and Bourbon, as well as the counts of Eu, Vendoine, and Richmond might be numbered amongst a multitude of prisoners. The next morning Henry marched to Calais, where it was agreed in council that he should return to England. At Dover he was received with acclamations, the people plunging into the waves to meet him, and bearing him in their arms to the beach. Nor was the enthusiasm less in London. Lords, commons, clergy, and citizens conducted him in triumph to the capital; the populace ran riot in his praises; and, what he perhaps valued more, the parliament was profuse to him in its grants of the national money. In the spring his vanity was yet farther flattered by a visit of Sigismund, king of the Romans, and emperor elect, who was anxious to reconcile the kings, that be might have their united aids in extinguishing the schism occasioned by the two pretenders to the papacy. With him came the French ambassadors, as also William of Bavaria, who proposed to assist in the friendly task of mediation. But Henry had not been taught by his late victory to be moderate in his demands, and the Count of Armagnac, who had succeeded to the administration of affairs on the death of the late dauphin, was by no means disposed to compromise the rights or the honour of his country. He had even attempted to retake Harfleur by drawing lines round the town, while he blockaded the harbour with a fleet of French ships and Genoese carracks. By Sigismund’s persuasions Henry was induced to abandon the idea of going himself to its relief, and sent instead the Duke of Bedford, when notwithstanding that the English ships were lower by a spear’s length than the Genoese carracks, the duke’s seamen boarded and took possession of them. Some few of the French ships escaped up the river, the rest struck—Harfleur was relieved.
A hasty glance at the affairs of France will be requisite to the understanding of Henry’s subsequent success in that country. So long as the Armagnacs maintained the ascendancy in Charles’s councils, the Duke of Burgundy was glad to seek the friendship of the English king. Though he would not enter into any positive engagements with him, he had yet during the last campaign forbidden his vassals to obey Charles’s summons, and allowed his county of Flanders to be declared neutral for the benefit of commerce. In the present year a communication was kept up between the two courts, ostensibly for the regulation of trade, in reality that each prince might turn to his own profit the personal quarrels of the other. A congress held between them at Calais, at which Sigismund and the Count of Hainault assisted, tended still more to alarm the French cabinet, for no one could believe that they had met only to deliberate on the schism in the church. Vague reports spread abroad that the duke had acknowledged Henry’s claims to the French crown, while in truth he was only seeking his own advantage, and upon the breaking up of the congress retired to execute the plans which he had carefully concealed from the English sovereign. At Valenciennes he agreed with the dauphin to assist him against Henry, and the dauphin on his part promised to unite with him in removing the Armagnacs from power. But the death of the young prince broke up these schemes, and the duke, challenging his opponents with having poisoned the heir to the throne, claimed the aid of every good Frenchman to assist in punishing the traitors. He then placed himself at the head of sixty thousand cavalry, and marched to Paris, which yet the Armagnacs were able to hold out against him. In another quarter he was more successful. The profligate Isabel of Bavaria, the dauphin’s mother, had been imprisoned by her husband’s orders in Tours. Her he released by stratagem, when she immediately assumed the title of regent, and though formerly the duke’s enemy, now appointed him by proclamation her lieutenant.
While Burgundy was upon his march to Paris, Henry landed in Normandy without opposition. Grown wise from the experience of his former campaign, he forbore to insult the natives by idle bravado, and would fain have persuaded the Normans to join him as their lawful duke. But the lapse of two centuries had made them forget their old attachment to the descendants of Rollo; they defended their country with courage, and might have baffled him had they not been abandoned to their own resources. While Armagnac and Burgundy contended at Paris for power, fortress after fortress fell into the hands of the invader, who would listen to neither peace nor armistice but on condition that Charles’s daughter, Catherine, should become his wife, that he should be declared regent during the lifetime of the king, and that upon Charles’s death he should inherit the crown. Nor would he suffer himself to be stopped in his career by the news from England. Taking advantage of his absence, the Lollards had entered into a secret understanding with the Scots, who under Albany and Douglas crossed the borders, and laid siege, the one to the castle of Berwick, and the other to that of Roxburgh. On the approach, however, of Bedford and Exeter, at the head of a hundred thousand men, they decamped with precipitation, and their fight disconcerted the plans of Sir John Oldcastle, who had emerged from his concealment near London. Being taken after an obstinate resistance in the marches of Wales, he was arraigned before the peers, by whom he was condemned to be hanged as a traitor, and burnt as a heretic, in St. Giles’s Fields, the theatre of his rebellion.
With the spring Henry resumed his operations with a reinforcement of fifteen thousand men. While he was thus employed, the Duke of Burgundy had triumphed over the Armagnacs. They had got possession of Paris, arrested all their enemies, and then goaded on the populace till they broke open the gaols and murdered the prisoners. Charles, however, the only surviving son of the king, was borne away in safety by Tannezier du Chastel, and the remains of the Armagnac faction proclaiming him regent, set up a rival administration at Poictiers. Both parties applied to Henry, who availed himself of their mutual animosities to gain his own ends, without, however, suffering any negotiations to check his warlike operations for a single hour. After a long career of success he laid siege to Rouen, which being too strong in its natural and artificial defences to be taken by force, he endeavoured to starve into submission. At length they were obliged to surrender, but the resolute conduct of the governor obliged Henry to grant them better terms than he had intended.
The full of Rouen made both parties eager to cultivate the friendship of the English monarch. The young dauphin failed, however, to keep the appointment he had made for that purpose, and Burgundy affected a willingness to comply with all demands. Isabella was also present with her daughter, but when it was found that Henry was captivated by the charms of Catherine, the artful mother withdrew her from these conferences, the more to inflame his passions. The real conferences were in the meanwhile going on secretly between the duke and the dauphin, who agreed after a time to forget their differences and unite against the common enemy. By this unexpected turn the English king was placed in a position of great danger, if the new allies could only have been sincere to each other. A single event changed the whole face of things. At the request of the young prince the duke, though with much reluctance, consented to meet him at Montereau sur Yonne. On approaching the town he heard that three barriers, with a gate in each, had been drawn across the bridge, and his suspicions were yet further raised when a courier announced that the dauphin had been long waiting for his arrival on the opposite bank. Still he proceeded. With twelve attendants he passed the first and second gates, which were immediately locked behind him. On drawing near the third, the prince appeared. Hereupon the duke knelt, and was about to speak, when Tannezeir du Chastel smote him on the face with a small axe, and before he could draw his sword he fell under a multitude of wounds. This disgraceful murder convinced the Burgundians that no reliance could be placed on the dauphin. Paris at once concluded a truce with Henry; Philip, son and heir to John, solicited his alliance; and Isabella promised that any arrangements made with that prince should be confirmed by Charles. Encouraged by such prospects, Henry demanded that Catherine should be given to him in marriage, that he should be regent during the king’s life, and inherit the crown upon his death. The French consented. A “perpetual peace” was ratified the next day. Henry was married to Catherine, and left Troyes for the siege of Sens, which he speedily reduced. The like fate attended Montereau and the strong fortress of Melun, when winter closed the campaign, and the kings and queens entered the capital in triumph.
Henry returned to England, where he was joyfully welcomed by his subjects, and Catherine was crowned with a magnificence unusual in those days. But he was soon recalled to the theatre of war by news of the fatal battle of Beauje, in which his brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom he had left his lieutenant in Normandy, had been defeated and slain. In this engagement a large body of Scots had fought under the French banners, and Henry, determined to make their own countrymen the instruments of his meditated vengeance, agreed to give Archibald, Earl of Douglas, an annuity of two hundred pounds, on condition that he should serve him for life with two hundred men at arms and two hundred foot soldiers. In the hope, too, that the Scots in the dauphin’s pay would not fight against their own prince, he persuaded James, who bad been his prisoner for sixteen years, to accompany him, with a promise that on his return he should revisit his own country. The result disappointed his expectations. In revenge he executed every Scot, taken in arms, as a traitor.
His usual success attended Henry in this expedition. He drove the dauphin from the walls of Chartres, chased him into the strong city of Bourges, and at the request of the Parisians, besieged Meaux, which, after a long siege, he compelled to surrender at discretion. To add to the king’s good fortune, his queen had lately been delivered of a son, and upon the reduction of Meaux paid a visit to her father and mother at the Bois de Vincennes. Henry hastened to join her, and the two courts repaired in company to Paris against the approaching festival of Whitsuntide. But in the midst of triumph and pageants, his attention was forcibly called to a malady he had too long neglected, and which by different writers has been variously described as a dysentery, a fistula, and a pleurisy. With a last effort of his strong mind to subdue bodily weakness, he undertook to raise the siege of Cosne at the desire of his allies, and the dauphin, alarmed at his approach, retreated across the Loire. Unable, however, to proceed from increasing debility, at Corbeil he gave the command to the Duke of Bedford, and was carried back to the Bois de Vincennes. In a few hours he expired, on the last day of August, in the year 1422.