You remember Franklin’s story of the speckled axe; how he turned the
grindstone to polish it up nice, and, tiring of the revolutions,
concluded he “liked a speckled axe best.” There was a king of England
who had a very speckled character and the people of England (who turned
the grindstone for him) long liked their king’s speckled character best
of all the kings that they had known.
When Prince of Wales he “cut up” so that he got the name of “Madcap
Harry,” some of the most amusing of his pranks being highway robbery
and burglary, for all which he was admired in his day and immortalized,
along with Jack Falstaff, by Shakspere. One of the light spots on
this character is his obedience to the commitment by Chief Justice
Gascoigne; and although it belongs to the realm of tradition, it is
so pleasant to believe and is so quaintly told by Lord Campbell that
we’ll e’en accept it: One of the Prince’s gang of cut purses had
been captured and imprisoned by Gascoigne, and the Prince came into
court and demanded his release, which was denied. The Prince, says
the chronicle, “being set all in a fury, all chafed and in a terrible
maner, came up to the place of jugement, men thinking that he would
have slain the juge, or have done to him some damage; but the juge
sitting still without moving, declaring the majestie of the king’s
place of jugement, and with an assured and bolde countenance, had to
the Prince these words following: ‘Sir, remember yourself. I kepe here
the place of the kinge, your soveraine lorde and father, to whom ye owe
double obedience: wherefore eftsoones in his name I charge you desiste
of your wilfulness and unlawfull enterprise, and from hensforth give
good example to those whiche hereafter shall be your propre subjectes.
And nowe, for your contempte and disobedience, go you to the prison
of the Kinge’s Benche, whereunto I committe you, and remain ye there
prisoner untill the pleasure of the kinge, your father, be further
knowen.’”
The prince’s better nature, and a sense of his family’s precarious
situation before the law perhaps, induced him to accept the sentence
and go to jail. On hearing this the king is recorded as saying: “O
merciful God, how much am I bound to your infinite goodness, especially
for that you have given me a juge who feareth not to minister justice,
and also a sonne, who can suffre semblably and obeye justice.”
In keeping with this wonderful “spasm of good behavior” is the sudden
change that came over the Madcap as soon as he became King Henry V.
He became as remarkable for his austere piety as he had been for his
wickedness. Unfortunately, his piety took the shape of burning Lollards
(the shouting Methodists of that day), and he signed the warrant under
which the brave and innocent Sir John Oldcastle, his old friend and
boon companion, was hung up in chains over a slow fire.
There could be but two outlets in those days for such a degree of
piety as Henry had achieved: as whatever he undertook must be bloody
and cruel, the choice lay between a crusade or an invasion of France.
As the latter promised the most booty and least risk he seemed to
have a call in that direction. The attempt seemed about equal to an
able bodied man attacking a paralytic patient in bed. The king of
France was insane: his heir was worthless and lazy; the queen regent
was an unfaithful wife and an unnatural mother, who took sides with
the faction that was trying to dethrone the king and destroy his and
her son. The kingdom was torn to pieces by civil strife between the
Orleanists and the Burgundians, each vying with the other in cruelty,
treachery, violence and plundering the government and outraging the
people. There was an awful state of affairs—just the chance for a
valiant English king.
Henry put up a demand for the French crown, under the pseudo claim of
Edward III., whose house his father had deposed. A usurper claiming a
neighbor’s crown by virtue of the usurped title of an overturned and
disinherited dynasty; as if one stealing a crown got all the reversions
of that crown by right. Henry would have made a good claim agent in
our day! And the English people, with the remembrance of Cressy and
Poictiers, of the Black Prince, and the captive King of France, and
all the booty and cheap glory that made England so rich and vain sixty
years before, fell in with Henry’s amiable designs on France. It was
perfectly clear to the whole nation, from the chief justice down to the
clodhopper, that Henry’s claim to the crown of France was a clear and
indefeasible one; that the war would be for a high and holy right—and
could not fail to pay.
And this was the main object of Henry after all: to divert the
kingdom’s attention from his own usurped title by a foreign war; to
fortify usurpation at home by attempted usurpation abroad. His father
had enjoined upon him this policy, in Shakspere’s words—
“Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
How I came by the crown, O God, forgive;
And grant it may with thee in true peace live.”
So in July, 1415, Henry and 30,000 more patriots, sailed across the
channel on 1,500 ships and landed unopposed at the mouth of the Seine.
It took them six weeks and cost half the army to reduce the Castle of
Harfleur, surrounded by a swamp, and then his generals advised him to
abandon the campaign. But he dare not go back to his insecure throne
with failure written on his very first attempt at glory; the expedition
had cost too much money and he must have something to show for it. So
boldly enough he struck for the heart of France.
This whole campaign was a close copy after the invasion by Edward III.
in 1346. There was the same unopposed march to the walls of Paris,
almost over the same ground; the retreat before a tardy French host;
the lucky crossing of the river Somme, over the identical Blanchetacque
Ford, and the bringing to bay of the English by many times their own
number of French, were all faithfully repeated; while the battle of
Agincourt took place only a short distance from the field of Cressy,
and in its main features was a repetition of that engagement. But in
one respect, honorable to him, Henry did _not_ copy after Edward and
the Black Prince. He forbade all plundering and destruction; a soldier
who stole the pix from a church at Corby was instantly executed.
The description of the scenes before the battle, when,
“Proud of their number and secure in soul,
The confident and over-lusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice;”
the contrary despondency of the English, the lofty, heroic tone of
Henry with his men, when he declared gaily he was glad there were no
more of them to share the honor of whipping ten to one of the French;
and his proclamation that any man who had no stomach for this fight
might depart; we “could not die in that man’s company that fears his
fellowship to die with us.” But his humble prostration in the solitude
of his own tent when he prayed piteously,—
“O, God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!”
All this makes up one of Shakspere’s most moving scenes. The action
and the result of this battle are as inexplicable as those of Cressy
and Poictiers. We know that now, as then, the sturdy English archers
did their fearful execution on the massed French. France had learned
nothing in seventy years of defeats and adversity; she had no infantry,
entrusted no peasantry with arms: still depended on gentlemen alone to
defend France—and again the gentlemen failed her. Sixty thousand were
packed in a narrow passage between two dense forests. On this mass the
bowmen fired their shafts until these were exhausted. Then throwing
away their bows, swinging their axes and long knives, and planting
firmly in the earth in front of them their steel-pointed pikes, they
waited the charge of the French chivalry. The mud was girth-deep. The
horses stumbled under their heavily-armored riders. Such as reached
the English line struck the horrid pikes and were hewn down by the
stalwart axmen. They break and retreat, carrying dismay and confusion
to the main body. The pikes are pulled up, and the line advanced. A
charge of English knights is hurled upon the broken mass of French,
and their return is covered by the axmen, who advance and form another
line of pikes to meet the countercharge of French. So it goes on, until
the French host is a mob, and the English are everywhere among them,
hewing, stabbing, and thrusting. “So great grew the mass of the slain,”
said an eye-witness, “and of those who were overthrown among them, that
our people ascended the very heaps, which had increased higher than
a man, and butchered their adversaries below with swords and other
weapons.” It all lasted three hours before the French could be called
defeated, for they were so numerous and were packed so closely that
even retreat was long impossible. Before the battle had been decided,
every Englishman had four or five prisoners on his hands, whom he was
holding for ransoms. This was the grand chance to recoup all their
losses and sufferings and grievous denial of plunder. This was a
predicament for a victorious army, and if a small force of the French
had made a rally they might then have reversed their defeat on the
scattered English. Henry tried to avert such a catastrophe by sounding
the order for every man to put all his prisoners to death: but cupidity
saved many, nevertheless.
The flower of the chivalry of France perished on this field, greatly
to the relief and benefit of France. Seven of the princes of the blood
royal, the heads of one hundred and twenty of the noble families of
France, and eight thousand gentlemen were counted among the 30,000
slain. The feudal nobility never recovered from the blow,—but France
did, all the sooner for lack of them.
The victorious army made its way to Calais, and Henry returned to
England, “covered with glory and loaded with debt.” But there was
unlimited exultation when Henry came marching home, into London, under
fifteen grand triumphal arches, insomuch that an eye-witness says, “A
greater assembly or a nobler spectacle was not recollected to have been
ever before in London.”
Campaign after campaign into France followed; she being plunged deeper
and deeper into civil war, anarchy, and mob-rule. Rouen fell in 1419,
and the two kings arranged a peace and a marriage between Henry and
the princess Catherine. (The courtship in Shakspere is racy.) In 1420
the two kings, side by side, made a triumphant entry into Paris, and
Henry was acknowledged as successor to the French crown after Charles
VI. should die. Another great demonstration was seen in London when
the French Catherine was crowned Queen of England (1421). Ah! there
was a fearful Nemesis awaiting this newly-married pair in the insanity
of their son, inherited from Catherine’s father. And England was to
pay dearly for her French glory in the miseries of the reign of Henry
VI. and the dreadful Wars of the Roses. Indeed, she was already paying
dearly in the load of taxation and the loss of life those wars had
entailed, insomuch that even now there was a scarcity of “worthy and
sufficient persons” to manage government affairs in the boroughs and
parishes.
The English army in France met with a sudden reverse, the commandant,
the Duke of Clarence, being slain. More troops had to be raised and
taken to France, and in the effort to keep his grasp on the prostrate
kingdom, Henry himself was prostrated in the grasp of an enemy he
could not resist. So, on the 31st of August, 1422, in the midst of his
campaign, Henry died.
The priests came to his bedside and recited the penitential psalm:
when they came to “Thou shalt build up the walls of Jerusalem,” the
dying man said: “Ah, if I had finished this war I would have gone to
Palestine to restore the Holy City.” He was the last of the crusade
dreamers, and the last of the great invaders of France among English
kings. In a few years all that he had won, and all that the greatest
English generals and the prowess of her archers could avail were
scattered by a mere girl creating and leading to victory new French
armies.
And this bauble of war was all there was of Henry Fifth’s reign,
the pride of the House of Lancaster. So we can hardly join in the
lamentation of the Duke of Bedford:
“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night,
Comets, importing change of time and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death!
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.”
The historian, White, pretty well sums up this “speckled character:”
“His personal ambition had been hurtful to his people. In the first
glare of his achievements, some parts of his character were obscured
which calm reflection has pointed out for the reprobation of succeeding
times. He was harsh and cruel beyond even the limits of the harsh and
cruel code under which he professed to act. He bought over the church
by giving up innovators to its vengeance; he compelled his prisoner,
James I. of Scotland, to accompany him in his last expedition to France
to avenge a great defeat his arms sustained at Beaugé at the hands of
the Scotch auxiliaries, and availed himself of this royal sanction
to execute as traitors all the Scottish prisoners who fell into his
hands. His massacre of the French captives has already been related,
and we shall see how injuriously the temporary glory of so atrocious a
career acted on the moral feelings of his people when it blunted their
perception of those great and manifest crimes and inspired the nobles
with a spirit of war and conquest which cost innumerable lives and
retarded the progress of the country in wealth and freedom for many
years.”
[To be continued.]
* * * * *
It is hard in this world to win virtue, freedom, and happiness,
but still harder to diffuse them. The wise man gets everything
from himself, the fool from others. The freeman must release the
slave—the philosopher think for the fool—the happy man labor for the
unhappy.—_Jean Paul F. Richter._