THE INVASION OF FRANCE
Henry set sail from Southampton on August 11th. His point of attack was
Harfleur, in the estuary of the Seine, now a decayed village, but then
reckoned to be the first seaport of Normandy. This importance was one
reason for attacking it; another was the activity shown by its sailors
in capturing English shipping. The fleet of transports was necessarily
large, fourteen or sixteen hundred vessels in all; it seems to have
accomplished the voyage in safety, though, as the disembarkation of
the troops did not begin till the night of August 14th, it may have
encountered rough weather, and some stores were certainly spoiled by
the sea.
Henry’s first care was to issue strict orders for the good behaviour
of his army. All property of the Church was to be held sacred, and
no violence to be done to any clerical person; women were not to be
injured. The penalty of death was to be inflicted on all offenders.
He had effected his landing, which it would have been easy to oppose,
without molestation. Nor did he meet with any hindrance when, four days
afterwards, the disembarkation of his men and stores completed, he
marched to Harfleur and invested the town. This occupied both banks
of the river Lézarde, a tributary of the Seine. The entrance to the
harbour was defended by a chain drawn across from two towers which
flanked either end of the walls. The defences of the town were strong,
and each of the three gates was defended by an outwork. The garrison
consisted of four hundred men-at-arms, who with their attendants may
have made up a force of between two and three thousand men. It was
reinforced, before the investment of the town was made complete, by
a body of troops under the Lord of Gaucourt, who immediately assumed
the chief command. Henry sent a herald to demand the surrender of the
town. It was consistent with the position which he claimed, that of a
sovereign demanding his rightful inheritance, that he threatened the
inhabitants with death if they refused obedience to the lawful Duke of
Normandy.
A regular siege was then commenced. Trenches were pushed up to the
town, and when the batteries were finished a cannonade was opened.
Henry had some heavy field-pieces and a certain number of artillerymen
and engineers, though these, of course, did not bear anything like
the modern proportion to the whole force of the army. The defence was
obstinate. The besieged repaired the damage caused by the cannonade
almost as fast as it was done, and successfully countermined the
English mines. They inflicted no little loss on their assailants by
the missiles which they discharged from the walls, and even made some
sallies with success. Meanwhile the English army was suffering greatly.
No small part of the stores brought from England had been damaged in
the passage across the Channel, and supplies from the country could
only be obtained by sending out large bodies of men. It was not long
before disease began to show itself in the camp. Bad and scanty food,
and the wetness of the weather, which seems to have been constantly
unfavourable throughout the campaign, caused an epidemic of dysentery.
As many as two thousand men are said to have perished of this disease.
Among them was the Bishop of Norwich--who, churchman as he was,
seems to have been a trusted and efficient counsellor in military
matters--and many nobles and knights.
Henry did not fail to perceive the gravity of the situation, and
determined to risk an assault. This was to be delivered at dawn, after
a cannonade had been kept up during the night. But before morning came,
the commander of the garrison sent an envoy to the King, bearing the
offer to capitulate unless the town should be relieved by the King
of France within three days. It was now the 19th of September, and
the siege had lasted exactly thirty days. No help arrived within the
stipulated time; indeed the French king and his counsellors had at
once informed the inhabitants that their army was not ready to act. On
Sunday the 22nd, the Lord of Gaucourt, accompanied by a number of the
chief inhabitants of Harfleur, made a formal surrender of the keys to
the English king. Henry received his visitors in a magnificent tent
which had been raised for the purpose on a hill fronting the town.
Everything was arranged to suit the royal state which it was a point of
principle with him to assume. Sir Robert Umfraville stood on his right
hand holding a spear, on the point of which was the crowned helmet
which it was his custom to wear, and which denoted that the King was
seeking to recover his own by arms. The English nobles stood in ranks
on either side. The ceremony over, the Governor and his company were
royally feasted, and on the next day Henry entered the town.
It was characteristic of the devout temper of the man that his first
thought was for his religious duties. He dismounted on reaching the
gate, had his shoes and beaver removed, and walked barefooted to the
church of St. Martin, where he offered up a thanksgiving for his
success. This piety, however, did not prevent him from pushing to the
extreme his use of a conqueror’s rights. The nobles and men-at-arms
were stripped of their armour and sent away, “clothed in their jackets
only,” after giving a promise on oath to surrender themselves prisoners
at Calais on the Martinmas following (November 11th). This, perhaps,
was no more than defeated combatants might have expected. But the
treatment of the inhabitants seems to have been harsh. They were
compelled to ransom their lives with all that they possessed, and then,
with their wives and children, were driven out of the town. To each
was given a miserable pittance of five sous, and they were permitted
to take with them a part of their clothing. “It was pitiful,” says
Monstrelet, writing apparently from the report of an eye-witness, “to
see and hear the sorrow of these poor people, thus driven away from
their dwellings and property.”
Harfleur was undoubtedly a great prize. The actual amount of booty
taken in the town was large, and the harbour was the most important
in Western Normandy. The loss of it, too, was deeply galling to the
French king, who made it the ground of an urgent summons to his nobles
that for want of succour his gallant and loyal subjects of Harfleur had
been forced to surrender. But the capture of a single town, however
important and wealthy, was not an adequate result of an expedition
which had aimed at nothing less than the conquest of France. It became
a pressing question what was to be done. The first expedient tried, if
we may so speak, was to send a challenge to the Dauphin, offering to
submit the decision of the claim to the throne of France to the issue
of a single combat. Henry was too good a soldier not to know that his
antagonists were not likely to give him so easy a way of escaping from
a perilous position, and could not have been disappointed when no
answer was sent to his message. The safest course would now have been
to return at once; and this seems to have been pressed upon the King
by the majority of his counsellors. But this prudent advice did not
approve itself to Henry’s adventurous temper. He was determined to show
that, at least, he was not afraid of the foes whom he had challenged,
and who, as he declared--it is hard to say with what belief in his own
words--had unjustly seized his inheritance. He determined accordingly
to make what may be called a military parade to Calais. This involved
a march of not less than a hundred and fifty miles through a hostile
country, a dangerous, and, but that one who cherishes such designs as
Henry’s must make a reputation for daring, a useless operation; but the
King’s determined will overcame all opposition, and preparations were
made to carry out the plan.
The sick and wounded were sent back to England, and with them the
prisoners--who, however, could not have been numerous--the booty, and
the engines of war, for which Henry probably felt that he had not
adequate means of transport. It suggests a curious contrast to the
conditions of modern warfare to find a skilful general voluntarily
ridding himself of his artillery. Five hundred men-at-arms and a
thousand archers were left to garrison Harfleur. On October 8th the
King commenced his march with such forces as were left. Elmham, his
chaplain, who was probably present, puts them at scarcely nine hundred
men-at-arms and five thousand archers; Monstrelet estimates the former
at two thousand, the latter at fifteen thousand.
Nearly half of his purposed journey Henry seems to have accomplished
unmolested. At Eu, near Tréport, the seat of the Counts of Artois, his
light troops were attacked, but repulsed the enemy with loss. And now
his difficulties began. His position, indeed, was curiously like that
in which his great-grandfather, the third Edward, had been before the
victory of Crecy. He was in the presence of superior forces, and he
had to cross the Somme, a considerable river, fordable in few places,
in despite of them. Edward had made the passage at Blanchetaque, a
ford near the sea, which got its name from the white stones which
there formed the bottom of the river. Henry’s first idea was to
follow his example, but he learned from his scouts that the ford was
strongly guarded by the French, and altering his line of march made for
Pont-de-Remy, a place about as much above Abbeville as Blanchetaque
is below it. The detachment sent to force the bridge found it strongly
occupied by the enemy, and was unable to dislodge them. Edward had made
an equally fruitless attempt at the same place.
Fortune, or rather the fault of his enemies, befriended him, as it had
befriended his predecessor. A Norman peasant, who preferred a hundred
nobles to his duty to his country, had guided Edward to the ford of
Blanchetaque; and now the neglect of the people of St. Quentin, who had
been commanded to stop the ford between Betencourt and Voyenne, allowed
a passage to Henry. The crossing was no easy task. The river was
swollen with rain, and the army had no little difficulty in approaching
the bank. If a sufficient French force had come in time to dispute the
passage, the English might have lost heavily, or even been destroyed;
but the first part of the army had made its way over unmolested, the
King himself superintending the operation, before the enemy came in
sight, and then not in sufficient force to prevent the completion of
the passage. Before nightfall the whole army had safely reached the
right bank of the Somme. Henry had been marching and counter-marching
for nine days on the other shore, and had been forced to make a long
detour from his proposed line. If he could have made the passage of
the river, as he had once hoped to do, at the ford of Blanchetaque, he
would have been at less than half the distance from Calais than that at
which he now found himself.
The line of march from which he had been driven by the necessity of
crossing the Somme he was bent on regaining.[9] The nearer to the
sea the easier the road, and there would be the advantage that one
flank of the army would be safe against attack. Accordingly he moved
westward unmolested, it would seem, by the French troops which had been
previously guarding the right bank of the Somme, and had now fallen
back on the main body of their countrymen. His route led him through
the villages of Peronne, Albert, Bonnieres, and Frevent. On October
24th he reached the village of Blangy-on-the-Ternoise, a stream with
an average breadth of about thirty feet and of considerable depth. It
is possible, however, that it was not then, as it is now, dammed up
to work a mill; and it is at this mill that local tradition fixes the
place of his crossing. Continuing his march up the slope which leads
to the table-land above the valley of the Ternoise, he found himself
close to the enemy, who indeed had posted themselves in great force
across the way to Calais. Their presence was announced to the Duke of
York, who was in command of the van. The King, calling a halt, rode
forward to reconnoitre, and began at once to make his arrangements for
the battle which he now felt to be imminent. His main body took up its
position at Maisoncelles, the baggage being placed in the rear of the
wood that still bears that name. The front lines of the French army
were but three bow-shots off; according to one account still less;
their headquarters seem to have been somewhere behind the village of
Azincour or Agincourt.
The night was spent by the English in much discomfort. The King’s
chaplain tells that he turned aside to a village where there were
houses, but very few of them. Some of the principal personages had a
roof over their heads; the main body of the army had to be content
with such rest as they could find in gardens and orchards, and this
amidst drenching rain. The supply of meat and drink was, however, a
little better than usual. The chaplains with the army were busy almost
till morning with receiving confessions and giving absolution, and
the complaint was that there were not enough of them for this duty,
although one of their number speaks of them as a clerical army. On the
other hand, the French passed the time in feasting and merriment, and
found one source of amusement, it is said, in casting dice for their
prisoners. The same story is told of the demeanour of the victors and
the vanquished before the battle of Hastings. It is possible that it
may be true, but it certainly points a moral very aptly.