HENRY V.
1413-1422.
Henry of Monmouth had a far easier task before him, when he ascended
the throne, than his father had been forced to take in hand. He had
the enormous advantage of succeeding to an established heritage, and
was no mere usurper legalized by parliamentary election. So firm did
he feel himself upon his seat, that he began his reign by releasing
the young Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., whom
Henry IV. had always kept in close custody. For he knew that none of
the odium of his father's usurpation rested upon himself, and that he
was well liked by the nation. Nor was his popularity ill deserved;
though only twenty-five years of age, he was already a tried warrior
and an able statesman. His life was sober and orderly, inclining
rather toward Spartan rigour than display and luxury. He was grave
and earnest in speech, courteous in all his dealings, and an enemy of
flatterers and favourites. His sincere piety bordered on asceticism. If
he had a fault, it was that he was somewhat overstern with those who
withstood him, like his great ancestor Edward I. His enemies called him
hard-hearted and sanctimonious.
[Sidenote: =Persecution of the Lollards.=]
Henry's piety and his love of order and orthodoxy were a source of
much trouble to the unhappy Lollards. From the moment of his accession
he bore very hardly upon them, and redoubled the severity of the
persecution which his father had begun. He did not spare even his own
friends, but arrested for heresy Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who
had been one of his most trusted servants. When accused of holding the
doctrines of Wicliffe, Oldcastle boldly avowed his sympathy for them,
spoke scornfully of the Papacy and its claims, and taunted his judge,
Archbishop Arundel, with all the sins and failings of the clergy. He
was condemned to be burnt, but escaped from the Tower and hid himself
in the Marches of Wales. Long afterwards he was retaken, and suffered
bravely for his opinions.
Henry's ill-treatment of the Lollards drove the unfortunate sectaries
to despair. Some of the more reckless of them planned to put an end to
their sufferings, by seizing the king's person, and compelling him to
relax the persecution. They tried to stir up a popular rising, like
that of Wat Tyler, but Henry got timely notice of their plot. When they
began to assemble by night in St. Martin's fields, outside the gates
of London, he came suddenly upon them with a great body of horse, and
scattered them all. Forty were hung next day as traitors, and for the
future they were treated as guilty of treason as well as of heresy.
[Sidenote: =Henry and the French crown.=]
Fortunately for England, Henry had other things in his mind besides the
suppression of the Wicliffites. He knew that nothing serves so well
to quiet down internal troubles as a successful and glorious foreign
war. He believed himself, and rightly, to be capable of leading the
national forces to victory, and he knew that England's old neighbour
and enemy across the Channel was weak and divided. Accordingly, from
the moment of his accession Henry began to prepare for an assault on
France. He was determined to claim not merely the restoration of the
lost provinces of Guienne, but the crown of France itself, as Edward
III. had done in the days before the treaty of Bretigny. It is hard
to discover how a sincerely religious and right-minded man, for such
Henry of Monmouth undoubtedly was, could persuade his conscience that
it was permissible to vamp up once more these antiquated claims. It
would seem that he regarded himself as a divinely appointed guardian
of law, order, morality, and religion, and had come to look upon the
French factions with their open wickedness, their treason, treachery,
murder, and rapine, as emissaries of Satan handed over to him for
punishment. Moreover, Henry was, as we have said, a very zealous
servant of the Church, and the Church did its best to egg him on to
the war. Chicheley, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the chief
supporters of it, partly because he wished to distract attention from
the persecution of the Lollards, and partly because Parliament had
been talking of a proposal to confiscate some Church land, and the
archbishop thought that he had better give them some other and more
exciting subject of discussion. In his old age, Chicheley bitterly
regretted his advice to King Henry, and built his college of All Souls
at Oxford, to pray for the repose of those who had fallen in the great
war which he had set going.
[Sidenote: =Preparations for war.=]
Before he had been a year upon the throne, Henry had broken with
France. It was in vain that the Dauphin and the Armagnac faction,
who were at this time predominant, endeavoured to turn him from his
purpose. They offered him the hand of the Princess Catherine, the
daughter of their mad king Charles VI., and with her the lost provinces
of Aquitaine and a dowry of 600,000 gold crowns. But Henry only replied
by asking for all that his ancestors had ever held in France, the
ancient realm of Henry II., extending from Normandy to the Pyrenees.
When this preposterous demand was refused, he summoned Parliament and
laid before it his scheme for an invasion of France. The proposal was
received with enthusiasm, partly from old national jealousy, partly
because the English resented the doings of the French in the time of
Henry IV., when Norman privateers had vexed the Channel ports, and
French succour had been lent to Owen Glyndower and the Scots. The
Commons and the clergy gave the king very liberal grants of money,
which he increased by seizing the estates of the "alien priories," that
is, the religious houses that were mere branches and dependencies of
continental abbeys.
[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Cambridge and Scrope.=]
By spending every shilling that he could raise, and even pawning the
crown jewels, the king collected and equipped a considerable army.
He assembled at Southampton some 2500 men-at-arms and 7000 archers
for the invasion. Just before he embarked, however, he found himself
exposed to a deadly peril, which showed him how precarious was the hold
of the Lancastrian dynasty on the throne. A plot had been formed by
his cousin, Richard of Cambridge, the younger brother of that Edmund
of Rutland who betrayed the rebels of 1399. It had as its object the
murder of Henry and the coronation of Edmund, Earl of March, whose
sister Richard had married. In the plot were implicated Lord Scrope,
a kinsman of the archbishop whom Henry IV. had executed and several
others who had grievances against the house of Lancaster. The king sent
them all to the block, and would not delay his sailing for a moment.
[Sidenote: =Siege of Harfleur.=]
He landed in Normandy late in the summer of 1415, and laid siege to
Harfleur, which then occupied the position that Havre enjoys to-day,
and was the chief commercial port at the mouth of the Seine. On the
news of Henry's approach, the French factions for once suspended their
hostilities, and many of the Burgundians, though not Duke John himself,
agreed to assist the Armagnacs in repelling the invaders. But they were
so long in gathering that Harfleur fell, after five weeks of siege. The
capture, however, had cost the English dear; not only had they lost
many men in the trenches, but a pestilence had broken out among them,
and a third of the army were down with camp-fever. After shipping off
his sick to Southampton, and providing a strong garrison for Harfleur,
King Henry found that he had no more than 6000 men left, with whom to
take the field against the oncoming French. But he would not withdraw
ingloriously by sea, and resolved to march home to Calais across
Northern France. This enterprise savoured of rashness, for the whole
countryside was swarming with the levies of the enemy. They had placed
the Constable of France, John d'Albret, in command: with him were
the young Duke of Orleans and all the rest of the Armagnac leaders.
Anthony of Brabant, brother to the Duke of Burgundy, was hurrying to
their aid from the north. By rapid movements--his whole army, archers
as well as men-at-arms, had been provided with horses taken from the
countryside--Henry reached the Somme. But he lost time in trying to
force a passage, and when at last he crossed the river high up, near
Peronne, the Constable and his host had outmarched him and thrown
themselves across the road to Calais. They were at least 30,000
strong, five times the force that Henry could put in line, and were
in excellent condition, while the English were worn out by their long
travel, amid violent October rains, and over bad country crossroads.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF AGINCOURT. 1415.]
[Sidenote: =Battle of Agincourt.=]
When King Henry reached Agincourt, he found the French army drawn up
across his path, and was forced to halt. The Constable, like King John
at Poictiers, was confident that he had the English in a trap, for
they had exhausted all their provisions, and had the flooded Somme in
their rear. Henry, however, was determined to fight, and put his hope
in the bad management which always characterized the disorderly armies
of feudal France. He was not disappointed: the Constable dismounted
all his knights and bade them fight on foot, for fear of the effect of
the archery on their horses. Only a few hundred mounted men formed a
forlorn hope in front. He arranged his army in three heavy columns, one
behind another, and formed the front entirely of mailed men-at-arms;
the cross-bowmen and light troops were placed in the rear, where they
could be of no possible use. The week had been rainy, and the space in
front of the French was a newly ploughed field sodden with water, and
hemmed in with woods and villages on either hand. At its further end
the English were waiting. Henry had drawn them up in a single four-deep
line, in order to make a front equal to that of the enemy. So arranged
they just filled the space between the woods. The archers were on the
wings, protected by _chevaux-de-frise_ of pointed stakes which they had
planted in front. The king with his men-at-arms formed the centre; a
small flanking force of archers had also been sent into the woods on
the right.
The Constable led his men straight on the English front, but they had
a mile to go across the greasy mud of the fields. To men arrayed in
the full knightly panoply, which had vastly increased in weight since
the days of Edward III., the ploughland was almost impassable. After a
space they began to sink as far as their ankles, and presently as far
as their knees, in the mud. The mounted men struggled on, and gradually
drew near the English, but they were shot down one after another as
they slowly forced themselves up to the stakes of the archery. The
main body of the first column never won its way so far; it literally
stuck fast in the tenacious clay and stood a few score yards from the
English line, as a target into which the archers emptied whole sheaves
of arrows. The crowded mass was soon full of dead and dying, for at
such short range armour could not protect its wearers. The whole column
reeled and wavered. Then King Henry, seeing the moment was come, bade
his whole line charge. The lightly equipped archers could cross with
ease the ploughland where the men-at-arms had found themselves unable
to move. They flung themselves upon the French knights, and by the
force and fury of their assault completely rolled them over. Though
unprotected by mail, they obtained a complete ascendency over the
enemy, dashing them down with their axes and maces till they lay in
heaps two or three deep. Henry and the band of men-at-arms around him
seem to have met with the only stubborn resistance: the king had to
fight hard for his life, and was nearly slain by the Duke of Alençon,
who had already struck down his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester. Alençon, however, was slain, and after his fall the whole
of his column was destroyed or captured.
Without a moment's hesitation, the English pushed on to attack the
second column, which was slowly advancing through the mud to aid the
van. Incredible as it may appear, their second charge was as successful
as the first, though the victors were exhausted and thinned in numbers
by the previous fighting, and did not muster half their adversaries'
force. Just after he had routed this second column, Henry received an
alarm that a detached body of the French had assailed his camp in the
rear, and were coming up to surround him. He at once bade his men slay
the prisoners they had taken, a harsh and, as it proved, an unnecessary
order, for the French in the rear only plundered the camp, and then
dispersed with their booty. Although the king had completely scattered
or destroyed the second French column, the third still remained in
order before him; but, cowed by the fate of their comrades, they turned
and retired hastily from the field, though they should by themselves
have been more than enough to overwhelm the exhausted band of English.
In this astonishing victory, Henry's small army had slain a much larger
number of men than they mustered in their own ranks. The Constable of
France, Anthony, Duke of Brabant--brother of John of Burgundy--the
Dukes of Bar and Alençon, and a whole crowd of counts and barons, had
fallen; it is said that no less than 10,000 French were slain, of whom
more than 8000 were men of gentle blood. In spite of the massacre of
captives in the midst of the fighting, there were still some prisoners
surviving. They included the young Duke of Orleans--the titular head
of the Armagnac faction--the Duke of Bourbon, the Counts of Eu and
Vendôme, and 1500 knights and nobles more. The English in this terrible
fight had lost less than 200 men, but among them were two great peers,
the Duke of York--the Edward of Rutland of whom we read in 1399--and
the Earl of Suffolk.
[Sidenote: =Henry returns to England.=]
Henry retraced his way to Calais, and crossed to England with his
prisoners and his booty, there to be received with splendid festivities
by his people, who regarded the glory of Agincourt as a sufficient
compensation for the losses of a costly campaign which had added
nothing save the single town of Harfleur to the possessions of the
English crown. The ransoms of a host of noble captives were relied upon
to replenish the exchequer, and the fearful losses of the Armagnac
party, who saw half their leaders slain at Agincourt, would evidently
weaken the strength of France in the remainder of the war.
[Sidenote: =End of the Great Schism.--Council of Constance.=]
Henry did not cross the Channel again in the year 1416, which he spent
partly in negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, whose help he wished
to secure against the Armagnacs, partly in treating with the Emperor
Sigismund about the common welfare of Christendom. Sigismund was
hard at work endeavouring to put an end to the "Great Schism," the
scandalous breach in the unity of the Church caused by the misconduct
of the rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. He visited England, and
won Henry's aid for his plans, which brought about the reunion of
Christendom at the Council of Constance--a reunion under evil auspices,
since it was marked by the burning of the great Bohemian teacher
John Huss, who had made the doctrines of Wicliffe popular among his
Slavonic countrymen in the far East. Moreover, it restored the unity
of Christendom, but did not reform either the papacy or the national
Churches. As this was not done, the general outbreak of religious
ferment was made inevitable in a later generation; after the failure
at Constance to reform the Church from within, it became necessary to
reform her from without.
[Sidenote: =Second invasion of France.--Conquest of Normandy.=]
Having come to an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy, and obtained
from him a promise of neutrality, Henry invaded France for the second
time in the summer of 1417. He took with him an army of somewhat over
16,000 men, landed in Normandy, and began to reduce one after another
all the fortresses of that province. Utterly humbled by the memory of
Agincourt, the Armagnacs made no attempt to meet him in the open field.
Some of the Norman towns held out gallantly enough, but they got no aid
from without. At the end of a year the whole duchy, save its capital,
the city of Rouen, was in English hands. Henry then assumed the state
of Duke of Normandy, and put the whole land under orderly government, a
boon it had not enjoyed for twenty years. He gave Norman baronies and
earldoms to many of his English followers, and handed over the control
of the cities to burghers of the Burgundian faction, who served the
English readily enough, out of their hatred for the Armagnacs. For
thirty years Normandy was to remain English. Rouen was added to the
rest of the duchy after a long siege of six months, in which half the
population perished by hunger. Irritated by this long resistance, Henry
imposed on it the harsh terms of a ransom of 300,000 crowns, and hung
Alain Blanchart, the citizen who had been the soul of the obstinate
defence (January, 1419).
While the conquest of Normandy was in progress, the French factions had
been more bitterly at strife than ever. In 1418 the Burgundian party in
Paris rose against their rivals, and massacred every man on whom they
could lay hands, including Bernard of Armagnac himself. The control
of the party of the feudal noblesse then passed into the hands of the
young dauphin Charles, the heir of France.
[Sidenote: =Murder of the Duke of Burgundy.=]
The fall of Rouen, however, frightened John of Burgundy, and unwilling
that France should fall wholly into the power of his ally King Henry,
he made proposals for a reconciliation with the Dauphin and his
Armagnac followers. The treacherous young prince accepted the overtures
with apparent cordiality, and invited Duke John to meet him on the
bridge of Montereau to settle terms of peace. But when Burgundy came to
the conference, he was deliberately slain by the Armagnac captains, in
the presence and with the consent of the Dauphin (August, 1419).
[Sidenote: =Treaty of Troyes.=]
The murder of Montereau was destined to make Henry master of France.
When Philip of Burgundy, the son of Duke John, heard of his father's
death, he vowed unending war against the Dauphin and his faction,
and took the field to help the English to complete the conquest of
France. Nor was Philip of Burgundy the only helper that Henry secured:
the Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria, bitterly hated her son
the Dauphin, and was glad to do him an evil turn. She proposed that
Charles should be disinherited, and that the crown should pass with
her favourite daughter Catherine to the hands of the English king.
So at Troyes, in Champagne, Henry, Philip of Burgundy, and Queen
Isabella concluded a formal treaty by which Henry received Catherine
to wife, and was to succeed to the French throne on the death of his
father-in-law, the old King Charles VI., who still lingered on in
complete imbecility (June 2, 1420).
[Sidenote: =Henry master of Northern France.=]
The treaty of Troyes put Paris and the greater part of Northern France
into Henry's hands. Casting national feeling aside in their bitter
partisan spirit, the Burgundian faction everywhere accepted the King
of England as the lawful regent and governor of France. South of the
Loire the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends still held their own, but
north of it they only possessed scattered fortresses dotted about in
Picardy, the Isle-de-France, and Champagne, from Boulogne in the north
to Orleans in the south.
After taking formal possession of Paris and holding a great meeting of
the Estates of the French realm at Rouen, Henry returned in triumph
to England with his young wife. He had reached a pitch of success in
war such as no English king had ever attained before, and the nation,
blinded by the personal merits of its king and gorged with the plunder
of France, forgave him all his faults. The waste of life and money,
the never-ending persecution of the Lollards, the precarious tenure of
the conquests in France--due, in sober truth, merely to the aid of the
Burgundian faction--were all forgotten.
[Sidenote: =Defeat of the English at Beaugé.=]
Henry had not long been in England, when bad news crossed the Channel
after him. He had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a
small army, to hold Maine against the Dauphin's adherents. But the
Armagnac bands had lately been strengthened by succours from Scotland,
under the Earl of Buchan, the son of the regent Albany. For, although
the King of Scots had been a prisoner in English hands for ten years
and more, his subjects and his uncle the regent were not thereby
constrained to keep the peace with England. Pushing forward rashly
to attack the Scots and Armagnacs, Clarence was routed and slain at
Beaugé (1421). The enemy at once overran Maine, and began to infest the
borders of Normandy.
[Sidenote: =Henry's third expedition.=]
This compelled the king to cross once more over the sea in order to
repair his brother's disastrous defeat. In a campaign extending from
the summer of 1421 to that of the following year, he cleared the
Dauphin's army out of their foothold north of the Loire, and then
proceeded to starve out one by one their isolated strongholds in the
north of France, the chief of which were Dreux and Meaux.
[Sidenote: =Siege of Meaux.--Death of Henry.=]
It was during the siege of Meaux, which continued all the winter of
1421 and spring of 1422, that Henry's health began to give dangerous
signs of breaking up. He had been campaigning from his boyhood, and
had never hitherto shown any weakness of constitution. But the winter
colds of 1421-2, or the camp-fever bred in the trenches during the
long siege of Meaux, had brought him very low. He was carried back
toward Paris in a desperate state of weakness from ague and dysentery.
Soon after, to the horror and dismay of the English and their French
partisans, he died at the castle of Vincennes on August 31, 1422,
before he had attained his thirty-fifth year.