The Battle of Verneuil 1424 E-Book

Richard Wadge

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 469

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In August 1424 the armies of England, Scotland and France met in the open fields outside the walls of Verneuil in a battle that would decide the future of the English conquests in France. The hero king, Henry V, had been dead for two years and the French felt that this was their chance to avenge their startling defeat at Agincourt, and recover the lands that Henry had won for England. Despite its importance, the battle is largely overlooked in accounts of the Hundred Years War. The Battle of Verneuil 1424 is the first proper account of the battle, and is also one of the first books to outline the important part the Scots played in the wars in France in the years between the two great battles of Agincourt and Verneuil.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

People in all three of the countries involved in the Battle of Verneuil have freely given me generous help while I have been writing this book.

Roselyne Millet, the Directrice of the Jérôme Carcopino Municipal Library in Verneuil supplied material which gave the French point of view. Jean Baptiste Pierrat and Frédéric Jurczyk in the Tourist Information Office in Verneuil were very patient and helpful with the random Englishman who appeared in the office one damp Saturday.

Staff of Historic Scotland, particularly Malcolm Irving, sorted out pictures of monuments in response to my enquiries. Jason Sutcliffe, who works for East Ayrshire Council in the Future Museum, also made sure I found the best images from their collection to meet my needs.

Just as happened in the battle, the Italians made an important contribution, thanks to the staff of the photographic office of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Yet again the cheerful professionalism of the staff of the Bodleian Library in Oxford has been a great help.

My son Edmund read the early chapters and provided penetrating advice which made me clarify things.

Finally, but by no means the smallest contribution, Eleanor gave cheerful, tolerant support to a husband living in the fifteenth century.

Thanks to you all.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

1 The Hundred Years War

2 England and France at the beginning of the fifteenth century

3 Scotland and the Auld Alliance

4 Tactics and strategy in the Hundred Years War

5 Recruiting armies in England, Scotland and France in the Middle Ages

6 Arms and armour at the time of the Battle of Verneuil

7 Henry V and the conquest of Normandy

8 Henry V: Regent of France

9 The legacy of Henry V

10 1423: The Regent of France versus the King of France

11 The road to Verneuil

12 The battle

13 The aftermath of the battle

14 The tide of war begins to turn

15 Verneuil: The forgotten battle of the Hundred Years War

Appendix A: English captains at the battles of Cravant and Verneuil

Appendix B: Reconstructing events at the Battle of Verneuil

Appendix C: The most important contemporary sources

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

1

The Hundred Years War

England and France waged the Hundred Years War between 1337 and 1453. While relations between the two kingdoms were more likely to be hostile than amiable between the Norman Conquest and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, hostility was more persistent during these years. There were times, such as c.1340–56 and 1415–35, when the fighting was almost continuous with some large-scale battles and sieges, and there were other times, such as c.1390–1410, when life was almost peaceful. The original cause of the war was that according to English law, Edward III had a good claim to the French throne through his mother, Isabella, who was daughter of Philip IV of France. Unsurprisingly, the French claimed that the ancient Salic law of the Franks excluded inheritance of royal power through the female line. Edward was not prepared to accept this slight. However, relations between the kings of England and France were made more complicated by the English king claiming to be Duke of Normandy and Duke of Aquitaine, which meant that he owed feudal fealty to the King of France for these lands. These were matters that were never going to be resolved solely by diplomacy or legal argument. But it is also fair to say that war became something of a habit among the English at this time.

This habit was fuelled by the longer running warfare between England and Scotland. Once the Hundred Years War1started England was in a pincer between Scotland to the north and France over the Channel to the south. There were two major areas of dispute between England and Scotland in the Middle Ages, which were as insoluble as was the dispute over the French throne: where was the border between the two kingdoms, and was the King of Scotland subject to the English king? Edward I had managed to establish a shaky English suzerainty, but it crumbled under his weak successor, Edward II. He could not counter Robert Bruce, Robert I of Scotland, a heroic figure who led his kingdom to independence. While a series of victories in Edward III’s reign taught the Scots to avoid provoking the English king, these two issues ensured that there was never more than a truce on the border. The Scots and the French agreed treaties in the fourteenth century to support each other against England – the Auld Alliance, which is described in a later chapter.

England’s two long wars came together in the fateful meeting of the armies of the three kingdoms at Verneuil in 1424.

The years of the Hundred Years War would have been eventful enough in western Europe without warfare between the two kingdoms. In 1347–50 the Black Death killed around 40 per cent of the population of Europe, but this only quietened the war for a couple of years. This dreadful cull of the population gave opportunities to the survivors; ordinary men and women had a scarcity value which gave them some economic power and choice. Towns and cities continued their rapid growth in much of western Europe, despite the ravages of war in France in particular. Local and international trade grew with the towns, and the great commercial cities of the Italian peninsula began to send their trading fleets full of exotic goods (and more ordinary items like high quality bowstaves for the English war-bow) to the ports of northern and western Europe.

What is perhaps most surprising in the period between 1380 and 1420 is the remarkable coincidences in the political upheavals in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and France. There were deeply divisive struggles between the king and the magnates and among the magnates themselves in all three countries. All three countries had an incompetent king for a period. Robert III of Scotland may have had some long-term physical disability after his accident in 1388 but he seems to have become vacillating and desperate to please many of his nobles. He was succeeded by a minor, James, who also happened to be a prisoner in England. Richard II of England became a capricious, self-indulgent ruler who found it very difficult to trust anyone outside his immediate circle. His successor Henry IV always had a problem because some people felt he was not a legitimate king because he had deposed Richard II. This may have led to him being plagued by self-doubt. But as his reign progressed, he increasingly suffered from sustained serious ill health which affected his ability to rule. At the same time, France was rent by feuding between the royal dukes and their supporters, because King Charles VI of France had increasingly frequent bouts of insanity, which necessitated a regency for much of the last thirty years of his reign. Yet despite these problems the three kingdoms managed to continue their desultory, often bloody struggles for supremacy.

At this time of tragedy and change, when the people needed spiritual support the most, the papacy was in a state of decay. It had been based in southern France at Avignon since 1309 where it gained an unenviable reputation for corruption and partiality. Then, from 1378 western Christendom ended up with two popes for forty years. Despite these problems with the leadership of Christendom, this was a period of deep personal faith, but that could be something very different from a deep faith in the spirituality of the Catholic Church. Some theologians and preachers put forward ideas that, with hindsight, we would regard as being the foundations of Protestantism.

The Hundred Years War inevitably led to a number of developments in military practice. The best known of these are the use of the English war-bow and the development of gunpowder artillery1. The development of professional non-noble armies was just as important. The success of the English armies, wherein everyone fought on foot regardless of rank and most of the soldiers were archers, was a great surprise in Continental Europe. It went against the tradition that noble, mailed and armoured horsemen were the most important and effective fighting men on the battlefield. The English armies weren’t the only ones that demonstrated the power of good infantry against armoured cavalry. The Scots showed that pike-armed infantry could defeat cavalry at Bannockburn against the English and the Flemings proved much the same point at Courtrai against the French. But the English were the only ones who used infantry archers to defeat armoured cavalry. The other surprise was that it was the English who were so successful. They had never been a major European military power in their own right before, although England had been an important part of Henry II’s Angevin Empire in the twelfth century.

It has been suggested that Edward III had a very small number of primitive cannons at the Battle of Crécy, but they had no effect on the outcome of the battle. However, by the fifteenth century gunpowder artillery had developed sufficiently to give a great advantage to besiegers, and by the end of the Hundred Years War it was becoming an effective force on the battlefield. Other nations took to hand-held gunpowder weapons rather than the war-bow, leaving England and Wales with their ‘eccentric’ choice of missile weapon until the sixteenth century. It was pike-armed infantry assisted by infantry armed with gunpowder weapons that ended the reign of heavy armoured cavalry as kings of the battlefield in western Europe. By the fifteenth century, many of the companies that made up the English armies in France, and even more of the individuals who served as archers and men-at-arms, were professional.2 Many of these professionals came from the ordinary people, not from the nobility or what would later be called the gentry. In his efforts to both counter the English and control his fractious kingdom, Charles VII of France also came round to encouraging the development of professional soldiers by establishing the gendarmes d’ordonnance. Interestingly, it was the kingdom of France that maintained and developed these professional soldiers in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while in England, suspicion of standing armies and royal tight-fistedness prevented the continued development of a professional army.

The Hundred Years War made a notable and lasting contribution to popular self-image of what it was to be English. In the fourteenth century, Edward III’s campaigns brought considerable wealth to England in the form of loot and ransoms. His victories brought pride to many English people. Both the wealth and the pride were spread to local levels by the involvement of ordinary men as archers in the wars. When Henry V reinvigorated the English war against the French, he won what became a near mythic victory at Agincourt. Again the stalwart English (and Welsh) archers were key contributors to English success. Although the Hundred Years War ended in defeat for the English, they maintained a healthy contempt for the French, which Henry VIII exploited. An expression of this well-established contempt for the fighting qualities of the French can be found in the description of the Battle of Verneuil in Edward Hall’s Chronicle, which was written in Henry VIII’s reign. Hall commented ‘for surely the nature of the Frenchman is not to labor long in fighting and muche more braggeth than fighteth’.3 In the nineteenth century, the no-nonsense English longbowman was built up into an archetype of what Englishmen could achieve. Three key events in this process of building the archers’ reputation were the battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. But the question this book raises is ‘Why is the Battle of Verneuil not the fourth battle in this list?’ A history which describes only the events of battles can be very sterile. A battle happens as part of a chain of events in history, and these events are what give the battle its significance. As this account of the Battle of Verneuil will show, the behaviour of the soldiers in a battle can turn the battle one way or another, and so they can also influence the path of history after the battle one way or another. These are the battles that historians call decisive. It is almost certain that the leaders and captains of the forces engaged in the Battle of Verneuil were aware that they and their men were engaged in just such a battle. Like the battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the Battle of Verneuil was the culmination of one side following a battle-seeking strategy. But, as the outcomes of these four major battles demonstrate, having a battle-seeking strategy and winning the sought-for battle were two very different things. This was why large battles were rare in the 116 years of the Hundred Years War. Leaders on both sides understood the strategic risks inherent in any battle, let alone a large-scale, decisive one. Therefore, as will become clear in the account of the years preceding the Battle of Verneuil, strategy was advanced by raids, sieges, ambushes and surprise assaults, rather than through a series of great set-piece battles such as happened in the Crimean War or the First World War.

Military activity is only half a war; diplomacy makes up the rest. Diplomatic activity during the Hundred Years War had various strands. There was the struggle for what we would now call the ‘moral high ground’. Whose cause was ‘more right’? While both sides sought rulings from the law departments of the great universities of western Europe, papal support was the key to establishing this. The papacy’s other role was to try to lead peace negotiations in an attempt to stop the shedding of Christian blood. At the same time as there was conflict and uncertainty at the top of secular society, there was conflict and division in the Church. In 1377 Pope Gregory XI ended the Avignon papacy by returning to Rome. He hoped that, by returning to his see, he would be able to re-establish the independence of the papacy. The standing of the papacy had been weakened by more than sixty-five years’ residency in Avignon where its decisions and actions were effectively controlled by the French kings. Something most clearly demonstrated by all seven Popes who reigned from Avignon being French. Unfortunately Gregory died a year later, before he had been able to do much to improve the papacy’s reputation. When the cardinals met to choose his successor, the Roman mob rioted, demanding that the conclave elect an Italian pope. Fear and national pride had more effect on the papal election than spiritual considerations, with the cardinals electing the Archbishop of Bari, who became Pope Urban VI. However, Urban was autocratic and intemperate and soon antagonised the cardinals, particularly the many French ones appointed during the time of the Avignon papacy. They met at Anagni, about 70km south-east of Rome, where they declared Urban’s election invalid. Fearing Urban’s reaction, the cardinals moved to Fondi further away from Rome, where they elected Robert, a son of the Count of Geneva, who became Pope Clement VII. This so outraged Urban that he had five of the cardinals tortured and killed!4 Clement needed to find a sympathetic haven to be secure from Urban’s outrage, and so re-established a papal court at Avignon. France and its supporters (many ruled by relatives of the French king), including Burgundy, Aragon, Castile and Naples, supported Clement. Scotland, honouring the Auld Alliance, also accepted Clement. England, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire and a number of north Italian city states supported Urban. Naturally both popes declared the other to be an antipope. All this was worse than anything that happened in England, Scotland or France in their divisions at this time.

The Papal Schism continued until the election of Martin V in 1417. The Schism affected the Hundred Years War since both the English and the French could gain papal support for their claims. They could do this knowing that the papacy did not have the standing to lead a peace process because of its divisions. This changed with Pope Martin’s election, but he was unable to negotiate even a temporary truce between the warring nations. However, his successor managed to promote negotiations in the early 1430s which brought lasting harm to the English cause. It is difficult to know what effect the Schism had on the ordinary men and women of England, Scotland and France. But it must be no coincidence that the philosopher and theologian John Wyclif, who questioned the Church’s right to its authority and vast properties, thrived at this time.

Diplomacy was also part of the practical aspect of war making; the kings of England and France made serious efforts to build up alliances. Firstly, there were attempts to gain active military support, more commonly by the French kings. The make-up of the army that fought for Charles VII of France at Verneuil is the clearest proof of the success of these efforts. Both the French and English kings made treaties with the great dukes of France and with the dukes of Brittany to try to gain some military advantage. Secondly, the kings of both realms made serious diplomatic efforts to build alliances which contained their enemy, rather than actively participating in the wars. Henry V’s negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor are an example of this. The most robust result of the diplomatic efforts throughout the Hundred Years War was The Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. Although they played their part earlier in the Hundred Years War on occasion, the Scots were particularly active in the wars in France in the period between the battles of Agincourt and Verneuil.

The Battle of Verneuil marked a high point for the kings of England in their efforts to win the Crown of France. The outcome of the battle ensured that Henry V’s legacy, both military and diplomatic, survived and was built upon. The story of how the armies of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and France came to meet on a hot summer’s day in the open fields just north of Verneuil in 1424 is a neglected tale. While it is overshadowed in popular history by other great battles of the Hundred Years War and later wars, it is one of the great achievements of English soldiers, as this book will recount. But it is more important than just another notable English military success; it was a decisive battle that affected the course of history in England and France for some years. It was part of a complex sequence of events following the shock of Henry V’s victory at Agincourt that ultimately led to consolidation of the kingdom of France as a European power after a century and half of disorder, and left England with the reputation of being a pugnacious neighbour in Europe; part of it, but also at the edge of it.

Notes

1 This term is used for convenience to describe the longbow used by the English and Welsh archers in particular in this period. Also I will on occasion use the term ‘English archers’ for the sake of brevity. In no way should this be taken as a denial of the contribution that the Welsh archers made both to the development of heavy bow military archery and to the success of the archers in English armies in these wars. For a detailed discussion of the development of English and Welsh archery leading up to the Hundred Years War please see Wadge R., Archery in Medieval England (Stroud, 2012).

2 For more information about this see Curry, A., ‘The First English Standing Army’, in Ross, C. (editor), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Stroud, Gloucester, 1979) p. 195.

3 Hall, E., Hall’s Chronicle (London, 1809), p. 122.

4 McCulloch, A., Galloway: A Land Apart (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 206.

2

England and France at the beginning of the fifteenth century

In the decades immediately before and after 1400, England, France and Scotland all endured their own particular version of the same political problem; conflict between the king and the great magnates of the nation. Sometimes this involved physical violence but more usually it was political plotting for supremacy. In all three countries this conflict concerned the rights of the king, the nature of kingship and the rights of the magnates. Kingship at this time was very personal. Robert I of Scotland, Edward III of England and Charles V of France were examples of successful kings who commanded the loyalty of the magnates and their people. In the heyday of their reigns, they all chose highly competent loyal servants. Robert and Edward were also heroic military figures. But if the king was a child or an incompetent, problems could arise. In all three kingdoms, there were senior relatives who could act as regent; men whose right to be regent would be questioned only by their own relatives but not by the nobility or the Church in general. If a kingdom was ruled by a weak king or a regent revolt and civil war were not inevitable, as the situation in Scotland at this time proved, but they did happen in England and France. Meanwhile the magnates, whether relatives of the king or not, were concerned with the maintenance of their own rights: primarily the security and integrity of their estates and access to the king for influence and patronage. In general they did not consider themselves as aspirants to the throne, except when the king had left no clear heir. Equally they were reluctant to accept a magnate succeeding or replacing the king. In both England and Scotland the Parliament had some restraining effect on both kings and magnates mainly through its powers to authorise the collection of specific taxes, but it was only able to influence the outcome of conflicts between the king and the magnates when acting in concert with one party or the other. The Church could only influence these struggles when the archbishops and bishops used their political skills and wealth in a secular manner by behaving very like lay magnates.

England

Two dramatic events showed the condition of England in the late fourteenth century. Firstly, in 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt showed that the ordinary people, including many wealthy peasants and merchants, would not just quietly pay taxes and ‘know their place’. The revolt is often said to have been a protest against the Poll Tax, which bore little relation to a person’s ability to pay in contrast to the more traditionally levied taxes on moveable property. While this is true, it was as much a revolt against landlords oppressively, and on occasion illegally, enforcing their ‘rights’ for fees and labour services. In addition, a series of laws had been enacted with the aim of keeping the mass of the population in their place after the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague. These included the Statute of Labourers which tried to limit wages and workers’ rights to choose their employer, sumptuary laws restricting clothing types, fabrics and colours to particular social groups and even the laws requiring archery practice which restricted leisure activities for the good of England. These various restrictions were attempts to contain the freedoms that the ordinary people had gained because of the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1351 it killed as much as 40 per cent of the population of the British Isles, which meant that workers became a scarce commodity. These attempts at repressing the freedoms that ordinary people had gained built up a powerful sense of discontent which the demands of the Poll Tax ignited into actual revolt. The rebels invaded London and confronted the young King Richard II. He showed courage (and possibly faith in his divinely ordained role as king) and led the rebels from the city after their leader Wat Tyler was killed. But all the promises he made to them came to nothing in the aftermath of the revolt. However, the revolt was not a failure, since Poll Tax was dropped, and there was no sustained attempt at systematic repression of the ‘peasants’.

The second of these events happened in 1400 when Henry Bolinbroke, a grandson of Edward III, deposed his cousin Richard II to become Henry IV. This action was the culmination of nearly two decades of tension and dispute between the established magnates and the Parliamentary Commons on the one hand and the king and his ‘court party’ on the other. Richard’s success with the rebels in 1381 seems to have reinforced his feeling that the king was appointed by God and that his will was paramount in ruling England. In his mind this meant that there was no need to consult either the magnates or the Parliamentary Commons. How much this view was reinforced by the theories of John Wyclif is uncertain. Since Wyclif was under the protection of Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, it is possible that he may have preached before the young king. But since the Peasants’ Revolt seems to have left Richard with a distrust of the mass of his subjects, he may have had little sympathy for much of Wyclif’s thinking, which was potentially revolutionary in the way it attacked the structures of spiritual power and authority. In 1382 the old magnates such as his uncles John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Buckingham, and the Earl of Arundel pushed to restart the war with France. At the same time a number of younger men such as Robert de Vere, Thomas Mowbray, Peter Courtenay and John Montagu came into the king’s household and began to form a counterbalance to the power and influence of the older magnates. While Richard didn’t have access to great wealth or patronage, what he did have he lavished on this group of younger courtiers. As a result he was able to surround himself with a group of nobles and knights whom he had chosen and who held strong personal and political loyalty to him. In this they differed from the nobles of the older generation like the king’s uncles, who had bonds formed through their military service, experience that the court circle lacked. In 1385 Parliament demanded that Richard reform the royal finances, particularly by spending less and granting less of the royal income as annuities to his courtiers. Since taxation had to be approved by Parliament, financial pressure was its most powerful weapon. While Gaunt objected to some of the proposals made by Parliament to achieve this, a majority of the politically powerful lords supported Parliament by issuing ‘Articles of Advice’ proposing that Richard attend council more frequently and accept its decisions. Richard accepted the advice and nine lords were appointed to provide guidance to the king on reforming his financial affairs. But Richard managed to avoid having to provide any detailed account of his household’s expenditure to Parliament, in part because the magnates were unwilling to undertake concerted action with the Commons at this time.

1386 was a turning point. Firstly, John of Gaunt left the kingdom with an army to pursue his ambitions in Spain. Richard encouraged this, quite probably calculating that if his powerful uncle was out of the country, the criticism of his court would be less effective. Knowing that Gaunt was absent from England, Charles VI of France collected a very large army at Sluys in preparation for mounting an invasion of England. Meanwhile, French and Castilian ships added to the threat by raiding the south coast. Parliament tried to fund a fleet to guard the Channel with limited success, and in September ordered the array of a large number of men to guard London against invasion. However there was insufficient money to pay these men so they started to live off the land in Kent and the south-east of England. Fortunately for England the French king abandoned the idea of an invasion in November. However, this did nothing to reduce the level of dissatisfaction that Parliament, the magnates and the taxpaying population at large felt with the king and courtiers. The sustained threat of invasion and the coastal raids by the French had demonstrated that Richard’s policy of trying to ‘buy’ peace with the French by offering to return some of his grandfather’s territorial gains was a mistake. This policy was promoted by his courtiers against the advice of many other peers who wanted to restart the war with France. Not only had he followed an ineffective policy towards France, Richard had done nothing to reform the royal finances. The Parliamentary Commons and the magnates now united in an attempt to get Richard to change his ways and govern within what they considered the traditions established in Edward III’s reign. Richard could not resist this combined pressure. In 1387 Henry Bolinbroke, Earl of Derby, became a junior member of the Lords Appellant. This group of peers forced King Richard to banish some of his favourites and to accept themselves as his councillors. However, Richard was soon able to reclaim power. In 1387 he put a series of questions about the legal status and extent of his royal prerogative to a group of judges led by the Chief Justice of Common Pleas. They pronounced in his favour, which allowed the offence of treason to be extended to include peaceful political opposition to the policies and actions of the king’s government. Then in 1389 Richard declared his majority, and with it his intention to become the ruler of England, taking power away from the various councils that had held it to greater or lesser extent up to this point. These actions caused much unease among the magnates and political classes. This unease was reinforced by Richard’s recruitment of a large personal retinue of Cheshire archers. These men came from his own estates – Richard was Earl of Chester – and acted as a personal bodyguard, the core of an army when necessary, and as enforcers of the king’s rule. The final provocation came in 1398 when Bolinbroke accused the Duke of Norfolk of treasonable activities. Richard banished both men, Norfolk for life and Bolinbroke for ten years. But shortly afterwards John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Bolinbroke’s father and the king’s uncle, died. His enormous estates and wealth passed to the banished Bolinbroke, but Richard was not prepared to allow this. He recalled the committee that had judged the case and persuaded it to do as he wished and banish Bolinbroke for life and disallow his inheritance, which meant that all of Gaunt’s enormous wealth reverted to the Crown. Not surprisingly, Bolinbroke refused to accept this and returned to England from Flanders with a small company. Richard was in Ireland trying to stabilise his rule there at the time of Henry’s invasion and so was unable to make a rapid response. More seriously for him, there was no one in England with sufficient power and influence to keep the kingdom safe in these circumstances. Richard had been in conflict with many of the long-standing magnates throughout his reign, and this attack on Henry’s rights of inheritance made many nobles great and small fear that the king meant to threaten the family rights of the nobility at large. This fear went to the core of the relationship between the English king and his nobles so that many either actively joined Bolinbroke or, more importantly for Richard, did nothing to support the king. Nor could Richard look to the English Church for support since he had driven Archbishop Arundel into exile in 1397. Indeed, Henry and Arundel had joined forces as fellow exiles and Arundel’s acute advice and guidance was of great value to Henry in the deposition of Richard and his succession to the throne. Richard, who had a clear belief in his prerogative rights as divinely approved king, ignored the political realities and hurriedly returned from Ireland. He had little support and had no choice but to accept Henry’s demands and allow Parliament to impeach some of his closest councillors. While on his way to meet Henry he was seized and imprisoned in the Tower before being moved to Pontefract Castle later in the year. Meanwhile, Parliament withdrew its fealty to Richard and Henry claimed the throne by right of blood and conquest. Henry was crowned in October 1399. Henry and Arundel found themselves having to manage the accumulated ill feeling towards Richard and his supporters that had built up particularly in the last three years of his reign. Initially Henry managed to avoid bloodshed, but the younger magnates who had gained lands and status as supporters of Richard found themselves losing both their titles and properties. These included the earls of Huntingdon, Kent, Rutland, Salisbury (father of Thomas who was so successful in the wars in France under Henry V & Henry VI) and Gloucester. Faced with the loss of both wealth and influence, they plotted to seize Henry and his sons during the Twelfth Night celebrations and restore Richard to the throne. It is probable that one of the plotters panicked and told Henry, who was able to escape. When the plotters tried to flee they were killed by angry townspeople in Cirencester and Bristol. Henry was now acutely aware of the danger the living Richard posed and it may be that orders were given that the former king should be kept in severely straitened conditions. Richard died in February 1400 at Pontefract Castle and his body was briefly displayed in St Paul’s Cathedral to publicise his end before being quietly buried. There is no clear evidence of the cause of Richard’s death but the general view has always been that it was the result of serious neglect rather than violence.

Henry IV immediately applied himself to building up enough support and approval to give him a realistic sense of security on the throne. Unfortunately for him there was another magnate, Edward Mortimer, Earl of March, who had as good a claim to the throne by blood although he was no threat at this date because he was a minor. But there were two major threats facing Henry before he could feel secure on his throne.

In 1403 the Percys led a serious military revolt against Henry. He had antagonised Henry Percy, known to all as Hotspur, in a dispute over ransoms for some of the Scottish prisoners Hotspur had taken at the Battle of Homildon Hill in the previous year. King Henry also owed the Percys payments for their duties as Wardens of the Marches. So Hotspur and his father the Earl of Northumberland agreed to ally with Owain Glyndŵr in the hope of trapping Henry IV between their two armies. The Percys raised an army in the north, particularly from Cheshire, including many erstwhile members of Richard’s infamous bodyguard of Cheshire archers, and marched south. Glyndŵr was either unable to move fast enough or too cautious, so Hotspur had to face the king’s army alone. The two armies met at Shrewsbury where a bloody battle took place. It was one of the rare battles with a substantial number of English war-bow archers on both sides. So the battle began with a devastating archery duel in which the rebellious Cheshire archers, who had been unable to fight for their king in 1399, were able to fight in Richard’s memory. They seem to have got the best of the shoot-out and some of the royal army melted away. But once the battle came to close quarters it is likely that the royal army had an advantage because Hotspur was killed in his personal assault on the king’s standard (and he hoped the king’s person). The dangers archery presented to men in full armour were demonstrated in this battle. Hotspur was said to have been killed by an arrow to the face because he had raised his visor to breathe in the heat of battle and Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V, was certainly wounded in the face by an arrow. After his son’s defeat, the Earl of Northumberland managed to make his peace with the king in the aftermath of the battle, an arrangement which was more like the way that Scottish magnates worked through their disputes with the Scottish throne in this period. Two years later there was more trouble in the north of England which led to the Earl of Northumberland fleeing to Scotland and Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, being beheaded. The archbishop and his supporters had been objecting to the level of taxation and the apparent anticlericalism of Henry’s administration. They were also antagonised by the greed of Henry’s supporters and household, including the Neville family who had gained status and wealth at the expense of the Percys and their supporters in the north. Quite why Henry decided to make such an example of Archbishop Scrope is not clear. Archbishop Arundel pleaded for Henry to respect clerical immunity from the death penalty, but to no avail. Henry may just have lost patience with the north and felt the need to make an example of someone; it may have been the climate of anticlericalism which made it difficult to allow any special treatment for Scrope. Whatever the reasons for this action, Henry faced no major threats to his rule for the rest of his reign, except for some tensions with his oldest son, Henry of Monmouth. Henry’s reign was one of the quiet patches in the Hundred Years War, since he followed Richard II’s example and didn’t actively prosecute the war with France. This was despite the perception in France, voiced by the Duke of Berry, King Charles’s brother, that ‘it [Henry IV’s coronation] is a great tragedy and a signal misfortune for our country. For as you well know, Lancaster governs by the will of the English people and the English people like nothing better than war.’5 Later in his reign he came near to proving the duke right by allowing English forces to fight in France in support of one or another of the factions struggling for control of France. However, England’s neighbours were able to take advantage of the uncertainty that affected England in the years immediately after Henry’s seizure of the throne. In 1401 Henry attempted to negotiate peace with Scotland, believing that he was in a powerful position after he had led a large English army into Scotland in the previous year, reaching Edinburgh in what amounted to a demonstration rather than an invasion. He raised the old English claim that the Scottish king should do homage to him for his kingdom, and thought he had a clever way of achieving this by proposing that this matter should be referred to arbitration. However, the Bishop of Glasgow countered with the proposal that Henry’s right to the throne of England could also be referred to arbitration. The conference ended abruptly.6 But after Hotspur’s victory at Homildon Hill in 1402, which resulted in the death or capture of some of the more bellicose Scottish leaders including Archibald Douglas, Earl of Douglas, and Murdoch Stewart, Earl of Fife, the Scots were less inclined to put serious pressure on northern England. The Earl of Douglas was a significant enemy of the English kings until his death at the Battle of Verneuil. He even fought for Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Then in 1406 Henry IV had one of his rare pieces of good luck when James, the young heir to the Scottish throne, was captured by English pirates. James was kept as an honoured prisoner by the English kings until 1424. For the rest of Henry IV’s reign the Scots had their own difficulties to deal with and largely left the English alone. From Henry’s point of view, relations with Scotland were dominated by discussions of the ransoms to be paid for James, who became King of Scotland early in his captivity, and for the earls of Douglas and Fife.

The Welsh, led by Owain Glyndŵr, revolted in 1400. In part this was because of Welsh dissatisfaction with English rule; Glyndŵr himself had a real grievance with the English Lord Grey of Ruthin, but there was also a strong feeling that Henry IV was not a legitimate king. If Henry was not the rightful King of England, then neither he nor any of his sons could be the rightful Prince of Wales. So Owain claimed to be the legitimate Prince of Wales. The French sent Owain help on several occasions, but after 1404, the tide began to turn against the Welsh despite their (possibly) gaining a victory over an army led by Henry IV himself, in the bloody Battle of Stalling Down in Glamorgan in the following year.7 By 1409, the Welsh effort was exhausted by persistent military pressure from the English, compounded by the particularly harsh winter of 1408–09. The revolt fizzled out, although Owain Glyndŵr was never captured.

The problems in Wales, his own health, money problems and probably personal inclination led Henry to concentrate on domestic matters for much of his reign. In 1406 Henry was temporarily incapacitated by ill health. A peaceful agreement was quickly made that a council made up of magnates both lay and clerical would rule the kingdom until Henry recovered. This council would concentrate on restoring the financial and political stability of the realm which had not recovered from Richard II’s time. Importantly the loyalty of the Parliamentary Commons was not in doubt even when they criticised the royal administration. This council remained active for the rest of Henry’s reign. However, Henry recovered sufficiently to be an influential player in the politics of England for much of the rest of his reign. Henry was able to manipulate the membership of the council to ensure that it tended to support him as ruler of England.8 His health collapsed again in 1409, when it was feared he would not recover, but he did. On this occasion, his heir Henry of Monmouth moved to become leader of the council, an act which marked the beginning of the struggle between the two Henrys. While this struggle never became violent it certainly became dangerous to the peace of England in 1412. Henry IV accused Prince Henry of having profited illegally from his captaincy of Calais. Prince Henry was able to clear himself but this episode ensured that he never trusted his father or those around him again. Henry IV seems to have favoured his second son Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence over Henry, which only added to the tension.

In the last two years of his reign Henry IV started to dabble in the murky politics of France, allowing small-scale English support for one side or the other. In 1412 Henry sent an expedition to support the Armagnacs led by his favourite son, Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence. This achieved nothing except some financial rewards because the Armagnacs and Burgundians reached one of their many short-term agreements to end the fighting between them. But it exacerbated the ill feeling between the two Henrys.

When Henry V succeeded in 1413, there were still mutterings about his right to rule. The Scots stirred the pot by providing refuge and some support for Thomas Ward, who claimed to be the deposed Richard II. A small group of plotters were arrested and their leader, a yeoman named John Whitlock, was tried for plotting rebellion and the assassination of Henry so that Thomas Ward could take the throne as Richard II restored. A more serious plot against him happened as Henry was preparing for his invasion of France in 1415. This time the plan was to put the Earl of March, Edmund Mortimer, on the throne. Henry was a very different character to his father in that he seems to have had a deep personal feeling that he was the true King of England in God’s eyes, whereas his father never seemed so confident. Moreover he seems to have been both a good judge of men and charismatic, and so was able to build a group of loyal, competent men about him.

People believed that the victory against the odds at Agincourt demonstrated that Henry was in receipt of God’s favour, and so must be the rightful King of England. For the rest of his reign he was a largely unchallenged hero king. However his early death in 1422 when his son was only 9 months old brought another of the problems of medieval monarchy to the fore – the need for a regent. The problems this led to are recounted in later chapters.

France

In 1380, three years after the 10-year-old Richard II came to the throne in England, Charles VI became King of France, aged 11. In another parallel with the situation in England, the royal uncles ruled, with one, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, taking the lead. Charles was declared of age in 1388 and began his personal rule. However, this was short-lived since he had his first episode of madness four years later. He recovered fairly quickly on this occasion, but the attacks continued throughout his reign and became longer in duration. Philip of Burgundy, who was with Charles when he went mad in 1392, declared himself regent. He was the senior royal relative at the time, and had already had successful experience in the role, so it seemed reasonable to both Burgundy and many others that he should be regent. But this decisive act antagonised the king’s brother, Louis, Duke of Orléans. In 1402 Charles recovered his sanity for an interval and declared a regent was no longer necessary so Burgundy’s pre-eminence was temporarily ended. However, Charles soon lapsed into insanity again and Orléans managed to become regent on this occasion. He was an extravagant spendthrift without Burgundy’s abilities or experience and so was soon replaced by Burgundy. In 1404, the elder statesman Philip of Burgundy died. His son John succeeded as duke and soon rivalled Orléans as the leading figure in the court of King Charles. One of the keys to the success of the dukes of Burgundy at this time, namely Philip the Bold and his son John and grandson Philip, was that not only were they basically competent and shrewd, but they cultivated popularity with the population at large, and with the citizens of Paris in particular. It was difficult for Queen Isabeau of France to gain any power and influence in these times of uncertainty, in part because Charles often seemed unable to recognise her in his bouts of madness, and in part because she was a foreigner (she was a Bavarian princess). She was unable to build up power and influence outside the royal court in the way the Burgundian dukes did and concentrated on the more limited aims of protecting her own rights and those of her son, the Dauphin. It was suggested that she became closer than was decent to Louis of Orléans in her efforts to achieve this, and that Charles, her fifth son, who later became Charles VII, was the result of this closeness.

John of Burgundy seems to have been more ruthless than his father since in 1407 his agents assassinated Louis of Orléans. John gained several years’ dominance of France by this action, although he was not unopposed. Louis’ successor as Duke of Orléans, Charles, was married to the daughter of Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, an alliance that proved vital to the opposition of the dukes of Burgundy. Bernard was the major figure in League of Gien which came into being in 1410 to co-ordinate the opposition to the dukes of Burgundy. The opposition to the Burgundians never seems to have been called the Orléanist party, but after the formation of the league, contemporaries thought of the power struggle as being between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians.9 Although both parties asked the English for troops late in Henry IV’s reign, the English neither took advantage of the situation in France nor had any real effect on the standing of either party. Both kingdoms seem to have broadly adhered to the terms of the Truce of Leulinghem agreed in 1389 until Henry V’s invasion of France in 1415. This is not to suggest that all was peaceful; trading or fishing in the Channel could still be dangerous with freebooters active on both sides. But the fact is that the near civil war in France seemed more intractable than the Hundred Years War, since there were seven reconciliations or peace treaties made between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians between 1405 and 1415, none of which brought any real period of peace!10

After the formation of the League of Gien, the Armagnac party gained ground against the Burgundians, particularly in Paris, where Duke Bernard seems to have been an effective leader. This may have led Louis, Duke of Anjou to join them, an alliance cemented by the betrothal of Charles, the fifth son of Charles and Isabeau (eventually becoming the fifth Dauphin in 1417 after the early deaths through ill health of his four older brothers) to Louis’ daughter, Marie. The long-term advantage for the Armagnac party from this was that Charles (the fifth Dauphin) came under the advice and influence of his formidable mother-in-law Yolande of Anjou and other Angevin counsellors. Indeed, Yolande seems to have become a maternal figure for Charles, replacing the unfortunate Isabeau, who was distracted by the need to protect the interests of whichever of her sons was Dauphin and her own feckless nature.

Once Henry V came to the English throne, and made his ambitions in France clear, these divisions among the French nobles became even more significant for the wellbeing of the kingdom of France. Historians agree that without the active support of some French nobles, or at least their neutrality or apathy, it was probably impossible for the English to achieve their war aims, even when they were led by someone as able as Henry. But at the Battle of Agincourt, both sides fought the English. While the Armagnac party lost more major figures in the battle, the Burgundians also took part. Duke John himself appeared to have delayed in a very calculating fashion, but two of his brothers were killed in the battle. The defeat at Agincourt shook all parties in France but they were unable to unify, perhaps understandably, since poor mad King Charles hardly made a credible figurehead. Duke John of Burgundy carefully consolidated his position of power in the years following the battle. Then in 1418 the Burgundians re-established their control of Paris on the back of a bloody popular rising against the Armagnacs in which Duke Bernard was killed. The journal written by an anonymous Parisian cleric at the time (misnamed the The Journal ofa Bourgeois ofParis) described the events, writing, ‘there was not one of the principal streets of Paris that did not have a killing in it … they [the corpses] were heaped up in piles in the mud like sides of bacon’.11 But it is unlikely that this was part of a plan by the Duke of Burgundy to replace King Charles and follow the example of earlier events in England. He seems to have been content to expand his duchy and maintain control of royal authority.12 But the storm of popular feeling that was released in Paris in 1418, in part fomented by the Duke of Burgundy, proved very difficult to contain. The same journal contains accounts of several more ‘purges’ against Armagnacs in which attacks were made on Armagnac properties and purely personal scores were settled. Charles the Dauphin was quite sensibly fearful of the situation in Paris and fled the capital as soon as the Burgundians approached at the start of these troubles. He went south of the Loire and set up an independent administration with a Parliament and Chancery at Poitiers.13 He had his own court which included his mother-in-law and other Angevin advisors, which when it wasn’t travelling about southern France was based at Bourges and Poitiers.

The political situation in 1419 was very volatile with first one party then the other gaining some advantage, but by the end of the year matters had settled into the pattern that held for about ten years. The Armagnacs were militarily active all round Paris, leading the writer of the Paris journal to comment that ‘… the Armagnacs were everywhere all the time as has been described. They killed, stole and burned everywhere, men, women and grain. They were worse than Saracens …’.14 Henry maintained the English drive for control of northern France by taking Pontoise, and following this up by sending his brother Clarence on by a chevauchée (raids by an army on horseback, which covered considerable distances looking for booty and reputation) which went right up to the gates of Paris. These advances seem to have made Duke John of Burgundy consider rethinking his allegiances. Perhaps the English were becoming too powerful and threatening his interests; maybe he began to think that Frenchmen should combine against the traditional foe. Whatever his thinking, he and the Dauphin managed to agree to a meeting where they might negotiate some sort of agreement. But, in what was an exceptionally short-sighted act, Duke John of Burgundy was assassinated on the bridge at Montereau as soon as he came into the presence of Charles the Dauphin of France, allegedly in revenge for the assassination of Louis of Orléans twelve years earlier. This was a remarkable case of the needs of the present being brushed aside by demands from the past. While no one accused Charles of actually striking a blow, many people found it unbelievable that he had no inkling of what was going to happen to the duke.

After the murder of his father, the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip, was an implacable opponent of the anti-English Armagnacs, including the Dauphin, although he continued to pay lip service to Charles as King of France. The situation had reached the point where ‘the seriousness of the divisions in France is further demonstrated by the numerous French chroniclers who depict Henry as the only man capable of bringing peace to a divided nation.’15 Although his father disinherited him under English and Burgundian pressure as a result of the events at Montereau, the Dauphin was not left helpless or friendless. In Bourges south of the Loire, he sheltered behind the formidable moat that the river provided against the English. In general Philip, Duke of Burgundy concentrated his efforts on securing his influence over the king and consolidating his hold on the areas linking the Duchy of Burgundy to his holdings in Flanders. The Armagnacs may not have been able to regain control of Paris but they harried the area around the capital and tried to disrupt communications between the various lands held by the Duke of Burgundy. All this stopped the Burgundians putting any significant pressure on the Dauphin south of the Loire. The Dauphin also provided a figurehead for all the French who wanted to resist the English conquest of northern France. This resistance effort included the activities of formal armies raised by the Dauphin to harass the English by carrying out chevauchées or recapturing towns and castles. These forces also supported the Armagnac held castles and fortified towns whose garrisons could influence the surrounding areas. There was also partisan type activity much of which was local and unco-ordinated in scope, but no less irritating to the English and their supporters for all that. But the Dauphin knew better than to risk a battle-seeking strategy against Henry V.

Charles VI’s mental incapacity made it much easier for Charles the Dauphin and the Armagnac party to ignore the statement of disinheritance. As a result, when both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422 he was able to claim that he, not his nephew the infant Henry VI of England, was the rightful King of France. However, bad blood still existed between him and Philip of Burgundy and it was to be another thirteen years before they made their peace and France began to make a unified effort against the English and their supporters.

Notes

5 Quoted in Sumption, J., Divided Houses (London, 2009), p. 864.

6 Nicholson, R. Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 220.

7 Recent historians have cast doubt on whether this battle happened at all because of the weakness of the original historical sources that mentioned it. There is also dispute over whether it happened in 1403 or 1405.

8 More details of the politics of the time can be found in Harriss, G., Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 498–505.

9 Small, G., Late Medieval France (London, 2009), p. 134.

10 Small, G. (2009), p. 135.

11A Parisian Journal