1415: Henry V's Year of Glory Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Mortimer

  List of Illustrations

  Map of Northern France

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Christmas Day 1414

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Epilogue

  Conclusion

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Appendices

  1 Edward, Duke of York

  2 The Great Council, 15–18 April

  3 Casualties at the Siege of Harfleur

  4 Numbers at the Battle of Agincourt

  Genealogical Tables

  1 The English Royal Family before 1399

  2 The French Royal Family

  3 The English Royal Family after 1399

  Select Bibliography and List of Abbreviations

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Henry V is regarded as the great English hero. Lionised in his own lifetime for his victory at Agincourt, his piety and his rigorous application of justice, he was elevated by Shakespeare into a champion of English nationalism. But does he really deserve to be thought of as ‘the greatest man who ever ruled England’?

  In Ian Mortimer’s groundbreaking book, he portrays Henry in the pivotal year of his reign; recording the dramatic event of 1415, he offers the fullest, most precise and least romanticised view we have of Henry and of what he did. The result is not only a fascinating reappraisal of Henry; it brings to the fore many unpalatable truths which biographies and military historians have largely ignored. At the centre of the book is the campaign which culminated in the battle of Agincourt: a slaughter ground designed not to advance England’s interest directly but to demonstrate God’s approval of Henry’s royal authority on both sides of the channel.

  About the Author

  Ian Mortimer has BA and PhD degrees in history from Exeter University and an MA in archive studies from University College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998, and was awarded the Alexander Prize (2004) by the Royal Historical Society for his work on the social history of medicine. He is the author of three other medieval biographies, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer (2003), The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III (2006) and The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King (2007) as well as the bestselling The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (2008). He lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor.

  ALSO BY IAN MORTIMER

  The Greatest Traitor:

  The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer,

  1st Earl of March,

  Ruler of England, 1327–1330

  The Perfect King:

  The Life of Edward III,

  Father of the English Nation

  The Fears of Henry IV:

  The Life of England’s Self-made King

  The Time Traveller’s Guide to

  Medieval England:

  A Handbook for Visitors to the

  Fourteenth Century

  List of Illustrations

  1. Portrait of Henry V, c. 1523, probably copied from a lost original (The Royal Collection © 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 403443).

  2. Effigy of Henry IV in Canterbury Cathedral (author’s collection).

  3. Effigy of Queen Joan in Canterbury Cathedral (author’s collection).

  4. Effigy of Thomas, duke of Clarence, in Canterbury Cathedral (Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral).

  5. Manuscript illumination of John, duke of Bedford, from the Bedford Hours (British Library, Add MS 18850 fol. 256v.).

  6. Sixteenth-century crayon drawing by J. le Boucq of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, copied from a lost portrait (Médiathèque d’Arras, bibliothèque municipale d’Arras, MS Arras 266).

  7. Effigy of Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, in Winchester Cathedral (author’s collection).

  8. Effigy of Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury Cathedral (Ric Horner).

  9. Effigy of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, and his wives in Staindrop Church, County Durham (Dr John Banham).

  10. Effigy of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and his wife, Beatrice, in Arundel Castle Chapel, English School, fourteenth century (His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle/Bridgeman Art Library).

  11. Effigy of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, in St Mary’s Church, Warwick (author’s collection).

  12. Manuscript illumination of London, from ‘A volume of Poems of Charles d’Orléans and other works’ (British Library, Royal MS 16 F ii fol. 73 r.).

  13. Westminster Hall (Robert Harding Picture Library Ltd/Alamy).

  14. Engraving of Westminster Palace, after a drawing by Wenceslas Hollar (World History Archive/Alamy).

  15. Portrait of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, attributed to Pisanello (original in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria).

  16. The Cathedral of Constance from the northwest in 1819, by Nikolaus Hug (original in the Rosgarten Museum, Constance, Germany).

  17. The rue vielle du Temple, Paris (author’s collection).

  18. Tour Jean sans Peur, Paris (author’s collection).

  19. Portrait of John the Fearless, French School, fifteenth century (The London Art Archive/Alamy; original in the Louvre, département des Peintures, MI 831).

  20.Effigy of Charles VI of France in St Denis, Paris (author’s collection).

  21. The keep of the Château de Vincennes, near Paris (author’s collection).

  22. John, duke of Berry, from Les très riches heures de duc de Berri by the Limbourg Brothers (original in the musée Condé, Chantilly, France, Ms 65/1284 f.1v).

  23. Portchester Castle, Hampshire (author’s collection).

  24. St Martin’s Church, Harfleur (Vigneron, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Harfleur_pont-Gorand.JPG).

  25. Château d’Arques, Arques-la-Bataille (AD, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Chateau_alb_1.jpg).

  26. Memorial brass of Lord and Lady Camoys, Trotton Church, Sussex (courtesy of H. Martin Stuchfield).

  27. Sculpture of Sir Thomas Erpingham, from the Erpingham Gate, Norwich (Anglia Images/Alamy).

  28. Effigy of Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, from Wingfield Church, Suffolk (author’s collection).

  29. The battlefield of Agincourt: looking southeast from the French position (author’s collection; edited by Stephen Read).

  30. The battlefield of Agincourt: looking northwest from the English position (author’s collection; edited by Stephen Read).

  31. Drawing of the town and harbour of Calais, c. 1535–40 (British Library, Cotton Augustus I ii fol. 70).

  32. Original letter said to have been written by Henry V in his own hand (British Library, Cotton Vespasian F iii fol. 9).

  This book is dedicated to my brother

  Robert Mortimer,

  a fire-fighter, a saver of lives

  – a real hero –

  and the kindest of men.

  IAN MORTIMER

  1415

  Henry V’s Year of Glory

  Author’s Note

  Foreign names have been treated in two ways. Members of the French royal family, including royal cousins (e.g. John the Fearless; Philip, count of Vertus) have been gi
ven in English. French individuals who were not members of the royal family have been named in French (e.g. Jean Petit, Jehanne de Lesparre) with the exception of the one reference to Joan of Arc, whose name is well known in the English-speaking world. Other foreign names have normally been given in the usual spelling in the original language – e.g. Duarte of Portugal, João of Portugal, Juan of Castile, Pedro de Luna, Giovanni Dominici – where possible. However, some Eastern European names have been given in English, e.g. Lord John of Chlum, Wenceslas of Dubá and Peter of Mladoňovice.

  With regard to currencies, readers might like to bear in mind that the pound sterling (£) was just one of two units of account in England. The other was the mark, which was the equivalent of two-thirds of a pound, or 13 shillings and 4 pence (13s 4d). Thus the gold coin called a noble – 6s 8d – was one third of £1 and one half of a mark,

  French money has usually been quantified in terms of crowns (écus à la couronne). The usual conversion rate has been taken as 6 crowns to £1 (so one French gold crown = one English gold half-noble). The discussion concerning the dowry of the Princess Katherine in early June 1415 touched upon treating the matter in terms of francs; as explained in the text, the franc was worth very slightly less, there being about 10.5 francs to 10 crowns.

  The term ‘Gascony’ in this book should be taken to mean all the territory under English rule in the southwest of France, as in my previous books.

  Prologue

  This book is not about a battle. It is about a man and his time. I have tried to show what he was and what he achieved over the course of one year: what he believed in, what he destroyed and what he became.

  The subject was not an ordinary man. Indeed, Henry V was not an ‘ordinary’ king. He was a hero in his own lifetime. Following his early death in France in 1422, he was given a semi-legendary status. In the 1590s he was already established as an English national icon; Shakespeare simply took that icon and gave it an enduring value, even to less warlike generations, by putting his most patriotic speeches into Henry’s mouth. Shakespeare also gave Henry a more rounded, likeable personality: he gave him a cheeriness that the real Henry never had. When presented with the good looks and dramatic flair of Lawrence Olivier, in his film of Shakespeare’s Henry V, delivered in an appropriately patriotic style for English and American audiences during the Second World War, Henry became the archetypal English champion. His negative traits were forgotten, all the failures of the age were blamed on other men, and all the successes attributed to him.

  As a result of this extreme adulation even the most scholarly historians have found it difficult to maintain their historical objectivity. The most famous example is the declaration by the English historian K. B. McFarlane that Henry V was, ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’.1 Many other writers have presented Henry as the typical medieval warrior-hero, regardless of his solemnity and profoundly religious nature. So, although this book is about a man and his time, it is also about challenging certain assumptions that we make about him. I do think he was an extraordinary man, in that he demonstrated phenomenal organisational skills, focus, determination, resilience, leadership and – above all else – religious conviction; but I also feel he was a deeply flawed individual. He lacked the simpler qualities of compassion, warmth, and the understanding of human frailty that one naturally looks for in all men – yeomen and paupers as well as kings. McFarlane, preaching from a pulpit of academic prejudice against historical biography, failed to draw attention to these shortcomings of his character.2 Thus my verdict on Henry’s supposed ‘greatness’ is very different from Mr McFarlane’s.

  There are already dozens of books on Henry V and dozens more on Agincourt – many of them by academic specialists who have devoted decades to the study of Henry and his battles. So it is fair to ask: what can I hope to do historically, over and above their collective efforts? What are the aims of this book?

  First, it is a continuation of my examination of the nature of personality and political ambition in the middle ages, continuing these themes from my earlier books about Roger Mortimer, Edward III and Henry IV. It is thus the fourth volume of my ‘biographical history’ of later medieval England. Second, I have tried to give a fuller and more representative view of Henry’s non-military activities in this year, especially his religious deeds, which tend to be very briefly noted as examples of his spirituality in full-length biographies and books about Agincourt. Third, I have paid much more attention than usual to the characters and social movements that formed the backdrop to Henry’s ambitions in 1415, especially with regard to the papal conflicts and the burning of Jan Hus at the council of Constance. It is important to remember that, at the same time as Henry was trying to reunite the ‘kingdom of England and France’, many people were trying to reunite the Church, and Henry himself drew parallels between the two unifying movements. Fourth, I have tried to show how Henry’s activities were part of a wider attempt to unite religious and political authority at the time – a European-wide movement towards establishing the divine right of kings, and in many ways the basis for the shift towards absolutism in the following century.

  The most significant innovation in this book is its calendar structure. One might call this an experiment in historical form. I have asked whether we can arrive at a different view of a historical subject through presenting well-known historical facts in a radically different way. As will be seen, a calendar-based form does permit many new insights. It forces a greater degree of accuracy with regard to dates and developmental processes. Repetition of key aspects of Henry’s behaviour appear in proportion to the evidence, and juxtapositions of important events go a long way to explaining some of his decisions. Above all else, the integration of all the various aspects of his life – the religious and the social, the judicial and the political – allow a vision of Henry that is very different from the patriotic stories with which we grew up. The book therefore is a demonstration of how a different framework may be used to see the past differently, and how we may obtain a new ‘projection’ (to borrow a term from geography) of the past by presenting historical events in a more chronologically precise way.

  Having said that, the calendar form has its complications. Describing a whole year in a man’s life, day by day, is a huge literary challenge. I do not think that it has been attempted previously for a medieval or early modern individual. This is a very different book from 1599 by James Shapiro, for example, which is not a day-to-day study of Shakespeare. It is impossible to avoid the fact that the calendar is a non-literary structure, like the Periodic Table of the Elements, and creating a literary work out of the Periodic Table in atomic order would be a challenge for anyone (even Tom Lehrer had to change the order of the elements in his famous song). The author has to maintain a balance between the facts on the one hand and readability on the other. This balance pivots around the question: which details should be included in their proper place, and which might be safely excluded or mentioned elsewhere? Normally historians resolve this question silently, through excising anything that is not relevant to their thesis or theme, and this process of selection is concealed within the structure of their books. However, in this study, which has no structure except the days of the year, everything relating to the king and his challenges is relevant. To exclude or change the position of anything would partially distort the picture of Henry V in 1415. Moreover, it is only by including everything that we can start to go beyond the evidence and to remark on aspects of normal medieval behaviour that do not feature in Henry’s life – his lack of relationships with women, for example, or the lack of references to jousting. Herein lies the problem: to include every fact in its proper place would result in a massive book, full of repetitive lists of apparently inconsequential details; yet to cut or remove anything would distort our image of the man in this year, and ruin the experiment.

  In trying to reconcile these problems of information, chronology and readability I have tended towards fullness and precision. I have i
ncluded almost everything I can find relating to the king’s decision-making, even such routine things as the confirmation of episcopal elections, warrants for arrest, commissions of inquiry, and the granting of royal pensions. In most cases these have been included under the heading of the day specified in the document. I have not included everything known for the year, however; I have excluded regular appointments and payments that were routinely made by the bureaucrats at Westminster (unless the nature of the grant suggests that Henry was personally involved). Some matters of accounting detail from May to August have been relegated to the notes section, to avoid tedious repetition. I have ignored administrative clarifications, such as confirmations of earlier royal grants by chancery officials, which would distract from the main purpose of the book. On the whole, I have tried to use as many facts as possible to give a full and multi-dimensional view of Henry – as a warrior, organiser, devoted Christian, patron, statesman and king – and I have sought to show how he behaved in relation to priests, subjects, women, diplomats, brothers and friends, as well as those who fought for him and those who fought against him.

  At the heart of this book – at the heart of all historical endeavour – there is one overarching purpose: to satisfy an instinctive desire to understand our race in other ages and in different circumstances, with regard to both individuals and communities, and to see how we have changed over the intervening centuries. For this reason I make no apology for wanting to go beyond patriotic hagiography and to look for the ‘real’ Henry V, as opposed to the charismatic Shakespearian hero or McFarlane’s ‘greatest man’. I have tried to draw attention to the complexities within Henry as an individual as well as the complexities of generally understanding men in a violent, God-fearing age. As I stressed at the end of my study of Edward III, it is in the inconsistencies of a character that one gets close to knowing the man. It is not in the bland generalisations that we find truth, but in the apparent irregularities that demand explanation. If I have alerted people to the fact that a man may be a hero and yet a monster, that he can be seen as blessed by God and yet be a wanton destroyer of lives, and that even a king might set himself on the path to his own self-destruction and the negation of his humanity in order to win recognition as something that people associate with ‘greatness’, then I will have succeeded.