VI
‘We have many times, and in many ways, sought peace … And well considering that the effect of Our wars are the deaths of men, destruction of countries, lamentations of women and children, and so many general evils … We are induced to seek diligently for all possible means to avoid the above-mentioned evils, and to acquire the approbation of God, and the praise of the world.’
Henry V’s challenge to the dauphin
‘They put out alle the French people both man woman and chylde and stuffed the town with English men.’
The Brut of England
At five o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 13 August the English fleet sailed into the Seine estuary. They anchored off the chalk headland of the Chef de Caux, three miles from Henry’s objective – the port of Harfleur. He forbade his troops to land before him under ‘pain of death,’ going ashore at a spot where Le Havre now stands, between six and seven o’clock in a beautiful dawn. On landing the king fell on his knees and prayed God to give him ‘justice’. By Saturday the disembarkation was completed. He issued orders, again under ‘pain of death’, that there must be no arson, that churches and church plate were to be left alone and that women and priests must go unmolested. No harlots might come within three miles of the camp; after a first warning any harlot who did so would have her left arm broken. Nor must there be any swearing. In the words of the late Professor E. F. Jacob, Henry meted out ‘that mixture of firmness and humanity which has always been the mark of the good English regimental officer’.1 He established his camp on a hill about a mile north-west of the unfortunate little town, and ‘when all the tents and pavilions and halls [marquees] were erected and set up, they seemed a right great and mighty city’.
Clarence established a second English camp under his command on a hill on the other side of the town, to the east in the direction of Rouen. When ‘at dawn in clear sunlight’ he and his men suddenly appeared over the brow of the hill, the sight caused ‘real fear and dread’ among the besieged. In addition, the English fleet blockaded the harbour. By 19 August the English had surrounded Harfleur and had enclosed it with a stockade, so that no one could get in or out.
Nevertheless, the beleaguered town had formidable defences. Its wall was unusually strong – polygonal, two-and-a-half miles in circumference and with twenty-six towers. Its three gates could only be reached across drawbridges from barbicans on the other side of a wide moat. Each barbican was strengthened by a circular bastion or ‘bulwark’ built around it, consisting of tree-trunks bound together by iron chains, reinforced by baulks of timber and covered by turf, with embrasures for guns and crossbows to fire through. In addition, an earth rampart had been thrown up between the wall and the moat. To the north the town was protected by the flooded valley of the river Lézarde, ‘a quarter as wide again as is the Thames at London’, to the south by the Lézarde itself and to the east by marshes. To seaward the harbour was guarded by two tall towers, by chain booms and by huge stakes on the seabed. It had an extremely competent commander in Jean d’Estouteville. Admittedly the garrison was under-strength though Raoul de Gaucourt, a redoubtable fighting man who lived near by, slipped into the town with 300 men-at-arms just before it was sealed off from the world outside.
Henry was determined to have Harfleur. The ‘key of the sea of all Normandy’ (the First Tudor Life’s description), it was also an ideal bridgehead from which to overrun Normandy and threaten Paris. The king saw it as another Calais, but better placed strategically. No doubt his spies had reported to him that the town contained few troops and the arrival of Gaucourt’s force at the last moment may well have thrown his plans out. It certainly put fresh heart into the defenders. When Henry summoned them to surrender ‘his’ town to the rightful Duke of Normandy, Estouteville sent a sardonic refusal; ‘You left us nothing to look after, and we’ve nothing to give you back.’
The English first attempted to tunnel underneath the moat to mine the walls. However, the French dug counter-tunnels and attacked the miners underground. The moat made it impossible to get close enough to use battering rams. Henry had recourse to his artillery which included cannon he had had in Wales, such as the ‘Messenger’ and the ‘King’s Daughter’. In all he possessed twelve heavy guns, but it took time to move them into position beneath the walls as they were impeded by the garrison firing at them from the ramparts, where they had mounted cannon of their own. The enormous English siege guns slowly trundled forward on vast wooden platforms until they were within range, then began to fire from behind protective wooden screens which tilted up; the gunners were also shielded by trenches and earthworks. The barrage continued day and night.
Henry’s cannon, of a size they had never seen before, terrified the French. Stone shot as big as millstones knocked wide holes in the walls while, so the Gesta informs us, ‘really fine buildings almost as far as the middle of the town were totally demolished or threatened imminent collapse.’2 The king supervised the bombardment tirelessly, spending whole nights in loading and laying his guns. Although the French managed to fill the breaches with palisades and tubs of earth, Henry was optimistic. On 3 September, writing to Bordeaux to order 600 casks of wine, he says that it will take only another eight days to reduce Harfleur, after which he intends to march towards Paris by way of Montivilliers, Dieppe and Rouen before going south to Guyenne. But at the end of eight days the town was still holding out.
Disease struck the English camp. ‘In this siege many men died of cold in nights and fruit eating; eke of stink of carrions,’ records Friar Capgrave.3 They were killed by the bloody flux, dysentery, induced by unripe fruit, sour new wine and local shellfish; a consignment of food contaminated by the sea may have been partly responsible. According to Monstrelet not less than 2,000 Englishmen perished, and another 2,000 were so ill that they had to be shipped home. Casualties included the Earls of Arundel and Suffolk and also Bishop Courtenay of Norwich, the king’s valued servant and close personal friend, who died in his arms; among those invalided back to England were the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of March. There were also many deserters. Yet nothing could deflect Henry.
The English cannon bombarded remorselessly the south-western bastion, which was the key to the siege. At the same time the English miners tunnelled forwards to undermine the walls, setting fire to the props which they placed beneath the foundations. By 16 September the bastion and the barbican which it had defended were in ruins, the moat on either side being filled in. The garrison made a sortie, setting fire to the English stockade. A second sortie ended in disaster. The English shot gunstones covered with flaming tow into the bastion where the tree-trunks and timber baulks caught fire, burning for two days. The French abandoned both the bastion and barbican to the besiegers.
By now the garrison was starving and there was no sign of any attempt to relieve it. Like the besiegers it had been stricken by the bloody flux. Nevertheless it refused the severe terms offered by Henry, though it could see the English pushing bridges across the moat, wheeling siege towers towards the walls and bringing up scaling ladders. On 17 September the king gave orders for a general assault on the following day and launched an even more intensive bombardment – including volleys of fire arrows. On 18 September the weary, sleepless defenders despaired and sent envoys to treat with Henry; they agreed to surrender if relief had not come by 22 September. No relief came. Accordingly on the day specified, a Sunday, the garrison’s leaders and sixty-six hostages walked out between rows of armed English to where the English king was waiting for them. By his orders they wore only shirts and had halters round their necks; they were forced to remain for several hours on their knees before being admitted to the royal presence. He was in a great silken pavilion, clad in cloth of gold and seated on a throne, while at his right stood Sir Gilbert Umfraville bearing his helmet with its crown, and his pole-axe. Even then it was some time before Henry deigned to look at them. He then upbraided them for withholding his town of Harfleur, ‘a noble portion of his inheritance’, from him ‘against God and all justice’.4
Then the Cross of St George was hoisted over the town gates, together with the leopards and lilies of the royal standard. Next day the king went barefoot to the half-destroyed parish church of Harfleur to offer up thanksgiving for his victory. His terms were that Gaucourt, together with sixty knights and 200 gentlemen in the garrison, were paroled and ordered to present themselves as ‘faithful captives’ at Calais at Martinmas (11 November) when they would be taken into custody for ransoming. The richer bourgeois were immediately sent to England to await ransoming. Some 2,000 of the ‘poorer sort’ were expelled ‘amid much lamentation, grief and tears for the loss of their customary although unlawful habitations’. As Henry explained, none of them, rich or poor, had any right to their houses, for they belonged to him ‘by right’. Only a few of Harfleur’s inhabitants were allowed to stay, on condition they took an oath of allegiance. Any goods or money found in the city were shared out among the troops, while a certain Richard Bokelond was granted ‘the inn called the Peacock’ as a reward for bringing two provision ships to the siege. On 5 October the king ordered a proclamation to be made in London and the greater English cities, offering houses in Harfleur, with cash subsidies, to all merchants and artisans who would come over and settle. Eventually, over a period of several years at least 10,000 English colonists arrived in Harfleur. Henry had the former townsmen’s title deeds publicly burnt in the market square. He was determined to turn Harfleur into a second Calais, another English town on the French littoral. However, the king received much praise from earlier English historians for not sacking the place, in accordance with the letter of the law, and for providing the poor whom he expelled with five sous a head to help them on their way.5
With his almost modern instinct for public relations, on 22 September Henry wrote to the mayor and aldermen of London announcing Harfleur’s capture – and also asking them to send him news of themselves from time to time. This was a correspondence he kept up throughout his campaigns in France.
Harfleur was a valuable acquisition, which would prove its worth in later years. Yet the fact remains that the siege was a disastrous start to Henry’s campaign; he had lost over a third of his troops. In a carefully composed letter to the mayor of London he says that he has won a great victory, even though his counsellors were begging him to go home as quickly as possible and not to march into France lest the French hem them all in ‘like sheep in pens’. Nonetheless, although he abandoned his original plan of advancing on Paris, the king insisted on marching up to Calais with his sadly depleted troops, many of them still suffering from dysentery.
Much ink has been wasted on trying to explain this foolhardy adventure. There was seemingly little to be gained by it, in terms of reconnaissance, plunder or reputation, while it was obviously a considerable gamble since the French were known to be gathering in great strength. Why did so coolly objective a soldier take so unprofitable a risk? He hints why in words to his Council: ‘Even if our enemies enlist the greatest armies, my trust is in God, and they shall not hurt my army nor myself. I will not allow them, puffed up with pride, to rejoice in misdeeds, nor, unjustly against God, to possess my goods. It cannot be too much emphasized that, for all his use of the latest military technology, Henry’s mind was fundamentally medieval. During the siege he had sent a challenge to the Dauphin Louis to a single combat which would decide who was to inherit Charles VI’s throne – ‘to place our quarrel at the will of God between Our person and yours’. Louis, a fat and sluggish nineteen-year-old, wisely declined. The march up to Calais was intended to be a divinely protected military promenade which would demonstrate that God not only recognized his claim to the crown of France but, far more important, to the crown of England.