XII
‘… soldiers waged into France for to make much murder of blood’
Bishop Reginald Pecock
‘Enemies have struck deep into the heart of France and enriched themselves.’
Jean Juvénal des Ursins
Henry was not going to be content with Normandy. He wanted all France. He knew that he did not have the resources to conquer the entire country by force of arms so he decided to see what diplomacy could do. During the first weeks of the siege of Rouen he had negotiated with the late Constable-Count of Armagnac, and had tried to play him off against the Duke of Burgundy. When the count was murdered the king foresaw that his party would survive its leader’s death, just as it had that of Orleans. However, after an attempt to meet the dauphin, the Armagnacs’ new leader, had failed in March 1419 Henry reverted to wooing the Burgundians.
There were several meetings between Henry and Duke John in the spring and early summer. At the first encounter ‘the duke saluted the king, bending his knee a little and inclining his head’, Monstrelet reports. ‘But the king took him by his hand, embraced him and showed him great respect.’1There seemed to be a real chance of an alliance, even if Duke John was also negotiating secretly with the dauphin. Early in June there was a meeting at Meulan attended not only by Henry, Clarence, Gloucester and Burgundy, but also by Queen Isabeau and Princess Catherine. The king – presumably frustrated by his self-imposed celibacy – was enchanted by the girl. He regarded her as the only possible bride for him, if contemporaries are to be believed. He stated his terms: Catherine, with Normandy and Aquitaine in full sovereignty.
He had asked too much. If genuinely anxious for a settlement with Henry and clearly prepared to concede a great deal, Duke John and Queen Isabeau dared not yield on sovereignty; to break up the kingdom of France in this way would destroy their prestige and their credit. Henry would accept nothing less. Before leaving Meulan he told the duke, ‘Fair cousin, we wish you to know that we will have the daughter of your king or we will drive him and you out of his realm.’ ‘Sire,’ answered John, ‘you may be pleased to say so, but before you can drive my lord and myself out of this realm I make no doubt that you will be heartily tired.’2 Henry had failed. He could not fight successfully an alliance of Burgundians and Armagnacs. And it quickly became obvious that Duke John had made up his mind to seek a reconciliation with the Armagnacs.
The name ‘Jean sans Peur’ bestowed on Duke John had a certain irony. In reality ‘Fearless John’ was a paranoiac who at Paris slept in a specially built tower which contained a single, easily defendable bedroom and a bathroom. (The Tour d’Artois, it still stands in the rue Etienne Marcel, a last fragment of the otherwise long-vanished palace of the dukes of Burgundy.) He would only go out with heavily armed bodyguards. He had reason to fear. Not only had he murdered the Duke of Orleans and others, but the Armagnacs blamed him for the massacres in Paris when some of their comrades had been made to jump from the Châtelet’s battlements on to the spears of the mob waiting below. He publicly admitted to having been persuaded by the Devil to kill Orleans and was suspected of being a warlock. A letter urging further evil deeds was widely circulated, addressed as follows:
Lucifer, emperor of the deep Acheron, king of Hell, duke of Erebus and Chaos, prince of the Shadows, marquis of Barathrum and Pluto, count of Gehenna, master, regent, guardian and governor of all devils in Hell and of those mortal men alive in the world who prefer to oppose the will and commandment of our adversary Jesus Christ, to our dearest and well-loved lieutenant and proctor-general in the West, John of Burgundy.3
Yet the duke was even more frightened of Henry than he was of the Armagnacs.
The king resumed the offensive. Very early on the morning of 31 July the Earl of Huntingdon and the Captal de Buch rode to Pontoise through the darkness. It had a garrison of 1,200 men under Marshal de l’Isle Adam and was considered sufficiently safe to be visited frequently by Charles VI’s court. In the gloom the captal’s troops stole up to the town ditch through vineyards just outside and hid there, waiting for a signal that Huntingdon’s men were in position. At 4.00 a.m. they scaled the walls with ladders and, despite a fierce response by the garrison, so damaged a gate that Huntingdon was able to gallop straight in. The town was then sacked horribly, its citizens losing everything they possessed – not to mention the atrocities to which their women were subjected. The English ‘gained great riches for it was full of wealth’ says Monstrelet. On hearing the news Henry had a Te Deum sung at Mantes. He rode in a week later, writing exultantly to the mayor and aldermen of London that its capture surpassed any previous gain. Not only had he taken a vast military depot stocked with arms and provisions valued at two million crowns but he now possessed an advance base on the River Oise from which to threaten Paris, a mere twelve miles away. Even if his communications might be dangerously extended and he was alarmingly far from his main bases, he had shown the Burgundians that he was in earnest when he threatened their duke at Meulan.
Today Pontoise is part of the Paris conurbation but when one visits it one can still see why it was of such vital importance in 1419. On a mighty bluff (near the modern railway station) the citadel’s ramparts were only 150 yards from the bank of the River Oise, so that gunners and archers could shoot down on to this crucial waterway up which even now barges bring food to Parisians. Moreover the Oise is sufficiently narrow to be easily blocked by a bridge of boats or a boom. An English garrison could not only stop supplies going up the river but could also raid Paris without warning.
The fear inspired by the English is vividly attested by the Bourgeois of Paris, an anonymous chronicler who lived at the French capital throughout these grim years. He was probably a canon of Nôtre Dame. He tells us that about ten o’clock in the morning on the feast of St Germain
twenty or thirty people entered Paris through the Saint-Denis Gate, in a state of terror like persons who had just escaped death, which indeed was true enough: some of them being wounded while others were faint with fear, cold and hunger, and all looked more dead than alive. Stopped at the gate and asked why they were in such a sad condition, they began to weep, saying, ‘We are from Pontoise, which for sure was captured by the English this morning; they killed everyone who crossed their path; and we count ourselves very lucky to have escaped from them, for no Saracens ever harmed Christians so sorely.’ As they were speaking the gatekeepers saw a huge crowd approaching, men, women and children, some wounded, others stripped of their clothes; one of the men there had come to seek shelter with two babies in a basket under his arm; many of the women were bareheaded, while others were only in their bodices or their shifts… three or four hundred people lay about, bemoaning their sufferings, the loss of goods and friends, since very few among them had not lost a relation or a comrade at Pontoise. And when they thought of those who were in the hands of those cruel tyrants the English their anguish was such they could scarcely bear it, being weak from lack of food and drink. Some pregnant women gave birth during their flight, dying shortly after. Nobody had a heart hard enough to contemplate their misery without shedding tears. They continued to arrive throughout the following week from Pontoise and the district around, reaching Paris in a daze like a great flock of sheep.4
The Bourgeois goes on to tell us that after capturing Pontoise the English terrorized all the area around Paris but did not assault the city. They contented themselves with ‘pillaging, killing, robbing, taking prisoners whom they would free only when a ransom had been paid’. He continues, ‘In those days the only news one heard was about the ravages of the English in France every day; they took towns and castles, spread ruin throughout the entire realm, sending everything, loot and prisoners, back to England.’5
‘Booty was one of the chief military objectives, and no one, peasant or townsman, clerk or knight, was immune from loss at the hands of enemy raiders,’ says McFarlane. ‘Civilians were as fair game as combatants … Clearly the plunder of France was no small matter; and equally clearly the English got far more than they gave. Fighting most of the time on alien soil, they could and did strip it of everything in the line of march.’6 A particularly vile practice was the kidnapping of boys and girls, to be sent across the Channel and sold as indentured servants.
The English of all classes, and no doubt the Welsh too, must have been staggered by the wealth of French cities and towns and by the fertility of French farmland. London was only half the size of Paris (which had a population of perhaps as many as 200,000) while no English city could rival Rouen. Much of England was still sheep country and had no grain lands like the plat pays. Vines were unknown (save for a few rare monastic vineyards producing thin and eccentric beverages). The sheer amount of wine in France – in those days produced even in the region around Paris – astonished the English troops, who frequently drank themselves into a stupor, to the fury of Henry and his commanders. This was truly a promised land for looters. At first there can have been little trouble in persuading men to stay and settle.
It should not be forgotten that Henry’s conquests in north-western France included part of Maine. Using Alençon as a base, his troops occupied a block of territory which stretched as far south as Beaumont-le-Vicomte and even a little further – there were constant raids down towards Angers. These southern conquests were extremely insecure, the strongholds constantly changed hands. As early as 1417 the English had attacked the great château of Lassay (between Mayenne and Alençon), severely damaging it; in 1422, presumably in response to raids, the dauphinists demolished it, to stop the English from using it as a base. The dauphinists walled the small town of Ste Suzanne a little further south, huddled beneath an already grim twelfth-century castle on a high cliff, creating something very like a Gascon bastide (or fortified frontier town). The menace of Henry’s invasion was transforming the landscape of north-western France. Villages, monasteries and even churches were fortified against the English.
The king also encouraged his captains to raid deep into enemy territory over the understandably ill-defined frontier. Just what this involved may be glimpsed from an often quoted minute to the Royal Council by one of his minor commanders, a veteran of the Agincourt campaign, who later became one of the most famous soldiers of the Hundred Years War – Sir John Fastolf. Although written thirteen years after Henry’s death it accurately describes a type of operation launched all too often by his men. In Fastolf’s opinion the most effective way of dealing with the French was to send small raiding parties of 750 lances into their territory from June to November ‘burning and destroying all they pass, both houses, corn, vines and all trees that bearen fruit for man’s sustenance’ while all livestock ‘that may not be driven off … be destroyed’. The object, Sir John explains bluntly, was to drive the enemies thereby to an extreme famine. No doubt he was doing no more than echo Vegetius, but this can scarcely have been of much comfort to the farmers in the path of such raids – if they managed to escape with their lives.7
It is known from the accounts of the Treasurer-General of Normandy, William Alyngton, that money was spent on spying. The captain of Calais had agents – the ancestors of MI6 – to warn him of any threats to the isolated city, and Henry employed these to discover French objectives and troop dispositions in Picardy. It is likely that every garrison captain made similar use of spies, whether on the frontier to report on enemy troop movements or inland to ferret out conspiracies. We even know of an English couple called Mr and Mrs Piket, who in 1420 had to leave Angers hurriedly for La Rochelle when the dauphin sent men to arrest them – they had been gathering information for Sir John Assheton, the bailli of the Cotentin.
Duke John was deeply alarmed by the failure of the negotiations at Meulan in June and the realization that the English king was not to be bought off. He was probably even more frightened by the man himself. Although scarcely an idealist, the duke saw that the only chance of saving France was a military alliance between Burgundians and Armagnacs, or at least between Burgundians and dauphinists; if he could dominate the weak and colourless young heir to the throne, he might be able to wean him away from his hardline Armagnac friends. Accordingly, a treaty between the duke and the dauphin was signed at Pouilly-le-Fort on 11 July 1419. In it both stated that they would resist ‘the damnable aggressions of the English, our ancient enemies’ which were exposing the entire kingdom of France ‘to the most cruel tyranny, perhaps even to total ruin’. The Parisians went wild with joy, dancing in their city’s streets where they set up tables to feast in celebration. They were justified in rejoicing – the new alliance was France’s last hope.
During the first half of July Duke John had had three meetings with the Dauphin Charles which had been without incident. Fear of the English king made the duke forget about the enmity of the irreconcilable Armagnacs who constituted the bulk of the future Charles VII’s entourage – men thirsting to avenge their foully murdered leader and comrades. John was still more shaken when Henry captured Pontoise. The situation was growing desperate, and the treaty of Pouilly-le-Fort had not brought military co-operation against the English any closer. He seems to have decided that at all costs he must see the sixteen-year-old dauphin again and impress upon him the urgency of the crisis.
On 10 September the two Valois kinsmen met by appointment for a further discussion. The rendezvous was some forty miles from Paris, on the fortified bridge of Montereau over the Seine where the Yonne flows into it. Barricades had been erected at both ends of the bridge with a wooden pen in the middle in which, each escorted by ten chosen advisers, they could meet safely without any fear of an army of the other’s supporters rushing forward to seize them. The duke’s worst nightmare was to come true; it was a cunningly planned Armagnac plot to trap and ‘execute’ him. No one will ever discover what exactly took place. What is known is that after Duke John had knelt on one knee before the dauphin, who raised him to his feet, there was a short conversation between them, then a sudden mêlée and John lay dead. A plausible reconstruction is that someone, probably Tanneguy du Chastel – a redoubtable Breton thug and former henchman of Louis of Orleans – had suddenly struck the duke in the face with a small battleaxe, cutting off part of his chin and knocking him down; and as he lay on the ground someone else pulled up his armour to thrust a sword into his belly, finishing him off. He was not killed in self-defence, as the Armagnacs afterwards claimed. Almost certainly the dauphin was implicated; he never punished anyone for the crime and in later years heaped honours on Tanneguy who undoubtedly had a hand in the killing. A Carthusian monk, showing the duke’s skull to François I in the sixteenth century, commented succinctly that the English entered France through the hole in Duke John’s head.8
The Armagnacs, the one faction committed unequivocally to Charles VI’s son, had not merely done themselves terrible damage in French public esteem but had very nearly ruined their patron’s cause. There was no chance now of any rapprochement with the Burgundians. The real losers were France and the French people, left at the invaders’ mercy. The Bourgeois, however much a committed Burgundian supporter he seems to have been, was justified in claiming that the Armagnacs had already brought much misery upon France as it was. ‘Normandy would still be French, the noble blood of France would never have been spilt nor the realm’s greatest lords carried off into exile, nor the battle lost nor so many good men killed on that dreadful day at Agincourt, where the king [of France] lost so many of truest and most loyal friends had it not been for the pride of that wretched name of Armagnac.’ The dauphin shared in the Armagnacs’ disgrace, since everyone knew that he was their puppet. Moreover, while the French continued to be divided the English were united in waging what for them was undoubtedly a national war.
On hearing the news of his father’s murder the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip ‘the Good’, took to his bed where he threw himself about, gnashing his teeth and rolling his eyes. This was probably more the effect of rage than of grief. (During all too many well attested paroxysms of anger he was said to turn blue in the face.) He had seen how Duke John had been repaid for his desire to save France and his sense of family loyalty, and could think of nothing but revenge. At a meeting held in Arras a month after the ‘bridge of Montereau’ the entire Burgundian faction – including its supporters in Paris – urged him to ally with Henry. A man of Flanders by upbringing, he knew very well how anxious his Flemish townsmen were to maintain good relations with their business friends in England. An English alliance would mean the acquisition of large chunks of northern France. In any case he had little alternative.
Henry reacted predictably, loudly and cynically lamenting the death of ‘a good and loyal knight and honourable prince’ (a blackly humorous description), while – to judge from the accounts in more or less contemporary chronicles – it was abundantly clear that he realized that he could now obtain almost anything he wanted. Waurin records how he swore that by the help of God and St George he would have the Lady Catherine though every Frenchmen should say him nay. Ten days after the murder Queen Isabeau wrote exhorting him to avenge Duke John and it seems that at the same time she asked Duke Philip to protect her from her son. She knew what Henry wanted and was prepared to co-operate. Negotiations between the English and the Burgundians began at Mantes at the end of October. Henry told the envoys that if their duke tried to take the French crown he would make war on him to the death. He expected to marry Catherine and inherit the crown from King Charles, who however might keep it during his life, while queen Isabeau was to retain her estates. These were the terms which would eventually be agreed by the Treaty of Troyes in April 1420 and make him ‘heir and regent of France’.
Meanwhile at Mantes, according to Tito Livio, the king ‘gave not himself to rest and sloth but with marvellous solicitude and diligence he laboured continually. For almost no day passed but he visited some of the holds, towns and [strong] places. And everything that they needed he enstored. He ordained in all parts sufficient garrisons for their defence. He victualled them. He repaired their castles, towers and walls. He cleansed and scoured their ditches.’9 He did not neglect to let London know what was happening, writing under his signet on 5 August 1419 to the mayor and aldermen that the enemy would not make peace and that therefore he must continue the war.
A further meeting of Burgundian notables at Arras warned Duke Philip that if he allied with the English there was a danger that not only would Henry drive the king and queen out of France but many of the French people as well, replacing them by English lords, knights and priests; this warning surely reflects the impression made by news of what was happening in Normandy. On the other hand most of Philip’s subjects believed in the dauphin’s guilt and wished that the duke would avenge his father’s murder. Philip was a Valois too, the great grandson of King John II who had been defeated at Poitiers, and it might be asked why he did not put in a bid for the throne himself instead of letting the Englishman take it. But Philip could not fight both the Armagnacs and the English; in any case the latter now had a name for near invincibility. By allying with Henry he doubled his territory and blocked the return to power of the hated faction which had killed his father so foully.
The king’s hold over large areas of France was to be made infinitely more secure by the alliance with Burgundy and by the feud between Burgundians and Armagnacs. Any Frenchman who had little love for the Englishman but feared the Armagnacs was forced to support him. This was particularly true in the capital where, in the light of the bloody massacres of recent years, every Parisian had good reason to dread the return of the dauphin whose Armagnac followers would surely take the opportunity of settling old scores as bloodily as possible. The Bourgeois of Paris shudders as he recounts how the city was full of rumours of fiendish Armagnac atrocities – each report of the dauphin’s forces raiding anywhere in the vicinity of Paris being greeted with horror.
Henry was perversely anachronistic in his insistence on seeing the throne of France as something which was neither more nor less than a personal inheritance. Yet at the same time he was fully aware of the power of nationalism – from his Welsh campaigns and from his English subjects’ frenzied rejoicing at his victories. Sometimes when talking to Frenchmen he even referred to ‘our way’ and ‘your way’. Where, on the other hand, he was centuries before his time was in presenting the dispute over the French throne as a struggle between personalities. No modern politician contesting the leadership of a party or the presidency could have sold his case more shrewdly. He offered himself as an experienced and proven leader, a superb soldier and brilliantly efficient administrator who could give outstandingly good government, impeccably fair justice and, above all, peace. At the same time he contrasted his rival with himself– as an immature degenerate, a murderer rejected by his parents, condemned by the law of the land, the willing tool of vicious and revengeful party bosses.
The King of England realized that he was now the most powerful man in France, against whom no one could hope to stand successfully, and that he was on the verge of a diplomatic triumph. He continued to batter his way mercilessly towards Paris while at the same time mopping up any Norman strongholds which still held out for the King of France. He moved his headquarters from Mantes to Pontoise on 6 August, Clarence raiding savagely up to the very gates of Paris. Gisors, the easternmost strongpoint in Normandy, fell to him on 23 September 1419, and St Germain very soon after; Gisors threatened the Burgundian border, St Germain Paris. The Burgundians might still control the capital but they had to accept that Henry was certain to capture it and that with Paris they would lose their hold over that tattered symbol of phantom authority which was poor, mad King Charles VI. They were forced to accept that their only course was to follow their instinct to avenge Duke John’s killing and ally with the English, however much good reason they had to dislike them. The English king knew that he could demand what he wanted from the Burgundians – their acquiescence in his conquering not merely vast tracts of France but the French crown itself. In early December his troops finally obtained the surrender of Château Gaillard on its great cliff overlooking the Seine. It had been popularly regarded by the French as the strongest fortress in the realm.
Constructive negotiations commenced as soon as the Burgundian envoys arrived at Mantes on 26 October. Despite their being received ‘very benignly and feasted’, Henry repeated what he had told Duke Philip’s father; that unless their master agreed to his terms he would conquer France by himself. This time he set a deadline for agreement – Martinmas, 11 November. He again made clear just what he wanted – there never was a more expert practitioner of realpolitik. He demanded the hand of Catherine of France and his recognition as heir to the French throne; while Charles VI might retain the crown till his death, Henry must be Regent of France during his mad fits; and the Duke of Burgundy would have to acknowledge Henry as his sovereign after his crowning. As the English king saw clearly, Philip had much to gain from an agreement; not only would he have the chance of increasing his territory but he would be protected from the dauphin and the Armagnacs. If some Burgundian supporters feared that Englishmen might monopolize all positions of power and influence in France, it was obvious that Henry V would never allow so dangerous a situation to develop. A treaty was signed with Duke Philip on Christmas Day, 1419. All that remained was to persuade the French king and queen to disinherit their son.
The dauphin was accused of killing Duke John on the bridge at Montereau and the accusation was used as a pretext for depriving him of his inheritance. Even had he been tried and found guilty there was no law or precedent for excluding him from the succession, while the notorious insanity of the French king made it impossible for him to set his son aside with any convincing show of legality. Nevertheless, the infuriated Burgundians’ desire for revenge enabled Henry to use the accusation as grounds for usurping the youth’s birthright.
The English king had convinced himself that in creating a dual monarchy, in which each realm would be governed according to its own laws, he was securing what was rightfully his. He believed that he alone could impose the same good government on France which he had given England. His entire political programme was based on these two firm convictions.
Henry tried indefatigably to surround dauphinist France with a string of diplomatic alliances, some of them dynastic. Excellent, although not particularly profitable, relations were maintained with the Emperor Sigismund, while the three important Elector-Archbishops of Cologne, Triers and Mainz all received English subsidies. A trade agreement was negotiated with Genoa.
The king also tried, unsuccessfully, to marry his brother Humphrey of Gloucester to the daughter of Charles III of Navarre, whose realm adjoined Guyenne. His most ambitious attempt at a dynastic alliance was in 1419 when he sent John Fitton and Agostino de Lante to Naples to explore the possibility of his brother John of Bedford being adopted by the Neapolitan queen. Bedford was thirty while Joanna II was forty-four, a widow with a discarded second husband. She was childless and clearly infertile, a byword for promiscuity and had a thoroughly sinister reputation. She had made the first move in the negotiations, offering to create Bedford Duke of Calabria – the title traditionally borne by heirs to the Neapolitan throne – and to acknowledge him as her official successor, besides handing over to him all citadels and castles in her possession. Probably just as well for Bedford, nothing came of this exotic project.
Henry V as a youth. From an early sixteenth-century copy of a lost original. (The Mansell Collection)
John, Duke of Bedford kneels before St George, from the Bedford Book of Hours c. 1423. The small forked beard makes it highly probable that St George is a portrait of Henry V. (The British Library)
Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury – Henry’s most formidable commander – with fashionable military haircut. Note his poleaxe. (The British Library)
Henry V’s aunt Princess Elizabeth Plantagenet and her third husband, Sir John Cornwall KG, one of his most daring commanders. From a window formerly at Ampthill in Bedfordshire.
Henry V’s father-in-law, King Charles VI of France, with his counsellors. (The Mansell Collection)
Henry V’s brother-in-law the Dauphin, with King Charles VII, as one of the Three Magi. From a miniature by Jean Fouquet. (Giraudon)
A room well known to Henry V – the ruins of the dining hall of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. (John Cooke Photography)
The château of Lassaye in Maine. Destroyed in 1417 to stop it being used as a base by the English, it was rebuilt in 1458 with cambered walls designed to resist siege artillery of the type used by Henry V. (S. Mountgarret)
A hunting scene of a sort very well known to Henry V. In the background is his favourite French residence, the castle of Bois-de-Vincennes. From the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. (Giraudon)
Henry V’s official residence in Paris, the Louvre, as it was in his time. From the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. (Giraudon)
English links with Scandinavia were closer than at any time since the eleventh century. Henry’s sister Philippa was the queen of Eric XIII, King of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Her husband’s great-aunt, St Bridget, had presided over the creation of the triple monarchy, now in a state of chronic unrest. The links had been responsible for the foundation of the Bridgettine monastery at Twickenham, its first nuns and monks being Swedes from Vadstena. Probably they were also why Henry employed the Dane, Sir Hartung von Clux (whom he made a Knight of the Garter) in so many capacities. Hartung led embassies to the Emperor Sigismund and also fought in France. In 1417 he brought four men-at-arms, nine archers and, most unusually, two crossbowmen to the invasion force. Later that year he was appointed captain of Creully and he was among the first to be given a Norman estate.
Henry’s diplomacy reached as far as the land of the Teutonic Order on the Baltic. That extraordinary country, stretching from the Neumark of Brandenburg to the Gulf of Finland, was ruled by celibate German knights who waged war on Europe’s last pagans, the snake-worshipping Lithuanians, and less admirably on the Catholic Poles. In 1410 the latter had inflicted a crushing defeat on them, killing their ‘hochmeister’. However, the Order remained rich and powerful, with its capital at the Marienburg and commercial centre at Danzig, it was of vital importance in Baltic trade and still wielded considerable international influence; in 1407 the Duke of Burgundy had tried to involve the hochmeister in a war with England. Every year a fleet sailed from Danzig to England, joining the fleet of the Hanse towns en route, laden with Prussian goods – corn, silver, furs, falcons and amber. It took home English cloth which was sold all over Poland and western Russia. It was important for the English to keep on good terms with the knights. In 1419 Friar Netter led an embassy to them, and also to King Ladislas of Poland with whom the Order was still at war.
The man whom Henry used most for diplomatic missions was Sir John Tiptoft, the former speaker and treasurer. He played an invaluable part in the negotiations to isolate France before the campaign of 1417, visiting the emperor and many German princes, the Kings of Aragon and Castile, and the republic of Genoa. He was among the commissioners who tried to manoeuvre the French into accepting Henry’s terms in 1419. During all this time he was also Seneschal of Guyenne, having been appointed in 1415, shortly before Henry sailed on his Harfleur expedition, to the most important office in the duchy.
The king never had time to visit Guyenne, although he demanded more and more money from it. He paid the duchy careful attention nonetheless, as is shown by his appointment of Tiptoft, and by that of Sir John Radcliffe as Seneschal of Bordeaux. He was tactful when dealing with the citizens of Bordeaux, writing frequently to the mayor and burgesses to tell them of his progress and asking them to send him news of themselves. The Gascons were firmly tied to England, partly because it bought so much of their wine, and they rejoiced at their king-duke’s victories in the north. He employed Gascon troops, one of his most redoubtable captains being the Captal de Buch, whom he made a Knight of the Garter. Yet Guyenne had its problems, suffering from dauphinist raids and brigandage. It was essential to make sure of two great southern magnates whose territories bordered the duchy, the Counts of Foix and Albret. This involved Henry in much tortuous diplomacy and a considerable outlay in cash.
Tito Livio tells us that the most devout king of England returned to Rouen to keep the feast of Christmas, 1419. However, although Henry himself may have been given up to devotion during this sacred season of the year, at the same time he sent his captains out to conquer further tracts of France. The English troops, who ‘feared not the death for the recovery of the king’s right … remained conquerors in the field and put their adversaries to flight, of whom they first slew many and many they maimed’. Meanwhile, Henry ‘persevered in the city of Rouen lauding and honouring the sole creator and redeemer of the world’.10