XIV
‘Come on! With us ye shall go see the King!’
A fifteenth-century translation
of Vegetius’s De Re Militari
‘Hélas, doulce France, doulce ville de Paris.’
Jean Juvénal des Ursins
The Anglo-Burgundian army, pausing to collect King Charles at Corbeil, returned to Paris. Henry rode in beside his dazed father-in-law while behind them rode the Dukes of Burgundy, Clarence and Bedford at the head of a glittering cavalcade which nonetheless had some sombre notes – the English king’s squire bearing his strange ensign of a fox’s brush on the tip of a lance, Duke Philip and his knights all in black. The heir and regent went at once to Nôtre Dame to pray at the high altar, before installing himself in the Louvre. Within hours of their arrival English troops had seized all strongpoints in the French capital, which they were to occupy for seventeen years; they captured the Bastille with a simple subterfuge; a knight engaged the Burgundian castellan in conversation until the soldiers were able to creep up and rush the drawbridge. Led by clergy, dons from the university and lawyers from the Parlement, the Parisians greeted the visitation with seeming joy, singing Te Deum, encouraged by the wine flowing from the public fountains which the city fathers had prudently provided to sweeten their mood. However alien, this terrifying foreign king might at least bring peace, rescue them from an unending nightmare of civil war and bloodshed. Next day Isabeau and Catherine arrived in their litters, the fountains flowing this time with rose water as well as wine.
The Parisians quickly had good cause to curse the heir and regent. Medieval currency was based on bimetallism and on a bewilderingly complex structure of monies of account – the pound sterling, the pound Scots, the pound tournois, the pound bordelais and the pound parisis, the exchange rate between them fluctuating from place to place. Throughout the century the amount of gold and silver available for coinage diminished steadily, with an accompanying rise in the value of both metals. There was a constant temptation for governments to lower the weight of coins, altering exchange rates to their own advantage. Almost as soon as Henry secured control of Paris the rate was altered to the detriment of the pound parisis, producing soaring inflation; within a week of his arrival there food prices more than doubled. The effect of endemic warfare on an agricultural economy always on a knife-edge – so finely balanced that Paris’s entire food supply could be endangered by a heat wave or a cold snap, let alone an influx of refugees – had already been disastrous. Soon corn, flour and bread were beyond the purchasing power of the poor.1
It is from the Bourgeois of Paris that we know that Parisians blamed the rise in food prices on the new exchange rates at Rouen. His journal has been described as a chronicle of nourishment – or, rather, of under-nourishment. By Christmas, Paris was in the grip of full-scale famine. Everywhere one heard little children crying, ‘I’m dying of hunger.’ Boys and girls, in bands of twenty or thirty, rooted for scraps on the city’s rubbish tips as they died from starvation and cold. Those who pitied them had nothing to give. There was no corn, no wood and no coal, and it was the coldest winter for forty years. People ate pigswill and cabbage roots, even the tripes from dead dogs. Thousands died, and wolves swam the Seine to eat the unburied corpses lying in the street.2
Meanwhile Henry and Charles presided over a meeting of the States General, which obligingly endorsed the Treaty of Troyes, and also agreed to a calling-in of the present currency and a re-coinage. This resulted in the coining of the beautiful Anglo-Gallic goldsalut, which bore the arms of England and France held by an angel and the Virgin. On one side was the inscription Henricus Dei Gratia Rex Angliae, Heres Franciae and on the other the presumptuous Christus Vincit. (This fresh devaluation made the famine still worse.) Later the Duke of Burgundy’s filial desire for revenge was partly assuaged by Charles VI obediently holding a lit-de-justice at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. The ‘heir of France’ sat with him on the great cushions, to hear the Parlement of Paris pronounce the dauphin and his principal henchmen guilty of Duke John’s murder. They were summoned to Paris where they were to make the amende honorable and be drawn in a tumbril through the public places of Paris bearing lighted torches. When, not unexpectedly, the dauphin and his friends failed to appear within three days, he was banished from the realm of France and debarred from inheriting the French crown by reason of his ‘horrible and dreadful crimes’.
Although cowed by years of massacre and famine, and also leaderless, the Parisians could not entirely repress their dislike of the English and their icy arrogance, nor of the foreign king who was to be imposed on them when Charles VI should die. The latter began to be held in considerable affection, according to the Bourgeois of Paris, by the ordinary people of Paris – ‘le menu peuple’ – who were to throng the streets in tears when he died. They did not enjoy the occupation of their city by foreigners. Although certain modern English historians claim that it is anachronistic to speak of ‘national’ feelings at this date, there is at least one contemporary witness who tells us just what the French thought about the English presence in their city.
If Georges Chastellain was a Flemish noble by birth, born at Ghent in 1405, he regarded himself as ‘a loyal Frenchman’ and always wrote his verses and his history in French. No doubt he suffered from the fashionable pessimism of the age – ‘I, man of sadness, born in an eclipse of darkness, and amid thick fogs of lamentation’ he says in the foreword to his chronicle – yet his testimony has unusual insights, even if it is occasionally inaccurate. A squire to Duke Philip the Good and Herald of the Order of the Golden Fleece he met all the famous people of his day and was very well-informed. He writes of 1420:
The city of Paris, ancient seat of France’s royal majesty, then seemed to have changed in both name and location, because this king and his great English people [son grant peuple anglais] made a new London of it no less by their rude and proud manner of talking as by their language, going everywhere through the city all of which they held as masters. And they went with their heads high like stags, staring all around them, glorying at the shame and ill-fortune of the French, whose blood they had shed in such quantities at Agincourt and elsewhere, and so much of whose heritage they had taken from them by tyranny …
For he [Henry V], and also the English lords who were there in much pomp, and more arrogant than can be imagined, had no respect whatever for any lords of France who were present so that it seemed indeed to the English lords and knights that the heritage of the French belonged to them, that the latter’s rule and lordship should be taken away by those of English name, whether they liked it or not. Thus did it appear, in truth, since from that time on all the realm and its business was governed and guided by the hand of the English king, and all its places and charges were bestowed and changed at his pleasure, turning out even those men put in place by the two dukes of Burgundy, father and son, and in their stead putting in Englishmen and people of that nation, foreigners unsuited to the nature of the country …
Such changes in places and charges did the King of England make on his coming to Paris that in secret many French hearts were sore stricken with sadness, had they dared show it, alas! Watching he who came upon them [Henry] as he was entering Paris they cried ‘Noel! Noel!’ and rejoiced since they hoped for peace, yet they knew only too well their misfortune and their servitude. And I call to mind often how men came to Jerusalem and stole the ark of the covenant, arcam foederis, and violated the temple and the holy places, and how the people there were treated and served scurvily, all their glory and past happiness abased and turned to shame and wretchedness. So it was with the English king and the French. For them every road led to sadness, and it gave him great joy to have done this.3
There is other testimony besides that of Chastellain.
The Burgundian nobles, most of whom were Frenchmen, found Henry’s coldness and stiff pride repellent. He rebuked Jehan de l’Isle Adam, a valiant marshal of France, for appearing in his presence in a rough grey coat and for then daring to look him in the face when explaining why. (l’Isle Adam had been the garrison commander at Pontoise when it was surprised and captured by the English in 1419.) The king was ill-pleased by the marshal’s proud answer that Frenchmen thought it unmanly to lower their eyes when speaking to anyone however high his rank might be. ‘That is not our way!’ he retorted angrily.4 Even in those days Frenchmen considered English manners cold and unnatural, and must have thought them peculiarly detestable in invaders. Yet they could do little to express their burning resentment while the Burgundians and Armagnacs hated each other more than they did Englishmen.
Peeresses crossed the Channel to wait on Queen Catherine – and to share in their menfolk’s spoils. An anonymous Norman chronicler records: ‘The king of England kept his Christmas at Paris in the Hôtel des Tournelles; and there were there the ladies of England who had come to the queen, namely the Duchesses of Clarence and York, the Countess of March, the countess marshal and other noble ladies from the realm of England.’5
Parisians were ashamed by the contrast between the splendour of the English king and his court at the Tournelles and Charles VI’s miserable condition at the Hôtel de Saint-Pol. They were strangely devoted to their crazed monarch, perhaps partly because he was a focus for anti-English feelings and partly out of pity for his madness. The Hôtel de Saint-Pol was a fine enough palace but the French king, madder and dirtier than ever, was ‘poorly and meanly’ served by a scant and shabby staff according to Monstrelet, who comments how this must have been ‘disgusting for all true and loyal Frenchmen’.6 Queen Isabeau, no doubt to her fury, had to stay by his side, while every French noble of importance was either with the Duke of Burgundy or the dauphin or else dancing attendance on the ‘heir and regent’ at the Hôtel des Tournelles. No doubt many cynical French courtiers fully expected that, in view of Charles’s age, anyone so much younger, as the Englishman, must soon enter upon his ‘inheritance’.
Yet, for all Henry’s ability it was undoubtedly usurpation. In 1435 the legal faculty of Bologna gave their verdict that the Dauphin Charles’s succession to the throne had been guaranteed by his investiture with the Dauphine in 1417, that Charles VI was not entitled to disinherit him simply on account of Duke John’s murder, that the king had been of unsound mind when he did so, that a father could not be both judge and accuser. However, the House of Lancaster had already shown in England that it knew both how to usurp and how to keep a throne.
Admirers of Joan of Arc – whether hagiographers or Bernard Shaw – have given an impression that Henry’s brother-in-law was a poor creature, at best a late maturer. Even Edouard Perroy subscribed to this view of him. ‘Physically and morally, Charles was a weakling, an unpleasant degenerate,’ he writes. ‘Puny in size, spindly, [he had] a face devoid of expression in which little frightened eyes, cunning if somnolent, lurked behind a great long nose … Roaming gloomily from palace to palace, silent, underhand, superstitious, this retarded adolescent would need to be buffeted much more by misfortune before he could show that he was a man and become a king.’7 Such a portrait verges on caricature. Admittedly, by comparison with, for example, the flamboyant figure of Philip of Burgundy, it is not easy to obtain a strong impression of the dauphin’s personality across the centuries. Undoubtedly he had an unimpressive physique and was fearful to the point of paranoia. A patron of astrologers and the occult, he was a solitary, bookish person who disliked fighting, hunting, tournaments and the normal amusements of fifteenth-century noblemen. The runt of Isabeau’s litter, whose two elder brothers had died young, he had never been intended for a throne. Nevertheless there are indications that he matured sooner rather than later. Chastellain, who had considerable respect for him, remarks that ‘what he lacked in courage, which was not in his nature, he made up for in shrewdness’.
Like Henry V, the future Charles VII grew up early. Born in 1403 he began presiding over royal councils in 1417 when still only fourteen. A year later he took the title of Lieutenant-General of France (the old French term for regent) and at once became a rallying point for opposition to the looming Anglo-Burgundian domination. He attracted an extremely able and distinguished following. If he was inscrutable he knew very well how to charm – he was said to have a very pleasant voice. Chastellain describes him as being extraordinarily subtle. If he did not care for war he could be both ruthless and violent, as he showed by his complicity in the murder of Duke John on the bridge at Montereau.
In his own way, despite his diffidence and lethargy, this cynical and highly intelligent young man was extremely formidable. However, during his early years he allowed incompetent favourites too much control of policy while his supporters were dangerously unruly; consequently he had difficulty surviving the sinister intrigues of the court of Bourges. He possessed no standing army and no money to pay one, although it has been estimated that the potential revenues from his territories, comparatively undevastated, amounted to at least three times those of Lancastrian France; monies were not properly collected or else embezzled. One day new officials would collect his taxes more efficiently and he would build an army. In the meantime he faced two opponents of genius: Henry and later Bedford. But one should not make the mistake of underestimating the Dauphin Charles.8
The dauphinists made much of Henry not being the rightful heir of Richard II, which must have infuriated the king. (As late as 1435 Jean Juvénal was still referring to the usurpation.) In the spring of 1421 Henry had an unpleasing reminder that opposition to theHouse of Lancaster was not yet dead in England. A close kinsman of the Earl of March, Sir John Mortimer, was arrested on suspicion of treason and sent to the Tower; it can only have been that he was plotting to place his cousin on the throne. The alarm was taken so seriously that he was incarcerated in a dungeon underground. Sir John escaped early in 1422 but was recaptured and again imprisoned in the Tower. He was to escape for a second time in 1424, to be recaptured once more, whereupon he was legally murdered – hanged, drawn and quartered – on the specious charge that his escape had been ‘treason’. Throughout Henry’s reign, the House of Lancaster remained nervous about public attention being drawn to March’s claim to the throne.
News from home that his presence was required there, after three years away, persuaded the heir of France that he must return to England even though it was the sacred season of Christmas. En route he could inspect his duchy of Normandy. On 27 December he left Paris for Rouen, leaving the Duke of Clarence in charge of France, and Exeter in charge of his new city of Paris, both ably supported by his best commanders. On the road to his Norman capital he caught up with Queen Catherine and her ladies who had left some days previously – when her farewell to her mumbling father had deeply moved spectators. With them rode the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of March and Warwick, and the captive King of Scots.