XIX
‘Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceases to enlarge itself,
Till, by broad spreading, it dispenses to nought.
With Henry’s death, the English circle ends.’
Shakespeare, Joan la Pucelle in King Henry VI, part I
‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion lies with the Lord Jesus Christ!’
Henry V on his deathbed
On 7 July 1422 there were public prayers in Paris for the health of King Henry, heir and regent of France. Waurin writes, ‘I have since been truly informed … that it was an inflammation which seized him in the fundament, which is called the disease of St Anthony.’1 (‘St Anthony’s Fire’, which is erysipelas.) We know from the Bourgeois of Paris that smallpox was raging in and around the capital, that many important Englishmen had caught it and that some people believed that the King of England was among them. One chronicler reports that Henry could not keep any food in his belly, which might imply a duodenal ulcer. Basin tells us that: ‘many say he was smitten with this illness because he had ordered, or had allowed, his troops to sack and devastate the oratory of St Fiacre and its glebe near Meaux. Indeed one often calls his disease, which swells the belly and legs hideously, St Fiacre’s Evil.’2 Plainly it was an internal malady, and on balance the most likely diagnosis is dysentery – the scourge which had killed so many of his troops during the siege of Meaux – eventually resulting in a fatal internal haemorrhage. It was certainly not leprosy, as some contemporary Frenchmen thought hopefully. Whatever it was, it was some time before the king would admit to himself that he was seriously, dangerously, ill.
Suddenly the Burgundians found themselves threatened by a totally unexpected dauphinist offensive. Duke Philip’s town of Cosne on the upper reaches of the Loire, fifty miles from Orleans, was besieged in such overwhelming force that its garrison agreed to surrender if not relieved by 12 August. Should Cosne fall to the dauphinists they would be able to strike through the Nivernais at Dijon, the Burgundian capital. Philip force marched every man at his disposal towards Cosne, begging Henry to lend him archers. Not only did the king agree but he promised to come in person.
Henry set out for Cosne but soon had to substitute a litter for his horse. When he reached Corbeil, fifteen miles south of Paris, he took to his bed and handed over command to Bedford. He was forced to spend a fortnight at Corbeil. Learning that the dauphinists had beaten a hasty retreat from Cosne he decided to return to Paris. Although he felt a little better, he took his physicians’ advice and travelled by barge down the Seine. However, he landed at Charenton and mounted his horse, but collapsed. He was carried back to the barge and taken to the castle of Bois-de-Vincennes, which he reached on or about 10 August.
The king must have known by now that he was dying. He was surrounded by the men whom he trusted most: his brother John, Duke of Bedford; his uncle Thomas, Duke of Exeter; his closest lieutenant Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; his standard-bearer Sir Lewis Robsart; and, his confessor again for the last eighteen months, Friar Thomas Netter. Among his intimate male companions Salisbury alone was absent, harrying the French.
The strangest absence was that of Queen Catherine. What is so curious is that she was within easy reach of Vincennes, at Paris only three miles away, and it was the normal custom even for medieval kings to have their wives by them when they were dying. It was not that she could not leave her baby; she had already done so and the child was in England. If her husband had summoned her she would have had to go to him. Plainly he did not summon her. The inference is that his feelings for Catherine were not quite so romantic as Shakespeare makes out, that he did not really think she had ‘witchcraft’ in her lips. Henry might well have anticipated Napoleon’s jibe at his own dynastic match – ‘It’s only a womb I’m marrying.’
‘I exhort you to continue in these wars until peace is gained,’ he told those round his bed. He continued, on a familiar note, that he had been perfectly justified in invading France. ‘It was not ambitious lust for dominion, nor for empty glory, nor any other cause that drew me to these wars, but only that by sueing of my right, I might at once gain peace and my own rights.’ The disinheritor of the heirs of Richard II and Charles VI added: ‘And before the wars were begun I was fully instructed by men of the holiest life and the wisest counsel that I ought and could begin the wars, prosecute them and justly finish them without danger to my soul.’ However, he begged forgiveness from his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, for his ill treatment of her and also from Lord Scrope’s children for having illegally confiscated entailed lands from them.
He provided for the government of the two kingdoms with his habitual thoroughness. The Duke of Gloucester was to be Lord Protector of England, but under the ultimate authority of the Duke of Bedford who was to be the future Henry VI’s principal official guardian; the baby’s other guardians were to be Bishop Beaufort, the Duke of Exeter, and the Earl of Warwick. Bedford, who was also to be governor of Normandy, must offer the regency of France to the Duke of Burgundy, to commit him more fully to the establishment of a Lancastrian dynasty in the land over which his forebears had reigned; if Philip declined, then Bedford was to take the regency himself – but at all costs he must preserve the alliance with Burgundy. Should the tide turn against the English, Bedford was to concentrate on saving Normandy. None of the higher ranking prisoners in England, especially the Duke of Orleans, was to be freed – to stop them organizing opposition to the English conquest.
The most recent French historian of the Hundred Years War, Jean Favier, commenting on Henry’s instructions to Bedford about saving Normandy, thinks that he was tacitly admitting the dauphin’s right to succeed to the French throne.3 It was certainly extraordinary advice to come from someone who had always claimed that God supported his own right to the throne of France. It may indicate a loss of nerve induced by physical weakness.
According to the Arthurian tale told to Chastellain by M. de La Trémouille, the hermit, John of Ghent, came unexpectedly to the king’s bedside. Henry was overjoyed to see the holy man. He asked him if he was going to recover from his illness. ‘Sire,’ answered the hermit, ‘you are at your end.’ Henry then inquired if his son would reign over France in his place. ‘Never, never, shall he reign nor abide,’ was the reply.4 However fantastic this story may appear, it really does seem that as he lay dying the king began to lose some of his confidence in the future of Lancastrian France.
His bed was in his chamber over the great hall in the donjon tower, built by Charles V some forty years previously, in which a single elegant column supported a high, vaulted ceiling. As a medieval king he had to die in public; courtiers thronged the room, though it is likely that to some extent he was shielded from curious eyes by screens placed around the bed.
Late in the evening of 20 August Henry asked his doctors how long he had to live, brushing aside soothing suggestions that God might still heal him. Then they told him the truth. ‘Sire, think you on your soul. For, saving the mercy of God, we judge not that you can live more than two hours.’ At this he summoned his confessor, Friar Netter, and together they recited the seven penitential psalms and the litany. After finishing the psalm Miserere mei, Deus he broke in, ‘O good lord, thou knowest that if thy pleasure had been to have suffered me to live my natural age my firm purpose and intent was, after I had established this realm of France in sure peace, to have gone and visited Jerusalem and to have re-edified the walls thereof, and to have expulsed from it the miscreants thine adversaries [the Turks].’
The king received Communion and was anointed. At the very end, his iron self-righteousness faltered and for a moment he feared for his salvation. Suddenly he screamed, as though replying to some evil spirit, ‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion is with the Lord Jesus Christ!’ Did he suspect that, as a usurper who insisted on being the rightful heir to England and France, he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, that persistent denial of the known truth for which there is no forgiveness? Even so, he died peacefully in Netter’s arms at the end of the two hours given to him by the doctors, just before midnight. His last words were ‘in manus tuas, Domine, ipsum terminum redemisti’. He was not quite thirty-five. Had he lived another six weeks he would have survived Charles VI and inherited the crown of France.
There followed the grisly ceremonies which attended the death of a medieval king. His entrails were removed and buried in the church of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés at Vincennes (where they came to light in the early 1980s), his body was dismembered and then boiled down in the castle kitchens to remove the flesh from the bones, both being embalmed and sealed in a lead casket. In September his funeral chariot, drawn by four great horses, set out on its journey to England. ‘Above the dead corpse [in the caskets] they laid a figure made of boiled hides or leather representing his person as to the similitude of a living creature, upon whose head was set an Imperial diadem of gold and precious stones, and in his right hand he held a sceptre royal, and in his left hand a bowl [orb] of gold; and in this manner adorned was his figure laid in a bed in the said chariot, with his visage uncovered towards the heavens.’ Beside the chariot walked mutes in white holding burning torches, behind came his household men gowned in black, behind them rode the Dukes of Bedford and Exeter and the King of Scots and, for part of the way, the Duke of Burgundy; and behind the princes rode 500 men-at-arms on black horses, their black lances reversed. Last of all came Queen Catherine in the white mourning of a king’s consort. Whenever the cortège passed through a town of substance ‘a canopy of marvellous great value such as is used to be borne over the Blessed Sacrament on Corpus Christi Day was borne over the chariot by men of great worship’.
The cortège did not reach London until 5 November, going by way of St Denis (the burial place of the Kings of France where Henry’s effigy sat for a time in state), Rouen, Abbeville, Montreuil, Boulogne, Calais, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester and Dartford before it was met at Blackheath by the mayor, aldermen and guildsmen of London. As it processed to St Paul’s there was a man standing outside the door of every house on the route holding a burning torch. After lying in state for two days the king’s remains were taken to Westminster Abbey to be interred with a pomp memorable even by the standards of medieval England.
His magnificent tomb in the abbey, and the chantry chapel which houses it, were completed in the 1440s. The tomb was surmounted by his silver gilt effigy, with hands and head of solid silver. Above hung his tilting helm, sword, shield and saddle. The effigy has long since lost its silver and silver gilt, and the wooden core alone remains. But his helm, sword, shield and saddle still hang there.
Charles VI died on 11 October, living just long enough to cheat the ancient enemy of France of his throne. Jean Chartier records that a few time-servers cheered when the one-year-old Henry VI was proclaimed ‘Henry, roy de France et d’Angleterre’. He adds: ‘But the more genuine wept and made moan because of the great kindness which had been in the said king of France [Charles VI] named Well Beloved, thinking on the many evils that might come upon them by changing their natural lord and how the said lordship was to be governed by foreign nations and customs, which was and is against reason and right, to the total destruction of the people and realm of France.’5 No doubt Chartier, as historiographer to the dauphin, is biased. Yet the Bourgeois of Paris, who was also there and watched the crazy old king’s cortège pass through the streets, is clearly telling the truth when he says that the ordinary people of Paris wept and cried, ‘Most dear of princes! Never shall we find another prince so kind! Never shall we see you again! Cursed be death! We shall have nothing but war now that you have left us. You will find rest while we shall live among tribulations and miseries of every kind. For we are doomed to be captives like the children of Israel when they were led away to Babylon.’ The Bourgeois adds that those in the streets or at the windows wept and cried as though the person each one loved most had died.6 It was not the most promising way to greet the accession of France’s first Lancastrian king.
Meanwhile in England, so Waurin admits, everyone continued to weep and lament and was in much sadness. He and Monstrelet, both writing in the 1440s, recount of Henry V how ‘even now as much honour and reverence is paid at his tomb as if it were certain that he was a saint in heaven’.7The Brut of England records of 1422 that ‘in that same year died most of the laurel trees in England’.8
The French writers of the day, including the most hostile, concede that though Henry had been their enemy he had been very great indeed. Waurin says of him; ‘a most clever man and expert in everything he undertook’,9 Jean Chartier; ‘a subtle conqueror and a skilful warrior.’10 Chastellain too is magnanimous: ‘It is not my intention to detract from or diminish in my writings either the honour or the glory of that valiant prince the English king, in whom valour and courage shone forth as befitted a mighty conqueror … of this King of England may high and glorious tales be told notwithstanding that he was the foe of France.’11
No one can deny that Henry V was a very great soldier and a very great king. Yet he was fortunate to die young. At his death there still remained two thirds of France to conquer, and had he lived he would have worn himself out in an unending series of sieges for which it would have become increasingly impossible to find the money. He was incapable of seeing where his wonderful gifts as a soldier and a diplomatist were leading him. Even with Henry V, even without Joan of Arc, the English could never have succeeded. The Burgundians were bound to turn against them. The king was basically an opportunist, albeit an opportunist of genius. As E. F.Jacob, one of his greatest admirers among modern historians, writes: ‘In the last analysis he was an adventurer, not a statesman; the risk he took in the creation of a double monarchy was too great, depended on too many uncertainties, and fundamentally misread the nature of France.’12 Waugh, another admirer who forces himself to be objective if not always successfully, has to concede that: ‘His will was doubtless set on purposes unworthy of a great or good man.’13 McFarlane, the most fervent admirer of all, admits: ‘It is the tragedy of his reign that he gave a wrong direction to national aspirations which he did so much himself to stimulate, that he led his people in pursuit of the chimera of foreign conquest.14 French historians have less difficulty in reaching the same conclusions.
The question may be asked why the Lancastrian conquest had no hope of enduring like that of William the Conqueror. But Anglo-Saxon England had been a much smaller country with a much smaller population in a more primitive age, while William had had no serious rivals after Hastings. In contrast Henry conquered a mere third of France, and that only because the kingdom was temporarily divided between two powerful factions with their own armies. Above all, the emergence of articulate French nationalism doomed his would-be dual monarchy.
Whether the king’s brutality in war was simply in keeping with the military conventions of the age or the expression of an unusually savage nature is not easy to decide. What is indisputable is his impact on the French. They suffered more from his invasions than from any between the Vikings and the Nazis.
It is hard to pass judgement on Henry as a man, but it is generally agreed that his reputation is based on admiration and not on affection. He was ruthless in subordinating his feelings to his ambition; he was only speaking the truth when he said that had Clarence survived Baugé he would have had him executed for disobeying orders. The kindest thing that can be said is that those who worked with him (except Lord Scrope) seem to have been devoted to the king and to his memory. But, beyond question, the man always gave place to the warlord – there was something a little inhuman about him.
The admirers of Henry (and they include most people in the English-speaking world) ascribe any imperfections in him to his having been a ‘late medieval man’ since late medieval men were prone to superstition and violence. Unfortunately for this argument there was a ‘late medieval man’ who is a perfect yardstick by which to judge the king, his successor as ruler of Lancastrian France – his brother Bedford, regent at Rouen and Paris from 1422 until his death in 1435. He too ‘shed the blood of Frenchmen piteously’ and won his own Agincourt; at Verneuil in 1424 he cut a Franco-Scots force to pieces, inflicting 7,000 casualties of whom 1,000 were dauphinists. ‘Brave, humane and just,’ Basin says of him, ‘so much so that Normans and French men who lived in his part of the realm had great affection for him.’15 The Bourgeois of Paris is no less complimentary – ‘his nature was quite un-English, for he never wanted to make war on anyone, whereas in truth the English are always wanting to wage war on their neighbours. Which is why they all die an evil death.’16 No contemporary French writer speaks of Henry in such terms. He was undoubtedly feared by his unwilling new subjects but he was certainly not loved by them.
In Henry’s own brutal words, ‘war without fire is like sausages without mustard.’ Not only emergent French nationalism but French local loyalties were outraged by his invasions and campaigns of conquest. The horror unleashed by him was unforgiveable, and also unforgettable. No account tells the whole harrowing story, conveys how widespread and how savage was the misery which he inflicted on the French people. In the midst of all his hero worship Shakespeare somehow discerns the sheer callous cruelty of the king:
What is it to me, if impious war
Array’d inflames, like to the prince of fiends
Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?17
But on the whole even Shakespeare succumbs to the legend. He could not know what had happened in France.