XX
‘All the time of war during these forty year betwixt England and France, wist I not scant three or four men which wolden accord throughout, in telling how a town or a castle was won in France, or how a battle was done there.’
Bishop Reginald Pecock1
‘For there may no king conquer a great realm by continual sieges.’
Sir John Fastolf2
At Formigny on 15 April 1450, six months after recapturing Rouen, the French under the command of a veteran of Agincourt annihilated an English army. It had just crossed the Channel in a desperate bid to relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Normandy; ironically, its archers were deployed in the same formation as at Agincourt. Caen fell in June. In August William Paston wrote, ‘And this same Wednesday was it told that Cherbourg is gone and we have not now a foot of land in Normandy.’ King Charles’s men went on to conquer Guyenne, an operation completed by the autumn of 1451, Bordeaux having surrendered in June. A final English attempt to regain the duchy was humiliatingly defeated at Castillon in 1453. The only French soil remaining in English hands was Calais and the Channel Islands.
Hatred of the invader from across the Channel had united the various French pays, making them forget their regional differences. The revival of French morale had been begun by Joan of Arc, after whose brief, meteoric career the English failed to conquer more territory. Then in 1435 Philip of Burgundy deserted them, recognizing Charles VII as King of France and his overlord. Henceforward the English increasingly suffered military and diplomatic reverses. Their occupation was doomed even though it took a reunited France another fifteen years to drive them out. To some extent they were defeated by the new French field cannon and handguns which, while still primitive, proved more effective than English bows.
Yet it was not just military technology which defeated the English. What broke them was lack of money. Henry VI’s total annual revenue at this period was only £30,000 when his household alone was costing £24,000 a year; his father’s pernicious practice of borrowing was continued so that the Crown’s debts grew to nearly £400,000. In consequence there was no cash for military operations, nothing with which to pay ever smaller forces in the field or in the garrisons, arrears of pay causing mutinies, desertion and still more plundering of the local French population. The King’s Ships were either sold off or left to rot at their moorings, while most of the English fortresses in France were allowed to grow so ruinous that it was impossible to defend them. All this came of embarking on a programme of overseas adventure and foreign conquest beyond England’s resources.
When the French possessions were lost there was an outcry in England, which had come to regard Normandy as English territory, Rouen as much an English city as Bordeaux. Henry VI’s three principal ministers were lynched. The kingdom sank rapidly into bloody anarchy. The nobility and gentry had been turned into professional soldiers by the wars in France; after being driven out, they and their followers were only too ready to use at home – and, if necessary, on each other – the lethal professional skills they had acquired abroad. What were later to be called the Wars of the Roses began in 1455, English veterans fighting each other instead of the French. Henry VI was deposed in 1461, to be murdered ten years later, less than three weeks after his only son had been killed at Tewkesbury. It was the end of the Lancastrian usurpation.
Yet the House of Lancaster might have survived the incapacity of its last king, even the madness which by a bitter irony he had inherited from his Valois grandfather, had it not been for his father’s bequest of ‘Lancastrian France’. For all his brilliance, Henry V’s ambition ended by bankrupting and discrediting his son, and by ruining his dynasty.
Looking back from the end of the fifteenth century, Philippe de Commynes (not a Frenchman but a man of Flanders), although he can refer to ‘the wise, handsome and very brave king Henry’, clearly believes that the destruction of the House of Lancaster was God’s judgement on it for what it had done in France. Writing of the fate of the dynasty, together with its Beaufort and Holland cousins and Yorkist kindred, he says:
All have been killed in battle. Their fathers and their followers had pillaged and destroyed the kingdom of France and possessed the greater part of it for many years. But they all killed each other … And yet people say, ‘God doesn’t punish men as he was accustomed to in the days of the children of Israel and tolerates wicked princes and men!’ … In the long run there is no lordship, and certainly no strong one, where the country does not remain in the possession of its own people. As may be seen from the example of France, where the English held much territory for 400 years, but now hold only Calais and two little castles which cost them much money to maintain. The rest they lost more quickly than they had conquered it since they lost more in a day than they had gained in a year.1
It is clear that he has no doubts that Lancastrian France had been doomed from the start.
In 1475 Edward IV rode out from Calais at the head of 12,000 troops, accompanied by almost every English peer who was fit enough to climb into a saddle. Once styled Earl of March, he had been born at Rouen when his father was lieutenant-general of Lancastrian France. The English army marched confidently towards the Somme, killing, burning, and looting in the traditional style. But, unlike Henry V, Edward realized that he could not afford a long war of conquest while, again unlike Henry, as a womanizer running to fat he could never have stood the strain of lengthy campaigning. He let himself be bought off by Louis XI for 75,000 gold crowns down and annual instalments of 50,000. Commynes observes that no one should be surprised at Louis paying such sums ‘considering the great evils the English have committed in this realm all too recently’. In the event it was the last full-scale English invasion of France. Nonetheless Commynes tells us that even in the 1490s the French still regarded their neighbours over the Channel as a threat:
All the English nobles, commons and clergy are ready at any moment to fight against this realm on the pretext of spurious claims to it, in the hope of winning profit here since God allowed their forebears to win several great battles … they carried off great plunder and wealth to England, taken from both the poor people and the lords of France whom they imprisoned in large numbers.2
As late as 1525, when François I was defeated at Pavia, Henry VIII thought he had a good chance of reconquering what had been Lancastrian France. Calais was lost only in 1558.
For centuries the north-western French celebrated the expulsion of the English. Until 1735 the liberation of Paris in 1436 was celebrated annually by the ‘Procession of the English’. The Earl of Warwick’s banner, captured at Montargis in 1427, was borne in triumph through that town on theFête des Anglais every year till 1792. Mass was said twice annually in every important church in France until the Revolution in thanksgiving for the freeing of Cherbourg in 1450 and the end of the occupation of Normandy; it continued to be said in some parishes of the Cotentin throughout the nineteenth century. Even now the occupation’s memory lingers. In Maine, farmers near Lassay still refer to the ‘time of the English’ (or did till a few years ago), while further west within living memory country people spoke of ‘going into England’ when crossing what had once been the frontier of the conquest.
After Waterloo in 1815 and after Sedan in 1870, when Alsace-Lorraine had to be surrendered, the French were again invaded and occupied by foreigners. It revived ancient but nonetheless bitter folk memories in the French people of what they had endured at the hands of the English. The cult of Joan of Arc embedded their ancestors’ sufferings still more firmly in the popular mind. No doubt two world wars have done much to make them forget the Hundred Years War. Yet it is no exaggeration to claim that by reviving the war Henry dug a chasm between French and English, a Chasm which has grown deeper down the centuries’.
Henry V’s truest and most lasting monument is not the beautiful chapel at Westminster, not Shakespeare’s play, not the tale of Agincourt and Crispin’s Day. Nor is it the Wars of the Roses. It is that antipathy and distrust which, sadly, all too many Frenchmen feel for those who speak English as their first language. That is the king’s legacy for those of us who live in the last years of the twentieth century. Other men and other wars have deepened it but he was one of its original architects.