‘I am the scourge of God’
Henry V
‘I am an Englishman, and am thy foe’
Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes
On 19 October 1449 a cheering mob opened the gates of Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and Charles VII of France – once disinherited dauphin, now ‘King Charles the very victorious’ – rode in to wild rejoicing. Rouen had been occupied by the English for thirty years. Within less than a year they would be driven out of Normandy altogether. It was the end not only of an English Normandy but of an Anglo-French dual monarchy. In particular it was the end of one man’s dream. The man was Henry V, who left an unhappy legacy when he died in 1422, a legacy that is still with us.
No one would deny the uneasy relationship between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. The former tend to distrust anyone who speaks English. Among the earliest and not the least reasons why this ingrained suspicion developed was the behaviour of English troops in France during the second half of the Hundred Years War, a war revived by Henry. No doubt French troops behaved as badly – but they were in France as Frenchmen, not as invaders who spoke a foreign tongue. The English had taken advantage of a civil war to conquer all north-western France. It was as if a French king had allied with the Yorkists during the Wars of the Roses, occupied south-eastern England, installed a French garrison at London and had himself declared heir to the throne, while at the same time turning Kent into a separate Anglo-French principality where he confiscated 500 estates and gave them to Frenchmen, besides settling 10,000 colonists at Dover. The humiliation and the atrocities would never have been forgotten. The French have long memories too.
Henry V is one of England’s heroes. The victor of Agincourt was idolized during his lifetime, his memory inspired one of Shakespeare’s most stirring (if scarcely greatest) plays, and the Victorians considered him a perfect Christian gentleman: ‘He was religious, pure in life, temperate, liberal, careful and yet splendid,’ says Bishop Stubbs, ‘merciful, truthful, and honourable, discreet in word, provident in counsel, prudent in judgement, modest in look, magnanimous in act, a true Englishman.’ In our own century Sir Winston Churchill could write of ‘the gleaming King’.
That brilliant historian of the medieval English, the late K. B. McFarlane, thought Henry ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England.’ His achievements were remarkable. At home not only did he tame the Welsh, destroying Owain Glyn Dŵr, but he restored law and order to a hitherto strife-torn realm; across the Channel he conquered a third of France, married the French king’s daughter and was recognized as heir and regent of France. So powerful is his spell that almost every English historian who studied him succumbs, bemused by his genius and dynamism, blind to any shortcomings. They attribute any criticism by French scholars to anglophobia.
Nevertheless his conquest of France was as much about loot as dynastic succession, accompanied by mass slaughter, arson and rape – French plunder was on sale all over England. It was very like the Norman conquest of England in reverse although lasting a mere thirty years. Just as William the Bastard had done, he seized the lands of the great nobles, and of many lesser nobles too, giving them to his soldiers. For three decades English interlopers, often sporting French titles, lorded it over hundreds of French estates – some great counties, others modest manors. They were, however, always in danger, dependent on English archers for survival. He not only evicted noblemen from castles but ordinary people from their homes. Countless Frenchmen of all classes emigrated from the territory conquered by him. When reproached with killing so many Christians in France, he answered, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins.’1
The misery inflicted on the French by Henry’s campaigns is indisputable. Any local historian in north-western France can point to a town, a château, an abbey or a church sacked by his men. Life in the countryside became a nightmare. When the English raided enemy territory they killed anything that moved, destroyed crops and food supplies and drove off livestock, in a calculated attempt to weaken their opponents by starving the civilian population. Occupied areas fared little better because of the pâtis or protection racket operated by English garrisons; villages had to pay extortionate dues in food and wine as well as money, failure to deliver sometimes incurred executions and burnings.
Yet Henry’s ambition was inspired by something more complicated than mere desire for conquest. It was a need to prove that he really was King of England. His father had usurped the throne and, as the Yorkists would demonstrate during the Wars of the Roses, there were others with a better right to it in law. If he could make good his great-grandfather Edward III’s claim to France he would show in trial by battle that God confirmed his right to the English crown.
During the nineteenth century French ‘patriotic’ historians reacted violently to the Hundred Years War, producing a portrait of Henry as distorted as the English icon. They saw fifteenth-century Anglo-Saxons as the first ‘Boches’. English historians responded to this xenophobic outburst with equal chauvinism, together with a cool assumption of objectivity (although few writers can have taken less pains to hide their dislike of the French than the venerated Wylie and Waugh in their massive study of the king’s reign). Even today English and French differ in their judgement. Harriss believes Henry had ‘grasped’ that the French crown ‘could only be securely held by one whom the French people accepted as King in the same measure as Englishmen did … given the years, energy and luck, he might have reshaped the development of both nations just, as in brief space, he had restored the fortunes of England.’2 By contrast Edouard Perroy thought that Henry’s successes, ‘his premature death at the height of unprecedented glory, have raised him very high, perhaps too high, in the estimation of posterity’. He refers to his ‘hypocritical bigotry, his double dealing, his pretence of observing the law and redressing wrongs when he merely sought to gratify his own ambition’. It remains to strike a balance.3
English studies of the king tend to discount French chroniclers, save for tributes to him when he died. Admittedly some borrow from each other and several wrote years after his death. Nevertheless all were alive during his reign (Jean Juvénal des Ursins, the monk of St Denis and Monstrelet being already in their thirties when he died), while all of them had spoken to people who had experienced the events of which they write. If they were prejudiced against him, then English chroniclers were biased in his favour. One prefers the testimony of the occupied to the occupiers – just as one accepts French rather than German versions of what happened in France between 1940 and 1944.
In England historians refuse to see the fifteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War as a conflict between French and English. They argue that while the English had a sense of nationality no such people as Frenchmen existed, only inhabitants of regions of France with no common identity. Yet if France was not seen then as she is now, almost as a person, there was nevertheless a concept of a French realm symbolized by the phrase ‘the honour of the fleur-de-lys’. By the fifteenth century the French had developed quite enough nationalism to consider their neighbours over the Channel hereditary enemies. If Henry did not think in national terms – for him France was ‘my inheritance’ – his subjects did and definitely tended to xenophobia. Many of France’s miseries during this period were due to Frenchmen yet all French chroniclers unite in seeing the English as the worst of their foes. The French may have possessed only a vague sense of nationality when Henry invaded their country but they quickly developed one in fighting him. They took the king at his own word – ‘I am the scourge of God’ – save that to them he was the Devil’s scourge rather than God’s.