CHAPTER FOUR
Henry V had been king of England for only a few weeks when there was a dramatic turn of events in France. The uneasy peace that had existed between Armagnacs and Burgundians since the previous autumn exploded in the sort of mob violence which would be a hallmark of the French Revolution in the 1790s. On 28 April 1413 a Parisian rabble burst into the dauphin’s palace, the Hôtel de Guienne, overcame his guards and seized the dauphin himself. Not long afterwards the same fate befell his parents, and the king, again in a scene that strikingly anticipated the 1790s, was forced to put on the revolutionary emblem, the white hood.1
The revolt was led by one Simon Caboche, who, aptly enough, was a butcher by trade. It rapidly emerged that like most Parisians he was also a Burgundian by sympathy. All the Armagnacs who held senior positions in the royal households, including Edouard, duke of Bar, Louis, duke of Bavaria (who was the queen’s brother), and thirteen or fourteen of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, were thrown into prison; some were murdered, others were executed, all were replaced by Burgundians. It was, as one Burgundian sympathiser coolly remarked, the best thing that had happened in Paris for the past twenty years.2
John the Fearless may have instigated these events because he felt he was losing control of his sixteen-year-old son-in-law, the dauphin, who was showing increasing signs of independence and had just dismissed his Burgundian chancellor. If he did, he was soon to reap the whirlwind. The dauphin bitterly resented the public humiliation that he had been forced to endure and determined to ally himself more firmly with the Armagnacs. And in May, his father, Charles VI, unexpectedly recovered his sanity. It was only a temporary reprieve, but it was enough to allow him to take advantage of a reaction against the bloodiness of the Cabochien coup to impose an equally temporary peace.3 By August, it was clear that the Armagnacs, with the help of the dauphin, were regaining control of Paris. Their device, or badge, emblazoned with the words “the right way,” began to reappear throughout the city and was again worn openly on their supporters’ clothing. The dauphin ordered the arrest of some of the most prominent Cabochiens and began replacing Burgundian officials with Armagnacs once more. In the face of growing rumours that John the Fearless himself would be seized and made to stand trial for the murder of Louis d’Orléans, the duke decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took flight for Flanders. He did so without seeking the king’s permission to leave, as he was obliged to do, and, as his chancellor wrote with barely disguised pique to the duchess, “without telling me or his other officials, whom he has left in this town you can imagine in what peril.”4
For the moment, the Armagnacs enjoyed the sweet taste of victory again. Charles, duke of Orléans, made a triumphal entry into Paris, riding side by side with the dukes of Anjou and Bourbon and the count of Alençon. They were joined a little later by the two Gascons who had proved such a thorn in the side of the English in Aquitaine, Charles d’Orléans’ father-in-law, Bernard, count of Armagnac, and Charles d’Albret, who was now restored to his post as constable of France. Although peace was officially proclaimed, all Paris was full of armed men, and every single official appointed by the duke of Burgundy was ousted and replaced by an Armagnac.5
On 8 February 1414 John the Fearless appeared before the gates of Paris at the head of a large army. He claimed that he had come at the dauphin’s request and flourished, as proof, letters from his son-in-law begging to be rescued from the Armagnacs. The letters were forgeries but they fooled most contemporary chroniclers (and some later historians). They did not, however, spark the uprising in Paris that the duke needed to gain entry to the city. Even though the terrified citizens, unable to go out to work in the fields as they usually did, were struck down with a fever and cough so severe that men were made impotent and pregnant women aborted, the gates of Paris remained firmly shut against him. After two weeks of frustration, the duke abandoned the siege and decamped back to Arras.6
Flushed with this success, the Armagnacs decided to take the war out to the enemy. The king had once more relapsed into a madness that was probably more comfortable than the insanity going on around him. Royal letters were therefore issued in his name, laying open the way for the prosecution of Louis d’Orléans’ murderer, and on 2 March 1414 war was declared on the duke of Burgundy. The Armagnacs marched out of Paris, taking with them the king and the dauphin.
With the king, who was once more wearing the badge of the Armagnacs, went the oriflamme,7 the sacred standard of France, which was only ever carried when the king himself was present in battle. With the dauphin, who was “in a jovial mood,” went “a handsome standard covered in beaten gold and adorned with a K, a swan [cigne] and an L,” a punning reference to La Cassinelle, a very beautiful girl in the queen’s household, who was “as good-natured as she was good-looking,” and with whom the dauphin was passionately in love. Since being “good-natured” was a medieval euphemism for being of easy virtue, the dauphin’s jovial mood is easily explained. What is more, by riding out under a device referring to his mistress he was able to combine paying lip-service to the chivalric ideal of fighting for the love of a woman with the altogether more satisfying notion that, in doing so, he was also insulting both his wife and his father-in-law. (The duke of Burgundy did not have much luck with his sons-in-law. Another daughter, Catherine, who had been offered as a potential bride to both Philippe d’Orléans [Charles’s younger brother] and Henry V of England, was married at the age of ten to the son of Louis, duke of Anjou, and sent to live at the Angevin court. Three years later, in the wake of John the Fearless’s flight from Paris and having spent all the dowry she brought with her, the duke of Anjou decided to join the Armagnacs. Catherine was therefore surplus to requirements and was unceremoniously and humiliatingly returned to her father “like a pauper.” As her husband was even younger than she was, it was likely that the marriage was unconsummated and therefore not legally binding, but it made her position difficult with regard to future marriages. Though she bore the family burden of being extremely ugly—a Burgundian would be punished for describing her and her sister as looking like a couple of baby owls without feathers—her repudiation was an extreme and unusual act of cruelty aimed at her father, rather than herself. The innocent victim of these politically motivated posturings was said to have died of grief and shame soon afterwards; it was certainly true that she never remarried.)8
The dauphin’s enthusiasm for making war on his father-in-law was not, apparently, shared by the royal military officers: the constable of France, Charles d’Albret, managed to break his leg and the admiral, Jacques de Châtillon, was similarly immobilised by a fortunately timed attack of gout. The first objective of the Armagnac army was to recover the towns of Compiègne and Soissons, which John the Fearless had seized on his way to Paris earlier in the year. Compiègne was taken relatively easily, but Soissons, where the Armagnac sympathies of the town were held in check by a Burgundian garrison in the castle, proved to be an altogether more bloody affair.
The garrison was commanded by Enguerrand de Bournonville, “an outstandingly good man-at-arms and a great captain,” who had carried out many “fine deeds of arms against the enemies of my lord of Burgundy.” He was a veteran of the battle of Othée in 1408, in which Burgundian forces had defeated the men of Liège, and of St Cloud in 1411, in which he had commanded a division against the Armagnacs. Bournonville had only a small force of men-at-arms from Picardy and Artois, reinforced with a group of English mercenaries, with which to defend both castle and town, but he refused to surrender. Faced with a besieging army and a hostile town, Bournonville carried out a heroic defence that ultimately proved futile. Soissons was taken by storm; Bournonville himself was captured and immediately executed. Though Burgundian partisans depicted this as a breach of chivalric conventions and an act of private vengeance by Jean, duke of Bourbon, whose bastard brother was killed by a crossbowman during the siege, Bournonville had been captured in arms against his king and was technically a rebel. According to the laws of war, therefore, his execution was entirely justified. His courage and loyalty on the scaffold nevertheless ensured him a deserved place in the history books. Bournonville asked for a drink and then declared, “Lord God, I ask your forgiveness for all my sins, and I thank you with all my heart that I die here for my true Lord. I ask you, gentlemen, to punish the traitors who have basely betrayed me, and I drink to my lord of Burgundy and to all his well-wishers, to the spite of all his enemies.”9
Bournonville’s execution was just the beginning. Despite the fact that some of the citizens of Soissons had colluded with the Armagnacs and actively assisted in its capture, the city was sacked with a savagery that became almost legendary. The men were slaughtered, the women, including nuns, were raped, and churches were ransacked for their treasure. The Armagnacs, it was said, behaved worse than Saracens, and more than one chronicler would conclude that the defeat at Agincourt, which was inflicted on the feast day of the cobbler-saints of Soissons the following year, was divine retribution for their crimes against the city. It would become a common refrain that nothing the English inflicted on the long-suffering inhabitants of northern France would exceed the miseries enacted upon them by their own fellow-countrymen.10
After the brutal sacking of Soissons, the Armagnacs swept into the heartlands of the duke of Burgundy’s territories and laid siege to Arras, “the shield, the wall and the defence of Western Flanders.”11 This time, however, they found a rock-solid defence and no traitors within the city’s walls. The siege petered out amidst a failure of money, supplies and will, exacerbated by an outbreak of dysentery, the scourge of besieging armies. But John the Fearless was sufficiently alarmed to be persuaded of the need to come to terms again. On 4 September 1414, acting through his brother Antoine, duke of Brabant, and his sister Margaret, wife of William, count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, he agreed the Peace of Arras, which was to end all military activity, offer an amnesty to those involved on both sides and prohibit all partisan behaviour. Neither side had any intention of keeping the treaty, but it allowed another temporary cessation of hostilities without loss of face for either party. Indeed, John the Fearless managed to avoid swearing to keep the peace in person for almost ten months and when he eventually did so, on 30 July 1415, it was so hedged about with conditions that it was almost meaningless.12
As John the Fearless was well aware, by the time he actually put pen to paper the Peace of Arras was an irrelevance. Just across the Channel, Henry V had gathered one of the biggest invasion fleets ever seen and was poised to set sail for France.
English military intervention in France had been likely ever since Henry V’s accession; after all, he had been intimately involved in the earl of Arundel’s expedition of 1411 and also, as the French mistakenly believed, in Clarence’s expedition the following year. What no one, except perhaps Henry himself, expected was that this time the English would not be invited in to assist one or other of the warring parties, but would invade independently, unannounced and entirely for their own ends. So intent were the French princes on pursuing their own private quarrels that this simply did not occur to them. They would pay dearly for their lack of imagination.
Henry had been waiting and preparing for just such an opportunity from the moment he ascended the throne. Although the establishment of law and order in his own kingdom was a priority, it was not the only one and would constantly vie for his attention with foreign policy. Unlike his father, Henry did not simply react to events on the continent but actively sought to influence them. The new king had two objectives: to neutralise those maritime nations that had traditionally allied with France against England and to protect English merchant shipping and coastal towns from attack.
The Spanish kingdom of Castile had consistently aided the French against the English, despite the fact that its co-regent, the widowed Queen Catherine, was Henry IV’s half-sister.13 Castilian galleys had frequently preyed on English shipping as it made its way to and from Aquitaine, and a small Castilian fleet under the command of “the unconquered knight” Don Pero Niño had made a series of raids on Bordeaux, Jersey and the south-west coast of England in the early 1400s, stealing ships, looting and burning the towns and killing their inhabitants. The new king now signed truces with Castile, appointing arbitrators to settle disputes and claims arising from both sides and holding out the prospect of a final peace in continuing negotiations. It was typical of Henry V that he did not allow breaches of the truces to go unchallenged, even if they were committed by his own side. As early as 17 May 1413 he ordered the release of two Spanish ships, the Seynt Pere de Seynt Mayo en Biskay and the Saint Pere, together with their cargoes, which had been captured and taken to Southampton by his own ship, the Gabriel de la Tour.14 This conciliatory policy achieved its short-term objective of preventing any Castilian intervention in English affairs.
“The greatest rovers and the greatest thieves,” according to a contemporary political song, were not the Spanish but the Bretons. Although geographically part of France, Brittany was virtually an independent state, with its own administrative and judicial systems, a small standing army and its own currency. For centuries the duchy had enjoyed close political ties with England. Henry II’s son Geoffrey had been count of Brittany in the twelfth century, young Breton princes had been brought up in the English royal household in the thirteenth century, English soldiers and mercenaries had played a decisive role in the Breton civil wars of the fourteenth century and as recently as 1403 Henry IV had married Joan of Navarre, the widow of Jean V, duke of Brittany. Despite these close links and English dependence on the importation of salt from Bourgneuf Bay,15relations between the merchants and seamen of the two nations had been distinctly adversarial. The rich pickings to be had from the commercial shipping ploughing regularly up and down the Channel were a great temptation to Breton and Devonshire pirates and the retaliatory seizure of ships and cargoes by both sides in pursuance of unpaid debts threatened to spiral out of control.
Henry V was determined to clamp down on piracy. Negotiations with the duke of Brittany resulted in January 1414 in a renewal and extension of the ten-year truce that had been agreed two years earlier. Keepers and enforcers of the truce were appointed on either side, with the result that English prisoners from London, Fowey and Calais were released and English ships from Bridgewater, Exeter, Saltash, Bristol and Lowestoft were returned, as were Breton ships held at Hamble, Fowey, Winchelsea and Rye.16 This was all standard practice, but Henry V was prepared to go a stage further in demonstrating his determination to enforce the treaty. In Devon alone, some 150 indictments for piracy were brought and around twenty ship-owners were charged. Among them were some of the most important and influential people in the county, including three former mayors of Dartmouth, all of whom had sat as Members of Parliament, and one of whom was deputy admiral for Devon. Like those convicted of criminal offences in the shires, they would also be given a second chance. They were allowed to sue for pardon and, with a nice irony, at least one would later lend his king an ex-pirate vessel, the Craccher, to patrol and help safeguard the seas during his campaigns in France.17
The unusual vigour with which Henry prosecuted those individuals guilty of breaking his truces was a clear indication of the depth of his commitment to keeping the peace with his maritime neighbours,18 but his reasoning was not entirely altruistic. The keeping of the seas was not just a matter of preserving order: it could have serious diplomatic consequences. Breaches of truces and safe-conducts threatened good relations with the Bretons, the Castilians and the Flemish which he needed to cultivate in the hope of detaching them from their traditional alliances with France. The newly negotiated truces with Brittany provided an excuse for the inclusion of clauses in which the duke unilaterally agreed not to receive or help any English traitors, exiles or pirates, and, more significantly, not to receive or help any armed enemies of Henry V, nor to allow any of his own subjects to join the king’s enemies. These undertakings would have serious implications for the role of Brittany during the Agincourt campaign.19
The same thinking guided Henry’s negotiations with the duke of Burgundy, which were intimately connected with his separate discussions with the king of France and the Armagnacs. The greater significance of the relationship with Burgundy was reflected in Henry’s choice of ambassadors. Instead of the relatively humble knights and clerks who had negotiated the truces with Castile and Brittany, he employed a glittering array of some of the most eminent in the land. Richard, earl of Warwick, and Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, were both veterans of important diplomatic embassies abroad, Henry Chichele, the future archbishop of Canterbury, was an expert in civil law and drafting treaties, and William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, was lieutenant of Calais. All were tried and trusted members of the king’s inner circle, and each of them brought experience and special skills to the negotiating table.
That such high-powered envoys should be sent to Calais merely to arbitrate and settle any disputes arising from the existing truces between England and Flanders, as they were nominally empowered to do, aroused suspicion. The fact that the English envoys chose to spend a considerable amount of time in the duke of Burgundy’s company—and that he actually paid out more than seven hundred pounds for them to travel between Calais and Bruges—added to the rumours. The Armagnacs now in control of Paris believed that an alliance had already been concluded between the duke and the English. If any secret deal was reached, however, there is no official record of it, though at least one contemporary chronicler got wind of discussions about a proposed marriage between Henry and one of the duke’s daughters.20
In fact, while English commercial interests in Flanders were a powerful argument for siding with John the Fearless, Henry was not yet ready to commit himself to a formal alliance with either party. The short-term aim of his policy towards France was simple, even though his methods were not: he wanted to exploit the divisions between Burgundians and Armagnacs to obtain the best possible outcome for himself. In this he was not very different from his predecessors, except that the focus of their attention since the 1370s had always been Aquitaine. Henry was more ambitious. When his ambassadors met those of the king of France at Leulinghen, near Boulogne, in September 1413, they began a lengthy lecture on Edward III’s claim to the throne of France and the unfulfilled terms of the Treaty of Brétigny. They even produced a selection of “most beautiful and notable books” to back up their demands with documentary evidence. (One can see the lawyer Chichele’s guiding hand in this reliance on historical text.) The French responded by quoting Salic Law and denying that the kings of England were even legitimate dukes of Aquitaine, let alone kings of France. In the stalemate that followed, all that could be agreed was a temporary truce to last for eight months.21An interesting side-light on these abortive negotiations was the English insistence that all the conversations and subsequent documentation should be conducted in Latin, even though French was the customary language of diplomacy. Already, it would seem, the English were asserting their Anglo-Saxon superiority and pretending that they did not understand French.
Before the year was out, a batch of Armagnac ambassadors, headed by Guillaume Boisratier, archbishop of Bourges, and Charles d’Albret, constable of France, had arrived in London. This time, the English appeared more conciliatory and a new truce was agreed to last for one year from 2 February 1414 to 2 February 1415. Although the English had previously insisted on their right to help their own allies despite the truces—which the alarmed Armagnacs must have interpreted as evidence of a secret arrangement with the Burgundians—they now agreed that all the allies and subjects of England and France should also be bound by these agreements. (The list included the duke of Brittany and also the duke of Burgundy’s subjects, the count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, and the duke of Brabant, but not the duke of Burgundy himself.) The spat over whether the proceedings should be recorded in Latin or French was repeated but resolved with the decision that, in future, all treaties between the two nations should be in both languages.22
Henry was prepared to make these minor concessions because the truces were useful and because he had his eye on the bigger picture. The French ambassadors had also been empowered to discuss a lasting peace and, “for the avoidance of bloodshed,” Henry declared himself ready to hear what they had to offer. He even agreed that the best prospect for securing peace was that he should marry Charles VI’s eleven-year-old daughter, Catherine, and undertook not to marry anyone else for the next three months while negotiations continued. Four days after the truces were signed, Henry appointed a low-key embassy to France, headed by Henry, Lord Scrope, which had powers to negotiate a peace, arrange the marriage and, if necessary, extend the period during which Henry had promised to remain single.23
As Henry had undoubtedly intended, his willingness to discuss peace lulled the Armagnacs into a false sense of security. Throughout the entire period of the negotiations, they also derived additional hope from the presence in Paris of Edward, duke of York, who was believed to favour an Armagnac alliance and the marriage with Catherine of France. The duke was actually on his way home from Aquitaine, but he lingered for five months in Paris, where he was assiduously courted and fêted by his Armagnac hosts. No expense was spared and the duke even received substantial sums of money due to him from the Armagnac princes after Clarence’s abortive expedition of 1412.24 Unfortunately for them, they had overestimated the duke’s influence at the English court; more seriously, they had also misjudged Henry V’s intentions.
The apparently favourable progress of negotiations between the English and the Armagnacs caused alarm and consternation in the Burgundian camp. John the Fearless’s situation had become increasingly desperate after his failed siege of Paris and his subsequent flight to Flanders. As the Armagnac army swept into the heartland of his territory in the summer of 1414, he knew that if he was to obtain English support, he would have to raise the stakes. He therefore sent ambassadors to England, empowering them to repeat the offer to Henry V of one of his daughters in marriage, but also to arrange an offensive and defensive alliance between the two countries. The terms he proposed were that, on request, each of them should supply the other with five hundred men-at-arms or a thousand archers for three months without payment; that the duke would help Henry to conquer the territories of the count of Armagnac, Charles d’Albret and the count of Angoulême; and that the duke and the king would mount a joint campaign to conquer the lands of the dukes of Orléans, Anjou and Bourbon and the counts of Alençon, Vertus and Eu. It was also suggested that neither party would make an alliance with any of these dukes or counts without the consent of the other and that the Anglo-Burgundian alliance would be aimed against all except the king of France, the dauphin, their successors, the duke’s close family, including his brothers, Antoine, duke of Brabant, and Philippe de Nevers, the king of Spain and the duke of Brittany.25
These were tempting terms for Henry and he had no hesitation in appointing envoys to discuss them. Henry, Lord Scrope, and Sir Hugh Mortimer, who had just returned from arranging the king’s marriage with Catherine of France, now found themselves simultaneously arranging his marriage with Catherine of Burgundy.26 They were joined on this embassy by three of Henry’s most trusted servants, Thomas Chaucer, Philip Morgan, a lawyer and future bishop of Worcester, and John Hovyngham, an archdeacon of Durham, who was the workhorse of most of Henry’s diplomatic missions.27 These ambassadors clearly suspected that the Burgundian terms were unworkable and that the feudal loyalty that the duke owed to the king of France would, in the field, take precedence over his convenient alliance with the king of England. Where, then, would that leave an English army in the midst of a campaign against the Armagnacs? Scrope and his fellow envoys were not reassured by the equivocal replies they received to their questions. The most startling aspect of the proposed alliance, however, was not mentioned in the official account of the negotiations. Henry had actually given his ambassadors full powers “to seek, obtain and receive the faith and liege homage of the duke of Burgundy, for himself and his heirs, to us and our heirs, and to receive him as our vassal.” Such homage could only have been given if Henry had persuaded the duke to renounce his allegiance to Charles VI and recognise his own title as the true king of France. Duplicitous and treacherous though John the Fearless undoubtedly was, his quarrel was not with Charles VI himself, but with the men surrounding him, and he was not yet prepared to betray his sovereign for an English alliance.28
Even without homage, the duke of Burgundy’s offers considerably strengthened Henry’s bargaining position with the Armagnacs. He was now able to take a discernibly sterner tone, referring to Charles VI as “our adversary of France” and demanding the restoration of his just rights and inheritances. It is even possible that he considered that the moment had now come when he could launch his invasion of France. At some point in the spring of 1414, Henry had called a meeting at Westminster of the great council of the realm, consisting of all the senior members of the aristocracy and the Church, to discuss and approve a resolution to go to war. Far from slavishly backing the idea, the lords of the great council delivered something of a reproof to their king, urging him that he should “in so high a matter begin nothing” except what was pleasing to God and would avoid the spilling of Christian blood. They urged him to negotiate further, to moderate his claims and to ensure that if he had to go to war it should only be because all other reasonable avenues had been exhausted and he had been denied “right and reason.”29
Henry responded by appointing yet another embassy, this time a high-profile one, led by Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, and Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury. On their arrival in Paris, Courtenay made the now customary claim for the throne of France, but then, almost in the same breath, acknowledged that this was unacceptable to the French and offered to compromise: Henry would accept Normandy, Touraine, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Flanders and a fully restored duchy of Aquitaine in full sovereignty, together with the lordship of Provence, the one million six hundred thousand crowns outstanding from the ransom of Jean II of France and two million crowns as dowry for the Princess Catherine. The Armagnacs, who had heard most of this before and regarded it simply as an opening gambit in the diplomatic game for Catherine’s marriage, responded by repeating the offer they had made in 1412 of an enlarged Aquitaine (though the thorny question of homage was left unaddressed), plus a dowry of six hundred thousand crowns.30
These were generous terms so far as the Armagnacs were concerned, but they were derisory compared to what Henry had claimed. It was this disparity—combined with some highly effective English propaganda—which led to the famous incident of the tennis balls. As told by Shakespeare, the dauphin responded to Henry’s demands by mocking his supposedly wild youth and sending him some tennis balls to play with, prompting Henry’s defiant reply:
When we have match’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.31
In fact, the dauphin, who was almost ten years younger than Henry, had nothing to do with these negotiations and was actually away from Paris campaigning against the duke of Burgundy when the embassy took place. Had he really sent tennis balls, especially to Henry V, who was notoriously prickly on the subject of his dignity, the insult would have been a major diplomatic incident and brought the negotiations to an abrupt end. This simply did not happen. Nevertheless, the tennis balls story found its way into some contemporary chronicles, and all English sources are unanimous in describing the French as mocking Henry’s claims and ridiculing the king himself; the ambassadors, according to one chronicler, “were treated with derision.”32 This was all patently untrue, but it was a convenient fiction that would whip up anti-French sentiment and help justify the English invasion of the following year.
The Peace of Arras in September 1414 put a temporary stop to hostilities between the Armagnacs and Burgundians and for the time being ended the duke of Burgundy’s need for military assistance. The terms of the military alliance that he had proposed to Henry were quietly dropped, though negotiations continued and the duke’s behaviour during the build-up to the battle of Agincourt suggests that he had given at least a tacit assurance that he would do nothing to hinder the English invasion. He would not be the first or last to hope that foreign troops would destroy his enemies for him.
The same high-powered English embassy, led by the bishops of Norwich and Durham but with the substitution of the king’s half-uncle, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, for the earl of Salisbury, returned to Paris in February 1415. Once again, they were received with great honour, and took their place in the public celebrations to mark the Peace of Arras. They attended feasts, watched Charles VI (despite his madness) joust against the count of Alençon, who had just been created a duke, and, more significantly, saw a friendly joust between Charles, duke of Orléans, and the duke of Burgundy’s brother Antoine. A few days later, they were also present to observe the performance of a challenge by three Portuguese knights against three French; as the Portuguese were long-term allies of the English, they were led into the field by the earl of Dorset, who then had the mortification of watching them being defeated.33
Despite the festivities, the serious business of the embassy was not neglected. The French were convinced that Henry V’s territorial demands were simply posturing and that the marriage would go ahead and resolve everything, not least because the English ambassadors now agreed to discuss the two questions separately. The English made some show of compromise, reducing their demand to a million crowns for Princess Catherine’s dowry, but the French refused to rise above eight hundred thousand and were not prepared to make any more concessions. The English declared themselves unable to agree to such terms without further authorisation (the standard diplomatic excuse for bringing negotiations to an end) and returned home empty-handed.34
Henry V had not expected any other outcome. Four days before the French made their final offer, he had summoned the mayor and aldermen of London into his presence at the Tower and informed them that he intended to cross the sea to recover his rights by conquest.35
It had always been unlikely that Henry would achieve all that he wanted in France through diplomacy alone. It is impossible to guess what concessions would have been enough to buy him off, but the marriage with Princess Catherine was certainly an indispensable condition: it was the only way that Henry could ensure that any lands he acquired in France would pass to his heirs by right of inheritance, as well as by legal treaty or conquest. As the son of a usurper himself, he understood all too well the necessity of securing the legitimacy of his future line. Though he also entertained (simultaneously) proposals of marriage with the daughters of the duke of Burgundy, the king of Aragon and the king of Portugal,36 these were never anything more than a polite detour along the road to diplomatic alliance.
What territorial concessions would have satisfied him? An enlarged Aquitaine, restored to the boundaries set by the Treaty of Brétigny, which had been the goal of his predecessors, was clearly not enough. The Armagnacs offered him this in the summer of 1414—as did John the Fearless, implicitly, with his proposal to assist Henry in conquering the lands of the count of Armagnac, Charles d’Albret and the count of Angoulême.37 Henry seems to have taken this restoration for granted. His ambitions were, instead, focused on creating a cross-Channel empire centred on Calais, and expanding westwards and southwards into Normandy and eastwards into Picardy and western Flanders. An English dominion of this size on French soil and flanked on either side by two friendly powers, Brittany and the Burgundian-controlled Low Countries, would have enormous strategic value. It would allow the English complete control over both the Straits of Dover and the Channel, safeguarding the merchant shipping of England and her allies and opening up potential new markets in the north of France. It would also give Henry command over the two most important waterways of France, the rivers Seine and Somme, enabling him to restrict the flow of goods and travellers into the interior at will. Finally, it would also place a further barrier, beyond the Channel, between France and Scotland, two ancient allies that were united in their enmity to England.