Battles of English History

It would almost seem as if Edward III. and his son never seriously contemplated the subjugation of France: for instead of attempting to take advantage of the virtual dissolution of all government resulting from the defeat of Poitiers and the king's capture, the Black Prince returned to England with his prisoner. The treaty of Bretigny, by which Edward resigned his claims to the French crown, and the French king abandoned all suzerainty over the south-west, was a reasonable solution of the difficulty, if nothing had been at stake but the personal pretensions of the two monarchs. But the national feelings of the French were too strongly roused: the treaty was never carried out. John's son and successor Charles V., or rather his military adviser the Constable Duguesclin, learned wisdom from the crushing defeats of Crecy and Poitiers, and steadily abstained from confronting English armies in the field. All the arts of minor warfare, raids, surprise of castles, cutting off of small parties, were adopted against the English, and the success though slow was steady, and was twofold. Outnumbered from the nature of the case, the English could not but lose in a war thus carried on; and the French subjects of the Black Prince were alienated, through being exposed both to injury at the hands of their own countrymen, and to heavy demands on their resources made by the prince to help him fight a losing game. Gradually things went more and more against the English, until by the time the Black Prince's health failed, and he went home to die, little was left beyond a few towns, which were bound to England by commercial ties. Nor was this all; in the second active stage of the great war, when Henry V. was formally accepted as heir to the French crown, the south-west was the region in which the cause of the Dauphin, the national cause, was most steadily supported.

CHAPTER VI

AGINCOURT AND ORLEANS

For nearly forty years after the death of the Black Prince the English pretensions against France lay dormant. Something like friendly relations existed from time to time between the two countries: Richard II. even contracted a marriage with a French princess, though he was deposed before his child bride was grown up. Cordial peace however was impossible: the English possessions in Guienne were a standing temptation to French ambition and patriotism: the English claim to the French crown was a standing provocation. That claim had by no means been forgotten: the glories of Crecy and Poitiers had made a deeper impression than the slow failure of the following years, the burden of which had fallen much more heavily on Guienne than on England. To the English mind the pretensions of their kings to the throne of France had become a national rather than a personal matter. It was England that considered herself entitled to dominate over France, rather than an individual claiming an inheritance for himself. Richard II. had been succeeded by his cousin the duke of Lancaster, who reigned by a perfectly valid national title, formally voted by Parliament, and substantially accepted by the country as a whole. He was, as it happened, the heir male of Edward III., heir according to the theory embodied in the Salic law which France had made her rule of succession: but he was not the heir of Edward III. according to the theory which alone could render valid Edward III.'s claim to France. What is commonly said in relation to Edward is strictly true of Henry V.: if his contention was based on a sound theory, it held good in favour of some one else. There is no trace of this being recognised in England: Henry V. was the lawful king of England, lawful successor of his great-grandfather, and might reasonably urge his great-grandfather's pretensions.

The state of France at the date of the accession of Henry V. was deplorable. The king, Charles VI., had long been mad; his occasional lucid intervals, when he was supposed to resume the reins of government, only served to make confusion worse. The queen was one of the worst of women, without the great abilities which went some way towards atoning for the wickedness of Catharine de Medicis or her namesake of Russia. The Dauphin was a dissolute and reckless boy. All good government was lost: for power was disputed by two bitterly hostile factions, each of which used it in turn for its own purposes. One was headed by the duke of Burgundy, cousin of the king, son of the boy who was taken prisoner at Poitiers beside his father king John. The other, which bore the name of Armagnacs,32 was headed by the young duke of Orleans, the king's nephew, between whom and John of Burgundy there was an irreconcilable blood-feud. The statesmanship of France was not ill-represented by the Dauphin's insult to Henry V., in sending him a present of balls at his accession, with a message implying that he deemed the young king, perhaps the ablest man of his age, little better than a child. Shakespeare makes much of the story that the archbishop of Canterbury urged Henry to undertake war with France, in order to divert his attention from ecclesiastical affairs at home. Whatever weight this may have had, the opportunity was obvious, and Henry was very well competent to use it.

In August 1415 Henry V. landed at the mouth of the Seine, with a well-equipped army of about 30,000 men. No better point for an invasion could be chosen: there was a good harbour for his base, and almost the shortest distance from the sea-shore to Paris is straight up the Seine. Before however he could advance Harfleur must be taken, and this cost an unexpectedly long time. More than a month elapsed before the town surrendered; and then it is suggested that dysentery, which was raging alike inside and outside the walls, was largely answerable for the surrender. The siege was conducted entirely by battering, like a siege of three or four centuries later: probably the comparative slowness and inadequacy of the cannonade was more or less balanced by the inferiority of the defensive works to those of later times. When the town had fallen (or was on the point of falling, for the date is not quite certain), Henry sent a message to the Dauphin, offering to settle the dispute by single combat with him, as his father was incapacitated. The proposal is altogether in the style of chivalry, and was doubtless considered the right and proper thing to do: but seeing that the Dauphin was a weak and debauched lad, and Henry in the very prime of vigour, there was nothing really high-minded about it. Henry deemed himself bound to wait for an answer, and during the interval resolved on his course of action. His army had been frightfully reduced by illness as well as by the losses in the siege: we are told that 5000 men had to be sent home invalided, besides the large number who died. A garrison was also wanted for Harfleur; altogether the king could not move with above a third of his original force. The accounts given from the English side, which are numerous and unusually circumstantial, vary only slightly: and one French writer, who expressly says that he saw the English army, agrees pretty closely with them. French writers in general had only hearsay to guide them, and had every motive to exaggerate the English numbers. Of men-at-arms Henry had left from 800 to 1000, of archers five or six thousand, besides other foot-soldiers who were probably about half as numerous. Whatever the number was, it had suffered no material change before the battle of Agincourt.

With such an insignificant force, offensive operations were out of the question. Prudence obviously suggested, while honour forbade, a direct return to England. Henry determined to march through the coast districts of Normandy, and so gain Calais. Doubtless he was encouraged to take this venturous course by his knowledge of the distracted state of France, and in particular by the fact that, while he had now been six weeks in the country, no attempt had been made to disturb him, though there was by this time a hostile army gathering at Rouen. About October 8 the English army started, carrying with them provisions for several days, with no waggons to delay their march, and under strict orders that there should be no plundering. Henry aimed at crossing the Somme as his great-grandfather had done, by the ford of Blanchetaque below Abbeville: but on coming within a few miles he was informed that it was very strongly held by the enemy. One French writer says that this information was false, and that it was the cause of the subsequent disaster, as otherwise Henry would have reached Calais without fighting. True or false, Henry believed it, and marched up the Somme, finding bridge after bridge broken, and naturally feeling that the chance of a French army barring the road was hourly increasing. At length, on October 18, fords were found near Nesle, and the English made their way safely across. Two days later Henry received a message from the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon to the effect that they proposed to fight him before he reached Calais, and asking him to appoint a meeting-place. Henry's reply was that of a general, not of a knight-errant: he was marching straight to Calais, and they might meet him where they pleased.

The proceedings of the French as reported are somewhat difficult to interpret. We are told, and there is no reason to disbelieve it, that D'Albret, the Constable of France, had been against attempting to relieve Harfleur: the tradition of the great defeats at Crecy and Poitiers, and of the success which had attended the subsequent policy of not fighting in the open field, might well account for this. For the same reason, doubtless, the army under his command was withdrawn behind the Somme on the news of Henry's march having begun, though why the river was not better guarded it is difficult to imagine. On the other hand we are told that the king of France came to Rouen with the Dauphin, after the fall of Harfleur, and that all the chief nobility of France came thither at his summons. So numerous were their forces, and so confident were they, that they refused the offer of a contingent from the city of Paris of 6000 men, one of them saying, "What do we want of the assistance of these shopkeepers, since we are three times as many as the English?" Most of these nobles must have marched with the Constable: it can only have been from his army that the challenge to Henry, above referred to, can possibly have been sent. Then an unintelligible story is told, of a royal council having been held at Rouen on October 20 (this date is clearly impossible), at which it was decided to fight a battle, and orders were sent accordingly to the Constable. But the same account goes on to speak of summons for all who were fit to bear arms to join the Constable's army, which from the nature of the case would have fought and (as was assumed) destroyed the English, long before any fresh troops could reinforce what was already far larger than necessary. Then follows a statement that an invitation was sent to the duke of Burgundy's son, who was only prevented from joining by his father's express orders, and that he never to his dying day forgot the humiliation of being kept away from the battle. Seeing that the youth in question was afterwards duke Philip called the Good, whose co-operation with Henry V. put France, officially speaking, into the hands of the latter, it is scarcely possible to accept this as true. Equally out of keeping with the prevalent feeling of the French at the time is the story that the king and the Dauphin wanted to join the army, and were prevented by the old duke of Berri, the king's uncle, who said, remembering Poitiers, "Better lose the battle than the king and the battle too." Why, if there was anything of an army in Normandy, and the council at Rouen were so bent on a battle, no attempt was made to harass Henry's march, when the Constable was ready to stop him in front, does not appear. From the English accounts, one of which was written by Henry's own attendant chaplain, it is perfectly certain that their march was nowhere really impeded by encountering enemies. The whole conduct of the French, alike in strategy and in the tactics of the actual battle of Agincourt, was ill judged: the explanation doubtless being that the great nobles could not be controlled effectually by the Constable.

When Henry crossed the Somme, the French army was apparently at Bapaume, twenty miles to the northward. Why they made no attempt to attack the English, who marched past them in a line parallel to the river, but a few miles to the north-east of it, can hardly be conjectured. At any moment, during two or three days, the Constable might have fallen upon them, and the English if defeated must have been destroyed, for the Somme would have been at their back. Perhaps the Constable thought it wiser to let Henry go to Calais unimpeded, and only moved in deference to positive orders from the king. Whatever the reason, it was not till Henry was passing him that he moved: then he marched in the same direction, the two routes gradually converging towards each other. On October 24, just after crossing the little river Ternoise, called in the English narratives the river of swords, Henry came almost into collision with the French, whose swarming bands covered the country on his right, and almost in front. The French halted, as if to tempt him to attack. Henry knew better than so to throw away his best chance: having the advantage of the ground, he halted and formed his line for battle. The general feeling in the English army, if one may trust Henry's chaplain, was one of deep despondency. Nor was this unreasonable, seeing that they must cut their way through an army several times the size of their own, unless the enemy threw away his advantage. The king alone was cool and confident. When Sir Walter Hungerford in his hearing uttered a wish for 10,000 more archers, Henry uttered the famous rebuke which Shakespeare33 has immortalised.

"If we are marked to die, we are enowTo do our country loss; and if to live,The fewer men, the greater share of honour.God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;It yearns me not if men my garments wear;Such outward things dwell not in my desires:But if it be a sin to covet honour,I am the most offending soul alive.No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:God's peace! I would not lose so great an honourAs one man more, methinks, would share from meFor the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,That he which hath no stomach to this fight,Let him depart; his passport shall be madeAnd crowns for convoy put into his purse:We would not die in that man's companyThat fears his fellowship to die with us."

The Constable, seeing that he could not attack the English to advantage, continued his march for a mile or so, and halted across the road by which the English must march to Calais, between the little villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, the English camping almost where they had halted to offer battle, in and about Maisoncelles. There was much rain in the night, to the great discomfort of the English, who had little shelter, and had had more than a fortnight of continuous and fairly hard marching, with rather scanty supplies of food. The rain proved in truth a valuable ally, when the French assailed them next day over the soft wet ground.

Early on the 25th Henry arrayed his little army in order of battle. In accordance with custom, the vanguard for marching purposes formed the right of the line, the rearguard the left: the former was commanded by the duke of York, the latter by lord Camoys, the king himself taking charge of the main body in the centre: the total number was too small to admit of a reserve. Accounts differ as to the exact formation adopted, though there is perfect unanimity as to the English men-at-arms having all dismounted, and left their horses in rear with the baggage, such as there was. Nor is there any doubt that the archers carried each man a six-foot stake, to plant in the ground in front of the line, so as to form a sort of palisade. These stakes we are expressly told had been cut by Henry's order immediately before crossing the Somme, when he knew that an attack from superior numbers was at any time possible. It seems to have been his own idea, and to have become the regular practice after Agincourt. Some writers state that the archers were entirely on the flanks, so that when the line had advanced to where it came into collision with the French, the archers lined the woods on each side of the open ground, which was crossed by the dismounted men-at-arms. This view however must be rejected for more reasons than one. The distance from the wood skirting Tramecourt on the English right to that skirting Agincourt on the left was over half-a-mile.34 This is too great a distance to be covered by arrows from the sides, even with the long-bow at its best, and it is certain that the arrows did deadly execution all over the battle-field. Moreover Henry had at the most only 1000 men-at-arms, probably under 900. This number in single rank would hardly suffice to cover half-a-mile, and of course they could not be in single rank: there is no reason to doubt what is stated by every authority who mentions the point at all, that they were four deep. It is necessary therefore to adopt the other view, that each of the three divisions had its separate formation, dismounted men-at-arms in line in the centre, and the archers on each flank of them. The archers were formed in wedges (cuneos), says Henry's chaplain. The formation already described in giving account of Crecy was no doubt by this time the regularly established one for an English line: its merits were obvious, and well tested. The differences between Crecy and Agincourt were only that in the latter case the front was in three divisions instead of two, and the archers were protected by an improvised palisade, besides being separated by shorter lines of spearmen. These differences would obviously all tend to make them more destructive.

The numbers of the French army are told so variously that it is impossible to state them with any confidence. They are usually given by comparison with the English, and the proportion varies from six times as great down to three times. Henry had perhaps about 10,000 in all, as has been stated above; he may well have had less, but cannot have had more.35 The French were drawn up in three divisions, one behind the other, each having a continuous line of dismounted men-at-arms. One contemporary, who says that the English were four deep, says that the French were thirty deep, which may possibly have been true of the men-at-arms, who formed a much larger proportion of the French army than of the English. The front line, at any rate, cannot have had more than 600 in front at the outside, for a small body of horsemen was placed on each flank to charge the English archers, and the whole space available was but half-a-mile, though it is true that they were much crowded together. There were archers, or at any rate cross-bowmen, in the French army: how they were posted does not appear, except that they were never given a chance of being useful. The knights, we are told, refused to let them have the post of honour in front, behaving thus with the usual feudal vaingloriousness, which had cost the French so dear at Crecy. Similarly we are told that the French had cannon, but certainly no use was made of them, perhaps for the same reason.

The highest nobility of France was well represented on the battle-field: in fact there were so many semi-royal personages that it was a difficult task for the Constable, whose authority they barely recognised, to distribute the honour of command so as to satisfy them. Ultimately the first division, which was to have the brunt of the fighting, and expected to carry off all the glory, comprised (it would be a farce to say it was commanded by) the Constable, the Marshal, the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the brother of the duke of Brittany, and the count of Eu. The second division had at its head the dukes of Alençon and Bar, the count of Nevers, youngest brother of the duke of Burgundy, and the count of Vaudemont, brother of the duke of Lorraine. The rear division was under men of less note: some or all of the men-at-arms belonging to it remained on horseback. The front line of the French was drawn up a little north of the cross-road which now (and possibly then) leads from Agincourt to Tramecourt. Here they were on rising ground, and had a wider space than further to the south, the woods which bound the ground which was the actual scene of conflict trending back a little on each side. Consequently when the French advanced, the men were crowded more together. We cannot be wrong in assuming that the taking up of this position was the Constable's doing, as he had throughout been averse to attacking the English in the field: they had but to hold it, and Henry must attack, with everything against him. If the French authorities are correct, Henry so fully recognised this that he tried to negotiate, but the terms offered were such as he declined to accept. This is not improbable in itself, though the English writers do not mention it: and it is all the more likely to be true, as the battle did not begin till some three hours after sunrise.

Less than a mile separated the two armies, over ploughed land, gently rising towards the French, and soft with the recent rain, the upper part at least doubtless already trodden into mire by the French, who had been stationary thereabouts since the previous afternoon. There was no alternative but to advance, as the French did not: but Henry possessed in his archers a means of stinging them into action, and the class pride of the French nobles had led to the adoption of an order of battle which gave them no means of replying. Towards ten o'clock the king gave the word, "In the name of Almighty God and of St. George, advance banners." For a moment, the English line knelt and touched the earth with their faces: then with a cheer they moved forward. As soon as they were within bowshot of the enemy the line halted, the archers fixed their stakes in the soft ground and began to shoot. Obviously the French could not stand to be riddled with arrows: the horsemen who had been placed on the flanks of the front line on purpose to "over-ride" the archers, were ordered to charge, but were unable even to reach the English and were driven back in confusion. The Constable now led the men-at-arms forwards, separating them apparently into three masses, to attack the three lines of English spearmen. Weighted with armour, they sank to the calf at each step, and the archers took them more and more in flank as they advanced. Still, they managed to reach and even to press back the English men-at-arms: but then the archers, taking to their bills, quitted the protection of the stakes, and closed on to the flanks of the helpless struggling mass, who were far too closely wedged together to use their spears. The Constable was killed: all the other noble personages figure on the list of prisoners: of one of them, the duke of Orleans, it is expressly said that he was taken out after the battle from a pile of dead and wounded; and probably the same fate befell others. Wounded or not, they could not move to escape from the ghastly heap, sunk deeper and deeper in the struggle into the miry soil. Pushing a little forward, Henry attacked the second French line, doubtless in the same manner, and with equally decisive result. The slaughter of the second division was presumably even greater, for all its leaders, with the duke of Brabant, who arrived with reinforcements during the battle, were found among the slain. Most of the third line fled without resistance; the counts at its head made a last desperate charge at the head of a few hundred men, and found the death they expected.

The battle was now won, and the English had time to secure the prisoners. Suddenly a body of French fugitives who had rallied, threatened a fresh attack: how many there were is not stated, but the total number of fugitives was two or three times as great as the whole English army. It was impossible to guard the prisoners while repelling the attack, and a slaughter of them had begun, when the enemy withdrew. Of the total French loss the estimates vary greatly: the names of the most important nobles who fell have been given already. It is perhaps worth mention that the grandfathers of two of them perished at Crecy, the then count of Alençon, and the then duke of Lorraine. Between slain and prisoners, the French nobility suffered enormously; in fact the blow to the Armagnac party was for the time crushing, though it may be doubted whether the loss was not a disguised gain to France, as leaving room for the far more competent professional soldiers, who conducted the last stages of the great war.