Unruly, p.29
Unruly, page 29
Thousands of Frenchmen were killed, as against a few hundred Englishmen, and thousands more were taken prisoner. Many of these were slaughtered after the battle when Henry got nervous that the French reserves might renew the fight against his still-outnumbered force. This is an excellent example of Henry’s selectivity when it came to being chivalrous.
Perhaps the most important consequence was this: among the dead were a lot of very important Frenchmen – and many of the bigwigs who survived were taken away and usually ransomed. Not always, though; Charles Duke of Orleans remained a prisoner in England for twenty-five years. The battle weakened France much more deeply than one lost battle would suggest. After Agincourt, Henry was in a hugely stronger geopolitical position than when his exhausted, diseased and outnumbered force had been hammering stakes into the ground in the rain on the night of 24 October.
Burgundy and Armagnac don’t mix
Even before Agincourt, France was in a terrible state. King Charles VI, who had been reigning since 1380, was severely mentally ill. He’d acceded to the throne as a child but started to have acute episodes of mental incompetence a few years after beginning his personal rule. This prompted a struggle for power among the major players at court, which resulted in a civil war at the end of which Charles was left a pitiful and befuddled figure, cared for only by his wife, and whose son had been disinherited. His grandson was Henry VI, the next king of England, and the reason I’ve written this potted biography of Charles is that Henry VI’s life story turned out to be almost identical.
That’s England in the middle of the century – back to France at the start. Charles’s issues were the kind that put the stigma into mental illness that nowadays everyone’s trying to remove. ‘People who are suffering with their mental health aren’t running around screaming with their clothes off, shitting themselves, refusing to wash, not knowing who they are or who other people are, or thinking they’re someone they’re not!’ Well, Charles VI was. The only stereotypical symptom of insanity Charles didn’t suffer from was thinking he was the king of France. On the few occasions he thought that, it meant he was having a good day. Instead, he spent long periods thinking he was made of glass and behaving with neurotic caution in case he shattered.
These delusional problems for the king caused severe real ones for the large country of which he was the absolute ruler. For long periods government had to be handled by a regency council, presided over by his wife Queen Isabeau but fought over by two groups of princes and aristocrats: the Burgundians, led by the Duke of Burgundy, and the Armagnacs, led initially by Louis, Duke of Orleans until he was murdered in 1307 (he was the father of Duke Charles who was captured at Agincourt), and then by the Count of Armagnac.
The murder of Duke Louis was what turned a lot of interpersonal unpleasantness into a lot of interpersonal unpleasantness involving soldiers. Civil war in France was pretty good news for the kings of England. While Henry IV just used the time for frighted peace to pant, his son saw it as the perfect context for a new broil. He invaded and, while the Armagnac faction sent an army to face him at Agincourt, the Burgundians remained neutral.
That’s pretty extreme, if you think about it. Remaining neutral when your country’s being invaded – particularly when the country is France and the invaders are English. But the hatred between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs seemed stronger than the long-running antipathy between England and France.
It reminds me of the left wing of modern British politics. While, in principle, all the various different kinds of lefties claim that their main aim is to keep the Conservatives out of power, in practice many left-wing groupings reserve their greatest animus for each other. In fact, the hard left is inclined to dismiss the centre left as ‘Tories’, which seems to be missing all kinds of points.
First and foremost, they’re not Tories. Demonstrably. It’s just a point of fact. The word ‘Tory’ is not open to interpretation like some words: idiot, hero, coward, hypocrite, statesman, to give a few examples. It just means ‘member of the Conservative Party’ and none of the adherents of new Labour, so reviled by the Corbynite wing of the party, are even Tory voters let alone members.
The left often uses ‘Tory’ as a term of abuse, like ‘monster’. This is forgetting that it isn’t a term of abuse, but a descriptive term that many people are happy to use about themselves. If it’s like ‘monster’, this is a world where monsters both exist and are often in control of the country, happily proclaiming themselves to be monsters. This is an odd context in which to label a non-monster who merely disagrees with you over various points of detail a monster. It’s like Churchill calling Attlee a Nazi.
I’m not, let me make clear before any excitement or panic sets in, equating Tories with monsters or Nazis. I am not a Tory myself, but the Conservative Party is a coherent political movement with many decent and sincere adherents. I don’t support it, but I don’t consider it to be so abominable that its nomenclature should be used as direct synonyms for evil.
That’s what the hard left does – but that’s not the problem. The problem is that’s all it does. Otherwise it leaves the Tories alone focusing its ire on people it calls Tories but who are in fact fellow Labour supporters – just ones who are a bit more centrist, a bit more capitalistic, frankly a bit more realistic.
The irony is not lost on me, as a left-leaning centrist, that in this little section I too am reserving my criticism for other people on the left rather than Tories. I’ve been polite about the Tories, but I’m censuring other left-wingers for dividing the left, which is, in turn, divisive of me. All this lefty mud-slinging is a huge help to the right.
In the same way, the English were hugely helped by the conflict between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. At the start of the civil war, both groups would have said they were pro-French, which meant pro-poor addled Charles VI. By 1418, John ‘the Fearless’ (if you say so), Duke of Burgundy and leader of the Burgundian faction, was flirting with acknowledging Henry V’s claim to the French throne.
It got worse. In 1419, an attempt at rapprochement with the Armagnacs was brokered, at which John was assassinated. This was understandable as Duke John had ordered the murder of Duke Louis twelve years earlier. Sadly this reciprocity didn’t lead to the two groups calling it quits. The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip ‘the Good’ (matter of opinion), signed an all-out alliance with Henry V. The Burgundians were now officially pro-English.
By this stage, the leading Armagnac was the dauphin – that is, the heir to the French throne. He was called Charles and was the fifth dauphin of his father’s reign; Charles VI’s sons seemed to have a lot of trouble staying alive. So in 1419 the situation for the French royal family was grave. The king was mad and there was a civil war going on in which only one of the two factions acknowledged the king’s son as the rightful heir. The other faction wanted the King of England to inherit. On top of this, the King of England had invaded and was assiduously occupying Normandy.
England takes over France forever
That’s what Henry had been doing since Agincourt. He went back to England for a bit, to soak up the plaudits and sign a treaty with Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, no less, in which the empire recognized his claim to the French throne. This must have been exciting. The crazy Plantagenet claim to the French throne, Edward III’s chancy punt, was getting endorsed by Europe’s biggest-wig. The daft notion that the King of England was also the rightful king of France was becoming mainstream. Think on that when you next assume that all internet conspiracy theories are doomed to be blasted away by the leaf-blower of reason.
In the same month as the treaty, August 1416, Henry’s younger brother John, Duke of Bedford, defeated a Franco-Genoese naval force at the Battle of the Seine. This relieved a siege on Harfleur and gave the English dominance in the Channel. The following year Henry landed in Normandy and started taking it over bit by bit. This was quite different from Edward III’s and the Black Prince’s technique of chevauchées and showy battles: this was about sieges and occupation. Henry meant to take Normandy and keep it. Paralysed by division, the French government did basically nothing so that, by August 1419, Henry’s army was at the gates of Paris.
This was the point at which John the Fearless took an Armagnac axe in the face at an emergency summit and the Burgundians signed an alliance with Henry. John’s skull was kept by some monks in Dijon for reasons vaguely connected to Catholics being weird, and when, 102 years later, Francis I, the then King of France (who was not, spoiler alert, also the king of England), came to visit, they showed it to him. Whichever monk was doing the tour pointed out the axe hole, saying, ‘Sire, this is the hole through which the English entered France.’
He was right. Henry’s conquering continued apace and, in 1320, the Treaty of Troyes was signed. This was as close to the absolute jackpot for Henry as could realistically be imagined. He wasn’t made king of France but he was made regent and heir to the throne. All he had to do was wait for mad King Charles to finally shatter, or die of eating his own shit, or try to fly from the top of Notre Dame, or something else that reinforces unhelpful stereotypes about mental illness, and he would be king of France as well as England.
Also in the terms of the treaty, it was arranged for him to marry Charles’s youngest daughter Catherine de Valois for a nice merging of royal bloods – though the basis for Henry’s whole claim to the French throne was that they were already massively merged. So a nice remerging, a non-refreshing of the genetic pot, tainted as it already was by mental illness and a propensity to premature death. I mean, Jesus. Wait till they have a child. The fact that he turned out to be a complete waste of space is not exactly a bolt from the blue.
That’s coming up. For now, this is the happy ending of the Hundred Years’ War in which England wins, and if that’s how you want to remember that war and the whole England vs France aspect of medieval history – and why wouldn’t you? – I’d skip on from here to Edward IV and try not to think about why his other kingdom of France isn’t getting much of a mention.
History is relentless, like football. I find watching football boring, but I’m not immune to the appeal of institutional triumph. When Liverpool or Manchester United (it usually seems to be one of those two) wins some title, has a great season, breaks some record, I’m drawn to that happy ending. It’s joyous and climactic. It often comes with a match referred to as a ‘final’.
But it isn’t final. They have their triumph but then, next season, they start again and probably do a bit worse. For me, that spoils the narrative. I’ve often thought that, when a great club wins everything, it should be closed down. Its players and resources could split among other teams. Having achieved its destiny, its greatest triumph, it should be allowed to ascend to sporting heaven rather than continue to scratch around on earth in the hope, at best, of repeating its triumph, but never of bettering it. I accept that this proposal would face opposition from club owners and fans but, had it always been the system, I think it would be great.
In narrative terms, it was a good move of Henry V to die two years after his greatest triumph. He never had to deal with the fallout: the challenges of maintaining and consolidating his position. France wasn’t really his: the Armagnacs, led by a dauphin determined to be king of France himself, were still in possession of most of the country and they weren’t going anywhere.
After his marriage to Catherine in June 1420, Henry returned triumphantly to England where, in early 1421, Catherine was crowned and impregnated – quickly ticking off quite a lot of a queen consort’s to-do list. In June of that year, Henry returned to France to relieve a situation caused by the defeat and death of his brother, the Duke of Clarence, in a battle against an Armagnac army. Henry spent the next year campaigning, chipping away at the dauphin’s possessions, before catching dysentery and dying in August 1422. Unlike Edward III, he never had to see himself fail.
Would he have failed? Could he have succeeded in building a long-term cross-Channel Charlemagne-style superstate? Probably not. Edward III couldn’t and he was a top-class king. Then again, Henry’s approach was different. He was conquering northern France, not just laying waste to it. He had made alliances within the French political milieu. He would probably have failed to reign as effective king of France and England but it’s far from definite.
It wouldn’t necessarily have been good news for England if he’d succeeded, though. France was a far bigger, far richer, far more central state than England. It was cool and fashionable – the popes lived there for a while which was pretty hip at the time. King of France was a promotion from king of England, so France was likely to be any joint king’s priority. When the Stuart kings of Scotland inherited the English throne in 1603, they moved straight to the capital of the richer and more central of their two kingdoms. Stuart rule of England did not turn out, in any meaningful sense, to be Scottish rule. A long-term Lancastrian regime based in Paris would have been unlikely to remain Anglocentric for long.
28. King Henry VI
Henry VI never met his father but he wouldn’t have remembered if he had. That’s not because he was useless, though he was useless, but because he was only eight months old when his father died. This wasn’t an ideal situation: the King of England was a baby and the King of France was mentally ill and likely to die quite soon, at which point the baby would take over as king of France as well. Who came up with this system?
Henry V had come up with it and fortunately had enough time, while he knew he was dying, to make some arrangements. And enough energy. I’m not sure, if I were dying of dysentery, I’d be able to summon up the vigour to give a shit about … well, anything other than my next agonizing shit. But then I’m fairly agnostic rather than extremely Catholic, so not quite as convinced as Henry was that I’d otherwise turn up in the afterlife and get an immediate rap on the knuckles from St Peter for neglecting my geopolitical admin.
Henry put his eldest surviving brother, John Duke of Bedford, who was a sensible and capable chap, in sole charge of both France and the ongoing war against the Armagnacs. He left his flakier brother, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, in more equivocal charge of both England and his infant son. So there was a plan, but the situation, like any royal minority, was delicate – and this minority was going to be long since the king had acceded at the tender age of nought.
The odd thing about Henry VI’s minority, though, was that it was by far the most successful part of his reign. Overall, it didn’t go amazingly well but neither was it an unmitigated disaster. The rest of his reign was an unmitigated disaster. At the start, a regency council was appointed to run England and, while there was a certain amount of bickering between Gloucester and the king’s great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, competent government was for the most part maintained.
What’s strange is that no one took the opportunity to call into question the infant king’s right to rule. Henry V’s charisma seems to have blasted away any question of the Lancastrian dynasty’s legitimacy. Henry VI was, in England at least, the unquestioned rightful king. This wasn’t due to any strengths on the child’s part. It was because there was a lot of loyalty to Henry V and a strong sense that his stellar reign, and therefore his whole dynasty, had been favoured by God.
Later in Henry VI’s reign, questions over his legitimacy re-emerged with disastrous consequences, but his remarkably stable minority shows that this wasn’t inevitable. Henry IV’s usurpation had weakened the monarchy, but Henry V’s successes had repaired a lot of that damage. It took rank incompetence from Henry VI to reopen all those cracks. If he’d been a half-decent ruler, the new Lancastrian succession might never have been questioned again.
Obviously England can’t be in charge of France
The country of which Henry was not the unquestioned king was France. Charles VI died in October 1422 and Henry was supposedly king of it from then on, though Charles’s son Charles, who was previously calling himself the dauphin, now reckoned he was King Charles VII. Events proved him right.
Not immediately, though. The Duke of Bedford was doing a bloody good job of continuing his brother’s work, winning a stunning victory in 1424 at the Battle of Verneuil where he defeated a much larger army of French and Scots (who have become almost inseparable from the French by this point – nice work, Edward I) by sheer force of killing them one by one. Events continued to favour the English until early 1429 when Joan of Arc turned up.
It seems to me that Joan of Arc was the quirky personification of an inevitable historical process. It’s almost as if God or Fate or Chance – history’s great showrunner in the sky – felt the need to jazz up an otherwise predictable narrative. England had neither the united leadership nor the wealth nor the international clout to take over and hold on to France. It would have been not merely like a snake swallowing a basketball but like a fox trying to kill a hippopotamus. The English situation was bound to deteriorate but a young French peasant woman, wearing armour and having holy visions, leading a French army while the dauphin looked on with scepticism turning to amazement, is a much more interesting way for that to happen.
If your awareness of history comes from a primarily English or British perspective, Joan of Arc is an awkward prospect. Her role in the story makes France right and England wrong. She is a rebuke to unworthy and unrealistic ambitions and only really enjoyable from a French perspective. ‘This is their bit,’ you have to say and let the French have fun.
That wasn’t the view of the English at the time. The trouble with personifications of inevitable historical processes is that, unlike the processes themselves, they can be killed. So that’s what the English did to her, after their Burgundian allies had captured her and handed her over in exchange for 10,000 livres tournois, which is roughly equivalent, in today’s money, to a lot.
