Agincourt (10 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.

CHAPTER FIVE

SCOTS AND PLOTS

Scotland had always been regarded as the French back door into England. The “auld alliance” between the two countries had been mutually beneficial. The French could rely on the Scots invading England from the north whenever the English themselves attacked France; the Scots, on the other hand, were able to maintain their own independence because the English were so preoccupied with their French ambitions. Unlike the Welsh, the Scots were very much part of the European chivalric tradition and could match the English tactic for tactic; their mercenaries were as active and as feared as English ones. The porous nature of the border between England and Scotland made it virtually impossible to police effectively, so if Henry was to make any sort of intervention in France, he needed to ensure that the border was secure and that the Scots stayed at home.

Although English kings had from time to time demanded homage from Scottish kings, Scotland at this time was an independent kingdom with its own monarchy and parliament. Like England and France, it had suffered from the incapacity of its kings and the mutually destructive power struggles between its magnates. Relations with England had deteriorated since the accession of Henry IV, who had begun his reign by demanding that Robert III do homage to him as king of England and by invading Scotland as far as Edinburgh. On 14 September 1402 Harry “Hotspur” Percy had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots at the battle of Homildon Hill. Seven Scottish magnates were killed and twenty-eight captured, including Murdoch, earl of Fife, the son and heir of the duke of Albany, the de facto regent of Scotland.
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