To France

Warfare, meanwhile, supplied a convenient means both to test God’s favour and to distract his critics from the severe political and financial crises with which the Lancastrian dynasty was still plagued. Henry IV had left so little money in his treasury that his executors initially refused to serve in the execution of his will. In warfare, Henry V could hope to revive the spirit of Edward III, his great-grandfather. By transforming the Anglo-French dispute into something approaching a crusade by Englishmen against the forces of French evil, he might even revive the spirit of the longvanished Richard I, by this time considered the very paragon of Christian knighthood, author of near-mythical feats including a propensity for eating the flesh of his Saracen foes. Above all, in a peculiar reversal of the circumstances of 1066, Henry V might emulate the success of William ‘the Conqueror’, through military victories demonstrating that his right to rule came directly from God.

Unlike his father, Henry V’s appearance is not certainly known to us. The closest that we come is a sixteenth-century panel portrait that historians suggest is based upon a contemporary study from the life. What is most striking here is the haircut: a ‘pudding bowl’, shaved clear above both ears and at the back of the skull, that would lead most modern youths to sue their barber but which, in days gone by, was meted out to schoolboys, like prunes and cold baths, as one of the penalties of a classical education. The last time that a haircut like this had been worn by a potential king of England was in the Bayeux Tapestry, when it was precisely the shaving clear of their ears and neck that had proclaimed the spartan qualities of England’s Norman conquerors. Now, rather than a Norman conquering England, an English King, similarly shaved, would take an army of English conquerors into Normandy.

Moving with a combination of diplomacy and skilful propaganda, already displayed in the presentation of the Oldcastle rebellion as something hydra-headed and frightful rather than the sad piece of incompetence that it actually was, by the end of 1414, Henry had proclaimed his intention to act as the hammer of all heretics and hence as a Christian ruler every bit as loyal to the Church as the King of France. He next had to provoke a reaction from France. Like Bismarck in the 1860s, he had to start a war without appearing to have done so. Ambassadors were sent to France to demand the proper implementation of the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny agreed more than fifty years before, the restoration of territories which the Treaty had in theory guaranteed to the English, the payment of more than £250,000 still owing from the ransom of King Jean II captured at Poitiers (who had died still in English captivity in 1364), and, most outrageously of all, the marriage of Henry himself to Catherine of Valois, Charles VI’s youngest daughter. When the French replied with an offer of partial compliance, Henry demanded the whole deal, which was inevitably refused. He could thus pose as the injured party, and from November 1414 persuade Parliament to grant the subsidies necessary to restart the war.

His strategy at this stage was so bold as to defy common sense. He would allow God and history to decide the righteousness of his cause. In other words, he would simply repeat the campaign of Edward III that had culminated in the first of the great English victories, at Crécy in 1346. He would land in Normandy and from there lead a great ‘chevauchée’ in arms across northern France in the direction of Calais, trusting that this would provoke the French king to a full-scale confrontation in which, as at Crécy, God would once again prove himself an Englishman. Like all the greatest generals, Henry not only had a bold plan, but the good fortune to unfold that plan more or less exactly as proposed. Landing at Harfleur on 14 August 1415, late in the campaigning season, within six weeks Henry had used his cannon to pound the town into surrender. Contrary to various retellings of the story, he allowed no massacre of the local population. On the contrary, having hoisted the royal standard and the banner of St George, the red cross symbolizing his crusading intentions, he ordered all women and children rounded up and sent under conduct to the French garrison at nearby Lillebonne. There they were indeed raped, but by their fellow Frenchmen, not by Henry’s soldiers. Harfleur itself was to be turned into a base for future operations, and to this end its records were systematically burned in the public square, so that no one might know who had owned what. The history of Normandy itself was to be rewritten by fire. The parallels here to the Peasants’ Revolt and the deliberate burning of manorial records are obvious and worth pondering.