Agincourt

From Harfleur, with barely a glance at Rouen, the ducal capital to the south, Henry marched his army, by now already depleted by the effects of dysentery, across country in the direction of Calais. There was no need for this march, other than to re-enact the Crécy campaign, and to provoke a response. The army might just as easily have returned to England from Harfleur as from Calais. Throughout September and October, ships arrived at Harfleur to disembark the cannon used in Henry’s siege. Nor was pillage a motive: the ordinances that Henry laid down for his army strictly prohibited any looting save for food. Provocation was clearly the chief intention. It succeeded. A fortnight’s march by more than 10,000 men, hurried along to begin with at the rate of nearly twenty miles a day, forced by the French presence on the north bank of the Somme to march inland a full twenty miles to the north-east of Paris before a crossing of the Somme could be effected, most of their nights spent camping in the open regardless of the weather, brought Henry and his men on 24 October near to the small hamlet of Agincourt, only a day or two’s march from Calais itself. Here, they encountered the French army commanded by the twenty-one-year-old Duke of Orléans. Scenting a defeated enemy, and just as keen to wipe clean past humiliations as the English were keen to reinflict them, the duke determined upon battle.

That night it rained, transforming the recently ploughed fields into a quagmire. Either side of the fields lay woods, filled with English and Welsh archers. Not surprisingly, the French were in no hurry to attack. A large part of the morning was spent in parleys and reconnaissance. Growing impatient with the delay, and defying all of the tactics by which English armies had previously triumphed against the French, at around ten in the morning Henry ordered his army go on the offensive. The eight thousand or so English men-at-arms were outnumbered by the French, by quite what proportion has never been agreed, probably more like two-to-one than the six-to-one or even thirty-to-one that various of the chroniclers allege. Urging his troops forward through the sticking mud, Henry nonetheless ensured that his archers came within range of the French cavalry before the French themselves had made preparations for defence let alone for a charge. The outcome was panic, as the French vanguard was forced back into a packed melée of horses and men which itself then came under assault from English archery.

This was far from the battle portrayed by Shakespeare or Laurence Olivier: no French cavalry charge, no sudden unleashing of thousands of bowstrings, merely a grim half-run, half-stumble by men in armour from one pile of corpses to the next. The Duke of Suffolk, who had only succeeded to his titles on the death of his father a few weeks earlier, was killed in the fighting, as was the Duke of York, the King’s cousin. Terrified by what might be waiting for them over the next few clods of earth, the English waded up the field, pole-axing Frenchman after Frenchman as they went. There was little thought of prisoners or ransoms. At around 1pm, during a lull in the slaughter, just as the English began to consider the possibility of ransoming survivors, a rumour went round that the French planned to counterattack. The King ordered the killing of whatever prisoners remained. The rumour was false. By modern historians, who most definitely were not there, the King’s order has been branded a war crime. In reality, like Richard I at Acre, Henry V had little alternative but to think of the consequences should he face a hostile and regrouped army with large numbers of his own men guarding prisoners rather than free to fight. The battle was bloody enough on both sides, without our needing to view it through a prism of twentieth-century correctitude. By the same token, attempts entirely to exonerate Henry, by suggesting that the massacred prisoners numbered only a few hundred rather than the thousands claimed by his critics, are equally futile. All told, the battle lasted between two and three hours. As soon it was over, the rain came down once more.

Agincourt concludes the great trio of English victories in the Hundred Years War, ranking with Crécy and Poitiers as proof that it was the English who won the battles, even though it was the French who eventually won the war. In this stark paradox lies a fundamental truth. No matter how many times the French were defeated in battle, the war itself was not to be decided by a few brief hours of slaughter. At Agincourt, Henry V proved that his cause was just and that God was on his side. His victory was greeted with general celebration in England. By Parliament he was accorded the unprecedented honour of a lifetime grant of the customs on wool. Bishop Henry Beaufort, his cousin, proclaimed the invincibility of the English nation (unconsciously echoing claims that had been made earlier about the Normans after Hastings), comparing Henry to David and the great heroes of the Biblical Old Testament. In reality, in France, little else had changed. Normandy, save for Harfleur, was still in French hands. None of the demands made in 1414 had been met.