Chapter XXXV: The Reign of Henry V (3)

From Montereau the united forces of England and France proceeded to Villeneuve-le-Roy, and thence to Mélun, which resisted all their efforts for four months. The Dauphin had escaped into Languedoc, where he joined the young Count Armagnac, who had a strong party there. But Barbazan, the governor of Mélun, was one of the men suspected of being engaged in the murder of the Duke of Burgundy, and the present duke was eager to secure him and other of his accomplices. Henry, therefore, excepted in the terms of capitulation all such as were participators in the guilt of that deed; but, on surrender, he interceded for Barbazan, and saved his life.

During this obstinate siege, which continued till the 18th of November, the court resided at Corbeil, where the poor old King of France was accustomed to have his melancholy soothed by the fine military band of his English son-in-law--the first expressly mentioned in history. The siege over, the two courts and all their attendants returned in a species of triumph to Paris. Henry and his father-in-law went first, as a matter of precaution, and made their entry into the city accompanied by a strong body of troops. The place was in a state of absolute starvation--to such a condition had the protracted civil war and the many massacres and riots which had taken place within and around its walls reduced it. Children were running through the streets in the agonies of famine, and old and young were actually perishing on the pavement. Yet, amid all its horrors and miseries, this strange capital put on an air of high rejoicing. The streets and houses were hung with tapestry and gay carpets, and if there was little to eat, the conduits were made to run with wine. The entrance of the two kings side by side was something like that of Saul and David into Jerusalem. The acclamations of the multitude were chiefly directed towards the hero of Agincourt. At the sight of him the people seemed to think themselves almost in possession of the wealth and the fat beeves of England. The principal citizens appeared wearing the red cross, the badge of the English; and the clergy in solemn procession chanted, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." The next day the two queens made their entry amid similar pageants and acclamations.

Charles summoned the three estates of the kingdom, and explained to them in a long speech the reasons which had induced him to make "a final and perpetual peace with his dear son, the King of England." The assembly gave its unanimous approbation to the treaty, and after that the Duke of Burgundy, apparelled in deep mourning, appeared before them, and demanded justice on the assassins of his father. The king pronounced judgment against them, as guilty of high treason, and they were proclaimed incapable of holding any office or property, their vassals, at the same time, being absolved from all their oaths of fealty and obligations of service. The Dauphin was mentioned as "Charles, calling himself Dauphin"; but he was not directly implicated as the author or abettor of the crime.

At this assembly Isabella was also proclaimed regent of France during the absence of Henry, who now proceeded to England, there to introduce his queen to his subjects and to see her crowned. The whole of this journey and the coronation was like the ovation of an ancient conqueror. After spending their Christmas at Paris, Henry and his young queen set out at the head of 6,000 men, commanded by the Duke of Bedford. They were received with great festivity at the different towns on their way; and on the 1st of February they left Calais, and landed at Dover, where, according to Monstrelet, "Catherine was received as if she had been an angel of God." The whole reception of the young conqueror and his beautiful bride was of the most enthusiastic kind. They proceeded first to Eltham, and thence, after due rest, to London, where Catherine was crowned with high state, on the 24th of February, 1421.

After the coronation, the royal pair made a progress northward as far as the shrine of St. John of Beverley. But here Henry's gay progress was cut short by the disastrous news of the defeat of his troops in France at the battle of Beaugé. Henry had left his brother, the Duke of Clarence, in command of his forces in Normandy, and Clarence, intending to strike a blow at the power of the Dauphin in Anjou, marched into that country, and fell in, not only with the Armagnacs, but with a body of 6,000 or 7,000 auxiliary Scots, near the town of Beaugé. These Scots had been engaged by the Armagnac party to serve against the English as a fitting counterpart. They were commanded by the Earl of Buchan, second son of the Duke of Albany, the Regent of Scotland. He had under him the Earl of Wigton, Lord Stuart of Darnley, Sir John Swinton, and other brave officers. The Duke of Clarence, deceived by the false report of some prisoners, hastened to surprise what he regarded as an inconsiderable body of troops. In his rash haste, and in opposition to the earnest advice of his officers, he left behind him his archers, and thus gave another convincing proof that in that force, and not in the men-at-arms, lay the secret of the English victories. He was assured that the Scots were keeping very indifferent watch and discipline, and made sure of securing an easy conquest. Having forced the passage of a bridge, Clarence was dashing on at the head of his cavalry, distinguished by a magnificent suit of armour, and a coronet of gold set with jewels, when he was met by the Scottish knights in full charge. Sir John Swinton spurred his horse right upon the duke, and bore him from his saddle with his lance, and the Earl of Buchan, as he fell, dashed out his brains with his battle-axe. The archers, however, came up in time to prevent the Scots from carrying off the body, and they speedily cleared the field with their clothyard shafts. In this encounter the English lost about 1,200 men, and had 300 taken prisoners; the Scots and French lost together about 1,000 men. The moral effect of this battle was immense. Though the victory actually remained with the English, yet the impression which the Scots made before the arrival of the archers, and their having killed the royal duke, the brother of the victorious Henry, and the Governor of Normandy, and having taken prisoner the Earls of Somerset, Dorset, and Huntingdon, seemed to point them out as the only soldiers in the world capable of contending with the English. Pope Martin V., when this news reached him, exclaimed, "Ha! the Scots are the only antidote to the English!" The joy of the Dauphin's party at this first gleam of success for many years over the dreaded islanders, was ecstatic. He created the Earl of Buchan Constable of France, the highest office of the kingdom, and Count of Aubigny.

The fame of this exploit on the field of Beaugé, and of the rewards showered in consequence on their countrymen, roused the martial Scots, and they poured over in large numbers into France. The spell of England's invincibility seemed for a moment broken, and enemies began to start up in various quarters. Jacques de Harcourt issued from his castle of Crotoy, in Picardy, and harassed the English both at sea and on shore. Poitou de Saintrailles and Vignolles, called La Hire, also infested Picardy. The fickle Parisians, who so lately shouted and carolled on the entrance of Henry into their city, now openly expressed their discontent, and proceeded to such lengths, that the English commander there, the Duke of Exeter, was compelled to drive them from the streets with his inimitable archers. The Dauphin, taking courage from all these circumstances, began to advance from the south towards the capital.

Henry, greatly chagrined at these events--calculated, if not stopped, to add infinitely to the difficulties in the path of his ambition--lost no time in preparing to reach the scene of action. He ordered troops to assemble with all celerity at Dover. He called together Parliament and Convocation, both of which met his views with the greatest alacrity. Parliament ratified at once the treaty of Troyes, and authorised his council to raise loans on its own security. The clergy granted him a tenth. To take a signal vengeance on the Scots, whose valour and the rashness of Clarence had thus broken in on his triumphs and enjoyments at home, he called on the young King of Scots to fulfil his engagement to serve in France under his banners; the condition being his return to Scotland three months after the termination of the campaign. Henry deemed that by this measure he should not only put Scot against Scot, but should, by having the Scottish king with him, deter any of his subjects from taking arms on the other side, and thus actually fighting against their own monarch. In this hope he was disappointed; but as the Scots had entered the French service without any declaration of war made by Scotland against England, the presence of the Scottish king on his side furnished him with the plea of treating every Scot who did battle on the other side as a traitor; and he sullied his fair fame when he came into the field by hanging every such Scot as fell into his hands.

(_From a photograph by R. Tudor Williams, Monmouth._)]

Henry saw there collected under his banner a gallant army of 4,000 men-at-arms and 24,000 archers. With these he landed at Calais on the 12th of June, sent on 1,200 men-at-arms by forced marches to Paris, to strengthen the garrison of the Duke of Exeter, and followed himself at more leisure. At Montreuil he met the Duke of Burgundy, and arranged the plans of action. Burgundy, in consequence, marched into Picardy, attacked and defeated the Dauphinites, and took Saintrailles and others of their bravest leaders prisoners. This revived the spirit of the royalists, and they speedily reduced various other places in the north-west.

Henry left the army under command of the Earl of Dorset, and hastening to Paris, paid a hasty visit to his father-in-law at the Bois de Vincennes. He then joined the army and advanced against Chartres, which was besieged by the Dauphin. The siege of Chartres was raised at Henry's approach, Beaugency was next taken, and the Dauphin retreated beyond the Loire. In the meantime the King of Scots, to whom Henry had assigned the siege of Dreux, prosecuted his mission with equal zeal and talent, and brought that strong place to capitulate on the 30th of August.

The whole of France, from the north to Paris, and from Paris to the Loire, was almost entirely in the hands of the English and their allies the Burgundians. The Dauphin, unable to stand a moment before the superior genius and troops of Henry, fell back successively from post to post, till he took refuge in the well-fortified city of Bourges. The troops of Henry had suffered considerably by their rapid marches and from scarcity of provisions. Henry, therefore, abandoned the pursuit of the Dauphin for a while; the country, from its past calamities, still lying a desert, and the miserable people perishing of hunger. He sought out sufficiently good quarters for his army, and left them to refresh themselves while he paid a short visit to Paris. He was very soon, however, in the field again, and by the 6th of October had sat down before the city of Meaux on the Marne. He was induced to undertake this siege from the earnest solicitations of the people of Paris. They represented that it was the stronghold of one of the most ferocious monsters who in those fearful times spread horror through afflicted France. This was an old companion of the late Count of Armagnac, called the Bastard of Vaurus, who had become so infuriated by the murder of his master, that the whole of mankind hardly seemed sufficient to appease, by death and suffering, his revenge. It cost Henry ten weeks to carry the town; and then the monster of Vaurus retired with his garrison to the market-place, which defied all the efforts of the English and their allies. The siege was carried on with sanguinary fury; no quarter was given on either side. On the 10th of May, 1422, the market-place was compelled to surrender from absolute famine; though the Dauphin had despatched the Sieur d'Affemont to endeavour to throw supplies into this fortress. Affemont was taken prisoner, and the place fell. The Bastard of Vaurus was beheaded, his body hung up on his own oak, and his banner, surmounted with his head, was attached to its highest bough. Three of his chief companions, who had vied with him in violence and ferocity, were executed with him; and a number of persons, suspected of being accessory to the death of the Duke of Burgundy, were marched to Paris to take their trials.

Henry had spent seven months in these operations. They had cost him a great number of his brave soldiers, and some of his most tried officers--amongst them the Earl of Worcester and Lord Clifford, who fell before the walls of Meaux. Sickness swept away many others; but the advantages of the reduction of Meaux were as distinguished as the cost; for it laid all the north of France as far as the Loire, with the exception of Maine, Anjou, and a few castles in Picardy, under his dominion. Whilst he lay before Meaux, however, he received the joyful intelligence of the safe delivery of his queen of a son, who had received his own name; the Duke of Bedford, the Bishop of Winchester, and Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault and Holland--who proved the cause of many misfortunes to the infant prince--being sponsors at his baptism.

One thing, however, troubled his joy on this auspicious event. Henry had probably studied the so-called science of astrology at Oxford, for it was part of the mass of rubbish regarded as real knowledge at that time. On leaving England, therefore, he strictly enjoined Catherine not to lie in at Windsor, for he had ascertained that the planets cast forward a lowering shadow upon Windsor, in the week when she might expect her confinement. From waywardness, or some other cause, Catherine specially chose as the place of her accouchement the forbidden spot--a conduct which she lived bitterly to rue. On the news being brought to Henry at Meaux, he eagerly demanded where the boy was born, and on being told it was at Windsor, he appeared greatly struck and chagrined, and repeated to his chamberlain, Lord Fitzhugh, the following lines:--

"I, Henry, born at Monmouth,
Shall small time reign and much get;
But Henry of Windsor shall long reign, and lose all.
But as God wills, so be it."

It is probable that these were sentiments which the king expressed, and that they owe their sibylline form to some chronicler or astrologer of the time. It is certain that Speed, Stowe, Fabyan and Holinshed concur in saying that the king "prophesied the calamities of Henry VI." The boy was born on the 6th of December, 1421. On hearing of the fall of Meaux, Catherine left her infant to the care of its uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and hastened to join Henry in France. She was escorted by the Duke of Bedford and 20,000 fresh troops, to enable Henry to complete the conquest of her brother and his unhappy country. She landed at Harfleur on the 21st of May, where she was received with great state and rejoicing by numbers of noblemen and gentlemen, who accompanied her on her route to Paris by Rouen to the Bois de Vincennes, where her father's court resided. Henry set out for Meaux to meet her there, and thence the two courts proceeded together to Paris to spend the festival of Whitsuntide.

But in the midst of these gay though unsatisfactory rejoicings there came a pressing message from the Duke of Burgundy to Henry, entreating him to hasten to his assistance against the Dauphin. Those sturdy Scots who had made such havoc amongst Henry's troops at Beaugé, were still in the country; and the Dauphin, collecting 20,000 men in the south, had put them under the command of the Earl of Buchan, the leader of those troops. They had crossed the Loire, taken La Charité, and proceeded to invest Cosne. At Cosne the Dauphin joined Buchan; and the Duke of Burgundy, to whom these towns belonged, seeing that his hereditary duchy of Burgundy would next be menaced, was most urgent in his appeal to Henry to fly to his assistance.

Henry, in the midst of his glory and his good fortune, had for some time felt the approaches of an illness that no exercise in the field or festivities in the city enabled him to shake off. In vain he resisted the insidious disease. It seized relentlessly on his constitution, and defied all the science of his physicians. At the call of Burgundy, however, he roused himself, and set out from Paris at the end of July. Cosne had agreed to surrender if not relieved by the 16th of August, and Henry was impatient to come up in time. But a greater victor than himself was now come out against him. Death had laid his hand upon him; and he had only reached Senlis, about twenty-eight miles from Paris, when he was seized with such debility that he was obliged to be carried thence to Corbeil in a horse-litter. There, spite of his determined attempt to go on, his malady assumed such feverish and alarming symptoms that he was compelled to give up, and surrender the command of the army to the Duke of Bedford. He had left the queen at Senlis, but she was now returned to the Bois de Vincennes, and thither he caused himself to be conveyed by water.

In the castle of Vincennes, which had witnessed many a strange passage in the history of France and her sovereigns, the great conqueror now lay helpless and hopeless of life, tended by Catherine and her mother. His very name had once more scared the Dauphin from the field. No sooner did he hear that Henry was on the way, than he hastily abandoned the siege of Cosne, recrossed the Loire, and threw himself again into Bourges. The Duke of Bedford, who found no enemy in the field, was preparing to cross the Loire in pursuit of him, when he was recalled to the dying bed of his royal brother.

If there ever was a combination of circumstances to make a death-bed hard, and cause the heart to cling tenaciously to life, they were those which surrounded Henry of Monmouth. But never, in the most trying hour of his existence, not even when he contemplated the vast hosts hemming him in on the eve of the great fight of Agincourt, did he display such unbroken firmness. For himself he expressed no anxiety and no regrets; his only solicitude was for his son and successor, still only nine months old. He called to his bedside his brother the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Warwick, and others of his lords, and to them he gave the most solemn injunctions to be faithful guardians of their infant sovereign. He expressed no remorse for the blood which he had shed in his wars, unquestionably believing all that he had so often asserted, that he was the chosen instrument of Providence for the chastisement and renovation of France.

To the Duke of Bedford he said, "Comfort my dear wife--the most afflicted creature living." He most earnestly recommended the Duke and all his commanders to cultivate the friendship of the Duke of Burgundy; never to make peace with Charles, who "called himself Dauphin," except on condition of his total renunciation of the crown; never to release the Duke of Orleans or any of the French princes of the blood taken at Agincourt; nor in any way to yield the claims of his son on France. He appointed his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, protector in England during his son's minority, and his brother the Duke of Bedford regent in France, who should avail himself on all occasions of the counsel of the Duke of Burgundy. Being assured by his physicians that he had not more than two hours to live, he then sent for his spiritual counsellors; and while they were chanting the seven penitential psalms he stopped them at the verse, "Build thou the walls of Jerusalem," and assured them that when he had completed the settlement of France he had always intended to undertake a crusade. This was precisely what his father had done on his death-bed; and this appeared still a favourite idea of the European princes. Having thus systematically concluded all his affairs, temporal and spiritual, he calmly died on the last day of August, 1422, amid the sobs and deep grief of all around him. The contemporary writer, Titus Livius of Friuli, who had seen him, thus describes his person:--"In stature he was a little above the middle size; his countenance was beautiful, his neck long, his body slender, and his limbs most elegantly formed. He was very strong; and so swift, that, with two companions, without either dogs or missive weapons, he caught a doe, one of the fleetest animals. He was a lover of music, and excelled in all martial and manly exercises." He was buried in Westminster Abbey.