The Rest Is History - 487. Hundred Years' War: Henry V’s Invasion of France (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Once more, we'll close the wall up with our English dead […] And upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and St. George!” Such was Henry V’s call to arms at the siege of Harfleur, as written by Shakespeare. The son of the Usurper King, Henry V has decided to take up the English claim to the French throne, thereby putting an end to the truce that had marked a pause in the Hundred Years’ War. And so, in the late summer of 1415, Henry has decided to lay siege to the massive port of Harfleur, in Normandy, a renowned nest of state-sponsored pirates. The English king has waited a long time for this moment, and the odds may never again be so favourable to him:  a civil war looms in France, as the formidable Burgundians, led by John the Fearless, jostle for power with their sworn enemies, the Armagnacs. The powerless French king, Charles VI, and his son, the Dauphin, can do nothing but watch the infighting unfold… Join Tom and Dominic in the first part of their return to the story of the Hundred Year’s War, as Henry V takes up a decades-old claim to the French throne… _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in New York, San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Boston. *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger, stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game's afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and St. George. Brilliant, Dominic. Yeah.

Isn't that basically the whole reason you've done the podcast is so that you can have the chance to read that speech? I've never done that speech before. It's a very moving moment. Well, you did it very well. Very stirring. So that is, of course, from Shakespeare's Henry V, the supreme epic of English martial achievement.

And that is Henry, the hero king's call to arms at the siege of Harfleur. And those lines, God for Harry England and St. George, that's the kind of thing that you see in tabloid newspaper sports sections when England are about to play the Germans. And our boys have been kicking over tables in peaceful French squares. Exactly. I mean, that's one of those Shakespearean lines that, you know, nothing of Shakespeare. You've never seen a single Shakespeare play, but it's entered the folk memory and the national

imagination, hasn't it? Even at the most kind of demotic level. Yeah, absolutely. And the setting is the late summer of 1415 and the English under Henry are laying siege to Harfleur, which is a port on the Seine Estuary in Normandy. And Henry, by this point, has been king for a couple of years. And he's basically a bit bored with just being king of England. So he decides that he'd like to be king of France as well and launches an invasion. But I mean, he doesn't just decide, Tom. He

actually is the king of France. He has a perfectly legitimate claim. He does, of course, which is one that his great-grandfather, Edward III, had been prosecuting as well. And people who've listened to the four episodes we did on the Hundred Years' War, this is basically the Hundred Years' War Part 2. And it's the Hundred Years' War because Henry V decides that he's going to go and attack France, because otherwise it would be, you know, the Forty Years' War or the Sixty Years' War or something. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive. Yeah. And I guess that the focus of the previous two episodes for us as English podcasters

was the two great victories of Crecy and Poitiers. But of course, the great victory that Henry V wins is probably the most famous of the lot, the Battle of Agincourt. Oh, by far. By far. And in part, it's because it's an even more startling victory. But in part, it is also, I think, wouldn't you say, because of Shakespeare, because it's immortalised in this extraordinary play. And his reputation as England's greatest warrior king is completely burnished and gilded by Shakespeare.

It's impossible to say now, isn't it? Because it's so embedded in the national imagination. Henry V is one of the two or three best known monarchs of England. So it's impossible to imagine a world in which he wasn't because we're so used to it. So how much Shakespeare has to do with that? I mean, I think you're probably right, a lot. And there have been fantastic Shakespearean performances. Kenneth Branagh as Henry V.

Olivier, of course. I mean, Olivier in the 1940s. Dominic, while I was preparing the notes for this, if ever my enthusiasm flagged, I would listen to Kenneth Branagh do the We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers speech on the eve before Agincourt, and it would always revitalise me.

So this is what I think sets the story of Henry V apart from the story about Edward III. Edward III, an incredibly impressive king, fights the Hundred Years' War, wins lots of battles, all of this. But Henry V, the idea of the underdog triumph against the odds, the idea of the band of brothers, we few, we happy few. I mean, that obviously plays a part. I mean, Nelson was obsessed with this and the idea of the band of brothers. And then in the Second World War, the idea of the few, once again, in the Battle of Britain, that gives it attraction that no other medieval battle has, maybe not even Hastings. Although, Dominic, I mean, of course, the victories won by Edward III and the Black Prince

are also very much against the odds and reflect the fact that England compared to France is a relatively minor power. I mean, it's astonishing that Edward III went to war with France. And it's kind of astonishing that Henry V is going to war with France. I mean, it's a big ask, but for reasons that we will come to in the course of this episode, it's perhaps not as big an ask as it might have been in the previous century. So let's give it a bit of context. So we didn't mention France at all when we were talking about Henry IV. So the usurper king, Battle of Shrewsbury, all that stuff we did last week. And partly that's because there has been a kind of a truce in the Hundred Years' War. Yeah, it's a truce, but it's a kind of cold war as well. Right, because the English are still making a claim, aren't they? So the English kings are still, you know, nominally, they call themselves King of France.

And conversely, the French have not accepted the Lancastrians as the rightful kings of England. They regard Henry IV as Henry of Lancaster rather than King Henry. Yeah, so that's how they always address him. And I think that that is partly out of genuine shock that Henry has toppled Richard. The English now have a reputation among the French as people who kill their kings, and this is seen as a terrible thing. But of course, it's also a way of denying Henry the kind of legitimacy that he might then capitalize on to start pressing his claim to the throne of France. And throughout his reign, the French are always in the background. So we compared

it to the Cold War. The role that they are playing is like the Soviet Union sending military advisors to Vietnam or whatever in the more recent Cold War. So in Scotland, Hotspur's great victory at Humbleton Hill among the captives is a French captain. And in Wales, where Owen Glyndwr has been leading this incredible rebellion against English rule, the French recognise him as what he claims to be the Prince of Wales in 1404. And the next year, they actually send a military expedition to Wales. It lands at Milford Haven. And this kind of Franco-Welsh force crosses into England, which is almost as far as Worcester. So on the British mainland, France is causing trouble. And also in English waters, they're causing trouble.

Yeah, the English don't have control of the seas, do they? The French have control. No, they've basically lost it. And Huffler is playing a key role in this. It's a kind of great nest of pirates, state-sponsored. And it's not just that they're preying on English shipping, but of course that they can launch raids on the southern English coast. So relations aren't great.

However, the previous two episodes we did on Henry IV, we were talking about how England really has been in a bit of a mess, you know, under Richard II and then under Henry IV. But it's fair to say, and this of course is always a comfort to the English, France, if anything, is in an even bigger mess. The French king, unlike Henry, Henry IV, and of course Henry V as his son, he doesn't have a crisis of legitimacy, but I think it would be fair to say he's not 100% on top of his game. And in fact, maybe of all the French kings, he is the man who could best do with a subscription to Better Help.

Better Help. I was thinking exactly that. Yeah. His mental health is very, very frail. He is in a terrible mess, isn't he? So Charles VI, he'd become king in 1380 and he was king for six centuries or something. Yeah, when he was 12. And we talked in the French Revolution, didn't we, about how French kings tend to be young. Yeah. But he's always having these breakdowns, isn't he? And the first one I read, 1392, it's because he's approached by a leper in a wood and that causes him to have a nervous breakdown. Extraordinary. He's on a military expedition, I think going off to Brittany and it's very, very hot. He's getting, you know, increasingly stressed and this leper looms out, grabs the bridle of his horse and

cries out, you are betrayed. And the king has this nervous breakdown and he takes to bed for several weeks. And then it seems that he's recovered from this. And then the next year, something even worse happens, which we actually discussed in our episode on the worst parties in history. And it's called by the French, the Balle des Ardents, the Ball of the Burning Men. And people may remember that it's a big party. The king and five of his lords decide that they will dress up as wild men of the woods and they coat themselves in tar and then stick branches and leaves onto themselves. And obviously they're aware that this is a little bit dangerous. So the king says,

whatever you do, you know, turn out all the candles. You can't have the candles. And then his younger brother, Louis, the Duke of Orléans comes in, says, oh, what are those costumes? He's got a torch, puts the torch up to look at them and he just goes, whoosh. And, you know, four of them burn to death and only the king and one other lord whose robes of court fire survive. Hot, hot, hot. Yeah. So that's that's not helpful to his mental stability at all. And by 1395, so two years on, he's claiming that he's St. George. He then starts worrying that he's made of glass. I love that. He worries that he's made of glass. So we talked

about that, I think, also with Bartholomew, when we talked about Burgundy. I mean, he's very anxious, isn't he? I mean, he basically wants to be literally wrapped in cotton wool. Yeah. Because if you're made of glass, anything could shatter you. And obviously, I mean, this isn't an ideal condition if you're the king of medieval France, being menaced by England and a host of other enemies, but nobody thinks to depose him. So he is called Charles the Mad, but he's also called Charles the Beloved. And actually when he's lucid, he's perfectly competent. But the problem is as the years go by, the periods of lucidity become fewer and fewer and shorter and shorter. And so the fact that the king is basically out of action makes faction fighting kind of inevitable because that's always what

happens. Yes. So there are two great factions, aren't there? Each of them is led by a charismatic and very formidable character. Yeah. Both of whom are members of the royal family. So let's start with the first one. The first one is Louis, the Duke of Orléans. Now, he has slightly got a bit of a tarnished reputation because he's the fellow with the torch at the Balle des Ardents, the Ball of the Burning Men. So he's a cad, isn't he?

Or is he a bounder? Hard to tell the difference. I think he's more of a cad. So he's a massive womaniser. So Thomas Walsingham, the monk at St. Albans, who we've been drawing on a lot for these episodes, describes him as a man who is always taking his pleasure with whores, harlots and incest. Okay. And the charge of incest relates to the fact that he's said to have had an affair with the queen.

So his sister. He's French. So I mean, this comes with the territory, doesn't it? Yeah. One may think that. And he'd been a very good friend of um henry of lancaster before henry became king and while he was in exile and then of course henry goes off and deposes richard ii and orléans feels incredibly insulted by this he feels that henry has stabbed him in the back that he's betrayed him well it's not all about him. As far as he's concerned, it is about him because he's getting criticised in France for the role that he's supposed to have played in the deposition of Richard II. So in a sense, the kind of the vigour of his hostility to Henry IV is an attempt to try

and demonstrate the fact that he wasn't complicit in Henry's coup. Right. So Thomas, a little bit like if you launched a coup and I was embarrassed that you'd done this, I might then try to distance myself from you, but then kind of massively overcompensated and challenged you to a duel. Because this is what Louis of Orléans does, isn't he? Literally. Yeah. He writes to Henry and says, let's settle this man to man. You've let me down here. Yeah. And Henry says, no, not having any of it. But I think that exchange reflects Louis' character. He's very hot headed.

He's very patriotic. He's a man who enjoys holding a grudge and nursing it. I like him. But he's also kind of very subtle and sophisticated. So a slight Captain Bentine quality to him perhaps. Sounds great. With the additional bonus of setting fire to people dressed in pitch. Yeah, and also the harlots and the incest, which Captain Bentine was a stranger to.

Yes, let's put that on the record. So very much not the kind of person who would tolerate a rival, but unfortunately he does have a rival in the French court, and this is in the form of John the Fearless. And you mentioned Bart Van Loo, who did one of our iconic early episodes, didn't he, on the Dukes of Burgundy. And John the Fearless is the son of the first great Duke of Burgundy, who was Philip the Bold, who was the youngest son of Charles V. So Philip the Bold was the uncle of Charles VI. So John the Fearless is Charles VI's cousin. And John the Fearless rules this enormous agglomeration of territories of all the French peers. He's the guy who has the largest land and property. So it includes not just Burgundy, but also the County of Flanders. And over the course of his father's life and his own life, John the Fearless kind of basically,

I mean, he comes to rule pretty much the whole of the Low Countries. And of course, that then embroils him in English politics because the Low Countries are crucial to the wool trade. So the Dukes of Burgundy are always kind of midway, a bit between France and England. And this is an important part of the story. So to survey the scene, we've got Charles VI, who thinks he's made of glass and is bonkers.

And then we've got the two power brokers who are fighting for control in France. Louis of Orléans, incest, burning torches and grudges. John the Fearless, literally fearless, rules Burgundy and the Le Contre. And for those two guys, the important thing is who's going to control the heir to the throne.

The Dauphin. Because do they assume that the mad king is not long for this world? I think it's the fact that with the king out of action and the Dauphin is quite young, he's not even a teenager at this point. If you can get him under his thumb, then basically you have the rule of France. And the Dauphin is not a hugely impressive figure. So he will grow up to become an absolutely classic teenager, very kind of sulky, moody, getting up at midday, a bit fat, to be honest. People are always commenting on this.

Tom, you're fat shamed of the Dauphin. It's not me. I'm merely quoting his contemporaries. And so certainly at this age, he's quite a cipher as well. And so as a result, the Orleanists and the Burgundians are just kind of endlessly kidnapping the Dauphin and it's all quite bewildering. They really need to kind of keep track of all the ins and outs of it. But it's John the Fearless who essentially emerges triumphant from this tit for the tat Dauphin kidnapping because he gets himself appointed guardian of the Dauphin while the king is off being mad. And Orléans, the Duke of Orléans responds to this in 1407 in a very

decisive way. He has a clean out of the royal council and almost all the Burgundian sympathisers are kicked off. And then he uses the royal treasury to buy himself the Duchy of Luxembourg, which basically straddles the two territories that the Duke of Burgundy rules. So in the low countries and in Burgundy proper. And this is infuriating to John the Fearless, and they're gearing up to have another crack at each other. And Charles VI comes out of his madness, and on the 20th of November, 1407, he summons the two Dukes into his presence, and he presides over a very solemn reconciliation. And it ends with him saying, now praise be God, you have sworn solemn oaths, all is good. And it ends with him saying, now, praise be God. You have sworn solemn oaths. All is good. And then three days later, Orléans is murdered in Paris

by 15 masked assassins as he is mounting his horse. Wow. That's a twist. And the assassins get arrested. And it turns out that the guy in charge of these assassins is a personal servant of John the Fearless. So it's pretty clear who's behind it. And in fact, John the Fearless doesn't deny it. He commissions a professor at the Sorbonne to deliver a public lecture on tyrannicide and how it's justified. And you would think that for the king to have to swallow this as he does is an abject humiliation. And it is. But the reason he does it is that he knows that if he doesn't, then there will be civil war and so the king issues john the fearless with an official pardon in the spring of 1408 hold on or leon he was the king's what relative was he to the king his brother his

younger brother he was his brother so his brother has been murdered by 15 masked men yeah and he gives the bloke who did it a pardon just because he's frightened of him. Yeah. Well, that's weak. Well, because not so much that he's worried about John the Fearless, but that he doesn't want France to collapse into civil war. Right. Okay. And John the Fearless, who is incredibly unscrupulous and very, very good at kind of pushing what he can do just far enough, he realises this. And so by November 1408, he's installed himself in Paris as the big man. 1409, he forces the king to issue him another formal pardon in Chartres

Cathedral. And also there in Chartres on that day is the new Duke of Orléans, who's called Charles, who at this point is only 15 years old. And when John the Fearless is given this pardon, it's said that he approaches the young son of the murdered Duke of Orléans, Charles, the new Duke of Orléans, who's only 15 years at this time. So he's had a very, very kind of brutal baptism into being the Duke of Orléans. And he approaches him and he's got tears streaming down his face and he says, I'm sorry, please forgive me. So sorry, I killed your father. Yeah, you know, but let's kiss and make up, you know, water under the bridge, let's move on.

And he asks for Orléans' forgiveness and Orléans refuses, even though he's only 15. And the king says, no, you got to kiss and make up. So they do. But I think it's pretty clear that Orléans is biding his time, even though it seems that John is now completely triumphant because he's got the king under his thumb.

He's the sole guardian of the Dauphin. He occupies Paris. It all seems brilliant. But the new Duke of Orléans is not taking it lying down. So in 1410, he leaves Paris and he goes to Guienne, which is about 50 miles east of Orléans. He's 16 by now. And he marries a girl called Bon. She's only 11. But that's kind of standard behaviour for this time. Yeah. Bon is the daughter of the Count of Armagnac, who is the Constable of France and very subtle, very skilful kind of little finger from Game of Thrones type character.

A shrewd operator. And so Armagnac has invited, as well as the young Duke of Orléans, he's invited various other Dukes, various other counts to attend the wedding because it's an ideal opportunity for them all to sign up to a kind of anti-Burgundian alliance. And there is one other figure, as well as Orléans, the young Duke of Orléans and Armagnac, And this is the Count of Alençon, who is a great landholder in Normandy. And he is, I mean, he's an absolute bruiser. He's very bold. He's very aggressive. He's kind of compared to a raging boar. And it's said of him by a contemporary chronicler that without Alençon, the good and holy cause of Orléans could not have been sustained. So with

this body of very heavyweight allies now behind him, Orléans could not have been sustained. So with this body of very heavyweight allies now behind him, Orléans starts preparing for revenge. And Burgundy is warned about this, so he starts recruiting troops. And it's said that there are so many soldiers out and about that people in France assume that there's an English invasion coming. So the two sides, Orléans, the young teenager who's lost his father and his wife, and their hangers-on, and all these cronies that went to the wedding, and they're the Armagnacs. Yes, because of the Count of Armagnac. And the other side, you have the Burgundians. But crucially, the Burgundians have under their power the king and the dauphin, so they can paint

the Armagnacs as insurgents, as rebels, basically. Exactly. And this is obviously brilliant for England and for Henry IV, who's been having a rough time of it. But it means that he can kind of fish in troubled waters because both sides are appealing to him for assistance. So what Henry does, he sends two expeditions to France. He sends one in 1411 on the side of Burgundy and against the Armagnacs. And then he sends one in 1412 against the Burgundians and on the side of the Armagnacs. Brilliant. That's excellent diplomacy. Yeah. And basically he's doing that because both sides are, you know, they're offering him enormous bribes. They're offering him all kinds of things. And so he plays them off against each other.

And actually he ends up basically being promised the whole of the Duchy of Aquitaine, which was the lands that were the kind of ancestral fiefdom of the kings of England and which Edward III had aggrandized. He'd been given an enormous tranche and the French had then whittled away. So, you know, this is looking great for Henry IV. And you'd think also that it would be the perfect opportunity for Henry to blood his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, the future Henry V. But interestingly, he doesn't. And this may well reflect the fact that, as we talked about in the previous episode, relations between father and eldest son by this point seem to have become quite troubled. But what Henry does,

he sends two people, both of whom are very close friends of Henry. Both of them are called Thomas, I'm pleased to say. So the first of them, the one who goes in 1411 is the Earl of Arundel, who had served with the Prince of Wales in Wales, one of his closest friends. And the second is the eldest of his three younger brothers, Thomas the Duke of Clarence. And for Clarence, it's very, very annoying because he arrives in France at the head of this great expedition, only to find that the two sides have made up again. So they've signed a compact. And Orléans is incredibly apologetic, says, you know, I'm really sorry, you won't have a chance to go out and sort of loot and stuff. But he gives Clarence a massive payoff. The two men become sworn brothers in arms and Clarence swears a formal oath that he will serve, aid, console and comfort Orléans. And he then goes back to England and he's loaded down with booty.

Even though he hasn't fought a single battle, he hasn't captured a single town. And it's a reminder to the English court of just how many riches are on offer in France. And so when Henry V comes to the throne, he's all the more alert than he would have been anyway to the opportunities on offer. And he can see in the loot that Clarence has brought back that the civil war in France absolutely promises an opportunity to win not just booty, but possibly land as well. Yeah. So it's that classic thing of a great sort of continental power that is riven by internal tension and a kind of offshore, smaller power that sees the opportunity to basically carve out. So it's a little bit kind of Japan and China in the 20th century or something. Well, the problem for France

is that Henry's crowned on the 9th of April, 1413. There's a kind of unseasonal snowstorm and contemporaries are unclear whether this is a good or bad omen. But what is very clear is that the new king is very, very formidable. So he's 26 by this point. He's battle-hardened. He's skilled in all the practicalities of kingship because he's effectively been ruling for long stretches of his father's reign. He's a man of absolutely iron determination, extraordinary capabilities. So in every way, if there is a man who is qualified to exploit the divisions in France, it is the new king of England. Well, that's good to hear. That's very promising. And it bodes well for the second half of this episode, in which we will discover if Henry V is indeed the man to profit from the internal

divisions of France. Come back we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com We are glad that Dauphin is so pleasant with us. His present and your pains we thank you for. When we have matched 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. So that's one of the most famous episodes in Shakespeare's play, Henry V. It's an episode that I remember very well from the Lady Bird book about Henry V that I read as a little boy. Yes, great illustration of it. So Henry V is sent to an embassy to France to basically demand his ancestral rights. And the Dauphin replies to him by sending him this, in the Ladybug book, there's a huge sort of chest full of tennis balls and they're all kind of, they're all bouncing all over the court.

And Henry says in the play, his jest will savour but of shallow wit when thousands weep more than did laugh at it. In other words, basically the Dauphin has said, this is, you know, why don't you play tennis and shut up and forget about interfering with France? And Henry's very offended by this and is like, you won't be laughing when we turn up with our rackets

and we will play such a set that men will, you know, or something like that. I've just invented that. It always makes me think of Obama laughing at Trump. Right. At that, whatever it is, they hold the big thing for journalists yeah the thing with the journalists presidents make terrible jokes and journalists pretend to find them amusing yeah and uh trump glowering and then goes off and kind of does a henry v so i mean the obvious question did it actually happen so anne curry who is as well as being a herald, is also the great doyen of Agincourt's studies.

She's a herald? She's a herald. I think she's the herald of the Earl of Arundel or something. When the Earl of Arundel goes out for dinner or something, does she accompany him in a surcoat, like blowing a trumpet? There's brilliant photographs of her in a kind of herald outfit. Wow. Yeah, so check them out. So she's very sceptical. She says the whole story is easily dismissed. But I'm pleased to say that Christopher Ormond, who's the great biographer of Henry V, he is slightly less sceptical.

And he cites an Englishman who's gone on an embassy to Paris and is told by one of the Frenchmen opposite that they view Henry with utter contempt and his ambitions. And that they're going to send him balls with which to play with and cushions upon which to lie. And the implication is that essentially the king is a baby. This is all ridiculous talk. and that they're going to send him balls with which to play with and cushions upon which to lie. And the implication is that essentially the king is a baby. You know, this is all ridiculous talk. And so Allman says, perhaps this is what kind of gave rise to the story. And also, of course, it reflects the character of the Dauphin. It's the kind of thing that perhaps that he would do.

But what it also does, it absolutely exemplifies the state of Anglo-French relations in the first two years of Henry V's reign, because essentially the story of these years is Henry sending embassies to Paris or to Burgundy to try and negotiate alliances or to extort lands and titles from the French king, and the French refusing to play ball. So among the ambassadors who go is the son of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Chaucer, who is a member of parliament, speaker for three times. And he's going off to Burgundy. Others are going to Paris. And they're demanding, first of all, a daughter of John the Fearless for Henry, then Catherine, the daughter of Charles VI. They want all the lands that Edward III had been promised. And also they'd quite like the Duchy of Normandy, perhaps, and perhaps the throne of France. It's unclear exactly what, but basically they want

lots of things. And also they would like the full ransom that was supposed to have been paid for John, the King of France, who had been captured by the Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers, and which the French had ended up not paying in its entirety. But do you know what? Henry V is the thing about like, oh, you're untried. You're just a toddler. Here are some tennis balls. You do the ludicrous demands. Henry V is not a person to take lightly.

No, exactly. Because as you said, he's 26 years old. He's battle-hardened. He's clearly a very sort of severe, serious, formidable man. It seems to me bonkers that the Dauphin would have provoked him in this way. And you know, Dominic, there are people in France who are keeping abreast of English affairs who do think Henry V is very impressive, and not just as a soldier, but as a man who essentially he seems to avow celibacy until he gets married. And the contrast there with the Dauphin is very great.

Oh, really? He devotes himself full-bloodedly to all his responsibilities as king. Again, huge contrast with the Dauphin. So there are people who actually quite admire him and are nervous about this. And I think also what makes it all the stranger, you know, if the tennis ball thing did happen, is that France in this period, so in the years that follow Henry's coronation, is slipping right back into civil war. So there'd

been that brief compact between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, which had seen the Duke of Clarence return with all his booty, but it doesn't last. And so in the same year that Henry is crowned, 1413, John the Fearless has been busy recruiting a paramilitary force with which to seize control of Paris. And we're recording this in the wake of the series that we did on the French Revolution. And there are some very weird premonitions of the French Revolution in this story. It's almost like a kind of overture. So the people that John the Fearless is siding with are members of the Butcher's Guild in Paris, who are known as the Écocheurs. The Flayers.

The Flayers, yes. Or they're alternatively known as the Cabochiens after their leader, Simon Caboch. And they wear very distinctive white hoods. And it's a bit like the Liberty cap. They basically go around forcing their superiors to wear these caps as a way of kind of humbling them. So they force them on noblemans, they force them on clerics and bishops, and they even force them on the Queen's ladies of honour. And they commission investigators to go around the city, finding out people whose hearts are not fully with them, who are not engaged with this kind of revolution that they're trying to instill. And then the names of those who are not on the side of the cabochier are proclaimed at street corners. So there is a kind of slight 1791 quality to all this, except that they are not targeting the king and there are

opportunities for John the Fearless to exploit them. And that's what he's doing because basically he's using them to intimidate the Dauphin. And at the beginning of May 1413, the Cabochin invade the Dauphin's palace. They've brought in a white hood. They make the Dauphin wear it. And the Cabochin kind of give him a stern lecture, say, you're rubbish. You know, you need to pull your socks up. They bring in clerics who give the poor Dauphin kind of lots of sermons, tell him to pull his socks up. And they also attack and eliminate a lot of the Dauphin's particular allies. So Anne Currie, in her absolutely groundbreaking book on Agincourt, she says that their assaults included the public beheading of the corpse of the Dauphin's Chamberlain, who had allegedly committed suicide in prison by hitting his head repeatedly with a wine jug.

I saw that and I was sceptical. Would that work? If you just hit yourself again and again with a jug? I don't think that would work. No, of course not. It's a deliberate way of saying, you know, we're not admitting to the murder, but basically we will murder you. So he was definitely killed by these white hooded cabochers. Yeah, of course.

Okay. The flayers. This is very Game of Thrones territory here. Yes, it is. Yes, and maybe not coincidentally. I mean, I think all this period is kind of huge influence on the writing of Game of Thrones.

Yeah. And so the poor Dauphin ends up basically a kind of prisoner. The king all this while has been, you know, he's been out with his mental problems. Then he recovers from them. He goes in a state procession to Notre Dame to give thanks. And the Cabochia ambush him and inevitably they've got a white hood and they make the king wear it and the king puts it on. So very bad. And the king and the Dauphin between them think, well, this is terrible. You know, we need to sort this out.

And so they turn to the Armagnacs who are lurking off in Orléans. And most of the Armagnacs are too nervous to intervene because they're afraid of the Cabochins. They're, you know, they're very, very menacing. Oh, really? But there is the Count of Alençon, who you may remember we described as this kind of fearless, bold, boar-like man. A bruiser, you said he was.

A bruiser. And he's not going to be intimidated by a bunch of butchers. So he raises a force, coordinates an attack on Paris. And on the 4th of August, 1413, the Armagnacs break into Paris and they massacre the Cabochins, who prove unable to deal with armed knights who have burst into the city. John the Fearless, all his plans are falling to pieces. He tries to kidnap the king. That's frustrated. He then scarpers. And of course, this is brilliant for the Armagnacs. They've now got Paris. They've got the king, but it's still not brilliant for the

Dauphin because now he's replaced the Burgundians with the Armagnacs and they're still kind of kicking him around. Basically, he wants to be the big man, he wants to be in charge, but it's always either the Burgundians or the Armagnacs. And the Dauphin and the king remain essentially ciphers. And so instead of a return to a secure monarchy, there's a collapse back into civil war. John the Fearless is banished from France as a traitor. The Armagnacs march into Burgundian territories. They attack the town of Soissons, which is a Burgundian town. They storm it and they inflict a brutal, notorious storm on it. The town is wasted. Nuns are raped, all that kind of thing. So while all this is going on, presumably Henry V is in

England and he's watching all this and he must be thinking, as France slips further and further into chaos, this is my opportunity. I mean, this is the prize waiting for the plucking. He does absolutely think that. And so he starts sending renewed embassies to John the Fearless saying, you know, come on, let's have an alliance. Let's go and, you know, attack Paris and the Armagnacs together. But John the Fearless is also a very shrewd political player. And so he uses the threat of an English alliance essentially to kind of force a peace on the Armagnacs. And so they sign yet another compact. And this is very bad news for Henry because suddenly, you know, he no longer has a potential alliance with the Burgundians. And Henry's ambassadors, who are actually in Paris when this Armagnac-Burgundian peace is

announced, realise that the ground has been completely cut from under their feet. They leave Paris empty-handed. They travel back, Dominic, to the Normandy coast and they take ship for England from the port of Harfleur. And they're back by the end of March 1415 with nothing to show for their diplomatic efforts, seemingly humiliated. But Henry, he's not bothered about that, right? Because he has already made his mind up that actually, you know, he'll never get a better opportunity

to carve out more lands, also to improve his reputation. You know, there are all kinds of reasons pushing him in favour of a French war, aren't there? Yeah. And so he's basically decided since the beginning of 1415 that he is going to go to war no matter what happens in Paris. So at the end of January, he dissembled representatives from all the kind of the main ports and harbours of southern England to tell them, I need ships, you know, provide me with ships. He'd start putting out feelers to Hanseatic ports along the coast of Northern Europe. 20th of February, he has sent out summons

to a great council of all the peers of England, which is due to meet on the 15th of April. And now, just before that meeting, his ambassadors come back from Paris, seemingly humiliated. And so he can demonstrate to the English and to the whole of Christendom that he's tried, he's made efforts, and his peace-loving efforts have been rebuffed. So that's why the tennis ball story works. It does. Because the tennis ball story, I mean, it can stand in for him saying, look, I've asked, I've asked nicely, I've pursued the path of diplomacy, and it has failed.

They've been thrown back in my face. I have no alternative now but to take military action. Because the mockery of Henry is the mockery of England. And so everyone in England, and including Parliament crucially, which votes money, can now be expected to rally behind him. So it's an absolutely classic example of Henry's genius, which he demonstrates throughout his life. He can turn seeming rebuffs, seeming setbacks, seeming disasters to his own advantage. And he will do this throughout his forthcoming invasion of France. But I guess it does focus one obvious question that people listening may have been wondering, which is apart from expediency, apart from the opportunity that the civil war in France

offers him, are there other motives he has for going to war? And I think indisputably, he authentically and genuinely believes that God does want him to be king. So it's quote Jonathan Sumption, who's written this absolutely enormous history of the Hundred Years' War in Cursed Kings, his book on this period. Assumption writes, Henry constantly presented his claims against the French as an appeal to God against the wickedness and unworthiness of England's traditional enemy. And Assumption goes on to say, this is not humbug. Henry is a ferociously devout and orthodox king, and he absolutely believes it. He genuinely thinks he has a right to be the king of France. And that goes back to Edward III.

And he thinks this isn't just propaganda. It's not contrivance. It's not an excuse. It's real. I should be the king of France, and God wants me to be the king of France. I think his readiness to invade France shows that he does think that, because effectively for Henry, devout that he is, by invading France, he is putting himself to the test. And if he fails, then it will demonstrate that God is not on his side. If he succeeds,

then it will demonstrate that God is on his side. But Tom, more prosaically, if he invades France, if he gets Parliament to vote in money, he invades France, it goes horribly wrong. He could be killed, he could be taken prisoner, but also it could shatter his legitimacy back at home, right? I mean, listeners won't have forgotten, his father was a usurper. Yeah, absolutely. So in a sense, he's a usurper himself, you could argue, or at least is the beneficiary of a usurpation. And so his legitimacy is more precious and also more fragile than it would be if he were

a different king. Well, I think this is a further dimension because it is often the way of the very devout that they tend to devoutly believe things that they need to believe. And this idea that Henry V, who is the son of a usurper, might be able to consolidate his regime and rally his people behind him is summed up in a phrase that Shakespeare uses in Henry IV, where the dying king is talking to his son and offering him his advice for how he should rule. And he says, busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels. In other words, take the minds of people in England off rebellion against you, off insurrection, and channel those energies into war with France.

And Henry is undoubtedly very, very aware of the fact that he's the son of a usurper. So Henry IV had buried Richard II's body, not in Westminster Abbey in the great tomb that Richard II had prepared for himself. But Henry V has Richard II's body translated to that tomb. And I think that that reflects the fact, again, that Henry V is a great believer in the sanctity of himself as an anointed king. And so he genuinely believes in the sanctity of Richard II as well. So there are all kinds of complicated motives. But I do agree, Henry is laying things on the line because essentially, if he fails, it will not only prove that God is not on his side, but it may well shatter his reign and

the whole legitimacy of the Lancastrian dynasty for good. So the stakes are absolutely enormous. But I think he's relying on God's backing for him, but he's also relying on the fact that France is in chaos and that he himself as king is a seasoned leader and that he is qualified absolutely to lead an invasion. He's only been king for two years. There's only two years, aren't there, between him becoming king and Agincourt? Yeah. Why the urgency? I mean, he's 26. He could be king for another quarter of a century, if not longer. So why does he feel... Of course, France is a bit of a basket case right now.

But do you think that speaks to a deep insecurity that he feels he has to prove himself quickly? I mean, to put it all on the line straight away when you're 26 years old? I think that is part of it. But I think above all, he just feels, you know, he's going to be good at it. He's going to do it. And you will know, because we've discussed this, that I once nominated Henry V as the most overrated king in English history, because I thought that launching an invasion of France, that it was doomed ultimately to failure, that it was a waste of resources, that it was a kind of ultimately an immoral thing to do. Having gone deep into this, I've now slightly changed my mind on that. I still think that it was, you know, it proves to be a terrible waste of money and resources and inflicts devastation on large numbers of people, you know, horrific for France. But I think to blame Henry for doing it is kind of akin to

blaming, I don't know, a lion for eating a zebra. It's just what he's going to do. He is a great king. He's a formidable military operator. He has the opportunity. He thinks God is on his side. Why wait? Let's crack on. Brilliant. Love it. And Henry can be confident that he'll be successful because he can trust not just in his own abilities, but he also, I mean, he's very much on top of all the other advantages he has. So, I mean, just to look at them, he has hugely experienced lieutenants. So he has his three brothers. So he's got Clarence, who's already been on an expedition. He's got his younger brother, Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, who will be going with him on the expedition and being kind of bloodied on this campaign. He's going to leave his middle brother, John, the

Duke of Bedford behind. Very competent, very loyal again. So Henry can be sure that England is secure in his rear. He's got his broader family. So notably Edward, the Duke of York, his cousin, who will be a kind of prominent leader on the campaign that's coming up. He's got his friends. He's got the Earl of Arundel, who led the campaign in 1411. And he's the bloke who's got Anne Currie, the historian as his herald. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. It all interweaves. So Henry's got Arundel and he's got all the rest of the peers. And basically all the peers will be coming with him. Henry's expecting that. But they want to go. I mean, Henry is giving them

what Edward III had given them and which Richard II hadn't, which is an opportunity for loot and glory and basically fun. So they're all lined up behind him. Unlike the French nobles who are all busy attacking each other, the English nobles, they're ready to go. And of course, Henry has, as he well knows, because he ended up with an arrow as a young man sticking in his skull. He has the most lethal killing machine in Europe, massive contingents of longbowmen. And just to remind people of what that means, these are arrows that can be fired with great accuracy, over 200 meters. A trained longbowman can fire kind of like 15 arrows a minute. Henry's taking about 7,000 archers to France. So 7,000 archers, they could fire what kind of over a hundred thousand arrows in a minute.

Wow. Collectively. I mean, that's a devastating firestorm. Henry knows what this is like. He suffered it. He's experienced it. And these archers, some of them are coming from Cheshire. You know, Henry Vaziel of Chester is the Prince of Wales. He knows how good they are. There are archers from Wales as well, also from Lancashire. These are the best in the country and therefore in the whole of Christendom. Yeah.

Speak to anybody from Wales about the Middle Age. If it ever comes up, they will tell you Welsh archers won the Battle of Agincourt. That's what it's all about. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so these conting will tell you Welsh archers won the Battle of Agincourt. That's what it's all about. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so these contingents exclusively consist of archers. Contingents that are coming from elsewhere tend to be mixed in with men at arms. And I think under Edward III, these contingents had been pretty much 50-50.

But under Henry V, the archers tend to outnumber men at arms about three to one. And I think that this reflects Henry's own decision. It's his innovation. And he'd introduced it in Wales. Maybe because he'd had that arrow, he'd been shot. It's kind of intensified for him his sense of just how dangerous this can be, and therefore how lethal. So Anne Currie's stats on this, of the expedition going to France, about 80% are archers, are longbowmen. So really that's a gamble though. That is a gamble.

Because if the enemy close in, those archers, they're defenceless basically against enemy knights or whatever. It is a gamble, but it's a gamble that reflects Henry's years of campaigning in Wales. Right. And also the other thing that, of course, that Henry learnt in Wales is the fact that you need money and you need the supplies that money can then buy. He, again, has lots of experience of this. And so he's got Parliament on board. So Thomas Chaucer, who we mentioned, he'd been three-time Speaker. In November 1414, he'd become Speaker for a record fourth time. He raises a

company. He's so enthusiastic. So he has 12 men at arms, 37 archers. So again, that's that one to three proportion. Sadly, Thomas Chaucer is invalided out before he can leave, but the archers and men at arms go. But in better news, Dick Whittington is on board. Dick Whittington is on board. So he's the mayor of London. He's rallying behind. Lots of loans. So it's all great. And so Henry, as a result, is able to raise certainly the largest force that had been mustered in England since the time of Edward III, maybe 12,000 men. This is a pretty formidable force. And his aim is a lot more than just a kind of cursory raid. His immediate target is Harfleur, that nest of pirates. If he can flush

that out and take it, then that would be brilliant. And maybe he could make it into a second Calais because the English hold Calais as a result of Edward III's wars. And if they can make Harfleur a second Calais, then that would be great. But Harfleur, because it's in Normandy, can also serve him as a launch pad for his kind of more ambitious plan, which is essentially to reclaim the Duchy of Normandy that William the Conqueror and his heirs had held. And he's clearly been preparing for this because when English ambassadors go to Paris, they've suddenly become quite keen on Henry's legal right to the Duchy of Normandy, which had actually ceased to exist, you know, maybe 200

years before. And the French are quite puzzled by this. I mean, they shouldn't have been. It's pretty clear why Henry would be interested in that. And on top of that, if you're going to take the very, very strongly fortified towns and castles of Normandy, you will need the latest weapon, which is cannon. And Henry IV had been a big fan of cannon. He'd fired them at Berwick. It was the first attack on a British city with cannon. And Henry V has inherited that enthusiasm. And he's commissioned all sorts of cannon in the Tower of London and takes with him to France the largest cannon ever forged in England. So it's all looking absolutely brilliant.

The invasion fleet is massing in the Solent, ready to cross to Normandy. And this is when a final French embassy appears in England in June 1415. Clearly, reports are coming in of what's happening and they're very, very nervous. So they offer Henry pretty generous terms and they are stunned when Henry turns them down. And the ambassadors leave with two parting shots. So one of them says to Henry, yeah, you've got all this stuff, but you're not going to do anything with it. It's going to be a hit and run raid. You know, you might loot a few fields, you might even capture a town, but you're not going to be able to do anything more than that. And that is hitting the spot because of course that is Henry's worry. He doesn't want that to happen. That's your argument. That was your argument

about why he was overrated. That basically it was a fool's errand because France is too big to digest and that no English king can ever hope to do anything other than sack a town, burn some houses, capture a few knights, and then go home again, right? Right. But I think the French ambassador means less than that. He literally means you will just go and loot a few fields and maybe capture one town. And that's what Henry is worried about, because that will not rank as a success in the eyes of England and the world, if that is all he can do. He needs to do more than that with all the money, all the men,

all the kit that he's prepared. It has to be something more than that. And the other parting shot is from a bishop who's travelled with the embassy. And Henry says to the bishop, look, I'm the King of France. I have a legal right to the crown of France. And the bishop retorts, our sovereign Lord is the true King of France. And you have no right to any of the things you claim. You are no king, even in England, but merely one claimant among many,

jostling for position with the true heirs of the late King Richard. I mean, that's punchy. Very, very punchy. That's below the belt, isn't it? It is. And it may well be because of that, that the revelation that hits Henry a few days later comes as an even greater blow than it already is. And this is the discovery of treason in his own retinue, because he's just preparing to embark at Southampton when he is approached by Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March, who is the guy who people who are opposed to the House of Lancaster think should be king in Henry's place. Yeah, the alternative claimant. And Edmund Mortimer comes and he says, look, there's this conspiracy against you. And it

includes the younger brother of Edward the Duke of York, your own cousin, Richard of York. And he is preparing this plot. He wants to take me, make me king. He wants to kill you, get rid of you. So, you know, beware, this is in the footing. And Henry does some investigations and he discovers that, you know, this plot hasn't gone very far, so it's not looking actually that serious. But Richard of York, the guy who's leading this conspiracy, had sounded out one of Henry's closest advisors and friends, Henry Scrope, who's the nephew of the Archbishop who Henry IV had executed, but had always been kind of very close to Henry V.

And Scrope had been completely contemptuous of the plot, said it's hopeless, you know, give it up. But he hadn't revealed it to Henry V. And so Henry is devastated by this. And when it's all revealed, he orders the execution, not just of Richard of York, but of Scrope as well. So this is not a good note on which to be leaving for France. Big old risk by Edmund mortimer to divulge the details

of a plot of which he is the focal point because henry could easily have said well i'll rub you out as well you're a threat to me yes except that i mean edmund mortimer is doing what scrape had failed to do right and scrape is executed for not revealing the plot whereas mortimer does reveal the plot and henry doesn't hold it against him isn isn't worried about him. No, and Mortimer is impeccably loyal to Henry V throughout his reign. Good for Mortimer. And I guess that this could have winded Henry, and it certainly focuses for him the nature of the risk that he is taking in going to France. There remain people who see him as a legitimate king. There are people who still want to bring the Lancastrian regime down and any hint of failure in France will be potentially fatal for Henry.

So he knows the gamble that he is taking. High risk though, Tom. Very, very high risk. But he's off 11th of August, 1415. Henry boards the largest ship in England. It had just been built for him in Greenwich, the Trinity Royal. He sails off at the head of a fleet of some 1,500 ships, which as Juliet Barker in her wonderful book on Agincourt points out, was a fleet 12 times the size of the Spanish Armada. And as they sail, very few people

on the fleet know where they're heading. The French certainly don't know where they're heading. They cross the Channel. Two days later, the English fleet arrives in the Great Bay at the mouth of the Seine and the ships moor off a beach, off one of the headlands. And it's described by a priest who accompanies Henry on this expedition and who is an absolutely brilliant source for the entire campaign. He describes it as being very stony with large boulders dangerous to ships. So not the kind of place where a fleet would conventionally moor, but it's been chosen precisely because the French would not expect a landing there. And so therefore there are no defenders. And Henry looks out from his flagship at the scene. There is this rocky beach. There's a cliff, which is quite easy to climb, and it rises about 300

feet to a plateau. And Henry knows that about three miles beyond that plateau is his target, the port of Harfleur. What a cliffhanger. So if you would like to hear the next episode, you're a member of the Restless History Club, you don't need to do anything because it's right there waiting for you. If you'd like to join the rest is history club to hear it right away the battle of harfleur once more into the breach and all that business you can sign up at the rest is history.com otherwise we will see you next time for the next installment of this thrilling story merci tom et au revoir. A bientôt. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.