The Rest Is History - 490. Hundred Years' War: England Triumphant (Part 4)

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

St Crispin’s day, 1415: Henry V stands victorious, after a tremendous defeat of the French forces at the Battle of Agincourt. He is just about to make a historic speech which will be retold by Shakespeare nearly two centuries later. There are mounds of bodies, too many dead for the chroniclers to count. Those who escaped the bloodshed have been taken prisoner back to England, including the young Duke of Orleans, on the day before his twenty-first birthday. And a month later, across the Channel, the Count of Armagnac comes to power in Paris, and rules so brutally that the residents of the French capital start to hope for an English invasion. Henry V is taking no time to rest, and begins planning his next offensive… Join Tom and Dominic in the fourth instalment of our series on the Hundred Year’s War, as Henry V considers his next move after his triumph at Agincourt. _______ *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 San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  *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. Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, our bending author hath pursued the story, in little room confining mighty men, mangling by starts the full course of their glory. Small time, but in that small, most greatly lived this star of England, fortune made his sword by which the world's best garden he achieved. So that's William Shakespeare on Henry V. And Tom, in this final episode, we will discuss the fact that it's just a small time in which the star of england most greatly lived but before we get on to the tragic end to the story we should return to the place we ended last time the battlefield

of agincourt the mud the corpses the horror i mean the effect of your tour de force performance last time was such that we've just had an absolute tongue lashing from our producer, a French producer. You can tell he's French from his name, Theo Young-Smith, who was appalled by what he said was the chauvinistic lies that had been told about the Battle of Agincourt. You know, let's dwell for a little bit on the horror now, Tom, because Theo wants to feel sad about all the flower of French chivalry. So take us into the mounds of bodies and the mud and the blood and the dismembered limbs and all that sort of stuff. Make Theo happy.

I don't think there is any doubt and has ever been any doubt that the scene was horrific and the memory of the horror as well as the glory is a part of what makes Agincourt the totemic battle that it is. Juliet Barker, in her account of the aftermath of the battle, she writes, the sheer scale of the French defeat was genuinely humbling, even frightening. And as you said, there are piles and piles of French dead raised in great mounds along the length of the English line and stretching all the way back to the original French positions. And it's evident that the flower of French chivalry have been slaughtered. And it's not possible to know the precise numbers. And that's partly for obvious reasons. There wasn't a chance for people to go around and count up the corpses,

but also the sense that the scale of the slaughter was just too overwhelming. So there's a Burgundian chronicler, you know, he's trying to work out how many died and he lists about 300. And then he just kind of throws his hands up and he says, many others I omit for the sake of brevity. And also because one cannot know how to record them all because there were too many of them. But French chroniclers being what they are, obviously they focus on those who are high born who die. And that does give you a sense, I think, of just how stunning a disaster this is for France, because by and large in battles, the well-born do not die.

They are protected in their armour. If they're captured, they expect their lives to be conserved. And on both accounts, this isn't the case with Agincourt. Three dukes are dead, among them the Duke of Alençon, the guy who was in command of the second block, the main body of the French army. And there are various stories about he dies. The most popular account, which some historians contest, I see no reason to doubt it, is that he is killed trying to reach Henry, that he gets cut down by Henry's bodyguards as he tries to surrender because the ferocity of his attack has been so great that they're not willing to cut him any quarter. There's also the Duke of Brabant, who's the younger brother of John the Fearless,

who we mentioned in the last episode. He's the guy who turns up late from brunch and he takes the banner and cuts the hole in it and kind of wears it like a poncho. And because he's not wearing the surcoat of the Duke of Brabant, when Henry gives the order for the prisoners to be killed, he is among the prisoners who get spitted. There's a lesson to us all there. Don't be late for a battle. Yeah, don't hang around having brunch. His younger brother, the Count of Nevers, is also killed. Seven of the French king's cousins are dead.

The constable Charles d'Arbray is dead. The Admiral of France, the Master of the Royal Archers. So that's the cream of the French military high command. There's even an archbishop, the Archbishop of Sens. He dies sword in hand in the midst of a melee. One chronicler describes him as striking blows on every side with the strength of a hectare. Another chronicler says, you know, this is not good behaviour from an archbishop, so he had it coming. He's no Justin Welby. No, he's not.

He's more Robert Runcie, whose men nicknamed him Killer, Tank Commander in World War II. Yes, he won the MC. He did. Brilliant. So also lower down through the kind of the structure of local French government. So there are officials called baillis, so bailiffs, and they essentially are the king's administrative representatives. And of the 21 baillis who have office north of the Loire, 12 are killed, so over half. And in Picardy,

which is where the battle has been fought, basically the whole seigneurial class has been wiped out. They've all answered the summons, you know, they've rallied to the flag and they've been destroyed. And in some cases, you know, two generations, in some cases, three generations have been wiped out. So essentially, local government in northern France has been decapitated on the battlefield. So those are the dead. On top of that, there are prisoners who survived. The Duke of Brabant would have been spared if people had known who he was.

The highest ranking prisoners have been kind of kept secure. And so estimates of the numbers of prisoners range from about 700 to about 2000. And their ranks include some very notable names. So Boussico, the great paladin of French chivalry who'd been taken prisoner by the Turks after Nicopolis, he's now been taken prisoner again. The most distinguished and in some ways the most tragic of the prisoners is the young Duke of Orléans, due to celebrate his 21st birthday on the 26th of October, so the day after Agincourt, and it's going to be a miserable birthday. So he has been found under a pile of corpses. His surcoat is so soaked with blood that it's difficult for the people who drag him out to

recognise who he is. And his captor is a Kentish knight called Richard Waller, who is knighted for his achievement actually on the battlefield. And he takes, as his coat of arms, the walnut tree that is his family crest with the Duke's shield hanging from it. Oh, that's very good. Yeah. And the Duke of Orléans, not only is he going to have a terrible birthday, he's going to spend the next quarter of a century as a prisoner in English custody. Yeah, because as we will see, Henry will end up signing with the Burgundians. And so therefore, they don't want to let the Duke of Orléans, who would be the leader of the Armagnac side, out.

And so the poor guy, as you say, 25 years, it's the measure of how long he is in England. He's a very distinguished poet. He writes these beautiful poems in French, but he also writes poems in English, years. It's the measure of how long he is in England. He's a very distinguished poet. He writes these beautiful poems in French, but he also writes poems in English, which are pretty good. I mean, they're pretty sophisticated. And for a French nobleman in the 15th century to end up writing English poetry. Listen, the day before your 21st birthday, you're looking forward to your 21st birthday, but actually the next day you'll see your native land as a free man. You'll be what? 46. An intervening period is just a hiatus.

Yeah. So terrible for him and terrible for the Armagnacs because basically they've been wiped out. John the Fearless has lost two brothers, but the Armagnac, their cream is gone, either dead or prisoner. But I think in a way, the most moving sense of the disaster that has befallen France, it's not in the details of any one of the prisoners or the dead. It's in a poem that was written a year or two after the battle by Alain Chartier, who's not just a poet, but a very loyal servant of the Dauphin, who will end

up becoming Charles VII, the one Joan of Arc comes to, the youngest son of Charles VI. And he writes this poem, the Livre des Quatre Dames, so the Book of the Four Women. And it's four women who are lamenting the fate of their husbands at the Battle of Agincourt. So they say, which of the four of them has the greatest cause for grief? One of them has a husband who's been killed. One of them has a husband who is a prisoner in England. One of them has a husband who's been killed. One of them has a husband who is a prisoner in England. One of them has a husband whose corpse has never been found. But they agree that the lady who has the greatest cause for grief is the fourth one because her husband had run away from the battle and had shown himself a coward. So there you go. The truth is, Dominic,

that even the English at the spectacle of the slaughter are capable of being moved to tears. Sir Henry's chaplain, who lived through the battle, he wrote, there is not a man with heart of flesh or even of stone who had he seen and pondered on the horrible deaths and bitter wounds of so many Christian men would not have dissolved into tears time and again for grief. Oh, that is moving, Tom.

Would that be true of you? Yeah, I think there's a time for mourning, but there's also a time to luxuriate in the warm glow of victory. And that presumably is what Henry V is doing right now, right? He believed God would give him the victory and God has absolutely given him everything he wanted. Henry does mourn the dead. He is stunned by it. He does weep for them. But he also feels that God has given him the victory. Absolutely.

And has backed him in the most spectacular manner possible. And if he mourns the French dead, then the thing that's astonishing is how few English there are to mourn. So in contrast to the slaughter of the French aristocracy, there are really only two magnates who die at Agincourt. One of them is the Duke of York, and one of them is a very young aristocrat, the Earl of Suffolk. And most of the English casualties are archers, so maybe 150 in total, compared to the thousands and thousands of the French. And this victory, I mean, there is no two ways about it. This is a victory that would not have been won without Henry. He's the man who has chosen to balance his army in the way that he has done with an emphasis on archers as opposed

to men at arms. It was his choice to march on Calais, knowing that it would risk a battle, offering himself up as a kind of bait, as he did in the battle itself. It's his tactics on the day of the battle that have prevailed over the French. And there's no question that it's his inspirational leadership, I think, that prevents the English line from buckling when that first great clash happens, when the French men at arms run into them, smash into them. And of course, it's not just a judgment on him, it's a judgment on France as well. So while he mourns the individual dead, he does feel that the French have brought this terrible fate on themselves. And in part, this is because they haven't acknowledged him as king, but it's also because of the many atrocities that Henry feels that they have been committing. So famously, anyone who knows the great speech that Henry gives in Shakespeare, this day is called the Feast of Crispian, and it is fought on St. Crispin's Day. And Crispin and Crispinian are two Christian martyrs who were beheaded in the third century in Soissons. And listeners may remember that Soissons is the place that had

been brutally ransacked and put to the torch by the Armagnac forces and the Armagnac leaders are all now dead. And so the sense that the quality of supernatural intervention has been shimmering over the battlefield is very strong. And there are English soldiers in the battle who say that they had seen St. George visible in the sky. I think that's very strong. And there are English soldiers in the battle who say that they had seen St. George visible in the sky. I think that's very likely. Well, I think completely. And Henry's chaplain is very clear on this. Far be it, he writes, from our people to ascribe the triumph to their own glory or strength, rather let it be ascribed to God alone, which I think is a commendable display of modesty. God, Henry and Welsh archers. People call it the Holy Trinity,

don't they? And it's an unbeatable combination. Yes. So Henry might have been tempted to leave the battlefield immediately because of course he is still in danger. His men are exhausted. There aren't very many of them. There are still lots of French contingents all over the place. But he decides that after that battle and after the march that they've had, the sleepless night, they really need to get their rest. And so they bed down, despite the fact that obviously the stench of carrion is hideous in the air. He orders the bodies of York and Suffolk to be cut up into four, to be boiled so that all the flesh falls off the bones, and the bones are then put in caskets so that they can be taken to England for Christian burial. The English soldiers fan out across the battlefield, stripping the dead of their valuables, jewellery, armour, weapons. And the problem is there's so

much to take that it's just impossible for it all to be taken with the army to Calais. So Henry orders what can't be taken to be piled up in a barn, and he then sets the barn on fire so that these weapons and armor can't be used by the enemy. And then once the English have taken what they want to take, then all the locals pile in. So they've already got the true cross and the crown jewels and everything. And now they're going in and they're taking what else they can. So I mentioned earlier that the French are very keen on giving, certainly the seigneurial class are keen on giving their sons the names of Arthurian heroes. And it always reminds me of a passage in the Mort d'Arthur, Thomas Mallory's account of the Arthurian legends, where Arthur and Mordred meet in the great battle at the end of the book. All

the knights of the round table slaughter each other. And then he gives this account of how the peasants come out and start stripping the dead. And it's almost the only time that peasants are mentioned in the whole of the Mort Dartha. And this sense that a similar fate is being visited on these knights with their Arthurian names, that they are now just lumps of flesh to be stripped of their valuables by peasants. Yeah, it's a very unsentimental, unglamorous end, isn't it? Obviously, they've got their baggage train and the English can pile into that to get all the food when they only had eight days food. And now they've finally got all the food they want and the bedding and stuff. And Henry is quite chivalrous towards his captives, the ones he hasn't killed. He is. There's a much later account that says that his French captives serve him at dinner. But I think this is unlikely to be true because it is so late. The more contemporaneous reports say that he treats

them graciously, that they are served dinner, but he does kind of basically give them a lecture and say, you brought it on your own heads. And the next morning at dawn, he takes them out across the battlefield so that they can see, as he sees it, the consequences of their refusal to accept him as king. And then he and his army set off for Calais and they're so loaded down that it takes them three days to cover the 40 odd miles. And on the 29th of October, Henry arrives at Calais and it's a triumphant arrival. And it's on the same day that news of Agincourt reaches London. And Henry has been lost for several days in the wilds of France. And so very dark rumours have been spreading. And therefore the news of the victory is greeted with all the

more kind of rapture and joy. Henry stays in Calais a couple of weeks to order the situation there. Then on the 16th of November, he lands at Dover in a snowstorm, pauses at Canterbury to offer up prayers there and to pay his respects both to the Black Prince who's buried there and his father, Henry IV, who is buried alongside the Black Prince. And on the 22nd of November, he is received on Blackheath on the road from Kent outside London, where what Tyler and all his gang had assembled during the Peasants' Revolt. But now Henry is being greeted by the mayor, by the aldermen, by several thousand liverymen, all in their kind of formal attire. And then at 10 o'clock, he enters London and absolute exuberant celebrations. And Shakespeare in his play compares it to a Roman triumph,

not actually accurate because Henry is not with his army. The rest of his army has kind of fanned out and the archers have gone back to their villages. The magnates have gone back to their castles. But Henry does enter surrounded by his captives. And there are all these kind of great mechanical tableau everywhere. There's a representation of David and Goliath. So again, you have maybe the earliest public manifestation of this idea that England has won against overwhelming odds. And Jonathan Sumption, in his account of this, he describes

the mottos that are kind of emblazoned over the city of London. And it includes even, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. And Sumption writes, the implicit references to Christ entering Jerusalem can have escaped no one. Here was a new England, the chosen instrument of God's will. So this quality of religiosity that is a character of Henry's militarism, it's there in the moment of triumph as in his moment of danger. And for Henry, so to remind everybody, his father Henry IV had killed Richard II and taken the throne. Their regime, the Lancastrian regime, had been insecure from day one all the way through. I mean, the Battle of Shrewsbury, there'd been plots and conspiracies. And one reason, arguably, why Henry pressed his case in France with such urgency

was he felt he needed to basically buy legitimacy for his regime. And he has that now, hasn't he? He has, by rallying the English people against that ancestral enemy, he has ensured total stability for his regime for at least a generation. Yes. So while he was away and all these dark rumours that his army had been wiped out, he'd been taken captive or killed, were swirling around England, there were people who were saying, he's an

illegitimate king, this is the punishment of God on him. But of course, it's completely turned around. And as you say, there will be no further internal insurrections or sedition against the Lancastrian regime until, what, kind of 1450. And actually, Tom, although the Wars of the Roses are coming much later on,

the fact that Henry V dies young and his successor is, what, nine months old? And the fact that there are then no revolts for decades tells you about the importance of the legacy of Agincourt. I mean, that is the ultimate testament to Henry V's success at Agincourt. Yes, and it's a popular success. The idea that, you know, it's the archers what won it is an important part of the way that the propaganda works for Henry. And he makes a conscious attempt to associate Agincourt with a kind of popular sense of patriotism. So one of the things that he does, you know, we did an episode on St. George.

This is where St. George really gets enshrined in the calendar of saints. He gets the Archbishop of Canterbury to say that St. George's Day will be celebrated kind of on a level with Christmas Day or Easter. It's that holy. But also very shrewdly, you know, he's been fighting against the Welsh, but he's now had Welsh bowmen with him on campaign. He wants to make the Welsh feel a part of this victory as well. And so he fixes that St. David's Day will also rank on that level. So it's very clever, very thoughtful. And isn't that another clue explaining why in Britain, Agincourt has, dare I say, a kind of a sacred status

that sets it apart from Cressy and Poitier. I mean, those were tremendous victories. But most people, I'm guessing, in Britain have probably never really heard of them. Whereas everybody's heard of Agincourt. It's entered the popular lexicon. And is that, do you think, not just because of Shakespeare, but also because even back then in 1415, Henry V is embedding Agincourt in the popular consciousness as a triumph, not just of the king and his knights, but of the nation, as it were. Yeah, I absolutely do. And I also think that the

English preserve a memory of this as a time when England, which is relative, say, to France or the empire, a very small, marginal kingdom, that it had achieved great things. So, you know, small time, but in that small, most greatly lived this star of England, Shakespeare's lines in his epilogue to the play. And there is evidence for this in the year that follows Agincourt, say 1416, when Henry hosts Sigismund, who is the emperor elect on a four month visit. And Sigismund had previously been to Paris and hadn't gone on well there at all, had left very disgruntled. But he thinks Henry V is brilliant,

absolutely loves him. And Sigismund is made a knight of the garter, which reflects very well, of course, on English chivalry. And he responds by giving Henry the heart of St. George. The heart of St. George. Yeah.

So that's quite a gift, isn't it? Yeah. Preserved ever since the days of the Roman Empire in what is now Turkey. No, in what's now Israel. Yeah. And so they get on tremendously well. They become great mates and they sign a treaty, the Treaty of Canterbury. And this is great for Henry because basically by the terms of the treaty,

both kings recognise the right of the other to pursue territorial claims against the French. So essentially, it's implicit acknowledgement by Sigismund that Henry is the rightful king of France. And he now has kind of imperial approval, imperial backing for his war. And there is no question that this war is going to be continued. There's no point for Henry of winning Agincourt if he doesn't then leverage it to prosecute his original plan, which was to conquer Normandy at the very least, and maybe to use that as a stepping stone to the conquest of further territories and maybe, you know, in his wildest dreams, the Kingdom of France itself. And he is now in a very strong position. So he's got

internal stability, he's got his international allies. And of course, he has a port which is situated on the Normandy coast in the form of Harfleur. One of the reasons that he had left Harfleur to march to Calais, thereby risking battle, was that he wanted to draw the French off Harfleur at a time when the walls were very damaged. These are being repaired over the course of 1415 into 1416. And on the 15th of August, 1416, actually while Sigismund is still in England, the Duke of Bedford, Henry's younger brother, sails with a fleet to Harfleur, where he meets with a French fleet that is trying to capture Harfleur back. Very brutal battle, but he wins it. And in the judgment of Chris Ormond, who is Henry's biographer, he writes that this was in its

effects the most telling of the few naval battles of the Hundred Years' War. And the reason for that is that it secures Harfleur for good. It enables the English to complete the sweeping of French pirates from the Channel and thereby ensures that Henry has ready access to the potential battlefields of Normandy. Also, he has money, which of course Henry from a very young age has understood is key to the making of war because Parliament is so impressed by Agincourt that they respond to Henry's requests for money with incredible generosity, allow him loads of new taxes. And amazingly, they even grant him the customs duty on imports and exports, which They respond to Henry's requests for money with incredible generosity, allow him loads of new taxes. And amazingly, they even grant him the customs duty on imports and exports, which is

normally very closely and jealously guarded by Parliament. They allow him to have that for life. And it's a statement of trust. We have confidence in you that you will not betray our trust and that you will use this income sensibly. So although Henry doesn't go to France in 1416, although a whole year passes and then another year, and it's not until 1417 that he's ready to embark again for Normandy, he's doing what he always does, which is to prepare and prepare and prepare. And he can do this partly because he knows that there's no point in launching this campaign unless he has money and cash and international backing behind him. But it's also because in France, the situation is utterly dire. Okay, well, let's find out after the break what's

been going on in France and what Henry V does next to capital rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com oh god why does this wretched and stiff-necked nation not obey these divine sentences so many and so terrible so that was the chancellor of henry v and he was talking to parliament in march 1416 parliament was poised to vote the king massive subsidies to renew the war in france and what the chancellor is effectively saying is the french have consistently flouted god's laws and they're being punished for it very obviously but they just will not learn and actually he's not alone in thinking that is he because quite a lot of people in France think that themselves they think Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt

and the English are God's punishment for all of their sins and evidence for that is the fact that as France continues to sin, so the headlines for France get worse and worse. Yes. So Agincourt is not helpful in stabilizing France. It's fair to say. So Charles d'Albray, the constable, had died at Agincourt. And so he has to be replaced. And the obvious person to replace him would be John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, who had sat out the Battle of Agincourt. But the Dauphin can't bring himself to do this. He hates John the Fearless. And so he turns to the Count of Armagnac, Charles of Orléans' father-in-law. Yeah, who's the last man standing of the Armagnac faction, basically, is he?

Pretty much, yes, because all the rest have been either killed or captured. And obviously, this means that the Dauphin is effectively declaring war again on Burgundy because the Armagnacs and the Burgundians hate each other. Right. These are the two sides who've been fighting the civil war. And then on the 18th of December, 1415, the Dauphin dies. So I mentioned that he'd been ill during the Ahen core campaign which may be one of the reasons he didn't actually fight in the battle so he dies of dysentery and do you want to know what an armagnac chronicler wrote i've seen it it's like some of our less obliging reviews grandiloquent idle useless inactive and timid

yeah what did this critic say yeah and that's from an armagnac actually so that is from one of his friends yes it is and so he's replaced as the dauphin by his younger brother who's called jean and i'll read you what sumption jonathan sumption says about him he was a sickly young man without political experience and almost entirely ignorant of the factional politics of the french court and And the king himself, Charles VI, is now pretty much permanently mad. Yeah, made of glass. So the whole of the kind of the commanding structures of the French state are in an absolutely terrible way. The Count of Armagnac, he's faced with this dump fire and his approach

is to throw petrol on it. So what he does, he comes into Paris and he stages a bloody purge of all his many enemies. So some are put to death, some are imprisoned, some exiled. And the people he particularly goes after are the butchers. So people who've listened to this whole series may remember the cabochiers, the white-haired hoods. So he goes after them. He abolishes all their privileges. He demolishes their headquarters. So that goes after them. He abolishes all their privileges. He demolishes

their headquarters. So that's not winning him hearts and minds. And for the next two years, Paris feels like an occupied city. It's resentful. It's embittered. It's hostile to Armagnac's rule. And many people in Paris are starting to think, well, the English are English, we hate them, but surely they can't be as bad as the Armagnacs. And at least Henry, if he comes, would give us order and justice because there is a sense that Henry is, if hard, nevertheless, a just man. And while this is going on, John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, is also on manoeuvres. So October 1416, Henry and Sigismund cross to Calais, where they meet with John the Fearless. And the details of the negotiations are kept secret, but the outline is pretty clear. Basically, that John will help Henry,

but not openly, because he's a peer of the French kingdom. He doesn't want to come out of the closet as yet. However, should Henry reach the stage where he could legitimately be acknowledged as king of France, John the Fearless will come in behind him. So basically, Henry needs to hit a certain benchmark, as it were, of French territory. He does, yes. And so the implications for Henry, you know, this is tremendous. He's now at the very least neutralized the most powerful magnate in France. And because he knows that this magnate is waiting for him to show that he's worthy to be king, he has every incentive to crack on with the conquest of Normandy, which is exactly what he does. So Henry lands back in Normandy on the 1st of August

1417. This time he has 10,000 men. So it's not quite as large as his previous expedition, but that's fine because there's no one now to oppose him. The French state is basically bankrupt. John the Fearless is kind of prowling around with his own army of 10,000 men. And what he does as Henry fans out across Normandy, what John the Fearless does is to capture a kind of screen of towns between Paris and Normandy that will effectively mean it's impossible for the Armagnacs to come out and confront Henry. So effectively now we have the Armagnacs in the capital and we have two kind of rival, but also kind of allied armies,

the English and the Burgundians, who are kind of just rampaging around the French countryside in northern France. That's basically it, isn't it? Yeah, basically. And Henry's target is to conquer Normandy, which of course had been the Duchy of Willing the Conqueror. And listeners who've heard the whole series may remember that Henry had been emphasising his interest in the Duchy of Normandy. The official title had long since gone into abeyance, but he'd been hinting that he wants to get it back. And so he makes a point of conquering fortress and town after fortress and town. And many of these have great resonances for anyone familiar with the old days of William the Conqueror. So he conquers Caen, where there is a

great castle that had been built by William. He conquers Falaise, which had been William the Conqueror's birthplace. And then his great, in some ways, a military feat comparable to Agincourt. I mean, an astonishing military feat. He lays siege to Rouen, which is by miles the largest town that the English ever lay siege to, let alone capture, in the whole of the Hundred Years' War. And it's very long. It's very long, it's very brutal, it lasts half a year. The news of it is followed across Christendom, as though they're following an ongoing sporting contest or something. It lasts from July 1418

to January 1419. With Rouen conquered, this is the ancestral capital of the Dukes of Normandy. Henry can now consider himself heir to William the Conqueror for real. And quite aside from the propagandistic benefits of this, Rouen commands both the upper and the lower reaches of the River Seine. And of course, Paris is on the Seine, and so Henry is now in a position to throttle the access of the French capital to the sea. So we're now in the spring of 1419. It's all going well for Henry. And what's even better is that in the last couple of years, and indeed in 1419 itself, French politics already, you know, blood-stained, crazed,ious faction ridden turns i mean if it were possible

even more into a kind of george rr martin bloodbath doesn't it yeah because you'd think maybe not enough dofans have died so let's kill another one so this hapless jean the dofan who'd succeeded the podgy dofan he gets an abscess on his neck and dies in April 1417, which means that he's then succeeded by an even younger Dauphin who's even more inexperienced. And this is Charles, who is now the king's only surviving son. He's very sickly, he's very moody, very lacking in self-confidence, and he has very spindly legs. So he looks like a kind of spider as he moves. And, you know, I mean, he's wholly inexperienced and unqualified. I mean, spoiler alert, he will go on to become a very successful king in due course after Joan of Arc rallies to his cause. But at this point, he looks an absolute loser. And he very nearly gets wiped out because in April 1419, remember that Paris has come under the rule of the Count of Armagnac, and he's much hated because he has imposed his rule at the point of a sword.

He's got rid of all the butchers. He's got rid of all the butchers. So this means that there are lots of people within Paris who are prepared to side with the Burgundians. And in April 1419, a traitor opens the gates to a Burgundian hit squad. They enter the capital, and the whole city rises up against the Armagnacs. The count is captured, battered to death. People carve the salt tire, which is his emblem, onto his naked corpse. 2,000 of his followers are slaughtered. The Dauphin very easily could have been caught up amongst them, but he gets smuggled out by a loyal servant. And he

escapes southwards to a town in central France called Bourges. And here he sets up his court. And in due course, he will come to be known derisively as the King of Bourges. And he will not return to Paris for 17 years. So Henry is now in charge of Normandy. John the Fearless is now in charge of Paris. And having possession of the French capital, John thinks, okay, I've got the English king on my doorstep. He's looking quite menacing. I've got the capital. Maybe it's time to switch sides, kind of build bridges with the Armagnacs, with the Dauphin, try and construct a kind of French resistance against Henry, this terrifyingly menacing opponent. And so the two sides do kind of put out feelers to each other. But Henry isn't really troubled by this. It's so easy to kind of make mischief, to play the two sides off against each other. And he's absolutely determined he's not going to allow the Burgundians and the Dauphin to constitute a serious opposition. Now, it is true that actually there is an in-person meeting between John the Fearless and the Dauphin on a causeway on the Seine, just outside Paris.

But they don't agree much. But because this is now public, because it might seemingly seem a kind of propaganda blow against Henry, Henry's having none of it. Henry's response is now public, because it might seemingly seem a kind of propaganda blow against Henry, Henry's having none of it. Henry's response is, okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I am going to drive home to these two losers that I have preponderant force, that they cannot oppose me. And so he launches a full advance on Paris. And by the 3rd of August, 1419, the Duke of Clarence has occupied Saint-Denis, the great cathedral that is the Westminster Abbey of French royalty, where they're all buried. And then on the 10th of August, the English arrive outside the gates of Paris itself. And their arrival is so

terrifying for the king. I mean, he's absolutely, he's in a terrible state by now, mind completely gone. But his servants bundle him out of the city as the Dauphin had earlier been bundled out with his queen and his daughter Catherine, and they flee to a town called Troyes, which is about 100 miles southeast of Paris. And there are many Parisians who are in such a state of despair that they're now actively willing Henry to occupy Paris. The condition of the city is so traumatic, so miserable that they feel Henry may be English, but he would at the very least impose order. You know, the Parisians have reached that state. This is the context, Tom. So John and the Dauphin now have a second meeting, don't they? So I remember reading about this when I was a boy

in, I don't know, some encyclopedia or something. And I thought this was a tremendous story. I don't know if there's been a French film about this, but it's one of the great set pieces in kind of French medieval history. They're meeting at Montereau, which is on this bridge, isn't it? And it's this kind of weird bridge with a kind of fenced wooden enclosure in the middle where they meet. It's built specifically so that the two sides can meet and they can be absolutely certain that there won't be any treachery. So the Dauphin, John the Fearless, their respective retinues, they both cross from either side of the banks and they meet in this kind of room that's been built on the middle of the bridge. And it's all very tightly controlled because obviously neither side trusts the other. So John the Fearless kneels before the Dauphin to signal his respect. And then he moves to rise. And as he does so, he puts his hand on his sword

and the Dauphin's servants think that this is treason. And so they cut him down and he's left for dead. And whether it was a misunderstanding or whether it actually was treachery, there's no question that the Dauphin is blamed for it. He's seen as having betrayed his word. It's absolutely blot on his honour. And of course, it's a disaster for him because the Burgundians are now absolutely committed to an alliance with England. And John has a very able son, Philip, Philip the Good, who we talked about a lot in our episode with Bart Van Loo on the Burgundians. And although Philip doesn't sign up to the English alliance immediately, negotiations are going on. And by December 1419, he and Henry are going public and saying that they are called upon by God to punish the treacherous Dauphin

and to give God's peace to France. And they issue public proposals. And these proposals are that there should be peace between England and France, that Charles VI should remain king until he dies. And Henry's happy to sign up to that because he's a man who thinks that the anointing of a king should really mean something. You can't just depose Charles VI. But that Henry is to rule as regent and he is to marry Charles VI's daughter, Catherine. And that once Charles VI dies, the crown of France will pass to Henry and then to his heirs, which will also be Catherine's heirs. And that England and France are to be separate kingdoms, but to be joined under the one crown. And what this means effectively is that the Dauphin has been disinherited. That's a pretty good deal for Henry, isn't it?

It's an amazing deal. He would effectively rule France nominally under Charles VI. Then when Charles VI is gone, Henry is king of France and of England. He doesn't need to combine them into one kingdom. I mean, that would be a challenge. It would be a really big logistical and administrative challenge, but it's not impossible. I mean, there are lots of people in European history who ruled two realms. We'll come to that. And the Dauphin can do nothing about this. Like his father feels like he's got no choice. He's impotent. I think there is a case for saying that Henry overreaches with this, that the temptation is too great. He could have said, look, I'll take Normandy, I'll take

Aquitaine, that's fine, and just consolidate those and not reach for the crown. But he feels he's the apex predator who's got the equivalent of a goat tethered to a tree. Of course he's going to go for it. And Charles VI is helpless to oppose him. The Dauphin is powerless. And so essentially it's agreed. And on the 8th of May, 1420, Henry goes to Saint-Denis and he prays there amid the tombs of all the kings of France. And then he heads south to Troyes where Charles VI and his daughter Catherine are waiting. And two weeks later he arrives and on the outskirts of the town, he meets Philip the Good, first time they've met. And then on the 21st of May, what will be called the Treaty of Troyes is ratified in the cathedral of the city. And when Henry seals it, he does it with the seal that had been used by Edward III to seal the Treaty of Bretigny, which was the treaty that had given him a vast swathe of France, but had not given him the

crown. So Henry's Treaty of Troyes is a level of success beyond even that, that Edward III had won. I've gone one better than the greatest king in English medieval history. Yeah. And so after the treaty has been signed, they come out and the terms of the treaty are read to French crowd in French, and then to the English, the retinue in Henry's train in English. And on the 2nd of June, Henry marries Catherine. Catherine is how old? She's 19. Right.

Catherine is then given a train of English ladies to serve her. So it's quite Marie Antoinette, you know, going from Austria to France. The French queen is now going from France to England. The difference being that she's actually going up in the world rather than down. Yeah, well, you might want to say that. So December, the two royal families enter Paris. Henry visits Notre Dame, prays there. A Burgundian is given charge of the Louvre, and an Englishman is given charge of the Bastille. And most prisons accept this,

for the reasons that we've been saying. They're just relieved that, you know, the war and all the horror is over. And on the 1st of February, 1421, Henry arrives with Catherine at Dover. So it's the first time that the new Queen of England sees her realm. Henry, very keen to kind of impress her, to show off. So the entry into London, he's arranged for a giant mechanical head on London Bridge. Wow, who wouldn't be impressed by that?

Well, I think she is. A head of whom though? Just a giant mechanical head. Just a generic head. Right. And then shortly afterwards, she's crowned in Westminster Abbey. And then on the 6th of December, she gives birth to Henry's first child. And everyone's waiting to see, you know, is it going to be a girl or a boy?

And it's a boy. And he, with such a lineage, he would undoubtedly turn out to be a really formidable, strong-willed and impressive martial king,'t he yes and this basically sets the seal on unbelievable triumph for henry and for england so henry is now the regents of france he's the heir to the ruling king of france and now he has a son who can succeed him as king of france He's 35, so the presumption must be that he has many years of life ahead of him. He's by far the best soldier in Christendom. I mean, his military achievements are astonishing. He's an incredibly capable, effective, successful king. He understands what it is to rule. And so looking at him at this moment, you might think this is all going to work out

brilliantly. But of course, it doesn't. And Dominic, you began this episode by reading from the epilogue of Henry V. And it's talking about how fortune made Henry's sword, by which the world's best garden he achieved. And then we omitted the final lines and of it left his son, Imperial Lord Henry VI, an infant band's crowned king of France and England. Did this king succeed? Whose state so many had the managing that they lost France and made his

England bleed, which oft our stage hath shown and for for their sake, in your fair minds, let this acceptance take. So the ending of Henry V, this great heroic drama, is a sombre one, a dark one, a reminder that it was effectively all for nothing. And actually, even before Henry's death, things have begun to go a bit darker. So in March 1422, the Duke of Clarence, Henry's brother, is defeated in battle against an army that's essentially made of Scottish knights. And Clarence dies. The French are still too afraid to face Henry himself. But the king, he's kind of probing the French defences along the Loire. And he's a bit anxious about it.

He's starting to run a bit out of money. So when you say the French defences, this is because the Dauphin is still resisting. Yeah. So despite the Treaty of Troyes, there are still French forces in the field that have not given up. So Henry's job now is to squash resistance. And this is proving much more difficult than perhaps he had imagined. If he'd been content with the northern half of France, say, the Loire could form a kind of barrier. It would be a bit like Nazi-occupied France and Vichy France, say. Yeah. The Loire could form a kind of barrier. It would be a bit like Nazi-occupied France

and Vichy France, something like that. But because he has proclaimed himself king of France, it's therefore his responsibility to reduce the whole kingdom, which means crossing the Loire and defeating the Dauphin. And had Henry lived, you know, he responds well to crises.

He might either have found a way to do it or, you know, he might have recalibrated his ambitions. He might have arrived at a kind of new treaty, but he doesn't because he falls ill and he dies. To give people a sense of that, he's campaigning all summer. This is only nine months after the birth of his son, two years since the Treaty of Troyes. He is campaigning. There's various sieges and whatnot at castles. And as is so often the way people are campaigning in the summer, people think he probably got dysentery or heat stroke or something like that. He's carried around in a litter and then he dies. Yeah. 31st of August, 1422. Yeah. And leaves the

son who, as you said, is only nine months old. And it's that that made me say that he was overrated king. Oh, because he got dysentery. No, the fact that he achieves this seeming impregnable success and then it all just melts away. And I think the consensus generally would be that that was always going to happen, that it was going to be impossible for England to swallow France, you know, like a kind of boa constrictor trying to swallow an elephant. It was never going to happen. Actually, reading about Henry in much greater depth than I've ever done before, I think you could kind of play devil's advocate. You could say that, you know, he's not just a great soldier. He is also an incredibly adept politician. He's perfectly capable, I think, you know, if crossing the is impossible of focusing on Normandy, focusing on the Northern reaches, focusing on Paris,

really making sure of his regime there, and then perhaps moving in later for the kill or arriving at some kind of accommodation. I mean, you could imagine that happening, I think. And the other thing is that Henry thinks hard about how his power should be projected and also how it should be protected. And I think that his emphasis on the fact that England and France will remain separate kingdoms, he's not aiming to integrate them, I think is very shrewd. It would have been the only way that he could have had success. Kind of like the union of England and Scotland, that the distinctiveness of the two kingdoms is a crucial part in persuading the peoples of the two kingdoms to accept the union. So to his French subjects, he projects himself as a model of justice, a man who can keep the peace.

And he does have French admirers. You know, we've been saying he is the best option. To his English subjects, of course, there's a nervousness because Henry actually spends most of his reign in France, not in England. And so obviously they're worried. They don't want to lose their king to the French. And I think that you can see Henry's sensitivity to this. So it's why the terms of the Treaty of Troyes were written and promulgated by him to the English in English and not in French or Latin. And that's part of a much broader policy

to emphasise the fact that he is an English king. So the letters that he sends that are stamped, his diplomatic missives, his administrative documents, they are often written in English. And it creates something that had basically not been a feature of English administrative life since 1066, which is English language-based administration. And in a way of all the many achievements of Henry V's reign that turned to ash, his conquests and all of that, this I think is the most enduring legacy of Henry's reign. It was always going to happen, but he expedites it. The fact that English government and English administration properly becomes English, written and expressed in England. Well, Tom, since we're at the end of the series, maybe Theo will let us go on a tiny bit longer.

So two things that occurred to me. The first thing, so this is the biggest turnaround in the history of The Rest is History. Certainly as far as you're concerned, that you've gone from, you know, I don't know, 50 episodes ago or 100 episodes ago saying Henry V was the most overrated king in English history. You were very vehement about it. And you said this was a self-indulgent, obviously impossible enterprise, unlike Edward III. And it was always going to fail. He wasted

money and blood on this enterprise. And actually thinking about you talking about the dual kingdoms, I mean, actually in this period, there is a really good example of a dynasty that rules multiple kingdoms very successfully, which is obviously the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs end up running this gigantic patchwork empire of different kingdoms. Or indeed the Spanish king, you know, Ferdinand and Isabella. Right, exactly. They do so very successfully for a very long period of time. So it's not impossible, I would say, that if Henry V lives.

I think it was always unlikely. And that's why I thought Henry V, he was never going to pull it off. But I do think having read about him, firstly, I mean, he's an amazingly competent king. He's really, really impressive. He's just really good at it. He's really good at it.

So KB Macfarlane, who was, you know, one of the great, great historians of the 15th century. I mean, he said Henry V was the greatest man that ever ruled England. I don't really want to talk in those terms, but Henry, I mean, he's a formidable man and he's a thoughtful man. You know, that sense that he had to promote an English identity in England and present himself as a properly French king in France, it sounds so obvious, but loads of kings wouldn't have thought to do that.

I mean, Henry VI and his regime don't really do that, but Henry does it. So had he lived, maybe there's a possibility that he might just have worked. I mean, it probably wouldn't in the long run, but I still think it was a waste. Obviously it was a waste. It was all for nothing.

All that blood, all that gold, all that suffering. Yeah. But Henry's not to know that. You know, we can't sit in judgment from posterity. No. And your counter-argument to that gold, all that suffering. But Henry's not to know that. We can't sit in judgment from posterity. No. And your counter-argument to that is, it's easy for us in the 21st century to say, what a waste of blood and money and effort and whatnot. But the two things are, one, that is what is expected of a medieval king. His nobles, they want excitement, booty, expansion, all of that. And if you fail to deliver deliver that people will judge you for it

and it will endanger your regime and secondly if you are the son of a usurper and your regime is insecure you probably have no choice yeah busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels exactly but the third is and this is what i always try and remember you know, is that you have to judge the moral standards of the age by its own moral standards. And Henry clearly thinks that he is chosen by God to be the king of France. And that being so, the sin would not be to invade France, but not to invade France. And I don't think that's just hypocrisy. I don't think that's just kind of Machiavellian humbug. I think he genuinely believes it. And Agincourt is's just hypocrisy. I don't think that's just kind of Machiavellian humbug. I think he genuinely believes it.

And Agincourt is the proof of that. He's put it to the test and he has spectacularly won. Well, Tom, a wonderful series. Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed doing this. So in 1422, Henry has tragically died and he's left a nine-month-old son on the throne of England. And Tom, we would be remiss if we did not pick up this story maybe next year with the reign of henry the sixth theo will finally get his way and we will finally tell the sad and sorry story of the english defeats in france that mark the end of the

hundred years war and then of course the beginning of the great medieval soap opera the greatest medieval soap opera them all the story of the wars of the roses so soap opera the greatest medieval soap opera them all the story of the wars of the roses so that will be coming at the rest is history and when it does of course tom rest is history club members will get it all in one go won't they they will so that's something to look forward to yeah so i imagine we'll be uh looking first of all at joan of arc which of course is one of the most extraordinary stories oh no i thought we were going to skip joan of arc that's shocking that's shocking no we're not going to skip Joan of Arc. That's shocking. That's shocking.

No, we're not going to skip Joan of Arc. One of the most extraordinary stories, not just of medieval history, but of all time. I can hear Theo giving a Gaelic laugh from here. Right, on that bombshell, Tom, merci beaucoup. A veritable tour de force as always. And everybody, we will see you next time for something completely different.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. 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.

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