The English invaders landed at Harfleur where for over a month they laid siege to the town. It was well fortified and surrounded by water ditches that had to be filled in to enable Henry’s forces to bring their guns close enough for attack. The conditions were difficult: many English soldiers died from dysentery. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ Or close the wall up with our English dead,’ cries Shakespeare’s Henry in his famous speech during the siege. The stirring words are eerily prophetic. Five hundred years almost exactly separate the Battle of Agincourt from the Battle of the Somme fought in the same area in 1916: five hundred years between one wall of English dead and another. In both cases ultimate victory came at a high price.
Once Henry had captured Harfleur he set up a garrison there and prepared to march deeper into France. First, though, he issued a challenge to the Dauphin, the King’s son, to meet him in a duel. The French King, Charles VI, was mad: his son, then eighteen years old, rather fat. The Dauphin declined. Henry wanted to go north towards Calais but he was forced to strike inland because the French had destroyed all means of crossing the Somme river. Supplies ran out and a contemporary account reports that the troops were ‘made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food’. Discipline was harsh: one Englishman caught stealing from a French church was hanged as an example to other would-be looters.
On 19th October 1415, the English army finally succeeded in crossing the Somme: five days later they came in sight of the main French army. Henry ordered his army to pitch camp, stay silent and wait. He had learned from some French prisoners that the enemy planned to use cavalry against his archers and, according to one chronicler, issued an instruction during the march ‘that every archer was to prepare and fashion for himself a stake or staff, either square or round, but six feet long … and sharpened at both ends’. These hastily prepared defences were to be driven into the ground on the battlefield to impale horses and riders as they charged at the English longbowmen. It had been raining hard and the field where the battle would take place was a quagmire.
Agincourt was a glorious memory, a historical legend and a Shakespearian dream.
As far as Henry was concerned, it was now or never. His army was exhausted by its march to Agincourt and was being constantly depleted by illness and death. On 25th October, the English attacked. The conditions were in their favour. The French menat-arms were weighed down by their cumbersome armour and their horses became lanced by the archers’ staves. The longbowmen did their work, sending volleys of arrows into the advancing cavalry, disrupting the attack and driving the French into the soggy mud. When they ran out of arrows they picked up anything they could find – axes, mallets, swords and spears – and waded into the fight, hacking at the oncoming enemy. After three hours, 5–10,000 Frenchmen had been killed, but the English army was still remarkably intact. Within the space of a morning, a group of exhausted Englishmen a quarter of the size of their enemy had renewed their country’s claim to territory across the Channel and heightened its reputation in the eyes of the world around it. No wonder Shakespeare chose their victory as the subject of his great pageant: it was a story to stir the blood of anyone with an ounce of patriotism in him.
Henry continued his campaigns in France throughout his reign. He captured Caen in 1417 and Rouen two years later: Normandy fell into English hands for the first time in 200 years. He married the French King’s daughter, Katherine, and was declared heir to the French throne and Regent of France. In 1420 he entered Paris. The noble families of France did not intend to stand by and watch their country handed over to an Englishman, and Henry would have to keep on fighting if he wanted to secure these great victories. In 1422 he died suddenly following the siege of Meaux just outside Paris. He was only thirty-four.
In a reign of nine years, Henry V had restarted the Hundred Years’ War and put England back in the ascendancy. His successes were short-lived. His infant son, Henry VI, was crowned King of England and France, but he turned out to be more priest than soldier. In 1429, seven years after Henry V’s death, the British were defeated at Orléans, thanks in part to the inspiration that the French received from a young visionary called Joan of Arc. Long before Henry VI’s reign was over, most of the land that his father had conquered was returned to France. Agincourt was a glorious memory, a historical legend and a Shakespearian dream.
In 1485, Henry Tudor defeated King Richard