Agincourt

Henry V was undoubtedly an opportunist, in the sense that he was remarkably clever at identifying the chance to turn something to his own advantage. Was he also an opportunist in the more negative sense of the word, a man prepared to put expediency before principle? Had he really been deprived of his 'just rights and inheritances'? If so, what were they and was it necessary for him to go to war to win them back? To answer those questions, we have to go back almost exactly 350 years before the Agincourt campaign, to another, even more momentous invasion.

In 1066 the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England and crowned their duke, William the Conqueror, as king of England. Though the kingdom continued to be governed separately and independently from Normandy, socially, culturally and, to a much lesser extent, politically, England effectively became part of the continent for the next one and a half centuries. The king-duke and his Anglo-Norman aristocracy held lands and office on both sides of the Channel and were equally at home in either place. French became the dominant language in England, though Latin remained the choice of official documents and the Church, and Anglo-Saxon lingered on in vernacular speech, particularly among the illiterate. Cathedrals and castles were built as the visible symbols of a newly powerful and dynamic system of lordship in Church and state.

The new technique of fighting which had won the battle of Hastings for the Normans was also adopted in England; instead of standing or riding and hurling the lance overarm, these new warriors, the knights, charged on horseback with the lance tucked beneath the arm, so that the weight of both horse and rider was behind the blow and the weapon was reusable. Though it required discipline and training, giving rise to the birth of tournaments and the cult of chivalry, a charge by massed ranks of knights with their lances couched in this way was irresistible. Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess who witnessed its devastating effect during the First Crusade, claimed that it could 'make a hole in the wall of Babylon'.²

Intimately connected with these military developments was the equally significant rise of the feudal system of land tenure, which provided the knights to do the fighting by creating a chain of dependent lordships with the king at its head. Again, it was William the Conqueror who introduced feudalism to England from France. Immediately beneath him in the hierarchy were his tenants-in-chief, each of whom had to perform a personal act of homage, acknowledging that he was the king's vassal, or liege man, and that he owed him certain services. The most important of these was the obligation to provide a certain number of knights for the royal army whenever called upon to do so. In order to fulfil this duty, the tenants-in-chief granted parcels of their own land to dependent knights upon the same conditions, so that a further relationship of lord and vassal was created. Though it quickly became the accepted practice that the eldest son of a tenant succeeded his father, this was not an automatic right and it had to be paid for by a fine. If the heir was under age, the lands returned to the lord for the period of his minority, but a vassal of any age could be deprived of his lands permanently if he committed an act contrary to his lord's interests. The feudal system underpinned the entire structure of Anglo-Norman society, just as it did in France, but if abused it could cause serious tension.

As far as England and France were concerned, the cracks took some time to show. Pressure began to build in the twelfth century. The marriage in 1152 of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine created a huge Angevin empire, which covered almost half of modern France as well as England and Wales. It encompassed Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Poitou - in fact, virtually all of western France apart from Brittany. Such an extensive, wealthy and powerful lordship was a threat, politically and militarily, to the authority and prestige of an increasingly ambitious French monarchy, which launched a series of invasions and conquests. Over time, virtually all of the Angevin inheritance was lost, including Normandy itself in 1204. All that then remained in English hands was the duchy of Aquitaine, a narrow strip of sparsely populated, wine-producing land on the western seaboard of France. Otherwise known as Gascony, or Guienne, it had no exceptional value, except for the strategic importance of its principal ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, but it was a constant source of friction between the French and English monarchies.³

The status of the duchy increasingly became the subject of dispute. The French claimed that the duke of Aquitaine was a peer of France, that he held his duchy as a vassal of the French crown and that he therefore had to pay personal homage for it to the king of France - in other words, that a classic feudal relationship existed, binding the English king-duke by ties of loyalty to serve the French king in times of war and, more importantly, establishing a superior lordship to which his Gascon subjects could appeal over his head. This was unacceptable to the dignity of the kings of England, who counter-claimed that they held the duchy in full sovereignty and recognised no superior authority but that of God. The Gascons, not unnaturally, exploited the situation to their own advantage, relying on their duke to defend them against repeated French invasions and yet appealing against him to the ultimate court of France, the Paris Parlement, whenever they felt threatened by his authority.⁴

A situation that had long been smouldering burst into flame in 1337 when Philippe VI of France exercised his feudal authority to declare that Edward III was a disobedient vassal and that Aquitaine was duly confiscated. This had happened twice before, in 1294 and 1324, resulting each time in a brief and inconclusive war. The difference this time was that Edward III's response was to challenge the legitimacy not of the king's decision, but of the king himself. He assumed the arms and title of king of France as his own and adopted the motto 'Dieu et mon droit', for God and my right, the right being his claim to the French crown. It was a move that transformed a relatively small-scale feudal conflict into a major dynastic dispute.⁵

Edward III was able to claim the throne by right of inheritance from his grandfather, Philippe IV of France, but he owed it to a Templar curse. Philippe IV was ambitious, quarrelsome and always chronically short of money. Expedients such as expelling the Jews from France and confiscating their debts made temporary contributions towards replenishing his coffers and whetted his appetite for bigger game. His choice of his next victim was as bold as his action was ruthless. The Knights Templar was the oldest military order in Christendom, founded in 1119 to defend the fledgling Crusader states in the Holy Land. It was also one of the richest of all religious orders; the generosity of the pious had enabled it to amass enormous wealth in lands, property and goods throughout Europe, but especially in France. The raison d'être for these powerful monk-knights had disappeared, however, when the city of Acre, the last Christian outpost in the Holy Land, fell to the Saracens in 1291. Despite their years of experience fighting in the east, the Templars were unprepared for the ferocity of the onslaught that was about to befall them in France.

Philippe acted swiftly and without warning: on a single night he seized the Temple treasury in Paris and ordered the arrest of every Templar in the country. With the aid of a reluctant but compliant pope (a French puppet whom he had installed under his thumb at Avignon), he set about the total destruction of the order. Its members were accused individually and collectively of sorcery, heresy, blasphemy and sexual perversion. As there was no evidence to support the charges, proof was obtained by confession extorted from the hapless Templars by the tortures of the Inquisition. Many died as they were tortured; some committed suicide; more than half of the 122 who admitted their supposed crimes later courageously withdrew their confessions and were burnt alive as relapsed heretics. Among this last group was Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the order, who was burnt at the stake before the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in March 1314. As the flames consumed him, de Molay's last act was to defy his persecutors. He proclaimed the innocence of the Templars, cursed the king and his descendants to the thirteenth generation and prophesied that king and pope would join him before the throne of judgement within a year. The prophecy was spectacularly fulfilled. Eight months later, both Philippe IV (aged forty-six) and his tool Clement V (aged fifty) were indeed dead, and within fourteen years so were the three sons and grandson who each successively succeeded Philippe. The ancient line of Capetian monarchs died with them.⁶

In 1328, therefore, the throne of France stood empty and there was no obvious candidate to succeed. Those with the strongest claim, because they were Philippe IV's direct descendants, were his grandchildren Jeanne, the daughter of his eldest son, and Edward III, the son of his daughter Isabelle. In practice, however, neither was acceptable to the French: Jeanne because she was a woman and Edward because he was king of England. The unfortunate Jeanne had been deprived of her inheritance once before. When her brother had died, she had been only four years old and her uncle had seized the throne; ironically, a few years later, exactly the same fate would befall his own young daughters. Since no one wanted a minor sovereign, let alone a female one, the precedent set by these usurpations of 1316 and 1321 was later justified and legitimised by the invention of the Salic Law, which declared that women could not succeed to the crown of France. Nicely dressed up with an entirely spurious ancestry dating back to Carolingian times, the new law was applied retrospectively. It therefore excluded Jeanne permanently, but it made no mention of whether the right to succeed could be passed down through the female line. Edward III could therefore still legitimately claim to be the rightful heir.

In 1328 his rights were purely academic. At the age of sixteen, he was not only a minor but also a powerless pawn in the hands of his mother, Queen Isabelle, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, a notorious pair who had compelled his father, Edward II, to abdicate and then procured his murder. Edward III was not in a position to enforce his claim to the French throne, but he was, in any case, pre-empted by yet another coup. Philippe IV's nephew, the preferred candidate of the French, seized the moment and was crowned Philippe VI. It was the Valois dynasty, not the Plantagenets, who replaced the Capetians as kings of France.

There was nothing unusual in this sequence of events. It was a drama that had been played out all over Europe many times before and one on which the curtain would rise many times again. But on this particular occasion, the consequences were to extend far beyond anything that any of those immediately involved could have imagined. Edward III's decision to enforce his claim by force of arms launched the Hundred Years War, a conflict that would last for five generations, cause untold deaths and destruction, and embroil France, England and most of their neighbours as well. Even if Edward III's claim to the French throne was only revived as a cynical counter-ploy for the confiscation of his duchy of Aquitaine, it was sufficiently valid to convince many Frenchmen, as well as Englishmen, of the justice of his cause. Undoubtedly some of them were 'persuaded' purely out of self-interest. Political intrigue, or even rebellion, could be justified by denouncing the Valois regime as illegitimate and inviting the king of England to take up his rightful inheritance in France.⁷