Henry V at Agincourt

A king is rarely defined by a single morning's victory at a position he had not chosen. Henry V had not intended to fight a battle at Agincourt. He had intended to march his army the remaining sixty miles north-east to the safety of Calais on the eighteen-day route from the captured port of Harfleur, after the surrender of Harfleur on the twenty-second of September 1415 had left him with the small force of approximately six thousand archers and one thousand five hundred men-at-arms, two-thirds of the army he had landed at the mouth of the Seine in August. The French Constable Charles d'Albret had blocked the route at Agincourt on the morning of the twenty-fourth of October with the full feudal levy of the French royal army. The English had no choice on the morning of the twenty-fifth except to fight on the ground d'Albret had selected.

THE LANCASTRIAN HEIR

Henry of Monmouth was born at Monmouth Castle in the Welsh Marches on the sixteenth of September 1386, eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of King Edward III. The Plantagenet succession at his birth was lodged in his cousin Richard II's line; Henry of Monmouth was a junior Lancastrian-Plantagenet of no particular royal expectation. His grandfather John of Gaunt died in February 1399; his cousin Richard II confiscated the Lancastrian inheritance the next month; his father returned from exile in July 1399, deposed Richard II in September, and was crowned Henry IV on the thirteenth of October 1399. Henry of Monmouth, twelve years old at his father's coronation, became Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne.

He served as a teenage commander in the long Welsh war against Owain Glyndŵr from 1400, was wounded by an arrow in the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury at sixteen on the twenty-first of July 1403 (the wound left the famous Henry V facial scar that the Westminster Abbey funeral effigy of 1422 records), took the field command of the southern Welsh front of the Glyndŵr war from 1403 to 1408, and led the recovery of Aberystwyth Castle in 1408 and the suppression of the closing Welsh resistance through 1409 to 1411. He took the Regency of England in his father's last illness from 1410, succeeded as Henry V on the twentieth of March 1413 at twenty-six, was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the ninth of April 1413, and inherited a Lancastrian throne whose constitutional legitimacy was still contested by the Yorkist-line Mortimer claimants.

THE HARFLEUR CAMPAIGN

He decided in the spring of 1415 to reopen the Plantagenet continental claim to the French throne that his great-grandfather Edward III had advanced in 1337. The decision rested on the calculation that the French monarchy under the intermittently-insane Charles VI was in the worst administrative-and-military condition it had been in across the previous century, and that a successful Plantagenet campaign in northern France would consolidate the Lancastrian dynastic legitimacy at home through the prestige of a military success on the standard model of the great Plantagenet kings.

He landed an English army of approximately twelve thousand men (nine thousand archers, three thousand men-at-arms) at the mouth of the Seine at the small Norman port of Chef-de-Caux on the thirteenth of August 1415, marched east along the north bank of the Seine to the fortified port-town of Harfleur, and laid siege to Harfleur on the seventeenth of August. The siege ran six weeks longer than expected (Harfleur was a stronger fortress than Henry's intelligence had reported, and the French had reinforced the garrison through the early summer). Harfleur surrendered on the twenty-second of September 1415 after the failure of the relief expedition under the French Constable d'Albret. The English army had taken substantial losses through the siege (approximately two thousand dead from dysentery from the foul siege-camp drinking-water and approximately a thousand combat dead). The garrison-and-Calais defensive arrangement Henry put in place after the surrender left him with approximately seven thousand five hundred men available for the next phase of the campaign.

THE MARCH TO CALAIS

He decided on the twentieth of October to march the reduced army the two hundred and fifty miles north-east from Harfleur to the safety of the English-held port of Calais, on the calculation that the campaign-season was effectively over, that the army's strength was insufficient for any further offensive operation, and that the demonstration of the strategic English ability to march freely across northern France would itself produce a useful diplomatic-and-political result. The route ran along the right bank of the Seine to Pont de l'Arche, then north-east to Eu and the Somme, across the Somme at Boves and Béthencourt, and on through the Pas-de-Calais to Calais. The total distance was approximately two hundred and forty miles. The estimated march-time was eight days.

The march took eighteen days. The army crossed the Somme on the eighteenth of October at the small ford at Voyennes after the French Constable d'Albret had destroyed the planned bridges at Blanchetaque, the Boves and Béthencourt crossings. By the twenty-fourth of October the army was at Maisoncelle, three miles south of the Constable's main position at Agincourt; the French royal army, approximately twenty thousand strong, had formed up across the narrow eight-hundred-yard ploughed-field between the woods on the road from Maisoncelle to Tramecourt and was blocking the route to Calais.

THE FIELD AT AGINCOURT

Henry held the army at Maisoncelle through the wet night of the twenty-fourth-to-twenty-fifth of October. The army's last full meal had been at Eu eight days earlier. The dysentery from the Harfleur siege water was still active across the men-at-arms and a substantial fraction of the archers. The wet October weather had soaked the ploughed-field of the proposed battlefield into a deep mud that would constrain the movement of any heavy cavalry across it. The morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of October 1415 (the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the patron saints of the shoemakers' and cobblers' guild) broke wet, cold and overcast.

Henry drew up the army across the eight-hundred-yard front between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt at dawn on the twenty-fifth: the dismounted English men-at-arms in three central divisions of about five hundred each under the King's personal command in the centre and the Duke of York and Sir Thomas Camoys on the wings; the longbow archers in two wing-formations of about three thousand archers each on the wood-flanks, with the archers' wooden stakes (the famous sharpened pointed stakes the archers had cut and carried on the march from the Somme crossing) driven into the ground in front of the archer positions to break the French cavalry charge. The sixty-six-year-old Sir Thomas Erpingham, the senior English field-commander, had the operational command of the archers.

THE THREE HOURS

Henry took the field-command position at the centre of the line at eight in the morning. He addressed the army in the famous Saint Crispin's Day address, the text of which has been transmitted through Shakespeare's 1599 play (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother) but is in the chronicle accounts of the actual day a much shorter and plainer speech to the immediate effect that the army would either fight that morning or be killed where they stood and that, since the king himself would not be ransomed, no Englishman should expect quarter.

The battle opened at eleven in the morning with the English advance to within longbow range (approximately three hundred yards) of the French line and the planting of the archers' stakes in the forward positions. The first French cavalry charge from the right and left French wings, on the order of the Constable d'Albret, broke against the stakes and the archers' fire and was beaten back with heavy French cavalry losses. The second French heavy-infantry advance, dismounted men-at-arms across the centre, came up across the deep ploughed-field mud, was funnelled by the narrowing of the field between the two woods into a compressed front on which the dismounted French men-at-arms were standing four and five deep, and was struck simultaneously by the front-rank English men-at-arms and by the close-range archery from the wings.

The compressed French infantry could not move forward in the mud, could not retreat against the press of the second-and-third French infantry waves coming up behind, and was cut down where it stood by the close-range English archery and the dismounted English men-at-arms working forward through the front French ranks with poleaxe-and-warhammer. The fighting ran for approximately three hours through the late morning and early afternoon. By two in the afternoon the French royal army had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force. The Constable d'Albret was dead. The Duke of Brabant was dead. The Duke of Alençon was dead. The Duke of Bar was dead. Three further French Dukes, ninety Counts, fifteen hundred knights of the French gentry, and approximately five thousand five hundred French rank-and-file men-at-arms were dead on the field. The English casualties were approximately four hundred dead, including the Duke of York (the King's first cousin) and the Earl of Suffolk.

THE RETURN AND THE LEGACY

Henry held the field through the rest of the twenty-fifth of October, resumed the march to Calais on the twenty-sixth, and reached Calais on the twenty-ninth. He sailed to Dover on the sixteenth of November and entered London in triumph on the twenty-third of November 1415 in the formal triumph procession on the model of the Roman Republican entries through Cheapside and the Mansion House to St Paul's Cathedral, with the Constable d'Albret's sword carried before him and the captured French standards displayed on the high altar of the cathedral.

He pursued the campaign across the next seven years to the Treaty of Troyes of the twenty-first of May 1420, by which Charles VI of France recognised him as the heir to the French throne and the regent of France for the duration of Charles's life. He married Charles's daughter Catherine of Valois on the second of June 1420 at the cathedral of Troyes, returned to England with the new Queen for the May 1421 coronation at Westminster, and died of dysentery at the Château de Vincennes outside Paris on the thirty-first of August 1422 at thirty-five, two months before the death of Charles VI and the consequent application of the Treaty of Troyes that would have made his infant son Henry VI both King of England and King of France. He is buried at Westminster Abbey under the famous Henry V chantry chapel at the east end of the Sanctuary.

The Agincourt victory is the central single English military memory of the Middle Ages. The standing Saint Crispin's Day speech that Shakespeare gave him in the 1599 play has been part of the English-language military rhetorical tradition for four hundred and twenty-six years. The Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Royal Regiment of Wales, the regimental descendants of the Welsh archers who fought at Agincourt, observe Saint Crispin's Day every year on the twenty-fifth of October with the regimental memorial parade and the Agincourt March played by the regimental band. The Plantagenet name in modern English memory carries the weight of the Saint Crispin's Day morning at Agincourt.