The body of the French army moved forward, but their great numbers made them unwieldy and confused. The arrows of the English archers continued to do their deadly work, and the riderless horses created further alarm among the men. The bodies of the dead already lay in piles upon the muddy ground, and the more nimble English soldiers were able to turn in upon the groaning mass of the enemy. Two-thirds of the remaining French army now fled. Henry was not yet certain of the victory; a third part of the army still remained on the field, and many unarmed French prisoners were held in the rear of the action. He ordered these men to be put to death, to avoid any threatening movement on their part. This was in defiance of the rules of chivalry, which forbade the execution of unarmed prisoners, and was also to the detriment of the English who could have been expected to earn sizeable ransoms from their captives. Yet Henry ordered 200 archers to carry out the work of killing. It can only be said that in the blood and heat of battle some pressing reason must have suggested itself to him. What that was, we do not know. His command was not wholly carried out, however, and many hundreds of noble prisoners survived the ordeal of the battle of Agincourt.
The king now marched unimpeded to Calais from where, after a few days’ respite, he sailed back to England. His reception in London on 23 November was a great occasion of state. 20,000 citizens met him at Blackheath, where he was hailed as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’. Two giant figures, of a man and a woman, were erected on London Bridge to welcome him; effigies of the lion and the antelope wearing the royal arms, with a choir of angels singing ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord’, greeted his progress. Other giant figures, and pageant wagons, and fanciful castles, decorated the route to St Paul’s Cathedral; the king, in a simple gown of purple, was greeted by groups of singers holding garlands. In this year, also, Henry began to wear an arched or imperial crown modelled upon that worn by the Holy Roman Emperor; it was an ‘imperial diadem of gold and precious stones’, adverting to the fact that he had regained an imperial kingship.
The victory was not immediately followed by an advantageous truce. No overwhelming victory has ever had such tenuous result. The sinews that had been stiffened were now relaxed again, and the blood summoned was permitted to subside. Yet the reputation of the king was greatly strengthened; he did now seem to be one favoured and protected by God, and the right of his dynasty to rule was manifestly confirmed. At a stroke he had become the leading figure in the royal politics of Europe. On a more practical level the parliament house bestowed on him a new grant of taxation, and guaranteed him for life the excise on exports of wool and leather.
The French attempted to recapture Harfleur both by land and by sea, but a decisive naval battle in the summer of 1416 proved their undoing. Henry prided himself on his navy; he was the first king since Alfred to create a national force at sea, and by the end of 1416 he possessed six great ships, eight barges and ten single-masted sailing vessels known as balingers.
With these he launched his second invasion of France in February 1417. He had come to claim the throne of France ‘de facto et realiter’; it was his by right. He undertook a sequence of sieges, beginning with the town of Caen, slowly moving southwards until he arrived at Falaise, best known as the birthplace of William the Conqueror. He was returning to the land of his now remote predecessor, and in the process had effectively seized Normandy. Then he moved on to the capital of the duchy, Rouen; the siege lasted for almost six months, creating intense misery for the citizens. According to a popular verse of the period:
They ate dogs, they ate cats,
They ate mice, horses and rats
For thirty pence went a rat …
Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419. The way to Paris now lay open. Some inconclusive negotiations took place between the two sides; facing Henry was the king of France, Charles VI, together with his son and successor known as the ‘dauphin’. These two men were joined by the duke of Burgundy, who had formed an unlikely pact with the dauphin in an effort to repel the English. But the allies fell out; at a meeting arranged upon a bridge, one of the dauphin’s retinue killed the duke. It may have been a plot or, as was claimed, an accident; the result was the same. With his enemies in disarray Henry came up to the gates of Paris and demanded the French crown. Who could now deny it to him? The new duke of Burgundy was inexperienced, the dauphin was in disgrace, and the king of France was intermittently insane.
After much debate a treaty was agreed in the spring of 1420 in which it was confirmed that Charles VI would disinherit his son and declare the English king to be his successor. Henry V would marry the king’s daughter Katherine, so that any male child would then automatically become king of France as well as of England. It was on the face of it a great victory; Henry had won more than any of his predecessors. Subsequent events, however, would prove that the concord was ultimately unstable. Why should the French agree to be ruled by a king at Westminster? Serious misgivings also existed, in some quarters of the English parliament, about the wisdom of the English domination of France; the costs of war were very large. The price of maintaining power would also be high. It was unwise to tangle with the affairs of the French.
At the early date of 1417 the clergy had ceased to pray for the king’s success in foreign warfare; the parliaments of 1420 and 1421 reverted to their former ways and refused to grant money for the enterprise. The chronicler of the period, Adam of Usk, finished his narrative with the exclamation, ‘but, woe is me! Mighty men and treasure of the realm will be most miserable foredone about this business.’ Some compensations were available, most notably for the great knights and the soldiers of fortune who brought back treasure and booty. Thomas Montague, the earl of Salisbury, wrote to the king that ‘we broughten home the fairest and greatest prey of beasts as all those saiden that saw them that ever they saw’. He returned with riches, in other words. Whether this heartened the clergy and the yeomen of England is another matter.
Fears existed about English sovereignty itself. What if one treasurer, for example, were to superintend the revenues of both countries bound in an intricate embrace? What if the king, or his successor, appointed a French noble to that task? These may have been groundless fears, but nonetheless they existed. It had become obvious that the king was already spending more time in France than in England, to the detriment of national interests.
The proof is to be found in the fact that Henry was obliged to consolidate his gains in France with further military campaigns. He possessed, or occupied, the duchy of Normandy together with the area known as Vexin – the region of northwest France on the right bank of the Seine. But there were still provinces ruled by the duke of Burgundy, and others governed by the dauphin. There could be no peace in a divided land.
Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.
Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.