Henry V as Warlord by Seward Desmond

Author:Seward, Desmond [Seward, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

One might easily count in the ditch ten or twelve dead to every one alive, who had died so quietly, without call or cry, as if they had died in their sleep. Henry allowed all babies born in the ditch to be hauled up in baskets and christened – after which they were returned to their mothers by basket.

Pious as always, the king marked the feast of Christmas with a truce – to last the twenty-four hours of Christmas day. He sent two priests and three servants into the ditch with food. He also sent his heralds to the captain of Rouen, Guy le Bouteiller, offering a meal to anyone who lacked food, and freedom to come into the English lines to eat it. The captain did not trust him and refused to let the Rouennais take advantage of the offer. Those in the ditch prayed that Henry might ‘win his right’, if we may believe John Page, ‘since Englishmen have tender hearts’.

As John Page also explains (and Vegetius teaches), hunger breaches even stone walls. On the night of New Year’s Eve 1419 a French knight at the Bridge Gate was heard shouting that he wanted to talk to a baron or knight with the right ancestry. Gilbert Umfraville shouted back that he was a knight and told him his name. (He was descended from a Norman knight who had ridden with William the Conqueror.) The French knight thanked God ‘for you are of the ancient blood of Normandy’. Umfraville arranged for envoys from Rouen to come and discuss with the king the possibility of a parley.

When they arrived the following day Henry, very much in character, made them wait until he had finished hearing Mass. When at last he saw them he had a scowling face. One of them remarked that Rouen was no mean city, whereupon the king replied fiercely, ‘It is mine and I will have it!’ When they pleaded for the folk in the ditch he answered, ‘Fellows, who put them there?’ Full scale negotiations for surrender began the following day, in two tents in Gloucester’s camp. When the ditch was again brought up the king listened coldly and refused to let the ‘useless mouths’ out, asking who had placed them in it. ‘I put hem not there and that wot ye!’ He insisted that Rouen was his by right, rebuking the envoys for having ‘kept my city, the which is mine inheritance’. He harped at length on this favourite theme; ‘Rouen is my heritage’. According to the First English Life he demanded, ‘Or else, peradventure, you take upon you the judgement of my title? Know you not how many castles, cities and defensible places have been by us obtained and gotten, and how often from the field with victories have we chased our adversaries? Were not these signs of justice?’5 It was yet another repetition of his claim that God was on his side, that he was justified by signs of divine approval.

The negotiations broke down and the envoys returned to Rouen.

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