Henry the Fifth by Alfred John Church

Author:Alfred John Church [Church, Alfred John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Nonfiction
ISBN: 4057664604941
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER X

AFTER AGINCOURT

Brilliant as was the victory which Henry had won at Agincourt, it had, it may be said, no immediate results. The English king was not in a position to follow it up. His loss on the field of battle had, as we have seen, been considerable—amounting to nearly a sixth of his army, if we are to accept the smaller estimate of his numbers, to a twelfth, if we take the larger. Nor is it likely that the sickness which had already so terribly diminished his force had altogether ceased. We are indeed expressly told that the soldiers were “sorely fatigued by their efforts in the battle, and greatly troubled by famine and other wants.” But, indeed, so sagacious and far-seeing a general could never have contemplated any other result. He had, in truth, got all that he could have hoped for. He had done what he had said he would do. He had marched from his town of Harfleur to his town of Calais, and all the hosts which the King of France had gathered to bar his way had been scattered before him. This chivalrous, even rash, undertaking had been accomplished, and accomplished with a success so splendid that it had seemed to be the very wisest thing that he could have done. He had not, it is true, achieved anything more towards the actual conquest of French territory than had been achieved on the day when Harfleur surrendered, but in prestige and in all that prestige can effect he had gained immensely. The glories of Crecy and Poictiers, dimmed by sixty years of feebleness and dissension, had been revived. Englishmen had again found that they could conquer even against desperate odds; and they had learnt that they had a captain at their head who was at least the equal in skill and courage of the greatest of those who had gone before him. Though the close of the day of Agincourt did not leave the conqueror in possession of one foot more of French soil than he had owned at its beginning, it brought him sensibly nearer to the end of his ambition, the crown of France. Any attempt to seize it at once would have been sheer madness. If he had ventured on a march to Paris, even the broken and dispirited remnant of the French army would have been sufficient to crush his feeble force. His policy was to wait, to gather fresh strength for a renewed effort. Meanwhile the profound discouragement that could not but be the result of a defeat so disastrous, suffered in circumstances so discreditable, would sink into the minds of his adversaries. Other causes, too, would be at work, the force of which he was shrewd enough to foresee. Dissension and jealousy were rife among the governing classes of France. Neither of the great feudatories of the French crown had been present at the battle of Agincourt. Two brothers of the Duke of Burgundy were there

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