Henry V as Warlord Read Free Page B

of Charles V and the Constable du Guesclin quickly regained for France the territories ceded at Brétigny.
    Richard realized that England simply could not afford to continue the war, that its expense was a grave source of weakness to the monarchy. On several occasions during the 1380s Parliament had refused to grant the taxes needed to pay for it, showing an obvious desire for more control of the central government. He admired French civilization and French luxury and was unusual for his age in being unmoved by considerations of military glory. He was correct in thinking that England, a comparatively poor and thinly populated land, should not embark on overseas conquest. However, he overestimated the strength of France, which was largely illusory despite the wealth and splendour of the Valois monarchy and of the French nobility; not only were the latter much too rich and independent but their king was afflicted by increasingly lengthy fits of insanity so that there was no national leadership. It has been argued that at this date France was not a nation but a collection of nations. Yet, although there was unquestionably great diversity in dialect and custom, this is an exaggeration. If semi-independent, the great nobles nonetheless regarded the king as the principal political figure in the country, as did the lesser nobility, even if there might not have been the close relationship which existed in England between Crown and Parliament. So determined was Richard to secure an Anglo-French peace that he seriously contemplated separating Guyenne from the English crown, with his uncle John of Gaunt as its duke and independent sovereign. The scheme came to nothing, but the English king compromised with a truce for twenty-eight years. He had already married the French king’s daughter, Isabel, in token of his good faith. In addition he had gone so far as to try to make the Church in England switch its allegiance from the Urbanist pope at Rome to the Clementist pope at Avignon since the latter was supported by the French.
    Richard was unpopular with all classes, save in a very few parts of the country. His attempts to free the monarchy from the dictates of Lords and Commons, his high-handed treatment of great noblemen and of the City of London, his inefficient government and personal extravagance, above all his arbitrary taxation – of the sort which had provoked the Peasants’ Revolt – were resented in particular. His pro-French policy was detested although it might have resulted in lighter taxation. His uncle, the murdered Duke of Gloucester, had led an anti-French lobby which rejoiced on hearing of the slaughter of ‘those rare boasting Frenchmen’ by the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396 although they had been on a crusade. The English remembered with pride the conquests of Edward III and the Black Prince, the victories of Crécy and Poitiers, a king of France being brought prisoner to London. They remembered too, with keen nostalgia, the loot and ransoms which had flooded back across the Channel; there was no longer the prospect, formerly open to all classes, of making one’s fortune from plundering in France. Moreover one has only to read Chaucer (whose verse was extremely popular in court circles and who had been born half a century before Henry), to realize that French had ceased to be the language of the ruling class, even of intellectuals, although still used sometimes for formal or official purposes; as king, Henry’s correspondence was always in English. Indeed there was a widespread feeling of hatred and disdain towards the French. In a poem of this period Eustache Deschamps has an English soldier shouting, ‘Dog of a Frenchman [ Franche dague ], you do naught but drink wine all day long!’ 2
    There was also an element of fear. French privateers were constantly harrying English shipping and raiding the South Coast. Froissart reports that the English said openly that their own king might be their ruin – ‘His heart