The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #211

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. If you remember last time we'd finished with the Siege of Harfleur,

00:00:19.520 Henry V's famous 1415 campaign. So in this episode, hopefully I'm going to try and get us up to

00:00:25.100 the Battle of Agincourt, or at least the night before the Battle of Agincourt. And so that's

00:00:30.420 about a whole month. And there is a fair amount of detail to go through. I hope you like it. So I

00:00:35.900 shall be continuing with Ian Mortimer's great book, 1415, Henry V's Year of Glory, which does go into

00:00:42.220 far more detail than I've seen in any other book. So let's just continue with this. Ian Mortimer

00:00:49.840 starts us off with cutting back to the French side of the equation. He says, quote, John the

00:00:54.780 fearless had been at Argueley for over a month now. Four days ago on the 20th, the ambassadors of the

00:01:00.580 French government led by the Duke of Lorraine had arrived. Their mission was to try to persuade John

00:01:05.280 to send men to help the Dauphin in his struggle against the English and at the same time to keep

00:01:10.540 John away from Paris because the French side were worried that John the fearless might attempt a coup

00:01:17.780 or another coup. If you remember from earlier episodes, there'd been all sorts of internal

00:01:22.440 civil strife, civil war in France between the Armagnac faction and the Burgundian faction. So

00:01:28.320 the powers that be, the actual royal family and the Dauphin and the king were suspicious and wary of

00:01:34.200 John the fearless, to say the least. They didn't necessarily really want him in command of an army,

00:01:39.360 but still they also needed him at the same time. So caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place.

00:01:43.760 Baltimore continues saying, with Paris in a heightened state of anxiety and experiencing

00:01:48.040 a particular cynicism with regard to the government, the appearance of John the fearless in the city

00:01:53.540 threatened to cause mayhem, if not an insurrection. And by today, we're talking about Tuesday the 24th

00:01:58.920 of September. Today, the ambassadors were given three letters, one of which had been written by John

00:02:04.180 the fearless himself. Of course, the Duke reveled in the chance to cause more upset in Paris and saw the

00:02:10.000 slight to himself in the earlier letters as being the perfect excuse to push the Dauphin into a corner.

00:02:16.280 John professed his deepest loyalty to the kingdom of France, but complained bitterly about the request

00:02:21.980 that he remain at home and not come to the rescue of France in her hour of need. Was he not the Dauphin's

00:02:28.300 father-in-law? Why had all the other lords of northern France been summoned and he had not? It was

00:02:33.820 nothing more than an attempt to belittle him and to undermine his honour, which he valued higher than

00:02:39.040 anything else in the world. Instead of the paltry 500 men-at-arms he had been asked to send, he would

00:02:44.740 attend in person with a far larger number, as it was his duty to save the kingdom in its current peril.

00:02:50.700 Another of the letters that went back with the Duke of Lorraine was written by vassals of John the

00:02:56.080 fearless on behalf of their lord. They complained that John had not been given command of his own men.

00:03:01.520 This was most unfitting. The men of Burgundy saw their prime loyalty being to the Duke of Burgundy

00:03:06.880 and not to the King of France. The lords also supported the tenor of the Duke's own letter.

00:03:12.540 How come the Dauphin required so few troops? Why had there been such a delay in requesting them from

00:03:17.520 the Duke of Burgundy? Why had the Duke himself been asked not to fight for the kingdom? Had not the

00:03:22.480 seriousness of the English threat been registered by the government? For the envoys who had to carry

00:03:26.860 these letters back to the Dauphin, the menace of John the fearless must have seemed as dangerous

00:03:32.020 as that of Henry V. And although the Duke's own letter seemed to suggest he was wholeheartedly

00:03:37.680 on the side of the French, they could not be sure he would not switch at the last moment and side

00:03:42.380 with the English. They could not be certain that he would not simply take his soldiers and ride into

00:03:47.100 Paris, betraying both the King of France and the King of England. The only thing they could be certain

00:03:51.960 of was that no one could trust him. As it happened, John the fearless had already started to gather his

00:03:56.840 forces together. He might have spent four days arguing against the King's order on the 1st of

00:04:01.700 September to send more troops, but in fact he had issued orders to his marshals on the 15th of

00:04:06.680 September to start gathering the men required." So it's not completely crazy for the Armagnac faction

00:04:13.300 in France to fear that John the fearless, Duke of Burgundy, might suddenly switch sides and just side

00:04:19.740 with Harry of England because he had had deals with the English before to side with them against the

00:04:26.960 Crown of France. So it's not really all that crazy or paranoid to think that could happen. But as it

00:04:33.460 turns out, John the fearless, spoiler alert, slight spoiler alert, John the fearless does never side

00:04:37.500 with the English in the 1415 campaign. Okay, on to Wednesday the 25th of September. The losses to the

00:04:43.420 English army did not end with the fall of Harfleur. In fact, it seems likely that the majority of the

00:04:48.080 casualties from the siege died after its capitulation. The end of September saw several

00:04:53.800 prominent men expire. On this day, Sir John Chidioc, Lord Fitzpain, succumbed. His is just one

00:05:00.380 of the many names that do not appear noted in the Chronicles as casualties of Henry's campaign.

00:05:05.480 Those writing such works had no wish to commemorate anything but the glory of Henry's victory and the

00:05:10.880 paucity of the English casualties. As a result, many men who gave their lives for Henry were simply

00:05:16.280 ignored. References to their death made for uncomfortable reading. Thursday the 26th. As noted

00:05:21.940 several times already, Henry repeatedly followed the pattern of Edward III's Cressy campaign of 1346.

00:05:28.480 Now he chose to enact another of Edward's wartime measures, a challenge to a duel. Edward III had

00:05:34.220 first offered to fight a duel with his rival, King Philip of France, with the priors being the

00:05:39.160 Kingdom of France in 1340. The idea was that the king could parade his courage and his Christian

00:05:45.520 virtues, offering to fight alone to avoid shedding Christian blood, while at the same time being very

00:05:50.840 sure that his rival would not actually meet him in battle. Today he issued a challenge to the Dauphin

00:05:56.500 to be carried to him at Vernon by the English herald William Bruges and Raoul de Gauchel. And here again

00:06:03.700 we get the actual words from the early 15th century. Brilliant stuff. Which says, quote,

00:06:08.660 Henry, by the grace of God, King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland, to the higher and

00:06:13.460 pursuant prince, the Dauphin, our cousin, eldest son of the most pursuant prince, our cousin and adversary

00:06:19.820 of France, from the reverence of God and to avoid the effusion of human blood we have in many times and

00:06:25.300 in many ways sought peace. And although we have not been able to obtain it, our desire to possess it

00:06:30.660 increases more and more. And while considering that the effects of our wars are the deaths of men,

00:06:36.400 destruction of countries, lamentations of women and children, and so many general evils, that every

00:06:42.040 good Christian must lament it and have pity, and us especially, whom this matter particularly concerns,

00:06:47.840 we are minded to seek diligently all possible means to avoid the above-mentioned evils, and to acquire

00:06:53.020 the approbation of God and the praise of the world. Whereas we have considered and reflected that,

00:06:58.500 as it has pleased God to visit our said cousin and your father with infirmity, in us and you

00:07:04.400 lies the remedy. And so everyone may know that we do not prevent it. We offer to place our quarrel at

00:07:10.100 the will of God between our person and yours. And if it should appear to you that you cannot accept

00:07:15.400 this offer on account of the interest that you think our said cousin, your father, has in it,

00:07:20.020 we declare that if you are willing to accept it and to do what we propose, it pleases us to permit

00:07:26.040 that our said cousin shall enjoy that which he has at present for the term of his life,

00:07:31.540 out of reverence for God and considering he, King Charles, is a sacred person, whatever it may

00:07:36.840 please God to see happen between us and you, as it shall be agreed between his counsel, ours and

00:07:41.640 yours. Thus, if God shall give us the victory, the crown of France with its appetences shall be

00:07:47.420 immediately rendered to us as our right, without difficulty, after his decease. And that all the lords and

00:07:53.220 the states of the kingdom of France shall be bound to accept this and shall be agreed between us.

00:07:57.680 For it is better for us, cousin, to decide this war forever between our two persons than to suffer

00:08:03.460 the unbelievers by means of our quarrels to destroy Christianity. Our mother, the holy church, to remain

00:08:09.940 in division and the people of God destroy one another. So a very roundabout way of saying, let you

00:08:15.560 and me finish this. You know, we don't want to kill other Christians unnecessarily. But as mentioned above,

00:08:21.260 Henry knew the Dauphin would not accept, you know, wouldn't accept the jewel, or almost certainly

00:08:26.040 wouldn't. Well, he didn't. Mortimer goes on. Here we see all the familiar arguments that really all

00:08:30.900 Henry wanted was peace, that he was simply doing God's will, and that the unification of England

00:08:35.680 and France was desirable in the eyes of God, as it would help heal the schism in the church. Perhaps

00:08:41.040 the most interesting line it contains is the overt statement that Henry sought the approbation of God

00:08:46.500 and the praise of the world, which seems a neat summing up of what truly motivated him.

00:08:51.340 Bruges and de Gaucourt were told to inform the Dauphin that Henry would wait for eight days at

00:08:56.440 Harfleur for the reply. The implication was that he would not wait much longer than that before leaving.

00:09:02.520 And then where would he go? Because as I said in the last episode, he's kind of got three choices.

00:09:07.100 He could go back to England because the siege of Harfleur just took much longer than it needed to,

00:09:12.060 and he lost more men than he thought he would. So he could go back to England and wait for another

00:09:18.720 year, or he could garrison Harfleur and wait for the French army to turn up, or he can chevalier

00:09:25.040 across northern France, Edward III style to Calais, goading the French army. They're his three choices.

00:09:31.400 The last one is what he did, and is sort of the most crazy option, especially seeing his men,

00:09:36.660 loads of the army have got dysentery, if nothing else. Even if they didn't have dysentery,

00:09:40.540 it'd still be the craziest option. But that's what he does decide to do.

00:09:45.220 Mortimer continues.

00:09:46.120 Sir William Butler of Warrington died today. He had been made a knight of the bath at Henry IV's

00:09:51.960 coronation, alongside Henry V's three brothers. Thus, although he does not figure prominently in

00:09:57.720 this book, he was a man whom the king had known for many years, and whose loss would have mattered

00:10:02.620 to him personally. Henry ordered that Sir William's body should be dismembered and boiled, and sent back

00:10:07.620 in the same ship that was carrying the bones of the Earl of Suffolk. There was also the matter of who

00:10:12.040 was going to take charge of his retinue. Butler had led a party of 50 Lancashire archers to Harfleur,

00:10:17.800 in addition to his own retinue of four men-at-arms and twelve archers. His death was a tragic blow to

00:10:23.680 Henry, as well as a personal loss. Friday the 27th.

00:10:27.140 Another knight, Sir John Southworth died today, coming straight after the deaths of Sir John Chidioc and

00:10:34.100 Sir William Butler. It causes us to ask how many Englishmen were sick at this point, and how many

00:10:39.040 men had actually died or were dying. When Henry had landed on the 14th of August, he had had a minimum

00:10:44.760 of 11,248 fighting men, of whom 2,266 were men-at-arms. In addition, there were the servants, pages, and

00:10:53.020 support staff, resulting in at least 15,000 men with the king, excluding mariners. The long-accepted

00:10:59.340 method of assessing the proportion of sick men is based on the assumption that the whole army was

00:11:04.200 equally infected, and all at the highest rate. This has normally been followed by historians in

00:11:09.240 their keenness to justify the long-established figure of just 5,900 Englishmen at Agincourt,

00:11:15.340 with the implication that the magnitude of the victory was as great as English legend and Henry V's

00:11:20.500 propaganda claims. A less nationalistic and more considered approach, using the list of those

00:11:25.920 invalided back to England, allows us to establish an accurate minimum of 1,693 for those sent home.

00:11:33.660 Unfortunately, these lists are incomplete, and we do not know how many names might be missing.

00:11:38.580 However, as we know, the army was divided into three battles, three army corps, you might say,

00:11:44.300 under the command of the king, Clarence, and York. We can estimate casualty rates in all three areas

00:11:50.580 where the English army was camped. This gives us a level of infection of about 17% across the whole

00:11:56.260 army. That's massive. That's sort of disastrous level. The total number of men sent home was very

00:12:02.760 probably between 1,693 and 2,550, of whom between 1,330 and 1,900 were fighting men, with the greatest

00:12:12.420 concentration among the men situated in close proximity to the king. As for the number of deaths,

00:12:17.560 there are actually very few deaths at Harfleur. One chronicler, Monstrelate, states that 2,000

00:12:23.100 Englishmen died at Harfleur, but it seems that, writing 30 years later, he confused 2,000 lost,

00:12:29.280 i.e. invalided home, with 2,000 dead. A close examination of the surviving accounts shows there

00:12:34.860 is only evidence for 37 English deaths, including those who died from attack as well as disease.

00:12:40.820 Probably fewer than 50 Englishmen perished at Harfleur. Two combat, that is.

00:12:45.060 Raoul de Gaucourt was given leave to depart today, possibly in the company of William Bruges.

00:12:50.200 But what was Henry to do with the other knights and men of honour who had surrendered at Harfleur?

00:12:55.020 He decided to release them temporarily after they had sworn an oath to present themselves at Calais

00:13:00.460 at Martinmas, which is the 11th of November. There they were to surrender themselves to the king

00:13:05.480 himself or his lieutenant, or a specially appointed deputy. 60 knights, including de Gaucourt, and more than

00:13:11.700 200 other gentlemen, were thus released in the expectation that they would voluntarily give

00:13:16.760 themselves up into custody in just six weeks' time. If a battle had already taken place, he told

00:13:22.300 them, they were simply to pay their ransoms. If no battle had taken place, they were to submit

00:13:27.280 themselves to imprisonment. The people of Paris were in confusion. Some did not believe that Harfleur

00:13:32.380 had yet fallen. Others thought that there must have been some betrayal, that it had been sold to the

00:13:37.480 English. Others said that Henry had already admitted this publicly, and still more were in

00:13:42.400 despair that the royal family was dealing with the war so badly. They bitterly resented the new

00:13:47.340 taxation and openly sang songs in praise of the Duke of Burgundy. Around this time, a Frenchman called

00:13:53.500 Colin de la Valérie, one of the Burgundian faction who had been exiled from Paris, wrote a letter to his

00:13:59.420 wife telling her to meet him at a certain town on the 20th of October and to bring with her 20 crowns,

00:14:05.680 for John the Fearless was planning to be there by that time with a large army. Not having the money,

00:14:10.640 she went to a friend to borrow it. Unfortunately, she left the letter with the said friend, who was

00:14:15.200 an Armagnac supporter. In no time at all, the streets of Paris were seething with the news

00:14:19.540 about an intended Burgundian rising. The gates were barricaded, and everyone in Paris was preparing

00:14:25.460 for the city to be attacked, not by Henry V, but by John the Fearless. Saturday the 28th, which was

00:14:31.200 the Feast of Wenceslas, and we told a great deal about St Wenceslas, who was the patron saint of

00:14:36.700 Bohemia, but I won't go into that because it's not strictly necessary to our story. We're told,

00:14:41.300 Henry's decision to send his sick back to England was forced upon him. To leave them at a half floor

00:14:46.960 would have been counterproductive in respect to both the likelihood of infecting others and their

00:14:51.880 consumption of food and other resources. To take them with him on a march across France would have

00:14:56.940 also been impossible. As the sick were returning without their horses and stores, they required

00:15:02.280 relatively few ships. Perhaps 20 large vessels sufficed. The ships from Holland had returned to

00:15:07.960 their own country shortly after the landing, and a number of English ships had returned to their

00:15:12.220 ports on the 12th of September, but enough remained for the task. The sailing started today. The Earl of

00:15:17.700 Arundel was put aboard a vessel with a guard of five healthy men-at-arms and many of his sick

00:15:23.300 followers. One of his men-at-arms died in the process. Other important lords who were carried

00:15:29.020 on board the ships included Thomas, Duke of Clarence, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, and John

00:15:34.320 Mowbray, the Earl Marshal, some of the biggest hitters in the army there. A significant proportion

00:15:39.220 of the high-ranking lords who had undertaken to come to France had been lost. A total of 12 dukes and

00:15:44.420 earls had mustered at Southampton in July. Two earls were now dead, Suffolk and Cambridge. So with a

00:15:50.900 further three earls and a duke lost to ill health, Henry had lost half of the original contingent of

00:15:55.960 magnates. Furthermore, Henry had decided to leave his uncle, Thomas Beaufort, Earl of Dorset, in charge

00:16:01.640 at Harfleur, and to send the Earl of Warwick directly to Calais by ship to defend the town and receive the

00:16:07.380 prisoners. At a time when rank meant so much in terms of the structures of command, Henry was running out

00:16:13.460 of leaders. Apart from Beaufort, there were only four members of the pre-campaign Royal Council with him.

00:16:18.860 His youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of York, Lord Fitzhugh, and Sir Thomas

00:16:24.320 Erpingham. End quote. So this chevauché, Henry's about to do, is going to be done on a shoestring

00:16:30.780 with a skeleton crew, sort of the absolute bare minimum. It must have seemed foolhardy at the time.

00:16:36.880 It must have seemed a bit crazy. But hey, we all know how it turned out, so let's continue.

00:16:41.780 Sunday the 29th, which was Micklemas. In England, the Regent John, Duke of Bedford,

00:16:47.120 sent out a writ to all the sheriffs, prelates, and lords proroguing Parliament from the 21st of

00:16:53.280 October to the 4th of November. He had received a message from Henry, who seems to have expressed

00:16:57.940 a desire to be present at the said Parliament. Henry had allowed himself five weeks to make

00:17:02.740 the journey back to Westminster. What was his strategy at this juncture? He had appointed his

00:17:07.460 uncle, Thomas Beaufort, lieutenant at Harfleur, but clearly he did not intend to stay there to command

00:17:12.460 personally. This accords with the information about his intended march through Montevilliers,

00:17:17.760 Dieppe, Rouen, and Paris, mentioned in Bordieu's letter of the 3rd of September. It also tallies

00:17:23.660 with his letter to the Dauphin, challenging him to a duel, which stated that he was going to stay

00:17:28.500 at Harfleur for eight days, implying that he was going to leave shortly afterwards. Clearly,

00:17:33.260 he never intended in wintering in the town, but was planning to march through France.

00:17:37.400 But where was he heading? Rouen and Paris, as Bordieu stated, or Calais? As we have seen,

00:17:43.320 and as Henry knew, the French army was gathering in Rouen. To attack it would be risking disaster.

00:17:49.140 English longbow armies were most successful when they managed to force an enemy to attack them,

00:17:53.840 and they themselves were in a static position. Then they cut down the troops charging towards them,

00:17:58.600 using the first fallen ranks as a means to slow up the ranks behind while they shot at them.

00:18:03.100 Henry might have gone looking for a fight and tried to attract the French to attack him near Rouen,

00:18:07.940 but had he done so, he would have had no escape plan, being so deep within Normandy.

00:18:13.360 If the French failed to be drawn into the attack, they could slowly strangle his army

00:18:17.400 by withholding supplies, besieging the English in the field, as it were, and they could call up more

00:18:23.000 and more men, the French could. Henry could not call up reinforcements, thus there was a good

00:18:27.480 strategic reason why he was not intending to head to Rouen. This part of Bordieu's letter

00:18:32.380 was probably deliberate misinformation, in case it fell into French hands. By the time it arrived

00:18:37.440 in Bordeaux, it would not have mattered what it said about Henry's strategy. Calais, on the other

00:18:42.680 hand, did offer an escape route, for it was a port. Henry had been fortifying and provisioning the

00:18:47.880 town all year for this very reason. For his troops to embark anywhere else, he would have needed to

00:18:52.940 arrange for a fleet to go to that place and wait there in fear of being attacked. He would then have

00:18:57.620 to lead his men to the waiting ships and make sure that they all embarked without being attacked,

00:19:02.220 by following French army. Disembarking had taken three whole days before. It was a risky operation.

00:19:08.820 Thus Calais was his only realistic option. It was his only safe port of embarkation. All the English

00:19:14.680 held alternatives were in Gascony, hundreds of miles to the south. In addition, de Gaucourt,

00:19:19.880 de Estreville and the other French prisoners from Harfleur had been instructed to make their way to Calais

00:19:24.900 and to surrender there to Henry in person, or if he was not there, if he had already departed for

00:19:30.140 England, for example, then a specially appointed deputy. This deputy would probably have been

00:19:34.740 someone of higher status, probably the Earl of Warwick, the Lieutenant of Calais, who was sent

00:19:39.580 directly there by ship. There is no doubt that Henry was sticking steadfastly to the plan

00:19:44.160 to march to Calais that had been developed many months earlier. Although it seems clear that marching

00:19:49.420 to Calais was, and always had been, his intended strategy, we have to ask whether this destination

00:19:54.520 was chosen in order to attract the attention of the French army gathering at Rouen. In short,

00:20:00.100 did he intend to do baton? Answering this question is a developmental process. As Henry proceeded towards

00:20:06.100 Calais, he could have expected his circumstances to change. So it is worth attempting to answer this

00:20:11.240 difficult question at various stages, including the outset, to see whether the answer changed as the march

00:20:17.200 altered course and ran into difficulties. So Henry's decision-making process would have to change on

00:20:22.720 the hoof, so to speak. The answer at this initial juncture is yes, he did intend to fight the French.

00:20:28.440 There are several reasons for this conclusion. First, Henry wanted a battle because his religious

00:20:33.440 outlook demanded it. He had come to France to put God's will to the test, and that could only properly

00:20:38.720 be done by a conflict in which he might lose his life. Second, he had come with an army that was too

00:20:44.620 large for just a siege. It was an army designed to fight a pitched battle. Although he had lost many

00:20:49.580 men, he still had the majority, and so could stick to his original plan. Third, he was determined to

00:20:55.340 follow a path previously trodden by Edward III's army to Blancherquay, a point at which the river Somme

00:21:01.520 could be forded. Henry III's march, which culminated in the Battle of Crecy, had been chosen specifically to

00:21:07.560 encourage the French to attack the English in Ponthieu. Henry, having sent Raoul de Gaucourt with

00:21:13.140 William Bruges to deliver the challenges to the Dauphin, knew that the Dauphin would have learnt

00:21:18.340 from the Gaucourt that the English were marching to Calais. He had even told him roughly the time

00:21:22.920 he was going to depart, after eight days. Telling all 260 gentlemen prisoners to meet him in Calais

00:21:28.860 was similarly a guarantee that the French would know where he was going. He was thus encouraging

00:21:33.540 the French to come after him and attack him. In his instructions to the 260 prisoners, he even

00:21:39.440 referred overtly to the likelihood of a battle. Thus, he was not just following Edward III's route,

00:21:44.760 he was adopting similar tactics. A fourth reason can be seen in the personal nature of Henry's

00:21:49.660 decision to march to Calais. It is clear from several sources that the majority of the leaders

00:21:54.380 still within the army at this point were strongly opposed to the idea of the march, precisely because

00:21:59.640 a battle would be too dangerous. One source claims that even the warlike Duke of Clarence was in favour

00:22:04.800 of bringing the campaign to an end, a division with Henry that perhaps led to his departure from

00:22:09.600 the English army as much as his suffering from dysentery. Leaving this aside, another well-informed

00:22:14.900 chronicler, writing sometime after 1446, so you know decades later, stated that the majority of the

00:22:21.440 councillors were of the opinion that a decision should be made not to march on due to the shortage of

00:22:27.460 fighting men following the ravages of dysentery. The author of The Guester wrote very much the same thing,

00:22:32.920 and here's a quote from the history of the time. Although a large majority of the royal council

00:22:38.120 advised against such a proposal, as it would be highly dangerous for him in this way to send his

00:22:43.100 small force, daily growing smaller, against the multitude of the French, which, constantly growing,

00:22:48.600 would surely enclose them on every side like sheep in folds, our king, relying on divine grace and

00:22:54.500 the justice of his cause, piously reflecting that victory consists not in a multitude, but with him,

00:23:00.580 him meaning God, who bestows victory upon whom he wills, whether they be of the many or the few,

00:23:07.840 with God affording him his leadership, as it is believed, did nevertheless decide to make that

00:23:12.640 march, end of quote. As I said in the last one, it just seems Henry had made his mind up. He'd gambled

00:23:18.780 everything on this campaign, and he needed a decisive victory. Just going home, having taken half

00:23:24.640 fleur and half fleur only, just wasn't good enough. He wanted, needed a pitched battle and a victory,

00:23:31.900 a decisive one, and so even if it means doing this chevalier across northern France and goading the

00:23:38.820 French, a much bigger army, which is extremely dangerous, and most military minds at the time,

00:23:44.620 and since, have thought it was sort of crazily dangerous. He feels like he's got to do it anyway.

00:23:49.620 You know, he's already gambled, he feels like. He's already made the gamble, so now he's got to

00:23:54.520 actually go through with it and do it. Okay, Mortimer continues saying,

00:23:57.800 the latter source gives a similar justification for the decision, stating that Henry said,

00:24:02.940 he would rather throw himself and his men on the mercy of God in determining the outcome of events,

00:24:08.360 not shirking the dangers, than offer himself to the enemy as grounds for elevating their pride,

00:24:13.860 diminishing the reputation of his honour by flight. From these accounts, it is clear that Henry went

00:24:18.640 against the consensus and took what his councillors considered to be a great gamble, deliberately

00:24:23.480 risking a battle. This contrasts with his considerable aversion to taking any risks in the course of

00:24:29.420 landing in August. What made him switch from being so risk-averse, then to being so risk-taking now?

00:24:35.540 It could only have been a defiance of the very risk that so worried his council, a chance to do battle.

00:24:41.800 Thus, his decision to march to Calais was not just a testing of God's will, and it was not just a

00:24:47.240 strategic calculation based on Edward III's success in 1346. It was also a matter of pride.

00:24:53.240 The above motivations, religious fanaticism, a confident strategy based on a historical precedent,

00:24:59.460 and pride, are not particularly edifying. Looking at Henry at the end of September,

00:25:04.200 one would hardly call him a great man. He had obtained one small town, a key target,

00:25:09.420 but had destroyed it in the process. He had lost a good proportion of his fighting force,

00:25:13.940 and left the remainder perilously situated in a hostile kingdom, with a large army gathering in

00:25:20.040 the field. As far as any reckoning of God's judgment went at the moment, his calls had been

00:25:24.900 cast into doubt by the death of Bishop Courtenay and the sickness of his brother and heir, Thomas,

00:25:30.360 and his great friend, the Earl of Arundel. The descent revealed by the Earl of Cambridge's plot

00:25:35.400 had not added to his glory, nor had the continued activities of the Lollards, at home that is.

00:25:41.880 Yet it was at this moment that he stepped out from the clouds of fallibility and made the decision

00:25:47.520 that made him, and changed him, and altered the balance of European politics in England's favour.

00:25:53.080 Through it, he set himself on the path to acquire the approbation of God and the praise of the world.

00:25:58.560 If Henry had shown any sign of greatness up until this point, it was as an organiser,

00:26:03.880 and a man convinced of his own infallibility, arranging for the circumstances of this march

00:26:09.160 to be as promising as possible. But in going against the council's decision,

00:26:13.540 Nelke showed that he was far more than just an organiser and a facilitator.

00:26:17.760 It must have taken complete determination, after all the delays, and after losing so many men to

00:26:23.000 districtry, to give the order to march on, and in so doing, he took on all the responsibility

00:26:27.920 and all the danger. He knew that he was himself a far greater prize than the ruins of Harfleur.

00:26:33.340 He knew the French would think they could retake the town any time, and so they were bound to come

00:26:38.220 after him. Then Henry and his army would lead the enemy away from the near-defenseless Harfleur,

00:26:44.160 like a lioness leading a predator away from her cubs. At this moment in time, we can see Henry V

00:26:49.300 throwing everything behind his faith. This is the moment when, having mapped out a path to greatness,

00:26:54.920 he actually set foot on it. Like Jan Hus, he was prepared to die in pursuit of what he believed

00:26:59.960 he had to do. Historians have sometimes called this the madness of unreasoning pietism, but they

00:27:06.020 forget that if a man truly believes God is on his side, no reasoning is necessary, or even possible.

00:27:12.020 For him, God really is on his side, and it would be madness to pretend otherwise. That is what is

00:27:17.320 so frightening about Henry V at the end of September 1415. End quote. Just a complete confidence that you're

00:27:23.640 in the right, and that God will see you through. We hope you enjoyed that video, and if you did,

00:27:27.940 please head over to lotusseaters.com for the full unabridged video.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 18, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #211 ｜ Henry V： Part VI

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