AGINCOURT.*
THE appearance of a posthumous volume on Henry V. by the late Dr. Wylie is an event of great interest. Dr. Wylie, as is well known, was a whole-hearted believer in the intensive cultivation of a limited period of history. He abhorred the fluent narratives and the facile generalizations of whole epochs, which add nothing to our knowledge of the past. He thought it better to fix his attention on one brief but momentous reign, that of Henry 1V., and to study all the available evidence of the chroniclers and the records bearing on the events of these fourteen years. He worked slowly but steadily, in the scanty leisure that an Inspector of Schools enjoys, and at length com- pleted his exhaustive history of the first Lancastrian Hung. He then began on the same scale a history of the more attractive Henry V. His first volume described the opening of the reign from 1413 to 1415 and the preparations for the French campaign. His second volume, which has now been published as the author left it, deals with the famous campaign of Harfleur and Agin- court, and ends with the remarkable naval fight at the mouth of the Seine in August, 1416, when John, Duke of Bedford, scattered the French and Genoese blockading fleet and relieved Harflcur. It is a monument of patient industry, equipped as usual with a critical apparatus in which every modern book referring to the subject seems to be mentioned, besides the old authorities. But those readers who are wise enough to fix their eyes on the text and neglect the interminable footnotes for the time being will find that it is very readable and entertaining, and that it presents a lively picture of the Agincourt campaign, which in some respects was the most astonishing forlorn hope in our military annals. There are, too, several valuable essays on topics more or less relevant to the matter in hand—one, for instance, on the Duke of Berry, bibliophile and patron of the arts, who died in 1416, and another on Great Waltham as a typical village of the period. Dr. Wylie's habit of borrowing from the chroniclers any curious obsolete words to which he took a fancy, and inserting them in his narrative, is not so prominent in this volume as in his earlier writings. The old terms are appropriately employed, for example, ina learned chapter on the Lancastrian Navy, but the author had almost cured himself of a tendency which he used to indulge to excess, like Rabelais. When he writes that at Agincourt "the archers matched up lance-heads or any snapped and broken weapons and butchered them like sheep or dinged and hammered them like lumps upon an anvil," we are reminded very faintly of the amazing vocabu- lary of the first and second volumes on Henry IV., though here as there the picturesque phrases are adapted from the
chroniclers.
From the modern standpoint the English invasion of Normandy in 1415 looks like an unscrupulous attempt to profit by the civil strife between Burgundian': and Armagnacs which was ruining France. The rival parties hated one another far more than they hated the invader, and the secret of Henry's success lay in the fact that the Dauphin dared not concentrate his whole strength in Normandy lest the Duke of Burgundy should come up and seize Paris and restore the rule of his butcher-partisans. The Duke did not, in fact, move during the campaign, though he was, Dr. Wylie is convinced, already the secret ally of England. His son, afterwards Philip the Good, was kept against his will far • The Reign of Remy the Fifth. By J. IL Wyse. Col, it., 1415-18. Cain. bridge: at the lancritty Frees. [305. net.] 'way from the battlefield, though the D ke's brother took part in thefight and waskilled. But itis not safe or fair to apply modern standards to the men of the early fifteenth century. Their modes of thought were wholly unlike ours. The piratical people of Harfieur, who surrendered after a six weeks' siege, seem to have been genuinely surprised at Henry's leniency in allowing most of them to go away unharmed, with small sums of pocket-money, of which they were relieved by French brigands. It is true that the wealthy burgesses who would not swear allegiance to the conqueror were sent to England and held to ransom, and that the half-empty town, like Calais, was to be filled up with English settlers. But in 1415 these were regarded as very fair terms. Again, the way in which the battle came about was distinctly mediaeval. Henry with the remnant of his expeditionary force, wasted by " the flux " in the Harfieur marshes now covered by Le Havre, and depleted also by the necessity of leaving a strong garrison in the captured town, set out in October, 1415, to march across Normandy and Pon- thieu to Calais. The ford of Bkoichetaque at the mouth of the Somme, where Edward III. had crossed on his way to Crecy, was guarded. Henry therefore marched up the west bank of the Somme beyond Amiens, while the French moved up the east bank to prevent bins from crossing. He had very little fool, and the country had been laid waste before him. He passed the Sells and the Avre, and struck south-east across last year's battlefield by Harbonnieres and Neale to the Upper Somme, since Peron= was strongly held. It was possibly at Harbonnieres that a soldier, whom Shakespeare identifies with Bardolph, stole a pyx from a church and was straightway hanged, in the presence of the Ring and the whole army,f or a felony which our German enemies would regard as an act of merit. Henry found two fords ill guarded at Bethencourt and Voyennea, east of Neale, and forced a passage on October 19th; moving thence northward past Peronne, and then westward across the Somme battlefield to Miraumont, whence his road lay by Acheux, Doullee% and St. Pol towards Calais. The French commanders had adopted a sound strategy in holding the Somme river- line and waiting until Henry had exhausted his little army by hard marching and lack of food. But directly he had crossed the Somme, they appear to have reverted to the ideas of the age of chivalry. In a Council of War at Peronne on October 19th, some said that the English should be allowed to make their• way to Calais. The majority, however, decided to fight the invader on the road, at an agreed time and place, and informed Henry of their decision. We cannot nowadays imagine Marshal Hindenburg, for instance, warning Sir Douglas Haig that he would fight him on such a day at Bapaume, and choosing a good level plain for the encounter. But this is what the French actually did in 1415. They marched off to Agincourt, between Montreuil and St. Pol, leaving Henry and his men to find their way there without hindrance. " The actual field of battle is limited to a stretch of perfectly open country (some two miles across and two and a half miles in breadth), and this was the site which the French themselves had deliberately chosen, where a fair fight could be played out free from all traps and bushmenta before everybody's eyes." Henry axrived on October 24th. He offered terms which the French, secure in their over- whelming strength, rejected out of hand, but he was informed that, as a gracious concession, the battle should take place next day, the feast of St. Crispin, instead of a day later, since his men were hungry and could not wait. The etiquette of chivalry was strictly observed, except in so far as the French far out- aurabered Henry's six thousand men, weary with more than a fortnight's marching.
The battle itself was a victory for a small disciplined force, righting with the energy of despair, against a vast but ill_ conditioned army whose noble leaders could not agree. It was a victory also for the archer over the man-at-arms. Rain had fallen all night, though Shakespeare makes no allusion to it, and the clay fields were heavy going for the French cavalry. Their opening charge, which was to scatter the archers, failed dismally. The French archers and crossbowmen came up, late and were scattered by the hail of English arrows. The French men-at-arms then advanced in columns so dense that they could not move freely, and fell a helpless prey to the English archers, who, after shooting off all their arrows, attacked the columns in flank and rear with "swords, hangers, mauls, and hatchet's." In three hours the French centre was virtually destroyed. While the victors were collecting the prisoners, the Duke of Brabant, Burgundy's brother, suddenly appeared on the field and began to rally the French reserves. At the same moment it was reported that French plunderers had looted the camp and stolen Henry's crown and state sword, which he carried with him on his march. Henry, thinking that the battle must be resumed, gave his men the order to kill all the prisoners, who outnumbered his small force and constituted a danger. The soldiers demurred, not out of humanity, but because they hoped for good ransoms from their noble captives Henry, however, insisted, threatening to hang any man who disobeyed, and the awful deed was done. The Duke of Brabant himself, who was captured a little later, was killed in cold blood. The remarkable thing is, as Dr. Wylie points out, that contemporary French opinion did not blame Henry for this massacre, but denounced this " cuzaed reassembling of wicked men "—French- men, that is,"who wouldnotrecognize that they were beaten by the rules of the game and whose useless rally made this dreadful slaughter a necessity." It seems to us that on such points as this Dr. Wylie's minute study of the chronicles is of great value. Under the influence of Shakespeare, whose representation of the hero-King is in accord with tradition, we think of Henry V. as a pious man, who was far more humane and generous than most of his contemporaries, and we are staggered by his brutality in slaughtering the prisoners. It is somewhat of a relief to find that his own age saw nothing flagrantly wrong in the act, and that his own countrymen simply regretter:lit as a waste of money. At the same time these judgments make us realize with a start the gulf that separates the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries in their conceptions of charity.
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