Henry V and the Dual Monarchy

By 1420, after less than three years' campaigning, Henry V had succeeded where his predecessors had failed. He had won the crown of France. Yet the parliament held at Westminster in December that very year was the most critical his government had had to face. The Commons had begun to voice their concern at the implications for England of the Treaty of Troyes, signed seven months earlier, in which Henry was designated the heir of King Charles VI. They recalled the precedent afforded by Edward III's assumption of the French title in 1340, and petitioned for re-affirmation of the undertaking he had then given that his English subjects would never be put in subjection to him and his heirs as kings of France: a request with which Humphrey of Gloucester, the king's brother and lieutenant in England, was glad to comply.

This petition was one of several submitted in that parliament which bore witness to the Commons' awareness of the constitutional implications not only of Henry's recognition as 'Heir of France' but also of his lengthy periods of absence abroad. Henry had been away since 1417. The Commons were anxious for him to return, but at the same time feared the possibility of a dissolution when he did. To allay this legitimate anxiety, it was therefore ordained that neither this parliament nor any summoned in future by a guardian or regent should be dissolved by the arrival of the king in England during its proceedings. As it happened, Henry's homeward progress took longer than expected, and when it was rumoured that parliamentary petitions might be sent abroad to be dealt with by the king at his leisure, the Commons immediately demanded that all such petitions be answered within the realm and before they returned home. This time, however, they over-reached themselves: the request was politely refused.

The Commons' constitutional vigilance was matched by a corresponding prudence with money. Hitherto they had responded nothing if not generously to their monarch's appeals for financial support. But after the Treaty of Troyes their attitude changed. In legal terms the war for the crown of France was over. The Dauphin was disinherited, and Henry recognised as Charles VI's heir. If the Dauphin chose to keep up the struggle, that was of no concern to the English parliament. The war between two nations had given way to one between the King of France and his rebellious subjects, in which the people of England had no part to play. Henry accepted the logic of this argument. He sought no taxation in the parliament of December 1420, and 1421 was the first year of the reign in which none was collected.

Parliament, in fact, was doing no more than take at face value Henry's own formulation of his aims. He had always said that in claiming the crown of France he was seeking merely to recover his rights. He presented himself not as a conqueror but as a legitimate heir. To that extent he was following the example of his ancestor William of Normandy who, three and a half centuries before, had presented his case in exactly similar terms. He came, he said, not as foreign conqueror, but as the designated successor of Edward the Confessor: it was he and not the usurper Harold who was the legitimate heir. And the problem that confronted William after Hastings was the problem that was to confront Henry after Troyes: the reluctance of the defeated people to accept his rule. William was driven by successive native rebellions to dispense with the notion of continuity and rely ever more on the support of his Norman lieutenants. In theory he might be the legitimate claimant; but in practice he was the ruler of an occupied country. Likewise, in theory, Henry might be the 'Heir of France'; but in practice the Dauphin was still an alternative source of authority. And until he was eliminated, the new regime could not feel safe. Henry might hope that given time, more of the feudal princes of France might be tempted to become parties to the Treaty of Troyes: the Duke of Brittany, perhaps, or the Count of Foix. But on the other hand, he had no assurance that they would. They might be no less tempted to join forces with the Dauphin to expel the English altogether.

Henry's design, moreover, contained another flaw. How was he to reconcile the promise given at Troyes to preserve the integrity of the French monarchy with the commitment he had given earlier at Rouen to guarantee the autonomy of Normandy? In 1418, when he had given that commitment, he could have had little idea that within two years he would be assuming responsibility for the affairs of the monarchy as a whole. Quite the contrary; at that time, as when he had set sail from Southampton in August 1417, the reconquest of the duchy probably represented the limit of his ambitions: a kind of Norman Conquest in reverse. But the murder of the Duke of Burgundy by the Dauphinists in September 1419 completely transformed the political situation. It drove the warring French factions further apart than ever. The Burgundians turned to the English as the lesser of the two evils, and the alliance that was forged between them placed the crown within King Henry's grasp. Charles VI, old and feeble by now, was allowed to remain king for his life-time; but on his death Henry was to succeed in all his dominions. Henry was to rule all the kingdom, not just a part of it; so on his succession Normandy was to revert to its status as a dependency of the crown of France. The greater cause of winning the crown had led him to forget, if not to ignore, a commitment, however vague, that he had given a year before. For let there be no mistake: preservation in full of the rights of the crown of France ran clean counter to the local particularism he had been appearing to encourage when dismemberment of those rights had been his aim.

Henry V, therefore, was no less opportunistic than Edward III had been three-quarters of a century before. Edward, having once staked his claim to the crown of France, had been willing in practice to raise or lower his demands in accordance with the fortunes of war. Henry, having renewed the claim, showed himself willing at first to settle for what his great-grandfather had been given, but then raised his demands to keep pace with the progress of his conquests. A bid for the crown itself might raise some problems – notably with his Norman subjects and, as we have seen, with the English parliamentary Commons – but it would solve far more: above all, it would circumvent the old and fruitless argument about the terms on which the king of England was to hold Gascony from the French king by making the Duke of Gascony himself the king of France. It offered the prospect of a bold and conclusive settlement of the centuries' old antagonisms between the English and French monarchies.

In Henry's opinion it represented not the conquest of France by England but the creation of a dual monarchy in which each kingdom was to be ruled according to its own laws and customs. Henry's claim was a personal one: he was fighting to recover what he regarded as his legitimate inheritance; but in the process of so doing he was seeking to end the divisions between the two kingdoms and to unite the princes of Europe in a crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land.

These were large aims, but if any man stood a chance of achieving them it was Henry. He was not only a supremely gifted man, but also an extraordinarily energetic one with a capacity to inspire others to work with equal single-mindedness in his cause. It is possible, just possible, that he could have brought the dual monarchy to fulfilment. But he was robbed of the chance to do so by his premature death in August 1422, two months before that of his father-in- law. It was his ten-months' old son, Henry VI, who was to succeed to the two crowns. Despite the loss of Henry's leadership, however, the English position proved remarkably durable. The military advance continued. Maine was subdued after the victory at Verneuil in 1424; and the idea of making the war self-financing began to approach reality. No more taxes were asked of the English parliament unti11429,and then only for the special occasion of the expedition to crown Henry VI King of France in Paris. Success, Henry's heirs must have hoped, would breed success. The stronger the English position looked, the greater the chance of the French accepting it.

But whom did they mean by 'the French'? Henry's insistence on the recovery of 'his rights' conveniently ignored the question of the identity of the people whom he sought to rule. Despite the centralising tendencies of successive Capetian monarchs late- medieval France remained very much a country of provinces, of local particularism. Indeed, so far from swamping aspirations to separatism, the Capetians had the contrary effect of encouraging the feudal princes to form autonomous administrations within their own domains, Some of these princes, like the Duke of Brittany, capitalised on long established feelings of regional identity. Some, indeed, went further, and sought by means of propaganda to make this identity a source of political strength. The Capetians themselves, it has long been recognised, used propaganda to promote loyalty to their own dynasty. On the principle that what was good for the goose was good for the gander the princes did the same. Thus the Duke of Brittany's lawyers argued that 'le pais de Bretaigne est un pais distinct et separe dautres'. And for the benefit of those impressed more by visual images than by legal jargon the ducal coronation service and other occasions for ceremonial display, like the chapters of the Order of the Ermine, provided a symbolic and heraldic representation of ducal authority. Brittany, it might be argued, was exceptional. It lay in a far corner of France, and retained its own ruler throughout this period. But its eastern neighbour, Normandy, though much nearer to Paris, and though absorbed into the kingdom in 1204, was no less conscious of its own individuality. In the movement of protest which followed the death of Philip IV in '1314, it secured the one effective provincial charter that was granted at that time, the 'charte aux Normands'. Small wonder, then, that in 1418 Henry V paid more than token respect to the duchy's desire for autonomy.

But the regional particularism that suited Henry as an opponent of the Valois monarchy undermined his authority as 'Heir of France'. To rule effectively he needed the support of the princes and regional nobility; and if they were reluctant to give it to a king of the House of Valois, they might have been even more reluctant to give it to one of the house of Lancaster. Yet Henry's position, at least in the immediate aftermath of the Duke of Burgundy's murder, was by no means as hopeless as it appeared.

Some Frenchmen at least were prepared to regard him not so much as an enemy as an ally of the Burgundians, and the invasion he had launched not as a struggle between the English and the French but as an episode in a war between two rival French factions, Burgundian and Armagnac. In which case support for the English did not automatically mean betrayal of France. The murder of the Duke of Burgundy at Montereau made it possible, indeed, to portray the war in personal rather than nationalistic terms. The Dauphin could be stigmatised as a murderer. King Henry was the legitimate heir; and those who opposed him were traitors.

The revival in the Dauphin's fortunes, however, changed all that. In February, 1429, Joan of Arc arrived on the scene and became, as one historian has put it, both the symptom and the agent of the revival in French national sentiment. In July she escorted the Dauphin to Rheims, where he was crowned king in the cathedral. He was now a legitimate monarch, and it became more difficult for the princes to deny him obedience. The turning point came at the conference of Arras in 1435 when the Duke of Burgundy abandoned the English alliance and renewed homage to his Valois cousin. Insofar, therefore, as the Hundred Years War was a contest between the King and the princes of France, it was resolved in the end to the satisfaction of the King. He emerged from this century of strife with his hold over his mightier subjects greatly strengthened.

He emerged, indeed, with his hold over all of his subjects greatly strengthened. He used the emergency as a justification for collecting taxes without consent, and with the resources thus given him fashioned a standing army in the direct pay of the crown. From this time the English and French monarchies can be seen to be heading in opposite directions. At the beginning of the war the English king had had the edge over his adversary in the ability to mobilise his nation's resources. Through parliament he was able to appeal not just to his immediate tenants but to all of his subjects to lend him financial support in a time of national need; and through their representatives in the Commons they usually responded generously. But, with time, the Commons came to learn how they could use the power of the purse- strings to demand changes in the internal governance of the realm and a measure of public accountability in the way their money was spent. The experience of the Hundred Years War therefore strengthened them vis-a-vis the crown and encouraged them to develop a corporate identity as a political body representing the realm.

It was otherwise in France. Central assemblies had never been viewed with much favour by either the king or his subjects. The people of Rouergue on one occasion went so far as to say that 'they did not want anything to do with a general assembly of the kingdom, of Languedoc or Languedoil, because they were not accustomed to be in assemblies with them; but the pays of Rouergue was accustomed to have an assembly of its own'. Provincial assemblies had far stronger roots in popular sentiment than central ones, and were of far greater use to the king as a means of raising money. But the process of securing consent from one assembly after another was a slow and cumbersome business, and the war effort was often hamstrung while it was being undertaken: so, when the crisis facing the Valois house reached its climax in the 1420s, Charles simply bypassed the whole consultative process and collected the money on his own authority. There was scarcely a flicker of resistance. People knew that it was the monarchy and not the estates that had delivered the country from the invader.

To the extent that the emergency occasioned by the war was to lead to the decay of representative institutions across the Channel, the English parliamentary Commons were therefore wise to be on their guard in December, '1420. True, they had little reason to suspect Henry of all people of seeking to impose taxation without consent; but in acknowledging the possibility that a future ruler, less scrupulous in his observance of customary procedures, might be tempted to invoke French precedent in English political life, they were in fact paying him the highest possible compliment. They were admitting that his dream of a dual monarchy might come true. In the event, however, it did not. It was an idea conceived out of its time. It would have stood a better chance of succeeding in the twelfth century than in the fifteenth: for Henry was set on uniting Christendom at a time when it was fast disintegrating.

Nigel Saul is lecturer in Medieval History at Royal Holloway & Bedford New College, and author of The Batsford Companion to Medieval England (Batsford, 1983).