It had not in any case been a popular insurrection, with perhaps no more than a few hundred participants. Yet it did effectively destroy any sympathy with the Lollard movement among the general population; heresy itself was now considered to be equivalent to rebellion.
Oldcastle himself evaded capture for almost four years; he was eventually seized in the neighbourhood of Welshpool and taken to London where he was hanged above a burning fire that consumed the gallows as well as the victim. In his last words before this painful death he declared that he would rise again after three days. In truth his resurrection took a little longer. In the sixteenth century he became celebrated as a proto-martyr of Protestantism; that is one of the reasons why Shakespeare felt obliged to change his name to Falstaff.
In a sense, however, the insurrection was a distraction. The young king’s reign was primarily defined by war. He gathered around him a group of young men who saw in battle and victory the foundations of glory. Principal among them were his three brothers, wholly committed to the success of the dynasty. War was considered to be the highest duty, and greatest achievement, of any king. It was this fervour, or lust, that effectively reopened the Hundred Years War after the interval of the previous two reigns. Almost at once the new king moved against France. He had been made duke of Aquitaine in 1399, as part of his patrimony; now he wished to reclaim the lands of Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu that had been granted to the English Crown in the treaty of 1360.
By the summer of 1415 all was ready for the French endeavour. The parliament house had furnished the necessary funds without any of the usual misgivings; the troops and the ships were requisitioned efficiently, and it seems that the nation supported this show of strength and determination by the young king. Yet not all of his subjects were ready to pay fealty to him. Some still questioned the legitimacy of the house of Lancaster and, in the days before the launching of the military expedition, certain nobles tried to organize a rebellion. They were forestalled, and swiftly executed. No one else would ever again threaten the reign of Henry V.
He sailed to France with an army of 8,000 men. There were archers, both mounted and on foot; there were ‘men-at-arms’, knights and esquires in full body armour complete with lance, sword and dagger. There were foot soldiers, fletchers, bowyers, carpenters, priests, surgeons, gunners and engineers. The two latter were needed for the prosecution of siege warfare, a technique for which Henry had trained himself in Wales. A royal officer, known as ‘the grand sergeanty’, was also on board; his sole job was to hold the king’s head in case of seasickness. It has been calculated that approximately 15,000 horses were transported to France. No female followers of the camp were allowed to sail. The punishment for any prostitute found among the soldiers was for all her money to be taken and for one of her arms to be broken before her being driven off with staves.
The expedition left Southampton on 11 August, accompanied by a flock of swans, and set sail for the coast of Normandy; the duchy belonged to Henry’s family, or so he claimed, and to land there was itself an act of proprietorship. He laid siege to the town of Harfleur, at the mouth of the river Seine, but it did not prove to be an easy victory; the town held out for five weeks, in which period Henry’s men suffered dysentery from the eating of unripe fruit. Yet he prevailed; the leaders of the town surrendered, and Henry promptly laid plans to turn it into an English colony. Since Harfleur was connected to Rouen and to Paris by the river, it was in a desirable position.
In his campaigns he was a rigid and severe disciplinarian; that is why he was successful. He planned meticulously, while retaining his command over the court administration at Westminster. Above all else he was possessed of great energy; whether in a tournament, or at a hunt, or in the field of battle, he was swift and unrelenting. He gave the impression of always being in a hurry, as if he had some strange presentiment of his early death.
From Harfleur he led his men north-east towards Calais, a distance of some 120 miles (75 kilometres); but then he received the unwelcome news that the French army was waiting for him on the right bank of the Somme. He was obliged to make a detour, marching along the left bank of the Somme until he could find a place of safe passage. The trek to Calais was supposed to have taken eight days, but only two weeks later did the English army cross the river. The king’s men were exhausted and hungry but, despite the presence of a French army shadowing them closely, he ordered them to march on to Calais. Everyone knew that he would have to confront the enemy before reaching the town.
