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Hundred Years War

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle

The period 1337 to 1453 was a turbulent time for England both at home and abroad. Edward the Third began what is known as the Hundred Years War with France. He claimed that as grandson of former French king Philippe the Fourth he was better qualified to be king of France than Philippe de Valois, who was a mere nephew. Edward declared himself king of France, a title shared by all British monarchs up until 1801.

In June 1340 the English believed an invasion was being prepared. The English decided on a preemptive attack against the invasion fleet gathering in the estuary of the Zwin at Sluys in Belgium. There was a huge battle which may have killed about 16000 men. Sluys was an English victory, which some historians claim was more important than subsequent better known victories such as Crecy or Agincourt.

By 1348 things seemed to be going well for Edward. He had invaded France, won a crushing victory at Crecy two years before, and had taken Calais. King David of Scotland, son of Robert the Bruce had been captured, which reduced the threat of trouble from Scotland. A new chapel was built at Windsor dedicated to St George in which the new award of the Order of the Garter would be presented to nobles who had given great service to the country. England seemed to be on a patriotic high. But it was in this year that the Black Death reached England, a disease so virulent that it was to kill a third of all Europeans. On top of problems created by the Black Death, Edward the Third was also to lose his son Edward The Black Prince in 1376, his health ruined by his years of military service. When King Edward himself died in 1377 the ten year old son of the Black Prince succeeded as Richard the Second. Richard faced down the Peasants Revolt in 1381, and was in many ways a remarkable king. But his qualities were ahead of their time, and he eventually succumbed to the violent nobles that surrounded him. In 1399 he was deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, grandson of Edward the Third who became Henry the Fourth. Henry had to struggle against Richard's supporters for the rest of his reign, and it wasn't until his son succeeded as Henry the Fifth in 1413 that the country recovered a measure of stability.

Kings College, Cambridge

A victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, and the subsequent marriage of Henry the Fifth to Catherine de Valois, the French king's daughter seemed to be paving the way for a period of greatness for England. Henry only had to outlive Charles the Sixth, the old French king, to inherit the whole of France. But Henry died young in 1422, leaving an infant son, Henry the Sixth. Young Henry is an interesting example of how history is rewritten after the event. He was a weak king, given a pious, saint-like image by an historian hired by Henry the Seventh, to lend weight to a sucession from him. This image has stuck with him. Henry was also portrayed as scholarly, founding Eton College in Windsor, and Kings College in Cambridge. In fact the real history of Henry the Sixth's creation of these two institutions is not so rarified. To a large extent his motivation was personal glory, and he tore down seven years work on the chapel at Eton when he learnt there were bigger cathedrals elsewhere. The indecisveness he showed in building Eton and King's College, the two great monuments to himself, also led to a loss of English influence in France. By 1453 all French territory except Calais had been lost. Henry the Sixth descended into madness, which led to a chaotic period of civil war, lasting from 1455 to 1485 known as the Wars of the Roses.

The period of the Hundred Years War was time of great patriotic feeling in England, a time when the country's sense of itself within the world was becoming stronger. Shakespeare chose this period as the setting for his famous patriotic play Henry the Fifth. But as always with national identity the ironies and contradictions are never far away. Bear in mind that the Hundred Years Way began not as a struggle between England and France, but as a dynastic struggle between two men who were competing over the throne of France. Edward the Third, the great English king who famously defeated the French at Crecy, was himself the grandson of a French king. Edward the Third's great grandson Henry the Fifth continued the struggle, and although Shakespeare appears to bang the patriotic drum in Henry The Fifth, the play is full of irony. When Henry questions the Archbishop of Canterbury about the validity of his claim to the French throne, the stuffy old Archbishop gives a speech which seems to involve most of the monarchs of Europe, and is completely incomprehensible. I remember reading this speech for the first time at school thinking I had to try and make sense of it all. Of course you could listen to such a confusing speech and misinterpret it's difficulty as the deep and meaningful complexity of international law; or you could see it as a load of nonsense, a smoke screen for a struggle between dynasties.

One of my favourite parts of the play is the Prologue's speech at the beginning of Act 2. Here the Prologue apologises for the limitations of the theatre, in which the despatch of an army to France has to be staged. But Shakespeare turns these limitations to his advantage:

And thence to France shall we convey you safe

And bring you back, charming the narrow sea

To give you gentle pass (2. 1. 37 - 39)

The cleverness of the play is to charm away the apparent differences between people, or to find differences and common ground existing together. For example the King shows his true nobility in claiming on the eve of battle that the differences between men ultimately mean nothing; then in the scene that follows we have the unedifying prospect of the soldier Pistol pretending to be a gentleman to a terrified young French prisoner. The King showed he was a better man by claiming that he was a lesser man: Pistol showed that he is a lesser man by pretending to be a better one. A war that went on for a hundred years was not based on any clear division. The narrow sea opens up, and is charmed away.