Agents of God Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War

It's hard to imagine today that there was ever a time when England and France

were more than two separate countries.

But 700 years ago, our ruling classes were bound

by a shared set of values, codes of behaviour and language,

locked together by one culture

in a marriage that had lasted 300 years.

But in the mid-14th century, it hit the rocks.

What followed was the longest and bloodiest divorce in history.

I'm going to tell the story of over 100 years of war,

when little England dared to challenge the mighty superpower that was France

and refused to give up.

We've seen how, over 70 years of war,

the bonds between England and France had been eroded

and how out of chaos and revolution,

a uniquely English identity emerged.

Now I'll explore why this was not enough for the great English King Henry V,

who wanted nothing less than the crown of France.

And I'll show how this war shaped and changed us,

helping make England what it is today.

In this final chapter of the story,

the war becomes a battle for national supremacy

and a fight for the moral high ground.

Henry V claims God is on HIS side,

until the French harness the power of a peasant girl who would become a saint.

In 1415, the English were celebrating their greatest victory of the war.

At the Battle of Agincourt, the French nobility had been decimated by King Henry V.

Remarkably, here at the National Archives,

detailed evidence of Henry's campaign still survives.

As a cultural historian, I'm fascinated by what it can tell us about his reign.

These beautifully preserved 600-year-old documents are contracts.

They're employment contracts between King Henry V and the soldiers that he hired.

So, here it says, "This is an indenture

"made between the King of England and hundreds of archers."

And if we look further through these documents, there's a list of them all.

It's amazing to see these names.

This roll call of English heroes who were on that battlefield.

Each of these men was individually contracted to serve the King.

"Sent from the King, Henry."

There's no record of any earlier Kings ever doing this.

Henry oversaw every detail of his campaigns.

The contracts are a testimony to his meticulous planning.

But that wasn't what won him the battle.

It was determination and unbridled ambition.

Henry was the son of a usurper.

His father had killed the rightful King to seize the crown.

When Henry took to the throne in 1413,

he'd had to prove his right to be King

and at Agincourt, he'd done just that.

On his return to London, Henry was greeted in triumph

on a victory procession through the city.

The celebratory mood was no doubt helped by the fact that the water conduits were filled with wine.

By all accounts, this was one of the greatest pageants in medieval history.

But for Henry, it wasn't the end. It was just the beginning.

Agincourt had made his reputation,

but it hadn't won back any of the ancestral lands the English saw as rightfully theirs.

Since the great victories of Edward III,

these had eroded to just Gascony, Ponthieu and Calais.

Now Henry wanted them back.

After two years' careful preparation,

he was on his way to France again...

..with an army of 10,000 men.

They landed on the beaches of Normandy,

just as his great-grandfather had done 70 years earlier.

But unlike Edward III, who'd come to Normandy to burn and raid it,

Henry was here to conquer it all,

and he would do it city by city.

The onslaught began in the wealthy town of Caen.

Caen was well-fortified, but Henry immediately found a strategic opportunity.

Outside the city walls stand two tall abbeys which he seized on arrival.

The towers of the abbeys were much higher than the walls of the city,

and, by taking these, the English could fire down on the defenders.

For three weeks, the citizens of Caen held out, refusing to surrender.

But on the 4th of September, the walls were breached and the city fell.

With a characteristic show of piety, Henry went to one of the abbeys to pray.

But he had another, more symbolic, reason for coming here.

The Abbaye-aux-Hommes contains a vital clue to what Henry had planned for France.

It's the burial place of a King famous for conquest and occupation -

William the Conqueror.

I'm here with historian Anne Curry.

Henry came here to see the tomb of William the Conqueror.

In many ways, he was trying to resurrect the idea

of a duchy of Normandy.

And in some ways too, it's a Norman conquest in reverse.

Henry started to give out lands to his followers, to his brothers, to his leading commanders.

He gave houses to London merchants so that they'd encourage cross-Channel trade.

So, it went much further than the Norman conquest itself.

It's very clever in terms of securing people's loyalty.

It is indeed and it also generates a long-term investment.

Obviously, Henry couldn't spend all his time here, but he was certain

that those to whom he'd given lands would be able to do that. He wanted a permanent settlement in Normandy,

a colonisation, if you like, of the duchy.

Henry's campaign was unlike any that had gone before it.

His aim was the annexation of the entire province of Normandy.

Within 11 months of the fall of Caen,

he'd taken nearly half of it,

and France, once the superpower of Europe, had done nothing to stop him.

Behind this failure to act was a fundamental change

that had happened in England, but not in France.

In England, with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

and the usurpation of Richard II,

the nature of kingship had changed.

English Kings were now held to account.

But in France, the sanctity of kingship had never been challenged.

No King had yet been deposed.

This meant the French were now stuck with King Charles VI, who was mad.

He spent long periods of time believing he was made of glass.

He wore reinforced clothing and allowed no-one to touch him.

His 38-year reign had seen France descend into civil war.

The country was being torn apart by two royal factions, vying for power,

locked in a blood feud.

They were too busy fighting each other to fight the English.

On one side were supporters of the mad King's son, the Dauphin, known as Orleanists.

And on the other, the Burgundians, led by the King's cousin,

the hugely wealthy Duke of Burgundy.

The Duke, known as John the Fearless, was the most powerful man in the country.

In central Paris, a section of his grand palace still remains.

It gives us a unique insight into the man.

According to legend, the Duke of Burgundy slept in a tiny room

in the top of this tall tower to avoid assassination attempts.

The Duke had made plenty of enemies.

Merciless in his quest for power, he'd even had the King's own brother murdered.

And these sadistic tendencies were paired with virtually limitless resources.

John the Fearless had control of Paris, and with it the royal treasury,

which he plundered frequently to finance his own political ambitions.

This man would have been a formidable enemy to Henry V.

But he had other interests which, for now, worked in Henry's favour.

The Duke of Burgundy was pro-English because his province of Flanders had close trade links with England.

You can see this represented symbolically on this magnificent ceiling at his home.

The solid oak tree of Burgundy

has the hops of Flanders wrapped around it, symbolising that bond.

It's easy to see this ceiling as a metaphor for the entangled web of the Duke's loyalties.

And if it suited him, he'd rather fight his own countrymen than the King of England.

His obsession with his own interests meant that the English, the old enemy,

were now running amok throughout Normandy unchallenged

and the capital was paralysed.

The chronicler Christine de Pizan was one of the few people

to recognise how dangerous this internal conflict was.

Christine was appalled at the divisions within France,

and when the civil war broke out, she wrote to the King's wife, Queen Isabeau,

asking her to heal the sickness and division in the kingdom.

She wrote, "The kingdom will be destroyed if it is divided amongst itself."

Christine was right.

Henry was fully exploiting France's vulnerability.

By the winter of 1418, he had reached the town of Rouen.

Capital of the province, Rouen was Normandy's last, great hope.

The townspeople had retreated inside the city's walls,

which stretched for five miles and were defended by 60 towers, believed to be unbreachable.

They would have had everything they needed within the walls of the city to withstand siege.

They had destroyed the suburbs and taken everything that was edible and useful inside the walls.

As Henry launched his attack, the people of Rouen held out,

convinced the Duke of Burgundy would come to their rescue.

Of course, he never did.

After four months of relentless siege, which dragged on into a freezing winter,

the people of Rouen faced starvation.

12,000 of their poorest and weakest were said to have been forced out of the city,

becoming trapped in a sodden no-man's-land between the walls and the English lines.

This was brutal even by medieval standards.

One chronicler, John Page, said that the English soldiers

took such pity on these poor people that they gave them their own bread.

Henry himself wasn't distracted by such niceties.

Furious that Rouen wouldn't give in, he continued to turn the screws on the town.

And the medieval siege had become more terrifying than ever, as these illustrations reveal.

This book of silverpoint drawings dates from the 1480s,

but it's an incredible document on the campaign and the way it was conducted.

Henry had replaced his catapults, trebuchets and scaling ladders

with something far more destructive - cannons.

The introduction of gunpowder was changing the nature of warfare

and just like his great-grandfather, Edward, Henry could see the value of new technology.

'If you think about the psychological impact on the townsmen, townswomen,

'of a city like Rouen that is being besieged for month after month.

'The roar of cannon.'

Fire!

Added to that, not only the terror of these gunshots,

also the terrible wounds inflicted by these early cannonballs,

whether iron, stone, lead shot.

To see people mutilated and killed by this - it adds a new level of horror

to the medieval battlefield, which was already a terrible place.

The sound of the arrows whistling overhead has been replaced with these enormous bangs.

There is a spiritual aspect to it. Hell is on earth.

After six months of siege, Rouen surrendered.

With the fall of that mighty city, the rest of Upper Normandy followed.

Henry's conquest of the province was complete.

Normandy belonged to the English.

Its fertile lands were distributed amongst his men.

Its towns garrisoned by English soldiers.

But Henry wasn't stopping there.

By the spring of 1419, his army was just 17 miles from Paris.

This was the domain of John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy.

He controlled the city and its treasury.

The Duke may have let Normandy fall, but he wouldn't do the same with Paris.

Distasteful as it might be, he'd have to make peace with the Orleanists.

Only together could they take on the English.

The peace negotiations took place on a gated bridge at Montereau, not far from Paris.

Both ends were locked and barricaded,

while ten delegates from each side, including the Duke, parleyed.

But the Orleanists weren't quite ready to bury the hatchet.

At least, not metaphorically.

John the Fearless was set upon,

his right hand cut off to stop him raising it to the devil,

then his head split open with an axe.

The Orleanists had got their revenge, but it would come at a terrible price.

The one person that could have saved the country was now dead.

It was later said that the English entered France through a hole in the Duke of Burgundy's skull.

This couldn't have gone better for Henry.

Not only had the French failed to unite against him,

but he was to gain a valuable new ally with a thirst for revenge.

One witness to the Duke of Burgundy's death was his 23-year-old son, Philip.

Philip was a temperamental young man, more interested in fashion than politics.

But the murder of his father put fire in his belly.

Fuelled by hatred of the Orleanists, he made an alliance with the English King,

promising to help him conquer the country.

This unlikely partnership put Henry at the height of his powers.

Without any fighting, he'd more than doubled the lands in his control,

which now included Paris.

Henry was now in the position to do what no English King had managed before.

He wanted nothing less than the crown of France.

This was to be diplomatically agreed,

but no-one could ignore the 10,000 English soldiers poised at the gates of Paris.

At the Cathedral of Troyes, Henry's new allies were gathered.

The insane King was made to disown his son and heir, the Dauphin,

and Queen Isabeau declared him illegitimate,

the son of one of her many lovers.

Henry had set the stage for the ultimate humiliation of France.

Up there on the high altar, Henry sealed a treaty in front of God

and a huge assembly of English, French and Burgundian nobles

that the kingdom of France should fall to himself and his bodily heirs

in perpetuity after the death of the old mad King Charles VI.

When Charles died, Henry V, King of England,

would also become King of France.

England had laid claim to the French crown before,

but this was different.

So, Anne, Henry's achievement was extraordinary. How seriously did he take it?

Henry V took the Treaty of Troyes very seriously indeed.

Not only did it make him heir to the French throne, it made him Regent of France, as well.

That meant he was responsible for everything in France,

for its money system - there'd been tremendous devaluation...

There was also the problem of effecting the law after a period of civil war,

of trying to create peace, of restoring some people to lands

that previously he'd confiscated, because now, he was, effectively, ruler of France

and trying to create peace as well as to keeping the enemy at bay.

After the treaty was sealed, so too was a union of the royal bloodlines.

Henry was solemnly betrothed to the beautiful Catherine of Valois,

the King's 18-year-old daughter, and they were married just 12 days later to great celebrations.

But not everyone in France was celebrating.

The country was still divided.

The Treaty of Troyes meant nothing to the Orleanists

and their leader, the Dauphin, who they still believed was the rightful heir.

The Dauphin, Charles, at just 17, was timid and insecure,

racked with doubts over his own legitimacy.

He was said to be highly superstitious and obsessed with astrology.

Far from a commanding military leader.

The Dauphin could only look on as Henry stole his inheritance.

In September 1420, the English King made his ceremonial entry into Paris.

That Christmas, he lodged at the Louvre.

This was the beginning of an English occupation of the French capital that would last for 15 years.

There's no doubt that Henry would have come here to Sainte-Chapelle,

the private chapel of the French monarchy.

In Henry's day, this place was internationally renowned

as a building-sized reliquary,

custom-made to house the most important relics in medieval Christendom -

those associated with Christ himself.

The crown of thorns, the lance that pierced his side,

and fragments of the True Cross itself.

Although the relics themselves aren't here any more,

the evidence that they were is all around us.

This was a chapel befitting of a superpower.

Now Henry, an English King, was heir to its invaluable relics

and all that they symbolised.

To be in possession of the relics of the Passion

signified divine favour.

The French monarchs had always been styled "most Christian of Kings",

"Rex Christianissimus".

There's something else that Henry would have been aware of

as he surveyed his inheritance here in Sainte-Chapelle,

and that's the incredible mystique that French kingship was shrouded in.

The fact that the Kings were anointed with holy chrism.

They could trace their line back to Charlemagne.

All of this really would have made an impression on Henry.

The Treaty of Troyes put all this in Henry's grasp.

But there was a catch.

In exchange for what he'd been granted,

Henry now had to conquer all the territories of the Burgundians' rivals, the Orleanists,

and those of the now disinherited Dauphin.

At home, they knew this would come at a cost.

Henry's ambition would lock the English into decades of war.

Here in the National Archives, there's a document that sheds light

on what Henry's subjects

actually thought

and what Englishmen felt about their King's overseas adventures.

These are parliamentary records from 1420.

What's so revealing is Parliament's concern for good governance at home.

What they want from their King is that he's a law-maker, a decision-maker

and that he is present in England.

And, most importantly, that they would not be subject to laws from France.

Above all, there was concern about who was going to pay for Henry's campaign.

He promised the English Parliament that all the costs of the conquest

would be raised from the occupied lands.

That's why, for the next eight years, there were no direct taxes in England, to pay for the war.

All the money came from Normandy.

As Henry's men pushed south, sweeping aside the Dauphin's army,

there was one corner of northern France that still held out.

The tiny island of Mont-Saint-Michel

and its great fortified abbey.

For three years, it had defied capture.

When you come here, it's easy to see why.

The abbey's built on a granite outcrop, it's walls are sheer

and the holy island itself is only accessible for a short period at low tide.

The abbot here, Robert Jolivet, defected to Henry in 1420,

but Mont-Saint-Michel's garrison didn't.

This infuriated the English King.

Henry even ordered the construction of a giant wooden fort, out there on the sands,

to prevent French ships from resupplying the garrison here.

But the island still held out.

This was more dangerous than it might seem.

The abbey was dedicated to St Michael, the Dauphin's personal saint.

It had become a symbol of French resilience.

And the longer it held out, the more potent that became.

The heroic French resistance and the news that their saint, St Michel,

had protected the garrison would be spread throughout all of France,

even to the smallest villages.

Henry's men remained outside the abbey for ten long years.

But he never would be able to take it.

Henry left a trail of savage destruction through the Dauphin's lands.

Ahead of him, the Orleanists lived in terror of the barbaric English.

But in 1422, Henry would pay the price for five years in the field.

He was fatally ill with dysentery, contracted during a siege.

Here at the castle of Vincennes,

Henry V, the great King of England and heir to the throne of France,

gave his last instructions on how his kingdom was to be governed after his death.

His brother, John, Duke of Bedford, was to be Regent in France,

while his youngest brother, Humphrey, was to be his subordinate in England.

Henry gave three clear commands to his brothers.

Firstly, they were to continue fighting until the Treaty of Troyes was accepted throughout France.

Secondly, they were to maintain the alliance with the Duke Of Burgundy.

Finally, they were never to give up the lands they had conquered.

It was here on the 31st of August, 1422, that Henry died,

aged 35.

He was buried at Westminster Abbey.

He never did become King of France.

In a cruel twist of fate, the mad King Charles, 19 years his senior,

outlived him,

dying just seven weeks after Henry.

The new heir to the two thrones was Henry's son, just a nine-month-old child.

'I'm with Juliet Barker, an expert on Henry's reign.'

So, now, there's this situation which all people fear - a royal minority.

A royal minority is probably the most dangerous situation you can have

as a medieval monarch,

because you have this big vacuum in the centre of power.

Everything depends on the monarch and if the monarch isn't in charge,

and is subject to all these people trying to muscle in and seize power for themselves,

then the whole system of government can collapse.

What's different about this minority

is that you have the King's brothers, Henry V's brothers, who are there to protect his legacy,

and what they want is for Henry VI to succeed as King of England, but also King of France.

And they take Henry V's legacy and they run with it.

They don't stop the conquest of France. It doesn't stop with Henry V's death.

The new Regent of France was Henry's brother, John, Duke of Bedford.

For seven long years, he would continue the war against the Dauphin.

And these years were some of England's most successful.

It was Bedford that would ultimately bear the burden of the deal Henry had done.

He was a remarkable man, a supreme strategist and commander.

But also a diplomat. He managed to maintain the crucial alliance with the Duke of Burgundy.

He even married the Duke's sister to secure the deal.

Together, by 1429, the English and the Burgundians

had reached the town of Beaugency.

Now Bedford's aim was to take the Dauphin's lands beyond the River Loire

and link up with England's ancestral territory of Gascony.

This would be a deathblow to the hapless Dauphin

and force him to finally accept the treaty.

Just over there is Beaugency Castle, a stronghold on the banks of the Loire.

And from up here in the tower, you get a great view down on the river.

In 1429, everything on this side, on the north bank, was English territory, including the castle.

While over there on the south side, it was French.

Just a few miles upstream is the city of Orleans, the Dauphin's key stronghold.

The town had been under siege for six months,

the people of Orleans on the point of giving up.

But then, on the 3rd of May, something incredible happens.

On the other side of the river, a relieving army of several thousand men sent by the Dauphin

appears before Orleans, and at its head, dressed in a suit of armour,

is not the Dauphin but a 17-year-old girl.

The Dauphin had found a secret weapon.

An illiterate shepherdess who claimed to have heard the voice of God -

Joan of Arc.

This was exactly the kind of spiritual intervention the Dauphin needed.

I have in front of me the Vigiles of Charles VII,

a late 15th-century manuscript that records his deeds as both Dauphin and King.

Within its pages, the illuminations also tell the dramatic story of Joan's life.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl from Domremy in eastern France.

In her home village, she heard the voices of St Michael and other saints

commanding her to rid France of the English.

When Joan was brought before the Dauphin, he saw an opportunity.

Endless defeats had left his fragile reputation in tatters.

But with her direct line to God,

Joan could become not just a spiritual figurehead, but a military leader.

What fascinates me most about this series of illuminations

is that we really get a sense of Joan's dual nature.

When we see her being taken off to have her virginity tested,

she's got this lovely long womanly hair, she's all dressed in pure white,

whereas when you turn to a later image, what you see is Joan sat alongside the King,

as his right-hand man, all in her armour and military attire.

It's recorded that the Dauphin spent a small fortune on a custom-made suit of armour for Joan.

Through her, the Dauphin would reclaim the divine support

the English considered their right.

His army would become the holy one.

Joan was seen as the moral saviour of the French army.

Here she's shown driving prostitutes away from the soldiers' camp.

And around that time, a letter of intent was sent to the English positions at Orleans.

These are believed to be Joan's own words.

"You, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of the kingdom of France.

"You, William Pole, Count of Suffolk. John, Lord Talbot.

"Surrender to the maid who is sent here by God.

"She is come here by God's will to reclaim the blood royal."

On the 3rd of May, Joan led an army of 4,000 men to Orleans.

After five days of hand-to-hand combat,

the English were forced to lift the siege on the town and abandon it.

With this victory, the legend of Joan of Arc was born.

I'm with her biographer, historian Olivier Bouzy.

With this boost to their morale, French armies swept down the Loire and reached Beaugency.

The English garrison at the castle surrendered and fled north,

but the French were in hot pursuit.

At Patay, just a few kilometres away, the English decided to stand and do battle.

England's archers hadn't been defeated on the battlefield

for over 80 years.

These low-born heroes had bent the rules of chivalry

to crush the French nobility at the great battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.

But here at Patay, the French heavy cavalry simply ran them down

before they could take position.

The Dauphin had won his first great victory.

Thousands of archers died.

And the myth of the English longbow's invincibility was destroyed.

For the chronicler Christine de Pizan, this reversal of fortunes was all down to the maid.

I love these lines. "In 1429, the sun began to shine again.

"Oh, what honour for the female sex.

"It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it,

"when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole kingdom,

"now recovered and made safe by a woman.

"Something that 5,000 men could not have done."

While the English were in total disarray,

the Dauphin, Joan and their armies made a 100-mile dash through English territories

to recapture the city of Reims, where the Dauphin was crowned -

Charles VII, King of France.

In the war of symbols, it didn't get better than this.

France now had a legitimate King, anointed, like all others before him,

with the mystical oil of clovis.

According to the chronicler Monstrelet,

the French now believed that God had turned against the English.

Bedford had never faced a bigger threat.

John, Duke of Bedford's greatest fear is he will lose the support of his French subjects en masse.

So, he wastes no time in shipping his nephew, King Henry,

now just nine years old, across the Channel to have him crowned too. He cannot be outdone by Charles.

But as Bedford planned the coronation, his luck changed.

Joan of Arc was captured and sold to him by the Burgundians.

This was his opportunity.

Bedford knew that if he could prove Joan to be a heretic,

he could destroy the new-found legitimacy of the Dauphin, now King Charles VII.

Joan was put on trial as a witch.

This is a copy

of the official Latin trial record.

There were French minutes taken also,

but it is in the standard format of a heresy trial.

-The majority of the trial, then, it is couched in theology and religious arguments.

-Very much so, yes.

Yes. The English and their supporters in France are very keen to do that.

And it's conducted in really proper fashion.

There are no English clergy involved. It is French trial for heresy and it follows the proper pattern of that.

I think for Joan, too, it is a religious trial.

She says that she loves her banner 40 times more than her sword.

She sees herself as a religious leader.

We have a portrayal of her here in the register of the Paris Parliament.

This is the first known attempt to draw a picture of Joan.

It's drawn by the Anglo-Burgundians. You can see her there with her banner, with "Jesus" on it,

"Jesus Maria", which would have been the full legend on it.

But what's really important about all of this, it's not just a trial of Joan, it's a trial of Charles VII.

The argument the English were trying to put forward

was that he had become King by intervention of the devil, not of God,

and therefore, he was not the legitimate King of France.

It was all really to denigrate him, to destroy his reputation.

-So, by Joan being burnt for heresy...

-Correct.

It was almost as good as declaring Charles himself a heretic.

The final and public destruction of Joan's reputation was to follow.

So, this is where she was burnt, here in the market place?

It was, absolutely.

It had to happen before Bedford could take the young King Henry VI up to Paris for coronation.

She was tied to the bouche, to the pyre.

She would have been high up, so people could see her there.

And it's said that someone gave her a small cross to hold.

It's also the case that they put the fire out and then started it again,

so that first of all, they could show she was dead, and then afterwards

to destroy any chance of relics being found of Joan later.

So, in many ways, it's crushing any future honouring of her.

Absolutely. It's a real destruction of her. A real sign that God is on the side of the English, really.

FLAMES ROAR AND CRACKLE

Ironically, it was Joan's trial that meant there was a lasting record of her deeds,

from which her legend would grow.

With Charles discredited, the Duke of Bedford could make his move.

On the 16th of December 1431,

the ten-year-old Henry VI was crowned "Rex Christianissimus",

"most Christian King of France", over there in Notre Dame Cathedral.

This was the first and only time an English monarch would hold both crowns.

The English had fought for 91 years for this moment.

But Bedford had been forced to compromise.

Tradition demanded that French coronations take place in the cathedral of Reims.

But that was in the hands of Charles.

The young King Henry had been crowned at Notre Dame in Paris.

The coronation had none of the symbolic potency Bedford needed to revive support for the English.

His task became ever more arduous.

The English in France were massively overstretched.

Normandy could no longer fund the conquest.

And they now faced an ever more confident enemy,

led by the new King Charles.

After four more years fulfilling his brother's wishes, Bedford could do no more.

In September 1435, he died.

What's amazing about John, Duke of Bedford is his commitment to the cause, to the family silver.

No-one did more to foster good relations with France than him.

He genuinely loved the place, and particularly his adopted city of Rouen.

He built his house here and, when he died, he chose to be buried here in Rouen Cathedral

and not in Westminster Abbey.

With Bedford's death came further disaster.

England's crucial alliance collapsed.

Sworn enemies Philip, the Duke of Burgundy, and King Charles VII, joined forces.

After 28 years, France was finally united.

Anyone found using the names "Burgundian" or "Orleanist"

were to have their tongue pierced through with a red-hot iron.

Now the French wanted the English out.

In February 1436, they reclaimed Paris,

driving the English occupiers from their city.

Now, after 15 years, the sacred Sainte-Chapelle was back in French hands.

If England were to keep any lands in France,

they needed to fight back.

All eyes turned on the young King, who would shortly come of age.

Would he be a lion like his father and, as King of France,

throw his all into protecting the inheritance that so much blood had been shed for?

Henry VI was England's only hope,

but it soon become apparent that he had no intention of waging war.

This is King's College Chapel in Cambridge,

begun by Henry in 1446 and finished some 100 years later.

It really is an incredible structure.

Although Henry died before King's College Chapel was completed

in his will he left clear instructions about its dimensions and how it should look.

It states, "The chapel shall contain in length

"288 feet of a side without any aisles.

"And all the wideness of 40 feet. Being in height 90 feet.

"Embattled, vaulted and buttressed."

Magnificent as the chapel is,

it's also symbolic of everything that was going wrong with Henry VI's reign.

This is where the money's going.

It's not going to maintain run-down garrisons and defences in Normandy, or to repair castle walls.

It's paying master masons to design and build this chapel

and its sister foundation at Eton.

Ironically, the inspiration for this was French -

the bright, open space of Sainte-Chapelle,

which Henry had seen as a boy during his stay in Paris.

Though he couldn't rival his father in being a warrior King,

Henry VI could equal him in his piety,

in his profound devotion to God.

And this was really all he was concerned about.

"Rex Christianissimus" he probably was,

but any medieval King that could not also wield a sword

would pay a high price for his failing.

Why isn't Henry VI interested?

He's a Lancastrian King, but he doesn't want to go to war like his father.

Henry VI is protected by his uncles.

Nobody dares let him go out to fight, in case he's killed or injured.

So, they put him in cotton wool and they look after him.

He's brought up in a court without a father figure.

He's brought up by clerics and by his mother too, and he is a very religious man.

His piety's been overplayed. But he is somebody who is determined that peace is more important,

and that peace and bringing peace is his God-given duty.

And he thinks that's more important than defending his realm militarily.

He's one of the only medieval Kings who never led his army into battle ever.

From a very young age, he was accustomed to taking advice from people

and not exerting his own will.

And I think you find that he's a very naive man

and also one who changed his mind all the time.

He didn't have a focus in his whole approach to things.

Henry's solution to bring peace to France

harked back to the prewar relationship between the two countries.

He would marry Margaret of Anjou, Charles VII's niece.

I love this book!

This is the huge Shrewsbury Book, a collection of romances and treatises,

presented by John Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, to Margaret of Anjou

on the occasion of her betrothal to Henry VI in 1444.

A veteran of the war, John Talbot was one of the Crown's most loyal warriors.

These first two pages perfectly encapsulate the political situation at the time.

Henry thought his marriage would cement peace with Charles VII

and secure his remaining territories in France.

The illustration shows the two royal lines, Plantagenet and Valois,

united by Henry VI.

So keen was Henry to have this marriage that under the Truce of Tours,

he was prepared to give away the entire French province of Maine, which caused uproar at court.

What's more, Henry had massively underestimated his counterpart across the Channel.

Charles VII had come a long way, shaped and changed by years of war.

The Dauphin is an extraordinary character.

He starts off his reign being a real, complete nonentity, very much like Henry VI had been.

But, gradually, over the years, he develops this absolute cunning

and is able to manipulate people,

and so all his efforts are directed at winning over the Duke of Burgundy from the English alliance,

winning over the Duke of Brittany, and he builds a whole circle of people around him

who all think he's going to give them more than an English alliance is going to do.

-So, an excellent diplomat?

-He had extraordinary diplomatic skills.

The other thing that Charles VII is really good at is choosing good men to be around him.

And I think that's where he excels in choosing wise counsellors,

who put in force these new ways of running the army, making it more efficient, more powerful.

And he invests heavily in the new artillery.

And that will transform his abilities and capabilities as a fighting monarch.

Charles had no intention of making peace with the English.

Now he was creating the most advanced army in Europe,

equipped with the very latest in hi-tech artillery,

by his new master gunner, Jean Bureau.

Particularly from the 1440s,

Charles places a great deal of emphasis on an artillery train,

because, remember, the war of reconquest against the English

is one primarily of siege, so it's very important for the French to build up their siege train.

And Charles employs Jean Bureau and his younger brother, Gaspar, the Bureau brothers,

who are the masters of the French artillery train.

These men seem to have been extremely competent not only as military engineers,

but also as masters of logistics. They seem to have been responsible for standardisation in the guns.

They seem to have been responsible for increasing introduction of iron shot rather than stone shot.

Have a care!

Oh, my God!

That is stone shot. That is sandstone.

They used to use sandstone, marble, anything they could easily carve.

If you think about the logistics, a mason has to carve that ball with a wooden template.

-This is much easier to produce and the hitting power of that...

-Oh, a lot more hitting power.

CANNON FIRES

Have a care!

The King of France has at his disposal the powder, the munitions,

the transport, the logistics, as well as a large number of siege guns.

CANNON FIRES

In 1449, Charles, once the underdog,

now launched 30,000 troops on Normandy.

In many towns, the native Normans opened the gates with no resistance.

They'd had enough of English rule.

Caen fell.

So did Rouen.

Charles was turning Henry V's tactics on the English,

systematically driving them out.

The whole English province collapsed under attack from Charles' armies,

culminating in a catastrophic defeat for England at Formigny,

near the Normandy coast, in 1450.

There was widespread fear that the French would now invade England.

And as the Channel ports flooded with out-of-work soldiers,

these rumblings of social unrest would become political revolution.

After just one year, all that was left was Gascony.

It was here where the war had started over 100 years earlier.

And after all the years of bloodshed and carnage,

all the land grabs and betrayals,

all the marriages and treaties, this is where it would finally end.

And it would end the medieval way, with a great battle.

Here, in the fields around Castillon, the two armies met.

Outnumbered almost two to one, the English were led by veteran of the war,

the ever-loyal knight, John Talbot.

He'd been released after the surrender of Rouen,

on the condition that he would never again bear arms against France.

But he'd still volunteered for this last stand.

Talbot remained true to his pledge of not wearing armour,

but he directed the English attack, riding on a great warhorse

and urging his men forward in an impetuous and uncoordinated charge on the French positions.

And Talbot hadn't counted on the new French army led by Jean Bureau.

The English archers were taken by surprise.

Mown down, not by arrows, but by the small arms fire of Bureau's new guns.

Talbot himself was found trapped under his fallen horse

and finished off by a French archer's axe.

This stone marks the spot where Talbot's body was found.

It's said that his body was stripped of its armour

and his face was mutilated beyond recognition.

But one of his stewards knew that he'd had two teeth removed,

so by feeling around within the gums of the blooded skull,

he was able to identify the corpse.

For me, this place is full of irony,

because right back at the beginning, over 100 years earlier,

it was the arrows of the humble English archers that ensured England's success

against the invincible French knights.

Now the French had learnt their lesson well,

for it was French guns in the hands of their low-born master gunner

that finished off England's great noble soldier.

With this defeat, Gascony was lost.

The Hundred Years' War was over.

It had been a long and bloody divorce and one that still resonates today.

Both sides had emerged profoundly changed and very different.

What had started as a dynastic dispute

ended up as a protracted struggle for national identity.

For France, victory had come at a high price.

English invasion, plague, famine and banditry

had cost two-thirds of the population.

But war had ultimately united France.

And she had reclaimed her place as the superpower of Europe.

England had been left counting the cost.

The Crown was virtually bankrupt. There was widespread dissent among the people and the nobility.

But they now shared the same language

and a culture that was distinctly English.

The seeds had been sown for the country we recognise today.

And without French lands,

England was now part of an island nation,

something that would shape our outlook for centuries to come.

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