‘For what does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?’
Mark 8: 36-37
Prince Hal was crowned King Henry V in 1413, and his presence on the throne immediately lifted the mood and spirit of the nation. He was a dignified, noble, and dynamic figure, and where he led, others followed.
His first act was to reopen the war with France, as the French had long been supplying money and arms to the troublesome Welsh and Scots. Their king, Charles VI, was half-mad, and it seemed the perfect moment to resume hostilities.
Henry crossed the Channel in the summer of 1415 and laid siege to the port of Harfleur, capturing it in September. He then headed east towards Calais but was intercepted by a huge French army at Agincourt and was left with no option but to stand and fight.
His soldiers were foot-sore, malnourished, and seriously outnumbered. Yet as the King drew his army up on the morning of October 25th – St. Crispin’s Day – he displayed a contagious and unshakeable faith in his hard-pressed troops. Victory was not only possible or likely, he assured them, but foreordained and inevitable. Resplendent in a surcoat emblazoned with the lions of England and the lilies of France, Henry imbued his men with such self-belief that once his archers had wreaked their usual havoc, as their forefathers had done at Crècy and Poitiers, there were thousands of Frenchmen dead or captured and only a handful of English casualties.
Agincourt was a triumph for the ages, and over the next few years Henry took Calais, Rouen, Caen, and eventually the whole of Normandy. He was soon at the gates of Paris, and it was then that the French sued for peace. The Treaty of Troyes of 1420 made Henry Regent of France until the time of Charles’s death. He would then become King of France as well as England and both thrones would pass automatically to his descendants. Henry married Catherine de Valois, Charles’s daughter, and the future looked full of promise.
But Henry died of dysentery at the height of his prestige in 1422 and was succeeded by his baby son, Henry VI (1422-1471). The dead king’s brother, the Duke of Bedford, took over as Regent of France and picked up the war trail straightaway. The Treaty of Troyes had been undermined not just by Henry’s death but also, in the same year, by that of Charles VI. The French king’s son – Prince Charles, the Dauphin – had claimed the throne, but he was a listless, somewhat defeatist personality, and made little impression on the battlefield.
It seemed certain to everyone in 1429 that Bedford would soon seize Orléans and definitively end the war. But a young country girl – Joan of Arc – turned up out of nowhere at the Dauphin’s court and announced that St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catherine had appeared to her, stating that she alone could lead France to victory. ‘The King of Heaven’, she declared to Charles, ‘bids me tell you that you shall then be anointed and crowned in the Cathedral of Rheims.’
The Dauphin, completely out of ideas himself, agreed to let the nineteen-year-old try, and the course and direction of the war were instantly reversed. Joan’s air of certainty and conviction, her transparent faith in God and his saints, plus her palpable purity and goodness, raised French morale to such a degree that Orléans was relieved and the English pushed back far enough so that Charles could be crowned at Rheims exactly as Joan had predicted.
Joan’s Heavenly messengers advised her then that her mission had been achieved, but the troops had become so wedded to her that she could not bear to walk away. After a failed attack on Paris in 1430 she was betrayed to the English and burnt at the stake the following year for witchcraft and heresy. As she died, clasping a rough cross and calling on Christ’s name, an English soldier perceptively remarked, ‘We are lost, for this maid was indeed a saint.’
England was lost without a doubt. Three great calamities – one military, one political, and one religious – broke the moral and spiritual fibre of the land. By 1453, the French, with Joan’s memory spurring them on, had regained all their territories save Calais. The sterling achievements of the English soldiery and the inspirational valour of their leaders – Edward III, The Black Prince, and Henry V – counted therefore for nothing. England was then torn apart internally by the decades-long bout of civil strife known as the War of the Roses. King Henry Tudor (1485-1509) restored order and stability but under his son, Henry VIII (1509-1547), the realm endured a spiritual attack from which, at the time of writing (1981), it has still to recover.
In the early 1530s, under the pretext of religious reform, Henry moved to confiscate and abolish England’s monasteries and abbeys. He restricted himself to the smaller ones at first, but once the process was underway it proved impossible to stop and grew exponentially as institution after institution was pillaged by the King’s rapacious officials and the equally venal nobility.
In an act of national shame and disgrace, the seventy-eight-year-old Abbott of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was dragged on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor, where he was hung, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. Such was his punishment for refusing to hand Glastonbury Abbey, England’s holiest site, over to the King.
Nine hundred religious houses were seized during this barbaric frenzy. The poor, who had relied on the hospitality of the monasteries, were left to fend for themselves in an increasingly brutal and money-obsessed world. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was a disaster on the level of the Ancient Irish War, the departure of the Grail, and the Norman Conquest. The beating heart of prayer that had sustained the country through good times and bad since Joseph of Arimathea’s day had been pulled out, strangled, and desecrated in an act of unparalleled collective savagery.
It was England’s Good Friday. A long (and ongoing) sojourn in Hades now awaited.
Excellent. You wrote this in 1981?