It is a curious feature of St Crispin's Day that a battle fought between Englishmen and Frenchmen on a wet October afternoon in Picardy should have anything to say to a Scot. No Scottish army stood in the field at Agincourt, and the day was neither a Scottish victory nor a Scottish defeat. Yet I have long thought it impossible to understand the most remarkable chapter in the history of the Auld Alliance without beginning there, and the anniversary seems as good an occasion as any to explain why.
Scotland in 1415 was a kingdom without its king. James I, taken at sea off Flamborough Head in 1406 while being sent, a boy of eleven, to the safety of the French court, was to spend eighteen years in English hands, and the government of the realm lay meanwhile with his uncle, Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany.¹ It would be uncharitable to say that Albany wished his nephew to remain in England. It would be accurate to say that he bore the separation with remarkable fortitude.
What followed Agincourt mattered more to Scotland than the battle itself. Having destroyed a great part of the French military nobility in a single afternoon, Henry V set about converting victory into conquest. Normandy fell between 1417 and 1419, and in May 1420 the Treaty of Troyes disinherited the Dauphin Charles, married Henry to Catherine of Valois and declared him heir to the crown of France.² In Edinburgh the treaty made disquieting reading. Since the reign of Edward I, English kings had asserted a superior lordship over Scotland and had repeatedly sought to make it good by arms. Were France to pass to the king of England, he would command the revenues of two kingdoms, and Scotland would lose the one ally able to draw them away.
The Auld Alliance is often spoken of in the language of sentiment, as though Scots and French had discovered in one another some natural affinity of temperament. I doubt that either party would have recognised the description. The treaty concluded by John Balliol's council with Philip IV in 1295, and renewed under Robert I at Corbeil in 1326, was an instrument of mutual deterrence: should England make war on either kingdom, the other was bound to make trouble.³ Scotland had attempted to honour that obligation in 1417, while Henry was occupied in Normandy, by laying siege to Roxburgh and Berwick. The enterprise accomplished so little that it passed into memory as the Foul Raid.⁴
A more serious effort followed in the autumn of 1419, when some six thousand Scots under John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, Albany's son, and Archibald Douglas, Earl of Wigtown, heir of the Black Douglases, landed at La Rochelle in answer to the Dauphin's appeal.⁵ Their reception was mixed. French courtiers, who had perhaps expected allies of more modest appetite, complained of men who consumed the wine and mutton of the very provinces they had come to defend. The complaint did not long survive the spring of 1421.
On Easter Eve, 22 March 1421, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, brother of Henry V and his lieutenant in France, learned that the Franco-Scottish army lay near Baugé in Anjou. Clarence, who had been invalided home from Harfleur and so missed Agincourt, had perhaps not forgotten the fact. Riding ahead of his archers with his men-at-arms, he forced the crossing of the Couesnon and attacked. His force was routed. Clarence was killed, the earls of Somerset and Huntingdon were taken, and the English army in Anjou ceased for a season to be an army.⁶ Several Scots afterwards laid claim to the killing of Clarence, which tells us something of the market value of the distinction. Pope Martin V is reported to have remarked, on hearing the news, that the Scots were well known as a remedy against the English. The remark may be apocryphal; it is certainly apt, and Norman Macdougall did well to borrow it for the title of his history of the alliance.⁷
The Valois were not ungrateful. Buchan was made Constable of France, the highest military office in the kingdom. Sir John Stewart of Darnley received the lordship of Aubigny-sur-Nère in Berry in 1423, which his descendants were to hold for more than two centuries. Archibald, fourth Earl of Douglas, crossed in 1424 with fresh troops and was created Duke of Touraine, the first Scot to hold a French duchy.⁸
The episode that interests me most, however, turns on a point of law. Henry, anticipating Scottish intervention, had brought James I to France in 1420 and caused him to command his subjects to quit the Dauphin's service. The Scots refused, on the ground that a king in the power of his enemies could not freely command. One may concede that the argument was convenient. It is also, I think, correct. Roman law had long since confronted the problem of the citizen in enemy hands: the captive's civil standing was held in suspense, his authority over his household lay dormant, and only by postliminium, upon his return, was his former condition restored.⁹ The Scots had no need of the Digest to arrive at the same conclusion. A community of the realm which had told Pope John XXII in 1320 that it would set aside even Robert I, should he submit the kingdom to England, was hardly likely to treat the orders of a captive as the voice of the Crown.¹⁰
Henry answered the argument in his own fashion. When Melun surrendered in November 1420, the Scots of the garrison were hanged as traitors for having borne arms against their sovereign, who had been present in the besieging camp.¹¹ Whatever its effect on the remaining garrisons, it left the Scots' argument unanswered.
For the first Scottish army in France the end came at Verneuil on 17 August 1424, where the Franco-Scottish host was broken by John, Duke of Bedford. Buchan and Douglas fell with a great part of their men, and the English showed the Scots little mercy that day.¹² In the same year James I came home at last, ransomed by treaty, and set about governing a kingdom that had grown accustomed to managing without him.
Not every Scot who survived Verneuil went home. Those who stayed formed the nucleus of the archers who guarded the person of the French king, the company that became the Garde Écossaise and retained its name and precedence into modern times.¹³ The Stewarts of Aubigny continued in Valois service. In 1558 Henri II extended to Scots the rights of naturalised Frenchmen, and the Scottish Parliament returned the courtesy.¹⁴ And when the Stuarts lost their thrones in 1688, it was to France that James VII and his court withdrew, settling at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with the honours, titles and loyalties that Pro Fide Press will examine in The Jacobite Noblesse in 2027.¹⁵
Henry's speech before Agincourt is a fine thing, and Shakespeare made it finer. Yet a Scot may be forgiven for reserving his own toast for a later and less celebrated anniversary, kept on the eve of Easter, in memory of a river crossing in Anjou.
Notes
Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1994); Stephen Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996).
Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud: Tempus, 2005); Juliet Barker, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle (London: Little, Brown, 2005); Jonathan Sumption, Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV (London: Faber and Faber, 2015).
Norman Macdougall, An Antidote to the English: The Auld Alliance, 1295–1560 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001); Elizabeth Bonner, "Scotland's 'Auld Alliance' with France, 1295–1560", History 84 (1999), 5–30.
Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998).
Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols (Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1987–98), viii, 115; Brian G. H. Ditcham, "'Mutton Guzzlers and Wine Bags': Foreign Soldiers and Native Reactions in Fifteenth-Century France", in C. T. Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France, c. 1350–1550 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 1–13; Brown, Black Douglases; Bernard Chevalier, "Les Écossais dans les armées de Charles VII jusqu'à la bataille de Verneuil", in Jeanne d'Arc: une époque, un rayonnement (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1982).
Bower, Scotichronicon, viii, 121–2; Macdougall, Antidote to the English, 66; Sumption, Cursed Kings.
Bower, Scotichronicon, viii, 121; Macdougall, Antidote to the English.
Brown, Black Douglases, 220; Macdougall, Antidote to the English.
Gaius, Institutes 1.129; Digest 49.15 (De captivis et de postliminio et redemptis ab hostibus).
Edward J. Cowan, 'For Freedom Alone': The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003).
Brown, James I; Sumption, Cursed Kings.
Brown, Black Douglases; Macdougall, Antidote to the English.
William Forbes-Leith, The Scots Men-at-Arms and Life-Guards in France, 1418–1830, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1882).
Elizabeth Bonner, "French Naturalization of the Scots in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries", Historical Journal 40 (1997), 1085–1115.
Edward Corp, A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
