Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [110]
The Sire de Gaucourt, who had led the defense, asked for a three-day truce in which he could send a messenger to the French king to discover whether or not a relief force was coming to the city’s help. If not, then he would surrender on condition that the English army did not sack and rape the town. Henry agreed, and so priests and nobles gathered at the breach by the Leure Gate, and the leading men came from the town, and they all swore solemn oaths to abide by the terms of the truce. Afterward, and after Henry had taken hostages to ensure that the garrison kept its word, a herald rode close under the walls and shouted up at the townsfolk who had watched the ceremony. He called in French. “You have nothing to fear! The King of England has not come to destroy you! We are good Christians and Harfleur is not Soissons! You have nothing to fear!”
Smoke drifted from the city to haze the late summer sky. It seemed strange that no guns fired, that no trebuchets thumped as they launched their missiles, and that the fighting had stopped. The dying did not stop. The corpses were still carried to the creeks and thrown to the gulls, and it seemed there would be no end to the sickness.
And there was no French relief force.
The French army was gathering to the east, but the message came back that it would not march to relieve Harfleur and so, on the next Sunday, the feast of Saint Vincent, the city surrendered.
A pavilion was erected on the hillside behind the English encampment and a throne was placed under the canopy and draped with cloth of gold. English banners flanked the pavilion, which was filled with the high nobility in their finest clothes. A man held aloft the king’s great helm, which was ringed with a golden crown, while archers lined a long path that led across the rubble of the siege-works to the ruined gate that had resisted so many attacks. Behind the archers were the rest of Henry’s army, spectators to the day’s drama.
The King of England, crowned with a simple circlet of gold and wearing a surcoat blazoned with the French royal coat of arms, sat enthroned in silence. He was watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering what he must do next. He had come to Normandy and won this surrender, but that victory had cost him half his army.
Hook was at the Leure Gate where Sir John commanded a force of ten men-at-arms and forty archers. Sir John, clad in plate armor that had been scoured to a shine, was mounted on his great destrier, Lucifer, who had been draped in a dazzling linen trapper resplendent with Sir John’s crest, and the same lion was modeled in painted wood to rear savagely from the crest of Sir John’s helmet. The men-at-arms were also in armor, but the archers were in leather jerkins and stained breeches. All the bowmen carried halters of rough rope, the kind that a peasant might use to lead a cow to market. “Treat them courteously,” Sir John told his bowmen, “they fought well! They’re men!”
“I thought they were all scum-sucking cabbage shitters,” Will of the Dale said quietly, but not quietly enough.
Sir John turned Lucifer. “They are that!” he said, “but they fought like Englishmen! So treat them like Englishmen!”
A section of the new wall had been demolished and, just after Sir John spoke, some three dozen men emerged from the gap. They had been ordered to approach the King of England barefoot and in plain linen shirts and hose. Now, nervous and apprehensive, they walked slowly and cautiously toward the waiting archers.
“Nooses!” Sir John ordered.
Hook and the other archers tied nooses in the ropes. Sir John beckoned a squire and handed his reins to the man, then slid out of his tall saddle. He patted Lucifer on the nose, then walked toward the approaching Frenchmen.
He singled out one man, a tall man with a hooked nose and a short