Note 140 — Chapter XXIII

Footnote 140: Hume, with his usual inaccuracy, asserts that the French army at Agincourt was headed as well by the Dauphin, as by all the other princes of the blood. The Dauphin wished to assist his countrymen, when they resolved to intercept the invaders; but, as we are expressly told by Le Fevre (c. 59), was not suffered to join the rendezvous. This is not the only mistake into which Hume has fallen in his account of this battle. In one paragraph he reports Henry to have been under the necessity of marching by land from Harfleur to Calais, in order to reach a place of safety from which he might transport his soldiers back to England; in another paragraph he represents him (with the same temerity which had been evinced by his predecessors before the battles of Poictiers and of Cressy) to have ventured without any object of moment, and merely for the sake of plunder, so far into the enemy's country as to leave himself no retreat. He tells us, moreover, that "Henry was master of fourteen thousand prisoners," whom he afterwards says that the King "carried with him to Paris, thence to England." Hume took this also without inquiry. Walsingham says, "Henry took (as they say—ut ferunt,—as though even that estimate required to be supported by common report,) seven hundred prisoners;" and of his prisoners, how many soever they were, he transported (as Des Ursins tells us) only the most considerable to England, dismissing the rest under promise to bring their ransom to him in the field of Lendi, on the feast of St. John in the summer, and, if he were not there, they should be discharged of the debt.(back)