War and taxes

It was Benjamin Franklin who said that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. He might have said "war and taxes", which is almost equally true. Moreover, history has demonstrated that war is often inextricably linked with taxes, either as a cause or a result of them.

Five years ago, in the monograph on Henry Vaughan that I wrote for Cecil Woolf's War Poets series, I drew attention to the many parallels between the seventeenth-century poet whom Siegfried Sassoon admired and Sassoon himself. One of my aims was to show that, although warfare may become more mechanised, in essence it does not become more sophisticated, and the wartime experiences of those who participated in the English Civil War were not so different from those of twentieth-century soldiers. I am reminded of this time and time again when reading about Britain's history of warfare. Some of the episodes I am about to mention may seem startlingly familiar.

Most recently, I have been researching the series of events known, somewhat inaccurately, as The Hundred Years War, a long-running conflict between England and France. When I say "England", I do mean England. Scotland was a separate kingdom, which had its own troubles. Wales had been annexed by England in 1284, and for more than two hundred years after that, the Welsh were effectively second-class citizens in the merged kingdom. (This situation stemmed from the fact that neither the Saxons nor the Danes had ever controlled Wales or Scotland and the resulting ethnic divisions would not be healed until 1603, when James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of Queen Elizabeth I. Long before that, however, the French were seen by their close relations, the Anglo-Norman nobility, as the real enemy.)

I note that 21st July will be the anniversary of the Battle of Shrewsbury, which fell right in the middle of the Hundred Years War, but had nothing much to do with it.  The main antagonists, on that occasion, were Harry Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland - known as "Hotspur" because of his impetuous nature (who does this remind you of?) - and King Henry IV, to whom Percy had previously given his allegiance. In this case, there were Welshmen on both sides, since the rebellious Percy and his father had made an alliance with Owain Glyndwr, a Welsh nobleman who had taken up the sword after being unfairly treated in a dispute with his English neighbour. At the same time, the king had long-standing associations with Wales, where he was a leading landowner, and was able to call hundreds of Welshmen to his side.

Someone asked me recently why Richard II of England was such an unpopular king. The answer, I fear, may lie less in Richard's mercurial personality than in the fact that he brought a temporary end to the Hundred Years War.  One only has to look back to the Falklands conflict of 1982 to see how a national leader can trade on a foreign invasion to gain lasting popularity, although in the case of the Hundred Years War, England may be regarded as the aggressor. Richard II had been born at Bordeaux, in the English Crown's French territories, and his father (the "Black Prince") had worn himself out fighting multiple large-scale battles in order to maintain English power on the Continent. Richard was a very different man from his father, and had no wish to spend his life campaigning overseas. Eventually he was forced to take steps to defend the realm against possible invasion, and this meant raising taxes. However, Richard refused to take the financial hit himself, declining to reduce his household bills. Having married the French king's daughter and made a peace treaty, he was surrounded by frustrated noblemen, branded a tyrant, and deposed.

The Welsh rebellion broke out almost immediately, and Richard's cousin Henry IV found that it was not as easy to keep the whole country happy as he had anticipated. Twenty years after his son, the Prince of Wales, was seriously wounded at Shrewsbury (almost certainly resulting in a permanently disfiguring scar), the prince came to the throne as the glorious King Henry V, who is remembered as a saviour of the nation in the war against France that resumed in 1415. Many Britons are under the false impression that the Battle of Agincourt was decisive. Miraculous as it was, it did not significantly assist the English in their goal of taking the French throne. It would be another five bloody years before Henry was recognised as the heir of King Charles VI of France, and his death at the age of 35 led on to further bloodshed in the form of a renewal of war with France, followed at close quarters by the Wars of the Roses.

The men who participated in these wars often lived to regret their experiences. Sir John Cornwall, a veteran of Agincourt, later served Henry in a second French campaign, in the course of which he witnessed his 17-year-old only son having his head blown off by a cannonball. Sir John vowed never again to fight a war of conquest. Reading this, I could not help thinking of the death of David Thomas, and the words of Sassoon's 1917 declaration: "I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest." It simply was not worth the human suffering.