25 October is a day of famous charges. In 1415 Henry V's tired, sick army, cut off on its way to Calais, stood behind a hedge of stakes at Agincourt while the French nobility struggled toward it through deep mud, and won a victory that strengthened his claim to the French throne. In 1854, at Balaclava in the Crimea, a thin line of Highlanders turned back Russian cavalry, the Heavy Brigade charged uphill and won, and then a misunderstood order sent the Light Brigade down a valley lined with guns. And in 1747, off Cape Finisterre, Edward Hawke's fleet fell on a French convoy's escort and took six of its eight ships of the line.
Agincourt, 1415: an army cut off
In 1415 Henry V of England invaded France to press his claim to the French crown. He landed in Normandy on 13 August, and the port of Harfleur held out until 22 September, by which time dysentery had badly weakened his army. Henry set out to march to Calais, by EBSCO's reckoning about 160 miles, but a French army shadowed him and cut him off near Agincourt. Its great lords had no single commander. According to the Musée de l'Armée, the army was led by the Constable of France, Charles d'Albret, and Marshal Boucicaut, and they were still arguing over the command when Henry took the initiative.1
How many men stood on each side is still argued over. EBSCO's Research Starters give about 6,300 to 6,500 English, most of them archers, against 20,000 to 30,000 French. Anne Curry, in her later research based on the surviving pay and muster records, puts the English at about 9,000 against about 12,000 French, and the Musée de l'Armée gives the same figures.2
Mud, stakes and arrows
Heavy rain fell in the night and turned the freshly plowed fields into deep mud. The English line, less than three-quarters of a mile wide, filled a narrow strip of open ground between woods. Henry advanced to within about 300 yards of the French, bow range, and his archers drove stakes into the ground in front of them.3
The French cavalry charged into the arrows: wounded horses bolted and threw their riders, and the stakes impaled others. Then the dismounted men-at-arms came on, weighed down by their armor, through the mud and on a narrow front where their numbers were no help. The second French line pressed in behind the first and blocked its retreat, and, in EBSCO's account, archers who had run short of arrows dropped their bows and attacked the struggling knights with knives, maces, swords and axes.4
Late in the day a raid fell on the English baggage, and Henry, fearing that the French were regrouping for a fresh attack, ordered prisoners to be killed. Anne Curry notes that this broke the rules of chivalry. Rémy Ambühl of the University of Southampton, who studied about 100 ransom contracts for men taken at Agincourt, found that captives from a wide range of ranks, not just knights, were held for ransom, and concluded that the massacre, if it took place, did not spare the greater men at the expense of the lesser.5
The prisoner poet, and the cost
The most important captive was Charles, Duke of Orléans. He spent the next twenty-five years as a prisoner in England and was freed only in 1440. In captivity he wrote poetry in both French and English, and his English poems survive in a single manuscript, Harley 682, which in David V. Harrington's count holds 6,531 lines of them.6
The dead were never properly counted. The Musée de l'Armée gives more than 5,000 French dead, the elite of their cavalry among them, another encyclopedia entry some 6,000 and EBSCO 7,000 to 10,000. For the English, both the Musée and EBSCO give about 500, while Rickard gives only 100.7
Henry marched on to Calais, and the English went on to conquer Normandy. At Troyes in 1420 he was recognized as heir to the French crown, and, as the World Encyclopedia entry notes, he won the French princess Catherine of Valois as his wife. Shakespeare's Henry V made the battle a lasting legend. The date is in the Julian calendar, which western Europe then used. Our full account of Agincourt tells the story in more detail.8
Balaclava, 1854: the redoubts fall
In the autumn of 1854 the Allies were besieging Sevastopol, and the British army under Lord Raglan drew its supplies through the small port of Balaclava. On 25 October about 25,000 Russians under General Pavel Liprandi attacked, aiming to break the siege lines and take the base.9
The first blow fell at dawn on a chain of redoubts along the Causeway Heights, held by Turkish troops, and the Russians took several of them and their guns. John Rickard puts the defenders at about 1,500 Turks with nine guns, who held out for about an hour and a half against overwhelming odds.10
The thin red line and the Heavy Brigade
Russian cavalry rode on toward the port. Major-General Sir Colin Campbell's 93rd Highlanders, with Turkish troops beside them, stood in two lines instead of forming the usual square, and two volleys turned the horsemen back. Campbell reportedly told his men they must die where they stood, and William Howard Russell of The Times described the Russians dashing at "that thin red streak tipped with steel", in the words the National Army Museum quotes. Military History Matters gives his dispatch as "a thin red streak topped up with a line of steel". The stand has been known ever since as the Thin Red Line.11
Soon afterward Brigadier-General James Scarlett's Heavy Brigade, about 800 horsemen by the National Army Museum's count, charged uphill at little more than a trot into Russian cavalry that the museum puts at 3,000 and Rickard at about 2,000 and, after some ten minutes of hacking, drove them back over the heights. One of its officers, Major William Forrest, wrote: "I got a crack on the head in one charge but the brass pot stood well".12
Into the valley: the Charge of the Light Brigade
Raglan, watching from the heights, saw the Russians getting ready to carry off the guns they had captured. At 10.45, by the National Army Museum's timeline, he sent the cavalry an order written by Richard Airey: "Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front". It was meant to stop the guns being removed, but it did not say which guns, and the cavalry in the valley could not see them.13
Captain Louis Nolan, the aide who carried it, told the cavalry commander, Lord Lucan, that Raglan's orders were for the cavalry to attack immediately. What Nolan and Lucan said to each other was never settled. Lucan passed the order to the Earl of Cardigan, who led the 673 men of the Light Brigade down the North Valley toward the Russian battery at its far end, about a mile and a quarter away. Nolan galloped across the front, apparently to warn Cardigan that they were going the wrong way, and was killed by one of the first shells.14
Fired on from three sides, the brigade rode into the guns. Those who reached them drove off the gunners and charged the Russian cavalry beyond, while French cavalry cleared the hills on the north side of the valley and helped cover the survivors' return. Watching, the French general Pierre Bosquet said: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre", it is magnificent, but it is not war, adding, according to the Royal Collection Trust, "c'est de la folie": it is madness.15
The cost, and a poem
The National Army Museum tells of Major Thomas Hutton, shot through both legs while his horse was wounded eleven times. It gives about 260 of the brigade's men killed or wounded and 475 horses lost; Rickard gives 360 men and 517 horses. Only about 200 riders came back.16
For the battle as a whole the museum puts British casualties at about 615 and Russian losses at about the same. Balaclava stayed in Allied hands, so Raglan could claim a victory, but the Russians kept the heights and the road over them, which made supplying the siege much harder through the winter.17
Alfred Tennyson read The Times report and wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade", published in The Examiner on 9 December 1854. The National Army Museum notes that the poem is why the charge is remembered. Its lines "Their's not to reason why" and "Some one had blunder'd" fixed the charge in memory. Our article on Balaclava follows the charge step by step.18
Cape Finisterre, 1747: Hawke's six prizes
During the War of the Austrian Succession, Rear-Admiral Edward Hawke's fleet, twelve ships of the line and two fifties, intercepted a large French convoy bound for the West Indies off Cape Finisterre, on the north-west coast of Spain. It was escorted by eight ships of the line under the Marquis de l'Estenduère, larger and stronger than the British ships, though fewer.19
The British took six of the eight, among them the Terrible, a 74-gun ship according to a contemporary print in the Royal Museums Greenwich collection, and the 50-gun Severn, which the prize court papers record with 340 men, two women and a child on board. The French flagship Tonnant was surrounded, but the Intrépide turned back into the fight and helped her get clear; according to the Rountree Tryon catalogue, citing the naval historian William Laird Clowes, both reached Brest.20
Hawke judged that Captain Thomas Fox of the Kent had fought half-heartedly and had him court-martialed, although, the Twickenham Museum notes, Fox's opponent, the Fougueux, had struck to him after three-quarters of an hour. Fox was dismissed from his command, but was reinstated and in 1749 promoted rear admiral and retired to Twickenham. There, the museum tells, he was a witness in a lawsuit over a vitriol works, described its stench as "like the horridest smell I ever smelt" and was asked, rather unkindly, whether it reminded him of gunpowder.21
British records, still kept in the Julian (Old Style) calendar, date the battle to 14 October, which is 25 October in the Gregorian calendar; The National Archives gives the Severn's capture as 14/25 October 1747.22
Also on 25 October
In 1944, off the island of Samar, the escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts of Taffy 3 fought off Admiral Kurita's battleships in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and the St. Lo became the first American ship, and the first major warship, sunk by a kamikaze attack. The battle is told on our 23 October page.23
Also on this day
- 1747: Second Battle of Cape Finisterre. Off Cape Finisterre, Edward Hawke's British fleet caught a large French convoy guarded by warships under Henri-François des Herbiers in the Austrian Succession war.
