Humphrey Duke of Gloucester looked to his associate, Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury who had come from Normandy to recruit a new army for action, perhaps in a different part of France, to provide him with another continental project. Parliament voted a direct tax on churches and knights’ fees for Salisbury’s expedition. Bedford decided to deploy this force to take Angers in a siege expected to last four months in accordance with his policy of gaining Normandy piece by piece. Gloucester and Salisbury on the other hand decided upon direct action nearer to the dauphin’s stronghold at Bourges south of the Loire and Salisbury set out for Orleans. Bedford’s own comment was that the decision to attack Orleans instead of Angers was taken ‘God knows by what advice’. But it was taken, despite the chivalric principle of not attacking the domains of prisoners whose revenues ought to be used to provide their ransoms: Charles, Duke of Orleans had been captive in England since Agincourt, and would not be released for another eleven years.1
In a study about events in Aquitaine, we will pass quickly over the siege of Orleans, the taking of certain strongpoints by its defenders, the killing of Salisbury by a cannonball, the ‘battle of the Herrings’ at nearby Rouvray where Sir John Falstolf defended a supply train so successfully that a major French and Scottish army sent to intercept it was utterly defeated, and the eventual raising of the siege already decided upon before Joan of Arc burst on to the scene.
* * *
Charles VII took Chinon on the north bank of the Loire in spring 1428 as a counter-measure to the English advance into Maine and the threat posed to Anjou. It was from there that he heard of Salisbury’s advance against Orleans. He sent the Bastard of Orleans and La Hire, with Poton de Xaintrailles and the Count of Clermont, to undertake the defence of Orleans as Salisbury, and then Suffolk, occupied positions on the south side of the Loire. He stayed back at Chinon sixty miles to the southwest. Then there were newcomers at Chinon, a girl called Joan from Bar-Lorraine in the east of France and her little bodyguard.2
Charles VII’s mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, was responsible for having her introduced to the court. Yolande’s second son was René of Anjou who had been adopted by his uncle, a cardinal who was also Duke of Bar-Lorraine, where Domrémy, Joan’s birthplace, was situated, and René had been adopted as his heir. Yolande’s late husband, Louis of Anjou, and these Angevins were the most influential people in young Charles’ life since his parents had disowned him.3 It was Yolande who had established Charles at Bourges in the Duke of Berry’s territory, and then left for her other important domain of Provence where her elder son Louis was duke, to return in 1423 when her daughter gave birth to the future Louis XI:4 ‘… there could be no doubt that any communication between the duchy of Bar and the royal court in the Loire, especially concerning a matter as weighty as a message from heaven, would come to the attention of René’s mother Yolande.’5 It was certainly she who certified that Joan was a virgin when other courtiers were anxious about the veracity of her claims. Joan’s claim to be God’s messenger was thoroughly examined by members of the university of Paris who had sided with the Armagnac/Orleanist cause and were now to be found at Poitiers.
Joan was given military training, a horse, a suit of armour, a banner, and a sword found where she said it would be. She dictated her challenge to the English: ‘King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France, you, William de la Pole, count of Suffolk, John, lord of Talbot, and you, Thomas, lord of Scales … you will never hold the kingdom of France from God … but King Charles, the true heir, will hold it.’ She was allowed to go in the company of John II, Duke of Alençon (who had given her the horse) to Orleans. The best proof of whether her claims were authentic or not was to let her relieve Orleans and take the dauphin to his coronation at Reims: if it worked it would be justified.
It did work. Joan and Alençon came to one of the bastilles that the English had constructed on the east side of Orleans, took it, and then took the stronghold called the Tourelles which gave access to the city, where the bastard of Orleans welcomed her amid general rejoicing. Then there were the mopping up operations at Jargeau, up river from Orleans where Suffolk’s force was defeated and he was taken prisoner. From there, they turned westwards and took Meung and Beaugency downstream. With Falstolf’s approach from the north, there was the engagement at Patay, where Talbot and Scales were taken prisoner but Falstolf got away. The kingdom of Bourges was extended to the northern bank of the Loire. The first part of Joan’s mission was accomplished.
Charles himself and Joan led the army into Anglo-Burgundian territory together for the second part. Her letter sent into Troyes on the shaft of an arrow was eventually enough to overawe the garrison there into surrendering, and so the town where the loathesome treaty had been signed in 1420 was in Charles VII’s hands. Once Troyes had opened its gates to their lawful king, the population of Reims opened theirs, and the chancellor of France, Regnault de Chartres, also archbishop of Reims, entered his cathedral from which he had been excluded by the Anglo-Burgundians. Charles VII was anointed with the holy oil of Clovis, then crowned and acclaimed with Joan beside him. She knelt before him and called him ‘noble king.’
[Joan] had been an exceptional leader in an exceptional moment – a miraculous anomaly who, by the will of heaven, had transformed the landscape in which she stood. She knew that God was with her, and how much work still lay ahead. But what if those around her believed the moment of miracles had passed?6
* * *
Meanwhile the alliance between England and Burgundy had been reaffirmed by the Duke of Bedford. Despite the point of their meeting in Paris being sharpened by a masque re-enacting the murder of his father on the bridge at Montereau in 1419, Philip was increasingly passive in the alliance. All energetic resistance to Joan’s dauphin now acknowledged as legitimate king was left to Bedford. Philip sent representaives to Reims for Charles’s coronation.
Philip left for Arras where he cautiously received Charles VII’s chancellor, Regnault de Chartres, and his general Raoul de Gaucourt to discuss future possibilities, which Bedford knew all about from Duchess Anne. Bedford had Cardinal Beaufort with him who had arrived with a contingent of soldiers intending to make for Bohemia to help King Sigismund put down the Hussite rising, but he left his troops with Bedford instead. Bedford set about putting the Paris defences in order with thirty foot walls and improved moats, doing his best to reassure the regency council in Engand that all was well between England and Burgundy: there was at least no open breach in the alliance for another five years.
Bedford denounced Charles as an imposter and Joan as a sorceress to the people of Paris. Charles VII took Bedford’s words as a challenge, and advanced with his army nearly to Senlis, reaching to within sight of Bedford’s troops in Paris. Their opposing armies dug in in front of each other. The next day they faced each other in the August heat but avoided any major engagement. Under cover of night, Bedford withdrew behind his strengthened walls into Paris.
Charles was free to wander about around Paris and take over in Compiègne and in Beauvais. He met Regnault of Chartres and Gaucourt near Arras with the result of their mission to Duke Philip who had accepted Charles’s admission of his participation in the Montereau murder and his offer to repay the value of jewels that had been stolen at the time. Philip would keep the lands the English had allowed him, and he would not have to do homage to Charles as king of France. Nevertheless, Bedford’s mystery play in Paris had had its desired effect upon Philip, and he agreed to no more than a truce in towns north of the Seine. Paris was not to be one of them, and its future was left undecided.
Joan set out from Compiègne intending to take the capital accompanied by Alençon. She took Saint-Denis, with its ancient abbey without opposition. She waited there for two weeks for Charles to arrive and then reconnaissances began of the new fortifications that Bedford had established. When Bedford heard that they were there, he mustered his Norman troops at Vernon to return. Joan decided to attack Paris before he could arrive. The Burgundians in the city were determined to resist her sacrilegious attack on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin.
Joan advanced into the moat towards the evening and shouted up her familiar challenge to the men on the machicolations who replied in a brutal and licentious manner. One of them hit her in the thigh with an crossbow bolt, and another killed her standard bearer.7 The Armagnacs carried her out of harm’s way and retreated. With Bedford likely to arrive soon, Charles VII decided to return south of the Loire to prepare further action, leaving Clermont to hold what possessions he had north of the river.
As for Joan, the theologians behind the walls of the city which she had tried to take now pronounced against her, asserting that her motivations were heretical, and that those who followed her had rejected the Church’s authority. Bedford soon arrived in Paris and reproached the people in Saint-Denis for having harboured the Armagnac army. Duke Philip joined him, as did Cardinal Beaufort once more. It was agreed to leave Paris in Burgundian hands and Armagnac ambassadors agreed to a six-months’ truce
Those around Charles VII were evidently keeping the impetuous and aggressive Joan away from the king. She found herself stranded at La Tremouïlle’s castle at Sully. All she could do was write letters to encourage the governors of Reims against the Burgundians, and to the Hussites in Bohemia to tell them to renounce their heresy or she would march againt them. But then she was permitted to range around in the Paris basin again involving herself in skirmishes, until Duke Philip decided to take Compiègne. Accompanied by Poton de Xaintrailles, she rode north to oppose him, and then, surrounded by Burgundians on a boulevard, she surrendered to their captain, Jean de Luxembourg. After Philip had come from his headquarters to look at the captive, she was taken to her captor’s castle at Beaulieu-les-Fontaines, expecting to be ransomed or exchanged as any other knight would have been. Personally speaking, her captor agreed, but Armagnac advice, particularly that of Archbishop Regnault, the Chancellor, was that Charles VII must dissociate himself from her or risk having charges of heresy and sorcery sticking to him.
The Paris university theologians and the inquisitor of the faith in English France requested Duke Philip to give her up to the Church for judgement. When he did not reply, they suggested she should be handed over to the custody of the bishop of Beauvais, since she was at present held in his diocese. The bishop was Pierre Cauchon, a scholar who had justified Duke John the Fearless over the murder of the Duke of Orleans. After the coronation at Reims the Armagnacs had taken over his diocese and ejected him. He had long been in the ruling councils of English France and he was eager to have Joan put on trial. The English ought to pay her ransom to Jean de Luxembourg and then hand her over to the Church as a heretic so that Cauchon himself would be her judge. They did and he was. The universitaires wanted her tried in Paris, but the English regency council thought it was risky to send her there, and so she was brought to Rouen in December 1430.8
* * *
Because of Joan’s assertion, widely accepted among his French supporters in 1429, that Charles was the divinely appointed king of France, the rulers of England hastily arranged what amounted to counter-coronations for Henry VI in England and in France. Bedford and his council in Rouen were the instigators of this decision. Henry VI would be crowned at Westminster and then brought to France during a military expedition, of which he would notionally be the commander, for his other coronation there. Preparations began as early as October 1429.
Henry VI was taken to the Abbey on 5 November by his tutor, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, for his coronation. After that, he presided at the banquet in Westminster Hall, seated between Cardinal Beaufort and Catherine of France, his mother. Ten days afterwards, he presided in the Parliament when Humphrey Duke of Gloucester relinquished his title of Protector of the Realm.
The king was not quite eight years old, but he was acknowledged as the sovereign of England. The same acknowledgement had to be made in France, and that meant raising the finance for the military expedition which may well have been required to fight in the present circumstances. Parliamentary business and the recruiting of the army was not over until the end of February 1430, and it took until 23 April for Henry VI, Cardinal Beaufort and this military force to reach Calais.
Duke Philip of Burgundy had agreed to support the project and was promised the county of Champagne in recompense because it still seemed intended that the coronation would happen in Reims. When it was realized that the English army was the only force that could be relied upon, the venue was changed in favour of Paris. Henry VI’s party reached Rouen in July 1430, and remained there until November 1431. The Burgundians had captured Joan in May 1430 and handed her over to the English for her trial in Rouen. She was burnt at the stake in May 1431. More troops came from England during that time and they secured the route to Saint-Denis and thence into Paris. Joan’s removal seemed necessary before the purpose of this journey could be accomplished.
The coronation at Notre Dame de Paris took place on 16 December 1431. The Frenchmen who were there were not impressed by the ceremony itself nor the food served at the banquet, nor the behaviour of the English in the cathedral. But more importantly:
… the fact that Cardinal Beaufort presided (and crowned Henry with a brand new crown purchased especially for the occasion) and the notable absence of the Duke of Burgundy from the ceremony underlined the fact that Lancastrian kingship was contested and that Henry was only one of two individuals claiming to be the rightful king of France.
It is doubtful whether a crown that had been used before, a French archbishop presiding and a Burgundian presence would have made any difference. Henry had little or no contact with the French nobility, and it was seen that he did not speak French, since his tutor spoke for him at the banquet. He left for Rouen after only ten or eleven days in Paris, and he was back in England in February. ‘He would never again set foot in his kingdom of France.’9
* * *
In August 1433, there was a significant change in the personnel of the king’s entourage: William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, assumed office as Steward of the royal household. He had served in France from 1422 onwards and been captured during the battle of Jargeau in 1429. He was freed after a few months having paid a large ransom. His new position in the royal household brought him into close contact with the eleven-year-old king, which would eventually facilitate their policy of peace with Charles VII and excite fierce opposition. This close relationship was developed independently of the royal uncles or the council.
Bedford came to England in July 1433 for a parliament which met at Westminster to discuss further action in France. The commons requested Bedford to stay in England from where he could exercise good government in both kingdoms and also ‘the welfare of the king’s noble person,’ as expressed in Henry V’s dying wishes. He remained in England until June 1434 by which time Henry was beginning to assert himself over the members of the council, though they resisted his will to rule on his own authority without them.10
Duke Philip was increasingly sure that he had little to expect from his alliance with the English. The Flemish cloth traders were turning away from their English suppliers and looking towards the Mediterranean for stocks of Merino wool. The war between England and France was inhibiting transport from Bruges. These considerations pushed Philip towards an approach towards the king of France. This explains why he had not opposed Joan of Arc’s gallop through his territory to Reims for the coronation of her dauphin, why he was not present in Paris for Henry’s, and why he concluded a truce with the court at Bourges where the peace party in his favour gained the upper hand after the disgrace of Georges de La Tremouille in 1433.11
A week after Bedford died at the age of forty-six in Rouen in September 1435, Philip made his separate treaty with the French at Arras. The civil war was over, and reconciliation had taken place between Valois and Burgundy. Dieppe was taken by France in December. The French had more successes in early 1436, and, on 17 April, the English garrison in Paris surrendered to Charles VII’s army. The signing of the treaty of Arras provoked an initiative by the English council to raise loans from towns, religious houses and certain individuals for the defence of Calais. Henry VI emerged as an active and participating ruler in these measures. There was even a brief suggestion that he should lead a military expedition to Calais himself, but it was a force led by Edmund Beaufort, destined for elsewhere in France, that was diverted there in the summer months of 1436 which broke the Burgundian siege on 29 July.
When the council met at Clerkenwell in November 1437 Henry was well on the way to having assumed full kingship in fulfilment of Lancastrian principles of consulting with his council. He was exercising patronage and distributing grants by himself by then. The minority government was at an end. ‘The dominant theme in English politics over the next decade or so was the extent to which Henry VI listened to counsel and exercised discretion in making his royal will felt.’12
* * *
A particular sphere of government important at the time that Henry VI was beginning his period of adult kingship was his religious and educational foundations in England. Such foundations were endemic in the Lancastrian system of government as in the case of Henry V’s Carthusian house founded at Sheen from 1417 onwards and in his confirmations of earlier foundations in Normandy and France made by kings of England.13 Henry VI was providing the royal initiative in these foundations that was observably not present in other areas of government. He was engaged single-mindedly in the projects for his colleges at Eton and Cambridge and he showed his determination that they should be lodged in buildings that were incomparably magnificent. Part of the financial endowment for Eton was found in the resources of the several French alien priories in England, such as Stogursey in West Somerset, founded by William de Falaise and his wife Geva in 1109 as a dependency of the Norman abbey at Lonlay,14 confiscated by Henry V before the Agincourt campaign but not used for it on account of certain scruples about using church money for bloodshed.15 These resources were still in hand for religious purposes in 1440. The buildings at Eton had to be truncated. College Chapel is no more than the quire of the great church that the king conceived and redesigned several times even after building had taken place on the scale of the greatest cathedrals,16 but that does not detract from the grandeur and conviction of faith that the king injected into it. A similar magnificent concept applied to the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge with all its wonders of undercut carving and perpendicular and lateral spaciousness. That the foundations were seen as linked, with schoolboys educated in the one proceeding to being undergraduates in the other, is evidence of a spirituality in the monarch in the early years of his majority that does not entirely coincide with the great K.B. McFarlane’s quip that he passed from first to second childhood without the ‘usual interval’ in between.17 Others were making similar foundations: Cardinal Kemp at Wye College in Suffolk and at Ewelme, and Lord Cromwell at Tattershall.18 Archbishop Pey Berland’s foundation of the university of Bordeaux in the king/duke’s domains must not be overlooked, nor his College of Saint-Raphaël to train indigenous clergy. Transcendent otherworldliness was certainly part of the spirit of the age in the Lancastrian epoch.
After Bedford’s death, there was less opposition to Suffolk developing his peace policy for France at the king’s naïve instigation, and less positive direction for an aggressive policy. The treaty of Arras had a double significance for Henry VI: Philip the Good had recognized Charles VII as his rightful king and was no longer England’s ally against him. ‘The return to normalcy under an adult monarch’19 was accepted in the meeting of the English great council which took place over three days between 12 and 14 November 1437. The declaration in which this was embodied referred back to the relationship established between Henry IV and his councillors of whom Henry Beaufort was one and could remember because he was there when it was set up in 1406. The king had just reached his sixteenth birthday. He was not prevented from making decisions on his own, and the councillors could not make decisions without him in matters concerning the kingdom of England or the duchy of Aquitaine. The king was less limited in his decisions and actions than nineteenth-century historians had maintained.20 Also writing in 1981, Bertram Wolffe was in agreement with R.A. Griffiths about the normal process of government being resumed: ‘The record of his childhood and adolescence … suggests physical strength, normal but not excessive piety and the natural ambition of a young monarch to become king, in fact as well as name, just as soon, if not sooner, than his advisers approved.’21
Henry VI had no intention of leading an army of his own in Normandy and for three years there was great hesitation about who should take command. Richard, Duke of York, with John Talbot’s assistance, had consolidated the English presence in upper Normandy and Picardy between May 1436 and the end of his two-year commission. After a good deal of hesitation in council, the king reluctantly re-appointed the duke for a five-year term from July 1440, but he did not arrive in Harfleur until June 1441, after his lengthy negotiations for powers comparable to those held by Bedford. Charles VII was pushed back to the gates of Paris, but there was not enough impetus to finalize the conflict, especially since Gascony was now in such great need of financial and military assistance.
Charles VII had profited from the presence of the Castilian freelance routier Rodrigo de Villandrando ravaging up from Agenais, Armagnac and Béarn as far north as Soulac at the northern tip of the Médoc. He had the support of French officers such as Poton de Xaintrailles, the bastard of Bourbon and Charles II of Albret. Then came the ‘Day’ of Tartas, 24 June 1442, when no English army appeared to challenge Charles VII’s occupation of the town on the Adour river, and his subsequent advance to Saint-Sever and Dax.
Gloucester was vigorously drawing attention to Charles VII’s undeniable intention to advance into English Gascony at the same time as condemning the release of the Duke of Orleans from his captivity in England in 1440. The policy of obtaining peace in France through negotiation remained Henry VI’s over-riding interest, despite the failure of the earlier conference at Gravelines in 1439 where the two cardinals, Beaufort and Kemp had conducted negotiations. The hope that the Duke of Orleans, once released, would be a spokesman for peace came to nothing when Charles VII persistently ignored him.22
A delay in the peace process towards France was tolerated when, in the early 1440s, Jean IV of Armagnac was hoping for an alliance with England in order to resist the expansion of the Valois monarchy towards the Pyrenees. He had deliberately not prevented his heir, the Viscount of Lomagne, from enrolling under the banner of Charles VII, hoping to turn away the king’s suspicions about himself while he continued in his double game, begun in July 1437 when he and Charles d’Albret had made a truce with Henry VI.23 This truce, made on the count’s own initiative, would last until 1 November 1438, that is, for the first full year of Henry VI’s majority. It gave Armagnac and his vassals free access to Guyenne and the subjects of the king/duke could enter his lands. Armagnac was not to give aid during this time to Charles VII.
With the king’s majority there arose the question of his future queen and what alliance that would make possible.24 Jean IV of Armagnac raised the possibility in May 1442 for a marriage alliance between the king of England and one of his three daughters: Bonne, daughter of his first marriage to Blanche of Brittany, or either of Eléonore and Isabelle, daughters of Isabelle of Navarre.25 A marriage alliance with England seemed to be the best guarantee of safety from the inroads of Charles VII. Armagnac left the English to make the first step and then sent as his ambassador Jean de Batut, archdeacon of Rodez, who was well-received in London with his numerous entourage.26
Henry VI entrusted the negotiations for his part to Thomas Beckynton, future bishop of Bath and Wells (who was close to him in the Eton project), Sir Robert Roos and Sir Edward Hull. Beckynton left Windsor on 5 June in company with Batut. The two clerics met up with Roos and Hull on the way to Plymouth and set sail in the Catherine, a Bayonne ship, reaching Bordeaux on 16 July. Batut left to report to his master at Lectoure.
The Englishmen found the military situation around Bordeaux very worrying. The seneschal, Sir Thomas Rampston, had been taken prisoner at the head of troops sent into combat against French forces. Batut found no better encouragement on his arrival at Lectoure. Jean IV realized that, if Charles VII did not know already about his plans, his son Lomagne would soon inform him of them. In the circumstances of French military gains and Anglo-Gascon losses, Jean IV naïvely believed that ‘in offering his daughter to one of the kings and his son to the other, he could be friend to both and wait the outcome of hostilities without disquiet.’27 He wrote to Roos, apologizing for the delay, and explained that a safe-conduct from the king of France to go into Armagnac territory to meet the princesses would obviously be difficult to obtain. He added that he would have liked to have found a portraitist to send the girls’ likenesses to Henry VI, but suggested it would be easier for the ambassadors to find one. A month later, Batut regretted that it would no longer be possible for them to make the journey since French troops were occupying the Landes. Roos’s reply was full of tight-lipped irony, amounting to a threat to call the whole thing off.
In the middle of September, Batut wrote a letter from Auch which was so full of intricate arguments that a reply in book form would have been needed. Beckynton was as well-trained in scholastic subtleties as the good archdeacon but, in the end, to reply was not worth the candle. Nevertheless the ambassadors did put pressure on Batut to hurry up with the portrait since Edward Hull, who had briefly returned to England, had brought a painter called Hans (too early for Holbein) back with him. Hans had been sent off to Lectoure with secret orders hidden in his measuring stick. Batut claimed that Hans was four days away from completing one likeness out of the three, but his pigments had frozen in the cold weather. The ambassadors saw through all this to the bad faith of Count Jean, so on 10 January 1443, Beckynton was on board ship in the Gironde, leaving his colleagues behind. Roos caught up with him bringing final letters from the count and Batut. Beckynton did not meet the king at Maidenhead until 21 February. The conclusion of all this was that the count and his astute councillor had wasted a whole year on a rather hopeless project. Henry VI never forgave Jean IV for the affront he had shown him, and Charles VII never forgave Henry VI for his approach to one of his enemies.28
* * *
Henry VI had emerged as the long awaited adult monarch but those around him experienced disappointment. Now that we have reached the 1440s, we have to ask once more the question of how effective the government of the king was when he was in his twenties. For this, Christine Carpenter developed ideas put forward by John Watts in meticulous detail in articles and a magisterial book.29 Henry VI was Charles VI of France’s grandson, and the possibility that he had inherited his mental incapacity was worrying: ‘all the evidence points to the idea that, some time between 1437 and 1443 or 1444, it was realized that the king would never become an adult except in name, and that the nobles, directed by Suffolk, decided to shoulder the burden of rule, just as they had done under Bedford in the minority.’30
The king listened to his advisers, and a pretence was maintained that the decisions made were the king’s own, expressed by those close to him. Historians talk of over-mighty subjects from among the nobility, but this was more a case of a less-than-mighty king. Henry VI’s indecisiveness was undeniable as was particularly observable in the administration of justice where ‘royal powers … in the localities could be manipulated with impunity by those who enjoyed Henry’s access and favour’.31 A tranche of Gascon trouble during this decade illustrates this assertion with considerable clarity. It resulted directly from the failed embassy for the alliance with the count of Armagnac, when a personality of considerable force and genuine rectitude presented himself in the king’s presence and brought about a positive outcome in a set of really difficult circumstances.
Archbishop Pey (Pierre) Berland of Bordeaux had welcomed Beckynton and the other ambassadors into the town, and it was during their visit, menaced by French activity in the hinterland, that the mettle of this most able supporter of the English presence in Gascony was understood and acted upon.
Berland was a native Gascon, born to a family of free graziers at Saint-Raphaël in the Médoc, three miles from Castelnau. He had been noticed for his potential as a boy, brought to Bordeaux for his schooling and sent to the university of Toulouse from which he emerged as a theologian and a doctor of canon law. The then archbishop of Bordeaux made him his secretary, and he travelled with him for the international conferences that ended the Great Schism. He was presented to a canon’s stall in the cathedral of Saint-André, and became archbishop himself in 1430, admired for his educational and philanthropic projects, and his resistance to CharlesVII’s ecclesiastical policy in France manifested in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, whereby the king intended to control the appointments of all bishops in his kingdom regardless of the pope’s authority.32 Being acquainted with Eugenius IV from his earlier career, Pey Berland gained his support for the foundation of the University of Bordeaux.
Berland resisted Charles VII’s encroachments in south-west France where he was the metropolitan and inheritor of the role instigated in the late Roman empire whereby the archbishop was the defender of the city and its people against all and any of its oppressors. Pey Berland became a Gascon homme politique. He accepted the position he was offered by his fellow Gascons as their director of policy and was regarded in England as the third power alongside the seneschal who administered the duchy and the mayor and jurats together who governed the town of Bordeaux.33 The seneschal of Gascony, the constable of Bordeaux, and the other king’s officers in the duchy were ordered to protect the archbishop, ‘one of the king’s councillors in the duchy of Aquitaine … because of the archbishop’s good service and the negotiations he often carries out for the king’.34 When Jean IV of Armagnac wanted to make his truce with England, Pey Berland and the constable, Walter Colles, were named for the drawing up of the conditions.35 That was from above. From below, when Rodrigo de Villandrando was making his ravages in the countryside in 1438, the country people came into Bordeaux and Pey Berland, who was from the same stock as they were, gave them bread, wine and subsistence, and bought extra supplies of grain at scarcity prices to distribute to them.36
Now in 1442, Pey Berland accepted a particular function. French forces had entered the Saintonge, the Agenais, and the Perigord. Royan on the Gironde estuary and Clairac on the Lot had been taken, and strongpoints on the tributaries of the Dordogne were under threat.37 Roos and Beckynton reported that when they arrived on 16 July 1442 they found ‘as sorrowful a town and as greatly dismayed and discouraged as any might be in the earth, as people desolate and cast out of all comfort of any succour to be had from your majesty against your enemies that had been in this country in great puissance’. Charles VII had ‘won and subdued all the country of the Landes except Dax and Bayonne,’ although the siege of Dax was going on at the time the letter was being written with bastilles being constructed around it.
That no hope could be expected from England was announced in letters that had been brought in ‘by one that calls himself Francis, whose name is in fact John Gore and delivered to divers estates here the Sunday before our arrival when he had come by boat to Castillon and thence rode overland into Bordeaux’. The city was full of rumour and sorrow on account of being ‘abandoned and cast away for ever’.
The envoys appealed to the king to send help quickly since ‘Your duchy of Guyenne is one of the oldest lordships belonging to your crown of England.’ They then tell the worst news: ‘In taking of Saint-Sever, Sir Thomas Rampston, your seneschal, is taken prisoner and, as it is said, the seal which he had … under my Lord of Huntingdon is taken also.’ So the reason for the false letters brought in by John Gore being accepted as real by the Bordelais was explained.38
Roos and Beckynton had produced the king’s authentic letters that had reached them at Plymouth before they left, and Pey Berland had translated them into the Gascon dialect to read out from the cathedral pulpit. These spoke of ‘the good and tender zeal’ which the king had ‘to the conservation and welfare of this your city and of all your true subjects in these parts, and putting them out of doubt of succours to be had in right brief time’. The letters encouraged the people to do all they could in the meantime for the city’s defence and safeguard, which had been done and was being done daily ‘in the strongest wise’. Bulwarks, guns, engines and all other necessary habiliments had been put in place. The king/duke’s letters had not said when English help would arrive, nor how powerful it would be. The clergy, nobles and bourgeoisie of Bordeaux decided that Pey Berland should go to England to represent the true state of the country and to plead for efficacious support.39
The day before he left, a body made up of all who had most influence went on a tour of inspection of the state of readiness of the town’s defences. The archbishop went on board ship in the afternoon of 25 July, seen off on the quay by the mayor, the jurats, the notables, Roos and Beckynton. A doctor of canon law and a herald called Robert travelled in the same ship. The herald was carrying letters from the ambassadors to Henry VI and to members of his council.
The archbishop arrived in London at a time that was least favourable to his enterprise. He met the Duke of Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort, preoccupied with their own dispute. Gloucester was likely to favour sending armed help but he had little influence at the time, and Beaufort, who then dominated the council, was still preoccupied with peace proposals. But there was a third person, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Lord Treasurer, and it was to him that the herald Robert had brought a secret letter from Roos and Beckynton under a separate cover from the other letters. They criticized the town’s government, but had important things to say about Pey Berland. They saw the qualities of a diplomat in him but said he was too reticent to volunteer much information. He needed to be ‘well groped and throughly examined’ so as to reveal the true state of affairs in the duchy because he was uniquely placed to show things in great depth out of his own experience.40
Pey Berland, after frustrating delays, approached Henry VI himself. So the strong-minded prelate, such as this conventionally pious king would warm to, was listened to when he stated the Gascon cause. This resulted in two letters and ordinances from the king, one dated 21 September, and the other 7 March. The first was written during Berland’s stay at court so that he knew what it said. He had shown the king that Charles VII was carrying out his invasion with an unusual number of forces and that the loss of the whole duchy was a real possibility.41
The king of France entered the Adour Valley with Gaston IV at his elbow. Jean Bureau’s guns had made short work of the walls of Dax, making an approach to Bayonne possible. Other armies intervened from Agen westwards, and from the Saintonge southwards, taking Royan which was well inside the Gironde Estuary. Pirates on the Gironde were siezing Gascon ships and preventing all commercial activity. On the night of 1–2 August, a hundred and thirty French soldiers from Royan came into the port of Bordeaux with six gabares (flat-bottomed river boats) and captured two ships laden with wine and wheat. They would have taken them to Royan had they not been caught off Blaye by several boats crewed by local people who knew the currents, gave chase and recovered the ships.42 Using such information, Pey Berland succeeded in persuading Henry VI to take a greater interest in the region and winning the attention of the council. It was decided that the Earl of Somerset would be sent there with an army of 10,000 men.
The king wrote to inform the people of Bordeaux himself of this, in French, dated 21 September 1442:
Dearly and well beloved, we have learned and it has been certified, as much by letters as by messages and especially by the very reverend father in God, our beloved and faithful counsellor the archbishop of Bordeaux, of the great hardships, evils and oppression, losses and injuries, that you have had to suffer during a certain time, and from which you are still suffering by cause of the continual war which our adversary Charles of Valois makes … We have also been informed of the true obedience, love, union and concord in which, to maintain your loyalty towards us, you always maintain yourselves with our officers sent there, awaiting very patiently the support and aid which you have so humbly sought and requested. And, dearly and well beloved, because, in great bitterness of heart, pain and compassion, we sustain your grief, evils and oppressions, and nothing will make us desist from the cause which has belonged to us for such a long time, and which our predecessors have so dearly loved and carefully guarded, to lose it, as we know will happen if there is not very soon a great remedy and support, and so on and so on …43
Pey Berland seems to have had doubts about the power of this letter to reassure his people, and realized that he could influence the king as much as anyone, so he asked for the dispatch of the letter to be delayed until it was possible to send a first reinforcement to Gascony along with it. And so it arrived in Bordeaux a month after it was written, together with ships from England disembarking a small contingent of troops commanded by Sir Edward Hull, who had been in Gascony earlier and whose return had been eagerly awaited. Pey Berland, a man wiser than had been presented in Thomas Beckynton’s letter, stayed in England so as to be reassured that the great army which Henry VI had promised was actually being sent.
After the fall of Dax, the French took the castle at Orthez, then, instead of attacking Bayonne, they had turned north and by the end of September had progressed as far as Langon.44 They took a number of small forts on the right bank of the Garonne into the Perigord area, into Sarlat and on the right bank of the Dordogne. On 3 October, Charles VII was at La Réole, where the town capitulated, but the great fortress of Quatre-Sos held out against him. Another French force went into Entre-Deux-Mers, taking Saint-Loubes on the road that led to Libourne.
Fear had returned in Bordeaux with the French now so close. Pey Berland was still in England, and no other home-grown leader emerged; so the Englishman Robert Roos was chosen as commander, and he found himself as the superior of the mayor who was not gifted with any great initiative despite a high opinion of himself. A sense of defeatism was growing, even expressed in public by the dean of the cathedral as Somerset’s force was awaited. However, when Hull arrived with Henry VI’s letter of encouragement, spirits rose when it was announced that Hull’s force was the advance guard for an army ‘as the memory of men had not seen in Gascony’ which was soon to arrive.45
Then the tide turned. Early in October, the Anglo-Gascons of Bayonne re-took Dax, which had been left defended by a force of only thirty men-at-arms. On 26 October, troops gathered by Robert Roos found the courage to re-take Saint-Loube and emptied it of gangs of freebooters who had been ravaging it. The captal de Buch, Pierre de Montferrant and other Gascon nobles were part of this force. Archers had recently arrived from England to support this mission, and Roos returned triumphant to Bordeaux. November saw other successes: three boats from Agen loaded with supplies of bread for the French troops besieging the Quatre-Sos fortress at La Réole were siezed by soldiers from Saint-Macaire; three hundred men-at-arms and as many archers, led by Roos and Hull, took Langon back from the French; those besieged at Quatre-Sos were reinforced when newly-arrived armed men managed to get inside; troops also set off to take back Sainte-Foy.46
The French put more effort into the siege of the Quatre-Sos fort at La Réole under the personal direction of Charles VII with intense artillery bombardments against the fortress’s immense walls. One Sunday, while Mass was being said, one of the largest guns exploded after being continuously fired, but it was replaced by two mortars which lobbed in 500- and 700-pound gunstones, so that the fortress surrendered. At the same time as that happened, Pey Berland disembarked at Bordeaux with more contingents of Somerset’s army led by Sir William Bonville, a disputacious landowner from Crewkerne in Somerset.
The house where Charles VII was lodging at La Réole caught fire on 4 December, and he escaped in his shirt with the help of his Scottish bodyguard. His sword – presumed to have belonged to St. Louis in the thirteenth century – was destroyed in the intense heat. Besides, the winter came early and was harsh: no provisions for the army could come from Toulouse along the frozen Garonne. A substantial number of horses perished from cold and lack of fodder. Charles VII left the continuing siege to Olivier de Coëtivy and was in Montauban for Christmas. Nevertheless, he had led his army in person and been exposed to danger. His re-established monarchy had been recognized by magnates in the south-west whose support mattered if France were to be united.47
However, at least for the present, several towns and castles returned to their English allegiance, and Pey Berland did the rounds to present them with Henry VI’s pardons.
* * *
In December 1443, Henry VI revived peace overtures to his ‘uncle and adversary the king of France.’ Approaches were made through François Duke of Brittany to request Charles VII to appoint ambassadors for the purpose. He responded positively by appointing ambassadors who were given safe-conducts to cross territory under English control for negotiations under the auspices of the Duke of Orleans to conclude a peace or at least an extended truce. On 11 February, Henry VI appointed his own representatives, led by Suffolk. At the same time they were to raise the question of marriage between Henry VI and Marguerite of Anjou, then aged sixteen. Charles VII’s niece by marriage thus became the centre of Suffolk’s diplomatic activity.
Charles VII instructed Juvenal des Ursins, then bishop of Laon, to come to Paris to draw up a dossier of relations between the French and English crowns since Edward III’s time, particularly concerning the treaty of Troyes of 1420 which he wanted to nullify.48 Charles VII decided upon Tours as a meeting place. It was there that the English ambassadors were received in a friendly manner on 17 April 1444 and took part in lavish festivities.49 Then Marguerite arrived from Angers with her mother and stayed in Beaumont Abbey where the English diplomats went to meet her. Feasting and sport continued with a contest between some of the English archers and their Scottish counterparts for a prize of 1,000 ecus. The Scots won.
The treaty of Tours, signed on 28 May, provided for a general truce in all English and French possessions from 1 June 1445 until 1 April 1446. Suffolk was given a hero’s welcome when he arrrived back in England with the betrothal agreed upon, even though it was accompanied only by a twenty-three month truce and René of Anjou could not afford a queenly dowry for his daughter: he was not merely impecunious: he was flat broke. His recent defeats in Lorraine and Italy and his ceaseless obligation to pay his ransom to the Duke of Burgundy for his release twelve years before meant that the titular king of Sicily and Jerusalem had no resources for anything beyond keeping his head above water.50
Loans were sought by Henry VI’s council to pay for Marguerite to come to be crowned in Westminster Abbey in suitable state. There were hopes that future negotiations for peace would follow.51 It was doubtful, on the other hand, whether desire for peace would prevail against the
the vested interests of the military gentry in England and Normandy for whom warfare had become ‘the prime expression of service to the Crown and the means to favour and reward.’52 Their rewards took the form of captured estates in Normandy and Maine, where they had settled their families and wanted to stay. Nevertheless, the delighted Henry VI rewarded the Earl of Suffolk with promotion to the rank of marquess and with the profitable wardship of Somerset’s orphan daughter, Margaret Beaufort.53
Suffolk returned to France to bring the new queen to England and continue negotiations for extending a peace settlement. When he left in October he was accompanied by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and his countess-to-be with Marguerite (who became known as Margaret) on the way home to England, as well as many other English noblemen and women. Money for the costs of an embassy lasting three months was available but the costs were severely under-estimated since it took much longer.
They had to go all the way to Nancy where Charles VII and René of Anjou were continuing Duke René’s struggle against Duke Philip who was backing Metz, the capital of René’s duchy of Lorraine, in its bid to be associated with the Empire, and then wait there for two months while Marguerite was fetched from Anjou. Rumours that the French were trying to gain further concessions from the English were spread by gossip-mongers, especially after it was leaked that the county of Maine was to be ceded to Duke René although Suffolk tried to deny it.
The diplomatic wedding, with Suffolk as proxy bridegroom, took place at Nancy. Marguerite came to Rouen, but the countess of Shrewsbury took her place in the procession there because she was indisposed. She crossed from Harfleur to Portsmouth, with sea-sickness added to her other illness. Henry VI disguised himself as an esquire delivering his own letter to her so as to see her for the first time. Margaret did not look at him.
They were married in person at Titchfield Abbey not far from Portsmouth by the king’s confessor, William Ayscough, bishop of Salisbury, on 22 April in a low-key solemnization out of respect for Margaret still not being in good health.54 Then they proceeded to London for the extravagant reception, spectacles and tableaux in the streets which hailed her as the bringer of peace in a corporate fit of wishful thinking on the way to her coronation on 30 May.55
There were hopeful signs for the great peace project: Charles VII sent a glittering company of French diplomats across the English Channel ‘in order to treat for peace’ in July 1445 led by Louis de Bourbon, Count of Vendome and Juvenal des Ursins, now Archbishop of Reims. They were accompanied by ambassadors from Henry IV of Spain, René, Duke of Anjou, and the Duke of Brittany. The Duke of Burgundy was meant to be represented, but pleaded lack of a safe-conduct for not sending an ambassador.
They stayed with Louis de Bourbon in his London lodgings and were brought to Westminster the next day by the Dukes of Buckingham and Suffolk, to be received in state by Henry VI and prominent English councillors. Juvenal des Ursins presented his letters of accreditation and spoke to the king in terms of the good will of Charles VII. They got down to work on 19 July. The English opened with a concession that had aleady been offered at Tours: Henry should retain Normandy and an enlarged Gascony while implicitly abandoning his claim to the crown of France and, along with it, the dual monarchy invented by his father and imposed upon Charles VI at Troyes in 1420. In reply, the French conceded greater Gascony (notwithstanding, as we have seen, the French advances that had already taken place in the valley of the Adour in 1442) but they were intransigent about Normandy which they regarded as occupied territory.
A proposal was made by one of the Frenchmen that all this should be resolved in a personal meeting between the two monarchs. Henry VI agreed to this in principle, but reminded his advisers that the truce agreed at Tours was about to expire. The upshot of all this extravagant diplomacy was no more than the extension of the truce until 1 April 1447. The idea of a personal meeting of the kings was frequently discussed in the following months, but came to nothing eventually, despite the intentions often expressed by both uncle and nephew.56 The nephew continued in his naïve optimism and the uncle in his cynical singlemindedness. The English peace party did not want to accept the stark fact that Charles VII had favoured Henry VI’s marriage to René d’Anjou’s daughter solely to prevent him allying with some other French magnate against him.
The personal meeting foundered on the question of the cession of the county of Maine to René of Anjou. René had not raised this issue when the ambassadors were in London but, in November 1445, envoys from Charles VII did. Charles VII had also enlisted his niece Margaret’s help; as her letter in reply to his envoys’ proposition of 17 December says, she will ‘stretch forth the hand’ to persuade Henry, and adds that he had already sent his own reply ‘at considerable length.’57 Here she was playing the rôle assigned to medieval queen consorts of an intercessor outlined by Christine de Pisan.58 Henry agreed to the request on his own responsibility, however unpopular it might be among the occupiers of Le Mans and its castle, together with a truce of twenty years. But Le Mans castle was still in English hands when the accepted date for withdrawal – 30 April 1446 – had passed.59
Duke Humphrey remained the principal opponent of this peace policy, and the king’s ministers decided to challenge him in the next parliament which was to be held in January 1447 in Cambridge. The venue was changed to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk’s heartland where he could exercise control. The duke was encouraged to go directly to his lodgings and some among the magnates went to put him under house arrest. He had already been unofficially accused of treason because he was opposed to Suffolk’s French policy. His supporters were rounded up and imprisoned separately.
All this put him into a depressive state and, on 23 February, he was found dead. He lay in an open coffin in Bury Abbey for a time to show there was no evidence of murder, and then spirited away to St Albans Abbey where he had expressed a wish to be buried.60 With Gloucester dead, most likely of a severe stroke,61 opposition to the peace negotiations had been removed. The suspicion grew that the king’s servants had had him killed.
Commissioners were appointed to negotiate compensation for dispossessed English residents in Maine. Delaying tactics were adopted by English captains and this made the renewal of war more likely. Henry VI signed a secret engagement with his uncle to hand over Le Mans and all the fortresses in Maine by 30 April 1446 in ‘a private letter conceived, written and sent in secret. It was an act of supreme folly which played straight into Charles VII’s hands.’62 By implicitly surrendering his sovereignty over Maine, Henry VI had allowed Charles VII to presume he would eventually surrender it elsewhere in France.
Charles VII’s programme was to unite French territory under the house of Valois. All that he was prepared to grant on the day that Maine was handed over to him was to extend the truce once more, this time until 1 April 1450.63 He had no notion of making peace except as the victor in a decisive conflict. He was never going to bargain anything away, even under cover of a marriage alliance within the family of his staunchest supporters in the house of Anjou.