Charles VII had reformed his army, established a system of national taxation on a firm footing, and exerted his authority over the great lords who had defied him. Even the Duke of Burgundy had decided to co-operate with him. It was an English initiative that gave him the opportunity to re-open his campaign against Gascony.
The flashpoint for new open warfare to end the extended truce of Tours was a Breton bastide called Fougères in March 1449.1 A mercenary force led by a captain from Aragon, François de Souriennes, sponsored by Somerset and Suffolk, had broken the truce in operation since 1444 by seizing this place situated on the borders of Brittany and Normandy. However, according to Charles VII, there was a deeper cause for the resumption of hostilities between France and England in an English attempt to detach François I, Duke of Brittany, from his allegiance to the French crown.2 This led, after a brief time, to the final expulsion of the English from Normandy which they had conquered and settled over more than a generation since their victory at Agincourt in 1415. The decisive battle was at Formigny on 15 April 1450 and Cherbourg capitulated on 12 August.
The King of France had already made known his intentions about a complete and permanent conquest of Gascony when he ordered his generals to invade the duchy westwards from Toulouse in 1442 and had persuaded the Count of Foix to renounce his allegiance to the king/duke. He meant to pursue his ambitions in the south-west, confident in the proved effectiveness of his fiscal and military revolution which had made the feudal aristocracy of France subordinate to the crown.
The new Count of Armagnac, Jean V, who had supported the king when he was Viscount of Lomagne, succeeded his rebellious father in November 1450. He had been brought up at Charles VII’s court and had already fought against Huntingdon in 1439 and against the Praguerie in 1440. He was rewarded with the restitution of lands confiscated from his father and – whatever happened in the next reign – was firmly on Charles VII’s side when the invasion of Gascony re-opened.3
No clear-cut distinction ought to be made between Charles VII’s activities for the recovery of Normandy and the conquest of Gascony. From 1450 onwards, he was receiving intelligence reports from his spies in England and his treasurer, Jacques Coeur, was financing their activities.4 Once in possession of Normandy, he realized his intentions. Ambassadors were sent to Scotland and to the Spanish kingdoms to ask for help.5
On 31 March 1450, at Tours, commanders were appointed for the southern campaign,6 while the war in Normandy still had six months to go. ‘And about that time the king of France began to fight in Gascony’, was the laconic comment offered by a nearly contemporary English chronicler.7
Operations had commenced before that, however. The Count of Foix had taken Mauléon and Guiche, the port that served Bayonne, in 1449, and Albret’s son, Amanieu, Count of Orval, was ordered to take Bazas, which he did ‘without a blow’ on 31 October in that year.8 The town of Bazas dominated all the territory between the Landes to its south and the Bordelais to the north. It was also a bishopric which included a certain number of towns loyal to Henry VI of England besides others which had already accepted French domination.9
Jean, count of Penthièvre was in charge of the siege of Bergerac on the right bank of the river Dordogne. Bazas and Bergerac were the two places from which the 1450 campaign was launched.10 Penthièvre, accompanied by Marshal de Jallongues, the Gascon Poton de Xaintrailles, the king’s master of the horse, Joachim Rouault, and other captains, with 600 lances and additional archers, persevered with the siege until the decisive arrival of Jean Bureau and his artillery pieces. Bergerac capitulated in October 1450. The English garrison and officials were allowed to leave, taking their movable property with them; any who wanted to stay took an oath of fidelity to Charles VII, and carried on with their normal occupations as before.11 Ribadieu, basing his account on the contemporary official chronicler, a monk of Saint-Denis called Jean Chartier, whose brother was the Bishop of Paris, goes on to say that neighbouring places were taken before Penthièvre withdrew to his winter quarters, and cites Jonzac as one of them, in spite of its being situated a long way north of Bergerac in the Haute-Saintonge. The capitulation of Montferrand, Sainte-Foy and Chalais which he also records, are more probable.12
From this point onwards, the interest turns back to Orval in his base at Bazas, from whence he advanced towards Bordeaux with an army of 2,000. He skirted around the city on the left bank to set up camp beside the little river Jalle in front of the castle at Blanquefort. Various independent brigands made cause with him, bringing him hundreds more troops.13 The Bordelais re-armed their citizens’ militia in a hurry. The breaking of the truce on the frontier between Brittany and Normandy had not been known about in Aquitaine and no preparations had been made. The militia was made up of 10,000 men but they were indifferently armed and had minimal military training.
This scratch force of Anglo-Gascons moved towards the count of Orval and took up a position at Castelnau in the south of the Médoc. Orval soon knew about their unconcealed approach and divided his troops, hiding half of them in woodland beside the road along which they were advancing and ordering the others to form up in battle order on the banks of the Jalle near Blanquefort with marshland in front of them. Orval had done his reconnaissance thoroughly beforehand.
The force from Bordeaux was under the command of the mayor of Bordeaux, Gadifer Shorthouse – the same who had been criticized eight years before for his arrogant shortcomings. He had been written off at that time by the English king’s lieutenant in Bordeaux, Sir Robert Roos, as being of ‘mediocre talent … and little disposed to recognize any authority superior to hs own’.14 He had positioned what cavalry he had behind his infantry on the march and they could not avoid pushing the footsloggers on towards the little river which is not at all wide but flowed (as it still does) between high banks at a much lower level than the terrain they were crossing. Shorthouse did not know about Orval’s troops concealed among the trees and he advanced towards the enemy troops that he could see, who pretended to turn and run from his advance. As soon as the Bordeaux militia crossed the stream by a bridge, Orval’s hidden troops came out of the wood to attack them from behind and on their flank. The other French troops then turned about to drive Shorthouse’s cavalry and infantry into the marsh where they could not move. More than 4,000 of them were taken prisoner, wounded or killed where they stood. Orval was too pre-occupied with taking prisoners to follow the others who rushed back to Bordeaux. He returned to Bazas, causing devastation as he went, but did not have the resources or equipment to lay siege to Bordeaux.15
All Souls’ Day 1450 saw Gadifer Shorthouse sending carts out from Bordeaux to bring back the 1,500 corpses of those cut down in the marshes near where the Pont d’Aquitaine spans the Garonne in our time, on what was to be remembered by the Gascons as the male journade.
The enquiry carried out after Archbishop Pey Berland’s death to decide upon his saintliness reported that this event had affected him deeply: he felt an ‘immeasurable sadness’ to the extent that he shut himself up alone in his chapel for forty-eight hours overcome with grief (like all the widows and orphans who did not have chapels of their own). He had the wounded brought to his new St. Peter’s Hospital or into his palace. The archiepiscopal see of Bordeaux had inherited from Roman times the idea that whoever held the office was the defender of the people, and he had eventually failed to carry out this function despite all his efforts since his consecration twenty years before.16
The Count of Orval sent a report of his success to Charles VII who set about raising a fresh army of 40,000 men in the early months of 1451, dividing it into four corps, each one commanded by a nominee of his own: his cousin Dunois, with his subordinates, Ponthièvre, Charles II d’Albret, and Jean V d’Armagnac. Dunois was to be responsible for the siege and conquest of Blaye. The king also ordered him to take Bourg, Libourne, Saint-Emilion, and the fortress of Fronsac which dominates the Dordogne Valley from its height, regarded by French and English captains alike as the key to the possession of Bordeaux.
All the towns mentioned were the goddaughters (filleules) of Bordeaux: an emotional tie as well as a strategic one. Penthièvre was sent to take possession of Castillon and to control the area between the two rivers Garonne and Dordogne known as Entre Deux Mers which he had just conquered. Albret was sent to subdue Dax on the Adour River and the strongholds around it. Armagnac was to take Saint-Macaire and Rions, and all the fortresses between Marmande and Cadillac. Since Orval was still occupying Bazas, Bordeaux would be taken in a noose if these plans were to succeed.17
The four armies organized on the basis of the king’s compagnies d’ordonnance began their advance in April 1451. In the same spirit that he had set out to win over several members of the Gascon nobility, Charles VII ordered severe punishments for any of his soldiers who mistreated the people in the territories through which they were advancing, or who took their crops or animals without paying for them. He wanted neither ransoms nor requisitions.18 Whatever he did subsequently, at present he let it be seen that he was conducting a hearts and minds campaign. Nevertheless, Gascon historians, of whom Henri Ribadieu (1866) and Raymond Corbin (1888) were typical, found it difficult to believe that the king of France was at any point motivated by a benevolent spirit. Corbin’s comment was that Charles VII ‘doubtless foresaw the soon-to-be-achieved downfall of the liberties and freedoms of Gascony’.19
Dunois had taken Montguyon after a siege lasting fourteen days.20 The captain there, Arnaud de Saint-Jean, a Gascon in the retinue of the captal de Buch, held negotiations with Dunois’ captains, the count of Angoulême and Jean Bureau among them, which set the pattern for future capitulations. The Anglo-Gascons were to be free to leave, taking their movable property and their weapons with them, except for any heavy artillery they had in the castle. They were to leave behind any French prisoners they had taken and not to take ransoms or any other payments from them. Any who stayed were to take an oath to remain loyal to the king of France, and any who might come back after having left could equally well take such an oath within fifteen days of their return. Arnaud de Saint-Jean was to have a safe-conduct to go wherever he pleased, and carts and baggage animals to take him as far as Libourne which would be sent back to Montguyon as soon as he left this river port on the Dordogne. The agreement was sealed on 6 May 1451, and the French commander established a garrison at Montguyon.21
From there, Dunois opened his campaign against Blaye on the east bank of the Gironde Estuary, one of the many goddaughters of Bordeaux. It was through Blaye that English grain, leather, and wool came into Bordeaux. Gadifer Shorthouse sent five warships there and he and Pierre de Montferrand undertook to prepare the town’s defences.
Despite having been deprived of his lordship of Lesparre in the Médoc, when Henry VI gave it to the Earl of Huntingdon to be his headquarters as lieutenant-general, Pierre de Montferrand remained fiercely loyal to the Anglo-Gascon cause. He was married to Mary, the Duke of Bedford’s natural daughter, and in exchange for his lost lordship he was given a lesser one in the Landes which gave him the title of Soudic de Trau. His elder brother, Bertrand de Montferrand, arrived to organize the defence of Bourg, a little way to the south and also on the coast of the Gironde. Jacques de Chabannes was sent by Dunois with an advance guard of 2,300 men overland against the brothers.22
Huntingdon, meanwhile, transferred his seat of government from the Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux to Lesparre, the better to organize the capital’s defence. Archbishop Pey Berland was once more active in stiffening the resistance of the city’s council – the jurade – and to seek help from England such as he had himself obtained in 1443.23
In the middle of May, Dunois left Montguyon to join up with Chabannes before the defences of Blaye, at the same time ordering Penthièvre to abandon the siege of Castillon in order to assist them. A fleet from La Rochelle was summoned to outnumber the little Bordeaux squadron in the Gironde, so it was with a naval engagement that the attack on Blaye began. The Bordeaux ships could not maintain their position, but the town itself held out against Bureau’s artillery bombardment until 21 May when Dunois made his advance. Blaye capitulated after three days and Dunois gave favourable terms to its defenders.24 For Charles VII, this was not conquest so much as recovery of ancient rights, even though it had taken three hundred years to accomplish it. Shorthouse and his deputy mayor and Pierre de Montferrand returned to Bordeaux. The Gascons left Blaye with full war honours.25
Bertrand de Montferrand saw that any resistance at Bourg in the face of the French artillery would be disastrous; he surrendered on 29 May. Dunois offered favourable terms once more to the citizens of Bourg, and then called upon those of Bordeaux to recognize the authority of the king of France, who had established himself with a powerful army at Saint-Jean d’Angély, no more than sixty miles to the north. The Three Estates of the Bordelais – that is the clergy, the nobles and the bourgeoisie – refused Dunois’s invitation, and he, supported by Bureau and the artillery, moved against Libourne, Saint-Emilion and Fronsac, other goddaughters of the capital of Gascony.
Pey Berland did not let up on his efforts to organize resistance. He had recently completed his building plan designed to prevent the masons of the city from being de-skilled during the financial depression. They built the great bell tower which he commissioned from them outside the east-end of the Cathedral of Saint-André which bears his name (as does the underground car park beneath the square). He now set about the elaborate restoration of the church at Lormont, where he had been curé twenty years before, as a gesture of defiance against Charles VII since it was in the path of any military approach from the north – the works would be completed on 5 September. Nevertheless, now that defeat seemed inevitable, even to him, his main contribution to defence took the form of mediation between the divine right claimed by the King of France26 and the system of government by remote control of the King of England, to whom his loyalty did not waver.
In the documents that concern the successive surrenders of the towns in the Bordelais, meticulously conserved in the remarkable new building of the Archives Métropole de Bordeaux into thirty-one printed volumes during the Third Republic and after, a pattern emerges of pragmatic conciliation on the part of the king and his officers, confirming the privileges each town had enjoyed during the long period of English domination and evoking loyalty to the new regime by means of a solemn oath taken by the citizens of influence. The confirmation of privileges by the Count of Angoulême to Saint-Macaire is typical. He informs them that ‘of special grace by these presents, they may use and enjoy in peace all the privileges, liberties, usages, customs, establishments and freedoms to which they have been justly and lawfully accustomed to use and enjoy in time past … the which privileges, etc., we swear to them and promise in good faith to give anew; all and such trust of which they shall inform us’.27
The tone of the conquest of Gascony had been set: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, the iron fist in the velvet glove. This was the method adopted by all Charles VII’s field commanders in the conquest of Bordeaux and Bayonne and of the smaller towns around them. The success of this policy depended on the nobles and townspeople keeping the oaths they had made to their new sovereign lord. For the most part, the members of the noble and mercantile classes knew when they were beaten. With the example of so many Anglo-Gascon towns and strongholds taken and then reinstated in their new obedience, even the doughty Archbishop Berland, who had led resistance in theory and in practice against Charles VII ever since taking office in 1430, decided it was time for his city to negotiate a peace with this patently invincible system of monarchy that Charles VII had brought into being. After that, the surrender of Bayonne would be quickly accomplished. Since the rulers of Foix-Béarn and Armagnac had been fighting on the king’s side, the unified French nation was soon to be extended to the Pyrenees.
* * *
The Valois king’s call to the people of Bordeaux to surrender was repeated at the same time as refugees from other places were arriving in the city. Among these was Gaston de Grailly, the captal de Buch (captal was his seigneurial title and Buch was the name of his lordship near Archachon, to the south-west of Bordeaux). Bertrand de Montferrand was one of the last to arrive of those who remained loyal to Henry VI. There were ample precedents now of towns making compromise agreements with Dunois, and Mayor Shorthouse and the jurade of Bordeaux requested one for themselves.
What was this jurade and who were its members? The jurade was a self-perpetuating system of bourgeois government for Bordeaux which had its origins in the early 12th century when the municipality successfully resisted a siege by King Alfonso VIII of Castille.28 Confirmed in office by successive kings/dukes from John Lackland onwards, it still retained the city in stability and prosperity in the period of domination by the House of Lancaster (1399–1453). Other towns in English Gascony that were also episcopal sees, like Bazas, were also governed by jurades.
At the centre of Bordeaux society, traders – for the most part vintners, obviously – were the ruling class. There were great differences between individual traders in respect of their wealth and the volume of their trade. The closest to patricians in the city were the great merchants as opposed to the shopkeepers who were a cut above the labourers. It was only the richest of the elite among the bourgeoisie who were eligible for membership of the jurade which governed the city in association with the English-appointed mayor and an assembly of churchmen, nobles and themselves: the Three Estates. They were an oligarchy, with each jurat representing a section of the city equivalent to a ward in London. It was hardly a democratic system, but it wasn’t feudalism either.
The Bordeaux historian Sandrine Lavaud gives examples of some of the jurats. Firstly, Arnaud de Bios, who was elected to the jurade in 1406 and was a member of the Council of Thirty during the subsequent year.29 He was the city treasurer in 1420, then a jurat once more in the year after. During the Hundred Years’ War, the jurade was responsible for the town’s defence. Another jurat, Benedyct Spina, English by origin but accepted into the town’s bourgeoisie, was sent to Henry IV’s court in 1407 to report on of the state of the town after it had resisted an attack by the Duke of Orleans, presumably because he spoke better English than the others (though this would not have been the ultimate criterion for choosing him at the time). Many of the bourgeoisie undertook to maintain a man-at-arms out of their own resources or on money borrowed from the town to do so. The jurats profited from their duties to the town, for example, by contracts to supply it with goods at their disposal. Arnaud de Bios provided ships for specific voyages on several occasions. Johan de la Geneva supplied the builders with lead for roofing purposes (we could assume that he had bought it from English importers), and gunpowder and saltpetre was provided by Pey de Ferran. The jurade also farmed out the collection of taxes to its members for a determined period, or they could benefit from exemption from a particular tax, or be offered a safe-conduct for travel. Benedyct Spina obtained a passport to allow him to go to Spain on business.
In return for these benefits (perhaps liable to be perceived as corrupt practice) the bourgeoisie from whom the jurats were selected were intensely loyal to the municipality. In turn, this made them fervent Anglo-Gascons, since it was in their interest to be such. They were called upon to perform military duties in person, like maintaining a guard-post for a time or holding the keys to one of the many city gates. These bourgeois grandees had their domestic premises in the area called La Rouselle, or near the Sainte-Colombe market, or in Les Salinières, Saint-Eloi or Saint-Michel quarters of the town. They had duties in absence in less salubrious parishes, like La Tropeyte or La Grave, where they had their business premises and warehouses.
There were others, less grand, who shared in the prosperity that the jurade maintained, like Guilhem Forton, who lived in a modest house in the rue Bouquinière, by the Sainte-Colombe market. This house had an entry, a living room and two bedrooms on the ground floor, with a cellar for the wine he kept for himself underneath. He had upstairs rooms where he kept tools and disused barrels. All his furniture was functional and none of it had any great value, being similar to what was to be found in workmen’s lodgings. The tools he used every day were found ready to hand in his bedroom. Nevertheless, there were eight silver pledges which represented the 805 livres owed to him by seventy-eight debtors at his death. His will demonstrates the value of movable capital in this society. This very ordinary house does not announce the fact that Forton had three other houses in the Saint-Michel parish, a vineyard at Graves, and agricultural land at Artigues. Mme Lavaud sardonically remarks that the wealth of Guilhem Forton was certainly real, but he was not ostentatious.30
These few examples present the conservative mindset of those who were ready to resist the blandishments of Charles VII and the Count of Dunois and any encouragement to become Frenchmen. If they could not resist their advance by military means, and if there were to be no help from England, they were prepared to stand behind their archbishop and his negotiators, in terms of present-day parlance, for the best deal possible with their new French rulers.
Twenty years after Guilhem Forton made his will, Messire Regnault Girard was required by King Louis XI, in 1465, the fourth year of his reign, to compile a memorandum about how to maintain Bordeaux in a state of security. It starts with an assessment of the town’s prosperity after eleven years of incorporation into the kingdom of France: it is ‘one of the great and well-populated cities of this kingdom, set on the river (sic) Gironde, and from there to the sea it is about 26 leagues. The river allows sea-going ships to come right into the river called La Lune, which is something very remarkable.’
In a well-worn classical image, Girard compares Bordeaux to a person’s stomach, which receives the food given to it and sends it on to the other members.
The town … receives ships and merchandise from all parts and all kingdoms and sends them on to various places like the kingdoms of Spain, Navarre and Aragon, and to the lands of Monseigneurs of Armagnac, Foix, Béarn and Albret, and into the lands of Languedoc and other places according to their needs.
Girard then asks what it was that brought such great prosperity to the place. His reply is unequivocal:
It is the isle of England, a large and rich kingdom with a great merchandise, like fine wool from which they make abundant cloth, lead, tin, metal, coal both from the rock and from the earth, besides other goods, and they have a great number of ships. Twice a year, around All Saints (1 November) and in March, the said English come with their ships laden with the above trade goods, coming down to the said place, Bordeaux.
When the ships have arrived from all the places mentioned above, traders bring money to have their merchandise, and the English bring a great deal of gold and silver too. They all get together and convert their money into Gascon wines and go home, leaving Bordeaux and the country around to prosper. The English leave the merchandise that they cannot sell straight away with their hosts in Bordeaux, still for sale, and the hosts make a great profit out of it when they sell it on to the traders from the other places mentioned above … if it were not for this trade with England, Bordeaux would not be Bordeaux.31
Girard goes on to say that, because there had been such affinity with the English in the past, measures had to be taken (in 1465) to defend the city and the port from their return. That is for us to consider later on. But for the moment, we ought to note that, even in its diminished state even eleven years after the second conquest of 1453 (if Girard is to be believed: he writes in the present tense), Bordeaux had enormous prosperity.
It was certainly prosperous in 1451 on the eve of the first conquest, still profiting from the truce between England and France that lasted from 1445 with Henry VI’s marriage to Marguerite of Anjou until 1449 and the Fougères incident. Prosperity and viable government were both realities. Nevertheless, the jurats had lived through all the tribulations of the years before the truce and were reading the writing on the wall. Dunois had conquered Normandy after all, and he had taken the great fortress of Fronsac from its English captain, John Strangways, who had been there with a native English garrison since 1438,32 and he was unable to resist Jean Bureau’s advanced weaponry. Unless an English force were to come to their rescue, they had to make provision for themselves in a profitable surrender.
* * *
It was still hoped that Henry VI’s government would send armed support against the incursions of Dunois. Rumours of an English fleet on its way to Bordeaux or Bayonne circulated. Sir Richard Woodville, the first Earl Rivers and future father-in-law of King Edward IV, was appointed seneschal of Guyenne on 18 October 1450, and a fleet expedition had been planned before then, but preparations were frustrated by financial incapacity leading to frequent postponements33 of an army being embarked at the same time as Dunois was making his triumphant inroads. By the time Strangways surrendered Fronsac on 5 June, Rivers had not set sail, and he did not.34 The nearly contemporary John Benet’s Chronicle made a bleak announcement in retrospect:
And the king ordered Lord Rivers with 4,000 men to resist the King of France at Bordeaux. They lay near Plymouth for a year for default of wages, and achieved nothing. And so on 3 July the city of Bordeaux was lost, and then all Gascony …35
It was the captal de Buch who made the first positive response to Dunois’s invitation to negotiate a peace settlement. He was ‘nearly a king in Aquitaine: his family (the Graillys), his alliances, the timbre of his character and services already rendered made appropriate the trust which the Bordelais had in him.’36 Henry VI had made him a knight of the Garter. As long ago as 1420, he had been proxy for Henry V’s marriage to Charles VI’s daughter Catherine of France, the present king’s sister. He had his own marriage ties with the French royal family through his wife, Marguerite d’Albret. In the 1420s, he had carried out actions against towns that had rebelled for France against English Gascony: Pyrnormand, Montguyon and Lamothe-Montravel. During the French invasion of 1442, he had fought alongside Sir Edward Hull at Saint-Loube. He was seventy in 1451, and lived in Bordeaux, like his ancestors, on the site of the Roman prefect’s palace, Le Puy-Paulin. His disputes with the jurade about some grazing land in 1447 had been forgotten by 1451.37 His older brother’s son was Gaston IV of Foix who had professed loyalty to Charles VII and was still besieging Dax for a good while after Fronsac had surrendered to Dunois. Since he was known to leaders on both sides, he was the best man to make approaches to Dunois with proposals drawn up by the jurade. He reported back to the Bordeaux leaders, the English officials – Huntingdon and Shorthouse – and the Three Estates of Gascony with Dunois’s reactions.
Still hoping against hope that help would come from England, the leaders in Bordeaux drew the negotiations out for as long as they could. When the French negotiators complained, they replied that they had their oath to Henry VI to consider. Charles VII had already nominated his trusty and well-beloved artillery commander, Jean Bureau, to replace Gadifer Shorthouse as Mayor of Bordeaux after it had capitulated, and it was he who acted as Dunois’s agent in the negotiations, entering and leaving the town every day with a safe-conduct like a modern commuter to the Gare Saint-Jean. Dunois showed some good will – in his sovereign lord’s interest – and accepted some of the proposals.
The Gascon delegation to negotiate with Bureau was made up of Archbishop Berland, Bernard Angevin who was a bourgeois ennobled by Henry VI, Jean de Lalande, lord of La Brède, the captal de Buch’s son-in-law, Gaillard du Durfort, lord of Blanquefort who had direct experience of French military efficiency, Guillaume Androu, lord of Lansac, and Bertrand de Montferrand, appointed by the Three Estates of Bordeaux to represent them and make decisions on their authority. They chose the Archbishop as their spokesman.38
Dunois appointed Poton de Xaintrailles, a Gascon soldier loyal to Charles VII for thirty years, Jean Bureau, and a judge from Mont de Marsan in the Landes, Ogier Brequit, as the French negotiators. They came to meetings under safe-conduct and were hospitably received by the Bordeaux authorities.39 They had to refer back to Charles VII himself, who was still seventy miles away at Saint-Jean d’Angély, at every stage, while the Bordeaux plenipotentiaries made their decisions collectively where they were. After two days of exchanges, a draft treaty of twenty-six articles was ready to be placed before the French king for him to ratify. No English troops had appeared. Pey Berland and his team had no choice, encircled as they were by armies ready to move in on them. They were making the best of a bad situation while Charles VII was offering a certain level of magnanimity, at least on the surface. The Gascon Ribadieu makes the comment that the treaty could have been considered a triumph for the Bordelais diplomats.40
They were given until 23 June to wait for an English relieving force to arrive at which date they must surrender if it had not. Convention called this ‘the day of battle’, and it was extended from 15 June for the goddaughter Fronsac as well – although the English garrison there had already surrendered. However, Charles VII maintained the possibility of tightening the noose on Bordeaux’s neck by not extending the date for the surrender of Saint-Macaire, Rions or Castillon beyond 13 June. The preamble to the treaty made all that clear.
If no hypothetical English relief force were to appear, the towns of Guyenne agreed that they would take an oath of fidelity to Charles VII in perpetuity. What came next was described by Ribadieu as ‘the Gascons’ revenge’: clauses in which the king was to offer a series of concessions in exchange for submission. He would swear in his turn, to maintain the bourgeois traders and the artisans of Bordeaux in their freedoms, privileges, liberties, statute laws, customs, observances and wages. If the king could not make time to participate in a solemn entrance in person, as he had done at Rouen when Normandy surrendered, Dunois would take the oath on his behalf and ratify the treaty in Bordeaux.
In addition, if residents of Bordeaux or of other towns in Guyenne should decide not to accept French rule, they could leave for wherever they might wish, and take their stock in trade, their capital, their gold, their ships ‘and everything whatever’. This concession would apply for six months during which time they would qualify for safe-conducts. If they did decide to go, their lands would be transferred to their close relatives and were not to be confiscated by the French crown. These terms would also apply to ambassadors who had already gone to England if that was their desire.41 It appeared that a great many would be likely to leave, and not only rich people. Charles VII would give amnesty even to criminals. He seemed to be required to sign everything with his eyes closed, as it were, while the defeated party were meticulous in their demands. They were introducing articles by means of which to recover their fortunes.
However, such an idea ignores the formula adopted by the king and Dunois for the towns already subjugated. Bordeaux did not seem to have qualified for any special treatment when Charles VII ratified the treaty. Even so, nobles and clergy who remained in the conquered territory would retain their lands, houses, lordships and castles: in fact, all they had ever received from the king/duke.42 The nobles were not to be required to pay any land tax, the only demands on them being the taxes they had always paid in the past. As for the tradesmen, they were still allowed to travel by the rivers or on land with nothing to pay by way of additional charges either to the King of France or to the nobles through whose lordships they passed. All this meant that the Gascons would find the change of regime acceptable. Charles VII had been in no way duped.
The Bordelais already had a university modelled on that of Toulouse – the achievement of Pey Berland just previously – and they now were to have a Parlement, a sovereign court of justice, also like Toulouse, which would be a source of profit and prestige. The Gascons were not to be liable for military service according to this treaty. For the moment, the mayor, his deputy and other officials were prisoners, but they were to be released (and in the case of Gadifer Shorthouse, replaced) once the treaty was ratified.43 The king would entrust the minting of money at Bordeaux to those who had the right to do so beforehand.44 The king’s soldiers, present for the defence of the province, were not to be billeted on the citizens but lodged in hostelries at national expense.45 All royal officials were bound not to abuse their responsibilities for profit at the expense of the citizens, and to maintain the privileges of Bordeaux.46 Moreover, the procurator was forbidden to make any exactions without the citizens’ consent or giving them previous notice.47 This was the final clause, but a general amnesty was to be added even for crimes. Refusing to take the oath to the King of France was not to be regarded as a crime during the first six months of the treaty’s operation. Ribadieu says that Charles VII was ready in June 1451 to give privileges to Gascony which other provinces in his kingdom did not have.
All these terms received the recorded agreement of the representatives of Bordeaux who had negotiated for them. They promised ‘on their bodies and their honour’ to keep strictly to the treaty which they had received by letters patent from the king.48
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An account of Dunois’s entry into Bordeaux is reserved for the next chapter because of its context. With the capitulation of the capital of Aquitaine, there was only one town, Bayonne, left loyal to Henry VI, and armed resistance was organized there against Dunois and Foix, who, after a few days rest and recreation for their troops, went south to complete their task.
An important source for the story of the conquest of Bayonne ought to have been that of Jules Balasque who was writing a very comprehensive narrative of events there from its origins until 1451. He had reached 1356, but his death intervened in 1872, and the archivist of the town, E. Deleurens, was persuaded by friends to conclude the work with a presentation of notes already prepared by M. Balasque, which had no connected sequence. Nevertheless, there were certain important indications given in them about how Bayonne became incorporated into the new France.
Like Bordeaux, Bayonne had particularly close ties with England. From Henry III’s time, the residents of the town had the right to take possession of any ships wrecked off their shores, and to the prosperity from the fair held there every year at Michaelmas. Edward II guaranteed their liberties by renewing their reunion with the English crown. Edward III also ratified their liberties and immunities and gave as good prices for their wines as for those from the Garonne Valley, together with favourable tax exemptions. Henry VI’s lieutenants had made the ties closer by allowing the municipality to impose charges on trade goods entering and leaving Bayonne. They could even mint their own coinage at the same weight and value as at Bordeaux and other towns in the duchy. It was worth their while to remain in the English orbit and this justified their resistance to the Valois encroachments when they came.49 The period of Sir Thomas Burton’s ten-year mayoral mandate was one of confidence. The profits of wreckage were used on improving the town’s fortifications.50 Like other towns in 1438, they had to cope with the threats and ravages of Rodrigo de Villandrando, known to have French lords encouraging him. Other towns made truces with him, which Henry VI forbade them to do.51 Another period of calm followed, with Philip Chetwynd as the English mayor, and Thomas Rampston seneschal of Guyenne, until he was discredited by his capture in 1442 that caused such discomfiture in Bordeaux. On 20 October 1442, Archbishop Pey Berland, Rampston, Chetwynd, and the lord of Gramont, were authorized to issue pardons to those who had sided with Charles VII when he took Dax.52 Repairs to the fortifications of the chateau were authorized, paid for by the salt tax, and Jean de Foix, Earl of Kendal, was granted possession of Mauléon Castle by the Duke of Suffolk, his father-in-law,53 to strengthen the Anglo-Gascon presence.54 But at the same time as the Anglo-French truce was broken in March 1449, it was in the hands of Luis de Beaumont, Baron of Guiche, constable of Navarre, and, when it was attacked by Gaston IV, Count of Foix, he handed it over to him.55 So, when Charles VII ordered his four armies to advance into Guyenne, Foix – together with Albret, Orval and Tartas, and the Scottish captain Robin Petit-Loup – Foix was in a good position to advance towards Dax and lay siege to it.56
Guiche, which served as the port for Bayonne twelve miles away from it, was also attacked on Gaston de Foix’s orders, and Luis de Beaumont, John Astley – the English mayor of Bayonne – and George Swyllington went to relieve the place with 4,000 men; 1,200 of the men were killed or taken prisoner, including Swyllington himself and ‘almost all of his company of sixty lances.’ Guiche was taken, but Foix did not advance any further. In January 1450 he went home.57
Before Beaumont’s party had set out for Guiche, ‘the horizon became darker and darker.’ A party was formed in December 1449 to resist the invaders, and the residents of Bayonne took an oath of fidelity to Henry VI on the sacred host and Saint-Léon’s body.58 Seven months later, on 8 July 1450, Foix was back in Dax, and the town and all the Landes area capitulated to him in exchange for the maintenance of their ancient freedoms. This was soon confirmed by letters patent from the king, signed at Taillebourg.59
When he left Bordeaux, Dunois made his way towards the River Adour with his artillery to take possession of the last Anglo-Gascon bastion at Bayonne. His letters of conciliation, carried by the Berry herald, were rejected by the Bayonnais, who, as the Bordelais had done, were hoping against hope for help from England. Jean de Beaumont, Prior of St. John of Jerusalem, the constable of Navarre’s brother, brought men at arms into Bayonne to defend it and waited for Dunois to arrive.60
Dunois ordered an attack on the suburbs of Bayonne on 7 August 1451.61 Foix, Chabannes, Xaintrailles, and Gaspard Bureau, maître d’artillerie, had joined him. Foix had command of the advance guard. The English troops went out to meet the attackers but soon withdrew again behind their boulevard when the culeuvrines, the serpentines and the ribeaudequins opened fire.62 The French took the boulevard and laid siege to the fort in the Saint-Léon suburb to the south. There were serious mining undertakings by the sappers and accompanying salvoes from the mortars and cannon. Seeing they could not keep the fort, the English set fire to it, but sixty of them lost their lives during the retreat. Foix established himself in the Augustinian Abbey, saved from the flames, while Albret, Tartas, and Penthièvre took the Saint-Esprit bridge on the north side of the town. The French troops were engaged for fifteen days in this operation against strong English resistance. In the end the deciding factor was the arrival in the Adour of a squadron of twelve Biscayan warships,63 carrying men and provisions, ordered by Foix to sustain the attackers.64
Then came supernatural aid in natural form. Let Guillaume Leseur, the count of Foix’s enthusiastic contemporary, tell what was seen, based on recollections of people who were there:
On a Friday morning [20 August], by the will and pleasure of our Lord, in their view [i.e., of the besieged] and of the French, there appeared in the sky, in full daylight, the form of a great white cross right over the middle of the town. Moved by this great sign, they recognized their inadequacy and, seeing their ruin and imminent peril and the danger they were in, besought and humbly begged Monsieur the Count of Foix and Monsieur the Count of Dunois … for negotiations so as to come to an arrangement.65
Dunois offered the churchmen, nobles and people of Bayonne a similar treaty to the one that Bordeaux had received in June, but Jean de Beaumont, with his company, was to be held prisoner ‘at the will and mercy of King Charles’.66 The triumphal entries followed, and Dunois left to report what had happened to the king at Taillebourg, while Foix went to Orthez and Mont de Marsan to get his breath back before he made his own way there.67
So all Gascony was incorporated into Charles VII’s kingdom. He was not only ‘Charles the Victorious;’ he was ‘Charles the well-served.’
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Albeit with certain significant exceptions on a global scale, we are all secularists now; but for Frenchmen living in the middle of the fifteenth century, a sign in the sky in the form of the white cross of St. Michael the Archangel that had been adopted as Charles VII’s emblem was unquestionably an indication of the favour of Almighty God toward his victory as far as the Pyrenees. Helen Castor in her wonderful appraisal of Joan of Arc has drawn attention to what Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, who was also Chancellor of England, said in his address at the opening of the parliament that assembled in March 1416, not quite six months after Agincourt. God had ‘spoken’ in favour of the English cause in the war with France three times already: in the naval battle at Sluys in 1340, at Poitiers in 1356 when even the French king was taken prisoner, and then, finally, at Agincourt.68 Like the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s ballad ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, God could have said, ‘What I tell you three times is true!’
Dunois understood that God had spoken again in the sign in the sky over Bayonne in 1451. There were some Englishmen – and some of their Gascon associates – who didn’t know when they were beaten, as we shall see in the next chapter, but it is always the really last word that counts. It had to be said louder after the siege of Bordeaux in October 1453; but, at the moment when the French generals toasted each other and their victorious king at Taillebourg in Bordeaux 1450 vintage, there was no doubt about the justice of the French victory. Nowadays aircrafts’ contrails are seen criss-crossing the sky over south-west France. There were no explanations of this kind possible for Dunois and his staff.