Nobody in England thought that the withdrawal of 1453 was the end of the struggle to retain English France; the French had huge problems trying to control Aquitaine, and, in 1475, Edward IV took an army to France but allowed himself to be bought off by the French Louis XI. From the 1450s, however, with Henry VI alternating between madness and weak and ineffective rule, the focus of English military energy turned inwards, and English armies, hardened and brutalized by the fighting in France, slaughtered each other in a vicious civil war that went on for thirty-three years. The dynastic struggles for the throne between descendants of Lionel of Antwerp, third son of Edward III, and those of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, were finally settled at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor, with only a very tenuous blood claim to the Lancastrian inheritance, defeated and killed Richard III, a direct descendant of Lionel.101 It would not be until nearly 300 years later that Sir Walter Scott would name this period the Wars of the Roses.
With the Tudor dynasty firmly in place, war with France resumed. Henry VII of England supported French rebels in what was termed the ‘mad war’ – actually a civil war – from 1488 to 1491. His son Henry VIII sent a probing expedition to Aquitaine in 1512 and, when that met with inglorious defeat, followed it up the following year with an army of 25,000 men that invaded from Calais. Despite a stunning English victory at Thérouanne – called the ‘Battle of the Spurs’ because of the number of spurred French knights killed – a peace treaty in 1514 gave England little, and raids from Calais into Picardy in 1522 and 1523 produced no lasting gain. An alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1542 led to the capture of Bolougne by English troops in 1544, and, even after Charles made a separate peace with France, Henry VIII’s and later Edward VI’s soldiers withstood repeated French attempts to capture the town, until it was returned to France as part of a peace settlement in 1550. Then, in 1557, Mary Tudor brought England into the war between France and Spain on the side of her Spanish husband Philip II, and, in the following year, a well-planned French attack on the weak garrison of Calais lost England’s last outpost in Europe.
The Hundred Years War had changed English society and attitudes profoundly. At its start, English nobles thought of themselves as Europeans; they had lands on both sides of the Channel, they spoke a form of French, they travelled to and fro, they married into cross-Channel families, and they owed religious allegiance to the pope. By the end, they thought of themselves as English, they spoke English, they owned little outside England, and they were increasingly suspicious of any theological direction from abroad. English hooliganism abroad and xenophobia within may not have started with the Hundred Years War, but they were certainly confirmed and hardened by it. The war did make many individuals very rich, but it also very nearly bankrupted the national treasury. The effort of sending the last expedition of 2,500 men under Talbot in 1452 to relieve Bordeaux was the equivalent of despatching an expeditionary force of 50,000 today; in 2012, we had very great difficulty in maintaining a mere 10,000 men in Afghanistan.102
Militarily, the advances in England were enormous. The old amateur feudal system was swept away and replaced by a regular, professional army. As professional armies are expensive, they would always be small, but they consistently defeated far larger but badly led French armies whose activities were uncoordinated and undisciplined. Only when the French, very late in the day, began to copy the English system did the vast differences in population and national wealth begin to take effect. The experiences of such a long period of sporadic campaigns were to lay the foundations for the English, and later the British, way of waging war. Professionalism would stay. In the civil war of the mid-seventeenth century, both royalists and parliamentarians initially attempted to conscript; it did not work, was regarded as an unacceptable imposition on free-born Englishmen and was abandoned. It took great debate and much deliberation before conscription was imposed halfway through the First World War and it was stopped once peace was declared; and, although imposed again for the Second World War and for some fifteen years after, it was always intended as a short-term and temporary stop-gap. Britain would wage her wars with career servicemen wherever possible, and most British soldiers looked, and still look, with disdain at European pressed men. Indeed, a further reason for the success of English arms in France in the Hundred Years War was the steady supply of good junior and middle piece officers, not, as was the case in the French army, promoted for their breeding or their influence, but for their professional ability: England was and still is a class-ridden society, but that class system was and is mobile and men did and do move up (and down) according to their merits. England had a host of military heroes, France only the very overrated du Guesclin and the mystic child Jeanne d’Arc.
After the withdrawal from France, England, and later Britain, developed into a world power at sea, which was natural enough for an island nation. As Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, Earl St Vincent, said in 1803 when asked about the possibility of a French invasion, ‘I do not say they cannot come – I do say they cannot come by sea’ – a remark repeated by the heads of the Royal Navy in 1914 and in 1940. An essential for the success of a necessarily small army is the use of technology as a force multiplier, and this was rarely forgotten by English and then British generals: from the longbow to the Baker rifle to the machine-gun to the tank, any advantage that would substitute machines or weapons for men was seized upon. A major lesson from the Hundred Years War was that a small nation with a professional army may be able to win its battles, but it takes many more men to hold ground than to win it in the first place. In her future wars, Britain would only operate on land as part of a coalition.103
France, very far from being a united country when Edward III stated his claim in 1337, was almost so by the end of the war. In the face of constant invasion from across the Channel, the occupants of Artois, Burgundy, the Île de France and even, albeit reluctantly, Brittany began to think of themselves as Frenchmen first, with provincial loyalties being replaced by a wider affinity, and there can be little doubt that the war accelerated nation-building there. It also created a reservoir of hatred of the ‘goddams’, the English who ravaged their lands. There cannot have been a town of any size in northern France that was not plundered, burned, attacked and despoiled by English soldiers, many of them over and over again, and, when the soldiers were not fighting over their fields and in their streets, the routiers were extracting loot and the English garrisons protection money.
In subsequent years, fighting the French seemed the natural occupation of English and then British armies. Elizabeth I sent troops to France to help the persecuted Huguenots. And, while for much of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) England was mainly concerned with her own internal troubles leading up to the English Civil War, she was always ready to prick the French when an opportunity arose, and one of the causes of the civil war was a perceived French influence over Charles I through his French wife Henrietta. Among the reasons for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, followed almost immediately by English participation in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97), was the pro-French foreign policy of James II. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) saw British troops under the great John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, inflict massive defeats on the French and their allies. An uncharacteristic alliance with France during the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20) only came about because Spain was seen as the greater threat, but the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–8) saw a reversion to the usual line-up. The Seven Years War (1756–63) brought vast British overseas territorial gains at the expense of France, although French support for the rebellious American colonists from 1775 to 1783 was a major factor in the establishment of the United States.
Then, in 1793, began the longest period of sustained warfare in modern British history. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lasted until 1815 with only two short breaks in 1802/3, when the English claim to the French throne was dropped, and from April 1814 until March 1815, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo in June of that year. That war was always referred to as the ‘Great War’ until supplanted by an even greater slaughter from 1914 to 1918. Even as recently as the twentieth century we have fought each other. The Royal Navy crippled the French Mediterranean Fleet at Mers el Kebir in July 1940 (after which the French attempted unsuccessfully to bomb Gibraltar) and then went on to attack the French port of Dakar in September of the same year. In June and July 1941, British and Indian troops fought a vicious campaign against Vichy French soldiers in Syria, and again in Madagascar from May to November 1942, while the Anglo-American Operation Torch landings in 1942 in French North Africa were stoutly resisted until the defenders realized the hopelessness of their situation.
Despite warm personal relations that exist between many Britons and French men and women, France as a nation has never liked us, and does not now. The feeling is mutual, and one suspects that the widespread British antipathy to the European Union might be a lot less intense were France not a major player in it. Some years ago, this author, having commanded the British contingent at a French Armistice Day parade in Limoges, was invited to lunch with the French general who had taken the salute, a delightful and cultured man who employed a superb cook and kept a very fine wine-cellar. After the consumption of much excellent claret and a considerable quantity of fine cognac, the general put his arm around me, looked me straight in the eye, and said: ‘N’oubliez jamais: vous êtes l’ennemi héreditaire.’
Could things have been different? Perhaps, if Henry V had not died when he did, he might have been accepted by the French as king, with his French wife; or if England had not tried to achieve quite so much and had contented herself with recovering Aquitaine, unquestionably English by legal and moral right, and fought to have it in full sovereignty, then we might perhaps still have a foothold in Europe today. Certainly, there was no excuse for the Tudor laxness that lost us Calais in 1558. It is much more likely, however, that at some stage the sovereignty of English France would have been given to a younger son and that the crowns would have once more diverged. As it was, an English child king and internal strife at home after the death of Henry V left little appetite for further European adventures until it was far too late, and, despite her going to war with France many times in the succeeding centuries, England’s future lay in the seas and in empire, whereas that of France was as a land power. For all that, the Hundred Years War was a great adventure, and a great and righteous cause.