Tell him, the crown, that he usurps, is mine,
And where he sets his foot, he ought to kneel;
’Tis not a petty dukedom that I claim,
But all the whole dominions of the realm;
Which if with grudging he refuse to yield,
I’ll take away those borrow’d plumes of his
And send him naked to the wilderness.
Shakespeare, Edward III, Act I, Scene I*
THE CAPETIAN LINE ended with something of a whimper: the three brothers – plus, if we are to be strictly accurate, a week-old baby – reigned altogether for only fourteen years. Louis X – known as le Hutin, the Quarrelsome, though several other kings might have had a better claim to the title – had in fact been King of Navarre since the death in 1305 of his mother, Queen Joan, but was to occupy the French throne for little more than eighteen months. His apologists give him credit for abolishing serfdom and for readmitting the Jews to France; but neither concession proved quite as good as it might have seemed. First of all, it was announced that each serf would have to pay for his freedom; if he could not or would not, his possessions – such as they were – would be seized anyway, to pay for what seemed an almost perpetual war in Flanders. As for the Jews (whom his father had expelled) they were indeed allowed back, but only for twelve years, on approval. During that time they were obliged always to wear an armband and to live in ghettos. After that time, they risked being expelled again.
The darkest stain on Louis’s character is the murder of his wife, Margaret, who, whatever she had been up to in the Tour de Nesle, certainly did not deserve death by suffocation. It was only five days later, on 19 August 1315, that her husband married Princess Clementia of Hungary.* Less than a year later he was dead, after a particularly exhausting game of tennis,† leaving Clementia pregnant. Here was a problem indeed, for this was the first time that a Capetian king had died without a male heir. Louis already had a daughter, Joan. If Clementia were to produce a son, he would inherit the throne; if a daughter, she and Joan would have roughly equal claims. Joan was older; on the other hand she was the daughter of Margaret, and after the affair of the Tour de Nesle no one could be sure by whom. Louis’s brother Philip took over the regency until finally, on 15 November 1316, Clementia gave birth to a boy. Unfortunately he is known as John I the Posthumous, for he lived for just five days, until the 20th: the youngest king of France with the shortest reign, and the only king to have borne the title through his entire lifetime. He was succeeded – though only after a good deal of opposition – by his uncle Philip, who now became Philip V – thus reaffirming the old Salic law which excluded women from the line of succession.
There can be little doubt that Philip was the ablest of the three brothers. He was also the nicest. While Louis and Charles showed no mercy to their errant wives after the great scandal, Philip stood by Joan of Burgundy – whose implication in the affair was admittedly a good deal less certain – through thick and thin, until her name was finally cleared by the Parlement in Paris and she was allowed to return to court. Cynics have suggested that he refused to abandon Joan because if he did he might also lose Burgundy, but such a consequence would have been highly unlikely: their surviving letters suggest a far more probable reason: that the two were deeply in love.
Politically and diplomatically, Philip’s principal achievement was to come to an agreement with Count Robert of Flanders, whereby Robert would formally recognise Philip’s young grandson Louis as his heir, in return for Louis being pledged in marriage to Robert’s second daughter, Margaret. He was, however, rather less successful with his infinitely trickier neighbour Edward II of England. The difficulty was the province of Gascony. Here Edward was technically Philip’s vassal; but he had avoided doing homage to Louis X and was clearly just as unwilling to show proper recognition to his brother. At last he most reluctantly consented – but on his arrival at Amiens was horrified to discover that Philip was now insisting on something more – a further oath of personal fealty to himself. This he very understandably refused; but the consequence was that relations between the two kings became worse instead of better.
Philip V reigned for a little over five years, dying – of sundry natural causes – in January 1322, and was succeeded by the youngest of the brothers, Charles IV, who reigned for six and despite three wives produced no male issue. Charles had difficulties, as had Philip, with the Count of Flanders and Edward of England, but those with Edward were soon overtaken by events – when in 1326 Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer seized the country with a small mercenary army, forced her husband to abdicate and the following year had him hideously murdered in Berkeley Castle. Her son Edward was thus a little over fourteen years old when he found himself the richest and most powerful ruler in Europe. True, English possessions beyond the Channel were no longer what they had once been. Two centuries before, Edward’s great-great-great-grandfather Henry II had claimed, either as fiefs by inheritance or through marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, almost half the area of the France we know today. Since Henry’s time, however, nearly all this had fallen away; and Edward wanted it back. On his mother’s instructions – but against every instinct of his own – he concluded a peace treaty with Charles. He would take back Aquitaine, but Charles would receive considerable territory in exchange, including the rich provinces of Limousin, Quercy and Périgord.
Charles himself died on 1 February 1328 in the Château de Vincennes. Like his brothers before him, he had produced no surviving male heir, but history strangely repeated itself. He left – just as Louis had left – a pregnant wife, and a regency under his cousin Philip of Valois was declared until she should produce her child. After two months, however, she gave birth to a girl; and so, owing to the Salic law, the direct branch of the Capetian line was extinct. There were now three possible candidates for the throne: Edward III of England, son of Isabella and grandson of Philip the Fair; Philip of Evreux, son-in-law of Louis X; and Philip of Valois, nephew of Philip IV and grandson of Philip III by his third son, Charles. Once again the Salic law became an issue, but the fact was that the French did not want a foreigner; they certainly had no wish to see themselves united with England under a single crown. Edward was still hardly more than a child – though he was already married, to Princess Philippa of Hainaut – lived across the sea and was the senior representative of that House of Plantagenet that for two centuries had caused them nothing but trouble. Philip was, moreover, already regent. They wanted a French king; and they got one. On 29 May 1328 King Philip VI was crowned at Reims.
And so, with Philip VI, ‘the Fortunate’, began the House of Valois. It was not a particularly promising start. The Capetians had been on the whole excellent kings. They had steadily built up France, transforming it from a Carolingian custard into a nation. Philip, however, perhaps conscious that he was not of royal birth – his father Charles of Valois, a younger brother of Philip IV, had striven all his life to gain a throne for himself but had never succeeded – seemed principally interested in matters of feudal prestige, particularly where they concerned the young Edward III who was, curiously enough, his nearest male relative. One of his first actions after his coronation was to summon Edward to pay homage for Aquitaine. Edward complied, but took his time; and when he eventually met Philip in Amiens Cathedral thirteen months later, he worded his vows so ambiguously that they were the cause of arguments between the two kings for years to come. But such arguments were inevitable, simply because Edward was convinced that it was he who had the strongest claim to the French throne. Even if the Salic law were upheld, he maintained, he himself as the late king’s nephew was a closer relation than Philip, who was merely a cousin; and from the moment of his own coronation he began to prepare for war.
Until the middle of the thirteenth century bows and arrows had been considered inferior weapons, with too short a range and insufficient penetrating power to be of much use against armoured cavalry; but Edward’s grandfather Edward I had, in the course of his campaigns in Wales, discovered the qualities of the Welsh longbow:
In the war against the Welsh, one of the men at arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; finally it lodged in the horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.*
Edward had decreed that archery should be regularly practised by all his subjects ‘who were not lame or decrepit’, and the decree was theoretically still in force: his grandson thus had at his command, potentially at least, the most formidable army in Europe. But he was not yet ready to move against France. First he must deal with Mortimer, who was using his power simply to enrich himself and acquiring castles and titles all over the country. Eventually in 1330 the king ran him to earth at Nottingham Castle. Despite Isabella’s famous entreaty, ‘Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer’, her odious lover was hanged at Tyburn, his immense estates forfeited to the crown and his body left swinging on the gallows for two full days in public view.
For these first years of Philip’s reign his relations with Edward were cordial enough; in 1332 the two even planned a joint Crusade, though it never came to anything. But Aquitaine remained a sore point, and Flanders was another, simply because the economies of England and Flanders were interdependent: England’s principal product was wool, the Flemish were a nation of weavers. The effective ruler of Flanders, Louis de Nevers, was Philip’s vassal, but his subjects were anglophiles to a man and Edward knew he could count on them when necessary. Then in 1336 there came the problem of Count Robert of Artois. Robert claimed that he had been unjustly dispossessed of his estates, and in attempting to recover them had resorted to forgery. His guilt had been discovered, and he had sought refuge in England. Philip had demanded his extradition; Edward – to whom Robert, as a former adviser to the king, was extremely useful – had refused. Philip in return declared Aquitaine confiscated, accusing Edward of ‘the many excesses, rebellions and acts of disobedience committed against us’ and of ‘sheltering the King’s mortal enemy’. That, for Edward, was the last straw. He denied Philip’s legitimacy and summoned him to surrender the throne of France.
The Hundred Years’ War had begun.
There is no reason for us to trace the course of the war in any great detail. It was not in fact a single confrontation; rather was it a series of conflicts waged between 1337 and 1453 by the House of Plantagenet against that of Valois for the control of the Kingdom of France. Although at an early stage Edward had established himself with his family at Antwerp as a forward base, he did not invade French territory until the autumn of 1339. Invading armies seldom behave well towards local populations, but the English army seems to have been worse than most. The countryside was ravaged, villages laid waste. At Origny the local convent was burnt to the ground, the nuns subjected to wholesale rape. Such conduct may have been deliberately intended to provoke the King of France to battle; if so, it very nearly succeeded. When the French army finally caught up with the English near Saint-Quentin, Philip proposed a formal encounter in single combat – the old chivalric tradition was dying hard – at a site to be chosen by Edward; he stipulated only that the field should have neither trees, ditches nor marsh.
Edward asked nothing better. He was twenty-five years old, at the peak of his health and vigour, with a passion for war in all its aspects. He was a regular participant at tournaments; and what, after all, was his cousin proposing but a glorified joust? No sooner had the challenge been accepted, however, than Philip had second thoughts. The chronicler Froissart suggests that he listened to the advice of his uncle Robert of Anjou, King of Naples and a noted astrologer; more probably his scouts simply reported that the English king was a good deal stronger than he had been led to expect. At all events he returned to Paris. The English, grumbling loudly about French cowardice, retired to Brussels for the winter.
Edward’s temper was considerably improved when, in January 1340, the people of Flanders recognised his claim to the French crown. He immediately quartered the arms of France with his own, ordered a new seal complete with fleurs-de-lys and adopted a surcoat of scarlet and blue, embroidered with the leopards and lilies that remain to this day on the royal escutcheon. But the Flemings, happy as they were to be an English rather than a French dependency, were men of business first and foremost, with a clear understanding of the value of money. When the king returned to England soon afterwards to hasten the delivery of the provisions he needed, they politely insisted that his wife and children should be left behind as security for the payment of his debts, Queen Philippa’s own crown being put in pawn to the merchants of Cologne.
Meanwhile the French navy had entered the Channel, where they were giving increasing trouble. Already in 1338 their privateers had raided Portsmouth and Southampton; that October, Edward had ordered a line of stakes to be driven across the Thames to prevent similar assaults on London. The following year it had been the turn of Dover and Folkestone. Finally, by midsummer 1340, the king was ready to sail from the Thames estuary with the navy that he had long been preparing: some two hundred vessels, carrying perhaps five thousand archers and men-at-arms, together with horses and stores. Also accompanying him were what a contemporary described as ‘a large number of English ladies, countesses, baronesses, knights’ ladies and wives of London burgesses, who were on their way to visit the Queen of England at Ghent’. But just before they sailed came ominous news: scouts who had been patrolling the Channel reported that a French fleet at least twice the size of the English was awaiting them at the mouth of the River Zwin near the little town of Sluys – in those days the port of nearby Bruges. Edward’s chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury John Stratford, urged him even at this late stage to cancel the whole expedition: in such conditions, he argued, to continue would be suicide. But the king remained firm – whereupon Stratford resigned his seal of office on the spot – and, shortly after midnight on 22 June, gave the order to weigh anchor.
On the afternoon of the day following, as his fleet approached the Flemish coast, Edward saw for himself the strength of the huge armada that Philip had drawn up: four hundred sail or more – ‘so many’, writes Froissart, ‘that their masts resembled a forest’. Nineteen of them were larger than any that the English had ever seen. Characteristically, however, the king decided to attack at once. Pausing only to ensure the protection of the ladies, he spent what remained of the day deploying his ships, one with men-at-arms between every two carrying archers. Then, early in the morning of Midsummer Day, he led his fleet straight into the harbour mouth.
What followed was a massacre. The French fought valiantly, but were so tightly crowded together in the narrow inlet that they could barely move. Edward bore down upon them with the wind behind him, his archers – operating from platforms or ‘castles’ mounted high above the decks – loosing volleys of arrows high into the air to rain down on the enemy ships, while the sharp English prows shattered the motionless French hulls like matchwood. Only when sufficient damage had been done did the longbowmen pause in their work, to allow the men-at-arms to grapple, board and fight to the death. For nine hours the battle continued. When it was finished 230 French ships, including the flagship, had been captured and the rest destroyed, the two admirals dead among the wreckage. The fish in the harbour drank so much French blood, it was said afterwards, that had God given them the power of speech they would have spoken in French.
The Battle of Sluys – the first great naval victory in English history – gave Edward command of the Channel and ensured a moderately satisfactory bridgehead for his expeditionary armies for several years to come. The French army, however – in marked contrast to its navy – remained unscathed, still refusing to fight; the Flemish allies, bored with the war, were growing ever more obstreperous; and when, at the approach of autumn, the elderly Countess of Hainaut – Edward’s mother-in-law and Philip’s sister – emerged from the convent to which she had retired and proposed a truce, the two monarchs willingly agreed. It was signed on 23 September 1340 and lasted until midsummer the following year.
The next five years saw a good deal of inconclusive fighting in Brittany and Gascony. In 1346, however, King Philip received disturbing news. The English were preparing a considerable army – reports spoke of 10,000 archers and 4,000 men-at-arms – while a fleet estimated at 700 sail was assembling at Portsmouth. Their destination remained a close secret; even the captains, it was said, were given their orders under seal, to be opened only when they had left harbour. This meant that Philip had to keep his own ships widely dispersed, ready for any eventuality. Froissart tells us that the English fleet was originally bound for Gascony; but at the last moment Edward changed his entire plan: it landed instead in Normandy, at the little port of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue on the eastern side of the Cotentin peninsula,* on 12 July.
For reasons not entirely clear, the army encamped for thirty-six hours on the beach before it advanced,† burning and plundering as it went. The unwalled towns of Barfleur, Carentan and the city of Caen were taken and sacked, and Rouen would have suffered the same fate – leaving the English in uncontested control of the lower Seine – had not the French army arrived just in time to save it. Edward had neither the time nor the money for a long siege; instead he wheeled to his right and crossed the river at Poissy, birthplace of Saint Louis and site of one of Philip’s favourite palaces, in which he celebrated the Feast of the Assumption, making free with his cousin’s best wines. Then he set off again towards Picardy and the Low Countries. He had a stroke of luck when he reached the Somme: the bridges were down, but it was low tide and his army was able to cross at a shallow ford just before the waters rose to block off the pursuing French. This twelve-hour respite was a godsend, giving him time to find a suitable defensive position and to rest his men before the confrontation he had long been awaiting. He found it on 26 August at Crécy, twelve miles north of Abbeville on the little River Maye, with a valley in front of him and thick woods behind.
The French cavalry of 8,000, supplemented by 4,000 hired Genoese crossbowmen and other mercenaries from Poland and Denmark, arrived in the late afternoon of Saturday 26 August, following a heavy shower of rain. The infantry was still some way behind. For that reason alone an immediate engagement was not to be thought of, and after a brief reconnaissance Philip ordered the attack deferred till the following day; but the knights in his vanguard ignored him, continuing to press forward up the hill until the English archers, no longer able to resist the temptation, loosed their first volley. By then it was too late to retire: the whole army was committed and the battle had begun. The Genoese advanced with their crossbows, the strings of which were soaking wet after the rain; but the evening sun was full in their eyes, and the English longbowmen – who had protected their own bowstrings by removing them and putting them inside their helmets – could shoot six arrows in the time it took the Italians to deliver a single bolt. The latter turned tail and fled – straight into the charging French cavalry, which mowed them down by the hundred before itself falling under the relentless hail from the archers. Pressed hard from behind, the French attacked again and again, but – at least where the English centre and left flank were concerned – with no greater success.
The principal threat was to the right wing, commanded by the young Prince of Wales,* where a number of French knights, together with a few Germans and Savoyards, had braved the arrows and were now grappling hand-to-hand with the English men-at-arms. The fighting was fierce and protracted, but they were finally routed by the prince and his companions. Meanwhile, in the gathering twilight, King Philip lost all control of the battle and his army lapsed into confusion. The fighting continued until long after dark; by morning, more than a third of the French army lay dead on the field. Among them – together with the king’s brother the Duke of Alençon, his nephew Guy of Blois, the Duke of Lorraine, the Count of Flanders, nine French counts and over fifteen hundred knights – was the stone-blind John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, who had insisted on being led into the fray to strike at least one blow with his sword. His entourage, in order not to lose him, had tied his horse’s bridle to their own. Not one of them escaped alive. They were found the next day, the knights lying round their leader, their horses still fastened together. The king’s body was washed in warm water and wrapped in a clean linen shroud, and a solemn Mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Durham for the repose of his soul. The Prince of Wales there and then appropriated his badge of the three ostrich feathers and the motto Ich Dien – ‘I Serve’ – which his distant successor still bears to this day. English losses were less than a hundred.
Dawn brought a heavy fog – not unusual in Picardy in late August – and the earls of Arundel, Northampton and Suffolk set off with a force of mounted knights to look for King Philip and any other important Frenchmen who might be trying to escape. They failed to find the king, but came instead upon the bulk of the French infantry, together with a number of leading church dignitaries, including the Archbishop of Rouen and the Grand Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. None of them had heard anything of the battle, and at first assumed that these new arrivals were their own compatriots. They were soon disillusioned. The English were in no mood for mercy. All the churchmen were killed in cold blood, as were the majority of the infantry – four times as many, according to one report, as lost their lives in the main encounter.
King Edward, Froissart tells us, had remained at the windmill he had chosen for his command post and had not once donned his helmet throughout the battle. Yet it was to him, rather than to his son, that the victory truly belonged. His alone was the strategy that had made it possible, while his coolness and shrewd tactical sense stood out in marked contrast to the impetuousness and lack of control shown by his adversary.* It was clear, too, that he better than anyone else understood the way in which warfare was evolving. The development of the longbow, capable in skilled hands of penetrating chain mail – or even a steel breastplate – from a range of a hundred yards or more, meant that henceforth any cavalry charge could be stopped in its tracks. As for artillery, such primitive devices as then existed were used exclusively for siege warfare; it would be well over a century before cannon and musketry proved their supremacy over the drawn bowstring, and the balance swung once again in favour of the aggressor rather than the defence.
And what, finally, of King Philip? He may have been a hopeless general; nevertheless he had been twice unhorsed and twice wounded, he had seen his standard-bearer killed in front of him and he had fought as valiantly as any of his men. With the help of Count John of Hainaut he managed to escape from the battlefield and rode under cover of darkness to the castle of Labroye, whose seneschal, roused in the small hours, demanded to know who so insistently sought admittance. ‘Open quickly’, answered Philip, ‘for I am the fortune of France.’ He was indeed. As his son was to prove ten years later at Poitiers, France could ill afford the cost of a captured king.
As soon as he had buried his dead, Edward advanced to Calais. He had no legal claim to the city: it had never been English. Even the French had been put off by its marshy approaches and general difficulty of access; it was only in the past century or so that the counts of Boulogne had recognised its strategic importance and developed it into the prosperous and strongly fortified city it had now become. But to Edward, too, its advantages were clear. Standing at the point where the Channel was at its narrowest, only some twenty miles from the English shore, Calais promised not only a far more convenient bridgehead than the ports of Flanders, but the all-important control of the eastern approach to the straits. It would not, however, be easy in the taking. Behind its formidable walls, protected by a double ditch fed by the sea itself, there waited a strong and determined garrison under an outstandingly able commander – even though he was a martyr to gout – named Jean de Vienne. A direct assault was obviously out of the question; the only hope lay in a blockade. And so, early in September, the English pitched their camp on the flat and windy marshes and built what was in effect a small wooden village, which Edward named Villeneuve-le-Hardi. (French was still the language of the English court.) The siege threatened to be long; it was only sensible to make themselves as comfortable as possible.
Winter came, and spring, and summer – and still Calais held out. Finally, at the end of July 1347, King Philip appeared with his army on the cliff at Sangatte, a mile or so to the west. He was horrified by what he saw. Villeneuve-le-Hardi had become a veritable town. A network of well-laid-out streets surrounded a marketplace, where regular markets were held on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There were, writes Froissart, ‘haberdashers’ and butchers’ shops, stalls selling cloth and bread and other necessities, so that almost anything could be bought there. All these things were brought over daily by sea from England, and goods and foodstuffs were also supplied from Flanders.’ This prosperous little community could of course have been easily destroyed, had Philip been able to reach it; but Edward, forewarned, had made the necessary dispositions. Loading his ships with archers, catapults and bombards, he had drawn them up in the shallow water along the whole length of coast between Sangatte and Calais, making any advance along the shore impossible. The only other route, through the swampy ground behind the dunes, depended on a bridge at Nieulay where he had posted his cousin the Earl of Derby with the remaining archers and men-at-arms. The most cursory reconnaissance – effected with the full cooperation of the English – was enough to convince Philip that the situation was hopeless. The next morning he and his army were gone.
The departure of his sovereign told Jean de Vienne all he needed to know. Further resistance was pointless. He now signalled his readiness to surrender, provided only that the king would promise safe conduct for all the citizens. Edward at first refused point-blank. Calais had cost him vast quantities of money and countless men, together with almost a year of his own life. But when his envoy, Sir Walter Manny, returned to report that without the assurance of safety the city would continue to resist he relented. Manny was sent back to de Vienne with new conditions: six of the principal citizens must present themselves before the king, barefoot and bare-headed, with halters around their necks and the keys of the city and castle in their hands. With them he would do as he pleased; the rest of the population would be spared.
The English terms were proclaimed in the marketplace, and immediately the richest of all the burghers, Master Eustache de Saint-Pierre, stepped forward. Before long five others joined him. There and then the six stripped to their shirts and breeches, donned the halters, took the keys and made their way to the gates, led by Jean de Vienne himself on a pony, his sword reversed in token of submission. On their arrival before the king they knelt before him, presented him with the keys and begged for mercy. Edward refused to listen, and ordered their immediate execution; Sir Walter pleaded with him in vain. Only when Queen Philippa, then heavily pregnant, threw herself with some difficulty on her knees before her husband and begged him to spare them did he finally relent.* On Saturday 4 August 1347, Edward III entered Calais in triumph and gave orders that the entire city be evacuated. The miserable citizens were permitted to take nothing with them: houses and estates, furniture and possessions, all were left behind for the use of English colonists whom the king brought in to take their places. The descendants of those colonists were to remain there for over two centuries until, on 7 January 1558, the city was recaptured at last.
For nine years after the fall of Calais, the war was largely forgotten. The Black Death struck France in January 1348; within ten years it had killed an estimated one-third of the people living between India and Iceland. Of those who survived, the majority had other, more pressing anxieties. There were a few minor skirmishes in Gascony and Brittany, and towards the end of 1355 Edward even landed at Calais with another army. He seems, however, to have thought better of the operation: he and his men were back in England little more than a month later. But he remained as determined as ever; he would be satisfied with nothing less than the throne of France. Philip’s son John II – John the Good, as he was later called – who had succeeded his father in 1350, was an incorrigible and impecunious romantic, whose dreams of chivalric derring-do were to betray him again and again. Fighting was in his blood, just as it was in Edward’s. For the time being, both monarchs had other business on their minds; but when the moment came, both would show themselves only too keen to continue the struggle.
In the same year as Edward’s abortive Calais expedition the Black Prince, now twenty-five and his father’s lieutenant in Gascony, took an army to the south-west, failing to capture Narbonne and Carcassonne but causing appalling devastation in the surrounding country. In 1356 he was more ambitious still, launching raids up and down the Loire to the point where John II determined to teach him a lesson, summoning all the nobles and knights to assemble with their retinues at Chartres in the first week of September. The response was almost universal; by the time the army was ready it included the king’s four sons, none of them yet out of their teens; the Constable of France, Gauthier de Brienne; two marshals; twenty-six dukes and counts; and lesser lords and knights without number, all bringing their own troops. Holinshed refers to three ‘battles’ (battalions) of 16,000 men each, making a total of 48,000, but he is almost certainly exaggerating. Whatever the precise figure, it was by any account a fairly impressive force that crossed the Loire at various points and then pressed south with all speed in pursuit of the English, catching up with them on the morning of Sunday 18 September, in the valley of the little River Moisson, seven miles south-east of Poitiers.
The French were in confident mood. For one thing, they comfortably outnumbered the English, who were probably no more than ten or twelve thousand at most; they also had reason to believe that the invaders were seriously short of food. For the rest of that day the two sides reconnoitred each other’s positions and prepared for battle, while the Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord, who had been sent by the Pope to attempt to negotiate a peace, shuttled fruitlessly backwards and forwards between the two sides. The Black Prince, who would certainly have avoided the battle if he could, offered to restore all his prisoners without ransom and to return all the castles that he had occupied; but John would accept nothing less than his own personal surrender, with a hundred of his knights – a demand that the prince refused to contemplate. As a result, soon after sunrise on the following day, the attack began.
It seems extraordinary that since their defeat at Crécy the French had taken no steps to raise and train enough longbowmen to pay back the English in their own coin, particularly since John was fully conscious of the danger presented by the English archers. His plan seems to have been to send a small force of some 300 mounted knights to charge into their midst and scatter them, before following with the main body of his army – on foot, because the marshy ground and the countless hedges and ditches were impossible for the cavalry to negotiate. The tactic proved disastrous. The knights – who represented the flower of his army, and included the Constable of France and both marshals – succumbed to the usual hail of arrows, and after this initial massacre the battle was as good as won. The French fought valiantly but were overwhelmed; and when the fighting was over their king himself was among the prisoners. The Black Prince treated him with elaborate courtesy. Froissart tells of how, the evening after the battle, he gave a supper in his honour, to which he also invited the other noble captives – including thirteen counts, an archbishop and sixty-six barons. ‘He himself served in all humility both at the King’s table and at the others … insisting that he was not worthy to sit himself at the table of so mighty a prince and so brave a soldier.’ Seven months later he personally escorted John to London.
The capture of John II, leaving France in the hands of a nineteen-year-old dauphin,* might well have signalled the end of the war. King Edward, however, saw it differently. To him it seemed the perfect opportunity for the final decisive thrust that would win him the French crown. For the next four years he fought hard, often brilliantly; but contrary to his expectations he made no real headway, and early in 1360 he agreed to peace negotiations. On 8 May, in the little village of Brétigny near Chartres, the Black Prince and the dauphin, Charles, agreed to the terms of a treaty, subject to confirmation by their respective fathers. The French would recognise Edward’s claim to Gascony and Poitou, together with various counties and towns in northern France, including Calais. They would also surrender the city of La Rochelle, which was of vital importance to England as the centre of the salt trade. King John’s ransom was fixed at 3 million gold crowns: he was to be released on payment of the first instalment, which was to be one-fifth of the total. No fewer than forty noble hostages would be given as security for the remainder, which would be paid in six more annual instalments. Edward, for his part, would agree to renounce his claim to the throne of France and to all other regions of the country.
When the two kings met at Calais in October, however, Edward insisted that he would make his renunciations only after the transfer to him of all the lands ceded at Brétigny, with a proviso that this should be complete by 1 November 1361. It was a deeply disingenuous stipulation, and both sides knew it. Such transfers were long and complicated: they could not possibly be completed in a single year. The fact of the matter was that Edward was determined to leave his options open. He willingly agreed to easier terms for the payment of the ransom – but, as things turned out, it would have been better if the money had not been paid at all. In the summer of 1363 one of the hostages, John’s second son, the Duke of Anjou, broke his parole and fled. His father, horrified, declared his intention of returning voluntarily to his captivity in London. His advisers did everything they could to dissuade him, but he remained firm. ‘If good faith and honour are to be banished from the rest of the world,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘they should still be found in the hearts and words of princes.’ He left Paris the week after Christmas, crossed the Channel in midwinter, and arrived in January 1364. Four months later he was dead, ‘of an unknown illness’. Edward ordered him a magnificent funeral service at St Paul’s before returning the body to France, where it was buried at Saint-Denis.
The former dauphin, now Charles V, may not have possessed all his father’s sense of honour, but he was a far more intelligent man and a far better king. He saw, as clearly as any of his subjects, that his army was hopelessly outmoded. Its radical remodelling he entrusted to a minor Breton nobleman named Bertrand du Guesclin, who had shown consistent courage in innumerable skirmishes and whom he now made his commander-in-chief. The result was the first permanent army paid with regular wages – an immense relief to the peasantry, who were no longer regularly robbed and plundered by companies of unemployed soldiers. For the rest of the century there were no more major battles; the policy instead was to keep up a steady pressure on the English, to harry them remorselessly and to allow them to tire themselves out. It worked remarkably well: by the time Charles VI succeeded his father in 1380 they had lost interest and enthusiasm and most of them had returned home.
Alas, it proved to be a false dawn. The Hundred Years’ War was not over yet, and the new King of France was revealed, all too soon, to be hopelessly insane.
* Most scholars now believe that at least the major part of this play is by Shakespeare. It has been included in both the Arden and the New Cambridge collections. This seems, incidentally, to be the first appearance in English of the phrase ‘borrow’d plumes’; the Oxford English Dictionary dates it no earlier than 1802.
* Her claim to the title is too long and complicated to go into here. She was born and brought up in Naples, and never set foot in Hungary in her life.
† He is the first person whose name we know to have played the game, and its first fatal casualty. See also p.193, fn.
* Itinerarium Cambriae, 1191.
* Just ten miles to the north of Utah beach, where the American 4th Division landed on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
† Possibly because the king had injured himself on landing. Froissart reports that ‘he stumbled, and fell so heavily that blood gushed from his nose. The knights surrounding him took this for a bad omen and begged him to go back on board for that day. “Why?” retorted the king without hesitation. “It is a very good sign: it shows that the land is thirsty to receive me.”’ The story would be more credible if it were not also told of William the Conqueror – and, I seem to remember, Julius Caesar.
* There is no reason to think that his sobriquet, the Black Prince, probably occasioned by his black armour, was ever attached to him during his lifetime.
* The chronicler of the Abbey of Saint-Denis suggests another reason for the French defeat: ‘The common soldiers wore tight shirts, so short that they exposed their private parts every time they bent over. The noblemen, on the other hand, wore hauberks extravagantly decorated and surmounted by vainglorious feathery crests. The Lord God, offended by so much obscenity and vanity, decided to use the King of England as His flail, to beat the French host into the ground.’
* Auguste Rodin’s magnificent sculpture The Burghers of Calais, commissioned by the city in 1884, stands in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Another of the twelve original casts can be seen in Victoria Tower Gardens, London, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. McDonald’s, in the city centre, has not changed its name as I suggested.
* He was the first heir presumptive to bear the title of Dauphin. In 1349, when Humbert II of Viennois sold the Dauphiné to Philip VI, he made a condition of the sale that the title would always be borne by France’s sovereign or his heir.