The Hundred Years War (33 page)

Above all the French King himself had at last matured. His natural astuteness and flexibility had been reinforced by an implacable determination. He became a good organizer and a subtle politician, ruthless and unscrupulous, with a nice talent for espionage and bribery—from the early 1440s he had in his pay carefully selected seigneurs in Normandy and Guyenne.

Despite the truce Somerset used the troops evacuated from Maine to seize two Breton fortresses. When King Charles remonstrated, he was told that Brittany was an English fief. Somerset, or perhaps Suffolk behind his back, then commissioned an Aragonese mercenary, François de Surienne (who rather surprisingly was a Knight of the Garter) to take his
écorcheurs
to seize and sack the prosperous Breton town of Fougères in March 1449. The truce had been broken, but what made the French particularly angry was the constant English pressure on the Duke of Brittany to abandon his alliance with France.

On 31 July 1449 Charles VII sent 30,000 troops into Normandy. They attacked from three directions—north, south and east. Instead of at least trying to concentrate his scattered handfuls of ill-paid, mutinous soldiers, Somerset left them in a score of garrisons and told them to hold on for as long as possible. Yet as he himself had reported that because of inadequate maintenance most English strongpoints ‘though they were stuffed with men and ordnance, they be so ruinous that they be unable to be defended’. In the north Pont-Audemer, Pont-l’Evêque and Lisieux had fallen by mid-August ; in the centre Verneuil, Mantes, Vernon and Argentan by early October; and in the south Coutances, Carentan, Saint-Lô and Valognes. Some commanders, especially the native Normans, opened their gates to the French without any attempt at resistance.

On 9 October Charles and the Bastard of Orleans (now Count of Dunois) encamped on the Seine only a few miles above Rouen. On 16 October the Bastard nearly rushed the walls, but Talbot managed to beat off the assault. However, the Rouennais had no intention of undergoing another siege like 1418 and rioted in the streets. Three days later a mob opened the gates and the entire English garrison took refuge in the citadel. Somerset had only 1,200 men, while ‘no corn, wood, meat or wine had been brought into the city for more than six weeks’ and he had no proper provisions. On 22 October Charles invested the citadel, digging trenches and erecting batteries. ‘Not a little alarmed‘, the Duke went out under a flag of truce to parley with the King, accompanied by forty knights and esquires and wearing ‘a long robe of blue figured velvet lined with sable fur and a hat of crimson velvet trimmed with sable’. Charles was unimpressed and sent him back. The French refused any terms which would not give them Talbot as a hostage. After twelve days of haggling, a surrender was agreed ; Somerset was allowed to retreat to Caen after handing over Talbot and promising to pay a large indemnity. Talbot had to watch glumly from a window as the French King made his ceremonial entry into Rouen, attended by his
Garde Ecossaise.
Shrewdly Charles issued an amnesty, pardoning the city’s clergy, nobles and burgesses. But all English houses, estates and movable goods were confiscated, the new French Seneschal receiving Somerset’s
hôtel.

During the winter the French captured Harfleur, Honfleur and Fresnoy, Bureau’s excellent artillery battering down the walls. Bribery was another powerful weapon. Richard des Epaules, Captain of Longuy in Perche, received £450
tournois
for surrendering his fortress, together with a confirmation of his captaincy—in Charles’s name. John Merbury, Captain of Gisors obtained
£
58
tournois
for yielding Gisors. The Welshman John Edwards extracted no less than £4,500
tournois
(£500 sterling) for La Roche Guyon. By the following spring the English retained little more than the Cherbourg peninsula.

The invasion of Normandy had taken all England by surprise. There was an outcry at the loss of Rouen. £10,000 was sent to Somerset, but no immediate reinforcements. In October 1449 Sir Thomas Kyriell KG, a former Captain of Gisors, began to assemble a force at Portsmouth. Billeted in the hospice called ‘God’s House’, the troops got completely out of control, drinking and robbing, so that because of mutinies and adverse winds Sir Thomas was unable to sail for several months.

Eventually Kyriell landed at Cherbourg on 15 March 1450, with a mere 2,500 men. Instead of marching to relieve Bayeux as ordered, he delayed in the Cotentin to besiege Valognes. (Later Sir John Fastolf was highly critical of this ‘negligently tarrying’, which allowed the French to bring up troops.) Sir Thomas then begged Somerset for more men. The Duke sent what he could—500 from Caen under Sir Robert Vere, 600 from Vire under Sir Henry Norbury and 800 from Bayeux under Sir Matthew Gough. The combined army, just over 4,000 strong and with Gough as second-in-command, finally began to march inland towards Bayeux on 12 April.

The Constable de Richemont and the Count of Clermont planned to intercept them. After Kyriell had crossed the river Vire, by a dangerous causeway four miles long over the estuary, on 14 April he camped in a valley near the little village of Formigny some ten miles from Bayeux. Inexplicably he stayed at his camp throughout the following morning. Early in the afternoon the English outposts suddenly sighted Clermont’s troops advancing down the road from Carentan to the north-west. Sir Thomas hastily formed up his troops—he had about 800 men-at-arms, the rest being archers—in a long line on top of a ridge above the valley, with three wedges of bowmen in the centre and on the wings who planted their stakes in front of them and dug small trenches with their daggers. (Ironically, it was the formation of Crécy and Agincourt.) Their rear was protected by a brook lined with trees and gardens.

Clermont, who himself had only 3,000 men, dismounted them and tried a probing frontal assault. It was easily repulsed, as were mounted charges on the wings. After a frustrating three hours the French brought up two culverins (small cannon) to make the English archers leave their positions. The bowmen did so with a vengeance, running forward and capturing both guns. If Kyriell had followed up now with his men-at-arms, he would have probably won the battle. But the French were allowed to rally. They then attacked the archers in the flank, recapturing their culverins and engaging the English in a general mêlée. The English might still have won—but then the Constable appeared from the south without warning, with 1,200 fresh troops. Clermont disengaged his men to prepare a final charge in conjunction with Richemont. Kyriell must have seen that they were doomed, but he reformed his own troops into a semi-circular line—though this prevented the archers from concentrating their fire—to receive a concerted attack from both the west and the south. The English were already weakened and when the assault came, despite a brave defiance, they were driven back to the brook where they were broken. Matthew Gough and a few men managed to cut their way out and reach Bayeux, but Kyriell was captured and most of his men were slain. Next morning the heralds counted 3,774 English dead. Formigny was the first decisive battle lost by the English since Bannockburn in 1314.

In June 1450, Caen was besieged. After three weeks of bombardment, Somerset surrendered—one of Bureau’s cannon-balls had smashed into a room occupied by the Duke’s wife and children, which no doubt helped to make up his mind. He was allowed to retire to Calais. Vire, Bayeux and Avranches had already fallen. Falaise surrendered on 21 July—in return for Talbot being set at liberty—and Domfront did so ten days later.

The last stand was made at Cherbourg by Thomas Gower, who commanded a garrison of a thousand men. Bureau mounted his batteries on the sand on the seaward side, waterproofing them with greased hides when the tide came in and returning after it had gone out to continue the cannonade. ‘The town received such a heavy battering from cannons and bombards that the like had never been seen before,’ says the anonymous continuator of Monstrelet’s chronicles. Gower fought with determination and many of the besiegers were killed, including the Admiral Prégent de Coëtivy. In England Sir John Fastolf was trying desperately to assemble a new army. But on 12 August 1450 Cherbourg surrendered. Save for the Channel Islands, the French had reconquered all Normandy.

11

The End: ‘A Dismal Fight’ 1450—1453

Talbot’s expedition to Guyenne of 1452—1453 was a final effort by an exhausted England. The campaign demonstrated a revolution in military technology, French cannon proving more effective than English bows. Fittingly, of the two commanders the Frenchman was a self-made man and an artisan, the Englishman a great noble and
preux chevalier.

The English could scarcely believe they had lost Normandy. But refugees were swarming across the Channel. Some of the officials found new posts in England, among them a few Normans—such as Raoul le Sage, Seigneur of Saint-Pierre, and the Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel—while several became royal ‘secretaries of the French tongue’, employed for correspondence with France. Others were not so lucky. Those who suffered most were the soldiers. Sir Andrew Ogard MP
³
did his best to help troops from his captaincy of Caen ; in his will of 1454 he wrote how they ‘came out of Normandy in great necessity as starving beggars’. The chronicler Robert Bate records how a large sum was raised to ship these men to Bordeaux ‘to save and keep the King’s right there’, but the money was embezzled so they had to stay and ‘became thieves and murderers in various places of this land’. It was not only the troops who suffered. In 1452 some ‘churchmen, nobles, soldiers and others’ from Maine petitioned Henry VI for relief; they had had to abandon ‘their many benefices, lands, lordships, estates and pensions’ in Maine and then during the conquest of Normandy had lost the movable goods upon which they and their families depended and ‘at this moment the majority of them are utterly ruined and in a state of beggary’. A note written on the document says that the petition was not granted, adding sombrely that many petitioners had been reduced to destitution, that ‘some for grief became ill and died; others were imprisoned for theft and condemned to death by law ; while others still remain, as rebels, in the Kingdom of France’.

As soon as the French had invaded Normandy a rumour had spread throughout England that the duchy had been sold by Suffolk and his government. In January 1450 the Bishop of Chichester, Adam Moleyns—the former Privy Seal and a close friend of Suffolk—was murdered at Portsmouth by Kyriell’s troops when bringing them their pay, lynched as a traitor who had betrayed Normandy to the French. Before Moleyns died he seems to have said something implicating Suffolk. On 28 January the House of Commons accused the Duke of selling the realm to the French. In February they charged him with taking money for Orleans’s release, plotting a French invasion, accepting bribes to stop reinforcements reaching Normandy and Guyenne, and selling secrets of English defences in France ; in March he was impeached for treasonable relations with the French, corruption and mismanagement. King Henry tried to save him by banishing him, but when Suffolk attempted to flee to Calais in April he was intercepted by a ship called the
Nicholas
(possibly on the orders of the Duke of York); on 2 May he was taken into a dinghy and made to lay his neck on the gunwale, then his head was hacked off with six strokes of a rusty sword.

At the end of May, before Cherbourg had fallen, Jack Cade (or ‘John Amend-all’), a reputed Irishman and undoubted murderer who had served very briefly in Normandy, raised the men of Kent in a peculiarly ugly rebellion. One of their grievances was the betrayal in France, Sir John Fastolf being unfairly accused of running down the garrisons. If there were other reasons, notably corrupt and extortionate government, the loss of Normandy was the spark. This rising, joined by a surprising number of local gentry and even by parish constables, was a far more dangerous affair than the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The rebels reached Blackheath, then retreated before royal troops, but when the King withdrew to Kenilworth they came back, entering London on 3 July, freeing the prisoners in the Marshalsea and storming the Tower of London. There they found the Treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele, whom they dragged off to a tavern in the Cheap where they beheaded him. Many of Cade’s followers were disillusioned by the looting, and after a fierce battle on London Bridge with government troops under ‘the good old Lord Scales’ and Sir Matthew Gough—fresh from Normandy—which lasted throughout the night of 5 July, the rebels fled from the capital. Cade was pursued to Sussex where he was caught and killed.