The Plantagenets (67 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
It was hardly surprising that in the face of these onerous demands and Lancaster’s bullish negotiating tactics, the peace talks collapsed. John II’s envoys argued that to grant away such vast swathes of France would put the king in breach of his coronation oath. Rather than finding a peaceful accommodation, both sides prepared for the resumption of war, and by the autumn of 1355 Edward had two large invasion forces organized – one under his own command and another under the Black Prince – to teach John II the same lessons his father had learned at Crécy and Calais in 1346–7.
Of the two armies that sailed for France in late 1355, only the Black Prince’s stayed very long. The king landed at Calais in late October, unsuccessfully petitioned John II to meet him in battle, and returned to England, scornful at the French king’s refusal to fight, by 12 November. For the rest of the winter he concentrated on leading troops in a terrible
chevauchée
around the Lowlands of Scotland, inflicting such misery on the local people and putting so much of their land and property to the torch that January 1356 became known as the ‘Burned Candlemas’.
The devastation caused in the Lowlands, however, could not compare to that wreaked upon south-west France by the Black Prince and his companions. Throughout the spring of 1356 it became clear that a showdown between John II and the English was inevitable. The Black Prince had wintered at Bordeaux, and the frontiers of English Aquitaine were littered with armed companies – some in the pay of the prince, others released from service in the army and operating as
freebooters. In May, another English force under the duke of Lancaster was sent to Normandy, and caused havoc in several important Norman towns before retreating out of John’s reach. There was widespread disgruntlement among the French aristocracy, and the king was beginning to face open opposition from his cousin Charles ‘the Bad’, king of Navarre and count of the Norman province of Evreux, who wished to depose John II and place the dauphin on the throne. Charles was arrested in April 1356 for his impertinence, but his brother, Philip of Navarre, crossed to England in August, held talks with Edward III at Clarendon and did liege homage to the English king as ‘king of France and duke of Normandy’. The pressure on John II to make a decisive move against the English was becoming intolerable.
The moment arrived on 19 September 1356, in fields outside the city of Poitiers. The Black Prince’s army consisted of 6,000–8,000 English and Gascon men; it was split as was now conventional into three divisions, with the prince commanding the middle. The French outnumbered the English–Gascon army by perhaps as much as two to one. Nevertheless, the English were well drilled and organized, in contrast to John II’s undisciplined and fractured army. Although the French had learned some of the lessons of Crécy, and were preparing to deploy their men-at-arms on foot in a defensive formation rather than wasting them in suicidal cavalry charges, they lacked the leadership to make their numbers and tactical plans tell. As the prince’s men traversed the French front line, passing behind thick hedges, two French commanders were goaded into attack. Traditional cavalry charges were sent against the English van and rearguard. They were slaughtered as they tried to cut through the bushes that protected their enemies.
It was the beginning of a day of unparalleled carnage for the French, in a defeat that would not be rivalled until the battle of Agincourt in 1415. During heavy fighting they lost more than 2,000 men, including the duke of Bourbon, the constable of France, one of the two marshals and the carrier of the Oriflamme – the sacred red battle standard of the French army which was said to have been
dipped in the blood of St Denis. Almost as many French noblemen were captured, including the king’s youngest son Philip, the archbishop of Sens, numerous counts, the other of the two marshals and – most disastrous of all – John II himself. The English lost no more than a few hundred men, and took prisoners worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was the most crushing defeat ever inflicted by a Plantagenet prince over a Capetian or Valois king, and it crowned for ever the glorious military legacy of the Black Prince. A banquet was given at the English camp following their victory, at which the legions of French prisoners were toasted and honoured with the greatest chivalric deference by the prince and his noble captains. John II was lauded as a great king who had fought more bravely than any other man on the field. But beneath the knightly courtesy, the political reality was clear: France was in crisis, while the English, who began to refer to the Black Prince informally as King Edward IV, were totally ascendant. The hostages taken at the battle of Poitiers were sent back to the king in England, who began to plot their ransom – a deal that would finally achieve the aim of re-establishing the lost Plantagenet empire in France.
By January 1358, following long and complex peace negotiations, John II’s ransom was set at 4 million gold écus – an impossible £666,666 – a ransom that, even allowing for inflation, made Richard the Lionheart’s look puny. Alongside it was a draft Treaty of London, along much the same lines as the failed Treaty of Guînes. In addition to the huge ransom, Edward’s price for abandoning his own claim to the French Crown was to be sovereignty over Aquitaine, Saintonge, Poitou, Limousin in the south and Ponthieu, Montreuil and Calais in the north. It might have been sealed by both sides, had events in France not sharply deteriorated: radical reformers in Paris chased the dauphin from the city and Charles of Navarre, now freed from prison, offered a deal to the English in which France would be partitioned, with Edward taking the Crown and around two-thirds of the realm’s territory. In the summer of 1358 a mass popular rebellion known as the Jacquerie tore through northern France, with the aim of destroying noblemen and knights, whom they blamed for betraying the
realm. Chroniclers reported ghastly atrocities as ordinary men and women took bloody revenge on their social superiors. One chronicler, Jean le Bel, recorded peasants killing a knight and roasting him on a spit, gang-raping his wife and force-feeding the unfortunate lady and her children the roasted flesh of their husband and father.
Another French chronicler, Jean de Venette, left a vivid description of the countryside during the late 1350s. He described the area of his birth near Compiègne, which had been ruined by relentless English attacks:
The vines in this region … were not pruned or kept from rotting … The fields were not sown or ploughed … There were no cattle or fowls in the fields … No wayfarers went along the roads carrying their best cheese and dairy produce to market … Houses and churches no longer presented a smiling appearance with newly repaired roofs, but rather the lamentable spectacle of scattered smoking ruins to which they had been reduced by devouring flames … The pleasant sound of bells was heard indeed, not as a summons to divine worship but as a warning of hostile intentions, in order that men might seek out hiding places while the enemy were yet on the way … Every misery increased on every hand, especially among the rural population … Yet their lords did not … repel their enemies, or attempt to attack them, except occasionally.
Seeing the lamentable condition of the enemy, by November 1358 Edward was no longer convinced that peace was the best option. He began to plan for a third massive invasion. He was temporarily dissuaded by the personal pleas of his prisoner John II, who petitioned him successfully for a second draft to the Treaty of London. In this the king’s ransom remained at 4 million écus; but the list of territories to be awarded to the Plantagenets in full sovereignty now included Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Boulogne, along with the overlordship of Brittany.
As the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Paris approached, Edward was pressing for its final obliteration, and a return to the
heyday of Henry II and Richard I’s supremacy over Philip Augustus. Unsurprisingly, the second draft Treaty of London was utterly rejected in Paris. In summer 1359 invasion plans were made; in October the king, the duke of Lancaster and the Black Prince led an army of around 10,000 men, split into three divisions, out of Calais and south-west towards the seat of French kingship at Reims. It was the most provocative target they could have picked: for at Reims lay the cathedral where French kings had been crowned since Louis I in
AD
816. Moreover, the town was just a few days’ march from Paris; if it should fall to the English king, then he would certainly have himself crowned as Edward I of France, spelling the completion of his march to supremacy over the kingdom.
Fortunately for the French, Reims was stoutly defended, and Edward abandoned his attempts at a siege in January 1360, after spending just five weeks before its walls. Rather than attempting to conquer Reims, he agreed an alliance with the duke of Burgundy, and set out for Paris, in the hope of drawing the dauphin into a pitched battle. Wisely, the dauphin refused to be tempted into following two previous generations of Valois kings and risking his freedom and sovereignty against English men-at-arms and archers. He stayed in Paris, and in April Edward was forced to march his army, weakened by plague and tired from several months in the field, back in the direction of Brittany. As they marched back west, they were caught outside Chartres in a powerful thunderstorm, which destroyed a large part of the baggage train. Hailstones large enough to kill horses fell from the sky in a day so ghastly as to be later dubbed Black Monday. For once, fortune had turned against the king of England. There was to be no Crécy or Poitiers in 1360; instead, peace talks were opened in the village of Brétigny on 1 May. By 8 May they had concluded. Edward accepted a treaty by which he took sovereign control of Aquitaine, Poitou, Saintonge and Angoumois in the south and Ponthieu, Montreuil, Calais and Guînes in the north. He gave up his claim to the French throne, and reduced John II’s ransom to 3 million écus. John agreed to stop supporting the Scots against the English and Edward to cease aiding the Flemings who regularly rebelled against
France. Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine all remained part of the French kingdom. It was not the grand re-establishment of Henry II’s empire which had once seemed possible; but it was a triumph nonetheless.
Edward returned to England in time for Christmas in 1360, to proclaim and celebrate the peace – the achievement of almost everything he and his allies had fought for since 1337. Parliament was called in January 1361 and duly ratified the peace. On St George’s Day at Windsor in 1361 Edward’s sons Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt and Edmund of Langley were all admitted to the Order of the Garter in recognition of the service they had given in the wars. (Edward’s youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, who had been born in 1355, had been the nominal regent of the realm during the king’s more recent absences.) The country was given over to celebrating the apparent end of a war that had consumed much of the country for twenty-three years.
In France, the mood was bleak. King John had been released on 5 December 1360 to return to France and raise his ransom, for which the first-ever gold franc (the
franc à cheval
) was minted. But the realm was devastated: overrun with English mercenary companies who had been disbanded from Edward’s armies and were now, with the end of the war, in need of occupation. They found this chiefly in inflicting continued misery on the inhabitants of Brittany and the south-west, capturing villages and castles before selling them back to their unlucky inhabitants. The legacy of Edward III’s reign seemed to have been set: while England basked in the sunbeams of triumph, France lay devastated, crippled for a generation by John II’s ransom, and territorially dismembered. And indeed, a high point in Plantagenet history had been reached. What was astonishing was the speed with which fortune’s wheel turned, and the age of glory fell spectacularly apart.
Age of Revolution
(1360–1399)
My God, this is a strange and fickle land
– RICHARD II (ACCORDING TO ADAM OF USK)
On 13 November 1362 Edward III celebrated his fiftieth birthday. As he faced old age, he could feel proud of his achievements. He was phenomenally rich, a powerful and famous king, who had shaped England in his own image: legal, cultural, military and visual. And if he was riding towards the twilight of his years – the life expectancy for Plantagenet kings was somewhere around sixty – he was doing so in style.
He and Queen Philippa lived in splendour and luxury. Enriched by the massive bounty and the large ransom payments they had won from the French, Edward led a truly regal existence. The king and queen’s households were merged in 1360, in recognition of the fact that after the Treaty of Brétigny the former would not be travelling as it used to around makeshift camps on the Continent. Thousands of pounds were spent on tournaments and jewels, falcons and dogs, fine clothes and lavish living. As the fortieth anniversary of Edward’s accession approached, his court spent one of the first protracted intervals of peacetime in an endless round of feasting and partying.
Much of the vast royal treasure was spent overhauling many of the king’s residences. Windsor castle was the showpiece. Directed by his talented, humble-born new minister William of Wykeham, the king had been spending vast sums (£8,500 a year in the mid-1360s) on redesigning Windsor as a monument to martial kingship and courtly love. Old buildings were torn down and vast, luxurious new royal halls, chapels and chambers were built in their place. Vaults and marbled cloisters connected splendid apartments. (Queen Philippa
alone had four personal chambers under construction, one for sleeping, another a chapel for prayer, a third decked with mirrors and a fourth for dancing.) And this was only one of the royal homes, to be lived in when the king and queen were not at their leisure in any number of splendid palaces and hunting lodges dotted about the Thames valley and the New Forest.