A Distant Mirror (51 page)

Far from clouding his name, Coucy’s departure from France rather than take part in the war, and his steadfast neutrality thereafter, were considered the epitome of honor on both sides, and served him well by protecting his estates from English attack. During Knollys’ raid through Picardy of 1370, “the land of the lord of Coucy abode in peace, nor was there any man or woman of it that had any hurt the value of a penny if they said they belonged to the lord of Coucy.” If they were robbed before their identity was made known, they were paid back by double the amount. A French knight, the Chevalier de Chin, took rather unchivalric advantage of this known immunity by carrying a banner bearing the Coucy arms into a furious scrimmage in Picardy in 1373. He caused great marvel among the English at the sight of his banner, for they said, “How is it that the Lord Coucy hath sent men hither to be against us when he ought to be our friend?” Yet such was the confidence in his honor that they did not believe the banner and forbore to take reprisals against his land “nor burn nor do any damage there.”

Charles’s planned strategy was avoidance of major battle while exerting scattered military action at every vulnerable point, with as much pressure as possible concentrated on Aquitaine. To recover Castile as an ally, he sent Du Guesclin back to Spain in 1369 with spectacular result. In a “marvelous grete and ferse batayle” near Toledo the two half-brothers Don Enrique and King Pedro fought with awful ax strokes hand to hand, “each cryinge theyre cryes,” until Pedro was overcome and captured. Froissart always prefers the noble version, but, according to a Spanish and possibly better-informed chronicler, the capture was effected less honorably. Surrounded and trapped in a castle, Pedro conveyed an offer to Du Guesclin of six fiefs and 200,000
gold dobles if he would convey him to safety. Feigning acceptance, Bertrand led the King out secretly and promptly turned him over to Enrique. Confronted by his brother, Pedro “set his hand on his knife and would have slayne him without remedy,” had not an alert French knight seized him by the leg and turned him upside down, whereupon Enrique killed him with a plunge of his dagger, and recovered the crown.

For France the result was the invaluable addition of Castilian sea power, and for England a renewed fear of invasion that cramped her effort overseas. Thereafter one mischance after another befell the English cause. The Black Prince was invalided by a contagious dysentery that spread among the English and Gascons and, in his case, gave way by a cruel irony to dropsy. With swollen limbs, he was “weighed down by so great infirmity of body that he could scarcely sit upon his horse,” and as he grew heavier and weaker could not mount and was confined to bed. For the paragon of battle, the man of action and incomparable pride, to be incapacitated at 38 by a humiliating disease was maddening, the more so when the situation he commanded was deteriorating. The Prince fell into rage and ill-temper. Before these came to a tragic climax, the next mischance arose.

In the wind of national feeling, French nobles were answering the crown, turning back transferred castles, forming small forces of 20, 50, or 100 men-at-arms to recover towns and strongholds in ceded territories. In one such skirmish early in 1370 at Lussac between Poitiers and Limoges, Sir John Chandos, seneschal of the region, with a company of about 300 clashed with a French force at a hump-backed bridge over the river Vienne. Dismounting to fight on foot, he marched to meet his enemies “with his banner before him and his company about him, his coat of arms upon him … and his sword in his hand.” Slipping on the dew-moistened ground of early morning, he fell and was struck by an enemy sword on the side of his blind eye so that he failed to see the blow coming. The sword penetrated between nose and forehead and entered the brain. For some unexplained reason, he had not closed his visor. Stunned to extra ferocity, his men beat off the enemy and, after blows and bloodshed, turned directly to tears with all the facility of medieval emotion. Gathering around the unconscious body of their leader, they “wept piteously … wronge their handes and tare their heeres,” crying, “Ah, Sir John Chandos, flowre of chivalry, unhappily was forged the glaive that thus hath wounded you and brought you in parell of dethe!”

Chandos died the next day without recovering consciousness, and the English in Guienne said “they had lost all on that side of the sea.”
As the architect and tactician of English victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Najera, Chandos was the greatest captain of his side if not of both sides. Although the French rejoiced at the enemy’s loss, there were some “right noble and valiant knights” who thought it a common loss, for an interesting reason. Chandos, they said, was “so sage and so imaginatyve” and so trusted by the King of England that he would have found some means “whereby peace might have ensued between the realms of England and France.” Even knighthood knew the craving for peace.

A few months later the Black Prince came to his last act of war. Territories were slipping from his hands, gnawed by forces under the Duc d’Anjou, the King’s energetic lieutenant in Languedoc, and by other forces under Du Guesclin. In August 1370 Charles’s policy of piecemeal negotiation with towns and nobles regained Limoges, whose Bishop, although he had taken the oath of fealty to the Black Prince, easily allowed himself to be bought back by the Duc de Berry, lieutenant for the central region. For a price of ten years’ exemption from excise taxes, the magistrates and citizens were glad to go along. Limoges raised the fleur-de-lys over its gates, and after due ceremony Berry departed, leaving a small garrison of 100 lances, too small to avert what was to follow.

Enraged by the “treason” and vowing to make the city pay dearly for it, the Black Prince determined to make an example that would prevent further defections. Commanding from a litter, he led a strong force, including two of his brothers and the elite of his knights, to assault Limoges. Miners tunneled under the walls, propping them with wooden posts which when fired caused sections of the wall to collapse. Plunging through the gaps, the men-at-arms blocked the city’s exits and proceeded on order to the massacre of the inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Screaming with terror, people fell on their knees before the Prince’s litter to beg for mercy, but “he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them” and they passed under the sword. Despite his order to spare no one, some great personages who could pay ransom were taken prisoner, including the Bishop, upon whom the Prince cast “a fierce and fell look,” swearing to cut off his head. However, by a deal with the Prince’s brother John of Gaunt, the Bishop escaped to Avignon, carrying with him the fearful tale.

The knights who watched or participated in the slaughter were no different in kind from those who wept so piteously for Chandos, but the obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. Chandos was bewailed because he was one of themselves, whereas the victims of Limoges were
outside chivalry. Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body, after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?

In customary punishment, Limoges was sacked and burned and its fortifications razed. Though the blood-soaked story, spreading through France, doubtless cowed resistance for the moment, it fostered in the long run the hatred of the English that fifty years later was to bring Joan of Arc to Orléans.

A hero’s career ended in the vengeful reprisal at Limoges. Too ill to govern, the Prince turned the rule of Aquitaine over to John of Gaunt, and at the same time suffered the death of his eldest son, Edward, aged six. In January 1371 he left Bordeaux never to return. With his wife and second son, Richard, he went home to six more years of the helpless life of an invalid.

With France now holding the initiative, England’s military strategy was mainly negative. The object of Sir Robert Knollys’ savage raid through northern France in 1370 was to do as much injury as possible in order to damage the French war effort and hold back French forces from Aquitaine. His forces could rob villages and burn ripe wheat in the fields as they marched, but could take no fortified places nor provoke frontal battle. Without prospect of either ransoms or glory, his knights grew disaffected as they neared Paris, yet their threat was sufficiently alarming to cause the appointment of Du Guesclin as Constable in October.

A record of being four times taken prisoner suggests either a rash or an inept warrior, but Bertrand was not a reckless plunger of the type of Raoul de Coucy. On the contrary, he was cautious and wily, and a believer in wearing down the enemy by deprivation and attrition, which was why Charles chose him. His first act was to conclude a personal pact with a formidable fellow Breton, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, called “the Butcher” from a habit of cutting off arms and legs in battle. The Breton team and its adherents harassed and pursued Knollys, and when his company was split by the defection of discontented knights, defeated it in combat on the lower Loire. Snapping and biting here and there, or buying off English captains too strongly installed, Du Guesclin’s forces liberated piece by piece the ceded territories.

Crucial advantage was won at sea in June 1372 by the Castilians’ defeat of an English convoy off La Rochelle. The English ships were bringing men and horses to reinforce Aquitaine and—more critically—£20,000 in soldiers’ pay, said to be enough to support 3,000 combatants
for a year. Informed by his spies of the expedition, Charles called upon his alliance with King Enrique. The Castilian galleons of 200 tons propelled by 180 oars manned by free men, not chained criminals, were more maneuverable than the square-rigged English merchantmen, which could not tack but only sail before the wind. The Spaniards were commanded by a professional admiral, Ambrosio Boccanegra, whose father had been admiral for Don Pedro but, with a sharp eye for the Wheel of Fortune, had changed sides at the right moment. The English commander was the Earl of Pembroke, a son-in-law of King Edward, aged 25 with a bad moral reputation and no known naval experience. Sailing into the bay, his ships were rammed by the Castillans, who sprayed the English rigging and decks with oil which they ignited by means of flaming arrows. From high poops or “castles” taller than the enemy’s, they threw stones down upon the English archers. In a two-day battle the English ships were burned, routed, and sunk. Among other losses, the vessel carrying the money was sent to the bottom.

Loss of the money weakened England’s hold of Aquitaine, which depended on payment of troops. Castilian control of the sea endangered communication with Bordeaux and, worse, opened the way to French raids on English shores. With just that in mind Charles was at this time developing a naval base and shipbuilding yards at Rouen, where the largest ships could ride up the Seine with the tide. Rather than wait to be attacked at home, the aging King Edward, now sixty, swore to go overseas himself “with such puissance that he would abide to give battle to the whole power of France.”

Assembling another fleet by the usual method of “arresting” merchant ships with their own masters and crews, and taking with him the ailing Black Prince and John of Gaunt, King Edward sailed with a large force at the end of August 1372, ready to brave the Castilians, only to be defeated by the weather. Contrary winds that prevailed for nine weeks repeatedly turned back the fleet or held it in port until it was too late in the year to go. The King had to give up the attempt at a cost of enormous expenditure in provisions and equipment, in pay and maintenance of mariners and men-at-arms, in cessation of trade and economic loss to the shipowners, and, not least, in growing discontent with the war.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft
rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

The naval fiasco led indirectly to the tragic fate of England’s third great soldier, the Captal de Buch. While Edward’s fleet floundered offshore, the French were recovering La Rochelle and its hinterland, and in the course of these combats the Captal was taken. He was caught at night by a Franco-Castilian landing party under the command of Owen of Wales, a protégé of France claiming to be the true Prince of Wales. Though the Captal fought mightily by torchlight, he was overpowered. Contrary to chivalric custom, Charles held him in prison in the Temple in Paris without privilege of ransom. The fate of the Captal became the wonder and dismay of knighthood.

Political purpose was more important to Charles V than the chivalric cult. He had never forgiven the Captal’s defection after the Battle of Cocherel in 1364, when the Captal at first turned French, in response to Charles’s grant of large revenues, and then relapsed. His heart belonged to his companion in arms, the Black Prince, and when war was renewed in 1369, he repudiated his homage to the King of France, gave back the properties, and rejoined the English. Charles was now determined to keep him out of action.

Although King Edward offered to exchange three or four French prisoners with ransoms worth 100,000 francs, Charles refused absolutely to let the intrepid Gascon be ransomed, even though he had been the rescuer of Charles’s wife and family at Meaux. While the Captal languished, French nobles pleaded with the King not to let a brave knight die in prison, but Charles said he was a strong warrior who, if free to fight again, would recover many places. Therefore he would release him only if he would “turn French,” which the Captal refused to do. On being once more petitioned by a group of which Coucy was this time the spokesman, the King reflected a little and asked what he might do. Coucy replied, “Sir, if you asked him to swear he would never again take up arms against the French, you could release him and it would be to your honor.”

“We will do it if he will,” said the King, but the gaunt and weakened Captal said “he would never take such an oath if he had to die in prison.” Left to that choice, never again to know his sword, his horse, or his freedom, he succumbed to depression, wanted neither to eat nor drink, gradually sank into coma, and died after four years in prison in 1376.