A Distant Mirror (65 page)

Clisson came of a turbulent family embattled on both sides in Brittany. His father, discovered in dealings with Edward III, had been beheaded by Philip VI, who had him arrested in the middle of a tournament, thrown in prison, and conducted almost naked to his execution without trial. The victim’s wife was said to have carried her husband’s severed head from Paris to Brittany to display before her seven-year-old son and exact his oath of vengeance and eternal hate for France. Then in an open boat, storm-tossed and starving, they escaped to England, where Edward, who was making every effort to win the loyalty of the Bretons, showered favor and properties on the widow and son.

Olivier was brought up at the English court along with the young Jean de Montfort, his Duke, whose jealousy and dislike he reciprocated. While he displayed a noble’s haughty manners, reinforced by an inflated opinion of himself, Clisson was called at one time “the churl” for his coarse language. Pursuing his vowed revenge, he fought against the French with incredible ferocity at Reims, Auray, Cocherel, and Najera in Spain. He wielded a two-handled ax with such force that it was said “no one who received his blows ever got up again,” although he failed to avert the enemy ax that cut through his helmet and took out his eye. In the course of the war in Brittany, Montfort enraged Clisson by favoring Sir John Chandos, and when he rewarded Chandos with a town and castle, Clisson denounced the Duke in terrible wrath, assaulted and razed the castle intended for Chandos, and used the stones to reconstruct his own.

Charles V had returned to him the lands confiscated from his father and wooed him with gifts, even sending him venison “as to a friend.” Whether it was these material persuasions or, as Olivier claimed, the
arrogance of the English toward the French that he could no longer suffer, he turned French in 1369 and redirected his ferocity against his former associates. It reached a peak when he learned that his squire, wounded and captured by the English, had been killed as a prisoner on being discovered to belong to Clisson. Olivier swore a great oath never “by the Mother of God throughout this year, neither in the morning nor in the evening, to give quarter to any Englishman.…” The following day, though lacking siege engines, he attacked an English stronghold with such fury and took it with such slaughter that no more than fifteen defenders were left alive. After locking them up in a tower room, Olivier ordered them released one by one, and as each came through the door he struck off his head with a single blow of a great ax and thus, with fifteen heads rolling at his feet, avenged his squire.

The cool-headed Coucy and the savage Breton must have found a complement in each other, for these two powerful barons, according to Clisson’s biographer, “remained always in the most perfect harmony.” At this time Coucy had just lost in shocking circumstances his companion from the Swiss campaign, Owen of Wales. While Coucy was in Normandy, Owen was conducting the siege of Mortagne on the coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Arising early on a clear and lovely morning, he sat on a stump in his shirt and cloak, viewing the castle and countryside, as was his habit, while having his hair combed by his Welsh squire, James Lambe. This man had recently been taken into his service as a compatriot who brought him tidings of his native land and told him “how all the country of Wales would gladly have him to be their lord.” Standing behind his master on the still morning before others were abroad, James Lambe plunged a Spanish dagger into Owen’s body, “stabbing him clean through so that he fell down stark dead.”

The assassin’s hand was certainly hired by the English, possibly to remove a focus of agitation on the Welsh border, or, as contemporaries believed, in reprisal for the miserable death in prison of the Captal de Buch, originally captured by Owen. If so, it was a surprisingly dishonorable blow upon an unarmed man, as recognized by the English captain inside besieged Mortagne to whom Lambe reported his deed. “He shook his head and beheld him right felly and said, ‘Ah, thou has murdered him.… But that this deed is for our profit … we shall have blame thereby rather than praise.’ ” On the French side, Charles V, though terribly angered, did not altogether regret the removal of Owen, a freebooter not guiltless of nefarious deeds of his own. His
murder reflected a new kind of animosity growing out of the war. Suborned assassination within the brotherhood of knights was an innovation of the 14th century.

Halfway through the Normandy campaign Coucy had been sent to strengthen the defense of the frontier with Flanders, where new dangers threatened. The Count of Flanders, whose boyhood loyalty had been so strongly French when he ran away from Isabella, had long since been brought by economic interests to favor the English. He appeared as a threat when he gave asylum to the Duke of Brittany, who had repudiated French vassalage and rejoined the English. King Charles now decided to rid himself of the problem of Brittany once and for all by confiscating the dukedom from Montfort on grounds of “felony” toward his sovereign. In the belief that most Breton nobles were pro-French, he planned to unite the dukedom with the crown of France under Montfort’s rival Jeanne de Penthièvre, but instead of suppressing the Breton nest of hornets, he succeeded only in arousing it.

In December 1378, at a ceremonial Court of Justice with the King seated in “royal majesty,” Montfort was tried before the peers of the realm—in absentia, since he ignored the summons. The twelve lay and twelve ecclesiastical peers of France were an elastic body in which successive barons of Coucy sometimes figured and sometimes did not. Froissart specifically refers to Enguerrand VII as a “peer of France,” and on this occasion he was one of four barons seated “on the fleur de lys” along with the peers of royal blood and a superabundance of eighteen prelates including four “mitred” abbots. The royal usher, after summoning Montfort aloud three times—at the entrance to the chamber, at the Marble Table in the courtyard, and at the gate of the palace—duly reported back that “he is not there.” The Procurator then read the indictment, citing the Duke’s treasons, crimes, “injuries and vexations,” including the murder of the priest sent to summon him. (After the Visconti fashion, Montfort had the messenger drowned in the river with the summons tied around his neck.) Following a juridical argument at enormous length of the rights and claims to the dukedom, Montfort’s title was declared null, and the King announced Brittany’s union with the crown.

Charles’s error was at once made clear by a rebellious outburst in the independent-minded duchy, even among the pro-French party. The endless quarrel came alive again, and since Montfort was conniving with the Count of Flanders and both of them with England,
Charles feared the possibility of a new invasion across the northern frontier. In this situation, the domain of Coucy guarding the northern gateway came into focus.

In February 1379 the King sent his Treasurer, Jean le Mercier, and an official with the title of Visitor General of Royal Property to survey the barony of Coucy with instructions “to look and advise and report the estate of the said seigneur.” In March, after receiving Mercier’s report, Charles went himself on a week’s tour of Coucy-le-Château and other castles and towns of the domain. Evidently ailing, the King watched from his litter the “joyous chase of deer” in hunts organized in his honor. Whether Enguerrand was present to welcome his sovereign is nowhere recorded, and the absence of mention suggests he may have been in the north assembling forces for defense, or in Normandy at the siege of Cherbourg.

The King was, however, accompanied by the court poet Eustache
Deschamps, who immediately produced a ballade extolling the marvels of the barony. A master of the verbal acrobatics of the French verse of his time, yet a realist and satirist at heart, Deschamps described himself as the “King of Ugliness” with the skin of a boar and the face of a monkey. He had entered royal service from humble birth as a simple messenger, advancing to usher-at-arms, bailiff, and
châtelain
of royal properties and, in the next reign, Steward of Water and Forests and ultimately
Général des finances
. Ready to turn out poetry for any occasion—a total of 1,675 ballades, 661 rondeaux, 80 virelais, 14 lays, and miscellaneous pieces—he now described in verse the “strongholds for men of valor” in Coucy’s many castles of St. Gobain, St. Lambert and La Fère, the parks of Folembray, the lovely manor St. Aubin, the falcons’ chase of herons, the famous
donjon:

It has been surmised that Charles had in mind the eventual purchase of Coucy, placing the crown in control of the greatest stronghold of the north. Purchase of great fiefs was not unprecedented; Coucy himself had thus indirectly acquired Soissons. Yet how he might have been
adequately compensated for so great an estate or why he would be expected to comply with the King’s desire remains obscure. The fact that he had no son and only a single female heir, the other being irrevocably English, may have been a consideration.

The marriage of Marie, sole heiress to the barony, was then being negotiated. At thirteen she was one of three candidates, along with Yolande de Bar, a niece of the King, and Catherine of Geneva, a sister of Pope Clement, who were prospects for the recently widowed son of the King of Aragon. Such places were not left empty for long. Eight days after the death of his wife, the Spanish prince dispatched envoys to Coucy, to the Duc d’Anjou as Yolande’s uncle, and to the Count of Geneva, with instructions to arrange matters as soon as possible with any one of the three. When Yolande was chosen, Marie afterward married Yolande’s brother Henri de Bar, eldest son of the Duc de Bar and of Marie de France, sister of Charles V. Alliance with the heir to a great duchy on the borders of Lorraine maintained the high level of the Coucys’ marital connections.

Whether Enguerrand was influenced by this new royal connection or by pride in his success in Normandy, he created at this time his own Order of Chivalry called, in the grand manner of the Coucys, the Order of the Crown. As indicated by Deschamps, who celebrated the order in a poem, the Crown was meant to symbolize not only grandeur and power but the dignity, virtue, and high conduct that surround a king. The points of its circle were the “twelve flowers of authority”: Faith, Virtue, Moderation, Love of God, Prudence, Truth, Honor, Strength, Mercy, Charity, Loyalty, and Largesse “shining on all below.” After 1379, Coucy’s seals display a patterned background of tiny crowns and a standing figure holding a crown—with some now uncertain significance—upside down. However elevated in name, the Order was democratic in spirit: it admitted ladies, demoiselles, and squires to membership.

In 1379 Isabella de Coucy died in England leaving Enguerrand free to remarry. Less precipitate than the Prince of Aragon, or too occupied in urgent affairs, he did not fill her place for seven years. Nothing came of the King’s visit to his barony at the time, but the crown’s interest remained active.

A new reign in England brought the English no better fortunes in the war. The easy mastery of the Channel that Edward III had once enjoyed was lost, thanks to Charles’s steady alliance with the sea power of Castile and his own program of shipbuilding. When a force led by
the Duke of Lancaster finally succeeded in landing near St. Malo in Brittany, the situation of Cherbourg was reversed. Held by the French, St. Malo defied siege and wore out the Duke until he went home in a cloud of failure. “And the commons of England began to murmur against the noblemen, saying how they had done all that season but little good.” Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King’s Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.

At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers’ Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King’s leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third Estate with the less than adequate performance by the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame the nobles or win knightly fame, but “in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country.” Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country’s defenders was none the less valid.

With ill-success on both sides in the war, both desired peace. Reopening of hostilities in Brittany had counterbalanced for France her success in Normandy, and the schism raised the temperature of hostility everywhere. Aware of failing health, Charles V did not want to leave the quarrels with Brittany and England a burden upon his son. The parleys after King Edward’s passing had closed without result and evidently in bad feeling. To avoid mutually irritating debates, it was proposed to convene separately the next time: the English at Calais and the French twenty miles away at St. Omer, with the Archbishop of Rouen acting as go-between. Postponed by the schism, this plan was adopted for a renewed effort in September 1379.

Coucy, Rivière, and Mercier with one or two others were the French plenipotentiaries at this parley, and they were also delegated to meet with the Count of Flanders at Arras in the hope of inducing him
to mediate a settlement with the Duke of Brittany. Before they could accomplish anything, the Count was caught up by a local
revolt that, surmounting every repression and involving every faction, was to plunge Flanders into ruinous civil war.