The Monks of War (32 page)

He boasts of his nation’s military superiority:

O noble English, that could entertain
With half their forces the full pride of France,
And let another half stand laughing by,
All out of work, and cold for action.

Indeed,
King Henry V,
despite anachronisms, accurately reflects how fifteenth-century Englishmen felt about the Hundred Years War.

In April 1443 Beaufort’s nephew, John Earl of Somerset, was made Captain General of France and Guyenne. It was a political appointment, as the Cardinal wanted to overshadow York. To add insult to injury the Council coolly asked York to ‘take patiens and forbere him for a tyme’ about the £20,000 he had spent on the War from his own pocket. Somerset, one of the most incompetent commanders of the entire War, landed at Cherbourg with 7,000 troops and led a seemingly aimless
chevauchée
through Maine and into Brittany. He refused to tell his plans to his captains, saying fatuously : ‘I will reveal my secret to no one. If my shirt knew my secret I would burn it.’ (Basin comments that even his shirt was incapable of divining something which did not exist.) His one positive action was to seize the Breton town of La Guerche, which he only returned to its Duke for a cash payment; it was not the best way of ensuring Brittany’s neutrality. After a few weeks he returned to England where he found himself a laughing-stock and was banished from court. He died shortly afterwards, some said by his own hand.

Yet the idea of a
chevauchée
was not altogether foolish. In 1435 that old vulture Sir John Fastolf, realizing that England could no longer afford the expense of long sieges, had proposed that two small armies of 750 men each under good generals should be sent on
chevauchées
every year from June to November, ‘burning and destroying all the lands as they pass, both house, corn, vines, and all trees that bearen fruit for man’s sustenance’, together with all livestock that could not be driven off. The object was to bring the enemy ‘thereby to an extreme famine’. However, his advice was not taken and English strategy generally continued to centre round holding and retaking strongpoints.

Fastolf’s career was one of the success stories of the Hundred Years War and is one of the best documented. He was born in 1380, the son of an esquire to Edward III. As a boy he was a page to the Duke of Norfolk. When he came of age in 1401 he inherited only a few farms near Caister and some tenements in Yarmouth, which gave him a total income of £46 a year. In 1409 he improved his finances by marrying Millicent Scrope, the elderly widow of a brother officer, but he gained more from the War, from offices, ransoms and loot. In 1413 he was made deputy constable of the castle and town of Bordeaux, in 1422 one of the King’s Counsellors in France, at a salary of £110, a post which he held until he left France in 1440. He was later Grand Master of the Duke of Bedford’s household. He held over twenty offices at various towns, including the Captaincy of Le Mans, the governorship of Maine and Anjou and finally the governorship of the Channel Islands. After his retirement from active service at the age of sixty, the Council continued to consult him on military matters (though like many other military advisers his advice does not seem to have been taken). His most spectacular coup, the capture of the Duke of Alençon at Verneuil in 1424, brought him prize-money worth £13,000 and with some of this he built his castle at Caister ; its tower had five stories of fine, large rooms with arcaded fireplaces and a summer and a winter hall with rich tapestry hangings. In 1445 his properties in Normandy were still worth £401 a year, though their value had been reduced by enemy raids ; they included ten castles, fifteen manoirs and an inn at Rouen. He foresaw the loss of Normandy and sold some of them. Even after losing the remainder, when he died in 1459 he was worth £1,450 a year from his English estates, nearly all of which had been purchased with his profits of war. The little Norfolk squire, who even at thirty-five had been only an esquire and household man to the Duke of Clarence, had become a Knight of the Garter, a French baron, and had he lived longer would almost certainly have become an English baron as well. In character he was typical of all too many English soldiers of the period. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ wrote a contemporary who had crossed him, ‘and for the most part without pity or mercy.’

Both Fastolf and the humblest archer profited from the systematic sharing of loot, which was strictly enforced. Henry V’s ordinance of 1419 had confirmed the existing practice which continued until the very end of the War. ‘All maner of captaynes, knyghtes, squyres, men of armes, archers, what so euer they shall be bounde to paye the iijde parte of all theyre gaynes in warre faithfully, and wythout fraude, to theyre imediate captayne or maister, in payne of lesing the hooll.’ This applied to anyone accompanying the troops, ‘physiciens, surgens, barbors, marchauntes, and suche lyke’, who must hand in any plunder to a senior officer. A document survives which lists down to the smallest sum the profits of war made in the year 1443—1444 by the garrison of the fortified islet of Tombelaine, in the sea opposite Mont-Saint-Michel, ‘in the retinue of the high and powerful lord, my lord the ... Earl of Somerset, Captain of the said place’. The archer John Flourison (a Frenchman by his name) ‘took a horse; sold for 6 gold
saluts
... took a prisoner ransomed for 12 gold
saluts
’, while the archer Roger Mill ‘won a sword sold for 37 shillings and 6 pence
tournois’.
The total of the archers’ profits was £28 17s 6d tournois (£3 4s 2d sterling), a third going to the men-at-arms ; of which third a third went to the captain, and of this captain’s third a further third went to the King. All was carefully registered by the garrison controller’s clerk and deputy, and then certified again by the controller himself under his seal.

By 1444 Cardinal Beaufort, grown very old, had withdrawn from politics. But his faction retained control, its leader being the Earl of Suffolk, whom Warwick had despised and whose régime was as harsh as it was incapable and corrupt, he and his greedy colleagues ruthlessly using their position to extort money, estates and commercial privilege, even employing their retinues to overawe law courts and seize desirable properties. Yet there was a better side to Suffolk ; he was a poet and even something of a mystic, loyal to his friends, and in his own incompetent way he tried to serve his King. After fighting in France for many years—with notable lack of distinction—he now agreed with the majority of the Council that England must make peace at all costs and would be lucky to retain Normandy and Guyenne.

Early in 1444, having first asked the Council for a formal indemnity from any blame, Suffolk led an embassy to a conference at Tours. The French were not prepared to make any concessions. In desperation Suffolk offered to surrender Maine in return for a two-year truce, presumably hoping to reach a lasting peace within that time ; he dared not make this clause public and so it was kept secret. He also betrothed King Henry to King Charles’s niece, the sixteen-year-old daughter of René of Anjou, titular King of Sicily.

News of the Truce of Tours was greeted with xenophobic fury throughout England. However, it was received very differently by the English in France—with ‘immense and indescribable joy’ according to Basin. This was the first break in hostilities since 1419, and after being ‘shut up for years behind town walls or in castles as though condemned to life imprisonment, living in fear and danger, they were marvellously happy at escaping from their long incarceration’, and ‘gave themselves up to dancing and feasting with yesterday’s enemies’. Basin’s description suggests what uncertain, claustrophobic and altogether terrifying lives the English must have led in Lancastrian France.

Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou were married in 1445. The beautiful foreign Queen, dark-haired and strong-willed, was hated from the very beginning, partly because she was a Frenchwoman and partly because of her support for Suffolk and her enmity towards the Duke of Gloucester. It was said that England had bought a Queen ‘not worth ten marks a year’, while in a contemporary English chronicler’s opinion : ‘Fro this tyme forward King Henry never profited ne went forward, but fortune began to turn fro him on al sides.’ Margaret speedily dominated her feeble, gullible husband, ensuring that he supported Suffolk, who was created a Duke in 1448. She also pressed Suffolk to honour his pledge to surrender Maine. News of the new Duke’s secret promise had, after all, leaked out, infuriating the English still further. They had reason to be angry; most of Maine was peaceful and apparently even loyal, while between its capital, Le Mans, and Alençon, the frontier made by the river Sarthe was held by a line of strong castles. But at the end of 1445 King Henry promised the French that he would give up Maine by the following April, the truce being extended until April 1447.

Before Maine could be surrendered, Gloucester and York would have to be muzzled. The former had already lost considerable prestige after the condemnation of his Duchess, Eleanor Cobham, in 1441 on a charge of trying to kill the King by witchcraft so that her husband could succeed to the throne. Moreover old Cardinal Beaufort had turned King Henry against his uncle. But Suffolk had to make sure. After circulating a rumour that Gloucester was about to rise in revolt, he arrested him without warning at Bury St Edmunds on 18 February 1447 : probably he died of a stroke brought on by rage, but public opinion believed that Suffolk had murdered the ‘Good Duke Humphrey’. The Duke of York, now heir presumptive to the throne, was recalled from France and sent to Ireland to keep him out of the way.

York was succeeded as Lieutenant-General at Rouen by the Duke of Somerset. On 16 March 1448, despite the unwillingness of their captains, Le Mans and the Maine fortresses were surrendered by specially appointed English commissioners. The truce between England and France was extended until April 1450.

Even in these last years the English behaved as though Normandy would stay in their hands permanently. Henry VI went on granting titles; as late as 1446 Sir William Bourchier, the Captain of Calais, was made Count of Eu. Perhaps there were fewer Englishmen in the duchy than might have been expected ; many settlers had intermarried and some had returned to England—at Harfleur in 1449 there were only 500 English compared with 10,000 put there by Henry V in 1416. But a generation of Normans had known no other government and were genuinely loyal to their English Duke ; there were Anglo-Normans now, just as for three centuries there had been Anglo-Gascons and Anglo-Irish. Indeed, Rouen may well have seemed more English than Dublin. The most solid symbol of Lancastrian rule was the beautiful gold
salut,
or Anglo-French crown, which continued to be struck until 1449.

England kept fewer troops than ever in the Norman garrisons. Moreover, arrears of pay caused mutinies and a stream of desertions which reduced the number still further : Henry VI’s annual revenue amounted to barely £30,000, when his household cost £24,000 a year and the Crown’s debts had grown to nearly £400,000.

By contrast, France’s finances were in good order. Charles VII’s officials had reintroduced the special taxes levied at the end of John II’s reign and were collecting them with a fair degree of success. Further, the rich merchant and tax-farmer, Jacques Coeur, was the King’s
argentier—
pay—master of the household—and could supply unlimited liquid cash. Indeed Coeur had amassed sufficient capital to finance campaigns on a truly vast scale.

Charles was already spending large sums on military reform, raising a standing army. In 1445 an edict established fifteen companies of 100 ‘lances’, each lance a unit of six men—a man-at-arms, two archers and three armed supernumeraries. By 1446 Charles had twenty such companies. Someone who saw them marvelled how ‘the men-at-arms were all armed with good cuirasses, armour for their limbs, swords and sallets [light helmets] and most of the sallets were adorned with silver’. The most radical innovation was that the troops were kept on in peace-time and not, as hitherto, dismissed at the end of every short period of hostilities. A real attempt was made to enforce some sort of discipline and to stop the men from living off the country and from levying the
pâtis,
and they were paid regularly every month. In 1448 another edict ordered the raising of 8,000 ‘franc-archers’ ; every parish had to contribute and equip a crossbowman or archer. Such troops were only paid in wartime but were exempt from taxes in time of peace. Charles also spent much money on artillery and acquired a remarkable master gunner, a Maître Jean Bureau, whom he commissioned to modernize his cannon. Previously the English system of indentured soldiers under contract had produced a professional fighting force infinitely superior to the undisciplined levies of France. But now the odds were in favour of the French with this new, full-time, properly paid army.

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.