Graham Turner’s Art – prints, cards and original paintings
Events across the Channel were also conspiring to prevent a lasting peace between France and England in the Hundred Years War. The growing rivalry among the Valois Princes of the Blood was to end by plunging their country into a French Wars of the Roses, and in consequence France would be unable to defend herself against invasion. It was to provide England with her greatest opportunity.
In 1392 Charles VI had gone mad while riding through a
forest, slaying four of his entourage and even trying to kill his nephew. Later
he would run howling like a wolf down the corridors of the royal palaces ; one
of his phobias was to think himself made of glass and suspect anyone who came
near of trying to shatter him. He recovered, but not for long, lucid spells
alternating with increasingly lengthy bouts of madness-‘far out of the way, no
medicine could help him,’ explains Froissart. (The cause may have been the
recently diagnosed disease of porphyria, which was later to be responsible for
George III’s insanity.)
When the King was crazy France was ruled by Burgundy, who
annually diverted one-eighth to one-sixth of the royal revenues to his own treasury.
When Charles was sane his brother Louis, Duke of Orleans, held power, no less
of a bloodsucker than his uncle Philip. Louis hoped to use French resources to
forward his ambitions in Italy, where he had a claim to Milan through his wife
Valentina, the daughter and heiress of Gian Galeazzo Visconti (and a lady ‘of
high mind, envious and covetous of the delights and state of this world’). He
imposed savage new taxes and was also suspected of practising magic, becoming
even more disliked than Burgundy. Frenchmen began to divide into two factions.
Few can have realized that this was the birth of a dreadful civil war which
would last for thirty years and put France at the mercy of the English.
However, fighting did not break out for almost another two decades.
The French were stunned by the news of King Richard’s
deposition. Henry IV hastily sent commissioners to confirm the truce and
Charles VI’s government agreed, although the new English King owed a good deal
of his home support to his repudiation of Richard’s policy of peace. Having
bought time, Henry refused to send little Queen Isabel home. She was only
restored to her family at the end of July 1400, without her jewels or her
dowry; he explained that he was keeping them because King John’s ransom had not
been paid in full.
In fact Henry was desperately short of money. During Richard
II’s reign the average annual revenue from customs duties on exported wool had
been £46,000, but by 1403 it had fallen to £26,000 ; later it rose but only to
an average of £36,000. Calais cost the exchequer £17,000 a year and Henry could
not pay its garrison ; eventually the troops mutinied and had to be bought off
with loans from various rich merchants. Moreover the King was plagued by
revolts by great magnates and by a full-scale national rising in Wales. Henry
IV was therefore in no position to go campaigning in France, though everyone
knew that he hoped to do so one day.
Louis of Orleans believed that the time was now ripe to
conquer Guyenne. In 1402 the title of Duke of Guyenne was bestowed on Charles
VI’s baby son, a gross provocation as Henry IV had already given it to the
Prince of Wales. In 1404, with the approval of the French Council, Louis of
Orleans began a systematic campaign against the duchy and took several castles.
Henry thought of going to the aid of the Guyennois in person, but was only able
to send Lord Berkeley with a small force. In 1405 the situation worsened, the
Constable Charles d‘Albret overrunning the north-eastern borders, the Count of
Clermont attacking over the Dordogne, and the Count of Armagnac advancing from
south of the Garonne to menace Bordeaux. In 1406 the Mayor, Sir Thomas
Swynborne, prepared the ducal capital for a siege after the enemy had reached
Fronsac, Libourne and Saint-Emilion, almost on the outskirts of Bordeaux (and
to the grave detriment of the vineyards). The Archbishop of Bordeaux wrote
desperately to Henry ‘we are in peril of being lost’, and in a later letter
reproached the King for abandoning them. Somehow the Bordelais beat off the
attack, defeating the French in a river battle on the Gironde in December 1406.
The other Guyennois cities were also loyal to the Lancastrians ; even when
occupied by the French Bergerac appealed to the English for protection. When in
1407 Orleans failed to take Blaye (the last stronghold on the Gironde before
Bordeaux), he and his troops, already disheartened by disease and unending
rain, withdrew in despair. Guyenne was left in peace to make a full recovery.
The French offensive had not been confined to Guyenne.
Privateers roamed the Channel and the Count of Saint-Pol raided the Isle of
Wight in 1404, demanding tribute in the name of Richard II’s Queen though with
scant success. An attack on Dartmouth was also unsuccessful while an attempt to
take Calais failed disastrously. In July 1404 Charles VI concluded an alliance
with Owain Glyndwr whom he recognized as Prince of Wales ; but a French
expedition of 1,000 men-at-arms and 500crossbowmen was prevented from sailing
by bad weather. The force which eventually landed at Milford Haven the
following year was too small to be of much use to the Welsh; in any case
Owain’s rising was already doomed. In 1407 dramatic developments in France
precluded any further interference in the affairs of Wales, let alone of
England.
In 1400 the French monarchy had once again appeared to be
the strongest power in western Europe. It was France who mounted the Crusade of
Nicopolis in 1396 to aid the Hungarians against the Turkish onslaught and,
though the crusaders met with a terrible defeat, even to mount such an
operation was a remarkable achievement. Furthermore France still possessed her
own Pope at Avignon. She had tamed Brittany and absorbed Flanders and dominated
the Low Countries. She had also acquired the overlordship of Genoa and was now
engaged on an ambitious Italian policy which might well gain her Milan.
This appearance of strength was the hollowest of façades,
and owed more to the splendour of the French court and of the French Princes
than to reality. For the realm was divided into great apanages as, unlike
England, French duchies and counties were territorial entities, sometimes whole
provinces, which went with the title and constituted semi-independent
palatinates. (The only remotely comparable parallel in England was the Duchy of
Lancaster.) The greedy Valois magnates who held them were usually content to
live in semi-regal splendour in their beautiful châteaux, even if the
countryside around them was still ravaged by routiers. There were two
exceptions, the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans.
Sir John de la Pole, nephew of Richard II’s Lord Chancellor
and father-in-law to the Lollard heretic Sir John Oldcastle, with his wife
Joan, daughter of Lord Cobham. From a brass of 1380 in the parish church at
Chrishall, Essex.
Philip the Bold of Burgundy had died in April 1404, to be
succeeded by his son John the Fearless-so called from gallant behaviour during
the Crusade of Nicopolis. He was a taciturn little man, hard, energetic and
charmless and, to judge from a famous contemporary portrait, singularly ugly,
with an excessively long nose, an undershot jaw and a crooked mouth. In
character, in Perroy’s view, he was even more ambitious than his father and
‘harsh, cynical, crafty, imperious, gloomy and a killjoy’. No one could have been
more different from his refined and graceful, if scandalous cousin of Orleans.
Both Dukes were equally determined to rule France. They were
opposed to each other in almost every important matter of policy. While John of
Burgundy supported the Pope of Rome to please his Flemish subjects, Louis of
Orleans upheld the Pope at Avignon ; John opposed war with England because of
the danger to Flemish trade, but Louis was hot against the English. Council
meetings were wrecked by the Dukes’ loud arguments and recriminations, while
their followers-who constituted two political parties—brawled in the streets.
When the Orleanists adopted the badge of a wooden club to signify Louis’s
intention of beating down opposition, John made his Burgundians sport a
carpenter’s plane to show that he would cut the cudgel down to size. However on
20 November 1407 Duke John and Duke Louis took Communion together, in token of
reconciliation. Only three days later, on a pitch-black Wednesday night and
after visiting the Queen, Louis of Orleans was ambushed as he went down the rue
Vieille-du-Temple ; his hand was chopped off (to stop it raising the Devil) and
his brains were scattered in the road. The Duke of Burgundy wept at his
cousin’s funeral-‘never was a more treacherous murder,’ he groaned—but two days
later, realizing that the assassins were about to be discovered, he blurted out
to an uncle, ‘I did it ; the Devil tempted me.’ He fled from Paris and rode
hard for Flanders.
France, and especially Paris, divided into two armed camps-Burgundians
and Armagnacs. The latter took their name from their leader, Bernard, Count of
Armagnac, whose daughter had married Louis’s son, Charles of Orleans. The
Burgundians drew their strength from the Parisian bourgeoisie and academics,
while the Armagnacs were what might be called the party of the establishment
and included the greater royal officials, a few of the richer bourgeoisie, most
of the nobles outside John’s territories and the other Princes of the Blood. In
1408, having hired a theologian from the Sorbonne to justify his cousin’s
assassination-on the grounds that he had been a tyrant-John returned to Paris
and extracted a pardon from the King. He then set up as a champion of reform,
promising to reduce the high taxes imposed by Louis, and secured the execution
of the Chancellor of the royal finances. By 1411, after purging the
administration and by well-placed gifts, especially to the important Guild of
Butchers, Burgundy had won control of Paris. The Armagnacs assembled an army
and with the Duke of Berry (Charles V’s last surviving brother) blockaded the
capital.
John of Burgundy then had recourse to Henry IV, offering the
hand of his daughter for the Prince of Wales, four towns in Flanders (including
Sluys) and help in conquering Normandy, in return for troops. In October 1411,
800 English men-at-arms and 2,000 archers marched out from Calais under the
Earl of Arundel. Henry had meant to lead them himself, but was prevented by
chronic ill-health. The English expedition soon joined John and 3,000 Parisian
militia at Meulan. The combined force stormed the Armagnac strongpoint at
Saint-Cloud and broke the blockade. Arundel and his men then went home.
Led by old Berry, the Armagnacs now made their own bid for
English aid. In May 1412, in return for the use of 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000
archers for three months, they offered the eventual cession of all Aquitaine as
it had been in 1369, with the immediate surrender of twenty fortresses on the
Guyenne border. In August Henry’s second son, the Duke of Clarence, landed in
the Cotentin and marched down towards Blois. Here, however, he received news
that Burgundian troops had invaded Berry’s territory and forced the Armagnacs
to surrender, and that all the French Princes including Burgundy were declining
any sort of military assistance from England. Undeterred, Thomas of Clarence
crossed the Loire and went through the wild and marshy Sologne and down the
Indre valley. The English were only bought off by the Princes with a promise of
210,000 gold crowns (over £34,000), 75,000 of which were to be paid
immediately, together with seven important hostages as surety for the balance.
The English leaders also extracted individual payments. Clarence asked for
120,000 crowns and received 40,000 and a gold crucifix worth 15,000 (with a
ruby as the wound in the side and three diamonds as the nails in the hands and
feet). His cousin the Duke of York wanted 40,000 crowns and was given 5,000
together with a gold cross of Damascus work valued at 40,000. Sir John Cornwall,
King Henry’s brother-in-law was paid in full 21,375 gold crowns. (It must have
been this money which paid for Sir John’s new house at Ampthill in Bedfordshire
; it was built ‘of such spoils as it is said that he won in France’, recorded
Leland.) Nothing could have been better calculated to excite the greed of the
English aristocracy and put them in mind of those wonderful sums extorted from
the French by their fathers and grandfathers. Clarence and his army then went
on to winter in Bordeaux, burning and slaying en route in the good old style.
Meanwhile in northern France the Calais garrison had taken
advantage of Clarence’s chevauchée to attack and capture Balinghem. It provided
yet another fortress in the March of Calais to add to the ring of strongpoints
which defended the precious English bastion.
Even John of Burgundy now became nervous about the
possibility of a full-scale English invasion. He summoned the Estates to meet
in Paris to grant new taxes to pay for defence. When the Estates began to criticize
his government, John retaliated by unleashing his Paris butchers who, led by
their leader Caboche, began a reign of terror which lasted for several weeks
and was aimed as much against the rich as the Armagnacs. So murderous were
their excesses that many bourgeois turned against Duke John and invited the
Dauphin and Princes to come and save them. In August 1413, after a vain attempt
to kidnap Charles VI, John the Fearless of Burgundy had to abandon Paris to the
Armagnacs and Count Bernard’s ferocious Gascons, and went home to spend the
next few years in his own semi-kingdom. Already he and the Armagnacs had ruined
France. For on 20 March Henry IV had breathed his last in the Jerusalem Chamber
at Westminster Abbey and there was a new King of England—Henry V.
