A Distant Mirror (67 page)

For reasons that remain enigmatic, Coucy declined the appointment. The reason he gave the King was that in order to hold Brittany, the Constable should be someone well known to, and familiar with, the Bretons—such as Clisson, whose appointment Coucy advised. His excuse, by itself, seems unconvincing. Clearly the problem of Brittany was crucial; nevertheless, if a settlement had to be reached with Montfort, Coucy himself, as Montfort’s former brother-in-law, was more likely to achieve it than Clisson, Montfort’s mortal enemy. Coucy and Montfort had both been married to daughters of Edward III, and though both wives were dead, the link established a relationship of importance in the Middle Ages, and in fact determined the choice of Coucy as mediator in the next reign.

Something is missing from Coucy’s explanation. It is improbable that, like Dante’s Pope, he made “the grand refusal” from a sense of inadequacy to the task. Modesty was certainly not a mark of the Coucys, and Enguerrand VII, judging by his seals and his Order of the Crown, held himself very highly. He accepted without hesitation all other assignments—battle, diplomacy, secret missions, foreign war, domestic governance—that crowded upon him, including the final one that was to cost his life. He was one of the nobility forced by the growing complications of public affairs to become statesmen, not merely swordsmen on horseback. Coucy’s rank, prowess, and territorial importance would have warranted military command in any case, but other qualities were making him indispensable to the crown. Intelligence, tact, skills of rhetoric, and a noticeable level-headedness were coming to be more useful than the traditional mindless impetuosity of the knight in the iron cocoon.

Why then did he refuse the Constableship? The fact that Marshal Sancerre, to whom it was offered next, likewise refused it suggests some motive common to both, perhaps connected with the King’s failing health. Charles V was, in fact, within two months of his death, and the advancing shadow may have been apparent. With the Dauphin a minor and the prospect of the King’s three rapacious, ambitious, and mutually hostile brothers vying for control of the Regency, the Constableship may have appeared likely to be politically dangerous for the occupant. Coucy could lose more than he might gain from it. Unlike Clisson, who was to accept the post, he avoided making enemies, nor, with his great lands and ancient ancestry, did he need the office for power and position.

Upon his refusal, the King appointed him Captain-General of Picardy and gave him the town, castle, and seigneury of Mortaigne on the northern frontier between Tournai and Valenciennes to ensure that this outpost would be held in strong hands. He was also named to the Regency Council for the Dauphin, on whose account Charles was increasingly troubled since the death of the Queen. Owing to the royal Dukes’ resistance to Clisson, the Constableship was left for the moment unfilled.

On the day Coucy took command of Picardy, July 19, 1380, the Earl of Buckingham landed at Calais and, with a force known from paymasters’ records to number 5,060, began a march of devastation and plunder through the region for which Coucy was now responsible. To raise the cost of the expedition, the English crown had resorted to a tithe on the clergy and an export tax on wool and hides, but as the proceeds were not yet in hand, the King had to pawn the crown jewels
for £10,000, which was sufficient only for the start. Thereafter the men-at-arms were to be paid from pillage en route. Because naval losses had reduced shipping, the expeditionary force had to cross “little by little,” taking two weeks for the whole force to complete the one or two days’ sail across the narrow neck of the Channel to Calais. The much longer sail directly to Brittany was precluded.

Buckingham’s raid was to prove virtually a replica of Lancaster’s seven years before—an open-eyed walk into privation, hunger, and ultimate futility. The strategic objective was to bring support to Montfort in Brittany and regain England’s footholds there. Buckingham, however, like Lancaster before him, instead of going directly toward his objective, took a long way around to the east through Champagne and Burgundy, in quest of combat and booty. Since the same tactics brought the same results as before, the question arises: Why this mad persistence?

Thomas of Buckingham himself is part of the answer. Aggressive and ruthless by temperament and “wonderfully overbearing” in manner in the same way as his brother the Black Prince, Buckingham resented Lancaster’s arrogation of power and saw himself carrying on the valor and glory of his father and eldest brother. Englishmen still felt themselves to be living in the triumphant era of Poitiers and Najera. “The English,” said Clisson after he left them, “are so proud of themselves and have had so many good days [at war] that they think they cannot lose.”

England’s most experienced soldier, Sir Robert Knollys, and other famous knights such as Lord Thomas Percy and Sir Hugh Calveley accompanied Buckingham to France. What beckoned them and younger men was personal opportunity for clash of arms, for reputation and profits, and for whatever punishment they could inflict upon France. For poor knights, squires, and yeomen, war was livelihood; as Buckingham argued, “They can better live in war than in peace, for in lying still there is no advantage.” Most knights went to war to “advance themselves,” as they put it. National strategic aim was not in their minds, and Brittany hardly more than an excuse.

With a force half men-at-arms and half archers, the English rode through Artois and northern Picardy keeping close order in case of French attack. “They shall have battle before they finish their march!” Coucy assured French knights who brought him intelligence of the enemy’s route, although he knew well enough that battle was enjoined by the King.
Charles V was not to be swerved from his philosophy of war. Not being a fighter himself, he was not prevented by personal pride from employing the lessons of experience, nor did he hesitate to
hurt the pride of chivalry by reminders of past defeats. His own initiation into war on the awful day of Poitiers had left a permanent mark. If a mystique of success enveloped the English in the conviction that “they could not lose,” Charles suffered from the opposite psychology. From the major clashes of the early part of the war, he had concluded that the delivery of armed force could not be reliably directed and that war was too important to be left to the chances of battle.

From headquarters at Péronne on the Somme, Coucy issued a general summons to all knights and squires of Artois and Picardy. The documents show him moving from place to place, at Hesdin, Arras, Abbeville, and St. Quentin, holding reviews and deploying units for defense of towns, “for he was anxious that no loss should be suffered from any negligence on his part.” How far Coucy, as a man of the sword, agreed with the King’s policy is moot; he carried out orders to avoid battle while following Buckingham’s march, even when it left a trail of burning villages through his own domain, but certain actions show that he shared the knights’ impatience to break through the agony of restraint.

Parties of French knights kept close to the English line of march to hamper foraging, and this proximity opened tempting opportunities for combat. Although one report describes the French as
immobilis quasi lapis
(immovable as stones), skirmishes were unavoidable, from which on the whole they did not carry off the honors. In one case, a fierce fight lasting an hour on horse and foot, the English took eighteen prisoners from a French party of thirty; in another the French, perceiving the enemy stronger, sounded retreat and fled. “The horses felt the effect of the spurs and very opportunely did these lords find the barriers [of their town] open,” but not before fifteen had been captured. Another party of thirty English, “seeking to perform some deed of arms,” set forth at dawn with their foragers, but were meanly frustrated of their main purpose when a group of important French lords escaped them. “God!” they cried, “what fortunes would have been ours if we had taken them, for they would have paid us 40,000 francs.”

When the countryside was stripped, the English demanded food from the towns under threat of attack. Refused by Reims, secure behind its walls, they retaliated by burning sixty surrounding villages within a week. Discovering several thousand sheep herded into ditches outside the city walls, the English sent men to drive them out under cover of their archers, who shot so keenly that no one from Reims dared to venture out or even appear on the bulwarks. Under renewed threat by the English to burn the fields of ripe grain, the citizens now delivered to them sixteen loads of bread and wine.

In this manner Buckingham advanced to Burgundy, where 2,000 French knights and squires had assembled in a mood to throw off the King’s restraints and fight. The leading nobles of the realm—Bourbon, Coucy, the Duc de Bar, the Comte d’Eu, Admiral Jean de Vienne—were present under the command of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Armed head to foot and with battle-ax in his hand, the Duke in bellicose spirit reviewed his forces. Heralds rode out from both sides with challenges to deeds of valor. Still the King from his chamber prohibited battle unless the French found themselves in decisive superiority. Burgundy did not dare defy his wishes, but the restraints broke when an English squire was killed in a fracas. In answer to the enemy’s challenge, a body of knights, including Coucy, engaged the English in a strenuous fight outside the gates of Troyes. The outcome was inconclusive, Buckingham moved on, the French followed, pleading with the King not to let the enemy slip through their hands. Charles replied only, “Let them alone; they will destroy themselves.”

At the Loire the French had gathered the advantage in numbers. Coucy and his companions were determined, “whether the King willed it or not,” to give battle before the English crossed the Sarthe into Brittany. Meanwhile Charles, negotiating while the armies marched, had persuaded the city of Nantes, key to Brittany and pro-French, not to admit the English and to declare loyalty to France without reference to Montfort. In the first week of September the English crossed the Sarthe and in that week Charles entered his last illness. The secretion from the abscess on his arm dried up, heralding death, and physicians and patient accepted the signal. Moved by litter to his favorite château of Beauté on the Marne, Charles sent for his brothers and brother-in-law—excepting Anjou, whom he hoped to keep at a distance from the Royal Treasury—and prepared to make dispositions for the journey of his soul.

Philip the Bold hastened to Paris, and Coucy likewise because of his responsibility as a member of the Regency Council. Anjou, who was kept apprised of events by partisans in Paris, hurried up from Languedoc, whether wanted or not.

The King suffered physically in his last days, but his mental anguish was heavier. Two things weighed on his conscience: his part in the schism and the questionable legality of his taxation. He had stretched temporary grants by the Estates into ten years of continuous taxes, and though he had used them for defense of the realm and the “public weal,” he had filled the royal coffers in the process and bought the allegiance of nobles with the people’s tax money. How would he answer to God? He had raised France from a “heap of ruins”; he had
canceled—except for Calais—the English conquests made in the time of his father and grandfather; he had uprooted Navarre permanently from Normandy; and if peace had receded from his grasp, he had, by the steady pursuit of national purpose, justified the loyalty of all who had felt themselves French in the hour of choice.

But had he bought recovery at the price of the people’s misery? The uprising in Languedoc had revealed the cost, and Charles was aware, through tax-collectors’ reports, of angry mutterings closer to home. Oppression of his subjects reacted upon the fate of his soul, for a sovereign’s illegal taxes could arouse the Divine wrath, and the complaints of those he had wronged would follow him to the judgment seat. In his own time the unknown author of the allegory
Songe du Vergier
(Dream of the Woodsman) branded as tyrants all princes who burdened their subjects with “taxes impossible to bear,” and theologians warned rulers that they should cancel all exactions and make restitution to great and small if they hoped for salvation. That hope dictated the King’s last act.

Within hours of death, fully dressed and laid on a chaise-longue before a perturbed group of prelates, seigneurs, and councillors representing the three estates, the King in a fading voice spoke first of the schism. He insisted in a troubled and rambling defense that he had sought to follow “in this as in all else, the surest road,” that “if ever rumor should say that the Cardinals acted under the inspiration of the Demon, you may be sure that no consideration of kinship dictated my choice but solely the statements of the said Cardinals and the advice of prelates, clerics and my councillors”; finally, that he would obey a decision of a General Council of the Church and “God could not reproach me if in my ignorance I acted contrary to a future decision of the Church.” It was the declaration of a very worried man.

At the door of death in the Middle Ages, the trembling traveler, more often than not, felt required to repudiate what he had done in life. When it came to taxes, the most conscientious sovereign of his time repudiated the exercise of kingship. He announced the terms of an ordinance to “abate and abolish” the hearth taxes, “as from here on, and it is our pleasure, wish and order by these same letters, that they shall no longer be current in our kingdom and that from now on our said people and subjects shall not pay any of them but shall be quit and discharged.”

Other, indirect taxes existed, but the hearth tax was the basic property tax on which the financial system rested. To decree that it should “no longer be current” was to deceive the people and deprive his successors—supposing the decree were to be carried out—of the means of
governing. Charles’s act was not an aberration. Sovereigns before him had been known to cancel taxes and return subsidies illegally exacted, and deathbed donors regularly made restitutions and established foundations that, if carried out, would bankrupt their families. Charles had amassed a huge fortune for his son, but by 1380 the theory that the King could live of his own domain was a ragged fiction. A regular financial footing, as Charles knew all too well, was government’s greatest need. In the chill of death, his soul’s need was stronger.