A Great and Glorious Adventure (42 page)

Clermont knew better than to attack the English on their own ground and instead brought up two light cannon, intending to blow the archers away. The guns opened fire and the archers did indeed
leave their position, but only to charge the guns, capture them and drag them back to the English line. This would have been the time to unleash the arrow storm, but instead Kyriell did nothing,
perhaps through overconfidence, and that gave the French time to reconsider. At this stage, the constable of France, Richemont, arrived from St Lô with his division of 1,200 men and
immediately threw them into a flank attack from the south on the archers. With enemy in front and enemy to the left, Kyriell could only form his men into a rough semi-circle and hope for the best.
The French closed and engaged the English in savage hand-to-hand fighting and numbers began to tell; the English were forced back against the brook and the killing began. Kyriell was captured and
many of his men butchered, with only a handful managing to escape to Bayeux. It was the first major English defeat for nearly forty years. In June of the same year, Caen fell, followed by Falaise
in July, and finally, on 12 August 1450, Cherbourg surrendered and Normandy, except for the offshore islands, was gone. A relief force commanded by Sir John Fastolf never left England.

Now only Aquitaine was left, and, sure enough, in late 1450, the French invaded. Initially, there was resistance; Aquitaine had been English since the twelfth century and most Guiennois had no
wish to change that, but, in the absence of a sizeable English army, garrisons began to fall. The following year, another French army attacked, and, on 30 June 1451, Bordeaux fell,
Bayonne following on 20 August. The new French tactics of cannon and bribery of minor nobles were working, and in England there was dismay and confusion. There the magnates were at
odds with each other and with the weak king; the rebellion in Kent led by Jack Cade – a far more serious affair than the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – had only just been
put down, money was short, and charge and counter-charge as to who was to blame for the French debacle were being flung around, sometimes with violence. There was only one man whose reputation was
unsullied and who could restore the situation: John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, now an old but still vigorous man of sixty-six, who had been released from French captivity with his ransom paid. In
September 1452, he was ordered to take an army to Aquitaine and restore English rule.

Talbot landed at the mouth of the River Gironde on 17 October 1452 with around 2,500 men and marched on Bordeaux. There the citizens rose in revolt, expelled the French garrison and opened the
gates to the English. The rising spread, as much against French oppression and taxes as in loyalty to the old regime, and at first it seemed that the status quo ante might be restored.
Reinforcements for Talbot arrived and a Gascon contingent was raised. But Charles VII spent the winter concentrating a new army, and, in the spring of 1453, he launched it into Aquitaine. On 17
July 1453, Talbot marched to the relief of the town of Castillon with around 8,000 men and attacked the French artillery redoubt, a deep ditch with a bank behind it on which were mounted cannon
– no longer the old bar-and-hoop type but with barrels cast in bronze or brass and a few even in iron.

The recent invention of the powder-mill meant that the gunpowder used was far more reliable and allowed a much higher muzzle velocity than that available in the earlier years of the war. And, as
the guns were sited to produce cross-fire, the result was a murderous hail of iron and stone at a very short range. Even then, the fighting went on for nearly an hour as Talbot’s men tried
desperately to cross the ditch, climb the bank and get at the cannon, but, when a Breton force of around 800 infantry suddenly arrived and attacked Talbot’s right flank, the end was only a
matter of time. Talbot was an easy target: he was the only mounted man, he was not wearing armour (one of the conditions for his release from captivity), and he had an obvious tabard with his coat
of arms. A cannon-ball felled his horse, and he was killed by a French infantryman with an axe. Large
numbers of English were killed and the pursuit went on as far as
Saint-Émilion, thirty miles away. Although nobody would have forecast it at the time, it was the last battle of the Hundred Years War. There were no more troops to send from an England riven
with internal strife, and, on 19 October 1453, Bordeaux surrendered. Now there was only Calais, and the great adventure was over.

Nobody in England thought that the withdrawal of 1453 was the end of the struggle to retain English France; the French had huge problems trying to control Aquitaine, and, in
1475, Edward IV took an army to France but allowed himself to be bought off by the French Louis XI. From the 1450s, however, with Henry VI alternating between madness and weak and ineffective rule,
the focus of English military energy turned inwards, and English armies, hardened and brutalized by the fighting in France, slaughtered each other in a vicious civil war that went on for
thirty-three years. The dynastic struggles for the throne between descendants of Lionel of Antwerp, third son of Edward III, and those of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, were finally
settled at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor, with only a very tenuous blood claim to the Lancastrian inheritance, defeated and killed Richard III, a direct descendant of
Lionel.
¹⁰¹
It would not be until nearly 300 years later that Sir Walter Scott would name this period the Wars of the Roses.

With the Tudor dynasty firmly in place, war with France resumed. Henry VII of England supported French rebels in what was termed the ‘mad war’ – actually a civil war –
from 1488 to 1491. His son Henry VIII
sent a probing expedition to Aquitaine in 1512 and, when that met with inglorious defeat, followed it up the following year with an
army of 25,000 men that invaded from Calais. Despite a stunning English victory at Thérouanne – called the ‘Battle of the Spurs’ because of the number of spurred French
knights killed – a peace treaty in 1514 gave England little, and raids from Calais into Picardy in 1522 and 1523 produced no lasting gain. An alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in
1542 led to the capture of Bolougne by English troops in 1544, and, even after Charles made a separate peace with France, Henry VIII’s and later Edward VI’s soldiers withstood repeated
French attempts to capture the town, until it was returned to France as part of a peace settlement in 1550. Then, in 1557, Mary Tudor brought England into the war between France and Spain on the
side of her Spanish husband Philip II, and, in the following year, a well-planned French attack on the weak garrison of Calais lost England’s last outpost in Europe.

The Hundred Years War had changed English society and attitudes profoundly. At its start, English nobles thought of themselves as Europeans; they had lands on both sides of the Channel, they
spoke a form of French, they travelled to and fro, they married into cross-Channel families, and they owed religious allegiance to the pope. By the end, they thought of themselves as English, they
spoke English, they owned little outside England, and they were increasingly suspicious of any theological direction from abroad. English hooliganism abroad and xenophobia within may not have
started with the Hundred Years War, but they were certainly confirmed and hardened by it. The war did make many individuals very rich, but it also very nearly bankrupted the national treasury. The
effort of sending the last expedition of 2,500 men under Talbot in 1452 to relieve Bordeaux was the equivalent of despatching an expeditionary force of 50,000 today; in 2012, we had very great
difficulty in maintaining a mere 10,000 men in Afghanistan.
¹⁰²

Militarily, the advances in England were enormous. The old amateur feudal system was swept away and replaced by a regular, professional army. As professional armies are expensive, they would
always be small, but they
consistently defeated far larger but badly led French armies whose activities were uncoordinated and undisciplined. Only when the French, very late
in the day, began to copy the English system did the vast differences in population and national wealth begin to take effect. The experiences of such a long period of sporadic campaigns were to lay
the foundations for the English, and later the British, way of waging war. Professionalism would stay. In the civil war of the mid-seventeenth century, both royalists and parliamentarians initially
attempted to conscript; it did not work, was regarded as an unacceptable imposition on free-born Englishmen and was abandoned. It took great debate and much deliberation before conscription was
imposed halfway through the First World War and it was stopped once peace was declared; and, although imposed again for the Second World War and for some fifteen years after, it was always intended
as a short-term and temporary stop-gap. Britain would wage her wars with career servicemen wherever possible, and most British soldiers looked, and still look, with disdain at European pressed men.
Indeed, a further reason for the success of English arms in France in the Hundred Years War was the steady supply of good junior and middle piece officers, not, as was the case in the French army,
promoted for their breeding or their influence, but for their professional ability: England was and still is a class-ridden society, but that class system was and is mobile and men did and do move
up (and down) according to their merits. England had a host of military heroes, France only the very overrated du Guesclin and the mystic child Jeanne d’Arc.

After the withdrawal from France, England, and later Britain, developed into a world power at sea, which was natural enough for an island nation. As Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, Earl St
Vincent, said in 1803 when asked about the possibility of a French invasion, ‘I do not say they cannot come – I do say they cannot come by sea’ – a remark repeated by the
heads of the Royal Navy in 1914 and in 1940. An essential for the success of a necessarily small army is the use of technology as a force multiplier, and this was rarely forgotten by English and
then British generals: from the longbow to the Baker rifle to the machine-gun to the tank, any advantage that would substitute machines or weapons for men was seized upon. A major lesson from the
Hundred Years War was that a small nation with a professional army may be able to win its battles, but it
takes many more men to hold ground than to win it in the first
place. In her future wars, Britain would only operate on land as part of a coalition.
¹⁰³

France, very far from being a united country when Edward III stated his claim in 1337, was almost so by the end of the war. In the face of constant invasion from across the Channel, the
occupants of Artois, Burgundy, the Île de France and even, albeit reluctantly, Brittany began to think of themselves as Frenchmen first, with provincial loyalties being replaced by a wider
affinity, and there can be little doubt that the war accelerated nation-building there. It also created a reservoir of hatred of the ‘goddams’, the English who ravaged their lands.
There cannot have been a town of any size in northern France that was not plundered, burned, attacked and despoiled by English soldiers, many of them over and over again, and, when the soldiers
were not fighting over their fields and in their streets, the
routiers
were extracting loot and the English garrisons protection money.

In subsequent years, fighting the French seemed the natural occupation of English and then British armies. Elizabeth I sent troops to France to help the persecuted Huguenots. And, while for much
of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) England was mainly concerned with her own internal troubles leading up to the English Civil War, she was always ready to prick the French when an opportunity
arose, and one of the causes of the civil war was a perceived French influence over Charles I through his French wife Henrietta. Among the reasons for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, followed
almost immediately by English participation in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97), was the pro-French foreign policy of James II. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)
saw British troops under the great John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, inflict massive defeats on the French and their allies. An uncharacteristic alliance with France during the War of the
Quadruple Alliance (1718–20) only came about because Spain was seen as the greater threat, but the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–8) saw a reversion to the usual line-up. The
Seven Years War (1756–63) brought
vast British overseas territorial gains at the expense of France, although French support for the rebellious American colonists from
1775 to 1783 was a major factor in the establishment of the United States.

Then, in 1793, began the longest period of sustained warfare in modern British history. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lasted until 1815 with only two short breaks in 1802/3, when
the English claim to the French throne was dropped, and from April 1814 until March 1815, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo in June of that year. That war was always referred to as the
‘Great War’ until supplanted by an even greater slaughter from 1914 to 1918. Even as recently as the twentieth century we have fought each other. The Royal Navy crippled the French
Mediterranean Fleet at Mers el Kebir in July 1940 (after which the French attempted unsuccessfully to bomb Gibraltar) and then went on to attack the French port of Dakar in September of the same
year. In June and July 1941, British and Indian troops fought a vicious campaign against Vichy French soldiers in Syria, and again in Madagascar from May to November 1942, while the Anglo-American
Operation Torch landings in 1942 in French North Africa were stoutly resisted until the defenders realized the hopelessness of their situation.