Shakespeare's Kings (7 page)

For reasons not entirely clear,
²
the army encamped for thirty-six hours on the beach before setting off to the north-east, burning and plundering as it advanced. The unwalled towns of Barfleur and Carentan and the city of Caen were taken and sacked, and Rouen would have suffered the same fate - leaving the English in uncontested control of the lower Seine — had not the French army arrived just in time to save it. Edward had neither the time nor the money for a long siege; instead he wheeled to his right — allowing Philip to think he might be making for Gascony after all - and crossed the Seine at Poissy, birthplace of Saint Louis and site of one of the French King's favourite country palaces, in which Edward celebrated the Feast of the Assumption,

making free of his cousin's best wines. Then he reverted to his original course towards Picardy and the Low Countries. He had a stroke of luck when he reached the Somme: the bridges were down, but it was low tide and his army was able to cross at a shallow ford just before the waters rose to block off the pursuing French. This twelve-hour respite was a godsend, giving him time to find a suitable defensive position and to rest his men before the confrontation he had long been awaiting. He found it at Crecy, some twelve miles north of Abbeville on the little river Maye, with a valley - known as the Vallee des Geres - in front of him and thick woods behind. He himself took command of the centre, with.the Earl of Northampton commanding his left wing and, on his right, in the care of Sir Godfrey d'Harcourt and Sir John Chandos, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales.
¹

The French cavalry numbering some
8,000
,
supplemented by
4,000
hired Genoese crossbowmen and other mercenaries from Poland and Denmark, arrived late in the afternoon of Saturday
26
August, following a heavy shower of rain. The infantry was still some way behind. For that reason alone an immediate engagement was not to be thought of, and after a brief personal reconnaissance King Philip ordered the attack deferred until the following day; but the knights in his vanguard ignored him, continuing to press forward up the hill until the English archers, no longer able to resist the temptation, loosed their first volley. By then it was too late to retire; the whole army was committed and the battle had begun. The Genoese advanced with their crossbows, the strings of which were soaking wet after the rain; but the evening sun was full in their eyes, and the English longbowmen - who had protected their own bowstrings by removing them and putting them inside their helmets — could shoot six arrows in the time it took the Italians to deliver a single bolt. The latter turned tail and fled - straight into the charging French cavalry, who mowed them down by the hundred before themselves going down under the relentless hail from the archers. Pressed hard from behind, the French attacked again and again, but -at least where the English centre and left flank were concerned — with no greater success.

1. There is no reason to think that his sobriquet, 'the Black Prince', probably occasioned by his black armour, was ever attached to him during his lifetime. Its earliest recorded appearance dates only from the sixteenth century.

The principal threat was to the right wing commanded by the young Prince of Wales, where a number of French knights, together with a group of Germans and Savoyards, had braved the arrows and were now fighting hand-to-hand with the English men-at-arms. At one point, Froissart tells us, the Prince was down on his knees, protected only by his standard-bearer Richard de Beaumont, who sheltered him with the banner of Wales until he once again struggled to his feet; and the Earls of Warwick and Oxford who were fighting beside him dispatched one of their knights, Sir Thomas of Norwich, to the King with an urgent appeal for help. Edward, informed of the situation, asked only whether his son was dead or wounded. On hearing that he was so far unharmed, though fighting desperately for his life, he sent Sir Thomas back to his superiors. 'Give them my command,' he said, 'to let the boy win his spurs; for if God has so ordained it I wish the day to be his, and the honour to go to him and to those in whose charge I have placed him.'

The Prince and his companions finally routed their assailants, who were forced to retire. Meanwhile, in the gathering twilight, King Philip lost all control of the
Battle
and his army lapsed into confusion. The fighting continued until long after dark; by morning, more than a third of the French army lay dead on the field. Among them - together with the King's brother the Duke of Alencon, his nephew Guy of Blois, the Duke of Lorraine and the Count of Flanders, nine French counts and over fifteen hundred knights — was the blind John of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia, who had insisted on being led into the fray to strike at least one blow with his sword. His entourage, in order not to lose him, had tied his horse's bridle to their own; they had then 'advanced so far forward that they all remained on the field, not one of them escaping alive. They were found the next day, the knights lying round their leader, with their horses still fastened together.' The King's body was washed in warm water and wrapped in a clean linen shroud, and a solemn mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Durham for the repose of his soul; the Prince of Wales, however, appropriated his badge of the three ostrich feathers and the motto
Ich Dien
—
'I Serve' - which his distant successor still bears to this day.

Dawn brought a heavy fog - not unusual in Picardy in late August - and the Earls of Arundel, Northampton and Suffolk set off with a considerable force of mounted knights to look for the King and for any other important Frenchmen who might be trying to escape. They did not find Philip, but came instead upon the bulk of the French infantry, together with a number of high church dignitaries including the Archbishop of Rouen and the Grand Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. None of these had heard anything of the battle, and at first assumed that they had come upon a group of their own compatriots. They were soon disillusioned; the English were in no mood for mercy. All the churchmen were killed in cold blood, as were the majority of the infantry - four times as many, according to one report, as lost their lives in the main encounter.

King Edward - again according to Froissart - had remained at the windmill that he had chosen for his command post and had not once donned his helmet throughout the battle. Yet it was to him, rather than to his son, that the victory truly belonged. His alone was the strategy that had made it possible, while his coolness under fire and his shrewd tactical sense stood out in marked contrast to the impetuousness and lack of control shown by his adversary.
¹
It was clear, too, that he better than anyone else understood the way in which warfare was evolving. The development of the longbow, capable in skilled hands of penetrating chain mail - or even a steel breastplate - from a range of a hundred yards or more, meant that henceforth any cavalry charge could be stopped in its tracks. As for artillery, such primitive devices as existed were used exclusively for siege warfare; it would be well over a century before cannon and musketry proved their supremacy over the drawn bowstring, and the balance swung once again in favour of the aggressor rather than the defence.

And what, finally, of King Philip? Twice unhorsed and twice wounded, he had seen his standard-bearer killed in front of him and had fought as valiantly as any of his men. With the help of John, Count of Hainault, he managed to escape from the battlefield and rode under cover of darkness to the castle of Labroye, whose seneschal, roused in the small hours, demanded to know who it was who so insistently sought admittance. 'Open quickly,' answered Philip, 'for I am the

fortune of France.' He was indeed. As his son was to prove ten years later at Poitiers, France could ill afford the cost of a captured king.

From Sluys the play wings us forward six years to the preliminaries to the battle of Crecy.
A short introductory scene (III
.ii), based on a passage in Froissart, shows the local population taking flight at the coming of the English host, after which (III,iii) Edward enters, followed shortly afterwards by his son the Black Prince. The Prince proudly lists to his father the cities he has taken since his arrival in France — in fact, father and son had made the conquests together — and tells him that the French army, 'With full a hundred thousand fighting men', is already being drawn up on the field. No sooner have the words left his Hps than 'King John'
¹
himself appears with his train. This is another imaginary scene, in which the two kings hurl insults at each other: Edward gives 'John' one last opportunity to give up the French throne

Before the sickle's thrust into the corn

Or that enkindled fury turn to flame?

but his offer is rejected with contempt:

Edward, I know what right thou hast in France,

And ere I basely will resign my crown

This champion field shall be a pool of blood

And all our prospect as a slaughter-house.

Historically there was no meeting of the two kings before the battle; nor do the chroniclers report any rousing speeches made to their respective armies of the kind made by the French King in the play. Imagined too is the ceremonial arming of the Black Prince by Edward and his nobles. Dramatically, on the other hand, the two incidents are more than justified; the arming of the Prince in particular is a brilliant touch. Battles, by their very nature, cannot be satisfactorily presented on a stage (though Shakespeare was to make the attempt on several occasions in the future). It is all the more important for the playwright to provide an adequate build-up, to leave his audience in no doubt as

i. See pp. 18—19 and note, and 23-4.

to the importance of the coming confrontation. Here we are given first a war of words, and then a series of short ceremonies which reflect all the panoply and pageantry of
Battle
- reminding us, too, of the military qualities of the Black Prince, whose youthful vigour is such that his father names the hardened old warrior Lord Audley to fight at his side.
¹

The encounter itself is encapsulated in two brief incidents, both in III,iii and both derived from Froissart through Holinshed. The first, only a dozen lines long, shows us the breathless 'King John' with the Duke of Lorraine (who, historically, lost his life on the field, though there is no suggestion of this in the play) watching the flight of the French army - for which they rightly blame the Genoese mercenaries although, if Holinshed is to be believed, the latter certainly had a lot to bear:

The third time againe the Genowaies leapt, and yelled, and went foorth till they came within shot, and fiercelie therwith discharged their crossbowes. Then the English archers stept foorth one pase, and let fhe their arrowes so wholie and so thicke togither, that it seemed to snowe. When the Genowaies felt the arrowes persing their heads, armes and breasts, manie of them cast downe their crossbowes, and cut the strings, and returned discomfited . . .

Then ye might haue seene the men of armes haue dasht in amongst them, and killed a great number of them, and euer the Englishmen shot where they saw the thickest prease: the sharpe arrowes ran into the men of armes, and into their horsses, and manie fell horsse and man amongst the Genowaies, and still the Englishmen shot. . . The throng was su
ch that one ouerthrew another;
also among the Englishmen, there were certeine of the footmen with great kniues, that went in among the men of armes, and killed manie of them as they laie on the ground, both earles, barons, knights, and esquires.

Then, represented at considerably greater length, comes the famous occasion in which King Edward refuses to send help to his beleaguered son, despite an appeal from Audley himself: