Shakespeare's Kings (8 page)

The Prince, as we know, never lived Nestor's 'three generations of men'; nor indeed did he fight in the same part of the battle as the old King of Bohemia, whose body he now brings triumphantly to his father as 'this first
fruit of my sword, ‘
Cropp'd and cut down even at the gate of death'. There is no doubt, however, that he fought magnificently, amply deserving the knighthood that, in the play, his father now bestows upon him. He had in fact been knighted the previous July, shortly after the landing in Normandy; but once again Shakespeare is thinking dramatically rather than historically, and the brief ceremony adds immeasurably to the battle's aftermath.
¹

As soon as he had buried his dead, Edward advanced to Calais. He had no legal claim to the city: it had never been English. Even the French had long been put off by its marshy approaches and general difficulty of access; it was only in the past century or so that the Counts of Boulogne had recognized its strategic importance and developed it into the prosperous and strongly fortified city that it had now become. But to the King of England, too, its advantages were clear. Standing at the point where the Channel was at its narrowest, only twenty-two miles from the English coast, Calais promised him not only a far more convenient bridgehead than the ports of Flanders, being a good deal nearer to Gascony, but the all-important control of the eastern approach to the straits. It would not, however, be easy in the taking. Behind its formidable walls, protected by a double ditch fed by the sea itself, there waited a strong and determined garrison under an outstandingly able commander (even though he was a martyr to gout) named Jean de

1
. It is plain that this scene (Ill.iv) is meant to end without the last six lines - which make no sense in the present context - and belong somewhere else. A possible explanation is suggested in the New Cambridge edition (p. 133) but need not concern us here.

Vienne. A direct assault was obviously out of the question; the only hope lay in a blockade. And so, early in September, the English encamped on the flat and windy marshes and built what was in effect a small wooden village, named by Edward Villeneuve-le-Hardi. (French was still the language of the English court.) The siege threatened to be long, so it was only sensible to make themselves as comfortable as possible.

Winter came, and spring, and summer - and still Calais held out. The blockade proved in the main successful; but the English fleet, constantly patrolling the roadstead, suffered much harassment from Norman privateers and lost no fewer than fifteen vessels during the siege. Already in October
1346
news had reached the camp that the Scots, traditional allies of France, had attempted a diversion by crossing the Tweed and laying waste the County Palatine of Durham. Edward, however, had made no move against them. He had foreseen the danger and when raising troops for his new offensive had deliberately refrained from calling out the northern border levies, whom he had left under the command of the Nevills, the Percys, the Archbishop of York William Zouche and other local magnates, so that they should be ready to deal with just such an emergency. Soon afterwards came a report that these levies had fallen on the Scots at Neville's Cross just outside Durham, cut them to pieces and taken prisoner their King, David II.
¹
More good news followed: Charles of Blois, the French claimant to the duchy of Brittany, had been captured by Sir Thomas Dagworth at La Roche-Darrien, while in Gascony the French army had given up the siege of Aiguillon and retired across the Loire. Edward, however, had refused to be deflected from Calais. The city was now completely blockaded by land and sea; its only hope, as he well knew, lay in the possibility of a relief expedition - of which, after eleven months, there was still no sign.

Finally, at the end of July
1347,
King Philip appeared with his army on the cliff at Sangatte, a mile or two to the west of Calais. He was horrified by what he saw. Villeneuve-le-Hardi had become a veritable town. A network of well laid-out streets surrounded a market place,

1. Another casualty of the battle was the famous Black Rood of
Scotland
, a piece of the True Cross set in an ebony crucifix which St Margaret, wife of King Malcolm Canmore, had left to the Scottish nation on her death in 1093. The English captured it and deposited it in the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. There it remained till the Reformation, when it was lost and almost certainly destroyed.

where regular markets were held on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There were, writes Froissart, 'haberdashers' and butchers' shops, stalls selling cloth and bread and other necessities, so that almost anything could be bought there. All these things were brought over daily by sea from England, and goods and foodstuffs were also supplied from Flanders.' This prosperous little community could of course have been easily destroyed, had Philip been able to reach it; but Edward, forewarned, had made the necessary dispensations. Loading his ships with archers, catapults and bombards, he had drawn them up in the shallow water along the whole length of coast between Sangatte and Calais, making any advance along the shore impossible. The only other route, through the marshy, swampy ground behind the dunes, depended on a bridge at Nieulay where he had posted his cousin the Earl of Derby (recently arrived from Gascony) with the remaining archers and men-at-arms. The most cursory reconnaissance — effected with the full cooperation of the English - was enough to convince the King of France that the situation was hopeless. He made the usual formal request for a pitched battle at some mutually acceptable spot, but cannot have been surprised when Edward refused it. The next morning he and his army were gone.

The departure of his sovereign told Jean de Vienne all he needed to know. The citizens of Calais were by now near starvation; if Froissart is to be believed, the commander had already expelled 'all poore and meane peple' — those who could not contribute to the defence of the town and simply constituted extra mouths to feed - to the number of
1,700.
Further resistance was pointl
ess. He now signalled his readiness to surrender, provided only that the King would promise safe conduct for all the citizens. Edward first refused point-blank: Calais had cost him vast quantities
of money and the lives of countl
ess soldiers and sailors, together with almost a year of his own. But when his two envoys, Lord Basset and Sir Walter Manny, returned to report that in that event the city would continue to resist, he relented. Manny — according once again to Froissart — was sent back to Jean de Vienne with new conditions: six of the principal citizens must present themselves before the King, barefoot and bare-headed, with halters round their necks and the keys of the city and of the castle in their hands. With them he would do as he pleased; the rest of the population would be spared.

The English terms were proclaimed in the market place, and immediately the richest of all the burghers, Master Eustache de Saint-Pierre, stepped forward. Before long five others had joined him. There and then the six stripped to their shirts and breeches, donned the halters, took the keys and made their way to the gates, led by Jean de Vienne himself mounted on a pony, his sword reversed in token of submission. On their arrival before the King they knelt before him, presented him with the keys and begged for mercy. Edward refused to listen, and ordered their immediate execution; Sir Walter pleaded with him in vain. Only when Queen Philippa, then heavily pregnant, threw herself on her knees before her husband and begged him to spare them did he finally relent.

The Queen thanked him from the bottom of her heart, then rose to her feet and told the six burghers to rise also. She had the halters taken from their necks and led them into her apartment. They were given new clothes and an ample dinner. Then each was presented with six nobles and they were escorted safely through the English army and went to live in various towns in Picardy.
¹

On Saturday
4
August
1347
King Edward III entered Calais in triumph and gave orders that the entire city be evacuated. The miserable citizens were permitted to take nothing with them: houses and estates, furniture and possessions, all were left behind for the use of the English colonists whom the King brought in to take their places. The descendants of those colonists were to remain there for over two centuries until, on
7
January
1558,
Calais was recaptured at last.

For nine years after the fall of Calais, the war was largely forgotten. The Black Death struck France in January
1348,
and England the following July; within ten years it had killed an estimated one-third of the population living between India and Iceland. Of those who survived, the majority had other, more pressing anxieties. There were a few minor skirmishes in Gascony and Brittany, and towards the end of
1355
Edward even landed with another army at Calais; but he seems to have thought better of the operation, since he and his men were back in

1. There is no reason to doubt the story of the burghers of Calais; nor is there any excuse for Londoners to forget it, since a bronze cast of Rodin's famous group was acquired for the nation in 1915 by the National Art Collections Fund and now stands in Westminster Palace Gardens.

England little more than a month later. Meanwhile successive popes did their best to bring about a lasting peace; if they failed, it was because neither of the protagonists really wanted it. Edward would be satisfied with nothing less than the throne of France; Philip's son John II, who had succeeded his father in
1350,
was an incorrigible and impetuous romantic whose dreams of chivalric derring-do were to betray him again and again. For the time being, both monarchs had other business on their minds; when the moment came, however, both would show themselves only too keen to continue the struggle.

In the same year as Edward's abortive Calais expedition the Black Prince, now twenty-five and his father's lieutenant in Gascony, took an army to south-west France, failing to capture Narbonne and Carcassonne but causing appalling devastation and destruction in the surrounding countryside. In
1356
he was more ambitious still, launching raids up and down the Loire to the point where King John determined to teach him a lesson, summoning all the noblemen and knights of the realm to assemble at Chartres in the first week of September with their retinues. The response was almost universal; by the time the army was ready it included the King's four sons, none of them yet out of their teens; the Constable of France, Gauthier de Brienne; two marshals; twenty-six dukes and counts;
334
bannerets; and lesser lords and knights without number, all bringing their own troops. Holinshed refers to three 'battles' (battalions) of
16,000
men each, making a total of
48,000
,
though he is almost certainly exaggerating. Whatever the precise figure, it was by any account a very considerable force that crossed the Loire at various points and then pressed south with all speed in pursuit of the English, catching up with them on the morning of Sunday
18
September, some seven miles south-east of Poitiers, in the valley of the little river Miosson.
¹

The French were in confident mood. For one thing, they comfortably outnumbered the English, who were probably no more than ten or twelve thousand at most; they also had reason to believe that the invaders were seriously short of food. For the rest of that day the two sides reconnoitred each other's positions and prepared for battle, while the

1. The site of the battle of Poitiers is occupied today by the farm known as La Cardinerie, formerly Maupertuis, a mile or so to the north of the former Benedictine Abbey of Nouaille
.

Cardinal Talleyrand de Perigord, who had been sent by the Pope to attempt to negotiate a peace, shuttled fruitlessly backwards and forwards between the two sides. The Black Prince, who would certainly have avoided the battle if he could, offered to restore all his prisoners without ransom and to return all the castles that he had occupied; but John would accept nothing less than his own personal surrender, with a hundred of his knights - a demand that the Prince not unnaturally refused outright. Consequently, soon after sunrise on the following day, the battle began.

It seems extraordinary that since their defeat at Crecy the French had taken no steps to raise and train enough regiments of longbowmen to pay back the English in their own coin, particularly since John was fully conscious of the danger presented by the English archers. His plan seems to have been first to send a small force of some three hundred mounted knights to charge into their midst and scatter them, before following with the main body of his army - on foot, because the marshy ground and the numerous hedges and ditches were impossible for cavalry to negotiate. The tactic proved disastrous. The knights — who represented the flower of his army and who included the Constable of France and both marshals - succumbed to the usual deluge of arrows, and after this initial massacre the battle was as good as won. The French fought valiantly, but were overwhelmed; and when the fighting was over John himself was among the prisoners. The Prince treated him with elaborate courtesy. Froissart tells of how, the evening after the battle, he gave a supper in his honour, to which he also invited the other noble captives, including thirteen counts, an archbishop and sixty-six barons. 'He himself served in all humility both at the King's table and at the others. . . insisting that he was not worthy to sit himself at the table of so mighty a prince and so brave a soldier.' Seven months later he escorted John personally to London.