The King Without a Kingdom (27 page)

N
OT EVERYTHING CAN
always be disastrous. Ah! You have noticed, Archambaud, this is one of my favourite sentiments. Yes! Yes, in the midst of all setbacks, of all sorrows, of all disappointments, we are always graced with some good that comes to comfort us. One simply needs to be able to appreciate it. God is only waiting for our gratitude to better prove his leniency.

You see, after a calamitous summer for France, and most disappointing, I confess, for my embassy, look how we are favoured by the season and the beautiful weather we have to continue our journey! It is an encouragement from the heavens.

I feared, after the rains we had in Berry, that we would come into a spell of bad weather, gusts of wind and the cold as we moved further north. And I was preparing to shut myself away in my palanquin, wrap myself up in furs and sustain us with mulled wine. And yet it is quite the opposite; the air has warmed, the sun is shining, and this December is like a spring. We sometimes experience this in Provence; but I didn’t expect such light, which brightens the countryside, such warmth that the horses sweat under their covers, to greet our entrance into Champagne.

It was almost cooler, I assure you, when I arrived in Breteuil in Normandy, at the beginning of July, to meet the king.

For, having left Avignon on the twenty-first of the month of June, it was the twelfth of July … ah! All right, you remember; I have already told you, and Capocci was sick, that’s right, at the speed at which I had him travel.

What King John was doing in Breteuil? The siege, the siege of the castle, after a short Norman
chevauchée
which had not been a great triumph for him, that is the least one can say.

The Duke of Lancaster, may I remind you, landed in the Cotentin on the eighteenth of June. Pay attention to the dates; they are most important, in this instance. The stars? Ah, no, I hadn’t particularly studied the stars for that day. What I meant was that in war, the weather and one’s speed sometimes count as much and sometimes even more than the number of troops.

So, he lands on the eighteenth of June; over the next three days he effects a junction at the Abbey of Montebourg with the detachments on the continent: the one that Robert Knolles, a good captain, brings from Brittany, and the one raised by Philip of Navarre. How many are the three of them lining up? Philip of Navarre and Godfrey of Harcourt scarcely have more than one hundred knights with them. Knolles supplies the largest contingent: three hundred men-at-arms, five hundred archers, not all English by the way; there are Bretons there who come with John of Montfort, pretender to the duchy against the Count of Blois, who is the Valois’ man. Lastly, Lancaster himself has just one hundred and fifty suits of armour and two hundred archers, but he has a sizeable remount of horses.

When King John II learned of these figures, he laughed a laugh that shook him from his belly to his hair. Did they think they could scare him with this pitiful army? If that was all his English cousin could muster, he had no great need for concern. ‘I was right, you see, Charles, my son, you see, Audrehem, not to fear putting my son-in-law in jail; yes, I was right to pour scorn upon the challenges of these little Navarrese, since they can only produce such meagre insignificant allies.’

And he gave himself credit for having, from the beginning of the month, called up the army in Chartres. ‘Wasn’t it good foresight, what do you say, Audrehem, what do you say, Charles, my son? And you see that it sufficed to call up the ban and not the arrière-ban. Let them run, these good Englishmen, let them get deeper into the country. We will swoop down on them and throw them into the mouth of the River Seine.’

He had rarely been so joyful, I was told, and I am willing to believe it. For this perpetually vanquished man loves war, at least in his dreams. Setting off, giving orders from high up on his charger, to be obeyed, at last! For in war, people obey … in any case at the beginning; leave the worries of finance and of government to Nicolas Braque, Lorris, de Bucy and the others; live in the company of men, no more women in the entourage; moving, moving constantly, eating in the saddle, in big mouthfuls, or at the roadside, sheltered by a tree already laden with tiny green fruit, receiving the scouts’ reports, pronouncing fine words that each one would go and repeat: ‘If the enemy is thirsty, he will drink his own blood’, place his hand on the shoulder of a knight who flushes with pleasure. ‘Never tired, Boucicaut. Your fine sword abounds, noble Coucy!’

And yet, has he won a single victory? Never. At twenty-two, designated by his father as Chief of War in Hainaut … ah! What a fine name: Chief of War! … He got himself noteworthily torn apart by the English. At twenty-five, with an even finer title, as if he were inventing them himself: Lord of the Conquest, he cost the populations of Languedoc dearly, without succeeding, in four months of siege, to take back Aiguillon, at the confluence of the Lot and the Garonne rivers. But listening to him, one would think that his battles were remarkable exploits, however sad their outcomes. Never has a man acquired so much assurance through the experience of defeat.

This time, he was making his pleasure last.

In the time it took him to fetch the oriflamme from Saint-Denis and, still without hurrying, regain Chartres, the Duke of Lancaster had already crossed the River Dives, having passed by Caen in the south, and come to spend the night in Lisieux. The memory of the
chevauchée
of Edward III, ten years earlier, and particularly of the sack of Caen, was not faded. Hundreds of bourgeois slain in the streets, forty thousand pieces of cloth snatched, all the precious objects removed to the other side of the Channel, the complete immolation of the town avoided by a whisker … the people of Normandy had certainly not forgotten and rather seemed eager to let the English archers through. All the more so that Philip of Évreux-Navarre and Messire Godfrey of Harcourt made it known that these Englishmen were friends. Butter, milk and cheeses were abundant, the cider readily drinkable; the horses in the luxuriant meadows didn’t lack forage. After all, feeding one thousand Englishmen, for one evening, cost less than paying the king all year round, his gabelle, his fouage,
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and his eight denier in the pound tax on purchased goods.

In Chartres, John II was to find his army rather less gathered together and ready than he had thought. He had been counting on an army of forty thousand men. Scarcely a third of that number could be counted. But wasn’t it enough, wasn’t it already too many in comparison with the enemy he was to face? ‘Aha! I will not pay those who did not turn up; all the more to my advantage. But I command that they be sent remonstrances.’

By the time he had set himself up in his fleur-de-lis-covered battle tent and dispatched those remonstrances … ‘When the king wants, knights must’ … the Duke of Lancaster was in Pont-Audemer, one of the King of Navarre’s fiefs. He was delivering the castle that a French party had been laying siege to for several weeks in vain, and was reinforcing, though not by much, the Navarrese garrison, with whom he was leaving a year’s worth of supplies, before heading south, where he was going to pillage the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin.

Time for the constable, the Duke of Athens, to bring a semblance of order to the chaos of Chartres, for those who had shown up had been trampling the fields of new wheat for three weeks now and were beginning to lose their patience, time especially to calm the discord between the two marshals, Audrehem and Jean of Clermont, who hated each other with a passion, and tackle Lancaster, who was already at the foot of the walls of the Castle of Conches and had dislodged the occupants in the name of the king. And then he set fire to it. In this way, the memory of Robert of Artois, and more recently that of Charles the Bad went up in smoke. That castle brought no good luck … And Lancaster headed for Breteuil. Apart from Évreux, all of the strongholds that the king had wanted to seize in his son-in-law’s fief were reclaimed one after the other.

‘We will crush these evil folk at Breteuil,’ said John II proudly when his army was finally able to set off. There are seventeen leagues from Chartres to Breteuil. The king wanted to cover them in one single march. Already, from noon onwards, it seems that stragglers began falling behind. When the army finally reached Breteuil, exhausted, Lancaster was there no more. He had taken the citadel, seized the French garrison and set up in its place a robust defence under the command of a good Navarrese leader, Sanche López, with whom he also left a year’s supply of provisions.

Quick to console himself, King John exclaimed: ‘We will hack them to pieces at Verneuil; won’t we, my sons?’ The dauphin didn’t dare say what he confided to me later, namely that it seemed to him absurd to pursue one thousand men with near fifteen thousand. He didn’t want to appear any less assured than his younger brothers who all, including the youngest, Philip, only fourteen years old, modelled themselves on their father and played the ardent fighters.

Verneuil, on the banks of the River Avre; one of the gateways to Normandy. The English cavalcade had gone through there like a raging torrent the day before. Its inhabitants saw the French army arrive like a river in spate.

Messire of Lancaster, aware of what was sweeping towards him, was more than wary of pushing on towards Paris. Taking the spoils he had taken en route, as well as a good number of prisoners, he cautiously set off again on the westbound road. ‘For Laigle,
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for Laigle, they have left for Laigle,’ indicated the villeins. Upon hearing this, King John felt singled out by divine attention. You can see why. But no, Archambaud, not because of the Eagle. Ah! You are there now. Because of the Spinning Sow, Monsieur of Spain’s murder, there, where the crime was perpetrated, exactly where the king arrived to carry out his punishment. He didn’t allow his army to sleep more than four hours. At Laigle, he would catch up with the English and the Navarrese, and it would be the hour, at last, of his vengeance.

Thus, on the ninth of July, having made a stop at the threshold of the Spinning Sow, long enough to bend his poleyn
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of iron, a strange spectacle for the army to see, a king in prayer and in tears on the doorstep of an inn! He at last caught sight of Lancaster’s lances, two leagues out of Laigle, on the edge of the Forest of Tuboeuf. All of this, my nephew, had happened just three days before the time when I was told of it.

‘Lace up your helmets, get in battle order,’ cried the king.

Then, for once in agreement, the constable and the two marshals intervened. ‘Sire,’ declared Audrehem roughly, ‘you have seen how keen I always am to serve you.’ ‘And me too,’ said Clermont.

‘But it would be folly to engage the enemy straight away. You mustn’t ask of your troops a single stride more. You have given them no respite for four days, and this very day you have led them more hurriedly than ever. The men are out of breath, just look at them; the archers have bloodied feet and if they didn’t have their pikes to hold themselves up, they would collapse right here on the road.’ ‘Ah, always the rank and file that slow everything down!’ said John II irritated. ‘Those on horseback fare little better,’ retorted Audrehem. ‘A good many mounts have withers wounded by their loads, and many others limp, that we have been unable to re-shoe. The armoured soldiers, going so in this heat, have bloodied arses. Don’t expect anything from your banners,
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before they have had a rest.’

‘Besides which, sire,’ added Clermont, ‘look at the territory we would be attacking in. Before us we have a dense forest, where Messire of Lancaster has hidden. He will easily be able to get his party out, while our archers become tangled up in the thicket and our lances charge tree trunks.’

King John had a moment of ill humour, cursing his men and the circumstances that foiled his will. Then he made one of those surprising decisions for which his courtiers call him The Good, so that their flattery may be repeated to him.

He sent his two first equerries, Pluyan du Val and Jean of Corquilleray, to the Duke of Lancaster to take his challenge to him and call him to battle. Lancaster was stationed in a clearing, his archers set out before him, while everywhere scouts observed the French army and staked out escape routes and fallback paths. The blue-eyed duke thus saw arrive before him, escorted by several men-at-arms, the two royal equerries who bore on the shafts of their lances pennons decorated with fleurs-de-lis, and who blew into their horns like tournament heralds. Flanked by Philip of Navarre, John of Montfort and Godfrey of Harcourt, he listened to the following speech, delivered to him by Pluyan du Val.

The King of France is coming at the head of an immense army, while the duke has but a small one. Therefore, he suggests to the duke that they confront each other the following day, with the same number of knights on either side, one hundred, or fifty, or even thirty, in a place to be agreed upon and according to all the rules of honour.

Lancaster courteously received the proposal of the king ‘who claims to be of France’, but was not any less reputed everywhere for his chivalry. He assured them he would consider the matter with his allies, whom he pointed to, as it was too serious to decide upon alone. The two equerries believed they could infer from these words that Lancaster would give his answer the following day.

It was upon this assurance that King John ordered his battle tent to be raised and fell straight into a deep sleep. And for the French the night was that of a snoring army.

In the morning, the Forest of Tuboeuf was empty. One could see that someone had been there but no sign was any longer to be seen of either Englishman or Navarrese. Lancaster had cautiously withdrawn his people to Argentan.

King John II gave free reign to his contempt for these dishonourable enemies, good for nothing but pillaging when no one was before them, and who slip away at the first signs of combat. ‘We wear the star on our hearts, whereas the garter flaps around their calves. This is what sets us apart. They are the knights of flight.’

But did he contemplate giving chase to them? The marshals suggested casting the freshest banners out on Lancaster’s trail; to their surprise, John II ruled out the idea. One would have said that he considered the battle won from the moment the enemy had failed to take up his challenge.