The King Without a Kingdom (36 page)

The compliment had hit home. The king prevaricated a little while longer, while I continued to plead, seasoning my words with compliments as big as the Alps. Which prince, since Saint Louis, had shown such an example as the one he could set? All of Christendom would admire a gallant gesture and would from now on seek his wisdom for arbitration or assistance in his power!

‘Have my pavilion raised,’ said the king to his equerries. ‘So be it, Monseigneur Cardinal; I will remain here until tomorrow, at sunrise, for your sake.’

‘For the sake of God, sire; only for the sake of God.’

And I left again. Six times during the day, I had to ride back and forth, proposing the terms of an agreement to one, bringing them back to the other; and each time, passing between the hedgerows of the Welsh archers clad in their half-white, half-green livery, I said to myself that if some of them, mistaking me for someone else, shot a volley of arrows at me, I would be well stung.

King John played dice to pass the time under his pavilion of vermilion drapery. All around the army wondered. Battle or no battle? And they argued about it hard, even in front of the king. There were wise ones and braggarts, timorous natures and the quick-tempered. Each allowed himself to air an opinion. In truth, King John remained undecided. I don’t think he considered himself for a single moment as the agent of the general good. He asked himself only the question of how his personal glory, which he confused with the good of his people, was best served. After so many setbacks and disappointments, what would most magnify his stature, a military victory or a negotiated settlement? Naturally, the idea of a defeat didn’t occur to him, nor to any of his advisors.

And yet, the king’s glory aside, the offers I brought him, with each trip, were by no means insignificant. After the first trip, the Prince of Wales consented to return all of the spoils he had taken during his
chevauchée
, as well as all the prisoners, without any demand for ransom. On the second, he accepted to give back all the strongholds and castles conquered, and to take for null and void all the homages and rallying to him and his cause. On the third trip, it was a payment in gold, as reparation for all that he had destroyed, not only that summer, but also the year before in the lands of Languedoc. One might well say that from his two expeditions, Prince Edward kept no benefit whatsoever.

And King John demanded yet more? Very well. I obtained from the prince the withdrawal of all of his garrisons located outside Aquitaine, a considerable success, and the commitment to never have any future dealings with either the Count of Foix, (while on that subject, Phoebus was in the king’s army, but I didn’t see him, he kept himself well out of the way) or with any of the king’s relatives, which referred precisely to Navarre. The prince was giving up a great deal; he was giving up more than I thought he would. And yet, I guessed that he didn’t, deep down, think that he would be exempted from fighting.

Truce does not prevent work. Consequently, all day he busied his men with strengthening their position. The archers doubled up the fences of stakes sharpened at both ends, to make defensive harrows. They cut down trees that they dragged across to block the pathways that the enemy could take. The Count of Suffolk, Marshal of the English army, inspected each troop, one after the other. The Counts of Warwick and Salisbury, and Lord of Audley took part in our meetings and escorted me through their camp.

The sun was going down as I brought King John a final proposal that I myself had suggested. The prince was ready to swear and sign that seven years long he would not take up arms nor undertake anything against the kingdom of France. We were therefore on the verge of a general peace.

‘Oh! We know the English,’ said Bishop Chauveau. ‘They swear, and then go back on their word.’

I retort that they would have difficulty going back on a commitment taken before the papal legate; I was to be signatory of the convention.

‘I will give you my answer at sunrise,’ said the king.

And I went away to lodge at the Abbey of Maupertuis. Never had I ridden so much in the same day, nor had I debated so much. As exhausted as I was, I took time to pray well, with all my heart. I was woken at the crack of dawn. The sun was just beginning to shine forth when I appeared once more before the battle tent of King John. At sunrise he had said. No one could be more punctual than I. I had a bad feeling. The entire army of France was under arms, in battle order, on foot, except for the three hundred designated for the charge, and were waiting only for the signal to attack.

‘Monseigneur Cardinal,’ declares the king briefly, ‘I will only accept to abandon the idea of fighting if Prince Edward and one hundred of his knights, of my choice, come and place themselves in my prison.’

‘Sire, that is too great a demand, and one that goes against honour; it renders all of our discussions yesterday useless. I have got to know the Prince of Wales well enough to know that he will not even consider it. He is not a man to give up without a fight, and to come and give himself up into your hands with the finest of the English chivalry would be the last thing he would do. Would you do such a thing, or any of your Knights of the Star, if you were in his position?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then, sire, it seems to me vain to take him a request made only to be rejected.’

‘Monseigneur Cardinal, I have every respect for your offices; but the sun is up. Please withdraw from the battlefield.’

Behind the king, they looked at each other through their ventails, and exchanged smiles and winks, Bishop Chauveau, John of Artois, Douglas, Eustache of Ribemont and even Audrehem and of course the archpriest, just as happy, it seemed, to have scuppered the efforts of the pope’s legate as they would be to crush the English.

For a moment, I wavered, so much wrath was welling up inside of me, hesitating to point out that I had the power of excommunication. But to what end? What effect would that have had? The French would have gone off to attack anyway, and I would only have managed to show up even more clearly the powerlessness of the Church. I only added: ‘God will be the judge, sire, as to which one of you will have shown himself to be the better Christian.’

And I went back up the hill for the last time towards the copses. I was raging. ‘They can all go to hell, these madmen!’ I said to myself in a gallop. The Lord won’t need to sort them; they are all good for his flames.’

Once arrived before the Prince of Wales, I tell him: ‘Good son, do what you can; you will have to fight. I was able to find no favour for an agreement with the King of France.’

‘To fight is indeed our intention,’ replied the prince. ‘May God help me!’

Thereupon, I left for Poitiers, embittered and greatly vexed. Now that was the moment my nephew Durazzo chose to tell me: ‘I beg you to relieve me from my service, my uncle. I want to go and fight.’

‘And with whom?’ I cried.

‘With the French of course!’

‘So you don’t think there are enough of them already?’

‘My uncle, understand that there will be a battle, and it is unworthy of a knight not to take part. And Messire of Hérédia also asks you.’

I should have berated him forcefully, telling him that he was required by the Holy See to escort me on my mission of peace, and that, quite the opposite of an act of nobility, to have joined one of the two sides could be seen rather as an act of treachery. I should have simply ordered him to stay. But I was weary, I was angry. And in a certain way, I understood him. I would also have liked to take up a lance, and charge whomever, Bishop Chauveau. So I shouted at him: ‘Go to hell both of you! And may it do you good!’ Those are the last words I addressed to my nephew Robert. I regret it, I regret it terribly.

I
T IS A DIFFICULT
thing indeed, when one isn’t there oneself, to reconstruct a battle, and difficult even when one
was
there. Particularly when it takes place as confusedly as that of the Battle of Maupertuis. It was told to me just hours afterwards, in twenty different ways, each considering it only from his point of view and only judging important what he himself had done there. Especially the defeated; from listening to them, they would have been victorious if not for their neighbours’ errors, the latter saying much the same thing.

An account that cannot be challenged is of what happened immediately after my departure from the French camp: the two marshals had an argument. The constable, Duke of Athens, having asked the king if he would care to listen to his advice, tells him something like this: ‘Sire, if you really want the English to surrender to your mercy, why don’t you let them wear themselves out through lack of supplies? Because their position is strong, but they will no longer be able to hold it when their bodies are weak. They are surrounded on all sides, and if they attempt to escape by the only way out, we can ourselves force them towards it, and we will crush them without difficulty. As we have waited a day, why can’t we wait another day or two, all the more so that with every moment our numbers are swelling with latecomers joining us?’ And the Marshal of Clermont to back him up: ‘The constable is right. A little wait will give us everything to gain and nothing to lose.’

That is when the Marshal of Audrehem lost his temper. Procrastinating, always procrastinating! It should already be over, since yesterday evening. ‘You will delay so much that you will end up letting them get away, as so often happens. Look at them moving around. They come down towards us to strengthen their position lower down and prepare their escape route. One might think, Clermont, that you are in no great rush to fight, and that it troubles you to see the English so close.’

The marshals’ quarrel had to come out into the open. But was it the most well-chosen moment? Clermont was not a man to take such outrage on the nose. He retorted, as if in a jeu de paume
59
: ‘You will not be so bold today, Audrehem, as to put your horse’s muzzle up my horse’s arse.’

Thereupon he joins the knights he is leading into the attack, is hauled up into his saddle, and himself gives the order to attack. Audrehem immediately copies him, and before the king has said a thing, or the constable commanded anything, the charge was under way, not at all grouped as had been decided, but in two separate squadrons which seemed less concerned with breaking the enemy than with distancing or chasing each other. The constable in turn asks for his charger and races off in an attempt to round them up.

Then the king has the attack called for all the banners; and all the men-at-arms, on foot, clumsy, weighed down by the fifty or sixty pounds of iron they carry on their backs, begin to advance through the fields towards the uphill path along which the cavalry are already rushing. Five hundred paces to cover.

High up, the Prince of Wales, seeing the French charge set off, cries out: ‘My fine lords, we are but small in number, but do not be afraid. Virtue nor victory do not inevitably go to the bigger party but go where God wants to send them. If we are defeated, we will incur no condemnation, and if the day is ours, we will be the most honoured in the world.’

The ground was already shaking at the foot of the hill; the Welsh archers were ready, kneeling behind their pointed stakes. And the first arrows began to whistle by …

First the Marshal of Clermont charged headlong at the banner of Salisbury, hurling himself into the hedge to make a breach in it. A hail of arrows broke his charge. It was a dreadful volley, according to those who came through it. The horses that had not been hit went on to impale themselves on the Welsh archers’ pointed stakes. From behind the stockade, the coutiliers and other foot soldiers suddenly appeared with their halberds, those terrible three-purpose weapons whose hook seizes the rider by his mail shirt, and sometimes by his skin to throw him down from his mount … whose point tears armour apart at the groin or the armpit when the man is down, whose curved blade, lastly, splits open the helmet. The Marshal of Clermont was amongst the first killed, and almost none of his people could make a hole in the English position. All undone along the route recommended by Eustache of Ribemont.

Instead of coming to the aid of Clermont, Audrehem had wanted to distance himself by following the course of the Miosson and thus outflank the English. He had run into the Count of Warwick’s troops whose archers did him a lot of damage. It was quickly learned that Audrehem had been wounded and taken prisoner. Of the Duke of Athens, nothing was known. He had vanished into the fray. The army had, in just a few moments, seen its three leaders disappear. A bad start. But that made only three hundred men killed or driven back out of the twenty-five thousand that were moving forward, step by step. The king had got back on his horse to tower above this field of armour, slowly marching on.

Then a curious stirring occurred. The survivors from Clermont’s charge, hurtling down between the two lethal hedgerows, their horses bolting, themselves maddened and unable to slow their mounts, collided with the first battalion, that of the Duke of Orléans, and bowled over like chess pieces their comrades-in-arms marching towards them on foot, with difficulty. Oh! They didn’t knock that many over; thirty or fifty perhaps, but those in their fall overturned as many again.