The Plantagenets (64 page)

The army reached Caen on 26 July. After brief negotiations with the garrison of the castle, they stormed the rich residential suburb of the city, leaving 2,500 corpses lying torn and bleeding in the streets, and sending the richer citizens back as prisoners to England. Then they marched along the south bank of the Seine for a fortnight. The French army was belatedly moved into a position to defend against the invasion; it broke the bridges across the river to prevent the English from crossing it and shadowed the invaders along the north bank.

By 12 August, the English were within twenty miles of Paris. Panic broke out in the city as the citizens realized the impact that such a violent and depraved army would have upon their lives and livelihoods. Philip’s government was compelled to call in fifty men-at-arms to attempt to keep the peace as terror racked Europe’s largest city. Throughout the city and suburbs buildings were barricaded and doors battened shut as the people prepared for street-to-street fighting. In the distance, downriver on the Seine, smoke was seen pouring from the towns of St-Cloud and St-Germain-en-Laye. The English were not far away.

Philip VI sat with his advisers in St-Denis and floundered. On 16 August the English rebridged the Seine. Desperate to keep them at bay, Philip offered a pitched battle on a plain four miles south of Paris and the French army marched to the allotted battleground.

But the English, instead of marching either south to give battle, or east to besiege Paris, headed sharply north, towards Flanders, in an attempt to join forces with a Flemish army that was in the field near Béthune. They marched north for more than a week, pushing so hard that the exhausted infantry went through their shoes and foraging parties left the countryside stripped and bare of all food and supplies.

When the English reached their intended rendezvous, they found that the Flemish army had given up and gone home. But it was too
late to avoid conflict of some sort. Philip’s eldest son John, duke of Normandy, had abandoned Aiguillon in mid-August and marched rapidly north to defend the duke’s beleaguered duchy. The road to battle had been joined.

The English and French finally met before a forest between the villages of Crécy and Wadincourt on Saturday 26 August 1346. The English were arrayed in two lines of infantry and men-at-arms in their impressive plate armour, who fought dismounted from their horses. The Black Prince commanded the front line, with Warwick and Northampton. The king drew up the troops, laughing and joking with them as he did so; then he took his place commanding the rearguard. On either side of the foot soldiers were two huge blocks of archers, dismounted from their horses and surrounded by baggage carts to inure them against cavalry charges. It was the archers that would decide the fate of a famous battle.

The French arrived at Crécy in dribs and drabs, but they comfortably outnumbered the English – Philip VI may have had 25,000 men in the field, including large numbers of Genoese mercenaries. The English had no more than half that total. The French king arranged his men in three battalions: crossbowmen at the front, with two divisions of cavalry behind them. They were flanked by infantry.

The sides stood and faced and shouted curses at one another and waited for their commands. At around five o’clock in the evening, it began to rain, and against the deafening rumpus of bugles and drums, the French crossbowmen and English archers began to loose their volleys. The English arrows were lethal: fired at a rate of five or six per archer per minute, they fell from the sky like a blizzard. The crossbow bolts of Philip’s Genoese mercenaries, meanwhile, were fired at less than half the rate and fell short of their targets. Here was the vital difference between the sides, and an advantage that would play out for much of the Hundred Years War: the longbow was the deadliest weapon in the field.

King David II of Scotland might have told his sponsor Philip VI about the devastation that English longbows had inflicted at Halidon Hill; but if he did, the lesson was not passed on. The French
cavalry – so long the pride and scourge of Europe – saw the crossbowmen in front of them falter, and took their faltering for cowardice. As the cavalry chased on the heels of the stricken crossbowmen, they too were thrown violently from their horses by the sickening thud of deadly white wood and metal into their bodies. Arrow shafts buried themselves deep into human flesh and horseflesh, creating a writhing, screaming chaos of rearing animals and dying, terrified men.

As the arrows whipped through the air, so Edward ordered another, novel assault. For the first time on the battlefields of France, cannonfire was heard. The English had brought several cannon to the field: primitive devices that used gunpowder to shoot metal bolts and pellets wildly, and in the general direction of the enemy. They were not so deadly as the longbows, but with the whistle of arrows punctuated by the ungodly roar of cannon-blasts, the demented battle-cries of men-at-arms in the melee, the agonized screams of terrified horses and men dying with their limbs severed and intestines spilled, the drums in the background and trumpets screaming into the evening, the battlefield at Crécy would have sounded like Hell itself.

The hero of the battle was afterwards judged to be the Black Prince, who fought valiantly in his first armed conflict, slashing at armed men, cutting down horses and bellowing instructions to the troops around him. At one point he was felled, and his standard bearer had to commit an act of utter desperation, dropping his flag momentarily to help the stricken prince to his feet. Thus Froissart relayed the tale that has since entered the corpus of English legend. As the fighting escalated around him the prince feared his men were falling too fast around him, and sent word to his father that he required help.

‘Is my son dead or felled?’ asked Edward, according to the chronicler.

Informed that the prince was not dead but faced difficult odds, Froissart has Edward reply: ‘Return to him and to them that sent you here, and say that they send no more to me for any adventure … as long as my son is alive … they suffer him this day to win his spurs.’

Several hours of fierce, bloody fighting routed King Philip and his allies. Their cavalry charges were skilfully made. Their horsemen regrouped and recharged with enormous bravery and accomplishment at each turn. But they were as helpless against the dismounted English positions as Edward II’s cavalry had been against the Scottish schiltroms at Bannockburn. The French king lost thousands upon thousands of men: 1,542 knights and squires were found dead by the English front line, and the losses among the ordinary soldiers were innumerable. Many important nobles allied to Philip’s cause lost their lives, including the blind King John of Bohemia, who emulated Sir Giles d’Argentein, the tragic hero of Bannockburn. Hearing that the French were losing, the sightless king asked to be led into the thick of battle, certain that he would be cut down. His body was found lying roped to the comrades who courageously undertook the suicide mission of leading him into the melee. Besides King John two dukes and four counts were killed. They were all given an honourable burial by the victorious English.

Edward sent proud news of victory back to England, boasting in a letter to parliament that ‘the whole host of France has been laid low’. The news very swiftly spread across the country, via a network of Dominican friars whom the royal government at home employed as travelling newsmen. All realized that Crécy was indeed a thundering, wonderful victory. It offered tangible return for all the hardships faced by the English people who had paid for their rampaging army. It offered massive propaganda value. And it was bolstered further in October when forces under Ralph Neville, Henry Percy and William Zouche, archbishop of York, routed a massive Scottish invading army at Neville’s Cross in county Durham. Four Scottish earls were captured, and the marshal, chamberlain and constable of Scotland died. The earl of Moray was killed in battle. Almost the entire military leadership of Scotland was removed in a single day, and King David II was captured and brought to England, there to remain a prisoner for eleven years.

Crécy was also a landmark moment in the history of the medieval military. The new, more professional means of recruitment and
radically revised field tactics that had been developing since the 1330s were proven not just against the Scots, but against the full might of the French army.

So 1346 was a very good year for English military power. Yet it did not settle the war. For at the heart of Edward’s tactics lay a paradox: although his army had inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined forces of the French king and his son, it had in no way endeared the people of Normandy to English lordship, or won favour for an English king over a French one. And while he severely discomfited Philip VI, the duke of Normandy and their allies, Edward’s victory at Crécy did not destroy French military capability or curb Philip’s overall political power.

So the two sides remained in the field. For the rest of the summer the earl of Lancaster continued to command action around Gascony. Sir Thomas Dagworth won a brilliant victory in Brittany, where he defeated and captured Charles of Blois at La Roche-Derrien. Meanwhile, in September 1346 Edward and the Black Prince began a brutal and terrible siege at Calais, which lasted until October 1347.

The siege of Calais was in some ways an even greater military occasion than the battle of Crécy. Almost 26,000 men took part – the largest English army that would take the field during the entire history of the Hundred Years War. Every English earl was present at some point during the siege, with the exception of four who were elderly or infirm. The financial demands placed on England to maintain this massive army for over a year were extraordinary, and included numerous new goods and export taxes that spurred widespread grumbling at home. Victory at Crécy, however, had transformed Edward’s status. The chronicler Jean le Bel wrote that 1346 had shattered the image of the English, recasting them from an ignoble race into the finest and most knightly people on earth. As the English camped outside the walls of Calais, the national gathering of magnificent soldiers served simultaneously as a pageant of chivalry and a hostile invading army.

Inside the town, meanwhile, the townsfolk grew so desperate and hungry that they began to chew the leather from their saddles. They
held out for a year, during which Philip VI tried to goad the English into leaving Calais by bringing his armies close enough that they might be lured into a pitched battle. Eventually, in October 1347, when it became clear that the English could not and would not be removed, a deputation of citizens emerged to surrender to Edward, wearing nooses around their necks to symbolize their utter subjection. In a choreographed show of chivalric might, Edward allowed Queen Philippa to plead successfully for his clemency. The bedraggled supplicants were spared, but their town was seized and would remain in English hands for more than two centuries. The king and his companions returned to England as conquering heroes.

The years 1346–7 had been some of the greatest and deadliest in Plantagenet history. But beyond these scenes of heroism and cruelty, resistance and privation, another, far more destructive form of death was gathering on the fringes of Europe, spreading down from the Asian steppe and entering Europe via her trading ports with the East. It travelled at a speed that even the deadliest army in Christendom could not match. By 1347 plague was coming.

The Death of a Princess

The English summer of 1348 was wet, but in defiance of the weather the country fairly blazed with glory. The king had returned to England in October the previous year in triumph. Calais had been taken. French advances in Gascony were stemmed. Philip VI had been humiliated on the battlefield and in the diplomatic meetings that led to a year-long truce. The Scots had been smashed.

The family and the country celebrated in style. Pageantry and festivities had been in full swing since Christmas, when the court had dressed in outlandish masks and costumes. Aristocratic revellers paraded before one another disguised as rabbits, dragons, pheasants and swans, while the king and his knights dressed in great green robes and peacock feathers. Once Christmas was over, a calendar of tournaments was organized. Jousts and romantic plays and games were held at Reading, Bury St Edmunds, Lichfield, Eltham, Windsor, Canterbury and Westminster between February and September.

At each tournament, the king paid close attention to the glamour of the spectacle. Occasionally it was surreal. Always it was lavish, with the royal family appearing in fine robes of purple, dazzling with pearls and diamonds sewn in intricate patterns on their sleeves and chests. At one tournament the king dressed as a giant bird, at another he decked his team out in matching blue-and-white uniforms, perhaps to recall the fleur-de-lis he had appropriated from the French arms. At Lichfield he fought under the arms of one of his veteran knights, Sir Thomas Bradeston: a lavish chivalrous display of faux-humility and comradeship.

A love of chivalry and showmanship lay at the heart of Edward’s whole being, and he made sure to parade his famous prisoners in high style: King David II of Scotland and all the captive nobility of Paris were given fine clothes and bathed in the warm munificence of the king’s generosity.

The centrepiece was Edward’s large royal family, which was maturing even as it continued to multiply. Although Edward was only thirty-five and Queen Philippa two years younger, they already had nine children. They ranged from the Black Prince who, at eighteen, was now an adult and a war hero, a warrior to his bones, to William of Windsor, a babe-in-arms who was born in June but would not live to adulthood.

The Black Prince had played a full political and military role in the wars. He basked in his father’s affections, stepping into the vacuum that was left in the king’s life following the injury and subsequent death of William Montagu earl of Salisbury in a jousting match in 1343. For the time being, he was the only one of the king’s sons who was of martial age. Lionel of Antwerp was nine, John of Gaunt eight and Edmund of Langley seven. (One further boy, Thomas of Woodstock, would be born in 1355.) Four girls made up the huge Plantagenet brood. Isabella (sixteen) and Joan (fifteen) had grown up in the same household as the Black Prince, with their cousin Joan of Kent; Mary and Margaret, three and two respectively, were toddlers in 1348, but had illustrious marriages in store.