Pt 8 (The last part)
THE REVIVAL OF FRANCE (pt 2)
One by one the great English knights were coming to the end of their careers. Late in 1368 Sir John Chandos, gallantly defending Aquitaine, attempted an ambush of a party of French soldiers. The morning was cold, and the ground was frozen solid. Since losing an eye in a hunting accident five years previously Chandos had never worn a visor. Descending from his horse to assist a fallen esquire who was being attacked by a group of Frenchmen, his foot caught in the long white armour robe that he was wearing against the cold. When he slipped on the icy ground he was recognized and swiftly seized. The point of a spear was thrust into the open helmet, ending the life of the architect of Poitiers and Auray.
The Prince of Wales, whose life was also rapidly slipping to an end, completed a ruthless career by an act of strange brutality. In Gascony defections were occurring right, left and centre, but when the supposedly loyal Limoges rebelled it was too much to bear. That the gates of the city had been opened to the French forces by the Bishop of Limoges, the godfather of the prince's son Richard, added insult to injury. The Black Prince, a sick man, overreacted totally. He supervised a fierce siege from the litter in which he was forced to be carried, and when the town fell allowed a brutal sack and massacre.
Historians have argued long about the rights and wrongs of the prince's action. It has even been pointed out that the sack of Limoges was fully within the rules of war as they were accepted at the time. So it may have been. The important point about Limoges is that the prince's action was totally unnecessary. It could never have achieved anything. If it were meant to terrorize other towns into confirming English rule, the Black Prince showed a deplorable lack of appreciation of the psychology of a populace who know they are winning. The following year he returned to England for the last time. In a brutal age he had controlled his savagery with wisdom and good sense, until this final, pointless massacre.
In 1372 the Earl of Pembroke, newly named Lieutenant of Aquitaine, sailed for the troubled province with an urgently needed relieving army. As his ships approached La Rochelle they were attacked by a dozen Castilian galleys. The battle lasted two days, and resulted in the total destruction of the English ships and the capture of the earl. With the lines of communication cut on the direct sea route, the Gascon strongholds began to topple before the combined efforts of the Duke of Anjou, du Guesclin, and de Clisson. Poitiers (August 1372) and La Rochelle (September 1372) opened their gates to the French without resistance.
In a battle at Soubise in that same August, the English suffered a further blow in the capture of Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch. For the first time in the Hundred Years' War, military sense took precedence over the profit motive, and ransom was refused. This new policy of Charles V was highly unpopular among the French knights, and particularly so with the esquire who had actually captured him, but the decision was a sign of the times, and the unfortunate Captal remained in captivity in Paris until his death in 1376.
Ironically, du Guesclin's native Brittany remained the one place in the west where an English army could land relatively safely and where a raiding party could seek sanctuary. The continued existence of English garrisons in the duchy resulted almost entirely from the duke's less than total loyalty to the pledge he had made to Charles V. In 1372 he finally threw off his mask, repudiated his homage to the French king, and fled to England from where, in 1373, a 4,OOO-strong English army came to Saint-Malo, though the duke was not with them. A rapid advance by du Guesclin from Rennes forced them to re-embark and sail round the peninsula to Brest, where they provided a welcome supplement to the garrison.
Du Guesclin, however, had demonstrated to Edward III that the north coast of Brittany could not be relied upon as a staging post for Aquitaine. He reinforced the point by taking Becherel, which still dominated the peninsula, and in spite of attacks had resisted him since 1363. As a further gesture he used Saint-Malo as a base for a raid on Jersey. While Olivier de Clisson laid siege to Brest, du Guesclin hurried back to Paris in August 1373. John of Gaunt had landed at Calais, and was leading the largest and most destructive chevauchee that France had seen for many years. Gaunt appears initially to have had no great aim apart from the usual one of causing havoc, but it soon became evident that he planned to march right across France to relieve Gascony. He actually reached his target, and the arrival of his bedraggled army, depleted and harassed by du Guesclin, must have put heart into the defenders of Bordeaux.
But the state of Gaunt's troops, weakened and weary of the war, only showed in microcosm the general feeling on both sides. Charles V had restarted the war and was winning, but he feared that he had not the resources to finish it. In January 1374 du Guesclin concluded a local peace with John of Gaunt, which eventually spread to a general truce. In 1376 the Black Prince died, followed within a year by his father, the mighty King Edward III. On every hand men were tired of war. For Charles V there remained a little local difficulty concerning the Duke of Brittany. In December 1378 the duke was accused of treachery and Brittany was annexed to the French Crown. Even though du Guesclin and de Clisson supported the king, the act proved to be an immense miscalculation. The population rose as one in support of the de Montfort duke, giving du Guesclin the unsavoury task of going to war against his own countrymen.
The Constable demonstrated an acute political skill which he had never before had the opportunity to employ. In a rare example of a negotiated settlement, du Guesclin managed to persuade an English army to return home without a fight. The commander, incidentally, was none other than Sir Hugh Calveley. What conversation, what reminiscences, must have been exchanged by these two men - now the elder statesmen of their respective armies?
Following this temporary solution du Guesclin settled in Brittany, perhaps hoping for a well-earned retirement. He was, after all, nearly sixty years old, and had been fighting throughout his entire life, but a final call came from his king. The people of Languedoc had rebelled against the Duke of Anjou and threatened the newly found stability of the area. It was to be du Guesclin's last campaign.
Bidding farewell to Brittany at the cathedral of Dol de Bretagne, where he reviewed his troops, he drove the brigands from Auvergne, and laid siege to a fortress called Chateauneuf de Randon. Here he was taken suddenly ill, and rapidly slowed down from the furious pace at which he had habitually lived his life. Forced to command the siege from his bed, he died there on 13 July 1380. The captain of the besieged castle, moved by the unexpectedness with which he had become part of a moment of history, brought the keys of the castle and laid them on du Guesclin's body. So died the great, tough little Breton. His life was unique in its military style, breaking all the social conventions of the day.
Unlike Jeanne d'Arc, Bertrand du Guesclin gave out no prophecies and suffered no martyr's death. But as she was to do half a century later, he seized the moment when France could reassert herself after black despair. He rejoiced, quite naturally, in the honours and titles heaped upon him: Count of Longueville, Duke of Molina, Earl of Trastamare, Constable of France, but always retained that common touch which enabled him to understand the mind of the ordinary soldier he had once been, whether to lead him or to oppose him. Had his patient strategy been heeded by those who came after him, Henry V's army would never have reached Agincourt in one piece, and the Hundred Years' War would have been known by another name.
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