1355, Edward of England repeated his invasion, ravaging
Artois, while his son, the Black Prince, from Guienne (which
the English had held since the Angevin time), devastated
Languedoc. The next year, this last named prince made another
sally from Bordeaux, northwards, towards the Loire, and was
encountered by the French king, with a splendid army, at
Poitiers. The victory of the English in this case was more
overwhelming than at Crécy, although they were greatly
outnumbered. King John was taken prisoner and conveyed to
London. His kingdom was in confusion. The dauphin called
together the States-General of France, and that body, in which
the commons, or third estate, attained to a majority in numbers,
assumed powers and compelled assent to reforms which seemed
likely to place it on a footing of equal importance with the
Parliament of England. The leader of the third estate in these
measures was Etienne or Stephen Marcel, provost of Paris, a
man of commanding energy and courage. The dauphin, under
orders from his captive father, attempted to nullify the
ordinances of the States-General. Paris rose at the call of
Marcel and the frightened prince became submissive; but the
nobles of the provinces resented these high-handed proceedings
of the Parisians and civil war ensued. The peasants, who were
in great misery, took advantage of the situation to rise in
support of the Paris burgesses, and for the redressing of
their own wrongs. This insurrection of the Jacquerie, as it is
known, produced horrible deeds of outrage and massacre on both
sides, and seems to have had no other result. Paris, meantime
(1358), was besieged and hard pressed; Marcel, suspected of an
intended treachery, was killed, and with his death the whole
attempt to assert popular rights fell to the ground.
The state of France at this time was one of measureless
misery. It was overrun with freebooters--discharged soldiers,
desperate homeless and idle men, and the ruffians who always
bestir themselves when authority disappears. They roamed the
country in bands, large and small, stripped it of what war had
spared, and left famine behind them.
At length, in 1360, terms of peace were agreed upon, in a
treaty signed at Bretigny, and fighting ceased, except in
Brittany, where the war went on for four years more. By the
treaty, all French claims upon Aquitaine and the dependencies
were given up, and Edward acquired full sovereignty there, no
longer owing homage, as a vassal, to the king of France.
Calais, too, was ceded to England, and so heavy a ransom was
exacted from the captive King John that he failed to collect
money for the payment of it and died in London (1364).
Charles the Wise.
Charles V., who now ruled independently, as he had ruled for
some years in his father's name, proved to be a more prudent
and capable prince, and his counsellors and captains were
wisely chosen. He was a man of studious tastes and of
considerable learning for that age, with intelligence to see
and understand the greater sources of evil in his kingdom.
Above all, he had patience enough to plant better things in
the seed and wait for them to grow, which is one of the
grander secrets of statesmanship. By careful, judicious
measures, he and those who shared the task of government with
him slowly improved the discipline and condition of their
armies. The "great companies" of freebooters, too strong to be
put down, were lured out of the kingdom by an expedition into
Spain, which the famous warrior Du Guesclin commanded, and
which was sent against the detestable Pedro, called the Cruel,
of Castile, whom the English supported. A stringent economy in
public expenditure was introduced, and the management of the
finances was improved. The towns were encouraged to strengthen
their fortifications, and the state and feeling of the whole
country were slowly lifted from the gloomy depth to which the
war had depressed them.
At length, in 1369, Charles felt prepared to challenge another
encounter with the English, by repudiating the ignominious
terms of the treaty of Bretigny. Before the year closed,
Edward's armies were in the country again, but accomplished
nothing beyond the havoc which they wrought as they marched.
The French avoided battles, and their cities were well
defended. Next year the English returned, and the Black Prince
earned infamy by a ferocious massacre of three thousand men,
women, and children, in the city of Limoges, when he had taken
it by storm. It was his last campaign. Already suffering from
a mortal disease, he returned to England, and died a few years
later. The war went on, with no decisive results, until 1375,
when it was suspended by a truce. In 1377, Edward III. died,
and the French king began war again with great success. Within
three years he expelled the English from every part of France
except Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.
If he had lived a little longer, there might soon have been an
end of the war. But he died in 1380, and fresh calamities fell
upon unhappy France.
{1038}
Rising Power of Burgundy.
The son who succeeded him, Charles VI., was an epileptic boy
of twelve years, who had three greedy and selfish uncles to
quarrel over the control of him, and to plunder the Crown of
territory and treasures. One of these was the Duke of
Burgundy, the first prince of a new great house which King
John had foolishly created. Just before that fatuous king
died, the old line of Burgundian dukes came to an end, and he
had the opportunity, which wise kings before him would have
improved very eagerly, to annex that fief to the crown.
Instead of doing so, he gave it as an appanage to his son
Philip, called "the Bold," and thus rooted a new plant of
feudalism in France which was destined to cause much trouble.
Another of the uncles was Louis, Duke of Anjou, heir to the
crown of Naples under a will of the lately murdered Queen
Joanna, and who was preparing for an expedition to enforce his
claim. The third was Duke of Berry, upon whom his father, King
John, had conferred another great appanage, including Berry,
Poitou and Auvergne.
The pillage and misgovernment of the realm under these
rapacious guardians of the young king was so great that
desperate risings were provoked, the most formidable of which
broke out in Paris. They were all suppressed, and with
merciless severity. At the same time, the Flemings, who had
again submitted to their count, revolted once more, under the
lead of Philip van Arteveld, son of their former leader. The
French moved an army to the assistance of the Count of
Flanders, and the sturdy men of Ghent, who confronted it
almost alone, suffered a crushing defeat at Roosebeke (1382).
Philip van Arteveld fell in the battle, with twenty-six
thousand of his men. Two years later, the Count of Flanders
died, and the Duke of Burgundy, who had married his daughter,
acquired that rich and noble possession. This beginning of the
union of Burgundy and the Netherlands, creating a power by the
side of the throne of France which threatened to overshadow
it, and having for its ultimate consequence the casting of the
wealth of the Low Countries into the lap of the House of
Austria and into the coffers of Spain, is an event of large
importance in European history.
Burgundians and Armagnacs.
When Charles VI. came of age, he took the government into his
own hands, and for some years it was administered by capable
men. But in 1392 the king's mind gave way, and his uncles
regained control of affairs. Philip of Burgundy maintained the
ascendancy until his death, in 1404. Then the controlling
influence passed to the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans,
between whom and the new Duke of Burgundy, John, called the
Fearless, a bitter feud arose. John, who was unscrupulous,
employed assassins to waylay and murder the Duke of Orleans,
which they did in November, 1407. This foul deed gave rise to
two parties in France. Those who sought vengeance ranged
themselves under the leadership of the Count of Armagnac, and
were called by his name. The Burgundians, who sustained Duke
John, were in the main a party of the people; for the Duke had
cultivated popularity, especially in Paris, by advocating
liberal measures and extending the rights and privileges of
the citizens.
The kingdom was kept in turmoil and terror for years by the
war of these factions, especially in and about Paris, where
the guild of the butchers took a prominent part in affairs, on
the Burgundian side, arming a riotous body of men who were
called Cabochiens, from their leader's name. In 1413 the
Armagnacs succeeded in recovering possession of the capital
and the Cabochiens were suppressed.
Second Stage of the Hundred Years War.
Meantime, Henry V. of England, the ambitious young Lancastrian
king who came to the throne of that country in 1413, saw a
favorable opportunity, in the distracted state of France, to
reopen the questions left unsettled by the breaking of the
treaty of Bretigny. He invaded France in 1415, as the rightful
king coming to dethrone a usurper, and began by taking
Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine, after a siege which cost
him so heavily that he found it prudent to retreat towards
Calais. The French intercepted him at Agincourt and forced him
to give them battle. He had only twenty thousand men, but they
formed a well disciplined and well ordered army. The French
had gathered eighty thousand men, but they were a feudal mob.
The battle ended, like those of Crécy and Poitiers, in the
routing and slaughter of the French, with small loss to
Henry's force. His army remained too weak in numbers, however,
for operations in a hostile country, and the English king
returned home, with a great train of captive princes and
lords.
He left the Armagnacs and Burgundians still fighting one
another, and disabling France as effectually as he could do if
he stayed to ravage the land. In 1417 he came back and began
to attack the strong cities of Normandy, one by one, taking
Caen first. In the next year, by a horrible massacre, the
Burgundian mob in Paris overcame the Armagnacs there, and
reinstated Duke John of Burgundy in possession of the capital.
The latter was already in negotiation with the English king,
and evidently prepared to sacrifice the kingdom for whatever
might seem advantageous to himself. But in 1419 Henry V. took
Rouen, and, when all of Normandy submitted with its capital,
he demanded nothing less than that great province, with
Brittany, Guienne, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in addition,--or,
substantially, the western half of France.
Burgundian and English Alliance.
Parleyings were brought to an end in September of that year by
the treacherous murder of Duke John. The Armagnacs slew him
foully, at an interview to which he had been enticed, on the
bridge of Montereau. His son, Duke Philip of Burgundy, now
reopened negotiations with the invader, in conjunction with
Queen Isabella (wife of the demented king), who had played an
evil part in all the factious troubles of the time. These two,
having control of the king's person, concluded a treaty with
Henry V. at Troyes, according to the terms of which Henry
should marry the king's daughter Catherine; should be
administrator of the kingdom of France while Charles VI.
lived, and should receive the crown when the latter died. The
marriage took place at once, and almost the whole of France
north of the Loire seemed submissive to the arrangement. The
States-General and the Parliament of Paris gave official
recognition to it; the disinherited dauphin of France, whose
own mother had signed away his regal heritage, retired, with
his Armagnac supporters, to the country south of the Loire,
and had little apparent prospect of holding even that.
{1039}
Two Kings in France.
But a mortal malady had already stricken King Henry V., and he
died in August, 1422. The unfortunate, rarely conscious French
king, whose crown Henry had waited for, died seven weeks
later. Each left an heir who was proclaimed king of France.
The English pretender (Henry VI. in England, Henry II. in
France) was an innocent infant, ten months old; but his court
was in Paris, his accession was proclaimed with due ceremony
at St. Denis, his sovereignty was recognized by the Parliament
and the University of that city, and the half of France
appeared resigned to the lapse of nationality which its
acceptance of him signified. The true heir of the royal house
of France (Charles VII.) was a young man of nearly mature age
and of fairly promising character; but he was proclaimed in a
little town of Berry, by a small following of lords and
knights, and the nation for which he stood hardly seemed to
exist.
The English supporters of the English king of France were too
arrogant and overbearing to retain very long the good will of
their allies among the French people. Something like a
national feeling in northern France was aroused by the
hostility they provoked, and the strength of the position in
which Henry V. left them was steadily but slowly lost. Charles
proved incapable, however, of using any advantages which
opened to him, or of giving his better counsellors an
opportunity to serve him with good effect, and no important
change took place in the situation of affairs until the
English laid siege, in 1428, to the city of Orleans, which was
the stronghold of the French cause.
Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
Then occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes in
history; the appearance of the young peasant girl of Lorraine,
Jeanne d'Arc, whose coming upon the scene of war was like the
descent of an angel out of Heaven, sent with a Divine
commission to rescue France. Belief in the inspiration of this
simple maiden, who had faith in her own visions and voices,
was easier for that age than belief in a rational rally of
public energies, and it worked like a miracle on the spirit of
the nation. But it could not have done so with effect if the
untaught country girl of Domremy had not been endowed in a
wonderful way, with a wise mind, as well as with an
imaginative one, and with courage as well as with faith. When
the belief in her inspired mission gave her power to lead the
foolish king, and authority to command his disorderly troops,
she acted almost invariably with understanding, with good
sense, with a clear, unclouded judgment, with straightforward
singleness of purpose, and with absolute personal
fearlessness. She saw the necessity for saving Orleans; and
when that had been done under her own captaincy (1429), she
saw how greatly King Charles would gain in prestige if he made
his way to Rheims, and received, like his predecessors, a
solemn coronation and consecration in the cathedral of that
city. It was by force of her gentle obstinacy of determination
that this was done, and the effect vindicated the sagacity of
the Maid. Then she looked upon her mission as accomplished,
and would have gone quietly home to her village; for she seems
to have remained as simple in feeling as when she left her
father's house, and was innocent to the end of any selfish
pleasure in the fame she had won and the importance she had
acquired. But those she had helped would not let her go; and
yet they would not be guided by her without wrangle and
resistance. She wished to move the army straight from Rheims
to Paris, and enter that city before it had time to recover
from the consternation it was in. But other counsellors
retarded the march, by stopping to capture small towns on the
way, until the opportunity for taking Paris was lost. The
king, who had been braced up to a little energy by her
influence, sank back into his indolent pleasures, and faction
and frivolity possessed the court again. Jeanne strove with
high courage against malignant opposition and many
disheartenments, in the siege of Paris and after, exposing
herself in battle with the bravery of a seasoned warrior; and
her reward was to find herself abandoned at last, in a
cowardly way, to the enemy, when she had led a sortie from the
town of Compiegne, to drive back the Duke of Burgundy, who was
besieging it. Taken prisoner, she was given up to the Duke,
and sold by him to the English at Rouen.
That the Maid acted with supernatural powers was believed by
the English as firmly as by the French; but those powers, in
their belief, came, not from Heaven, but from Hell. In their
view she was not a saint, but a sorceress. They paid a high
price to the Duke of Burgundy for his captive, in order to put
her on trial for the witchcraft which they held she had
practised against them, and to destroy her mischievous power.
No consideration for her sex, or her youth, or for the beauty
and purity of character that is revealed in all the accounts
of her trial, moved her judges to compassion. They condemned
her remorselessly to the stake, and she was burned on the 31st
of May, 1431, with no effort put forth on the part of the
French or their ungrateful king to save her from that horrible
fate.
End of the Hundred Years War.
After this, things went badly with the English, though some
years passed before Charles VII. was roused again to any
display of capable powers. At last, in 1435, a general
conference of all parties in the war was brought about at
Arras. The English were offered Normandy and Aquitaine in full
sovereignty, but they refused it, and withdrew from the
conference when greater concessions were denied to them. The
Duke of Burgundy then made terms with King Charles, abandoning
the English alliance, and obtaining satisfaction for the
murder of his father. Charles was now able, for the first time
in his reign, to enter the capital of his kingdom (May, 1436),
and it is said that he found it so wasted by a pestilence and
so ruined and deserted, that wolves came into the city, and
that forty persons were devoured by them in a single week,
some two years later.
{1040}
Charles now began to show better qualities than had appeared
in his character before. He adopted strong measures to
suppress the bands of marauders who harassed and wasted the
country, and to bring all armed forces in the kingdom under
the control and command of the Crown. He began the creation of
a disciplined and regulated militia in France. He called into
his service the greatest French merchant of the day, Jacques
Cœur, who successfully reorganized the finances of the state,
and whose reward, after a few years, was to be prosecuted and
plundered by malignant courtiers, while the king looked
passively on, as he had looked on at the trial and execution
of Jeanne d'Arc.
In 1449, a fresh attack upon the English in Normandy was
begun; and as civil war--the War of the Roses--was then at the
point of outbreak in England, they could make no effective
resistance. Within a year, the whole of Normandy had become
obedient again to the rule of the king of France. In two years
more Guienne had been recovered, and when, in October, 1453,
the French king entered Bordeaux, the English had been finally
expelled from every foot of the realm except Calais and its
near neighborhood. The Hundred Years War was at an end.
England under Edward III.
The century of the Hundred Years War had been, in England, one
of few conspicuous events; and when the romantic tale of that
war--the last sanguinary romance of expiring Chivalry--is
taken out of the English annals of the time, there is not much
left that looks interesting on the surface of things. Below
the surface there are movements of no little importance to be
found.
When Edward III. put forward his claim to the crown of France,
and prepared to make it good by force of arms, the English
nation had absolutely no interest of its own in the
enterprise, from which it could derive no possible advantage,
but which did, on the contrary, promise harm to it, very
plainly, whatever might be the result. If the king succeeded,
his English realm would become a mere minor appendage to a far
more imposing continental dominion, and he and his successors
might easily acquire a power independent and absolute, over
their subjects. If he failed, the humiliation of failure would
wound the pride and the prestige of the nation, while its
resources would have been drained for naught. But these
rational considerations did not suffice to breed any
discoverable opposition to King Edward's ambitious
undertaking. The Parliament gave sanction to it; most probably
the people at large approved, with exultant expectations of
national glory; and when Crécy and Poitiers, with victories
over the hostile Scots, filled the measure of England's glory
to overflowing, they were intoxicated by it, and had little
thought then of the cost or the consequences.
But long before Edward's reign came to an end, the splendid
pageantries of the war had passed out of sight, and a new
generation was looking at, and was suffering from, the
miseries and mortifications that came in its train. The
attempt to conquer France had failed; the fruits of the
victories of Crécy and Poitiers had been lost; even Guienne,
which had been English ground since the days of Henry II., was
mostly given up. And England was weak from the drain of money
and men which the war had caused. The awful plague of the 14th
century, the Black Death, had smitten her people hard and left
diminished numbers to bear the burden. There had been famine
in the land, and grievous distress, and much sorrow.
But the calamities of this bitter time wrought beneficent
effects, which no man then living is likely to have clearly
understood. By plague, famine and battle, labor was made
scarce, wages were raised, the half-enslaved laborer was
speedily emancipated, despite the efforts of Parliament to
keep him in bonds, and land-owners were forced to let their
lands to tenant-farmers, who strengthened the English
middle-class. By the demands of the war for money and men, the
king was held more in dependence on Parliament than he might
otherwise have been, and the plant of constitutional
government, which began its growth in the previous century,
took deeper root.
In the last years of his life Edward III. lost all of his
vigor, and fell under the influence of a woman, Alice Perrers,
who wronged and scandalized the nation. The king's eldest son,
the Black Prince, was slowly dying of an incurable disease,
and took little part in affairs; when he interfered, it seems
to have been with some leanings to the popular side. The next
in age of the living sons of Edward was a turbulent, proud,
self-seeking prince, who gave England much trouble and was
hated profoundly. This was John, Duke of Lancaster, called
John of Gaunt, or Ghent, because of his birth in that city.
England under Richard II.
The Black Prince, dying in 1376, left a young son, Richard,
then ten years old, who was immediately recognized as the heir
to the throne, and who succeeded to it in the following year,
when Edward III. died. The Duke of Lancaster had been
suspected of a design to set Richard aside and claim the crown
for himself. But he did not venture the attempt; nor was he
able to secure even the regency of the kingdom during the
young king's minority. The distrust of him was so general that
Parliament and the lords preferred to invest Richard with full
sovereignty even in his boyhood. But John of Gaunt,
notwithstanding these endeavors to exclude him from any place
of authority, contrived to attain a substantial mastery of the
government, managing the war in France and the expenditure of
public moneys in his own way, and managing them very badly. At
least, he was held chiefly responsible for what was bad, and
his name was heard oftenest in the mutterings of popular
discontent. The peasants were now growing very impatient of
the last fetters of villeinage which they wore, and very
conscious of their right to complete freedom. Those feelings
were strongly stirred in them by a heavy poll-tax which
Parliament levied in 1381. The consequence was an outbreak of
insurrection, led by one Wat the Tyler, which became
formidable and dangerous. The insurgents began by making
everybody they encountered swear to be true to King Richard,
and to submit to no king named John, meaning John of Gaunt.
They increased in numbers and boldness until they entered and
took possession of the city of London, where they beheaded the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and other obnoxious persons; but
permitted no thieving to be done.
{1041}
The day after this occurred, Wat Tyler met the young king at
Smithfield, for a conference, and was suddenly killed by one
of those who attended the king. The excuse made for the deed
was some word of insolence on the part of the insurgent
leader; but there is every appearance of a foul act of
treachery in the affair. Richard on this occasion behaved
boldly and with much presence of mind, acquiring by his
courage and readiness a command over the angry rebels, which
resulted in their dispersion.