freedom, and that of any twenty of his comrades. Are there so many
from his part?”
“No doubt, sir,” said the officer.
They sent for Gobain Agache, and they made him their offer pleasantly
enough. He stood before them stolid for a moment. They did not press
him.
As to which of these two kings should prove himself by ordeal of
battle to be the rightful king Gobain Agache cared nothing. The
jabbering of Welsh and of half English in the billets had sounded to
him very foreign indeed, but then many of the others there were also
of his own kind. He was disturbed in the matter of loyalty to his
lord, who, he was told, had followed the Valois king upon the farther
side of the river. He was disturbed about his farm, and what would
happen to it if the battle were decided one way or the other; and
here he was, with the value of his farm to his hand for the taking!
So he spoke.
“The ford is close by. Your men ought to have seen it. Any stranger
could see it. It is clearly marked at low tide from the hard to the
hard, a broad made way of marl and chalk and great stones going right
across the river.”
Edward looked at that one of his subordinates chiefly responsible,
who murmured at once,--
“Sir, we did not reach this bank until the tide was already flowing.”
“Did you see a hard going down into the water?” said the king sharply.
“I thought it was a village wharf.”
The king smiled, and turned again to Gobain Agache.
“How broad is it?”
“About twenty paces,” said the farmer.
“Who is the best fisherman here?” said the king abruptly.
Gobain hesitated.
“I do not know the place,” he said.
The king nodded his head slightly to a younger man who stood ready.
That younger man went out. Edward bade the farmer be seated on a form
near the wall, and spent the next few minutes talking of this and
that at random, until the young man who had gone out came back with
an old, wooden-faced fellow, who pulled his hair as he entered and
stood stooping somewhat and stroking his beard with his left hand.
Of him the king asked at what o’clock the tide was full. He said, but
in the speech of St. Valery,--
“At midnight, for it is the full moon.”
“That means that the last of the ebb,” said Edward, half to himself
and half to his companions, “will be a little after six in the
morning.”
The fisherman shook his head and grinned at hearing such strange
errors.
“After seven,” he said. “Seven hours ebb, five hours flow.”
An old man, half servant, half vassal, who looked after the king’s
land round the waters of Chichester harbour, and who could always be
straight with his master, looked him full in the face and said,--
“Never argue about the tide.”
And Edward answered,--
“All the better, so long as it is not too late.”
Then he turned to the old fisherman for a last question,--
“What depth is there at the very lowest of the passage on this ebb?”
“No more than knee-deep water,” said the old man, “for the springs
are making, and we shall have the lowest ebb in three more tides.”
All this the king fitted together in one. He saw his opportunity. The
ford close at hand, its hardness, the chance of the tide just at the
right moment; he saw how all depended upon the defence of the farther
shore. He saw that his chance of crossing and escaping to Calais had
come.
He told the young man to lead the fisherman out and to give him a
piece of gold, and to see that no one took it from him.
* * * * *
The king gave orders for a march in the first hours of the morning,
long before dawn, while still they had the full moonlight to guide
them. The sergeants were warned. The Court and the army took but
little sleep. The grooms had none.
The accustomed delays and rearrangements, without which no force
is gathered, kept them to within two hours of dawn. There was but
one road leading parallel to the shore along the higher dry land
southward; the very long column followed it under the moonlight.
They reached Saigneville, those few miles to the south, just as the
beginnings of daylight, mixing in with the last gold of the moon,
was restoring colour to the world. Yet an hour more was the division
occupied in marshalling under three columns to face the river. It was
broad daylight by the time everything was done, and the sun was very
near the edge of the uplands on the farther shore.
In front of the army ran rapidly the broad stream of the estuary,
racing at more than half ebb to the sea. Already the mud flats below
the village were widely exposed, and were similarly showing upon
the farther bank, and there, running out boldly to the water, which
still submerged it, was the causeway of the ford. Its prolongation,
now that they knew its character, could be caught by the eye nearly
a mile beyond, upon the farther flats. It was Blanchetaque, the
ford, broad and raised as Gobain had described it. Far away upon the
low bluff there could just be made out doubtfully the small--the
too small--force which the advance guard of the Valois had sent to
protect that scarcely threatened issue. It numbered not a sixth of
the Plantagenet’s columns.
Those three columns waited for the fall of the tide. Before them, in
a small, close group, some four hundred knights, fully armed, stood
for the order to mount. It came somewhat before seven in the morning.
The thing had to be calculated closely. Too early a start would find
unfordable water. Too late would mean the catching of the ends of the
column by the tide; for the rearguard of that army, as it crossed on
so narrow a front, was two miles from the head.
The signal sounded, and that trumpet was heard by Godemard de Fay,
the commander of the Valois on the farther bank. He saw Edward’s
knights mount, and the three columns, each four abreast, coming
across the covered causeway, formed. Against Edward’s mounted squires
he sent knights, equally mounted and armed, down into the water to
take the shock. These two small bodies of cavalry met, struggling and
thrusting and hacking at each other, with the salt ebb swirling round
the horses’ knees as the beasts slipped and struggled on the slime
of the causeway floor. But not the wrestling between those handfuls
of heavily accoutred nobles was to decide the passage. That was
determined by the long-bow.
Behind the French knights, on the hard above the falling water level,
a detachment of the Genoese with their cross-bows supported the horse
and sent their shafts into the mass of Edward’s knights, perhaps just
reaching the infantry behind. But that infantry was here in the van,
wholly made up of the archers, the superb arm of all that command,
and it was _they_ who forced the advance. For the Welsh long-bow,
with its greater precision, its sharper impact, its longer range,
and the discipline of the force that used it, firing with exactitude
and command, not only threw Godemard’s horse into a confusion,
stampeding from the causeway into the mud and breaking back towards
the shore, but threw into an equal confusion the Genoese archers and
the French infantry behind. Edward’s knights, acting as a sort of
spearhead, could go forward, but only through the perpetual support
of the long-bow men as they advanced steadily through the narrowing
water and up towards the shore.
There was a moment of hesitation and of last resistance, then that
break in the line which is the end. Edward could see from far off
the horse of his small group of knights vigorously mounting the
bluff, and the scattering of the small force that opposed them. The
bridgehead was held; the main army began to file across.
So close was the issue that it could hardly save its baggage. A
detachment of the King of France’s forces had already appeared upon
the sky-line above Saigneville before the wagons could follow the
last of the English infantry on to the ford. Much of Edward’s train
had to be abandoned. But that same accident which caused so severe a
loss in provision saved the army. The Plantagenet’s command, nearly
all its fighting men at least, had crossed the Somme, and the rising
tide had made pursuit impossible by the time the Valois’ men had
made secure of their booty and had reached the eastern bank. They
watched the growing flood of water between, as, far away upon the
farther bank, the triple column of the English king disappeared over
the western folds of the land.
This was the crossing of Blanchetaque, and this it was which founded,
two days later, the decision of Crécy.
Edward had said “God and our Lady and St. George will find me a
passage.”
VILLE GAGNÉE
(_Friday, April 13, 1436_)
In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of
argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years--and
you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was
king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been
the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city
had been founded!
There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the
fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just
remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the
great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the
Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king--the grandson of a
king of France, the son of a daughter of France--but a king also of
England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was
their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates--all the
world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that
great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow,
still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember
this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of
good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of
Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true
Parisian thing?
All the great story of Joan, those intense two years, had not passed
unheeded. The loud echoes of it had sounded through Paris on that
memorable day when the armoured girl had fallen wounded in the
fruitless assault upon the St. Honoré Gate. But not even that great
sweep of reconquest could wholly shake the city. All the country
round fell away from the Plantagenet to the Valois, but Paris was
still Plantagenet. For nearly half a lifetime one state of things had
endured, and after so many miseries it seemed well enough.
But latterly there had come a change. For the people, and especially
the young men, were telling each other that Burgundy was no longer
friends with their boyish, weak, and distant king; and at the same
time had come a petty but significant alteration in the air of the
city, something that the men of the time hardly noticed--something
of profound significance for posterity was at work. The forces
within the city were no longer of one kind. Even of the nobles, some
were wholly foreign. The English tongue had arisen, and Willoughby,
in command of the garrison, was of that tongue. The conqueror of
Agincourt had spoken, thought, and lived in French. It was as a man
indistinguishable from their own nobles that he had ridden all the
way down the narrow St. Martin’s street, kissing the relics at the
church doors when he made his entry into Paris, all those years
before. But even by his time the tide had turned in England. The
Black Death had done its work before he was born. Henry V. himself
could use the English tongue, and to all the lesser men about him it
was native. Many nobles even could then speak no other. Now, after
the working of a full seventeen years, the estrangement was more
pronounced still; and the populace of Paris knew not, when a patrol
passed by at night, whether its few men would chance to be men of
like speech with themselves or of alien tongue.
And there was yet another matter, perhaps decisive of the issue
that came--in part because a reliance upon Burgundy had made the
populace seem secure for the young Plantagenet king, in part because
the heavy drain of men in the losing campaign all around left few
to spare for Paris: _the garrison in arms under Willoughby was too
small_--hardly more than a battalion (as we say to-day) and a couple
of squadrons.
Already by the spring of the year the regency of England and of
France was troubled, and a month before Easter the citizens had been
summoned to take oath, individually, in support of that treaty of
Troyes by which the young king reigned. For his mother, a princess of
the blood royal of France, was dead. Very few refused to swear. All
the great notables swore. The Bishop and the Abbots and the Prior of
St. Martin, and the chiefs of all the Courts of Justice and of the
Exchequer, and all the Bar, and all the City Companies, and every
priest and monk. It seemed a unanimity; though some few had taken
advantage of the liberty to leave the town, if their allegiance was
to him, the Valois, who called himself King of France outside the
walls.
Beneath that official surface the quarrel between the government at
Westminster and Burgundy had changed the Parisian mind. Already,
secretly, letters were passing between a little group of the
livery-men of the city and Charles of Valois, the king who was
reconquering his kingdom. They treated for amnesty; they assured
Charles (with too much assurance) that he had the support of the
populace in the streets.
So passed Easter. Arthur of Brittany, Count of Richemont and
Constable of France, received those letters and made his plan.
No very great force accompanied him as he marched up northwards
towards Paris through the night, but from within the city there was
nothing strong enough to meet him. There is a curious air of ease,
simplicity, and silence about that last revolution which suddenly
slipped the great capital away from the hands of the Lancastrian
Plantagenets, kings of England.
They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable,
and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles
with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his
hands.
It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of
April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s
Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light,
just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones,
and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall
covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall
remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one
man mounting guard upon the parapet.
Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white
lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did
Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely
man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the
next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round,
certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate,
little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened
to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard
looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the
links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with
a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable
and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon
of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and
grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive
archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman
straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode
L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the
guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the
lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning
light, and cried out, “_Ville gagnée!_” Never was there an odder
capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.
That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets
in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the
market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable,
he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again--Notre-Dame--and,
leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in
their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and
the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received
them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable
answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall
eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was
already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the
head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that
hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.
It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took
the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what
preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty
mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized
the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the
street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his
little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up
Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.
The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the
merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting
for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to
harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street,
shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s
men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his
small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made
eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly
twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the
English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille,
having saved his command. There he awaited terms.
The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the
gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once;
put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies,
strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation
of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master,
the French king, Charles--a decree of general amnesty--and all the
Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the
15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with
troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside
the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were
granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille
be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and
his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through
the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city
wall.
As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly
that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late
government, to whom they called out, “_Ah, the fox! The fox!_” But he
grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man
heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the
water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they
embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably
enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.
LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD
(_January 5, 1477_)
In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly
hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to
show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen
years younger or fifteen years older--he would have looked the same.
He was simply dressed--it was winter--in warm grey clothes, and
though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the
small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and
thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands.
His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone
in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully
ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been
consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to
himself.
One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which
hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic
clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long
intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of
the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the
crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.
It was the king--Louis XI.
To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely,
stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the
larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks,
was further stored the whole business of the realm.
In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of
five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges.
In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had
been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the
reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.
It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen
years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same
sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed
him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that
absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in
the same fashion to gold.
But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This,
the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged
and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them--some quite
unconsciously, none quite consciously--the agents of a great purpose,
had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great
rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.
All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from
the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and
of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man--Charles the
Bold--ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s
power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State,
breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France
halved.
This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast
more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning,
tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail,
patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle,
square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of
thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the
midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a
charge.
The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting
here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads
which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued
the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital,
destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.
* * * * *
As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame,
muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after
scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly
changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he
suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been
sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped
in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued
in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his
race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in
that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin
of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had
shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so
much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.
* * * * *