The negotiations abandoned, the campaigning went on and, in 1435, the French managed to recapture Harfleur and Dieppe. The loss of Harfleur was particularly serious for it meant that river traffic to and from Rouen would have to run the blockade of French ships, and the loss of Paris the following year was not only a propaganda blow but also added weight to those who believed Jeanne d’Arc’s prophecy of five years previously. A far greater blow than the loss of Harfleur, however, was the death of the duke of Bedford in Rouen on 14 September 1435, at the age of only forty-six. We do not know how he died – the Brut Chronicle simply says that he took sick – but he was hugely overworked and could have fallen prey to any of a number of possible diseases. With him went the last realistic hope of securing an English France: a consummate diplomat who was genuinely popular, particularly in Normandy, he understood and respected French culture, was a sound strategist, and managed to maintain reasonably civilized relationships with most factions, including those of his enemies.
Even had Bedford lived, the problem for the English was that their forces were vastly overstretched, trying to hold a frontier of 350 miles with Valois France south of the Loire, and another 170 or so miles along the eastern border of Aquitaine. Without allies and without sufficient funds to pay mercenaries, there were simply not enough English soldiers to provide the frontier garrisons to guard against inroads. Mobile English expeditionary forces seeking out French armies and defeating them was one thing; holding the territory thus taken was a very different matter. Further negotiations in 1439 failed, this time over the position of English settlers in Normandy whom England would not dispossess to restore their lands to the original owners, and, in 1441, Pontoise, the last English stronghold in the Île de France, twenty miles north-west of Paris, fell. In 1444, a truce was agreed and the marriage of Henry VI and Henri II to the fourteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou, whose aunt was the wife of Charles VII, was arranged. As it turned out, she was a far stronger character than her husband, who would eventually fall prey to the Valois madness inherited from his mother, but even at this stage Henry was much more inclined to peace at (almost) any price than his great father would ever have been.
Henry VI as a child had been under the control of his uncles, but as he grew older he began to take more and more power into his own hands, as indeed he was entitled to do. A wise king, however, would consult with his council and the great men of the realm, and, even if he need not always follow their advice, he should at least seek it. The problem was that Henry was kind, generous, pious and abstemious; he hated bloodshed of any sort and only very reluctantly agreed to executions, frequently pardoning criminals from murderers to petty thieves; he desperately wanted peace with France and would go to great lengths to get it. While all these qualities would have been excellent in a country parson, they were not the qualities of a king, and both the in-fighting that went on in the English court as rival blocs jockeyed for power and the king’s own clumsy attempts to make peace under the Francophile urgings of his wife inevitably had an impact on the war.
At some stage during the dialogue prior to Henry VI’s marriage, Suffolk, now a duke and the chief negotiator, promised to restore Maine to Charles VII, a pledge he made with Henry’s knowledge but without telling the rest of his advisers. The result was the king’s government following one policy – sovereignty over all of France – and the king following another. When the news got out, the London mob was furious, blaming Suffolk, and of course the precedent was now set: if the English would give up Maine without a fight, what about the other territories? It took another three years for the French to get Maine, as the English garrisons held on regardless of what their king might have promised, but finally they had to be surrendered. Normandy at least was thought to be secure: the population was genuinely loyal to their duke, the king of England, and a whole generation had grown up knowing nothing but English rule. The military garrison was tiny, however, and made even tinier by long delays in paying the soldiers, which encouraged desertions, and, when Charles VII sent his army into Normandy in the summer of 1449, there was little to stop them swiftly capturing the cities and towns, including Rouen, where they captured Talbot (taken prisoner at Patay in 1429, he had been exchanged for a French nobleman in 1433). Now only the Cotentin peninsula was held, and that was under immediate threat.
The French military revival came as an unpleasant shock in England. At long last, Charles VII had decided to be a king and had rooted out the incompetent and corrupt administrators and replaced them with hard-faced accountants who were able to raise the taxes that had hitherto gone uncollected. With much of this money he created a new, professional army. At long last, the French were beginning to learn the lessons of defeat by the English: instead of going to war with an army of well-bred nobles leading a half-trained rabble, there would be battalions of paid men-at-arms, archers, crossbowmen and light infantry, who would not be disbanded at the end of every campaign but retained as a permanent force. In addition, he spent money on developing and greatly enlarging the artillery arm. Now tiny bodies of English professionals would no longer find it so easy to beat far larger French armies: the era of English total military supremacy was coming to an end. English soldiers were still better trained, better led and better equipped, but the margin was steadily decreasing and there were not nearly enough of them.
Something had to be done to redress the situation in Normandy and, in October 1449, Sir Thomas Kyriell was ordered to assemble an army at Portsmouth to sail to France. Kyriell, a Kentish man of fifty-three, a knight of the Garter and a knight banneret, had started his military career as a man-at-arms under Sir Gilbert d’Umfraville and had won ennoblement and promotion by military prowess. There was no doubt of his abilities as a soldier and a commander, but there was always a cloud hanging over him. He had been suspected of corruption and of fraudulent conversion of his soldiers’ pay, although this was never proved, and his personal conduct left much to be desired. In Portsmouth, he allowed his soldiers to run amok – they even lynched the bishop of Chichester, who was bringing their pay – and the time it took to restore discipline, combined with an unfavourable wind, meant that he did not reach Cherbourg until mid-March 1450, with around 1,500 archers and 500 men-at-arms. Instead of marching straight for English-held Bayeux, as he had been ordered to do, Kyriell decided instead to lay siege to Valognes, a town of little strategic significance about ten miles south-east of Cherbourg, the only possible justification for this breach of instructions being that the garrison of Valognes might conceivably have been able to cut off Kyriell’s supply route from the sea and his line of retreat. The delay allowed the French to bring up more troops, so, when Kyriell eventually marched for Bayeux, reinforced by another 1,500 archers from the Cotentin garrisons, he found a French army of about the same size commanded by the count of Clermont advancing down the road towards him. Kyriell did everything that he should have done. He formed his men-at-arms into line along a ridge near the village of Formigny, about ten miles north-west of Bayeux, where he had a stream to protect his rear. He put his archers on the flanks with some in the centre, and ordered them to plant their stakes and dig anti-cavalry holes in front. It was a classic English tactical position and Kyriell waited for the French to attack, confident that he could slaughter the lot.
Clermont knew better than to attack the English on their own ground and instead brought up two light cannon, intending to blow the archers away. The guns opened fire and the archers did indeed leave their position, but only to charge the guns, capture them and drag them back to the English line. This would have been the time to unleash the arrow storm, but instead Kyriell did nothing, perhaps through overconfidence, and that gave the French time to reconsider. At this stage, the constable of France, Richemont, arrived from St Lô with his division of 1,200 men and immediately threw them into a flank attack from the south on the archers. With enemy in front and enemy to the left, Kyriell could only form his men into a rough semi-circle and hope for the best. The French
closed and engaged the English in savage hand-to-hand fighting and numbers began to tell; the English were forced back against the brook and the killing began. Kyriell was captured and many of his men butchered, with only a handful managing to escape to Bayeux. It was the first major English defeat for nearly forty years. In June of the same year, Caen fell, followed by Falaise in July, and finally, on 12 August 1450, Cherbourg surrendered and Normandy, except for the offshore islands, was gone. A relief force commanded by Sir John Fastolf never left England.
Now only Aquitaine was left, and, sure enough, in late 1450, the French invaded. Initially, there was resistance; Aquitaine had been English since the twelfth century and most Guiennois had no wish to change that, but, in the absence of a sizeable English army, garrisons began to fall. The following year, another French army attacked, and, on 30 June 1451, Bordeaux fell, Bayonne following on 20 August. The new French tactics of cannon and bribery of minor nobles were working, and in England there was dismay and confusion. There the magnates were at odds with each other and with the weak king; the rebellion in Kent led by Jack Cade – a far more serious affair than the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – had only just been put down, money was short, and charge and counter-charge as to who was to blame for the French debacle were being flung around, sometimes with violence. There was only one man whose reputation was unsullied and who could restore the situation: John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, now an old but still vigorous man of sixty-six, who had been released from French captivity with his ransom paid. In September 1452, he was ordered to take an army to Aquitaine and restore English rule.
Talbot landed at the mouth of the River Gironde on 17 October 1452 with around 2,500 men and marched on Bordeaux. There the citizens rose in revolt, expelled the French garrison and opened the gates to the English. The rising spread, as much against French oppression and taxes as in loyalty to the old regime, and at first it seemed that the status quo ante might be restored. Reinforcements for Talbot arrived and a Gascon contingent was raised. But Charles VII spent the winter concentrating a new army, and, in the spring of 1453, he launched it into Aquitaine. On 17 July 1453, Talbot marched to the relief of the town of Castillon with around 8,000 men and attacked the French artillery redoubt, a deep ditch with a bank behind it on which were mounted cannon – no longer the old bar-and-hoop type but with barrels cast in bronze or brass and a few even in iron.
The recent invention of the powder-mill meant that the gunpowder used was far more reliable and allowed a much higher muzzle velocity than that available in the earlier years of the war. And, as the guns were sited to produce cross-fire, the result was a murderous hail of iron and stone at a very short range. Even then, the fighting went on for nearly an hour as Talbot’s men tried desperately to cross the ditch, climb the bank and get at the cannon, but, when a Breton force of around 800 infantry suddenly arrived and attacked Talbot’s right flank, the end was only a matter of time. Talbot was an easy target: he was the only mounted man, he was not wearing armour (one of the conditions for his release from captivity), and he had an obvious tabard with his coat of arms. A cannon-ball felled his horse, and he was killed by a French infantryman with an axe. Large numbers of English were killed and the pursuit went on as far as Saint-Émilion, thirty miles away. Although nobody would have forecast it at the time, it was the last battle of the Hundred Years War. There were no more troops to send from an England riven with internal strife, and, on 19 October 1453, Bordeaux surrendered. Now there was only Calais, and the great adventure was over.
EPILOGUE
Nobody in England thought that the withdrawal of 1453 was the end of the struggle to retain English France; the French had huge problems trying to control Aquitaine, and, in 1475, Edward IV took an army to France but allowed himself to be bought off by the French Louis XI. From the 1450s, however, with Henry VI alternating between madness and weak and ineffective rule, the focus of English military energy turned inwards, and English armies, hardened and brutalized by the fighting in France, slaughtered each other in a vicious civil war that went on for thirty-three years. The dynastic struggles for the throne between descendants of Lionel of Antwerp, third son of Edward III, and those of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, were finally settled at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor, with only a very tenuous blood claim to the Lancastrian inheritance, defeated and killed Richard III, a direct descendant of Lionel.101 It would not be until nearly 300 years later that Sir Walter Scott would name this period the Wars of the Roses.
With the Tudor dynasty firmly in place, war with France resumed. Henry VII of England supported French rebels in what was termed the ‘mad war’ – actually a civil war – from 1488 to 1491. His son Henry VIII sent a probing expedition to Aquitaine in 1512 and, when that met with inglorious defeat, followed it up the following year with an army of 25,000 men that invaded from Calais. Despite a stunning English victory at Thérouanne – called the ‘Battle of the Spurs’ because of the number of spurred French knights killed – a peace treaty in 1514 gave England little, and raids from Calais into Picardy in 1522 and 1523 produced no lasting gain. An alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1542 led to the capture of Bolougne by English troops in 1544, and, even after Charles made a separate peace with France, Henry VIII’s and later Edward VI’s soldiers withstood repeated French attempts to capture the town, until it was returned to France as part of a peace settlement in 1550. Then, in 1557, Mary Tudor brought England into the war between France and Spain on the side of her Spanish husband Philip II, and, in the following year, a well-planned French attack on the weak garrison of Calais lost England’s last outpost in Europe.
The Hundred Years War had changed English society and attitudes profoundly. At its start, English nobles thought of themselves as Europeans; they had lands on both sides of the Channel, they spoke a form of French, they travelled to and fro, they married into cross-Channel families, and they owed religious allegiance to the pope. By the end, they thought of themselves as English, they spoke English, they owned little outside England, and they were increasingly suspicious of any theological direction from abroad. English hooliganism abroad and xenophobia within may not have started with the Hundred Years War, but they were certainly confirmed and hardened by it. The war did make many individuals very rich, but it also very nearly bankrupted the national treasury. The effort of sending the last expedition of 2,500 men under Talbot in 1452 to relieve Bordeaux was the equivalent of despatching an expeditionary force of 50,000 today; in 2012, we had very great difficulty in maintaining a mere 10,000 men in Afghanistan.102
Militarily, the advances in England were enormous. The old amateur feudal system was swept away and replaced by a regular, professional army. As professional armies are expensive, they would always be small, but they consistently defeated far larger but badly led French armies whose activities were uncoordinated and undisciplined. Only when the French, very late in the day, began to copy the English system did the vast differences in population and national wealth begin to take effect. The experiences of such a long period of sporadic campaigns were to lay the foundations for the English, and later the British, way of waging war. Professionalism would stay. In the civil war of the mid-seventeenth century, both royalists and parliamentarians initially attempted to conscript; it did not work, was regarded as an unacceptable imposition on free-born Englishmen and was abandoned. It took great debate and much deliberation before conscription was imposed halfway through the First World War and it was stopped once peace was declared; and, although imposed again for the Second World War and for some fifteen years after, it was always intended as a short-term and temporary stop-gap. Britain would wage her wars with career servicemen wherever possible, and most British soldiers looked, and still look, with disdain at European pressed men. Indeed, a further reason for the success of English arms in France in the Hundred Years War was the steady supply of good junior and middle piece officers, not, as was the case in the French army, promoted fo
r their breeding or their influence, but for their professional ability: England was and still is a class-ridden society, but that class system was and is mobile and men did and do move up (and down) according to their merits. England had a host of military heroes, France only the very overrated du Guesclin and the mystic child Jeanne d’Arc.
After the withdrawal from France, England, and later Britain, developed into a world power at sea, which was natural enough for an island nation. As Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, Earl St Vincent, said in 1803 when asked about the possibility of a French invasion, ‘I do not say they cannot come – I do say they cannot come by sea’ – a remark repeated by the heads of the Royal Navy in 1914 and in 1940. An essential for the success of a necessarily small army is the use of technology as a force multiplier, and this was rarely forgotten by English and then British generals: from the longbow to the Baker rifle to the machine-gun to the tank, any advantage that would substitute machines or weapons for men was seized upon. A major lesson from the Hundred Years War was that a small nation with a professional army may be able to win its battles, but it takes many more men to hold ground than to win it in the first place. In her future wars, Britain would only operate on land as part of a coalition.103
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