The King Without a Kingdom

by Maurice Druon

  Instead of coming to the aid of Clermont, Audrehem had wanted to distance himself by following the course of the Miosson and thus outflank the English. He had run into the Count of Warwick’s troops whose archers did him a lot of damage. It was quickly learned that Audrehem had been wounded and taken prisoner. Of the Duke of Athens, nothing was known. He had vanished into the fray. The army had, in just a few moments, seen its three leaders disappear. A bad start. But that made only three hundred men killed or driven back out of the twenty-five thousand that were moving forward, step by step. The king had got back on his horse to tower above this field of armour, slowly marching on.

  Then a curious stirring occurred. The survivors from Clermont’s charge, hurtling down between the two lethal hedgerows, their horses bolting, themselves maddened and unable to slow their mounts, collided with the first battalion, that of the Duke of Orléans, and bowled over like chess pieces their comrades-in-arms marching towards them on foot, with difficulty. Oh! They didn’t knock that many over; thirty or fifty perhaps, but those in their fall overturned as many again.

  As a result, there is panic within the banner of Orléans. The first ranks, wanting to steer clear of the impact, move backwards in disarray; those behind do not know why those in front are pushing back, nor under what enemy thrust; and in moments the rout takes hold of a battalion of almost six thousand men. They are not used to fighting on foot, unless in a combat area, one on one. Here, weighed down as they are, struggling to move, their vision narrowed by their bascinets, they imagine themselves already done for and with no way out. And they all begin to flee though they are still well out of the first enemy’s reach. It is a wonder, an army that drives itself back all on its own!

  The troops of the Duke of Orléans and the duke himself give ground where nobody is fighting them, several units seeking refuge behind the king’s battalion, but most of them running straight, if one can say running, to the horses held by their pages, all these proud men with nothing, in truth, following on their heels but the fear that they had inspired in themselves.

  All to be hauled up onto the saddle, to take off so soon in the battle, some leaving folded up like carpets across their mounts since they hadn’t managed to straddle them properly. And disappearing into the countryside … The hand of God, we can’t refrain from thinking that … can we, Archambaud? And only the heathens would dare smile about it.

  The dauphin’s battalion had also gone ahead – ‘Montjoie Saint-Denis!’60 – and having received no order to return or to surge back, carried on walking. The first rows, gasping for breath from their march, entered between the same hedges that had proven fatal to Clermont, stumbling upon the horses and the men killed there a short while earlier. They were welcomed by the same cloud of arrows, shot from behind the stockades. There was a great noise of swords struck, and cries of rage or pain. The bottleneck was extremely tight, with very few of them at the clash, all the others behind them crushed, and no longer able to move. Jean de Landas, Voudenay, the Sire Guichard too stood, as they had been ordered to, by the side of the dauphin, who would have had great difficulty, as would his brothers of Poitiers and Berry, to move or command the slightest movement. And then, once again, through the slit of a helmet, when you are on foot, with several hundred suits of armour in front of you, your field of vision is severely limited. The dauphin could scarcely see beyond his banner, held by the knight Tristan of Meignelay. When the knights of the Count of Warwick, those who had captured Audrehem, swooped down on horseback upon the flank of the dauphin’s battalion, it was too late to prepare to meet the charge.

  How ironic! These English, who so readily fought on foot and who had built their reputation upon it, had got back in the saddle no sooner had they seen their enemies engaging the attack dismounted. Without having to be great in number, they produced the same pile-up in the dauphin’s battle corps, but tighter still than the one that had happened spontaneously amongst the Duke of Orléans’s men. And with even more confusion. ‘Watch out, watch out,’ they shouted to the king’s three sons. Warwick’s knights pressed on towards the banner of the dauphin, that very dauphin who had dropped his short lance and struggled, jostled by his own men, just to keep hold of his sword.

  It was Voudenay, or perhaps Guichard, nobody knows exactly, who grabbed him by the arm, shouting: ‘Follow us; you must withdraw, monseigneur!’ If only they could. The dauphin saw poor Tristan of Meignelay lying on the ground, blood leaking from his camail61 as if from a cracked pot and pouring onto the banner bearing the arms of Normandy and the Dauphiny. And that, I fear, gave him the ardour to make off. Landas and Voudenay cleared a path for him through their own ranks. His two brothers followed, urged on by Saint-Venant.

  That he got out of a difficult situation, is fine in itself, and one should have only praise for those who helped him get out. They had the mission of guiding and protecting him. They couldn’t leave the sons of France, and most of all, the first amongst them, in enemy hands. That is all well and good. That the dauphin went to his horse, or that his horse was called to him, and that he got on it, and his companions did the same, that is still meet and right, because they had just been jostled by men on horseback.

  But that the dauphin should then, without looking back, take off like a shot, should ride away, leaving the battlefield, just as his uncle of Orléans had a moment before, he will have difficulty passing that off as honourable conduct. Ah! The Knights of the Star were not having their finest hour!

  Saint-Venant, an old and devoted servant of the crown, will always maintain that it was he who took the decision to remove the dauphin, having already been able to judge that the king’s battalion was in a sorry state, that his priority was at all costs to save the heir to the throne with whose guard he was entrusted, and, further, that he had had to strongly insist and almost order the dauphin to leave, and he maintained that even to the dauphin himself, gallant Saint-Venant! Others, alas, have less discreet tongues.

  The men of the dauphin’s battalion, seeing him disappear, were not long in scattering, they too running to their horses, sounding a general retreat.

  The dauphin rode a good league, as he had taken off at full gallop. Then, considering him safe, Voudenay, Landas and Guichard informed him that they were going back to fight. He didn’t answer them. And what would he have said to them? ‘You are going back to the engagement, while I withdraw; I give you my congratulations and I salute you’? Saint-Venant wanted to return as well. But somebody had to stay with the dauphin, and the others forced him to take on the task, as the oldest and wisest amongst them. Thus Saint-Venant, with a small escort that quickly grew, by the way, with the terror-stricken deserters they encountered, accompanied the dauphin to the vast Castle of Chauvigny and shut him up in it. And apparently, upon arriving there, the dauphin had to struggle to remove his gauntlet, his right hand was so swollen, all purple. And he was seen to cry.

  8

  The Battalion of the King

  THERE REMAINED THE battalion of the king … Pour us a little more of this Moselle wine, Brunet. Who do you mean? The archpriest? Ah yes, the one from Verdun! I will see him tomorrow, that will be quite early enough. We are here for three days as we have made such good progress in this continuing spring, so much so that the trees are in bud, in December.

  Yes, King John remained on the battlefield of Maupertuis. Maupertuis … well fancy that, I hadn’t thought of that. Names, we repeat them, we no longer realize what they mean. Fatal outcome, fatal period. One should be wary of waging war in a place so named.

  First the king sees the banners his brother commanded fleeing in disarray, before even encountering the enemy. Then his son’s banners disintegrate and disappear, when scarcely engaged. He had certainly felt great vexation, but without thinking that anything was lost for all that. His battalion alone outnumbered all the English put together.

  A better captain would have probably understood the danger and modified his battle strategy. And yet King John left the knights of
England all the time they needed to repeat against him the charge that had just worked so well for them. They came at him out of nowhere, lances lowered, and broke his battle front.

  Poor John II! His father, King Philip, had been defeated at Crécy for having cast his cavalry against the rank and file, and he himself was getting trounced, at Poitiers, for the exact opposite reason.

  ‘Nothing can be done when one confronts people without honour who always use different weapons from your own.’ That is what he told me later on, when I saw him again. Since they were moving forward on foot, the English should have, had they been valiant men, remained on foot themselves. Oh! He is not the only prince to put the blame for his failures on an enemy who has not played by the rules he himself had chosen!

  He also told me that the wrath that this put him in had strengthened his limbs. He didn’t feel the weight of his armour any more. He had broken his iron mace, but beforehand had battered to death more than one assailant. He preferred, for that matter, knocking out rather than setting about his adversaries; but as he only had his double-headed battleaxe left, he brandished it, he whirled it around, he brought it to bear. One might have been inspired to think of a crazed woodcutter in a forest of steel. One more furious than he on a battlefield has never been seen. He felt nothing, neither fatigue nor dread, only the rage that blinded him, even more than the blood that was trickling onto his left eyelid.

  He was so sure of winning, just a little earlier; he had victory in his hand. And everything collapsed. Because of what, because of whom? Because of Clermont, because of Audrehem, his wicked marshals who set off too soon, because of his constable, an ass! They can lie down and die, all of them! On that front he can put his mind at rest, the good king; that wish at least was granted. The Duke of Athens was dead; he would be found shortly after against a bush, his body gashed open by the blow of a voulge and trampled by horses in a charge. The Marshal of Clermont was dead; he was hit by so many arrows that his corpse resembled a cockerel fanning its tail feathers. Audrehem has been taken prisoner, his thigh run through.

  Rage and fury. All is lost, and yet King John only looks to kill, kill, kill everything that is before him. And then bad luck, to die, his heart torn open! His blue coat of arms, embroidered with the lilies of France is in shreds. He saw fall the oriflamme, held tight against his chest by the courageous Geoffroy of Charny; five coutiliers were upon him; a Welsh bidau62 or an Irish valet, armed with a blunt butcher’s knife, took the banner of France.

  The king calls his own people. ‘Here, Artois! Here, Bourbon!’ They were there just a moment ago. Yes! But now, the son of Count Robert, the denouncer of the King of Navarre, the pea-brained giant, ‘my cousin John, my cousin John’, is held prisoner, and his brother Charles of Artois as well, and Monseigneur of Bourbon the father of the dauphine.

  ‘Come to me, Regnault, come to me, bishop! Make God hear you!’ If Regnault Chauveau was speaking to God at that moment, it was face to face. The bishop’s body was lying somewhere, eyes closed under his purple mitre of iron. Nobody answered the king any more except for a breaking voice shouting: ‘Father, father, watch out! To your right father, watch out!’

  The king had a glimmer of hope upon seeing Landas, Voudenay and Guichard reappear at the battle, on horseback. Had the runaways pulled themselves together? Were the princes’ banners riding back at a gallop to relieve him? ‘Where are my sons?’

  ‘Safe from harm, sire!’

  Landas and Voudenay had charged. Alone. The king would find out later that they had died for their honour, having returned to the fight so that no one would think them cowards, having saved the Princes of France. Just one of his sons remains with the king, the youngest, his favourite, Philip, who continues to shout: ‘To your left, father, watch out! Father, father, look out on your right,’ and who frankly hinders him, more than he helps. As the sword is a little too heavy in the hands of the child to be truly offensive, and King John sometimes needs to push away this useless blade from his long axe, to be able to stop his assailants in their tracks. But at least he hadn’t run away, little Philip!

  Suddenly, John II finds himself surrounded by twenty of the enemy, on foot, in such a hurry that they get in the way of each other. He hears them shout: ‘It’s the king, it’s the king, death to the king!’

  Not a single French coat of arms in this terrible circle. On the targes and shields, nothing but English or Gascon devices. ‘Give yourself up, give yourself up, or you are dead,’ they shout at him.

  But the mad king doesn’t hear a thing. He continues to cleave the air with his axe. As he has been recognized, they hold back; why yes, they want to take him alive! And he cuts the wind to his right, to his left, especially to his right because on the left his eye is stuck together with blood. ‘Father, watch out …’ The king is hit by a blow to the shoulder. An enormous knight breaks through the throng, makes a hole in the steel wall with his body, elbow-armours his way through to the king, gasping for breath, who is still chopping the air. No, it is not John of Artois; I told you he was taken prisoner. In a loud, French voice, the knight shouts: ‘Sire, sire, give yourself up.’

  King John then stops hitting at nothing, contemplates all those around him, who are encircling him, and answers to the knight: ‘To whom should I give myself up, to whom? Where is my cousin the Prince of Wales? I will speak only to him.’

  Sire, he is not here; but give yourself up to me, and I will take you before him,’ responds the giant.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Denis de Morbecque, knight, but for the last five years in the kingdom of England, since I cannot remain in yours.’

  Morbecque, convicted of murder and the crime of private war, the brother of that Jean de Morbecque who works so well for the Navarrese, who negotiated the treaty between Philip of Évreux and Edward III. Ah! Fate did things well and added spice to misfortune to make it all the more bitter.

  ‘I will give myself up to you,’ says the king.

  Throwing his battleaxe into the grass, he takes off his gauntlet and holds it out to the huge knight. And then, motionless an instant, eyes closed, he lets the defeat sink in.

  But then around him the racket starts up again, he is jostled, pulled, crushed, shaken, suffocated. The twenty fellows shout all together: ‘I took him, I took him, it was I who took him!’ More than all the others, a Gascon shouts: ‘He is mine. I was the first to assail him. And you come along, Morbecque, when the deed is done.’ And Morbecque replies: ‘What are you proclaiming there, Troy? He gave himself up to me, not to you.’

  Because it was sure to pay very well, the capture of the King of France, both in honour and in money! And everyone sought to cling on to him to secure their own rights. Seized by the arm by Bertrand of Troy, by the collar, the king ended up getting knocked over in his armour. They would have torn him to pieces.

  ‘Seigneurs, seigneurs!’ he shouted. ‘Take me courteously, would you, and my son as well, before my cousin the prince. Do not fight any longer over my capture. I am great enough to make you all rich.’

  But they wouldn’t listen. They continued to shout: ‘It is I who took him. He is mine!’

  And they fought amongst themselves, these knights, red-faced and iron claws drawn, they fought for a king like dogs for a bone.

  Let us now go over to the side of the Prince of Wales. His good captain, John Chandos, had just joined him on a hillock which dominated a large part of the battlefield, and they had stopped there. Their horses, nostrils bloodshot, bits enveloped in frothy slaver, were covered in foam. They themselves were gasping for breath. ‘We could hear each other taking huge gulps of air,’ Chandos told me. The prince’s face was streaming beneath the steel camail attached to his helmet, which hung over his face and covered his shoulders, rose up and down with each intake of breath.

  Before them, nothing but torn-apart hedges, crushed shrubs, devastated vines. Everywhere mounts and men slain. Here a horse in agony endlessly kicked in the air. There a suit of armo
ur crawled. Elsewhere, three equerries carried the body of a dying knight to the foot of a tree. Everywhere, Welsh archers and Irish coutiliers stripped the corpses bare. One could still hear the clash of combat in some quarters. The English knights passed through the plain closing ranks on one of the last Frenchmen attempting to escape.

  Chandos said: ‘Thank God, the day is ours, monseigneur.’

  ‘Yes indeed, by God it is. We have prevailed!’ answered the prince. And Chandos continued: ‘It would be good, I believe, that you stop here, and had your banner put up on this tall bush. In this way, your people, who are scattered far and wide, will rally around you. And you too could refresh yourself a little, as I see you are rather hot. There is no need to pursue them any more.’

  ‘I believe you are right,’ said the prince.

  And while the lion and lily banner was being put up on a bush and the buglers were sounding with their trumpets the prince’s call to arms, Edward had his bascinet removed, shook out his blond hair, wiped his streaming moustache dry.

  What a day! It has to be said that he had really given his all, galloping relentlessly to show himself to each troop, encouraging his archers, exhorting his knights, deciding on the places where reinforcements were to be directed, well, it was above all Warwick and Suffolk, his marshals, who decided; but he was always there to tell them: ‘Go on, you are doing well …’ In truth, he had taken only one decision himself, but a capital one, and which really deserved him all the day’s glory. When he had seen the disorder provoked in the banner of Orléans by nothing other than the backward surge of the French charge, he had immediately put some of his men back in the saddle to go and produce a similar effect in the battalion of the Duke of Normandy. He himself had entered into the fray on ten occasions. One had the feeling that he was everywhere. And everyone who rallied came to him to say: ‘The day is yours. The day is yours. It is a great date that peoples will remember. The day is yours, you have done wonders.’