Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  A military investment of Le Mans began on 10 February 1448 after a smooth mobilization closely supervised by Charles himself.56 This was the first test of the new permanent army as organized at Nancy in 1445. By 10 February he had assembled at Le Mans from 6,000 to 7,000 troops, with a large artillery train and siege engines. The English garrison, reinforced from Normandy, allegedly by the notorious freebooters of Lord Camoys, numbered some 2,500.57 When Brézé approached the suburbs on 13 February, backed by the massive French force, his progress was resisted, but contact was ultimately established with Gough, Eyton and Mundeford and local truces established for parleys. Gough and Eyton continued in negotiations and produced a new trump card which the French naturally found most strange and exasperating: they alleged that they had just received fresh instructions direct from Henry himself, under his privy seal, ordering them to make no surrender pending the arrival of fresh ambassadors from England. The Frenchmen were very sceptical, but ultimately agreed to further truces until noon on 19 February, to enable reference to be made back to Charles VII. But they were finally forced to flee in disorder when Mundeford sallied out of the castle intent on capturing them, with a force of six or seven hundred armed men, calling for combat.

  Charles VII, at Lavardin, now sent his cup-bearer Raordin Regnault, off to England with two long, up-to-the-minute, detailed accounts of these abortive negotiations, omitting nothing except the vital fact of his investing army in position around Le Mans.58 But Henry had indeed already appointed new plenipotentiaries, Adam Moleyns, Reginald Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, and Sir Robert Roos, on 30 January, to treat with Charles’s commissaries.59 Gough and Eyton on 13 February were thus telling the truth and had been speedily and accurately informed. Later, on Sunday 18 February, Hoo wrote again in mounting alarm to Brézé to inform him that Moleyns and his fellows had landed at Honfleur the previous Thursday and were hastening to Lavardin. He knew that Garter had already been sent to Lavardin to Charles VII with news of this embassy and could therefore see no justification for the provoking and dangerous siege while negotiations and the truce continued.60 On 22 February Garter, clearly a model herald, hastening on his return from Lavardin to meet Moleyns and Roos at Alençon with Charles VII’s letters of safe conduct, declined the escort offered him by Brézé, who was travelling via Le Mans, because this would be an embarrassing sight to both of them. He was given Touraine herald to conduct him by an alternative route, but he too felt bound to complain that Moleyns and Roos, who he considered as close to his king and as devoted to peace as any man, were not being received with the honour due to them.61

  Crisis on the spot was now matched by belatedly expressed alarm in England. By 31 January the council there had had their own disturbing reports of Charles VII’s military preparations against Maine and considered that Edmund Beaufort should take up his duties as king’s lieutenant in Normandy, France and Gascony at once and on a war footing. He received £2,275 as immediate payment for the first quarter’s wages of 1,000 archers, part of his £20,000 per annum and 1,000 marks was paid out for his shipping on 5 March. Next day accurate news of the ‘mighty siege’ and ‘sharp war’ at Le Mans secured him a further advance of £2,500 for a further force of 200 spears and 2,000 bows.62

  Henry’s promise to surrender Maine, a unilateral gesture in return for nothing more than his Valois uncle’s unspecified goodwill towards a peace settlement, had thus divided and confused his own councillors at home and demoralized his administration and garrisons in France. Charles VII had been able to use to the full the opportunities provided by the truce for the organization and development of his military forces. Moreover, he had now conducted a successful trial mobilization, with palpable justification, to ensure possession of what had become his legal right, which only Henry’s rebellious subjects were withholding from him.

  Moleyns and Roos appear to have reached Lavardin by 6 March,63 and a treaty was signed on the nth, followed by separate conventions regarding the truce and the surrenders on 15 March. Compensation, at ten years purchase, was now agreed for the dispossessed, to be paid by cancelling the annual sums from the revenues of Normandy due to Charles as agreed by Suffolk at Nancy in 1445. The English would thus pay the compensation themselves! All English-held Maine, except Fresnay, was to be surrendered and consequently the truce could be extended to 1 April 1450.64

  The siege of Le Mans by Charles VII’s new army was indeed a reality. Three heavy skirmishes took place and the walls, gates and some buildings of the town were heavily damaged.65 It was Charles VII’s successful investment of the city which made ultimate surrender inevitable. This came at 10 p.m. on 15 March 1448, when Osbert Mundeford, styled bailiff of Maine, read out aloud on the bridge at the entrance to the castle a notarial instrument on behalf of Mathew Gough and Fulk Eyton. Its points were (1) that the ‘peaceful’ surrender was now made for the benefit of René of Anjou and Charles of Maine only; (2) for the achievement of a good, firm and secure peace only; (3) that the sovereignty was expressly reserved to Henry and his heirs; (4) that if anything was attempted against the above, then the gift was revoked and Henry re-entered into full possession.66 On the 16th the defenders marched out in company with Moleyns and Roos, equipped with six months’ provisions.67 On 12 June 1448 Gough and Eyton received Henry’s discharge and commendation as good and faithful executors of their charge to deliver Maine!68 In fact it was now abundantly clear that the valuable bargaining counter of Henry’s marriage and much more besides had been thrown away at Tours in May 1444. Three years of wrangling under cover of a precarious truce and the ultimate threat of Charles VII’s force majeure had at last accomplished a surrender which seriously undermined the English position in France and had no point other than the empty fulfilment of Henry’s irresponsible personal promise, made ‘on the word of a king’ to his new-found, dearly beloved Uncle Charles.

  The treaty of Lavardin of 11 March 1448, which in theory implemented the final surrender of Maine, differed from the truce of Tours in one very significant respect. The English version, which the French ratified, includes the duke of Brittany among the ‘colligate confoederate, amici, auxiliantes, fautores et adhaerantes’ of Henry VI, listed after the king of Portugal and before the duke of York. The French version, which the English ratified, includes him among Charles VII’s ‘seigneurs les dues’. Thus in the spring of 1448 Henry and his negotiators were now aware of the vital importance of the duke of Brittany’s allegiance, which they had cavalierly ignored at Tours and the two sides consequently had to leave this issue undecided in order to be able to formalize the final surrender of Maine. The disputed allegiance of Brittany now replaced possession of Maine as the principal danger to the continuation of the truce. This was on two counts. In the first place no provision was made to accommodate the dispossessed from Le Mans, and the other English garrisons in Maine, elsewhere. They found themselves new homes in the dismantled fortress of St James de Bevron, in the marches between Brittany and English Normandy and built two new fortresses in Mortain, allegedly arousing the alarm of the duke of Brittany and inviting the opportunist claim of Charles VII that these moves constituted serious infringements of the truce in a frontier area. Secondly, Henry had himself become concerned and involved in the quarrel between his friend and ally Gilles of Brittany, who had stoutly maintained his English allegiance, and his brother, the duke, who was supported by Charles VII.

  Gilles’s problems stemmed in the first instance from discontent with his appanage, which consisted of certain rents on the ducal demesne, but land situated only outside the duchy and subject to homage to René count of Anjou and to Charles VII. He had contemptuously renounced these before four public notaries at Le Guildo on 23 December 1445 as derogatory to his dignity. Gilles first drew Henry, his acknowledged overlord, into his dispute with his brother the duke through his close contacts with the English authorities in Normandy, Mathew Gough, Chancellor Hoo and Sir Robert Roos. Requests to Hoo and Roos for advice about the payment of his English pension
and how he should behave when Henry made his intended journey into France were passed on to Henry himself. Advised to contact Henry direct, he sent an envoy to England whose instructions, dated at Biron on 5 July 1445, were intercepted by his brother the duke. They were taken to constitute treason with the English because in them he allegedly offered to lay his grievance over his appanage before Henry’s council in France or England and to accept him as his principal lord. He also offered Henry his further services subject to the truce, undertook to place his castles in Brittany at Henry’s disposal and requested that Henry’s subjects in France be called upon to give him aid if he required it. His friend Mathew Gough went on a mission of reconciliation to the duke to explain all this away as harmless early in October 1445, and Gilles and his brother the duke were formally reconciled by their uncle Arthur de Richemont, constable of France, at Rieux on 19 October. But the price Gilles had to pay was the surrender of St Malo and Moncontour and an undertaking to break off his English contacts. A letter under Henry’s sign manual and signet, written by Gervais le Vulre at Westminster on 25 October 1445 reveals that out of affection for Gilles and their nearness of blood (their mothers were sisters, daughters of Charles VI of France), Henry had personally interceded with the duke to give Gilles an honourable Breton endowment. In this letter Henry also expressed his disbelief that the duke could disapprove of Gilles’s Anglo-Norman contacts and had informed him that he had instructed Chancellor Hoo and others in his service there to do all in their power to serve Gilles. When Gilles at Le Guildo on 23 December 1445 solemnly renounced his French appanage and continued his English contacts he was duly encouraged, especially by Mathew Gough, with strong assurances of Henry’s great affection and with hopes that he might receive the earldom of Richmond and other English favours.

  On 16 March 1446 the duke, by contrast, decided to cement his links with the Valois by performing homage to Charles VII at Chinon. This he did standing for Brittany and kneeling in liege homage only for his French lands, just as previous dukes had done. The allegiance of Brittany was always to Charles VII, if not to Henry VI, a vital factor in the Anglo-French struggle. Charles never overlooked it. As he himself said, it was ‘a matter of the highest importance which touches the king nearer than almost any other which can arise in this realm’. Although the form of Duke Francis’s homage was displeasing to the French chancellor and others of Charles’s entourage, Charles himself was not too particular. He took it graciously and willingly and improved the occasion by absolving the duke from the odium of his father’s English adherence and his own homage which he had done to Henry while himself under age.69

  Late in April 1446 Gilles began to fear for his personal safety in Brittany. He requested the English captain of Avranches to send him an English bodyguard of twenty-five men to his castle of Le Guildo. Hoo and Roos gave their approval, provided the guards were not taken from the garrison strength. But in June 1446 he successfully defied emissaries from his brother, sent to summon him to answer further charges of planning a military coup with the English, and ignored advice from the English captains to leave Le Guildo and come to Normandy with his family and followers. He was consequently arrested by a trick on 26 June. A French force, sent by Charles VII under Admiral Coëtivi, was admitted to his castle at Le Guildo in the mistaken belief that they were a friendly mission from his uncle of France. The Frenchmen conveyed him to the duke; the duke put him on trial before the Estates of Brittany and the process dragged on until July 1447 with no conclusive issue. Gilles was then confined by the duke in various strongholds: Châteaubriant, Moncontour, Touffon and, finally, La Hardouinaie where he was murdered on the night of 24 April 1450.70

  It seems that Gilles genuinely regarded himself as Henry’s man and protected by the terms of the truce of Tours. Whatever his differences with his brother the duke, he was totally unprepared for a French attack upon him in breach of the truce. The Boke of Noblesse, originally written in the early 1450s to promote and justify an English reconquest, confirms that the ‘grete adversarie of Fraunce Charles the viithe’ was currently regarded in England as the first truce-breaker by this arrest of Gilles, for which the subsequent English attack on Fougères was a legitimate retaliation.71 When Henry VI himself was ultimately convinced, in August 1448, that their Valois uncle Charles VII, not Duke Francis, had been responsible for his arrest, he too regarded this as a breach of the truce. Some of Gilles’s servants fled to England where they were warmly received by Henry. As early as 1446 one of Gilles’s valets was busy at court trying to get a military expedition launched into Brittany to rescue his master. Lodged with Suffolk, he was wearing the SS collar of the Lancastrian royal livery. Montauban, the principal stronghold of Gilles’s gaoler Arthur de Montauban, was the first objective suggested for such an expedition. Similar plans were also made among the English captains in Normandy. To this end Mathew Gough sought the services of Francois de Surienne’s famous échelleur, Thomassin Duquesne.72

  Thus for more than one reason the allegiance of Brittany belatedly became of prime importance to Henry VI, as it always had been to Charles VII, and Henry’s negotiators began a tussle to compel the duke’s representatives to accept English injunctions. From 1447 English versions of the Anglo-French negotiations extending the truces no longer specified the French allies among whom the duke of Brittany had originally been included at Tours.73 At the conclusion of the treaty of Lavardin on 11 March 1448, prior to the surrender of Le Mans on the 15th, Moleyns and Roos, sent out by Henry as plenipotentiaries direct from London, were under strict instructions not to treat on the question whether the duke of Brittany was a subject of Charles VII. They were instructed categorically to affirm that he was not so. Therefore the English version included him among Henry’s vassals. The duke of Somerset, as Henry’s lieutenant of France and Normandy, pointedly referred Charles VII to these facts at the ultimate conference held at Port St Ouen from 15 to 20 June 1449 in proof of his stance that he himself had no power to accept that Brittany was included in the truce as Charles’s vassal. On this score the French king repeatedly accused Somerset of prevarication and deceit. But Somerset correctly pointed out that Henry’s own personal emissaries, sent post-haste to negotiate the final surrender of Le Mans, had been strictly forbidden to do this and he did not have that power either. The French notaries at Port St Ouen in 1449 duly recorded Somerset’s version of the Lavardin proceedings and there is no record that any French protest had been made at Moleyns’s and Roos’s stand on that earlier occasion. The historian of Brittany pertinently remarks that it is very strange that neither the French nor the Breton negotiators at any time accused the English of falsifying that crucial treaty of Lavardin by which the surrender of Le Mans was secured.74 Clearly, they had to accept it, in order to get the surrender agreed to there. The graphic story of a false, inaccurate version of the treaty giving Henry the allegiance of Brittany, foisted upon the French by the cunning English in a ditch, by candlelight, outside the gates of Le Mans, goes back no further than 1464, when Louis XI was marshalling evidence to use against Edward IV who had renewed the English claims to the French inheritance and to the Breton allegiance.75

  Moleyns and Roos were ordered to remain in France in the spring of 1448 to treat for a final peace settlement, after their success in securing the ultimate surrender of Maine without a gross violation of the truce or, indeed, a general outbreak of war. To them were added Reginald Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, Osborne Mundeford and Somerset himself, who was now, at last, actually present as Henry’s lieutenant in France and Normandy. This group were now Henry’s commissioners to treat for the permanent peace which should have been attainable now that the alleged primary obstacle to that end, inability to surrender Maine, had finally been removed.76 In June Somerset sent Mundeford to join Moleyns and Roos, still with Charles VII, but excused himself, because of his recent arrival and personal inexperience in the matter.77 Alas, the re-occupation of St James de Bevron and Mortain by the dispossessed and disinherited garr
isons of Maine had meantime reduced the level of the peace negotiations to a fresh wrangle about these alleged new infringements of the truce.

  In negotiations at Louviers on 24 August 1448 Moleyns, the principal English negotiator, endeavoured to justify the English diplomatic stance. He maintained that St James de Bevron and the other fortresses in question had previously been in English hands. Their re-occupation could not have infringed the truce with Charles VII because they lay in the marches towards Brittany, whose duke owed allegiance to Henry VI. There could thus be no question of a frontier there between English and French territory. With the French contention that international law forbad the occupation of marches during a truce Moleyns agreed, but countered that Henry had the right to take what action he deemed fit because his vassal Francis duke of Brittany had failed to do justice to his subjects as he was bound to do. This was a clear reference to Gilles’s predicament. But the presence of Michel de Parthenay, constable of Rennes, declaring that his master the duke was in fact the subject of Charles VII and repudiating the English allegiance, proved an insurmountable obstacle to progress here and Moleyns adjourned the conference on the lame excuse that Somerset, the king’s new lieutenant in Normandy and France, must be consulted.78 In fact he sent Garter back to England with a request for specific guidance in this impasse. Henry and his council duly considered the problem and produced a revealingly futile memorandum on 30 October 1448. This instructed the ambassadors to make the maximum use of the old patents of oaths of allegiance, given by the previous duke of Brittany and by all the notable people of the duchy, including the present duke, and Henry declared he would take his stand on these and in no way allow them to be impugned. If the Breton ambassadors still could not be moved, then the English ambassadors were to allow discussion to continue under due legal protest but prevaricate as much as possible by securing long prorogations for further references back to the two principals Henry and Charles. In this way a rupture must be prevented.79 These were the barren delaying tactics pursued. Consequently what turned out to be the final meeting of the English and French ambassadors for peace at Vaudreuil on 15 November 1448 made no progress.80