A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The majority of the conference now renounced the Voie de Fait. It was declared “too perilous” and likely to involve the King of France in wars against all those obedient to the “Intruder” in Rome. Even if Boniface were defeated, said the prelates, the nations of England, Italy, Germany, and Hungary would still not accept Benedict XIII and “the schism would be stronger than it is now.” The only hope was for Benedict to put his abdication in the hands of the King of France, who would then call upon his fellow sovereigns of the other obedience to obtain that of Boniface likewise. Despite the obvious flaws in this procedure, a decision for cession was clearly what the crown wanted. Without a French Pope as its beneficiary, the Way of Force had lost its attraction.

  Adria and conquest of the Papal States vanished with the Voie de Fait, and with it any prospect for Benedict of ousting his rival by force of French arms. To convince him of this, the crown dispatched the most imposing embassy ever sent to Avignon, consisting of all three royal Dukes—Burgundy, Berry, and Orléans—supported by ten delegates of the University. Though softened by splendid gifts of Burgundian wines and Flemish tapestries, the message was a conscious assertion of royal will over the Church. It met an opponent unsurpassed in the techniques of evasion.

  The issue was debated in polished discourse at a series of audiences, each opening on an appropriate text, with the usual “flowers of rhetoric” and many canonical and historical citations by each side. As a former professor at Montpellier, Benedict was not to be put down by the academics from Paris. While continually reasserting his willingness to work until death for union, he refused to be cornered into abdicating without a bilateral guarantee. Since here was the glaring weakness of the French case, he may have suspected that the French wanted him out mainly in order to install a French Pope in his place—and he may have been right. He twisted and evaded as the hunters pursued. When they demanded to see the text of the oath signed by the cardinals in conclave, he first refused, then offered to tell the substance in secret, then, when further pressed, to read it aloud without handing it over. When that too was rejected, he claimed a kind of executive privilege on the ground that resolutions of the conclave could not be communicated to anyone.

  Forced to yield, he proposes a joint conference of both popes and both sets of cardinals. The visitors say this is impossible because of the Intruder’s obstinacy, and that Benedict’s voluntary cession is what is wanted. He asks for the proposal in writing. Gilles Deschamps replies that that is not necessary since it consists of but one word of two syllables: “cession.” The Pope asks for time to reflect. During the pause, Burgundy invites the cardinals to give him their opinion “in good conscience as private persons, not as members of the Sacred College.” They favor cession nineteen to one, the lone opponent being the Cardinal of Pampeluna, another Spaniard. When the cardinals put their opinion in writing, Benedict forbids them to sign the document. At an audience from which he excludes the University delegates he informs the Dukes that if they will support him, he will abandon to them the conquest and possession of the Papal States. They are deaf to the proposal.

  The discussions have now lasted for two months, with the visitors coming across the river every day from Villeneuve, where they are staying. They discover one morning that during the night someone has burned the famous bridge by setting fire to boats moored to the piles. At once fearing “treason” and attack, they seize arms, but on second thought suspect the Pope. If the Spaniard is laughing on the other bank, it is privately. Swearing he has had nothing to do with the fire, he sends workmen to repair the bridge and arrange a temporary pontoon of boats tied together, hardly suitable for proud Dukes to ride across in dignity. The only alternative is crossing by boat, which is slow and insecure against the rushing waters. Disgusted, the visitors after consultation with the cardinals decide on one last appeal, which Benedict, still affirming his devotion to union, rejects. Defeated, the French depart after three months of empty effort. The schism remains unresolved.

  With no assurance that his abdication would end the schism, Benedict cannot bear all the blame. Astonishingly, he won a champion in Nicolas de Clamanges, who had so furiously prophesied doom if the popes postponed abdication by a single day. In a decision which caused a storm at the University he now accepted office as Benedict’s secretary, and was later to write of him that “though gravely accused, he was great and laudable and I believe him to have been a saintly man nor do I know anyone more praiseworthy.” Did Nicolas act from conviction or was he bought? Since his motives are lost to us, let us believe them sincere.

  Outraged by the outcome of its efforts, all the more because Benedict’s original words had nourished high hopes, the University proposed two radical measures: it advised the King to withhold from Benedict the ecclesiastical revenues of France, a step amounting to a break with Avignon; and it advised the cardinals that if Benedict continued to refuse cession, he should be deposed by a General Council. The crown was not yet prepared to withhold obedience, though it was to come to that stage three years later. Fourteen years were to pass before Europe could achieve the momentary unity for a General Council, which even then did not succeed.

  The University kept up its campaign. Letters went to rulers and other universities urging them to insist on cession by both popes. Doctors of Theology journeyed forth on horseback to preach in towns and provinces against the evils of the schism. In the course of denouncing the corruptions of the Church, they spread—with results they may not have intended—the demand for reform. The French crown sent envoys to the King of England and princes of Germany urging the way of mutual cession, and received everyone’s earnest concurrence with as yet little practical result. Benedict XIII resisted every pressure. For nearly thirty years to come, despite French withdrawal of obedience, siege of Avignon, desertion by his cardinals, deposition by two Councils, and the rivalry of three other popes, he would not step down. Retreating to a Spanish fortress, he died in 1422 at the age of 94 still maintaining his claim.

  Unexpectedly, the war, if not the schism, gave promise of ending at last. In March 1395, Richard II proposed a marriage between himself and Isabelle, daughter of the King of France. He was 29 years old, she six. As a way of by-passing the unyielding disputes to gain peace by other means, it was a bold move, even if peace was not its only motive.

  Richard II had no use for what he termed this “intolerable war,” nor did he share the animosity for France it had bred in most Englishmen. On the contrary, he admired France, desired to meet her King, and wanted peace in order to strengthen himself against his domestic opponents. He had ruled constitutionally for seven years since his rough treatment by the Lords Appellant, but his autocratic nature, intensified by that humiliation, craved absolute monarchy and the subjection of his enemies. Kingship, which can corrupt or improve, seems to have had a generally one-sided effect in the 14th century: only Charles V gained wisdom from responsibility. Richard was moody, profligate, despotic, emotional, and temperamentally if not physically aggressive. When his wife, Anne of Bohemia, sister of Wenceslas, died in 1394, he indulged the passion of his grief by ordering the royal manor of Sheen to be destroyed because she had died there. At her funeral, believing himself insulted by the behavior of the Earl of Arundel, one of the Lords Appellant, the King seized a staff and struck him to the ground.

  Anne had been a sweet-natured woman of his own age who inspired, unlike her unhappy brother, only the most benign comments in the chronicles. Her death may have loosened some restraining influence, besides leaving Richard without a direct heir. To ensure his line, a second marriage was advisable, but the choice of a six-year-old child who was expressly spared consummation of the marriage until she was twelve suggests that an heir was not Richard’s primary object. He wanted reconciliation with France in order to close off opportunities to the “boars” of England and, quite specifically, to gain French support, if need be, against them. His envoys were instructed to obtain assurance from the French King and from his uncles a
nd brother “to aid and sustain Richard with all their power against any of his subjects.”

  That was hardly a normal request by one King of another, especially one so lately and still technically his enemy. Richard was only two years away from his grasp at absolute monarchy, the murder of Gloucester, the execution of Arundel, the banishment of Norfolk and Henry of Lancaster, and the series of compulsive provocations which in two more years were to lose him his crown and finally his life. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

  Richard was King in a time of increasing tensions, suppressed but not eased since the Peasants’ Revolt. Lawless bands of marauding knights and archers still spread disorder, heavy taxes were a constant complaint, Lollardy, despite the efforts to stamp it out, flickered everywhere. Its social no less than religious threat united crown and Church against it: the days of John of Gaunt’s alliance with Wyclif were gone, although Lollards appeared in high places. During the Parliament of 1394–95 the movement suddenly surfaced with an inflammatory public statement of twelve “conclusions and truths for the reformation of Holy Church in England.”

  Supported by several members of the House of Commons, including the ever troublesome Sir Richard Stury and another knight who were both members of the Privy Council, a petition for the twelve reforms, written in English, was presented as a bill to Parliament. Simultaneously it was pinned in public view on the doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The Twelve Conclusions were a mirror of the late medieval Church as seen by the dissatisfied; by those who wanted to believe and have faith but felt blocked by encrusted materialism and idolatry. They were the conclusions Wyclif had reached one by one, beginning with the two most threatening to Church and priesthood: temporal disendowment and denial of the “supposed miracle” of transubstantiation. Other rituals denounced in the list were vows of chastity, which in priests encouraged vice, and in women, who were “by nature frail and imperfect,” led to many horrible sins; consecration or exorcism of physical objects, which was nothing but “jugglery,” akin to necromancy; and pilgrimages to deaf images of wood and stone, which were a form of idolatry. The Tenth Conclusion was new—a virtual denial of the right to kill. It asserted that manslaughter in battle or by court of justice for any temporal cause was expressly contrary to the New Testament.

  So alarmed were the bishops by the Twelve Conclusions that they summoned Richard home from Ireland, where he then was, to decree new measures of suppression. The King himself, in fury at the heresy, threatened to kill Sir Richard Stury “by the foulest death that may be” if he ever broke the oath to recant that was forced upon him. The Twelve Conclusions, however, were beyond the sovereign’s power to kill. Lollardy had already found a response in Queen Anne’s Bohemian retinue and through them formed a connection between the ideas of Wyclif and Jan Hus.

  Richard’s proposal of marriage, broached before the French Dukes went to Avignon, was not unanimously welcomed. Philippe de Mézières was its ardent advocate in the interests of crusade, as was the Duke of Burgundy in the interests of commerce. But the hostility of half a century was not easily dissipated. Berry and Orléans were both opposed, and when the proposal was debated in the French Council, several members objected on the ground that a marriage without a peace was unnatural. Coucy, if he had not been absent in Italy, might have shared that attitude. An incident of the same year shows him leaning over backward—perhaps because of his special connections—to maintain the formal relationship between enemies, even during a period of truce. Asked by Froissart, who was preparing to visit England, for letters of introduction to Richard and his uncles, Coucy refused “because he was a Frenchman” to write to the King, although he gave Froissart a letter to his daughter Philippa. If a letter to the King of England was impolitic, marriage to the King of England must indeed have appeared radical.

  In the Council, Arnaud de Corbie, the Chancellor, advised acceptance on the ground that the marriage bond would strengthen the English King against the war party in his own country. The interests of peace prevailed. In July, 1,200 French gentlemen escorted a formal English embassy led by Earl Marshal Nottingham to the Council table in Paris. Agreement was reached on a dowry for Isabelle of 800,000 francs but no lands, and on a truce of 28 years. For the first time, a truce was long enough to represent a genuine forswearing of belligerent will—at least on the part of the negotiators. That was the difficulty.

  If the French on whose soil the war was fought had, on the whole, had enough, too many English, personified in the Duke of Gloucester, had not. They were galled by a sense of having been bilked out of the gains confirmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. They ached to get satisfaction and saw the marriage putting it off forever. Footloose knights and yeomen were still attracted by the warring way of life and its loot on the continent. The commons, suffering from disrupted commerce and oppressive taxes, may have wanted peace, but they did not like the French marriage. They feared Richard would give away too much to the French; there were mutterings about Calais, and disappointment if not suspicion at the choice of a child queen and continued uncertainty about an heir.

  Because of Gloucester’s influence and popularity with the Londoners, Richard did not dare to conclude the alliance without his concurrence and that of his party. More than a year elapsed in the effort to obtain it. The French sent Robert the Hermit to add the weight of Heaven’s command for peace, and to impress upon the English the Turkish menace which the Hermit knew from his travels in Syria. A visionary, even if he traveled with seven horses at the expense of the French King, was not the best choice to influence Gloucester. When, at the climax of his peroration, the Hermit warned, “Surely, whoever is or will be against the peace shall pay dearly for it be he alive or dead,” Gloucester pulled him up with a sharp, “How do you know that?” Robert could only answer by “divine inspiration,” which left the Duke unimpressed. He remained “hard-hearted against the peace,” and by his words “condemned and despised greatly the Frenchmen.”

  Richard worriedly told Count Waleran de St. Pol, who had accompanied the Hermit, that Gloucester was trying to influence the people against a peace, perhaps even to “raise the people against me, which is a great peril.” St. Pol, the hard-headed brother of saintly Pierre de Luxemburg, advised the King to win his uncle with fair words and great gifts until the marriage and peace were concluded. Then he could “take other counsel,” because then he would be strong enough to “oppress all rebels, for the French King if need be shall aid you; of this you may be sure.” The lubricator of politics was the same then as before and since. Richard promised Gloucester £100,000 and an earldom for his son worth £2,000 a year (which he later failed to make good) and, by various persuasions and pressures brought to bear by the Duke of Lancaster, secured a sullen acquiescence.

  A proxy marriage and ratification of the truce were celebrated in Paris in March 1396, with Nottingham acting as proxy for the King. Nottingham now had occasion to meet the object of his esteem in entertainment if not in combat, for Coucy was one of those who acted as host to the English ambassadors during their three-week stay in the capital. After endorsement of the marriage contract by the barons of England, Richard himself went to Calais in August, where in conferences with the Duke of Burgundy he went far to show himself a friend of France. He agreed to support the Way of Cession and persuade the Pope of Rome to resign, and, more realistically, he agreed to yield English footholds in Brittany. He went home again to make known the articles of peace to his countrymen, for he said he “could not firmly conclude a peace without the general consent of the people of England.”

  He returned in October for the climactic meeting with the King of France, held with all appropriate magnificence in a field of bright pavilions on the borders of Calais. Between two lines of 400 French knights and 400 English knights “with their swords in their hands,” the two Kings advance
d toward each other, each escorted by the uncles of the other. As they met and embraced, all 800 knights knelt, many weeping with emotion. Meetings, banquets, and merriment followed. The seven-year-old bride, swamped in scarlet velvet and emeralds, was handed over and formally married to Richard in November at Calais by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Enguerrand de Coucy was not present at the ceremonies nor to meet his daughter Philippa, who was in the English party, for he had already departed with the chief knights and nobles of the realm on the last crusade of any consequence in the Middle Ages.

  The Kings were at peace, but all the old issues—disputed frontiers and territories, homages and reparations, Guienne and Calais—remained unresolved, and Gloucester’s rancor abided. The French found that all the honors and entertainments and gifts of gold and silver they heaped on him in an effort to soften his antagonism went for nothing. He took the gifts and remained cold, hard, and covert in his answers. “We waste our effort on this Duke of Gloucester,” Burgundy said to his council, “for as long as he lives there shall surely be no peace between France and England. He will always find new inventions and accidents to engender hatred and the strife between the realms.” It did not take Gloucester, who would be dead within a year, to find these. Burgundy himself, through the fratricidal strife with Orléans carried on by his son, was as responsible as any. And the unending war had cut a gulf too deep to be easily pasted over. In England, Richard and Lancaster were the only genuine supporters of a pro-French policy, and both were dead three years after the French marriage. Animosity toward France endured. Not quite twenty years after the reconciliation, Henry V was to call to his followers, “Once more unto the breach!”