by Helen Castor
It was a good plan, but it could not survive the sudden deaths in April and May 1417 of the young dauphin and his father-in-law, the count of Hainaut. Again there was a new heir to the throne, this time the king’s youngest son, fourteen-year-old Charles; but he was already in Paris with his father, at the heart of the Armagnac regime, and, unlike his dead brothers, he had no links by marriage to the Burgundian dynasty. Quite the reverse: he was betrothed to the daughter of Louis, duke of Anjou and titular king of Sicily, who, until his death in April 1417, was one of the closest confederates of the count of Armagnac and a personal enemy of the duke of Burgundy. And Charles, who had spent much of the last four years at the Angevin court under the wing of Duke Louis and his formidable duchess Yolande of Aragon, was hardly likely now to reject the political embrace of his surrogate family.
Still, John of Burgundy had regrouped before, and he could do so again. From his castle at Hesdin, he issued an open letter to the people of France, each of the many copies signed with his own hand. The Armagnacs, he said, were ‘traitors, destroyers, pillagers and poisoners’; they had murdered the king’s sons Louis and Jean, and their treacherous plans lay behind the English triumph at Azincourt. Put simply, they were dedicated to the destruction of the kingdom of France. He, on the other hand, was determined to protect and preserve the French king and his people, a ‘holy, loyal and necessary task’ in which he would ‘persevere until death’, and – in case the appeal of his manifesto were not yet sufficiently apparent – he would abolish all taxes to boot. This was no search for a settlement; this, it was clear, was war.
As spring turned into summer, and summer into autumn, Burgundian forces moved into towns and cities around Paris: Troyes to the south-east, Reims to the east, Amiens to the north, Chartres to the south-west. Some townspeople opened their gates; others tried, and failed, to hold out. By October, the noose was drawing tighter. The duke and his army were just ten miles from the capital and, as food ran short and prices rose, ‘Paris was now suffering extremely’, noted the despairing journal-writer within the city’s walls.
To strengthen his white-knuckled grip on government, the count of Armagnac sought to rally his supporters behind a royal figurehead by appointing the young dauphin Charles as lieutenant-general of his father’s kingdom. But two could play at that game. Charles’s mother, Queen Isabeau, had once been so closely associated with the dead duke of Orléans in the attempt to rule on behalf of her distracted and unstable husband that – as so often happened when female hands touched the reins of power – breathless whispers of innuendo had begun to curl around her reputation. Since then, however, her attempts to preserve some neutral ground on which her husband and sons might stand had provoked growing hostility within the embattled Armagnac regime, and in April 1417 the count of Armagnac had sent her into political exile at Tours, more than a hundred miles from the capital. That, it turned out, was a mistake. When John of Burgundy arrived at her gates in the first week of November, she had no option left but to welcome him – murderer of the duke of Orléans though he was – as a liberator and a protector. Now the duke of Burgundy could draw on the authority of the queen to speak for her husband, the king, while the count of Armagnac could draw on the authority of the dauphin as the heir to his father’s throne. France, in effect, had two governments, each committed to the obliteration of the other.
And while they fought, Henry of England slipped through the open door behind them. By January 1418, as Burgundian troops pushed westward into Rouen, the capital of Normandy, the rest of the duchy was being quietly dismembered by the return of the English invaders. Henry had moved inland from the coast with characteristically inexorable purpose, taking the great castle and town of Caen and with it Bayeux, then Alençon, Argentan and Falaise. And almost the greatest shock of this violent assault was that – little more than two years after the wretched day of Azincourt – it no longer seemed the worst of the horrors France had to face. ‘Some people who had come to Paris from Normandy, having escaped from the English by paying ransom or some other way,’ reported the Parisian in his journal, ‘had then been captured by the Burgundians and then a mile or so further on had been captured yet again by the French’ – that is, the Armagnacs – ‘and had been as brutally and as cruelly treated by them as if by Saracens. These men, all honest merchants, reputable men, who had been in the hands of all three and had bought their freedom, solemnly affirmed on oath that the English had been kinder to them than the Burgundians had, and the Burgundians a hundred times kinder than the troops from Paris, as regards food, ransom, physical suffering, and imprisonment, which had astonished them, as it must all good Christians …’
The greatest of all good Christians, Pope Martin V – newly installed by the Council of Constance – sent special envoys in May to treat for peace, but John of Burgundy was not interested in peace when victory was within his grasp. He paid lip service to the cardinals’ mission, but his attention was elsewhere: his siege of Paris was about to bear bloody fruit. In the rain-swept darkness of the early hours of 29 May, Burgundian sympathisers within the blockaded capital opened the gate of Saint-Germain-des-Près to a detachment of Burgundian men-at-arms. They had surprise as well as deadly intent on their side, and they were brutally effective. Some seized control of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the royal residence in the east of the city, and with it the bewildered person of the king. Others hunted down the count of Armagnac and his captains, to put them in chains. By the early afternoon, there could be no doubt that Paris was theirs. For years it had been politic to wear a white sash, the symbol of the Armagnac confederacy, in the city’s streets. Now thousands of Parisians daubed or chalked their clothes with the Burgundian saltire – the diagonal cross of St Andrew, one of the duke’s badges – to demonstrate their support for their new ruler, or to ward off dangerous accusations of Armagnac collaboration.
‘God save the king, the dauphin, and peace!’ the Burgundian troops had cried. God had given them the king, but peace was not, it seemed, part of His plan. ‘Paris was in an uproar’, reported the journal-writer; ‘the people took up their arms much faster than the soldiers did.’ This was the chance, at last, for those who hated the Armagnacs – those who supported the duke of Burgundy, or resented the oppressions of Armagnac rule, or loathed the count and his captains as ‘foreigners’ from the south – to take their revenge. The city turned on itself, and in the streets bludgeoned corpses lay heaped, stripped almost naked (‘like sides of bacon – a dreadful thing’), their clotting blood washed into the gutters by the pouring rain. Worse was to come. Two weeks later, false alarms at the city gates roused the mob to new fear, and a new fury. They broke into the prisons, mutilating and killing all those they found inside, or lighting up the night by torching any building from which they found their entry barred. Among those who died – his body later identified not by his disfigured face, but by the cell in which he had slept – was the captive count of Armagnac. A band of flesh had been hacked from his torso, from shoulder to hip, in savage mockery of the sash his partisans had worn so proudly.
It was another month before the city was quiet enough for the duke of Burgundy to stage his own triumphant arrival, with Queen Isabeau at his side. Their cavalcade was greeted by crowds who wept, cheered and called ‘Noël!’, the traditional cry of celebration and welcome. At last, king and capital were in Duke John’s hands, along with the power they represented. But the brightness of this new Burgundian dawn, glittering with the sharpened steel of the plane-engraved lances carried by the duke’s soldiers, was shadowed by two menacing clouds. The English were on the march: by the end of July their ominous advance had brought them to the walls of Burgundian-held Rouen, France’s second city and the key to upper Normandy. The presence of England’s army on French soil had once exerted useful diversionary pressure on France’s Armagnac government, but now that the duke himself ruled in the name of the king, he could not afford to be complacent in the face of this growing threat. And the uncomfortable truth was
that one vital component of the royal authority he claimed to represent still eluded his grasp. As Burgundian troops had stormed into the sleeping city on 29 May, Armagnac loyalists led by the provost of Paris, a former servant of Louis of Orléans named Tanguy du Châtel, had spirited fifteen-year-old Dauphin Charles away in his nightclothes.
Duke John could reassure himself, of course, that Charles was young and inexperienced, and, with only the stricken rump of the Armagnac regime left at his disposal, he could not match the grandeur of Burgundy’s resources. The dauphin was surrounded still by a coterie of loyal supporters: not only Tanguy du Châtel, but men such as Robert le Maçon, his chancellor, and Jean Louvet (‘one of the worst Christians in the world’, said the Parisian journal-writer) – former servants, respectively, of his prospective mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, and his mother, Queen Isabeau. These counsellors were shrewd, ambitious and driven, but among their number were no princes of the blood, ready to rally their pays to his cause. With the count of Armagnac so violently dispatched to join the dead of Azincourt, and the dukes of Bourbon and Orléans still prisoners in England, Charles could look little further among the front ranks of the nobility than to the latter’s younger brother, the count of Vertus, and his illegitimate half-brother Jean, known, with respectful acknowledgement of his lineage, as the Bastard of Orléans. And, limited in leadership as the dauphin’s cause undoubtedly was, it was limited too in cold, hard cash. Thanks to John of Burgundy’s show-stealing promise to abolish taxation, the dauphin could hardly attempt to levy the sums required to raise a great army without haemorrhaging support he could not afford to lose.
But his cause was not lost. He could turn, always, to the deep pockets and the formidable political brain of the woman who had become a mentor as well as a second mother to him: Yolande of Aragon, the dowager duchess of Anjou, whose daughter Marie was to be his wife, and whose young sons, the new duke Louis and nine-year-old René, were his companions and friends. With her backing, the dauphin established himself a little more than a hundred miles south of Paris in the city of Bourges, the capital of the duchy of Berry that he had inherited after the death in 1416 of his aged great-uncle – and now, of necessity rather than choice, the new capital of Armagnac France.
It was a motley approximation of a royal court, with a hurriedly organised parlement at Poitiers and exchequer at Bourges to mirror those in Burgundian Paris, and at its head a fifteen-year-old boy calling himself the ‘regent of France’. But there could be no doubt how much it mattered. However loudly the duke of Burgundy claimed to be the loyal counsellor of the king, and however firmly the queen supported the Burgundian regime, the dauphin refused to accept that a government led by Duke John was anything other than a treasonable usurpation. The unhappy fact was that, while the daily reality of conflict between Armagnacs and Burgundians simmered in towns and cities across the country, the indissoluble sovereignty of France’s most Christian king had been raggedly torn into three. The duke of Burgundy dominated the north and the east; the dauphin controlled the centre and the south; and all the while Henry of England – who, like his royal predecessors, already held Gascony in the south-west – continued his relentless advance across Normandy into the heart of the kingdom.
In January 1419, after a five-month siege, the English finally starved Rouen into submission, and two weeks later Henry’s forces were at Mantes, only thirty miles from Paris. ‘No one did anything about it’, noted the journal-writer, matter-of-fact in his misery, ‘because all the French lords were angry with each other, because the dauphin was at odds with his father on account of the duke of Burgundy, who was with the king, and all the other princes of the blood royal had been taken prisoner by the English king at the battle of Azincourt …’ This Parisian remained stalwartly hostile to the Armagnacs, but his faith in the duke of Burgundy had not survived his recent experience of Burgundian rule. ‘So the kingdom of France went from bad to worse … And this was entirely, or almost entirely, the fault of the duke of Burgundy, who was the slowest man in the world in everything that he did …’ In fact, by the time news arrived of the fall of Rouen, Duke John had already left his troops to hold the beleaguered capital while he removed the king and queen to the greater safety of the town of Provins, fifty miles from Paris in the opposite direction from the English army’s approach.
It seemed possible, now, that France was not just broken, but lost. The kingdom was ancient – but perhaps not eternal, and certainly not immutable. It had, after all, changed shape before, its frontiers ebbing and flowing with the cross-currents of international diplomacy and the rip tides of war. Kings of England had been instrumental in that process already, and might be again; and now a duke of Burgundy whose powers were not confined by France’s borders exerted a new and unpredictable gravitational pull. By the summer of 1419, the rival forces wrenching and tearing at the body politic had reached a jittery, precarious impasse. Like wrestlers grappling in search of a winning hold, envoys embraced at summits convened in all possible combinations: the king of England and the duke of Burgundy; the duke of Burgundy and the dauphin; the dauphin and the king of England. Henry hoped that he had won John as an ally to his cause, only to find that Charles had agreed a temporary truce with the man Armagnac propaganda had previously dubbed the ‘dearest and well-loved lieutenant’ of ‘Lucifer, king of hell’.
The forty-eight-year-old duke and the sixteen-year-old dauphin came face to face three times in the first half of July, but their publicly declared promises – that they would join hands to resist the English, and henceforth govern France together as friends – proved as insubstantial as their smiles; meanwhile the crashing thunderstorms that lashed the country with rain and great hailstones were seen by many (said the monk of Saint-Denis) as a sign that these ill-starred negotiations would come to nothing. It was not until the end of the month – when King Henry’s troops stormed Pontoise, less than twenty miles from Paris, and much too close for comfort – that minds were concentrated and another personal conference arranged, this time for September at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, south-east of the capital.
The pressing concern for security amid the heightened threat of the English advance meant that the duke of Burgundy now faced another diplomatic meeting in the middle of a river. At Montereau a many-arched bridge spanned the waters where the river Yonne gave into the Seine. On one bank stood the town, held by the dauphin; on the other, the castle, which Charles now made over to the duke of Burgundy as a gesture of goodwill, to facilitate an encounter on which the future of France might stand or fall. By swearing an oath to do one another no harm, and then advancing from opposite sides onto the bridge with only ten men each for company, both the duke and the dauphin could be reassured that their counsels would not be overheard, nor ambushed by some hidden army. The dauphin and his advisers – cautious and painstaking hosts, who had had to work hard to persuade Duke John to accept their invitation to Montereau – gave meticulous thought to the practicalities of the meeting. A stone tower already stood halfway along the bridge, between castle and town, but now a new wooden enclosure was constructed on the town side of the tower, within which the two deputations could safely speak without fear of attack from outside.
By the afternoon of Sunday 10 September preparations were complete. Under the crisp autumn sky, the duke of Burgundy – sleek in his magnificence, hooded eyes unreadable – took the winding path from the castle onto the bridge, past the tower and into the newly built palisade, the gate clicking shut as the last of his men was ushered inside, a key turning in the lock behind them. Ahead stood the short, scrawny figure of the dauphin, an ungainly adolescent who had not inherited the good looks of either of his royal parents, and with him ten of his most senior attendants, including Jean Louvet and Tanguy du Châtel, the latter a familiar face from the frequent embassies of recent weeks. As the duke knelt, doffing his black velvet hat in obeisance to his prince, he could hear the water moving softly all around, but he could see only the craftsmanship of the carpe
nters who had enclosed the bridge with wooden walls. Did he think of his cabinet of curiosities at Hesdin? The moment was fleeting. Then the buffet struck: the steel blade of a war axe, driven deep into his skull.
There was blood, pooling around the falling body of John of Burgundy, dripping in great gouts from the axe in the hands of Tanguy du Châtel. In blind shock, in churning panic, the duke’s counsellors started forward, only to find themselves caught by soldiers pouring through the open door at the far end of the palisade. In their ears, voices shrill with hate shouted, ‘Kill! Kill!’ – and as they were bundled away they saw, in an uncomprehending blur, a man kneeling over the prone figure of their lord, and the bright blade of a sword plunging down. Then, suddenly, came a roar of explosions, as Armagnac troops concealed within the stone tower on the bridge turned their guns on the bewildered Burgundians in Montereau’s castle, waiting in vain for the duke’s return.
It was an assassination more precisely planned and more ruthlessly executed than the murder of the duke of Orléans in the streets of Paris twelve years earlier. And as the mutilated corpse was carried away from the bridge – stripped of its finery and blood-smeared, with one hand dangling, almost severed, in a mess of mangled tendons – it was clear that the consequences of this duke’s death would be still more terrible. For the veteran Tanguy du Châtel it was an eye for an eye, a reckoning at last for the loss of his former master. For the teenage dauphin, who had been just four years old when Louis of Orléans died, it was the striking down of the devil’s lieutenant, the man who had raised war in the kingdom for as long as the young prince could remember. But this killing, in one bloody moment, had irretrievably altered the essence of the conflict. Now – however subtle the diplomacy between the lords of France, and however implacable the onslaught of the English – there could be no hope of reconciliation between Armagnac and Burgundian.