by Helen Castor
This was remarkable frankness: clearly, the twenty-four-year-old king did not enjoy full control over his own administration, and his most powerful servants were now entirely capable of taking his law into their own hands. Nor did the death of Giac bring greater calm to the court. Another favourite, Le Camus de Beaulieu, was brutally murdered in June 1427, and few doubted that the constable had ordered his dispatch. Meanwhile, Richemont himself introduced a new face into the crowd jostling for position around the king. Georges de La Trémoille – another former Burgundian, whose brother Jean remained master of the duke of Burgundy’s household – had been instrumental in Giac’s execution, and married his widow five months later. Almost immediately, La Trémoille began his own ascent in Charles’s confidence, and soon he and Richemont, in their turn, were at daggers drawn. Yolande, bruised by the self-destructive violence of this bloody heaving and shoving, retreated from court for the first time in three years. And all the while, the people of France endured the effects of a war that now seemed to have no beginning, and no end.
The people of Paris – a city that had once been the centre of the conflict, these days all but abandoned by the powerful – had to find their own moments of distraction in this grimly uncertain world. In the late summer of 1425, the journal-writer there reported, two entertainments had been devised for the diversion of the citizens. On the last Sunday in August, an enclosure was set up in the Rue Saint-Honoré in which a large pig was placed, along with four blind men, each of them wearing armour and carrying a hefty club. Whichever man could kill the pig would win its carcass as a prize, and ‘they fought this very odd battle’, the anonymous Parisian said, ‘giving each other tremendous blows with the clubs. Whenever they tried to get a good blow in at the pig, they would hit each other, so that if they had not been wearing armour they would certainly have killed each other.’ Then, the following Saturday in the Rue Saint-Denis, a long pole was set up, more than thirty feet tall and thoroughly greased, with a basket on the top containing a goose and a handful of silver coins. Whoever succeeded in reaching the basket would win its contents; but the greasy pole defeated all comers, until at last the boy who had climbed highest was given the goose, though not the money. The other news of note was that, a little earlier in the year, a painting of the Danse Macabre had been unveiled along the cloister walls of the city’s cemetery of the Holy Innocents. The grinning figure of Death led a grotesque carnival in which king, beggar, pope and peasant were swept up all together, the pomp and power of the great exposed as worthless vanity by this inexorable procession to the grave. The dance of death; the greasy pole; a battle of the blind. If the journal-writer felt any temptation to suggest that these moments in Parisian life might echo the wider state of the kingdom, it was one he heroically resisted.
By the spring of 1427, when the duke of Bedford at last returned to the city, Paris was in the grip of dreadful weather: heavy frosts, constant rain and storms of hail. The regent’s mood was little better. He had knocked heads together in England, but fifteen months of work had produced no permanent solution to Gloucester’s truculence, and in France every step forward seemed to be matched by another reverse. There was cause for English celebration that autumn, when many months of campaigning in Brittany at last persuaded its duke, always a versatile player in this endless game, to abandon his alliance with the Armagnacs and pledge his renewed loyalty to the English king. But just seventy-two hours before the treaty was finally signed on 8 September, cheers died on English lips when Armagnac forces won two substantial encounters in a single day. At Montargis, sixty miles south of Paris, a besieging English army was driven off by Armagnac troops under the command of the Bastard of Orléans (illegitimate brother of the duke who, twelve years after Azincourt, still remained a prisoner in England) and a captain named Étienne de Vignolles, known to all by his nickname as ‘La Hire’. And 150 miles further west, another Armagnac captain named Ambroise de Loré wiped out an English force almost within sight of the fortress of Sainte-Suzanne, headquarters of Sir John Fastolf, the English military governor in Maine.
For the kingdom of Bourges, meanwhile, these moments of triumph were shafts of light in a lowering sky. The loss of the Breton alliance was a grievous blow. Not only that, but the perfidy of the duke of Brittany compromised the standing of his brother, Richemont, as the military leader of Armagnac France – a circumstance that might have mattered more had Richemont not been busy doing his own extraordinary damage from inside the Armagnac regime. In more than two years since he had sworn homage to the king at Chinon, the constable had yet to lead his troops to victory in an engagement with the enemy. Now, with the English in Maine, and Brittany to the west once again a hostile power, Yolande’s duchy of Anjou stood in need of urgent reinforcement. Richemont, however, was yet again arming himself not to confront the English, but to remove an ‘evil counsellor’ from the king’s side – this time his own former protégé, La Trémoille.
And this time, Charles had had enough. La Trémoille’s determination not to be prised from his place was matched by the king’s resolve not to lose another favourite to sudden death or distant exile. Together, in the spring of 1428, king and counsellor seized the great castle at Chinon, which had been in Richemont’s hands ever since his appointment as constable. There, they set about rallying the resources of the kingdom, calling once again on the presence of Yolande to foster confidence in their efforts, while Richemont – his energies now focused entirely on internal rivals rather than the enemy without – installed himself in the fortified citadel of Parthenay in Poitou, forty miles to the south-west. But that autumn, alarming reports arrived of a new and unexpected threat. Orléans was under siege.
Technically, Orléans should never have been an English target. According to the laws of war, the lands of a prisoner – and the duke of Orléans was still a captive in London – had protected status, being reserved from combat to produce the money that would pay his ransom. But there was good reason for the English to make a strategic exception to this honourable rule. Orléans was the northernmost town on the great curve of the river Loire. If the English were ever to make a decisive push across this natural boundary, to break the stalemate that held the war in brutal and costly stasis, Orléans would have to fall. And if it fell, the doorway into Armagnac France would be wide open.
The man behind this plan was Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, at forty a gifted and vastly experienced commander with an exemplary record of service to Henry V and the regent Bedford – ‘a thorough soldier, an excellent fighter, and very astute in all his dealings’, the Parisian journal-writer noted approvingly. But his march on Orléans was not unequivocal evidence of renewed purpose on the part of the English. Salisbury himself was intent on securing the Loire crossing there, but that had not been Bedford’s strategy; the regent and the council over which he presided in Paris in the spring of 1428 had decided that the newly recruited troops the earl was bringing from England should be used to advance the English line from Maine into Anjou, consolidating the conquest slowly and carefully, piece by piece, with a push from English-held Le Mans to the gates of Yolande’s capital, Angers.
But when Salisbury and his army landed in France that July, it was to Orléans, not Angers, that they headed; persuasion, or insubordination, or some combination of the two had deflected the regent from his chosen path. And this would not be a momentary diversion. More than thirty watchtowers studded the ancient walls that surrounded Orléans on the north side of the Loire. A massive stone bridge, more than two hundred years old, reached from the town’s great gate to an island in the river and then on – a span of nineteen arches in total – to a fortified tower known as the Tourelles, from which a wooden bridge gave access to the river’s southern bank. It was a daunting prospect, but Salisbury showed no sign of intimidation. His first move was to launch a storming campaign to isolate the town by water, with the capture of Jargeau, ten miles upstream, and Meung and Beaugency, ten and fifteen miles downstream, among dozens o
f other nearby settlements and strongholds: ‘… the fare and speed since our last coming into this land has been so good’, he reported, ‘that I am ever beholden to thank God, beseeching him to continue it for his mercy’.
By 12 October, he was ready to take up position outside Orléans itself. Lacking enough men to surround it on all sides, he settled on an attack from the south; the bridge, he believed, was the key to possession of the town. For twelve days the Tourelles held out against English bombardment and assault until at last, on 24 October, its defenders withdrew across the river to take refuge behind the town walls. English triumph, however, was short-lived. As the besiegers advanced to secure the bridgehead, they saw that the Orléanais had somehow succeeded in mining the bridge across which they had just retreated. The English might hold the Tourelles, but their route into Orléans was gone. Not long after, Salisbury stood at an upper window in the fortress, gazing out across the fast-flowing water at the town he could not reach. Suddenly, a stone cannonball fired from one of the watchtowers on the opposite bank smashed into the wall beside him. When his shocked attendants reached the earl amid the rubble, he was still breathing; but, where one side of his face had been, there was only a gaping, bloody hole. He died eight days later.
This double loss, of the earl of Salisbury and the bridge he had hoped to cross, changed the essence of the English campaign. Instead of a bold strike under a brilliant commander to force their way over the Loire, they found themselves facing a grinding, protracted siege directed by a substitute leader, the earl of Suffolk, an intelligent but cautious man who had little of Salisbury’s daring or charisma. Suffolk strengthened the blockade that Salisbury had established round the town, so far as he could. Earthworks reinforced with wood, known as boulevards, topped with fortifications known as bastilles, were built at intervals outside the walls, but much of the territory to the north and east of the town remained open, because – as Salisbury had known – the English were too few for their grip to become a stranglehold. English guns continued to fire on Orléans, and reinforcements under the command of the lords Scales and Talbot were summoned, but the strategy of the siege was now simply to wait, in the hope that hunger and despair would do their work.
It was a plan fraught with risk. Winter was coming, and the same circumstance that made Orléans a prize to be won – its key position on the frontier between English and Armagnac France – left the army encamped around its walls exposed to danger. Bourges itself was only sixty miles to the south, and the task of maintaining supply lines to the besiegers was almost as difficult as that of doing the same, from the other side, for the besieged. Not, of course, that the English would have swapped places. There was no doubt that Charles was doing what he could to relieve the siege; he was determined to defend Orléans with all his power, reported the Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ‘believing that, if it were lost into the hands of the enemy, that would mean the total destruction of his frontiers and country and of himself too …’. He sent the Bastard of Orléans to take command of the town, together with La Hire, who had helped the Bastard to victory at Montargis, John Stewart of Darnley, the constable of the Scots, and other captains including an experienced professional soldier named Poton de Xaintrailles. With them, the king sent specialist gunners, and his personal surgeon to tend to the wounded.
At Chinon, he had also gathered a meeting of the estates-general, representatives of their regions who were authorised to make grants of taxation for the defence of the realm. This they did, but they also appealed to the king for the restoration of good government, imploring him to reunite the princes of the blood around his throne, and especially that, ‘by all good means possible’, he should find a way to make peace with the duke of Burgundy. But this was palpably a plea made in hope rather than expectation. While the truces that offered some form of protection to the lands on the frontier between Burgundian territory and Armagnac France were still holding, the duke himself had paid a rare visit to Bedford in Paris that spring, and there was no sign that his preoccupation with the Low Countries – where he was in the process of securing his victory over Jacqueline of Hainaut – would produce any significant reordering of his alliance with the English in France, however equivocal that relationship might now be. Nor did the prospects of unity among the Armagnac lords seem any brighter. Their ranks had at least been reinforced by the return of the young duke of Alençon, newly ransomed from his captivity after Verneuil, but Richemont was still plotting against La Trémoille behind the walls of Parthenay – and the destructive manoeuvring of the constable Yolande had helped to appoint could only compromise her chances of mitigating the destabilising effects of La Trémoille’s presence within the court itself.
As the cold set in, and the weeks of the siege began to turn into grim and frozen months, the impasse at Orléans seemed to encapsulate the plight of the whole kingdom. Across great swathes of France, the oppressive and violent reality of armies moving through the countryside, of battles and sieges, pillage and plunder, had left behind scorched earth, torched homes, and lives and livelihoods destroyed. And over the long years of suffering, as the war slowed to an attritional struggle, the stakes for which it was being fought had begun to blur and fade. Once, this had been a conflict between two anointed sovereigns: Charles the Well-Beloved, who was, whatever his failings, the most Christian king of France, and Henry of England, hailed by his subjects as the true elect of God. Now, the rhetoric might remain, but neither of the two kings for whom so much death and devastation were being wrought had received unction from heaven – one, another Henry, because he was only a child, and the other, another Charles, because he had been disowned by his father, and the holy church at Reims where the most Christian king should receive his crown had been taken from him.
Now, too, there was no question of a king leading his troops in battle. Henry was too young, and although his uncle Bedford was a man of integrity and skill, in the conduct of the war one hand was tied behind his back by the fact that any policy deviating from that set by his dead brother – the release of significant prisoners, for example, or the negotiation of a treaty that might involve territorial concessions – could not in practice be pursued without the guaranteeing authority of an adult monarch. And on the other side it had become clear, to the point where it was no longer questioned, that Charles, at almost twenty-six, would not fight. He had a son to succeed him should he fall, but, all the same, the combined effect of the continuing fragility of the Armagnac regime with his own lack of military capability meant that there would be no repeat of the gestures towards equipping himself for the battlefield that he had made as a teenager.
So that winter, while the king remained at Chinon, it was the Bastard of Orléans who led the resistance to the English siege. His task – apart from directing dangerous but ultimately ineffective skirmishes and sorties, which the chronicler Monstrelet felt moved to declare were ‘too long and boring’ to describe – was to find a weakness in the English position. And it was clear to the soldiers in the town that the length of the English supply line was one such point of vulnerability. Most of the besiegers’ food came from Paris, seventy miles to the north, and at the beginning of February a convoy bound for Orléans was assembled in the city, consisting of more than three hundred carts packed with provisions – mainly flour and salted fish, because it was almost Lent, the season of fasting when eating meat was forbidden. The people of the countryside around Paris watched as the supplies they had been forced to give up began their journey south with a guard of archers under the command of Sir John Fastolf.
They were not, however, the only ones who knew the food was on its way. The Bastard of Orléans, with La Hire, Xaintrailles and Darnley, had succeeded in leading a detachment of troops from within the besieged town past the English blockade to meet a relief force approaching from Blois under the command of the count of Clermont, son and heir to the duke of Bourbon who was, like the Bastard’s brother, still a prisoner in England. On 12 February,
after a bitterly cold night, they closed on the English convoy outside a village named Rouvray, thirteen miles north-west of Orléans. Across the plain, Fastolf saw them coming. Realising that his men were heavily outnumbered, he drew his carts into a defensive circle and ordered the civilians in his company to lead the horses into the shelter of this makeshift encampment. The archers drove their sharpened stakes into the ground where they stood guard at the only two points of entry left in this wall of wagons, while the men-at-arms took up position nearby. Then they waited.
Two hours passed while, at a distance, the Armagnacs prepared for battle and attempted to decide on their tactics. In the end, they could only agree to disagree, Darnley’s Scotsmen preferring to fight on foot, the French to prepare a charge on horseback. The details, after all, hardly mattered, given the crushing weight of their numbers. When Fastolf sent a messenger to ask if they would ransom prisoners, the answer was chilling: ‘if a hair of them escaped’, Clermont declared ringingly, ‘if they were not all put to the sword’, then he himself would give up all claim on God’s help for the future. And then, at three in the afternoon, the attack began. Fastolf’s archers were ready. Within moments, horses and men were falling, arrows tearing through flesh, animals screaming in pain and panic as longbows and stakes did their deadly work. Soon the frozen ground was sodden with Armagnac blood. More than four hundred men died that day, among them one-eyed John Stewart of Darnley, and with him the very last of the Scots army in France. In total, the English casualties numbered four.
The victory was remarkable. It mattered to the hungry English soldiers at Orléans, who would eat well that Lent, and it mattered that God had smiled on troops loyal to Henry, the true king of France. All the same, this triumph of English archers against overwhelming odds did not resonate with the grandeur of Agincourt, nor even of the ‘second Agincourt’ of Verneuil. Instead, people spoke of it, in tribute to the contents of Fastolf’s convoy, as the ‘Battle of the Herrings’. And the journal-writer in Paris drew his account of the fighting to a close with a heartfelt lament. ‘How dreadful it is, on both sides, that Christian men must kill each other like this without knowing why!’