The Black Prince hoped for a decisive battle at Vitoria. The army was arrayed in battle formation and various challenges were sent out, but, if Enrique had not fought the English in France,61 du Guesclin and his French officers certainly had and their advice was bolstered by a letter from Charles V of France, who advised Enrique that he should on no account be tempted into a set-piece battle, which the English would win, but rather that he should delay until the English ran out of food and fodder and had to retreat. What the Castilians could do was fall upon patrols and scouts, and it was in one of these minor skirmishes that Sir William Felton was killed. He was in command of a foraging party of around 300 mounted men-at-arms and archers west of Vitoria when he was surprised by a much larger French force. Taking up a position on a knoll near the village of Arinez, Felton’s little group held off all comers until Felton was killed and the archers ran out of arrows, whereupon they had to surrender. For centuries afterwards, the knoll was known as Inglesamendi – the Hill of the English.62
The advice to Enrique not to force a battle was sound, and sure enough, in mid-March, the Black Prince had to move, heading south-east and then south-west to approach Burgos from the east, reaching Logrono on 1 April 1367. But politics forced Enrique’s hand. Towns and fortresses on the English approach route were declaring for Pedro; there were mutterings in the ranks of the army, from the Castilians who thought Enrique was behaving in a cowardly fashion, and from the French and the mercenaries who wanted a battle so that they could be paid. Against all his better judgement and against du Guesclin’s strongly worded urgings, Enrique decided to fight, for, if he did not, he would forfeit his throne by default as the population increasingly turned to Pedro.
The Trastamaran army took up a blocking position east of the village of Najera on the main road to Burgos. In front of them was a tributary of the River Najerilla, which flows into the Ebro to the north, while behind them was the Najerilla itself and then the village. There was one narrow bridge over the Najerilla, and to the west of the village there was (and is) a line of sandstone cliffs, difficult to scale without weapons and armour, impossible with them, and lacking any route for a horse. It may be that Enrique, or more probably du Guesclin, chose the position for the very reason that the army would thus find it difficult to run away. It was in any event a good defensive position for an army that was probably outnumbered by that of the Black Prince, who would have to attack – and thus reduce the effect of the archers – if he wanted to force the road to Burgos. But the prince had no intention of doing what his enemy wanted. Well before first light, the army left Logrono and made a wide flank march to form up on the north (left) flank of the Franco-Castilian line. The first indication the troops of Enrique had that the English were anywhere in the vicinity was when they saw banners and pennants fluttering away a few hundred yards on their left.
Du Guesclin desperately issued orders to the whole army to swing round to face north, while the English dismounted and formed their usual line of men-at-arms with the archers on the wings. The left-hand French division managed to wheel round reasonably quickly, but in the rest of the army panic set in, with the second division dissolving into a mass of men running for the village, while some of the Castilian light cavalry decided to desert to the English. Du Guesclin realized that he had no option but to abandon any idea of standing on the defensive: his only chance was to attack the English and hope that his men could run the gauntlet of the arrow storm. They could not. The Castilian heavy cavalry refused to dismount and paid the penalty in dead, wounded and maddened horses, while the light infantry could not stand. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes, with fleeing Frenchmen and Castilians trying to get across the one bridge over the Najerilla and trampling and crushing each other in the process. The English rearguard slaughtered them as they were trapped by the river or struggled to reach the bridge, which was now blocked by the bodies of their own men. It was a complete rout, with du Guesclin and nearly all the senior commanders captured. The next morning, the heralds claimed to have counted over 5,000 bodies of Enrique of Trastamara’s men. English losses were negligible.
Now began the accounting for prisoners and the calculation of ransoms. Many of the prisoners, du Guesclin and Marshal Arnaud d’Audrehem among them, had been captured by the English before and had not paid the ransoms promised then, and some heated discussion ensued. Enrique himself had not been captured – although unhorsed, he had fled on a horse taken from one of his knights, and eventually crossed the border into Aragon and got away into France. For Pedro the matter of who owned which prisoner was academic – he wanted to slaughter the lot as being the sure way to prevent any further trouble from them. The Black Prince demurred: the prisoners belonged to those who had captured them, who were in turn entitled to the ransoms, and in any case the knightly code prevented the killing of prisoners – or at any rate the killing of rich prisoners.
The Spanish campaign culminating at Najera was a spectacular success militarily: a professional English army had crossed inhospitable terrain in the depths of winter and once again had defeated a French-sponsored enemy with few casualties of its own. Politically and economically, however, it was a disaster. Pedro began to renege on all that he had promised; he failed to hand over the Basque country around Bilbao, he was unable or unwilling to pay for the cost of the campaign, as he had agreed, and he could not even repay the loan made to him to buy off Charles of Navarre. Most of the Castilian knights had no intention of paying the ransoms promised, and in some cases legal arguments in the courts of Castile and Aragon went on for years. In the event, Pedro’s Spanish practices did him no good at all, for only two years later he was again dethroned and murdered, stabbed to death by Enrique of Trastamara himself, who was helped by those whom Pedro had failed to have executed after Najera. From 1369, Castile with its navy was therefore firmly in the French camp.
If Pedro was not going to keep his word and pay for the campaign that restored him, then the Black Prince would have to raise the money from Aquitaine, where there were already grumblings about the expense of maintaining what was seen as his lavish court in Bordeaux. As even higher hearth taxes (roughly equivalent to rates or a form of poll tax) were announced, some in the population began to wonder whether being protected from French occupation was worth the cost. Some of the Gascon magnates decided, rather shrewdly, to appeal to the French king Charles V against the hearth tax. To allow such appeals was entirely contrary to the Treaty of Brétigny, so for the moment Charles simply collected the appeals without doing anything about them. In the meantime, he was restocking the French treasury – the extra taxes imposed to raise the ransom for his father were retained – and building up an army.
By January 1369, Charles was ready to make his move: he announced that he was going to hear appeals against Edward’s taxation policies, and, when challenged that this contravened Brétigny, he replied that France had never ratified the renunciation of sovereignty over Aquitaine. King Edward, more politically aware than his son, advised the prince to drop the hearth tax, but Prince Edward could see no other way of restoring his finances. When in June 1369 war broke out once more and Charles announced that he had ‘confiscated’ Aquitaine, the Black Prince was both furious and caught by surprise. He was in any case incapable of taking the field personally, as he had contracted some sort of disease – possibly dysentery, possibly malaria, possibly both and possibly while campaigning in Spain – which had led to further complications and necessitated him being carried everywhere in a litter.
Charles V had taken note of the lessons of Crécy and Poitiers, and well understood that to fight the English in open battle was to lose. Rather, he instructed his commanders, including Bertrand du Guesclin, whom he appointed constable of France in 1370, to whittle away at English power by selective targeting and what in modern parlance would be called guerrilla warfare. Towns with only a small English garrison could be attacked, foraging parties ambushed, supply convoys destroyed, and inhabitants persuaded,
bribed or coerced into changing sides. The English did not have the manpower to put garrisons large enough to hold out in every town, and the only answer was to resort to the chevauchée. Sir John Chandos was recalled from his estates in Normandy but was killed in January 1370 in a skirmish at Lussac-les-Châteaux. He was wearing a long surcoat and slipped on the frozen ground. He was either not wearing a helmet or, if he was, had the visor up, and a French esquire stabbed him in the face. His was a serious loss as not only was he a highly competent military commander and strategist, but he was also well liked in Aquitaine and noted for his diplomacy. John of Gaunt led an expedition through Normandy, but, while he created a great swathe of destruction, he met no French armies. Sir Robert Knollys burned and plundered his way to the very gates of Paris, but still Charles avoided battle and Knollys could only retire.
In the same year, 1370, the citizens of Limoges transferred their allegiance to the French, a move that particularly incensed Prince Edward, as their leader, the bishop of Limoges, was godfather to the prince’s son and had always been considered a personal friend. Such betrayal could not be tolerated and the Black Prince’s army of over 5,000 men (according to Froissart, but probably nearer 3,000) laid siege to Limoges. After a month of mining and counter-mining, the English collapsed the walls and the soldiers poured in. The prince from his wheeled litter ordered a massacre of the population. As the contemporary chronicler puts it:
Men, women and children flung themselves on their knees before the prince crying ‘have mercy on us gentle sir’. But he was so inflamed with anger that he would not listen. Neither man nor woman was heeded but all who could be found were put to the sword including many who were in no way to blame. I do not understand how they could have failed to take pity on people who were too unimportant to have committed treason. Yet they paid for it, and paid more dearly than the leaders who had committed it... more than three thousand people were dragged out to have their throats cut.34
They had indeed paid more dearly than their leaders,63 for many of the nobles who had instigated the change of allegiance were allowed to surrender and were subsequently ransomed, while the bishop of Limoges, who should in all conscience have suffered a traitor’s death, was handed over to the (French) pope. The numbers of the slain may, of course, have been wildly exaggerated, but, if the slaughter did happen, it lends weight to the theory that it was the French who coined the nickname ‘the Black Prince’.
But, although Limoges had been recovered, at least for the time being, English France was falling fast. In 1371, the Black Prince, now crippled by his illness, returned to England, leaving John of Gaunt as ruler of Aquitaine and the other English territories, but he could not stop the rot either, and, as the husband of the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, he was particularly disliked in Castile by the ruling Trastamara faction. In 1372, du Guesclin marched into Poitiers when the citizens threw open the gates in defiance of the English garrison commander, and La Rochelle fell when blockaded by the Castilian fleet and attacked on land by du Guesclin. The last real opportunity to recover the situation came when King Edward mustered an army of 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers to be transported to France in 400 ships from Sandwich in August 1372. Although Edward was old, ailing and in the grip of a greedy mistress,64 he himself embarked, as did the Black Prince, who was carried on board on a stretcher, but the weather conspired against them. The fleet spent weeks being buffeted to and fro and was never able to make landfall until eventually, after the ships had been blown back to England yet again, the adventure was called off, at enormous cost.
The following year, John of Gaunt mounted another chevauchée from Calais, and, although he created a great band of devastation through central France as far as Bordeaux, he lost most of his horses through hard riding and lack of fodder without meeting a single French army, du Guesclin contenting himself with cutting out foraging parties, stragglers and small patrols. By the end of 1373, most of Aquitaine had gone, with only the county of Guienne, around Bordeaux, and the coastal strip as far as Bayonne holding out. The French had overrun most of Brittany, whose duke had taken refuge in England, although they could not take Brest, which remained firmly in English hands, while in the north only Calais and a few garrisons in Normandy remained of the great holdings confirmed as a result of the Battle of Poitiers. The French tactic of guerrilla war and piecemeal reduction was working, but the task of invading Guienne was formidable and, despite increasing French and Castilian strength in the Channel, Calais, supplied by English ships, could hold out for far longer than Charles V wanted to spend on a siege. In 1375, negotiations for a truce began.
On Trinity Sunday, 7 June 1376, the Black Prince died in England at the age of forty-six. Had he escaped the illness that killed him, he would surely have been as great a king as his father, who followed his son to the grave a year and two weeks later. By the time of his death, Edward III was sixty-five years old and senile, cantankerous and losing much of his earlier popularity. Nevertheless, he was a great king, perhaps one of our greatest: he had dealt with Scotland, recovered English lands in Europe, presided over a genuine revolution in military affairs, renewed faith in government after the unstable years of his father and then of his mother and Mortimer, stabilized the currency, expanded English trade, and made England a power to be feared and respected. That it all began to fall apart in his later years does not detract from his essential greatness.
England has always been at her weakest when there is a disputed succession, an incompetent monarch or a child king. The successor to Edward III was the ten-year-old second son of the Black Prince (the older son, another Edward, had died in 1369 aged six), Richard of Bordeaux, who would reign as Richard II. The real power was to be exercised by a council, chosen from Lords, Commons and Clergy, until Richard came of age, with the whole edifice supervised by the king’s uncles, John of Gaunt and the younger earls Edmund of Cambridge and Thomas of Buckingham. Gaunt was frequently suspected – then and later – of harbouring ambitions for the throne himself, and, had primogeniture for the English succession not been firmly established by then, he would surely have succeeded. All the evidence, however, shows that he was a genuine supporter of royal legitimacy and of his nephew, whose magnificent coronation he arranged, at enormous expense.
Despite the wishes both of the ruling council of England and of the French king Charles V for some form of truce, there were too many vested interests in mayhem and murder for fighting to stop completely. While there were no great battles for the next few years, raids, sieges and encounters at sea went on, and, although the English no longer got the best of all these skirmishes, the seemingly unstoppable French advance was slowed and then halted. The efforts of those wishing a permanent peace suffered a setback when the French pope Gregory XI died in 1378 and the conclave of cardinals elected an Italian, Bartolomeo Prignano, as Urban VI. The French refused to accept his election and put forward their own candidate, Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who, although Swiss by birth, had spent most of his time in France, and acclaimed him as Pope Clement VII. Thus began the Great Western Schism, with Urban in Rome recognized by England and Clement in Avignon supported by France and Scotland. Previously, while the popes were regarded with great suspicion by the English, they did at least provide a forum for peace negotiations, but now with the schism that option was gone and there was no professedly disinterested single body to act as a go-between.
Richard II was in many ways a tragic figure. As the younger son, he would not have been raised to be king, and, although his mother had considerable (and generally beneficial) influence on his early education and subsequent development, he had little contact with his father, who was frequently away on campaign, and his senior uncle, Gaunt, was unpopular in the country. This unpopularity was, of course, partly engendered through envy: the dukedom of Lancaster was immensely rich and in many aspects was independent of the central government. But Gaunt’s frequent quarrels with various bishops (usually over the question of sanctuary in churches),65 hi
s obvious disdain for public opinion, and his lack of charisma (perhaps surprising given his genes) as a military commander did not help his reputation.
It was an unfortunate start to the reign that the truce negotiated in 1375 ran out only a few days after Richard’s accession. It was even more unfortunate that the French had used the brief peace to prepare for war, by embarking on a major ship-building programme based in Rouen, while the English, short of money, had been much less energetic. In the summer of 1377, French fleets, aided by the Castilian galleys of Enrique, raided the English Channel ports from Rye as far as Plymouth. They would land, loot what they could, set fire to anything that looked as if it might burn and set sail again. They landed on the Isle of Wight and extracted a ransom before departing; attacked Southampton, where they were bloodily repulsed by local forces under Sir John Arundel, a younger son of the third earl of Arundel; raided Poole; and tried (and failed) to effect a landing in Folkestone. On the continent, the French admiral Jean de Vienne blockaded Calais by sea while the duke of Burgundy laid siege on land. Fortunately for the Calais garrison, commanded by Sir Hugh Calveley, although some of the outer defences fell, bad weather and heavy rains made mining and the movement of siege engines impossible and the French withdrew, giving Sir Hugh an opportunity to sally out, attack Étaples further down the coast, and remove the large quantities of wine stored there. Meanwhile, in the Dordogne, the duke of Anjou was steadily reducing English-held towns. He captured the seneschal of Aquitaine, Sir Thomas Felton, father of the Sir William who had been killed in Spain, and threatened Bordeaux, only to have to turn back when he found pro-English forces in his rear. Brest was under siege, but was reinforced from England in January 1378, although English attempts to capture Saint-Malo and to initiate a campaign in Normandy failed.
A Great and Glorious Adventure Page 20
