Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  Meantime Moleyns and Roos had been negotiating equally inconclusively for the release of Gilles of Brittany, soliciting directly to the duke while seeking the assistance of Charles VII to this end. They did not know that on 21 July 1448 Charles himself laid down the most stringent conditions, which he required the duke to see observed, before Gilles could be released. Gilles must do direct, personal homage to him; firm undertakings must be given by Henry VI and papal sanctions be obtained to back these up. Finally, he stipulated that on no account must the release appear to be made at the behest of the English.81 On 20 August 1448 Henry himself sent yet another of his personal letters to Charles, via Garter, because the duke of Brittany had now directly informed his ambassadors that the arrest and detention of Gilles had been made on the advice and initiative of Charles VII and that he could only release him with Charles’s consent. The pathetic declaration of his nephew Henry’s great love for Gilles, above all normal sentiments between cousins, his complete trust in his uncle Charles’s good intentions, and references to the long and fearsome hardships which his friend and cousin, Charles’s Breton nephew, was known to have endured, alike failed to move the French king. He took no steps to secure Gilles’s release or to restore his sequestered property.82

  The new, obstinate English stand over the Breton allegiance and the re-establishment of English forces in the Breton marches acquired sharper point and purpose when, in the small hours of 23 or 24 March 1449, an Aragonese captain in English service, François de Surienne, knight of the Garter in the stall of John Holand duke of Exeter, English military commander and king’s councillor, seized the important Breton town and fortress of Fougères by surprise assault. Punitive military effort had now been added to the diplomatic exertions designed to ensure the safety and secure the release of Gilles of Brittany. It does not seem to have been thought that Gilles was detained in Fougères; the object was to secure the border fortress as a valuable bargaining pledge. Any fears that Charles VII would represent this as a flagrant breach of the truce, absolving him from its observation, and declare open war to drive the English from Normandy, appear to have been cavalierly discounted in England. According to de Surienne’s subsequent letters of 15 March 1450, the first such moves to secure the release of Gilles of Brittany by force had come from Mathew Gough and others in Normandy, when they had asked to borrow his escalade-master and some of his soldiers. Then Jean le Roussellet, his marshal at Verneuil, who had been on a mission to England, brought back the suggestion, made by the duke of Suffolk, that de Surienne himself should capture Fougères and hold it, subject to Suffolk’s guidance. De Surienne in reply sent another messenger to England, one Raoul de Vatonne, asking for a secure base on the borders of Brittany from which to mount the operation. It was Suffolk who arranged for him to receive Condé-sur-Noireau (Calvados) from Sir John Fastolf for this purpose.

  The decisive stage in his acceptance of this task was a personal visit he made to England, apparently some time in 1447, during which Suffolk personally encouraged him in the enterprise and told him he had settled it all with Henry. From this point the capture of Fougères was a secret, fall-back policy to secure the release of Gilles if diplomacy failed. Somerset, at his house at Blackfriars, newly appointed governor of Normandy but then still in England, also assured de Surienne, newly made knight of the Garter for his intended services, that these contingency plans had the king’s approval and declared that such an enterprise would be entirely worthy of a Garter knight. Later, when present and in command in Normandy, Somerset, through intermediaries, expressed fears that the enterprise might be prematurely discovered and fail, and therefore pressed for its speedy execution, personally intervening to secure the making of special assault tools, the manufacture of which was illegal (long pincers for cutting gate fastenings, etc.). After the capture he sent Mortain herald to congratulate de Surienne and to make sure he held it firmly, supplying him with bows, arrows and gunpowder when requested.

  De Surienne, once in possession, confidently rejected terms offered by the duke of Brittany for surrender of the place and sent his own pursuivant, Bon Désir, direct to Suffolk in England for his further instructions. He duly received letters back from both Henry and Suffolk ordering him to hold the place firmly until further notice. Moreover, Somerset also wrote to the same effect, under his own signet and sign manual, also promising reinforcements. Since his assault force had been largely drawn piecemeal from garrisons of many different captains in Normandy, and these could not stay with him beyond Michaelmas 1449, de Surienne sent one Guillim de Lille to England to Suffolk with details of his needs. De Lille returned and assured him that Henry had been informed and had appointed Sir Robert Vere to reinforce him, pending the crossing over of a great army. Vere indeed got as far as Caen, but no further, and the duke of Brittany, on learning of his approach, laid siege to Fougères. De Surienne considered he needed at least 1,000 fighting men to hold it and he had only 400. Yet, in spite of being out-gunned and undermanned, he ignored repeated requests of his followers to make terms, even though a number of them fraternized with the enemy and gave away his secrets. He succeeded in holding Fougères for five weeks until, finally, his garrison would no longer obey his orders and he had to surrender. He could see no future for himself except to retire with his family to Aragon, and sent back his Garter to Henry by the herald Longueville, in disgust at his betrayal. He might have had 50,000 gold crowns cash down and other inducements for an earlier surrender to the duke of Brittany and he indignantly repudiated any suggestions of dishonourable conduct and aspersions that he had acted on his own initiative in undertaking the capture. He had acted on explicit orders from England. Such was his own justification for his actions.83 The depositions subsequently taken by the French at Rouen from October to December 1449 before Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins, chancellor of France, specifically to prove the responsibility of the English government for the assault on Fougères, even allowing for the desire of the witnesses to please their French conquerors, only serve to confirm that the prudent, self-interested de Surienne was not the kind of rash captain who would do such a thing on his own initiative. He was convinced that his orders came from Henry in England and there is no room for doubt that they had done so.84

  Somerset had arrived in Rouen in March 1448 to fulfil three roles: commander-in-chief and head of the English government in Normandy, posts kept vacant by the king’s vacillation since Michaelmas 1445, and, by far the most important job in Henry’s eyes, to act as conservator of the truce. His insistence on addressing Charles VII only as ‘the uncle in France’, which Charles found derogatory to his honour and contrary to the practice of Somerset’s predecessor York,85 was no new, pointless discourtesy: Henry’s claim to the French crown was now no longer negotiable and was perforce re-asserted because the allegiance of Brittany could only be claimed in his capacity as king of France. The English envoys to maintain the truce admitted this at their final meeting with Charles at Roches Tranchelion on 31 July 1449.86 Time and again, both through his envoys, meeting with Somerset’s envoys, and in his letters directly to Henry, Charles asserted that Somerset, as Henry’s plenipotentiary over the truce, yet refused to do justice over St James de Bevron, Mortain and Fougères. Persistently and unvaryingly Somerset claimed that he had not been given such powers. In English eyes affairs on the borders of Brittany and Normandy were no concern of Charles VII. The adamant stand by both Henry and Charles that the allegiance of Brittany was not negotiable must exonerate the loyal and unfortunate Somerset from the French charges of duplicity. He had in fact no power to accept the incidents of St James de Bevron and Mortain as breaches of the truce, or power to order or compel de Surienne to surrender Fougères to the duke of Brittany, as the French insisted it should be surrendered. This point was emphasized by a direct appeal which de Surienne made to Henry over Somerset’s head.87 Complete absence of any mention of the allegiance of Brittany in the direct correspondence between the two kings, Charles and Henry, obscures this vita
l point. Instruction given to Harvart, Charles’s personal envoy, sent to Henry in June 1449, specifically ordered him not to discuss it.88 Thus the conferences of 20 June 1449 at Port St Ouen, from 25 June to 4 July at Louviers and the abbey of Bonport89 and, finally, at Roches Tranchelion on 31 July 1449, all failed on the basic question of the allegiance of Brittany. The truce thus ultimately foundered. At Tours, in their eagerness to secure the Angevin marriage and the truce, the English had neglected the Breton allegiance. From 1447 they attempted to resurrect it. Henry refused to abandon his childhood friend, Gilles of Brittany, his liegeman and subject, whose detention by Charles VII he ultimately regarded as the first breach of the truce, and he made his release a sine qua non for the surrender of Fougères. The allegiance of Brittany was of greater importance to Charles VII even than the possession of Maine had been. In the ultimate event, at the final meeting of 31 July 1449, held by Charles VII to justify the resumption of hostilities, the chancellor of France was made to declare that the restoration of Fougères was a lesser thing than the issue of Breton homage.90 It was defence of his vassal’s rights which provided Charles VII with his justification for reopening the war.

  For a full month after de Surienne’s daring feat of arms, this contingent English plan to secure Gilles’s release if negotiation failed actually seemed assured of success. Charles’s ambassadors, Cousinot and Pierre de Fontenil, were with Somerset in Rouen from 7–22 April 1449 and, although the capture of Fougères had been common knowledge even before their departure on 7 April, they made no mention of it in their negotiations. It seems that Charles VII, even at that late stage, was still not quite sure of his vassal duke. The terrified Duke Francis had fled from Rennes to Vannes on the first news of the English attack.91 At first he actually proposed to surrender Gilles. He sent the pursuivant Malo to Somerset at Rouen92 and Michel de Parthenay to Fougères where, according to the English ambassadors at Roches Tranchelion, confirmed as true by de Surienne’s letter to Henry, and by the depositions recorded at the French inquiry, he not only offered to release his brother, but also to pay de Surienne handsomely into the bargain to surrender the fortress. 93 But, in fact, a train of events had begun on 10 April which led swiftly to the complete expulsion of the English forces from the whole of Normandy, branded with the full guilt of breaking the truce. That day Charles knew for certain that the duke was appealing to him for assistance as his vassal.94 This at last put right on Charles’s side. He was now entitled to claim that the English had broken the truce by their acts at St James de Bevron, Mortain and Fougères. An offensive and defensive alliance between Charles and Francis to drive the English from Normandy was drafted at Rennes on 17 June and confirmed on 27 June.95 Charles gave power to Dunois, as his lieutenant general, to treat for the surrender of places in Normandy on 17 July96 and through his chancellor, after consultations with his council and the lords of his blood, he declared himself absolved from the truce of Tours to Somerset’s ambassadors at Roches Tranchelion on 31 July 1449.

  The military recovery of Normandy by French and Breton forces, for which the investment of Le Mans had been a valuable dress rehearsal, now proceeded with astonishing speed. No acknowledgement of the desperately dangerous weakness of Normandy, demoralized by five years of precariously maintained truce and the forcible amputation of Maine, appears to have been made by Henry before May 1449.97 On 27 May provision was made for 100 men-at-arms and 1,200 archers to muster at Portsmouth on 11 June.98 On 20 and 22 December Henry was reduced to pledging his jewels and plate for the renewed war, which he had never believed would happen.99 De Surienne was forced to make a composition for Fougères on 1 November and by 1450 only Honfleur, Caen, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Fresnay, Domfront, Saint-Sauveur, Vire, Falaise and a few other small places were left of English Normandy. The battle of Formigny of 15 April 1450 administered the coup de grâce’, the fall of Cherbourg on 12 August completed a reconquest which had taken little over a year. All the English high hopes placed on the Angevin marriage and truce at Tours in May 1444 had come to nothing. Charles VII, as the inscription on his portrait proclaimed, was ‘Le Trèsvictorieux Roi de France’. In his own good time, in one year and six days, he had conquered Henry’s duchy of Normandy, six whole days’ marches long and four broad, six bishoprics, one noble archbishopric and a hundred towns and castles, not counting those destroyed by the war.100 Henry by contrast, as the contemptuous jingle now ran among his own subjects, was no king at all; ‘The king’s son, lost all his father won’.

  Undoubtedly Henry himself bore the ultimate responsibility for the loss of Normandy, brought about by his marriage and truce policy of 1444 and the means by which it was implemented and continued up to the summer of 1449. As a result of it Charles VII was able completely to transform his position from a general stalemate in 1443 to a point where he was poised for reconquest, with every appearance of right on his side, a splendid war machine to hand and a firm treaty guaranteeing every assistance from the duke of Brittany. Nevertheless, under Henry, the loyal but supine duke of Somerset, who had accepted from him the supreme appointment of lieutenant and commanderin-chief in France and Normandy in December 1446, could be held immediately responsible for the military disasters. York had returned to England, in September 1445, taking with him his personal retinue, for which he was subsequently criticized by Henry’s entourage, and was never allowed to return. After his withdrawal there was no English field force in Normandy and no commander-in-chief at all until Somerset was finally allowed to take up his hitherto sinecure appointment in March 1448. Even then he was content to accept Henry’s interpretation of his appointment as being primarily to maintain, at all cost, a truce which was still, quite unrealistically, expected to lead to a final peace. His loyal prevarications over Fougères finally gave Charles VII the excuse he needed to resume hostilities which the English had neither forseen nor provided for. Consequently numerous but isolated and neglected English garrisons, each one only capable of a few weeks’ resistance, fell in rapid succession before the French and Breton armies which were launched against them in July 1449. These armies were some 30,000 strong and serviced with effective siege artillery. For comparison, even under Bedford the total English forces had never exceeded 15,000. With the exception of limited forces, perhaps totalling 1,500, which he sent out from Caen, Bayeux and Vire to the assistance of Kyriell’s small relieving army of 2,500 in April 1450, Somerset’s strategy, if so it could be called, was merely for each garrison to sit tight and wait to be invested.101 He did nothing to check the escalating collapse of the English positions and in the situation which had been allowed to develop by the summer of 1449 there was probably nothing else he could have done.

  The personal participation of the commander-in-chief in operations was thus confined to making the two most important and humiliating surrenders of the campaign. On 29 October 1446, after he had lost the allegiance of his capital city Rouen and had retreated into the citadel there, he made a degrading composition with Charles VII to secure the release of himself, his duchess and their children, and the English garrison. This involved the surrender of all the English strongholds still held in the Pays de Caux: Arques, Caudebec, Montivilliers, Lillebonne, Tancarville and Honfleur; a ransom of 50,000 crowns and the delivery into French hands of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, Normandy’s only remaining successful English general, together with four other hostages. The refusal of the commander of Honfleur to obey his orders left Talbot in captivity until 21 July 1450, when the garrison of Falaise successfully made his release a condition of their capitulation. In Caen, the second city of Normandy and Somerset’s final place of refuge with his family, he surrendered the stronghold to the Count of Dunois on 1 July 1450, handing over eighteen hostages to be held until he and his family, and the 4,000-strong English garrison, had departed directly from France by Oistreham, the port of Caen. Somerset, in his disgrace, made by sea first for Calais, not England, presumably fearful of the nature of his reception. Henry, however, persisted in maintainin
g him in favour and two months later appointed him to a further supreme military command as Constable of England. A year later he received the other highest military office, the captaincy of Calais. The abject surrenders Somerset made to the French and his part in the surrender of Maine were to be the principal grounds on which Richard duke of York, whom he had supplanted in France, blamed him for the disasters of the reign and later rose in armed strength to compel Henry to consent to his destruction as a menace to the safety of the realm.

  The first victims of the loss of Maine, Anjou and Normandy were the thousands of English combatants, their families and dependants, including Norman-born wives and sympathizers, who were allowed to depart to England with only their lives and personal possessions when there remained nowhere else for them to go; refugees from the four final, simultaneous sieges of Caen, Falaise, Domfront and Cherbourg in July and early August 1450. According to Berry herald they numbered some 4,000 from Caen and a further 2,300 combatants with their dependants from Falaise, Domfront and Cherbourg.102 Abandoned by Henry’s government, destitute and permanently embittered, they could do little immediately to help themselves other than petition and beg at the impoverished royal household for relief and sustenance.103 Their past and present commanders and captains, who had other resources in England to fall back on, had, of course, lost most in lands, rents and offices. Somerset’s own lost princely patrimony of Harcourt, Mortain and Maine was nearly equalled by York’s apanage, the counties and lordships of Evreux, Beaumont-le-Rogier, Orbec, Conches and Bretheuil.104 Some, like Sir John Fastolf, whose lands in Normandy and Maine had once produced a clear £675 per annum, while still losing heavily in the débâcle, had managed to salvage something by prudent sales in advance.105 Even in the final years absentee landlords like York and his henchmen Scales, Oldhall and Ogard, who had left their own officials behind them, were still being remitted substantial sums to England.106 But Somerset alone, prime target for the accumulated resentment of the dispossessed Anglo-Norman establishment, was alleged to have received compensation for losses from Henry, for his own and what had been intended for others, for the surrendering garrisons of Maine.107 The rest, great and small, were hardly likely to be content with memories of past benefits enjoyed during thirty years of English occupation and could be expected to make common cause against those whom they held responsible for their current misfortunes.