A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  By the time the English envoys reached home, King Edward too had died, on June 23, the penultimate day of the truce. The jubilee year of his reign had passed virtually unnoticed and his death excited hardly more attention. He died deserted by the minions of power, including Alice Perrers, who was said to have stripped the rings from the King’s fingers as she departed. A ten-year-old child mounted the throne, initiating the divisive time that was to spread its wreckage over the next century and confirm Langland’s warning from Holy Writ, “Woe is the land with a youth for its king!”

  Isabella de Coucy, summoned from France in April by couriers on “business of extreme urgency,”* was at her father’s side when he died. Shortly before the end, she dispatched couriers to Coucy with news and “important questions” to be settled. On June 26, even before her father’s funeral, she requested and received permission to return to France, evidently with urgent matters to discuss.

  The problem for Coucy was more than simply one of allegiance; it was aggravated by great revenues, by bonds of kinship of great importance in that day, and by the oath of fellowship in the Order of the Garter. To repudiate fealty, kinship, and fellowship was no light thing. Other lords, like the Captal de Buch and Clisson, had transferred their loyalty from one side to another, but they were generally Gascons or Bretons or Hainaulters who did not feel themselves basically French or English. Coucy’s own seneschal, the valiant Chanoine de Robersart, turned English while he was in England with Coucy in the 1360s. After swearing homage to Edward III, he coolly returned with Lancaster’s army to ravage Picardy, which a few years earlier he had fought with such verve to defend. He was, however, a native of Hainault.*

  Plainly, Coucy could play no great part in his country’s affairs if he maintained neutrality as before. He not only needed to take sides; he doubtless wanted to take sides. National feeling had swelled in the years of French recovery. Writers gloried in the many cities of Picardy, Normandy, and Aquitaine retaken by Charles V. “Not Roland, not Arthur nor Oliver,” exclaims the knight in the Songe du Vergier, a political allegory of 1376, “ever did such deeds of arms as you have done by your wisdom, your power and your prayers!” (and, the author might have added, by Charles’s persuasive use of money). “When you came to the throne the horns and pride of your enemies reached up to heaven. Thanks to God, you have broken their horns and profoundly humiliated them.”

  Out of the polarity of war, a sense of French nationhood developed against the foil of England. In a dialogue between a French and an English soldier written about 1370 by the future Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, the Englishman declares that Normandy at least should belong to England and that they are within their rights in this matter. “Hold your peace!” cries the Frenchman. “That is not true. You can hold nothing this side of the sea except by tyranny; the sea is and ought to be your boundary.” That was a new idea. Homage and dynastic marriages were still the form of loyalty, but country was becoming the determinant. No longer could a French noble like Harcourt have so guiltlessly joined and guided the English in invasion of his native land. No longer could Coucy straddle loyalty across the Channel.

  Two months after King Edward’s death, Coucy addressed to Richard II a formal renunciation of “all that I hold of you in faith and homage.” Dated August 26, 1377, and presented to Richard by several lords and squires sent by Coucy to witness the delivery, the letter recalled the “alliance” he had had with “my most honored and redoubted lord and father, the King lately deceased (on whom God have mercy),” and continued:

  Now it has happened that war has arisen between my natural and sovereign lord, on the one part, and you on the other, at which I grieve more than at anything that could happen in this world, and would it could be remedied, but my lord has commanded and required me to serve him, and acquit myself of my duty, as I am bound to do; whom as you know well I ought not to disobey; so I will serve him to the best of my power as I ought to do.

  Wherefore, most honorable and puissant lord, in order that no one may in any wise speak or say a thing against me, or against my honor, I acquaint you with the aforesaid things and return to you all that I may hold from you in faith or homage.

  And also, most honored sire, my most honored lord and father above named was pleased to ordain and place me in the most noble company and Order of the Garter; so let it please your most noble and puissant lordship to provide in my place whomsoever you may please, and therein hold me excused.

  The double allegiance was broken. In becoming “a good and true Frenchman,” Coucy had chosen a nationality, even if the word did not yet exist. Only one thing was remarkable about the choice: that he parted with his wife along with his English lands and fealty. It has generally been said that he felt obliged to part with her in order to be free to choose France, but this would have been necessary only if Isabella had refused to be reconciled to the loss of their English estates. On renunciation of allegiance, the properties would be subject to confiscation. Everything known about Isabella suggests that this was the determining factor. Her compulsive extravagance, her neurotic dependence on home and on her father’s indulgence—which she may have hoped to transfer onto her brothers and nephew—her insecurity in France make it likely that the separation was her choice, whether or not it was also her husband’s.

  What Coucy felt for his vain, spoiled, selfish, willful wife—love, hate, or indifference—no evidence tells. Judging by what is known of her temperament, she was not a lovable Plantagenet, of whom history records few. In any event, she returned to and remained in England with her younger daughter, Philippa, who had always lived there. All her husband’s English estates, “manors, hamlets, honours, domains, towns, lands, tenements, animals, provender, goods and chattels” were forfeited to the crown and cautiously delivered to a trusteeship for Isabella consisting of the Archbishop of York, two bishops, and four other commissioners. Since women were not precluded from owning property in their own right, the arrangement indicates that her brothers mistrusted her habits. The terms provided that the revenues would be paid to her by the trustees “as long as she remains in England.”

  Isabella’s indeterminate status as neither wife nor widow lasted only two years. In April 1379 she died in unknown circumstances at the age of 47. All of Coucy’s lands in England were eventually settled on his daughter Philippa.

  The French renewed belligerency the instant the truce expired. In combination with the Spanish fleet, they launched a series of raids on England’s south coast even before they learned of King Edward’s death. In an effort to keep that event secret from them during the transfer of power, the English had “stopped incontinent all the passages of the kingdom, letting no one issue from the realm.” The organization required to close all exits must have been considerable, but proved futile since the French had already started.

  Under the command of Admiral Jean de Vienne, the French and Spaniards landed at Rye opposite Boulogne on June 29 and subjected it to 24 hours of savagery—burning, looting, killing men, women, and children and carrying off girls to the ships in deliberate emulation of the English savagery inflicted on the towns of France. In the flames, a church of “wonderful beauty” (according to Walsingham) was destroyed. Despite the insistence of a group of French knights who wanted to hold Rye as a permanent base—a kind of Calais in England—the Admiral refused. Occupation was not the French object but destruction and terror to bring the English to a peace treaty, and to prevent reinforcements for Calais, where the French were planning a major attack.

  Meeting little effective resistance, the French continued down the south coast, attacking Folkestone, Portsmouth, Weymouth, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and marching ten miles inland to burn Lewes, where they scattered and slaughtered a body of 200 defenders led by the local prior and two knights. After sailing away, they returned a month later to devastate the Isle of Wight off Southampton. The dread that haunted the English out of a dark atavistic terror of ancient Danish raiders and conquering Normans was brought to awful re
ality.

  Weakness of defense was not due to any false sense of security. These were the same towns attacked by the French in previous raids. Moreover in the last six months, as the truce waned, royal decrees had been raising the blackest specters of French invasion, but in the disarray of the time few defense measures had been taken. When the invader came, the fate of the towns did not greatly excite the nobles’ protective efforts. Sir John Arundel, a knight of later infamy, successfully defended Hampton with 400 lances, but not until the citizens at his demand had put up the money in good coin to engage them.

  When Lancaster’s castle of Pevensey on the Sussex coast was endangered, the Duke was reported by the ever-hostile Walsingham to have refused to send defenders, with the callous remark, “Let the French burn it. I am rich enough to rebuild it.” The remark sounds invented and as such breathes the same malice toward the nobles as animated another clerical chronicler, Jean de Venette—and for the same reason: failure of the knights to defend the land and people against their enemies. It was no accident that out of these invaded counties, Kent and Sussex, the Peasants’ Revolt was to come.

  * The others were Lionel, dead in Italy, Joanna in the Black Death, and two daughters, Margaret, married to the Earl of Pembroke, and Mary, married to the Duke of Brittany.

  * It is not entirely clear whether the couriers were sent to her in France or by her from England to her husband in France.

  * Robersart settled in England with three sons and founded a line that terminated some 200 years later in Amy Robsart, the ill-fated wife of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

  Chapter 15

  The Emperor in Paris

  The most spectacular if not the most significant event of the decade in France was the visit to Paris of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, in December to January 1377–78. Coucy’s notable social presence was again called on, as it had been for the wedding of the Duke of Burgundy, to lend his quality of grace and splendor to the escort of nobles for the visitor. In the jeweled glow of the occasion’s majestic pageantry, Charles V’s reign came to its zenith. The public was awed and gratified by the splendid ceremonies, and the propaganda value for Valois prestige probably equaled the incalculable expense.

  Although Charles V was the third generation of Valois on the throne, he was not entirely free of uneasiness about the legitimacy of the title, the more so because of doubts about his own paternity. For private and for state reasons, his constant effort was to enhance the dignity of the crown. Politically his purpose in arranging the visit was to isolate England by tightening his ties with his uncle the Emperor, and he also had questions of territorial transfer and marital arrangements to discuss with him. Emotionally the kinship was important to him, although he knew his uncle to be calculating and slippery when it came to the test. Above all, he would have an occasion for the kind of grandiose public ceremony so important to medieval rule.

  In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God. Although vestiges of the imperial prestige remained, neither theory nor title any longer corresponded to existing reality. Imperial sovereignty in Italy was hardly more than a sham; it was dwindling on the western fringe of the empire in Hainault, Holland, and Luxemburg, and retreating in the east before the growing nationhood of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. Its core was a haphazard federation of German principalities, duchies, cities, leagues, margraves, archbishoprics, and counties under shifting and overlapping sovereignties. Hapsburgs and Luxemburgs, Hohenstaufens, Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs, and Wettins despoiled each other in endless wars; the Ritter or knight lived by robbing the merchant; every town believed its prosperity depended on the ruin of its rival; within the towns, merchants and craft guilds contended for control; an exploited peasantry smoldered and periodically flamed in revolt. The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.

  As theoretic lay leader of the Christian community, the Emperor was an elected sovereign currently drawn from the Luxemburg rulers of Bohemia. Charles IV’s family ties with France, the preferred home of his father, John the Blind, were close. He had been brought up at the French court from the age of seven, had married a sister of Philip VI, and his own sister Bonne had married Philip’s son Jean II. Though slightly hunchbacked and sallow of skin, he had been handsome in his prime, with long black hair and beard and lustrous black eyes. Now 61, he had outlived three wives, wedded a fourth, and married off seven or eight of his offspring into an intricate network of Hungarian, Bavarian, and Hapsburg dynasties. Seemingly affable and meek, he was quick and firm in decision, but restless and never still. He was given to whittling willow branches as he listened apparently abstracted to petitioners and advisers, and then made to each a reply “full of wisdom.” He spoke and wrote Czech as well as French, Italian, German, and Latin, all equally proficiently. In being cerebral and shrewd, he was like his nephew Charles V, both being the opposite of irrational, intemperate fathers.

  Charles IV was astute enough to recognize that the Empire of his title was not that of Charlemagne. His central concern was the Kingdom of Bohemia, whose territorial enlargement and cultural enrichment he pursued with effect that earned him the title “Father of His Country.” He himself represented the nationalist tendencies that were making his imperial title obsolete.

  While the Emperor’s welcome was being prepared, Coucy entered the war with England, not in his home territory of Picardy but in Languedoc against the Gascons, under the leadership of the Duc d’Anjou, Governor of Languedoc. Like Lancaster also a king’s brother, Anjou was driven by ambition for a crown of his own. In joining him, Coucy forged the connection that within a few years was to draw him into Anjou’s fateful pursuit of the crown of Naples.

  After two months of siege and skirmish in Gascony, Coucy returned to Paris to serve as an escort to the Emperor. The welcoming party that was to greet him at Cambrai on the Hainault border included, besides Coucy, the King’s two chief advisers, Rivière and Mercier, and many nobles, knights, and squires, making in all a party of 300 resplendent horsemen. On December 22, they rode forward a league from the city to meet the advancing guests. Two hundred of Cambrai’s leading townsmen and clergy, headed by the Bishop, rode with them through ranks of archers and commoners stationed at the gates. The Emperor in a furred winter cloak of gray on a gray horse, together with his eldest son, Wenceslas, King of the Romans, was escorted into the city, where he dismounted with some difficulty, being afflicted by gout, and accompanied the Bishop to prayers in the church.

  His primary purpose in coming, he told the French lords afterward at dinner, was to visit King Charles and his Queen and their children whom he wished to see “more than any other creatures in the world.” When he had accomplished this and presented his son to them, he would die with a quiet mind whenever God wished to take him. The Emperor was in fact in the last year of his life, and perhaps anticipating death, as people did in a time of few remedies or cures, he may have undertaken the uncomfortable journey more from a desire to revisit the Paris of his youth than for political advantage.

  At each town in his progress through Picardy and the Ile de France, delegations met him in ceremonial welcome and presented gifts of meat, fish, bread, wines, and wagonloads of hay and oats, paid for by the King. On each occasion the Emperor was careful to state that he was a guest in a city of the King of France, while his hosts took pains that no bells should be rung or other rituals allowed that might signify imperial supremacy. The Emperor’s choice of a gray horse was a gesture to mark the distinction from an entry into a town of the Empire, when he customarily rode a white horse. The emphasis placed by the authorized French chronicle on these points of protocol shows that the matter was much on the mind of the French King. Charles V wanted to build up the visit as a showcase for his claim of a just war, but not to leave his people under any illusions abo
ut the Emperor as overlord or universal monarch. The elaborate courtesies and festivities he arranged were a measure of the great significance he attached to the visit. In the semi-official chronicle of his reign, no less than eighty pages of detailed account were devoted to it.

  At Compiègne near Paris, the Emperor was welcomed by the Duc de Bourbon, brother of the Queen, with a retinue in new liveries of parti-colored white and blue. At Senlis the welcomers were the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy and the Archbishop of Sens with a suite of 500 all dressed alike in gray and black, the knights in velvet and the squires in silk of the same colors. Enjoying this spectacle, the viewer would spread word of the occasion’s grandeur, but its unhappy hero, whose gout took a turn for the worse, had to forgo a planned banquet and proceed the rest of the way by means of the Dauphin’s litter harnessed to two mules and two horses.

  At the Abbey of St. Denis, three archbishops, ten bishops, and the entire Royal Council awaited the Emperor for the visit to the royal mausoleum, where he had to be lifted from his litter and carried into the church to pray devoutly at the tomb of St. Louis. Expressing himself as “madly desirous” to see the famous treasure and relics of St. Denis, the Emperor was shown the preserved body of the saint, who, having been martyred by decapitation on the hill of Montmartre (hence its name), had walked with his head in his hands to the site where he laid the head down and founded the abbey. The Emperor gazed for a long time at the relics and the jeweled crown of St. Louis and the royal tombs, especially of Philip VI, his onetime brother-in-law.