Chapter 29
CHAPTER XX. THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR. PHILIP VI. AND JOHN II. PART I.
We have just been spectators at the labor of formation of the French kingship and the French nation. We have seen monarchical unity and national unity rising, little by little, out of and above the feudal system, which had been the first result of barbarians settling upon the ruins of the Roman Empire.
In the fourteenth century a new and vital question arose. Will the French dominion preserve its nationality? Will the kingship remain French or pass to the foreigner? This question brought ravages upon France, and kept her fortunes in suspense for a hundred years of war with England, from the reign of Philip of Valois to that of Charles VII.
And a young girl of Lorraine, called Joan of Arc, had the glory of communicating to France that decisive impulse which brought to a triumphant issue the independence of the French nation and kingship. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the elevation of Philip of Valois to the throne, as representative of the male line amongst the descendants of Hugh Capay, took place
of virtue, not of any old written law, but of a traditional rite, recognized and confirmed by two recent resolutions taken at the death of the two eldest sons of Philip the Handsome. The rite thus promulgated became at once a fact accepted by the whole of France. Philip of Valois had for arrival none but a foreign prince, and there was no mind in France, say contemporary chroniclers, to be subjects of the King of England.
Some weeks after his accession, on the 29th of May 1328, Philip was crowned at Rennes in presence of a brilliant assemblage of princes and lords, French and foreign, and next year on the 6th of June, Edward III, King of England, being summoned to fulfill a vassal's duties by doing homage to the King of France for the Duchy of Aquitaine, which he held, appeared in the Cathedral of Amiens, with his crown on his head, his sword at his side, and his
gilded spurs on his heels. When he drew near to the throne, the Viscount de Mellon, King's Chamberlain, invited him to lay aside his crown, his sword, and his spurs, and to go down on his knees before Philip. Not without a murmur, Edward obeyed, but when the Chamberlain said to him, Sir, you, as
Duke of Aquitaine, became legion of my lord the King who is here, and do promise to keep towards him faith and loyalty, Edward protested, saying that he owed only simple homage, and not liege homage, a closer bond, imposing on the vassal a more stringent obligation, to serve and defend his suzerain against every enemy whatsoever. "'Cousin,' said Philip to him, "'we would not deceive you, and what you have now done
contenteth us well until you have returned to your own country, and seen from the acts of your predecessors what you ought to do.' "'Gramercy, dear sir,' answered the King of England, and with the reservation he had just made, and which was added to the formula of homage, he placed his hands between the hands of the King of France, who kissed him on the mouth, and accepted his homage, confiding
in Edward's promise to certify himself by reference to the archives of England of the extent to which his ancestors had been bound.' This certification took place on 30 March 1331, about two years after his visit to Amiens. Edward III recognized, by letters expressed, the said homage which we did at Amiens to the King of France in general terms, is and must be understood as liege, and that we are
bound, as Duke of Aquitaine and Pier of France, to show him faith and loyalty. The relations between the two kings were not destined to be for long so courteous and so Pacific. Even before the question of the secession to the throne of France arose between them, they had adopted contrary policies.
When Philip was crowned at Rennes, Louis de Nevers, Count of Flanders, repaired thither with the following of eighty-six knights, and he it was to whom the right belonged of carrying the sword of the kingdom. The heralds-at-arms repeated three times, "'Count of Flanders, if you are here, come and do your duty.'
He made no answer. The king was astounded, and bade him explain himself. "'My lord,' answered the Count, "'may it please you not to be astounded. They call the Count of Flanders, and not Louis de Nevers.' "'What then?'
replied the King. "'Are you not the Count of Flanders?' "'It is true, sir,' rejoined the other, "'that I bear the name, but I do not possess the authority. The burghers of Bruges, Ypry, and Kessel have driven me from my land, and there scarce remains
but the town of Gint, where I dare show myself.' "'Fair cousin,' said Philip, "'we will swear by you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow, that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the Countship of Flanders.' Some of the French barons who happened to be present represented to the King that the
Flemish burghers were powerful, that autumn was a bad season for a war in their country, and that Louis the quarreler, in 1315, had been obliged to come to a standstill in a similar expedition. Philip consulted his constable, Walter de Chatillon, who had served the King's his predecessors in their wars against Flanders.
"'Whoso hath good stomach for fight,' answered the constable, "'findeth all time seasonable.' "'Well then,' said the King, embracing him, "'whoso loveth me will follow me.' The war thus resolved upon was forthwith begun. Philip, on arriving with his army before Kessel, found the place defended by sixteen thousand Flemings under the command of Nicholas Zanaquin, the richest of the burghers of Furness, and
already renowned for his zeal in the insurrection against the Count. For several days the French remained inactive around the mountain on which Kessel is built, and which the knights, mounted on iron-clad horses, were unable to scale. The Flemings had planted on a tower of Kessel a flag carrying a cock, with this inscription, "'When the cock that is hereon shall crow, the foundling King herein shall go.'
They called Philip the foundling King because he had no business to expect to be King. Philip in his wrath gave up to fire and pillage the outskirts of the place. The Flemings marshaled at the top of the mountain, made no movement. On the twenty-fourth of August, 1328, about three in the afternoon, the French knights had disarmed.
Some were playing at chess, others strolled about from tent to tent in their fine robes, in search of amusement, and the King was asleep in his tent after a long carouse, when all on a sudden his confessor, a Dominican friar, shouted out that the Flemings were attacking the camp. Xanaquin indeed came out full softly and without a bit of noise, says Frosart, with his troops
in three divisions, to surprise the French camp at three points. He was quite close to the King's tent, and some chroniclers say that he was already lifting his mace over the head of Philip, who had armed in hot haste, and was defended only by a few knights, one of whom was waving the auraflam around him, when others hurried up, and Xanaquin was forced to stay his hand.
At two other points of the camp the attack had failed. The French gathered about the King and the Flemings about Xanaquin, and there took place so stubborn a fight that of sixteen thousand Flemings who were there not one recoiled, says Frosart, and all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon the other, without budging from the spot where the battle had begun.
The same evening Philip entered castle, which he set on fire, and in a few days afterwards, On leaving for France, he said to Count Louis, before the French barons, Count, I have worked for you at my own and my baron's expense. I give you back your land, recovered and in peace. So take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to
return. For if I do, it will be to my own profit and to your hurt. The Count of Flanders was far from following the advice of the King of France, and the King of France was far from foreseeing whether he would be led by the road upon which he had just set foot.
It has already been pointed out to what a position of wealth, population and power, industrial and commercial activity, had, in the thirteenth century, raised the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Epris, Fumez, Poitras and Douay, and with what energy they had defended against their lords, their prosperity and their liberties. It was the struggle, sometimes sullen, sometimes violent, of feudal lordship against municipal
burgherdom. The able and imperious Philip the Handsome had tested the strength of the Flemish cities, and had not cared to push them to extremity. When in 1322 Count Louis de Nevers, scarcely eighteen years of age, inherited from his grandfather Robert III. the Countship of Flanders, he gave himself up, in respect of the majority
of towns in the Countship, to the same course of oppression and injustice as had been familiar to his predecessors. The burghers resisted him with the same, often ruffianly, energy, and when, after a six-year struggle amongst Flemings, the Count of Flanders, who had been conquered by the burghers, owed his return as master of his Countship to the King of the French, he troubled
himself about nothing but avenging himself and enjoying his victory at the expense of the vanquished. He chastised, despoiled, prescribed, and inflicted atrocious punishments, and not content with striking at individuals, he attacked the cities themselves. Nearly all of them, save Ghent, which had been favourable to the Count, saw their privileges
annulled or curtailed of their most essential guarantees. The burghers of Bruges were obliged to meet the Count half-way to his castle of Vail, and on their knees implore his pity. At Eprice the bell in the tower was broken up. Philip of Valois made himself a partner in these severities.
He ordered the fortifications of Bruges, Epris, and Courtres to be destroyed, and he charged French agents to see to their demolition. Absolute power is often led into mistakes by its insolence, but when it is in the hands of rash and reckless mediocrity there is no knowing how clumsy and blind it can be. Neither the King of France nor the Count of Flanders seemed to remember that the Flemish
communes had, at their door, a natural and powerful ally who could not do without them any more than they could do without him. Woolenstuffs, cloths, carpets, warm coverings of every sort, were the chief articles of the manufacturers and commerce of Flanders. There chiefly was to be found all that the active and enterprising merchants of the time
exported to Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Russia, and even Asia, and it was from England that they chiefly imported their wool, the primary staple of their handiwork. All Flanders, says Foy-Sart, was based upon cloth and no wool, no cloth. On the other hand it was to Flanders that England, her landowners and farmers, sold the fleeces of their flocks, and the two countries were thus united by the bond of their mutual
prosperity. The Count of Flanders forgot or defied this fact so far as in 1336, at the instigation, it is said, of the King of France, to have all the English in Flanders arrested and kept in prison. The Flanders were not long deferred.
On the 5th of October in the same year the King of England ordered the arrest of all Flemish merchants in his kingdom and the seizure of their goods, and he at the same time prohibited the exportation of wool. Flanders was given over, says her principal historian, to desolation. Nearly all her looms ceased rattling on one and the same day, and the streets of her cities,
but lately filled with rich and busy workmen, were overrun with beggars who asked in vain for work to escape from misery and hunger. The English landowners and farmers did not suffer so much, but were scarcely less angered. Only it was to the King of France and the Count of Flanders, rather than their own king, that they held themselves indebted for the stagnation of their affairs, and their discontent
saw it vent only in execration of the foreigner. When great national interests are to such a point misconceived and injured, there crop up before long clear-sided and bold men who undertake the championship of them, and foment the quarrel to explosion-heat, either from personal views or patriotic feeling. The question of secession to the throne of France seemed settled by the inaction of the
King of England, and the formal homage he had come and paid to the King of France at Amiens, but it was merely in abeyance. Many people, both in England and in France, still thought of it and spoke of it, and many intrigues bred of hope or fear were kept up with reference to it at the courts of the two kings.
When the rumblings of anger were loud on both sides in consequence of affairs in Flanders, two men of note, a Frenchman and a Fleming, considering that the hour had come, determined to revive the question, and turn the great struggle which could not fail to be excited thereby to the profit of their own and their country's cause, for it is singular how ambition and devotion, selfishness and patriotism, combine and mingle in the human soul, and
even in great souls. Philip VI had embroiled himself with the prince of his line, Robert of Artois, great-grandson of Robert, the first Count of Artois, who was a brother of Saint-Louis, and was killed during the crusade in Egypt, at the Battle of Mansoura. As early as the reign of Philip the Handsome, Robert claimed the Countship of Artois as
his heritage, but having had his pretensions rejected by a decision of the peers of the kingdom, he had hoped for more success under Philip of Valois, whose sister he had married. Philip tried to satisfy him with another domain raised to a peerage, but Robert, more and more discontented, got involved in a series of intrigues, plots, falsehoods, forgeries, and even, according to public report, imprisonments and crimes, which in 1332 led to his being
condemned by the court of peers to banishment and the confiscation of his property. He fled for refuge first to Vermont, and then to England, to the court of Edward III, who received him graciously, and whom he forthwith commenced inciting to claim the Crown of France—his inheritance, as he said, which King Philip holds most wrongfully. Edward III, who was naturally prudent, and had been involved, almost ever since his accession,
in a stubborn war with Scotland, cared but little for rushing into a fresh and far more serious enterprise. But of all human passions, hatred is perhaps the most determined in the prosecution of its designs. Robert accompanied the King of England in his campaigns northward, and, sir, said he,
whilst they were marching together over the heaths of Scotland, leave this poor country, and give your thoughts to the noble Crown of France. When Edward, on returning to London, was self-complacently rejoicing at his successes over his neighbours, Robert took pains to pique his self-respect, by expressing astonishment that he did not seek more practical and more brilliant successes.
History sometimes reveals sentiments and processes about which history is silent. We read in a poem of the fourteenth century, entitled The Vow on the Heron, In the season when summer is verging upon its decline, and the gay birds are forgetting their sweet converse on the trees, now despoiled of their verdure, Robert seeks for consolation in the pleasures of fowling, for he cannot forget the gentle
land of France, the glorious country, whence he is in exile. He carries a falcon, which goes flying over the waters till a heron falls its prey. Then he calls two young damsels to take the bird to the king's palace, singing the wile and sweet discourse. Fly, fly, ye honourless knights, give place to galants on whom love smiles.
Here is the dish for galants who are faithful to their mistresses. The heron is the most timid of birds, for it fears its own shadow. It is for the heron to receive the vows of King Edward, who, though lawful King of France, dares not claim that noble heritage. At these words the king flushed.
His heart was wroth, and he cried aloud, Since coward is thrown in my teeth, I make vow on this heron to the God of Paradise, That ere a single year rolls by I will defy the King of Paris. Count Robert hears and smiles, and lo, to his own heart he says, Now have I won, and my heron will cause a great war.
Robert's confidence in this tempter's work of his was well founded, but a little premature. Edward III did not repel him, complained loudly of the assistance rendered by the King of France to the Scots, gave an absolute refusal to Philip's demands for the extradition of the rebel Robert, and retorted by protesting in his turn against the reception accorded in France to David Bruce, the rival of his own favourite, Balliol, for the throne of
Scotland. In Aquitaine he claimed, as of his own domain, some places still occupied by Philip. Philip on his side neglected no chance of causing Edward embarrassment, and more or less overtly assisting his foes. The two kings were profoundly distrustful one of the other, for saw both of them that
they would one day come to blows, and prepared for it by mutually working to entangle and enfeeble one another. But neither durst as yet proclaim his wishes or his fears, and take the initiative in those unknown events which war must bring about to the great peril of their people, and perhaps of themselves.
From 1334 to 1337, as they continued to advance towards the issue, foreseen and at the same time deferred, of this situation, they were both of them seeking allies in Europe for their approaching struggle. Philip had a notable one under his thumb. The Pope at that time settled at Avignon, and he made use of him for the purpose of
proposing a new crusade, in which Edward III should be called upon to join with him. If Edward complied, any enterprise on his part against France would become impossible, and if he declined, Christendom would cry fie upon him. Two successive popes, John XXII and Benedict XII, preached the crusade, and offered their mediation to settle the differences between the two kings, but they were unsuccessful
in both their attempts. The two kings strained every nerve to form laic alliances. Philip did all he could to secure to himself the fidelity of Count Louis of Flanders, whom the King of England several times attempted, but in vain, to win over. Philip drew into close relations with himself the kings of Bohemia and Navarre, the dukes
of Lorraine and Burgundy, the Count of Foy, the Genoese, the Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and many other lords. The two principal neighbours of Flanders, the Count of Hanulk and the Duke of Brabant, received the solicitations of both kings at one and the same time. The former had to wife Joan of Valois, sister of the King of France, but he had married
his daughter Philippa to the King of England, and when Edward's envoys came and asked for his support in the great business which their master had in view— "'If the King can succeed in it,' said the Count, "'I shall be right glad. It may well be supposed that my heart is with him, him who hath my daughter, rather than with King Philip, though I have married his sister, for he hath filched from me the hand
of the young Duke of Brabant, who should have wedded my daughter Isabel, and hath kept him for a daughter of his own. So help will I my dear and beloved son the King of England to the best of my power. But he must get far stronger aid than mine, for Hanulk is but a little place in comparison with the kingdom of France, and England is too far off to succor us.
Dear sir,' said the envoys, "'advise us of what lords our master might best seek aid, and in what he might best put his trust.' "'By my soul,' said the Count, "'I could not point to lords so powerful to aid him in this business as would be the Duke of Brabant, who is his cousin Germain, the Duke of Gouldras, who hath his sister to wife, and sire de Fouquemont.
They are those who have the most men at arms in the least time, and they are right good soldiers, provided that money be given them in proportion, for they are lords and men who are glad of pay.' Edward III went for powerful allies even beyond the Rhine. He treated with Louis V of Bavaria, Emperor of Germany.
He even had a solemn interview with him at a diat assembled at Koblenz, and Louis named Edward vicar imperial throughout all the empire situated on the left bank of the Rhine, with orders to all princes of the low countries to follow and obey him, for a space of seven years in the field. But Louis of Bavaria was a tottering emperor, excommunicated by the Pope, and with a formidable
competitor in Frederick of Austria. When the time for action arrived, King John of Bohemia, a zealous ally of the French king, persuaded the Emperor of Germany that his dignity would be compromised if he were to go and join the army of the English king, in whose pay he would appear to have enlisted, when Louis of Bavaria withdrew from his alliance with Edward III, sending back the subsidies
he had received from him.
