PART ONE
1
God had spoken. That, at least, was what the English said. In the circumstances, it was hard for the French to argue. Or, rather, it would have been, had they not been too busy arguing among themselves.
For the English, it was simple. Their king’s claim to the throne of France – and, for that matter, his dynasty’s contested right to wear the crown of England – had been utterly, gloriously vindicated by his astonishing victory at the battle they called ‘Agincourt’. Only God’s will could explain how so few Englishmen had vanquished so many great knights of France, and how it was that so little English blood had been spilled when so much death had been visited on their adversaries. This was heaven’s mandate in action: the triumph of another David over the might of an arrogant Goliath, as one of the royal chaplains who had formed the spiritual corps of the English army now solemnly noted in his account of the campaign. These clerical conscripts had sat behind the English lines as the fighting raged, praying furiously for divine intervention, and its undeniable manifestation in ‘that mound of pity and blood’ in which the French had fallen could lead to only one conclusion. ‘Far be it from our people to ascribe the triumph to their own glory or strength,’ wrote the anonymous priest with palpable fervour; ‘rather let it be ascribed to God alone, from Whom is every victory, lest the Lord be wrathful at our ingratitude and at another time turn from us, which Heaven forbid, His victorious hand.’
Clearly, the English king was waging a just war. He had given his French subjects every chance to acknowledge his rightful claim to be their ruler by descent from the French mother of his royal ancestor Edward III. Outside the walls of Harfleur, following the prescription for the conduct of righteous war laid down in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, he had patiently explained that he came in peace, if only they would open the gates and submit to his authority as their duty demanded. Their obstinate refusal meant that he had no choice but to take up the sword of justice to punish their rebellion. In doing so he was, explained his chaplain, the ‘true elect of God’ – ‘our gracious king, His own soldier’ – at the head of an army that, thanks to the king’s stern instructions, conducted itself soberly and piously, without resorting to pillage or indulging in vengeful or wanton violence.
The exposition of this analysis by the anonymous royal chaplain in his Gesta Henrici Quinti, ‘The Deeds of Henry V’, was intended in part to persuade an international audience of the merits of the king’s cause: specifically, the great Council of the Church then meeting in the German city of Constance. There was also a domestic constituency that needed reminding of the imperative to lend practical support to Henry’s divinely sanctioned project – the representatives of English boroughs and shires in parliament, and the representatives of the English Church in convocation, whose responsibility it was to assent to the taxes that would pay for the king’s future campaigns in France.
But heaven’s judgement had been made so plain that it seemed a source of irritation, in some quarters at least, that such campaigns would have to be fought at all. The bishop of Winchester, England’s chancellor, in his opening address to the parliament that gathered in March 1416, noted testily that God had, in fact, already spoken three times over: once in England’s great naval victory over the French fleet at Sluys in 1340; then in 1356, when France’s king had been captured at Poitiers; and now, on the killing field of Agincourt. ‘O God,’ remarked the royal chaplain as he recounted the tenor of the chancellor’s speech, ‘why does this wretched and stiff-necked nation not obey these divine sentences, so many and so terrible, to which, by a vengeance most clearly made manifest, obedience is demanded of them?’
The wretched and stiff-necked nation itself, however – while accepting that God had indeed spoken – was much less certain of what He had actually said. Clearly, the English cause was not just. After all, the English king had no lawful right to the throne of France, since claims through the female line had no validity in the most Christian kingdom, and the French had no wish to be his subjects, which made his attempt at conquest an act of unwarranted aggression and his proposed rule a tyranny. The conflict between the two kingdoms would hardly have lasted so long, nor would it have encompassed French successes as well as English ones, had God’s judgement been quite so overwhelmingly obvious as the English king was pleased to suggest. The inference of the accursed day of Azincourt, therefore, was not that God supported England’s unjust claims. Instead, He had chosen to use England’s unjust claims as an instrument with which to punish France for its sins.
Sin was the heart of the matter, that much was clear; but exactly what sin, and committed by whom, were questions on which it was more difficult to agree. Perhaps, suggested the chronicler Thomas Basin half a century later, the blessed saints Crispin and Crispian had abandoned the French to the carnage unleashed on their feast day at Azincourt because their town of Soissons had been sacked and their shrines plundered only a year before, in the course of the civil war between Burgundians and Armagnacs. ‘Everyone’, he said with sorrowful resignation, ‘can think what they will.’ For himself, Basin preferred to stick to the facts, ‘leaving the discussion of the arcane workings of the divine will to those who presume to do so’.
There were plenty of them. The monk who chronicled the events of 1415 from the abbey of Saint-Denis outside the walls of Paris attempted a pass at the same kind of historical humility – ‘I leave it to those who have given the matter careful consideration’, he said, ‘to decide if we should attribute the ruin of the kingdom to the French nobility’ – but he could restrain himself only momentarily from a thunderous verdict of his own. It could hardly be denied that the great were no longer good. The lords of France had fallen into sybaritic luxury, into vanity and into vice, and their impious abuse of Holy Mother Church was matched only by their mortal hatred of each other. ‘All these crimes’, the chronicler of Saint-Denis declared, ‘and others worse still, to put it briefly, have justly stirred up the wrath of God against the great men of the kingdom, so that He has taken from them the power to defeat their enemies, or even to resist their attack.’
But even if it could be agreed that divine retribution was patently at work, questions still remained. Were all of France’s sinful noblemen equally guilty in the eyes of God, or were some among them more reprehensible – and therefore more responsible for the desperate straits in which the kingdom now found itself – than others? Supporters of the Armagnac cause knew that one crime above all had cast a shadow dark enough to blot out the light of heaven’s grace: the bloody murder of Louis of Orléans by his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. That unnatural act had precipitated a civil war which not only turned the realm upon itself, but opened the door to English aggression. John of Burgundy, the Armagnacs were well aware, had had dealings with the king of England both before and after Henry had inherited his father’s throne. Now, the fact that the duke had not taken the field at Azincourt provided proof positive that Burgundy had entered into secret negotiations with the English, and – with horrifying treachery – had agreed not to resist their invasion. About the dreadful outcome of the battle and the slaughter of the duke’s countrymen, the Armagnac chronicler Jean Juvénal des Ursins reported, ‘it was commonly said that he did not seem angered in the slightest’.
Pierre de Fenin, on the other hand – a writer whose noble family came from the Burgundian-dominated region of Artois – was no less confident that Duke John had been ‘much enraged by the French loss when he was told of it’. Those who supported the duke in his efforts to secure the stake that was rightfully his in the government of the kingdom knew that he had wanted nothing more than to fight at Azincourt, until he had been refused permission in the name of the king himself. The deaths of the duke’s two brothers, Anthony of Brabant and Philip of Nevers, had been a shattering blow which struck at the heart of his family and his dynasty. And to Burgundian eyes, it was remarkable how many of those who had escaped with their lives, if not their honour, from that field of blood were members of the Armagnac confederacy; chief among the English prisoners, after all, was young Charles, duke of Orléans.
What, then, should John of Burgundy do, as he surveyed the devastation that the crimes of his Armagnac enemies had wrought on the kingdom? From the safety of his duchy of Burgundy, he contemplated his options and calculated his odds. To his French followers, the duke was a distinctively imposing figure, his shrewd brain working behind languorously hooded eyes, the long nose sketching an inimitable profile beneath the rich black folds – piled forward and pinned with a ruby of extraordinary price – of his trademark chaperon hat; all in all, as unlike their beloved but pitiful king as it was possible to imagine. But the frontiers of France, as the Armagnacs well knew in accusing him of treachery, were not the limits of the arena across which Duke John now aimed to manoeuvre.
Great prince of France though he was, the territories of Burgundy itself extended his political reach beyond the bounds of the kingdom. As the duke of Burgundy he was a vassal of the French king, sworn to serve and obey; but as the count of Burgundy – holding the lands immediately to the east of his duchy, a fief which lay outside the French king’s dominions – he owed allegiance and homage to the Holy Roman Emperor. Nor were the ‘Two Burgundies’, as they were known, his only stake in the complex, shifting geography of western European power. From his mother, the heiress Margaret of Male, he had also inherited the rich counties of Flanders and Artois, territories which made him a force to be reckoned with in the Low Countries.
The colossal figure of the Burgundian duke, towering over the French political landscape, therefore had one foot planted within the kingdom and the other without – a separation of powers which, at times, required him to perform spine-twisting acts of political contortionism. Back in 1406, for example, he had been appointed as the French king’s captain-general to command an assault on the English-held port of Calais. He mustered his forces, ready to begin the campaign – and at the same moment, even as he buckled on his armour and rode out to review his troops, his ambassadors were busily negotiating a treaty with the English in which their master guaranteed that his Flemish fortresses would offer no military support of any kind to the French attack that he himself was about to lead.
But, despite the dark suspicions of the Armagnacs, this was not treachery, or even duplicity, in any unequivocal sense. As count of Flanders, the duke had a duty, and a political imperative, to support the economic interests of the wealthy Flemish towns of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres – and that required him to maintain a relationship with England close enough to safeguard the supply of English wool to those who produced fine Flemish cloth, and to protect commercial shipping in the waters between England and Flanders. It did not mean that, as duke of Burgundy, he was any the less a prince of France. In 1406, his outrage had been unmistakable when the order to attack the English at Calais was countermanded from Paris at the eleventh hour for lack of funds: ‘My lord has been and is as saddened and angered by this as it is possible to be in all the world, and no one can placate him,’ the duke’s treasurer told his colleagues in Burgundy. And in 1415 – whatever the insinuations made in the aftermath of the slaughter at Azincourt – he had come to no accommodation with the English invaders.
Instead, in the weeks and months after the battle, Duke John’s sights were fixed as firmly as they had ever been on the prize that still eluded him: control of the government of France. During November 1415 he advanced on Paris, ‘very distressed by the deaths of his brothers and his men’ (explained the anonymous and by now pro-Burgundian Parisian who kept a journal throughout these years), but prevented from reaching the helpless king by the Armagnac ‘betrayers of France’. For the Armagnacs who controlled the capital, meanwhile, the duke’s distress was less immediately striking than the heavily armed troops at his back. The gates of the city were closed against him; and his hopes were dashed in December by the death of the dauphin Louis – a young man with a reputation for indolence and self-indulgence who had nevertheless exerted himself in the search for a lasting settlement with the duke, to whose daughter he was married. A year earlier, Louis had attempted to forbid ‘the use on either side of injurious or slanderous terms such as “Burgundian” or “Armagnac”’. But now that the dauphin was dead, the count of Armagnac himself was appointed constable of France: a man of wisdom and foresight, said the monk of Saint-Denis; as cruel as Nero, exclaimed the Parisian journal-writer. And by February 1416, the latter reported in horror, he was ‘in sole charge of the whole kingdom of France, in spite of all objections, for the king was still not well’.
As the Armagnac grip on government tightened, the duke of Burgundy had little choice but to withdraw his forces northward to his strongholds in Flanders and Artois. His castle at Hesdin, thirty miles west of Arras, lay only seven miles from the field at Azincourt where the English had killed his brothers, and where the Armagnacs – he believed – had failed to defend France. Hesdin was not only a fortress and a ducal residence but a curiosity, housing a suite of rooms filled with ingenious contraptions, finely wrought automata and galumphing practical jokes. Visitors to the castle’s gallery might be distracted by a misshapen reflection in a distorting mirror, only to find themselves drenched in jets of water triggered by a footfall or squirted from an innocently impassive statue. Those who avoided the buffets of a mechanical contrivance that dealt unexpected blows to the head and shoulders at the gallery’s exit found a room filled with rain and snow, thunder and lightning, ‘as if from the sky itself’, and beyond that a wooden figure of a hermit, an uncanny presence that became truly unnerving when it began to speak.
This cabinet of wonders had been part of the fabric of the castle at Hesdin for more than a hundred years. By the spring of 1416, however, John of Burgundy could have been forgiven for thinking that life was beginning to imitate artifice. The gathering of international opinion at the Council of the Church in Constance was fast becoming a hall of mirrors: every theological and political dispute in Europe was reflected there – often in ludicrous disproportion, at least in relation to the council’s ostensible task of seeking an end to the long-running schism in the papacy. The delegates sent by the Armagnac government in Paris expended a great deal of energy in the attempt to deny any kind of hearing to their English adversaries, but their assault on their French enemy, the duke of Burgundy, was equally vitriolic. The formidable chancellor of the university of Paris, an eminent theologian named Jean Gerson, railed against the justification of the murder of the duke of Orléans proposed in 1407 by Jean Petit, demanding that it now be formally condemned with the full weight of the Church’s authority; but the duke of Burgundy had sent a delegation of his own to the council, and his men – led by the bishop of Arras, with the support of Pierre Cauchon, another Paris-trained theologian, and as passionate a Burgundian as Gerson was an Armagnac – railed back, meeting every attack with a blistering compound of argument, bribery and barely disguised threats.
While the ecclesiastics wrangled, Duke John tested his footing on uncertain ground by entering into a diplomatic dance with the ‘elect of God’ himself, Henry of England. In July 1416 duke and king agreed a treaty by which they promised not to make war against one another in the duke’s northern territories of Picardy, Flanders and Artois, and a face-to-face meeting in English-held Calais was planned for the autumn. The situation was so delicate and the lack of trust so grave that elaborate arrangements were put in place to guarantee the duke’s safety. On 5 October, he left his town of Saint-Omer to arrive at Gravelines, near Calais, at low tide, where the river Aa flowed into the sea as a shallow stream. With his household men and an armed escort, he took up position on one bank of the river; on the other, similarly attended, was the duke of Gloucester, the English king’s youngest brother. After a moment, both men advanced, until their horses stood side by side in the middle of the water. The two dukes shook hands and exchanged the kiss of peace, before Humphrey of Gloucester rode on, a lavishly entertained hostage, to Saint-Omer, while John of Burgundy made his way to Calais to meet the king.
By 13 October, when the exchange was effected in reverse, the duke had successfully negotiated both this ad hoc water feature and a week of English hospitality without obvious mishap. But if King Henry had hoped that their private discussions would persuade the Burgundian duke to support his divinely sanctioned claim to the throne of France, he was to be sadly disappointed. ‘What kind of conclusion these enigmatic talks and exchanges had produced went no further than the king’s breast or the reticence with which he kept his counsel,’ reported Henry’s chaplain in some frustration; ‘… the general view was that Burgundy had all this time detained our king with ambiguities and prevarications and had so left him, and that in the end, like all Frenchmen, he would be found a double-dealer, one person in public and another in private.’
The difficulty was indeed the duke’s French identity, albeit not quite in the way the royal chaplain suggested. Tempting though the acquisition of such a powerful ally against his French enemies might be, and necessary though it always was to protect Anglo-Flemish trade, a military pact with England would vindicate the Armagnacs’ allegations of Burgundian treachery and spell the end, once and for all, of the duke’s claim to be the rightful defender of his king and country. He turned instead to a French ally who would serve to bolster that claim: the new dauphin, eighteen-year-old Jean of Touraine, who – as it happened – was married to his niece Jacqueline, heiress to the rich and strategically vital counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland in the Low Countries, where the young couple lived at her father’s court. In November 1416 the duke followed his inconclusive English conference at Calais with another at Valenciennes in Hainaut, and this time a definitive agreement was the result: Burgundy and Hainaut would work together to establish Dauphin Jean – naturally, with his wife’s uncle of Burgundy at his side – at the head of government in Paris.
It was a good plan, but it could not survive the sudden deaths in April and May 1417 of the young dauphin and his father-in-law, the count of Hainaut. Again there was a new heir to the throne, this time the king’s youngest son, fourteen-year-old Charles; but he was already in Paris with his father, at the heart of the Armagnac regime, and, unlike his dead brothers, he had no links by marriage to the Burgundian dynasty. Quite the reverse: he was betrothed to the daughter of Louis, duke of Anjou and titular king of Sicily, who, until his death in April 1417, was one of the closest confederates of the count of Armagnac and a personal enemy of the duke of Burgundy. And Charles, who had spent much of the last four years at the Angevin court under the wing of Duke Louis and his formidable duchess Yolande of Aragon, was hardly likely now to reject the political embrace of his surrogate family.
Still, John of Burgundy had regrouped before, and he could do so again. From his castle at Hesdin, he issued an open letter to the people of France, each of the many copies signed with his own hand. The Armagnacs, he said, were ‘traitors, destroyers, pillagers and poisoners’; they had murdered the king’s sons Louis and Jean, and their treacherous plans lay behind the English triumph at Azincourt. Put simply, they were dedicated to the destruction of the kingdom of France. He, on the other hand, was determined to protect and preserve the French king and his people, a ‘holy, loyal and necessary task’ in which he would ‘persevere until death’, and – in case the appeal of his manifesto were not yet sufficiently apparent – he would abolish all taxes to boot. This was no search for a settlement; this, it was clear, was war.
As spring turned into summer, and summer into autumn, Burgundian forces moved into towns and cities around Paris: Troyes to the south-east, Reims to the east, Amiens to the north, Chartres to the south-west. Some townspeople opened their gates; others tried, and failed, to hold out. By October, the noose was drawing tighter. The duke and his army were just ten miles from the capital and, as food ran short and prices rose, ‘Paris was now suffering extremely’, noted the despairing journal-writer within the city’s walls.
To strengthen his white-knuckled grip on government, the count of Armagnac sought to rally his supporters behind a royal figurehead by appointing the young dauphin Charles as lieutenant-general of his father’s kingdom. But two could play at that game. Charles’s mother, Queen Isabeau, had once been so closely associated with the dead duke of Orléans in the attempt to rule on behalf of her distracted and unstable husband that – as so often happened when female hands touched the reins of power – breathless whispers of innuendo had begun to curl around her reputation. Since then, however, her attempts to preserve some neutral ground on which her husband and sons might stand had provoked growing hostility within the embattled Armagnac regime, and in April 1417 the count of Armagnac had sent her into political exile at Tours, more than a hundred miles from the capital. That, it turned out, was a mistake. When John of Burgundy arrived at her gates in the first week of November, she had no option left but to welcome him – murderer of the duke of Orléans though he was – as a liberator and a protector. Now the duke of Burgundy could draw on the authority of the queen to speak for her husband, the king, while the count of Armagnac could draw on the authority of the dauphin as the heir to his father’s throne. France, in effect, had two governments, each committed to the obliteration of the other.
And while they fought, Henry of England slipped through the open door behind them. By January 1418, as Burgundian troops pushed westward into Rouen, the capital of Normandy, the rest of the duchy was being quietly dismembered by the return of the English invaders. Henry had moved inland from the coast with characteristically inexorable purpose, taking the great castle and town of Caen and with it Bayeux, then Alençon, Argentan and Falaise. And almost the greatest shock of this violent assault was that – little more than two years after the wretched day of Azincourt – it no longer seemed the worst of the horrors France had to face. ‘Some people who had come to Paris from Normandy, having escaped from the English by paying ransom or some other way,’ reported the Parisian in his journal, ‘had then been captured by the Burgundians and then a mile or so further on had been captured yet again by the French’ – that is, the Armagnacs – ‘and had been as brutally and as cruelly treated by them as if by Saracens. These men, all honest merchants, reputable men, who had been in the hands of all three and had bought their freedom, solemnly affirmed on oath that the English had been kinder to them than the Burgundians had, and the Burgundians a hundred times kinder than the troops from Paris, as regards food, ransom, physical suffering, and imprisonment, which had astonished them, as it must all good Christians …’
The greatest of all good Christians, Pope Martin V – newly installed by the Council of Constance – sent special envoys in May to treat for peace, but John of Burgundy was not interested in peace when victory was within his grasp. He paid lip service to the cardinals’ mission, but his attention was elsewhere: his siege of Paris was about to bear bloody fruit. In the rain-swept darkness of the early hours of 29 May, Burgundian sympathisers within the blockaded capital opened the gate of Saint-Germain-des-Près to a detachment of Burgundian men-at-arms. They had surprise as well as deadly intent on their side, and they were brutally effective. Some seized control of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the royal residence in the east of the city, and with it the bewildered person of the king. Others hunted down the count of Armagnac and his captains, to put them in chains. By the early afternoon, there could be no doubt that Paris was theirs. For years it had been politic to wear a white sash, the symbol of the Armagnac confederacy, in the city’s streets. Now thousands of Parisians daubed or chalked their clothes with the Burgundian saltire – the diagonal cross of St Andrew, one of the duke’s badges – to demonstrate their support for their new ruler, or to ward off dangerous accusations of Armagnac collaboration.
‘God save the king, the dauphin, and peace!’ the Burgundian troops had cried. God had given them the king, but peace was not, it seemed, part of His plan. ‘Paris was in an uproar’, reported the journal-writer; ‘the people took up their arms much faster than the soldiers did.’ This was the chance, at last, for those who hated the Armagnacs – those who supported the duke of Burgundy, or resented the oppressions of Armagnac rule, or loathed the count and his captains as ‘foreigners’ from the south – to take their revenge. The city turned on itself, and in the streets bludgeoned corpses lay heaped, stripped almost naked (‘like sides of bacon – a dreadful thing’), their clotting blood washed into the gutters by the pouring rain. Worse was to come. Two weeks later, false alarms at the city gates roused the mob to new fear, and a new fury. They broke into the prisons, mutilating and killing all those they found inside, or lighting up the night by torching any building from which they found their entry barred. Among those who died – his body later identified not by his disfigured face, but by the cell in which he had slept – was the captive count of Armagnac. A band of flesh had been hacked from his torso, from shoulder to hip, in savage mockery of the sash his partisans had worn so proudly.
It was another month before the city was quiet enough for the duke of Burgundy to stage his own triumphant arrival, with Queen Isabeau at his side. Their cavalcade was greeted by crowds who wept, cheered and called ‘Noël!’, the traditional cry of celebration and welcome. At last, king and capital were in Duke John’s hands, along with the power they represented. But the brightness of this new Burgundian dawn, glittering with the sharpened steel of the plane-engraved lances carried by the duke’s soldiers, was shadowed by two menacing clouds. The English were on the march: by the end of July their ominous advance had brought them to the walls of Burgundian-held Rouen, France’s second city and the key to upper Normandy. The presence of England’s army on French soil had once exerted useful diversionary pressure on France’s Armagnac government, but now that the duke himself ruled in the name of the king, he could not afford to be complacent in the face of this growing threat. And the uncomfortable truth was that one vital component of the royal authority he claimed to represent still eluded his grasp. As Burgundian troops had stormed into the sleeping city on 29 May, Armagnac loyalists led by the provost of Paris, a former servant of Louis of Orléans named Tanguy du Châtel, had spirited fifteen-year-old Dauphin Charles away in his nightclothes.
Duke John could reassure himself, of course, that Charles was young and inexperienced, and, with only the stricken rump of the Armagnac regime left at his disposal, he could not match the grandeur of Burgundy’s resources. The dauphin was surrounded still by a coterie of loyal supporters: not only Tanguy du Châtel, but men such as Robert le Maçon, his chancellor, and Jean Louvet (‘one of the worst Christians in the world’, said the Parisian journal-writer) – former servants, respectively, of his prospective mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, and his mother, Queen Isabeau. These counsellors were shrewd, ambitious and driven, but among their number were no princes of the blood, ready to rally their pays to his cause. With the count of Armagnac so violently dispatched to join the dead of Azincourt, and the dukes of Bourbon and Orléans still prisoners in England, Charles could look little further among the front ranks of the nobility than to the latter’s younger brother, the count of Vertus, and his illegitimate half-brother Jean, known, with respectful acknowledgement of his lineage, as the Bastard of Orléans. And, limited in leadership as the dauphin’s cause undoubtedly was, it was limited too in cold, hard cash. Thanks to John of Burgundy’s show-stealing promise to abolish taxation, the dauphin could hardly attempt to levy the sums required to raise a great army without haemorrhaging support he could not afford to lose.
But his cause was not lost. He could turn, always, to the deep pockets and the formidable political brain of the woman who had become a mentor as well as a second mother to him: Yolande of Aragon, the dowager duchess of Anjou, whose daughter Marie was to be his wife, and whose young sons, the new duke Louis and nine-year-old René, were his companions and friends. With her backing, the dauphin established himself a little more than a hundred miles south of Paris in the city of Bourges, the capital of the duchy of Berry that he had inherited after the death in 1416 of his aged great-uncle – and now, of necessity rather than choice, the new capital of Armagnac France.
It was a motley approximation of a royal court, with a hurriedly organised parlement at Poitiers and exchequer at Bourges to mirror those in Burgundian Paris, and at its head a fifteen-year-old boy calling himself the ‘regent of France’. But there could be no doubt how much it mattered. However loudly the duke of Burgundy claimed to be the loyal counsellor of the king, and however firmly the queen supported the Burgundian regime, the dauphin refused to accept that a government led by Duke John was anything other than a treasonable usurpation. The unhappy fact was that, while the daily reality of conflict between Armagnacs and Burgundians simmered in towns and cities across the country, the indissoluble sovereignty of France’s most Christian king had been raggedly torn into three. The duke of Burgundy dominated the north and the east; the dauphin controlled the centre and the south; and all the while Henry of England – who, like his royal predecessors, already held Gascony in the south-west – continued his relentless advance across Normandy into the heart of the kingdom.
In January 1419, after a five-month siege, the English finally starved Rouen into submission, and two weeks later Henry’s forces were at Mantes, only thirty miles from Paris. ‘No one did anything about it’, noted the journal-writer, matter-of-fact in his misery, ‘because all the French lords were angry with each other, because the dauphin was at odds with his father on account of the duke of Burgundy, who was with the king, and all the other princes of the blood royal had been taken prisoner by the English king at the battle of Azincourt …’ This Parisian remained stalwartly hostile to the Armagnacs, but his faith in the duke of Burgundy had not survived his recent experience of Burgundian rule. ‘So the kingdom of France went from bad to worse … And this was entirely, or almost entirely, the fault of the duke of Burgundy, who was the slowest man in the world in everything that he did …’ In fact, by the time news arrived of the fall of Rouen, Duke John had already left his troops to hold the beleaguered capital while he removed the king and queen to the greater safety of the town of Provins, fifty miles from Paris in the opposite direction from the English army’s approach.
It seemed possible, now, that France was not just broken, but lost. The kingdom was ancient – but perhaps not eternal, and certainly not immutable. It had, after all, changed shape before, its frontiers ebbing and flowing with the cross-currents of international diplomacy and the rip tides of war. Kings of England had been instrumental in that process already, and might be again; and now a duke of Burgundy whose powers were not confined by France’s borders exerted a new and unpredictable gravitational pull. By the summer of 1419, the rival forces wrenching and tearing at the body politic had reached a jittery, precarious impasse. Like wrestlers grappling in search of a winning hold, envoys embraced at summits convened in all possible combinations: the king of England and the duke of Burgundy; the duke of Burgundy and the dauphin; the dauphin and the king of England. Henry hoped that he had won John as an ally to his cause, only to find that Charles had agreed a temporary truce with the man Armagnac propaganda had previously dubbed the ‘dearest and well-loved lieutenant’ of ‘Lucifer, king of hell’.
The forty-eight-year-old duke and the sixteen-year-old dauphin came face to face three times in the first half of July, but their publicly declared promises – that they would join hands to resist the English, and henceforth govern France together as friends – proved as insubstantial as their smiles; meanwhile the crashing thunderstorms that lashed the country with rain and great hailstones were seen by many (said the monk of Saint-Denis) as a sign that these ill-starred negotiations would come to nothing. It was not until the end of the month – when King Henry’s troops stormed Pontoise, less than twenty miles from Paris, and much too close for comfort – that minds were concentrated and another personal conference arranged, this time for September at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, south-east of the capital.
The pressing concern for security amid the heightened threat of the English advance meant that the duke of Burgundy now faced another diplomatic meeting in the middle of a river. At Montereau a many-arched bridge spanned the waters where the river Yonne gave into the Seine. On one bank stood the town, held by the dauphin; on the other, the castle, which Charles now made over to the duke of Burgundy as a gesture of goodwill, to facilitate an encounter on which the future of France might stand or fall. By swearing an oath to do one another no harm, and then advancing from opposite sides onto the bridge with only ten men each for company, both the duke and the dauphin could be reassured that their counsels would not be overheard, nor ambushed by some hidden army. The dauphin and his advisers – cautious and painstaking hosts, who had had to work hard to persuade Duke John to accept their invitation to Montereau – gave meticulous thought to the practicalities of the meeting. A stone tower already stood halfway along the bridge, between castle and town, but now a new wooden enclosure was constructed on the town side of the tower, within which the two deputations could safely speak without fear of attack from outside.
By the afternoon of Sunday 10 September preparations were complete. Under the crisp autumn sky, the duke of Burgundy – sleek in his magnificence, hooded eyes unreadable – took the winding path from the castle onto the bridge, past the tower and into the newly built palisade, the gate clicking shut as the last of his men was ushered inside, a key turning in the lock behind them. Ahead stood the short, scrawny figure of the dauphin, an ungainly adolescent who had not inherited the good looks of either of his royal parents, and with him ten of his most senior attendants, including Jean Louvet and Tanguy du Châtel, the latter a familiar face from the frequent embassies of recent weeks. As the duke knelt, doffing his black velvet hat in obeisance to his prince, he could hear the water moving softly all around, but he could see only the craftsmanship of the carpenters who had enclosed the bridge with wooden walls. Did he think of his cabinet of curiosities at Hesdin? The moment was fleeting. Then the buffet struck: the steel blade of a war axe, driven deep into his skull.
There was blood, pooling around the falling body of John of Burgundy, dripping in great gouts from the axe in the hands of Tanguy du Châtel. In blind shock, in churning panic, the duke’s counsellors started forward, only to find themselves caught by soldiers pouring through the open door at the far end of the palisade. In their ears, voices shrill with hate shouted, ‘Kill! Kill!’ – and as they were bundled away they saw, in an uncomprehending blur, a man kneeling over the prone figure of their lord, and the bright blade of a sword plunging down. Then, suddenly, came a roar of explosions, as Armagnac troops concealed within the stone tower on the bridge turned their guns on the bewildered Burgundians in Montereau’s castle, waiting in vain for the duke’s return.
It was an assassination more precisely planned and more ruthlessly executed than the murder of the duke of Orléans in the streets of Paris twelve years earlier. And as the mutilated corpse was carried away from the bridge – stripped of its finery and blood-smeared, with one hand dangling, almost severed, in a mess of mangled tendons – it was clear that the consequences of this duke’s death would be still more terrible. For the veteran Tanguy du Châtel it was an eye for an eye, a reckoning at last for the loss of his former master. For the teenage dauphin, who had been just four years old when Louis of Orléans died, it was the striking down of the devil’s lieutenant, the man who had raised war in the kingdom for as long as the young prince could remember. But this killing, in one bloody moment, had irretrievably altered the essence of the conflict. Now – however subtle the diplomacy between the lords of France, and however implacable the onslaught of the English – there could be no hope of reconciliation between Armagnac and Burgundian.
In public, the dauphin acknowledged no conspiracy against the duke. Instead, he explained, the first sword drawn on the bridge had been that of John of Burgundy himself, or perhaps – he later remembered – the duke’s attendant Archambaud de Foix, lord of Navailles. (The princely finger was pointed at de Foix only after he had died of head wounds sustained during the mêlée, and was therefore conveniently unable to contest the accusation.) It was this unprovoked Burgundian aggression that had caused the suddenoutburst of violence, to the dauphin’s utter consternation, and it was only thanks to the quick thinking of his loyal servants that – God be praised – he had not been taken hostage. But no amount of wide-eyed protestation – nor the suggestion to his ‘dear and well-beloved brother’, the duke’s son and heir Philip, that he should remain calm in the face of these unfortunate events – could disguise the fact that John of Burgundy had died under the dauphin’s safe-conduct, at the hands of the dauphin’s men.
And that, for the Burgundians, changed everything. Two hundred miles away in the Flemish town of Ghent, twenty-three-year-old Philip, the new duke, was overwhelmed with ‘extreme grief and distress’ at his father’s death, his counsellors reported. For Duke John’s widow, Margaret of Bavaria, her husband was a Christ-like figure, entering the palisade on the bridge to be betrayed by Tanguy du Châtel’s Judas. Not everyone would be prepared to endorse that particular image, perhaps; but in Burgundian eyes there could be no doubt that the dauphin – the heir to the throne of the most Christian king – was guilty of perjury and murder. As a result, Philip of Burgundy was confronted with a decision more fateful, more extreme, than any his father had faced. The hapless king, with Queen Isabeau at his side, remained under Burgundian protection at Troyes, ninety miles south-east of Paris, ‘where they are with their poor retinue like fugitives’, said the journal-writer bleakly. But Charles the Mad and Well-Beloved was already past his fiftieth birthday – and after him, what then? There were two claimants to his crown: an Armagnac dauphin, or an English king. And for Philip of Burgundy, after Montereau, that was no choice at all.
Still it took time to accept that the next monarch of France might be an English invader. As autumn faded into the beginnings of a bitter winter, Duke Philip remained in the north, in Flanders and Artois, deliberating with his counsellors and arranging a magnificent service for his father’s soul in the abbey church of Saint-Vaast in Arras. From Dijon, his indefatigable mother marshalled the resources of the two Burgundies to gather all possible evidence of the crime perpetrated against her husband, and to lobby the great powers of Europe to support her quest for justice. Meanwhile, as the marauding English devastated the countryside to the north of Paris, the dauphin did what he could to exert pressure of his own on the Burgundian-held capital, declaring his commitment to peace even while his troops plundered and burned the lands to the south.
It was not enough. By the spring of 1420, both the Parisian journal-writer and the monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, four miles north of the city walls, were convinced that the English were the lesser of the two evils that menaced the kingdom. Duke Philip of Burgundy agreed. Negotiations – conducted in a series of taut, delicate exchanges between the duke at Arras, the queen at Troyes, the parlement of Paris and the English in Rouen – had taken months, but finally, on 21 May, the sovereign powers of England and France came together in the incense-clouded cathedral of Troyes for the sealing of a treaty.
That sacred space bore witness to the terrible force of the divine will: half a century earlier the spire that reached towards heaven from the crossing of the nave had been smashed into rubble by a tornado, and two decades after that a bolt of lightning had made an inferno of the wooden roof. But still the cathedral endured, an architectural testament to the possibility that, with the blessing of the Almighty, restoration might follow destruction. Not, perhaps, for King Charles of France himself, whose unsound mind had evaded all attempts to make it whole; but it seemed at last that his war-torn kingdom might find a new future. At the high altar, amid the press of lords and prelates, retainers and servants, stood France’s enemy-turned-saviour: Henry of England, scarred and self-possessed, with his eldest brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, by his side. Before him was the majesty of the French crown, as embodied by the queen, Isabeau, and the young duke of Burgundy, a loyal counsellor ready to speak for his faltering king. Both sides knew the terms of the peace which had brought them together, but this was the solemn moment at which those provisions became inescapably binding.
Charles, by the grace of God king of France, recognised Henry of England as the rightful heir to his throne. Because of his own unfortunate indisposition – gracefully acknowledged in the ventriloquised text of the treaty – Henry would take control of the kingdom’s government with immediate effect: he was now France’s regent as well as its heir. He would marry the king’s daughter Catherine, their union a physical incarnation of this perpetual peace, and their descendants would wear a double crown as monarchs of the twin realms of England and France, which would thus be joined forever in concord and tranquillity.
And so, not quite five years after the horror of Azincourt, the English king was clasped in the political embrace of the sovereign lord of the French as notre très-cher fils, ‘our dearest son’. The adolescent who until this moment would have claimed that title went almost unmentioned: the ‘horrible and enormous crimes’ of the ‘so-called dauphin’ were such, the treaty declared, that King Charles and his dear sons Henry of England and Philip of Burgundy (the latter being already the husband of another of the royal daughters of France) now swore to have no more dealings with him. Instead, Henry – acting in the name of the most Christian king as heir and regent of France – would do everything in his power to restore to their rightful allegiance those rebellious parts of the kingdom that still held for the party ‘commonly called that of the dauphin, or Armagnac’. Royal seals were pressed into soft wax; and, as preparations began for the wedding to come, heralds set out to inform the French people of the identity of their next monarch, and to demand oaths of their loyalty.
Truly, it seemed, God had spoken.