Now “wholly French” once more, Coucy served as the King’s right arm through the closing efforts of the reign. Though only 41, Charles V felt time pressing. In February 1378 his Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, who was the same age as he, died of childbed fever after the birth of a daughter, Catherine. Three weeks later, the last to survive of her previous five daughters died, leaving of her eight children only two sons and the newborn to outlive her. The King “sorrowed long and marvelously” from his wife’s death “and so did many other good people, for the Queen and he loved each other as much as loyal married people can.” A month later came the death—precipitating the schism—of Pope Gregory XI, with whom Charles had been closely associated, followed in November by the death of his uncle the Emperor and shortly afterward by the passing of his longtime ally King Enrique of Castile. In all these losses Charles cannot but have felt the advancing shadow of his own limited time, and with it an urgency to leave his kingdom whole and at peace before he too departed.
To that end he must close the three portals of danger represented by the persistent betrayals of Charles of Navarre, by the alliance of the Duke of Brittany with England, and by the continuing war with England itself. Coucy’s strategic territory, his military and diplomatic talents, and that evident dependability which Gregory XI had found notable made him a fulcrum of the King’s effort. His first task was to conduct a campaign to eliminate Charles of Navarre from Normandy once and for all.
On learning that Navarre had again secretly negotiated to re-open Normandy to the English, Charles V swore to drive his faithless vassal out of every town and castle he held there. Legality was at hand in the person of Navarre’s two sons, in whose name the Navarrese fiefs in Normandy could be taken over. Since their mother, the King’s sister, was dead, Charles V could claim their guardianship by an argument that would admit of no dispute: they were both in his custody at the court of France at the time. Why their father allowed this to happen is unclear, unless he intended it as some devious camouflage of his dealings with England.
Legal evidence of Navarre’s treason was provided when his chamberlain, Jacques de Rue, arrived in Paris with letters for the two sons. Under interrogation, De Rue testified freely—without torture, as the King took care to have stated in the authorized chronicle—that Charles of Navarre planned to poison the King of France right after Easter through a steward of the royal bakery. Taking advantage of the ensuing disarray and succession of a minor, he would then open hostilities by seizing French strongholds along the Seine while the English landed in Normandy.
This story was easily believable of a prince who had already attempted the life of his other brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, in a melodrama infused with all the lurid glitter of the 14th century. Foix had married the flirtatious Agnes, Navarre’s sister, but, as a man of “impetuous passions,” had not ceased his gallantries, with the result that Agnes departed in umbrage to take refuge with her brother. The brothers-in-law were already at odds in a quarrel over money. When Agnes’ fifteen-year-old son, Gaston, came to plead with her to return, she refused to go unless the request came from her husband. Charles of Navarre then gave his nephew a bag of powder to take home, telling him that it would cause his father to desire the reconciliation, but that he must keep the agent secret or it would not work. On Gaston’s return to Foix, the bag of powder was discovered by his bastard brother Yvain, and shown to the Count, who fed it to one of his dogs, which promptly expired in painful convulsions.
Restrained from killing his heir and only legitimate son on the spot, the Count locked him up while all of Gaston’s household who had gone with him to Navarre were examined and fifteen of them executed. Meanwhile Gaston, realizing that his uncle had conspired to have him commit parricide, gave way to despair, refusing all food. On being informed of this situation while he was paring his nails with a knife, the Count of Foix rushed to his son’s cell, seized him by the throat saying, “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?” and accidentally cut him across the jugular with the knife that was still in his hand. The boy turned on his side without a word and, the wound proving fatal, died the same day. One more mortal sin was added to the already overburdened record of Charles of Navarre.
Corroboration of Navarre’s “crimes and treasons” against the King of France was supplied when codes to his ciphered correspondence were taken from a second arrested counselor, Pierre du Tertre. All the collected evidence, and signed confessions by the two counselors, were made public in their formal trial, conducted with utmost solemnity before a great assembly of magistrates, clerics, notaries, merchants, and visitors to Paris. Upon sentence of death, both counselors were executed. Their headless bodies were hung on the gibbet and their severed limbs on the four principal gates of Paris. A public record was thus established to justify Charles of Navarre’s Norman subjects in transferring their allegiance to his son.
The Normandy campaign was already under way. At the first report of Navarre’s treason, the King had assembled an army at Rouen and “sent hastily for the Sire de Coucy and the Sire de Rivière,” whom he put in command under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Burgundy. Fearful of English landings, he instructed them to conquer Navarre’s towns and castles, especially those nearest the coast, as speedily as possible either by force or by negotiation. Bureau de la Rivière, the King’s Chamberlain, with whom Coucy was to be so closely associated in this campaign and afterward, belonged to the group of bourgeois-born councillors derisively called Marmosets by the King’s brothers in reference to the little stone grotesques that peered from the cornices and pillars of churches. He was a courteous and gracious official, highly esteemed by Charles V, who had given him controlling power in the Regency council he had established in case he should die while the Dauphin was still a minor.
The combination of Coucy and Rivière reflected the combined military and political strategy to be employed. Against walled towns, siege was slow and costly. For rapid conquest everything depended on a negotiated surrender, but this could be achieved only by a credible show of force and in most cases initial combat. To add to the persuasion of force, Charles of Navarre’s two sons were taken along “to show to the whole country that the war was in behalf of these children for their inheritance.”
Bayeux, “a handsome and strong city” at the base of the Cotentin peninsula where an English landing might be expected (ten miles from a later landing place renamed Omaha Beach), was the first major objective. Bringing up their forces below the walls and exhibiting the young heir of Navarre as the rightful lord, Coucy and Rivière warned the citizens “in impressive language” that if the town were taken by storm “they would all be slaughtered and the place re-peopled by another set of inhabitants.” The problem in each case was that the captains of Navarrese garrisons, who might be charged with treason to their Prince or dishonored if they surrendered without making a defense, had not the same motive to yield as the citizens. And since captains generally shut themselves up in the citadel if besiegers won, thus escaping the slaughter and plunder visited upon the populace, they preferred to risk a siege rather than to surrender.
At Bayeux, the garrison was overruled. Influenced by the rights of Navarre’s sons and the persuasions of their Bishop, the townspeople asked for a three-day truce to negotiate terms, always an intricate business which had to be put in writing with signed and sealed copies delivered to each side. When this was completed, Coucy and Rivière entered the city to take possession in the name of the King of France. After replacing the magistrates with their own appointees and leaving in place a garrison to prevent rebellion, they moved forward up the peninsula toward the next stronghold. Successive towns and castles, bombarded both “by arms and words,” were taken without much loss of time, although not without active siege measures, mining of walls, and sharp combats with killed and wounded on both sides. In the interests of haste, Coucy and Rivière readily granted favorable terms and allowed determined partisans of Navarre to depart if they chose to go. Working effectively with Rivière, Coucy displayed a capacity he shared with the King for cool pursuit of policy, grafted in Coucy’s case upon a man of action.
Charles of Navarre himself, under attack in the south by the King of Castile, was not present, and because of contrary winds no more than a few of his English allies arrived. One group succeeded in occupying Cherbourg, but was hemmed in there by a French siege. Elsewhere, Navarrese captains faced a hard choice, because if they chose to resist they could hope for little help, while if they yielded, Normandy would be lost to the King of Navarre. Evreux, the heart of his Norman possessions, manned by his strongest garrison and a loyal population, gave Coucy and Rivière their hardest fight. “Every day they made assault,” and so tightly encircled the town that it was forced to capitulate. The fall of Evreux delighted the King who came to Rouen to greet the victors who “had so well sped.” Only Cherbourg, which the English could supply by sea, withstood prolonged sieges commanded at different times by Du Guesclin and Coucy, and remained in English hands.
With that exception, by the end of 1378 Charles of Navarre had lost all his estates in Normandy. Walls and fortifications were razed so that his strongholds could not again be held by enemies of France. In the south, the seigneury of Montpellier, his last possession in France, was taken from him by the Duc d’Anjou. Scotched at last after thirtyyears of compulsive plotting, Charles of Navarre was left to live out a destitute and friendless decade in his mountain kingdom so much too narrow for his soul. So might Satan have been penned in a sheepfold.
Famous knights who were to be Coucy’s companions in future ventures took part in episodes of the Normandy campaign, among them the late Queen’s brother, the good-tempered if unremarkable Louis, Duc de Bourbon; also the energetic new Admiral, Jean de Vienne; and, most notably, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, who brought a Breton company to Coucy’s aid at the siege of Evreux. Whether at this time or some other, these two disparate personalities joined in the special comradeship of brotherhood-in-arms, a formal arrangement in which the partners drew up terms of mutual aid and equal division of profits and ransoms.
Clisson came of a turbulent family embattled on both sides in Brittany. His father, discovered in dealings with Edward III, had been beheaded by Philip VI, who had him arrested in the middle of a tournament, thrown in prison, and conducted almost naked to his execution without trial. The victim’s wife was said to have carried her husband’s severed head from Paris to Brittany to display before her seven-year-old son and exact his oath of vengeance and eternal hate for France. Then in an open boat, storm-tossed and starving, they escaped to England, where Edward, who was making every effort to win the loyalty of the Bretons, showered favor and properties on the widow and son.
Olivier was brought up at the English court along with the young Jean de Montfort, his Duke, whose jealousy and dislike he reciprocated. While he displayed a noble’s haughty manners, reinforced by an inflated opinion of himself, Clisson was called at one time “the churl” for his coarse language. Pursuing his vowed revenge, he fought against the French with incredible ferocity at Reims, Auray, Cocherel, and Najera in Spain. He wielded a two-handled ax with such force that it was said “no one who received his blows ever got up again,” although he failed to avert the enemy ax that cut through his helmet and took out his eye. In the course of the war in Brittany, Montfort enraged Clisson by favoring Sir John Chandos, and when he rewarded Chandos with a town and castle, Clisson denounced the Duke in terrible wrath, assaulted and razed the castle intended for Chandos, and used the stones to reconstruct his own.
Charles V had returned to him the lands confiscated from his father and wooed him with gifts, even sending him venison “as to a friend.” Whether it was these material persuasions or, as Olivier claimed, the arrogance of the English toward the French that he could no longer suffer, he turned French in 1369 and redirected his ferocity against his former associates. It reached a peak when he learned that his squire, wounded and captured by the English, had been killed as a prisoner on being discovered to belong to Clisson. Olivier swore a great oath never “by the Mother of God throughout this year, neither in the morning nor in the evening, to give quarter to any Englishman.…” The following day, though lacking siege engines, he attacked an English stronghold with such fury and took it with such slaughter that no more than fifteen defenders were left alive. After locking them up in a tower room, Olivier ordered them released one by one, and as each came through the door he struck off his head with a single blow of a great ax and thus, with fifteen heads rolling at his feet, avenged his squire.
The cool-headed Coucy and the savage Breton must have found a complement in each other, for these two powerful barons, according to Clisson’s biographer, “remained always in the most perfect harmony.” At this time Coucy had just lost in shocking circumstances his companion from the Swiss campaign, Owen of Wales. While Coucy was in Normandy, Owen was conducting the siege of Mortagne on the coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Arising early on a clear and lovely morning, he sat on a stump in his shirt and cloak, viewing the castle and countryside, as was his habit, while having his hair combed by his Welsh squire, James Lambe. This man had recently been taken into his service as a compatriot who brought him tidings of his native land and told him “how all the country of Wales would gladly have him to be their lord.” Standing behind his master on the still morning before others were abroad, James Lambe plunged a Spanish dagger into Owen’s body, “stabbing him clean through so that he fell down stark dead.”
The assassin’s hand was certainly hired by the English, possibly to remove a focus of agitation on the Welsh border, or, as contemporaries believed, in reprisal for the miserable death in prison of the Captal de Buch, originally captured by Owen. If so, it was a surprisingly dishonorable blow upon an unarmed man, as recognized by the English captain inside besieged Mortagne to whom Lambe reported his deed. “He shook his head and beheld him right felly and said, ‘Ah, thou has murdered him.… But that this deed is for our profit … we shall have blame thereby rather than praise.’ ” On the French side, Charles V, though terribly angered, did not altogether regret the removal of Owen, a freebooter not guiltless of nefarious deeds of his own. His murder reflected a new kind of animosity growing out of the war. Suborned assassination within the brotherhood of knights was an innovation of the 14th century.
Halfway through the Normandy campaign Coucy had been sent to strengthen the defense of the frontier with Flanders, where new dangers threatened. The Count of Flanders, whose boyhood loyalty had been so strongly French when he ran away from Isabella, had long since been brought by economic interests to favor the English. He appeared as a threat when he gave asylum to the Duke of Brittany, who had repudiated French vassalage and rejoined the English. King Charles now decided to rid himself of the problem of Brittany once and for all by confiscating the dukedom from Montfort on grounds of “felony” toward his sovereign. In the belief that most Breton nobles were pro-French, he planned to unite the dukedom with the crown of France under Montfort’s rival Jeanne de Penthièvre, but instead of suppressing the Breton nest of hornets, he succeeded only in arousing it.
In December 1378, at a ceremonial Court of Justice with the King seated in “royal majesty,” Montfort was tried before the peers of the realm—in absentia, since he ignored the summons. The twelve lay and twelve ecclesiastical peers of France were an elastic body in which successive barons of Coucy sometimes figured and sometimes did not. Froissart specifically refers to Enguerrand VII as a “peer of France,” and on this occasion he was one of four barons seated “on the fleur de lys” along with the peers of royal blood and a superabundance of eighteen prelates including four “mitred” abbots. The royal usher, after summoning Montfort aloud three times—at the entrance to the chamber, at the Marble Table in the courtyard, and at the gate of the palace—duly reported back that “he is not there.” The Procurator then read the indictment, citing the Duke’s treasons, crimes, “injuries and vexations,” including the murder of the priest sent to summon him. (After the Visconti fashion, Montfort had the messenger drowned in the river with the summons tied around his neck.) Following a juridical argument at enormous length of the rights and claims to the dukedom, Montfort’s title was declared null, and the King announced Brittany’s union with the crown.
Charles’s error was at once made clear by a rebellious outburst in the independent-minded duchy, even among the pro-French party. The endless quarrel came alive again, and since Montfort was conniving with the Count of Flanders and both of them with England, Charles feared the possibility of a new invasion across the northern frontier. In this situation, the domain of Coucy guarding the northern gateway came into focus.
In February 1379 the King sent his Treasurer, Jean le Mercier, and an official with the title of Visitor General of Royal Property to survey the barony of Coucy with instructions “to look and advise and report the estate of the said seigneur.” In March, after receiving Mercier’s report, Charles went himself on a week’s tour of Coucy-le-Château and other castles and towns of the domain. Evidently ailing, the King watched from his litter the “joyous chase of deer” in hunts organized in his honor. Whether Enguerrand was present to welcome his sovereign is nowhere recorded, and the absence of mention suggests he may have been in the north assembling forces for defense, or in Normandy at the siege of Cherbourg.
The King was, however, accompanied by the court poet Eustache Deschamps, who immediately produced a ballade extolling the marvels of the barony. A master of the verbal acrobatics of the French verse of his time, yet a realist and satirist at heart, Deschamps described himself as the “King of Ugliness” with the skin of a boar and the face of a monkey. He had entered royal service from humble birth as a simple messenger, advancing to usher-at-arms, bailiff, and châtelain of royal properties and, in the next reign, Steward of Water and Forests and ultimately Général des finances. Ready to turn out poetry for any occasion—a total of 1,675 ballades, 661 rondeaux, 80 virelais, 14 lays, and miscellaneous pieces—he now described in verse the “strongholds for men of valor” in Coucy’s many castles of St. Gobain, St. Lambert and La Fère, the parks of Folembray, the lovely manor St. Aubin, the falcons’ chase of herons, the famous donjon:
Who would know a land of great delight
Where lies the heart of the realm of France,
With fortress strong of marvelous might,
Tall forests and lakes of sweet plaisance,
Songs of birds, parks orderly as a dance,
Must to Coucy turn his steps.
There he will find the nonpareille
Whence comes the cry, “Coucy à la merveille!”
It has been surmised that Charles had in mind the eventual purchase of Coucy, placing the crown in control of the greatest stronghold of the north. Purchase of great fiefs was not unprecedented; Coucy himself had thus indirectly acquired Soissons. Yet how he might have been adequately compensated for so great an estate or why he would be expected to comply with the King’s desire remains obscure. The fact that he had no son and only a single female heir, the other being irrevocably English, may have been a consideration.
The marriage of Marie, sole heiress to the barony, was then being negotiated. At thirteen she was one of three candidates, along with Yolande de Bar, a niece of the King, and Catherine of Geneva, a sister of Pope Clement, who were prospects for the recently widowed son of the King of Aragon. Such places were not left empty for long. Eight days after the death of his wife, the Spanish prince dispatched envoys to Coucy, to the Duc d’Anjou as Yolande’s uncle, and to the Count of Geneva, with instructions to arrange matters as soon as possible with any one of the three. When Yolande was chosen, Marie afterward married Yolande’s brother Henri de Bar, eldest son of the Duc de Bar and of Marie de France, sister of Charles V. Alliance with the heir to a great duchy on the borders of Lorraine maintained the high level of the Coucys’ marital connections.
Whether Enguerrand was influenced by this new royal connection or by pride in his success in Normandy, he created at this time his own Order of Chivalry called, in the grand manner of the Coucys, the Order of the Crown. As indicated by Deschamps, who celebrated the order in a poem, the Crown was meant to symbolize not only grandeur and power but the dignity, virtue, and high conduct that surround a king. The points of its circle were the “twelve flowers of authority”: Faith, Virtue, Moderation, Love of God, Prudence, Truth, Honor, Strength, Mercy, Charity, Loyalty, and Largesse “shining on all below.” After 1379, Coucy’s seals display a patterned background of tiny crowns and a standing figure holding a crown—with some now uncertain significance—upside down. However elevated in name, the Order was democratic in spirit: it admitted ladies, demoiselles, and squires to membership.
In 1379 Isabella de Coucy died in England leaving Enguerrand free to remarry. Less precipitate than the Prince of Aragon, or too occupied in urgent affairs, he did not fill her place for seven years. Nothing came of the King’s visit to his barony at the time, but the crown’s interest remained active.
A new reign in England brought the English no better fortunes in the war. The easy mastery of the Channel that Edward III had once enjoyed was lost, thanks to Charles’s steady alliance with the sea power of Castile and his own program of shipbuilding. When a force led bythe Duke of Lancaster finally succeeded in landing near St. Malo in Brittany, the situation of Cherbourg was reversed. Held by the French, St. Malo defied siege and wore out the Duke until he went home in a cloud of failure. “And the commons of England began to murmur against the noblemen, saying how they had done all that season but little good.” Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King’s Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.
At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers’ Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King’s leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third Estate with the less than adequate performance by the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame the nobles or win knightly fame, but “in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country.” Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country’s defenders was none the less valid.
With ill-success on both sides in the war, both desired peace. Reopening of hostilities in Brittany had counterbalanced for France her success in Normandy, and the schism raised the temperature of hostility everywhere. Aware of failing health, Charles V did not want to leave the quarrels with Brittany and England a burden upon his son. The parleys after King Edward’s passing had closed without result and evidently in bad feeling. To avoid mutually irritating debates, it was proposed to convene separately the next time: the English at Calais and the French twenty miles away at St. Omer, with the Archbishop of Rouen acting as go-between. Postponed by the schism, this plan was adopted for a renewed effort in September 1379.
Coucy, Rivière, and Mercier with one or two others were the French plenipotentiaries at this parley, and they were also delegated to meet with the Count of Flanders at Arras in the hope of inducing him to mediate a settlement with the Duke of Brittany. Before they could accomplish anything, the Count was caught up by a local revolt that, surmounting every repression and involving every faction, was to plunge Flanders into ruinous civil war.
The rising of the men of Ghent had no connection with the workers’ insurrection that had seized control of Florence in the previous year. Although separate and spontaneous, the events in the two cloth cities initiated a whirlwind of class war over the next five years arising both from the accumulated miseries of the working class and from a new strength resulting from the disruptions of the Black Death. In Florence, Flanders, Languedoc, Paris, England, and back to Flanders and northern France, insurrections succeeded each other without visible link, except in the last phase. Some were urban, some rural; some arose from desperation, some from strength; but all were precipitated by one factor: oppressive taxes.
At Ghent, where the weavers were in greatest strength, the Count invited trouble when he levied a tax on the city to pay for a tournament. Led by the cry of an angry tradesman that tax money must not be squandered “on the follies of princes and the upkeep of actors and buffoons,” the citizens refused to pay. The Count, playing on the commercial rivalry of the cities, secured the support of Bruges by a promise to build a canal connecting it to the sea, to the advantage of its commerce and the detriment of Ghent. When 500 diggers began work on a channel to divert the river Lys, Ghent dispatched its militia to the attack, and from that point on, the conflict enlarged itself like a cell dividing. Of Flanders’ fierce tribulations that now began, Froissart wrote, “What shall they say that readeth this or heareth it read, but that it was the work of the Devil?”
At the opposite end of France at the same time, revolt erupted in Languedoc, where famine, oppression, war, and taxes had left a trail of misery under the harsh rule of the Duc d’Anjou. Impatient, bold, and habitually forcing events, Anjou exercised virtually sovereign power over a region amounting to a quarter of the realm. He swallowed its revenues whole, without distinguishing what was applied to his personal use from what was applied to the defense of Languedoc or the kingdom. To make up for fewer hearths as a result of the plague, the tax per hearth was raised each year, but the people obtained no benefit in better defense. Bandit companies still penetrated their valleys, still forced their villages to buy respite from pillage. In 1378, food taxes on consumption were added to those on sales, falling most heavily on the poor. When tax-collectors began the practice of house searches, like agents of the Inquisition, outrage was piled on misery.
“How can we live like this?” protesting groups cried as they gathered before the Virgin’s statue to implore her aid. “How can we feed ourselves and our children when already we cannot pay the heavy taxes laid on us by the rich for their own comfort?” Riots and disorders spread and reached revolt in July 1379 when Anjou’s Council levied a heavy new tax of twelve francs per hearth without convoking the Estates, merely asking the assent of the municipal councils. The Duke himself was absent at the time, conducting the war in Brittany. The wrath of his overburdened subjects burst with extraordinary violence against all in authority: royal officials, nobles, and the upper bourgeois of the town councils, whom the common people held responsible for the new tax. “Kill, kill all the rich!” was the cry, as reported by a seigneur of Clermont afterward. “Seigneurs and other good men of the country and towns,” he said, “went in great fear of death” and in that other fear inspired by all revolts, “that if this infamous insolence of the common people was not rigorously suppressed, worse would follow.”
At Le Puy, Nîmes, Clermont, and other towns, the people formed armed mobs, looted rich households, murdered officials, and committed acts of savagery—even, it was reported, “cut open bodies with their knives and ate like animals the flesh of baptized men.” In October the commotion reached a climax in Montpellier when five of Anjou’s councillors were killed and eighty others reportedly massacred. The insurgents sent out emissaries in an effort to raise a general revolt, but lacking the solid industrial base and traditions of the Flemish struggle, the rising quickly flared and was soon suppressed. Clement VII, dependent on Anjou’s control of Languedoc for his support, instantly sent Cardinal Albano, a native of Languedoc, to calm the people and warn them of the terrible punishment for lèse-majesté. Already afraid of their rebellion, the leaders were persuaded to submit to the King’s mercy.
The fate of Montpellier was deliberately dramatized for punitive effect. On the day of the return of the Duc d’Anjou in January, a vast procession of citizens over the age of fourteen was led through the city gate by the Cardinal, along with surviving officials, ecclesiastics, monks, faculty, and students of the university. Lined up on both sides of the road, they fell on their knees crying “Mercy!” as the Duke and his men in armor rode by. Along the way were stationed magistrates in gowns of office without mantles, hats, or belts, women in unadorned dress, citizens with halters around their necks, and, finally, all the children under fourteen, each group falling to its knees in turn to cry “Mercy!” The keys to the city’s gates and the knocker of the great bell were humbly submitted. During the next two days, at Anjou’s command, all arms were surrendered and the chief buildings turned over to his men-at-arms.
Then from a platform erected in the main square the Duke announced the ferocious sentence: 600 individuals condemned to death—one third to be hung, one third beheaded, one third burned, all their property to be confiscated, and their children sentenced to perpetual servitude. One half the property of all other citizens was to be confiscated and a fine levied of 6,000 francs plus the cost of the Duke’s expenses caused by the outbreak. The walls and gates of the city were to be razed, the university to lose all its rights, properties, and archives.
A great outcry greeted the sentence, the Cardinal and prelates pleaded “very lovingly” for pity on the people, the university wept, women and children knelt and wailed. On the following day a reduced sentence was announced, remitting most of the penalties. The whole performance had been for effect. A letter of Charles V to the Cardinal, dated two months earlier, had stated his intention to be merciful, but the power of the crown to punish required demonstration.
The events in Languedoc had one far-reaching result: in exhibiting the distress of his subjects, they left the King with a guilty conscience, which could have serious consequences at a medieval deathbed. For the time being, conscious of the avarice and oppressions of his brother and the unpopularity they reflected on the crown, Charles reduced the hearth tax and recalled Anjou as Governor of Languedoc. Unhappily, his replacement, after an interim under Du Guesclin, was the Duc de Berry, whose rule of pure acquisitiveness undiluted by any political sense proved, if anything, more rapacious than his brother’s.
In April 1379, Coucy and Rivière with several new colleagues went once more in quest of peace to a parley at Boulogne. They were empowered to make new concessions of territory and sovereignty and again to offer a marriage, in the person of Charles’s baby daughter, Catherine, to Richard II. Through six parleys in the last six years the mirage of peace had mocked its seekers. In the same period, except for French success in Normandy, continuance of war had brought no advantage to either side but rather, through increasing antagonism and suspicion, had made the war harder to end.
The English came to the parley in divided mind, partly to try what diplomacy could gain, partly to maintain a holding operation while they prepared another assault. Montfort’s rebellion had given them another opportunity to re-enter France and regain the territories theythought of as theirs. Ever since Charles’s repudiation of the Treaty of Brétigny and the reverses that followed, they had hated the French for falsely and wrongfully, as they saw it, dispossessing them of their property. Defense of their own countrymen might be lackadaisical, but in combat overseas, where plunder offered, there was no lack of will to fight, only lack of money. Other means being exhausted, funds for an expedition to Brittany were raised in 1379 by a graduated poll (or head) tax, a new device designed to cover clergy and peasants at lower income levels than before. Calculated, with the usual vagueness about population figures, to bring in £50,000, it produced only £20,000, all of it invested in a fleet commanded by Sir John Arundel.
Delayed until winter by lack of wind and then by threat of a French raid, Arundel took part of his force to Southampton to guard against an enemy landing and, while there, to conduct himself indistinguishably from the enemy. Besides robbing the countryside, he quartered his men-at-arms and archers in a convent, allowing them to violate at will the nuns and a number of poor widows who lived there, and to carry them off to the ships when ready to sail. Arundel was the man who had demanded money in hand before he would defend the south-coast towns against earlier French raids. If Walsingham may be believed, he used it for ostentation as extreme as his brutality. He is said to have embarked with a wardrobe of 52 suits embroidered in gold, and horses and equipment to the value of £7,000.
Sailing in December, his convoy was caught by a violent storm during which he ordered the kidnapped women thrown overboard to lighten the ships, maltreated the crew, and having struck down the pilot, was fittingly wrecked on the rocks of the Irish coast. Twenty-five ships with all equipment and all but seven survivors were lost. Arundel’s body, rolling in the waves, was washed up three days later. Driven back by the storm, the remainder of the fleet never made the crossing and the tax money was accordingly wasted.
Already in 1378 the Commons had complained of the drain of money in a war in which they no longer perceived a national interest. Although war provided business and a living to many besides the nobles, the Commons protested that it was the King’s affair and that he had spent £46,000 for the maintenance of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, and other places “for which the Commons ought in no way to be charged.” The government replied that the good-keeping of these “barbicans” overseas was the safeguard of the realm, “otherwise we should never find rest nor peace with our enemies for then they would push hot war to the thresholds of our houses which God forbid.” The argument was not likely to persuade the south-coast towns, which continued to suffer hot war pushed to their thresholds by savage French and Castilian raids. In August 1380 even London was to tremble when an audacious Castilian force sailed fifteen miles up the Thames to sack Gravesend and leave it in flames.
In answer to the Commons, the Royal Council claimed that the footholds in France gave the King “convenient gates and entrances toward his enemies to grieve them when he is ready to act.” It was a revealing statement of the intentions of the war party headed by the new King’s youngest uncle, the Earl of Buckingham. A proud, fierce, intolerant young man of 25, he was a late version of the 12th century Bertrand de Born, who had once so feelingly exhorted his fellow knights, “Never give up war!”
In March 1380 the English renewed promises of aid to Montfort, but realization was postponed while the alternatives of peace were tested at Boulogne. At this parley Coucy and his fellow envoys offered new cessions and adjustments and the entire county of Angoulême as dowry for Catherine, but the English remained suspicious. They believed that the French offer was a ruse to prevent their coming to Montfort’s aid. But basically, English reluctance to make peace was simply a desire to go on fighting, now strongly reinforced by the fact of the schism.
Pope Urban, not yet in his mad stage, was exercising every pressure to prevent Richard’s marriage to a French princess and encourage a marriage to Wenceslas’ sister, Anne of Bohemia, which would weld England and the Empire in an Urbanist axis. When there was only one Pope, England was anti-papal, but the existence of two made it necessary to take sides. Richard’s advisers rejected the French marriage, negotiations were ruptured, and two years later the King of England married Anne of Bohemia. In the final irony for Charles, it was the schism, for which he was responsible, that frustrated his goal of peace. “All the witte of this worlde,” Langland wrote in epitaph,
Can nought conforem a pees bytwene the pope and his enymys;
Ne bitwene two Cristene kynges, can no wighte pees make,
Profitable to ayther people.
Nor could Charles find a settlement in Brittany. Coucy and others were sent on several missions, evidently in search of a formula, and a Breton Assembly of the Three Estates pleaded movingly for a pardon of their Duke, but Charles mistrusted Montfort too much to restore him. Montfort on his part would make no peace with the sovereign who had confiscated his dukedom. For others, particularly Du Guesclin, the situation was a tangle of conflicting loyalties. Reluctant to fight his Breton compatriots, and subjected to a whispering campaign by his enemies at court, Du Guesclin left Brittany to lead a campaign against the Free Companies in Auvergne. Here, while besieging a castle, he suddenly fell ill and died in July 1380. While his burial was taking place in the royal mausoleum at St. Denis with honors “as though he had been the King’s son,” a new English expedition under Buckingham was already on its way. With the enemy at hand, and war or unrest in Brittany and Flanders, France was without a Constable.
At urgent councils held to decide Du Guesclin’s successor, Coucy and Clisson were the leading candidates. Because of the “great repute” he had won in Normandy and the “great favor” in which the King held him, Coucy was offered the appointment, the highest and most lucrative lay office of the realm.
As chief military officer, the Constable outranked the royal princes; an attack upon his person was considered a crime of lèse-majesté. He was responsible for cohesion of the armed forces, and for tactical command when the King did not take the field. With control of recruitment, enrollment, provisioning, and all other arrangements for war, his opportunities for enlarging his fortune were immense. If the King was not engaged, the Constable’s banner flew over captured towns; all booty theoretically belonged to him, except for money and prisoners reserved to the King and for artillery reserved to the Master of Crossbows. In addition to a fixed salary of 2,000 francs a month in peace as in war, he was paid upon the outbreak of hostilities a sum equal to one day’s pay for every man-at-arms under contract. Even if this was intended for military expenses, it offered the recipient considerable scope. And apart from its profits, the Constableship had become, with the widening of war, a post of real function.
For reasons that remain enigmatic, Coucy declined the appointment. The reason he gave the King was that in order to hold Brittany, the Constable should be someone well known to, and familiar with, the Bretons—such as Clisson, whose appointment Coucy advised. His excuse, by itself, seems unconvincing. Clearly the problem of Brittany was crucial; nevertheless, if a settlement had to be reached with Montfort, Coucy himself, as Montfort’s former brother-in-law, was more likely to achieve it than Clisson, Montfort’s mortal enemy. Coucy and Montfort had both been married to daughters of Edward III, and though both wives were dead, the link established a relationship of importance in the Middle Ages, and in fact determined the choice of Coucy as mediator in the next reign.
Something is missing from Coucy’s explanation. It is improbable that, like Dante’s Pope, he made “the grand refusal” from a sense of inadequacy to the task. Modesty was certainly not a mark of the Coucys, and Enguerrand VII, judging by his seals and his Order of the Crown, held himself very highly. He accepted without hesitation all other assignments—battle, diplomacy, secret missions, foreign war, domestic governance—that crowded upon him, including the final one that was to cost his life. He was one of the nobility forced by the growing complications of public affairs to become statesmen, not merely swordsmen on horseback. Coucy’s rank, prowess, and territorial importance would have warranted military command in any case, but other qualities were making him indispensable to the crown. Intelligence, tact, skills of rhetoric, and a noticeable level-headedness were coming to be more useful than the traditional mindless impetuosity of the knight in the iron cocoon.
Why then did he refuse the Constableship? The fact that Marshal Sancerre, to whom it was offered next, likewise refused it suggests some motive common to both, perhaps connected with the King’s failing health. Charles V was, in fact, within two months of his death, and the advancing shadow may have been apparent. With the Dauphin a minor and the prospect of the King’s three rapacious, ambitious, and mutually hostile brothers vying for control of the Regency, the Constableship may have appeared likely to be politically dangerous for the occupant. Coucy could lose more than he might gain from it. Unlike Clisson, who was to accept the post, he avoided making enemies, nor, with his great lands and ancient ancestry, did he need the office for power and position.
Upon his refusal, the King appointed him Captain-General of Picardy and gave him the town, castle, and seigneury of Mortaigne on the northern frontier between Tournai and Valenciennes to ensure that this outpost would be held in strong hands. He was also named to the Regency Council for the Dauphin, on whose account Charles was increasingly troubled since the death of the Queen. Owing to the royal Dukes’ resistance to Clisson, the Constableship was left for the moment unfilled.
On the day Coucy took command of Picardy, July 19, 1380, the Earl of Buckingham landed at Calais and, with a force known from paymasters’ records to number 5,060, began a march of devastation and plunder through the region for which Coucy was now responsible. To raise the cost of the expedition, the English crown had resorted to a tithe on the clergy and an export tax on wool and hides, but as the proceeds were not yet in hand, the King had to pawn the crown jewels for £10,000, which was sufficient only for the start. Thereafter the men-at-arms were to be paid from pillage en route. Because naval losses had reduced shipping, the expeditionary force had to cross “little by little,” taking two weeks for the whole force to complete the one or two days’ sail across the narrow neck of the Channel to Calais. The much longer sail directly to Brittany was precluded.
Buckingham’s raid was to prove virtually a replica of Lancaster’s seven years before—an open-eyed walk into privation, hunger, and ultimate futility. The strategic objective was to bring support to Montfort in Brittany and regain England’s footholds there. Buckingham, however, like Lancaster before him, instead of going directly toward his objective, took a long way around to the east through Champagne and Burgundy, in quest of combat and booty. Since the same tactics brought the same results as before, the question arises: Why this mad persistence?
Thomas of Buckingham himself is part of the answer. Aggressive and ruthless by temperament and “wonderfully overbearing” in manner in the same way as his brother the Black Prince, Buckingham resented Lancaster’s arrogation of power and saw himself carrying on the valor and glory of his father and eldest brother. Englishmen still felt themselves to be living in the triumphant era of Poitiers and Najera. “The English,” said Clisson after he left them, “are so proud of themselves and have had so many good days [at war] that they think they cannot lose.”
England’s most experienced soldier, Sir Robert Knollys, and other famous knights such as Lord Thomas Percy and Sir Hugh Calveley accompanied Buckingham to France. What beckoned them and younger men was personal opportunity for clash of arms, for reputation and profits, and for whatever punishment they could inflict upon France. For poor knights, squires, and yeomen, war was livelihood; as Buckingham argued, “They can better live in war than in peace, for in lying still there is no advantage.” Most knights went to war to “advance themselves,” as they put it. National strategic aim was not in their minds, and Brittany hardly more than an excuse.
With a force half men-at-arms and half archers, the English rode through Artois and northern Picardy keeping close order in case of French attack. “They shall have battle before they finish their march!” Coucy assured French knights who brought him intelligence of the enemy’s route, although he knew well enough that battle was enjoined by the King. Charles V was not to be swerved from his philosophy of war. Not being a fighter himself, he was not prevented by personal pride from employing the lessons of experience, nor did he hesitate to hurt the pride of chivalry by reminders of past defeats. His own initiation into war on the awful day of Poitiers had left a permanent mark. If a mystique of success enveloped the English in the conviction that “they could not lose,” Charles suffered from the opposite psychology. From the major clashes of the early part of the war, he had concluded that the delivery of armed force could not be reliably directed and that war was too important to be left to the chances of battle.
From headquarters at Péronne on the Somme, Coucy issued a general summons to all knights and squires of Artois and Picardy. The documents show him moving from place to place, at Hesdin, Arras, Abbeville, and St. Quentin, holding reviews and deploying units for defense of towns, “for he was anxious that no loss should be suffered from any negligence on his part.” How far Coucy, as a man of the sword, agreed with the King’s policy is moot; he carried out orders to avoid battle while following Buckingham’s march, even when it left a trail of burning villages through his own domain, but certain actions show that he shared the knights’ impatience to break through the agony of restraint.
Parties of French knights kept close to the English line of march to hamper foraging, and this proximity opened tempting opportunities for combat. Although one report describes the French as immobilis quasi lapis (immovable as stones), skirmishes were unavoidable, from which on the whole they did not carry off the honors. In one case, a fierce fight lasting an hour on horse and foot, the English took eighteen prisoners from a French party of thirty; in another the French, perceiving the enemy stronger, sounded retreat and fled. “The horses felt the effect of the spurs and very opportunely did these lords find the barriers [of their town] open,” but not before fifteen had been captured. Another party of thirty English, “seeking to perform some deed of arms,” set forth at dawn with their foragers, but were meanly frustrated of their main purpose when a group of important French lords escaped them. “God!” they cried, “what fortunes would have been ours if we had taken them, for they would have paid us 40,000 francs.”
When the countryside was stripped, the English demanded food from the towns under threat of attack. Refused by Reims, secure behind its walls, they retaliated by burning sixty surrounding villages within a week. Discovering several thousand sheep herded into ditches outside the city walls, the English sent men to drive them out under cover of their archers, who shot so keenly that no one from Reims dared to venture out or even appear on the bulwarks. Under renewed threat by the English to burn the fields of ripe grain, the citizens now delivered to them sixteen loads of bread and wine.
In this manner Buckingham advanced to Burgundy, where 2,000 French knights and squires had assembled in a mood to throw off the King’s restraints and fight. The leading nobles of the realm—Bourbon, Coucy, the Duc de Bar, the Comte d’Eu, Admiral Jean de Vienne—were present under the command of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Armed head to foot and with battle-ax in his hand, the Duke in bellicose spirit reviewed his forces. Heralds rode out from both sides with challenges to deeds of valor. Still the King from his chamber prohibited battle unless the French found themselves in decisive superiority. Burgundy did not dare defy his wishes, but the restraints broke when an English squire was killed in a fracas. In answer to the enemy’s challenge, a body of knights, including Coucy, engaged the English in a strenuous fight outside the gates of Troyes. The outcome was inconclusive, Buckingham moved on, the French followed, pleading with the King not to let the enemy slip through their hands. Charles replied only, “Let them alone; they will destroy themselves.”
At the Loire the French had gathered the advantage in numbers. Coucy and his companions were determined, “whether the King willed it or not,” to give battle before the English crossed the Sarthe into Brittany. Meanwhile Charles, negotiating while the armies marched, had persuaded the city of Nantes, key to Brittany and pro-French, not to admit the English and to declare loyalty to France without reference to Montfort. In the first week of September the English crossed the Sarthe and in that week Charles entered his last illness. The secretion from the abscess on his arm dried up, heralding death, and physicians and patient accepted the signal. Moved by litter to his favorite château of Beauté on the Marne, Charles sent for his brothers and brother-in-law—excepting Anjou, whom he hoped to keep at a distance from the Royal Treasury—and prepared to make dispositions for the journey of his soul.
Philip the Bold hastened to Paris, and Coucy likewise because of his responsibility as a member of the Regency Council. Anjou, who was kept apprised of events by partisans in Paris, hurried up from Languedoc, whether wanted or not.
The King suffered physically in his last days, but his mental anguish was heavier. Two things weighed on his conscience: his part in the schism and the questionable legality of his taxation. He had stretched temporary grants by the Estates into ten years of continuous taxes, and though he had used them for defense of the realm and the “public weal,” he had filled the royal coffers in the process and bought the allegiance of nobles with the people’s tax money. How would he answer to God? He had raised France from a “heap of ruins”; he had canceled—except for Calais—the English conquests made in the time of his father and grandfather; he had uprooted Navarre permanently from Normandy; and if peace had receded from his grasp, he had, by the steady pursuit of national purpose, justified the loyalty of all who had felt themselves French in the hour of choice.
But had he bought recovery at the price of the people’s misery? The uprising in Languedoc had revealed the cost, and Charles was aware, through tax-collectors’ reports, of angry mutterings closer to home. Oppression of his subjects reacted upon the fate of his soul, for a sovereign’s illegal taxes could arouse the Divine wrath, and the complaints of those he had wronged would follow him to the judgment seat. In his own time the unknown author of the allegory Songe du Vergier (Dream of the Woodsman) branded as tyrants all princes who burdened their subjects with “taxes impossible to bear,” and theologians warned rulers that they should cancel all exactions and make restitution to great and small if they hoped for salvation. That hope dictated the King’s last act.
Within hours of death, fully dressed and laid on a chaise-longue before a perturbed group of prelates, seigneurs, and councillors representing the three estates, the King in a fading voice spoke first of the schism. He insisted in a troubled and rambling defense that he had sought to follow “in this as in all else, the surest road,” that “if ever rumor should say that the Cardinals acted under the inspiration of the Demon, you may be sure that no consideration of kinship dictated my choice but solely the statements of the said Cardinals and the advice of prelates, clerics and my councillors”; finally, that he would obey a decision of a General Council of the Church and “God could not reproach me if in my ignorance I acted contrary to a future decision of the Church.” It was the declaration of a very worried man.
At the door of death in the Middle Ages, the trembling traveler, more often than not, felt required to repudiate what he had done in life. When it came to taxes, the most conscientious sovereign of his time repudiated the exercise of kingship. He announced the terms of an ordinance to “abate and abolish” the hearth taxes, “as from here on, and it is our pleasure, wish and order by these same letters, that they shall no longer be current in our kingdom and that from now on our said people and subjects shall not pay any of them but shall be quit and discharged.”
Other, indirect taxes existed, but the hearth tax was the basic property tax on which the financial system rested. To decree that it should “no longer be current” was to deceive the people and deprive his successors—supposing the decree were to be carried out—of the means of governing. Charles’s act was not an aberration. Sovereigns before him had been known to cancel taxes and return subsidies illegally exacted, and deathbed donors regularly made restitutions and established foundations that, if carried out, would bankrupt their families. Charles had amassed a huge fortune for his son, but by 1380 the theory that the King could live of his own domain was a ragged fiction. A regular financial footing, as Charles knew all too well, was government’s greatest need. In the chill of death, his soul’s need was stronger.
The King received extreme unction, commended to his brothers his twelve-year-old son, and urged on them with his last breath the lifting of taxes: “Take them off as speedily as you can.” Bureau de la Rivière, kneeling in tears at the bedside, embraced the King; the room was emptied of the sobbing crowd so that his last moments should be in peace. He died on September 16, 1380, and his last ordinance was proclaimed the next day. Between public rejoicing and the conflicting sentiments of the late King’s brothers, an explosive situation was created.
In Brittany in the same month Buckingham received an ambiguous welcome. Montfort, whose whole life was spent balancing enemies, intriguing, fighting, quarreling, and making treaties with everyone, was a habitual double-dealer. Charles being dead, he was prepared to make peace with the new King, and opened negotiations with the French while at the same time signing a compact of many oaths with Buckingham to jointly besiege Nantes. But the reluctance of Breton nobles to support an attack on their countrymen decided their lord to choose France. Coucy, warmly in favor of a reconciliation with Brittany, was one of the negotiators who concluded a treaty with Montfort in January 1381. Buckingham, who was not kept informed by his ally, found towns and castles closed to him and provisions withdrawn inside their walls. Through the winter months his wasted army wandered from place to place, often lacking food and shelter. Finally told by Montfort that he must leave, he and his companions took ship for England in March 1381. Except for individual knighthoods and ransoms and some fruits of pillage collected en route, Buckingham and his fellows had accomplished no military purpose, “to their great discomfort and the discomfort of the whole English nation.”
Both nations under boy kings now suffered the rule of ambitious and contending uncles who, wearing no crown, exercised power without responsibility. War receded; internal stress reached the bursting point.