It was precisely this that John, duke of Bedford, the elder of Henry V’s surviving brothers, tried to do when he became regent of France on the death of the king. Within less than two months, the ailing Charles VI followed his son-in-law to the grave, giving effect to the succession clause of the treaty of Troyes. Henry VI, still less than a year old, already king of England, now assumed the crown of France, a position which his father had never quite achieved.
In France Bedford, acting for his nephew, strove to reduce the area of the country still faithful to the Valois ‘claimant’, the dauphin, Charles, now regarded by many as Charles VII although, like his young English nephew, still uncrowned. On 31 July 1423 an army representing the combined power of England and Burgundy defeated a Franco-Scottish army at Cravant, while a year later, on 17 August 1424, at Verneuil another army, led by Bedford himself, encountered and, after heavy fighting, convincingly defeated another such enemy army, this time reinforced by Genoese crossbowmen. The outcome had considerable significance. It marked the second French defeat in a year; it fully restored to the English their military reputation which was no longer seen to depend on one man, Henry V; and, most important of all, it opened the way southwards for further advance into central France. In Normandy, the settlers could sleep more soundly as the theatre of active war moved south. The future held considerable possibility.
For the French, on the other hand, the dark years of the war, not unlike the 1340s and 1350s, appeared to have returned. By 1427, much of Maine and Anjou, names whose familiarity stems from their frequent appearance on the list of English diplomatic demands, were in the hands of the English, now advancing southwards. It was the line of the river Loire which was to save the French. The English could not cross it leaving behind them unconquered French outposts, of which Orléans was one. In the autumn of 1428 the English, under one of their most notable commanders, Thomas, earl of Salisbury, besieged the town. In November, Salisbury, a chivalric figure, was killed, the victim of a cannonball. But still the English persisted, while all France looked to the siege. In May 1429 the struggle was resolved. An unknown peasant girl from Lorraine, Joan of Arc, persuaded the dauphin that she had been sent by God to raise the siege. In spite of scepticism and outright hostility to her at the court (how could she achieve what professional commanders had failed to do?) Joan received permission and active encouragement to attempt what she claimed she had been sent to carry out. In the event, she succeeded. On 8 May 1429 the English abandoned the siege; France, through Joan, had won a great moral victory. As Christine de Pisan put it, ‘the sun began to shine once more’.
It was a victory which could, and did, lead to greater things. Within a month or so the French, having won important skirmishes at Jargeau and Patay, could turn towards achieving the next logical step of their success story, the coronation of the dauphin as king of France. On 17 July 1429, less than ten weeks after relieving Orleans, and having in the meanwhile brought back to French rule a number of towns, including Troyes where the fateful treaty had been sealed in 1420, Joan stood in the cathedral at Reims watching the dauphin as he underwent the rite of coronation, the rite by which his predecessors had become full kings of France. A fundamental challenge had been levelled at the settlement made at Troyes which had altered the line of succession to the crown of France. Could the challenge be maintained?
The English saw the coronation of Charles VII at Reims as a considerable threat to their authority. In December 1431 Henry VI, now ten years old, was brought to Paris and crowned in Notre-Dame by an English bishop; the fact that the ceremony had not taken place at Reims did not escape the notice of contemporaries. Yet in spite of the need to bring strong and immediate pressure to bear upon the English, the French were not able to follow up their successes of 1429. In the following year, indeed, Joan of Arc was captured at Compiègne and in May 1431, after what was a political trial carried out under ecclesiastical rules, she was condemned and burned at Rouen. The war was going the way of neither side. The English defences held. There was deadlock.
In the circumstances men turned to negotiation. In the summer months of 1435 there took place at Arras, in north-eastern France, a great congress attended by the representatives of a number of European states and the Church.16 After weeks of discussion, the sides failed to agree terms, either over the crown of France or over the lands to be held by the English, and under what conditions. However the congress was the occasion of an event of some significance. Having obtained a papal dispensation, Philip, duke of Burgundy, forsook his support of the settlement made at Troyes and, hence, too, his allegiance to the English as rulers of France. From now on he either fought on the French side or acted as a neutral between the parties. If, in the years to follow, he did relatively little to help the Valois war effort, his defection greatly angered the English who reacted in strongly emotional terms to what they regarded as an act of betrayal and treason against the English crown.
In 1439 a further attempt was made to secure a diplomatic settlement when the French, the English, and the Burgundians (but not the representatives of the Church, excluded by the English for their alleged partiality at Arras) met near Calais in the summer of that year. The territorial offers were never really more than variations on others made earlier in the war. Although the French offer of a ‘half-peace’ (a truce for a set period of between fifteen and thirty years, in exchange for an English undertaking not to use the French royal title during that period) was taken seriously at first, it was turned down when the English demanded a perpetual peace together with the grant of Normandy and an enlarged Aquitaine (as in 1360) in full sovereignty.
More significant, however, was the influence which the English settlement in Normandy came to exercise upon the proceedings. When asked to restore those Frenchmen who had lost their lands for refusing to recognise the legitimacy of English rule in the duchy, the English negotiators refused point blank. They could not give the impression that they doubted the validity of their king’s claim to the crown of France, for by so doing they would have thrown doubt upon the symbolic and legal importance of Henry VI’s French coronation, rendering illegal the very authority (the royal one) upon which the validity of the grants made to Englishmen (and others) in Normandy depended. Further, to have made the concession over restoration of lands would have meant depriving their own people of their French interests, something which, for both moral and financial reasons, they were not prepared to do.
If diplomacy was bringing a settlement no nearer, military events would do so only very slowly. It is true that in the late 1430s the English suffered some reverses and territorial losses. In 1435 both Dieppe and Harfleur were taken by the French and in the next year Paris went the same way. The loss of the two ports was serious, as the English now had only limited access to Normandy and to the capital, Rouen, which had come to replace Paris. Yet they fought on, trying to defend the long line which was the border of their dominion in northern France, much as their predecessors had done in Aquitaine in the 1370s. In such a situation the initiative lay with the attacker. The English must have echoed the rejoicings of the people of Rouen when it was announced, in the early summer of 1444, that a truce had been agreed between England and France, and that Henry VI was to marry Margaret of Anjou, a niece by marriage of Charles VII. Once again it was hoped to postpone a settlement and place faith upon a personal union between the royal families of the two countries to resolve the outcome of the old dispute between them.
The truce of Tours marked the beginning of another brief phase of diplomacy. At the negotiations, the English made an important concession in saying that the claim to the French crown might be traded for a sovereign Normandy. Then, in December 1445, Henry VI secretly undertook the surrender of the county of Maine, in so doing appearing to renounce sovereignty over it and implying, too, that the English might yield to further pressure, military or diplomatic.
If Henry had hoped for peace, he was to be sadly disillusioned. From 1446 to 1448 the French spared no effort to bring about the surrender of Maine which those Englishmen holding Le Mans, its capital, refused to carry out until, in March 1448, they finally gave way. Fifteen months later, under the pretext that the English had broken the truce, the French invaded Normandy from several directions. The well-planned attack led to a campaign of less than a year. By the early summer of 1450 the English, driven out of their lands and defeated in battle at Formigny in early April, had lost their hold on northern France. Only Calais remained to them. The issue had been settled by force of arms.
The final act was soon to follow. Aquitaine, still English, had not attracted much attention from either side since 1413, the military emphasis since then having been on northern France. Neither Henry V nor his son had placed the solution to the problem of Aquitaine (the old feudal problem) high in his list of priorities. Yet the duchy was not entirely forgotten. When Philip of Burgundy abandoned the English alliance and returned to that of France in 1435, he released French troops from eastern France whose services Charles VII could now employ in the south-west. In 1442 both the king and the dauphin, Louis, went on an expedition into Aquitaine which greatly troubled the government in London. Soon afterwards, the truce of Tours intervened. None the less, once war had been renewed in 1449 and Normandy had been recovered, it was time to turn again towards Aquitaine where the English must have felt isolated and apprehensive. In 1451 the French invaded, overran most of the duchy, and took Bordeaux. In the following year, however, a plot was hatched by the English and their supporters, which regained for them control of the city. The pro-English party must have realised, however, that neither they nor their masters in London were in a position to hold out for long. Nor did they. In 1453 the French returned in force and at Castillon, on 17 July, they defeated the English whose commander, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, a man of long experience, was killed by the murderous fire of French cannon.
Although men of the day may not have known it, the Hundred Years War was effectively over.
1 W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power (Oxford, 1983), ch. 3.
2 The reader will find much of value for this chapter in J. Le Patourel, ‘The origins of the war’, The Hundred Years War, ed. Fowler, pp. 28—50.
3 J. A. Kicklighter, ‘English Bordeaux in conflict: the execution of Pierre Vigier de la Rousselle and its aftermath, 1312—24’, J. Med. H., 9 (1983), 1—14.
4 See the essay by J. J. N. Palmer, ‘The war aims of the protagonists and the negotiations for peace’, The Hundred Years War, ed. Fowler, pp. 51—74, which is particularly valuable for the fourteenth century.
5 Perroy (The Hundred Years War, p. 157) called it ‘the Castilian comedy’, scarcely doing justice to its importance. Its proper significance was developed by P. Russell, The English intervention in Spain and Portugal in the time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford, 1955)
6 Palmer, ‘War aims’, p. 63.
7 M. McKisack, The fourteenth century, 1307—1399 (Oxford, 1959), p. 475, n. 3, citing Rotuli parliamentorum, III, 338.
8 N. Housley, ‘The bishop of Norwich’s crusade, May 1383’, H.T., 33 (May, 1983), 15—20.
9 V. J. Scattergood, ‘Chaucer and the French war: Sir Thopas and Melibee’, Court and poet, ed. G. S. Burgess (Liverpool, 1981), pp. 287—96.
10 Palmer, ‘War aims’, pp. 64—5.
11 C.J. Ford, ‘Piracy or policy: the crisis in the Channel, 1400—1403 ‘, T.R. Hist. S., fifth series, 29 (1979), 63—78.
12 J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry the Fourth (4 vols., London, 1884—98), iv, 68—9; R. Vaughan, John the Fearless. The growth of Burgundian power (London, 1966), pp. 94—5.
13 Palmer, ‘War aims’, p. 69.
14 See the assessment of M. Keen, ‘Diplomacy’, Henry V. The practice of kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1985). PP. 181—99.
15 For much of this and what follows, see C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415—1450. The history of a medieval occupation (Oxford, 1983), and R. Massey, ‘The land settlement in Lancastrian Normandy ‘, Property and politics: essays in later medieval English history, ed. A.J. Pollard (Gloucester: New York, 1984), pp. 76—96.
16 See J. G. Dickinson, The congress of Arras, 1435 (Oxford, 1955).