• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

To the shocked eyes of Petrarch, sent by Galeazzo Visconti to congratulate King Jean on his liberation, France was “a heap of ruins.” Petrarch was an inveterate complainer who raised every complaint to an extremity, whether it was the iniquity of doctors, the smells of Avignon, or the decadence of the papacy. But even if exaggerated, his account of France as he saw it in January 1361 was tragic enough. “Everywhere was solitude, desolation and misery; fields are deserted, houses ruined and empty except in the walled towns; everywhere you see the fatal footprints of the English and the hateful scars still bleeding from their swords.” In royal Paris, “shamed by devastation up to her very gates … even the Seine flows sadly as if feeling the sorrow of it, and weeps, trembling for the fate of the whole land.”

Petrarch presented the King with two rings from Galeazzo, one a huge ruby as a gift, one torn from Jean’s hand at Poitiers which Galeazzo had somehow redeemed. Afterward he treated the court to a Latin oration on the Biblical text of Manasseh’s return from Babylon, with felicitous references to the mutability of Fortune as shown by Jean’s marvelous restoration out of captivity. The King and the Prince, Petrarch wrote in the voluminous correspondence of which he carefully kept copies, “fixed their eyes on me” with great interest, and he felt that his discussion of Fortune especially aroused the attention of the Dauphin, “a young man of ardent intelligence.”

Personal misfortunes, apart from those of his country, had afflicted the Dauphin. In October 1360 his three-year-old daughter, Jeanne, and her infant sister, Bonne, his only children, had died within two weeks of each other, though whether of the plague, like the Queen, is not stated. At the double burial the Dauphin was seen “so sorrowful as never before he had been.” He himself had been afflicted by an illness which caused his hair and nails to fall out and rendered him “dry as a stick.” Gossip attributed it to poison administered by Charles of Navarre, which it may well have been, for the symptoms are those of arsenic poisoning. The King of Navarre had once again turned inimical. In December 1359 when the English were at Reims, perhaps fearing that Edward might indeed gain the crown, he had plotted a coup of his own. Armed men were to enter Paris by several gates, combine forces to seize the Louvre, enter and kill the Dauphin and his Council, then spread through the city, seizing strong points before the Parisians could assemble. His ultimate purpose as usual remains mysterious. Betrayed to the Dauphin, the plot fractured relations between them and left Charles of Navarre prowling in hostility as before.

Not only payment of the ransom but fulfillment of the territorial terms controlled the hostages’ fate. Too lightly, as the chronicler said, sovereignties had been disposed of at Brétigny, with no account taken of the fact that territories on paper represented people on the ground. Something had happened to these people during two decades of war. The citizens of the seaport of La Rochelle implored the King not to give them up, saying they would rather be taxed up to half their property every year than be turned over to English rule. “We may submit to the English with our lips,” they said, “but with our hearts never.” Weeping, the inhabitants of Cahors lamented that the King had left them orphans. The little town of St. Romain de Tarn refused to admit the English commissioners within its gates, although it reluctantly sent envoys to take the oath of homage next day at a neighboring place.

For all his countrymen who equated the English with the brigands and hated them helplessly in their hearts, Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, the naval commander of the raid on Winchelsea, spoke through his acts. As citizen of a ceded town, he adamantly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England. Persisting against all threats, he was transferred to England, held in a dungeon without recourse to law or