A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [134]
Like Pope Boniface’s claim to total papal supremacy, the terms of Brétigny were obsolete. It was too late to transfer provinces of France like simple fiefs; unnoticed, the inhabitants had come to feel themselves French. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
The fate of the hostages was caught up in it. With the ransom in arrears and trouble arising over the ceded territories, their exile stretched ahead to no visible horizon. They were not being returned in fixed numbers every six months as planned, nor being replaced by substitutes, because few could be found willing to go and Edward made difficulties over the names proposed. In November 1362 the four impatient royal Dukes, who had expected to be released a year earlier, negotiated a treaty of their own with Edward by which they promised to deliver 200,000 florins due on the ransom and certain additional territories belonging to the Duc d’Orléans in return for their freedom and that of six other hostages. They were to stay in Calais on parole until delivery had been fulfilled. Never averse to taking a little extra, Edward was willing to let them go on these terms, but King Jean insistently refused his consent unless his cousin the Comte d’Alençon, the Comte d’Auvergne, and the Sire de Coucy were released in place of three of those named by the “Lilies.” Since Jean’s choices were greater nobles than the other three, Edward in his turn refused consent. Correspondence flowed, the royal Dukes dispatched urgent and angry appeals, finally King Jean, who had by now left his unhappy country for Avignon, lost interest and yielded. Coucy as a result remained in England. More than ever, after the departure of the royal Dukes, he was the object of Edward’s and his daughter’s interest.
Events took a startling turn when King Jean himself, for whose recovery his country had sacrificed so much, voluntarily returned to captivity in England. The motivations of this curious monarch are not readily understood 600 years later; only the train of circumstance is clear.
On regaining the throne, King Jean’s first effort to cope with his country’s tormentors proved to be another Poitiers in miniature. To stem the “Great Company” of Tard-Venus who were overrunning central France, he had hired one of their own kind, the “Archpriest,” Arnaut de Cervole, and, in addition, dispatched a small royal army of 200 knights and 400 archers under the Count of Tancarville, lieutenant of the region, and the renowned Jacques de Bourbon, Count de la Marche, a great-grandson of St. Louis, who had saved King Philip’s life at Crécy. Both had been wounded and captured at Poitiers without having their appetite for offensive warfare in the least diminished. On April 6, 1362, against the advice of Arnaut de Cervole, the two valorous knights ordered an attack at Brignais, a height held by the Tard-Venus near Lyon. The brigands let loose an avalanche of stones upon the royal host, cracking helmets and armor, felling horses, and shattering the attack as the English archers had done at Poitiers. Then on foot, with shortened lances, they finished off the business. Jacques de Bourbon and with him his eldest son and his nephew were killed, and the Count of Tancarville and many other rich nobles captured and held for ransom. Otherwise the brigands made no use of their victory other than to continue brigandage. Lyon purchased artillery, strengthened its walls, and maintained guards with lanterns at night; the countryside suffered as before.
The King’s response to Brignais was to leave for Avignon, where he was to stay for nearly a year. Amid military chaos and every other affliction of his realm, his purpose in going was to resume the crusade that had been broken off twenty years ago by the Anglo-French war. Though he could neither protect his own land, raise his ransom,