A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [154]
Du Guesclin’s warriors went off to Spain, where they fought with such effect and dispatch that Don Pedro fled, Don Enrique was crowned King, and the companies, of whom too few found a grave, returned all too soon to France. The interests of England, however, renewed the struggle. Don Pedro appealed to the Black Prince, who, moved by eagerness for war and glory, took up his cause. He was moved, too, by the need to break a Franco-Castilian alliance which, owing to a strong Spanish fleet, threatened English communication with Aquitaine and heightened the persistent English fear of invasion. Finances, as always, were crucial. Don Pedro swore to repay all costs when he had regained the throne, and the Black Prince, though advised not to rely on a man so stained by villainies, refused to forgo the battle. With Du Guesclin and the French companies again supporting Don Enrique, the war was reopened in 1367 and the outcome reversed.
At the Battle of Najera in April 1367 the English won a victory famous in medieval annals, and the French suffered another of the defeats that were undercutting not only the renown but the fact of military supremacy. Don Enrique had been advised by Du Guesclin and Marshal d’Audrehem not to risk a pitched battle against the Prince and “the best fighting men on earth,” but rather to cut off their supplies and “to famish them without striking a blow”—the same advice given and ignored by the French at Poitiers. For various reasons of terrain, weather, and because it would have seemed ignoble to the new King’s Spanish following, the advice was impractical and the result catastrophic. Don Enrique fled, Don Pedro was restored, and Bertrand Du Guesclin a second time taken prisoner. Although inclined to hold him, the Prince let himself be stung by Bertrand’s taunt that he was keeping him “out of fear,” and agreed to let him be ransomed at a stiff price of 100,000 francs.
If glory was lost at Najera, the defeat, like that of Auray, was not without advantage, for only battered remnants of the companies returned to France. For this relief Du Guesclin received the credit, so that, as Deschamps was to write, all the prayers of the common people were lavished upon him. Further relief resulted from the deaths of the bandit leader Seguin de Badefol and the “Archpriest”—the former poisoned at dinner by Charles of Navarre to avoid paying him, and the latter assassinated by his own followers. The respite, however, was short. When Don Pedro, as predicted, defaulted on his debts, the Black Prince, hard-pressed by angry unpaid troops, “encouraged them underhand” to filter back into France to supply themselves there by the usual forceful means. Small in numbers but war-hardened and formidable, Anglo-Gascon bands made their way into Champagne and Picardy, “where they did so much damage and wicked acts as caused great tribulation.”
For the Prince, the glory of Najera quickly turned sour; the victory for him was the peak of Fortune’s Wheel—all the rest was to be downward. His pride alienated the Gascons, for “he did not value a knight at one button, nor a burgher nor a burgher’s wife, nor any common folk.” When he transferred the burden of Don Pedro’s debts to the people of Guienne in the form of annual hearth taxes in 1367–68, Gascon lords rebelled and re-opened negotiations with Charles V for a return to French allegiance. A cause and an instrument for upsetting the Treaty of Brétigny was now in the French King’s hands.
Chapter 11
The Gilded Shroud
Such was the France to which Coucy returned in 1367. His own domain, judging by a major step he took in the following year, suffered from the shortage of labor that was afflicting landowners everywhere since the Black Death. Picardy, in the path of English penetration from the start, had suffered