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By Root 1307 0

which could not tack but only sail before the wind. The Spaniards were commanded by a professional admiral, Ambrosio Boccanegra, whose father had been admiral for Don Pedro but, with a sharp eye for the Wheel of Fortune, had changed sides at the right moment. The English commander was the Earl of Pembroke, a son-in-law of King Edward, aged 25 with a bad moral reputation and no known naval experience. Sailing into the bay, his ships were rammed by the Castillans, who sprayed the English rigging and decks with oil which they ignited by means of flaming arrows. From high poops or “castles” taller than the enemy’s, they threw stones down upon the English archers. In a two-day battle the English ships were burned, routed, and sunk. Among other losses, the vessel carrying the money was sent to the bottom.

Loss of the money weakened England’s hold of Aquitaine, which depended on payment of troops. Castilian control of the sea endangered communication with Bordeaux and, worse, opened the way to French raids on English shores. With just that in mind Charles was at this time developing a naval base and shipbuilding yards at Rouen, where the largest ships could ride up the Seine with the tide. Rather than wait to be attacked at home, the aging King Edward, now sixty, swore to go overseas himself “with such puissance that he would abide to give battle to the whole power of France.”

Assembling another fleet by the usual method of “arresting” merchant ships with their own masters and crews, and taking with him the ailing Black Prince and John of Gaunt, King Edward sailed with a large force at the end of August 1372, ready to brave the Castilians, only to be defeated by the weather. Contrary winds that prevailed for nine weeks repeatedly turned back the fleet or held it in port until it was too late in the year to go. The King had to give up the attempt at a cost of enormous expenditure in provisions and equipment, in pay and maintenance of mariners and men-at-arms, in cessation of trade and economic loss to the shipowners, and, not least, in growing discontent with the war.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

The naval fiasco led indirectly to the tragic fate of England’s third great soldier, the Captal de Buch. While Edward’s fleet floundered offshore, the French were recovering La Rochelle and its hinterland, and in the course of these combats the Captal was taken. He was caught at night by a Franco-Castilian landing party under the command of Owen of Wales, a protégé of France claiming to be the true Prince of Wales. Though the Captal fought mightily by torchlight, he was overpowered. Contrary to chivalric custom, Charles held him in prison in the Temple in Paris without privilege of ransom. The fate of the Captal became the wonder and dismay of knighthood.

Political purpose was more important to Charles V than the chivalric cult. He had never forgiven the Captal’s defection after the Battle of Cocherel in 1364, when the Captal at first turned French, in response to Charles’s grant of large revenues, and then relapsed. His heart belonged to his companion in arms, the Black Prince, and when war was renewed in 1369, he repudiated his homage to the King of France, gave back the properties, and rejoined the English. Charles was now determined to keep him out of action.

Although King Edward offered to exchange three or four French prisoners with ransoms worth 100,000 francs, Charles refused absolutely to let the intrepid Gascon be ransomed, even though he had been the rescuer of Charles’s wife and family at Meaux. While the Captal languished, French nobles pleaded with the King not to let a brave knight die in prison, but Charles said he