A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [185]
Further on, at Wattwiller, within a day’s ride of Leopold’s castle at Breisach, a treaty was signed on January 13 between Coucy and the Dukes of Austria by which they ceded to him the fief of the deceased Count of Nidau, including the town of Büren, in return for his renouncing his other claims. Whether Coucy on his way out still represented a sufficient threat to extract this settlement, or whether it had been negotiated earlier as the price of his departure, is unrecorded. In any event, he did not go home empty-handed.* The companies straggled back through January and February. Coucy had succeeded in keeping them out of France for almost six months, longer than Du Guesclin had removed them to Spain in 1365.
King Charles in February promptly commissioned him, together with Marshal Sancerre and Olivier de Clisson and several knights who had served with the Güglers, to command operations against their former associates who had resumed pillage in Champagne. The Sire du Coucy, “knight banneret with two knights bachelor and seven squires of his house,” and Marshal Sancerre were each to have 200 men-at-arms, and Clisson 100, in the pay of the King, to lead “against several companies just returned from the borders of Germany.” Evidently they applied successful pressure. By March the Breton companies reappeared along the Rhône and in May were hired by the Pope for renewed war in Italy.
The Anglo-French peace conference in Bruges, reconvened in December 1375 in the presence of dukes, cardinals, Constable Du Guesclin, and other grand personages, spent itself in more legalities, more displays, jousts, fetes, and banquets, and attracted even more people than the previous parley, until an epidemic of some kind subdued its pleasures. The dispute over territories and sovereignty became further complicated by Charles’s demand that Edward pay reparations for damages caused by the war. No agreement was reached except to extend the truce for another year. Again Charles, now anxious for a “good peace,” bethought him of the Sire de Coucy, whose connections in England “well fitted him to treat of peace between the two Kings.”
At the time of Coucy’s expedition against Austria, the restless Isabella had gone home as usual to England, leaving France several months before her husband’s departure. Judging by various gifts, grants, and subsidies showered on her by King Edward, she still exercised a spell upon her father. Now in his dotage, Edward was equally subject to the spell of a beautiful and vulgar mistress, Alice Perrers, to whom he gave the late Queen’s robes and jewels and who paraded through London on her way to a tournament in a triumphal chariot under the title of “Lady of the Sun.” Isabella on her previous visit had not shared residence at court with the supplanter of her mother, but on this occasion her scruples were vanquished by filial affection, or possibly expectation of largesse. The King paid her debts and expenses and servants’ wages and granted pardons to three separate criminals for whom she interceded, including one for “breach of the peace” in killing the servant of another man. The record does not tell why she was interested. She was presented “by the King’s own hand” with a hooded robe of scarlet cloth cut in the style of the robes of the Garter “with hood and sleeves furred and turned up with ermine”; a second of the same for St. George’s Day; and at Christmas an ermine-trimmed velvet robe each for herself and her daughter Philippa. (Marie, as heiress to the Coucy domain, remained in France.)
As King Edward’s granddaughter, eight-year-old Philippa was a distinct personage who had been betrothed since the age of four to Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, then aged ten. In consequence of this alliance she bore the title of Countess of Oxford and shared with her mother in the bounty of the autumnal monarch. As the year turned, Edward gave Isabella a complete