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Can nought conforem a pees bytwene the pope and his enymys;

Ne bitwene two Cristene kynges, can no wighte pees make,

Profitable to ayther people.

Nor could Charles find a settlement in Brittany. Coucy and others were sent on several missions, evidently in search of a formula, and a Breton Assembly of the Three Estates pleaded movingly for a pardon of their Duke, but Charles mistrusted Montfort too much to restore him. Montfort on his part would make no peace with the sovereign who had confiscated his dukedom. For others, particularly Du Guesclin, the situation was a tangle of conflicting loyalties. Reluctant to fight his Breton compatriots, and subjected to a whispering campaign by his enemies at court, Du Guesclin left Brittany to lead a campaign against the Free Companies in Auvergne. Here, while besieging a castle, he suddenly fell ill and died in July 1380. While his burial was taking place in the royal mausoleum at St. Denis with honors “as though he had been the King’s son,” a new English expedition under Buckingham was already on its way. With the enemy at hand, and war or unrest in Brittany and Flanders, France was without a Constable.

At urgent councils held to decide Du Guesclin’s successor, Coucy and Clisson were the leading candidates. Because of the “great repute” he had won in Normandy and the “great favor” in which the King held him, Coucy was offered the appointment, the highest and most lucrative lay office of the realm.

As chief military officer, the Constable outranked the royal princes; an attack upon his person was considered a crime of lèse-majesté. He was responsible for cohesion of the armed forces, and for tactical command when the King did not take the field. With control of recruitment, enrollment, provisioning, and all other arrangements for war, his opportunities for enlarging his fortune were immense. If the King was not engaged, the Constable’s banner flew over captured towns; all booty theoretically belonged to him, except for money and prisoners reserved to the King and for artillery reserved to the Master of Crossbows. In addition to a fixed salary of 2,000 francs a month in peace as in war, he was paid upon the outbreak of hostilities a sum equal to one day’s pay for every man-at-arms under contract. Even if this was intended for military expenses, it offered the recipient considerable scope. And apart from its profits, the Constableship had become, with the widening of war, a post of real function.

For reasons that remain enigmatic, Coucy declined the appointment. The reason he gave the King was that in order to hold Brittany, the Constable should be someone well known to, and familiar with, the Bretons—such as Clisson, whose appointment Coucy advised. His excuse, by itself, seems unconvincing. Clearly the problem of Brittany was crucial; nevertheless, if a settlement had to be reached with Montfort, Coucy himself, as Montfort’s former brother-in-law, was more likely to achieve it than Clisson, Montfort’s mortal enemy. Coucy and Montfort had both been married to daughters of Edward III, and though both wives were dead, the link established a relationship of importance in the Middle Ages, and in fact determined the choice of Coucy as mediator in the next reign.

Something is missing from Coucy’s explanation. It is improbable that, like Dante’s Pope, he made “the grand refusal” from a sense of inadequacy to the task. Modesty was certainly not a mark of the Coucys, and Enguerrand VII, judging by his seals and his Order of the Crown, held himself very highly. He accepted without hesitation all other assignments—battle, diplomacy, secret missions, foreign war, domestic governance—that crowded upon him, including the final one that was to cost his life. He was one of the nobility forced by the growing complications of public affairs to become statesmen, not merely swordsmen on horseback. Coucy’s rank, prowess, and territorial importance would have warranted military command in any case, but other qualities were making him indispensable