A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [272]
Commanding eighty knights and a total force of 1,500 fully paid for six months in advance, Vienne crossed in the early summer of 1385, bringing a “free gift” of 50,000 gold francs to the King of Scotland and fifty suits of armor, including lances and shields, to his nobles. The Scottish envoys had indeed asked the French to bring equipment to arm a thousand Scots, which should have been a warning, but the realities of Scotland proved an unpleasant surprise. Castles were bare and gloomy with primitive conditions and few comforts in a miserable climate. The damp stone huts of clan chieftains were worse, lacking windows or chimneys, filled with peat smoke and the smell of manure. Their inhabitants engaged in prolonged vendettas of organized cattle-raiding, wife-stealing, betrayal, and murder. They had no iron to shoe their horses nor leather for saddles and bridles, which previously had been imported ready-made from Flanders.
Accustomed to “tapestried halls, goodly castles, and soft beds,” the French asked themselves, “Why have we come hither? We never knew what poverty meant until now.” Their hosts were no better pleased with the visitors. They resented the luxury-loving French knights and welcomed them coldly. Instead of marching toward pitched battle with banners flying, they withdrew their forces when they learned that a large English army was advancing.
Diverted by a new outbreak in Flanders, the French army of reinforcement did not come. During enforced idleness, Admiral de Vienne’s frustrated martial ardor turned to love; he engaged in a guilty amour with a cousin of the Scottish King which enraged his hosts “so that the Admiral was in danger of death.” Whether the final quarrel was over this issue or because the Scots insisted that the French should pay the cost of their visit, the Admiral in any case undertook to bear the cost personally, hurriedly hired a number of ships, and departed.
Meanwhile, the party of Ghent, led by Artevelde’s successor Francis Ackerman, had seized Damme, the port of Bruges at the mouth of the Scheldt where the French reinforcements for Scotland were to have been launched. The attack was prompted by the English, who were suffering the usual terrors spread by rumors of a French invasion. A French army, bringing the King fresh from his marriage bed, marched north to besiege Damme and, though suffering much from the heat, from English archers, and from an outbreak of plague, recaptured it after a siege of six weeks.
Punishment was savage, chiefly by the Burgundians, who burned and destroyed up to the gates of Ghent. Many prisoners, taken for ransom, were put to death to serve as an example. One of them at the block warned his executioners that “the King can kill men of strong heart, but though he exterminates all Flemings their dry bones will rise up to fight him again.” The point was borne in upon the Duke of Burgundy that alienation of his own subjects was not in his best interests. A peace settlement without further penalties or fines was concluded in December at Tournai and efforts made afterward to restore Flanders’ damaged commerce. But the harm done by decades of strife could not be undone; the great age of Flemish prosperity had passed.
Possibly stimulated by all the weddings, Coucy’s remarriage at the age of 46 to a girl some thirty years his junior took place in February 1386. The bride was Isabelle, daughter of the Duc de Lorraine, “a very beautiful demoiselle of the noble and great generation of the house of Blois.” She had been considered as a bride for the King during the interval when Stephen of Bavaria was recalcitrant, and was described as “of the King’s age or very close,” which would have made her sixteen to eighteen. Charles had been “near agreed” to the match until the Bavarian proposal was revived.
Little is known of the second Isabelle de Coucy except