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For the Duke of Burgundy, peace was a pressing necessity in order to restore the commerce between Flanders and England. It could only have been with his approval that a holy man called Robert the Hermit appeared at court, sponsored by the King’s chamberlain, Guillaume Martel, to bring word that peace was Heaven’s command. When returning from Palestine, the Hermit said, a voice had spoken to him out of a terrible storm at sea, telling him that he would survive the peril and that on reaching land he must go to the King and tell him to make peace with England, and warn that all who opposed it would pay dearly. Peace had its opponents as well as advocates.

The most important advocate—and most significant change in the situation—was the King of England. As autocratic as his father, but no soldier, Richard II wanted to end the war in order to reduce the power of the barons and promote a more absolute monarchy. His wish coincided with that of the Duke of Lancaster, who, having established his daughters as Queens of Castile and Portugal, wanted peace with France to protect their interests. “Let my brother Gloucester go make war on Sultan Bajazet, who is menacing Christendom on the frontiers of Hungary,” he said; that was the proper sphere for those anxious to fight.

Through the joint efforts of Lancaster and Burgundy, parley was resumed in May 1393 at Leulinghen, a war-torn village on the banks of the Somme near Abbeville. For lack of housing, the delegates—Burgundy and Berry for France, Lancaster, Gloucester, and the Archbishop of York for England—and their retinues lived in tents, among which Philip of Burgundy’s was naturally the focus of all eyes. It was made of painted canvas in the form of a castle with turrets and crenellated walls and a portcullis guarding the entrance beween two towers of wood. The main hall inside gave onto many separate apartments divided by little streets.

King Charles was theoretically if not actively present, housed in a nearby Benedictine abbey with a fine enclosed garden on the banks of the beautiful river. With his mind fixed on the adventure of crusade, the King of France, like the King of England, was ready to close a struggle begun before either of them had been born. Meetings of the parley were held in a chapel with a thatched roof and walls hung with tapestries depicting ancient battles to conceal the ruined murals behind. When Lancaster remarked that the delegates should not be looking at scenes of war when treating of peace, the tapestries were hurriedly removed and replaced by scenes of the last days of Christ. As senior uncles, Berry and Lancaster sat on elevated chairs with Burgundy and Gloucester next to them, and counts, prelates, knights, learned lawyers, and clerks ranged along the walls. Among the delegates moved a royal visitor, Leon V de Lusignan, called King of Armenia although in fact all that remained of his realm was Cyprus. Having lost that too to the Turks, he was a fervent voice importuning both the French Dukes and the English for a crusade.

The schism became an issue when Pope Clement sent the noble Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna, well supplied with gold and magnificent gifts, to urge the legitimacy of the Avignonese papacy on the English. Angrily Lancaster said to him, “It is you, Cardinals of Avignon, who gave [the schism] birth, you who sustain it, you who augment it every day. Woe to you!” Burgundy did not argue the issue. He offered to ignore the schism in order to move the parley toward a treaty, leaving it to the University to work out the means of re-uniting the Church.

When it came to the French demand for the razing of Calais and the English demand for fulfillment of all the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, the parties were as far apart as ever. Calais was “the last town we would ever give up,” the English said, while the French insisted that territories which had resolutely refused to give their allegiance to England could not be forcibly transferred. At this impasse each side discreetly