A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [377]
In France, Jean de Nevers, who had succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1404, turned assassin, precipitating a train of evils. In 1407 he employed a gang of toughs to murder his rival Louis d’Orléans in the streets of Paris. As Louis was returning to his hotel after dark, he was set upon by hired killers who cut off his left hand holding the reins, dragged him from his mule, hacked him to death with swords, axes, and wooden clubs, and left his body in the gutter while his mounted escort, which never seems to have been much use on these occasions, fled.
Protected from penalty by his ducal power, John the Fearless publicly defended his act, through a spokesman, as justifiable tyrannicide, charging Louis with vice, corruption, sorcery, and a long list of public and private villainies. Since Louis was associated in the public mind with the extravagance and license of the court and with its endless demand for money, John of Burgundy was able to make himself appear the people’s champion by opposing the government’s latest tax levy. In the void left by a mad King, the Duke filled the people’s craving for a royal friend and protector.
Mortal hatreds and implacable conflict between Burgundians and Orléanists consumed France for the next thirty years. Regional and political groups formed around the antagonists, brigand companies employed by both sides re-emerged, leaving their smoking tracks of pillage and massacre. Each side raised the Oriflamme against the other, won and lost control of the helpless King and the capital, multiplied taxes. Administrative structures fell into disorder, finance and justice were abused, offices bought and sold, Parlement became a market place of corruption. The realm, declared an Orléanist manifesto, was sunk in crime and sin with God blasphemed everywhere, “even by churchmen and children.”
The middle class rose in the same effort to oust corrupt officials and establish measures of good government as Etienne Marcel had led more than fifty years before—and with no more success. Impatient for immediate results, a turbulent collection of the butchers, skinners, and tanners of Paris, called Cabochiens after their leader Caboche, broke into fierce revolt, reproducing the revolt of the Maillotins with increased brutality. Inevitably the bourgeois reacted against them and opened the gates to the Orléanist party which suppressed the revolt, restored venal officials, canceled the reforms and persecuted the reformers. John of Burgundy, who had judiciously removed himself during the violence, was declared a rebel and, following the old pattern of Charles of Navarre, entered into alliance with the English.
Henry IV of England, after continuous struggle against Welsh revolt, baronial antagonists, and a son impatient for the crown, died in 1413, to be succeeded by the said son who at 25 was prepared, with all the sanctimonious energy of a reformed rake, to enter upon a reign of stern virtue and heroic conquest. Relying on the anarchy in France and his arrangements with the Duke of Burgundy, and hoping by military successes to unite the English behind the house of Lancaster, Henry V took up the old war and the threadbare claim to the French crown which had not gained in validity by passing to him through a usurper. On the pretext of various French perfidies, he invaded France in 1415 in Mars’s favorite month of August, announcing that he had come “into his own land, his own country, and his own kingdom.” After the siege and capture of Harfleur in Normandy, he marched north for Calais to return home for the winter. About thirty miles short of his goal, not far from the battlefield of Crécy, he met the French army at Agincourt.
The Battle of Agincourt