The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [108]
That with his name the mothers still their babes?
I see report is fabulous and false.
King Henry VI
Talbot’s expedition to Guyenne of 1452—1453 was a final effort by an exhausted England. The campaign demonstrated a revolution in military technology, French cannon proving more effective than English bows. Fittingly, of the two commanders the Frenchman was a self-made man and an artisan, the Englishman a great noble and preux chevalier.
The English could scarcely believe they had lost Normandy. But refugees were swarming across the Channel. Some of the officials found new posts in England, among them a few Normans—such as Raoul le Sage, Seigneur of Saint-Pierre, and the Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel—while several became royal ‘secretaries of the French tongue’, employed for correspondence with France. Others were not so lucky. Those who suffered most were the soldiers. Sir Andrew Ogard MP3 did his best to help troops from his captaincy of Caen ; in his will of 1454 he wrote how they ‘came out of Normandy in great necessity as starving beggars’. The chronicler Robert Bate records how a large sum was raised to ship these men to Bordeaux ‘to save and keep the King’s right there’, but the money was embezzled so they had to stay and ‘became thieves and murderers in various places of this land’. It was not only the troops who suffered. In 1452 some ‘churchmen, nobles, soldiers and others’ from Maine petitioned Henry VI for relief; they had had to abandon ‘their many benefices, lands, lordships, estates and pensions’ in Maine and then during the conquest of Normandy had lost the movable goods upon which they and their families depended and ‘at this moment the majority of them are utterly ruined and in a state of beggary’. A note written on the document says that the petition was not granted, adding sombrely that many petitioners had been reduced to destitution, that ‘some for grief became ill and died; others were imprisoned for theft and condemned to death by law ; while others still remain, as rebels, in the Kingdom of France’.
As soon as the French had invaded Normandy a rumour had spread throughout England that the duchy had been sold by Suffolk and his government. In January 1450 the Bishop of Chichester, Adam Moleyns—the former Privy Seal and a close friend of Suffolk—was murdered at Portsmouth by Kyriell’s troops when bringing them their pay, lynched as a traitor who had betrayed Normandy to the French. Before Moleyns died he seems to have said something implicating Suffolk. On 28 January the House of Commons accused the Duke of selling the realm to the French. In February they charged him with taking money for Orleans’s release, plotting a French invasion, accepting bribes to stop reinforcements reaching Normandy and Guyenne, and selling secrets of English defences in France ; in March he was impeached for treasonable relations with the French, corruption and mismanagement. King Henry tried to save him by banishing him, but when Suffolk attempted to flee to Calais in April he was intercepted by a ship called the Nicholas (possibly on the orders of the Duke of York); on 2 May he was taken into a dinghy and made to lay his neck on the gunwale, then his head was hacked off with six strokes of a rusty sword.
At the end of May, before Cherbourg had fallen, Jack Cade (or ‘John Amend-all’), a reputed Irishman and undoubted murderer who had served very briefly in Normandy, raised the men of Kent in a peculiarly ugly rebellion. One of their grievances was the betrayal in France, Sir John Fastolf being unfairly accused of running down the garrisons. If there were other reasons, notably corrupt and extortionate government, the loss of Normandy was the spark. This rising, joined by a surprising number of local gentry and even by parish constables, was a far more dangerous affair than the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The rebels reached Blackheath, then retreated before royal troops, but when the King withdrew to Kenilworth they came back, entering London on 3 July, freeing the prisoners in the Marshalsea and