The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [43]
Nothing shows Charles’s resourcefulness more than his use of du Guesclin. Perroy considers him to have been ‘incapable of winning a battle or of being successful in a siege of any scope, just good enough to put new life into pillaging routiers who recognized their master in him, swollen with self-importance’. This is not quite fair. Admittedly du Guesclin was a rotten general, but in the end he learnt to understand his King’s Fabian tactics, recognizing that there was no other way of defeating the English combination of archers and dismounted men-at-arms in a direct confrontation. He became a commander who, if he could not win battles, could win campaigns. Charles deliberately metamorphosed the ugly, ungifted plebeian little man into a folk-hero, ransoming him at exaggerated prices, making him a Count and finally burying him with the Kings of France at Saint-Denis.
Throughout 1368 Charles’s agents collected nearly 900 appeals against the Black Prince in Aquitaine, appeals by magnates and squires, by towns, by bishops and abbots. All this was done in secret, until at the very end of the year the French King announced publicly that he was entitled to receive such appeals. In January 1369 he sent a summons to the Black Prince at Bordeaux to answer them. ‘We command you to come to our city of Paris and there to show and present yourself before us in our chamber of peers.’ The Prince, visibly astonished, shook his head and then glared at the French envoys. ‘Sirs, we will gladly go to Paris,’ he replied grimly, ‘but I assure you that it shall be with helmet on our head and 60,000 men.’ However though Prince Edward might be able to send an army he could not now ride with it; since his Spanish campaign he had suffered from dysentery and mysterious fevers and was now swollen with dropsy—he could only travel by litter. Illness was affecting both his temper and his judgement.
Edward III, shrewder than his son, saw impending disaster and told him to withdraw the hearth tax. The English King implored Charles not to receive appeals from Aquitaine and suggested that both sides make the formal renunciations stipulated ten years earlier at Brétigny. Charles took no notice and sent a letter of formal defiance to King Edward ; it was delivered—so Froissart claims—by a scullion, which infuriated him. War was declared in June 1369. In November the French King announced that he had confiscated Aquitaine.
Before the English knew what was happening the French had also overrun Abbeville and the county of Ponthieu. Fighting broke out in Pérrigord, in Quercy and in the Agenais, while all the Rouergue was lost. At the end of 1369 the English suffered a truly disastrous casualty; the Prince had hastily recalled Sir John Chandos, who returned to be killed at an obscure siege on New Year’s Eve. Even his enemies mourned him—Charles V said that had Chandos lived he would have found a way of making a lasting peace.
The English resorted to old, tried tactics. King Edward’s third son John of Gaunt—now Duke of Lancaster-led a chevauchée into Normandy in midsummer 1369, before the harvest. It was indistinguishable from a Grand Company’s campaign as the English government was too short of money to pay the troops properly and made arrangements to pay them out of booty, appointing special receivers for the purpose. Indeed many of Gaunt’s men were routiers, together with large numbers of the worst criminals in England who had been promised pardons. The following year Sir Robert Knollys-who had once boasted that he fought neither for the King of England