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such a warm reception that he had to beat a hasty retreat back to his ships. The same year he and Gaunt besieged Saint-Malo with no better success. In July 1380 the Earl’s brother, Sir John Arundel who was Marshal of England, led a nasty little raid on Brittany which demonstrated both the savagery of the English and their self righteous hatred of the Pope at Avignon. His troops stormed a convent and raped and tortured the nuns, carrying off some of the unfortunate women to amuse them for the rest of the raid. God, however, does not seem to have appreciated this fine theological distinction between schismatic and orthodox nuns, and a terrible storm sent Sir John to the bottom on the way home, with twenty ships and a thousand men. Only Sir Hugh Calveley and seven others were washed ashore alive.

In the same month the Earl of Buckingham and Sir Robert Knollys marched out of Calais on yet another chevauchée. They made for Brittany by a circular route which went through the Beauce and Vendôme before linking up with Duke John’s troops at Rennes. They did the usual fearful damage without being offered battle, and achieved nothing.

It was also in July 1380 that Bertrand du Guesclin fell ill and died while he was besieging a castle in the Auvergne. His master survived him less than three months, dying on 16 September at Vincennes from a heart attack. He was only forty-three. Yet even though he had failed to drive the English out of his country, Charles V had won back the greater part of that which had been conquered by Edward III.

5

Richard II: A Lost Peace 1380-1399

For ye [Richard] be always inclined to the pleasure of the Frenchmen and to take with them peace, to the confusion and dishonour of the realm of England.

Froissart

For the people of England ... said how Richard of Bordeaux would destroy them all if he be let alone. His heart is so French that he cannot hide it, but a day will come to pay for all.

Froissart

In 1380 the Kings of England and France were both minors. Richard II, born at Bordeaux in 1367, grew up to be fastidious and overbearing, with a streak of megalomania and a neurotic flair for making enemies. Charles VI, a year younger, took after his grandfather John II in combining an excessive love of pleasure with a pugnacious and unbalanced temperament. Both these monarchs were surrounded by greedy, opinionated uncles. In England the enormously rich and powerful John of Gaunt so obviously thought that he deserved a throne himself that some contemporaries suspected him of seeking to supplant young Richard ; the Earl of Cambridge was a timid nonentity—‘a prince that loved his ease and little business’—but the youngest uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Buckingham and future Duke of Gloucester, was as ambitious as he was violent-tempered and would later intrigue murderously against his nephew’s government. The three English royal Dukes reluctantly acquiesced in the realm being ruled by a council chosen by Parliament. In France, on the other hand, Philip the Bold of Burgundy soon governed the kingdom as he pleased, the Duke of Anjou becoming more interested in pursuing a claim to the Neapolitan throne, while the Duke of Berry was immersed in a lavish patronage of the arts.

The War in these years was an international struggle which was not restricted to England and France. At the beginning of Richard II’s reign the English Parliament spoke fearfully of all the wars in ‘France, Spain, Ireland, Aquitaine, Brittany and others’—which would soon extend to Flanders, Scotland and even Portugal. The conflict was further complicated by the schism between Rome and Avignon ; there was no longer an impartial Pope to mediate. Moreover by now it was the French rather than the English who were the aggressors in Guyenne and at sea, and England went in fear of invasion.

The most urgent tasks of Richard II’s Council were to find ships to fight the combined French and Castilian fleet which was raiding the south coast, and to maintain the garrisons on the French coast which kept open the sea-route to Guyenne.