The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [53]
Nevertheless the English Council had an excellent plan of defence. The King’s Ships were to lie in the Thames until the enemy troops had been lured inland and then attack their fleet to cut off any hope of escape. Meanwhile small English forces scattered along the coast were to retreat before the French until they could rejoin the main English army near London.
However, the invasion was delayed until the autumn because of the illness of Philip of Burgundy. When the time came the sailing-masters told the French high command that the weather was by now too unreliable. ‘Most dread and powerful lords : of a truth, the sea is foul and the nights be too long, too dark, too cold, too wet and too windy. We are short of victuals, while we must have a full moon and a favourable wind with us. Moreover the English coast and the English havens are dangerous. Too many of our ships are old and too many are small and might be swamped by those that are large. And the sea is at its worst between 29 September and 25 November.’ In mid-November 1386 the French decided to call off the invasion.
No doubt had the French managed to land they would have perpetrated atrocities like those of the English in France. Some historians emphasize that French troops behaved just as badly to their own people as the English, and in this context it has been argued that late medieval France was not a nation but a collection of nations. However, there is plenty of evidence to show that Frenchmen of every region blamed the anarchy and bloodshed of the War exclusively on the English ; it is significant that throughout France the routiers were known as ‘the English’, although there were many Frenchmen among them. This hatred gave rise to such strange legends as the story that the English had tails (probably due to Welsh footmen hanging their long knives from the back of their belts).
The War played an important role in the growth of English nationalism. As the English began to regard the French as their natural prey, they developed feelings of hatred and contempt; in a poem Eustache Deschamps (who died in 1410) credits an English soldier with the words:
‘Dog of a Frenchman, you do nought but drink wine.’ As with the French, a common hatred came to override local loyalties.
Even so, some of the noblest English minds of the time rejected the War. In De Officio Regis the Lollard heresiarch John Wyclif condemned all warfare as contrary to God’s Commandment to love one’s neighbour ; he also questioned any man’s right to claim a kingdom and to hazard lives in pursuit of such a claim. The Dominican John Bromyard, by no means a heretic, was concerned in his Summa Predicantium (Points for Preachers) with the corruption caused by warfare—the greed, contempt for life and lack of scruple which it engendered, especially among ill-paid troops.
Hatred of the French was much in evidence at the Parliament of October 1386, which met when England still thought itself threatened by invasion. The absence of the moderating influence of John of Gaunt, away in Castile, was only too apparent. The King’s uncle Buckingham, now Duke of Gloucester, led the opposition to the Chancellor, Suffolk. Richard reacted with characteristic arrogance, saying that his people were in rebellion and he would ask ‘our cousin, the King of France’ to help put them down. This provoked the retort that if a monarch ’rashly in his insane counsels exercise his own peculiar desire‘, it was lawful for lords and magnates ‘to pluck down the King from his royal throne and to raise to the throne some