The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [78]
Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury and Count of Perche, was—after Henry V—the most distinguished commander produced by England during the entire Hundred Years War. Henry’s favourite general, he had been made a Knight of the Garter and in 1419 Lieutenant-Governor of Normandy. A strategist as well as a tactician, he was always original and imaginative yet practical and patient at the same time. The Bourgeois of Paris calls him ‘the knightly, skilful and subtle Comte de Salisbury’. Furthermore, he was an all-round soldier, as good at staff work as he was at fighting, while he was probably the first English commander (after King Henry) to be a gunnery expert. His men liked and trusted him, though fearful of his strict discipline. Above all, he worked well with Bedford. The French dreaded the Earl, who was known to drag his captives back to Paris at the end of a rope. In King Henry VI Shakespeare makes the Duke of Anjou say :
Salisbury is a desperate homicide;
He fighteth as one weary of his life.
This may well have been how the Dauphinists saw him, and at this period they themselves were short of even moderately good commanders.
There was a third Englishman of the same calibre as Bedford and Salisbury, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick and Count of Aumale. However although undoubtedly as capable, despite long and conscientious service in France he achieved less. Warwick’s fascination is that he is almost the only English commander in the Hundred Years War (other than a monarch) of whom a probable natural likeness has survived. His effigy at Warwick shows a fine-boned face, fastidious yet powerful and unmistakably patrician, with an expression which is both graceful and arrogant. Even his hands have the same haughty elegance. Moreover we know a good deal about his life from the account written a generation later by the antiquarian John Rous. Born in 1382, Warwick fought and routed Owain Glyndwr when he was only twenty. In 1408 he went on a remarkable pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and en route was the guest of Charles VI at Paris and of the Doge at Venice, besides fighting a triumphant tournament with Pandolfo Malatesta at Verona. On the way home he visited Poland and the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and Germany. After taking part at the siege of Harfleur in 1415 he received Emperor Sigismund at Calais, when he declined to accept the gift of a sword for King Henry, suggesting that the Emperor should present it in person. Warwick played an important part in the conquest of Normandy and in the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Troyes. At various times Captain of Calais, Rouen, Meaux and Beauvais, ‘Captain and Lieutenant General of the King and the Regent in the Field’ in 1426—1427, and a member of the Council of Regency in England, he was a pillar of the Anglo-French state. Immensely wealthy, with an income of nearly £5,000, and of ancient lineage—the Beauchamps had been Earls since 1268—he had the honour of being appointed tutor to the young Henry VI. Due to lack of space there is not much about chivalry in these pages, but its ideals were real enough, and there was no better fifteenth-century English exponent of it than Warwick. It is therefore all the more interesting that this was the man who would burn Joan of Arc.
Salisbury and Warwick could rely on an unusually gifted team, most of whom worked together for twenty years or more. They were not knights-errant like the Earl of Warwick, but professional soldiers. They included Lord Willoughby d’Eresby, Lord Talbot, Lord Scales, Sir John Fastolf, Sir Matthew Gough, Sir Thomas Rempston, Sir Thomas Kyriell and Sir William Glasdale. Brave, brutal men, they throve on a life of battles, raids and skirmishes, an existence which even when not campaigning was a routine of camp, saddle and fortress. One or two lived to be killed in the Wars of the Roses, and nearly all made fortunes.