Chapter 16, part 2 - History of England 1B, by David Hume

In that critical moment the Captal de Buche unexpectedly appeared, and attacked in flank the dauphin’s line, which fell into some confusion. Landas, Bodenai, and St. Venant, to whom the care of that young prince and his brothers had been committed, too anxious for their charge, or for their own safety, carried them off the field, and set the example of flight, which was followed by that whole division. The duke of Orleans, seized with alike panic, and imagining all was lost, thought no longer of fighting, but carried off his division by a retreat, which soon turned into a flight. Lord Chandos called out to the prince, that the day was won; and encouraged him to attack the division under King John, which, though more numerous than the whole English army, were somewhat dismayed with the precipitate flight of their companions. John here made the utmost efforts to retrieve by his valor what his imprudence had betrayed; and the only resistance made that day was by his line of battle. The prince of Wales fell with impetuosity on some German cavalry placed in the front, and commanded by the counts of Sallebruche, Nydo, and Nosto; a fierce battle ensued: one side were encouraged by the near prospect of so great a victory; the other were stimulated by the shame of quitting the field to an enemy so much inferior: but the three German generals, together with the duke of Athens, constable of France, falling in battle, that body of cavalry gave way, and left the king himself exposed to the whole fury of the enemy. The ranks were every moment thinned around him: the nobles fell by his side one after another: his son, scarce fourteen years of age, received a wound, while he was fighting valiantly in defence of his father: the king himself, spent with fatigue and overwhelmed by numbers, might easily have been slain; but every English gentleman, ambitious of taking alive the royal prisoner, spared him in the action, exhorted him to surrender, and offered him quarter: several, who attempted to seize him, suffered for their temerity. He still cried out, “Where is my cousin, the prince of Wales?” and seemed unwilling to become prisoner to any person of inferior rank. But being told that the prince was at a distance on the field, he threw down his gauntlet, and yielded himself to Dennis de Morbec, a knight of Arras, who had been obliged to fly his country for murder. His son was taken with him.[*]

The prince of Wales, who had been carried away in pursuit of the flying enemy, finding the field entirely clear, had ordered a tent to be pitched, and was reposing himself after the toils of battle; inquiring still with great anxiety concerning the fate of the French monarch. He despatched the earl of Warwick to bring him intelligence; and that nobleman came happily in time to save the life of the captive prince which was exposed to greater danger than it had been during the heat of the action. The English had taken him by violence from Morbec: the Gascons claimed the honor of detaining the royal prisoner; and some brutal soldiers, rather than yield the prize to their rivals, had threatened to put him to death.[*] Warwick overawed both parties, and approaching the king with great demonstrations of respect, offered to conduct him to the prince’s tent.

Here commences the real and truly admirable heroism of Edward; for victories are vulgar things in comparison of that moderation and humanity displayed by a young prince of twenty-seven years of age, not yet cooled from the fury of battle, and elated by as extraordinary and as unexpected success as had ever crowned the arms of any commander. He came forth to meet the captive king with all the marks of regard and sympathy; administered comfort to him amidst his misfortunes; paid him the tribute of praise due to his valor; and ascribed his own victory merely to the blind chance of war, or to a superior providence, which controls all the efforts of human force and prudence.[**] The behavior of John showed him not unworthy of this courteous treatment; his present abject fortune never made him forget a moment that he was a king: more touched by Edward’s generosity than by his own calamities, he confessed that, notwithstanding his defeat and captivity, his honor was still unimpaired; and that if he yielded the victory, it was at least gained by a prince of such consummate valor and humanity.

Edward ordered a repast to be prepared in his tent for the prisoner; and he himself served at the royal captive’s table, as if he had been one of his retinue: he stood at the king’s back during the meal; constantly refused to take a place at table; and declared that, being a subject, he was too well acquainted with the distance between his own rank and that of royal majesty, to assume such freedom. All his father’s pretensions to the crown of France were now buried in oblivion: John in captivity received the honors of a king, which were refused him when seated on the throne: his misfortunes, not his title, were respected; and the French prisoners, conquered by this elevation of mind, more than by their late discomfiture, burst into tears of admiration; which were only checked by the reflection, that such genuine and unaltered heroism in an enemy must certainly in the issue prove but the more dangerous to their native country.[*]

All the English and Gascon knights imitated the generous example set them by their prince. The captives were every where treated with humanity, and were soon after dismissed, on paying moderate ransoms to the persons into whose hands they had fallen. The extent of their fortunes was considered; and an attention was given that they should still have sufficient means left to perform their military service in a manner suitable to their rank and quality. Yet so numerous were the noble prisoners, that these ransoms, added to the spoils gained in the field, were sufficient to enrich the prince’s army; and as they had suffered very little in the action, their joy and exultation were complete.

The prince of Wales conducted his prisoner to Bordeaux; and not being provided with forces so numerous as might enable him to push his present advantages, he concluded a two years’ truce with France,[**] which was also become requisite, that he might conduct the captive king with safety into England. He landed at Southwark, and was met by a great concourse of people, of all ranks and stations. {1357.

The prisoner was clad in royal apparel, and mounted on a white steed, distinguished by its size and beauty, and by the richness of its furniture. The conqueror rode by his side in a meaner attire, and carried by a black palfrey. In this situation, more glorious than all the insolent parade of a Roman triumph, he passed through the streets of London, and presented the king of France to his father, who advanced to meet him, and received him with the same courtesy as if he had been a neighboring potentate that had voluntarily come to pay him a friendly visit.[***] It is impossible, in reflecting on this noble conduct, not to perceive the advantages which resulted from the otherwise whimsical principles of chivalry, and which gave men in those rude times some superiority even over people of a more cultivated age and nation.

The king of France, besides the generous treatment which he met with in England, had the melancholy consolation of the wretched, to see companions in affliction. The king of Scots had been eleven years a captive in Edward’s hands; and the good fortune of this latter monarch had reduced at once the two neighboring potentates, with whom he was engaged in war, to be prisoners in his capital.

1357.

But Edward finding that the conquest of Scotland was nowise advanced by the captivity of its sovereign, and that the government conducted by Robert Stuart, his nephew and heir, was still able to defend itself, consented to restore David Bruce to his liberty, for the ransom of one hundred thousand marks sterling; and that prince delivered the sons of all his principal nobility, as hostages for the payment.[*]

1358.

Meanwhile, the captivity of John, joined to the preceding disorders of the French government, had produced in that country a dissolution, almost total, of civil authority, and had occasioned confusions the most horrible and destructive that had ever been experienced in any age or in any nation. The dauphin, now about eighteen years of age, naturally assumed the royal power during his father’s captivity; but though endowed with an excellent capacity, even in such early years, he possessed neither experience nor authority sufficient to defend a state, assailed at once by foreign power and shaken by intestine faction. In order to obtain supply, he assembled the states of the kingdom: that assembly, instead of supporting his administration, were themselves seized with the spirit of confusion; and laid hold of the present opportunity to demand limitations of the prince’s power, the punishment of past malversations, and the liberty of the king of Navarre. Marcel, provost of the merchants and first magistrate of Paris, put himself at the head of the unruly populace; and from the violence and temerity of his character, pushed them to commit the most criminal outrages against the royal authority. They detained the dauphin in a sort of captivity; they murdered in his presence Robert de Clermont and John de Conflans, mareschals, the one of Normandy, the other of Burgundy; they threatened all the other ministers with a like fate; and when Charles, who was obliged to temporize and dissemble, made his escape from their hands, they levied war against him, and openly erected the standard of rebellion, The other cities of the kingdom, in imitation of the capital, shook off the dauphin’s authority, took the government into their own hands, and spread the disorder into every province. The nobles, whose inclinations led them to adhere to the crown, and were naturally disposed to check these tumults, had lost all their influence; and being reproached with cowardice on account of the base desertion of their sovereign in the battle of Poiotiers, were treated with universal contempt by the inferior orders. The troops, who, from the deficiency of pay, were no longer retained in discipline, threw off all regard to their officers, sought the means of subsistence by plunder and robbery, and associating to them all the disorderly people with whom that age abounded, formed numerous bands, which infested all parts of the kingdom. They desolated the open country; burned and plundered the villages; and by cutting off all means of communication or subsistence, reduced even the inhabitants of the walled towns to the most extreme necessity. The peasants, formerly oppressed, and now left unprotected by their masters, became desperate from their present misery; and rising every where in arms, carried to the last extremity those disorders which were derived from the sedition of the citizens and disbanded soldiers.[*]

The gentry, hated for their tyranny, were every where exposed to the violence of popular rage; and instead of meeting with the regard due to their past dignity, became only, on that account, the object of more wanton insult to the mutinous peasants. They were hunted like wild beasts, and put to the sword without mercy: their castles were consumed with fire, and levelled to the ground: their wives and daughters were first ravished, then murdered: the savages proceeded so far as to impale some gentlemen, and roast them alive before a slow fire: a body of nine thousand of them broke into Meaux, where the wife of the dauphin, with above three hundred ladies, had taken shelter: the most brutal treatment and most atrocious cruelty were justly dreaded by this helpless company: but the Captal de Buche, though in the service of Edward, yet moved by generosity and by the gallantry of a true knight, flew to their rescue, and beat off the peasants with great slaughter. In other civil wars, the opposite factions, falling under the government of their several leaders, commonly preserve still the vestige of some rule and order: but here the wild state of nature seemed to be renewed: every man was thrown loose and independent of his fellows: and the populousness of the country, derived from the preceding police of civil society, served only to increase the horror and confusion of the scene.

Amidst these disorders, the king of Navarre made his escape from prison, and presented a dangerous leader to the furious malecontents.[*] But the splendid talents of this prince qualified him only to do mischief, and to increase the public distractions: he wanted the steadiness and prudence requisite for making his intrigues subservient to his ambition, and forming his numerous partisans into a regular faction. He revived his pretensions, somewhat obsolete, to the crown of France: but while he advanced this claim, he relied entirely on his alliance with the English, who were concerned in interest to disappoint his pretensions; and who, being public and inveterate enemies to the state, served only, by the friendship which they seemingly bore him, to render his cause the more odious. And in all his operations, he acted more like a leader of banditti, than one who aspired to be the head of a regular government, and who was engaged by his station to endeavor the reëstablishment of order in the community.

The eyes, therefore, of all the French, who wished to restore peace to their miserable and desolated country, were turned towards the dauphin; and that young prince, though not remarkable for his military talents, possessed so much prudence and spirit, that he daily gained the ascendant over all his enemies. Marcel, the seditious provost of Paris, was slain, while he was attempting to deliver the city to the king of Navarre and the English; and the capital immediately returned to its duty.[**] The most considerable bodies of the mutinous peasants were dispersed, and put to the sword: some bands of military robbers underwent the same fate: and though many grievous disorders still remained, France began gradually to assume the face of a regular civil government, and to form some plan for its defence and security.

During the confusion in the dauphin’s affairs, Edward seemed to have a favorable opportunity for pushing his conquests: but besides that his hands were tied by the truce, and he could only assist underhand the faction of Navarre, the state of the English finances and military power, during those ages, rendered the kingdom incapable of making any regular or steady effort, and obliged it to exert its force at very distant intervals, by which all the projected ends were commonly disappointed. Edward employed himself, during a conjuncture so inviting, chiefly in negotiations with his prisoner; and John had the weakness to sign terms of peace, which, had they taken effect, must have totally ruined and dismembered his kingdom. He agreed to restore all the provinces which had been possessed by Henry II. and his two sons, and to annex them forever to England, without any obligation of homage or fealty on the part of the English monarch. But the dauphin and the states of France rejected this treaty, so dishonorable and pernicious to the kingdom;[*] and Edward on the expiration of the truce, having now, by subsidies and frugality, collected some treasure, prepared himself for a new invasion of France.

The great authority and renown of the king and the prince of Wales, the splendid success of their former enterprises, and the certain prospect of plunder from the defenceless provinces of France, soon brought together the whole military power of England; and the same motives invited to Edward’s standard all the hardy adventurers of the different countries of Europe.[**] He passed over to Calais, where he assembled an army of near a hundred thousand men; a force which the dauphin could not pretend to withstand in the open field: that prince, therefore, prepared himself to elude a blow, which it was impossible for him to resist. He put all the considerable towns in a posture of defence; ordered them to be supplied with magazines and provisions; distributed proper garrisons in all places; secured every thing valuable in the fortified cities; and chose his own station at Paris, with a view of allowing the enemy to vent their fury on the open country.

1359.

The king, aware of this plan of defence, was obliged to carry along with him six thousand wagons, loaded with the provisions necessary for the subsistence of his army. After ravaging the province of Picardy, he advanced into Champagne; and having a strong desire of being crowned king of France at Rheims, the usual place in which this ceremony is performed, he laid siege to that city, and carried on his attacks, though without success, for the space of seven weeks.[***]

1360.

The place was bravely defended by the inhabitants, encouraged by the exhortations of the archbishop, John de Craon; till the advanced season (for this expedition was entered upon in the beginning of winter) obliged the king to raise the siege. The province of Champagne, meanwhile, was desolated by his incursions; and he thence conducted his army, with a like intent, into Burgundy. He took and pillaged Tonnerre, Gaillon, Avalon, and other small places; but the duke of Burgundy, that he might preserve his country from further ravages, consented to pay him the sum of one hundred thousand nobles.[*] Edward then bent his march towards the Nivernois, which saved itself by a like composition: he laid waste Brie and the Gatinois; and after a long march, very destructive to France, and somewhat ruinous to his own troops, he appeared before the gates of Paris, and taking up his quarters at Bourg-la-Reine, extended his army to Longjumeau, Montrouge, and Vaugirard. He tried to provoke the dauphin to hazard a battle, by sending him a defiance; but could not make that prudent prince change his plan of operations. Paris was safe from the danger of an assault by its numerous garrison; from that of a blockade by its well-supplied magazines: and as Edward himself could not subsist his army in a country wasted by foreign and domestic enemies, and left also empty by the precaution of the dauphin, he was obliged to remove his quarters; and he spread his troops into the provinces of Maine, Beausse, and the Chartraine, which were abandoned to the fury of their devastations.[**] The only repose which France experienced was during the festival of Easter, when the king stopped the course of his ravages. For superstition can sometimes restrain the rage of men, which neither justice nor humanity is able to control.