Why not alternate and have some detailed updates and some overview updates? BTW, PM Baselius444 for more information on this time period; his TL, An Age of Miracles, is set during this period and beyond...
The Dead Live: A Hundred Years' War Timeline
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Why not alternate and have some detailed updates and some overview updates? BTW, PM Baselius444 for more information on this time period; his TL, An Age of Miracles, is set during this period and beyond...
Update Twenty-Nine: Cousinly Feuds
I am back from my vacation and updates will start coming out again. The pace won't be as break-neck as it was during July, mostly because I have a bunch of RL things starting up, but I hope to provide regular updates. We now start getting into the chaos and conflict in France as Charles VI descends into utter madness. I really hope you enjoy, and it is great to be back.
Richard's Rebellion coincided with the end of the ten-year Truce of Rennes that Edward V and Charles VI had signed in 1395. As a result, English efforts to extend the truce were hampered immensely, which when coupled with Louis d'Orléans' wish for conflict and conquest could only result in more conflict and strife to come. In April of 1405 the state of armed truce and relative peace between France and England came to an end with open conflict occurring between the two kingdoms for the first time in 22 years (1). The first years were characterized mostly by raids and counter-raids, as the two sides tested the measure of their opponents, but particularly the upheaval of Richard's Rebellion, with the death of the English representative to Aquitaine, meant that the English were on the back foot from the start and opened the path for significant French attempts at driving out the English interlopers. It was only on the arrival of the new Duke of Aquitaine, the Prince of Wales (2), that English efforts at repelling the French assaults began to prove fruitful. English rule extended from the city of Bordeaux and into the surrounding areas, encompassing much of Saintogne and Périgord, with its borders resting on the cities of Saintes, Angoulême, St. Jean de Cole, Perigeux, Bergerac, Agens and then a narrow strip of territory along the right bank of the Gironde and the lower Dordogne including the towns of Blaye, Bourg, Libourne and Saint-Émilion and the fortress of Fronsac. These places served as the outer defenses of the Bordelais against attack from the north and east. A second block of territory comprised the city of Bayonne together with the territory known as the Terre de Labourd lying south of it and the provinces of the Adour valley to the east, including the important towns of Saint-Sever and Dax. A narrow ribbon of bleak, windswept coastal land running through the Landes connected the two regions and bordered on Albret Lands in Gascony (3).
Aquitaine's economy was based mainly on its production of wine, on the ship-owning community of Bayonne and on the role of Bordeaux as an entrepôt for the produce of the five great river basins of southern France which passed through the Gironde to the sea, although significant economic activity in Saintogne and Périgord provided a vital impetus for the region. It was therefore vulnerable to war and political upheaval, which could sever its links to the highlands of Languedoc and Périgord and make the sea lanes to its principal export markets in England and the Low Countries precarious. England was the natural market for the wines of Bordeaux at a time when wine could not be carried over long distances except by water. The tight, self-perpetuating commercial oligarchy of Bordeaux, from which the city’s governing class was drawn, had close financial relations with the English aristocracy and with the mercantile community of London. The city was reliant on the great granaries of Périgord and Saintonge for their food, being unable to feed the large Bordolais population on the lands surrounding the city alone. The seat of the duchy’s administration was the former citadel of Bordeaux, the Château de l’Ombrière. This large rambling fortress, parts of which dated back to Roman times, was by now entirely enclosed by the city and devoid of any defensive function. It housed the Seneschal of Guyenne, who was the chief administrative, judicial and military authority of the duchy, and the Constable of Bordeaux, who served as its principal financial officer. They were supported by a small group of clerks and military retainers. In addition the Mayor of Bordeaux, a royal appointment, played an increasingly important part in the government of the duchy and were vital to the running of the duchy, supporting the various royal governors and Dukes who officially governed the region. All three officers were generally English knights although exceptionally the office of Seneschal was held throughout the first decade of the 15th century by a Gascon, Gaillard de Durfort, Sieur de Duras. He belonged to one of the most consistently loyal noble families of Guyenne. Recently the practice had also grown up of appointing an English knight as Seneschal of the Landes, whose main function was the defense of the southern marches of the duchy (4).
In addition to the territory which was directly administered from Bordeaux there were several dozen remote castles scattered across south-western France which were garrisoned by companies of routiers, generally Gascon or Béarnais. These captains acknowledged the King of England as their sovereign, but they did not depend on him for their wages and were only loosely controlled by his officials. They financed themselves from patis, essentially protection money collected under agreements imposed by force on the surrounding country. Some of these castles were enclaves of the duchy which had been left stranded behind the lines by the incoming tide of French conquest in the last three decades of the fourteenth century. They included the Pyrenean fortresses of Mauléon and Lourdes, both of them surrounded by territory controlled by the viscounts of Béarn; and the powerful garrisoned castle of Mussidan in the valley of the Isle in Périgord, which belonged to the Montauts, one of the great landed families of the Bordelais. However, most of the remote castles beyond the march had been seized by Gascon companies from their French owners during the last great period of routier activity in the mid-1380s (5). The Albrets had been the foremost barons of English Guyenne until the 1340s and again in the 1360s before throwing in their lot with the French Crown. Their wealth, combined with a pervasive network of kinsmen and clients, made them a formidable force in the region. Charles, the current lord of Albret, was also an influential voice in Paris: a pensioner of Charles VI, an ally of the Duke of Orléans and from 1403 Constable of France. Charles d'Albret, Lord of Albret married Marguerite de Comminges, Countess of Comminges, in late 1403 and had received the County of Bigorre from his patron, the Duc d'Orléans in 1404. This left Gascony split in three large blocks under the Foix-Armagnac, Navarrese and Albret families. Of these the Foix-Armagnac were tied closely to Navarre, who in turn were commonly considered allies of the English, while the Albret were closely aligned with the House of Orléans (6).
Charles de Berry, Duc de Berry et Auvergne, Comte de Montpensier, Poitier, Étampes et Rodez
The betrothal of Enguerrand VIII de Coucy to Jacqueline of Bavaria caused immense challenges for Jean, Duc de Bourgone, who held out hope for the unification of the Low Countries under his dynasty and viewed the extensive lands held by the Coucy's as a threat to those dynastic ambitions. This was coupled with the interests of the Duc d'Orléans who was just as interested in gaining control of the Coucy lands, precisely because of their vital positioning in regards to the Bourgogne lands, encircling them from the north-west and north-east while also disrupting the connection between the Burgundian lands at several points. Fighting to counter these pressures were the tireless efforts of the young Sieur de Coucy's mother, Isabelle de Lorraine, his sister Marie de Coucy, Duchess de Bar, and his prospective father-in-law William II of Bavaria-Straubing. Raids and litigation to take up claims to the Coucy lands were near-constant from both the Burgundians and Orléanists and took up an immense amount of time and energy for the Coucy allies to counter. Eventually, Isabelle de Lorraine found herself forced to look for another great magnate's protection, deciding to put her trust in Charles de Berry - a man well known for protecting and supporting those who he had responsibilities towards (7). Charles de Berry's wife, Valentina Visconti, died in early 1401 of the Plague while Isabelle's husband Enguerrand de Coucy had passed in 1403 of the same plague (8). By 1406 Isabelle and Charles had come to an agreement where, in return for protecting the interests of her son, Isabelle would marry Charles. This linked Charles de Berry with the wider Coucy family network which included ties to his erstwhile opponent in Aragon, Yolande de Bar, and her son Ferran, as well as to the Dukes of Lorraine, Bar, Norfolk and Oxford. The marriage also served as the beginning of an improved relationship between the previously staunchly anti-English Berry family (9).
Charles de Berry began exerting his influence fully in French power politics in 1406, just as the feud between Jean de Bourgogne and Louis d'Orléans threatened to escalate into bloodshed. Louis of Orléans by now dominated the French royal administration. The continuing decline of Charles VI’s powers, even in his moments of sanity, made it increasingly obvious that there would have to be a regency in fact if not in name and Louis was the only possible candidate at the time. The deaths of the two royal uncles had left the only other option for power the increasingly hated Queen Isabeau because of the lack of experience or distraction of the young successors to the dukes (10). The Queen was the guardian of the royal children and the appointed arbiter between the princes under the ordinances, but she did not attend council meetings and had to exercise her influence behind the scenes. Charles de Berry, Jean de Bourbon and Jean de Bourgogne all found themselves struggling to come to grips, though Jean de Bourgogne was able to involve himself in 1404 against the Coucy lands - where from the feud with the Duc d'Orléans would steadily escalate, while Jean de Bourbon found himself increasingly drawn into the feud occasionally on the Burgundian side while Charles de Berry was distracted by the immense conflict in Castile that would soon end in disaster at the Battle of Toledo (11). The extent of Louis’ control over the government was reflected in the growing scale of his appropriations from the revenues of the crown. The main victim of this largesse apart from the royal treasury was the house of Burgundy. The arrears of Philip’s claims on the French treasury were left unpaid once he was dead. His pensions were nominally renewed in favor of his son but they were not paid either. The overall level of payments to the treasurers at Dijon and Lille, which had risen to its highest point in the last years of Philip’s life, was reduced to a trickle. The proceeds of royal taxation in the Burgundian domains, which had been regularly granted to the old duke, were not regranted to his successor until April 1405 and then only briefly. The lavish special grants more or less artificially justified by reference to Philip’s special services to the Crown came to a complete halt for two years before being resumed for a short period at a much more modest level. As a result the total receipts of the new Duke of Burgundy fell by more than half, from a high of nearly 700,000 livres in the financial year 1402–3 to about 320,000 livres three years later. This sudden and catastrophic reversal of the fortunes of the house of Burgundy was bound sooner or later to provoke a crisis among the princes of the house of France. Philip the Bold had left a complex succession. The duchy of Burgundy passed on his death to his eldest son, Jean Count of Nevers. The three substantial territories of Flanders and Artois in the north and the Imperial county of Burgundy east of the Saône had been brought to Philip by Margaret of Flanders upon their marriage and Jean did not inherit them until she died a year after her husband in March 1405. The two Imperial principalities of Brabant and Limburg, which had in practice been Burgundian protectorates for years, had been promised by their ruler, Jeanne, Duchess of Brabant, to Philip and his heirs. As a result of a family arrangement they would have passed after Jeanne’s death to the new Duke’s younger brother Antoine, but due to his death shortly before Jeanne, the lands were passed on to Jean instead. That left the third brother Philip to inherit the remaining territories in France, the counties of Nevers and Rethel and the scattered domains in Champagne. Nominally therefore there was a staged partition of Philip the Bold’s great empire. But in practice it continued to operate as a single political unit and Jean gained the vast majority of the inheritance anyway. Jean cooperated closely with his mother in the year before her death and with his brother afterwards. The impressive central institutions of the Burgundian state remained intact. Basing himself in his father’s Parisian palaces he also played the leading part in managing his family’s difficult relations with the King of France and his councilors and ministers (12).
With Louis d'Orléans leading the government and Jean de Bourgogne leading the opposition, Charles de Berry was left to work as arbiter between the two sides, who increasingly found themselves at greater and greater odds, and occasionally as an opportunistic political actor, as was the case in the dispute over the Coucy inheritance. Marriage connections between the great ducal families began to tie together the different factions, with the Bourbons and Bourgogne family intermarrying while Anjou and Orléans did so with each other as well. Charles de Berry meanwhile, found himself in an escalating conflict with King Pedro of Navarre, who had once tried to have him killed. As a result raids and assaults broke out between partisans of the two sides - the harshest fighting taking place in Normandy, where old scars and grudges of the Armagnac Succession Crisis proved to still hold strong. The most significant development in the first decade of his rule as Duc de Berry was the betrothal of Charles' grandson, Charles de Berry, by his heir Jean de Berry, to Joan of Wales - the eldest daughter of the Prince of Wales. This would be the first, but certainly not the last, marriage between the Berry's and the English. Over time, as relations between Navarre and England soured over the continued Navarrese support of the Lancasters of Castile, the Anglo-Berry alliance would grow in importance for both parties who were looking for a stable ally in the chaos of French politics (13).
Louis, Duc d'Orléans Exerts Power on Behalf of His Brother
Thirty-three years old at his father’s death, Jean Duke of Burgundy was a short, bull-headed man of unprepossessing appearance, graceless, awkward and taciturn, a striking contrast to his urbane father and his extrovert cousin Louis of Orléans. But he was a man of formidable talents. He was an experienced military commander, the best that his dynasty produced, who had led the French contingent on the Turkish Crusade and had endured the bitter fighting and hardships that followed. He was an excellent administrator who had for years deputized for his father in Burgundy and occasionally in Flanders and Artois as well. He took a genuine interest in the mechanics of power and understood the exigencies of government better perhaps than any other European prince of his day except perhaps Enrique V of Castile and Edward V of England. Jean knew how to select and reward his servants, and they repaid him with a steadfast loyalty even at the most difficult moments of his career. He played the part of a great prince well, living magnificently and holding one of the great courts of western Europe. In a political world dominated by constant bargaining for advantage Jean proved to be an outstanding negotiator with an inspired instinct for his adversaries’ weakness, who knew just how far he could press an advantage. But the most noticeable thing about the new Duke of Burgundy was his overpowering ambition. Jean was determined, uncompromising and completely unscrupulous. He was brutal, cunning and duplicitous, resorting readily to violence even when persuasion or compromise might have achieved more. Above all he lacked judgment. He was impulsive, an opportunist who rarely weighed the consequences of his actions or counted their cost. He had a devious mind, suspicious and wary, trusting no one. Despite the soubriquet ‘the Fearless’, he proved to be an unquiet soul who lived in constant fear. He fortified his Parisian headquarters, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, something which his father had never thought necessary. He never went out without a bodyguard. As he lay dying at Halle, Philip the Bold exhorted his sons to ‘hold the crown and realm of France always close to their heart’. Jean desperately needed to succeed to his father’s political authority at the center of affairs, if only in order to maintain the flow of financial subventions which had supported the Burgundian empire in Philip’s day. He had some advantages in the snake-pit of Parisian court politics. He was the King’s first cousin. His daughter Margaret was betrothed to the Prince Louis and his heir Philip to another of Charles’s children, Marie. These unions could be expected to secure the house of Burgundy’s influence in the French state through the next generation of the French royal line so far as the fragile lives of medieval children could do so. Yet the new Duke of Burgundy was an outsider by comparison with his father and the other princes of the fleur-de-lys. He had never been close to Charles personally as in different ways both Philip of Burgundy and Louis of Orléans had. He did not have half a century of intimate involvement with the affairs of France to justify his claims to influence and subsidies. He had played almost no part in its councils before the beginning of 1405. His most experienced advisers urged him to spend more time in Paris, building up his influence at court and in council, but his appearances in the capital were fewer and shorter than his father’s. He made matters worse by a resentful and aggressive manner. Jean did not have the ready charm or open manner which had eased Louis of Orléans’ path to influence and wealth. He had few true colleagues, only dependents and allies of interest or convenience (14).
Jean the Fearless’s political strategy was conceived in the first months after his father’s death. It was to appeal over the heads of the small political community at the center of affairs to a broader constituency beyond, which resented the corruption and inefficiency of the administration and the heavy burden of taxation. It was not a new programme. It was essentially the programme of the Estates-General of the 1350s. It was the programme of Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, the last French prince to break with the solidarity of his class, who had become the voice of radical reform and popular discontent in the same period. It was the programme of the Parisian maillotins of 1383 and their allies in the industrial towns of northern France. And it was the programme with which Philip the Bold himself had toyed briefly in 1402 before reaching a comfortable accommodation with his rivals on the French royal council. Its natural supporters were drawn from the Church, the University of Paris and a small but influential minority of radicals in the civil service. But above all it depended on the support of the larger French towns, which bore the brunt of taxation and whose mobs had provided the force behind the rebellions of the 1350s and 1380s. Of these by far the most significant for its size, wealth and political tradition as well as its proximity to the seat of power was Paris. Over the following years Jean the Fearless would forge a close alliance with the radical politicians of the capital and with the mobs which they could conjure up from the city’s maze of lanes and tenements. Philip the Bold, with his consummate skill in managing the closed political world of the royal court and his perennial suspicion of popular movements, would never have done what his son did. But Jean understood better than his father the strength of public anger generated by the despoliation of the Crown by the royal princes and their hangers-on. How far Jean really believed in his own programme was open to doubt. He had a genuine belief in administrative reform and in cutting back the luxuriant growth of the institutions of government. But there were contradictions at the heart of his political programme of which he can hardly have been unaware. His alliance with the urban mobs destroyed the power of the monarchy which he was bent on using for his own ends. The spoils of government which he hoped to wrest from the hands of his cousin depended on the continuance of taxation at wartime levels without the corresponding levels of expenditure, the very principle to which his radical allies were implacably opposed. And the violence of his methods brought a new instability to French politics which led directly to civil war and ultimately destroyed many of the French elite (14).
Jean the Fearless became Duke of Burgundy at a time when taxation had become a major issue. The taille of January 1404 was bitterly resented. It had been imposed at a time of depopulation and recession. It was collected on top of the aides which had been levied, ostensibly for war purposes, for years. It was justified by reference to military projects which had failed, in part because very little of the proceeds had actually been spent on them. Collection of the taille was widely resisted and in places had to be enforced with considerable brutality. The Queen and the Duke of Orléans were directly blamed both for instituting the taille and for diverting its proceeds into their own pockets. The story of Louis’ seizure of the cash from the treasury tower was all over Paris at once. Rumor magnified the facts. During the summer of 1404 libelous sheets attacking him were being distributed in the streets of the capital and nailed to gates, doors and houses. These issues came to a head in the King’s council early in 1405. The Duke of Orléans was determined to reopen the war with England in the summer on the largest possible scale and pressed for another taille of 800,000 écus. The Duke of Burgundy declared himself opposed. He succeeded in recruiting the Queen to his cause. Her main priority was characteristically mercenary. She wanted to be allowed to pawn the King’s personal jewels in order to raise no less than 120,000 francs to give to her brother Louis of Bavaria, a transaction widely regarded as discreditable but which was approved by the council at the beginning of February, probably with Jean’s support. His reward came a week later on 13 February when their alliance was sealed in a formal treaty. Over the following week the council argued about the proposed taille. The Duke of Burgundy denounced it as tyranny. He declared that if it was implemented he would not allow it to be collected in his own domains. His objections were supported by the Duke of Brittany and behind the scenes by the Queen. When it became clear that the majority was with the Duke of Orléans, Jean protested and stormed out. He summoned a group of senior officials before him, including the two first presidents of the Parlement de Paris, three masters of the Chambre des Comptes and the Provost of the Merchants of Paris, and repeated his protest to them. Then he left Paris in high dudgeon followed by the Duke of Brittany, while the council continued their discussions in their absence. The Duke of Berry wrote to Margaret of Burgundy in his most patronizing vein suggesting that she should bring her son to his senses. ‘He has been poorly advised,’ said the Duke; ‘one can tell that he is new to his domains and has no experience of government.’ completely ignoring the irony of this statement by a man who had himself only recently taken up power. The new tax was finally agreed on 5 March 1405. The atmosphere in the city was exceptionally tense and the councilors hurriedly left for their suburban mansions before the ordinance was published. As they had expected it was received with rage in the streets of the capital. Its nominal purpose, to pay for the war with England, was regarded with overt cynicism. Unlike the similar imposition the year before it did not even have the semblance of royal approval, for apart from a brief interval in January and early February the King had been ‘absent’ since the previous autumn. The populace blamed the Duke of Orléans. A Burgundian official in Paris reported that anyone associated with him was obliged to go out with armor under his clothing and a weapon in his hand. New public order measures were introduced restricting the carrying of knives in public other than table cutlery. Louis was by no means confident that this would be enough. He warned his retainers in France and Germany to hold themselves ready to come urgently to his aid if violence should break out in the streets (14).
The Queen, although she had in fact opposed the taille, was almost as unpopular as Louis was. She was the butt of venomous lampoons. There were stories of the King being left penniless and the young Dauphin starving as barrel-loads of precious stones were sent off in carts to support the enterprises of her brother in Bavaria. The anger extended well beyond the streets. After the Duke of Burgundy’s departure from Paris the officials whom he had summoned to hear his protest were interviewed by the Dukes of Orléans and Berry to discover what he had said and how they had reacted. Their answers were not reassuring. ‘It seemed to them’, they are said to have replied, ‘that my lord of Burgundy … was truly moved by pity and sympathy for the people and that his thoughts were sensible and praiseworthy.’ The two royal dukes were shocked and closed the interview at once. There were plenty of others willing to speak out. The Augustinian preacher Jacques Legrand, a rising political moralist who had been invited to preach before the court, took the opportunity to denounce the incapacity of the King, the vice and extravagance of the Queen and the ‘insufferable greed’ of the Duke of Orléans. Under Charles V, he declared, taxes had also been high but at least he had spent the proceeds in the greater interests of France. Legrand’s sermon was not well received by its audience. On his way home the preacher was threatened with violence by angry partisans of Louis and Isabeau. These signs of her mounting unpopularity caused much distress to Isabeau, who soon regretted her brief dalliance with the Duke of Burgundy and turned back to her more steadfast lover and ally, the Duc d'Orléans. Louis d'Orléans advised her to leave France for her own safety and take refuge in his domains in Luxembourg. She gave serious thought to this but ultimately decided to remain at court with her children. However, she remained uncertain about her future. By July she was transferring substantial sums to her brother from the proceeds of the aides to redeem his mortgaged lands on the Danube with a view to living there if she was forced to leave France (15).
The rulers of France were too preoccupied with their own disputes to think of intervening in the troubles of England. The overweening ambition of the Duke of Orléans was beginning to trouble even his traditional supporters on the royal council. Louis had recently procured from the ailing King letters granting him the whole of Normandy. Normandy was the most valuable province of the royal demesne, though largely under Navarrese control at the time. It had never previously been granted as an appanage to anyone other than the heir to the throne. The grant provoked uproar among the Norman nobility and a significant section of the royal council as well as the King of Navarre who felt his power-base directly challenged, with the result that the appanage in due course was revoked. When, around the middle of July 1405, the King began to recover his wits the dissidents persuaded him to summon an extraordinary meeting of his council attended by all the royal princes in order to consider the future administration of his demesne and the state of the public revenues. At this stage neither of the rivals was in Paris. The Duke of Orléans was still in Normandy. He rushed back to Paris but arrived too late to halt the march of events. The Duke of Burgundy, who was in Flanders, decided to answer the King’s summons with a large armed force at his back. Jean had substantial forces available in Flanders and Artois in case of an English descent on the coast. He called on them to meet him at Arras to march on Paris. On 15 August he set out at the head of a small advance guard of about 600 mounted men. He was sure that he could count on the support of the Parisians to let him into the city. Jean the Fearless’ aggressive move provoked panic at the French court. The King relapsed into incoherence. For the next four months he was speechless, incontinent and unwilling to shave, wash or change his clothes or eat or sleep at regular hours. ‘He was tragic to behold, eaten by fleas and covered in filth,’ recorded Jean Jouvenel. The Duke of Orléans was stunned by the reports from Arras. He had been aware of the threat of disorder in the streets of Paris but he had not anticipated an attempted coup d’état by a prince of France. On 17 August, the day after the news of Jean’s approach reached Paris, Louis hastily dispatched orders to his officers and allies to raise all the troops they could. He then fled the capital accompanied by the Queen. They told everyone that they were leaving for the hunt and then rode as fast as they could for the royal castle overlooking the Seine at Corbeil. As she left the Queen wrote out her instructions to a small group of loyal allies in the city, including her brother Louis of Bavaria and the Master of the Royal Household Jean de Montaigu. They were told to take Charles the Dauphin and Prince Louis from the Hôtel Saint-Pol and bring them on the following day together with their siblings and Louis' child-bride Margaret of Burgundy. There was nothing that Louis could do to stop his rival entering the capital but he could at least stop him taking control of the symbols of power. No one bothered with Charles VI. He was barely even a symbol any longer (16).
Charles the Child, Dauphin of France
The afternoon of 18 August was hot, close and thunderous. Prince Louis, whose health had always been delicate, had just been bled and was lying exhausted and feverish in his apartment at the Hôtel Saint-Pol when the Queen’s emissaries came for him. Brushing aside the protests of his attendants and doctors they carried him in torrential rain across the gardens of the palace followed by the other royal children to a boat waiting on the Seine. Late that night, the Duke of Burgundy had reached the village of Louvres fifteen miles north of Paris on the Senlis road when the news of the Dauphin’s removal was brought to him. At dawn on 19 August he left Louvres with a detachment of cavalry and arrived in the city as it was stirring. There was a hurried conference with the other royal princes, none of whom had been consulted about the removal of the royal children. The Duke of Burgundy then rode at speed across the city with his men, to the astonishment of Parisians opening up their shops, and set out in pursuit. Twelve miles from the city walls they caught up with the Dauphin near the village of Juvisy on the Seine. His brother Louis was being drawn along the road in a litter with an escort of soldiers under the command of Louis of Bavaria. The cortège was already surrounded by his soldiers when Jean rode up, dismounted, and cut the cords of the litter with his sword. According to his own account he approached his young son-in-law and asked whether he wished to continue his journey or return to rejoin his father in Paris. The Prince replied tearfully that he wanted to return. There was a brief altercation with his escort by the roadside. But the Orléanists were heavily outnumbered. The litter was turned round and brought back to Paris. The Parisians were ecstatic. A large crowd of armed and mounted citizens came out to meet the Duke and the Dauphin on the road and escorted them in triumph to the Louvre. There the young dauphin was formally handed into the custody of the Duke of Berry while the young Prince Louis was taken into the Duc de Bourgogne's housegold. A Burgundian garrison was brought into the fortress to ensure that he stayed there. The Queen and the Duke of Orléans were at Pouilly waiting for the Dauphin to join them when they heard the news that he had been taken back to Paris. They abandoned their dinner and fled to the Queen’s castle at Melun. From there the Duke of Orléans addressed a furious protest to the Parlement of Paris, accusing the Duke of Burgundy of treason and calling on the King’s servants to ensure that the Dauphin was not taken out of Paris or more troops allowed in. That evening the Duke of Burgundy fired off his own highly partisan account of the double kidnapping of the Dauphin and dispatched it to notables, bishops and towns across the realm in case they should be misled by ‘sinister reports’ of the event. He invited them to send representatives to Paris to hear his proposals for the government of the realm. Two days later, on 21 August, without waiting for their response, Jean announced his proposals before a large gathering of dignitaries in the royal palace on the Cité. It was an invited assembly in the traditional manner of the Valois monarchy, not so much an occasion for deliberation as a carefully choreographed public statement. The Dauphin nominally presided, representing the King, who was raving behind the closed doors of his rooms in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. All the royal princes who were present in Paris including Jean himself were ranged on his right and the bishops and abbots on his left. The delegates of the city of Paris filled the body of the hall. The rector and professors of the University were there in strength (17).
Jean’s councillor Jean de Nielles, a practiced orator, spoke for him. His message was cleverly judged to attract support from the widest possible range of opinion. He declared that his master had come to Paris by the urgent command of the King. If he had come with a large armed force, said Jean de Nielles, this was only in order to protect himself, the King and the city of Paris against the violence of his enemies. Having come to perform his duty to the King he had a programme of administrative and financial reforms to improve the government of the realm. This included most of the grievances which had animated the streets of Paris. The King’s family, attendants and ministers, he declared, had neglected his care and exploited his incapacity in order to obtain unjustifiable grants for themselves. They had purloined his jewelry and silver, which was clearly a reference to the Queen. They had allowed the administration of justice to lapse and the royal demesne to decay. Meanwhile the country was oppressed by taxation, levied with gross brutality by an army of tax farmers, judicial officers and sergeants. All this had been done ostensibly in order to finance a war with England. But in fact, almost nothing had been done to prosecute the war. On the contrary the English had been able to devastate the coastal regions of France while the proceeds of the war taxes had been pocketed by the King’s ministers. John demanded that the King be treated with dignity and respect and his personal household and assets properly administered in his interest. He wanted the punctilious administration of justice by officers chosen on merit and not through influence or bribes; the honest administration of the royal domain; an end to improvident and abusive grants; and the expenditure of tax revenues only on the purposes for which they had been imposed. The Duke of Orléans was not mentioned, yet almost every sentence implicitly referred to him. Everything that the Duke of Burgundy had done, Jean de Nielles concluded, had been done by the advice and consent of the Dauphin and the royal princes. At this point several of those present threw their gauntlets to the floor to challenge anyone who might call them traitors for supporting Jean’s bid for power. The Dauphin brought the proceedings to a close by rising to his feet and declaring his approval of Jean’s act in bringing him back to Paris (18). In the wrangling that followed, it was eventually agreed to split the royal children between their prospective in-laws with the result that the brood of royal children were dispersed across France, with only the Dauphin remaining in the Capital under the guardianship of Charles de Berry, and even he would eventually find himself spirited away to Bourges where his uncle could protect him. Louis d'Orléans would grasp back some of his power and influence, but Jean de Bourgogne had for the moment taken command of the reins of power in France (19).
Footnotes:
(1) IOTL warfare started up between France and England following Henry's usurpation of the throne. This deposed Charles VI's son-in-law and led to immense instability in England. Beginning in the mid-1390s, Richard II began acting out against his nobility and eventually escalated to imprisonment and murder of numerous opponents. His deposal by Henry was welcomed in some corners, but numerous uprisings would characterize Henry IV's reign, most importantly the Glydwr Uprising which lasted for more than a decade. This instability left England weakened and distracted, which prompted the French to jump at the opportunity. The conflict grew into a full-on war at sea and on land.
(2) This is similar to what was done with Edward III and the Black Prince IOTL. Edward V is giving his heir one of the hardest posts in England and allows him to build up authority in France.
(3) These lands are significantly larger than those left IOTL. By retaining so much of Saintogne and Périgord, Bordeaux remains sustainable and is in a much better place than IOTL. Over the course of the long truce between France and England, the city has grown immensely, reaching a population of 35,000 by the turn of the century.
(4) This is based on the running of the duchy IOTL, although things are much better off due to the larger lands under the city's control and the extended period of peace the region has experienced when compared to France or the Isle of Britain.
(5) These are basically castles under Routier control IOTL as well, though under closer control than IOTL. It bears reminding that the Viscounts of Béarn are also Counts of Foix and Armagnac, leaving these territories and supports dependent on the good will of the de Foix family and their cousins from Navarre.
(6) The Albrets are becoming really important in Gascony. Charles d'Albret's marriage to Marguerite de Comminges and the granting of other lands basically means that he replaces the Armagnacs as the main pro-French leaders in Gascony. The main difference from the Armagnacs is that the Albrets are rather limited to Gascony and don't hold the wide ranging lands of the Armganacs elsewhere. How loyal they stay to France is as much a question as how loyal Navarre or Foix are going to stay loyal to the English - very questionable.
(7) The Coucy inheritance was important to begin with, but the marriage to Jacqueline really makes it a vital territory to control. Charles de Berry uses his usual charm to accomplish this.
(8) She died in the mid 1390s IOTL, here she lives a bit longer.
(9) IOTL Isabelle never remarried, but with a son in need of protection she goes through with it. This helps establish ties between Berry and England in a rather round-about fashion, and serves as a signal for closer relations between the Berry lands and England.
(10) Charles de Berry is involved in Spain at this point in time, while the Anjou are preparing for an invasion of Sicily. They really don't have the time to get too involved. In the meanwhile Jean de Bourbon and Jean de Bourgogne are busy trying to orientate themselves.
(11) The Coucy inheritance really becomes a point of contest between the different families and leaves Berry somewhat distanced from both Bourgogne and Orléans.
(12) This is all OTL.
(13) As mentioned, Berry is looking for allies and has little skin in the game regarding the succession - so he turns to England for support. In the meantime the relationship with Navarre, which has never been very good, goes into terminal decline. The fact that the Navarrese are married into the Lancaster and not Plantagenet dynasty is really coming back to bite the English. This is at the same time as relations between Castile and England are at a low point over the actions of Thomas of Beaufort.
(14) All of this is OTL. The struggles between different French factions are becoming increasingly tense. I also thought it would be a good idea to get a clear idea of who Jean Sans Peur really was.
(15) It is honestly impressive how much people hated Isabeau. After her husband descended into madness she went completely mercenary, out for herself - and on occasion - her children.
(16) This is based on an OTL power struggle between Burgundy and Orléans. The literal fight over children is honestly rather chilling.
(17) I have really found a love for the sheer level of factionalism that caused chaos in France in this period, particularly when you consider that they were trying to fight a major war against England at the same time.
(18) The sheer brazenness of Jean is rather impressive at times, I hope I conveyed it well.
(19) Due to the fact that many of the children are bound up in the courtly factions it is decided that someone running off with all of them at once is unacceptable, so everyone gets a pawn for the game.
Counsinly Feuds
Prince Edward of Wales is made Duke of Aquitaine by his Father Edward V
Prince Edward of Wales is made Duke of Aquitaine by his Father Edward V
Richard's Rebellion coincided with the end of the ten-year Truce of Rennes that Edward V and Charles VI had signed in 1395. As a result, English efforts to extend the truce were hampered immensely, which when coupled with Louis d'Orléans' wish for conflict and conquest could only result in more conflict and strife to come. In April of 1405 the state of armed truce and relative peace between France and England came to an end with open conflict occurring between the two kingdoms for the first time in 22 years (1). The first years were characterized mostly by raids and counter-raids, as the two sides tested the measure of their opponents, but particularly the upheaval of Richard's Rebellion, with the death of the English representative to Aquitaine, meant that the English were on the back foot from the start and opened the path for significant French attempts at driving out the English interlopers. It was only on the arrival of the new Duke of Aquitaine, the Prince of Wales (2), that English efforts at repelling the French assaults began to prove fruitful. English rule extended from the city of Bordeaux and into the surrounding areas, encompassing much of Saintogne and Périgord, with its borders resting on the cities of Saintes, Angoulême, St. Jean de Cole, Perigeux, Bergerac, Agens and then a narrow strip of territory along the right bank of the Gironde and the lower Dordogne including the towns of Blaye, Bourg, Libourne and Saint-Émilion and the fortress of Fronsac. These places served as the outer defenses of the Bordelais against attack from the north and east. A second block of territory comprised the city of Bayonne together with the territory known as the Terre de Labourd lying south of it and the provinces of the Adour valley to the east, including the important towns of Saint-Sever and Dax. A narrow ribbon of bleak, windswept coastal land running through the Landes connected the two regions and bordered on Albret Lands in Gascony (3).
Aquitaine's economy was based mainly on its production of wine, on the ship-owning community of Bayonne and on the role of Bordeaux as an entrepôt for the produce of the five great river basins of southern France which passed through the Gironde to the sea, although significant economic activity in Saintogne and Périgord provided a vital impetus for the region. It was therefore vulnerable to war and political upheaval, which could sever its links to the highlands of Languedoc and Périgord and make the sea lanes to its principal export markets in England and the Low Countries precarious. England was the natural market for the wines of Bordeaux at a time when wine could not be carried over long distances except by water. The tight, self-perpetuating commercial oligarchy of Bordeaux, from which the city’s governing class was drawn, had close financial relations with the English aristocracy and with the mercantile community of London. The city was reliant on the great granaries of Périgord and Saintonge for their food, being unable to feed the large Bordolais population on the lands surrounding the city alone. The seat of the duchy’s administration was the former citadel of Bordeaux, the Château de l’Ombrière. This large rambling fortress, parts of which dated back to Roman times, was by now entirely enclosed by the city and devoid of any defensive function. It housed the Seneschal of Guyenne, who was the chief administrative, judicial and military authority of the duchy, and the Constable of Bordeaux, who served as its principal financial officer. They were supported by a small group of clerks and military retainers. In addition the Mayor of Bordeaux, a royal appointment, played an increasingly important part in the government of the duchy and were vital to the running of the duchy, supporting the various royal governors and Dukes who officially governed the region. All three officers were generally English knights although exceptionally the office of Seneschal was held throughout the first decade of the 15th century by a Gascon, Gaillard de Durfort, Sieur de Duras. He belonged to one of the most consistently loyal noble families of Guyenne. Recently the practice had also grown up of appointing an English knight as Seneschal of the Landes, whose main function was the defense of the southern marches of the duchy (4).
In addition to the territory which was directly administered from Bordeaux there were several dozen remote castles scattered across south-western France which were garrisoned by companies of routiers, generally Gascon or Béarnais. These captains acknowledged the King of England as their sovereign, but they did not depend on him for their wages and were only loosely controlled by his officials. They financed themselves from patis, essentially protection money collected under agreements imposed by force on the surrounding country. Some of these castles were enclaves of the duchy which had been left stranded behind the lines by the incoming tide of French conquest in the last three decades of the fourteenth century. They included the Pyrenean fortresses of Mauléon and Lourdes, both of them surrounded by territory controlled by the viscounts of Béarn; and the powerful garrisoned castle of Mussidan in the valley of the Isle in Périgord, which belonged to the Montauts, one of the great landed families of the Bordelais. However, most of the remote castles beyond the march had been seized by Gascon companies from their French owners during the last great period of routier activity in the mid-1380s (5). The Albrets had been the foremost barons of English Guyenne until the 1340s and again in the 1360s before throwing in their lot with the French Crown. Their wealth, combined with a pervasive network of kinsmen and clients, made them a formidable force in the region. Charles, the current lord of Albret, was also an influential voice in Paris: a pensioner of Charles VI, an ally of the Duke of Orléans and from 1403 Constable of France. Charles d'Albret, Lord of Albret married Marguerite de Comminges, Countess of Comminges, in late 1403 and had received the County of Bigorre from his patron, the Duc d'Orléans in 1404. This left Gascony split in three large blocks under the Foix-Armagnac, Navarrese and Albret families. Of these the Foix-Armagnac were tied closely to Navarre, who in turn were commonly considered allies of the English, while the Albret were closely aligned with the House of Orléans (6).
Charles de Berry, Duc de Berry et Auvergne, Comte de Montpensier, Poitier, Étampes et Rodez
The betrothal of Enguerrand VIII de Coucy to Jacqueline of Bavaria caused immense challenges for Jean, Duc de Bourgone, who held out hope for the unification of the Low Countries under his dynasty and viewed the extensive lands held by the Coucy's as a threat to those dynastic ambitions. This was coupled with the interests of the Duc d'Orléans who was just as interested in gaining control of the Coucy lands, precisely because of their vital positioning in regards to the Bourgogne lands, encircling them from the north-west and north-east while also disrupting the connection between the Burgundian lands at several points. Fighting to counter these pressures were the tireless efforts of the young Sieur de Coucy's mother, Isabelle de Lorraine, his sister Marie de Coucy, Duchess de Bar, and his prospective father-in-law William II of Bavaria-Straubing. Raids and litigation to take up claims to the Coucy lands were near-constant from both the Burgundians and Orléanists and took up an immense amount of time and energy for the Coucy allies to counter. Eventually, Isabelle de Lorraine found herself forced to look for another great magnate's protection, deciding to put her trust in Charles de Berry - a man well known for protecting and supporting those who he had responsibilities towards (7). Charles de Berry's wife, Valentina Visconti, died in early 1401 of the Plague while Isabelle's husband Enguerrand de Coucy had passed in 1403 of the same plague (8). By 1406 Isabelle and Charles had come to an agreement where, in return for protecting the interests of her son, Isabelle would marry Charles. This linked Charles de Berry with the wider Coucy family network which included ties to his erstwhile opponent in Aragon, Yolande de Bar, and her son Ferran, as well as to the Dukes of Lorraine, Bar, Norfolk and Oxford. The marriage also served as the beginning of an improved relationship between the previously staunchly anti-English Berry family (9).
Charles de Berry began exerting his influence fully in French power politics in 1406, just as the feud between Jean de Bourgogne and Louis d'Orléans threatened to escalate into bloodshed. Louis of Orléans by now dominated the French royal administration. The continuing decline of Charles VI’s powers, even in his moments of sanity, made it increasingly obvious that there would have to be a regency in fact if not in name and Louis was the only possible candidate at the time. The deaths of the two royal uncles had left the only other option for power the increasingly hated Queen Isabeau because of the lack of experience or distraction of the young successors to the dukes (10). The Queen was the guardian of the royal children and the appointed arbiter between the princes under the ordinances, but she did not attend council meetings and had to exercise her influence behind the scenes. Charles de Berry, Jean de Bourbon and Jean de Bourgogne all found themselves struggling to come to grips, though Jean de Bourgogne was able to involve himself in 1404 against the Coucy lands - where from the feud with the Duc d'Orléans would steadily escalate, while Jean de Bourbon found himself increasingly drawn into the feud occasionally on the Burgundian side while Charles de Berry was distracted by the immense conflict in Castile that would soon end in disaster at the Battle of Toledo (11). The extent of Louis’ control over the government was reflected in the growing scale of his appropriations from the revenues of the crown. The main victim of this largesse apart from the royal treasury was the house of Burgundy. The arrears of Philip’s claims on the French treasury were left unpaid once he was dead. His pensions were nominally renewed in favor of his son but they were not paid either. The overall level of payments to the treasurers at Dijon and Lille, which had risen to its highest point in the last years of Philip’s life, was reduced to a trickle. The proceeds of royal taxation in the Burgundian domains, which had been regularly granted to the old duke, were not regranted to his successor until April 1405 and then only briefly. The lavish special grants more or less artificially justified by reference to Philip’s special services to the Crown came to a complete halt for two years before being resumed for a short period at a much more modest level. As a result the total receipts of the new Duke of Burgundy fell by more than half, from a high of nearly 700,000 livres in the financial year 1402–3 to about 320,000 livres three years later. This sudden and catastrophic reversal of the fortunes of the house of Burgundy was bound sooner or later to provoke a crisis among the princes of the house of France. Philip the Bold had left a complex succession. The duchy of Burgundy passed on his death to his eldest son, Jean Count of Nevers. The three substantial territories of Flanders and Artois in the north and the Imperial county of Burgundy east of the Saône had been brought to Philip by Margaret of Flanders upon their marriage and Jean did not inherit them until she died a year after her husband in March 1405. The two Imperial principalities of Brabant and Limburg, which had in practice been Burgundian protectorates for years, had been promised by their ruler, Jeanne, Duchess of Brabant, to Philip and his heirs. As a result of a family arrangement they would have passed after Jeanne’s death to the new Duke’s younger brother Antoine, but due to his death shortly before Jeanne, the lands were passed on to Jean instead. That left the third brother Philip to inherit the remaining territories in France, the counties of Nevers and Rethel and the scattered domains in Champagne. Nominally therefore there was a staged partition of Philip the Bold’s great empire. But in practice it continued to operate as a single political unit and Jean gained the vast majority of the inheritance anyway. Jean cooperated closely with his mother in the year before her death and with his brother afterwards. The impressive central institutions of the Burgundian state remained intact. Basing himself in his father’s Parisian palaces he also played the leading part in managing his family’s difficult relations with the King of France and his councilors and ministers (12).
With Louis d'Orléans leading the government and Jean de Bourgogne leading the opposition, Charles de Berry was left to work as arbiter between the two sides, who increasingly found themselves at greater and greater odds, and occasionally as an opportunistic political actor, as was the case in the dispute over the Coucy inheritance. Marriage connections between the great ducal families began to tie together the different factions, with the Bourbons and Bourgogne family intermarrying while Anjou and Orléans did so with each other as well. Charles de Berry meanwhile, found himself in an escalating conflict with King Pedro of Navarre, who had once tried to have him killed. As a result raids and assaults broke out between partisans of the two sides - the harshest fighting taking place in Normandy, where old scars and grudges of the Armagnac Succession Crisis proved to still hold strong. The most significant development in the first decade of his rule as Duc de Berry was the betrothal of Charles' grandson, Charles de Berry, by his heir Jean de Berry, to Joan of Wales - the eldest daughter of the Prince of Wales. This would be the first, but certainly not the last, marriage between the Berry's and the English. Over time, as relations between Navarre and England soured over the continued Navarrese support of the Lancasters of Castile, the Anglo-Berry alliance would grow in importance for both parties who were looking for a stable ally in the chaos of French politics (13).
Louis, Duc d'Orléans Exerts Power on Behalf of His Brother
Thirty-three years old at his father’s death, Jean Duke of Burgundy was a short, bull-headed man of unprepossessing appearance, graceless, awkward and taciturn, a striking contrast to his urbane father and his extrovert cousin Louis of Orléans. But he was a man of formidable talents. He was an experienced military commander, the best that his dynasty produced, who had led the French contingent on the Turkish Crusade and had endured the bitter fighting and hardships that followed. He was an excellent administrator who had for years deputized for his father in Burgundy and occasionally in Flanders and Artois as well. He took a genuine interest in the mechanics of power and understood the exigencies of government better perhaps than any other European prince of his day except perhaps Enrique V of Castile and Edward V of England. Jean knew how to select and reward his servants, and they repaid him with a steadfast loyalty even at the most difficult moments of his career. He played the part of a great prince well, living magnificently and holding one of the great courts of western Europe. In a political world dominated by constant bargaining for advantage Jean proved to be an outstanding negotiator with an inspired instinct for his adversaries’ weakness, who knew just how far he could press an advantage. But the most noticeable thing about the new Duke of Burgundy was his overpowering ambition. Jean was determined, uncompromising and completely unscrupulous. He was brutal, cunning and duplicitous, resorting readily to violence even when persuasion or compromise might have achieved more. Above all he lacked judgment. He was impulsive, an opportunist who rarely weighed the consequences of his actions or counted their cost. He had a devious mind, suspicious and wary, trusting no one. Despite the soubriquet ‘the Fearless’, he proved to be an unquiet soul who lived in constant fear. He fortified his Parisian headquarters, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, something which his father had never thought necessary. He never went out without a bodyguard. As he lay dying at Halle, Philip the Bold exhorted his sons to ‘hold the crown and realm of France always close to their heart’. Jean desperately needed to succeed to his father’s political authority at the center of affairs, if only in order to maintain the flow of financial subventions which had supported the Burgundian empire in Philip’s day. He had some advantages in the snake-pit of Parisian court politics. He was the King’s first cousin. His daughter Margaret was betrothed to the Prince Louis and his heir Philip to another of Charles’s children, Marie. These unions could be expected to secure the house of Burgundy’s influence in the French state through the next generation of the French royal line so far as the fragile lives of medieval children could do so. Yet the new Duke of Burgundy was an outsider by comparison with his father and the other princes of the fleur-de-lys. He had never been close to Charles personally as in different ways both Philip of Burgundy and Louis of Orléans had. He did not have half a century of intimate involvement with the affairs of France to justify his claims to influence and subsidies. He had played almost no part in its councils before the beginning of 1405. His most experienced advisers urged him to spend more time in Paris, building up his influence at court and in council, but his appearances in the capital were fewer and shorter than his father’s. He made matters worse by a resentful and aggressive manner. Jean did not have the ready charm or open manner which had eased Louis of Orléans’ path to influence and wealth. He had few true colleagues, only dependents and allies of interest or convenience (14).
Jean the Fearless’s political strategy was conceived in the first months after his father’s death. It was to appeal over the heads of the small political community at the center of affairs to a broader constituency beyond, which resented the corruption and inefficiency of the administration and the heavy burden of taxation. It was not a new programme. It was essentially the programme of the Estates-General of the 1350s. It was the programme of Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, the last French prince to break with the solidarity of his class, who had become the voice of radical reform and popular discontent in the same period. It was the programme of the Parisian maillotins of 1383 and their allies in the industrial towns of northern France. And it was the programme with which Philip the Bold himself had toyed briefly in 1402 before reaching a comfortable accommodation with his rivals on the French royal council. Its natural supporters were drawn from the Church, the University of Paris and a small but influential minority of radicals in the civil service. But above all it depended on the support of the larger French towns, which bore the brunt of taxation and whose mobs had provided the force behind the rebellions of the 1350s and 1380s. Of these by far the most significant for its size, wealth and political tradition as well as its proximity to the seat of power was Paris. Over the following years Jean the Fearless would forge a close alliance with the radical politicians of the capital and with the mobs which they could conjure up from the city’s maze of lanes and tenements. Philip the Bold, with his consummate skill in managing the closed political world of the royal court and his perennial suspicion of popular movements, would never have done what his son did. But Jean understood better than his father the strength of public anger generated by the despoliation of the Crown by the royal princes and their hangers-on. How far Jean really believed in his own programme was open to doubt. He had a genuine belief in administrative reform and in cutting back the luxuriant growth of the institutions of government. But there were contradictions at the heart of his political programme of which he can hardly have been unaware. His alliance with the urban mobs destroyed the power of the monarchy which he was bent on using for his own ends. The spoils of government which he hoped to wrest from the hands of his cousin depended on the continuance of taxation at wartime levels without the corresponding levels of expenditure, the very principle to which his radical allies were implacably opposed. And the violence of his methods brought a new instability to French politics which led directly to civil war and ultimately destroyed many of the French elite (14).
Jean the Fearless became Duke of Burgundy at a time when taxation had become a major issue. The taille of January 1404 was bitterly resented. It had been imposed at a time of depopulation and recession. It was collected on top of the aides which had been levied, ostensibly for war purposes, for years. It was justified by reference to military projects which had failed, in part because very little of the proceeds had actually been spent on them. Collection of the taille was widely resisted and in places had to be enforced with considerable brutality. The Queen and the Duke of Orléans were directly blamed both for instituting the taille and for diverting its proceeds into their own pockets. The story of Louis’ seizure of the cash from the treasury tower was all over Paris at once. Rumor magnified the facts. During the summer of 1404 libelous sheets attacking him were being distributed in the streets of the capital and nailed to gates, doors and houses. These issues came to a head in the King’s council early in 1405. The Duke of Orléans was determined to reopen the war with England in the summer on the largest possible scale and pressed for another taille of 800,000 écus. The Duke of Burgundy declared himself opposed. He succeeded in recruiting the Queen to his cause. Her main priority was characteristically mercenary. She wanted to be allowed to pawn the King’s personal jewels in order to raise no less than 120,000 francs to give to her brother Louis of Bavaria, a transaction widely regarded as discreditable but which was approved by the council at the beginning of February, probably with Jean’s support. His reward came a week later on 13 February when their alliance was sealed in a formal treaty. Over the following week the council argued about the proposed taille. The Duke of Burgundy denounced it as tyranny. He declared that if it was implemented he would not allow it to be collected in his own domains. His objections were supported by the Duke of Brittany and behind the scenes by the Queen. When it became clear that the majority was with the Duke of Orléans, Jean protested and stormed out. He summoned a group of senior officials before him, including the two first presidents of the Parlement de Paris, three masters of the Chambre des Comptes and the Provost of the Merchants of Paris, and repeated his protest to them. Then he left Paris in high dudgeon followed by the Duke of Brittany, while the council continued their discussions in their absence. The Duke of Berry wrote to Margaret of Burgundy in his most patronizing vein suggesting that she should bring her son to his senses. ‘He has been poorly advised,’ said the Duke; ‘one can tell that he is new to his domains and has no experience of government.’ completely ignoring the irony of this statement by a man who had himself only recently taken up power. The new tax was finally agreed on 5 March 1405. The atmosphere in the city was exceptionally tense and the councilors hurriedly left for their suburban mansions before the ordinance was published. As they had expected it was received with rage in the streets of the capital. Its nominal purpose, to pay for the war with England, was regarded with overt cynicism. Unlike the similar imposition the year before it did not even have the semblance of royal approval, for apart from a brief interval in January and early February the King had been ‘absent’ since the previous autumn. The populace blamed the Duke of Orléans. A Burgundian official in Paris reported that anyone associated with him was obliged to go out with armor under his clothing and a weapon in his hand. New public order measures were introduced restricting the carrying of knives in public other than table cutlery. Louis was by no means confident that this would be enough. He warned his retainers in France and Germany to hold themselves ready to come urgently to his aid if violence should break out in the streets (14).
The Queen, although she had in fact opposed the taille, was almost as unpopular as Louis was. She was the butt of venomous lampoons. There were stories of the King being left penniless and the young Dauphin starving as barrel-loads of precious stones were sent off in carts to support the enterprises of her brother in Bavaria. The anger extended well beyond the streets. After the Duke of Burgundy’s departure from Paris the officials whom he had summoned to hear his protest were interviewed by the Dukes of Orléans and Berry to discover what he had said and how they had reacted. Their answers were not reassuring. ‘It seemed to them’, they are said to have replied, ‘that my lord of Burgundy … was truly moved by pity and sympathy for the people and that his thoughts were sensible and praiseworthy.’ The two royal dukes were shocked and closed the interview at once. There were plenty of others willing to speak out. The Augustinian preacher Jacques Legrand, a rising political moralist who had been invited to preach before the court, took the opportunity to denounce the incapacity of the King, the vice and extravagance of the Queen and the ‘insufferable greed’ of the Duke of Orléans. Under Charles V, he declared, taxes had also been high but at least he had spent the proceeds in the greater interests of France. Legrand’s sermon was not well received by its audience. On his way home the preacher was threatened with violence by angry partisans of Louis and Isabeau. These signs of her mounting unpopularity caused much distress to Isabeau, who soon regretted her brief dalliance with the Duke of Burgundy and turned back to her more steadfast lover and ally, the Duc d'Orléans. Louis d'Orléans advised her to leave France for her own safety and take refuge in his domains in Luxembourg. She gave serious thought to this but ultimately decided to remain at court with her children. However, she remained uncertain about her future. By July she was transferring substantial sums to her brother from the proceeds of the aides to redeem his mortgaged lands on the Danube with a view to living there if she was forced to leave France (15).
The rulers of France were too preoccupied with their own disputes to think of intervening in the troubles of England. The overweening ambition of the Duke of Orléans was beginning to trouble even his traditional supporters on the royal council. Louis had recently procured from the ailing King letters granting him the whole of Normandy. Normandy was the most valuable province of the royal demesne, though largely under Navarrese control at the time. It had never previously been granted as an appanage to anyone other than the heir to the throne. The grant provoked uproar among the Norman nobility and a significant section of the royal council as well as the King of Navarre who felt his power-base directly challenged, with the result that the appanage in due course was revoked. When, around the middle of July 1405, the King began to recover his wits the dissidents persuaded him to summon an extraordinary meeting of his council attended by all the royal princes in order to consider the future administration of his demesne and the state of the public revenues. At this stage neither of the rivals was in Paris. The Duke of Orléans was still in Normandy. He rushed back to Paris but arrived too late to halt the march of events. The Duke of Burgundy, who was in Flanders, decided to answer the King’s summons with a large armed force at his back. Jean had substantial forces available in Flanders and Artois in case of an English descent on the coast. He called on them to meet him at Arras to march on Paris. On 15 August he set out at the head of a small advance guard of about 600 mounted men. He was sure that he could count on the support of the Parisians to let him into the city. Jean the Fearless’ aggressive move provoked panic at the French court. The King relapsed into incoherence. For the next four months he was speechless, incontinent and unwilling to shave, wash or change his clothes or eat or sleep at regular hours. ‘He was tragic to behold, eaten by fleas and covered in filth,’ recorded Jean Jouvenel. The Duke of Orléans was stunned by the reports from Arras. He had been aware of the threat of disorder in the streets of Paris but he had not anticipated an attempted coup d’état by a prince of France. On 17 August, the day after the news of Jean’s approach reached Paris, Louis hastily dispatched orders to his officers and allies to raise all the troops they could. He then fled the capital accompanied by the Queen. They told everyone that they were leaving for the hunt and then rode as fast as they could for the royal castle overlooking the Seine at Corbeil. As she left the Queen wrote out her instructions to a small group of loyal allies in the city, including her brother Louis of Bavaria and the Master of the Royal Household Jean de Montaigu. They were told to take Charles the Dauphin and Prince Louis from the Hôtel Saint-Pol and bring them on the following day together with their siblings and Louis' child-bride Margaret of Burgundy. There was nothing that Louis could do to stop his rival entering the capital but he could at least stop him taking control of the symbols of power. No one bothered with Charles VI. He was barely even a symbol any longer (16).
Charles the Child, Dauphin of France
The afternoon of 18 August was hot, close and thunderous. Prince Louis, whose health had always been delicate, had just been bled and was lying exhausted and feverish in his apartment at the Hôtel Saint-Pol when the Queen’s emissaries came for him. Brushing aside the protests of his attendants and doctors they carried him in torrential rain across the gardens of the palace followed by the other royal children to a boat waiting on the Seine. Late that night, the Duke of Burgundy had reached the village of Louvres fifteen miles north of Paris on the Senlis road when the news of the Dauphin’s removal was brought to him. At dawn on 19 August he left Louvres with a detachment of cavalry and arrived in the city as it was stirring. There was a hurried conference with the other royal princes, none of whom had been consulted about the removal of the royal children. The Duke of Burgundy then rode at speed across the city with his men, to the astonishment of Parisians opening up their shops, and set out in pursuit. Twelve miles from the city walls they caught up with the Dauphin near the village of Juvisy on the Seine. His brother Louis was being drawn along the road in a litter with an escort of soldiers under the command of Louis of Bavaria. The cortège was already surrounded by his soldiers when Jean rode up, dismounted, and cut the cords of the litter with his sword. According to his own account he approached his young son-in-law and asked whether he wished to continue his journey or return to rejoin his father in Paris. The Prince replied tearfully that he wanted to return. There was a brief altercation with his escort by the roadside. But the Orléanists were heavily outnumbered. The litter was turned round and brought back to Paris. The Parisians were ecstatic. A large crowd of armed and mounted citizens came out to meet the Duke and the Dauphin on the road and escorted them in triumph to the Louvre. There the young dauphin was formally handed into the custody of the Duke of Berry while the young Prince Louis was taken into the Duc de Bourgogne's housegold. A Burgundian garrison was brought into the fortress to ensure that he stayed there. The Queen and the Duke of Orléans were at Pouilly waiting for the Dauphin to join them when they heard the news that he had been taken back to Paris. They abandoned their dinner and fled to the Queen’s castle at Melun. From there the Duke of Orléans addressed a furious protest to the Parlement of Paris, accusing the Duke of Burgundy of treason and calling on the King’s servants to ensure that the Dauphin was not taken out of Paris or more troops allowed in. That evening the Duke of Burgundy fired off his own highly partisan account of the double kidnapping of the Dauphin and dispatched it to notables, bishops and towns across the realm in case they should be misled by ‘sinister reports’ of the event. He invited them to send representatives to Paris to hear his proposals for the government of the realm. Two days later, on 21 August, without waiting for their response, Jean announced his proposals before a large gathering of dignitaries in the royal palace on the Cité. It was an invited assembly in the traditional manner of the Valois monarchy, not so much an occasion for deliberation as a carefully choreographed public statement. The Dauphin nominally presided, representing the King, who was raving behind the closed doors of his rooms in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. All the royal princes who were present in Paris including Jean himself were ranged on his right and the bishops and abbots on his left. The delegates of the city of Paris filled the body of the hall. The rector and professors of the University were there in strength (17).
Jean’s councillor Jean de Nielles, a practiced orator, spoke for him. His message was cleverly judged to attract support from the widest possible range of opinion. He declared that his master had come to Paris by the urgent command of the King. If he had come with a large armed force, said Jean de Nielles, this was only in order to protect himself, the King and the city of Paris against the violence of his enemies. Having come to perform his duty to the King he had a programme of administrative and financial reforms to improve the government of the realm. This included most of the grievances which had animated the streets of Paris. The King’s family, attendants and ministers, he declared, had neglected his care and exploited his incapacity in order to obtain unjustifiable grants for themselves. They had purloined his jewelry and silver, which was clearly a reference to the Queen. They had allowed the administration of justice to lapse and the royal demesne to decay. Meanwhile the country was oppressed by taxation, levied with gross brutality by an army of tax farmers, judicial officers and sergeants. All this had been done ostensibly in order to finance a war with England. But in fact, almost nothing had been done to prosecute the war. On the contrary the English had been able to devastate the coastal regions of France while the proceeds of the war taxes had been pocketed by the King’s ministers. John demanded that the King be treated with dignity and respect and his personal household and assets properly administered in his interest. He wanted the punctilious administration of justice by officers chosen on merit and not through influence or bribes; the honest administration of the royal domain; an end to improvident and abusive grants; and the expenditure of tax revenues only on the purposes for which they had been imposed. The Duke of Orléans was not mentioned, yet almost every sentence implicitly referred to him. Everything that the Duke of Burgundy had done, Jean de Nielles concluded, had been done by the advice and consent of the Dauphin and the royal princes. At this point several of those present threw their gauntlets to the floor to challenge anyone who might call them traitors for supporting Jean’s bid for power. The Dauphin brought the proceedings to a close by rising to his feet and declaring his approval of Jean’s act in bringing him back to Paris (18). In the wrangling that followed, it was eventually agreed to split the royal children between their prospective in-laws with the result that the brood of royal children were dispersed across France, with only the Dauphin remaining in the Capital under the guardianship of Charles de Berry, and even he would eventually find himself spirited away to Bourges where his uncle could protect him. Louis d'Orléans would grasp back some of his power and influence, but Jean de Bourgogne had for the moment taken command of the reins of power in France (19).
Footnotes:
(1) IOTL warfare started up between France and England following Henry's usurpation of the throne. This deposed Charles VI's son-in-law and led to immense instability in England. Beginning in the mid-1390s, Richard II began acting out against his nobility and eventually escalated to imprisonment and murder of numerous opponents. His deposal by Henry was welcomed in some corners, but numerous uprisings would characterize Henry IV's reign, most importantly the Glydwr Uprising which lasted for more than a decade. This instability left England weakened and distracted, which prompted the French to jump at the opportunity. The conflict grew into a full-on war at sea and on land.
(2) This is similar to what was done with Edward III and the Black Prince IOTL. Edward V is giving his heir one of the hardest posts in England and allows him to build up authority in France.
(3) These lands are significantly larger than those left IOTL. By retaining so much of Saintogne and Périgord, Bordeaux remains sustainable and is in a much better place than IOTL. Over the course of the long truce between France and England, the city has grown immensely, reaching a population of 35,000 by the turn of the century.
(4) This is based on the running of the duchy IOTL, although things are much better off due to the larger lands under the city's control and the extended period of peace the region has experienced when compared to France or the Isle of Britain.
(5) These are basically castles under Routier control IOTL as well, though under closer control than IOTL. It bears reminding that the Viscounts of Béarn are also Counts of Foix and Armagnac, leaving these territories and supports dependent on the good will of the de Foix family and their cousins from Navarre.
(6) The Albrets are becoming really important in Gascony. Charles d'Albret's marriage to Marguerite de Comminges and the granting of other lands basically means that he replaces the Armagnacs as the main pro-French leaders in Gascony. The main difference from the Armagnacs is that the Albrets are rather limited to Gascony and don't hold the wide ranging lands of the Armganacs elsewhere. How loyal they stay to France is as much a question as how loyal Navarre or Foix are going to stay loyal to the English - very questionable.
(7) The Coucy inheritance was important to begin with, but the marriage to Jacqueline really makes it a vital territory to control. Charles de Berry uses his usual charm to accomplish this.
(8) She died in the mid 1390s IOTL, here she lives a bit longer.
(9) IOTL Isabelle never remarried, but with a son in need of protection she goes through with it. This helps establish ties between Berry and England in a rather round-about fashion, and serves as a signal for closer relations between the Berry lands and England.
(10) Charles de Berry is involved in Spain at this point in time, while the Anjou are preparing for an invasion of Sicily. They really don't have the time to get too involved. In the meanwhile Jean de Bourbon and Jean de Bourgogne are busy trying to orientate themselves.
(11) The Coucy inheritance really becomes a point of contest between the different families and leaves Berry somewhat distanced from both Bourgogne and Orléans.
(12) This is all OTL.
(13) As mentioned, Berry is looking for allies and has little skin in the game regarding the succession - so he turns to England for support. In the meantime the relationship with Navarre, which has never been very good, goes into terminal decline. The fact that the Navarrese are married into the Lancaster and not Plantagenet dynasty is really coming back to bite the English. This is at the same time as relations between Castile and England are at a low point over the actions of Thomas of Beaufort.
(14) All of this is OTL. The struggles between different French factions are becoming increasingly tense. I also thought it would be a good idea to get a clear idea of who Jean Sans Peur really was.
(15) It is honestly impressive how much people hated Isabeau. After her husband descended into madness she went completely mercenary, out for herself - and on occasion - her children.
(16) This is based on an OTL power struggle between Burgundy and Orléans. The literal fight over children is honestly rather chilling.
(17) I have really found a love for the sheer level of factionalism that caused chaos in France in this period, particularly when you consider that they were trying to fight a major war against England at the same time.
(18) The sheer brazenness of Jean is rather impressive at times, I hope I conveyed it well.
(19) Due to the fact that many of the children are bound up in the courtly factions it is decided that someone running off with all of them at once is unacceptable, so everyone gets a pawn for the game.
Lovin the update! Question: what's the status of the Lancastrian estates in England? From what I remember in OTL John of Gaunt was the wealthiest man in the Realm next to the King, so with the betrayel of the Beauforts and the tensions between England and Castile, has Edward V confiscated the Duchy or not? If he hasn't, he really should, considering that the situation could easily shape up to be a replay of Anglo-French relations over Aquitaine.
Thanks, it is great to be back at it. The early 1400s is one of the darkest periods in French history, so while unrest is common this is a unique occurence.
The relationship with Castile is going to be very important. It is important to remember that much of the events of this update occur simultaneusly with Richard's Rebellion and the Castilian War of Succession that started following Juan II's death. The Lancastrian estates are in a state of limbo for a while, as Edward tries to get ahold of the Beauforts to punish them for supporting the rebellion. The decision to protect the Beauforts is what leads to the confiscation of the Lancastrian estates in England. This is going to fundamentally undermine Anglo-Castilian relations and really shift the web of alliances immensely. I will be getting into this a lot more in later updates.
They could, but remember that not only did Thomas Beaufort's arrival prove vital to the Lancastrian victory, they are also among the greatest nobles in Castile and Thomas is brother to Henry IV. Henry IV was unhappy with his brother's acts, but he also held an intense dislike of Edward to begin with, stemming from the aftermath of the Great Peasants' Revolt in the mid 1380s. The Beauforts would likely be able to completely undermine Lancaster rule if they wanted to. Handing over the Beauforts simply isn't tenable. Add the growing closeness of the Berry family to the Plantagenets, and the Berry's ties to the Trastamara, and relations are at an all time low. Even if the Lancasters could hand over the Beauforts, they have neither the will nor the inclination to do so.
This is so nice i wish that i could write a storie just like this.
It's so good just if i'm reading Tuchman or Sumption I love this.
It's so good just if i'm reading Tuchman or Sumption I love this.
Update Thirty: Before the Deluge
Things begin to pick up with regards to England and France while things are set up so that I can focus on France for the next several updates. I really hope you enjoy.
The effects of Richard's Rebellion would prove long and deadly. With his capture and imprisonment of King Edward, along with the civil war that followed, Richard of Bordeaux, Duke of Carlisle, had proven that it was possible to take power by force - even under a King as strong and popular as Edward V. The first impact of this would play itself out in a gruesome follow up to Richard's Rebellion. The Easter Rising was orchestrated by the Earl of Cambridge alongside many former supporters of Richard, though neither the Earl of Salisbury nor Baron le Strange participated. The Earl of Cambridge argued that Edward was weak, as illustrated by his lenient treatment of the rebels, and convinced many that a rebellion would not be greatly punished, even if it failed. This was coupled with numerous promises of land and titles to everyone and anyone willing to join. Edward of Norwich had himself been deeply offended by the lowering of his rank to Earl, and hoped to claim the throne for his heirs through his marriage to Richard of Bordeaux's eldest daughter Mary after disqualifying Edward V and his descendants. On Easter Sunday, 13th of April 1406, the Earl of Cambridge launched an attack on the Easter Procession that the royal family had commonly come to participate in - from the Canterbury Cathedral to Battle Palace. In his efforts to recruit supporters the Earl of Cambridge asked the Baron le Strange for his support - but by this time Richard le Strange had become a close companion and friend of the Prince of Wales and as a result betrayed the plot to the King when he learned of it. As a result, when Edward of Norwich, alongside Ralph Lumley, first Baron Lumley, Sir Thomas Blount and Sir Bernard Brocas, attacked the royal procession they were caught by surprise when the procession proved to be heavily armed and prepared. The ensuing fight saw Thomas Blount killed while the other conspirators were captured and imprisoned by King Edward. The Earl of Cambridge would find himself betrayed by Ralph Lumley, who detailed the extent of the conspiracy to the King, and when Edward of Norwich's brother Richard of Conisburgh (1) begged for his brother's life the request was denied, citing the Earl's own dismissal of Edward's mercy in the past. Edward of Norwich and a dozen other magnates would find themselves placed under the axe for treason, while their lands were distributed liberally among royalist supporters (2). Following the confiscation of the Lancaster Estate, Richard le Strange found himself made Earl of Derby for his role in revealing the conspiracy. Richard of Conisburgh received his brother's title and some of his estate while Edward of Norwich's son Edward and daughter Margaret were taken into the royal household as wards of the King and retained the remainder of the Norwich estate.
By the end of the Easter Rising it was deemed time for the marriage of Mary of England to David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay to move forward. The nominal ruler of Scotland had been the affable but infirm and incapable Robert III who was father to David Stewart. His reign was considered a time of plenty, disfigured by ‘dissension, strife and brawling’. By the turn of the new century Robert had been king in name for his entire reign, having been under his brother's control since the late 1380s. The general counsel of the realm met shortly after David Stewart's return to Scotland in early 1400 at Perth. This body, which was assuming growing importance in Scotland, enjoyed a status somewhat similar to the English great council, exercising most of the political functions of the Scottish Parliament. It abrogated Robert’s powers of government and transferred them to his eldest son the 22-year old David Stewart Duke of Rothesay, in an obvious coup against the man behind the throne - the Earl of Fife and Duke of Albany, Robert Stewart. David was now appointed as Lieutenant to govern in the King's place for three years, subject to extension. But he was unable to impose his own authority due to the interests of the large factions of Scotland. The terms of his appointment required him to exercise his functions under the supervision of a special council of twenty-one ‘wise men’. In practice this meant that his power was uneasily shared with the two powerful interest groups which dominated the special council. One group formed around the King’s ambitious and autocratic brother Robert Stewart, Earl of Fife and Duke of Albany, unquestionably the ablest member of his generation of Stewarts. In addition to being Chamberlain of Scotland and the Crown’s chief financial officer, Albany was the most powerful territorial magnate north of the Forth and had been de facto regent for his brother the king. The other group was associated with the Black Douglases, the dynasty founded by the Archibald ‘the Grim’, Earl of Douglas. Now well into his seventies, Douglas was one of the more extraordinary figures of fourteenth-century Scotland. He was the dominant military leader on the Scottish borderlands and the leading protagonist of the guerrilla war against England. In spite of his illegitimate birth he had succeeded by sheer intelligence, ruthlessness and force of personality in appropriating the earldom to himself together with most of its vast domains in southern Scotland, fighting off the claims of the ‘Red Douglases’ who represented the legitimate line. The Douglases’ only significant rivals in the border region were the Dunbar Earls of March, the dominant territorial magnates in Lothian since the eleventh century. For decades the Douglases had resisted any long-term accommodation with the English, even at times when Scotland’s French allies were committed to one (3). The Truce of Rennes in 1395 had been ratified by Robert II under strong French pressure and against the vocal objections of the border lords, but collapsed quickly once England became riven by feuds and factional infighting under the Duke of Carlisle. Instead a fragile truce was renewed from year to year. Successive ‘march days’ between representatives of the two realms were given over to debilitating argument about the frequent armed incursions across the border and to frustrating and unsuccessful efforts to persuade the Scots to agree to a permanent peace. The truth was that the border war had become a way of life, an economic necessity to which men had adapted themselves on both sides. Sparsely populated with few towns, only marginally cultivable, affected by persistent lawlessness and war damage, much of the Scottish border region was held under the distinctive Scottish system of feudal tenure in which service was at least as significant to the superior lord as rent. The border lords depended mainly on war for their livelihood. It was plunder that built their imposing stone houses, that bought their glittering armor and expensive warhorses, that drew them to the world of European chivalry. The Douglases, like other lords of the region, relied in their turn on extensive networks of dependents: kinsmen, tenants, friends and followers who looked to them for leadership and patronage and for opportunities which only war could provide. (4)
David's sudden ascension to power in 1400 and Edward V's return caused chaos and uncertainty in the border regions. Furthermore, the Duke of Albany was quick to start pushing David from power. By 1403 David Stewart's supporters were experiencing daily attacks and feared to walk the streets of Edinburgh at night. Learning of a possible assassination plot against him by his uncle, and nearing the end of his three year tenure as Lieutenant of Scotland with little hope of extending it, it became clear that it was too dangerous to remain. As such David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay fled the Scottish capital in late September 1403, arriving in London in time to celebrate Christmas with the royal family (5). This was the reason Edward V had remained behind for the summer in 1404, when he was captured and Richard's Rebellion began, because he was planning an invasion of Scotland so that his prospective son-in-law might be placed back in power. David was caught off guard by the Rebellion and eventually joined his future brother-in-law the Prince of Wales for the duration of the conflict, participating in the Battles of Wadworth and Windsor with distinction. Most of 1405 was spent repairing the damage done by the Rebellion, and by 1406 plans were in motion once more for an invasion to place David back in power. Soon after the Easter Rising news arrived of Robert III's death on the 6th of April and Robert, Duke of Albany's usurpation of the throne as Robert IV of Scotland (6). David Stewart and Mary of England married on the 21st of June, whereupon David left for the Scottish Marches to lead an invasion of Scotland. The force that invaded Scotland in the summer of 1406 was led by David Stewart with the support of Henry Percy and Ralph Neville, the Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Westmoreland respectively. Although the army was summoned to assemble at York on 3rd July, it did not approach Scotland until mid-August. This was due to the gradual arrival of army supplies. Edward and David were well aware of the delays these preparations would cause the campaign. The army left York on 25 July and reached Newcastle-upon-Tyne four days later; it was plagued by shortages of supplies, particularly food, of which more had had to be requested before even leaving York. As the campaign progressed, bad weather exacerbated the problem of food shortages. The army was around 13,000 men, of which 800 men-at-arms and 2000 archers came directly from the Royal Household. The English fleet also patrolled the east coast of Scotland in order to besiege Scottish trade and to resupply the army when required. At least three convoys were sent from London and the Humber, the first of which delivered 100 tons of flour and ten tons of sea salt to David's army in Scotland. David crossed the border in mid-August. He took great care not to ravage or pillage the countryside on their march through Berwickshire and Lothian, hoping to gain popular support for his claim. However, the forces under David faced little opposition from King Robert as the English army marched through Haddington, where they were met by the Earl of Dunbar - who hoped to use the opportunity to crush his rivals the Black Douglases, and the Red Douglases under George Douglas, First Earl of Angus (7). The army under David finally met with opposition west of Huntingdon, at Gladsmuir, before encountering the Scottish army, 20,000 strong, at Musselburgh where they blocked the crossing to the River Esk, ten kilometers from Edinburgh. The battle started with the advance of English longbowmen, who rained down hell on the Scotish traditional Schiltron formation under Archibald Douglas, Fourth Earl of Douglas and son to recently deceased Grim Douglas, across the river. As the Schiltron formation consisted of closely pressed men in a shield wall, the formation was particularly vulnerable to attack and was devastated by the archery. This prompted the Earl of Douglas to order an attack across the River, despite orders from King Robert to stay back. The attack of the Black Douglases convinced others to attack as well, and the Scottish army was soon in a disorderly and undisciplined attack across the river into the teeth of the English army. The English moved to meet them in the shallows of the ford, and in the battle that followed the weight of veteran archery, heavily armed infantry and superior generalship won out. The butchery at the ford went on for several hours until the Scots began to break, whereupon Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, launched his heavy cavalry into the weakened and uncertain enemy in the ford. The Scots were bowled over and descended into chaos, as every man sought to flee the English knights. The Scots were chased for miles, and captured or killed by the thousands, until a few remnants were able to take refuge in Edinburgh. King Robert IV fled Edinburgh for his heartlands north of the Forth of Firth while David paraded through the streets of Edinburgh in victory. He was crowned King David III of Scotland soon after and set about establishing control of the lands south of the Firth. By 1407 the Black Douglases were in full retreat, eventually fleeing north to King Robert, while the Red Douglases were granted the extensive Douglas' lands and title to the earldom. Over the next five years the two Kings of Scotland would fight each other, with David slowly winning out (8). By 1412 King Robert found himself driven into exile with many of his supporters, fleeing to England where they would come to constitute a core part of the army of the Duke of Burgundy (9). The lands of Northern Scotland were divided among David's supporters, while he at the same time took immense grants of the lands for his own - greatly strengthening the hand of the Scottish Monarchy in the process and ensuring happy relations between England and Scotland for the time being. Mary of England gave birth to three sons and two daughters named David, James, Robert, Elizabeth and Mary respectively over the course of the decades that followed their marriage.
As the sons of Edward V grew to adulthood, he began looking for lands and titles for them. Using large tracts of land taken after the Rebellion, he made Richard of Kent, who was made Duke of York, and John of Lincoln, who became Duke of Lincoln. At the same time the Duchy of Lancaster found itself fully integrated into the lands of the English Crown, as relations between Castile and England collapsed completely due to Enrique IV's unwillingness to hand over his brother Thomas of Beaufort. The breakdown of relations with Castile would significantly damage relations with Navarre, who had until then been de facto allies of the King of England. At the same time relations with Brittany went into a steep decline as Duke Jean V de Montfort, who had succeeded his father in 1399 and was married to Joan of Carlisle - daughter of the former Duke of Carlisle, began to align himself with the Duke of Orléans and in opposition to the English. The loss of both of England's allies in France fundamentally undermined the security and stability of the English realm in France and left them scrambling for support. It was under these circumstances that relations with the Duc de Berry were opened up - culminating in a marriage between Joan of Wales to the eldest grandson of the Duc de Berry, Charles de Berry, by his heir Jean de Berry, and Jean's wife Isabelle de Bourbon who had brought with her the Dauphinate of Auvergne as dowry in their marriage.
Fighting in Gascony between French and English Forces
The summer campaign on the Gascon March of 1405 would prove to be an immense effort on the French behalf who would seek to exploit the chaos in England that followed Richard's Rebellion. But the armies had to be manned and funded in the south with very little help from the royal treasury. The main French military effort in the region did not begin until July. The French advanced on the duchy from two directions. The Constable of France, Charles d’Albret, gathered his forces at Saint-Jean d’Angély at the end of June. On the 6th of July he laid siege to Taillebourg, a well-fortified castle atop a rock overlooking the Charente River, north of Saintes. Vastly outnumbered, the small garrison held out for two weeks before they accepted surrender, having run out of water and uncertain of their ability to repel the invaders. This opened up the western bank of the Charente, which Charles crossed over soon after. He led his army southwards, sending out siege parties and the like to take over the lands north of Saintes before arriving in front of Saintes on the 23rd of July. Due to the extended siege of Taillebourg, Saintes was well prepared for a siege. John de Grailly, Earl of Bedford was present as commander of the defenses, for his first command, and was well supplied and reinforced. The Siege of Saintes would take on immense significance as proof of French failures, with dozens of assaults beaten back by the charismatic Earl, while several large sallies caused havoc among the French. The siege dragged on into 1406, as Louis d'Orléans fought to keep hold of his power, and saw his war party increasingly dismissed as corrupt, venal and incompetent (10).
Some three weeks after Albret’s arrival at Chalais, the French mounted a two-pronged attack on the Bordelais from the east. The young Gaston V, Count of Foix and Armagnac invaded the lower valley of the Garonne with a force of 1,000 men-at-arms and 300 crossbowmen, while the Count of Clermont simultaneously moved down the valley of the Dordogne with a second army comprising much of the military nobility of Languedoc. The defense in both valleys was the responsibility of the King of England’s Seneschal of the Agenais, Nompar de Caumont. But his forces were weak and thinly spread and were swiftly overwhelmed. The pattern was the same everywhere. From the walls of remote fortresses small garrisons of hardened Gascon routiers resisted with ferocity for as long as they could, while the towns opened their gates at once rather than run the risk of a sack. In the course of a seven-week campaign the French overran all the places held by the Anglo-Gascons in the Agenais, eighteen castles and walled towns including the important strongholds of Port-Sainte-Marie, Tonneins and Aiguillon as well as the surviving Anglo-Gascon garrisons on the Dordogne at Castelnaud and Badefols. Caumont himself was captured and lost all of his own castles in the region. These disasters played out just as Prince Edward of Wales, newly made Duke of Aquitaine arrived in Bordeaux with an army 5,000 strong, just before storms closed the sea-routs. The bitter winter fighting that followed saw the French advance under the Count of Clermont stopped at the gates of Bergerac (11). In mid-December, the Count of Clermont crossed south to combine with the forces of the Count of Foix and assaulted Langon, the last significant Anglo-Gascon town on the Garonne up stream of Bordeaux. It required the direct intervention of the Prince to prevent the fall of Langon, but in the following months the French forces were forced to abandon most of their conquests in the region, including the lands around Saintes, as their forces were drawn into the growing struggle for power in Paris. This resulted in a flood of Anglo-Gascon forces rushing into the abandoned territories, swiftly and easily reconquering a year's worth of castles and towns in the winter months of January and February (12).
The expenditures of the conflicts in Gascony and Scotland placed a burden on the English economy that led King Edward to look for solutions. He eventually decided to place several minor tolls and taxes on wool and wine to finance the conflict. The expansion of the Great Wool Custom would help to shoulder the economic burden fully for the time being. While minor, these financial burdens caused murmurs of discontent, particularly among the English merchants who were made to pay. The steady rise in prices on English wool would with time have a largescale impact on the economic system of Europe. The Italian Banks had built many of their fortunes on a textile industry based on English wool, and as prices rose, they would increasingly look for new opportunities to offset the greater costs of the wool (13). Around the same time Edward began work on major legal reforms and the establishment of a permanent tax-collection civil service which would help to streamline the complex and interconnected web of financial transactions. He began implementing payed tax-collectors, moving away from tax-farming on his own estates, and worked to simplify the tax codes, and set up salaried collectors at many of the custom houses and with many of the toll collectors, while implementing strict measures against corruption. These reforms would help strengthen the English State, and would grow in importance and reach over the coming decades, to service the needs of the English Crown. However they also created tension and dissatisfaction among the English populace, which would with time result in popular discontent (14).
Valdemar of Helsingborg, Claimant King of Poland and Crown Prince of the Nordic Union
After the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War of 1410–1411 not all issues between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Teutonic Knights were settled. The most contentious matter was the border between Samogitia and Prussia. Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great demanded the entire right bank of the Neman River including the town of Memel. The Knights demanded that after deaths of Vytautas and Jogaila, King of Poland, Samogitia would pass to them. Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, agreed to mediate the dispute and appointed Benedict Makrai to hear the arguments. On 3 May 1413, Benedict made the decision and recognized the right bank of the Neman River, including Klaipėda, to Lithuania. The Knights refused to accept this decision and Teutonic Grand Master Heinrich von Plauen ordered Teutonic armies into northern Poland. The army, commanded by Michael Küchmeister von Sternberg, returned into Prussia after just 16 days of campaign. The knights did not believe that the Order, still recovering from the defeat in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, was ready for another war with Poland. Küchmeister deposed von Plauen and became the Grand Master. He attempted to reopen the negotiations with Poland in May 1414. As King Jogaila demanded the reinstatement of von Plauen and refused any attempts at a compromise, the talks broke down. Armies of King Jogaila and Grand Duke Vytautas invaded Prussia ruled by the monastic state in summer of 1414. They traveled through Osterode into Warmia, plundering villages and burning the crops. The Teutonic Knights chose to concentrate their defensive efforts in Culmerland. The Knights remained in their castles and refused an open battle as they realized Polish and Lithuanian superiority in a pitched battle. Küchmeister followed scorched earth tactics hoping to deprive invading armies of food and supplies. This tactics later resulted in a famine and plague in the region. The invaders were not able or willing to seek a decisive military victory by lengthy sieges of Teutonic castles. Papal legate William of Lausanne proposed resolving the conflict through diplomacy and a two-year truce was signed in Strasburg in October. Jogaila and Vytautas agreed to present their case to the Pope for mediation. Pope Honorius' mediation would prove long-drawn and distracted, as conflicts of significantly greater importance to the Papacy were waged at the time. The war earned its name, The Hunger War, from destructive scorched earth tactics employed by both sides. While the conflict ended without any major political results, famine and plague swept through Prussia. 86 knights of the Teutonic Order died from plague following the war. In comparison, about 400 knights perished in the Battle of Grunwald (15). These losses undermined German control of the Teutonic Order and opened it up to membership from across Europe. Particularly Nordic members would begin to join in the mid 1410s, growing to a steady stream by 1418.
No decision had been reached by 1418 when the negotiations collapsed near simultaneously with the start of the Great Polish War of Succession. Władysław II Jagiełło died in early 1418 at the age of 66, leaving behind him his eldest daughter, Elizabeth Bonifacia - daughter of Queen Jadwiga, who was married to the Crown Prince of the Nordic Union, Valdemar of Helsingborg. In addition to this was his daughter by Anna of Cilli, named Jadwiga, who at age ten remained without any real supporters, though she would eventually marry the heir to the Duchy of Mazovia, Konrad Piast, after being spirited away by a group of conspirators. Finally, and most importantly, were Casimir and Alexander Jagiellon - Władysław II Jagiełło's sons by Jeanne d'Anjou. Ordinarily sons would follow their fathers' onto the throne, but in this case neither Casimir nor Alexander had any real claim to the throne beyond being sons of Władysław II Jagiełło, his claim having come through marriages to Jadwiga and Anna of Cilli. Furthermore, Casimir was at this time three years old while his brother Alexander was two years old. Another issue lay in Vytautas' claim to Lithuania, where by right Casimir Jagiellon would become Grand Duke of Lithuania after the death of Jogaila. When news arrived of Jogaila's death Vytautas immediately declared himself Grand Duke of Lithuania, though he was challenged by supporters of the Jagellion claim. Olaf, on learning of Władysław II Jagiełło's death, reached out to his erstwhile ally Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor to negotiate a settlement regarding Mary of Hungary's extant claims to Poland. After months of negotiations, Sigismund agreed to renounce his wife's claims to the Kingdom of Poland and quietly provided aid to the Nordic Union in return for unquestioned support within the Empire. Soon after Olaf I of the Nordic Union issued a claim on behalf of his daughter-in-law Elizabeth Bonifacia to the Polish throne. The Teutonic Order announced its support for the Nordic claim in June of 1418, while the Hanseatic League declared its support for Casimir Jagellion (16).
On the 12th of July 1418 Valdemar of Helsingborg landed at Danzig in the lands of the Teutonic Order and marched on Poznan with a joint Nordic-Teutonic force. By the 28th Poznan had opened its gates to Valdemar and declared its support for his claim to the throne. Poznan had been the first capital of Poland and home to the oldest cathedral in Poland, and as such seemed grand enough as a location to hold a coronation. On the 14th of August 1418 Valdemar of Helsingborg was crowned Waldemar I, King of Poland alongside his wife Elizabeth Bonifacia at The Archcathedral Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul in Poznan. Several Polish magnates despised these foreign interlopers and began to gather an army to fight on behalf of the Jagellion claimants. Casimir was taken to the St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków and crowned King Casimir IV Jagellion of Poland by the 28th of August 1418. This marked the beginning of a decades long struggle between the Jagellion dynasty and the Bjelbo dynasty of the Nordic Union for the throne of Poland. Furthermore, the struggle between the Jagellions and Vytautas and his successors would prove equally great and would prove to be the central dynamic of Eastern Europe for most of the 15th century. The Teutonic Order would find itself assailed by Nordic membership from 1418, with a Nordic Bjelbo Grand Master, Prince Hàkon of Lund, appointed by 1425, solving many of the recruitment issues experienced by the Order but subordinating it to Nordic subjugation - a cause for strife among the increasingly outnumbered German Knights of the Order (17). Sigismund, when not distracted by internal matters in the Empire or his far-flung kingdoms would also provide aid and support for his Nordic allies in the form of diplomatic and financial support, as well as allying with them against the Hanseatic League when it proved necessary (18).
Jacqueline of Bavaria, Duchess of Bavaria-Straubing, Countess of Holland, Hainaut and Zeeland
The Hanseatic League was severely damaged by the Dano-Hanseatic War of 1406-1408. Many of its cities had lost a significant part of their fleets, leaving their traders vulnerable to pirates and the Victual Brothers, who set up operations on the Estonian Isles and in various larger and smaller coastal settlements across the Baltic Coasts. Further, the imposition of the Sound Toll served as a constant drain on the previously immensely prosperous Baltic Trade. Lübeck, Queen of the Baltic, was further hampered by the imposition of a tax on their salt trade. By 1418 the League had recovered somewhat from the Battle of the Sound and were ready to avenge themselves. Therefore when news arrived of Nordic pretensions on the Kingdom of Poland, the League were among the first to declare their opposition. Raids and attacks on the Nordic coasts began in early 1419, as soon as the weather permitted, and escalated steadily over the course of the year. In the inter-war years, Olaf had worked steadily to secure the trade routes and coastal cities of the Nordic Union in preparation for the resumption of warfare. New cannons had been placed in several key locations and the Nordic fleet had been expanded significantly, with several innovations to the rigging and sails as well as the placement of cannon on a few ships. The Nordic and Hanseatic fleets clashed in smaller and larger skirmishes and battles throughout 1419 and 1420 with some success for the Hanseatic League, though the route between Danzig and Scania remained open along with Nordic command of the Straits, which had been fortified greatly (19).
On the 31st of May 1417 William II of Bavaria-Straubing died of an infected dog bite, five weeks after the marriage of Enguerrand VIII de Coucy and Jacqueline of Bavaria. Enguerrand ascended to the post of Duke of Bavaria-Straubing and Count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut jure uxoris alongside his wife. Jacqueline's inheritance was immediately challenged by Jacqueline's uncle John of Bavaria, Prince-Bishop of Liege, who gave up his bishopric to pursue his claims to his brother's inheritance. This reignited the Hook and Cod War, with the Hooks supporting Jacqueline and the Cods supporting John of Bavaria. John immediately found support from the Burgundian faction, while the Berrys provided what aid they could. Ingleram de Coucy, Duke of Oxford, arrived in Holland to great acclaim with a contingent from his lands in England. This would significantly strengthen the hand of the Coucy faction, who came to rely on the support of the Coucy family connections for support. In Bavaria, the tensions between the Dukes of Bavaria erupted into full on war, as the Dukes of Bavaria-Munich and John of Bavaria launched a joint attack at Louis VII, Duke of Bavaria-Ingolstad and successor to Duke Stephen III, and succeeded in creating an opportunity for Duke Henry of Bavaria-Landshut to escape. The sudden freeing of the Duke of Bavaria-Landshut proved to be of limited popularity among the population of Bavaria-Landshut who had prospered under the Dukes of Bavaria-Ingolstad. This resulted in the duchy being rendered asunder as partisans of Landshut and Ingolstad fought for supremacy. The Duchy of Bavaria-Straubing proved equally contested, between John of Bavaria and Jacqueline de Coucy - with Jacqueline allying with Duke Louis of Bavaria-Ingolstad in the conflict. Louis of Bavaria-Ingolstad would bind together most of northern Bavaria under his and his kinswoman's control by 1418 though the continued strife in France would plague their relationship for years to come (20).
Footnotes:
(1) This is the man the OTL House of York is descended from.
(2) This series of events is based largely on the Epiphany Rising of OTL, though under significantly different circumstances. Many of the actors are also the same, though the de Hollands stay out of it. These were OTL supporters of Richard who rose in his name against the usurping Henry IV, this time they really miscalculate. Furthermore Edward's leniency comes back to bite him - though luckily without too serious consequences.
(3) This is largely based on the OTL reign of Robert III. The major differences are David's time spent in England and on crusade as well as the Duke of Albany's control of Robert III from the beginning of his reign - having been handed over to his brother by the English. The background for the Black and Red Douglases are OTL.
(4) This is also based on OTL descriptions of the Anglo-Scottish borders. It really becomes an interesting place when you start reading on it.
(5) IOTL David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay was lieutenant for his father for the majority of his reign, but experienced problems similar to those described earlier. IOTL he ended up imprisoned by Albany and poisoned, dying during this time period.
(6) The Duke of Albany can't quite crown David's younger brother king - as he did IOTL, and determines that if he is usurping the throne anyway he might as well do it for himself.
(7) This is similar to the OTL English Invasion of Scotland in 1400, though with more impact.
(8) This victory strengthens David's position, and particularly the defeat of the Black Douglases provides him with significant support in the region.
(9) The relations between England and Burgundy aren't quite as cozy as IOTL. These Scots are going to keep their claims in Scotland, in some ways recreating the Bruce-Baliol situation of previous periods. Scotland does not stay stable or satisfied under David and he is forced to fight near-constant rebellions and revolts in favor of the pro-French Albany Stewarts.
(10) This campaign and warfare in Gascony is similar to fighting that occurred in OTL at around this time, though under different circumstances. The most important difference here are the larger lands controlled by the English in the region north of Bordeaux.
(11) These are again similar to successes experienced IOTL by the French. The arrival of the Prince of Wales is where things really start departing from the script.
(12) IOTL Langon fell, though was quickly retaken. The French pulling out of their conquests is based on them doing so IOTL. This has to do with instability and near civil war in Paris - something we will look much more closely at next update.
(13) I really suggest reading up on the medieval economy, particularly in this period. The interconnectedness of the English wool trade with Florentine textiles, which are in turn connected to Italian Banks, who in turn finance mercenary companies and the wars happening across Europe at this point in time. I could go on, particularly with the Salt trade or the Eastern trade.
(14) These are really tentative steps in the right direction, but remain a somewhat minor experiment by a King who is interested in seeing how he can improve things.
(15) The Hunger War is all OTL.
(16) I really hope this is clear enough. To clarify, there are two claims on Poland and two claims to Lithuania, with the Jagellion being one party in both struggles. The Nordic Union is contesting the Polish crown while Vytautas wants the Lithuanian one. Local Poles and around half the Lithuanians support the Jagellions. The Nordics are supported by the Teutonic Order while Vytautas is aided by Musovy. The Hanseatic League supports the Jagellions. Those are the sides so far in the conflict, but there is plenty of time for it to get more complex. Do remember that Prince Valdemar of Helsingborg is a grandson of King Edward V while Casimir Jagellion is the grandson of Louis II of Naples - who is deeply tied to the French court.
(17) The Teutonic Order has taken on a distinctly Nordic character by this point in time, to the great distress of the German knights. The Order is moving increasingly into the subordinate role it took on later in history IOTL, the difference is that it is the Nordic Union they find themselves leaning on instead of the Poles.
(18) Sigismund really doesn't like the Hanseatic League. It is far too powerful and influential for his tastes, and present a threat to his dynasty's hold on power - as was illustrated by their support of Rupert of Germany.
(19) Neither side is really winning this clash at the moment, though it is costing both of them money.
(20) This got rather ridiculous, but that is Wittelsbach Bavaria for you in this time period. I hope you are able to follow it, I confused myself once or twice.
Before the Deluge
The Execution of Edward of Norwich, Earl of Cambridge
The Execution of Edward of Norwich, Earl of Cambridge
The effects of Richard's Rebellion would prove long and deadly. With his capture and imprisonment of King Edward, along with the civil war that followed, Richard of Bordeaux, Duke of Carlisle, had proven that it was possible to take power by force - even under a King as strong and popular as Edward V. The first impact of this would play itself out in a gruesome follow up to Richard's Rebellion. The Easter Rising was orchestrated by the Earl of Cambridge alongside many former supporters of Richard, though neither the Earl of Salisbury nor Baron le Strange participated. The Earl of Cambridge argued that Edward was weak, as illustrated by his lenient treatment of the rebels, and convinced many that a rebellion would not be greatly punished, even if it failed. This was coupled with numerous promises of land and titles to everyone and anyone willing to join. Edward of Norwich had himself been deeply offended by the lowering of his rank to Earl, and hoped to claim the throne for his heirs through his marriage to Richard of Bordeaux's eldest daughter Mary after disqualifying Edward V and his descendants. On Easter Sunday, 13th of April 1406, the Earl of Cambridge launched an attack on the Easter Procession that the royal family had commonly come to participate in - from the Canterbury Cathedral to Battle Palace. In his efforts to recruit supporters the Earl of Cambridge asked the Baron le Strange for his support - but by this time Richard le Strange had become a close companion and friend of the Prince of Wales and as a result betrayed the plot to the King when he learned of it. As a result, when Edward of Norwich, alongside Ralph Lumley, first Baron Lumley, Sir Thomas Blount and Sir Bernard Brocas, attacked the royal procession they were caught by surprise when the procession proved to be heavily armed and prepared. The ensuing fight saw Thomas Blount killed while the other conspirators were captured and imprisoned by King Edward. The Earl of Cambridge would find himself betrayed by Ralph Lumley, who detailed the extent of the conspiracy to the King, and when Edward of Norwich's brother Richard of Conisburgh (1) begged for his brother's life the request was denied, citing the Earl's own dismissal of Edward's mercy in the past. Edward of Norwich and a dozen other magnates would find themselves placed under the axe for treason, while their lands were distributed liberally among royalist supporters (2). Following the confiscation of the Lancaster Estate, Richard le Strange found himself made Earl of Derby for his role in revealing the conspiracy. Richard of Conisburgh received his brother's title and some of his estate while Edward of Norwich's son Edward and daughter Margaret were taken into the royal household as wards of the King and retained the remainder of the Norwich estate.
By the end of the Easter Rising it was deemed time for the marriage of Mary of England to David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay to move forward. The nominal ruler of Scotland had been the affable but infirm and incapable Robert III who was father to David Stewart. His reign was considered a time of plenty, disfigured by ‘dissension, strife and brawling’. By the turn of the new century Robert had been king in name for his entire reign, having been under his brother's control since the late 1380s. The general counsel of the realm met shortly after David Stewart's return to Scotland in early 1400 at Perth. This body, which was assuming growing importance in Scotland, enjoyed a status somewhat similar to the English great council, exercising most of the political functions of the Scottish Parliament. It abrogated Robert’s powers of government and transferred them to his eldest son the 22-year old David Stewart Duke of Rothesay, in an obvious coup against the man behind the throne - the Earl of Fife and Duke of Albany, Robert Stewart. David was now appointed as Lieutenant to govern in the King's place for three years, subject to extension. But he was unable to impose his own authority due to the interests of the large factions of Scotland. The terms of his appointment required him to exercise his functions under the supervision of a special council of twenty-one ‘wise men’. In practice this meant that his power was uneasily shared with the two powerful interest groups which dominated the special council. One group formed around the King’s ambitious and autocratic brother Robert Stewart, Earl of Fife and Duke of Albany, unquestionably the ablest member of his generation of Stewarts. In addition to being Chamberlain of Scotland and the Crown’s chief financial officer, Albany was the most powerful territorial magnate north of the Forth and had been de facto regent for his brother the king. The other group was associated with the Black Douglases, the dynasty founded by the Archibald ‘the Grim’, Earl of Douglas. Now well into his seventies, Douglas was one of the more extraordinary figures of fourteenth-century Scotland. He was the dominant military leader on the Scottish borderlands and the leading protagonist of the guerrilla war against England. In spite of his illegitimate birth he had succeeded by sheer intelligence, ruthlessness and force of personality in appropriating the earldom to himself together with most of its vast domains in southern Scotland, fighting off the claims of the ‘Red Douglases’ who represented the legitimate line. The Douglases’ only significant rivals in the border region were the Dunbar Earls of March, the dominant territorial magnates in Lothian since the eleventh century. For decades the Douglases had resisted any long-term accommodation with the English, even at times when Scotland’s French allies were committed to one (3). The Truce of Rennes in 1395 had been ratified by Robert II under strong French pressure and against the vocal objections of the border lords, but collapsed quickly once England became riven by feuds and factional infighting under the Duke of Carlisle. Instead a fragile truce was renewed from year to year. Successive ‘march days’ between representatives of the two realms were given over to debilitating argument about the frequent armed incursions across the border and to frustrating and unsuccessful efforts to persuade the Scots to agree to a permanent peace. The truth was that the border war had become a way of life, an economic necessity to which men had adapted themselves on both sides. Sparsely populated with few towns, only marginally cultivable, affected by persistent lawlessness and war damage, much of the Scottish border region was held under the distinctive Scottish system of feudal tenure in which service was at least as significant to the superior lord as rent. The border lords depended mainly on war for their livelihood. It was plunder that built their imposing stone houses, that bought their glittering armor and expensive warhorses, that drew them to the world of European chivalry. The Douglases, like other lords of the region, relied in their turn on extensive networks of dependents: kinsmen, tenants, friends and followers who looked to them for leadership and patronage and for opportunities which only war could provide. (4)
David's sudden ascension to power in 1400 and Edward V's return caused chaos and uncertainty in the border regions. Furthermore, the Duke of Albany was quick to start pushing David from power. By 1403 David Stewart's supporters were experiencing daily attacks and feared to walk the streets of Edinburgh at night. Learning of a possible assassination plot against him by his uncle, and nearing the end of his three year tenure as Lieutenant of Scotland with little hope of extending it, it became clear that it was too dangerous to remain. As such David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay fled the Scottish capital in late September 1403, arriving in London in time to celebrate Christmas with the royal family (5). This was the reason Edward V had remained behind for the summer in 1404, when he was captured and Richard's Rebellion began, because he was planning an invasion of Scotland so that his prospective son-in-law might be placed back in power. David was caught off guard by the Rebellion and eventually joined his future brother-in-law the Prince of Wales for the duration of the conflict, participating in the Battles of Wadworth and Windsor with distinction. Most of 1405 was spent repairing the damage done by the Rebellion, and by 1406 plans were in motion once more for an invasion to place David back in power. Soon after the Easter Rising news arrived of Robert III's death on the 6th of April and Robert, Duke of Albany's usurpation of the throne as Robert IV of Scotland (6). David Stewart and Mary of England married on the 21st of June, whereupon David left for the Scottish Marches to lead an invasion of Scotland. The force that invaded Scotland in the summer of 1406 was led by David Stewart with the support of Henry Percy and Ralph Neville, the Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Westmoreland respectively. Although the army was summoned to assemble at York on 3rd July, it did not approach Scotland until mid-August. This was due to the gradual arrival of army supplies. Edward and David were well aware of the delays these preparations would cause the campaign. The army left York on 25 July and reached Newcastle-upon-Tyne four days later; it was plagued by shortages of supplies, particularly food, of which more had had to be requested before even leaving York. As the campaign progressed, bad weather exacerbated the problem of food shortages. The army was around 13,000 men, of which 800 men-at-arms and 2000 archers came directly from the Royal Household. The English fleet also patrolled the east coast of Scotland in order to besiege Scottish trade and to resupply the army when required. At least three convoys were sent from London and the Humber, the first of which delivered 100 tons of flour and ten tons of sea salt to David's army in Scotland. David crossed the border in mid-August. He took great care not to ravage or pillage the countryside on their march through Berwickshire and Lothian, hoping to gain popular support for his claim. However, the forces under David faced little opposition from King Robert as the English army marched through Haddington, where they were met by the Earl of Dunbar - who hoped to use the opportunity to crush his rivals the Black Douglases, and the Red Douglases under George Douglas, First Earl of Angus (7). The army under David finally met with opposition west of Huntingdon, at Gladsmuir, before encountering the Scottish army, 20,000 strong, at Musselburgh where they blocked the crossing to the River Esk, ten kilometers from Edinburgh. The battle started with the advance of English longbowmen, who rained down hell on the Scotish traditional Schiltron formation under Archibald Douglas, Fourth Earl of Douglas and son to recently deceased Grim Douglas, across the river. As the Schiltron formation consisted of closely pressed men in a shield wall, the formation was particularly vulnerable to attack and was devastated by the archery. This prompted the Earl of Douglas to order an attack across the River, despite orders from King Robert to stay back. The attack of the Black Douglases convinced others to attack as well, and the Scottish army was soon in a disorderly and undisciplined attack across the river into the teeth of the English army. The English moved to meet them in the shallows of the ford, and in the battle that followed the weight of veteran archery, heavily armed infantry and superior generalship won out. The butchery at the ford went on for several hours until the Scots began to break, whereupon Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, launched his heavy cavalry into the weakened and uncertain enemy in the ford. The Scots were bowled over and descended into chaos, as every man sought to flee the English knights. The Scots were chased for miles, and captured or killed by the thousands, until a few remnants were able to take refuge in Edinburgh. King Robert IV fled Edinburgh for his heartlands north of the Forth of Firth while David paraded through the streets of Edinburgh in victory. He was crowned King David III of Scotland soon after and set about establishing control of the lands south of the Firth. By 1407 the Black Douglases were in full retreat, eventually fleeing north to King Robert, while the Red Douglases were granted the extensive Douglas' lands and title to the earldom. Over the next five years the two Kings of Scotland would fight each other, with David slowly winning out (8). By 1412 King Robert found himself driven into exile with many of his supporters, fleeing to England where they would come to constitute a core part of the army of the Duke of Burgundy (9). The lands of Northern Scotland were divided among David's supporters, while he at the same time took immense grants of the lands for his own - greatly strengthening the hand of the Scottish Monarchy in the process and ensuring happy relations between England and Scotland for the time being. Mary of England gave birth to three sons and two daughters named David, James, Robert, Elizabeth and Mary respectively over the course of the decades that followed their marriage.
As the sons of Edward V grew to adulthood, he began looking for lands and titles for them. Using large tracts of land taken after the Rebellion, he made Richard of Kent, who was made Duke of York, and John of Lincoln, who became Duke of Lincoln. At the same time the Duchy of Lancaster found itself fully integrated into the lands of the English Crown, as relations between Castile and England collapsed completely due to Enrique IV's unwillingness to hand over his brother Thomas of Beaufort. The breakdown of relations with Castile would significantly damage relations with Navarre, who had until then been de facto allies of the King of England. At the same time relations with Brittany went into a steep decline as Duke Jean V de Montfort, who had succeeded his father in 1399 and was married to Joan of Carlisle - daughter of the former Duke of Carlisle, began to align himself with the Duke of Orléans and in opposition to the English. The loss of both of England's allies in France fundamentally undermined the security and stability of the English realm in France and left them scrambling for support. It was under these circumstances that relations with the Duc de Berry were opened up - culminating in a marriage between Joan of Wales to the eldest grandson of the Duc de Berry, Charles de Berry, by his heir Jean de Berry, and Jean's wife Isabelle de Bourbon who had brought with her the Dauphinate of Auvergne as dowry in their marriage.
Fighting in Gascony between French and English Forces
The summer campaign on the Gascon March of 1405 would prove to be an immense effort on the French behalf who would seek to exploit the chaos in England that followed Richard's Rebellion. But the armies had to be manned and funded in the south with very little help from the royal treasury. The main French military effort in the region did not begin until July. The French advanced on the duchy from two directions. The Constable of France, Charles d’Albret, gathered his forces at Saint-Jean d’Angély at the end of June. On the 6th of July he laid siege to Taillebourg, a well-fortified castle atop a rock overlooking the Charente River, north of Saintes. Vastly outnumbered, the small garrison held out for two weeks before they accepted surrender, having run out of water and uncertain of their ability to repel the invaders. This opened up the western bank of the Charente, which Charles crossed over soon after. He led his army southwards, sending out siege parties and the like to take over the lands north of Saintes before arriving in front of Saintes on the 23rd of July. Due to the extended siege of Taillebourg, Saintes was well prepared for a siege. John de Grailly, Earl of Bedford was present as commander of the defenses, for his first command, and was well supplied and reinforced. The Siege of Saintes would take on immense significance as proof of French failures, with dozens of assaults beaten back by the charismatic Earl, while several large sallies caused havoc among the French. The siege dragged on into 1406, as Louis d'Orléans fought to keep hold of his power, and saw his war party increasingly dismissed as corrupt, venal and incompetent (10).
Some three weeks after Albret’s arrival at Chalais, the French mounted a two-pronged attack on the Bordelais from the east. The young Gaston V, Count of Foix and Armagnac invaded the lower valley of the Garonne with a force of 1,000 men-at-arms and 300 crossbowmen, while the Count of Clermont simultaneously moved down the valley of the Dordogne with a second army comprising much of the military nobility of Languedoc. The defense in both valleys was the responsibility of the King of England’s Seneschal of the Agenais, Nompar de Caumont. But his forces were weak and thinly spread and were swiftly overwhelmed. The pattern was the same everywhere. From the walls of remote fortresses small garrisons of hardened Gascon routiers resisted with ferocity for as long as they could, while the towns opened their gates at once rather than run the risk of a sack. In the course of a seven-week campaign the French overran all the places held by the Anglo-Gascons in the Agenais, eighteen castles and walled towns including the important strongholds of Port-Sainte-Marie, Tonneins and Aiguillon as well as the surviving Anglo-Gascon garrisons on the Dordogne at Castelnaud and Badefols. Caumont himself was captured and lost all of his own castles in the region. These disasters played out just as Prince Edward of Wales, newly made Duke of Aquitaine arrived in Bordeaux with an army 5,000 strong, just before storms closed the sea-routs. The bitter winter fighting that followed saw the French advance under the Count of Clermont stopped at the gates of Bergerac (11). In mid-December, the Count of Clermont crossed south to combine with the forces of the Count of Foix and assaulted Langon, the last significant Anglo-Gascon town on the Garonne up stream of Bordeaux. It required the direct intervention of the Prince to prevent the fall of Langon, but in the following months the French forces were forced to abandon most of their conquests in the region, including the lands around Saintes, as their forces were drawn into the growing struggle for power in Paris. This resulted in a flood of Anglo-Gascon forces rushing into the abandoned territories, swiftly and easily reconquering a year's worth of castles and towns in the winter months of January and February (12).
The expenditures of the conflicts in Gascony and Scotland placed a burden on the English economy that led King Edward to look for solutions. He eventually decided to place several minor tolls and taxes on wool and wine to finance the conflict. The expansion of the Great Wool Custom would help to shoulder the economic burden fully for the time being. While minor, these financial burdens caused murmurs of discontent, particularly among the English merchants who were made to pay. The steady rise in prices on English wool would with time have a largescale impact on the economic system of Europe. The Italian Banks had built many of their fortunes on a textile industry based on English wool, and as prices rose, they would increasingly look for new opportunities to offset the greater costs of the wool (13). Around the same time Edward began work on major legal reforms and the establishment of a permanent tax-collection civil service which would help to streamline the complex and interconnected web of financial transactions. He began implementing payed tax-collectors, moving away from tax-farming on his own estates, and worked to simplify the tax codes, and set up salaried collectors at many of the custom houses and with many of the toll collectors, while implementing strict measures against corruption. These reforms would help strengthen the English State, and would grow in importance and reach over the coming decades, to service the needs of the English Crown. However they also created tension and dissatisfaction among the English populace, which would with time result in popular discontent (14).
Valdemar of Helsingborg, Claimant King of Poland and Crown Prince of the Nordic Union
No decision had been reached by 1418 when the negotiations collapsed near simultaneously with the start of the Great Polish War of Succession. Władysław II Jagiełło died in early 1418 at the age of 66, leaving behind him his eldest daughter, Elizabeth Bonifacia - daughter of Queen Jadwiga, who was married to the Crown Prince of the Nordic Union, Valdemar of Helsingborg. In addition to this was his daughter by Anna of Cilli, named Jadwiga, who at age ten remained without any real supporters, though she would eventually marry the heir to the Duchy of Mazovia, Konrad Piast, after being spirited away by a group of conspirators. Finally, and most importantly, were Casimir and Alexander Jagiellon - Władysław II Jagiełło's sons by Jeanne d'Anjou. Ordinarily sons would follow their fathers' onto the throne, but in this case neither Casimir nor Alexander had any real claim to the throne beyond being sons of Władysław II Jagiełło, his claim having come through marriages to Jadwiga and Anna of Cilli. Furthermore, Casimir was at this time three years old while his brother Alexander was two years old. Another issue lay in Vytautas' claim to Lithuania, where by right Casimir Jagiellon would become Grand Duke of Lithuania after the death of Jogaila. When news arrived of Jogaila's death Vytautas immediately declared himself Grand Duke of Lithuania, though he was challenged by supporters of the Jagellion claim. Olaf, on learning of Władysław II Jagiełło's death, reached out to his erstwhile ally Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor to negotiate a settlement regarding Mary of Hungary's extant claims to Poland. After months of negotiations, Sigismund agreed to renounce his wife's claims to the Kingdom of Poland and quietly provided aid to the Nordic Union in return for unquestioned support within the Empire. Soon after Olaf I of the Nordic Union issued a claim on behalf of his daughter-in-law Elizabeth Bonifacia to the Polish throne. The Teutonic Order announced its support for the Nordic claim in June of 1418, while the Hanseatic League declared its support for Casimir Jagellion (16).
On the 12th of July 1418 Valdemar of Helsingborg landed at Danzig in the lands of the Teutonic Order and marched on Poznan with a joint Nordic-Teutonic force. By the 28th Poznan had opened its gates to Valdemar and declared its support for his claim to the throne. Poznan had been the first capital of Poland and home to the oldest cathedral in Poland, and as such seemed grand enough as a location to hold a coronation. On the 14th of August 1418 Valdemar of Helsingborg was crowned Waldemar I, King of Poland alongside his wife Elizabeth Bonifacia at The Archcathedral Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul in Poznan. Several Polish magnates despised these foreign interlopers and began to gather an army to fight on behalf of the Jagellion claimants. Casimir was taken to the St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków and crowned King Casimir IV Jagellion of Poland by the 28th of August 1418. This marked the beginning of a decades long struggle between the Jagellion dynasty and the Bjelbo dynasty of the Nordic Union for the throne of Poland. Furthermore, the struggle between the Jagellions and Vytautas and his successors would prove equally great and would prove to be the central dynamic of Eastern Europe for most of the 15th century. The Teutonic Order would find itself assailed by Nordic membership from 1418, with a Nordic Bjelbo Grand Master, Prince Hàkon of Lund, appointed by 1425, solving many of the recruitment issues experienced by the Order but subordinating it to Nordic subjugation - a cause for strife among the increasingly outnumbered German Knights of the Order (17). Sigismund, when not distracted by internal matters in the Empire or his far-flung kingdoms would also provide aid and support for his Nordic allies in the form of diplomatic and financial support, as well as allying with them against the Hanseatic League when it proved necessary (18).
Jacqueline of Bavaria, Duchess of Bavaria-Straubing, Countess of Holland, Hainaut and Zeeland
On the 31st of May 1417 William II of Bavaria-Straubing died of an infected dog bite, five weeks after the marriage of Enguerrand VIII de Coucy and Jacqueline of Bavaria. Enguerrand ascended to the post of Duke of Bavaria-Straubing and Count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut jure uxoris alongside his wife. Jacqueline's inheritance was immediately challenged by Jacqueline's uncle John of Bavaria, Prince-Bishop of Liege, who gave up his bishopric to pursue his claims to his brother's inheritance. This reignited the Hook and Cod War, with the Hooks supporting Jacqueline and the Cods supporting John of Bavaria. John immediately found support from the Burgundian faction, while the Berrys provided what aid they could. Ingleram de Coucy, Duke of Oxford, arrived in Holland to great acclaim with a contingent from his lands in England. This would significantly strengthen the hand of the Coucy faction, who came to rely on the support of the Coucy family connections for support. In Bavaria, the tensions between the Dukes of Bavaria erupted into full on war, as the Dukes of Bavaria-Munich and John of Bavaria launched a joint attack at Louis VII, Duke of Bavaria-Ingolstad and successor to Duke Stephen III, and succeeded in creating an opportunity for Duke Henry of Bavaria-Landshut to escape. The sudden freeing of the Duke of Bavaria-Landshut proved to be of limited popularity among the population of Bavaria-Landshut who had prospered under the Dukes of Bavaria-Ingolstad. This resulted in the duchy being rendered asunder as partisans of Landshut and Ingolstad fought for supremacy. The Duchy of Bavaria-Straubing proved equally contested, between John of Bavaria and Jacqueline de Coucy - with Jacqueline allying with Duke Louis of Bavaria-Ingolstad in the conflict. Louis of Bavaria-Ingolstad would bind together most of northern Bavaria under his and his kinswoman's control by 1418 though the continued strife in France would plague their relationship for years to come (20).
Footnotes:
(1) This is the man the OTL House of York is descended from.
(2) This series of events is based largely on the Epiphany Rising of OTL, though under significantly different circumstances. Many of the actors are also the same, though the de Hollands stay out of it. These were OTL supporters of Richard who rose in his name against the usurping Henry IV, this time they really miscalculate. Furthermore Edward's leniency comes back to bite him - though luckily without too serious consequences.
(3) This is largely based on the OTL reign of Robert III. The major differences are David's time spent in England and on crusade as well as the Duke of Albany's control of Robert III from the beginning of his reign - having been handed over to his brother by the English. The background for the Black and Red Douglases are OTL.
(4) This is also based on OTL descriptions of the Anglo-Scottish borders. It really becomes an interesting place when you start reading on it.
(5) IOTL David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay was lieutenant for his father for the majority of his reign, but experienced problems similar to those described earlier. IOTL he ended up imprisoned by Albany and poisoned, dying during this time period.
(6) The Duke of Albany can't quite crown David's younger brother king - as he did IOTL, and determines that if he is usurping the throne anyway he might as well do it for himself.
(7) This is similar to the OTL English Invasion of Scotland in 1400, though with more impact.
(8) This victory strengthens David's position, and particularly the defeat of the Black Douglases provides him with significant support in the region.
(9) The relations between England and Burgundy aren't quite as cozy as IOTL. These Scots are going to keep their claims in Scotland, in some ways recreating the Bruce-Baliol situation of previous periods. Scotland does not stay stable or satisfied under David and he is forced to fight near-constant rebellions and revolts in favor of the pro-French Albany Stewarts.
(10) This campaign and warfare in Gascony is similar to fighting that occurred in OTL at around this time, though under different circumstances. The most important difference here are the larger lands controlled by the English in the region north of Bordeaux.
(11) These are again similar to successes experienced IOTL by the French. The arrival of the Prince of Wales is where things really start departing from the script.
(12) IOTL Langon fell, though was quickly retaken. The French pulling out of their conquests is based on them doing so IOTL. This has to do with instability and near civil war in Paris - something we will look much more closely at next update.
(13) I really suggest reading up on the medieval economy, particularly in this period. The interconnectedness of the English wool trade with Florentine textiles, which are in turn connected to Italian Banks, who in turn finance mercenary companies and the wars happening across Europe at this point in time. I could go on, particularly with the Salt trade or the Eastern trade.
(14) These are really tentative steps in the right direction, but remain a somewhat minor experiment by a King who is interested in seeing how he can improve things.
(15) The Hunger War is all OTL.
(16) I really hope this is clear enough. To clarify, there are two claims on Poland and two claims to Lithuania, with the Jagellion being one party in both struggles. The Nordic Union is contesting the Polish crown while Vytautas wants the Lithuanian one. Local Poles and around half the Lithuanians support the Jagellions. The Nordics are supported by the Teutonic Order while Vytautas is aided by Musovy. The Hanseatic League supports the Jagellions. Those are the sides so far in the conflict, but there is plenty of time for it to get more complex. Do remember that Prince Valdemar of Helsingborg is a grandson of King Edward V while Casimir Jagellion is the grandson of Louis II of Naples - who is deeply tied to the French court.
(17) The Teutonic Order has taken on a distinctly Nordic character by this point in time, to the great distress of the German knights. The Order is moving increasingly into the subordinate role it took on later in history IOTL, the difference is that it is the Nordic Union they find themselves leaning on instead of the Poles.
(18) Sigismund really doesn't like the Hanseatic League. It is far too powerful and influential for his tastes, and present a threat to his dynasty's hold on power - as was illustrated by their support of Rupert of Germany.
(19) Neither side is really winning this clash at the moment, though it is costing both of them money.
(20) This got rather ridiculous, but that is Wittelsbach Bavaria for you in this time period. I hope you are able to follow it, I confused myself once or twice.
Indeed. Both Brandenburg and Saxony came close the previous century too!
Things are going to go off the rails in a couple more updates, and then everything goes to hell. My problem at the moment is that I don't really have too many sources I can rely on because things have run so far away from OTL that it is barely recognizable.
Understandable. Do the best you can on filing the serial numbers off analogous incidents
.Understandable. Do the best you can on filing the serial numbers off analogous incidents
I think that there is a great deal to be gained from leaning on historical events. It helps me to get more into detail on a lot of events and helps me to determine what seems plausible and what doesn't. Most of the time it is a question of finding ways of integrating OTL with TTL that is the most fun, though going freestyle has its benefits as well.
Update Thirty-One: The Paralysis of Princes
This is a long one bringing us up to 1407 and the point at which France really runs off the rails. I really hope you enjoyed this one, I tried to work in the various financial strictures and clarify the challenges the French face. This should help to explain to some degree why the French were so greatly challenged during the 100 years' war.
Within a short time of his arrival in Paris the Duke of Burgundy discovered the limitations of his position. It was one thing for him to present his programme to a stage-managed assembly of his own making in Paris but quite another to convert it into policy. Jean had no official status or powers and did not control any of the main organs of the government. The royal household, the council, the Parlement and the Chambre des Comptes were all dominated by men with a personal interest in the current system. Jean’s proposals were not at all welcome to them. They were a threat to their jobs and perquisites. Many of them were also allies or clients of the Duke of Orléans. The princes in Paris had allowed themselves to be associated with Jean at the public session in the royal palace, but they were less committed than they seemed. A Burgundian official writing home thought that they were stringing him along and that they were all covertly on the side of the Duke of Orléans. As soon as the Paris assembly had ended the princes moved to assert their collective control over the machinery of government. The prime movers were the King’s cousins, the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon. They were supported by the shrewd and independent-minded King of Navarre, Pedro who reigned over his Pyrenean kingdom and vast French holding as a French politician. These men summoned a smaller meeting of prominent noblemen, prelates and officials immediately after the assembly in the palace. They agreed to appoint the Duke of Berry as captain of Paris, who would increasingly be seen as representative of the royalist cause and draw his support from that claim. The captains of the Louvre and the Bastille were made to swear to take orders only from the council. When after a few days the King showed signs of emerging from his torpor, the councilors issued ordinances in his name commanding the rival princes to disarm and forbidding the King’s subjects to join them. On 26 August 1405 a written summary of the Duke of Burgundy’s programme was presented by a delegation of his councilors for action to the two principal institutions of the French state, the Parlement of Paris and the Chambre des Comptes. The judges of the Parlement gave a non-committal reply. They would always do their duty by the King, they said. In the Chambre des Comptes the reception of the document was even cooler. The president, the old Orléanist Jean de Montaigu Bishop of Chartres, told Jean’s representatives that if it should please the King and his council to give them such instructions then they would do what they could to comply ‘so far as it lay within their province’. They were officers of the King, they added later, after another Burgundian missive had been brought to them, but they owed duties not only to him but to his Queen and children as well. It would always be their object to satisfy them all. They returned a very similar answer to the representatives of the Duke of Orléans. These answers put Jean in a quandary. There was no other way for him to impose his will than to obtain the support of the King’s council. This would not be easy unless the Duke of Orléans could be forced into submission (1).
Faced with a political stalemate both sides turned to propaganda and then to violence. A written summary of Jean the Fearless’s programme was distributed at the end of August to all the principal towns of the realm, the first of a long series of political pamphlets which Jean would issue over the following years to build up popular support for his cause. Louis replied with a bilious circular giving his own version of events. These bombastic and repetitive exchanges continued into September. It is uncertain what impact they had on those who read them. At Senlis, where the Duke of Orléans’ letters were read out to the officers of the town and then to a general assembly of the citizens, the councilors replied that they would act ‘as good subjects of the King’. Their apprehensive reaction was probably typical. People were afraid of the direction that events seemed to be taking and unsure what to do. Melun had many advantages as a base for the Queen and the Duke of Orléans: proximity to Paris; a virtually impregnable site on its island in the Seine; good communications by road and river to Louis’ domains on the Loire and in Champagne; and access to the treasury reserve of coin and bullion which was kept in a tower of the castle. Louis is said to have purloined 100,000 francs from this source, twice that much according to some sources. The troops which he had summoned to his assistance were already gathering outside the town in the fields by the Seine within days of the incident at Juvisy. They included the Counts of Saint-Pol and Alençon and the Duke of Lorraine with their retinues and the principal retainers of Louis’ household and domains. He also succeeded in recruiting most of the organized bodies of troops then available in France. Jean Harpeden, a long-standing Orléanist, arrived with troops withdrawn from the march of Calais. The Duke of Anjou René d'Anjou, having been given the title by his father on reaching the age of 13, was another ally, and was at Gâtinais on his way to Provence when he received Louis of Orléans’ summons to return urgently to Melun ‘without passing through Paris’. He turned back and placed his retinue at the disposal of the Queen. Negotiations were in hand under the Constable, Charles d'Albret. They had more than 3,000 men under their command on the march of Gascony. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Paris the Duke of Burgundy’s military position had begun to look precarious (2).
Inside the city the princes tried to broker a deal. Louis of Orléans, however, was in no mood for compromise. The Duke of Bourbon had already made two journeys to Melun with the council’s order disarming the rivals and his own proposals for an accommodation. He was sent away both times empty-handed. The Duke of Anjou tried to broker a compromise, but he succeeded no better. At the beginning of September he led another larger delegation to Melun. The Queen would not even receive them. Louis did receive them but with taunts. Seeing the representatives of the University among them he told them to mind their own business and ‘go back to their schools’. A few days after this a final attempt was made by the Duke of Berry, acknowledged by most as a neutral party and increasingly head of the royal council whom perhaps Louis would not dare to mock for fear of turning the magnate against him. But Louis was adamant. "Let him who has right on his side stick to his course," he said. By this time he was reported to have about 5,000 men under arms. On 5 September they struck their camp and advanced on Paris, bearing pennons with Louis’ motto, "Je l’envie", meaning "I want it". In front of them the capital was armed for a siege. The Duke of Burgundy had been joined in the city by his brother Phillip and his ally the worldly prince-bishop of Liège and their troops. More soldiers were continuing to arrive from Flanders, Burgundy and the Low Countries. They paraded in the streets behind pennons marked with a Flemish motto "Ich houd", a direct answer to his rival’s motto which might be roughly translated "I am keeping it." (3) The new arrivals nearly doubled the army of the Duke of Burgundy, bringing its strength to more or less the same level as his rival’s. At the end of the month the total number of men-at-arms at Jean’s disposal rose to 4,560 at a cost, according to his accountant, which was ‘horrible to relate’. In addition to these, large numbers of men arrived to defend Paris who were by no means Burgundian partisans but were appalled by the prospect of an Orléanist assault on the capital of France. Jean had already garrisoned the Louvre. Louis of Bavaria’s garrison in the Bastille had been expelled and replaced by Burgundian loyalists. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was stuffed with weapons and ammunition and the streets around it blocked by manned barricades. The Duke of Berry followed suit at the Hôtel de Nesle, his headquarters on the left bank. All the gates of the city were closed and sealed up for the first time in twenty-four years except for four which gave onto the main axial roads. Houses were demolished around the principal urban fortifications and chains stretched across the Seine to stop an attempt to land troops on the strands of the river. The citizens organized night watches in shifts of 500 men. Piles of stones were collected at street corners to assail invaders and some 600 iron chains were forged in the space of a week to block street crossings and bridges. In the university quarter on the left bank the students armed themselves for the coming fight, while the rector and professors cowered with the princes in the comparative security of the Hôtel d’Anjou. The population was heart and soul with the Duke, as the Castilian ambassador reported. Or at least, as a devout Orléanist put it, the ‘common people’ were. But even they were uneasy. They were afraid of the vengeance of the Duke of Orléans if ever an accommodation between the princes restored him to a measure of his former power. Orders to arm against him were therefore issued in the name of the Dauphin. The young and simple prince did not understand much of what was done in his name, but his value as a seal of authority had never been greater (4).
On 20 September 1405 the Duke of Orléans reviewed his troops on the plains south of Paris. They began to spread out in small groups across the Beauce and the Gâtinais. On the following day the first Orléanist companies penetrated east of the Seine and invaded Champagne. Much of the Île de France was wasted by the troops of either side. Peasants abandoned the harvest to find refuge in walled towns and castles. A stream of refugees poured through the gates of the capital. There had been no time to stock the city against a siege. The vast daily traffic which was required to feed the city was suddenly reduced to a trickle and fresh supplies could only be brought in with an armed escort. Within a few days of the opening of the campaign both armies began to run out of food. Louis of Orléans, who had no supply train, tried to quarter his army in the fertile region north of the Marne but the inhabitants of Meaux, who controlled the only practicable river crossing, refused to open their gates. Divisions appeared in the ranks on both sides. The Queen’s household was reported to be riven by dissent. In Paris the council was paralyzed by the growing doubts and disagreements of the princes. It was, however, the Orléanists who lost their nerve first. Towards the end of September they resolved to open negotiations. On 8 October Louis collected his army together in the Bois de Vincennes on the east side of the city. Fear gripped the citizens. The possibility of a sack of the city was openly discussed. The novelist Christine de Pisan stayed up for much of the night writing an emotional letter to the Queen appealing to her to save ‘this wounded and battered realm’. In fact the danger had passed. The growing difficulty of supplying their armies forced both protagonists to negotiate. The Duke of Burgundy was also feeling the strain financially. He was selling annuities, pledging his jewels and borrowing from the towns of Flanders and Burgundy, while Louis d'Orléans leveraged his estates and even considered pawning his lands in Normandy to Pedro of Navarre, who despite his opposition to Louis was always willing to accept a deal that expanded his own power. By the end of September talks were in progress in the castle of Vincennes. They turned mainly on the Duke of Burgundy’s reform programme as he had outlined it to the assembly in Paris on 21 August. Jean insisted that before he would dismiss his troops the Queen, all the royal dukes and the leading councilors would have to swear to work to put it into effect as soon as the King had recovered his senses. Louis of Orléans’ position was equally simple. He was the closest blood relation of the King and saw no reason to accept any limitation on his right to govern in the King’s ‘absences’. His councilors and allies were more realistic. It was obvious that there was a good deal of support for the Duke of Burgundy. Unless he got most of what he wanted the divisions of the realm would not be healed. Louis of Orléans was finally persuaded by his councilors to submit. On 16 October he and the Queen met the Duke of Burgundy and his two brothers on the fortified bridge over the Seine at Charenton to seal the terms. They swore to keep the peace and be forever brothers. They took communion from a shared wafer, then ate and slept together as a mark of reconciliation. That afternoon the agreement was proclaimed by the heralds at the Parlement and the Châtelet. A week later, with the troops dismissed on each side, the Queen and Louis d'Orléans entered Paris together, escorted by the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Anjou and the King of Navarre, to be greeted by outward rejoicing and inward fearfulness (5).
Siege of Angoulême
In Paris decision-making was now practically paralyzed by the disputes between the princes and the prolonged ‘absences’ of the King. The Duke of Burgundy had succeeded in imposing a nominal commitment to reform on his cousins in October, but the political community still looked to the Duke of Orléans for leadership. Meanwhile Jean the Fearless hectored the cowed and resentful councilors on the subject of administrative reform, and they responded with sullen obstruction. Jean de Montaigu, the Master of the Royal Household, and his two brothers, both senior officers of the Chambre des Comptes, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to create a common front against him on the council. They engineered an alliance between the Queen and the Dukes of Anjou and Orléans, the Duc d'Anjou's grandmother Marie de Blois-Châtillion advising and ruling with him (6). A formal treaty between these potentates was sealed at the beginning of December 1405 in which they undertook to pursue a common position on all issues relating to the interests of the King. The Duke of Bourbon, the Count of Tancarville and Montaigu himself were all undeclared adherents to this pact. Relations between the rival groups shortly reached breaking point. On 4 December Jean summoned the Constable Charles d’Albret and all the royal chamberlains to a meeting to discuss how to overcome the princes’ resistance to his proposals. After four or five hours of deliberation he invited them to meet him again over dinner at the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the following day. The other princes and their allies held their own meeting at the Bastille, at the end of which they sent a message to the Constable and chamberlains directing them not to attend Jean’s dinner. They did this, they said, ‘in case people should think that he had some right to undertake the reform of the realm, and should imagine that the princes were about to join him in this enterprise’. Jean’s fury knew no bounds. The Dukes of Anjou and Orléans, fearing that he would attack them, had guards posted in their Parisian mansions and appeared at the next meeting of the council carrying weapons beneath their cloaks. ‘My lord’s business seems to be going badly,’ wrote a Burgundian official to his colleagues at Dijon. A few days after this incident the Dukes of Bourbon and Berry, who came closest to being neutral in these disputes, succeeded in brokering an accommodation between the princes and restoring a measure of goodwill which persisted for several months (7).
They agreed to confer upon the Queen a permanent power to mediate between the rival cabals. At the same time Louis of Orléans made some concessions to John’s desire for a recognized position at the heart of the French state and a measure of administrative reform, provided that his own interests were not prejudiced. At Christmas 1405 Charles VI began to recover his senses and it became possible for the first time in several months to transact important business. On 27 January 1406 the council, meeting in the King’s presence, approved two new ordinances about the government of the kingdom during his ‘absences’. The first substantially reproduced the abortive instrument which Philip the Bold had pressed on the confused King in April 1403. The power of government during the King’s ‘absences’ was formally conferred on Isabeau of Bavaria, with the benefit of such advice as might be required from the four royal dukes of Berry, Bourbon, Orléans and Burgundy, the royal council or the officers of state. The second formally recognized the new Duke of Burgundy as having succeeded to the position in the French government previously occupied by his father and conferred on him a special role in the upbringing of the royal children. These ordinances, and especially the first, were destined to have a fateful influence on the politics of the following years, while the second was undermined before it was even passed due to the dispersed positioning of the children and the furious unwillingness to hand them over of the various princes (8). The ordinances meant that any faction seeking to control the government would have to control the Queen or the one of the Princes. Isabeau, elevated to the position of president of what was in effect a council of regency but without any significant following of her own, would be forced into a succession of defensive alliances with whichever of the princes seemed at the time to be most powerful or least threatening. The flow of gifts and revenues into John’s coffers was resumed, albeit on a modest scale and with frequent interruptions. In due course the council also addressed John’s objections to his rival’s position as Captain-General on the march of Calais. The appointment was transferred to him and he was able to put his own men into the key garrisons. At the end of January 1406 the first tentative steps were taken towards putting the Burgundian reform programme into effect. Official salaries were reduced, in some cases by as much as half. ‘Extraordinary’ salary supplements were curtailed or abolished. The number of financial and judicial officers was ordered to be drastically diminished. All pensions charged on the royal demesne in favor of members of the Parlement were revoked unless justified by at least twenty years’ service. At the same time there appears to have been a notable reduction in the scale of grants to the Queen and the royal princes. The princes had reconciled themselves to these measures as the price of peace. But the civil service had not. The Parlement in particular fought a vigorous rearguard action, picking over the ordinances for defects of form or drafting, sending them back for revision and deferring registration as long as they could. Before long the jobbery resumed and the number of appointments recommenced its inexorable climb. By the spring of 1406 it was clear that the Duke of Burgundy’s reform programme had run into the sand. Meanwhile the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy played out their appointed roles, engaging in the traditional rituals of reconciliation, kissing, feasting together and wearing each other’s emblems. The tension was never far from the surface (9).
Against this background the war received less attention from the politicians in Paris than it had formerly done. The whole question of war finance had become particularly difficult as a result of the princes’ quarrels. None of them was willing to sacrifice his claims on the resources of the Crown. Without that the only way of funding large-scale operations against the English was to impose another taille. This would be extremely unpopular and was certain to be exploited by the Duke of Burgundy to consolidate his political support among the populace. This prospect aroused real fear among his cousins. In the previous autumn the council had considered a scheme for an entirely new system of taxation involving a flat rate charge of 20 gold écus on every settlement in France which could not claim exemption on account of war damage or plague. Its authors thought that it would raise 18 million écus, net of collection costs, or more than six times the yield of the aides, gabelle and tailles combined. It was proposed to use nearly 13 million écus of this to fund a standing army of about 40,000 men and the rest on the royal household and the accumulation of a new treasury reserve. It is not clear who devised or supported this fantastic scheme, which would have been administratively unworkable and well beyond the resources of France even in better times. But it quickly foundered on the opposition of the princes and, apparently, of the King. Under these circumstances the war effort went on (10).
During the spring of 1406 local French forces on the march of Gascony began the enormous task of recapturing the places which had been so cheaply conquered by the Anglo-Gascon companies over the winter. In the larger scheme of things the strategic value of these places was questionable. But they were a source of fear and insecurity to the communities of the south-west, who could be bullied into providing the finance and most of the troops to recover them, without the need to tap the royal treasury in Paris. The main effort was directed to the recovery of Brantôme from the garrison installed there in November by the lord of Mussidan. Brantôme was a substantial walled town whose possession gave the Gascon companies a base from which to raid across the whole of the region north of the Dordogne. The place was under siege by the beginning of February 1406. By the end of March the Constable, the Counts of Foix, Clermont and Alençon, and the Seneschals of Saintonge, Poitou and Limousin were outside the walls with some 1,200 troops between them. The walls were battered by artillery until the garrison finally entered into an elaborate conditional surrender agreement at the beginning of April. The men in Brantôme appealed to the council in Bordeaux to relieve them and everyone assumed that they would find a way of doing so. The French royal council even heard reports that the Prince of Wales in person was on his way, which frightened them into sending heavy reinforcements from the north (11). Surprising many, the Prince arrived before these reinforcements, and scattered the smaller French force before him. The French force linked up with the reinforcements, expanding their force to almost 8,000 by early May. The Constable decided to launch an attempt at the other great stronghold on the Charentes in late May, beginning the Siege of Angoulême. The fighting around Angoulême reached a fever pitch by late June with daily skirmishes and challenges issued. The Earl of Bedford, having established his skills as a man under siege, was placed in command of the Angoulême garrison while the Prince of Wales remained south of the city, able to retreat to the city if necessary but preventing a proper encirclement by his positioning. Following a period of negotiations, and the arrival of more English reinforcements - bringing the two forces to near parity, the two sides agreed to meet in battle. The Battle of Angoulême occurred on July 3rd 1406, and resulted in a resounding English victory. Having had the time to prepare defensive positions and able to bring thousands of archers and hundreds of different gunpowder weapons to bear, the French were forced to attack on uneven ground and uphill. The result was clear from the moment the first French cavalry charge floundered. Over the course of the next three hours the French launched five attacks at the English forces, experiencing only failure. By the end of the battle, the Constable agreed to retreat after negotiations with the English during a break in the assaults (12).
At the beginning of July 1406 Raimond de Montaut lord of Mussidan died without a male heir. One of the last men living to have fought with King Edward IV at Nájera, Raimond had been a power in the Bordelais and western Périgord for nearly half a century. In addition to the fortress of Mussidan in Périgord he had also been lord of Blaye, a substantial walled town on the right bank of the Gironde. The council in Bordeaux was filled with foreboding. Raimond had left two daughters: Joan, who had recently married the French Seneschal of Saintonge John Harpeden; and Marie, the designated heiress of Mussidan and Blaye, a young unmarried woman whose choice of husband was likely to determine the ultimate allegiance of both places. Raimond’s widow Margaret d'Albret, who had custody of her daughter and assumed the administration of her domains, was a cousin of the Constable of France. She also occupied in her own right the important fortress of Vayres on the left bank of the Dordogne a short distance downstream of Libourne. On his deathbed Raimond had done what he could to ensure that his possessions would not fall into French hands. He had limited his wife’s rights as far as he legally could. He had charged Marie to live and die in the allegiance of the King of England and to take no husband who would not undertake to do the same. But there was a limit to what Raimond could achieve from beyond the grave. The whole affair showed how dependent the English duchy was on the choices of a few hundred Gascon noblemen bound by complex links of marriage, kinship and alliance which cut across traditional political allegiances. The first man to move, preempting any French attempts at taking Marie, was the Earl of Bedford, John de Grailly. In a spectacular march he crossed the length of the Duchy of Aquitaine, almost directly from the Battle of Angoulême, arriving in the middle of the month. Marie de Montaut was quickly married to John de Grailly, expanding the Grailly fortunes immensely in Gascony - with the young Earl becoming among the largest landholders in Gascony and securing the English territories in the process (13). The conflict between France and England would return to a simmer for the rest of the summer and autumn of 1406 as negotiations towards peace continued to run endlessly in circles around each other.
Jean de Berry, Comte de Montpensier and heir to the Duc de Berry
France was a country divided by late 1406. Over the course of the last fifty years great magnates and royal cadet branches had partitioned France between them and were now fighting for the highest powers of the King. The most important faction of the period was the coalition led by Louis d'Orléans, supported by the Dukes of Anjou for the most part, which was known as the Orléanist party. Queen Isabeau and her brother Duke Louis of Bavaria represented a faction commonly aligned with the Orléanists, but would often move to support other factions if it was felt to benefit the Queen. Opposing the Orléanists were the Burgundians, led by Jean de Bourgogne, and supported by various populist supporters from a clerical and mercantile background and the Duc de Bourgogne's extended familial alliance network in eastern and northern France and in the Empire. A third faction, which swung between the other factions and would on occasion set forth its own claims, was the Navarrese party which was led by King Pedro of Navarre and strongly supported by the Count Foix and Armagnac, as well as several other minor nobles centered mostly in the Languedoc and Normandy. The fourth faction, commonly called the Royalists for their support of the Dauphin, were led by the Duke of Berry, Charles de Berry. The Royalists drew their support from the protégés of the Marmousets who helped govern the Kingdom of France, the nobility of most of the Languedoc and central France, the Coucy's and their alliance network on the marches between the Empire and France and enjoyed the support of the King of England. The Bourbons would move several times between allegiance to the Burgundians and Royalists, but were often relatively neutral when possible. The Bretons formed a mostly neutral fifth party with splitner factions supporting every other faction imaginable (14).
An increasingly important issue proved to be the suitability of the Dauphin as a ruler. As he neared fifteen Charles de Valois continued to exhibit childish and immature behavior, increasingly coupled with uncontrollable rage which had caused the death of more than one servant. As he grew into a young adult it became increasingly clear that the Dauphin would be a terror as ruler, prompting whispers and schemes in search of a solution. In late 1406 a collection of minor nobles representative of both the major factions tried to have him placed in a monastery and disinherited, though the momentarily lucid King Charles reacted violently to the notion and had several of them exiled for the suggestion despite all pleas from both Louis d'Orléans and Jean de Bourgogne in favor of the motion. In time, it became increasingly clear that if anything was to be done about the Dauphin it would not be with the King's support. As the only person without a claim to any of the younger Princes of France, Charles de Berry found himself increasingly as the main protector of the Dauphin both due to their common ties to England and his hopes for protecting the legitimacy of the monarchy (15). The arrival of Joan of Wales and Catherine of England at Bourges, where the Dauphin would spend much of his time when he wasn't at court, and the following arrival and weddings of Joan of Wales to Charles de Berry the Younger and Charles de Valois to Catherine of England solidified the alliance between the Royalists and England. At the same time Charles de Berry was able to fully gain control of the Lieutenancy for the lands of the Rhône Alps which were under Royal control, creating a solid block of Royalist support across Central and South-Eastern France only interrupted by the Duchy of Bourbon and its dependencies (16).
Jean sans Peur, Duc de Bourgogne et Brabant, Count of Flanders
The collapse of French military efforts in Gascony came down to the critical factor of money. The local assemblies which had financed the campaign so far were unlikely to grant another tax so soon, even with the heavy-handed methods of persuasion employed by the Constable. A campaign in the Bordelais would probably have been beyond their financial capacity anyway. Albret reported to the council in Paris that after more than two years on the Gascon march, in which he had had to meet much of the cost of his retinue from his own resources, he could not go on without substantial funding from the King. He needed 45,000 or 50,000 francs urgently (17). The Constable’s appeal made a considerable impression in Paris, where the factions immediately fell into conflict over the prospect. The Duke of Berry, naturally averse to the risks of war, among the peacemakers of the spring and the recently aligned with the English was immediately in opposition, joined soon after by the Burgundians under Jean de Bourgogne. Against this were the Orléanists, supporters of the Queen and increasingly the Navarrese. The possible expulsion of the English from south-western France was a great prize. On the other hand mounting a major campaign on the Gascon march would involve repudiating all of the recent diplomatic overtures to Edward V, and the English were well prepared for any military campaign. Furthermore, the treasury could not raise 45,000 or 50,000 francs, which was in any event a considerable under-estimate, without imposing another taille. This would require the authority of the King who was ‘absent’. It was also likely to provoke the hostility of the Duke of Burgundy and his supporters in the streets. At about the beginning of July 1406, when no answer had been received from Paris, the Counts of Clermont and Alençon were sent north to press for action in person. Arriving in the capital they found that the King had recovered his wits a few days earlier. It took another three weeks to gather all the right people in the capital (18). In the last week of July a great council finally assembled in the King’s presence in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. All of the royal princes, Berry, Bourbon, Orléans, Burgundy and Anjou, were present together with the King of Navarre. They were joined by the King’s councilors and chamberlains and a mass of knights. The discussions extended into early August and showed no sign of ending any time soon. The factions supportive of the war effort were slowly able to convince the Burgundians to support the proposal. At length the council decided to support the Constable’s proposal, despite the strenuous refusal of the Duke of Berry to support the measure. It was agreed that the Duke of Orléans would command a major offensive on Saintes in the autumn, while the Duke of Bourbon would lead a second army down the Garonne valley from Languedoc. Even the Duke of Burgundy accepted the case for attacking Bordeaux while its defenders were weakened by Scottish events and the Easter Rising, which they had expected to be far larger than it proved to be. The main bones of contention were the perennial question of finance and Jean’s fear that operations against Bordeaux, in addition to glorifying his rival, would strip resources from the march of Calais. Reports from the northern front seemed to lend force to his fears. The English, who could see the sky darkening above their heads, had declared their intention of reinforcing Calais and had made a start on replenishing its stores. Their garrison had recently become more aggressive. An English force from Guînes had laid siege to the small fort of Balinghem at the southern edge of the pale, which was used by the French as an observation post. Exaggerated reports of these developments circulated in Paris, where it was believed that the English King’s bastard, the Duke of Oxford, was embarking a great army to invade France through Picardy. The Duke of Burgundy made adroit use of these rumors. He pressed for a simultaneous invasion of the pale of Calais under his own command. It was his price for agreeing to the offensive on the Gascon march, and the council eventually agreed to pay it. Jean Jouvenel, whose father was one of the Duke of Orléans’ advisers, thought that their main reason was to keep the peace between the rival princes and avoid the ‘grumbles and gripes’ which had paralyzed its work in the past. Some of them may also have reflected that the northern campaign would be a useful feint to divert English attention and resources away from the south-west (19).
The decision to mount a simultaneous campaign in the north greatly aggravated the problem of finance. The Chambre des Comptes prepared a report on the state of the government’s finances, which showed that the combined demesne revenues and tax receipts of the Crown only just covered its ordinary expenses. This included the aides which had been more than enough under Charles V to pay for the reconquest of much of western France. This was the measure of the pre-emption of royal revenues by the princes and the civil service. It meant that another taille would be required. The King was outraged and called for an investigation. But no investigation of this long-standing problem was likely to resolve the immediate issue. The Duke of Burgundy objected to another taille ‘with all the force he could muster’. He thought that the money should be raised in ‘other ways’. By this he meant savings on the obese budget of the administration. Others objected to this attempt to revive the Burgundian programme of administrative reform which they had thought had been successfully buried. The outcome was a compromise. It was decided to pay for the double campaign by a mixture of economies and fresh taxes. On 28 July, in a rare show of unison, the whole council approved a great administrative ordinance, the second attempt in a year to prune the public administration and achieve large savings in the government’s budget. There were to be drastic reductions in the personnel of the royal household, the Chambre des Comptes and the mints. The ‘extraordinary’ supplements were to be abolished again and some other perquisites done away with. Severe restrictions were imposed on new grants, especially those made at the expense of the royal demesne. In addition there was to be a ‘little taille’ of 200,000 francs, to be divided equally between the campaign treasurers of the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy. An ordinance was approved imposing this tax, in which it was tendentiously claimed that France was about to be invaded by Ingleram de Mowbray and that the money was urgently required for its defense. The Duke of Burgundy left Paris on 10 August to begin his preparations. A few days later the compromise was undone by the Parlement. The judges declared the ordinance to be ‘contrary to the King’s honour’ and declined to register it. They would have been badly affected by the reforms, and particularly by the abolition of salary supplements. Their objections were no doubt fortified by the official element on the council and possibly by some of the princes. The result was to create a gap in the government’s war budget. On 16 September the taille was doubled to 400,000 francs. The lion’s share of the increased taille, 250,000 francs, was to be used to fund Louis d'Orléans’ campaign. A fresh ordinance was published, even more tendentious than the first, which declared by way of explanation that a second English army was now poised to invade France. Jean the Fearless, who was at Dijon, had not been consulted. He was furious. He felt that he had been hoodwinked. He returned to Paris at the end of September to try to have the new ordinance cancelled. But by the time he arrived it was too late and the Calais expedition collapsed without funding. Arrangements to farm out the increased tax were already in hand and the Duke of Orléans had left for the Gascon march (20).
French preparations for the assault on Saintogne got under way in the second week of September 1406, within a few days of the final decisions in Paris (21). The Constable Charles d’Albret established his headquarters in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, an ancient monastic town on the River Boutonne in northern Saintonge. His preparation for the coming campaign was methodical and conceived on an impressive scale. French troops, stripped from garrisons across the south-west and pressed into service by the provincial seneschals, were moving down the river valleys into Saintonge. By the end of the month, the Constable had about 1,500 locally recruited men-at arms and 500 crossbowmen under his command. Victuals and other stores were being collected throughout the region. Thirty armed ships were lying in the bay of La Rochelle, including ten oared barges and galleys under the command of Charles de Savoisy, by now France’s indispensable naval contractor. All of this was beginning to eat up money at a time when the taille had not even begun to come in. The Constable demanded another hearth tax from the long-suffering population of Poitou, which had already granted one earlier in the year and another the year before. Coming on top of all the usual difficulties associated with the presence of large numbers of undisciplined soldiers, these demands were declared to be intolerable and were rejected. The Seneschal of Poitou blustered. The Duke of Orléans ordered it to be collected by force. The Constable, faced by wage demands from the crews of his ships, seized large sums of money and plate from the citizens and churches of La Rochelle. English spies in Paris reported to the Captain of Calais on the movements of the Duke of Orléans and the progress of his preparations. The city of Bordeaux and other front-line towns organized a pervasive intelligence network and received frequent, generally accurate reports of French plans. The Duke of Orléans had left Paris for Saint-Denis on 16 September to receive the Oriflamme, the traditional battle flag of the French monarchy. He began his march south two days later. But the Constable’s long-drawn-out travails delayed his arrival in Saintonge by nearly a month. On 15 October 1406 the Duke finally raised his standard at Saint-Jean d’Angély. It was the largest and most distinguished royal army to take the field since 1383 and the first to be commanded by a royal prince. Louis’ cavalry contingent was estimated at 5,000 men-at-arms, representing a total strength with pages, armed servants, bowmen, infantry and artillerymen of at least thrice that number. Five hundred pioneers went ahead of the columns clearing the paths and smoothing the way for carts and artillery pieces. The nobility thronged to share the place of honor at Louis’ side. With him marched the Constable, the new Admiral of France Pierre ‘Clignet’ de Bréban, and the calculating Jean II de Montaigu. The heads of most of the famous noble houses of the north were there, including the Counts of Clermont, Alençon, La Marche and Vendôme; the seneschals of all the march provinces north of the Dordogne; and the Count of Foix representing, along with the Constable, the two principal noble houses of the south-western march. Jean V, Duke of Brittany did not appear in person but he sent ships to reinforce the fleet already gathered at La Rochelle and troops to join Louis on the Charente River. Louis d'Orléans crossed the river on the 3rd of November, taking Taillebourg by storm and marching south on Saintes once again (22).
The Battle of Île-d'Aix
The Duke of Orléans encountered mounting difficulties in his Siege of Saintes. His siege engines hurled great rocks at the walls of Bourg and did a great deal of damage. But the defenders under John de Grailly, Earl of Bedford, held out once again before overwhelming odds. They repaired the breaches and fought from the top of the debris. A succession of assaults was mounted against the walls. They tenaciously fought all of them back. Mines were dug under the towers. Countermines were dug beneath them. Overshadowing everything else was the problem of supply. The French army's numbers were equivalent to the population of a substantial town. Rooted to the spot, the army exhausted the available food supplies over a progressively increasing distance as the siege continued. The campaign had started too late in the year for the soldiers to take the new harvest, which was safely locked up in walled towns and castles. These problems were aggravated by the weather. The winter was exceptionally cold and it rained incessantly. As Christmas approached the rain turned to sleet and hail and the wind blew it in the soldiers’ faces. Their tents were waterlogged. Men waded knee-deep in mud. Food stocks rotted away. Fodder was in short supply and the streams were filled with mud, causing pack animals to die in large numbers. Basic sanitation failed completely. Shortly dysentery, the great enemy of siege operations throughout history, began to take hold in the French camp and human casualties mounted. By the end of the year disease and desertion were taking a heavy toll. Morale collapsed. The war treasurers began to run out of money. The luxurious existence which was still being enjoyed in Louis’ own enclosure began to arouse resentment. Rumors circulated among the soldiers that he had gambled away the money raised for their wages. Sensing their enemies’ discomfiture the Gascons in the town redoubled their efforts, battering the French encampment with artillery fire and stone-throwers, picking off men with arrows and crossbow bolts and launching sorties from the gates. On the Gascon march the consensus was that the tide had turned (23).
The French commanders at Saintes had been counting on the ships gathered at La Rochelle to keep the army supplied and to complete the encirclement of the town. The operations of the fleet were directed by the newly appointed Admiral of France, Clignet de Bréban. He was not well-regarded: an obscure and low-born individual enriched by the munificence of the Duke of Orléans; a bombastic and bootlicking mediocrity according to numerous hostile voices. Bréban’s misfortune was that the annual wine fleet from England had arrived at Bordeaux at the end of October, some twenty large ships, many of which would have been armed for the dangerous passage past Brittany and across the Bay of Biscay. Together with the ships and barges already at Bordeaux the Prince of Wales disposed of some fifty merchantmen moored in the Garonne off the city in addition to a small number of oared barges. These vessels were sent to the Île d'Oléron, at the mouth of the Charente River, under Roger Mortimer, Earl of March and heir to the Dukedom of Clarence, and John Hastings, the Earl of Pembroke, to blockade the French fleet and prevent it from entering the river. In December, as conditions were becoming desperate in the French camp, the Duke of Orléans ordered Bréban’s fleet to fight their way through the blockade, something which they had so far shrunk from attempting. Twenty-two French ships were filled with soldiers and sailed from La Rochelle a few days before Christmas to break the blockade. On the 22nd of December the two fleets clashed in the narrow waters between the Mainland, the Île d'Oléron and Île de Ré in what would become known as the Battle of île-d'Aix, named for a small island in the middle of the area where the English had scouts stationed. These scouts spotted the launch of the French fleet and swiftly alerted the English, who launched their fleet of thirty ships. As the French sailed southward for the mouth of the Charente River, they found themselves attacked out of the fog of the morning, from the Île d'Oléron, just north of the Charente River. In the space of the first hour three French ships had been captured, only to be boarded by the rest of the French fleet. Over the course of the next five hours ships were taken and re-taken, and then taken once again. The English and French archers dueled with each other from their heightened bastions on the ships' decks and terrorized the fighters as they crossed from ship to ship. A clump of some five French and seven English ships were driven close to Île-d'Aix, with some of the fighting transferring onto the sandy beaches of the tiny island. Clignet de Bréban decided to cut his losses as the sun began to set. The French were hounded northwards until they were able to take refuge in the port of La Rochelle. In total the French fleet lost more than half its ships, including those sent by the Duke of Brittany, and saw hundreds of minor knights captured or killed, with almost a thousand casualties in total. The English on the other hand lost just three ships permanently, and were able to crew many of the abandoned French ships. Bernard de Lesparre, who had been the de facto leader of the English fleet on behalf of the two Earls, took two of the captured French ships up the river to Saintes and set fire to them in midstream to advertise his triumph to the Duke of Orléans. A subsequent judicial inquiry in England attributed most of the credit to Bernard and the Gascons. The leading English captains, it was found, had held back until it was clear which way the battle was going, as a result of which they were deprived of their share of the prizes. Shortly afterwards Clignet de Bréban and Charles de Savoisy arrived in Louis of Orléans’ camp with the captain of La Rochelle to review the situation. There could be no question of another attempt to run the gauntlet of the Charente. Yet without one there was no prospect of feeding the army (24).
The Duke of Orléans was mortified. For a time he refused to recognize defeat. He wrote to the council in Paris calling for more funds. Great things would happen, he said, as soon as his men were paid. He wrote to the Republic of Venice and to others asking for the services of a military engineer. He hoped to extend the campaign through to the spring. But the proceeds of the taille were by now exhausted and the treasury in Paris was empty. On the 11th of January 1407 Louis was finally persuaded that the army could not go on. His representatives approached the defenders and asked for a temporary cease-fire to allow negotiations to take place. After some hesitation this was agreed. Renaud lord of Pons, France’s long-standing truce commissioner on the northern march of Gascony, tried to bargain with Prince Edward for an honorable way out. But Edward knew that he had won. He had no interest in saving Louis’ face and declined to make any agreement. On the 14th Louis gave up. At dawn he broke up his camp and laid off his army. The news resounded all across the south-west. The Anglo-Gascon companies resumed their raiding across the march. The lord of Limeuil readmitted the Anglo-Gascons to his fortresses on the Dordogne and the Vézère. Archambaud d’Abzac recovered possession of Castelnaud at the edge of the Sarladais. A string of new garrisons appeared like mushrooms after raids along the river valleys. In April 1407 there was a long conference between Gascon and French officials in the small bastide town of Cadillac, which marked the effective limit of English administration in the Garonne valley. The outcome was a series of local cease-fire agreements with the lord of Albret, his brother the lord of Sainte-Bazeille, the Count of Foix-Armagnac and the lord of Pons, together covering most of the march of Gascony on both sides of the Dordogne. The most serious military threat to the duchy since 1377 had failed through a combination of misjudgment, hubris and ill-fortune on the Duke’s side and skillful leadership, better soldiery and stable government on the English side. Louis d'Orléans’ high rank, the status of his fellow commanders and the size of their army made the humiliation hard to live down. In Paris the acerbic clerk of the Parlement, who was in the habit of noting his views in the margin of his registers, was unimpressed by the sufferings of the French army. He dismissed the whole enterprise as a ‘joy-ride’, an ‘entreprise de revel’, which had brought nothing but failure and expense. A month after the forced break-up of the Orléans army the Duke of Burgundy arrived in the capital with an intimidating retinue of 3,000 mounted men at his back and confronted his enemies at an ill-tempered meeting of the council in the presence of the King, then enjoying an interval of sanity. The Duke of Orléans was not there but the Duke of Anjou, who had personally intervened to stop the taille in Anjou and Maine being paid to the war treasurers at Saint-Omer - an act that had partly prevented Jean de Bourgogne's own campaign against Calais, got the rough end of Jean’s tongue. A few days after this meeting the King relapsed once more into incoherence and all substantial business came to a halt. Jean left for Flanders towards the end of January 1407, a few days before Louis of Orléans returned to the capital from the Charente (25).
Once he had resumed the reins of power Louis set about ensuring that his rival would never again be in a position to dictate terms to the council as he had done the previous August. In April 1407, when Charles was once more able to attend to business, his brother set about reorganizing the council’s membership. On 28 April, at a session attended by the King, the Dauphin and all the royal princes apart from the Duke of Burgundy, a new ordinance was approved. The number of councilors was halved. Twenty-six named individuals were appointed to the reduced body in addition to the royal princes and the officers of state. Eleven reliable allies of the Duke of Burgundy were removed. This left only two men who could be counted on to represent John’s interests on the new council, whereas twenty of the named councilors were publicly identified with the Duke of Orléans. On the following day a similar revolution occurred in the financial departments. The number of treasurers and généraux-conseillers des finances, who controlled the collection of the aides, was reduced. A clean sweep was made of the Duke of Burgundy’s protégés. John returned to the capital a week after these decisions were made but found that it was too late to do anything about them. The new council was in place. The King was once more ‘absent’. John felt the impact of the change immediately. He had recently presented his account to the King. He was owed very large sums: 189,666 livres in arrears which had been due to his father at the time of his death and another 157,925 livres for the cost of the abortive campaign against Calais and the maintenance of the French garrisons of the northern march. These enormous debts were acknowledged and payment was ostensibly secured on the aides of five dioceses of Picardy and Champagne. But none of them was paid. In addition his pensions from the treasury, his annual subsidy for the maintenance of the castle of Sluys and his right to the proceeds of the aides collected in his domains, all of which had been confirmed two years before, were stopped. The flow of ‘extraordinary’ grants, already reduced to a trickle, dried up entirely. In the long run these measures would have bankrupted the Burgundian state, as Louis and his allies understood and intended. Louis himself on the other hand received his pensions and aides without interruption and continued to procure generous royal grants in his own favor. Among John’s circle it was believed that the Duke of Orléans’ next move would be to have the duchy of Guyenne, which nominally belonged to the Dauphin, transferred to himself. By the end of May 1407 John was back in Flanders contemplating murder (26).
Footnotes:
(1) This is all largely based on OTL. This update is an in depth look at the lead up to the French Civil War. I have been really lucky to find a detailed description of many of the events of the period.
(2) This happened almost exactly as described IOTL. The difference lies in the fact that the Duke of Anjou is King of Naples and therefore is distracted enough to have his young son take control of the French territories.
(3) This is all from OTL. I found it hilarious that there were medieval trolls who made fun of Ducal mottos.
(4) The factional nature of this struggle and the way popular might plays into everything seemed weird to me for quite a while, but the almost proto-liberal revolutionary nature of some of these struggles has really fascinated me greatly.
(5) This is again almost all based on OTL, with relatively few changes to take into account butterflies from the TL.
(6) This is again different in regards to the Anjou, where Louis II is deeply involved in a major conflict for Sicily at this time, which leaves the French territories as a distraction. The grandmother mentioned is the venerable Marie de Blois who fought so hard to place her son on the Neapolitan throne and holds a strong claim to the Duchy of Brittany.
(7) This is mostly OTL.
(8) The second ordinance is completely undermined by the extra factions ITTL. IOTL Jean Sans Peur was able to get control of the royal children, which strengthened his hand immensely. Here they are spread out among the factions.
(9) This is all based on OTL.
(10) I have been really lucky to find some sources that focus in detail on the economics of this period and the immense costs involved in the warfare of this period between France and England. The English are ridiculously lucky to have evaded a great deal of the instability that occurred under Henry IV.
(11) IOTL the English basically abandoned Aquitaine and got ridiculously lucky that the French collapsed under their own hubris. This town fell IOTL and marked a turning point in the conflict for quite a while.
(12) The much greater English investment in the area and more secure holdings on the Charente river really prove vital to securing English fortunes ITTL.
(13) Marie de Montaut's marriage became much more of an issue IOTL and became fundamentally tied to Louis d'Orléans' military plans. I won't go into the details of what happened IOTL, but it is one of those events within larger events that it is really worth reading up on. I was very fascinated by all of it.
(14) I thought it was necessary to clarify what the various different factions were. Keep in mind that people are moving back and forth between factions near constantly as the leaders poach valuable clients from their rivals. At the same times alliances and cooperation, as well as murderous feuds, saturate the relations between every single faction. I know that it is ridiculously complex, and I am trying to make it as clear as I can here, but I think it is really important that the complexity of the issues involved in this are properly conveyed.
(15) These events are happening simultaneously with everything else that I describe. Charles de Berry is increasingly forced to participate, if nothing else then to protect his own interests. He remains somewhat outside of the central struggle, but he is vital as the primary defender of the Dauphin and ally of the King of England.
(16) To be clear, almost all of south-eastern France outside of Provence, Savoy and Piedmont are now under Berry control, while Charles is uncle to the Count of Savoy - who is soon to become a Duke after a payment to Sigismund.
(17) IOTL Charles d'Albret had a better hand to play and able to convince people to support him relatively easily because the English holdings were far weaker than ITTL. People talked seriously about driving them into the sea. There is probably a good POD somewhere in here where the English lose the war to the French under a concerted effort to end the war, though the underlying factionalization and growth of magnates does make it challenging. A sane Charles VI might be interesting as well.
(18) This is all OTL.
(19) The challenges involved in convincing the French to support the Duke of Orléans' plans are far greater ITTL, and even when it is passed the Duke of Berry stays completely out of the conflict.
(20) This is all based on OTL.
(21) The campaign is located in a different location due to the great importance of Saintogne to England ITTL. IOTL they attacked up the Garonne with the goal of taking Bordeaux. Here they can't make a direct assault on the city without removing the northern territories first.
(22) The forces described are mostly based on OTL. There are certain differences to the people involved and the like due to butterflies and specific people having died who would otherwise have participated here.
(23) This is all OTL. Louis d'Orléans really pissed away this opportunity. IOTL it was even egregious because they were besieging a small town instead of a major city like Saintes. It was really a complete failure of leadership that doomed the effort from start to finish.
(24) This is based on an OTL naval battle, but due to the difference in location of the campaign the battle plays out somewhat differently. It is also a larger clash. The loss of those Breton ships are going to haunt the Orléans faction for quite some time, having hoped to add them to their supporters and almost accomplishing it prior to the battle.
(25) This is the OTL fallout from the failure of the expedition.
(26) This is again very close to OTL events. These are the events that culminated in the assassination of Louis d'Orléans IOTL. I realize that this update is kind of ridiculous in the degree of detail it takes with the events leading up to 1407 but I thought it important to detail the events, and I haven't really seen them well described in a lot of places.
The Paralysis of Princes
Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France
Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France
Within a short time of his arrival in Paris the Duke of Burgundy discovered the limitations of his position. It was one thing for him to present his programme to a stage-managed assembly of his own making in Paris but quite another to convert it into policy. Jean had no official status or powers and did not control any of the main organs of the government. The royal household, the council, the Parlement and the Chambre des Comptes were all dominated by men with a personal interest in the current system. Jean’s proposals were not at all welcome to them. They were a threat to their jobs and perquisites. Many of them were also allies or clients of the Duke of Orléans. The princes in Paris had allowed themselves to be associated with Jean at the public session in the royal palace, but they were less committed than they seemed. A Burgundian official writing home thought that they were stringing him along and that they were all covertly on the side of the Duke of Orléans. As soon as the Paris assembly had ended the princes moved to assert their collective control over the machinery of government. The prime movers were the King’s cousins, the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon. They were supported by the shrewd and independent-minded King of Navarre, Pedro who reigned over his Pyrenean kingdom and vast French holding as a French politician. These men summoned a smaller meeting of prominent noblemen, prelates and officials immediately after the assembly in the palace. They agreed to appoint the Duke of Berry as captain of Paris, who would increasingly be seen as representative of the royalist cause and draw his support from that claim. The captains of the Louvre and the Bastille were made to swear to take orders only from the council. When after a few days the King showed signs of emerging from his torpor, the councilors issued ordinances in his name commanding the rival princes to disarm and forbidding the King’s subjects to join them. On 26 August 1405 a written summary of the Duke of Burgundy’s programme was presented by a delegation of his councilors for action to the two principal institutions of the French state, the Parlement of Paris and the Chambre des Comptes. The judges of the Parlement gave a non-committal reply. They would always do their duty by the King, they said. In the Chambre des Comptes the reception of the document was even cooler. The president, the old Orléanist Jean de Montaigu Bishop of Chartres, told Jean’s representatives that if it should please the King and his council to give them such instructions then they would do what they could to comply ‘so far as it lay within their province’. They were officers of the King, they added later, after another Burgundian missive had been brought to them, but they owed duties not only to him but to his Queen and children as well. It would always be their object to satisfy them all. They returned a very similar answer to the representatives of the Duke of Orléans. These answers put Jean in a quandary. There was no other way for him to impose his will than to obtain the support of the King’s council. This would not be easy unless the Duke of Orléans could be forced into submission (1).
Faced with a political stalemate both sides turned to propaganda and then to violence. A written summary of Jean the Fearless’s programme was distributed at the end of August to all the principal towns of the realm, the first of a long series of political pamphlets which Jean would issue over the following years to build up popular support for his cause. Louis replied with a bilious circular giving his own version of events. These bombastic and repetitive exchanges continued into September. It is uncertain what impact they had on those who read them. At Senlis, where the Duke of Orléans’ letters were read out to the officers of the town and then to a general assembly of the citizens, the councilors replied that they would act ‘as good subjects of the King’. Their apprehensive reaction was probably typical. People were afraid of the direction that events seemed to be taking and unsure what to do. Melun had many advantages as a base for the Queen and the Duke of Orléans: proximity to Paris; a virtually impregnable site on its island in the Seine; good communications by road and river to Louis’ domains on the Loire and in Champagne; and access to the treasury reserve of coin and bullion which was kept in a tower of the castle. Louis is said to have purloined 100,000 francs from this source, twice that much according to some sources. The troops which he had summoned to his assistance were already gathering outside the town in the fields by the Seine within days of the incident at Juvisy. They included the Counts of Saint-Pol and Alençon and the Duke of Lorraine with their retinues and the principal retainers of Louis’ household and domains. He also succeeded in recruiting most of the organized bodies of troops then available in France. Jean Harpeden, a long-standing Orléanist, arrived with troops withdrawn from the march of Calais. The Duke of Anjou René d'Anjou, having been given the title by his father on reaching the age of 13, was another ally, and was at Gâtinais on his way to Provence when he received Louis of Orléans’ summons to return urgently to Melun ‘without passing through Paris’. He turned back and placed his retinue at the disposal of the Queen. Negotiations were in hand under the Constable, Charles d'Albret. They had more than 3,000 men under their command on the march of Gascony. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Paris the Duke of Burgundy’s military position had begun to look precarious (2).
Inside the city the princes tried to broker a deal. Louis of Orléans, however, was in no mood for compromise. The Duke of Bourbon had already made two journeys to Melun with the council’s order disarming the rivals and his own proposals for an accommodation. He was sent away both times empty-handed. The Duke of Anjou tried to broker a compromise, but he succeeded no better. At the beginning of September he led another larger delegation to Melun. The Queen would not even receive them. Louis did receive them but with taunts. Seeing the representatives of the University among them he told them to mind their own business and ‘go back to their schools’. A few days after this a final attempt was made by the Duke of Berry, acknowledged by most as a neutral party and increasingly head of the royal council whom perhaps Louis would not dare to mock for fear of turning the magnate against him. But Louis was adamant. "Let him who has right on his side stick to his course," he said. By this time he was reported to have about 5,000 men under arms. On 5 September they struck their camp and advanced on Paris, bearing pennons with Louis’ motto, "Je l’envie", meaning "I want it". In front of them the capital was armed for a siege. The Duke of Burgundy had been joined in the city by his brother Phillip and his ally the worldly prince-bishop of Liège and their troops. More soldiers were continuing to arrive from Flanders, Burgundy and the Low Countries. They paraded in the streets behind pennons marked with a Flemish motto "Ich houd", a direct answer to his rival’s motto which might be roughly translated "I am keeping it." (3) The new arrivals nearly doubled the army of the Duke of Burgundy, bringing its strength to more or less the same level as his rival’s. At the end of the month the total number of men-at-arms at Jean’s disposal rose to 4,560 at a cost, according to his accountant, which was ‘horrible to relate’. In addition to these, large numbers of men arrived to defend Paris who were by no means Burgundian partisans but were appalled by the prospect of an Orléanist assault on the capital of France. Jean had already garrisoned the Louvre. Louis of Bavaria’s garrison in the Bastille had been expelled and replaced by Burgundian loyalists. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was stuffed with weapons and ammunition and the streets around it blocked by manned barricades. The Duke of Berry followed suit at the Hôtel de Nesle, his headquarters on the left bank. All the gates of the city were closed and sealed up for the first time in twenty-four years except for four which gave onto the main axial roads. Houses were demolished around the principal urban fortifications and chains stretched across the Seine to stop an attempt to land troops on the strands of the river. The citizens organized night watches in shifts of 500 men. Piles of stones were collected at street corners to assail invaders and some 600 iron chains were forged in the space of a week to block street crossings and bridges. In the university quarter on the left bank the students armed themselves for the coming fight, while the rector and professors cowered with the princes in the comparative security of the Hôtel d’Anjou. The population was heart and soul with the Duke, as the Castilian ambassador reported. Or at least, as a devout Orléanist put it, the ‘common people’ were. But even they were uneasy. They were afraid of the vengeance of the Duke of Orléans if ever an accommodation between the princes restored him to a measure of his former power. Orders to arm against him were therefore issued in the name of the Dauphin. The young and simple prince did not understand much of what was done in his name, but his value as a seal of authority had never been greater (4).
On 20 September 1405 the Duke of Orléans reviewed his troops on the plains south of Paris. They began to spread out in small groups across the Beauce and the Gâtinais. On the following day the first Orléanist companies penetrated east of the Seine and invaded Champagne. Much of the Île de France was wasted by the troops of either side. Peasants abandoned the harvest to find refuge in walled towns and castles. A stream of refugees poured through the gates of the capital. There had been no time to stock the city against a siege. The vast daily traffic which was required to feed the city was suddenly reduced to a trickle and fresh supplies could only be brought in with an armed escort. Within a few days of the opening of the campaign both armies began to run out of food. Louis of Orléans, who had no supply train, tried to quarter his army in the fertile region north of the Marne but the inhabitants of Meaux, who controlled the only practicable river crossing, refused to open their gates. Divisions appeared in the ranks on both sides. The Queen’s household was reported to be riven by dissent. In Paris the council was paralyzed by the growing doubts and disagreements of the princes. It was, however, the Orléanists who lost their nerve first. Towards the end of September they resolved to open negotiations. On 8 October Louis collected his army together in the Bois de Vincennes on the east side of the city. Fear gripped the citizens. The possibility of a sack of the city was openly discussed. The novelist Christine de Pisan stayed up for much of the night writing an emotional letter to the Queen appealing to her to save ‘this wounded and battered realm’. In fact the danger had passed. The growing difficulty of supplying their armies forced both protagonists to negotiate. The Duke of Burgundy was also feeling the strain financially. He was selling annuities, pledging his jewels and borrowing from the towns of Flanders and Burgundy, while Louis d'Orléans leveraged his estates and even considered pawning his lands in Normandy to Pedro of Navarre, who despite his opposition to Louis was always willing to accept a deal that expanded his own power. By the end of September talks were in progress in the castle of Vincennes. They turned mainly on the Duke of Burgundy’s reform programme as he had outlined it to the assembly in Paris on 21 August. Jean insisted that before he would dismiss his troops the Queen, all the royal dukes and the leading councilors would have to swear to work to put it into effect as soon as the King had recovered his senses. Louis of Orléans’ position was equally simple. He was the closest blood relation of the King and saw no reason to accept any limitation on his right to govern in the King’s ‘absences’. His councilors and allies were more realistic. It was obvious that there was a good deal of support for the Duke of Burgundy. Unless he got most of what he wanted the divisions of the realm would not be healed. Louis of Orléans was finally persuaded by his councilors to submit. On 16 October he and the Queen met the Duke of Burgundy and his two brothers on the fortified bridge over the Seine at Charenton to seal the terms. They swore to keep the peace and be forever brothers. They took communion from a shared wafer, then ate and slept together as a mark of reconciliation. That afternoon the agreement was proclaimed by the heralds at the Parlement and the Châtelet. A week later, with the troops dismissed on each side, the Queen and Louis d'Orléans entered Paris together, escorted by the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Anjou and the King of Navarre, to be greeted by outward rejoicing and inward fearfulness (5).
Siege of Angoulême
In Paris decision-making was now practically paralyzed by the disputes between the princes and the prolonged ‘absences’ of the King. The Duke of Burgundy had succeeded in imposing a nominal commitment to reform on his cousins in October, but the political community still looked to the Duke of Orléans for leadership. Meanwhile Jean the Fearless hectored the cowed and resentful councilors on the subject of administrative reform, and they responded with sullen obstruction. Jean de Montaigu, the Master of the Royal Household, and his two brothers, both senior officers of the Chambre des Comptes, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to create a common front against him on the council. They engineered an alliance between the Queen and the Dukes of Anjou and Orléans, the Duc d'Anjou's grandmother Marie de Blois-Châtillion advising and ruling with him (6). A formal treaty between these potentates was sealed at the beginning of December 1405 in which they undertook to pursue a common position on all issues relating to the interests of the King. The Duke of Bourbon, the Count of Tancarville and Montaigu himself were all undeclared adherents to this pact. Relations between the rival groups shortly reached breaking point. On 4 December Jean summoned the Constable Charles d’Albret and all the royal chamberlains to a meeting to discuss how to overcome the princes’ resistance to his proposals. After four or five hours of deliberation he invited them to meet him again over dinner at the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the following day. The other princes and their allies held their own meeting at the Bastille, at the end of which they sent a message to the Constable and chamberlains directing them not to attend Jean’s dinner. They did this, they said, ‘in case people should think that he had some right to undertake the reform of the realm, and should imagine that the princes were about to join him in this enterprise’. Jean’s fury knew no bounds. The Dukes of Anjou and Orléans, fearing that he would attack them, had guards posted in their Parisian mansions and appeared at the next meeting of the council carrying weapons beneath their cloaks. ‘My lord’s business seems to be going badly,’ wrote a Burgundian official to his colleagues at Dijon. A few days after this incident the Dukes of Bourbon and Berry, who came closest to being neutral in these disputes, succeeded in brokering an accommodation between the princes and restoring a measure of goodwill which persisted for several months (7).
They agreed to confer upon the Queen a permanent power to mediate between the rival cabals. At the same time Louis of Orléans made some concessions to John’s desire for a recognized position at the heart of the French state and a measure of administrative reform, provided that his own interests were not prejudiced. At Christmas 1405 Charles VI began to recover his senses and it became possible for the first time in several months to transact important business. On 27 January 1406 the council, meeting in the King’s presence, approved two new ordinances about the government of the kingdom during his ‘absences’. The first substantially reproduced the abortive instrument which Philip the Bold had pressed on the confused King in April 1403. The power of government during the King’s ‘absences’ was formally conferred on Isabeau of Bavaria, with the benefit of such advice as might be required from the four royal dukes of Berry, Bourbon, Orléans and Burgundy, the royal council or the officers of state. The second formally recognized the new Duke of Burgundy as having succeeded to the position in the French government previously occupied by his father and conferred on him a special role in the upbringing of the royal children. These ordinances, and especially the first, were destined to have a fateful influence on the politics of the following years, while the second was undermined before it was even passed due to the dispersed positioning of the children and the furious unwillingness to hand them over of the various princes (8). The ordinances meant that any faction seeking to control the government would have to control the Queen or the one of the Princes. Isabeau, elevated to the position of president of what was in effect a council of regency but without any significant following of her own, would be forced into a succession of defensive alliances with whichever of the princes seemed at the time to be most powerful or least threatening. The flow of gifts and revenues into John’s coffers was resumed, albeit on a modest scale and with frequent interruptions. In due course the council also addressed John’s objections to his rival’s position as Captain-General on the march of Calais. The appointment was transferred to him and he was able to put his own men into the key garrisons. At the end of January 1406 the first tentative steps were taken towards putting the Burgundian reform programme into effect. Official salaries were reduced, in some cases by as much as half. ‘Extraordinary’ salary supplements were curtailed or abolished. The number of financial and judicial officers was ordered to be drastically diminished. All pensions charged on the royal demesne in favor of members of the Parlement were revoked unless justified by at least twenty years’ service. At the same time there appears to have been a notable reduction in the scale of grants to the Queen and the royal princes. The princes had reconciled themselves to these measures as the price of peace. But the civil service had not. The Parlement in particular fought a vigorous rearguard action, picking over the ordinances for defects of form or drafting, sending them back for revision and deferring registration as long as they could. Before long the jobbery resumed and the number of appointments recommenced its inexorable climb. By the spring of 1406 it was clear that the Duke of Burgundy’s reform programme had run into the sand. Meanwhile the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy played out their appointed roles, engaging in the traditional rituals of reconciliation, kissing, feasting together and wearing each other’s emblems. The tension was never far from the surface (9).
Against this background the war received less attention from the politicians in Paris than it had formerly done. The whole question of war finance had become particularly difficult as a result of the princes’ quarrels. None of them was willing to sacrifice his claims on the resources of the Crown. Without that the only way of funding large-scale operations against the English was to impose another taille. This would be extremely unpopular and was certain to be exploited by the Duke of Burgundy to consolidate his political support among the populace. This prospect aroused real fear among his cousins. In the previous autumn the council had considered a scheme for an entirely new system of taxation involving a flat rate charge of 20 gold écus on every settlement in France which could not claim exemption on account of war damage or plague. Its authors thought that it would raise 18 million écus, net of collection costs, or more than six times the yield of the aides, gabelle and tailles combined. It was proposed to use nearly 13 million écus of this to fund a standing army of about 40,000 men and the rest on the royal household and the accumulation of a new treasury reserve. It is not clear who devised or supported this fantastic scheme, which would have been administratively unworkable and well beyond the resources of France even in better times. But it quickly foundered on the opposition of the princes and, apparently, of the King. Under these circumstances the war effort went on (10).
During the spring of 1406 local French forces on the march of Gascony began the enormous task of recapturing the places which had been so cheaply conquered by the Anglo-Gascon companies over the winter. In the larger scheme of things the strategic value of these places was questionable. But they were a source of fear and insecurity to the communities of the south-west, who could be bullied into providing the finance and most of the troops to recover them, without the need to tap the royal treasury in Paris. The main effort was directed to the recovery of Brantôme from the garrison installed there in November by the lord of Mussidan. Brantôme was a substantial walled town whose possession gave the Gascon companies a base from which to raid across the whole of the region north of the Dordogne. The place was under siege by the beginning of February 1406. By the end of March the Constable, the Counts of Foix, Clermont and Alençon, and the Seneschals of Saintonge, Poitou and Limousin were outside the walls with some 1,200 troops between them. The walls were battered by artillery until the garrison finally entered into an elaborate conditional surrender agreement at the beginning of April. The men in Brantôme appealed to the council in Bordeaux to relieve them and everyone assumed that they would find a way of doing so. The French royal council even heard reports that the Prince of Wales in person was on his way, which frightened them into sending heavy reinforcements from the north (11). Surprising many, the Prince arrived before these reinforcements, and scattered the smaller French force before him. The French force linked up with the reinforcements, expanding their force to almost 8,000 by early May. The Constable decided to launch an attempt at the other great stronghold on the Charentes in late May, beginning the Siege of Angoulême. The fighting around Angoulême reached a fever pitch by late June with daily skirmishes and challenges issued. The Earl of Bedford, having established his skills as a man under siege, was placed in command of the Angoulême garrison while the Prince of Wales remained south of the city, able to retreat to the city if necessary but preventing a proper encirclement by his positioning. Following a period of negotiations, and the arrival of more English reinforcements - bringing the two forces to near parity, the two sides agreed to meet in battle. The Battle of Angoulême occurred on July 3rd 1406, and resulted in a resounding English victory. Having had the time to prepare defensive positions and able to bring thousands of archers and hundreds of different gunpowder weapons to bear, the French were forced to attack on uneven ground and uphill. The result was clear from the moment the first French cavalry charge floundered. Over the course of the next three hours the French launched five attacks at the English forces, experiencing only failure. By the end of the battle, the Constable agreed to retreat after negotiations with the English during a break in the assaults (12).
At the beginning of July 1406 Raimond de Montaut lord of Mussidan died without a male heir. One of the last men living to have fought with King Edward IV at Nájera, Raimond had been a power in the Bordelais and western Périgord for nearly half a century. In addition to the fortress of Mussidan in Périgord he had also been lord of Blaye, a substantial walled town on the right bank of the Gironde. The council in Bordeaux was filled with foreboding. Raimond had left two daughters: Joan, who had recently married the French Seneschal of Saintonge John Harpeden; and Marie, the designated heiress of Mussidan and Blaye, a young unmarried woman whose choice of husband was likely to determine the ultimate allegiance of both places. Raimond’s widow Margaret d'Albret, who had custody of her daughter and assumed the administration of her domains, was a cousin of the Constable of France. She also occupied in her own right the important fortress of Vayres on the left bank of the Dordogne a short distance downstream of Libourne. On his deathbed Raimond had done what he could to ensure that his possessions would not fall into French hands. He had limited his wife’s rights as far as he legally could. He had charged Marie to live and die in the allegiance of the King of England and to take no husband who would not undertake to do the same. But there was a limit to what Raimond could achieve from beyond the grave. The whole affair showed how dependent the English duchy was on the choices of a few hundred Gascon noblemen bound by complex links of marriage, kinship and alliance which cut across traditional political allegiances. The first man to move, preempting any French attempts at taking Marie, was the Earl of Bedford, John de Grailly. In a spectacular march he crossed the length of the Duchy of Aquitaine, almost directly from the Battle of Angoulême, arriving in the middle of the month. Marie de Montaut was quickly married to John de Grailly, expanding the Grailly fortunes immensely in Gascony - with the young Earl becoming among the largest landholders in Gascony and securing the English territories in the process (13). The conflict between France and England would return to a simmer for the rest of the summer and autumn of 1406 as negotiations towards peace continued to run endlessly in circles around each other.
Jean de Berry, Comte de Montpensier and heir to the Duc de Berry
An increasingly important issue proved to be the suitability of the Dauphin as a ruler. As he neared fifteen Charles de Valois continued to exhibit childish and immature behavior, increasingly coupled with uncontrollable rage which had caused the death of more than one servant. As he grew into a young adult it became increasingly clear that the Dauphin would be a terror as ruler, prompting whispers and schemes in search of a solution. In late 1406 a collection of minor nobles representative of both the major factions tried to have him placed in a monastery and disinherited, though the momentarily lucid King Charles reacted violently to the notion and had several of them exiled for the suggestion despite all pleas from both Louis d'Orléans and Jean de Bourgogne in favor of the motion. In time, it became increasingly clear that if anything was to be done about the Dauphin it would not be with the King's support. As the only person without a claim to any of the younger Princes of France, Charles de Berry found himself increasingly as the main protector of the Dauphin both due to their common ties to England and his hopes for protecting the legitimacy of the monarchy (15). The arrival of Joan of Wales and Catherine of England at Bourges, where the Dauphin would spend much of his time when he wasn't at court, and the following arrival and weddings of Joan of Wales to Charles de Berry the Younger and Charles de Valois to Catherine of England solidified the alliance between the Royalists and England. At the same time Charles de Berry was able to fully gain control of the Lieutenancy for the lands of the Rhône Alps which were under Royal control, creating a solid block of Royalist support across Central and South-Eastern France only interrupted by the Duchy of Bourbon and its dependencies (16).
Jean sans Peur, Duc de Bourgogne et Brabant, Count of Flanders
The decision to mount a simultaneous campaign in the north greatly aggravated the problem of finance. The Chambre des Comptes prepared a report on the state of the government’s finances, which showed that the combined demesne revenues and tax receipts of the Crown only just covered its ordinary expenses. This included the aides which had been more than enough under Charles V to pay for the reconquest of much of western France. This was the measure of the pre-emption of royal revenues by the princes and the civil service. It meant that another taille would be required. The King was outraged and called for an investigation. But no investigation of this long-standing problem was likely to resolve the immediate issue. The Duke of Burgundy objected to another taille ‘with all the force he could muster’. He thought that the money should be raised in ‘other ways’. By this he meant savings on the obese budget of the administration. Others objected to this attempt to revive the Burgundian programme of administrative reform which they had thought had been successfully buried. The outcome was a compromise. It was decided to pay for the double campaign by a mixture of economies and fresh taxes. On 28 July, in a rare show of unison, the whole council approved a great administrative ordinance, the second attempt in a year to prune the public administration and achieve large savings in the government’s budget. There were to be drastic reductions in the personnel of the royal household, the Chambre des Comptes and the mints. The ‘extraordinary’ supplements were to be abolished again and some other perquisites done away with. Severe restrictions were imposed on new grants, especially those made at the expense of the royal demesne. In addition there was to be a ‘little taille’ of 200,000 francs, to be divided equally between the campaign treasurers of the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy. An ordinance was approved imposing this tax, in which it was tendentiously claimed that France was about to be invaded by Ingleram de Mowbray and that the money was urgently required for its defense. The Duke of Burgundy left Paris on 10 August to begin his preparations. A few days later the compromise was undone by the Parlement. The judges declared the ordinance to be ‘contrary to the King’s honour’ and declined to register it. They would have been badly affected by the reforms, and particularly by the abolition of salary supplements. Their objections were no doubt fortified by the official element on the council and possibly by some of the princes. The result was to create a gap in the government’s war budget. On 16 September the taille was doubled to 400,000 francs. The lion’s share of the increased taille, 250,000 francs, was to be used to fund Louis d'Orléans’ campaign. A fresh ordinance was published, even more tendentious than the first, which declared by way of explanation that a second English army was now poised to invade France. Jean the Fearless, who was at Dijon, had not been consulted. He was furious. He felt that he had been hoodwinked. He returned to Paris at the end of September to try to have the new ordinance cancelled. But by the time he arrived it was too late and the Calais expedition collapsed without funding. Arrangements to farm out the increased tax were already in hand and the Duke of Orléans had left for the Gascon march (20).
French preparations for the assault on Saintogne got under way in the second week of September 1406, within a few days of the final decisions in Paris (21). The Constable Charles d’Albret established his headquarters in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, an ancient monastic town on the River Boutonne in northern Saintonge. His preparation for the coming campaign was methodical and conceived on an impressive scale. French troops, stripped from garrisons across the south-west and pressed into service by the provincial seneschals, were moving down the river valleys into Saintonge. By the end of the month, the Constable had about 1,500 locally recruited men-at arms and 500 crossbowmen under his command. Victuals and other stores were being collected throughout the region. Thirty armed ships were lying in the bay of La Rochelle, including ten oared barges and galleys under the command of Charles de Savoisy, by now France’s indispensable naval contractor. All of this was beginning to eat up money at a time when the taille had not even begun to come in. The Constable demanded another hearth tax from the long-suffering population of Poitou, which had already granted one earlier in the year and another the year before. Coming on top of all the usual difficulties associated with the presence of large numbers of undisciplined soldiers, these demands were declared to be intolerable and were rejected. The Seneschal of Poitou blustered. The Duke of Orléans ordered it to be collected by force. The Constable, faced by wage demands from the crews of his ships, seized large sums of money and plate from the citizens and churches of La Rochelle. English spies in Paris reported to the Captain of Calais on the movements of the Duke of Orléans and the progress of his preparations. The city of Bordeaux and other front-line towns organized a pervasive intelligence network and received frequent, generally accurate reports of French plans. The Duke of Orléans had left Paris for Saint-Denis on 16 September to receive the Oriflamme, the traditional battle flag of the French monarchy. He began his march south two days later. But the Constable’s long-drawn-out travails delayed his arrival in Saintonge by nearly a month. On 15 October 1406 the Duke finally raised his standard at Saint-Jean d’Angély. It was the largest and most distinguished royal army to take the field since 1383 and the first to be commanded by a royal prince. Louis’ cavalry contingent was estimated at 5,000 men-at-arms, representing a total strength with pages, armed servants, bowmen, infantry and artillerymen of at least thrice that number. Five hundred pioneers went ahead of the columns clearing the paths and smoothing the way for carts and artillery pieces. The nobility thronged to share the place of honor at Louis’ side. With him marched the Constable, the new Admiral of France Pierre ‘Clignet’ de Bréban, and the calculating Jean II de Montaigu. The heads of most of the famous noble houses of the north were there, including the Counts of Clermont, Alençon, La Marche and Vendôme; the seneschals of all the march provinces north of the Dordogne; and the Count of Foix representing, along with the Constable, the two principal noble houses of the south-western march. Jean V, Duke of Brittany did not appear in person but he sent ships to reinforce the fleet already gathered at La Rochelle and troops to join Louis on the Charente River. Louis d'Orléans crossed the river on the 3rd of November, taking Taillebourg by storm and marching south on Saintes once again (22).
The Battle of Île-d'Aix
The French commanders at Saintes had been counting on the ships gathered at La Rochelle to keep the army supplied and to complete the encirclement of the town. The operations of the fleet were directed by the newly appointed Admiral of France, Clignet de Bréban. He was not well-regarded: an obscure and low-born individual enriched by the munificence of the Duke of Orléans; a bombastic and bootlicking mediocrity according to numerous hostile voices. Bréban’s misfortune was that the annual wine fleet from England had arrived at Bordeaux at the end of October, some twenty large ships, many of which would have been armed for the dangerous passage past Brittany and across the Bay of Biscay. Together with the ships and barges already at Bordeaux the Prince of Wales disposed of some fifty merchantmen moored in the Garonne off the city in addition to a small number of oared barges. These vessels were sent to the Île d'Oléron, at the mouth of the Charente River, under Roger Mortimer, Earl of March and heir to the Dukedom of Clarence, and John Hastings, the Earl of Pembroke, to blockade the French fleet and prevent it from entering the river. In December, as conditions were becoming desperate in the French camp, the Duke of Orléans ordered Bréban’s fleet to fight their way through the blockade, something which they had so far shrunk from attempting. Twenty-two French ships were filled with soldiers and sailed from La Rochelle a few days before Christmas to break the blockade. On the 22nd of December the two fleets clashed in the narrow waters between the Mainland, the Île d'Oléron and Île de Ré in what would become known as the Battle of île-d'Aix, named for a small island in the middle of the area where the English had scouts stationed. These scouts spotted the launch of the French fleet and swiftly alerted the English, who launched their fleet of thirty ships. As the French sailed southward for the mouth of the Charente River, they found themselves attacked out of the fog of the morning, from the Île d'Oléron, just north of the Charente River. In the space of the first hour three French ships had been captured, only to be boarded by the rest of the French fleet. Over the course of the next five hours ships were taken and re-taken, and then taken once again. The English and French archers dueled with each other from their heightened bastions on the ships' decks and terrorized the fighters as they crossed from ship to ship. A clump of some five French and seven English ships were driven close to Île-d'Aix, with some of the fighting transferring onto the sandy beaches of the tiny island. Clignet de Bréban decided to cut his losses as the sun began to set. The French were hounded northwards until they were able to take refuge in the port of La Rochelle. In total the French fleet lost more than half its ships, including those sent by the Duke of Brittany, and saw hundreds of minor knights captured or killed, with almost a thousand casualties in total. The English on the other hand lost just three ships permanently, and were able to crew many of the abandoned French ships. Bernard de Lesparre, who had been the de facto leader of the English fleet on behalf of the two Earls, took two of the captured French ships up the river to Saintes and set fire to them in midstream to advertise his triumph to the Duke of Orléans. A subsequent judicial inquiry in England attributed most of the credit to Bernard and the Gascons. The leading English captains, it was found, had held back until it was clear which way the battle was going, as a result of which they were deprived of their share of the prizes. Shortly afterwards Clignet de Bréban and Charles de Savoisy arrived in Louis of Orléans’ camp with the captain of La Rochelle to review the situation. There could be no question of another attempt to run the gauntlet of the Charente. Yet without one there was no prospect of feeding the army (24).
The Duke of Orléans was mortified. For a time he refused to recognize defeat. He wrote to the council in Paris calling for more funds. Great things would happen, he said, as soon as his men were paid. He wrote to the Republic of Venice and to others asking for the services of a military engineer. He hoped to extend the campaign through to the spring. But the proceeds of the taille were by now exhausted and the treasury in Paris was empty. On the 11th of January 1407 Louis was finally persuaded that the army could not go on. His representatives approached the defenders and asked for a temporary cease-fire to allow negotiations to take place. After some hesitation this was agreed. Renaud lord of Pons, France’s long-standing truce commissioner on the northern march of Gascony, tried to bargain with Prince Edward for an honorable way out. But Edward knew that he had won. He had no interest in saving Louis’ face and declined to make any agreement. On the 14th Louis gave up. At dawn he broke up his camp and laid off his army. The news resounded all across the south-west. The Anglo-Gascon companies resumed their raiding across the march. The lord of Limeuil readmitted the Anglo-Gascons to his fortresses on the Dordogne and the Vézère. Archambaud d’Abzac recovered possession of Castelnaud at the edge of the Sarladais. A string of new garrisons appeared like mushrooms after raids along the river valleys. In April 1407 there was a long conference between Gascon and French officials in the small bastide town of Cadillac, which marked the effective limit of English administration in the Garonne valley. The outcome was a series of local cease-fire agreements with the lord of Albret, his brother the lord of Sainte-Bazeille, the Count of Foix-Armagnac and the lord of Pons, together covering most of the march of Gascony on both sides of the Dordogne. The most serious military threat to the duchy since 1377 had failed through a combination of misjudgment, hubris and ill-fortune on the Duke’s side and skillful leadership, better soldiery and stable government on the English side. Louis d'Orléans’ high rank, the status of his fellow commanders and the size of their army made the humiliation hard to live down. In Paris the acerbic clerk of the Parlement, who was in the habit of noting his views in the margin of his registers, was unimpressed by the sufferings of the French army. He dismissed the whole enterprise as a ‘joy-ride’, an ‘entreprise de revel’, which had brought nothing but failure and expense. A month after the forced break-up of the Orléans army the Duke of Burgundy arrived in the capital with an intimidating retinue of 3,000 mounted men at his back and confronted his enemies at an ill-tempered meeting of the council in the presence of the King, then enjoying an interval of sanity. The Duke of Orléans was not there but the Duke of Anjou, who had personally intervened to stop the taille in Anjou and Maine being paid to the war treasurers at Saint-Omer - an act that had partly prevented Jean de Bourgogne's own campaign against Calais, got the rough end of Jean’s tongue. A few days after this meeting the King relapsed once more into incoherence and all substantial business came to a halt. Jean left for Flanders towards the end of January 1407, a few days before Louis of Orléans returned to the capital from the Charente (25).
Once he had resumed the reins of power Louis set about ensuring that his rival would never again be in a position to dictate terms to the council as he had done the previous August. In April 1407, when Charles was once more able to attend to business, his brother set about reorganizing the council’s membership. On 28 April, at a session attended by the King, the Dauphin and all the royal princes apart from the Duke of Burgundy, a new ordinance was approved. The number of councilors was halved. Twenty-six named individuals were appointed to the reduced body in addition to the royal princes and the officers of state. Eleven reliable allies of the Duke of Burgundy were removed. This left only two men who could be counted on to represent John’s interests on the new council, whereas twenty of the named councilors were publicly identified with the Duke of Orléans. On the following day a similar revolution occurred in the financial departments. The number of treasurers and généraux-conseillers des finances, who controlled the collection of the aides, was reduced. A clean sweep was made of the Duke of Burgundy’s protégés. John returned to the capital a week after these decisions were made but found that it was too late to do anything about them. The new council was in place. The King was once more ‘absent’. John felt the impact of the change immediately. He had recently presented his account to the King. He was owed very large sums: 189,666 livres in arrears which had been due to his father at the time of his death and another 157,925 livres for the cost of the abortive campaign against Calais and the maintenance of the French garrisons of the northern march. These enormous debts were acknowledged and payment was ostensibly secured on the aides of five dioceses of Picardy and Champagne. But none of them was paid. In addition his pensions from the treasury, his annual subsidy for the maintenance of the castle of Sluys and his right to the proceeds of the aides collected in his domains, all of which had been confirmed two years before, were stopped. The flow of ‘extraordinary’ grants, already reduced to a trickle, dried up entirely. In the long run these measures would have bankrupted the Burgundian state, as Louis and his allies understood and intended. Louis himself on the other hand received his pensions and aides without interruption and continued to procure generous royal grants in his own favor. Among John’s circle it was believed that the Duke of Orléans’ next move would be to have the duchy of Guyenne, which nominally belonged to the Dauphin, transferred to himself. By the end of May 1407 John was back in Flanders contemplating murder (26).
Footnotes:
(1) This is all largely based on OTL. This update is an in depth look at the lead up to the French Civil War. I have been really lucky to find a detailed description of many of the events of the period.
(2) This happened almost exactly as described IOTL. The difference lies in the fact that the Duke of Anjou is King of Naples and therefore is distracted enough to have his young son take control of the French territories.
(3) This is all from OTL. I found it hilarious that there were medieval trolls who made fun of Ducal mottos.
(4) The factional nature of this struggle and the way popular might plays into everything seemed weird to me for quite a while, but the almost proto-liberal revolutionary nature of some of these struggles has really fascinated me greatly.
(5) This is again almost all based on OTL, with relatively few changes to take into account butterflies from the TL.
(6) This is again different in regards to the Anjou, where Louis II is deeply involved in a major conflict for Sicily at this time, which leaves the French territories as a distraction. The grandmother mentioned is the venerable Marie de Blois who fought so hard to place her son on the Neapolitan throne and holds a strong claim to the Duchy of Brittany.
(7) This is mostly OTL.
(8) The second ordinance is completely undermined by the extra factions ITTL. IOTL Jean Sans Peur was able to get control of the royal children, which strengthened his hand immensely. Here they are spread out among the factions.
(9) This is all based on OTL.
(10) I have been really lucky to find some sources that focus in detail on the economics of this period and the immense costs involved in the warfare of this period between France and England. The English are ridiculously lucky to have evaded a great deal of the instability that occurred under Henry IV.
(11) IOTL the English basically abandoned Aquitaine and got ridiculously lucky that the French collapsed under their own hubris. This town fell IOTL and marked a turning point in the conflict for quite a while.
(12) The much greater English investment in the area and more secure holdings on the Charente river really prove vital to securing English fortunes ITTL.
(13) Marie de Montaut's marriage became much more of an issue IOTL and became fundamentally tied to Louis d'Orléans' military plans. I won't go into the details of what happened IOTL, but it is one of those events within larger events that it is really worth reading up on. I was very fascinated by all of it.
(14) I thought it was necessary to clarify what the various different factions were. Keep in mind that people are moving back and forth between factions near constantly as the leaders poach valuable clients from their rivals. At the same times alliances and cooperation, as well as murderous feuds, saturate the relations between every single faction. I know that it is ridiculously complex, and I am trying to make it as clear as I can here, but I think it is really important that the complexity of the issues involved in this are properly conveyed.
(15) These events are happening simultaneously with everything else that I describe. Charles de Berry is increasingly forced to participate, if nothing else then to protect his own interests. He remains somewhat outside of the central struggle, but he is vital as the primary defender of the Dauphin and ally of the King of England.
(16) To be clear, almost all of south-eastern France outside of Provence, Savoy and Piedmont are now under Berry control, while Charles is uncle to the Count of Savoy - who is soon to become a Duke after a payment to Sigismund.
(17) IOTL Charles d'Albret had a better hand to play and able to convince people to support him relatively easily because the English holdings were far weaker than ITTL. People talked seriously about driving them into the sea. There is probably a good POD somewhere in here where the English lose the war to the French under a concerted effort to end the war, though the underlying factionalization and growth of magnates does make it challenging. A sane Charles VI might be interesting as well.
(18) This is all OTL.
(19) The challenges involved in convincing the French to support the Duke of Orléans' plans are far greater ITTL, and even when it is passed the Duke of Berry stays completely out of the conflict.
(20) This is all based on OTL.
(21) The campaign is located in a different location due to the great importance of Saintogne to England ITTL. IOTL they attacked up the Garonne with the goal of taking Bordeaux. Here they can't make a direct assault on the city without removing the northern territories first.
(22) The forces described are mostly based on OTL. There are certain differences to the people involved and the like due to butterflies and specific people having died who would otherwise have participated here.
(23) This is all OTL. Louis d'Orléans really pissed away this opportunity. IOTL it was even egregious because they were besieging a small town instead of a major city like Saintes. It was really a complete failure of leadership that doomed the effort from start to finish.
(24) This is based on an OTL naval battle, but due to the difference in location of the campaign the battle plays out somewhat differently. It is also a larger clash. The loss of those Breton ships are going to haunt the Orléans faction for quite some time, having hoped to add them to their supporters and almost accomplishing it prior to the battle.
(25) This is the OTL fallout from the failure of the expedition.
(26) This is again very close to OTL events. These are the events that culminated in the assassination of Louis d'Orléans IOTL. I realize that this update is kind of ridiculous in the degree of detail it takes with the events leading up to 1407 but I thought it important to detail the events, and I haven't really seen them well described in a lot of places.
That battle certainly was an ill day for the Orleanists!
One step closer to civil war it seems.
One step closer to civil war it seems.
Good timeline so far, it seems that one of the reasons the Hundred Years War dragged so long in OTL is that many of the French nobility regarded the Valois as "usurpers". With France even more divided TTL, I wouldn't be surprised if Pedro of Navarre decides to press his claim to the French throne, viewing the current troubles as divine punishment on the Valois for "usurping" the throne.
An interesting outcome from a devastating civil war could be a drop in agnatic succession. This is certainly true for certain outcomes giving Pedro as King Pierre of France.
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