Читать книгу The History of France (Vol. 1-6) - Guizot François - Страница 47

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We have just been spectators at the labor of formation of the French kingship and the French nation. We have seen monarchical unity and national unity rising, little by little, out of and above the feudal system, which had been the first result of barbarians settling upon the ruins of the Roman empire. In the fourteenth century, a new and a vital question arose: Will the French dominion preserve its nationality? Will the kingship remain French, or pass to the foreigner? This question brought ravages upon France, and kept her fortunes in suspense for a hundred years of war with England, from the reign of Philip of Valois to that of Charles VII.; and a young girl of Lorraine, called Joan of Arc, had the glory of communicating to France that decisive impulse which brought to a triumphant issue the independence of the French nation and kingship.

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the elevation of Philip of Valois to the throne, as representative of the male line amongst the descendants of Hugh Capet, took place by virtue, not of any old written law, but of a traditional right, recognized and confirmed by two recent resolutions taken at the death of the two eldest sons of Philip the Handsome. The right thus promulgated became at once a fact accepted by the whole of France; Philip of Valois had for rival none but a foreign prince, and “there was no mind in France,” say contemporary chroniclers, “to be subjects of the King of England.” Some weeks after his accession, on the 29th of May, 1328, Philip was crowned at Rheims, in presence of a brilliant assemblage of princes and lords, French and foreign; and next year, on the 6th of June, Edward III., King of England, being summoned to fulfil a vassal’s duties by doing homage to the King of France for the duchy of Aquitaine, which he held, appeared in the cathedral of Amiens, with his crown on his head, his sword at his side, and his gilded spurs on his heels. When he drew near to the throne, the Viscount de Melun, king’s chamberlain, invited him to lay aside his crown, his sword, and his spurs, and go down on his knees before Philip. Not without a murmur, Edward obeyed; but when the chamberlain said to him, “Sir, you, as Duke of Aquitaine, became liegeman of my lord the king who is here, and do promise to keep towards him faith and loyalty,” Edward protested, saying that he owed only simple homage, and not liege-homage—a closer bond, imposing on the vassal more stringent obligations [to serve and defend his suzerain against every enemy whatsoever]. “Cousin,” said Philip to him, “we would not deceive you, and what you have now done contenteth us well until you have returned to your own country, and seen from the acts of your predecessors what you ought to do.”

“Gramercy, dear sir,” answered the King of England; and with the reservation he had just made, and which was added to the formula of homage, he placed his hands between the hands of the King of France, who kissed him on the mouth, and accepted his homage, confiding in Edward’s promise to certify himself by reference to the archives of England of the extent to which his ancestors had been bound. The certification took place, and on the 30th of March, 1331, about two years after his visit to Amiens, Edward III. recognized, by letters express, “that the said homage which we did at Amiens to the King of France in general terms, is and must be understood as liege; and that we are bound, as Duke of Aquitaine and peer of France, to show him faith and loyalty.”

The relations between the two kings were not destined to be for long so courteous and so pacific. Even before the question of the succession to the throne of France arose between them they had adopted contrary policies. When Philip was crowned at Rheims, Louis de Nevers, Count of Flanders, repaired thither with a following of eighty-six knights, and he it was to whom the right belonged of carrying the sword of the kingdom. The heralds-at-arms repeated three times, “Count of Flanders, if you are here, come and do your duty.” He made no answer. The king was astounded, and bade him explain himself. “My lord,” answered the count, “may it please you not to be astounded; they called the Count of Flanders, and not Louis de Nevers.” “What then!” replied the king; “are you not the Count of Flanders?” “It is true, sir,” rejoined the other, “that I bear the name, but I do not possess the authority; the burghers of Bruges, Ypres, and Cassel have driven me from my land, and there scarce remains but the town of Ghent where I dare show myself.” “Fair cousin,” said Philip, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.” Some of the French barons who happened to be present represented to the king that the Flemish burghers were powerful; that autumn was a bad season for a war in their country; and that Louis the Quarreller, in 1315, had been obliged to come to a stand-still in a similar expedition. Philip consulted his constable, Walter de Chatillon, who had served the kings his predecessors in their wars against Flanders. “Whoso hath good stomach for fight,” answered the constable, “findeth all times seasonable.” “Well, then,” said the king, embracing him, “whoso loveth me will follow me.” The war thus resolved upon was forthwith begun. Philip, on arriving with his army before Cassel, found the place defended by sixteen thousand Flemings under the command of Nicholas Zannequin, the richest of the burghers of Furnes, and already renowned for his zeal in the insurrection against the count. For several days the French remained inactive around the mountain on which Cassel is built, and which the knights, mounted on iron-clad horses, were unable to scale. The Flemings had planted on a tower of Cassel a flag carrying a cock, with this inscription:—

“When the cock that is hereon shall crow, The foundling king herein shall go.”

They called Philip the foundling king because he had no business to expect to be king. Philip in his wrath gave up to fire and pillage the outskirts of the place. The Flemings marshalled at the top of the mountain made no movement. On the 24th of August, 1328, about three in the afternoon, the French knights had disarmed. Some were playing at chess; others “strolled from tent to tent in their fine robes, in search of amusement;” and the king was asleep in his tent after a long carouse, when all on a sudden his confessor, a Dominican friar, shouted out that the Flemings were attacking the camp. Zannequin, indeed, “came out full softly and without a bit of noise,” says Froissart, “with his troops in three divisions, to surprise the French camp at three points. He was quite close to the king’s tent, and some chroniclers say that he was already lifting his mace over the head of Philip, who had armed in hot haste, and was defended only by a few knights, of whom one was waving the oriflamme round him, when others hurried up, and Zannequin was forced to stay his hand. At two other points of the camp the attack had failed. The French gathered about the king and the Flemings about Zannequin; and there took place so stubborn a fight, that “of sixteen thousand Flemings who were there not one recoiled,” says Froissart, “and all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another, without budging from the spot where the battle had begun.” The same evening Philip entered Cassel, which he set on fire, and, in a few days afterwards, on leaving for France, he said to Count Louis, before the French barons, Count, I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for if I do, it will be to my own profit and to your hurt.”

The Count of Flanders was far from following the advice of the King of France, and the King of France was far from foreseeing whither he would be led by the road upon which he had just set foot. It has already been pointed out to what a position of wealth, population, and power, industrial and commercial activity had in the thirteenth century raised the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Fumes, Courtrai, and Douai, and with what energy they had defended against their lords their prosperity and their liberties. It was the struggle, sometimes sullen, sometimes violent, of feudal lordship against municipal burgherdom. The able and imperious Philip the Handsome had tested the strength of the Flemish cities, and had not cared to push them to extremity. When, in 1322, Count Louis de Nevers, scarcely eighteen years of age, inherited from his grandfather Robert III. the countship of Flanders, he gave himself up, in respect of the majority of towns in the countship, to the same course of oppression and injustice as had been familiar to his predecessors; the burghers resisted him with the same, often ruffianly, energy; and when, after a six years’ struggle amongst Flemings, the Count of Flanders, who had been conquered by the burghers, owed his return as master of his countship to the King of the French, he troubled himself about nothing but avenging himself and enjoying his victory at the expense of the vanquished. He chastised, despoiled, proscribed, and inflicted atrocious punishments; and, not content with striking at individuals, he attacked the cities themselves. Nearly all of them, save Ghent, which had been favorable to the count, saw their privileges annulled or curtailed of their most essential guarantees. The burghers of Bruges were obliged to meet the count half way to his castle of Vale, and on their knees implore his pity. At Ypres the bell in the tower was broken up. Philip of Valois made himself a partner in these severities; he ordered the fortifications of Bruges, Ypres, and Courtrai to be destroyed, and he charged French agents to see to their demolition. Absolute power is often led into mistakes by its insolence; but when it is in the hands of rash and reckless mediocrity, there is no knowing how clumsy and blind it can be. Neither the King of France nor the Count of Flanders seemed to remember that the Flemish communes had at their door a natural and powerful ally who could not do without them any more than they could do without him. Woollen stuffs, cloths, carpets, warm coverings of every sort were the chief articles of the manufactures and commerce of Flanders; there chiefly was to be found all that the active and enterprising merchants of the time exported to Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Russia, and even Asia; and it was from England that they chiefly imported their wool, the primary staple of their handiwork. “All Flanders,” says Froissart, “was based upon cloth and no wool, no cloth.” On the other hand it was to Flanders that England, her land-owners and farmers, sold the fleeces of their flocks; and the two countries were thus united by the bond of their mutual prosperity. The Count of Flanders forgot or defied this fact so far as in 1336, at the instigation, it is said, of the King of France, to have all the English in Flanders arrested and kept in prison. Reprisals were not long deferred. On the 5th of October in the same year the King of England ordered the arrest of all Flemish merchants in his kingdom and the seizure of their goods; and he at the same time prohibited the exportation of wool. “Flanders was given over,” says her principal historian, “to desolation; nearly all her looms ceased rattling on one and the same day, and the streets of her cities, but lately filled with rich and busy workmen, were overrun with beggars who asked in vain for work to escape from misery and hunger.” The English land-owners and farmers did not suffer so much, but were scarcely less angered; only it was to the King of France and the Count of Flanders rather than their own king that they held themselves indebted for the stagnation of their affairs, and their discontent sought vent only in execration of the foreigner.

When great national interests are to such a point misconceived and injured, there crop up, before long, clear-sighted and bold men who undertake the championship of them, and foment the quarrel to explosion-heat, either from personal views or patriotic feeling. The question of succession to the throne of France seemed settled by the inaction of the King of England, and the formal homage he had come and paid to the King of France at Amiens; but it was merely in abeyance. Many people both in England and in France still thought of it and spoke of it; and many intrigues bred of hope or fear were kept up with reference to it at the courts of the two kings. When the rumblings of anger were loud on both sides in consequence of affairs in Flanders, two men of note, a Frenchman and a Fleming, considering that the hour had come, determined to revive the question, and turn the great struggle which could not fail to be excited thereby to the profit of their own and their countries’ cause, for it is singular how ambition and devotion, selfishness and patriotism, combine and mingle in the human soul, and even in great souls.

Philip VI. had embroiled himself with a prince of his line, Robert of Artois, great-grandson of Robert the first Count of Artois, who was a brother of St. Louis, and was killed during the crusade in Egypt, at the battle of Mansourah. As early as the reign of Philip the Handsome Robert claimed the count-ship of Artois as his heritage; but having had his pretensions rejected by a decision of the peers of the kingdom, he had hoped for more success under Philip of Valois, whose sister he had married. Philip tried to satisfy him with another domain raised to a peerage; but Robert, more and more discontented, got involved in a series of intrigues, plots, falsehoods, forgeries, and even, according to public report, imprisonments and crimes, which, in 1332, led to his being condemned by the court of peers to banishment and the confiscation of his property. He fled for refuge first to Brabant, and then to England, to the court of Edward III., who received him graciously, and whom he forthwith commenced inciting to claim the crown of France, “his inheritance,” as he said, “which King Philip holds most wrongfully.” Edward III., who was naturally prudent, and had been involved, almost ever since his accession, in a stubborn war with Scotland, cared but little for rushing into a fresh and far more serious enterprise. But of all human passions hatred is perhaps the most determined in the prosecution of its designs. Robert accompanied the King of England in his campaigns northward; and “Sir,” said he, whilst they were marching together over the heaths of Scotland, “leave this poor country, and give your thoughts to the noble crown of France.” When Edward, on returning to London, was self-complacently rejoicing at his successes over his neighbors, Robert took pains to pique his self-respect, by expressing astonishment that he did not seek more practical and more brilliant successes. Poetry sometimes reveals sentiments and processes about which history is silent. We read in a poem of the fourteenth century, entitled The vow on the heron, “In the season when summer is verging upon its decline, and the gay birds are forgetting their sweet converse on the trees, now despoiled of their verdure, Robert seeks for consolation in the pleasures of fowling, for he cannot forget the gentle land of France, the glorious country whence he is an exile. He carries a falcon, which goes flying over the waters till a heron falls its prey; then he calls two young damsels to take the bird to the king’s palace, singing the while in sweet discourse: ‘Fly, fly, ye honorless knights; give place to gallants on whom love smiles; here is the dish for gallants who are faithful to their mistresses. The heron is the most timid of birds, for it fears its own shadow; it is for the heron to receive the vows of King Edward, who, though lawful King of France, dares not claim that noble heritage.’ At these words the king flushed, his heart was wroth, and he cried aloud, ‘Since coward is thrown in my teeth, I make vow [on this heron] to the God of Paradise that ere a single year rolls by I will defy the King of Paris.’ Count Robert hears and smiles; and low to his own heart he says, ‘Now have I won: and my heron will cause a great war.’ ”

Robert’s confidence in this tempter’s work of his was well founded, but a little premature. Edward III. did not repel him; complained loudly of the assistance rendered by the King of France to the Scots; gave an absolute refusal to Philip’s demands for the extradition of the rebel Robert, and retorted by protesting, in his turn, against the reception accorded in France to David Bruce, the rival of his own favorite Baliol for the throne of Scotland. In Aquitaine he claimed as of his own domain some places still occupied by Philip. Philip, on his side, neglected no chance of causing Edward embarrassment, and more or less overtly assisting his foes. The two kings were profoundly distrustful one of the other, foresaw, both of them, that they would one day come to blows, and prepared for it by mutually working to entangle and enfeeble one another. But neither durst as yet proclaim his wishes or his fears, and take the initiative in those unknown events which war must bring about to the great peril of their people and perhaps of themselves. From 1334 to 1337, as they continued to advance towards the issue, foreseen and at the same time deferred, of this situation, they were both of them seeking allies in Europe for their approaching struggle. Philip had a notable one under his thumb, the pope at that time settled at Avignon; and he made use of him for the purpose of proposing a new crusade, in which Edward III. should be called upon to join with him. If Edward complied, any enterprise on his part against France would become impossible; and if he declined, Christendom would cry fie upon him. Two successive popes, John XXII. and Benedict XII., preached the crusade, and offered their mediation to settle the differences between the two kings; but they were unsuccessful in both their attempts. The two kings strained every nerve to form laic alliances. Philip did all he could to secure to himself the fidelity of Count Louis of Flanders, whom the King of England several times attempted, but in vain, to win over. Philip drew into close relations with himself the Kings of Bohemia and Navarre, the Dukes of Lorraine and Burgundy, the Count of Foix, the Genoese, the Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and many other lords. The two principal neighbors of Flanders, the Count of Hainault and the Duke of Brabant, received the solicitations of both kings at one and the same time. The former had to wife Joan of Valois, sister of the King of France, but he had married his daughter Philippa to the King of England; and when Edward’s envoys came and asked for his support in “the great business which their master had in view.” “If the king can succeed in it,” said the count, “I shall be right glad. It may well be supposed that my heart is with him, him who hath my daughter, rather than with King Philip, though I have married his sister; for he hath filched from me the hand of the young Duke of Brabant, who should have wedded my daughter Isabel, and hath kept him for a daughter of his own. So help will I my dear and beloved son the King of England to the best of my power. But he must get far stronger aid than mine, for Hainault is but a little place in comparison with the kingdom of France, and England is too far off to succor us.” “Dear sir,” said the envoys, “advise us of what lords our master might best seek aid, and in what he might best put his trust.” “By my soul,” said the count, “I could not point to lord so powerful to aid him in this business as would be the Duke of Brabant, who is his cousin-german, the Duke of Gueldres, who hath his sister to wife, and Sire de Fauquemont. They are those who would have most men-at-arms in the least time, and they are right good soldiers; provided that money be given them in proportion, for they are lords and men who are glad of pay.” Edward III. went for powerful allies even beyond the Rhine; he treated with Louis V. of Bavaria, Emperor of Germany; he even had a solemn interview with him at a diet assembled at Coblenz, and Louis named Edward vicar imperial throughout all the empire situated on the left bank of the Rhine, with orders to all the princes of the Low Countries to follow and obey him, for a space of seven years, in the field. But Louis of Bavaria was a tottering emperor, excommunicated by the pope, and with a formidable competitor in Frederick of Austria. When the time for action arrived, King John of Bohemia, a zealous ally of the French king, persuaded the Emperor of Germany that his dignity would be compromised if he were to go and join the army of the English king, in whose pay he would appear to have enlisted; and Louis of Bavaria withdrew from his alliance with Edward III., sending back the subsidies he had received from him.

Which side were the Flemings themselves to take in a conflict of such importance, and already so hot even before it had reached bursting point? It was clearly in Flanders that each king was likely to find his most efficient allies; and so it was there that they made the most strenuous applications. Edward III. hastened to restore between England and the Flemish communes the commercial relations which had been for a while disturbed by the arrest of the traders in both countries. He sent into Flanders, even to Ghent, ambassadors charged to enter into negotiations with the burghers; and one of the most considerable amongst these burghers, Solver of Courtrai, who had but lately supported Count Louis in his quarrels with the people of Bruges, loudly declared that the alliance of the King of England was the first requirement of Flanders, and gave apartments in his own house to one of the English envoys. Edward proposed the establishment in Flanders of a magazine for English wools; and he gave assurance to such Flemish weavers as would settle in England of all the securities they could desire. He even offered to give his daughter Joan in marriage to the son of the Count of Flanders. Philip, on his side, tried hard to reconcile the communes of Flanders to their count, and so make them faithful to himself; he let them off two years’ payment of a rent due to him of forty thousand livres of Paris per annum; he promised them the monopoly of exporting wools from France; he authorized the Brugesmen to widen the moats of their city, and even to repair its ramparts. The King of England’s envoys met in most of the Flemish cities with a favor which was real, but intermingled with prudent reservations, and Count Louis of Flanders remained ever closely allied with the King of France, “for he was right French and loyal,” says Froissart, “and with good reason, for he had the King of France almost alone to thank for restoring him to his country by force.”

Whilst, by both sides, preparations were thus being made on the Continent for war, the question which was to make it burst forth was being decided in England. In the soul of Edward temptation overcame indecision. As early as the month of June, 1336, in a Parliament assembled at Northampton, he had complained of the assistance given by the King of France to the Scots, and he had expressed a “hope that if the French and the Scots were to join, they would at last offer him battle, which the latter had always carefully avoided.” In September of the same year he employed similar language in a Parliament held at Nottingham, and he obtained therefrom subsidies for the war going on not only in Scotland, but also in Aquitaine, against the French king’s lieutenants. In April and May of the following year, 1337, he granted to Robert of Artois, his tempter for three years past, court favors which proved his resolution to have been already taken. On the 21st of August following he formally declared war against the King of France, and addressed to all the sheriffs, archbishops, and bishops of his kingdom a circular in which he attributed the initiative to Philip; on the 26th of August he gave his ally, the Emperor of Germany, notice of what he had just done, whilst, for the first time, insultingly describing Philip as “setting himself up for King of France.” At last, on the 7th of October, 1337, he proclaimed himself King of France, as his lawful inheritance, designating as representatives and supporters of his right the Duke of Brabant, the Marquis of Juliers, the Count of Hainault, and William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton.

The enterprise had no foundation in right, and seemed to have few chances of success. If the succession to the crown of France had not been regulated beforehand by a special and positive law, Philip of Valois had on his side the traditional right of nearly three centuries past and actual possession without any disputes having arisen in France upon the subject. His title had been expressly declared by the peers of the kingdom, sanctioned by the Church, and recognized by Edward himself, who had come to pay him homage. He had the general and free assent of his people: to repeat the words of the chroniclers of the time, “There was no mind in France to be subjects of the King of England.” Philip VI. was regarded in Europe as a greater and more powerful sovereign than Edward III. He had the pope settled in the midst of his kingdom; and he often traversed it with an array of valiant nobility whom he knew how to support and serve on occasion as faithfully as he was served by them. “He was highly prized and honored,” says Froissart, “for the victory he had won (at Cassel) over the Flemings, and also for the handsome service he had done his cousin Count Louis. He did thereby abide in great prosperity and honor, and he greatly increased the royal state; never had there been king in France, it was said, who had kept state like King Philip, and he provided tourneys and jousts and diversions in great abundance.” No national interest, no public ground, was provocative of war between the two peoples; it was a war of personal ambition, like that which in the eleventh century William the Conqueror had carried into England. The memory of that great event was still, in the fourteenth century, so fresh in France, that when the pretensions of Edward were declared, and the struggle was begun, an assemblage of Normans, barons and knights, or, according to others, the Estates of Normandy themselves, came and proposed to Philip to undertake once more, and at their own expense, the conquest of England, if he would put at their head his eldest son, John, their own duke. The king received their deputation at Vincennes, on the 23d of March, 1339, and accepted their offer. They bound themselves to supply for the expedition four thousand men-at-arms and twenty thousand foot, whom they promised to maintain for ten weeks, and even a fortnight beyond, if, when the Duke of Normandy had crossed to England, his council should consider the prolongation necessary. The conditions in detail and the subsequent course of the enterprise thus projected were minutely regulated and settled in a treaty published by Dutillet in 1588, from a copy found at Caen when Edward III. became master of that city in 1346. The events of the war, the long fits of hesitation on the part of both kings, and the repeated alternations from hostilities to truces and truces to hostilities, prevented anything from coming of this proposal, the authenticity of which has been questioned by M. Michelet amongst others, but the genuineness of which has been demonstrated by M. Adolph Despont, member of the appeal-court of Caen, in his learned Histoire du Cotentin.

Edward III., though he had proclaimed himself King of France, did not at the outset of his claim adopt the policy of a man firmly resolved and burning to succeed. From 1337 to 1340 he behaved as if he were at strife with the Count of Flanders rather than with the King of France. He was incessantly to and fro, either by embassy or in person, between England, Flanders, Hainault, Brabant, and even Germany, for the purpose of bringing the princes and people to actively co-operate with him against his rival; and during this diplomatic movement such was the hostility between the King of England and the Count of Flanders that Edward’s ambassadors thought it impossible for them to pass through Flanders in safety, and went to Holland for a ship in which to return to England. Nor were their fears groundless; for the Count of Flanders had caused to be arrested, and was still detaining in prison at the castle of Rupelmonde, the Fleming Sohier of Courtrai, who had received into his house at Ghent one of the English envoys, and had shown himself favorable to their cause. Edward keenly resented these outrages, demanded, but did not obtain, the release of Sohier of Courtrai, and by way of revenge gave orders in November, 1337, to two of his bravest captains, the Earl of Derby and Walter de Manny, to go and attack the fort of Cadsand, situated between the Island of Walcheren and the town of Ecluse (or Sluys), a post of consequence to the Count of Flanders, who had confided the keeping of it to his bastard brother Guy, with five thousand of his most faithful subjects. It was a sanguinary affair. The besieged were surprised, but defended themselves bravely; the landing cost the English dear; the Earl of Derby was wounded and hurled to the ground, but his comrade, Walter de Manny, raised him up with a shout to his men of “Lancaster, for the Earl of Derby;” and at last the English prevailed. The Bastard of Flanders was made prisoner; the town was pillaged and burned; and the English returned to England, and “told their adventure,” says Froissart, “to the king, who was right joyous when he saw them and learned how they had sped.”

Thus began that war which was to be so cruel and so long. The Flemings bore the first brunt of it. It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in amongst them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn towards England, but the count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away from her, and many amongst them were loath to separate themselves entirely from France. Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares and at the cross-roads, said one to another, that they had heard much wisdom, to their mind, from a burgher who was called James Van Artevelde, and who was a brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if he could obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains without standing ill with the King of France or the King of England. These sayings began to get spread abroad, insomuch that a quarter or half the city was informed thereof, especially the small folks of the commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly. They began to assemble in the streets, and it came to pass that one day, after dinner, several went from house to house calling for their comrades, and saying, ‘Come and hear the wise man’s counsel.’ On the 26th of December, 1337, they came to the house of the said James Van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his door.