There are two sides in the history
of an alliance as in that of a war. Of the history of the ancient League,
however, the first chapter belongs almost entirely to France. Some
Scotsmen went thither and influenced the political condition of the
country long before France impressed the policy of Scotland. It will clear
the way for what follows, to take a glance at the social condition of the
land to which the Scots refugees flocked, after their country had
established itself in hostile independence of the Plantagenet kings. In
later times people have been accustomed to seek the politics of France in
Paris, giving little heed to the provinces; but at the accession of the
house of Valois, the contrast between the eminence of the one and the
insignificance of the other was still greater.
Paris was at that time, indeed, as much beyond any
other European capital in extent, in noble buildings, and in luxurious
living, as it is now beyond the secondary towns of France. The
fruitfulness of the reigning family provided it with a little mob of
native royalties, who made it so attractive that not only did all the
great feudatories of the crown flock thither, but even independent
monarchs preferred playing the courtier there to reigning in their own
dingy capitals. One finds the kings of Navarre, of Sicily, and of Bohemia
perpetually in the way, and turning up upon the surface of history when
anything notable occurs in the French Court; they could not tear
themselves from the attractions of the place.
The populousness and luxurious
living of Paris are attested in a not pleasant or dignified fashion by the
large number of butchers necessary to supply the city. They formed, when
combined, a sort of small army; large enough, however, to be estimated by
the thousand. They were often used as a powerful but a dangerous political
engine. By bullying bravado and violence they held a sort of corporate
power when almost everything else of the kind had been annihilated. This
power they used according to their nature. It was they who did the
professional part of the business when the prisons were broken open by the
Burgundiall party, and the throats of the prisoners cut, making a scene in
the year 1418 which was exactly repeated in the year 1792.
The allusion to these brutes brings
one naturally from the concentration of luxury, wealth, and rank in Paris,
to the horrible abyss by which it was all surrounded. It is difficult to
conceive the wretchedness and degradation of France at that time—still
more difficult, when it is fully realised, to understand by what steps the
great nation of Henry IV. and
Louis XIV.—the still greater nation of later times—arose to such a height
of lustre and triumph. Whatever other elements were at work in the long
eventful regeneration, it may surely be permitted to our national pride to
count that the infusion of Scottish blood into the veins, as it were, of
the country, must have had some share in the change.
There was at that time
throughout the land neither sturdy independence nor affectionate, trusting
dependence. Everything was thoroughly wrong. The great showed their
superiority only in acts of injustice, insult, and cruelty; the poor were
servile and abject in subjection, and brutal, treacherous, and ungrateful
when the iron rule was for a moment evaded. A sort of mortifying process
was killing all the elements of independent constitutional action one by
one, and approaching the heart. The jurisdictions and privileges which the
municipalities had inherited from the Roman Empire were crushed out.
The lower feudatories were
absorbed one by one, and the higher followed. By a curious fatality it
fell to the family of Valois to unite the characteristic defects of a
centralised despotism with those of an oligarchy. The great provinces came
gradually one by one into the hands of the King; but instead of being
united to the crown so as to make a compact and symmetrical empire, they
were given to the princes of the blood and their descendants.
Hence arose a class of nobles or
territorial aristocracy, who formed a separate caste, looking down upon
and bearing enmity to all owners of territory who were not of the
blood-royal. Such were the lords of Burgundy, Orleans, Anjou, Bourbon,
Bern, La Marche, and a crowd of others. The tendency of things was towards
not only a divine right in the crown to govern, but a divine right in the
blood-royal to possess all things. The law was gradually withdrawing its
protection from those who were not either themselves of the royal stock,
or protected in a sort of clientage by one of the princes of the blood.
Men in the highest places who did not belong to the sacred race might be
pitched from their chairs of state to the dungeon or the scaffold, with
that reckless celerity which characterises the loss of influence in
Eastern despotisms.
One of the few men in that
disastrous period who was enabled to afford to France some of the services
of a real statesman was the Sieur de Montagu. He had been raised to
influence under Charles V., and became comptroller of Finances under his
mad successor, Charles VI. He was a little, smooth-spoken, inoffensive
man, who had the art of making friends; and few positions would have
appeared in any tolerably well-governed state more firm and unassailable
than his. He had two brothers invested with rich bishoprics, one of them
also holding civil office, and rising to be Chancellor of France; while
his daughters were married into the first families among the nobles of
France below the rank of royalty.
Of course he had not neglected the
opportunity which a supervisance of the wretched and ruined finances of
the nation afforded him for enlarging and consolidating his own fortunes.
He had enormous wealth to fall back upon should he ever be driven from
office. In too fatal a reliance on the security of his position, he made
an imprudent display of his worldly goods, on the occasion of the
advancement of one of his brothers from the shabbyish bishopric of
Poitiers to the brilliant see of Paris. Montagu resolved to give an
entertainment, and to do the thing in style. The company who were invited
and who attended proved at once his greatness and his popularity. The list
of distinguished guests would dazzle the eyes of the most fashionable
penny-a-liner of the ‘Morning Post.’ It included the King and Queen of
France, the King of Navarre, and the royal dukes in a bundle. They were
feasted from a service of gold and silver such as, it was significantly
remarked, none of their own palaces could produce.
The magnificence of an entertainment
is not always so exceedingly satisfactory to the entertained as the
confiding landlord expects it to be. On this occasion one of the
guests—John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy—took offence at the profuse
magnificence which surrounded him, and argued himself into the conclusion
that it would more aptly become his own palace than the hotel of the
parvenu.
A few days afterwards, when Montagu
was decorously walking to morning mass with one of his bishop brothers,
Pierre des Essarts the Prevôt of Paris crossed his path and laid a hand on
his shoulder. The great statesman, highly indignant at such a familiarity,
cried out, "Ribaud, es-tu si hardi que de me toucher?" but Essarts had a
warrant, and in fact the affair was serious. Montagu was arrested and
thrown into a dungeon in the Petit Chatelet. The next step was to get up a
feasible accusation against him. Doubtless his methods of amassing money,
like those of every other statesman of the day, would not stand a very
severe scrutiny; but proceedings in this direction would be slow, petty,
and inconclusive; and as any chance might turn the tables in the victim’s
favour, it was necessary to get up something more astounding, odious, and
conclusive. He was therefore charged with sorcery and magic; and, to bring
the accusation to a definite and practical conclusion, it was alleged that
by these illegal arts he had produced the King’s insanity. He was put to
the torture, and, after giving his tormentors hard work, he confessed
whatever they pleased. The instruments being removed, he retracted, and
appealed to his dislocated wrists and wrenches of the body, ending in
hernia, as the real causes of his confession. But he was in hands where
his wealth, not the punishment of a guilty man, was wanted.
The affair had to be got over before
the King should have a lucid interval; so the tortured mangled body was
relieved of its miseries by the headsman’s axe. The King, when the lucid
interval came, was indignant at the usage his faithful servant had
received: but there was no remedy. John the Fearless was not the man to
loose his grip on what he had touched, and, unless the head could also
have been restored to its old owner, how was restoration to be made of the
estates?
It is one of the most significant
marks of a Providence overruling the affairs of man, that such acts are
calculated, in some shape or other, to retaliate on their doers. When the
princes of the blood established practices of cruelty and perfidy, they
were unable absolutely to exempt themselves, and establish as an unfailing
rule that the consequent calamities should be restricted entirely to
inferior persons. The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orleans, the King’s nearest
relations, were rivals for that supreme power which somebody or other must
wield in the name of the madman. The former took a short way of settling
the question. Orleans was murdered in the streets of Paris by the
direction of Burgundy. The clergy and the savans of the day were called
upon to applaud the deed as a wholesome act of tyrannicide. The
opportunity was a good one for propitiating clerical influences. It was
the time when rival popes were bidding for support, and stretching points
with each other; so, what the one scrupled at, the other was delighted to
oblige with. The sinuosities of the discussion on the slaughter of
Orleans, influenced as they were by the duplex action of the Popedom and
the oscillations of the two contending civil parties, would make an
amusing history of ups and downs. To-day a consistory applauds the act as
a service to God and the King— next a synod brings the consistory to task
for maintaining a doctrine so revolting; and, anon, a higher authority
justifies the consistory and rebukes the synod.
This affair caused great uneasiness
throughout the whole privileged class of royal scions. Attacking and
killing one of their own number in the open street was treating him no
better than a common seigneur, or even a roturier. The Duke of Burgundy
should not have acted so by one of themselves. It was an ungentlemanly
thing. Upon the other hand, were he to be subjected to legal
responsibility for what he had done, this would involve the admission that
the royal class could be liable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary
tribunals—an alternative too horrible and preposterous to be indulged in
for a moment. Altogether the question was indeed in a fix.
The end illustrated the spirit
expressed in the Psalms, "Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half
their days." The death of their leader did not immediately ruin the
Orleanists, who continued the struggle under his relation the Count of
Armagnac. Year after year went on the ceaseless contest, each up and down
alternately, while their wild struggle crushed and ruined every
surrounding object they came in contact with. Nor when Henry V. was
thundering at the gate could they hear the warning voice of conquest over
the horrid din of their own quarrels, or relax their hold of each other to
turn an arm against the invader.
To be sure, they met and tried to
come to an understanding. One meeting was held on an island in a small
lake with a barrier across it, so that but few could be assembled on
either side, and these few could not touch each other. The results of this
meeting were not very satisfactory, but the next was more conclusive. It
was held on the long bridge of Montereau, where the Yonne meets the Seine.
A complex barrier was erected to obviate treachery. The Orleanists,
however, had the last handling of it, and the Duke of Burgundy, with the
small body of attendants admitted on the bridge, found themselves somehow
face to face with the Orleanists, while a bar clicked behind them and cut
off their communication. John the Fearless made the best of things,
clapped his greatest enemy, Tanguy du Chatel, on the shoulder, and called
him a good guarantee for his safety. As he knelt to the young Dauphin, the
hilt of his sword incommoded him, and he touched it to move it aside.
Those who surrounded him, waiting the first good opportunity for their
work, pretended that they believed he was drawing his sword, and
immediately hacked him to pieces. Comines drew from this incident the
moral that rival kings and great heads of parties should not attempt to
hold personal interviews. The temptation on such occasions to settle all
old scores by a single coup, he counted too great for ordinary flesh and
blood.
While such was the nature of things
at the top of the social tree, to convey an impression of the wretchedness
and degradation at its other extremity is beyond the power of general
terms. The details themselves make the reader at last callous with their
weary monotony of torture, starvation, and slaughter. The stories told to
inflame the sans-culottes of the Revolution—how that a feudal lord
coming home from the chase would rip up the ventres of a couple of
serfs, and warm his feet in their reeking vitals—such things were no
exaggeration of the reality, and, indeed, no imagination could exaggerate
it. From the frequency with which whole districts are rendered
pestilential by the thousands of dead, starved, or slaughtered, one
wonders how the land kept up its population, and how the scanty remnant of
inhabitants had heart to renew the race, and bring into the world fresh
victims of such honors. ‘When Henry V. came over to make his conquest, his
captains excited curiosity at first, until they knew better the habits of
the country, by abstaining from an established practice both of Orleanists
and Burgundians, which required that when any peasant had been caught, and
compelled to act as guide, to bury the dead, or perform any enforced
services, he should, when no longer of use, be stripped of any clothing
worth removing, and then be hung up by the heels before a fire, where,
whether with the refinement of basting or not, he was roasted until he
gave the clue to any hoard of silver pieces he might have saved, or until
he died, if he could or would give no such clue.
The English victories in the hundred
years’ war, which seem so astounding, are but natural results to those who
are in the habit of contemplating, through contemporary documents, the
abjectness of the French peasantry or villainage of the period. The great
masses brought into the field were so far from being trained to war,
either as soldiers of the crown or followers of their seigneurs, that they
were denied the use of arms, unless when marshalled in an army. The
English bow and bill men were, on the other hand, sturdy knaves, well fed,
free within certain limits, and expert at handling their weapons. In fact,
between them and their Norman masters, after the lapse of centuries, a
sort of surly compact had been formed as between those who knew each other
to be sterling stuff, for they were kindred in character, and had both
sprung from the same hardy Scandinavian stock. The English bow and bill
men were nearly as good as mailed men-at-arms; and one of these fully
equipped and mounted was among a crowd of serfs like a ship of war in a
fleet of fishing boats—he could go about unharmed, slaughtering all he
could come at, until he became tired. So little of common cause was there
between them, that the French men-at-arms on some provocation would set to
slaughtering among their starving crowd of followers, or would let the
enemy do so without taking umbrage. The Captal of Buch gained great honour
by a bloody attack on a large body of the Jacques, who were doing no
creditable work, certainly, yet it was on his own side. In their great
battles with the English invaders, the French men-at-arms were nearly as
much occupied in chastising their own serfs as in fighting with the enemy;
and at Agincourt the leaders would not condescend to act at the head of
their men, but formed themselves into a separate battel, apart from the
great mass, who became consequently a chaotic crowd, not only useless but
detrimental. According to a very offensive practice of those chivalrous
times, the chances of safety to a vanquished foe depended on what he was
likely to fetch in ransom; in some instances a rich or royal captive was
in danger from a contest among his captors for the monopoly of his capture
and the corresponding ransom-money. Alas for the poor French serf! there
was little chance of making anything of him; nor in the distracted
state of the country, was he worth preserving as a slave. He was put to
the most valuable use when his carcass manured the ground on which he
fell.
So much for the social condition of
the French people during the early part of the hundred years’ war with the
English kings. To the political condition of France as a nation, and one
of the European community, perhaps the best key may be found in the remark
of Sismondi, that the contest was not in its origin a national one between
France and England. It was a question of disputed succession, in which the
competitors for the crown were the only persons ostensibly interested. The
nobles took their side according to their calculations, founded on
interest or connection, as the smaller European princes have done in the
great wars of later times. As to the serfage, if they thought at all, the
tendency of their thoughts would probably be that they could not be more
miserable than they were, whoever was their king; and we may be pretty
sure that they did not attempt to solve the question about the prevalence
of the old Salic code within the soil of France. In fact, the invaders,
accustomed to treat their neighbours at home as fellow-beings, were, as we
have seen, kinder to the poor peasantry than their armed countrymen. But a
conquering class or race will ever become insolent and exasperating;
and, after a
time, the oppression and insolence of the invaders sent the healthy blood
of patriotism to the heart of the people, where it aroused that cohesive
natural energy which swept the enemy from the land, and made France the
great empire it became.
With the Scots, on the other hand,
the war, though waged on French soil, was national from the beginning. It
was thus the fortune of their allies to secure a body of men-at-arms who
were not only brave men and thoroughly-trained soldiers, but who brought
with them still higher qualities in that steadfast faith which had been
hardened on the anvil of a war for national freedom. Nominally entering
the French service as mercenary troops, there never were soldiers less
amenable to the reproachful application of that term. Of all the various
elements which a French army then contained—among the
Italian and German
hirelings—among native men-at-arms who had been fighting but the other day
against their existing leader and cause, and might in a few days do so
again—among the wretched serfage who were driven into the field and did
not even know what side they were on—among all these, the Scots alone had
a cause at heart. France was the field on which they could meet and strike
the Norman invaders who had dealt so much oppression on their paternal
soil, and had run up so long an account of injuries and cruelties ere they
were driven forth. The feeling, no doubt, was an unamiable one, according
to modern ethics. It came to nothing that can be expressed in gentler
language than the Scot’s undying hatred of his neighbour to the south of
the Tweed. The many terrible incidents in the long war of Scottish
independence testify the sincerity of this hatred. But as motives went in
those days, it was among the most sterling and honest going, and served to
provide the French kings with a body of men hardy and resolute, steady and
true; and possessing so specially these qualities, that even Louis
XI.—perhaps of all monarchs whose character is well known to the world the
most unconfiding and most sceptical of anything like simple faith and
honesty— was content, amid all his shifting slippery policy and his
suspicions and precautions, to rely implicitly on the faith of his Scots
Guard.
The English army had been twelve
years in occupation. Agincourt had been fought, the infant heir of the
house of Lancaster had been proclaimed at Paris with the quiet decorum
that attends the doings of a strong government, when Scotland resolved to
act. In 1424, John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, arrived in France with a small
army of his fellow-countrymen. Accounts of the numbers under his command
vary from 5000 to 7000. This seems but a small affair in the history of
invasions, but, looking at the conditions under which it was accomplished,
it will turn out to be a rather marvellous achievement. It is only
necessary to look at the map of Europe to see that from whichever side of
our island the Scots attempted to approach France, they must pass through
the narrow seas in which England even then professed to have a naval
superiority. A steamer now plies from Leith to Dunkirk for the benefit of
those who prefer economy and a sea voyage to a railway journey; but from
the union of the crowns down to the establishment of that vessel a year or
two ago, the idea of going from Scotland to France otherwise than through
England would have been scouted. The method of transferring troops, too,
in that period, was by galleys, rowed by galley-slaves, little better than
mere rafts for sea-going purposes, and ever requiring in foul weather to
hug the shore. Scotland could not have afforded vessels to transport this
force; it was taken in hand by France, Castile and Aragon offering, as we
are told, to assist with forty vessels.
Henry V. of England, then ruling in
France, naturally felt the seriousness of an infusion of such fresh blood
into the distracted and ruined country; and he instructed his brother, the
Duke of Bedford, acting as viceroy, to put on the screw at all the English
seaports, and do whatever the old traditional prerogatives of the crown,
in purveying vessels and seamen, was capable of doing, in order that a
force might be raised to intercept the Scots expedition. Bedford lost the
opportunity, however. The Scots troops debarked at La Rochelle, and,
passing towards the valley of the Loire, encamped at Chatillon.
These rough northern foreigners were
not received by the natives without invidious criticism. Two or three
instances occur in which the simple parsimony of the commissariat of the
Scots camp has astonished the people of more luxurious countries. But it
became a second nature with the wandering man-at-arms to bear enforced
starvation at one time, and compensate it by superfluous indulgence at
another. The Scots probably took their opportunity in a country which,
desolated though it was by warfare, was a Garden of Eden after their own
desolate bogs, and they earned for themselves the designation of sacs à
vin et mangeurs de moutons.
But an opportunity occurred for
wiping off such a reproach. The Scots and some French, all under the
command of Buchan, approached the old town of Baugé, in Anjou, on one side
of the stream of the Cauanon, while Clarence and the great English host
were encamped on the other. The Scots, just in time to save themselves,
discovered their danger. The English were crossing the river by a narrow
bridge when Buchan came up and fought the portion of the army which had
crossed over. As M. Michel remarks, it was the same tactic that enabled
Wallace to defeat Surrey and Cressingham at Stirling—it might also be
described as a seizing of the opportunity that was afterwards so signally
missed at Flodden. Then took place one of those hand-to-hand conflicts, in
which the highest-spirited and best-mounted knights of the age encountered
in a mingled turmoil of general battle and single combat. The great host
meanwhile struggled over, and was attacked in detail. It was a victory
attended, from its peculiar conditions, with more than the avenge
slaughter of the conquered. In the words of Monstrelet, "The Duke of
Clarence, the Earl of Kyme (I), the Lord Boos, Marshal of England, and, in
general, the flower of the chivalry and esquiredom, were left dead on the
field, with two or three thousand fighting men."
Henry V. was naturally provoked by a
defeat that so strongly resembled those he had been accustomed to inflict;
and his anger, sharpened by grief for the death of his brother, tempted
him into one of those unworthy acts which great conquerors sometimes
commit when thwarted by defeat. He had then in his possession the young
King of the Scots, James I. With his consent, or in his name, an
instruction was issued to the Scots army no longer to fight in the cause
of France against England. Buchan protested that the orders of a monarch
not at freedom were of no avail. Henry then thought fit to treat the Scots
as rebels, not entitled to the courtesies of war. To make the case more
clear, he took his captive to France. James was in the English camp when
Melun was taken, and therefore Henry hanged twenty Scotsmen found among
the garrison. On the surrendering of Meaux, too, there were especially
excluded from the conditions of the capitulation all the Welsh, Irish, and
Scotch—as if all these were alike rebels.
It is generally said that Buchan got
the baton of High Constable of France as a reward for the victory of Baugé,
though Monstrelet speaks of him as Constable when he fought it. At all
events, he held this high office—an office so very high that his poor
countrymen at home cannot have easily seen to the top of it. We are told
that, in court precedence, it ranked next after the blood-royal; that an
insult to the holder of it, being equivalent to one on royalty itself was
similarly punished; and that he was the highest military authority in the
kingdom, having at his disposal all its warlike resources—the
commander-in-chief, in short. Moreri, who tells us this, also, to be sure,
tells us that when a king of England dies, the lord mayor of London acts
as interim king until another is fairly settled on the throne; but it is
to be presumed that Moreri had a better knowledge of the practices on the
banks of the Seine than of those on the banks of the Thames. In this
country we are familiar with the title chiefly through the great names
coupled with it—the Constable de Luxemburg, the Constable Montmorenci, Du
Guesclin, and the terrible Bourbon. Among such names, to stumble on the
Constable Buchan sounds quite homely, as we say in Scotland. The
constabulary was considered too formidable an office to be always full,
and seems to have been reserved for emergencies, like the Roman
dictatorship; and that hour of emergency and of destitution of native
spirit must have been dark indeed, when its highest dignity, and also the
custody of the honour of the nation, were together conferred upon a
stranger. The dignity was balanced by princely domains and castles
stretching over the territory between Avranches and Chartres. These the
new - comer seems to have almost taken into his own hand, for the French
authorities speak of his putting himself in possession of the castle at
Chartres after the battle of Baugé.
After that battle Buchan was joined
by his father-in-law, Archibald Earl of Douglas, who brought with him a
reinforcement of four or five thousand Scots. Douglas, among other honours
and substantial rewards, was invested with the great dukedom of Touraine.
There was almost a rivalry in the royal munificence to the two leaders,
and their followers were not forgotten, as we shall afterwards see; but
they left on bloody battle-fields a record that their honours and
emoluments were well paid for, and but briefly enjoyed. Though Baugé had
taught the wholesome doctrine to the French that their enemies were not
unconquerable, and had put the house of Valois in sufficient heart to
renew the struggle, it was yet uphill work. In the battle of Crevant in
1424 the Scots were the chief sufferers. In one brief sentence Monstrelet
testifies to their devotedness, and narrates their fate: "The English and
Burgundians won the day and the field; the greater part of the Scots,
amounting to three thousand, who were in the front ranks, were either
killed or taken."
The remnant of the Scots
auxiliaries, though thus thinned and weakened, bore the chief weight of
the bloody battle of Verneuil a year afterwards. This is one of the many
battles in which defeat has been attributed to misunderstandings and
mistakes among allies, for there were there men of three nations on one
side—French, Lombards, and Scots. Wherever the blame lay, the penalty was
paid by the Scots, of whom all but a few lay dead where they fought. It
has been said that their fate was of their own seeking, for on meeting
face to face with their mortal enemies of England, they sent Bedford a
message that they would neither spare nor be spared—neither give nor take
quarter. Buchan, the High Constable, and Douglas, the Duke of Touraine,
were found among the dead. They had not given their lives an utterly vain
sacrifice to the cause of their adoption. Though Verneuil is counted among
the English victories, it had no resemblance to the sweeping triumphs of
Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. It was so tough an affair, and was so near
to the defeat of Bedford and Salisbury, that they became really alarmed
about the stability of the supremacy of the house of Lancaster in France. |