XL. They were summoned to Paris, few members, in the CHAP. anarchic state of the country, being able to proceed thither. The conditions of peace were, however, announced to the Parisians; and the people, as well as the nobles around the regent, protested with indignation against the enormity of the sacrifice. The cession of Normandy would have brought the English once more to Mantes and to Andelys, so that those temporary ravages of war, which the mercenary bands now inflicted on the country up to the gates of Paris, would have been rendered permanent. With one voice, therefore, court and capital rejected the concessions that King John had made, and plainly declared that it was better the monarch should remain a captive than the monarchy be so cruelly dismembered. Edward, who thought he had demanded but fair terms, was very wroth at this rejection; and he at length prepared, what it would have been far more profitable to have done immediately after the battle of Poitiers, he raised an army wherewith to overrun France, and defeat whatever armies its regent might bring against him. Edward and his expedition did not, however, reach Calais till the end of October, by which time the knights and soldiers of the Low Countries, who had flocked thither to join him, were exhausted in patience and in pocket. The English king marched to Rheims, the west of France being too completely devastated to furnish provisions for an army. The season was too advanced for a siege, and the rain fell in torrents, so that Edward kept his army in the convents around Rheims; nor did he leave it until the following January, when he entered Burgundy, and approached Chalons. The Burgundians and the duke saw no mode of escaping the devastation of the English army but by entering into an agreement with its chief. It had, indeed, become the habit for the people of the French provinces to escape the rapine and violence of the mercenary cap XI. CHAP. tains by paying them periodical sums. The Duke of Burgundy treated with the English on this footing, and stipulated to pay Edward at Calais, at several epochs, the sum of 200,000 deniers of gold or moutons, as the coins were called. The county of Nevers entered into a similar engagement. After his bloodless campaign, in which only one person perished*, Edward marched by the course of the Yonne to Paris. He encamped on the hills between Bourg La Reine, and Chatillon, within view of the capital, to the gates of which he more than once marched, with his army in three divisions, prepared for battle. None but skirmishers came from out of the gates; and the regent paid no attention to a challenge that Edward sent him. He burned the suburbs on the south side of the Seine, those of St. Germain des Près, Notre Dame des Champs, and San Marcel, lest the English should lodge within them. Edward, not prepared to undertake the siege of Paris, although he threatened it for the following season, retired upon Montlhery, burning it, Lonjumeau, and all the villages around. It was a melancholy Easter for the Parisians. "The intention of King Edward," says Froissart, was to enter the rich vale of the Beauce, and proceed through it to the Loire, and thence to Brittany, whence, being refreshed and reinforced, he might return, about the time of vintage, to lay siege to Paris." The regent, his uncle, and brother, adds the same authority, "saw that this could not last long, for neither church nor landed proprietor could obtain any rent." The French therefore sent envoys after Edward, whom they found at a village called Bretigny, in the vicinity of Chartres. The English king was bent on obtaining those terms to which John had consented, and which had been rejected * Et notandum quod in toto illo viaggio non periit quisquam nostrum præter quod dominus Thomas de Morrens percussus est medio de una gunna.-Knighton. in Paris, and this obstinacy gave few hopes of an accommodation. The Duke of Lancaster is then said to have represented to him the great cost of the war, in which, however the soldiers gained, monarchs lost. Edward, he said, might expend a life in compassing what he desired. The Duke of Lancaster recommended Edward to accept the terms which the French offered; for, after all, concluded the gallant counsellor, "we may lose in a day what we have been twenty years in conquering." No words could depict better than these of the Duke of Lancaster, in Froissart, the relative positions of the two powers or crowns upon the continent, where the French king, having all the opportunities of aggression at hand, whilst the means of defence for the English must come across the sea, was always able to retrieve disaster. Edward was induced to redemand Normandy, as the ancient possession of his house, and as within a few hours' sail of English succour; but Normandy and the Seine in English hands rendered Paris untenable, and the French monarchy a nullity. What the English king aimed at was indeed an impossibility. It was to crush and partition that kingdom of France which had started up of itself by a kind of natural growth, and to which, at that time, all the French were bound, as the link of their nationality, the centre of their tongue, their pride, and their existence. Had Edward more of the advanced knowledge of after times, he would have confined his demands to the south, added Languedoc to Guienne, and, by giving Aquitaine to one of the princes of his house, formed there, perhaps, a monarchy which might have vied with that of the north. Edward still insisted on having Normandy, when, in the midst of the negotiations, says Froissart, there arose a storm, with thunder and lightning so dreadful, and with a shower of stones so portentous, that the boldest were frightened. Edward, in the midst of it, stretched CHAP. XI. CHAP. out his arms to Our Lady of Chartres, the steeple of The first treaty concluded between the Kings of France and England as feudal equals, was thus signed at Bretigny on the 8th of May, 1360. Edward waived his claim upon Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine. But Poitou, Angoulême, Xaintonge, Cahors, Agen, Périgord, the Rouergue, and the Limousin, with all south of those provinces to the Pyrenees, including Tarbes, were ceded in full sovereignty to the English king. The county of Ponthieu, Montreuil, Guise, and Calais, were ceded in the north. The ransom of the king was fixed at 3,000,000 of golden crowns, or 6,000,000 of English nobles. On the payment of 600,000 crowns, the French king, who was previously to be brought to Calais, should be set at liberty; and the remaining payments should be made of 40,000 crowns at a time. Hostages were to be furnished until the term of total payment. Of all the ceded provinces the barons and lords were to do direct homage to the King of England, who was to be sole sovereign as in his own domain, recognising no superiority, homage, resort, or subjection whatever. The King of England, at the same time, waiving all right to the throne of France, was to claim no homage of the Counts of Flanders or of Brittany. John of Montfort was to be restored to his county of Montfort; and the rival claims of the count and of Charles of Blois were to be decided by the two kings,— each holding what he held until the time of such decision. Philip of Navarre and the heir of Godfrey of Harcourt were to be restored to their possessions, and all exiles were to return without being molested. The King of France was to lend no aid to the Scotch, and the King of England made a similar stipulation with regard to the Flemings. The difficulty with the French for the consummation of this treaty was the payment of the first instalment of 600,000 crowns. It was got over by Galeas Visconti, Duke of Milan, who paid the money as the price of a marriage between his son and Isabella, daughter of King John. It was the necessities of the peace of Bretigny that first drove the French royal family into connection with the Dukes of Milan, -a connection which drew after it many consequences. The first and principal conditions of the treaty being thus accomplished in October, King John departed from Calais, and journeyed on foot to return thanks to Our Lady of Boulogne for his deliverance. The treaty of Bretigny is considered by French historians as the degradation of their crown. Yet as an award between Plantagenet and Capet, it was no more than fair. John was merely compelled to disgorge a certain portion of what Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair had more stolen than conquered; and at the same time to abandon a feudal superiority, which had also been filched and magnified by trickery and chicane. Such, no doubt, were the views of Edward. But the French, even of that time, began to entertain far higher and juster ideas of national right than those which were attached to the mere patrimony of monarchs. From the Garonne, and even from the Mediterranean, to the Meuse, a race had sprung up, with a common language, identical interests, and a kindred feeling of patriotism, then best expressed by allegiance to the reigning crown. It was painful and humiliating to the Poitevin and the Picard to be torn from the great family to which he appertained, and made over to a distant monarch of another race: the province, instead of remaining the peaceful portion of a large and well defined kingdom, being transformed into a frontier, eternally exposed to the CHAP. XI. |