A HUNDRED YEARS OF WAR
In 1801 George III, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, dropped the English claim to the throne of France. For four hundred and sixty years, since the time of the great King Edward III, all nineteen of German George’s predecessors had born the fleur-de-lys of France on the royal coat of arms along with the lions of England and latterly the lion of Scotland and the Irish harp. The withdrawal of the claim, which had been prosecuted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, was purely pragmatic: France and England had been at war since 1793, and if England opposed the French revoloution and supported a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, then she could not also claim the throne for herself. By the Treaty of Amiens, which ushered in a short breather in the war with France, England recognised the French Republic, and by doing so negated her own claims.
The original claim was seen by Englishmen – and by many occupants of what is now France – as wholly legitimate when it was made. Phillip IV of France, ‘The Fair’, had three sons and one daughter. The daughter, Isabella, married Edward II of England. Phillip died in 1314 and all three of his sons reigned after him: Louis X from 1314 to 1316, Phillip V from 1316 to 1322 and Charles IV from 1322 to 1328. None of the three had any legitimate heirs. Isabella, rather unfairly dubbed ‘the She-Wolf of France’, was initially neglected after her marriage to a weak English king who preferred the company of his catamite to that of his queen. While she eventually lived in open adultery with Roger Mortimer, was the figurehead for a rebellion against her husband which deposed and imprisoned him, and was almost certainly complicit in his murder in 1327[*], she nevertheless managed to attract the king’s attention sufficiently to produce two sons and two daughters.
Royal succession in France (and nearly everywhere else) by the fourteenth century was through inheritance by blood, but French custom (and arguably French law) forbade a female from ascending the throne, and so when Charles IV of France, the last of the Capetian line, died in 1328 leaving only a daughter, the nearest male relative was the fifteen year-old Edward III of England, who was of course the son of Charles IV’s sister and the grandson of Phillip the Fair. The English did not oppose the accepted French custom which prevented a female succession, but argued that it did not apply to a male descended through the female line. The French, unwilling to accept the king of their traditional enemy as their king demurred, and gave their throne to Phillip of Valois, a nephew of Phillip the Fair. And so began the Hundred Years War, which lasted for rather more than a hundred years, and saw Edward III and his successors press their claim to the French throne. It almost succeeded: Henry V of England was eventually recognised as Regent of France and when he died prematurely his infant son, out of Katherine of Valois, was crowned as king of France. It was not to last. A French military revival, political problems in England and parliamentary opposition to the cost of the war led to the withdrawal of English troops from France except for Calais, and a peace treaty in 1453. Had Henry V of England not died young, leaving an infant heir, would Elizabeth II be Queen of France today? Probably not, but there were those in 1801, and there are still those today, who regret the passing of the claim.
There was not, of course, continual warfare for a hundred years – there were frequent truces and the constant shifting of allegiances in an age when the concept of national loyalty had not yet taken hold. Fortunes fluctuated – but there were constant skirmishes, even during periods of so called peace, and certain trends that can be identified. It was a good time to be a career soldier, for if the main war could not provide employment there were the Breton wars of succession, really the Hundred Years War by surrogate, when France supported one claimant to the Duchy of Brittany and the English another, and for those who preferred a more exotic clime there were always the campaigns of John of Gaunt and the Black Prince in Spain. It was not, however, a good time to be a civilian: high taxes to pay for the war, impressment, atrocities and looting by marauding armies and regular visitations by the Plague all combined to make the role of the European peasant a far from happy one.
Militarily the constant theme of the war is that of the professional versus the amateur. In England the feudal system, relying as it did on limited service owed to the king by those who held lands or appointments from him, backed by a half trained and poorly equipped militia, had been recognised as no longer capable of supporting modern war, particularly war abroad, and had been replaced by the enlistment of professional volunteers: well paid, trained and equipped, disciplined, uniformed and led by men who knew their business. In Europe this was not the case, and war was still seen as the prerogative of the nobility backed by a peasant levy and foreign mercenaries. There organisations were loose, tactics a matter of individual preference, and command a basis for discussion. The difference was well illustrated by the three great battles of the war: Crecy and Poitiers in the fourteenth and Agincourt in the fifteenth centuries when professional English armies roundly defeated far larger French formations. While there were great advances in military skills and methods in the years during which hostilities lasted, the one consistent factor was the influence of English archers, who composed up to eighty per cent of English armies. The longbow was the English weapon of mass destruction. It was consistently ignored by England’s enemies who were thus consistently slaughtered by it.
In the end, while the English won most of the battles they had not the manpower to hold the lands conquered, and with the defeat of John Talbot’s English army at Castillon, just east of Bordeaux, by the new concept of massed artillery in 1453, the war came to an end. Over a century of war had turned Anglo-Normans into Englishmen, and the denizens of Artois, Normandy, Burgundy, Blois, Toulouse and the rest into Frenchmen. The effects of that war are still with us: during his time as President of France General Charles de Gaulle had a standing instruction with his staff that on no journey around France was he ever to be taken within thirty kilometres of Agincourt.
P.S. For an account of the war you may wish to read A Great and Glorious Adventure, a military history of the Hundred Years War, published by Atlantic Books and now available in paperback and on Kindle.
[*] The tale that he was killed by having a red hot poker shoved up his bottom persists, but is not mentioned until many years after his death. It was probably invented as a warning against homosexuality, not then a civil crime but a heresy. While it was important not to have obvious wounds on a royal body – which would have to be displayed – the likelihood is that Edward II was smothered, a far easier and much less noisy method of disposal.