Nevertheless, this second truce might have had some chance of lasting, if the Duke of Brittany had not chosen that moment to die.
He left no legitimate son nor direct heir. The duchy was claimed both by his youngest brother the Count of Montfort-l’Amaury, and by his nephew Charles of Blois, who was a Valois by marriage. Edward III immediately took the side of Jean de Montfort. The result was that there were two Kings of France, each with his own Duke of Brittany, as each already had his own King of Scotland.
The question of Brittany closely affected Robert, since his mother was sister to the late Duke Jean. Edward III could do no less, nor indeed better, than give Robert the command of the army that was to disembark on the coast of Brittany.
Robert of Artois’ great hour had come.
Robert was now fifty-six. The muscles of his face had grown hard with a lifetime of hate, and the hair that framed it had turned the curious colour of cider mixed with water common to red-headed men when they start going grey. He was no longer the bad lot who thought he was making war when he sacked his Aunt Mahaut’s castles. He knew now what war was. He planned his campaign with great care; and he had all the authority conferred by age and the accumulated experience of a turbulent life. He was held in great respect. Who remembered now that he was a forger, a perjurer, a murderer and something of a sorcerer? Who would have dared remind him of it? He was Monseigneur Robert, a giant beginning to grow old but still possessed of surprising strength and immense self-assurance who, invariably dressed in red, was leading an English army into France. Nor did it matter to him that his soldiers were foreigners. Indeed, this was not the sort of thing to which any count, baron or knight gave a thought. Their campaigns were family matters; their battles quarrels over inheritance; the enemy was a cousin, the ally another. It was to the population who would be massacred, whose houses would be burnt, barns looted and women raped, that the word foreigner meant enemy; not to the princes who were defending their titles and asserting their rights.
For Robert this war between France and England was his war; he had wanted it, preached it, created it, it represented ten years of unceasing effort. It was as if he had been born and had lived only for this. He had once lamented that he had never been able to enjoy the passing moment; now, at last, he could savour it to the full. He breathed the very air as if it had some peculiarly delectable quality. Each moment was a happy one. From the back of his great chestnut, his head bare and his helm hanging from the saddle-bow, he cracked terrifying jokes with his entourage. He had twenty-two thousand knights and soldiers under his command and, when he looked back, he could see his lances, like some death-dealing crop, rippling away to the horizon. The poor Bretons fled before him, some in carts, but most trudging along in their cloth or bark boots. The women dragged their children by the hand, while the men carried a sack of black flour on their shoulders.
Though Robert of Artois was fifty-six, he could still ride stages of fifteen leagues, and he could still dream. Tomorrow he would take Brest; then he would take Vannes, then Rennes; after that, he would enter Normandy and seize Alençon, which belonged to Philippe of Valois’ brother; from Alençon he would go on to Evreux, and then to Conches, his own Conches! He would hasten to Château Gaillard and free Madame de Beaumont. Then he would fall irresistibly on Paris; he would go to the Louvre, to Vincennes, to Saint-Germain, seize Philippe of Valois, remove him from the throne and hand the crown to Edward, who would make him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom of France. His destiny had already known less probable ups and downs, and never before had he had a whole army raising the dust of the roads behind him.
And, indeed, Robert took Brest, where he relieved the Countess de Montfort, a robust and spirited woman who, though her husband was held prisoner by the King of France, had continued to resist with her back to the sea at this extreme end of her duchy. And Robert crossed Brittany in triumph and besieged Vannes; he set up his perriers and catapults, and sited his bombards, whose smoke dissolved among the November clouds, to breach the walls. There was a strong garrison in Vannes but it did not appear to be particularly resolute and was merely awaiting the first assault so as to be able to surrender honourably. A few men on both sides would have to be sacrificed so that the decencies might be preserved.
Robert had his steel helm laced up and mounted his huge war-horse which seemed to sag a little beneath his weight. He shouted his last orders, lowered his visor, and waved his six-pound mace round his head. The heralds held his banner to the breeze and shouted at the tops of their voices: ‘Artois into battle!’
Footmen ran beside the horses, some carrying long ladders between six of them, others parcels of burning tow attached to the ends of rods; and the army thundered forward towards the heap of stones where the rampart had been breached, while Monseigneur of Artois’ steaming surcoat flashed like lightning under the heavy grey clouds.
A crossbow bolt fired from a loophole pierced the silk surcoat, the armour, the leather jerkin, and the linen of his shirt. The shock was no greater than that of a lance in a joust. Robert of Artois pulled out the bolt himself; but a few strides farther on, though he did not understand what was happening to him, why the sky had suddenly turned so black and why his legs were no longer gripping his horse, he fell into the mud.
While his troops were taking Vannes, the giant, whose helm had been removed, was being carried back to the camp on a ladder; his blood was dripping down between the rungs.
Robert had never been wounded before. Throughout his two campaigns in Flanders, his own expedition into Artois, and the war in Aquitaine, Robert had never received so much as a scratch. In fifty tournaments no broken lance had ever touched him, nor had any wild boar when hunting.
Why should this have happened before Vannes, a town that was making no more than a show of resistance, and was only a minor stage in his epic progress? Robert of Artois had heard no sinister prophecies about either Vannes or Brittany. The hand that had released the bolt was that of an unknown man who did not even know whom he was shooting at.
Robert fought for four days, but now it was not against princes and parliaments, against the laws of succession, the customs of counties, or the greed and ambition of royal families; he was fighting his own body. Death had entered into him through a wound whose black lips stood open between the heart that had beaten so ardently and the stomach that had feasted so well; nor was it the death that freezes, but that which burns. The fire was in his veins. In four days death was to burn up the strength of that body which was good for another twenty years of living.
He refused to make a will, shouting that tomorrow he would be on horseback again. He had to be tied down to receive the last sacraments, for he wanted to attack the chaplain whom he believed to be Thierry d’Hirson. He was delirious.
Robert of Artois had always hated the sea; but now a ship was made ready to take him to England. Throughout the night, to the tossing of the waves, he seemed to be pleading in some strange court of justice, addressing the barons of France, calling them ‘my noble lords’, and demanding of Philip the Fair that he should order the seizure of all Philippe of Valois’ possessions, his royal robe, his sceptre and his crown, in conformity with a Papal Bull of Excommunication. His voice, from where he lay in the sterncastle, could be heard in the bows and even by the lookouts at the mastheads.
He grew a little quieter just before dawn and asked that his mattress be placed near the door, so that he might gaze at the last stars. But he never saw the sun rise. Till the moment he died, he still believed he would get well. The last word he uttered was: ‘Never’ And no one could tell whether he was speaking to the kings, to the sea or to God.
Every man born into the world has his own function which, whether trivial or important, is usually unknown to himself, but which, unawares and apparently of his own free will, he is forced by his nature, his relations with his fellow men and the chances of life to fulfil. Robert of Artois had set the Western world on fire: his task was done.
Wh
en King Edward III, in Flanders, heard of his death, his eyelashes became moist, and he wrote a letter to Queen Philippa in which he said:
‘Dearest Heart, Robert of Artois, our cousin, has been called to God; because of the affection in which we held him and for our honour, we have written to our chancellor and our treasurer and have ordered them to have him buried in our city of London. We wish you, dearest Heart, to see that our will is properly carried out. May God keep you. Given under our private seal in the town of Grandchamp, on Saint Catherine’s day, in the sixteenth year of our reign over England, and in the third over France.’
At the beginning of January, 1343, the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, received the heaviest coffin ever to be carried into it.
AT THIS POINT THE AUTHOR, COMPELLED BY HISTORY TO KILL OFF HIS FAVOURITE CHARACTER, WITH WHOM HE HAS LIVED FOR SIX YEARS, IS MOVED TO A SORROW COMPARABLE TO THAT OF KING EDWARD OF ENGLAND; THE PEN, AS THE OLD CHRONICLERS SAY, FALLS FROM HIS HAND, AND HE HAS NO DESIRE TO CONTINUE, AT LEAST FOR THE PRESENT, EXCEPT TO INFORM THE READER OF THE DESTINIES OF SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY.
WE NOW MOVE ON ELEVEN YEARS AND CROSS THE ALPS.
EPILOGUE:
1354–62
1.
The Road to Rome
ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22nd, 1354, in Siena, Giannino Baglioni, an important man of that city, received at the Tolomei Palace, where his family held its bank, a letter from the famous Cola di Rienzi who had seized the Government of Rome and assumed the ancient title of Tribune. The letter, which was dated from the Capitol on the preceding Thursday, ran as follows:
‘My very dear friend, we have sent messengers to seek you out and, if they found you, to pray you to be good enough to come to us in Rome. They have reported that they found you in Siena, but were unable to persuade you to come to see us. Since it was uncertain whether they would be able to find you, we did not write to you; but now that we know where you are, we pray you to come to see us in all haste as soon as you receive this letter, and in the greatest secrecy, about a matter which concerns the Kingdom of France.’
Why did the Tribune, who had grown up in a tavern in the Trastevere, but asserted that he was the illegitimate son of the Emperor Henry VII of Germany – and therefore half-brother to King John of Bohemia – and whom Petrarch celebrated as having restored to Italy her ancient grandeur, wish to converse so urgently and so secretly with Giannino Baglioni? This, indeed, was the question Giannino was pondering as he journeyed towards Rome with his friend the notary Angelo Guidarelli, whom he had asked to accompany him both because a journey seems less long when you are travelling with a friend and also because the notary was a clever man of affairs and knew the banking business.
The sun still beats down warmly over the Sienese countryside in September, and the stubble left by harvest covers the fields with a sort of animal fur. It is one of the most beautiful countrysides in the world: God has drawn the curve of its hills with an exquisite freedom, and has given it a rich and varied vegetation among which the cypresses stand out like lords. Man has worked this earth to advantage and has spread his dwellings over it; but from the most princely villa to the humblest cottage they all have a similar grace and harmony with their ochre walls and curved tiles. The road is never monotonous; it winds and rises, only to descend into another valley between terraced fields and age-old olive groves. Both God and man have shown their genius at Siena.
What was this matter that concerned France and about which the Tribune of Rome wished to talk to the Sienese banker? Why had he approached him twice, sending him this pressing letter in which he addressed him as ‘very dear friend’? No doubt it must be some question of a further loan to the King of Paris, or of ransoms to pay for great lords held prisoner in England. Giannino Baglioni had been unaware that Cola di Rienzi took so much interest in the fate of the French.
If this was so, why had the Tribune not approached the more senior members of the company, Tolomeo Tolomei, for instance, or Andrea, or Giaccomo, who were much more expert in matters of this kind and had gone to Paris in the past to liquidate the affairs of old Uncle Spinello, when the French branches had been closed? Of course, Giannino’s mother had been French, a daughter of the nobility, who figured in his earliest memories as beautiful, young and rather melancholy, living in an old manor lost in a rainswept countryside. And of course, his father, Guccio Baglioni, who had died fourteen years ago, the dear man, during a journey in Campania – and Giannino crossed himself discreetly as he swayed to the motion of his horse – had been mixed up with great and secret affairs between the Courts of Paris, London and Naples, at the period he lived in France; he had known very high personages indeed, even kings and queens, and in days gone by had told Giannino of these matters.
But Giannino did not care to remember France, just because of the mother he had never seen again – he did not even know whether she was alive or dead – and also because of his birth which, though legitimate according to his father, had always been held to be illegitimate by the other members of the family whom he had never met till he was nine years old: grandfather Mino Baglioni, the Tolomei uncles, and innumerable cousins. For a long time Giannino had felt that he was a stranger to them and different from them. He had done all he could to obliterate this difference, to become part of the community he had entered so late, in a country in which he had not been born.
Among the many diverse activities of the Tolomei Company he had specialized in the wool trade; perhaps he had a deep longing for sheep, green fields and mist. Two years after his father’s death he had married an heiress of a good Sienese family, Giovanna Vivoli, by whom he had had three sons, and with whom he had lived very happily for six years; but she had died of the Black Death in 1348. The following year he had married Francesca Agazzano, who had given him two more sons and was now expecting her third child.
He conducted his affairs with integrity, was much respected by his fellow citizens and had been appointed, owing to the consideration in which he was held, Administrator of the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy.
They passed by San Quirico d’Orcia, Radicofani, Acquapendente, the lake of Bolsena and Montefiascone, spent the nights in hostelries with great porticos, and took the road again next morning. Giannino and Guidarelli had now left Tuscany. The farther they journeyed, the more decided Giannino became to tell the Tribune Cola, with all possible courtesy, that he had no wish to be mixed up in transactions with France. The notary Guidarelli wholly approved his resolve; there was really very little to be said for a country in which the Italian companies had been so often despoiled, and whose affairs since the outbreak of war with England had been going far too ill to encourage risking money. How much more agreeable it was to live in a little republic like Siena, where the arts and commerce prospered, rather than in one of these great kingdoms governed by madmen!40
From the Tolomei Palace, Giannino had kept in touch with French affairs during these last years; indeed, there were many debts there which would no doubt never be collected. The French really seemed to be demented, and Valois the worst of all, for he had succeeded first in losing Brittany, then Flanders, then Normandy, then Saintonge, only to be brought to bay like a roe-deer by the English armies encircling Paris. The tournament hero, who wanted to lead the world on a crusade, had refused to accept the challenge by which his enemies offered him battle in the plain of Vaugirard, almost at the doors of his palace; and then, believing the English to be in flight because they were withdrawing northwards – and, after all, why should they have been in flight when they had been everywhere victorious? – Philippe had suddenly hurried off in pursuit, exhausting his troops by forced marches, had caught up with Edward, beyond the Somme and been heavily defeated.
The echoes of Crécy had reached Siena. It was known that the King of France had ordered his infantry straight into the attack after a march of five leagues, without giving them time to rest, and that the French chivalry, irritated by the slowness of the infantry’s
advance, had charged through the ranks of their own footmen, spreading chaos and trampling them beneath their horses’ hooves, only to be shot to pieces by the cross-fire of the English archers.
‘They explained away their defeat by claiming that it was the gunpowder artillery, supplied to the English by Italy, which had sown disorder and panic in their ranks by the noise it made. But it was not the gunpowder artillery, Guidarelli; it was their own stupidity.’
And what splendid feats of arms had been performed that day! For instance, John of Bohemia, now fifty and blind, had insisted on being led into the battle; his war-horse had been attached to those of two of his knights, one on either side; and the blind King had charged into the mêlée, brandishing his mace. Unfortunately it had fallen on the heads of the two unlucky knights who were escorting him. He had been picked up dead, still linked to his battered companions.
And this might well stand for a symbol of the French chivalry who, enclosed in the dark of their helms and despising the people, wantonly destroyed themselves.
On the evening of Crécy, when Philippe VI was wandering about the countryside with an escort of no more than six men, he had knocked on the door of a little manor house and cried: ‘Open, open to the unhappy King of France!’
Nor must it be overlooked that Messer Dante had cursed the whole race of Valois because the first of them, Count Charles, had once sacked Siena and Florence. All the enemies of the divino poeta had come to a bad end.
And after Crécy had come the Black Death, brought by the Genoese. You could never expect anything good from them either! Their ships had brought the foul disease from the Orient; it had gained a hold in Provence, had fallen on Avignon, that vicious and debauched city, and had ravaged it as a punishment for its sins. Merely to have heard Messer Petrarch’s descriptions of the stinking infamy of that latter-day Babylon was to know it was marked out for avenging calamities.41