France chose Philip from the House of Valois as king when Capetian King Charles VI died without male issue on1 February 1328, effectively snubbing a closer male relative, Edward III of England. Edward retaliated.
1337 – The Beginning
The Battle of Cadzand (9 November 1337) was the first skirmish in the Anglo-French Hundred Years War (1337-1453). An English force of approximately 3500 decimated the Flemish garrison of several thousand men and laid waste to the Flemish island of Cadzand. The triumph gave Edward III his first victory in his battle for the French crown.
At the time, Cadzand was part of Flanders, a semi-autonomous French region. The victory boosted English morale and outraged French King Philip VI. The English rout intimidated the Flemish border regions.
Edward’s act of aggression in pursuit of the crown, he thought his rightfully, shaped Anglo-French relations for generations to come.
1453 – The End
The French victory at the 1453 Battle of Castillion, the first engagement settled by field artillery, ended 113 years of death and destruction. At the time, England and France did not negotiate a formal truce or peace treaty. The Plantagenets did not win. England’s Henry VI regime ceased pursuing the French crown.
After Henry VI’s death and Edward IV’s ascension to the throne, in 1475, Edward and Louis XI of France negotiated a treaty at Picquigny, a community near Amiens, France.
Edward allied with the Duke of Burgundy to invade France once again. The effort did not go as planned, and Louis coaxed Edward to the negotiation table. The kings agreed to a seven-year truce, free trade between countries, and mutual support if either faced a rebellion.
Louis paid Edward a sum of money to retire to England and gave him a yearly pension. He also paid the ransom for Margaret of Anjou, deceased King Henry VI’s Queen consort held by Edward IV.
Determined pursuit of the French crown died with the dissolution of the House of Plantagenet.
The Back Story
Much changed in England and on the continent in over a century of intense fighting, the catastrophic devastation of the bubonic plague, and intermittent periods of relative détente, which brings us to a question: What was the point of 113 years of death, destruction, and political upheaval?
What was Edward’s mindset, and what did he hope to achieve by going to war?
One way to come to grips with the issue is to consider what had not yet come to pass in European history.
When fourteen-year-old Edward of Windsor received his crown as Edward III, the European Age of Enlightenment (1685-1815) was four centuries in the future. The intellectual movement, also recognized as the Age of Reason, introduced ideas about politics, religion, and science unavailable in Edward’s time and to England’s and France’s political leaders during the unrestrained Hundred Years War.
The Enlightenment notion rational change can improve the human condition did not pervade the culture in France or England. Questioning traditional royal authority was a dangerous and deadly game. Individual rights of the governed were yet to be a consideration for any political leader.
Edward’s mindset was akin to the thinking of one of his antecedents, Richard I (1157-1199). Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard the Lionheart) was a military leader and warrior.
During Richard’s captivity in 1193, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI demanded Richard show deference to his captor as head of the Holy Roman Empire. Richard refused. “I am born of a rank which recognizes no superior but God, to whom alone I am responsible.”
At the 1198 Battle of Gisors (Courcelles), Richard took the motto still used by the British monarchy, Dieu et mon Droit, meaning God and my Right.
When Edward of Windsor ascended to his throne, he ruled as a warrior king who stepped into a history of lethal conflict between the Angevin/Plantagenet and French monarchies.
Edward did not hold himself accountable to the people. He catered to the aristocracy when politically necessary and when he needed to raise taxes for his war efforts.
The son of King Edward II, he ruled according to his conscience and by God’s grace. He made war at his discretion.
In the absence of a male heir, Edward was the closest male relative to France’s deceased Charles IV. Edward pursued his right to the French throne.
Historians view the Hundred Years War as occurring in three phases:
1337-1360 - Edwardian War
1369-1389 - Carolinian War
1415-1453 - Lancastrian War.
Edwardian War:
Energized by success at the Flemish island of Cadzand in November 1337, Edward III vigorously pursued his claim.
24 June 1340 naval Battle of Sluys
In Flanders, the Battle of Sluys (contemporary spelling – Sluis) gave Edward control of the English Channel. The English force destroyed or captured the majority of the French fleet.
26 August 1346 Battle of Crecy
The Battle of Crecy, the second significant engagement in the Edwardian War, went to the English. Edward’s forces landed on a peninsula in Normandy on 12 July 1346. In a military action called chevauchee (shoe-vo-she’), English troops burned and pillaged territory in northern France to reduce the region’s productivity. Aware of pursuit by a substantial French force, Edward set up a defensive position near Crecy, a city close to the French coast on the English Channel.
Edward’s strategic defensive position and the English longbow carried the day. The French suffered significant losses and were unable to thwart Edward’s offensive action. Edward laid siege to the nearby port city of Calais from September 1346 to August 1347. With Calais’s capitulation after the year-long siege, England maintained a foothold on the continent throughout the Hundred Years War and long after the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.
The Black Death of 1346 to 1353 halted military engagements. Estimates are the bubonic plague decimated 25% to 60% of the European population.
19 September 1356 Battle of Poitiers
By 1356, French and English military forces were back in business as usual. The English once again routed the French forces at the Battle of Poitiers, a city in Edward’s duchy of Aquitaine. Edward III’s son, Edward, the Black Prince, captured his cousin, French king John II. Success at Poitiers led to the Treaty of Bretigny drafted in May 1360 and ratified on 24 October 1360 in Calais as the Treaty of Calais.
Treaty of Calais, 24 October 1360 (aka Treaty of Bretigny):
France ceded territory to the English monarch. Edward III held Aquitaine and Gascony and seventeen additional properties free and clear. He was under no obligation to pay homage to the French king. All Edward III’s properties outside the French domain became unburdened by suzerainty to the French king. The treaty required John II to raise the ransom for his release from captivity.
Edward III renounced his claim to the French throne and retired to England, but the conflict continued.
Carolinian War – 1369-1389 (named for Charles V of France):
In May 1369, French King Charles V (1338-1380) summoned Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince), to Paris. Previously, Edward raised taxes in Aquitaine and Gascony. When the Black Prince ignored the people’s grievances about excessive taxation, they turned to the French monarch to redress their complaints.
The Black Prince refused to travel to Paris at the king’s request. Charles seized the moment and declared war. By 1389, Charles recovered much of the French territory ceded to England at the 1360 Treaty of Calais.
The Black Prince died in 1376, and his son Richard of Bordeaux (1367-1399) became next in line for Edward III’s throne. When Edward III died in June the following year, young Richard ascended to the throne as Richard II.
18 July 1389 Truce of Leulinghem:
Richard II, as King of England, and France’s Charles VI negotiated the Truce of Leulinghem. The kings did not address the duchy of Aquitaine’s status and the English king’s duty to pay homage to the French king. Among other terms, both sides agreed to a twenty-seven-year truce. Except for Calais, Richard vacated English estates and fiefs in France.
The truce held while the kings wrestled with civil unrest in their respective realms.
Lancastrian War – 1415-1453 (named after the House of Lancaster, a cadet branch of the Plantagenet dynasty):
Henry V (1386-1422), the second Lancastrian king, resumed Edward III’s quest for the French throne by invading northern France in 1415. Henry achieved several strategic military successes, the most notable of which was the 1415 Battle of Agincourt.
By 1420, Henry forced France’s Charles VI to the negotiation table. Charles capitulated to Henry, who became Charles’s regent until Charles’s death, at which time the French throne would revert to Henry V and his heirs. Charles VII of France suffered disinheritance, and Charles VI promised his youngest daughter Catherine of Valois to Henry in marriage.
Henry V continued his French campaign until the battlefield pathogen called the bloody flux caught up with him. Henry died on 31 August 1422, mere weeks before Mad King Charles of France died on 21 October 1422.
England continued Henry V’s French campaign after Henry’s death. John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford and Henry V’s brother, pursued the war effort against long odds. England besieged the community of Orleans in north-central France. Eventually, with a boost from the Maid of Orleans, the siege lifted, and the English retreated.
In 1450, at the Battle of Formigny, Charles VII of France took back Normandy.
On 17 July 1453, at the Battle of Castillion, France took back Aquitaine and Gascony, the end of the Hundred Years War.
Epilogue:
The Hundred Years War was the backdrop against which the House of Plantagenet played out their final decades.
According to agnate primogeniture, guaranteeing male succession to the throne minimized civil unrest and stabilized the realm.
A case in point: French King Charles IV’s death without male issue created civil unrest in France and international conflict between ruling families in France and England.
The Black Prince’s premature death in 1376 predeceasing Edward III is another case in point. According to the rule of substitution, the Black Prince’s son, Richard of Bordeaux, ascended to the throne as Richard II in 1377, as was his right and responsibility. However, a ten-year-old child’s placement as the nominal head of state put England’s political and civil stability at risk.
Primogeniture as a system of governance/power retention is vulnerable to political maneuverings. Civil and political unrest ensued in France and England. The 1455-1485 Wars of the Roses were a product of and manifestation of political instability in the Plantagenet dynasty.
Caveat:
The vignettes in Plantagenet: The End of a Dynasty convey the reader through the monarchs’ succession from Richard II, through the Wars of the Roses, and Richard III’s death at Bosworth Field.
Throughout Plantagenet: The End of a Dynasty, the vignettes focus on how the monarch attained the mantle of royal power or had the mantle thrust upon him. The second and equally important focus is on the sovereign’s abject humanness and the important women in his life.
Meet the royal family who shaped English history. Expect no adulation. Expect no condemnation.
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