If the two parties had been reduced for leaders to the two claimants only, the war would not, perhaps, have lasted long.
In the first campaign the Count of Montfort was made prisoner at the siege of Nantes, carried off to Paris, and shut up in the tower of the Louvre, whence he did not escape until three years were over. Charles of Blois, with all his personal valor, was so scrupulously devout that he often added to the embarrassments and at the same time the delays of war. He never marched without being followed by his almoner, who took with him everywhere bread, and wine, and water, and fire in a pot, for the purpose of saying mass by the way. One day when Charles was accordingly hearing it and was very near the enemy, one of his officers, Auffroy de Montboucher, said to him, “Sir, you see right well that your enemies are yonder, and you halt a longer time than they need to take you.” “Auffroy,” answered the prince, “we shall always have towns and castles, and, if they are taken, we shall, with God’s help, recover them; but if we miss hearing of mass we shall never recover it.” Neither side, however, had much detriment from either the captivity or pious delays of its chief. Joan of Flanders, Countess of Montfort, was at Rennes when she heard that her husband had been taken prisoner at Nantes. “Although she made great mourning in her heart,” says Froissart, “she made it not like a disconsolate woman, but like a proud and gallant man. She showed to her friends and soldiers a little boy she had, and whose name was John, even as his father’s, and she said to them, ‘Ah! sirs, be not discomforted and cast down because of my lord whom we have lost; he was but one man; see, here is my little boy, who, please God, shall be his avenger. I have wealth in abundance, and of it I will give you enow, and I will provide you with such a leader as shall give you all fresh heart.’ She went through all her good towns and fortresses, taking her young son with her, re-enforcing the garrisons with men and all they wanted, and giving away abundantly wherever she thought it would be well laid out. Then she went her way to Hennebon-sur-Mer, which was a strong town and strong castle, and there she abode, and her son with her, all the winter.” In May, 1242, Charles of Blois came to besiege her; but the attempts at assault were not successful. “The Countess of Montfort, who was cased in armor and rode on a fine steed, galloped from street to street through the town, summoned the people to defend themselves stoutly, and called on the women, dames, damoisels, and others, to pull up the roads, and carry the stones to the ramparts to throw down on the assailants.” She attempted a bolder enterprise. “She sometimes mounted a tower, right up to the top, that she might see the better how her people bore themselves. She one day saw that all they of the hostile army, lords and others, had left their quarters and gone to watch the assault. She mounted her steed, all armed as she was, and summoned to horse with her about three hundred men-at-arms who were on guard at a gate which was not being assailed. She went out thereat with all her company and threw herself valiantly upon the tents and quarters of the lords of France, which were all burned, being guarded only by boys and varlets, who fled as soon as they saw the countess and her folks entering and setting fire. When the lords saw their quarters burning and heard the noise which came therefrom, they ran up all dazed and crying, ‘Betrayed! betrayed!’ so that none remained for the assault. When the countess saw the enemy’s host running up from all parts, she re-assembled all her folks, and seeing right well that she could not enter the town again without too great loss, she went off by another road to the castle of Brest [or, more probably, d’Auray, as Brest is much more than three leagues from Hennebon], which lies as near as three leagues from thence.” Though hotly pursued by the assailants, “she rode so fast and so well that she and the greater part of her folks arrived at the castle of Brest, where she was received and feasted right joyously. Those of her folks who were in Hennebon were all night in great disquietude because neither she nor any of her company returned; and the assailant lords, who had taken up quarters nearer to the town, cried, ‘Come out, come out, and seek your countess; she is lost; you will not find a bit of her.’ In such fear the folks in Hennebon remained five days. But the countess wrought so well that she had now full five hundred comrades armed and well mounted; then she set out from Brest about midnight and came away, arriving at sunrise and riding straight upon one of the flanks of the enemy’s host; there she had the gate of Hennebon castle opened, and entered in with great joy and a great noise of trumpets and drums; whereby the besiegers were roughly disturbed and awakened.”
The joy of the besieged was short. Charles of Blois pressed on the siege more rigorously every day, threatening that, when he should have taken the place, he would put all the inhabitants to the sword. Consternation spread even to the brave; and a negotiation was opened with a view of arriving at terms of capitulation. By dint of prayers Countess Joan obtained a delay of three days. The first two had expired, and the besiegers were preparing for a fresh assault, when Joan, from the top of her tower, saw the sea covered with sails: “‘See, see, she cried, the aid so much desired!’ Every one in the town, as best they could, rushed up at once to the windows and battlements of the walls to see what it might be,” says Froissart. In point of fact it was a fleet with six thousand men brought from England to the relief of Hennebon by Amaury de Clisson and Walter de Manny; and they had been a long while detained at sea by contrary winds.
“When they had landed the countess herself went to them and feasted them and thanked them greatly, which was no wonder, for she had sore need of their coming.” It was far better still when, next day, the new arrivals had attacked the besiegers and gained a brilliant victory over them. When they re-entered the place, “whoever,” says Froissart, “saw the countess descend from the castle, and kiss my lord Walter de Manny and his comrades, one after another, two or three times, might well have said that it was a gallant dame.”
All the while that the Count of Montfort was a prisoner in the tower of the Louvre, the countess his wife strove for his cause with the same indefatigable energy. He escaped in 1345, crossed over to England, swore fealty and homage to Edward III. for the duchy of Brittany, and immediately returned to take in hand, himself, his own cause. But in the very year of his escape, on the 26th of September, 1345, he died at the castle of Hennebon, leaving once more his wife, with a young child, alone at the head of his party and having in charge the future of his house. The Countess Joan maintained the rights and interests of her son as she had maintained those of her husband. For nineteen years, she, with the help of England, struggled against Charles of Blois, the head of a party growing more and more powerful, and protected by France. Fortune shifted her favors and her asperities from one camp to the other. Charles of Blois had at first pretty considerable success; but on the 18th of June, 1347, in a battle in which he personally displayed a brilliant courage, he was in his turn made prisoner, carried to England, and immured in the Tower of London. There he remained nine years. But he too had a valiant and indomitable wife, Joan of Penthievre, the Cripple. She did for her husband all that Joan of Montfort was doing for hers. All the time that he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, she was the soul and the head of his party, in the open country as well as in the towns, turning to profitable account the inclinations of the Breton population, whom the presence and the ravages of the English had turned against John of Montfort and his cause. She even convoked at Dinan, in 1352, a general assembly of her partisans, which is counted by the Breton historians as the second holding of the states of their country. During nine years, from 1347 to 1356, the two Joans were the two heads of their parties in politics and in war. Charles of Blois at last obtained his liberty from Edward III. on hard conditions, and returned to Brittany to take up the conduct of his own affairs. The struggle between the two claimants still lasted eight years, with vicissitudes ending in nothing definite. In 1363 Charles of Blois and young John of Montfort, weary of their fruitless efforts and the sufferings of their countries, determined both of them to make peace and share Brittany between them. Rennes was to be Charles’s capital, and Nantes that of his rival. The treaty had been signed, an altar raised between the two armies, and an oath taken on both sides; but when Joan of Penthivre was informed of it she refused downright to ratify it. “I married you,” she said to her husband, “to defend my inheritance, and not to yield the half of it; I am only a woman, but I would lose my life, and two lives if I had them, rather than consent to any cession of the kind.” Charles of Blois, as weak before his wife as brave before the enemy, broke the treaty he had but just sworn to, and set out for Nantes to resume the war. “My lord,” said Countess Joan to him in presence of all his knights, “you are going to defend my inheritance and yours, which my lord of Montfort—wrongfully, God knows—doth withhold from us, and the barons of Brittany who are here present know that I am rightful heiress of it. I pray you affectionately not to make any ordinance, composition, or treaty whereby the duchy corporate remain not ours.” Charles set out; and in the following year, on the 29th of September, 1364, the battle of Auray cost him his life and the countship of Brittany. When he was wounded to death he said, “I have long been at war against my conscience.” At sight of his dead body on the field of battle young John of Montfort, his conqueror, was touched, and cried out, “Alas my cousin, by your obstinacy you have been the cause of great evils in Brittany: may God forgive you! It grieves me much that you are come to so sad an end.” After this outburst of generous compassion came the joy of victory, which Montfort owed above all to his English allies and to John Chandos their leader, to whom, “My Lord John,” said he, “this great fortune path come to me through your great sense and prowess: wherefore, I pray you, drink out of my cup.” “Sir,” answered Chandos, “let us go hence, and render you your thanks to God for this happy fortune you have gotten, for, without the death of yonder warrior, you could not have come into the inheritance of Brittany.” From that day forth John of Monfort remained in point of fact Duke of Brittany, and Joan of Penthievre, the Cripple, the proud princess who had so obstinately defended her rights against him, survived for full twenty years the death of her husband and the loss of her duchy.
Whilst the two Joans were exhibiting in Brittany, for the preservation or the recovery of their little dominion, so much energy and persistency, another Joan, no princess, but not the less a heroine, was, in no other interest than the satisfaction of her love and her vengeance, making war, all by herself, on the same territory. Several Norman and Breton lords, and amongst others Oliver de Clisson and Godfrey d’Harcourt, were suspected, nominally attached as they were to the King of France, of having made secret overtures to the King of England. Philip of Valois had them arrested at a tournament, and had them beheaded without any form of trial, in the middle of the market-place at Paris, to the number of fourteen. The head of Clisson was sent to Nantes and exposed on one of the gates of the city. At the news thereof, his widow, Joan of Belleville, attended by several men of family, her neighbors and friends, set out for a castle occupied by the troops of Philip’s candidate, Charles of Blois. The fate of Clisson was not yet known there; it was supposed that his wife was on a hunting excursion; and she was admitted without distrust. As soon as she was inside, the blast of a horn gave notice to her followers, whom she had left concealed in the neighboring woods. They rushed up, and took possession of the castle, and Joan de Clisson had all the inhabitants—but one—put to the sword. But this was too little for her grief and her zeal. At the head of her troops, augmented, she scoured the country and seized several places, everywhere driving out or putting to death the servants of the King of France. Philip confiscated the property of the house of Clisson. Joan moved from land to sea. She manned several vessels, attacked the French ships she fell in with, ravaged the coasts, and ended by going and placing at the service of the Countess of Montfort her hatred and her son, a boy of seven years of age, whom she had taken with her in all her expeditions, and who was afterwards the great constable, Oliver de Clisson. We shall find him under Charles V. and Charles VI. as devoted to France and her kings as if he had not made his first essays in arms against the candidate of their ancestor, Philip. His mother had sent him to England, to be brought up at the court of Edward III., but, shortly after taking a glorious part with the English in the battle of Auray, in which he lost an eye, and which secured the duchy of Brittany to the Count of Montfort, De Clisson got embroiled none the less with his suzerain, who had given John Chandos the castle of Gavre, near Nantes. “Devil take me, my lord,” said Oliver to him, “if ever Englishman shall be my neighbor;” and he went forthwith and attacked the castle, which he completely demolished. The hatreds of women whose passions have made them heroines of war are more personal and more obstinate than those of the roughest warriors. Accordingly the war for the duchy of Brittany, in the fourteenth century, has been called, in history, the war of the three Joans.
This war was, on both sides, remarkable for cruelty. If Joan de Clisson gave to the sword all the people in a castle, belonging to Charles of Blois, to which she had been admitted on a supposition of pacific intentions, Charles of Blois, on his side, finding in another castle thirty knights, partisans of the Count of Montfort, had their heads shot from catapults over the walls of Nantes, which he was besieging, and, at the same time that he saved from pillage the churches of Quimper, which he had just taken, he allowed his troops to massacre fourteen hundred inhabitants, and had his principal prisoners beheaded. One of them, being a deacon, he caused to be degraded, and then handed over to the populace, who stoned him. It is characteristic of the middle ages that in them the ferocity of barbaric times existed side by side with the sentiments of chivalry and the fervor of Christianity: so slow is the race of man to eschew evil, even when it has begun to discern and relish good. War was then the passion and habitual condition of men. They made it without motive as well as without prevision, in a transport of feeling or for the sake of pastime, to display their strength or to escape from listlessness; and, whilst making it, they abandoned themselves without scruple to all those deeds of violence, vengeance, brutal anger, or fierce delight, which war provokes. At the same time, however, the generous impulses of feudal chivalry, the sympathies of Christian piety, tender affections, faithful devotion, noble tastes, were fermenting in their souls; and human nature appeared with all its complications, its inconsistencies, and its irregularities, but also with all its wealth of prospective development. The three Joans of the fourteenth century were but eighty years in advance of the Joan of Arc of the fifteenth; and the knights of Charles V., Du Guesclin and De Clisson, were the forerunners of the Bayard of Francis I.
An incident which has retained its popularity in French history, to wit, the fight between thirty Bretons and thirty English during the just now commemorated war in Brittany, will give a better idea than any general observations could of the real, living characteristics of facts and manners, barbaric and at the same time chivalric, at that period. No apology is needed for here reproducing the chief details as they have been related by Froissart, the dramatic chronicler of the middle ages.