This whole expedition was—as we see it in Froissart—neither politics nor war, but chivalry. What interest had England, or Edward III., or the Prince of Wales in Don Pedro? None. He was a cruel tyrant, rightfully expelled. The Prince of Wales would set him back upon his throne in the interest of royal legitimacy, and because there offered a brilliant opportunity for fame and plunder: the Black Prince thought less of the latter than the Free Companies enlisted under his banner, and less than his own rapacious knights.

So in three divisions, headed by the most famous knights and in a way generalled by Sir John Chandos, the host passes through the kingdom of Navarre, and crosses the Pyrenees. Then begin a series of exploits. Sir Thomas Felton and a company set out just to dare and beard the Castillian army, and after entrancing feats of knight-errantry, are all captured or slain. Much is the prince annoyed at this; but bears on, gladdened with the thought, often expressed, that the bastard Henry is a bold and hardy knight, and is advancing to give battle.

And true it was. One of Henry’s counsellors explains to him how easy it is to hem in the Black Prince in the defiles, and starve him into a disastrous retreat. Perish the thought! “By the soul of my father,” answers King Henry, “I have such a desire to see this prince, and to try my strength with him, that we will never part without a battle.”

So the unnecessary and resultless battle of Navaretta took place. Don Pedro, the cruel rightful king, was knighted, with others, by the Prince of Wales before the fight. The tried unflinching chivalry of England and Aquitaine conquered, although one division of King Henry’s host had du Guesclin at its head. That knight was captured; somehow his star had a way of sinking before the steadier fortune of Sir John Chandos, who was here du Guesclin’s captor for a second time. King Henry, after valiant fighting, escaped. Don Pedro was re-set upon his throne; and played false with the Black Prince and his army, in the matter of pay. The whole expedition turned back across the Pyrenees. And not so long after, Henry bestirred himself, and the tardily freed du Guesclin hurried again to aid him. This time there was no Black Prince and Sir John Chandos; and Don Pedro was conquered and slain, and Henry was at last firm upon his throne.

Could anything have been more chivalric, more objectless, and more absolutely lacking in result? It is a beautiful story; every one should refresh his childhood’s memory of it by reading Froissart’s delightful pages. And then let him also read at least the subsequent story of the death of Sir John Chandos in a knightly brush at arms; he, the really wise and great leader, perishes through his personal rash knighthood! It is a fine tale of the ending of an old and mighty knight, the very flower of chivalry, as he was called.

So matters fare on through these Chronicles. All is charming and interesting and picturesque; charming also for the knights: great fame is won and fat ransoms paid to recoup knightly fortunes. Now and then—all too frequently, alas! and the only pity of it all!—some brave knight has the mishap to lose his life! That is to say, the only pity of it from the point of view of good Sir John. But we can see further horrors in this picture of chivalry’s actualities: we see King Edward pillage, devastate, destroy France;[688] we see the awful outcome of the general ruin in the rising of the vile, unhappy peasants, the Jacquerie; then in the indiscriminate slaughter and pillaging by the Free Companies, no longer well employed by royalties; and then we see the cruel treachery of many an incident wrought out by such a flower of chivalry even as du Guesclin.[689] Indeed all the horrors of ceaseless interminable war are everywhere, and no more dreadful horror through the whole story than the bloody sack of Limoges commanded by that perfect knight, the Black Prince, himself stricken with disease, and carried in a litter through the breach of the walls into the town, and there reposing, assuaging his cruel soul, while his men run hither and thither “slaying men, women and children according to their orders.”[690]

But when King Edward was old, and the Prince of Wales dying with disease, the French and their partisans gathered heart, and pressed back the English party with successful captures and reprisals. Du Guesclin was made Constable of France; and there remained no English leader who was his match. From this second period onwards, the wars and slaughters and pillagings become more embittered, more horrid and less relieved. The tone of everything is brutalized, and the good chronicler himself frequently animadverts on the wanton destruction wrought, and the frightful ruin. All is not as in the opening of the story, which was so fascinating, so knightly and almost as purely adventurous as the Arthurian romances—only that there was less love of ladies and a disturbing dearth of forests perilous, and enchanted castles. It was then that the reader had ever and anon to remind himself that Froissart is not romance or legend, but a contemporary chronicle; and that in spite of heightened colours and expanded (if not invented) dialogues, his narrative does not belong to the imaginative or fictitious side of chivalry, but to its actualities.[691]

Froissart’s pictures of the depravity and devastation caused by the wars of England and France, disclose the unhappy actuality in which chivalry might move and have its being. And the knights were part of the cruelty, treachery, and lust. One may remark besides in Froissart a certain shallowness, a certain emptying, of the spirit of chivalry. One phase of this lay in the expansion of form and ceremony, while life was departing;—as, for example, in the hypertrophe of heraldry, and in the pageantry of the later tournaments, where such care was taken to prevent injury to the combatants. A subtler phase of chivalry’s emptying lay in its preciosity and in the excessive growth of fantasy and utter romance—of which enough will be said in the next chapter.