The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central French force, or second “battle,” under Orleans gave Edward’s army the breathing space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the vanguard and the cutting to pieces of the Dauphin’s “battle,” the permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that the French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was lost from that moment, between ten and eleven o’clock, when Orleans’ confused column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap open between King John and the lead of his third battle and the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never did), John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was still intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third “battle,” would have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically far less disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he now made. He had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five, perhaps six thousand men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy’s archers he had none. What number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the attempt upon which he had decided. The rest of the large force that was with him was of less considerable military value; but, on the other hand, he could calculate not unjustly upon the fact that all his men were fresh, and that he was leading them against a body that had struggled for two hours against two fierce assaults, and one that has but just emerged—unbroken, it is true—from a particularly severe hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last reserve to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and wished all his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last body of knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large, fresh body of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its further side, there were those in the Black Prince’s force who began to doubt the issue. A picturesque story remains to us of Edward’s overhearing a despairing phrase, and casting at its author the retort that he had lied damnably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body and had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The exact spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by the railway station. It overlooks (if anything can be said to “overlook” in that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet higher than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away, the long defence had held its own throughout that morning. The Black Prince recalled them to the main body. Having done so, he formed into one closely ordered force all the now mixed men of the three lines who were still able to go forward. John was coming on with his armoured knights on foot, their horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those men, embarrassed and weighted by their metal under the growing heat of the day, nearly double the distance which his son’s men had found too much for them). Edward bade his men-at-arms mount, and his archers mounted too. It will be remembered that six men out of seven were mounted originally for the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting on foot had spared the horses. They were all available. And the teams and sumpter animals were available as well in so far as he had need of them. John’s men, just coming up on foot to the opposite edge of the little dip, saw the low foot line of the Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of command into a high mounted line. But before that mounted line moved forward, Edward had a last command to give. He called for the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks’ course of the raid. He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer—an Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland—set him, with the great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John’s corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John’s knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal’s charge drove home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen, later most properly to be called “The Bold.” And this lad fought side by side with his father, calling to the king: “Father, guard to the right! Father, guard to the left!” as the lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed them. The lessening and lessening group of French lords that could still hold their own in the contracting circle was doomed, and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of the Plantagenet’s men galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub around some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making eastward to where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to ask what this might be, and was told that it was the King of France who had been taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were disputing. John, pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to one of Edward’s knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had said to the Valois, his lawful king, “Sir, I am serving against you, for I have lost my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became the man of the King of England.”
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the Battle of Poitiers.