From this point the story is one of almost unbroken failure for the English in France. They were now about to pass through the experience which later befell the Spaniards in the Low Countries, and the French themselves in the Peninsula. The turning-point is of course the appearance in the field of Joan of Arc, a phenomenon so extraordinary that it has become the exclusive property of the votaries of poetry and sentiment, and is, perhaps rightly, not to be rescued from their hands. It is certain that her military talents were of the slightest; but, on the other hand, she possessed the magic of leadership and the amazing power of restoring the moral strength of her countrymen, which had been impaired as never before by an endless succession of defeats. The English not unnaturally attributed this power to witchcraft: for by what other agency could a peasant girl have checked the ever-victorious army? and the punishment of witchcraft being the fire they burnt her to death. Any other nation would have done the same in their place then, and there are still a few folks both in France and the United Kingdom who would do so now. But the fire in the market-place of Rouen availed the English little. "The French," as Monstrelet says, believed that "God was against the English"; and the English began to believe it themselves.
1430.
For the woman's quick instinct and the pure insight of a saintly soul had guided the maid aright. The moral quality of the English force was corrupted, and needed only to meet some loftier spirit to fall into decay. The chivalrous character of the war was gone. Hostile commanders no longer laid each other friendly wagers on the success of their next operations. The army too was ceasing to be national; the English element was growing smaller and smaller in number, and fast sinking to the level of the lawless adventurers who furnished the majority in the ranks. Long contempt of the enemy had bred insolence and carelessness, and the old discipline was almost gone. The sight of a deer or a hare sufficed to set a whole division hallooing, sometimes, as at Patay, with disastrous results. On that day the French scouts, who were feeling for the enemy, roused a stag, which ran towards the English array, and was greeted with such a storm of yells as told the French all that they wanted to know. The English force blundered on, without advanced parties of any kind, till it suddenly found itself on the verge of an engagement. Then the leaders wrangled as to the question of fighting in enclosed or open country, and, having finally in overweening confidence selected the open, were surprised and routed before the archers could plant their stakes in the ground. Worst of all, an officer in high command, Sir John Falstolfe, seeing that defeat was certain, disobeyed the order to dismount and galloped away. He was disgraced by Bedford, but was afterwards for some reason reinstated, though had Harry been king he would assuredly have lost his head.[34]
Sandacourt,
1431.
Among the French the revival of the military spirit soon showed itself in a remarkable development of new ideas. They had long copied, though with a bad grace, the English practice of dismounting men-at-arms and furnishing archers with a palisade of stakes, but in 1434 at Gerberoy they used the three arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, in combination, with signal success. Artillery was still so far a novelty in the field that only three years before a whole army collected by the Duke of Bar had flung itself howling to the ground at the first discharge; but the English archers, though they knew better than to behave thus, were sadly dismayed when the round stone shot came bounding within their trusted palisade. It was just after this, too, that two fatal blows were struck at the English by the shifting of Burgundy to the French side, and by the death of their ablest leader, John, Duke of Bedford.
Still the war, wantonly and foolishly continued by an inefficient Government, dragged on and on, and, though not unbroken by occasional brilliant exploits, turned steadily against the English. The behaviour of the soldiers was sullied more and more by shameful barbarity; and gradually but surely their hold on Normandy and Guienne slipped from them. Truce was made at last in 1444, and Charles the Seventh seized the opportunity to execute a series of long-meditated reforms in the French army. He established a national militia of fifteen companies of men-at-arms and archers, each six hundred strong, organised garrisons of trained men for the towns, took the greatest pains for the equipment, discipline, and regular payment of the troops, and formed the finest park of artillery thitherto seen. In a word, he laid the foundation of the French standing army, with the Scottish archers and Scottish men-at-arms at its head, two famous corps that remained in their old place on the army-list until the French Revolution. Thus French military organisation, spurred by a century of misfortune, made one gigantic bound ahead of English, and may be said to have kept the lead ever since.
1440.
1449.
1450,
April 18.
In England there had been no such improvement. A feeble effort had been made to check by statute fraudulent enlistment and the still graver abuse of embezzlement of the soldiers' pay by the captains, but this was of little help when the enforcement of the Act[35] was entrusted to so corrupt and avaricious a commander as the Duke of Somerset. Throughout the truce the soldiers on the English side behaved abominably; but, since they were robbed of their wages by their officers, it is hardly surprising that they should have repaid themselves by the plunder of the country. When finally the truce was broken, and the French invaded Normandy, the English dominion fell before them like a house of cards. Town after town, their garrisons depleted to fill Somerset's pocket, surrendered to superior force, and the English as they marched forth had the mortification to see the Normans gleefully doff the red cross of St. George for the white cross of France. An attempt to save the province was foiled by the rout of the English reinforcements at Fourmigny, and Normandy was lost. Anjou and Maine had been already made over to the father of Henry the Sixth's Queen, and Guienne and Gascony, which had been English since the reign of Henry the Second, alone remained. Next year they too went the way of Normandy and were lost.
1453,
July 20.
Gascony, however, notwithstanding her hot southern blood, was in no such anxiety as Normandy to be quit of the English, and sent messages to England that, if an army were sent to help her, she would revolt against the French to rejoin her old mistress. England lent a willing ear, and John Talbot, the veteran Earl of Shrewsbury, was sent out to this, his last campaign. The decisive battle was fought under the walls of Chatillon. The French were strongly entrenched, with three hundred pieces of artillery in position, a striking testimony to their military progress. The English fought with the weapon which for a century had won them their victories, and for the last as for the first battle of the Hundred Years' War, every man alighted from his horse. John Talbot alone, in virtue of his fourscore years, remained mounted on his hackney; and with the indomitable old man at their head the English hurled themselves upon the entrenchment. It was a mad, desperate, hopeless venture, but they stormed forward with such impetuosity that they went near to carry the position. For a full hour they persisted, until at last, riddled through and through by the fire of the artillery, they fell back. Then the French sallied forth and turned the defeat into a rout. Old John Talbot's pony was shot under him, and being pinned to the ground under the dead animal he was killed where he lay. Young John Talbot, Lord Lisle, refused to leave his father, and fell by his side. The army was dispersed over Aquitaine, and the ancestral domains of seven generations of English kings passed from them for ever. By the irony of fate a Scottish soldier[36] was appointed to hold for the crown of France the French provinces that had clung with such attachment to England. Of all the great possessions of the English in France Calais now alone was left, to break in due time the heart of an English Queen.