At this critical moment the evils of France were suddenly multiplied by the rising of a class for which neither king, nobles, nor citizens had done anything. The |The Jacquerie.| serfs or villeins of France had suffered terrible hardships within the last decade. Their numbers had been decimated by the Black Death, and the survivors had to add to their own tasks the work of those who had perished. Their hard-won savings had been wrung from them to pay the ransom of their lords, who had fallen into the hands of the English at Poitiers or elsewhere. The lands from which they extracted a scanty living were devastated by the mercenary soldiers in peace as well as in war. Despairing of redress, they determined, at any rate, to avenge their sufferings. The story of their revolt is one of almost unredeemed horror. It began in the district of Beauvais, and rapidly spread over Champagne, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France. Castles were burned; men, women, and even children were tortured and put to death. But the nobles soon recovered from the first panic, and took arms against enemies whom they now loathed as much as they had previously despised them. The ill-armed peasants were unable to face the trained men-at-arms, and the suppression of the revolt was as murderous and destructive as its outbreak.
There was little real sympathy between peasants and bourgeois. They had, it is true, a common enemy in the nobles, and Marcel had tried to use the Jacquerie as a diversion in his own favour. But he gave no efficient aid to his allies, and his half-hearted connection only brought upon himself the discredit and disaster of their ruinous defeat. From the victorious troops of the nobles the regent was able to form an army for the reduction of his rebellious capital. The citizens were bellicose, but they were not warlike, and it was necessary to bring trained troops to |Siege of Paris.| the aid of their undisciplined valour. Charles of Navarre was appointed captain-general of Paris, and brought a mercenary army for its defence. But the king’s aims were as purely selfish as ever. While professing to defend the city, he was negotiating with the regent for its surrender. Such proceedings excited serious mistrust, which was increased by quarrels between the citizens and the soldiers of Navarre. At last the king left Paris for St. Denis, and further resistance seemed almost hopeless. The citizens were willing to make terms, but the Dauphin would not negotiate with the murderer of the marshals. Marcel felt that in such a dilemma he could no longer trust his followers. A party was already formed within the city which was hostile to his continued ascendency, and in favour of restoring the royal authority. If the citizens had to choose between their own safety and the interests of their provost, their choice could not be long delayed. There was only one apparent means of escape, and Marcel clutched at it. He offered to surrender Paris to Charles of Navarre, and to proclaim him King of France. But on the very night when this treacherous design was to be carried out, Marcel was assassinated by one of his |Murder of Marcel.| own followers (July 31, 1358). It is easy to see and condemn the errors of his later career, but his name will always be memorable in French history as the leader of the most notable attempt, before 1789, to give to France a constitutional form of government.
Two days after the death of Marcel the regent Charles entered Paris, and the restoration of the royal authority was signalised by the severe punishment of its chief opponents. In the next year Charles bought off the King of Navarre, who had lost all hopes of gaining the crown with the collapse of the bourgeois revolution. There still remained the war with England. During the truce John had been negotiating for his release, and in 1359 he agreed to the cession of nearly the whole of northern and western France. But the Dauphin was of opinion that the mutilation of his inheritance was too high a price to pay for his father’s liberty. He convened the States-General, now the docile instrument of the prince whose authority had been so recently defied by its predecessors. The so-called treaty of London was unanimously rejected, and Edward III. had no alternative but to renew the war. He collected an enormous army for the invasion of France in October, 1359. But the Dauphin had learned a lesson from experience, and would fight no more battles like Crecy and Poitiers. The English army |English invasion, 1359.| advanced to Rheims, but found the city too strongly defended. An attack upon Burgundy was repelled, not by arms, but by the payment of a large sum of money. Edward marched against Paris, but the Dauphin refused to quit the shelter of the walls, and the invaders had to turn westwards to Chartres. The country had been so desolated by war and pestilence that it was difficult to feed the army, the season was wet and unfavourable, and Edward III., finding that his army was wasting away without gaining any success, agreed to negotiate. By the treaty of Bretigni (May 8, 1360) he renounced |Treaty of Bretigni.| his claims to the French throne and to the Norman and Plantagenet provinces north of the Loire. In return he was to enjoy full sovereignty, without any homage to the French king, in his own conquest of Calais, and in the possessions which Eleanor had brought to Henry II., viz. Guienne, Gascony, Poitou, Saintonge, and a number of smaller territories. France was to renounce the Scottish, and England the Flemish alliance. The ransom of King John was fixed at three million crowns, to be paid in six yearly instalments. On receipt of the first instalment the king was to be released, but hostages were to be given for the payment of the remainder. It was not easy to raise the ransom from exhausted France; but Galeazzo Visconti was opportunely willing to pay six hundred thousand gold florins to gain for his son the hand of a French princess, and this bargain with the Milanese despot enabled John to return to his kingdom. He seems, however, to have found the cares of government a disagreeable burden after the comparative gaiety of his imprisonment in London. In 1363 his second son, Louis of Anjou, escaped from Calais, whither he had gone as one of his father’s hostages. John seized the opportunity to parade a chivalrous regard for his plighted word, and at the same time to abandon duties which had become difficult and distasteful. Leaving the regency once more to his eldest son, he sailed to England in January 1364, and died in London three months later. Before his departure he had done one act which is of cardinal importance in the history of France. In 1361 a return of the plague had carried off Philip de Rouvre, the childless ruler of Burgundy, Franche-Comté, and Artois. The two latter provinces, which had come to Philip through the female line, passed to Margaret of Flanders, but the duchy |Duchy of Burgundy.| of Burgundy escheated to the crown. A prudent king would have retained the direct rule of so valuable a possession; but John, with reckless generosity, gave it away to his fourth son Philip, who had fought boldly by his side at Poitiers, and had shared his captivity. This Philip the Bold is the founder of the great line of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy.
The new king, Charles V., had been the practical ruler of France since the battle of Poitiers. During those eight years |Government of Charles V.| he had learned from harsh experience many lessons which stood him in good stead when circumstances enabled him to gain some success. The very weakness of his bodily health, which contemporaries attributed to poison administered by Charles of Navarre during their early friendship, debarred him from the active exercises of chivalry, and impelled him to cultivate his mental faculties. Fragile, timid, a stranger to the joys of the tournament and the battle-field, he seems strangely out of place in the days of the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin, of John Chandos and the Captal de Buch. Yet Charles V. is the greatest of the Valois kings before Louis XI., and must be reckoned among the founders of modern France. His chief task was to restore the despotic power of the crown, which had been so rudely shaken between 1355 and 1358. Arbitrary taxation was to supersede the grant of supplies by the estates; military and civil officials were to be royal nominees; even the local assessors and collectors of taxes were to be under the supervision and control of the crown. Only once did the States-General meet during the reign, and then they were summoned merely to strengthen the king’s hands. But the despotism of Charles V. was a capable and orderly government, wholly different from that of his predecessors. It is curious to note how this absolute king adopts and turns to his own advantage the expedients of his enemies. He reimposed the gabelle on salt, and the aides or taxes on the sale of commodities, the two financial expedients of the States of 1355. He retained the élus, the local collectors whom the States had nominated to levy these charges, though he was careful to take their appointment into his own hands. He gave tardy expression to the will of the estates by putting an end to the debasement of the currency, the worst of all grievances, and by imposing strict limitations on the right of purveyance. When his brother, Louis of Anjou, provoked discontent by his brutal administration in Languedoc, Charles did not hesitate to dismiss him from the governorship, and to grant redress to the complainants. Such a government was a great and a novel boon in the fourteenth century, and it is only on its financial side that it is open to hostile criticism. The expenses, both civil and military, were enormous, and the people were subjected to a heavier burden of taxation than they had ever experienced before. And the taxes were not only excessive in amount and arbitrary in their imposition, they were also oppressive and unequal. To increase the receipts from the gabelle, Charles V. introduced the practice of requiring every family to purchase at least a fixed amount of salt from the royal granaries; and the principle of equality, which is enjoined in his ordinances, was infringed by the frequent grant or sale of exemptions, sometimes to a class, sometimes to a district or a corporation. It is these exemptions, multiplied as time goes on, which make the financial system of France, down to the Revolution, so unjust, so disorderly, and so inefficient. And Charles V. was also responsible for a disastrous innovation. His predecessors had received a revenue from customs duties levied on the frontiers of their kingdom. Charles was the first to hamper domestic trade by imposing customs on the transit from one province to another.
But in spite of these drawbacks the administration of Charles V. was eminently successful, and it was this success which led his subjects to approve, or even to welcome, the |The French welcome absolute rule.| arbitrary character of his rule. A people which had suffered from every kind of misfortune, from foreign invasion, pestilence, and civil strife, as the French had done in the middle of the fourteenth century, is never very eager to limit the power of a capable ruler. What it needs is a government which will maintain order at home, and retrieve the national honour by victories over foreign foes; and to such a government much will be forgiven. If the English had reason to approve the personal rule of the Tudor sovereigns, the French a century earlier had infinitely more reason to support a king who gratified their most imperious desires. For not only did Charles V. remedy the most glaring defects of his predecessors’ administration, but this most unmilitary of kings was able to gain triumphs over the hated English which a few years before must have seemed impossible.
The first opportunity for an indirect renewal of the strife with England was offered by affairs in Brittany. The treaty |War in Brittany.| of Bretigni had left unsettled the long struggle between John de Montfort and Charles of Blois, and England and France were not pledged to abandon the cause of their respective candidates. In the very year of his accession Charles V. determined to strike a vigorous blow in favour of the House of Blois, and sent Bertrand du Guesclin, whose military genius he had already detected, to lead a considerable force into Brittany. But this first enterprise was not crowned with success. The superior discipline of the English mercenaries enabled them to gain a decisive victory in the hard-fought battle of Aurai (September 29, 1364). Charles of Blois was slain, and Bertrand du Guesclin was left a prisoner in the hands of John Chandos. To prevent a complete transfer of the allegiance of Brittany to the English king Charles V. found it necessary to negotiate, and in April, 1365, John de Montfort was recognised as duke, with the proviso that if he died without male issue the duchy should pass to the eldest son of Charles of Blois.
More important in its ultimate results was French intervention in Castile. The government of Peter the Cruel had excited the bitter enmity of his subjects, who |War in Castile.| found a champion in the king’s bastard half-brother, Henry of Trastamara. Henry appealed for aid to France, and Charles V. welcomed the opportunity to rid his country of the hated free companies. Bertrand du Guesclin, who had been ransomed from his captors, raised an army among these professional soldiers, and crossed the Pyrenees at the end of 1365. The task of the invaders was facilitated by a general revolt of the Castilians. Henry of Trastamara was crowned king, and Peter fled to Bordeaux to implore English assistance. The Black Prince was conscious that French ascendency in the Spanish peninsula threatened his duchy of Aquitaine, and chivalrous motives impelled him to support a legitimate king against a usurper. Peter made the most lavish promises of pay to his auxiliaries, and the Black Prince became surety for the good faith of his guest. In 1367 all preparations were complete, and the treacherous Charles of Navarre gave a passage through his kingdom to the invaders. Between Najara and Navarrette, not far from the later battle-field of Vittoria, a complete victory was won over the French and Castilian forces. Du Guesclin was once more a captive, Peter the Cruel recovered his crown, and Henry of Trastamara had to seek safety in exile. But Peter proved to be as faithless as he was cruel. He declined to fulfil his promises to allies who seemed to be no longer necessary, and the English prince was in great straits to satisfy the soldiers who had trusted in his surety. To make matters worse the troops were wasted with disease, and the Black Prince himself contracted a fever which remained in his blood and led to his early death. With his temper embittered and his health broken, he led the remnants of his army back to Gascony. His departure was followed by a new revolution in Castile. Henry of Trastamara returned to reclaim the crown, and du Guesclin, whom the Black Prince imprudently allowed to pay a second ransom, once more entered his service. In 1369 the French troops won the battle of Montiel, and in a personal interview which followed Peter was stabbed to the heart by his half-brother. Thus all the fruits of the battle of Najara were lost, and a king was seated in Castile who was pledged to the French alliance.
These events in Castile encouraged Charles V. to carry out a long-cherished design for the reconquest of the English |Renewal of English war.| provinces. A pretext for a rupture was found in the discontent which was excited in Aquitaine by the heavy taxes levied by the Black Prince to defray the expenses of his Spanish expedition. In 1368 several of the Gascon nobles, regardless of the treaty of Bretigni, appealed to Charles V., as their suzerain, to redress their grievances. Charles delayed a final rupture until he had made his preparations, and had heard of the triumph of his ally in Castile. In 1369 he summoned the Black Prince to appear in Paris to answer the complaints of his subjects before the court of peers. Edward replied grimly that he would willingly go to Paris, but with sixty thousand men in his company. It was easier, however, to utter the threat than to carry it out. The conditions which had enabled the English to gain some conspicuous successes in the earlier war were now altered, and to some extent reversed. The wise government of Charles V. had already removed many of the administrative evils which had crippled France under his grandfather and his father. Thanks to du Guesclin, the French king could now put into the field a professional army under capable leaders, in place of the disorderly feudal levies which had been cut to pieces at Crecy and Poitiers. The Black Prince was no longer the active and resolute commander that he had shown himself before his illness, and he lost some of his most capable lieutenants, notably Chandos, who died in 1370. The provinces ceded at Bretigni had had some years’ experience of English rule, and their discontent was stimulated by a growing sense of national sympathy with the rest of France. Another very prominent cause of the reversal of military success in the years following 1369 is to be found in the cautious tactics deliberately adopted and enforced by Charles V. himself. For an invading army victory is imperatively necessary; for the defenders it is enough not to be defeated. Charles forbade his generals, no matter what provocation they received, to risk an engagement in the open field. They were to shut their troops in the strong towns, and to leave the English armies to be wasted by disease, by want of provisions, and by the difficulty of coercing a |English disasters.| hostile population. As the invaders departed, the French could harass their march, cut off stragglers and supplies, and occupy the territory which the enemy was compelled to evacuate. These tactics were eminently successful, and they were immensely aided by the support of the Castilian fleet, which enabled the French to gain a temporary naval ascendency. This deprived the English of direct communication with the coast of Aquitaine, and forced them to carry on military operations at a disastrous distance from their ultimate base of supplies. Almost the only English success was the capture of Limoges in 1370 by the Black Prince, who blackened his own reputation by ordering an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants. Soon afterwards he was compelled by illness to return to England, and to resign his duchy of Aquitaine, which he never revisited. In 1372 the English fleet, which was carrying an army under the Earl of Pembroke to Bordeaux, was destroyed off La Rochelle by the combined naval forces of France and Castile. A new and larger force was prepared in 1373 under John of Gaunt, but in consequence of this maritime disaster it was necessary to land the troops at Calais. Thence John of Gaunt marched right across France, but he found no enemy to beat in the field, and he could not take a single fortress. Meanwhile his troops melted away through desertion, disease, and famine. A defeated army could hardly have been in a more lamentable condition than that of which a scanty and impoverished remnant succeeded in reaching Bordeaux. The failure of this great effort on the part of England was decisive. Already several provinces had been practically lost, and by 1374, of all the vast possessions which had been gained at Bretigni, there remained only Calais in the north, and the strip of land stretching from Bordeaux to Bayonne. In 1375 the Pope succeeded in negotiating a truce for two years, and before its expiry both the Black Prince and Edward III. had died, and England, bitterly chagrined at such complete and unexpected disasters, had passed under the rule of a child.
In 1378 hostilities were resumed, though the English wished to prolong the truce, and it seemed almost inevitable that Charles V. would complete his task of expelling |Last years of Charles V.| the foreigner from French soil. The English had no longer any allies in France. John de Montfort, who had clung to his old protectors ever since the outbreak of war in 1369, had been expelled from Brittany, which was now almost wholly occupied by royal troops. Charles of Navarre, who had been a traitor to both sides in turn, discovered his mistake in allowing the English power to be so completely depressed, and opened negotiations with John of Gaunt for a joint effort to recover the lost provinces. But between France and Castile the King of Navarre found himself powerless. The royal troops seized the strong places which he possessed in France, while the Castilians entered Navarre and laid siege to Pampeluna. Charles the Bad was deserted even by his own son, and was forced to make a humiliating peace in 1378. If the French forces had now been concentrated on the reduction of Bordeaux and Bayonne, and if the Castilian fleet had been employed to cut off reinforcements by sea, the English must have lost their last strongholds in Aquitaine. But Charles V. was tempted by his successes to undertake a more ambitious project—the annexation of the duchy of Brittany to the royal domain. Such a plan at once raised the whole of Brittany against him. The supporters of the House of Blois, who had fought for the king against de Montfort, were resolute to defend the independence of their province. The great soldiers of France, Bertrand du Guesclin and Olivier de Clisson, were Bretons by birth, and though they obeyed the royal orders, their action in Brittany was reluctant and inefficient. The rebellion was wholly successful; John de Montfort was restored to his duchy, and was even welcomed by the widowed Countess of Blois, who had so long championed the cause of her husband against him. This failure in Brittany was a bitter disappointment to Charles V., and his chagrin was increased by the death of Bertrand du Guesclin. The king himself did not long survive his most brilliant and faithful servant, and at the time of his death (September 16, 1380), the English still possessed a foothold in the north and south of France, which enabled them to make disastrous use of the disorders of the next reign.