The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

It happens that the personality of Don Pedro is not unknown to us, from other sources, and the bombastic account[38] written by his faithful squire, Gutierre de Gamez, has so many interesting points in it about Rouen at this date that I must refer to it, if only to bring out of its obscurity a book that is hardly known, and almost deserves to rank near the more famous and extended chronicle of the "Loyal Servitor" of Bayard. Without going at any length into a life which does not concern us, I may say briefly that after his education at the Court of Castile, which he is said to have owed to his descent from the royal house of France, Don Pedro was commissioned at twenty-five years of age to attack the Barbary Corsairs in the Western Mediterranean. Ever since Du Guesclin had deposed Pedro the Cruel, and placed Henry of Trastamare upon the throne of Castille, the alliance between that power and France remained a political tradition; and at about this time Charles VI. being at war with England, asked for help, with which Don Pedro was sent. He actually took a town in Cornwall, laid Portland under contribution, and burnt the town of Poole. Returning to Harfleur, he was prevented by contrary winds from again crossing the Channel, and therefore decided to sail up the Seine and winter at Rouen. The luxury of the French nobles was only one of the many reasons of the weakness and disaster of the nation, and Don Pedro's voyage up the river seems to have been made pleasant to him by every châtelaine upon its banks, until he reached the Clos des Galées (which is rightly described in the "Victorial"), and met the somewhat gruff demands of the authorities of Rouen.

They must have very soon changed their opinions, however; indeed, from the fact that in July of that same year the welcome and the gifts offered to Louis, Duke of Orléans, by the sheriffs were entirely contrary to the wishes of the population, who had just rebelled against his taxes, we may infer that a friend of that Duke, as Don Pedro showed himself to be on visiting Paris a little later, was not likely to have long been treated with hostility or even indifference by the civic officials.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that we soon hear of a love-affair in Rouen, and that too with the daughter of M. de Bellengues, the captain of the town himself. This lady had but just become a widow, after her marriage with Renaud de Trie, Admiral of France, which took place from the Hôtel du Bec, before a large assembly of her father's friends in their parish church of St. Lô, with sixteen "Farceurs" dancing before the procession to amuse the people. "She is too good-looking," said the Captain, "for me to prevent anyone from seeing her;" and by this brilliant ceremony he gave a decisive check to the prevailing custom of secret weddings in a private chapel.[39] The description of the Château of Sérifontaine, near Rouen, where the gallant Don first met the old and sickly admiral and his pretty wife, is as complete as almost any other I have seen, as a picture of a great French nobleman's house at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

I have no space to quote the "Victorial" unfortunately, and from its pages I can only hint at the abundance you may gather of the ordered beauty and quiet of the place; of the chapel with its band of wind-instruments and minstrels; of the gracious orchards and gardens by the stream; of the lake that could be drained at will, to choose the best fishes for the Admiral's table; of the five and forty sporting dogs and the men who cleaned the kennels; of the long rows of stalls, each with its horse, in the spacious stables; of the falcons and their perches and their keepers; of the separate lodgings of my lady, joined to the main building by a drawbridge, and filled with dainty furniture. There, too, may be read how Madame went forth so soon as she had risen from her bed, with her ten maids-in-waiting, to a shrubbery where each sat in silence, with her rosary and her Book of Hours; how they then set to picking flowers till it was time for Mass; how breakfast followed, with chickens and roasted game upon a silver dish, and wine; how they all rode out together of an early afternoon, taking what gentlemen were there, and singing blithely till the fields echoed as with the songs of Paradise. Into this delightful abode the old Admiral had invited the sea-captain, who was a guest of Rouen. The Spaniard was welcomed with a banquet on his arrival, at which his host, too feeble now to ride or hunt, did the honours of his house right courteously, providing sweet music during all the dinner, and a ball afterwards, at which his wife danced for an hour with the gay Don Pedro. After a ride round the castle grounds the visitor went off to Paris, and can hardly have been surprised, when he returned to Rouen and found the Admiral had died, to receive a message from the pretty widow to come up and hear the news.

But the lovers were unlucky, for she might not wed again so soon after her widowhood, and he was under orders for the war, and had no permission for such dalliance from his master, the King of Castille. So he sailed away towards Harfleur, after many protestations of affection on each side, during an eclipse of the sun which came on as he left Rouen harbour, and much terrified his sailors. And the end of his little story is that he married Doña Beatrix of Portugal, and died in 1453; while Jeanne de Bellengues espoused as her second husband Louis Mallet de Graville, Sieur de Montagu, Grand-Master of the Arbalétriers of France, and died still in her youth, in 1419. She was buried in the chapel of the Trinity in Rouen Cathedral, and all her husband's lands were confiscated by the English King. The intimate connection that existed at this time with Spain is exemplified again by the marriage of Robert de Bracquemont, who surrendered Pont de l'Arche to King Henry during the English advance on Rouen, with Inez de Mendoza, daughter of a high functionary at the Court of Castille, where he had been the French ambassador, and owned estates in Fuentesol and Pennarenda.

I have mentioned the irritation of the populace when Louis d'Orléans was received so well by the sheriffs. But their disgust at "the six barrels of wine, and the bales of royal scarlet" then presented may not have been merely political; for many must have remembered how in 1390 the Hôtel de Ville had actually been seized for debt owing to the extravagant gifts of silver plate presented to Isabeau of Bavaria. The family of Mustel in fact had "fait mettre en criées et subhastations le manoir de la ville." And in times of such distress the citizens may well have objected to any useless ostentation on the part of their officials.

Disturbances continued rife in Rouen through these terrible years of the weakness of the King. Chains had to be fastened permanently across many squares and streets in the town, which had become absolutely depopulated owing to the misery of such riots as that of 1411, or the still more serious outbreak of 1417, when the perpetual quarrels of the Armagnac and Burgundian parties were reflected in the factions of the town. The burgesses declared for them of Burgundy, who posed as the "Progressives," or defenders of the people's rights, and therefore objected to the Bailli and the Château, as being the representatives of the Conservative and aristocratic Armagnacs, the gatherers of those hateful taxes, which had been doubled that year, and had thus made still more difficult a commerce already crippled by constant changes in the currency. Perpetual imposts and extraordinary war-subventions had drained the town of its resources for some time. Every religious community had been forced to forego all privileges and contribute like the rest. And after Bernard, Count of Armagnac, had assumed official direction of the Government, his excessive exactions made it easy to add the loss of Harfleur and the defeat of Agincourt, to the many sins of his party. The brigandage and violence of an Armagnac, Jean Raoulet, all along the Seine, brought home to the people of Rouen with an even more startling clearness the necessity for trying what the other side could do for them.

So John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had an easy part to play as the champion of the downtrodden people. On the 24th of April he sent a political manifesto into the town (very much of the kind to which modern France has become accustomed) promising relief from taxation. Before swallowing the bait entirely the burgesses submitted the seals to examination in Paris, but the drapers of Rouen scarcely waited for confirmation before they attacked the royal tax-gatherers with cries of "Long live Burgundy!" Thereupon d'Armagnac sent three commissioners with a troop of Bretons and Genoese cross-bowmen from Paris. But the townsfolk would not let the mercenaries enter, seizing the keys of the town from the officials and mounting their own guard at every gate. The three commissioners, powerless without their escort, took refuge in the Château. The King's bailli, Raoul de Gancourt, refused to leave his post. He seems to have been a man brave enough to make his mark upon the stricken field of Agincourt, and intellectual enough to win a local reputation as a poet, a nature in fact somewhat akin to Charles d'Orléans. But though he could make no head against the rioters he would not leave his honour behind him in the Rue Beauvoisine, and gathered round his hospitable hearth a few of the choice spirits of the town who joined him in deploring the excesses of the populace.

Outside in the market-place Burgundian orators were rousing the passions of the mob, and chief among the leaders of the people were Alain Blanchart and De Livet, a canon of the Cathedral, then in charge of the diocese during the absence of Louis d'Harcourt, who much preferred the amusements of a courtier to the pious seclusion of an archbishop. As soon as the news of all this reached Paris, the Dauphin himself, with a brilliant suite, set out for Rouen, and encamped in the fortress on St. Catherine's Hill, to the south-east of the town, between the Aubette and the Seine. A message sent him by De Gancourt, intercepted by the citizens, put the finishing touch to their resentment. Three men were picked out to rid them of the bailli. One of them was Guillot Leclerc (afterwards beheaded for his crime), but Alain Blanchart had no share in the assassination, whatever you may imagine to be the meaning of Monstrelet's remarks. At midnight on the 23rd of July (the day of the Dauphin's arrival on St. Catherine) some masked men went to De Gancourt's door, begging him to receive a malefactor they had arrested. The moment the bailli appeared they fell upon him and left him dead in the gutter. Directly afterwards they rushed on to the house of his lieutenant-general, Jean Legier, seized him and his nephew, and threw them into the Seine, together with other prominent members of the Armagnac faction.

The only result was a short blockade of the town by the Dauphin's troops and a military demonstration from the Château, which could be reinforced from outside through a postern to the west of the Porte Bouvreuil.[40] The citizens then surrendered, the Sire de Gamaches was made bailli, and Jean d'Harcourt (a relation of the absentee archbishop) was made captain of the town, with command of the castle; but the Dauphin's party was not strong enough to punish as they wished, and Rouen was left in a state of ill-suppressed disloyalty. This broke out once more into rebellion at the beginning of the new year. Robert de Bracquemont, made Admiral of France in April 1417 (whose Spanish alliances I have mentioned on [p. 174]), was sent down with troops as lieutenant-general of the King in Rouen, Gisors, Caux, and Honfleur. But he could not get into the town, and had to wait in the fortress of St. Catherine. During his short tenure of office the negotiations (preserved in the archives of Dieppe) which he was obliged to attempt, in order to secure some sort of coalition between the hostile factions against the English army, are a lamentable revelation of the dissensions of the time. When the supremacy of the Burgundians became inevitable, he went away, as we have seen, to Spain, leaving his opponent, Guy le Bouteiller, to take command of the castle of Rouen, and bring back with him Alain Blanchart with other democratic exiles; and these two are prominent names in the siege that is to come, for Blanchart was made captain of the picked burgess-troop of the Arbalétriers of Rouen, Guillaume d'Hondetot was made bailli, and Laghen, the Bastard of Arly, was made lieutenant.[41] The Royalist Armagnacs were definitely abandoned, but, as we shall see, the unhappy town gained little in the crisis of her fate from her Burgundian sympathies.