Review of The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion, by Jonathan Sumption, pub. Faber 2023
The beginning seemeth a great pleasure, but the way out is very narrow to come honourably out thereof.’ - Edmund Dudley on foreign wars
This fifth volume has been a frustratingly long time coming; having devoured the previous four, I often wished the noble lord would get on with it and spend less time giving Reith Lectures and fulminating about lockdowns. But it arrived at last and completes a monumental achievement in historical writing. Though those of us who had collected the previous four in paperback and have made space on our shelves for the fifth were pardonably irritated to find that it was only available in hardback and Kindle (I bought the latter as I decided I couldn’t wait for the paperback).
As usual, one can’t fault the thoroughness of the research, the objectivity of the analysis or the readability of the clear, unfussy writing style - “But if the King’s illness had been a misfortune, his recovery was a disaster”. I would say that in this volume there are fewer of the odd little anecdotes and character sketches that enlivened the others, but that may well be the nature of the material. These were the end times of a preposterously long war which had left lands ravaged and populations exhausted. Most, even in the English government, wanted nothing more than to put a stop to it. The trouble was that they had painted themselves into a corner with their misplaced reverence for the baseless sovereignty claims of Edward III and the conquests of Henry V (who, had he lived, was looking likely to have realised they were unsustainable in the long run and to have come to an accommodation). They were, as Sumption puts it, “prisoners of their own claims, condemned by the logic of the past to carry on a war that they knew they could no longer win”. Even after it had been irrevocably lost, they went on playing ostrich: “Henry VI and Edward IV continued to make appointments to ghost offices in a Gascon administration which no longer existed, and grants of land and revenues which they no longer possessed”.
Meanwhile ordinary people in France continued to suffer the horrors that followed a “ville prise” and the depredations of unpaid soldiers on both sides who replaced their missing wages via pillage while their masters turned a blind eye:
“A soldier called Colard de Verly from the Dauphinist garrison of Guise was captured in the city’s territory while trying to carry off some local people for ransom. Colard was imprisoned in the felons’ jail pending his appearance in the city’s criminal court. The Dauphin’s representative demanded (and secured) his release, asserting that this was ‘not a crime but a simple act of war’. ‘In conducting his wars’, this officer explained, ‘the King does not have the means to pay his troops, who therefore have no choice but to burn down buildings and kill or kidnap people.” Their own people, be it noted.
English people, though protected from such effects of war in their own lands, were burdened with crippling taxes to support an increasingly useless venture; indeed one reason the English could never conclusively defeat their opponents was that the English parliament, which had to vote the taxes, had had enough of pouring money down an insatiable drain.
This volume, of course, includes the story of Joan of Arc (who, you may be interested to learn, wasn’t a shepherdess and never used her father’s name of Darc - apparently Lorraine women went by the mother’s name) and many another grim episode. Nevertheless, there are moments of light relief - the peace conference at which even the two mediators were not on speaking terms; the meeting to which the prince-bishop of Liege turned up “wearing plate armour and a straw hat”; phrases like “John the Fearless’s cynical promise of honest government and tax cuts”, at which we cannot but feel that very little has changed. But the lasting impression is of how much suffering was caused to ordinary people and to how little purpose. What lay behind the deed of amicable separation executed by Robin and Jeanne Porcher of Châteaudun in 1422, which declared that they could no longer afford to live together as husband and wife, we cannot know for sure, but in all probability it involved the ruin of trade and harvests and/or the ravages of looting, all direct results of a pointless and unjust war.
Perhaps the last word should rest with Bernard Georges of Bordeaux, a Gascon arrested by the French for supporting English rule in Gascony (many Gascons did, mainly because the English government was further away than the increasingly centralising French one and less able to interfere with their regional interests). “He told his interrogators that he had joined the rebellion because he ‘did not want to be French’, but it was clear that he had no emotional attachment to the English either. When asked why he had not migrated to England like some of his fellow citizens, he replied that he did not want to live in England and would not like the beer.” Clearly a man who preferred localism and minding one’s own business to nationalism of any kind.