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Home The Hundred Years' War with France The Second Period of Decline; Part 3 |
The Second Period of Decline; Part 3From that moment the Duke began to draw off from the English side. A congress met at Arras in 1435, when the French offered to cede Normandy and Aquitaine, in full sovereignty, if the English would abandon the claim on the throne. These terms - 7 better than those which Edward took at Bretigny - were foolishly refused. Thereon Burgundy went over to the French; in the same year Bedford, whose ability alone had kept the English cause together, died. From that time onward the English cause in France was a lost cause.The eighteen years from 1435 to 1453 from the last stage of the Hundred Years' War, a period of English disaster. Step by step we were beaten back. One small garrison after another was overcome. The year 1436 saw the French regain Paris; and, more ominous still, the Duke of Burgundy besieged Calais. Though all went wrong we showed a wonderful pertinacity in resisting. One noble after another, Warwick, York, Somerset, went to France and failed, yet none dared advise peace. One man had the courage to yield some in order to preserve the rest; William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, negotiated a truce, ceded Maine and Touraine, and arranged a marriage between Henry and Margaret of Anjou; yet the peace proved acutely unpopular; it is true that the French would hardly have kept it long, but it was the English who broke it, within four years of its making. And Suffolk scarcely survived his peace; he was impeached and banished, but his enemies did not mean to let him go. They waylaid his ship, seized him, and, using the gunwale of a boat as the block, caused his head to be hewed off. The truth is, that, in 1450, England had fallen sick of the very disease from which France was recovering - madness in the head and paralysis in the members. For Charles VI we read Henry VI; for Burgundian and Armagnac, York and Lancaster; but the symptoms were the same. The court was surrounded by nobles all seeking their own advantage; private feuds came before patriotism. Neither party had the energy to stave off further disaster in France, nor the moral courage to withdraw. They could only be active in fault-finding. In 1453 Talbot led some six thousand men to drive off the French force besieging Chatillon on the Dordogne. His command was not much less than Henry Vs at Agincourt, but he had men of different mettle against him. The French withdrew to their entrenched camp, beat off Talbot's charge, and eventually scattered his whole force in rout. Talbot himself was slain, "very old and worn with years". And with his death a war which was also "very old and worn with years" came to an end. The close of the Hundred Years' War marks an epoch in English history. We have seen two distinct stages of English wars with France. The first belongs to the reigns of the Norman and Angevin kings, and was the natural result of English kings holding a double position, in being Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, Counts of Anjou and Maine., These wars were essentially feudal struggles between a feudal, superior and turbulent feudal barons. The second stage is that of the Hundred Years' War, in which both Edward III and Henry V asserted a claim to be Kings of France; one wrested from France the great duchy of Aquitaine in full sovereignty; the other actually won the crown for his son. These were not feudal, but national struggles. It was not the Duke of Normandy against the King of France, but England against France. The enterprise of English politics was turned to conquest in France. France was regarded as the natural field of English expansion. After many ups and downs this policy failed and was abandoned. When we again take up the story of English foreign policy under the Tudors we shall find that it has undergone a complete change. Wars with France did not indeed cease, but they were no longer wars of conquest. Further, England no longer thirsts for military glory. A new field of ambition has opened. Hence forth her eyes turn to the sea and across it to the New World. |
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