Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

Thomas had joined the pursuit, riding with Sam and a dozen other archers. Those archers would all become rich on their plunder, but Thomas had not ridden to find jewels or plate armour or an expensive horse.

‘You found him?’ Genevieve asked. She sat beside him, her head on his shoulder, and Hugh leaned against her.

‘I found them both.’

‘Tell me again,’ she said, like a child wanting to hear a familiar and comforting story.

So Thomas told her how he had caught up with Cardinal Bessières and how the cardinal’s men-at-arms had tried to protect their master, and how Sam and the archers had beaten them down, and Thomas had confronted Father Marchant, who had loudly declared that he was a priest and not a combatant, and Thomas had used la Malice to disembowel him so that his guts slid out from his robe and spilt onto the saddle and then down to the ground, and Thomas had laughed at him. ‘That’s payment for my wife’s eye, you bastard.’ He had been tempted to let the priest die in agony, but then killed him with another swing of la Malice .

Cardinal Bessières had been begging for mercy.

‘You are a combatant,’ Thomas had said.

‘No! I am a cardinal! I will pay you!’

‘I see no red hat,’ Thomas said, ‘only a helmet,’ and the cardinal had tried to pull the bascinet off his head, then screamed as he saw la Malice coming, and the scream only stopped when Saint Peter’s blade had ripped open his throat. Only then had Thomas turned back towards the battlefield where the dead now lay beneath the stars.

Roland was with his Bertille. ‘I should have shouted at you,’ he told Thomas, ‘I didn’t realise you had been deafened.’

‘It was a terrible mistake,’ Thomas lied gravely, ‘and I apologise.’

‘It was not dishonourable,’ Roland said, ‘because you were not to know he had surrendered. He was still holding a sword, and you were deafened.’

‘It was God’s will,’ Bertille said. She looked radiant.

Roland nodded. ‘It was God’s will,’ he agreed, then, after a pause. ‘And la Malice ?’

‘She’s gone,’ Thomas said.

‘Where?’

‘Where she cannot be found,’ Thomas said.

He had taken la Malice to the largest gap in the hedge where men were piling weapons discarded on the battlefield. The good weapons were put into one pile, the cheap and worthless weapons onto another. There were broken swords, shattered crossbows, an axe with a bent blade, and a score of rusted falchions. ‘What happens to them?’ Thomas had asked a man wearing the Prince of Wales’s three-feathered badge.

‘Melted down, like as not. That looks like a piece of shit.’

‘It is,’ Thomas had said, and he had tossed the Sword of the Fisherman onto the pile of worthless junk. It looked no different to all the other cheap falchions. A shattered spear had landed on top of it, then a broken sword had clattered onto the heap. When he had looked back Thomas could not even tell which sword was the relic and which was not. It would be put into the fire, melted, and then reforged. Perhaps a ploughshare?

‘Now we go home,’ he said. ‘Castillon first, then back to England.’

‘Home,’ Genevieve said happily.

The Sword of Saint Peter had come. It had gone. It was over. It was time to go home.

Historical Note

Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King Edward III, is best known as the Black Prince, though that name was not coined until long after his death. No one is quite sure why he was to be called the Black Prince, but even in France he was remembered as le Prince Noir , and I have come across references as late as the nineteenth century to French mothers threatening their disobedient children with a ghostly visit from this long-dead enemy. Some say the name arose from the colour of his armour, but there is little evidence to support that explanation, nor does it seem to be a reference to his character, which, so far as we can tell from the little information that remains, was anything but dark. He was generous, probably headstrong, probably romantic (he made an impractical marriage to the beautiful Joan, Maid of Kent), loyal to his father, but otherwise little is known of his personality. He is most famous as a soldier, though much of his life was spent in inefficient administration of his father’s French possessions. He fought at Crécy, and shortly before his death won a victory at Najera in Spain, but Poitiers is his most significant military achievement, and, despite his fame, the battle has receded from common memory while his father’s great victory at Crécy, and Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt remain celebrated.

Yet Poitiers deserves a place among England’s most significant military achievements. It was an extraordinary battle. The prince was outnumbered, his army was thirsty, hungry, and travel-worn, yet it fought, by medieval standards, a very long battle and ended it as outright victors and with the King of France as their prisoner. King Jean II was taken back to London where he joined another royal prisoner, King David II of Scotland, who had been captured after the battle of Neville’s Cross ten years before (described in Thomas of Hookton’s adventure Vagabond ).

The battle of Poitiers was the culmination of the prince’s second great chevauchée through France. The first, in 1355, had struck south-east from Gascony and laid waste a great swathe of country, stopping just short of Montpellier, but ravaging, among many other towns and cities, the bourg of Carcassonne. A chevauchée was a destructive raid, designed to inflict severe economic damage on the enemy who, to end the losses, would need to fight a battle. If the enemy refused battle, as the French did in 1355, the chevauchée resulted in a shameful loss of face for the French and huge profit for the English. If they accepted battle, as King Jean chose in 1356, they risked defeat. Or perhaps they would achieve revenge and victory.

There are many riddles around the battle of Poitiers. One of the most puzzling is whether the prince really wanted to fight on that September morning. The previous day, a Sunday, had been spent in tortuous negotiations with the cardinals (Bessières is fictional, but Talleyrand was the principal negotiator). There is evidence that the prince was ready to accept the humiliating terms the church offered, but some historians believe he was merely playing for time. What does seem certain is that the battle began early on the Monday morning when the French perceived the English left wing retreating, and they feared that the prince planned to slip away across the Miosson and so escape them. That would have been an extraordinarily risky manoeuvre, to pass an army over a river while a dwindling rearguard defended against an enemy intent on stopping the retreat, but undoubtedly the Earl of Warwick’s battle was intending to cross the Miosson. My own suspicion is that the prince hoped to evade the French and continue his retreat to Gascony, but was prepared to change that plan if the French attacked.

If the prince was in two minds, the same could be said of King Jean. He was no great warrior and he undoubtedly feared the power of the English archers. On the other hand he had the advantage of numbers and must have known his enemy was weakened by hunger. Some of his advisers suggested caution, others urged him to battle. He chose battle. It is possible that neither side was wholly committed to fighting that day, yet the hotheads on the French side prevailed and King Jean decided to attack. The prince, I am sure, would have preferred to retreat.