A Distant Mirror (57 page)

Still trying to avert that last calamity, Charles again delegated Coucy as diplomat to re-open negotiations with England, this time without benefit of the royal Dukes, to spare their expensive presence. Over the next six months, from January to June 1377, the parleys met variously at Boulogne, Calais, and halfway between at Montreuil on the coast. As the only lay noble in a group of ministers, Coucy had as his chief colleague Bureau de la Rivière, the Chamberlain, along with two ecclesiastical ministers, the Bishops of Laon and Bayeux, and various members of the Council.

The English envoys, representing adherents of both Lancaster and the late Prince, were men with whom Coucy was very likely acquainted, from his recent visit to England if not before. Varying from one meeting to another, they included the guardian of the heir to the throne, Sir Guichard d’Angle, a gallant and admired Gascon, long a campaigner with the Black Prince; the Lollard knight Sir Richard Stury, whom Lancaster had reinstated in office; Lord Thomas Percy, a
veteran of the French wars and brother of Sir Henry Percy; the Earl of Salisbury; and lastly a trusted servant of the court connected with Lancaster’s entourage, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love,
The Book of the Duchess
, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French, from which he had translated the
Roman de la Rose
, something in the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”

In different circumstances from Langland, Chaucer enjoyed a grant from the King of a daily pitcher of wine and was married to Katherine Swynford’s sister Philippa, a relationship that had brought them both into the ducal household.
The Book of the Duchess
was a graceful elegy for Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, a well-beloved lady who had died at the age of 27 after bearing seven children. Though its choice of language was considered peculiar, its author lost no favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic of
Troilus and Criseyde
, adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace with France.

Poets and writers served frequently as ambassadors because their rhetorical powers conferred distinction on the elaborate speeches required on these occasions. Petrarch had served the Visconti as envoy or at least as ornamental figurehead of a mission. Boccaccio negotiated for Florence with the Pope, and the poet Deschamps acted for Charles V and his successor. Diplomacy was a ceremonial and verbose procedure with great attention paid to juridical detail and points of honor, which may have been one reason why it so often failed to produce agreement.

The prolonged parleys of 1377 acquainted Coucy with every pivot in the complex relationship of England and France. Offers and counteroffers and intricate bargains were discussed concerning Scotland, Castile, Calais, a proposed new dynasty for Aquitaine under a son of Edward III who would renounce his ties to England, or failing that, a partition, or an exchange of fiefs as complicated as a game of jack-straws. As always since the war began, nuncios of the Pope added their
intensive efforts at mediation. Although the French held the upper hand, the English out of weakness and indecision could not be brought to accept any settlement, even a proposed match between Prince Richard and King Charles’s seven-year-old daughter Marie.

The first parley broke up without progress and reconvened a month later. Twice the truce, due to expire April 1, was prolonged for a month to keep the negotiations alive. The envoys treated earnestly in long working sessions. What was Coucy’s role, what Chaucer’s? Their words have vanished; no record was kept because the discussions, especially regarding the marriage, were secret. Charles’s instructions to his envoys stated that “The King does not wish the marriage to be broached on his part, but if the English mention it, you may listen to what they say and afterwards report to the King.”

The French offered many proposals, including title to twelve cities of Aquitaine (which England already held), if Edward would give back Calais and all that he had taken in Picardy; either that, they said, “or else nothing.” Stubbornly the English refused, believing that as long as they held their foothold in northern France they could yet return and regain their losses.

England’s domestic situation during the parleys erupted in a new crisis. Lancaster had suppressed but far from settled English discontents. A new Parliament, sufficiently packed by the Duke to elect his steward as Speaker, obediently granted subsidies in January. The bishops were not so amenable and Wyclif was their target. He had not yet voiced his denial of the Eucharist and the priesthood, but his statement of civil dominion and disendowment was heresy enough. Although his call for reform of clerical abuses and his anti-papism had support among the clergy, they were not going to wait passively to be disendowed. Archbishop Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay of London summoned Wyclif to a convocation in February to answer for his heretical preaching. The recurring struggle of centuries between crown and Church, was now played out again in an uproarious fracas at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Lancaster hoped to discredit the bishops with the laity. He assigned four Masters of Theology to Wyclif’s defense and proceeded himself in company with the Marshal, Sir Henry Percy, and their armed retinues to attend the hearings at St. Paul’s. A crowd of aroused citizens filled the cathedral, angered by rumors that Lancaster was planning to extend the Marshal’s jurisdiction over the city’s traditional right to maintain public order. Bishop Courtenay was popular with the Londoners, the Duke was not. Anger rose when the armed guard shoved people aside to make way for the Duke and Marshal, followed by a
loud quarrel when Courtenay refused the Duke’s demand for a chair for Wyclif. The young and vigorous Bishop, himself the son of an earl and a descendant of Edward I, was not about to take orders inside his own precincts.

“I will make you bend, you and all the rest of the bishops,” growled Lancaster. The crowd moved and shouted in menace, Lancaster threatened to arrest the disturbers, Courtenay told him if he did so in the cathedral he would be excommunicated. “A little more of this,” the Duke was heard to mutter, “and I will have you dragged out of the church by the hair of your head.” The crowd’s rage exploded, the Duke and Marshal judged it wise to withdraw, Wyclif had not even spoken. Lancaster had succeeded in breaking up the proceedings, which was his object, but at a cost of turning popular sentiment ever more against himself, not against the bishops.

London seethed, and on news that Percy had arrested a citizen for slandering the Duke, boiled over. A mob gathered in a lynching mood to rush the Savoy Palace, and on its way fell upon a priest who spoke insultingly of Peter de la Mare and beat him to death, as Marcel’s mob had murdered a hapless victim of its rage twenty years before. Warned while dining on oysters at the Savoy, Lancaster and Percy escaped by boat down the Thames to take refuge in the honored halls of the Princess of Wales and her son, where none would venture to assault them. Meanwhile Bishop Courtenay, also warned and fearing a catastrophe for which he might be blamed, had hastened to the Savoy Palace and succeeded in quieting the mob.

After flight and humiliation, Lancaster required that his authority be restored by a formal apology from the city. The Princess pleaded with the citizens to be reconciled with the Duke for her sake; the King’s sovereignty was invoked; the authorities of London exacted the release of Peter de la Mare as the price of their apology; the clergy regained the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer. Factions were deepened and the state further torn by the affair.

In the excitement at St. Paul’s, the matter of Wyclif had not been tested. The English prelates, caught between clerical interest and national sentiment, might have been content to let the matter drop, but the papacy was not. In May, Gregory XI issued five Bulls addressed to the English episcopacy and to the King and the University of Oxford, condemning Wyclif’s errors and demanding his arrest. All discussion of his heretical doctrines was to be suppressed and all who supported them removed from office. An issue full of danger was added to all the other sources of strife. The new Parliament was strongly anti-papal; the King, babbling of hawks and hunting instead of attending to the
urgent needs of his soul, was dying. For the moment, while England waited uneasily for the change of reign, the bishops held the proceedings against Wyclif in abeyance.

In France the negotiators held a final meeting in May at Montreuil in the ancient walled castle whose western ramparts faced the sea. The Chancellors of both countries took part, Pierre d’Orgement for France and the Bishop of St. David’s for England. Terms were discussed at length in open session, which Charles wanted so that his final offer should be formally submitted and receive a firm answer. He did not get it. While generous in what it left in English hands, his offer withheld sovereignty over any part of France and insisted on Calais. Concealing rejection in evasion, the English said they lacked final authority and would have to submit the terms to their King. As the event shortly proved, the French must at this point have started preparing for belligerent action. While the talks petered out, the little Princess Marie died in Paris, eliminating the proposed marriage. The parley broke up with no place or date agreed upon for another meeting and no prolongation of the truce.

By the time the English envoys reached home, King Edward too had died, on June 23, the penultimate day of the truce. The jubilee year of his reign had passed virtually unnoticed and his death excited hardly more attention. He died deserted by the minions of power, including Alice Perrers, who was said to have stripped the rings from the King’s fingers as she departed. A ten-year-old child mounted the throne, initiating the divisive time that was to spread its wreckage over the next century and confirm Langland’s warning from Holy Writ, “Woe is the land with a youth for its king!”

Isabella de Coucy, summoned from France in April by couriers on “business of extreme urgency,”
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was at her father’s side when he died. Shortly before the end, she dispatched couriers to Coucy with news and “important questions” to be settled. On June 26, even before her father’s funeral, she requested and received permission to return to France, evidently with urgent matters to discuss.

The problem for Coucy was more than simply one of allegiance; it was aggravated by great revenues, by bonds of kinship of great importance in that day, and by the oath of fellowship in the Order of the Garter. To repudiate fealty, kinship, and fellowship was no light thing.
Other lords, like the Captal de Buch and Clisson, had transferred their loyalty from one side to another, but they were generally Gascons or Bretons or Hainaulters who did not feel themselves basically French or English. Coucy’s own seneschal, the valiant Chanoine de
Robersart, turned English while he was in England with Coucy in the 1360s. After swearing homage to Edward III, he coolly returned with Lancaster’s army to ravage Picardy, which a few years earlier he had fought with such verve to defend. He was, however, a native of Hainault.
^*

Plainly, Coucy could play no great part in his country’s affairs if he maintained neutrality as before. He not only needed to take sides; he doubtless wanted to take sides. National feeling had swelled in the years of French recovery. Writers gloried in the many cities of Picardy, Normandy, and Aquitaine retaken by Charles V. “Not Roland, not Arthur nor Oliver,” exclaims the knight in the
Songe du Vergier
, a political allegory of 1376, “ever did such deeds of arms as you have done by your wisdom, your power and your prayers!” (and, the author might have added, by Charles’s persuasive use of money). “When you came to the throne the horns and pride of your enemies reached up to heaven. Thanks to God, you have broken their horns and profoundly humiliated them.”

Out of the polarity of war, a sense of French nationhood developed against the foil of England. In a dialogue between a French and an English soldier written about 1370 by the future Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, the Englishman declares that Normandy at least should belong to England and that they are within their rights in this matter. “Hold your peace!” cries the Frenchman. “That is not true. You can hold nothing this side of the sea except by tyranny; the sea is and ought to be your boundary.” That was a new idea. Homage and dynastic marriages were still the form of loyalty, but country was becoming the determinant. No longer could a French noble like Harcourt have so guiltlessly joined and guided the English in invasion of his native land. No longer could Coucy straddle loyalty across the Channel.

Two months after King Edward’s death, Coucy addressed to Richard II a formal renunciation of “all that I hold of you in faith and homage.” Dated August 26, 1377, and presented to Richard by several lords and squires sent by Coucy to witness the delivery, the letter recalled the “alliance” he had had with “my most honored and redoubted
lord and father, the King lately deceased (on whom God have mercy),” and continued: