The King Without a Kingdom (29 page)

I am finally beginning to understand the reasons for the favour he enjoys. First, he had joined the king in the
chevauchée
of Saintonge, in ’51, a small expedition, but it had allowed John II to believe that he would be a victorious king. The archpriest had brought him his troop, twenty men in armour and sixty foot sergeants. How could he have gathered them together, in Vélines? The fact remains that this formed a company. One thousand golden écus, settled by the War Treasury, for one year’s service. That allowed the king to say: ‘We have been companions for a long while, haven’t we, archpriest?’

After that, he had served under Monsieur of Spain, and shrewdly never failed to mention it before the king. It was even under the orders of Charles of Spain, in his campaign of ’53, that he had chased the English out of his very own castle in Vélines and the surrounding lands, Montcarret, Montaigne, Montravel … The English held Libourne and kept a big garrison of archers there. But he, Arnaud of Cervole, held Sainte-Foy and was not willing to have it taken from him … ‘I am against the pope because he took away my archpriesthood; I am against the Englishman because he ravaged my castle; I am against the Navarrese because he slew my con stable. Ah! If only I had been in Laigle, close by him, to defend him!’ It was music to the ears of the king.

And then, finally, the archpriest excels in the new explosive devices. He loves them, he tames them, he plays with them. Nothing pleases him more, so he told me, than lighting a fuse, after underground preparations, and to see a castle’s tower open up like a flower, like a bouquet, throwing up into the air men and stones, pikes and tiles. Because of that, he is held in some awe, if not esteem, at least a certain respect; amongst the hardiest of knights, many are loath to approach these weapons of the Devil, but he handles them as if they were toys. There are such people, whenever new methods of waging war appear, who immediately grasp their importance and build a reputation upon their usage. While the valets-at-arms run for cover, hands over their ears, and even the barons and the marshals step back warily, Cervole watches the barrels of gunpowder roll by with an amused glimmer in his eye, gives clear orders, jumps over the fougasses, slides into the saps,
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crawls along on his cubitières, clambers out, calmly strikes a light, takes his time to gain a blind spot or crouch down behind a wall, while thunder rumbles, the earth quakes and the walls open.

Such tasks require solid teams. Cervole has trained his own; deft louts, slaughter-loving, delighted to spread terror, to break, to destroy. He pays them well; risk deserves payment. And he goes about flanked by his two lieutenants, whom one might think had been chosen for their names: Gaston de la Parade and Bernard d’Orgueil.
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Between us we knew that, were King John to put these three powdermen to use, Breteuil would fall within a week. But no; he wanted his belfry on wheels.

Meanwhile, as the great tower rose up, Don Sanche López, his Navarrese and his Englishmen, shut up in the castle, didn’t seem especially nervous. The guards were relieved by their fellows at set times on the battlement parapets. The besieged, well stocked with provisions, looked healthy. From time to time they shot a volley of arrows at the workers, but sparingly, so as not to use up their ammunition needlessly. These shots sometimes occurred as the king was passing and brought him the illusion of an exploit. ‘Did you see? An entire volley of arrows happened upon him, and our sire did not flinch, not at all; ah! The good king …’ and allowed the archpriest, Orgueil and la Parade to cry out to him: ‘Watch out, sire, we will stave off attack!’ Shielding him with their bodies against the darts that slammed into the grass at their feet.

He didn’t smell good, the archpriest. But it has to be admitted that everyone stank, the whole camp stank: it was above all by the smell that Breteuil was under siege! The breeze carried the odours of excrement, because all those men busy shovelling, carting, sawing, nailing, relieved themselves as close as they could to their place of work. Nobody washed at all, and the king himself, constantly in armour …

Using as many perfumes and essences as I could, I stayed long enough to observe the weaknesses of King John. Ah! So much recklessness is a wonder!

There were two cardinals sent there by the Holy Father to attempt to reach a widespread general peace; he received letters from all the princes of Europe who criticized his behaviour towards the King of Navarre and advised him to release him; he learned that taxes everywhere weren’t coming in, and that not only in Normandy, not only in Paris, but throughout the kingdom, the people’s mood was sour and on the verge of revolt; he knew, most importantly, that two English armies were readying themselves against him, that of Lancaster in the Cotentin, which was receiving reinforcements, and that of Aquitaine … But nothing was of the slightest importance, in his eyes, compared to the siege of a small Norman stronghold, and nothing could distract him from it. Insisting stubbornly on the detail without any longer perceiving the whole is a most unnatural vice in a prince.

For an entire month, John II only went to Paris once, for four days, and to commit there a foolishness that I will tell you of shortly. And the only edict he didn’t leave to his advisors was the proclamation heard in the towns and bailiwicks up to six leagues around Breteuil that all manner of mason, carpenter, digger, sapper, hoer, woodcutter and other manoeuvrer were to come to him, without delay, bringing with them those instruments and tools necessary for their crafts, to work on components of the laying siege.

The sight of his great, mobile belfry, his assault tower as he called it, filled him with satisfaction. Three storeys; each platform wide enough for two hundred men to stand and fight on. That made a total of six hundred soldiers who would occupy this extraordinary machine, once enough faggots and fascines
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had been brought, enough stones carted and enough earth tamped down to form the path along which it would roll on its four enormous wheels.

King John was so proud of his belfry that he had invited people to come and see it being built and then put into action. This is how the bastard of Castile, Henri de Trastamare, as well as the Earl of Douglas, had come to be there.

‘Messire Edward has his Navarrese, but I have my Scottish earl,’ said the king elegantly, ignoring the fact that Philip of Navarre brought half of Normandy to the English, while Messire of Douglas brought nothing more to the King of France than his valiant sword.

I can still hear the king explaining to us: ‘Look, messeigneurs, this tower may be pushed to whichever part of the ramparts we wish, and look down upon them, enabling the assailants to fire all sorts of bolts and projectiles right into the stronghold, or even attack the battlement parapets themselves. The purpose of the leathers nailed to its sides is to stop dead the enemy arrows.’ And I continued to insist on talking to him about the conditions for peace!

The Spaniard and the Scot were not the only ones staring at the enormous wooden tower. The people of Messire Sanche López were also watching it, with caution, because the archpriest had set up other machines which rained down balls of stone and powder darts upon the garrison. The castle had, so to speak, had its roof blown off. But López’s people didn’t seem that frightened. They made holes halfway up their own walls. ‘To run away more easily,’ said the king.

Finally the great day arrived. I was there; the matter was of interest to me. The Holy See has its troops, and towns that we need to be able to defend, and I stood nearby on a small hillock, out of the way. King John II appears, wearing his helmet crowned with flowers of gold. With his gleaming sword he signals the launch of the attack, while the trumpets sound. From the summit of the leather-covered tower flies the fleur-de-lis banner; below, the banners of the troops occupying the three storeys. The belfry is a veritable bouquet of standards! And now it is on the move. Men and horses are hitched up to it in clusters, and the archpriest orchestrates with his rants. I was told that one thousand pounds’ worth of hemp rope had been used. The engine makes progress, albeit very slowly, with a swaying motion and the creaking of wood, but it makes progress. To see it moving forward thus, rocking a little and festooned with flags, the image of an attacking ship comes to mind. And the ship does indeed board the stronghold, in great tumult. They are already fighting on the battlements, at the level of the third platform. Swords cross, arrows fly in tight volleys. The army surrounding the castle, all heads up, faces raised, are holding their breath. Up there, magnificent feats are performed. The king, ventail raised, watches, his superb battle in the air.

And then suddenly, an enormous explosion gives the troops a start, and a cloud of smoke obscures the banners at the belfry’s summit.

Messire of Lancaster had left the cannons in the charge of Don Sanche López, who had carefully avoided using them up until now. And there are the cannon muzzles poking through the holes made in the castle walls and shooting at close range into the rolling tower, bursting open the covering of cowhides, flattening rows of men on the platforms, shattering pieces of the wooden frame.

Try as they might to join in the battle, the archpriest’s ballisters
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and catapults cannot prevent the firing of a second salvo, then a third. Not only iron cannonballs, but also burning pots, a sort of Greek fire, hit the belfry. The men fall, screaming, or rush and tumble down the ladders or even throw themselves into the void, horribly burnt. From the top of the noble machine flames soar upward. And then, with an infernal crack, the whole upper storey collapses; its occupants are crushed under a blazing furnace … Never in my entire life, Archambaud, have I heard a more appalling clamour of suffering; and I wasn’t even that close. The archers were trapped in a tangle of incandescent beams, their chests crushed, their legs, their arms going up in flames. The cowhides let off an awful stench as they burned. The tower was leaning, leaning, and just as we thought it was going to collapse, it came to a halt, tilted at an angle, still flaming. Men threw water at it as best they could, they went about removing the crushed and burned bodies, and all the while the castle’s defenders danced for joy on the walls, crying: ‘Loyalty to Saint George! Loyalty to Navarre!’

King John, even before this disaster, seemed to be looking around him for someone to blame, though there was no one but himself. But the archpriest was there, under his iron hat, and the king’s great wrath, that was to burst, for the while remained within the royal helmet. Because Cervole was probably the only man in the whole army who wouldn’t have hesitated in saying to the king: ‘Look at your stupidity, sire. I advised you to dig mines, rather than build these big scaffolds that haven’t been in use for almost fifty years now. It is no longer the age of the Knights Templar, and Breteuil is not Jerusalem.’

The king simply asked: ‘This tower, can it be repaired?’

‘No, sire.’

‘So break up what is left. We will use it to fill in the ditches.’

That evening, I thought it timely to speak to him seriously on the subject of the beginnings of a peace treaty. Setbacks ordinarily open a king’s ear to hearing of wisdom. The horror that we had just witnessed allowed me to appeal to his Christian sentiments. And if his chivalrous fervour was hungry for exploits, the pope would give him them, him and the princes of Europe, but far more meritorious and glorious, in the region of Constantinople. I was rebuffed, which filled Capocci with joy.

‘I have two English
chevauchées
threatening me in my very kingdom and cannot delay getting ready to rush upon them. That is all I care about at present. We will talk again in Chartres, if you please.’

The dangers he ignored the day before suddenly seemed to him to be of the utmost importance.

And Breteuil? What was he to decide for Breteuil? To prepare a new assault would take the besieging troops another month. The besieged, for their part, even if they hadn’t used up either their supplies or their ammunition, had suffered badly. They had their wounded, their towers were roofless. Somebody spoke of negotiating, of offering the garrison an honourable surrender. The king turned to me. ‘Well then, Monseigneur Cardinal …’

It was my turn to show him haughtiness. I had come from Avignon to work towards a general peace, not to mediate any such delivery of a fortress. He understood his mistake, and disguised his lack of composure by way of what he thought to be an amusing retort. ‘If cardinal is detained, archpriest can do his job.’

And the next day, while the tower continued to burn and the workers had gone back to work, but this time to bury the dead, our Sire of Vélines, raised up on his steel greaves, and preceded by the sounding of horns, went to confer with Don Sanche López. They walked back and forth a long while before the castle’s drawbridge, watched by the soldiers of both camps.

They were both professional soldiers and couldn’t delude each other. ‘What if I had attacked you with gunpowder mines, under your walls, messire?’

‘Ah! Messire, I think you would have got the better of us.’

‘How much longer could you have held out?’

‘Not as long as we would have wished, but longer than you had hoped. We have water, victuals, arrows and cannonballs a’plenty.’

An hour passed and the archpriest returned to the king. ‘Don Sanche López consents to hand over the castle, if you let him go free and if you give him some money.’

‘So be it, give it to him and let’s be done with it!’

Two days later, the men from the garrison, heads held high and purses filled, left to meet up with Monseigneur of Lancaster. King John would have to repair Breteuil at his own expense. Thus ended the siege he had wanted to be memorable. Even then he had the effrontery to maintain that without his assault belfry, the stronghold would not have come to terms so quickly.