The Three Edwards (61 page)

The great regret of his life was that he missed both Crécy and Poictiers. He was engaged in the relief of Berwick when the Black Prince marched to the Loire and came face to face with the huge French army of King John. Having accomplished the relief of the city on the Scottish border, Manny reached Westminster just in time to hear of the amazing victory of the prince. However, he accompanied the army of Edward to France after the repudiation by the French dauphin of the treaty arranged with John in his English captivity. He led the scouting party which came closest to the gates of Paris. Never before had mad desire tugged so insistently at his heart strings as on this occasion. Rising in his stirrups, he gazed under a cupped hand at the high walls of the great city. If he had been free to act, he undoubtedly would have tried some rash enterprise, such, perhaps, as scaling the outer wall and hoisting the leopards of England over the gate, if only for an hour. But he was there on strict orders from the king which precluded any foolhardiness of this kind. Regretfully he turned back and rejoined the royal army.

It was on this expedition that he was given the honor he desired above all others. Lord Grey of Rothersfield had died and his place in the Order of the Garter was given to Manny, who had not been included among the original members.

Manny married into the royal family, becoming the husband of Margaret, daughter and heiress of Thomas of Brotherton, the oldest son of Edward I by his second wife, Marguerite of France. It must have been a love match, for Margaret had succeeded to the honors of her father (she would later be created Duchess of Norfolk) and was one of the great catches of the kingdom. Manny himself had been given much property, but he was relatively a poor man.

The picture of him that emerges from the brief references in the chronicles of the day is that of a soldier of unusual qualities, friendly and likable, and of much lighter spirits than most of his countrymen. He was a generous man and spent a fortune in the formation of the Charterhouse in London, beginning with the donation of land for a cemetery during the Black Death.

It was characteristic of him that in his will he stipulated that a penny was to be paid to every poor person who had attended his funeral.

When things were blackest for the French and the freebooters were ravaging the countryside, the English soldiers had a saying, “Sir Robert Knollys all France controls.” Sir Robert seems to have had a good opinion of himself, as well, for he carried on his device of a ram’s horn the words:

Which can be translated as follows:

This stocky soldier of low degree, with his lowering brow and split upper lip, became to the French what the Black Douglas had been to the English, a figure of dread. And yet he was in no sense bloodthirsty as some of the freebooters seem to have been. He did not kill for the sake of killing, although he burned and ravaged the country when it suited his purpose. But inside his steel glove there was a fist of iron.

Stout John Hawkwood with his White Company had departed from France and was on his way to the Lombardy plains before Knollys and his close friend, Sir Hugh Calveley, started what they called the Great Company. It was made up of all the best Englishmen left and a fair sprinkling of Gascons. They established themselves in the valley of the Loire, calling that province their “chambre,” and in a very short time they had forty castles in their hands, and the personal share of Knollys in this colossal accumulation of booty was said to be a hundred thousand crowns, a constable’s ransom. It was at this time that the two daring leaders threw Avignon into a panic by announcing their intention to burn the papal city. Calveley, who was a man of mad impulses, would perhaps have undertaken this feat, but Knollys saw no profit in it; so they did not go nearer than thirty miles and contented themselves later with burning the suburbs of the great city of Orleans. These depredations were so thorough that soon the naked gables of burned houses became known as the “mitres of Knollys.”

He had married early and his wife, Constantia, was reported to have been “a woman of a dissolute living before marriage.” She was of good birth, however, and had a crest of her own, a fess dancette between three pards’ faces sable. From this, heraldic authorities concluded she belonged
to the family of Beverly in Yorkshire. She was, at any rate, a woman of spirit and was a perfect mate for a soldier of fortune. At one stage, when he needed recruits, she got together three shiploads of men of an adventurous turn and took them over to Brittany personally.

Knollys and Calveley, who run through the freebooting saga like twin brothers, were at the battle of Auray and were given credit in some accounts for the capture of Bertrand du Guesclin. Early in 1364 Calveley was holding the castle of Le Pont d’Onne against a besieging force led by the great Bertrand. Several assaults had been repulsed and then the marshal decided to try a mining operation. His purpose was discovered by the defenders when a flagon of water, left on a parapet, was upset. Every member of the garrison swore not to have touched it and so it was filled a second time. Soon after it was found on the ground again. This made it clear that tremors in the masonry had been the cause. Calveley put his ear to the ground and heard sounds deep in the earth which he identified as digging.

A bold defense was decided upon. The defense ran out a mine of then own and destroyed the shaft of the attacking force. Du Guesclin found it advisable then to raise the siege.

Knollys had his great chance in 1370 when he was summoned to Windsor and given command of one of two armies which were being sent across the Channel to forestall a French attempt at landing a force in Wales. With an army of fifty-five hundred men, mostly archers but with a certain number of knights among them, Knollys proceeded to cut quite a swath. Landing at Calais, he marched so close to Paris that the watch over the city gates could see the smoke of burning villages. The French king was in Paris at the time but he would not allow any attempt to offer battle. Knollys waited long enough to become convinced that Fabian tactics were prevailing in the councils of the king and then marched westward. The booty secured on this bold foray was almost incalculable. Sir Robert was not having an easy time in his command, however. The knights serving under him disliked taking orders from a man who had risen from the ranks. They called him “the old brigand.” Finally a party of them took things into their own hands and set off with a considerable part of the force. Meeting with a French troop, they took a good shaking up and were glad to get on board their transports for home. Here the ringleader laid charges against Knollys, but at the court-martial which resulted the leader was exonerated. The accuser was arrested later and executed as a traitor.

It is on record, nonetheless, that the king had to be placated by a personal gift of a very large sum of money.

For ten more years Knollys was in the middle of things, sometimes in an official capacity, sometimes on personal ventures, and always doing
well. Once the Duke of Anjou, a brother of the French king, was trying to capture Knollys’ own castle of Derval and executed some English hostages. The old brigand retaliated by chopping off the heads of an equal number of Frenchmen and throwing them out over the walls.

He retired in 1383, after more than thirty years of continuous fighting and a consistent record of success. Settling down at his manor house at Sculthorpe in Norfolk, he devoted himself to charitable work. He had wide estates and so much wealth that he built a chantry at Rochester and a hospital at Pontefract, large enough for a master, six priests, and thirteen people of the poor. This became known as Knollys’ Almshouse and it continued in existence until the Reformation.

In 1389 he went to Rome on a pilgrimage and met Hawkwood there. Between them they established an English hospital at Rome. What a meeting that must have been between the two most successful freebooters produced by a country with a remarkable record in that direction: the once black-a-vised but now grizzled Knollys, who was still called in France
le vêritable demon de guerre
, and old John Hawkwood, who had just retired after leading the armies of Florence to a conclusive victory over Milan! Brigands they were, but they were more than that: they both had been supremely able leaders. Abstemious in their habits (for no drunkard could keep control of a freebooting company) and not much given to talk, their tongues must have wagged nevertheless with tales of this and that, of the new cannon and the deadly longbow, of comrades dead and gone, and in general of the futility of war, a lesson which must have been very plain to them.

Hawkwood was to have no more than four years of peaceful retirement, but the burly Knollys outlived him by thirteen years, dying finally in his bed at Sculthorpe at an age in the proximity of ninety years. His wife died a few days later and they were buried side by side, the once dissolute lady and the always realistic gleaner of the spoils of war. He had not received the supreme honor of membership in the Order of the Garter.

Sir John de Hawkwood differed in two respects from all the other great military leaders on the English side. First, there was not a chivalrous bone in his body. He did not fight for the sheer love of conflict, for the admiration of fellow knights, for the love of a beautiful lady; he fought for wealth and power, and he became the greatest condottiere of his time, perhaps of all time. Second, he did not treat common people with scorn or unnecessary
cruelty. In fact, he preferred when possible to levy on the nobility and the clergy.

Students of his campaigns declare him to be the first general of the modern type and, further, that he has never been equaled at his kind of warfare.

Some say he began life as a tailor in London, and one Italian historian calls him
Granni della Ginglia
(John of the Needle). The truth is that he was the second son of Gilbert de Hawkwood, a holder of land and a tanner at Hedingham Sibil in Essex.

Entering the army under John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, he came to the attention of the Black Prince and was knighted. When the truce had been made after the capture of the French king at Poictiers, Hawkwood turned his eye to personal gain and became the leader of a body of Free Companions. France was the sorriest land in all Christendom, for even the French soldiers turned to freebooting and the rape of their own home. Hawkwood seems to have been the most successful of all, even though he often acted on the principles imputed to Robin Hood. Certainly he was the first to see that France had been bled white and that the return of the plague, which was beginning again, would complete the work the Free Companies had begun.

He was a handsome man, above the average in height, with the shoulders of a woodsman and the deep chest of a runner. His eye was that of a born leader, keen, luminous, firm. Because of the confidence he inspired among Englishmen who were at loose ends in France, he got the very best of them. He could pick and choose, and his picking and choosing were so expert that he gradually gathered about him a band of superlative strength known as the White Company. Some writers think the name arose from the splendor of equipment they used, but there must have been some more tangible reason. They may have worn cloaks of white, or at least of light gray, or perhaps they had white cockades in their riding hats. It might even have been that the baldrics they wore crosswise on their chests were of that color. Whatever the reason, the White Company, or the
Compagnia Bianca
as it was called in Italy, became the most talked about and the most feared of the Free Companies.

Hawkwood trained his men with a thoroughness equal to that of Oliver Cromwell in a later century and in accordance with his own theories. The company consisted of a thousand lances, a misleading count which came of considering three mounted men as one lance; a thoroughly trained man-at-arms, a squire, and a page, the latter having to be content with riding a palfrey. Both the man-at-arms and the squire rode heavily armed. Their chief weapon was a long lance of such weight that it took two men to handle it. The lance, however, was only for use when fighting on foot, when the stout companions would form themselves into a square or circle
and receive the enemy on the lance points. For use in the saddle, they had heavy swords and daggers. Five lances constituted a company, five companies a troop.

With the thousand lances were two thousand foot soldiers, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them bowmen. Most of them had carried a longbow on the fields of Crécy and Poictiers and they were supremely expert with it. In fact, they had learned a better way of handling that deadly weapon. They would place one end in the ground, which kept the bow firmer and made a steadier aim possible. It may be taken for granted that Hawkwood placed his greatest reliance on his bowmen; having nothing of the Bourbon in him and being quick to learn. These strong-limbed sons of Albion could make twenty miles a day and would be in camp before the weary horses, with their heavy loads, hobbled in on stiff limbs.

Well, here was a France as bare as a bone on a dust heap. And here was the White Company, fit to battle any force in Christendom and avid for spoils. And here was John Hawkwood, the best leader in all the armies. What to do?

Hawkwood knew what to do.

Over the mountainous barrier between France and Italy lay the Lombardy plains, bounteous and fertile and dotted with cities fairly bursting with wealth; all of them fighting with bitter jealousy among themselves. In Lombardy, moreover, was the great family of the Visconti, the dukes and absolute rulers of Milan. The present head of this great family was the ambitious Bernabò Visconti, who was determined to get all of the plain under his rule and to oust the Avignon popes at the same time. Hawkwood decided that the White Company would have a fine future in this warm and luscious land. After capturing the city of Pau as a final gesture (and robbing only the clergy), he made an arrangement with another band of freebooters under the command of Bernard de Salle by which the newcomers enrolled themselves in the company.