Miniatures of French history

In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years—and you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city had been founded!

There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king—the grandson of a king of France, the son of a daughter of France—but a king also of England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates—all the world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow, still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true Parisian thing?

All the great story of Joan, those intense two years, had not passed unheeded. The loud echoes of it had sounded through Paris on that memorable day when the armoured girl had fallen wounded in the fruitless assault upon the St. Honoré Gate. But not even that great sweep of reconquest could wholly shake the city. All the country round fell away from the Plantagenet to the Valois, but Paris was still Plantagenet. For nearly half a lifetime one state of things had endured, and after so many miseries it seemed well enough.

But latterly there had come a change. For the people, and especially the young men, were telling each other that Burgundy was no longer friends with their boyish, weak, and distant king; and at the same time had come a petty but significant alteration in the air of the city, something that the men of the time hardly noticed—something of profound significance for posterity was at work. The forces within the city were no longer of one kind. Even of the nobles, some were wholly foreign. The English tongue had arisen, and Willoughby, in command of the garrison, was of that tongue. The conqueror of Agincourt had spoken, thought, and lived in French. It was as a man indistinguishable from their own nobles that he had ridden all the way down the narrow St. Martin’s street, kissing the relics at the church doors when he made his entry into Paris, all those years before. But even by his time the tide had turned in England. The Black Death had done its work before he was born. Henry V. himself could use the English tongue, and to all the lesser men about him it was native. Many nobles even could then speak no other. Now, after the working of a full seventeen years, the estrangement was more pronounced still; and the populace of Paris knew not, when a patrol passed by at night, whether its few men would chance to be men of like speech with themselves or of alien tongue.

And there was yet another matter, perhaps decisive of the issue that came—in part because a reliance upon Burgundy had made the populace seem secure for the young Plantagenet king, in part because the heavy drain of men in the losing campaign all around left few to spare for Paris: the garrison in arms under Willoughby was too small—hardly more than a battalion (as we say to-day) and a couple of squadrons.

Already by the spring of the year the regency of England and of France was troubled, and a month before Easter the citizens had been summoned to take oath, individually, in support of that treaty of Troyes by which the young king reigned. For his mother, a princess of the blood royal of France, was dead. Very few refused to swear. All the great notables swore. The Bishop and the Abbots and the Prior of St. Martin, and the chiefs of all the Courts of Justice and of the Exchequer, and all the Bar, and all the City Companies, and every priest and monk. It seemed a unanimity; though some few had taken advantage of the liberty to leave the town, if their allegiance was to him, the Valois, who called himself King of France outside the walls.

Beneath that official surface the quarrel between the government at Westminster and Burgundy had changed the Parisian mind. Already, secretly, letters were passing between a little group of the livery-men of the city and Charles of Valois, the king who was reconquering his kingdom. They treated for amnesty; they assured Charles (with too much assurance) that he had the support of the populace in the streets.

So passed Easter. Arthur of Brittany, Count of Richemont and Constable of France, received those letters and made his plan. No very great force accompanied him as he marched up northwards towards Paris through the night, but from within the city there was nothing strong enough to meet him. There is a curious air of ease, simplicity, and silence about that last revolution which suddenly slipped the great capital away from the hands of the Lancastrian Plantagenets, kings of England.

They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable, and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his hands.

It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light, just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones, and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one man mounting guard upon the parapet.

Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round, certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate, little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning light, and cried out, “Ville gagnée!” Never was there an odder capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.

That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable, he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again—Notre-Dame—and, leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.

It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.

The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street, shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille, having saved his command. There he awaited terms.

The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once; put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies, strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master, the French king, Charles—a decree of general amnesty—and all the Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the 15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city wall.

As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late government, to whom they called out, “Ah, the fox! The fox!” But he grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.