Here is my last post for the time being at least on the Hundred Years
War. Fittingly enough it is on the subject of the last engagement of that war;
the Battle of Castillon in 1453. In its way Castillon was as seminal as Crecy,
for just as that engagement heralded the arrival of the long bow as a
battle-winning weapon that would secure a century of English ascendancy, so at
Castillon the cannon came of age to play a decisive part in the battle.
The initiative in the war had turned decisively in favour of the French
in the aftermath of the Battle of Formigny in 1450. This had been a disastrous
defeat for the English under Sir Thomas Kyriell. An English army of 4000 men
had been forced into an indefensible position and all but annihilated by a
superior French force. Following this battle the French had overrun all
Normandy and reclaimed it for King Charles VII, whilst refugees poured across
the channel. In the following year the French had invaded the English territory
of Guyenne, culminating in the seizure of Bordeaux.
Battle of Formigny
In England there was widespread outrage. The Duke of Suffolk; whom many
blamed for the debacle of the loss of Normandy and accused of conniving with
the French, was arrested and beheaded with six strokes of a rusty sword.
The expedition of 1452 led by the septuagenarian Lord Talbot represented
the last throw of the dice for the English to regain their territories in
Guyenne and was supported by a widespread popular uprising. The following
spring found Talbot advancing at the head of 6000 men towards a French army of
9000 who were laying siege to the town of Castillon.
Upon arrival Talbot received false intelligence that the French were
fleeing. In fact under the direction of master-gunner Jean Bureau the French
had dug in and were ready for a fight.
The French camp was a well-constructed affair, protected by an earth
rampart, palisade and ditch and designed to allow the 300 French guns to
enfilade their attackers.
Talbot, convinced that his enemies would not stand, thought to over-run
the French camp and began an immediate attack with the forces that were to
hand, not waiting for his whole army to come up. The English advanced in
columns against the French with men at arms to the fore and archers to the
rear. They did not lack for courage that day but it was a foolhardy enterprise
and slaughter was the result as the English pressed forward; attempting to
cross the ditch and storm the ramparts, only to be torn apart by murderous
cannon fire at point blank range. The English nevertheless pressed on with the
attack for a full hour as fresh men reached the battlefield and were thrown
forward into the fray.
Talbot himself, the only man on horseback, had refused to wear armour in
accordance with an oath he had sworn upon being ransomed from captivity
following the fall of Caen. Instead, cloaked in purple, he offered an obvious
target for the French gunners and a well-aimed cannonball struck his horse.
Pinned beneath the stricken animal, old Talbot was hacked to pieces as a
counter charge from the French camp swept away the broken English and further
French reinforcements arrived to take them in the flank. By the time that
Bureau’s guns fell silent, four thousand Englishmen lay dead. It was as
profound an illustration of a change in the game of war as that made on the
Western Front in 1914.
Battle of Castillon
Within a few months of the Battle of Castillon, King Henry VI had lost
his mind and Richard Duke of York had taken power in his stead. England stood
on the brink of the Wars of the Roses; that murderous civil conflict ensuring
that the territory lost in France would remain lost forever. The One Hundred
Years War was at an end.
Just two months before the flower of English chivalry were mown down at
Castillon by French guns, another event of world changing proportions had
occurred. At the other end of Europe the mighty walls of Constantinople, which
had repelled invaders from east and west for a thousand years were at last
breached by the massive siege artillery of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the
Conqueror who then took the city, snuffing out at last the venerable Empire of
Byzantium. The age of the gun had truly dawned.
No comments:
Post a Comment