The History of the British Army. J. W. Fortescue
April 18.
In England there had been no such improvement. A feeble effort had been made to check by statute fraudulent enlistment and the still graver abuse of embezzlement of the soldiers' pay by the captains, but this was of little help when the enforcement of the Act[35] was entrusted to so corrupt and avaricious a commander as the Duke of Somerset. Throughout the truce the soldiers on the English side behaved abominably; but, since they were robbed of their wages by their officers, it is hardly surprising that they should have repaid themselves by the plunder of the country. When finally the truce was broken, and the French invaded Normandy, the English dominion fell before them like a house of cards. Town after town, their garrisons depleted to fill Somerset's pocket, surrendered to superior force, and the English as they marched forth had the mortification to see the Normans gleefully doff the red cross of St. George for the white cross of France. An attempt to save the province was foiled by the rout of the English reinforcements at Fourmigny, and Normandy was lost. Anjou and Maine had been already made over to the father of Henry the Sixth's Queen, and Guienne and Gascony, which had been English since the reign of Henry the Second, alone remained. Next year they too went the way of Normandy and were lost.
1453,
July 20.
Gascony, however, notwithstanding her hot southern blood, was in no such anxiety as Normandy to be quit of the English, and sent messages to England that, if an army were sent to help her, she would revolt against the French to rejoin her old mistress. England lent a willing ear, and John Talbot, the veteran Earl of Shrewsbury, was sent out to this, his last campaign. The decisive battle was fought under the walls of Chatillon. The French were strongly entrenched, with three hundred pieces of artillery in position, a striking testimony to their military progress. The English fought with the weapon which for a century had won them their victories, and for the last as for the first battle of the Hundred Years' War, every man alighted from his horse. John Talbot alone, in virtue of his fourscore years, remained mounted on his hackney; and with the indomitable old man at their head the English hurled themselves upon the entrenchment. It was a mad, desperate, hopeless venture, but they stormed forward with such impetuosity that they went near to carry the position. For a full hour they persisted, until at last, riddled through and through by the fire of the artillery, they fell back. Then the French sallied forth and turned the defeat into a rout. Old John Talbot's pony was shot under him, and being pinned to the ground under the dead animal he was killed where he lay. Young John Talbot, Lord Lisle, refused to leave his father, and fell by his side. The army was dispersed over Aquitaine, and the ancestral domains of seven generations of English kings passed from them for ever. By the irony of fate a Scottish soldier[36] was appointed to hold for the crown of France the French provinces that had clung with such attachment to England. Of all the great possessions of the English in France Calais now alone was left, to break in due time the heart of an English Queen.
At home the discontent over the national disgrace was profound. The people of course cast about to find a scapegoat, and after one or two changes finally fixed upon the blameless and unfortunate Henry the Sixth. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the disease from which England had suffered ever since the death of King Henry the Fifth, but for this the nation itself was principally responsible. It had chosen for its rulers the House of Lancaster because Henry of Bolingbroke had agreed to accept constitutional checks on the royal power before the country was ripe for self-government. It had thrown off the yoke of discipline which alone could enable it to tug the heavy load of English weal and English honour, and it paid the inevitable penalty. Numbers of republics have made the same mistake during the present century and have suffered or are suffering the same punishment. There is no surer sign of an undisciplined nation than civil war.
In the England of the fifteenth century the disease had been deeply aggravated by the interminable campaigns in France. All classes at home, from the highest to the lowest, were equally selfish and apathetic in respect of the national good: internal order was at an end, and riots and outrages which amounted to private war continued unceasingly and remained unrepressed. The system of indentures between king and subject for the supply of troops had been extended from subject to retainer and, as has been well said, the clause "for the King's service" could easily be dropped out of the contract.[37] The red cross of St. George never appears in the English battlefields; red rose and white were indeed the emblems of contending factions, but we hear far more of the badges of great families, the ragged staff, the cresset and the like, and of the liveries, which, though forbidden by statute to any but the king, were conspicuous all through the Civil War. The loss of France furnished but too much material to the hands of violence and strife. England was full of unemployed soldiers, who had been trained in the undisciplined school of French faction to treachery and plunder and all that is lowest and most inhuman in war. Hundreds of men who had held comfortable posts in French garrisons, and had turned them to purposes of brigandage, were cast adrift upon England, barbarised, brutalised, demoralised, to recoup themselves in their own country. After the peace of Brétigny the disbanded soldiery had made France their chamber and swept down thence upon Italy; the like men[38] were now to be let loose upon England, and France was to be well avenged of her old enemy. Worst of all, the leaders of factions, in the madness of their animosity, were not ashamed to import foreign troops and set them at each other's throats.
1460.
1461.
I shall not dwell upon this miserable and disastrous period, marking as it does the wreck of our ancient military greatness. Such few military points as present themselves in the scanty chronicles of this time must be noted, and no more. Of the principal figures one only is to be remarked. Warwick the "King-maker" must be passed over as rather a statesman than a soldier; Margaret of Anjou—the pestilent, indomitable woman—must be remembered only for her importation of mercenaries; Edward the Fourth, full of the military genius of the Plantagenets, alone is deserving of lengthier mention. There was not an action at which he was present wherein he did not make that presence felt. It was he who at Northampton turned his treacherous admission to the left of the Lancastrian position to instant and decisive account. It was he who in the following year, still only a boy of twenty, crushed Owen Tudor at Mortimer's Cross; it was he who held supreme command at that more terrible Marston Moor of the fifteenth century, the battle of Towton.
March 28.
This action has a peculiar interest as an example of English tactics and tenacity turned upon themselves. The Lancastrians, sixty thousand strong, were formed up on a plateau eight miles to the north of Ferrybridge, facing south-their right resting on a brook, called the Cock, their left on the Great North Road. It was a strong position, but too much cramped for their numbers, having a front of less than a mile in extent. They were probably drawn up according to the old fashion in three lines of great depth. The Yorkists numbered but five-and-thirty thousand, but they were expecting an additional thirteen thousand under the Duke of Norfolk, which, advancing from Ferrybridge, would come up on their own right and against the left flank of the enemy. Edward appears to have remedied his numerical inferiority after the pattern of his great ancestor at Creçy by forming his army in echelon of three lines, refusing his right. The foremost or left line of the echelon was commanded by Lord Falconbridge, the second by Warwick, and the third by Edward in person. The Yorkists advancing northward to the attack had just caught sight of the enemy on a height beyond a slight dip in the ground called Towton Dale, when there came on a blinding snowstorm, which so effectually veiled both armies that it was only by their shouts that they could know each other's position. Falconbridge with great readiness seized the moment to push forward his archers to the edge of the plateau, whence he bade them shoot flight-arrows, specially adapted to fly over a long range, into the Lancastrian columns. This done he quickly withdrew his men. The Lancastrians thereupon poured in a tremendous shower of fighting arrows, all of which fell short of their supposed mark, and maintained it till their sheaves were well-nigh exhausted. Then Falconbridge again advanced and began to shoot in earnest; his men had not only their own stock of shafts but also those discharged by the enemy. The rain of missiles was too much for the Lancastrians: they broke from their position on the height and poured down across the dip to drive the Yorkists from the slope above it. Then the action became general and the whole line was soon hotly engaged.
What followed for the next few hours in the driving snow