entrance to Roncesvalles, and giving private orders to their commander to run away at the approach of the enemy; and by procuring that he himself should be taken prisoner by a friendly knight, and kept in confinement until the issue of the invasion was decided!1 The Black Prince, the most loyal and perfect knight in Europe, unable to raise the promised subsidy with sufficient despatch, melted down his plate to provide funds for the expedition. Peter of Castile was no less prodigal of promises; but of more current coin not a maravedi was forthcoming.2 Meanwhile Henry, who had been received with enthusiasm both at Toledo and at Seville, made such preparations as were possible to him, with the resources at his command, to defend his kingdom against the invaders. Summoned by the Black Prince to return to their allegiance, Sir Hugh Calverley of Carrion and his English adventurers 3 were constrained to abandon the cause of Henry of Trastamara and to range themselves in the ranks of their countrymen; while the French companions were content to remain in the service of the Bastard, not only to fight against an English prince, but against the assassin of a French princess. Nor is it entirely impertinent to recall the fact that four hundred and fifty years later, a descendant of the Calverleys drew sword against the French in Castile, in defence of the liberties of the Spanish people, when Sir Stapleton Cotton won for himself a new title of honour on the glorious field of Salamanca. For The English army at length marched through Roncesvalles without opposition from either Castile or Navarre. Henry awaited the invaders at Salvatierra, on the road from Alava to Burgos, and the first encounter, if it was honourable to English valour, was disastrous to the English arms. at Ariñez, some five miles from Vitoria-where four hundred and fifty years later the defeat was nobly avenged-the advanced guard of less than five hundred horse and foot, under the command of Sir Thomas Fuller, was surprised and entirely cut to pieces, after a long and heroic struggle, by a body of over three thousand troops under the experienced leader 1 Ayala, 436-464; Froissart, i., part 2, cap. 224. 2 See John Talbot Dillon, Peter the Cruel (1788), vol. ii., pp. 21, 22. 3 Mérimée, 484. Not of Carrion, but of Combermere. The name of Calverley is still maintained in the family of Cotton. Sir Hugh, Lord of Carrion, is mentioned in Camden and in Fuller's Worthies, vol. i., p. 274. Sir Stapleton Cotton was not a descendant of this Sir Hugh, as he died without issue, but probably of some member of his family. See Ormerod's Cheshire, ii., 263, and 766-9. 5 During the preparations for this expedition, Richard, eldest son of the Black Prince, and afterwards Richard II. of England, was born at Bordeaux. ship of the French Marshal d'Audeneham.1 The Black Prince was too prudent a general to give battle on ground that had been chosen by his enemy. He retreated as far as Viana in Navarre, and then once more advancing, sought to turn the enemy's position by a march upon Logroño. At length, on the 3rd of April, 1367, the two armies met in a level plain between Najera and Navarrete, where Henry had imprudently or chivalrously descended to give formal battle. The issue was never doubtful. The army that was led by Henry consisted of not more than five thousand men at arms and some twenty thousand light troops, for the most part untrained to serious warfare, and armed only with slings and javelins.2 The Black Prince commanded ten thousand English and foreign knights, as many archers, and a large force of the best infantry in Europe. The Duke of Lancaster, brother of Edward the Black Prince, John Chandos, and Jacme, titular king of Majorca, all had commands in the invading army. The victory of the English was complete. Don Sancho the king's brother, Bertrand du Guesclin, Bègue de Vilaines, the Marshal d'Audeneham, the Grand Masters of Santiago and Calatrava were among the prisoners of war. "England," says Dunham, "fruitful as she has been in heroes, can bcast of few such glorious fields." To my thinking, the victory is one of which every decent Englishman should be heartily ashamed. If the glory of war consists not in the cause in which valour is displayed, but in the mere amount of the slaughter, then the battles of Tamerlane and Genghis, the massacres of Perpignan and Beziers, are nobler than Thermopylae or Albuera. Henry of Trastamara, no longer king in Spain, made good his escape into Aragon, where he was sheltered by that Cardinal Pedro de Luna, afterwards so celebrated as Benedict XIII.; and his rival returned to his old courses as Peter the Cruel. Invested with the honour of knighthood at the hands of the Black Prince, Peter had sworn to do no violence to any of his prisoners. He had distinguished himself at Navarrete, not in the heat of the battle, but in the pursuit of the fugitives. Mounted on a black charger, when the day was won, he had galloped about the field, crying out for the death of his brother; and returning unsuccessful to the quarters of the victorious Plantaganet, he slew with his own hand a Castilian prisoner who had taken refuge under the standard of the Black Prince. 1 Mérimée, 487. general, John of Gaunt 2 Ayala, 443. 3 The fault would seem to have lain with that ever unskilful Froissart, chap. 226; ibid., 238; Ayala, 471. This violation, not only of the laws of battle, but of his knightly oath, called for a severe rebuke from his English patron; but Peter, unabashed, demanded the persons of all his captured subjects, that he might deal with them according to his evil pleasure. Having succeeded, moreover, on some pretext in securing three Castilian nobles of specially exalted position, he caused them immediately to be killed in his own tent.1 The victory at Navarete and the presence of the English army opened the way to Burgos; and Peter, as soon as he was safe within its walls, had no other thought but to defraud his English defenders, and to wreak his vengeance upon his Castilian subjects. In both respects he was completely successful. Fradulent conveyances took the place of the money that was due. False charters took the place of the territory that had been promised. The streets of Burgos were red with the noblest blood of Castile. Having sworn before the high altar in the Cathedral of Burgos to hand over the city of Soria to John Chandos, and to invest the Black Prince with the lordship of Biscay, the king delivered charters or letters patent in fulfilment of his vow, but, at the same time, he sent word to the Biscayans and to the Sorians forbidding them to suffer their new masters to take possession of their territories, or to admit any of their representatives within their boundaries. The arrival of Peter at his capital was the signal for an immense number of executions or murders; among others, the burning alive of Doña Urraca de Osorio, a noble lady, guilty of absolutely no crime, real or imaginary, beyond her relationship to another victim. At length the royal miscreant ran away to Seville, leaving the Black Prince and his army, not only without money, but absolutely without food, on the burning plains of Castile." The greater part of the English troops died of famine and disease. An attempt was made to poison the prince, from the effects of which he never recovered. And the gallant defender of royal rights was fain to leave Spain (September, 1367), with the loss of his soldiers, of his money, and of his health, befooled and cheated in one of the worst causes in which Engish blood and English treasure have ever been squandered on the Continent of Europe. 1 D. Gomez Carrillo, D. Sancho Moscoso, Grand Master of Santiago; D. Garcia Tenorio, son of the Admiral of Castile. M. Mérimée speaks with admiration of the conduct of the Prince of Wales, not only during, but after the battle. 2 Knighton, c. 2629; Walsingham, t. 305; Ayala, 500. 3 Edward retired invalided to England in 1368, though he did not actually die till 1374. The French, moreover, emboldened by the discomfiture of the Black Prince-not by his enemies but by his ally in Spain -determined to drive the English out of Aquitaine. And thus Edward's interference in the affairs of Spain directly led to the declaration of war against England by Charles V. in April, 1369, and to all the disasters that followed. Nor did the English intervention secure the wretched object of the expedition. Peter, relieved of the presence of his benefactor, entered upon a new career of bloodshed; and within a year after the retirement of the Black Prince from the deadly camp on the plains of Valladolid, Henry of Trastamara once more took the field in Castile. Crossing the Pyrenees from his asylum in Languedoc, and passing through Aragon and Navarre at the head of a little body of four hundred knights, the Count was joyfully received by his old friends at Calahorra and Burgos in August, 1369. Madrid and other cities as far south as Cordova declared for the deliverer. (Toledo alone held out for Peter, who, after a fruitless alliance with Mohammed V. of Granada, found himself closely invested by his rival in the Castle of Montiel in La Mancha. Seeking, as usual, to extricate himself from his difficulties by some skilful treaty, he entered into negotiations with Bertrand du Guesclin,' who once more commanded the French contingent in the service of Henry of Trastamara. A bribe of 200,000 doubloons, or rather, a promise of that sum, was offered to du Guesclin as the price of his dishonour. The Breton knight affected to be convinced. Henry was to be delivered into the hands of his brother. Thus extricated, as he hoped, from a position that had become untenable, Peter, on the night of the 23rd March, 1369, stole from his faminestriken retreat. Guided by a trusty hand to the tent of du Guesclin, he found no confederate, but Henry of Trastamara himself—not his victim, but his executioner. He died unregretted by man or woman in Castile, and his death brought relief and prosperity to Spain. 2 Peter the Cruel, according to all authentic history, was a 1 The story of his ransom, fixed by himself at the enormous sum of 100,000 gold florins, and faithfully paid to Edward the Black Prince, is told by both Froissart and Ayala, and is a delightful contrast to the sordid and faithless barbarism of the contemporary Court of Spain. Froissart, chap. 247; Ayala, 466-470. 2 In the hour of his supreme danger the only men found to strike a blow in defence of Peter the Cruel were two Englishmen, Sir Ralph Holmes and James Rowland, faithful to their commander, odious though he was, as became true knights and soldiers. But that any Englishman should have been in his service after his treatment of Edward the Black Prince, is certainly strange. See Froissart, i., 242. Peter was not struck down by his brother's dagger without a struggle, and the brothers fighting hand to hand in the midst of a ring of French men at arms, who called for fair play (Franc jeu), rolled over in a deadly embrace. Don Henry man so completely detestable that it would be strange if he had not attracted the attention of apologists. At the despotic Court of Ferdinand and Isabella, it was a species of lèse majesté to speak of any King of Castile as unworthy. There was something in Peter's destruction of his powerful nobles not entirely displeasing to the autocratic Ferdinand; and it was ordained that he was no longer to be known as the Cruel, but as El Justiciero, the doer of justice—the title more worthily borne by his father. It was at this time, too, that a courtly author and royal herald, Pedro de Gratia Dei-rather a strange surname, once adopted by a celebrated Jew on his conversion-published another vindication of the character of Peter the Cruel, under the title of a Life of the worthy King Prosper Mérimée's Life of the King is a brilliant work,2 impartial in profession, apologetic in tone, but full of damning facts. The chronicles of Froissart and of Ayala are the chief contemporary authorities. No one has succeeded in making him an attractive character; and his long reign of nearly twenty years, which began in his boyhood, at the age of sixteen, and came to a close ere he had passed the prime of early manhood, does not include one single good deed in either his private or his public life, to relieve the general gloom of his wickedness. according to the most celebrated of the many legends, fell undermost, when Rocaberti, an Aragonese knight, caught hold of Don Peter and allowed his assailant to get the upper hand, saying: Ni quito Rey, ni pongo Rey, According to Argote de Molina and the Romances del rey don Pedro, the name of the knight was Fernando Perez de Andrada, and it is du Guesclin himself who is sometimes said to have intervened at the critical moment. Froissart, ch. 254. Carbonell, p. 197. Mérimée, chap. xxiii. According to another account, Peter escaped from Montiel, but was captured outside the walls by a French knight, Bègue de Vilaine, by whom he was delivered into the hands of his brother. The man must have been more or less than human who could have suffered Peter to escape from his clutches. 1 It was printed (in 1790) in the Semanario Erudito of Valladara: Tit. 27, 28. Philip II. says Zuñiga (Anales de Sevilla, año 1369) dió precepto de clamarle Justiciero; mas nunca se le borrava el titulo de Cruel. More modern apologists are the Count de la Roca, El Rey don Pedro defendido (1648) and the licentiate Lerdo del Pozo, Apologia, etc. (1780). A catalogue of the writers who have attempted desacreditar la Cronica del Rey Don Pedro escrita por D.P. Lopez de Ayala will be found in vol. xx. of the Documentos ineditos, page 28, et seq. 2 There is a very good note in which all the biographers of Peter are passed in review in Lafuente tom, ix., pp. 308-315. There is also a Defensa de la veracidad de Don Pedro Lopez de Ayala en la cronica del Rey don Pedro, by Rafael de Floranes, in vol. xix. of the Documentos Ineditos, pp. 513-575 Old Froissart, the Italian Matteo Villani, and Pedro Gomez de Albornoz give no uncertain confirmation of the records of Ayala, whose temperate language when chronicling the greatest villainies of his master is worthy of all respect. |