Hundred Years' War, 1415–1453
The Lancastrian War was the third and final phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France. It lasted from 1415, when Henry V of England invaded Normandy, to 1453, when the English were definitively defeated in Aquitaine. It followed a long period of peace from the end of the Caroline War in 1389. The phase is named after the House of Lancaster, the ruling house of the Kingdom of England, to which Henry V belonged.
The early years of the Lancastrian War were dominated by the forces of the House of Plantagenet, who held the English throne and also claimed that of France. Initial English successes, notably at the Battle of Agincourt, coupled with divisions among the French ruling class, allowed Henry V to win the allegiance of large parts of France. Under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, the English king married the French princess Catherine of Valois and was made regent of the kingdom and heir to the throne of France. A victory on paper was thus achieved by the English, with their claims now having legal standing. Some of the French nobility refused to recognise the agreement, however, and so military conflict continued. Henry V and, after his death, his brother John, Duke of Bedford, brought the English to the height of their power in France, with a Plantagenet crowned in Paris.
The second half of this phase of the war was dominated by forces loyal to the House of Valois, the French-born rivals of the Plantagenets who continued to claim the throne of France themselves. Beginning in 1429, French forces counterattacked, inspired by Joan of Arc, La Hire and the Count of Dunois, and aided by a reconciliation with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, who had previously sided with the Plantagenets. Charles VII was crowned in Notre-Dame de Reims in 1429, and from then a slow but steady reconquest of English-held French territories ensued. Ultimately the English would be expelled from France, except for the Pale of Calais, which would be re-captured by the French a century later.
The Battle of Castillon (1453) was the final major engagement of the Hundred Years' War, but France and England remained formally at war until the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475. English, and later British, monarchs would continue to nominally claim the French throne until 1802 though they would never again seriously pursue it.
England resumes the war[edit]
Henry V of England, of the House of Plantagenet, asserted a claim of inheritance of the French throne through the female line; female agency and inheritance were recognised in English law but rejected in France due to the Salic law. Henry sought to succeed to the French throne via the claim of his great-grandfather, Edward III of England, through Edward's mother – a claim which the court of France had previously rejected in favour of a more distant but male-line successor, Philip VI.
On his English accession in 1413, Henry V pacified the realm by conciliating the remaining enemies of the House of Lancaster, and suppressing the heresy of the Lollards. In 1415, Henry V invaded France and captured Harfleur. Decimated by diseases, Henry's army marched to Calais to withdraw from the French campaign. The French forces of Charles VI of Valois harassed the English, but refrained from making an open battle while amassing their numbers. The French finally gave battle at Agincourt, which proved to be a major English victory and an overwhelming disaster for the Valois side.
The Armagnac and Burgundian factions of the French court began negotiations to unite against the foreign enemy. Notable leaders of the Armagnac faction, such as Charles, Duke of Orléans, John I, Duke of Bourbon, and Arthur de Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany), became prisoners in England. The Burgundians, under John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had conserved their forces, not having fought at Agincourt, but the duke's younger brothers — Anthony, Duke of Brabant and Philip II, Count of Nevers — died at that battle. At a meeting between the Dauphin Charles and John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy was assassinated by the Dauphin's followers in 1419, prompting his son and successor, Philip the Good, to form an alliance with Henry V.
Treaty of Troyes[edit]
In the spring of 1420, Henry and Philip forced Charles VI of France to sign the Treaty of Troyes, by which Henry would marry Charles's daughter Catherine of Valois, and Henry and his heirs would inherit the throne of France, disinheriting Charles's own son, the Dauphin Charles. Henry formally entered Paris later that year and the agreement was ratified by the Estates-General of France. In March, an English army under the command of the Earl of Salisbury had ambushed and destroyed a Franco-Scottish force at Fresnay 20 miles north of Le Mans. According to a chronicler, the French and Scottish lost 3,000 men, their camp and its contents including the Scottish treasury. In 1421, an English army of 4,000 was defeated by a Franco-Scottish army of 5,000 at the Battle of Baugé. During the battle the Duke of Clarence, brother of Henry V, was killed.
Defection of the Burgundians[edit]
Bedford was the only person that kept the Burgundian forces on the side of the Plantagenets. The Duke of Burgundy was not on good terms with Bedford's younger brother, Gloucester. At Bedford's death in 1435, the Burgundians deemed themselves excused from the English alliance, and signed the Treaty of Arras, restoring Paris to Charles VII. Their allegiance remained fickle, but the Burgundian focus on expanding their domains into the Low Countries left them little energy to intervene in France. The death of Bedford at the same time removed the one uniting force on the English side, while foreshadowing the decline of English dominance in France.
Long truces that marked the war at this point; they gave Charles time to reorganise his army and government, replacing his feudal levies with a more modern professional army that could put its superior numbers to good use, and centralising the French state. A repetition of Du Guesclin's battle avoidance strategy paid dividends and the French were able to recover town after town.
By 1449, the French had retaken Rouen. In 1450, the Count of Clermont and Arthur de Richemont, Earl of Richmond, of the Montfort family (the future Arthur III, Duke of Brittany) caught an English army attempting to relieve Caen at the Battle of Formigny and defeated it. The English army was attacked from the flank and rear by Richemont's force just as they were on the verge of beating Clermont's army. The French proceeded to capture Caen on July 6 and Bordeaux and Bayonne in 1451. The attempt by Talbot to retake Guyenne, though initially welcomed by the locals, was crushed by Jean Bureau and his cannons at the Battle of Castillon in 1453 where Talbot had led a small Anglo-Gascon force in a frontal attack on an entrenched camp. This is considered the last battle of the Hundred Years' War.