Late Middle Ages

The Treaty of Picquigny and the end of English France

On the morning of 29 August 1475, on a meadow beside the Somme at Picquigny, near Abbeville, King Edward IV of England and King Louis XI of France met in a wooden pavilion built in the middle of a temporary bridge, with the river running between their armies. The two kings spoke for an hour, partly in French and partly through interpreters. Edward’s army of around thirteen thousand men had crossed the Channel in July hoping to repeat the chevauchées of Henry V; Louis, who had not yet raised a great field army, had come to negotiate. The treaty signed that day — the Treaty of Picquigny — ended the English claim to the French throne for a down payment of 75,000 crowns and an annual pension of 50,000 crowns. It was a peace of money, and the English chroniclers were to be scathing about it; but the abandonment of the dynastic claim was a renunciation of any real territorial ambition, and it is a reasonable convention to date the end of the Hundred Years’ War to that August morning.

The road to Picquigny

By 1475, the war had been quiescent for almost twenty years. The last English foothold on the continent, the Pale of Calais, had been retained since 1347; the Channel was patrolled by English and Breton privateers; the two crowns, however, had not faced each other in a major battle since Castillon in 1453. The English claim to the French throne was kept formally alive in the royal title, but it had no practical content: Henry VI’s brief restoration in 1470–1471, the Lancastrian Readeption, had ended in the slaughter of Tewkesbury and the death of Henry’s only son.

Edward IV, who had taken the throne from Henry in 1461, lost it to him in 1470, and recovered it by the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in April 1471, was in 1475 the most powerful English king since Henry V. His treasury was full — the customs and subsidies of a restored crown, and the accumulated forfeitures of the attainted Lancastrian estates — and his chamberlain, Lord Hastings, and his brother the Duke of Gloucester, were urging him to use it. Charles the Bold of Burgundy, with whom Edward had signed a treaty at London in July 1474, was threatening the French frontier from the east; Edward could march into France, pin Louis’s attention, and force a settlement. He crossed at Sandwich with about thirteen thousand men on 4 July 1475.

Louis’s response was to negotiate. Charles the Bold, instead of moving against the French, was absorbed in his own wars in Lorraine and on the Rhine: he could not, or would not, support the English. Edward, finding himself alone in Picardy with a contract army, an empty purse, and a French king offering money, accepted a settlement. The treaty was signed within eight weeks of his landing.

What the treaty actually said

The treaty had seven articles. The English king, “for the good of peace, for the utility of the public weal of Christendom, and for the great and excessive costs and damages suffered in times past by both kingdoms,” renounced the English claim to the French throne and to all the territories held by the English kings since the beginning of the war. He was to be paid 75,000 crowns down (a half of which was paid within a fortnight, the remainder in two instalments) and a pension of 50,000 crowns a year, for so long as both kings should live. The two kings bound themselves to a defensive alliance: if either was attacked, the other was to come to his aid with archers and men-at-arms. English merchants were to have free access to the French markets; French merchants to the English; and the garrison of Calais was to be maintained, at French expense, for an annual sum.

The crucial point, for the long story, was the renunciation. Edward’s claim, which had been formally advanced in 1340 and reaffirmed in 1420, was now withdrawn. The famous “King of France” clause of the English royal style, which had been retained by Henry VI and the Yorkists, was at last abandoned. Edward IV wrote to his subjects in 1475 to announce the renunciation as a new era. The castellan of Calais, Anthony, Lord Rivers, was to fly the English flag over the citadel, but no longer, in any official sense, as the standard of a French king.

A crown pensioner’s war

The English reaction to the treaty was caustic. William Worcester, the Lancastrian chronicler, called it a “tribute”; the Croyland Continuator wrote that Edward “preferred the false security of gold to the honour and renown of the English crown”; the Great Chronicle of London in the 1480s called the peace a “shameful” arrangement. The pensions, payable in two instalments a year, were not always forthcoming: Louis suspended them in 1481, the year of his death; Edward’s successors pressed for them. The agreement of 1484, the Treaty of Pecquigny Renewed, was modified by Henry VII after Bosworth in 1485, and was finally dropped in 1492.

And yet the English crown was a beneficiary. Edward IV’s Exchequer receipts in 1476–1477 included 60,000 crowns from Louis’s payments; the total in nine years (1475–1484) was something over 380,000 crowns. The money helped Edward to pay off the loans that had financed the 1475 expedition, and helped Henry VII to consolidate his new throne after 1485. The “pension” of Picquigny was an asset, not merely a shame, and the financial dependence that it involved was a real one. Until the pension dried up in 1492, the English crown had a continuing interest in not going to war with France.

The loss of Calais and the final closure

The treaty of 1475 was, in a sense, the end of English France. The two centuries of Plantagenet dominion in France, which had begun with the accession of Henry II in 1154 and survived the loss of Normandy in 1204 and the treaties of 1259 and 1303, were now formally closed. The only remaining territory, the Pale of Calais — a small district on the Strait of Dover, with the citadel of Calais as its capital and the outlying strongholds of Guînes, Ham, and the Tower of Rysbank — was retained by an English garrison under Anthony, Lord Rivers, and by the 1540s was still a small but real bridgehead.

It fell in 1558, after a siege of eight days. The French army, under François de Guise, took the citadel on 7 January 1558, the Tower of Rysbank on the 8th, and the rest of the Pale by the end of the month. Mary I, who had just lost her husband Philip II of Spain, was already dead, succeeded on 17 November 1558 by Elizabeth I. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed wrote that the news “did pierce the heart” of the old queen; it was, in fact, the closing of the long arc of English dominion in France. The title “King of France,” which Elizabeth I would quietly drop in 1559 as part of the settlement of Cateau-Cambrésis, had been a fiction since 1475; the loss of Calais made the fiction a memory.

What the renunciation meant for both kingdoms

The renunciation of 1475 was an act of state, not a private accord, and it had two long-term consequences. For the English crown, it signalled the closure of a continental agenda. The “Plantagenet” ambition that had animated Henry V and the Lancastrian claim was over; the English crown was now a power of the British Isles, with interests in Scotland, Ireland, and the Channel, and (after 1492) in the new world of the Atlantic. Henry VII’s diplomacy, conducted in the 1490s and 1500s, was the diplomacy of a kingdom with no continental pretensions; and that is one reason, as David Potter and others have argued, why the Tudor monarchy proved so durable.

For the French crown, the renunciation was the legal confirmation of a fait accompli. The duchy of Aquitaine had been lost in 1453, Normandy in 1449–1450, the county of Ponthieu in 1360 and again in 1475. The treaty of Picquigny was a recording of the recovery, not the cause of it. Louis XI (1423–1483) had used the war of 1472–1475 to keep Charles the Bold in check; the settlement that followed was the work of a king who knew that the English question could now be closed. The title “King of France,” as used in England, was a mere dynastic curiosity. The Royaumont continuation of the Grandes Chroniques de France, written in Paris in the 1470s, treats the Hundred Years’ War as a coherent past — the long, finished, and fortunate story of a kingdom rescued from disaster.

The English reception of the peace

The English reaction to Picquigny is itself a piece of the political history of the late fifteenth century. The Privy Council, which met in London in September 1475, ratified the treaty; the House of Commons, in a long petition of November 1475, accepted the renunciation. The Lords, however, were more cautious: the Earl of Warwick (the Kingmaker, before his fall in 1478) was not yet a rebel, and the Lord Hastings, the king’s chamberlain, was to be the executor of the deal. The treaty, in short, was ratified, but it was not loved. The Croyland chronicler, in a famous passage, wrote that the English “preferred money to honour”; the Great Chronicle of London called it “the most shameful peace that ever was made in England.”

The political consequences of the treaty, for the English crown, were substantial. The king’s household, which had been financed by the French war, was now to be financed by the French pension. The pension, in turn, depended on the king’s good relations with the French. Edward IV, in 1475, was in the position of a pensioner; the next king, Richard III, did not even get the pension. Henry VII, who came to the throne in 1485, had to renegotiate the treaty; the new agreement, signed in 1492, dropped the pension. The “pension” of Picquigny, in the end, was a short-lived affair.

The English experience of the treaty of 1475 is a reminder that the war was not a uniform national project. The English crown, in 1475, was in search of a way out; the English magnates, in 1475, were in search of a way to make money. The war, in this sense, was a war of the crown. The peace, in this sense, was a peace of the crown. The English magnates, in 1475, were no longer fighting for the French throne.

The French recovery

The French monarchy, in the generation after Picquigny, was the beneficiary of the war. The duchy of Aquitaine was now in French hands, and the duchy was a major source of revenue. The duchy of Burgundy, which had been a French duchy since 1477, was now a part of the French state. The duchy of Brittany, which had been a French fief since 1532, was now a part of the French state. The new French monarchy, in the late fifteenth century, was a powerful state with a strong army and a full treasury. The work of the Bureau brothers, the new taxes of the taille and the aides, the Compagnies d’ordonnance of 1445, were now the basis of a real French state.

The French state, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was a centralised state with a permanent army, a permanent bureaucracy, and a permanent fiscal system. The Gabelle, the Aides, the Taille, the Élections, the Généralités, were the instruments of the new monarchy. The new monarchy, under Louis XI (1423–1483) and Charles VIII (1470–1498), was the result of a long process of state-formation, and the process was, in part, the result of the war. The war had made the monarchy; the monarchy had made the state.

References and further reading

  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vol. V: Triumph and Illusion (London: Faber & Faber, 2021).
  • Jean Favier, Louis XI (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
  • Robert Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), and his essay on the treaty in History Today (1975).
  • C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), on the chroniclers’ reactions to Picquigny.
  • Bertrand Schnerb, Les guerres de Bourgogne, 1384–1477 (Paris: Payot, 1995).