Rounding off our series on forgotten Scottish battle victories

IF asked to name some of the greatest and most devastating military defeats of the English by the Scots before the Act of Union in 1707, most people would say Bannockburn and Stirling Bridge, while National readers might suggest Roslin and Sark after our descriptions of them in the past two editions of this column.

You would have to be very knowledgeable or to be thinking out of the box to come up with the Battle of Baugé on March 22, 1421. That is because the battle took place in France and was part of the Hundred Years War rather than Scotland’s Wars of Independence.

Yet apart from a few Frenchmen fighting on “our” side, this was very much a Scottish victory over an English army, and it changed the course of European history.

So few people know about it, however, largely because English historians tend to concentrate on Crecy and Agincourt rather than the numerous defeats the English suffered in that long conflict which actually lasted for 116 years.

It is also yet another example of how Scottish history has not been taught to Scots.

Our curriculum is still fixated on British history, and although there have been improvements in the teaching of Scottish history, there is still a considerable way to go, especially so at this time of Brexit when many more Scots could be doing with better knowledge of Scotland’s historic links to the continent.

The greatest of those was the Auld Alliance, signed in 1295 by King John Balliol and Philip IV of France. The Alliance was renewed periodically after that date and by the 1410s it was very much “in play” as Henry V of England initiated the third phase of the Hundred Years War, often known to historians as the Lancastrian War.

In 1418, it was the French Dauphin who called on his Scottish allies for assistance in his efforts to curtail Henry’s depredations after the great battle of Agincourt in 1415. It had to be the Dauphin, or Crown Prince, who sought help from Scotland because the French king, Charles VI, was already showing signs of the mental illness that would eventually see him nicknamed Charles the Mad.

The French aristocracy had split into two factions with many supporting the Duke of Burgundy in his aspirations to take the throne, while many others stayed loyal to the King and the House of Valois, known as the Armagnacs. Increasingly it was the teenaged Dauphin, the future Charles VII, who made all the major decisions for the Valois regime and, faced with the Burgundy alliance with Henry V and the surrender of many of his own forces, he sent for help from Scotland.

The complicating factor at the time was that King James I of Scotland was still a prisoner of the English, albeit that he was part of the royal household of Henry, whom he greatly admired, and he would actually fight with the English army against the French in France in 1420. In charge of Scotland was the Duke of Albany, Robert Stewart, who had become regent when James was first captured by the English in 1406 while en route to France.

There had been no large battles between the Scots and the English since the Battle of Homildon Hill, or Humbleton Hill, in 1402 won by the English, but with England preoccupied with France, Albany no doubt felt it safe to respond positively to Scotland’s oldest ally. By 1419, there was also peace of a sort along the border with England so the Scots could afford to send an army of around 6000 men including men at arms, spearman and archers to serve alongside the remaining French royal army.

The National:

They were under the command of Albany’s son, John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, above, and Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Wigtoun or Wigtown. It was Buchan who would take overall command of the army which was joined by the small local forces of Gilbert La Fayette or Lafayette, the Marshal of France. Scots thus made up 80 to 90 per cent of the army that would win a great victory.

We actually know more about the Battle of Baugé than we do about many of the conflicts of that era involving Scotland, because four different chroniclers have given us contemporary accounts of the battle. They differ on several aspects, such as the numbers involved, but all agree that the Scots army, assisted by a small number of French troops, inflicted a devastating defeat on the English army.

The Scottish troops, perhaps because they had not been used as a self-contained army, but to reinforce the Valois army at various places, had unfortunately gained a poor reputation among their hosts. It had been reported that they consumed far too much mutton and certainly far too much wine for French tastes, but no one, especially the Dauphin, doubted their ability to fight.

Having all but conquered France in the years 1417 to 1420, Henry V had married Catherine of Valois, daughter of the French king, and signed the Treaty of Troyes which made him heir to the French throne. He then went home to England to be with his French wife and sort out some domestic problems.

Taking advantage of the lull. Buchan and Wigtoun had gone home in 1420 to fetch more troops, suggesting that the Scots numbers had been depleted due to battle injuries, or more likely illnesses such as dysentery which was rife in both armies during all that long war. Indeed it was dysentery that would kill Henry V in 1422.

Henry, then childless, had left his brother and heir Thomas, the Duke of Clarence, in charge of the English forces in France. Clarence was a fine soldier who had led the English army in France from 1412 onwards. Under Henry he had commanded divisions of the English army, but he had not been at Agincourt and had therefore missed out on the glory the English achieved that day.

Henry had given his brother the task of taking over the whole region of Anjou and, raiding deep into France from their base in Normandy in early 1420, Clarence’s forces got as far as the city of Angers, about 190 miles south-west of Paris in the heart of the Loire region. Angers was heavily defended, however, and at that time of year no army of that era could sustain a long siege.

Clarence decided to head back to Normandy and it was at that point that Buchan moved from Tours to confront the English force.

Scouting parties had been sent out by both commanders, and a small contingent of Scots was captured and taken before Clarence. Whether by subterfuge or not, the evidence of the Scottish prisoners convinced Clarence that he could make a smash and grab raid and destroy the Scottish army which had based itself at Vieil-Baugé, a small village to the south west of Baugé.

It was to prove a fatal mistake. Clarence was convinced he could win the encounter with just knights and men-at-arms. Ordering the Earl of Salisbury to bring up the archers who made up the bulk of the English army, Clarence charged ahead with around 1500 men-at-arms including Henry V’s great friend and mentor, Thomas Beaufort, the Duke of Exeter – he features in Shakespeare’s Henry V – the Earl of Somerset and the Earl of Huntingdon and their retinues.

Clarence darted to take the bridge at Baugé, but a small Scottish contingent of archers and some French cavalry defied him long enough for Buchan to muster his entire force, which he concealed behind a ridge above the village of Vieil-Baugé.

It was now that the glory-hunting Clarence compounded his earlier error of not taking his archers. Under a hail of Scottish arrows, he led his force on an uphill charge only to be confronted with the Scottish army that outnumbered him at least two-to-one and which had the advantage of fighting downhill.

There are several accounts of Clarence going bravely to his death. He may have been unhorsed by a Scottish knight, Sir John Carmichael, and Alexander Buchanan is said to have then killed Clarence with his mace, but after the battle, the Duke’s body was found riddled with arrows so he may well have fallen early in the charge up that disastrous hill.

It truly was a disaster. For the loss of a few dozen men, the Scots and French army killed around 1500 of the English force. Among the dead were the Earl of Tankerville and Baron John de Ros, while the Duke of Exeter and the Earls of Somerset and Huntingdon were captured, and their ransom enriched their Scottish captors. Had Salisbury not rallied his archers, the Scots could have annihilated the English force, but for whatever reason, he and the remainder of the army were able to escape back to Normandy.

Henry V was devastated at the loss of his brother, and led a new English army into France the following year, dying of dysentery after the siege of Meaux in 1422.

The Dauphin was so delighted with the Scottish success that, after becoming king on the death of his father in October 1422, he made Buchan the Constable of France, in effect the commander of the entire French army. Wigtoun was made Count of Longueville, and Carmichael was later elected Bishop of Orleans. King Charles VII also instituted the Garde Ecossaise, the royal bodyguard, which lasted until the French Revolution.

News of the victory at Baugé reverberated around Europe.

It was the first utterly decisive defeat of an English army in that final phase of the Hundred Years War and was a major psychological boost to the French royal house, and indeed France itself.

There would be reverses from then onwards, but France had shown that England was not invincible. In Rome, Pope Martin V commented: “Verily, the Scots are well-known as an antidote to the English.”

The English in France rallied under the Duke of Bedford and at the Battle of Verneuil in 1424, it was the Scottish contingent’s turn to be routed and almost massacred to a man, though chroniclers blame the French part of the army for that defeat.

By then King James I was on the throne back in Scotland and he decided to take no further official part in the Hundred Years War. Instead, France’s salvation was left to a young peasant girl from the village of Domremy called Jeanne … Thus ends our short series on famous Scottish victories you have never heard of. Well, not until now.