Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England by Catherine Hanley

their fathers, including the count of Dreux and the count of St Pol, riding with Philip. But Louis had one wise old head in his camp – Henry Clément, the marshal, who had trained him as a boy.
    Meanwhile, John was making a dangerous alliance with a powerful Poitevin noble, Hugh IX de Lusignan. For a number of years he had been John’s enemy since John had taken Hugh’s betrothed Isabelle of Angoulême and married her himself, but now in a strange twist John offered his daughter by Isabelle, Joan, in marriage to Hugh’s son. Hugh decided to throw in his lot with the English king, and the betrothal took place on 25 May 1214 (Hugh junior was at this point in his mid-twenties; Joan was four), whereupon Hugh and many other Poitevin nobles joined John in the insurrection.
    John’s next move was to approach the well-fortified and strategically important city of Nantes, a port which straddled the River Loire and was the seat of the dukes of Brittany, and threaten it in an effort to force the new duke to submit to him. The succession of the dukedom of Brittany in recent years had been complicated. Constance, who had been duchess of Brittany in her own right, had remarried after the death of her husband Geoffrey, son of Henry II, in 1186 and had borne more children, so the murdered Arthur and the imprisoned Eleanor had three younger half-sisters. Due to her captive state Eleanor had been overlooked as Arthur’s heir following his death, so the duchy passed to Alix, eldest of the three younger sisters, who had recently married; her husband therefore became duke of Brittany in right of his wife, and it was he with whom John attempted to negotiate. Unfortunately for John the husband in question was Peter de Dreux, Louis’s cousin and boyhood companion.
    Peter refused absolutely to surrender Nantes to the English king, despite the fact that any siege might endanger his twelve-year-old wife, and despite the fact that his elder brother Robert was at that time a prisoner in John’s custody, having been captured during a skirmish, and was liable to be used as leverage. The taking of hostages of noble or knightly rank was a common feature of conflicts in the early thirteenth century: ostensibly this was because the ‘brotherhood’ of chivalry was international, so anyone of knightly rank or above was entitled to certain privileges, but of more practical import was the fact that it would be foolish to kill a nobleman if you could capture him and offer him up for ransom instead. Such hostages were normally treated reasonably well, but it was only two years since John had hanged twenty-eight sons of Welsh chieftains, many of them children, handed over to him by Prince Llewelyn of Wales, so Peter can have been under no illusions that his decision to remain loyal to Louis might cost his brother his life. His courage won him a reprieve, however, and John decided against a full-scale siege of Nantes and withdrew. Instead he headed back along the River Loire, taking Ancenis on 11 June and Angers on 17 June before turning his attention to the fortress of La-Roche-aux-Moines.
    This was a castle which had been recently built by William des Roches, the seneschal (an officer appointed by the king to oversee justice and administration) of Anjou, in order to defend the route from Nantes to Le Mans. John arrived there on 19 June 1214 and demanded surrender, but the garrison refused. He brought in siege machinery and bombarded the castle for two weeks, even erecting a gallows outside the walls and threatening to hang the entire garrison, but still they held out.
    Louis, meanwhile, was on the Breton border with his army when news of the siege at La-Roche-aux-Moines reached him. This presented him with a major dilemma. Should he ride towards John’s forces and engage him, thus committing himself to a set-piece battle in which he risked all his troops? Or should he wait to see the outcome at La-Roche-aux-Moines and then seek to head John off elsewhere