Who Was John Talbot?

John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury (c. 1384–1453), known in the English and French chronicles as the “English Achilles,” was the longest-serving English commander of the Hundred Years’ War. He fought in France for almost four decades, from the invasion of 1415 to the catastrophe of Castillon on 17 July 1453, in which he was killed along with his son John, Viscount Lisle. He was a minor Shropshire baron by origin, and his career is the most striking example in the war of the genuine self-made English captain. The French gave him his epithet; the English, by the time of his death, regarded him as a national hero.

Origins and early service

The Talbots were a Shropshire baronial family of respectable antiquity but limited wealth. John Talbot succeeded to the barony of Furnivall and the Shropshire estates in 1404, on the death of his father Richard, the 4th Baron Talbot. He was knighted by Henry V in France in 1419, and he served through the conquest of Normandy. He was made a count of Normandy by Henry V in 1421 and lieutenant of the county of Maine. The Caroline phase brought him a step up: he was created Baron Talbot and Furnivall, then earl of Shrewsbury in 1442. By the 1440s, after the death of the duke of York and the retirement of other captains, he was the senior English soldier in France.

Agincourt and the Loire campaign

Talbot fought at Agincourt on 25 October 1415, as a captain under the duke of York, and served through the siege of Falaise, the conquest of the Cotentin, and the campaigns of 1417–1419. He was at the Battle of the Herrings on 12 February 1429, where the French under Sir John Stuart were defeated in a minor but bloody engagement near Orléans. In the days after the lifting of the siege on 8 May 1429, Talbot led the English garrison’s attempts to stem the French counter-offensive. He was defeated at the Battle of Patay on 18 June 1429, in which the earl of Salisbury and Lord Scales were killed and the English cavalry was destroyed in detail by the mounted men-at-arms of Jean, comte de Dunois, and the Duke of Alençon. Talbot was not captured at Patay; he was taken, separately, in a skirmish later in 1429 and ransomed.

Ireland and the second French war

Between 1414 and 1445 Talbot served four terms as Lieutenant of Ireland — a political and military post that carried a substantial salary and a long absence from France. He was recalled to France in 1445 and served as the principal English commander in Normandy. He was the most prominent of the English commanders who refused to acknowledge the disgraceful surrender of Rouen in October 1449 — he held the citadel of Rouen for several weeks after the city had capitulated, and was forced to withdraw only when his position was militarily untenable. The defence of Rouen was the high point of his late career and the one that fixed his reputation as a professional soldier.

Castillon

Talbot’s last appointment was the defence of Gascony in 1452–1453, after the English reoccupation of Bordeaux in October 1452. The French, under Jean Bureau and the constable Arthur de Richemont, opened the siege of Castillon-sur-Dordogne on 8 July 1453. Talbot marched from Bordeaux on 16 July with perhaps 4,000 men. The French, under Bureau, had constructed a fortified camp in the parish of Eymet, a mile east of Castillon, defended by a substantial train of field artillery, reportedly more than 300 guns. Talbot, in his late sixties, attacked without adequate reconnaissance on the morning of 17 July. The French artillery devastated the English formations, Talbot’s son was killed, and Talbot himself, refusing to flee, was killed. The English army was destroyed in detail. Bordeaux surrendered on 19 October 1453.

Reputation

Talbot’s posthumous reputation is mixed. The English made him the model of the professional chivalric captain, the inheritor of the Black Prince, the foil to the feebleness of Henry VI’s government. The Prose Brut and Enguerrand de Monstrelet treat him as a major figure of the war. The Tudor tradition, which needed a hero of the Lost Cause, fixed his image as the “English Achilles” and built a major monument to him in old St Paul’s. The modern scholarly treatment — A. J. Pollard’s John Talbot and the War in France, 1427–1453 (1983) — restores him to his place as a competent but not exceptional soldier whose career, more than any other, illustrated the structural decay of the English war effort in the late 1440s and early 1450s.