Who Was Philip VI of France?

Philip VI of France (1293–1350) reigned from 1328 to 1350, the first king of the Valois house, and lost the three great battles of the Edwardian phase of the Hundred Years’ War. He did not start the war. The decision to apply the Salic Law to the succession of Charles IV and to bar Edward III of England from the throne was taken by the French magnates in February 1328; Edward did homage to Philip at Amiens on 6 June 1329 and accepted the settlement. The drift to war was the work of the years 1330 to 1337, and in those years Philip’s caution, his dependence on a narrow group of advisors, and his habit of half-measures did more to make the war inevitable than any single act of either king.

The succession of 1328

Philip was the eldest son of Charles of Valois, himself the younger brother of Philip IV. The direct Capetian line of the French kings — Louis XVI through Philip V and Charles IV — died out on 1 February 1328 with the death of Charles IV. The two serious claimants were Philip, who could claim the throne through the male Capetian line, and Edward III of England, whose mother Isabella was the sister of Charles IV. The French magnates applied the Salic Law and chose Philip. He was crowned at Reims on 29 May 1328. Edward was not yet sixteen, and his regency (Isabella and Mortimer) was not in a position to challenge the decision.

The drift to war

The compromise held for nine years. Edward did homage to Philip for the duchy of Aquitaine at Amiens on 6 June 1329; the homage was awkward and was later disputed, but it was done. The compromise broke down over a sequence of disputes: the case of Robert d’Artois, the French nobleman banished in 1332 and given refuge by Edward III; the naval war in the Channel, where English privateers were seizing French shipping; and the question of the French support for Scotland. On 24 May 1337 the Parlement of Paris, in Edward’s absence, declared the duchy of Aquitaine forfeit. Edward renounced his homage on 7 October 1337. He did not, however, formally assume the title “King of France” until the Westminster Parliament of 26 January 1340.

The disasters

The first decade of the war was a sequence of French disasters, and most of them were the result of Philip’s personal decisions. The naval battle off Sluys on 24 June 1340 destroyed the French fleet. The chevauchée of 1339 and 1340 emptied the French treasury. The battle of Crécy on 26 August 1346 — in which Philip attacked uphill into a prepared English position, in the rain, on ground he had not scouted — cost the lives of a substantial proportion of the higher French nobility, including the count of Alençon, the count of Flanders, and the count of Blois. The siege of Calais (1346–1347) ended in a surrender that left England a permanent foothold in the Channel. The battle of Poitiers (1356) and the capture of King John II followed in the next reign.

Philip was not a fool. He understood the constitutional difficulties of the situation, and he understood the importance of naval power. He was, however, a feudal magnate on a throne that increasingly demanded a national monarch, and the gap between the two roles was, in the end, the cause of the disasters. The standard treatment is in Jean Favier’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1980); the modern English account is Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War vol. I (1990) and vol. II (1999).

The Black Death and the last years

The Black Death reached Marseille in January 1348 and Paris in the autumn. Philip’s last years were dominated by the demographic catastrophe, by the fiscal strain of the war, and by the question of the ransom of the prisoners. He died on 22 August 1350, at the abbey of Coulombs, and was buried at Saint-Denis. He was succeeded by his son John II, who would be captured at Poitiers six years later and who would die in captivity in London in 1364.

Reputation

The standard verdict of the chroniclers, Froissart’s polite sympathy, Jean Le Bel’s harsher line, and the Latin commentators’ near-unanimous hostility, is that Philip was cautious, indecisive, and out of his depth. Modern scholarship is more nuanced: the structural problems of the Valois monarchy in 1328 were not of his making, and he had neither the institutions nor the resources to solve them. The first phase of the war was, in effect, the Valois monarchy learning on the job.