An excerpt from A Brief Medieval History of Velois vol. 2 by Master of Historical Divination Salvador Devalance. Published by University of Whitegate Press, 1549 ME.
The War of the Bastards was a conflict between the Duc Philippe de Flan-Gothe on behalf of his nephew, Louis VII, and the Comte Louis the Iron-Hearted, who served as the guardian for the underage king Henri IV. And if history were so simple as that, this tome would be a brief history in truth as well as in title. To understand this civil war, we must first go back to its antecedent civil war.
When we left the previous volume, King Henri III had just come to power following a series of brutal dynastic struggles. This on again off again domestic turmoil had gone on for decades, and the Priest’s War was only its most recent flare up.
Henri III came to the throne by accident, rather than by anyone’s intention. He unified the kingdom only as everyone's object of last resort.
His uncle and elder brother had each coalesced a faction around themselves, and each systematically worked to execute anyone who could form a threat to their power. Far from sparing their own kin, family became their prime targets. Finally, the claimants met each other in battle and, by happenstance, each was killed within an hour of the other. Although neither side was aware of the fact until it was all over.
The dynastic genocide left only a single claimant behind, a shy terrified boy of fifteen who never had a day’s instruction of how to rule. He had been hidden in a monastery by his mother, before she and both of his two sisters were murdered by unknown assailants while traveling. The boy was always quiet and introspective by nature, and the colossal familial bloodletting he witnessed as a boy only exasperated these traits.
His reign was marked by a determined avoidance of conflict. If this had been represented as a strong policy in pursuit of peace, he might have been more well regarded. However, his vassals quickly realized that it was actually the result of a weak and desultory executive force. They took advantage of the situation to increase their own power at the expense of the traditional rights of the crown.
During his reign, Henri III fathered bastards of both sexes, but only two of his natural sons survived into adulthood. Soon after his official coronation, he married the widow Margaret de Emmoi. The new king's wife was almost twenty years his elder, and gave him no legitimate children. She had also failed to produce heirs for her first husband, so it is almost certain that she was barren. Regardless, she quickly passed beyond her years of childbearing altogether.
Despite this failure, their marriage was, to all indications, a happy one. When Margaret was taken in an outbreak of plague, the king was inconsolable. He fell into a deep despair and forewent even the pretense of trying to govern.
In a few years, he also fell ill and it seemed that he would soon die. His ministers insisted that he must name a definite heir and legitimize one of his two sons. The king relented; one may presume out of a desire to be left alone to die in peace. He called for the mother of his youngest surviving son, Henri IV, to be brought to him.
Jeanne was a peasant servant girl living at the royal palace. One can imagine her surprise at being brought to the king’s room, only to be told that she was marrying him and would soon be queen, at least briefly.
They were married, her son was legitimized, and a writ of succession was signed and witnessed. Later that night, the king died. The eleven-year-old boy was crowned, and power came to rest with a low-born dowager queen and a regency council.
Whatever her nature before her brief marriage, the dowager queen quickly turned tyrant. Using her influence over her son, she shaped the regency council until, after only a few years, it consisted entirely of her own minions. She knew the precarious nature of her son’s position, as well as her own, and responded with vicious retaliation at the slightest trace of dissent. However, this heavy handed approach only sowed further seeds of rebellion.
Many landowners who might have been won over by careful diplomacy, were instead exiled from the king’s court. Cast adrift, they quickly found themselves drawn to another locus of power. The Duc Philippe had been biding his time carefully for this moment. Rather than bend the knee to the boy king, he retreated to his own land with the new king’s elder half-brother Louis VII.
Now that the time was right, he emerged. The Duc Philippe declared that Henri IV had never been legitimized. The marriage to the dowager queen had obviously never been consummated after the vows had been taken, because the king died on the wedding night. He denounced the writ of succession as a forgery, and explained that his own signature had been extracted under threats of force. Supposedly, the day after the king’s death. Therefore, by rights of primogeniture, the true king was his own ward.
Louis VII was a lad of twenty-four, old enough to dispense with the need for a regency council. Besides this, his mother was the Duc Philippe’s sister and their family was among the oldest and most noble in the kingdom. Furthermore, Louis VII was married to his first cousin, the Duc’s eldest daughter. She had already provided many daughters to her husband, and was already pregnant with another child. Under Velian succession laws it was thus almost assured that there would be a legitimate heir to ensure continuity of rule. These advantages recommended themselves to the disaffected nobles who flocked to his banner.
During the first year of the war, the fighting was very limited. Most nobles still preferred to remain neutral, so the armies mustered by each side represented only each king’s personal retainers and closest allies. Although he had effectively declared the onset of hostilities with his proclamation on the illegitimacy of Henri IV, the Duc Philippe preferred to wait and gather his allies while his enemy came to him.
The dowager queen Jeanne was happy to oblige. She first gave command of her forces to her lover, the sycophantic knight Ser William de Vermillion. He promptly departed on a punitive expedition, allowed himself to be lured into an ambush, and oversaw the destruction of the majority of his army in the first clash of the war. The battle was decisive, and Ser William returned south with one in ten of the men he had set out with.
The commander hadn’t even found the good manners to be one of the casualties.
With the king’s army routed there was no longer any force capable of stopping the rebels, and they began to raid freely, as allies flocked to their ascendant fortunes. Ser William continued to try and muster some kind of resistance, but only succeeded in aiding his opponents. Again and again, he insisted on mustering garrisons for pointless offensives, which only squandered their resources.
Ultimately, it was winter that stopped the Duc, at least temporarily. Ser William was called back to Vermillion, and dismissed from his position.
Now the dowager queen turned to the Comte Louis the Iron-hearted. Ser Ironheart had been a general in the previous civil war and brought great glory to his name. After the Priest’s War, he served as marshal under Henri III, where he did his best to hold the kingdom together. Queen Jeanne had removed him from the position because he expressly refused to indulge in the courtly intrigues which she encouraged. Alas, she had no choice but to return to the old warhorse.
Ser Ironheart remains one of the most enigmatic studies in chivalry today. We can never know for certain what drove him to serve the queen he famously described a “painted-up woman of absolutely no virtue whatsoever… the notorious adulteress”.
All we can know is what his sons claimed after the war. He felt his honor demanded that he must protect his king, whom he had acknowledged before the gods as a signatory of the writ of succession.
Besides their change in leadership, the armies of king Henri IV had other reasons for hope as the campaigning season began again. Many nobles had indeed flocked to the cause of Louis VII, but those nobles had their own enemies. The rightful succession of Henri IV became an honorable cover for local feuds across the kingdom.
Furthermore, during their ascendancy the forces under the Duc Philippe had not been discretionary in their raids for loot, and made enemies of many neutrals. It is only at this point the conflict became a true civil war as old feuds, simmering since the indecisive end of the previous conflict, suddenly began to erupt everywhere.
The Duc Philippe and Comte Louis the Iron-hearted fought continuously across the whole of the next year, but never directly against each other. As armies proliferated, and fighting spread like wildfire, dozens of opponents presented themselves. Each of the two great commanders preferred to hunt weaker prey. As the next winter began, the Duc Philippe retained the initiative, but neither side had found a decisive advantage to suggest that victory might be near.
The fighting had not gone unnoticed by Velois’ neighbors, but none had yet interfered until this point. Teutonia was involved in a violent interregnum of their own, and in no position to do anything. Lusitan watched with growing interest. They had no interest in helping either king, but they did have an interest in extending the fighting for as long as possible. Seeing that Duc Philippe still seemed to hold the upper hand, they offered generous loans to the dowager queen at a time when both sides began to find their war chests running dry.
At the worst possible moment, Duc Philippe fell ill. Near the beginning of the next campaigning season, he developed a severe case of consumption which left him hovering near the point of death. With his money exhausted, and his marshal incapacitated, Louis VII suddenly found himself bereft of friends. Fair-weather allies now moved to the side of his enemy, who suddenly seemed poised to bring war to its final conclusion.
Once again, the armies of Henri IV marched into Flan-Gothe. They won easy victory after easy victory in a series of minor confrontations, and it seemed as though nothing could oppose them. With no other option available to him, Louis VII took personal command of his own army.
The minor battles had been feints and delaying actions, while he gathered up all the forces that still remained to him. Finally, he risked it all in one last confrontation. When the two armies faced off against each other, Louis VII was outnumbered five to one. It seemed hopeless, but in fact, the fighting was not nearly so lopsided.
The largest single contingent of forces on the field came from the elderly Marquis de Fer. The Marquis was an old and dear friend of Ser Ironheart, but he had not formally declared allegiance to either king. To date, he had carefully preserved his forces, and kept his army apart from the fighting. Before launching this endeavor, Duc Phillipe had concluded a marriage contract between the Marquis’ son, and his own youngest daughter. These split alliances had kept the Fer-Mark neutral until that point.
The Comte had gathered numbers for intimidation, but many of those numbers were feudal levies. These men were ill-trained, ill-equipped, and had already been held far longer than their oaths demanded. He also hired several mercenary companies, but as the fighting moved back into his favor, Lusitan withdrew their financial support. This left the mercenaries' payments in arrears, and their loyalty questionable.
Still, the Ironheart possessed a clear advantage as battle commenced- until he was struck in the shoulder by a stray arrow, and forced to retire from the field of battle. As he left the field, the enemy line was in the process of collapse, and all still seemed well.
Within the hour, Louis VII had rushed into the heart of the battle himself and stabilized the line. Word began to spread through the army of Henri IV that their general Ser Ironheart was injured, and perhaps dead. Desertions began as a slow trickle, but by the evening they had become a flood.
That night the old Marquis Louis de Fer and his son Jean – who would replace him in just over a year, when his father died of what is believed to be a series of strokes – both swore fealty to Louis VII. Neither the young rebel king, nor the Marquis’ heir in waiting, could have imagined at the time how deeply their future rule would be defined by their opposition to the other. For the moment, at least, they were allies.
The Duc Philippe began to recover, but even as he did so, he found he was no longer so vital to the war effort as he had once been. Louis VII led his army on a string of victories as he harried his enemies from Flan-Gothe. He wisely refused to over extend himself, and instead began preparations for a major offensive the next year.
Ser Ironheart also still lived, but his wound turned septic and now he hung on the point of death. With no allies, and out of money, the dowager queen began a desperate secret negotiation with the Imperium. Finally, believing they had no other options, Henri IV swore a feudal oath to the emperor. The oath was kept a close secret to avoid frightening away the few domestic allies who still remained. It remains still a frequent topic of debate if the old Comte knew of the king’s vassalage to the Imperium, but that's a mystery now lost to time.
One man who was aware of the secret alliance, however, was the Doge of Whitegate. The Republic’s network of spies had thoroughly compromised the Imperial court, and nothing the Emperor did escaped the notice of their ancient enemy. Until this point, the Republic had remained neutral. However, with their ultimate adversary now in alliance with one of the two kings, they quickly aligned themselves with the foe of their foe.
Louis VII launched a sudden strike on the capitol. His forces were light, but with most defenders dispersed for the winter, there was no one to stop him. Vermillion was under siege, but that siege was hardly complete due to the lack of men in the attacking army, and supplies were still coming and going easily. Regardless, the dowager queen panicked and sent an urgent summons for aid.
The Imperial legions and the assembling armies of Henri IV made plans to rendezvous in the Velian Whitewoods. These plans were, in due course, passed directly to the Republic. Ser Ironheart remained in Vermillion to lead the defense from his sickbed. Ser William was again given a chance to redeem himself, by overseeing the link up of forces.
As Ser William entered the forest to take his new command, the jaws of the trap had already closed.
The attack on the capital had been a feint. While Louis VII led a small army to offer himself as bait, Duc Philippe took the bulk of their forces to form one arm of an encircling pincer movement. Republican forces from Whitegate formed the other arm, and together they crushed their enemies between them.
Besides being taken by complete surprise, the forces of Henri IV were again hampered by the incompetence of their commander. For their part, the Imperials fared no better. The best of their veteran soldiers were still engaged, fighting in Teutonia. The army that marched into Velois was led by rich young nobles looking for easy glory, leading untrained raw recruits press ganged into service against their will.
The result was a total slaughter. This time, at least, Ser William had the decency to be among those captured in battle. He was held for a ransom, but when the dowager queen refused to even consider negotiations for him, he was beheaded.
The Doge and Louis VII concluded an alliance and the Republic made Henri IV’s oath of fealty to the emperor public. Any hope of further loans from Lusitan vanished. With the heart of the Imperium exposed by the destruction of the legions, the emperor now disavowed his new vassal. He claimed that no promises of definite military assistance had ever been made. Incidentally he also withdrew his legions from Teuntonia, extending that nation’s interregnum, and further weakening the Imperium's influence over the election of the next Caesar.
The new allied army joined Louis VII at Vermillion, and the city was then placed under siege in earnest. With no hope of rescue, Comte Louis the Iron-hearted violated his queen’s orders and offered terms of surrender. Henri IV and his mother would renounce their claims and be allowed to go into exile, and their soldiers would be granted a royal pardon.
The terms were accepted, but once he was allowed inside the gates, the new King Louis VII changed his mind. He immediately ordered his younger half-brother thrown into the dungeons, where he was later hacked to death. He allowed the former queen Jeanne to live, but kept her imprisoned. Royal pardons were extended to the soldiers, but only after vows of loyalty and a humiliating renunciation of past resistance were extracted.
Ser Ironheart was horrified by this flagrant betrayal of terms, and refused to bend the knee to his new king. Louis VII ordered him tortured into submission, but the old knight escaped through suicide. A vial of poison was slipped to him in prison, supposedly by his old nemesis the Duc Philippe.
Perhaps the old Duke had begun to realize that he no longer quite controlled the nephew he had just put into power.
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