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From Hesdin Mahaut journeyed constantly through her County of Artois, visiting her castles, the towns or villages around them, and the various religious houses and hospitals she had founded, and attending in general to the well-being of her subjects. For her it was not enough that she was born to reign.
Capres, for whom Philip, at Parma's suggestion, had sent the commission as governor of Artois and of Hesdin, was obliged to renounce those offices, notwithstanding his earlier "reconciliation," and the "blood and water" of John Sarrasin.
The constable did not serve a whit the less valiantly and brilliantly in this campaign of Picardy; he surprised and carried the town of Hesdin, which was defended by a strong garrison; but after the victory he treated with a generosity which was not perhaps free from calculation the imperialist nobility shut up in the castle; he set all his prisoners at large, and paid particular attention to the Countess de Roeux, of the house of Croy, whom he knew to have influence with Charles V. He was certainly not preparing just then to abandon the King of France and go over to the camp of the emperor; but he was sufficiently irritated against Francis I. to gladly seize an opportunity of making new friends on the rival side.
We were to start for Tramecourt now, but on the way we were to make a couple of stops. Our way was to take us through St. Pol and Hesdin, and, going so, we came to the town of Le Quesnoy. Here some of the 11th Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders were stationed. My heart leaped at the sight of them.
This quaint episode so amused Louis, that he ever after recounted it when telling of the piety of his sister. Let us now go in imagination to the Castle of Hesdin, and see something of its treasures and of the daily life of the Countess Mahaut. Soon after her accession to Artois, her two daughters married sons of King Philip le Bel, and her little son, Robert, then became her principal care.
Between Peronne and Namur did the party turn aside to visit the young Duchess of Burgundy, either at Hesdin or at Aire? Such is the conjecture of a learned Belgian editor, and he carries his surmise further in suggesting that in this brief sojourn was performed Chastellain's mystery of "The Peace of Peronne."
That night the wagon which was descending to M. sur M. by the Hesdin road, collided at the corner of a street, just as it was entering the town, with a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, which was going in the opposite direction, and in which there was but one person, a man enveloped in a mantle. The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent shock.
At the negotiations entered upon, in 1525, between Francis I. and Charles V., Francis I. was prompt in making large and unpalatable concessions: he renounced his pretensions, so far as Italy was concerned, to the duchy of Milan, to Genoa, and to the kingdom of Naples; his suzerainty over the countships of Flanders and Artois, and possession of Hesdin and Tournay; he consented to reinstate Duke Charles of Bourbon in all his hereditary property and rights, and to pay three millions of crowns in gold for his own ransom; but he refused to cede Provence and Dauphiny to the Duke of Bourbon as an independent state, and to hand over the duchy of Burgundy to Charles V., as heir of his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, only daughter of Charles the Rash.
Yet such a tour, costing so little as regards money, time and fatigue, teems with interest of very varied and unlooked-for kind. Every inch of ground is historic to begin with, and has contributed its page to Anglo-French annals or English romance. We may take the little railway from Hesdin to Abbeville, traversing the forest of Crecy, and drive across the cornfields to Agincourt.
From this friendly little town a charming woodland journey may be made by the railway now leading through the forest of Crecy to Abbeville. Between Hesdin and Arras the geometrically planted cider apple trees and poplars growing in parallel lines are without beauty, but by the railway are bits of waste ground covered with cowslip, wind flowers, cuckoo-pint, and dandelion.
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