Loss of Aquitaine

In the midst of all this, a miracle seemed to present itself. The citizens of Bordeaux, resenting their new French rulers, took repossession of the city and its surrounding region in the name of Henry VI. John Talbot, veteran of the Norman wars, ‘England’s Achilles’, led an expeditionary force from England. The disasters of the past few years seemed on the verge of solution. On 17 July 1453, attempting to bring assistance to the town of Castillon on the river Dordogne east of Bordeaux, Talbot threw his troops against what he assumed to be a weakly defended French position. It was in fact an artillery battery into which the French had retreated. Undaunted, and determined, Don Quixote-like to prove his honour, Talbot charged. As is the inevitable consequence of cavalry advancing directly into cannon, at Castillon as in the Charge of the Light Brigade almost exactly four hundred years later, shrapnel triumphed over horse-flesh. Talbot was killed, his death at the age of sixty-six a fitting symbol of the end of British empire in France and of the futility of much that in the previous century had passed for chivalry. Bordeaux fell to Charles VII in October. After almost exactly three hundred years united to the English crown, Aquitaine was no longer an English colony.