The Hundred Years War ends in England’s agonising defeat – but triumph for Jonathan Sumption

On 5 February 1328 the last Capetian king of France was laid to rest in the royal mausoleum of Saint-Denis. It is now 33 years, and more than 3,000 pages since Jonathan Sumption’s first readers followed Charles IV on his last journey, as his funeral procession wound its slow way from Notre-Dame across the Grand Pont and out through the streets of Paris into the open countryside to the north of Europe’s most populous and richest city.

The death of Charles IV led to a crisis of succession that for the next four generations would embroil France and England in a war of unimaginable savagery. At the time of his death his queen was seven months pregnant, and when she gave birth to a daughter in the spring the crown was assumed by the late king’s cousin, the grandson of Philip III, Philip of Valois.

The Valois succession caused little protest at the time – certainly none in the English parliament – and but for two factors would now be happily forgotten.