Calais – a problem for 674 years
Calais, like its sibling, Dover, is a hard town to love. It is ugly and workaday and entirely without pretension. But it has been a constant in French and English history for centuries.
It was in the summer of 1346 that Edward III, one of the last English monarchs who spoke French as his first language, decided to add the French port and its hinterland, the Pas de Calais, to his realm. He had just defeated Philippe VI de Valois at the Battle of Crécy, some 50 miles south, and saw no reason why the shortest crossing from Kent to his newly extended French territories should be controlled by the French.
So, instead of sailing his army home, Edward decided to lay siege to Calais. He blockaded the port and stationed his troops in the surrounding marshland. His proclamation was a simple one: surrender or die. But the good folk of Calais were in no mood to give in. They withstood the siege, smuggling in what food and supplies they could, resorting in the end to eating grass and rats.
Nine months later, frustrated beyond measure, Edward issued an ultimatum. Either they opened the gates or he would take the town by force and kill every one of its inhabitants. “My will is such that all will die there,” he said. The officer in command of Calais, Jean de Vienne, sent a message to the French king, begging him to break the siege. “If we do not have any help,” he wrote, “we will be leaving the city all in the fields, to fight, to live or to die. Because we prefer to die honourably in the fields than to eat each other.” But the message was intercepted. Philippe, in any case, could see no way through the English lines.
Realising that his victory would come at a price and would scarcely resound in the annals of chivalry, Edward then decided that the townspeople would be spared if, as part of the terms of surrender, they sent out six citizens in chains to be executed on the spot.
Thus it was that the Burghers of Calais, barefoot, dressed in sackcloth, with ropes around their necks, made their way through the town gates and presented themselves to Edward, who immediately ordered their execution. It was the intervention of his wife, Queen Philippa of Hainaut, a province of France close-by Calais, that saved their lives. Instead of having them killed, Edward had them transported to England, from which, sometime after, they were ransomed back to France.
Rodin’s fabulous bronze statue, The Burghers of Calais, erected opposite the town’s rather splendid hotel de ville, commemorates the heroism of the six city fathers, whose “pain, anguish and fatalism” were to the artist the definition of heroism and self-sacrifice.
For Edward, the business was best forgotten, following on the valour so richly displayed at Crécy, but from then on, for the next 211 years, Calais was considered part of the kingdom of England, sending members to the parliament in London and dominating the lucrative wool trade with the Continent. The arrival of the Black Death less than a year after the town’s surrender only served to reinforce its English nature. The native French and Flemish population was almost wiped out and was replaced by immigrants from England, including at one point Dick Whittington, later the mayor of London.
The situation couldn’t last. Geography was against it. And it duly didn’t. In 1558, during the reign of Queen Mary, and with England somewhat preoccupied with the threat posed by Spain, Calais was seized by Duke François de Guise on behalf of King Henri II and restored to French sovereignty.
Think, though, of how much easier Brexit would have been if the Pas (or Pale) de Calais had remained in UK hands. the Channel tunnel would have been British at both ends. Calais itself would have been a British port, and all talk of banning access to the Single Market would have run up against the logic of a British possession straddling the border between France and Belgium.
But that’s history for you: lost opportunities at every turn. Instead of a straight run across the Dover straits, with the Union flag flying at both ends, trucks bound for the EU must now queue up in their thousands in the Kent countryside, while those making the return journey huddle together in Calais, moving forward at a funereal pace.
We can’t even look forward to the return of the booze cruise for day trips to Calais are about to become a thing of the past, it seems. The town once regarded as the jewel in the crown of England will soon become enemy territory, governed by dictat from Brussels and Paris, employing border guards and customs officials by the thousand to process movements between ports formerly bound together by a shared history.
No doubt, ways round will be found. Nothing is forever. But from 1 January 1, the new order of things can be encompassed in a single phrase, suitably revised: Foreigners begin in Calais.