![]() ![]() We live in times when it is easy to understand how people can be bestial to each other because of their religious imaginations. And now England and France are also at peace only the Isles de la Manche remind us that once the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth II ruled a kingdom spanning the Channel waters, a truly European power, whose centre might just as well have been Paris as Westminster. ![]() ![]() Poor Sir Matthieu did not live to follow his master back to France and see Bourges once more, but he found an honourable and tranquil grave in East Anglia. ![]() By 1431 de la Pole was home, his purse considerably lighter after paying a crushing ransom, but he would have been a natural host for this now-Anglophile scion of the French royal house. The village was one of the principal homes of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk: in 1429, he had found himself the opposite number of the Duke as a prisoner in France, captured in the wake of the crushing English humiliation at the relief of the city of Orléans, which turned Joan forever into “the Maid of Orléans”. It is likely that the Duke of Orléans spent time at Westhorpe as an honoured if involuntary guest alongside Sir Mathieu Borgue. ![]()
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