Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/328

 But the impetuous charge of the English and Gascons shouting ‘Talbot, Talbot, St. George,’ left the issue long doubtful. Shrewsbury ordered his men to protect themselves against the enemy's fire by interlocking their bucklers. His standard was fixed for a moment on the rampart and the entrance of the camp carried. But this advantage was again lost, and before it could be recovered a body of Breton lances concealed on the heights of Mont d'Horable to the north threw themselves on the flank of the wearied English, and Shrewsbury, already wounded in the face, was struck in the leg by a shot from a culverin and dismounted. His men began to fly, and the French descending on the little group around him, one of them thrust a sword through his body without recognising his victim. His son Lisle, whom he had vainly entreated to save himself, fell by his side. Gashed and trampled under foot, Shrewsbury's body was so disfigured that his own herald recognised it next day only by the absence of a tooth (, ii. 43). It was conveyed to England and interred in the old burial-place of the Stranges in the parish church of Whitchurch, though to this day the peasants of Périgord believe him to be buried in a mound between the camp and the Dordogne which, from a chapel that surmounted it till the Revolution, is called ‘la chapelle de Talbot’ (, p. 313). Hunter (p. 64) indeed says that his remains were buried in France, and not brought to England until many years after by his grandson, Sir Gilbert Talbot of Grafton, but he gives no authority for the statement. Over his remains was erected a fine canopied monument enclosing his effigy in full armour, with the mantle of the order of the Garter, and his feet resting on a talbot dog; having suffered greatly from the ravages of time and the fall of the church in 1711, it was completely restored by his descendant, Countess Brownlow, in 1874. The inscription gives the wrong date 7 July. At the rebuilding of the church an urn containing his heart embalmed was discovered.

Shrewsbury was a sort of Hotspur, owing his reputation more to dash and daring than to any true military genius. ‘Ducum Angliæ omnium strenuissimus et audacissimus,’ wrote the chronicler Basin (i. 192). In all his long career as a commander he fought only two actions which deserve to be called battles; Patay was a rout from the beginning, and Castillon a miscalculation. The last general of the school of Edward III who fought abroad was overthrown significantly enough by artillery, the new arm which the French had recently developed. Shrewsbury's courageous perseverance and ubiquitous activity throughout an unusually protracted military career, and the forlorn attempt of the valiant old warrior to stem the disasters of his country, made a deep impression upon both nations. The legends of Guienne still keep green the memory of ‘le roi Talabot’ (, p. 282).

Besides the effigy on his tomb, several characteristic portraits of Shrewsbury have been preserved. Almost all show a strongly marked face with aquiline nose and commanding eye. One is engraved in Strutt's ‘Regal Antiquities,’ p. 85, and again in Doyle's ‘Official Baronage,’ from MS. Reg. 15 E. vi., a book presented by Shrewsbury to Margaret of Anjou; another from the same source is in Strutt's ‘Dress and Habits of England,’ plate cxv.; a larger one was reproduced from a manuscript belonging to Louise of Savoy by André Thevet in ‘Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres,’ Paris, 1584, and has since been re-engraved in Ribadieu's ‘Histoire de la Conquête de la Guyenne,’ Bordeaux, 1866. The sixteenth-century engraver has included a representation of Talbot's sword said to have been found in the Dordogne about 1575; it bore the inscription ‘Sum Talboti pro vincere inimico meo, 1443.’ A quaint picture of Shrewsbury in his tabard, now in the College of Arms, is stated to have been removed from his widow's tomb in Old St. Paul's before the fire. It is engraved in Lodge's ‘Illustrations’ and (from a copy at Castle Ashby) in Pennant's ‘Journey to London,’ along with a companion portrait of Shrewsbury's second wife from the same collection.

Shrewsbury was twice married. By his first wife, Maud, daughter of Thomas Neville, lord Furnivall, whom he espoused before March 1407, perhaps before October 1404, he had three sons: John [q. v.], who succeeded him as second earl and is separately noticed; Thomas, born in Ireland on 19 June 1416, died on 10 Aug. in the same year (, p. 26); and Christopher of Treeton, who was slain at the battle of Northampton in 1460. He had at least one daughter, Joan, who shortly after 25 July 1457 became the fourth wife of James, lord Berkeley (d. 1463), and, surviving him, married, about 1487, Edmund Hungerford (Complete Peerage, i. 330). Shrewsbury married secondly, in or before 1433, Margaret (cf., i. 444, 458), eldest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, fifth earl of Warwick [q. v.], by his first wife, Elizabeth, only child of Thomas, lord Berkeley (d. 1417). She and her husband continued her mother's resis-