On 3 April 1367 Edward, the Black Prince, destroyed Henry of Trastámara’s army near Nájera and put Peter of Castile back on his throne — and got nothing for it: Henry escaped, Peter never paid, and the campaign wrecked the Prince’s health, his finances and the English position in Aquitaine.
The Battle of Nájera, fought on 3 April 1367 in La Rioja and also called the Battle of Navarrete, was the last great field victory of Edward, the Black Prince, and the one that destroyed him. It was fought to decide the Castilian civil war between Peter of Castile and his illegitimate half-brother Henry of Trastámara, and it was fought by English and French soldiers because both crowns wanted control of the Castilian war fleet, the largest in the Atlantic.
Tactically it went perfectly. Henry’s army was caught with a river behind it, his light cavalry was shot off the field by English archers, his vanguard was surrounded, and his best commander was taken prisoner. Strategically it was a catastrophe for the winners. Henry himself escaped, Peter never paid a penny of what he had promised, and the Prince returned to Aquitaine with an empty treasury, a sick body and the tax demands that would push his Gascon lords into appealing to the King of France.
The Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 had paused the war between England and France and left both kingdoms with the same problem: thousands of unemployed soldiers of the free companies living off whatever countryside they were standing in. In late 1365 Charles V of France, helped by Pope Urban V, paid to send most of them over the Pyrenees under the pretext of a crusade against Granada, and then France and Aragon paid to turn them into an army for Henry of Trastámara. It removed the companies from France and put a French client on the Castilian throne in the same stroke, and by 1366 Peter had been driven out of his kingdom.
What made Castile worth this trouble was its navy. Castilian galleys outnumbered and outclassed anything England or France could put to sea, and whichever side had them could dominate the Channel approaches and the Gascon wine route. Peter fled to Bayonne and asked the Black Prince for help; the Prince, who ruled Aquitaine and needed both money and employment for his own soldiers, agreed at a meeting with Peter and Charles II of Navarre in 1366 on terms that were never going to be honoured — Peter would repay the whole cost of the army and hand over Castilian territory to Aquitaine.
Getting into Castile meant crossing Navarre, whose king Charles II had promised the pass to both sides and was paid by both. He solved the problem by arranging his own capture during a hunt so that he could not be expected to fight for anyone. The Prince’s army came through in February 1367 and found Henry doing exactly what he had been advised to do: refusing battle and wearing the invaders down in a hungry country.
That strategy worked while it lasted. In the third week of March, at Ariñez in the Basque country, Henry’s light horse under Don Tello and his French knights destroyed a reconnaissance detachment under Sir Thomas Felton; Sir William Felton was killed and several English captains taken. It was the first defeat the Prince’s army had suffered and it shook its confidence. But avoiding battle looked like cowardice to the Castilian nobility whose support Henry needed, and when the Prince crossed the Ebro at Logroño, Henry gave up the line of the Najerilla and came out to fight in the open — over the objections of du Guesclin and every one of his field commanders.
The Prince did not attack from the direction Henry was watching. According to the Chandos Herald his army marched from Navarrete by night on a roundabout route and came over a hill at first light on the north-east flank of an army still facing east. Henry’s vanguard under du Guesclin wheeled to meet it, but behind them the line was breaking up in the confusion, and some Castilian horse and a larger body of foot went over to the enemy. Rather than let the collapse spread, du Guesclin charged with the best Castilian troops and the French companies, and drove the English vanguard under John of Gaunt and Chandos back until the two sides were too close for spears and fought with swords, axes and daggers.
The battle was decided on the wings by archery. The Gascon companies began to work round du Guesclin’s flanks; Don Tello brought the Castilian light horse across to stop them and was met by the English archers, against whom lightly armoured horsemen had no protection at all, and his squadrons fled. Henry charged the Gascons himself several times and lost his horses to the same arrows. With the vanguard flanked and surrounded it was crushed, and the main body of Henry’s army — much of which had not fought — ran for the single narrow bridge over the Najerilla at Nájera. Most of the day’s casualties happened there, in the water and at the bridgehead, with the Majorcan and Aragonese horse riding them down. The victors then sacked the town.
When it was over the Prince asked whether Henry had been killed or captured. Told that he had not, he said — in the Gascon of his own duchy — “non ay res fait”: nothing then is done. It is the most honest verdict anyone gave on the battle. Henry had stood up to the most formidable army in Europe in the open field, which made his reputation with the Castilian nobility, and he got over the Pyrenees alive. The nobles captured with him mostly bought their way out of the mercenaries’ hands within months and went straight back to the war.
Peter, restored, did not pay. Whether he could not — his kingdom was still contested — or never meant to is argued either way, and he did write to Castilian towns demanding money for the Prince. What is certain is that the Prince got neither his costs nor the promised territory, that the English alliance with Castile ended there, and that Peter was left without a foreign protector. Two years later he was dead at the Battle of Montiel, killed by the half-brother he had beaten here.
The Prince came out of Spain with dysentery he never shook off; he was an invalid within a few years and dead in 1376, at forty-five. The campaign had been financed on credit against a repayment that never arrived, and the bill landed on Aquitaine. The hearth tax he imposed to cover it gave his Gascon lords a grievance and gave Charles V the opening he had been waiting for: in 1369 the appeals of the Gascon nobility were heard in Paris, the French declared the duchy forfeit, and the war that Brétigny had paused began again — this time with the French winning most of it.
The strategic prize went to the other side as well. Henry II, once secure, allied Castile to France, and the Castilian galleys the whole business had been about went into French service: in 1372 they destroyed an English fleet at La Rochelle. Nájera is therefore the clearest case in the Hundred Years’ War of a battle won completely and lost entirely — the tactics flawless, the archers decisive, and every political object of the campaign forfeited within five years.