The Forgotten Battle of the Isle of Ré: The Ghosts of Feneau Still Have Much to Say

Four hundred years after the bitter and bloody defeat for the British crown, a triumph quickly eclipsed on the French side, many gray areas remain to be cleared. The Île de Ré Heritage association, with a team of renowned historians, is attempting to piece together the puzzle.

On the evening of November 8, 1627, a deathly silence followed the last gasps of the soldiers dying in the marshes, when they were not finished off. It would last for centuries.

Did Charles ^I 's kingdom want to stifle a scandal that would have tarnished Buckingham's image, "a great scumbag and the king's most powerful favorite," as Charles Dickens vitriolly described him? The tabloids were not yet there to make their front page headlines about the fiasco on the Île de Ré. No dispatch from across the Channel established the death toll, estimated at 400 according to the Duke.

Seven years after the events, the treasurer and paymaster general of the English army, John Mason, recalculated the accounts, using precise figures. Although close to Buckingham, he exaggerated the death toll of the Battle of Feneau Bridge, estimating the number of British and Irish troops killed at 3,000, "including a large number of leaders, captains, and gentlemen," as Sir Simon of Ewes confirmed at the time. Buckingham was undoubtedly himself an indirect victim, assassinated in 1628 by a veteran of the Siege of Ré.

This bitter failure did not bode well for the young Charles ^I , crowned in 1625. It further accentuated his conflicting relations with the Parliament of England, which led him, after two civil wars and a revolution, to the scaffold in 1649, from which Cromwell's Republic was born.

More surprising is the disinterest of the French in a triumph – they are rare in history – over the "hereditary enemy." Certainly, Dumas mentions in "The Three Musketeers" the "four cannons and sixty flags which were brought to Paris by Claude de Saint-Simon, and hung with great pomp from the vaults of Notre-Dame." Or again the Te Deums which "were sung in the camp, and from there spread throughout all of France." Certainly, the victory at the end of the Great Siege of La Rochelle (1627-1629) conferred more prestige on Louis XIII and Richelieu. But it is clear that certain resounding defeats, from Agincourt to Waterloo, have left a more lasting mark on the national memory.

What remains today of the Battle of Feneau? Salt marshes, just like they were back then. The wooden floating bridge has long since disappeared. Built in 1808, the eponymous stone bridge spanning the Feneau channel, between Loix and La Couarde-sur-Mer, was the subject of some confusion until recently, proof that the exact location of the structure has been lost in the twists and turns of time. In the spring of 2024, local history enthusiasts from the Île de Ré Patrimoine association announced that they had discovered the probable locations of the British entrenchment and the floating bridge, in the extension of a place known as… Chemin des Anglais, on which a cycle path has been built.

Among the pieces of the puzzle they assembled was the description left by Jacques Isnard, the 17th ^- century author of "The Siege of the Fort of Saint-Martin and Flight of the English from the Isle of Ré" ( ^2nd edition, 1902, Hachette-BNF). The chronicler indicates, as a pirate would with buried treasure, that one must walk along a "causeway bordered by a ditch full of water [...] and immense salt marshes, which ends three or four hundred paces further at a small wooden bridge, [...] turn right for about eighty paces, then left for nearly two hundred paces and [...] make a bend of one hundred and twenty paces that can give access to six horsemen abreast."

Isnard takes as its starting point the former Davière estate, a "Protestant fortified house" mentioned by Edward Herbert de Cherbury, a contemporary British historian of the battle, in his work "The Expedition to the Isle of Rhe" ("The Expedition to the Isle of Ré", republished by Hanse, 2018, not translated). Île de Ré Heritage has identified the building, now private property. The resemblance to the one painted by Laurent de La Hyre, in the background of his painting "The Defeat of the English on the Isle of Ré by the French Army on November 8, 1627", is striking. Not yet listed, it was nevertheless noted in 1979 in the "General Inventory of Monuments on the Isle of Ré".

The association makes this the heart of its project, "400 years: the siege of the Île de Ré," which proposes to connect the different historical sites to create a "memorial arc of the Wars of Religion." It would first be necessary to cross-reference the discoveries with the results of archaeological research. This is the whole point of the work carried out by the international academic team brought together by the association , under the direction of Benjamin Deruelle, a war historian at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

The ghosts of Feneau still have much to say.