The war was pushed on zealously by both sides. Henry III., King of England, sent to Louis messengers charged to declare to him that his reason for breaking the truce concluded between them was, that he regarded it as his duty towards his step-father, the Count of La Marche, to defend him by arms. Louis answered that, for his own part, he had scrupulously observed the truce, and had no idea of breaking it; but he considered that he had a perfect right to punish a rebellious vassal. In this young King of France, this docile son of an able mother, none knew what a hero there was, until he revealed himself on a sudden. Near two towns of Saintonge, Taillebourg and Saintes, at a bridge which covered the approaches of one and in front of the walls of the other, Louis, on the 21st and 22d of July, delivered two battles, in which the brilliancy of his personal valor and the affectionate enthusiasm he excited in his troops secured victory and the surrender of the two places. “At sight of the numerous banners, above which rose the oriflamme, close to Taillebourg, and of such a multitude of tents, one pressing against another and forming as it were a large and populous city, the King of England turned sharply to the Count of La Marche, saying, ‘My father, is this what you did promise me? Is yonder the numerous chivalry that you did engage to raise for me, when you said that all I should have to do would be to get money together?’ ‘That did I never say,’ answered the count. ‘Yea, verily,’ rejoined Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III.: ‘for yonder I have amongst my baggage writing of your own to such purport.’ And when the Count of La Marche energetically denied that he had ever signed or sent such writing, Henry III. reminded him bitterly of the messages he had sent to England, and of his urgent exhortations to war. ‘It was never done with my consent,’ cried the Count of La Marche, with an oath; ‘put the blame of it upon your mother, who is my wife; for, by the gullet of God, it was all devised without my knowledge.’”
It was not Henry III. alone who was disgusted with the war in which his mother had involved him; the majority of the English lords who had accompanied him left him, and asked the King of France for permission to pass through his kingdom on their way home. There were those who would have dissuaded Louis from compliance; but, “Let them go,” said he; “I would ask nothing better than that all my foes should thus depart forever far away from my abode.” Those about him made merry over Henry III., a refugee at Bordeaux, deserted by the English and plundered by the Gascons. “Hold! hold! said Louis; “turn him not into ridicule, and make me not hated of him by reason of your banter; his charities and his piety shall exempt him from all contumely.” The Count of La Marche lost no time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a far-seeing politician and the sympathetic feeling of a Christian. He required that the domains he had just wrested from the count should belong to the crown, and to the Count of Poitiers, under the suzerainty of the crown. As for the rest of his lands, the Count of La Marche, his wife and children, were obliged to beg a grant of them at the good pleasure of the king, to whom the count was, further, to give up, as guarantee for fidelity in future, three castles, in which a royal garrison should be kept at the count’s expense. When introduced into the king’s presence, the count, his wife, and children, “with sobs, and sighs, and tears, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and began to cry aloud, ‘Most gracious sir, forgive us thy wrath and thy displeasure, for we have done wickedly and pridefully towards thee.’ And the king, seeing the Count of La Marche such humble guise before him, could not restrain his compassion amidst his wrath, but made him rise up, and forgave him graciously all the evil he had wrought against him.”