The first use Du Guesclin made of it was to go and put his name and his sword at the service first of the Duke of Anjou, governor of Languedoc, who was making war in Provence against Queen Joan of Naples, and then of his Spanish patron, Henry of Transtamare, who had recommenced the war in Spain against his brother, Pedro the Cruel, whom he was before long to dethrone for the second time and slay with his own hand.  But whilst Du Guesclin was taking part in this settlement of the Spanish question, important events called him back to the north of the Pyrenees for the service of his own king, the defence of his own country, and the aggrandizement of his own fortunes.  The English and Gascon bands which, in 1367, had recrossed the Pyrenees with the Prince of Wales, after having restored Don Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile had not disappeared.  Having no more to do in their own prince’s service, they had spread abroad over France, which they called “their apartment,” and recommenced, in the countries between the Seine and the Loire, their life of vagabondage and pillage.  A general outcry was raised; it was the Prince of Wales, men said, who had let them loose, and the people called them the host (army) of England.  A proceeding of the Prince of Wales himself had the effect of adding to the rage of the people that of the aristocratic classes.  He was lavish of expenditure, and held at Bordeaux a magnificent court, for which the revenues from his domains and ordinary resources were insufficient; so he imposed a tax for five years of ten sous per hearth or family, “in order to satisfy,” he said, “the large claims against him.”  In order to levy this tax legally, he convoked the estates of Aquitaine, first at Niort, and then, successively, at Angouleme, Poitiers, Bordeaux, and Bergerac; but nowhere could he obtain the vote he demanded.  “When we obeyed the King of France,” said the Gascons, “we were never so aggrieved with subsidies, hearth-taxes, or gabels, and we will not be, as long as we can defend ourselves.”  The Prince of Wales persisted in his demands.  He was ill and irritable, and was becoming truly the Black Prince.  The Aquitanians too became irritated.  The prince’s more temperate advisers, even those of English birth, tried in vain to move him from his stubborn course.  Even John Chandos, the most notable as well as the wisest of them, failed, and withdrew to his domain of St. Sauveur, in Normandy, that he might have nothing to do with measures of which he disapproved.  Being driven to extremity, the principal lords of Aquitaine, the Counts of Comminges, of Armagnac, of Perigord, and many barons besides, set out for France, and made complaint, on the 30th of June, 1368, before Charles V. and his peers, “on account of the grievances which the Prince of Wales was purposed to put upon them.”  They had recourse, they said, to the King of France as their sovereign lord, who had no power to renounce his suzerainty or the jurisdiction of his court of peers and of his parliament.