The Demon's Brood (24 page)

Ignoring the plague, Edward kept an ever more splendid court. In 1348 the Knights of the Order of the Garter, which had been founded four years before, were given magnificent robes to wear at their ceremonies in St George's Chapel. For all the story of the king picking up the beautiful Lady Salisbury's garter and declaring, ‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense'
(may he be ashamed who thinks evil of it) to save her from embarrassment, it had a political function. Most members, veterans of the campaigns in France, were not only successful commanders but magnates, such as Lancaster and the Earl of Warwick, which reassured the old nobility.

During Christmas 1349, Edward learned that the French had bribed the Italian mercenary who was governor of Calais to hand over the city. Terrifying the governor into turning double agent, the king and his eldest son crossed the Channel and entered Calais secretly, fighting incognito under Sir Walter Manny's command and ambushing the enemy when they came to take possession. Characteristically, Edward gave his prisoners a sumptuous dinner on New Year's Eve, presiding in person and wearing a pearl coronet.

The next year he destroyed the Castilian fleet off Winchelsea in the engagement known as Les Espagnols-sur-Mer, confirming his control of the Channel. Determined to conquer France, Edward then embarked on a series of
chevauchées
, to weaken the new Valois king, Philip's son John II. Yet for a decade after Crécy no more decisive battles were fought on land. While Edward retained Calais and what had been recovered in Gascony, he did not make any further gains.

Despite the Black Death, it was easier for him to find money for the war, presented to parliament as ‘a joint stock enterprise undertaken for the defence of the realm and of his legitimate claim to the throne of France'.
¹²
Everyone knew of his victories from his letters to bishops and abbots, read out in parish churches, marketplaces and shire courts. Since 1345 a gifted treasurer, William Edington, Bishop of Winchester, had been centralizing royal revenue under the Exchequer so that the
king's income could be properly budgeted, which enabled him to finance campaigns without asking too much in taxes. In any case, lords and commons were more inclined to finance hostilities because of the loot.

Even the magnificent new coinage introduced in 1344 served as propaganda. Gold nobles, half-nobles and quarter-nobles had an image of the king in armour, standing in a ship and bearing a shield with the arms of France and England. A jingle ran:

Four things our noble showeth unto me,

King, ship and sword, and power of the sea.

Accompanied by the words, ‘King of France and England', so that no one could fail to understand its meaning, the image symbolized Edward's claim to the French crown, his victory at Sluys and his control of the Channel. Unlike Henry III's gold penny, the noble proved a lasting success.

The king had built a team of commanders, from very different backgrounds. Lancaster, whom he made a duke in 1351, belonged to the blood royal, while the Hainaulter Sir Walter Manny was a kinsman of the queen and Sir John Chandos's Derbyshire manor had belonged to his family since the Conquest. By contrast, Thomas Dagworth – aged nearly eighty when killed in an ambush – was of humble origin, as was his successor as Captain of Brittany, Walter Bentley, another fine soldier. (Bentley made his fortune by marrying Jeanne de Clisson, a female pirate known as the ‘Lioness of Brittany'.) The team included semi-bandits like Sir Robert Knolles and his half-brother Sir Hugh Calveley, who led ‘free companies' of brigands. There was even an ex-serf from Norfolk, Sir Robert Salle, personally knighted by the king. But his best general was his eldest son Edward, Prince of Wales, nicknamed the ‘Black Prince' from his armour.

In 1354, in secret instructions to the Duke of Lancaster, the king revealed how aware he was of his Plantagenet inheritance. In return for peace, Lancaster must demand the duchies of
Aquitaine-Guyenne and Normandy and the county of Ponthieu, just as the king's ancestors had held them. He must also obtain Anjou, Poitou, Maine, Touraine, the Angoumois, the Limousin and all lands ruled by Henry II. The next year, Edward launched two major offensives. The attack he led in the north was let down by the defection of his ally the King of Navarre, and failed. The other offensive under the Black Prince laid waste to Languedoc, destroying whole towns.

Unexpectedly, the Black Prince then won a shattering victory. In September 1356, on a similar
chevauchée
, he was intercepted by John II near Poitiers – and, astonishingly, 6,000 Englishmen routed 20,000 Frenchmen. His father's aims now grew more attainable. John was brought to England, to be housed in the Savoy Palace at London for the next four years.

David II was still in the Tower and in 1356 Balliol surrendered his claim to the Scottish crown to Edward, who immediately led a vicious raid into Scotland, known as the ‘Burnt Candlemas', although bad weather soon made him withdraw, with a great booty of loot and livestock. If he hoped to become King of Scots, it was an odd way of endearing himself to his future subjects. However, later that year he released David, whom he recognized as king while extracting a crippling indemnity.

In autumn 1359 Edward again invaded northern France, to capture Rheims (crowning place of the kings of France) for his coronation. Rheims proved impregnable and after two months spent camping before its walls in the snow, he set off on a
chevau-chée
that took him to Burgundy. He then appeared before Paris, but the Dauphin refused to come out and fight, so he returned to the coast through the Beauce, inflicting terrible devastation.

Despite vast plunder, Edward then accepted that he did not have the resources to make himself King of France. He compromised. In May 1360, by the Treaty of Brétigny, John II ceded Guyenne, Poitou, the Limousin and other territories in full sovereignty to Edward, who renounced his claim to the French throne. Created Prince of Aquitaine, the Black Prince ruled the
new state from Bordeaux as an independent country, installing a glittering ducal court at his capital. It seemed that his father had achieved a large part of his ambitions.

Had Edward III died soon after Brétigny, he would be remembered as our greatest king. He had united England behind him with his ‘we're all in this together' approach, victory after victory and a river of loot. The loot took the sting out of taxation that came to be taken for granted by the Commons.

His reputation as a conqueror and his awesome presence, enhanced by dazzling pomp, had given him a god-like image. He increased his popularity still further by fostering a sense of nationalism. In 1362 a statute ordained that English must be spoken in the law courts, while from then on the king opened parliament in English. He encouraged his courtiers to read the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, who was made one of his ‘
varlets de chambre
' in 1367 and awarded a gallon of wine a day in 1374.

The Black Prince possessed all his father's magnificence and physical courage, but not his charm or political sense. Haughty and extravagant, he made himself disliked throughout his principality, even in the Gascon heartland, which was normally unshakably loyal to the Plantagenets. During an ill-judged intervention in a war for the Castilian throne, although he won a splendid victory at Najéra in 1367 he incurred huge expenses. To pay for these and for his lavish court, he levied a hearth tax that alienated local magnates as well as squires. In 1369 they appealed against it to the new French king, Charles V, who took the opportunity to ‘confiscate' Aquitaine. War broke out first in northern France, however, where Edward's county of Ponthieu rose against the English and declared for Charles.

Because of ill health, Charles V employed a Breton squire, Bertrand du Guesclin, to fight the war for him. Realizing English archers and dismounted men-at-arms were unbeatable,
Bertrand used guerrilla warfare, with hit-and-run raids that cut communications, isolated strongholds and wore down morale. The Black Prince fought back ferociously, massacring the entire population of Limoges after its recapture in 1370, a crime which shocked all Aquitaine. Then his health cracked, and he returned to England as an invalid.

When Poitou went over to Charles in 1372, King Edward sailed for France in August with 14,000 troops, but his armada was blown back to port by storms. Then a Castilian fleet defeated the English at sea, making it impossible to send reinforcements to Aquitaine. The next summer John of Gaunt led a
chevau-chée
from Calais to Bordeaux via the Auvergne, the sole answer the English could make to the new French tactics, but it ended with Gaunt losing half his army and all his horses. By the end of 1373 the Principality of Aquitaine had ceased to exist beyond the old frontiers of Gascony. The only other English possessions in France other than Calais were one or two seaports in Brittany and Normandy.

The authority for Edward's final years is the last great Benedictine chronicler, Thomas Walsingham (
c
.1340–1422), a Norfolk man at St Albans who continued the tradition of Matthew Paris. Aided by fellow monks, well informed by distinguished visitors, his books provide the fullest account of the reigns during which he lived. Fond of scandal, he was to be the source of much of Shakespeare's history through the medium of Holinshed.

The king had been deteriorating since Philippa's death in 1369, his progresses restricted to the home counties. After the abortive campaign of 1372, he went to pieces, drinking heavily and falling further under the spell of a greedy mistress, once a lady-in-waiting to the queen. This was Alice Perrers, thirty years younger than him, the daughter of a Berkshire thatcher and widow – previously maidservant – of a London merchant,
from whom she had acquired a highly professional interest in real estate.

‘A shameless, impudent harlot' is how Walsingham describes Alice. ‘She was not attractive or beautiful, but compensated for these defects by her seductive voice.'
¹³
He tells us she hired a Dominican friar, supposedly a physician but in fact a warlock, to make wax images of herself and Edward joined together, enhancing the spell with incantations and magic herbs. After giving the king a bastard son when only fifteen (before Philippa died), followed by two daughters, Alice fastened her hold. Besides extracting cash, jewels and estates that included fifty manors,
¹⁴
she developed into a ruthless businesswoman.

With a City office in Thames Street, Alice was a curiously modern figure, as much entrepreneur as courtesan. She had close links with the chamberlain, Lord Latimer, and his disreputable financial agent, the London vintner and alderman Sir Richard Lyons, whom she joined in advancing war loans to the Crown at astronomical interest. Together, they bought up at a knock-down price royal debts that were then redeemed by the Exchequer at face value, often making her 100 per cent profit. She also dealt in pearls, amassing 200,000.

Always ready to use her influence at court for cash, brazenly flaunting her position, by Edward's command Alice attended a tournament in the City in 1375 as ‘The Lady of the Sun', dressed in a golden gown. She was clearly the model for the horrible Lady Meed in Langland's
Piers Plowman
(if not for Chaucer's Wife of Bath). Everybody other than the king and John of Gaunt loathed her, attributing her domination to sorcery and love-philtres – the heresiarch John Wycliffe called her ‘the Devil's Tool'.

Looking like an Old Testament prophet, with long white beard and hair, Edward ended as a drink-sodden dotard. His third son,
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, ruled in his name, hated for his arrogance and his friendship with Alice Perrers, that ‘evil enchantress'.
¹⁵
Dissatisfaction at reverses in France and an end to the loot was fuelled by a scorching summer in 1375, during which everybody dreaded a further outbreak of plague. When the Black Prince died the following spring, the English were in despair. While he was alive they had felt safe from enemy invasion as he was a fine soldier – unlike Gaunt.

At the parliament of spring 1376, the Speaker of the Commons, Sir Peter de la Mare, complained that Edward's chamberlain Lord Latimer (a veteran of Crécy rumoured to be a multiple murderer) and his agent, the shady Richard Lyons, had profiteered from trafficking in royal debts and moving the staple – the monopoly on wool for export – from Calais. Sir Peter also accused Alice of annually stealing thousands of pounds in bullion from the king. Before granting taxes, the Commons insisted that Latimer be dismissed, Lyons imprisoned and the lady banished from court.

Gaunt, who angrily referred to the Commons as ‘these ignorant knights of the hedgerow',
¹⁶
took revenge in the next parliament. Packed with his supporters and having his steward as speaker, it declared the ‘Good Parliament' to have been no parliament, reinstated Latimer and Alice Perrers at court, and released Lyons from a luxurious imprisonment. Sir Peter de la Mare spent several months in a dungeon at Nottingham Castle.

Walsingham says that by early 1377 Edward sat like a statue, unable to speak or move.
¹⁷
He died at Sheen on 21 June, after a final stroke. The tale of Alice stripping the rings from his fingers before fleeing from the palace, leaving him attended by only a single priest, may be untrue but shows how much she was hated. (Most of Alice's wealth was confiscated by parliament, and she spent the next quarter of a century engaged in litigation to recover it, dying relatively poor in 1404.) In reality, Edward's three surviving sons were at his deathbed.

He was given a funeral Froissart considered to be of a sort
unseen since King Arthur's time. When his hearse, escorted by 400 torch bearers, was carried through the streets to Westminster Abbey by twenty-four knights in black, his sons walking behind, the crowd wept and sobbed. According to his instructions, he was buried by the side of the grandfather whom he had venerated. The effigy on his tomb in the abbey has a face (derived from a death mask) that, although distorted by a stroke, inspires awe.