by Dan Jones
The French were trapped and slaughtered. ‘It was indeed a bloody and murderous battle,’ wrote Froissart, the great French chronicler, who noted that ‘sea fights are always fiercer than fights on land because retreat and flight are impossible. Each man is obliged to hazard his life and hope for success, relying on his own personal bravery and skill.’ Between 16,000 and 18,000 French and Genoese were killed, either cut down on deck or drowned. Both French commanders died: Quiéret killed as his ship was boarded, Béhuchet hanged from the mast of his ship.
It was one of the greatest early naval victories in English history. The English and their Flemish allies cheered and celebrated the victory in disbelief. Almost the entire French fleet had been captured or destroyed, eliminating at a stroke much of the danger to English merchant ships in the Channel, and Philip’s ability to blockade the English from the continental coastline. The death toll alone on the French side was shocking. The chronicler Thomas of Burton wrote that ‘for three days after the battle in all the water of the Zwin … there seemed to be more blood than water. And there were so many dead and drowned French and Normans there that it was said, ridiculing them, that if God had given the fish the power of speech after they had devoured so many of the dead, they would thereafter have spoken fluent French.’
Centuries later, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans would think of Sluys as a historical precursor to the Spanish Armada. The sixteenth-century writer of the play Edward III (likely co-written by Shakespeare, although the following passage is not thought to be his) would imagine the aftermath thus:
Purple the sea, whose channel filled as fast
With streaming gore, that from the maimed fell,
As did her gushing moisture break into
The crannied cleftures of the through shot planks.
Here flew a head, dissevered from the trunk,
There mangled arms and legs were tossed aloft,
As when a whirlwind takes the summer dust
And scatters it in middle of the air.
Thus the battle of Sluys was later immortalized in English maritime history. But at the time, it was only one victory amidst a tide of discontent.
After three years of fighting, Edward’s war with France had put greater strain on English government and royal finance than any military project since the Third Crusade. Sluys was a great victory, no doubt. But it came at great cost.
Edward’s war was conceived on the grandest possible scale – way beyond the means even of a Plantagenet king who expected to incur massive debts in the course of his wars. The Lanercost chronicler estimated Edward’s payments to his Flemish and German allies in 1337–40 at ‘one thousand marks a day, according to others, two thousand’. This was an exaggeration – but not a wild one.
Even as he stood on the cog Thomas and watched French ships burn in 1340, Edward had already spent £400,000 on the war, much of it owed as debts to Italian banks – mainly the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence, although he also had substantial accounts with the Portinari of Florence and the Busdraghi of Lucca as well as with banks and merchants in the German Hanse and the Low Countries. At home, the northern merchant William de la Pole organized even greater loans from syndicates of merchants from London and York, who advanced hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Crown. Although usury was still forbidden, Christian banks and merchants employed a variety of ingenious book-keeping devices to hide the fact that interest on loans ran as high as 40 per cent. Royal crowns and jewels stood as collateral against the loans, as did vast amounts of plate forcibly borrowed from English religious houses. The large debts Edward had run up throughout Europe were already beginning to cause him some political difficulties. Exactly a month after the French fleet was destroyed, the earls of Northampton, Warwick and Derby were arrested in Brussels by creditors. They had stood guarantors of debts that were in default, and it was only with some difficulty that Edward had them released.
Back at home, England suffered for Edward’s new war. The effects were felt at every level of society. Taxation was levied heavily and often – tenths and fifteenths were imposed on the country every year between 1337 and 1339, and a general ninth followed in 1340. The hated practice of purveyance was rife. Efforts were made to rig the wool market, by selling monopoly on the trade to leading merchants, although the scheme eventually failed.
Popular protest songs captured the discontent of the poor in their struggle to cope with Crown demands that squeezed harder than any before them. One poem, now known as the Song against the King’s Taxes, complained that ‘such tribute can in no manner last long; Out of emptiness, who can give, or touch anything with his hands? People are reduced to such ill plight, that they can give no more; I fear, if they had a leader, they would rise in rebellion. Loss of property often makes people fools.’
A rural labourer born in 1300 would have been lucky to reach his fortieth birthday at the time of Sluys. Had he done so, he would have lived through near-constant war on two fronts, seven years of the Great Famine that coincided with a period of plummeting wages, and rates of taxation both onerous and incessant. Such a life, when contrasted with rumours that Edward III rather enjoyed his expensive campaigns in Flanders as an excuse to hold lavish, wasteful and costly tournaments, was not conducive to an orderly existence. England would not feel the fury of a popular rising for another forty years, but in 1340, Edward’s chronic need for cash had driven the country back into the sort of political crisis that had rocked his grandfather in 1297 and beset his father for the better part of his reign.
The Crisis of 1341
Violent seas threw the king’s boat about for three days as it stuttered from the coast of Flanders to the mouth of the Thames. It was the very end of November 1340, and with winter approaching it was more dangerous than usual to venture a Channel crossing. But Edward was desperate, and furious, and ready to thrash England and his ministers with every ounce of his considerable energy. His war with France was floundering: short of money, short of glory and short of allies. And Edward had convinced himself that the fault lay with the regency administration he had left behind him in Westminster, which was led by John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury.
The king was not only convinced that he was being deliberately starved of the funds he needed to fight his war; with the stress of his position laying heavy on his mind, he had begun to imagine he was being hung out for the slaughter. ‘I believe that the archbishop wished me, by lack of money, to be betrayed and killed,’ he would later write to the pope. Edward’s solution was to return from Flanders and mete out severe punishment in person.
The boat reached London long after curfew on 30 November 1340, having that evening navigated a grey, turbulent Thames estuary so rough, says the author of the contemporary history known as the Scalachronica, that Edward himself ‘was in jeopardy of drowning’. Around midnight, the captain put into a wharf by the Tower of London. The drenched and grim-faced passengers disembarked by the flicker of torchlight. As they looked up, tired, cold and wet, it was as if the whole Tower was asleep. There was no sound, and no movement on the ramparts. The king’s return was not expected. Although there should have been a close watch kept on the fortress after dark, no one saw them arrive.
That London’s fortress stood apparently unguarded during wartime enraged Edward. He burst into the Tower, inspected it in fury and began to make a list of men he wished brought before him: his treasurer, chancellor and their department officials; his justices; the mayor of London and the London merchants who were supposed to be managing the wool trade; and of course, the constable of the Tower, upon whose watch the capital’s key strongpoint had been left so disgracefully unguarded.
Edward’s anger was easy to understand. The war in which he had invested so much money was, after three years of sporadic fighting, almost entirely bankrupt. Sluys had been a great victory, but what followed was frustration and costly stalemate, as Philip VI sidestepped attempts to draw him to battle. He dismissed the English king’s eccentric of
fer of a personal duel or a staged battle between a hundred knights from either side, considering quite reasonably that in the first instance a podgy French king approaching his fiftieth birthday was no match for a virile 28-year-old Plantagenet, and in the second he had nothing to gain and much to lose in a tournament with live bets on the outcome.
This came as a personal affront to Edward, and the two military operations that followed the offer had also been failures. Attacks on the border towns of Tournai and St-Omer cost a great deal of money and manpower, but led in both cases to nothing but slaughter and retreat. Chevauchées – armed horseback charges through the countryside designed solely to cause terror and chaos among the local people – might gratify the soldiers who rode on them, but yielded no strategic advances. The truce of Esplechin, which established peace everywhere from Scotland to Gascony and concluded a season of fruitless campaigning, was hardly the blow struck for English military resurgence that Edward had wished for when he declared war three years previously.
There was no doubt in Edward’s mind that a chronic shortage of war funding was to blame for the English failures after Sluys. Edward was in massive arrears to his Flemish allies, and could not fight on until they were paid the enormous sums they had been promised for their support. For this, he needed his ministers to extract cash from the realm any way they could. From this sticking point erupted the gravest crisis of his reign.
On 1 December 1340, the morning after his first tirades in the Tower, Edward embarked on a wholesale purge of his government. He began to dismiss his officials from the top, and worked his way downwards. First to go were the chancellor and treasurer. Then he had the chief justice of common pleas (one of the two most senior judges in England) arrested, along with four other judges, the constable of the Tower, and three leading English merchants. A number of exchequer officials were fired, and instructions issued to the clerks who remained to provide a full audit of their recent transactions. Further to demonstrate his utter lack of faith in that institution, Edward arranged for tax receipts now to be paid directly into an emergency treasury at the Tower of London.
Outside London there was a broad sweep of local royal servants: Edward purged his customs officials and replaced around half the sheriffs and all of the coroners and escheators – responsible for collecting royal revenues in the shires of England. A public commission of oyer and terminer was established to travel from county to county, rooting out corruption with a licence to hear complaints about abuses of power by royal officials stretching back to the beginning of Edward II’s reign.
Then Edward turned on his archbishop of Canterbury for revenge. Stratford was president of the regency council and thus, in the king’s eyes, ultimately accountable for all the failings he perceived in English government. His brother, Robert Stratford, bishop of Chichester, was the chancellor whom Edward had fired at the Tower. In an angry exchange of letters and public accusations, he charged John Stratford with keeping money from him, obstructing tax requests in parliament and abusing his authority.
Stratford, however, was unmoved. To his mind, fault lay not with his regency administration, but with the king himself, who made excessive demands on the country, heeded the advice of his ignorant friends and had acted as a tyrant when he made summary arrests of his subjects and threatened the rights of the Church through the archbishopric of Canterbury. When he received Edward’s letters, he replied in equally angry terms. He called Edward a new Rehoboam – a reference to the biblical king who ignored wise counsel for the words of his young friends, and thus oppressed his people.
It was a barbed comment. Rehoboam was famous for having told the people of Israel that: ‘My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions’ (I Kings 12:14). And in case that was too cryptic for Edward, Stratford spelled out the comparison. He accused Edward of breaking Magna Carta and his coronation oath, warning him that ‘what happened to your father, sire, you know well’.
During Christmas and the early spring, Edward held a series of typically lavish tournaments around the country. Meanwhile, a public war of letters continued with Stratford, which included an astonishingly angry assault from Edward and his advisers, which was referred to by Stratford as the libellus famosus (‘notorious libel’), and in which the king upgraded his disparagement of the archbishop and accused him of treason.
This was a dangerous situation. Edward was correct to perceive mismanagement in his officials, but to accuse an archbishop of Canterbury of treason incurred the suspicion of tyranny. Stratford refused to be moved by the king’s rage, denied most of the accusations made against him and demanded the right to defend himself in parliament. The fuming king began to fill his letters to the archbishop with personal abuse. The conflict seemed as though it might evoke one of the most infamous episodes in Plantagenet history. Stratford, in his heated opposition to the king, was aware of the precedent his predecessor, Thomas Becket, had set.
Matters came to a head when a parliament was called for March 1341. Using the pretext of non-payment of taxes, Edward attempted to have his servants physically prevent Stratford from entering the Painted Chamber in the palace of Westminster, where parliament met. Meanwhile, he allowed into the chamber a number of his household servants and advisers, who had no right to sit there. Stratford took up an indignant place directly outside the chamber door, holding his archbishop’s staff and steadfastly refusing to move until he was admitted. For three days a stand-off prevailed, until the earl of Surrey stepped in to mediate, telling the king that: ‘Parliaments were not wont to be like this. For here those who should be foremost are shut out, while there sit other men of low rank who have no business to be here.’ Stratford was eventually permitted to enter the chamber, to hear thirty-two charges of misconduct brought against him.
If Edward felt he had won, however, he was mistaken. During the debates that followed, it became very clear that the wrathful king had overreached. The whole weight of national support lay behind the archbishop. A petition was presented showing that he had the backing of a number of the great magnates and prelates, the community of London and the parliamentary commons. There was little a king who wished to keep his throne could do in the teeth of such opposition. By 3 May 1341 Edward was forced, humiliatingly, to climb down. Through mediation by the earl of Salisbury and other loyalists among the lords, the king was persuaded to take part in a parliamentary reconciliation with the archbishop and agree a programme of reform, in which tax collectors were made accountable to parliament and investigations were launched into purveyance. The king promised that in future, the great ministers of state – the chancellor, treasurer, and judges, the keeper of the privy seal and the leading men of the royal household – were to be sworn in parliament, while lords and royal ministers should not be arrested and judged ‘except in parliament and by their peers’.
Fortunately for Edward, this was the most peaceful end to a full-blown political crisis that had been seen in England since 1297. The drama and rage of his secret entry to the Tower had fizzled into public embarrassment before parliament. He vowed, in the sort of bombastic fashion that would have suited Henry II, that he would never appoint another churchman as a minister, nor indeed any man whom he could not hang, draw and behead when they let him down. But this was grandstanding, and it ignored the momentous implications that the crisis of 1341 had for both the passage of the French war and the future government of the realm. Edward’s personal quarrel with his archbishop and attempt to punish his ministers had thrown up a principle by which the activities of the Crown’s leading officials could be scrutinized in parliament. A mechanism had been inadvertently established by which England could now settle political crises without descent into bloody civil war.
Moreover, and perhaps rather surprisingly, Edward’s grudging concessions earned him enough political goodwill to negotiate a new source of funding for his wars. Rather than collecting taxes via the levy of a
movables tax of a ninth and a forced loan, parliament agreed to grant the king a direct tax on wool – one of the major English exports – which raised an astonishing amount of revenue. Nearly 30,000 wool sacks were appropriated for the Crown to sell on; their value of around £126,000 made this the heaviest tax to be levied on England since the end of King John’s reign.
While all this took place, Queen Philippa was at King’s Langley, where on 5 June 1341 she gave birth to another son. He was given a traditional English name – Edmund – and a tournament was held to celebrate the birth. The assembled nobles then travelled together to London to attend a series of war councils, by which the next stage of the king’s quarrel with France could be advanced. It would not have escaped Edward that his survival of the quarrel with Stratford had been all the more assured by the fact that no great nobleman had risen up to oppose him in the manner of a Thomas of Lancaster or Simon de Montfort. Despite the stresses of Edward’s difficulties in France, the onerous nature of his financial demands and his own hard-headed behaviour towards Archbishop Stratford, the events of 1341 had seen no resort to that armed opposition to the Crown which had occurred as recently as 1328–9, when Henry of Lancaster faced down Roger Mortimer. It had become clear in the teeth of the crisis that Edward enjoyed a powerful and unusually strong relationship with the leading men of his realm. They would, in time, come to enjoy the rewards of that relationship together.
