The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  The Order of the Garter struck many contemporaries as crass and insensitive. At a time when England was ravaged by the Black Death and impoverished by the financial demands of war, to a chronicler like Henry Knighton it seemed the height of callousness for the king to indulge in spendthrift carefree tourneying.

  But for Edward, the Order had a purpose beyond simple enjoyment and indulgence. Every Plantagenet king since John, in 1205, had been prevented from defending his foreign territories by knights and earls who chafed at the duty to serve abroad. Edward had been lucky with victories – particularly in 1340 and 1346 – which justified the massive expense, effort and death incurred fighting in France. But he knew his family’s history. If God withdrew his favour and victories slowed, the great men of the realm would eventually demand a reason to bear arms overseas.

  The answer lay in making foreign service a badge of honour, not a tiresome obligation hanging over from the days of feudal service. It was clear that knighthood was now likely to be a cause of death, expense and discomfort – thus it was necessary for Edward to knit the knightly community of the realm around him by giving it a caste culture, with royalty at its core. The Order of the Garter gave Plantagenet kingship an explicit division by which to celebrate and reward knightly chivalry. The exotic French motto reminded all who aspired to membership that aristocracy was a pan-European brotherhood, not a purely English rank.

  Thus, at the great St George’s Day tournament of 1349, the Order of the Garter was formally and finally established. It was a means of binding the king and his sons to the men whom they would lead into battle on the Continent for decades to come. And having abandoned his plans for a Round Table house at Windsor five years previously, Edward now gave orders to establish a college church in the town. The chapel within the College of St George would be the Order’s spiritual and ceremonial home. Work began in 1350, and took seven years to complete, incurring as great a cost as some of Edward I’s greatest Welsh castles. Indeed, £6,500 was spent at Windsor between 1350 and 1357 – almost all of it on the chapel. To give the chapel a truly holy mystique, Edward donated to it the Cross of Gneth – a fragment of the True Cross taken from Llywelyn the Last during the final conquest of Wales in 1283.

  For centuries afterwards, St George’s Chapel stood for the intoxicating blend of martial prowess, spiritual devotion, romantic gentility and lavish ceremonial that Edward and his companions cultivated. In building the Order of the Garter and its home, Edward showed himself to be perhaps the greatest and most complete of all the Plantagenet kings. He combined the flair for visual and architectural magnificence of Henry III with the fearsome military capability of Edward I. Truly, this was a high point of his family’s history, visionary propaganda from a superbly assured king.

  Decade of Triumph

  During the early years of his life and reign Edward III had cast himself in the Arthurian pageantry of his court as Sir Lionel, the humble knight of the Round Table, a comrade in arms who would fight shoulder to shoulder with his men. By the 1350s, his achievements had overtaken his humility, and the king began to be represented as Arthur himself, ruling his glorious kingdom from the new Camelot, which was Windsor. The king had spent vast, almost unimaginable sums of money on his wars, but they had brought him glory and prestige that reverberated across Christendom; England’s prosperity was bound tightly to her fortunes in war. Besides Arthurian posturing, Edward symbolized the new military order by flying the arms of St George wherever possible. The red cross fluttered on the masts of his naval fleet, led by the cog Thomas and supported by scores more ships, which patrolled the Channel. St George appeared on the great seal of England alongside the Virgin Mary. In 1348 Edward, under the protection of his warrior saint, felt sufficiently secure in both his military victories and his resurgent kingship to reject an approach by the electors of the German states to succeed to the position of emperor.

  Relations with France and Scotland were now at the king’s command. The English court teemed with well-born hostages: King David II of Scotland and the counts of Eu and Tancarville led a large and valuable group of French and Scottish prisoners. Despite the ravages of the Black Death and the uncertainty it cast over large-scale military campaigning, Edward pursued both causes. Frequent sallies were undertaken across the Channel, some under his own command, others under trusted lieutenants like Henry Grosmont, earl of Lancaster, who led a small expedition to Gascony during the winter of 1349–50.

  On 24 December 1349, as the court was beginning its Christmas celebrations at Havering in Essex, Edward III received alarming news: Calais was about to be betrayed to the French. With no time to raise an army, he enlisted the Black Prince and a small company of trusted soldiers and sailed at once and in the utmost secrecy for France. By 1 January 1350 Edward’s crack force was at Calais, and had gained clandestine access to the town. Before dawn the next day, a treacherous Italian mercenary raised the French flag above the citadel of Calais – the signal for a band of French knights to storm in through the town gates. The king was waiting. He and his men fell upon the invaders, advancing under the arms of Sir Walter Manny, while Edward reverted to his old disguise of a simple knight to avoid detection and capture. Fierce hand-to-hand combat in the streets of Calais resulted in a successful defence, as the king and his men battered their enemies back, shouting ‘Edward and St George’ as they did so. Within hours, Calais was saved, and the story of its defenders’ daring and glamorous mission would add to the burgeoning body of folklore attesting to the bravery of Edward III and the Black Prince.

  On 22 August 1350, Philip VI died. He was succeeded by his son John II, the duke of Normandy who had long been an adversary of the English, fighting against Lancaster in Gascony and leading men into battle at Crécy. His accession as king, however, coincided with a year-long truce between the kingdoms, and during the summer of 1350 Edward turned his attention to another of England’s enemies: Castile. The Iberian realm was ruled by another new king, Pedro I the Cruel, and Edward was quick to talk up largely baseless rumours that Pedro wished to invade England. In fact, Castilian ships sailed through the Channel on their way to trade wool in Flanders, and made a vexing habit of attacking English ships on their way. For Edward this was pretext enough. As the sun was setting on 29 August 1350, a large English fleet of around fifty cogs met a fleet of more than twenty larger Castilian galleys in the waters off Winchelsea. The English ships were commanded by the king, the Black Prince, and the earls of Lancaster, Northampton and Warwick. Together they drew the willing Castilians into a bloody sea battle.

  Although the design of ships had improved in the years since the twelfth century, medieval naval tactics in the rough seas north of the Mediterranean remained primitive, particularly when compared with those used by Edward’s land armies, with their dismounted men-at-arms and mounted archers. The art of fighting actions in open water still amounted to little more than a waterborne melee. Edward ordered his cogs to attack the Castilian galleys by charging them like battering rams, throwing grappling irons at the sides of the ships and attempting to board parties of knights to slay the enemy sailors and throw their bodies into the churning waters. There was little attention paid to the tactics of manoeuvring ships in formation, or of attacking at distance. Battle was given at close quarters, and leaned heavily on chance.

  At Winchelsea these tactics were very nearly fatal for the king. Amid the blast of trumpets and shouts of pain and rage, his cog took serious – ultimately fatal – damage when it crashed into a galley. Only by fighting his way aboard amid a hail of arrows and metal bars thrown down by Castilian defenders and taking command of the enemy ship did Edward escape drowning. Meanwhile the Black Prince’s ship, jousting at another Castilian vessel, was damaged just as seriously, and the prince was rescued only by the arrival of Lancaster’s ship. Finally, as darkness fell over the Channel, an enemy ship very nearly succeeded in towing away an English vessel carrying many members of the king’s household; one enterprising royal servant had
the presence of mind to creep aboard the galley and cut through the halyard, to bring down the sail and stop the galley from escaping with its valuable booty. Eventually, despite these close-run escapades, the English cogs won the day, capturing numerous galleys, destroying others and hurling hundreds of stricken sailors into the pitiless sea, where they drowned. In later years, the battle of Winchelsea became known as Les Espagnols sur Mer: the Spaniards in the sea.

  It was a matter of great fortune that Edward and his captains and lieutenants emerged unscathed from the chaos of a sea battle – but good luck was something that the king of England had earned during his dazzling military career. The Castilian fleet was effectively put out of the Channel for years to come, while Edward’s fleet established its hegemony, escorting merchant ships back and forth between Bordeaux and the English ports.

  The king celebrated his victory by giving thanks at Thomas Becket’s shrine then heading to his northern estates to go hunting, and his lieutenants made their way back to France to skirmish their way around the fringes of Aquitaine. Several spectacular victories in Brittany and Gascony left Edward effectively in charge of Aquitaine, Brittany and the area around Calais by autumn 1352. In Scotland, a power vacuum in the absence of Edward’s prisoner David II allowed English lords to extend their reach into the Scottish Lowlands. For the next eight years Edward busied himself in the quest to make his dominance permanent.

  As military plans were made, however, Edward made sure he retained a firm grip on the government of England. The effect of the first wave of the Black Death had been to throw England’s labour economy into tumult. Since thousands of ordinary workers had died, wages threatened to soar – which would prove damaging if not disastrous to the class of knightly landowners who sat in Edward’s parliaments, granted his taxes and served as royal officials in the localities. The Crown, too, as the greatest landowner in England, would suffer similar losses should the cost of estate management rise too sharply. Reacting promptly to the threat, Edward instituted the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, which was ratified in parliament as the Statute of Labourers in 1351. The labour laws set rigid schedules for wages for every class of worker imaginable, which kept them artificially deflated at pre-Black Death levels. ‘Saddlers, skinners, white-tawers, cordwainers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, tilers, shipwrights, carters and all other artisans and labourers shall not take for their labour and handiwork more than what, in the places where they happen to labour, was customarily paid to such persons in the said twentieth year [1347] and in the other common years preceding,’ read one typical clause of the statute. ‘If any man take more, he shall be committed to the nearest jail.’ Lords were granted the right to compel labourers – whether legally free or unfree serfs – to serve them, while prices of foodstuffs were similarly kept down: ‘butchers, fishmongers, hostlers, brewers, bakers, pullers and all other vendors of any victuals, be bound to sell … victuals for a reasonable price,’ read the statute.

  The Statute of Labourers was enforced with some vigour by the same class of men it was designed to protect. Commissioners were appointed to investigate excessive wages and prices, and for decades afterwards their appearance in the localities to investigate breaches of the law and fine offenders created a simmering class resentment between shire elites and the lower orders beneath them. This effect was redoubled by the fact that the labour commissions were one part of a radical overhaul to the whole system of local lawkeeping, for which England’s political classes had been waiting nearly half a century. Instead of relying on large, irregular circuits of judges touring the country, Edward began to use smaller, regular bodies made up of leading local landowners. They sat both on peace commissions (as justices of the peace, or JPs – the heirs to the keepers of the peace who had been established earlier in the reign) and on a raft of other local commissions, most notably those to enforce the labour laws. The sense that royal government was coalescing in the hands of a self-interested political class would cause violent social tension in later decades. In the short term, however, Edward’s swift action to deal with the most obvious economic effects of the Black Death kept him the confidence of the class on which he relied heavily for war funding.

  With political peace continuing at home, Edward was able to concentrate on pushing towards a lasting peace with France and Scotland. Part of the problem with finding a settlement stemmed from the fact that Edward himself was not entirely certain of what a perpetual peace should look like. He clung proudly to his dynastic claim to the French Crown, but it was increasingly obvious that this was a lever by which to move negotiations in favour of a reconstituted Plantagenet empire. At peace talks held in Guînes in 1354 Edward proposed to renounce his claim to John II’s throne in exchange for full English sovereignty over Aquitaine, Poitou, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Limoges and Ponthieu, even before disputes over the lordship of Brittany, Normandy and Flanders were settled. Subsequently, at a magnificent peace conference held under papal authority in Avignon during the winter of 1354–5, Henry Grosmont – raised since 1351 to the rank of duke of Lancaster – and the earl of Arundel began negotiations from an even more aggressive position, demanding English control over Aquitaine, Poitou, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Angoulême, Normandy, Ponthieu, Quercy and Limousin.

  It was hardly surprising that in the face of these onerous demands and Lancaster’s bullish negotiating tactics, the peace talks collapsed. John II’s envoys argued that to grant away such vast swathes of France would put the king in breach of his coronation oath. Rather than finding a peaceful accommodation, both sides prepared for the resumption of war, and by the autumn of 1355 Edward had two large invasion forces organized – one under his own command and another under the Black Prince – to teach John II the same lessons his father had learned at Crécy and Calais in 1346–7.

  Of the two armies that sailed for France in late 1355, only the Black Prince’s stayed very long. The king landed at Calais in late October, unsuccessfully petitioned John II to meet him in battle, and returned to England, scornful at the French king’s refusal to fight, by 12 November. For the rest of the winter he concentrated on leading troops in a terrible chevauchée around the Lowlands of Scotland, inflicting such misery on the local people and putting so much of their land and property to the torch that January 1356 became known as the ‘Burned Candlemas’.

  The devastation caused in the Lowlands, however, could not compare to that wreaked upon south-west France by the Black Prince and his companions. Throughout the spring of 1356 it became clear that a showdown between John II and the English was inevitable. The Black Prince had wintered at Bordeaux, and the frontiers of English Aquitaine were littered with armed companies – some in the pay of the prince, others released from service in the army and operating as freebooters. In May, another English force under the duke of Lancaster was sent to Normandy, and caused havoc in several important Norman towns before retreating out of John’s reach. There was widespread disgruntlement among the French aristocracy, and the king was beginning to face open opposition from his cousin Charles ‘the Bad’, king of Navarre and count of the Norman province of Evreux, who wished to depose John II and place the dauphin on the throne. Charles was arrested in April 1356 for his impertinence, but his brother, Philip of Navarre, crossed to England in August, held talks with Edward III at Clarendon and did liege homage to the English king as ‘king of France and duke of Normandy’. The pressure on John II to make a decisive move against the English was becoming intolerable.

  The moment arrived on 19 September 1356, in fields outside the city of Poitiers. The Black Prince’s army consisted of 6,000–8,000 English and Gascon men; it was split as was now conventional into three divisions, with the prince commanding the middle. The French outnumbered the English–Gascon army by perhaps as much as two to one. Nevertheless, the English were well drilled and organized, in contrast to John II’s undisciplined and fractured army. Although the French had learned some of the lessons of Crécy, and were preparing to deploy their me
n-at-arms on foot in a defensive formation rather than wasting them in suicidal cavalry charges, they lacked the leadership to make their numbers and tactical plans tell. As the prince’s men traversed the French front line, passing behind thick hedges, two French commanders were goaded into attack. Traditional cavalry charges were sent against the English van and rearguard. They were slaughtered as they tried to cut through the bushes that protected their enemies.

  It was the beginning of a day of unparalleled carnage for the French, in a defeat that would not be rivalled until the battle of Agincourt in 1415. During heavy fighting they lost more than 2,000 men, including the duke of Bourbon, the constable of France, one of the two marshals and the carrier of the Oriflamme – the sacred red battle standard of the French army which was said to have been dipped in the blood of St Denis. Almost as many French noblemen were captured, including the king’s youngest son Philip, the archbishop of Sens, numerous counts, the other of the two marshals and – most disastrous of all – John II himself. The English lost no more than a few hundred men, and took prisoners worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was the most crushing defeat ever inflicted by a Plantagenet prince over a Capetian or Valois king, and it crowned for ever the glorious military legacy of the Black Prince. A banquet was given at the English camp following their victory, at which the legions of French prisoners were toasted and honoured with the greatest chivalric deference by the prince and his noble captains. John II was lauded as a great king who had fought more bravely than any other man on the field. But beneath the knightly courtesy, the political reality was clear: France was in crisis, while the English, who began to refer to the Black Prince informally as King Edward IV, were totally ascendant. The hostages taken at the battle of Poitiers were sent back to the king in England, who began to plot their ransom – a deal that would finally achieve the aim of re-establishing the lost Plantagenet empire in France.