The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  By January 1358, following long and complex peace negotiations, John II’s ransom was set at 4 million gold écus – an impossible £666,666 – a ransom that, even allowing for inflation, made Richard the Lionheart’s look puny. Alongside it was a draft Treaty of London, along much the same lines as the failed Treaty of Guînes. In addition to the huge ransom, Edward’s price for abandoning his own claim to the French Crown was to be sovereignty over Aquitaine, Saintonge, Poitou, Limousin in the south and Ponthieu, Montreuil and Calais in the north. It might have been sealed by both sides, had events in France not sharply deteriorated: radical reformers in Paris chased the dauphin from the city and Charles of Navarre, now freed from prison, offered a deal to the English in which France would be partitioned, with Edward taking the Crown and around two-thirds of the realm’s territory. In the summer of 1358 a mass popular rebellion known as the Jacquerie tore through northern France, with the aim of destroying noblemen and knights, whom they blamed for betraying the realm. Chroniclers reported ghastly atrocities as ordinary men and women took bloody revenge on their social superiors. One chronicler, Jean le Bel, recorded peasants killing a knight and roasting him on a spit, gang-raping his wife and force-feeding the unfortunate lady and her children the roasted flesh of their husband and father.

  Another French chronicler, Jean de Venette, left a vivid description of the countryside during the late 1350s. He described the area of his birth near Compiègne, which had been ruined by relentless English attacks:

  The vines in this region … were not pruned or kept from rotting … The fields were not sown or ploughed … There were no cattle or fowls in the fields … No wayfarers went along the roads carrying their best cheese and dairy produce to market … Houses and churches no longer presented a smiling appearance with newly repaired roofs, but rather the lamentable spectacle of scattered smoking ruins to which they had been reduced by devouring flames … The pleasant sound of bells was heard indeed, not as a summons to divine worship but as a warning of hostile intentions, in order that men might seek out hiding places while the enemy were yet on the way … Every misery increased on every hand, especially among the rural population … Yet their lords did not … repel their enemies, or attempt to attack them, except occasionally.

  Seeing the lamentable condition of the enemy, by November 1358 Edward was no longer convinced that peace was the best option. He began to plan for a third massive invasion. He was temporarily dissuaded by the personal pleas of his prisoner John II, who petitioned him successfully for a second draft to the Treaty of London. In this the king’s ransom remained at 4 million écus; but the list of territories to be awarded to the Plantagenets in full sovereignty now included Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Boulogne, along with the overlordship of Brittany.

  As the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Paris approached, Edward was pressing for its final obliteration, and a return to the heyday of Henry II and Richard I’s supremacy over Philip Augustus. Unsurprisingly, the second draft Treaty of London was utterly rejected in Paris. In summer 1359 invasion plans were made; in October the king, the duke of Lancaster and the Black Prince led an army of around 10,000 men, split into three divisions, out of Calais and south-west towards the seat of French kingship at Reims. It was the most provocative target they could have picked: for at Reims lay the cathedral where French kings had been crowned since Louis I in AD 816. Moreover, the town was just a few days’ march from Paris; if it should fall to the English king, then he would certainly have himself crowned as Edward I of France, spelling the completion of his march to supremacy over the kingdom.

  Fortunately for the French, Reims was stoutly defended, and Edward abandoned his attempts at a siege in January 1360, after spending just five weeks before its walls. Rather than attempting to conquer Reims, he agreed an alliance with the duke of Burgundy, and set out for Paris, in the hope of drawing the dauphin into a pitched battle. Wisely, the dauphin refused to be tempted into following two previous generations of Valois kings and risking his freedom and sovereignty against English men-at-arms and archers. He stayed in Paris, and in April Edward was forced to march his army, weakened by plague and tired from several months in the field, back in the direction of Brittany. As they marched back west, they were caught outside Chartres in a powerful thunderstorm, which destroyed a large part of the baggage train. Hailstones large enough to kill horses fell from the sky in a day so ghastly as to be later dubbed Black Monday. For once, fortune had turned against the king of England. There was to be no Crécy or Poitiers in 1360; instead, peace talks were opened in the village of Brétigny on 1 May. By 8 May they had concluded. Edward accepted a treaty by which he took sovereign control of Aquitaine, Poitou, Saintonge and Angoumois in the south and Ponthieu, Montreuil, Calais and Guînes in the north. He gave up his claim to the French throne, and reduced John II’s ransom to 3 million écus. John agreed to stop supporting the Scots against the English and Edward to cease aiding the Flemings who regularly rebelled against France. Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine all remained part of the French kingdom. It was not the grand re-establishment of Henry II’s empire which had once seemed possible; but it was a triumph nonetheless.

  Edward returned to England in time for Christmas in 1360, to proclaim and celebrate the peace – the achievement of almost everything he and his allies had fought for since 1337. Parliament was called in January 1361 and duly ratified the peace. On St George’s Day at Windsor in 1361 Edward’s sons Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt and Edmund of Langley were all admitted to the Order of the Garter in recognition of the service they had given in the wars. (Edward’s youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, who had been born in 1355, had been the nominal regent of the realm during the king’s more recent absences.) The country was given over to celebrating the apparent end of a war that had consumed much of the country for twenty-three years.

  In France, the mood was bleak. King John had been released on 5 December 1360 to return to France and raise his ransom, for which the first-ever gold franc (the franc à cheval) was minted. But the realm was devastated: overrun with English mercenary companies who had been disbanded from Edward’s armies and were now, with the end of the war, in need of occupation. They found this chiefly in inflicting continued misery on the inhabitants of Brittany and the south-west, capturing villages and castles before selling them back to their unlucky inhabitants. The legacy of Edward III’s reign seemed to have been set: while England basked in the sunbeams of triumph, France lay devastated, crippled for a generation by John II’s ransom, and territorially dismembered. And indeed, a high point in Plantagenet history had been reached. What was astonishing was the speed with which fortune’s wheel turned, and the age of glory fell spectacularly apart.

  PART VII

  Age of Revolution

  (1360–1399)

  My God, this is a strange and fickle land

  – RICHARD II (ACCORDING TO ADAM OF USK)

  The Family Business

  On 13 November 1362 Edward III celebrated his fiftieth birthday. As he faced old age, he could feel proud of his achievements. He was phenomenally rich, a powerful and famous king, who had shaped England in his own image: legal, cultural, military and visual. And if he was riding towards the twilight of his years – the life expectancy for Plantagenet kings was somewhere around sixty – he was doing so in style.

  He and Queen Philippa lived in splendour and luxury. Enriched by the massive bounty and the large ransom payments they had won from the French, Edward led a truly regal existence. The king and queen’s households were merged in 1360, in recognition of the fact that after the Treaty of Brétigny the former would not be travelling as it used to around makeshift camps on the Continent. Thousands of pounds were spent on tournaments and jewels, falcons and dogs, fine clothes and lavish living. As the fortieth anniversary of Edward’s accession approached, his court spent one of the first protracted intervals of peacetime in an endless round of feasting and partying.

  Much of the vast ro
yal treasure was spent overhauling many of the king’s residences. Windsor castle was the showpiece. Directed by his talented, humble-born new minister William of Wykeham, the king had been spending vast sums (£8,500 a year in the mid-1360s) on redesigning Windsor as a monument to martial kingship and courtly love. Old buildings were torn down and vast, luxurious new royal halls, chapels and chambers were built in their place. Vaults and marbled cloisters connected splendid apartments. (Queen Philippa alone had four personal chambers under construction, one for sleeping, another a chapel for prayer, a third decked with mirrors and a fourth for dancing.) And this was only one of the royal homes, to be lived in when the king and queen were not at their leisure in any number of splendid palaces and hunting lodges dotted about the Thames valley and the New Forest.

  But as he reached his half-century, Edward was not entirely self-indulgent. He thought a great deal of his people, and the way that they regarded his kingship. The public celebrations of his birthday centred on a parliament dominated by knights, burgesses and citizens, and were given in a spirit of high royal generosity. Meeting in October, it heard large numbers of petitions and sought to remedy as many complaints and grievances as possible. A Statute of Purveyance was finally granted, drastically limiting the most pernicious royal practice of requisitioning in wartime by limiting the forced purchase of food and goods to the king, queen and heir. Royal purveyors were now known as ‘buyers’ – and they operated under a strict code of conduct. This was an easier grant for Edward to make in peacetime than in wartime, to be sure, but the fact that he made it advertised an innate understanding of the hardships of his subjects.

  There was more symbolic work, too. During the course of Edward’s lifetime, there had been an important shift in the fabric of life in his kingdom. The language of the realm was moving away from French and towards English. The native tongue – once considered a rude, barbaric dialect unfit for well-born mouths to speak, or administrators to use – was now becoming commonplace. The king spoke it. All the aristocrats of the age understood it. Travelling minstrels singing the newly fashionable English ballads of Robin Hood in noblemen’s halls used the native tongue. Rising dons like John Wyclif, who was beginning to impress his colleagues at Oxford University in the early 1360s, would come to translate the Bible into English. The age of the first great English vernacular poets – Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower and the Pearl and Gawain poet – was dawning. As a result, Edward used his fiftieth birthday parliament to usher in a new age of English-speaking. The Statute of Pleading formally changed the spoken language of parliamentary address and arguments in the royal law courts from French to English. (Records were still to be kept in Latin.) It was another populist statute, designed, as it said, to remedy a situation in which ‘the people which do implead … in the king’s court … have no knowledge or understanding of that which is said for them or against them by their Serjeants (lawyers) and other pleaders’.

  Finally, Edward turned his mind to his family. Now that he was fifty, it was also time to endow the next generation of Plantagenets, too. And his final act in the birthday parliament was to honour his adult sons with lavish new titles and roles: setting them up to take the helm of the mighty land of England when he was gone.

  Edward and Philippa had seen nine of their children reach adulthood. By 1362 six of them were still alive. Young Joan had died in plague agonies during the Black Death, and when a second wave of the plague came back to England in 1361, it killed two of her sisters. The Children’s Plague, as the second wave has been called, wiped out around a quarter of England’s young people, including the seventeen-year-old Princess Mary and fifteen-year-old Princess Margaret. By 1362 that meant only one daughter was left: Isabella, a woman approaching her thirtieth birthday, who had refused to marry a Gascon lord during the 1350s and had withdrawn herself for good from Edward’s diplomatic plans, refusing to marry for anything but love.

  Nevertheless, despite the misfortunes and truculence of his daughters, Edward could still boast five healthy Plantagenet princes, and all but the seven-year-old Thomas of Woodstock gained handsome rewards in 1362. The eldest, of course, was the Black Prince. The heir to the throne was also now the finest soldier in England: a strapping veteran of all the great campaigns since 1346, and finally a married man. In 1361 he had been wedded at Windsor, quite scandalously, to his first cousin Joan of Kent. According to the writer known as the Chandos Herald, Joan was ‘a lady of great worth … very beautiful, pleasing and wise’. Not everyone was so kind – and indeed, the marriage was very much for love, rather than political gain. Joan had been married twice before. She already had five children by Sir Thomas Holland, and her first husband, the earl of Salisbury, was still alive. She was addicted to jewels and spending and brought no beneficial foreign alliances. Moreover, it looked as if the marriage would afford the Black Prince the dubious status of being the first Plantagenet king to be married to a divorced mother since Henry II had wed Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  Nevertheless the Black Prince had been well rewarded by his father. He was earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall and prince of Wales by the time of his wedding. His income exceeded £8,000. Since he and Joan had married, they had been living at Kennington, in a brand-new palace designed by the master-mason Henry Yevele – who would become the most brilliant builder of the age. Shortly before the king’s birthday, Edward had awarded them a new home. He settled the duchy of Aquitaine on the Black Prince, with powers that were effectively palatinate. The great warrior kings Richard I and Edward I had cut their teeth in Aquitaine, and the Black Prince had won the greatest battle of the age at Poitiers on its northern borders. For Edward III to send his eldest son as part of his own fiftieth birthday celebrations sent an unequivocal message: the Black Prince’s time for kingship would shortly arrive. Prince Edward and Princess Joan moved to Bordeaux in February 1363.

  This was the Black Prince accounted for. But Edward III was a student of his family’s history, and he had plans for the other sons, too. He had read William of Newburgh’s twelfth-century chronicle of early Plantagenet history and now, as his birthday approached, Edward began to put into place his own version of the grand familial strategy that Henry II had conceived for his own children, two hundred years previously. Each was to be awarded a landed inheritance in a different corner of Europe, with the eldest son the mightiest.

  On his birthday itself – which fell on the final day of the 1362 parliament – Edward came to parliament with his third and fourth sons, John of Gaunt and Edmund Langley, and proceeded to bestow marvellous new titles upon them. The records of the parliament give us a laconic clue as to the magnificence of the ceremony.

  And then the chancellor said to the great men and commons that our lord the king had discussed with some of the great men how God had truly blessed him in many ways, and especially in the begetting of his sons who were of legal age, and he therefore willed their names and honour to increase; that is to say, that his son Lionel [of Antwerp], then being in Ireland, should be named … duke of Clarence …

  As the record states, Lionel was abroad. But John of Gaunt and Edmund Langley were present, and they received their honours in person:

  And then our said lord the king girded his said son John with a lance, and put on his head a fur cap, and on top a circle of gold and precious stones, and named and made him duke of Lancaster, and gave him a charter of the said name of duke of Lancaster. And then he girded his said son Edmund with a lance, and named and made him earl of Cambridge, and gave him a charter of the name of earl of Cambridge.

  Duke of Clarence, duke of Lancaster, earl of Cambridge: these were grand titles indeed. And each of them bore a notional responsibility for a different corner of the Plantagenet dominions.

  Lionel of Antwerp’s title was rather novel. The duchy of Clarence was an Irish title that brought with it lands on the west coast of Ireland. (The name Clarence referred to the Clare family from whom the lands were inherited.) When joined to the earldom o
f Ulster, which Lionel held by virtue of his marriage to Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster, the new duchy of Clarence formed the greatest power bloc in Ireland. By the time his title was announced in parliament, Clarence was already in Dublin, having been appointed lieutenant of Ireland in 1361 and given 50 knights, 300 men-at-arms and 540 mounted archers, with provision to raise more troops in Ireland. His destiny was marked out: he was to expand and maintain Plantagenet power in the wild Irish west. He was the first Plantagenet prince to set foot in the lordship since King John.

  John of Gaunt, meanwhile, was raised to duke of Lancaster to replace Henry Grosmont, Edward’s friend and general, who had died, probably of plague, in 1361, aged fifty-one. Gaunt had married Grosmont’s daughter Blanche of Lancaster at Reading Abbey in 1359, and on his father-in-law’s death he had inherited in its entirety one of the largest and most important networks of estates in England. He thus brought back into the immediate royal family the inheritance of Edward II’s nemesis Thomas of Lancaster, which played a vital role in maintaining order and security in the north of England, where the Scottish border was such a regular area of distraction and warfare.

  The north, then, was to be Gaunt’s sphere. Edward III demanded on numerous occasions during the 1350s and 1360s that his third son be recognized as heir to King David II of Scotland, who had been released from prison in 1357 but struggled beneath the burden of his onerous ransom obligations. Whether the demand for Gaunt’s promotion to the Scottish Crown was posturing at the negotiating table, by which the Scots could be forced to pay their king’s ransom, or whether it represented something more ambitious on Edward’s part is debatable. But early in the 1360s it seemed likely that while the Black Prince took care of Aquitaine and Lionel duke of Clarence guided policy in Ireland, John of Gaunt was to be groomed for a role that would see him overseeing Scottish defence and affairs.