The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  With Thomas of Woodstock little more than an infant, that just left Edmund Langley. The king’s fourth son was earmarked for one of the most important spheres of foreign policy: Flanders and the Low Countries.

  In November 1361 the duke of Burgundy died, and left as his widow a twelve-year-old girl, Margaret. The child was the daughter of Louis of Male, count of Flanders, and was heiress to the counties of Nevers, Flanders, Rethel, Burgundy and Artois, as well as the duchies of Brabant and Limbourg. Together, these lands formed a power bloc that looked like an Aquitaine of the north: a massive, potentially independent group of counties that, combined under the leadership of a single ruler, might be used to counterbalance the might of the French Crown. In addition, with its rich trading towns Flanders offered a treasure trove for whoever could acquire it.

  As soon as the duke of Burgundy’s death was known, Edward began to negotiate in secret for Margaret’s marriage to his son Edmund. Matters were complicated by the need to secure permission for marriage from the Francophile Pope Urban V (r.1362–70). Like the Black Prince and Joan of Kent, Edmund and Margaret were related within the prohibited bounds of consanguinity. But Edward III was not put off by the challenge. As well as making the 21-year-old Edmund earl of Cambridge, he awarded him control over the northern French counties of Ponthieu and Calais, to give him a standing interest in the region. A diplomatic campaign of huge energy and cunning began and occupied much of Edward’s time and energy during the 1360s.

  Thus Edward celebrated his fiftieth birthday: with great laws, parliamentary gifts, family ennoblement and the launch of a dynastic plan for his large if diminished brood of Plantagenet children. It seemed to anticipate territorial expansion on the part of each of Edward’s four mature sons without offering the potential to bring them into conflict with one another which had blighted the final decades of Henry II’s reign. If Edward III learned anything from his reading of William of Newburgh’s histories, it was that eagle chicks left in the same nest would soon come to vicious fighting.

  And indeed, the decades that followed would prove that Edward III’s children had far more brotherly loyalty than Henry II’s.

  Unfortunately for Edward, while fraternal relations waxed strong, the streak of good luck enjoyed by his family in the 1350s was about to run out.

  Unravelling Fortunes

  The year 1369 was a very bleak one for Edward III and his family. It was a year of almost unrelenting failure and loss, which capped a decade of gathering doom. Death followed death, sickness piled upon sickness, and everything that had shone with such glory in the 1350s suddenly seemed to be scattering in the wind like ashes. Against a background of reversing fortunes on the Continent, the Edwardians began to slip away into death, infirmity and incapacity.

  Spending the 1360s at far greater ease than any decade previously had not left Edward rested. From the middle of the decade his health was declining. The king and queen spent much of their time with their combined household at their hunting lodges in the New Forest, avoiding Westminster and slowly corroding into old age. Edward took solace in the comforts of his wife’s servant Alice Perrers – a girl in her early twenties, with a seductive voice and a sharp eye for advancement. She bore the king her first illegitimate child in 1364; thereafter she used her position in the royal favour to advance ever higher in the court.

  In the field of domestic policy, Edward used his time wisely. The realm he had forged remained prestigious, and continued to host great state occasions, as it did in 1364, when the kings of Scotland, France and Cyprus were all entertained in London at once. Domestic governance continued to be reformed. England gained legislation to reform local peacekeeping and empower justices of the peace to administer law and order in the shires. Parliaments also passed sumptuary statutes, which regulated what different ranks of society could wear, and forbade the lower orders from wearing more luxurious types of furs, cloaks or shoes. The efforts to settle the Plantagenet empire on the surviving royal children in a coherent way continued.

  Yet against all this ran a current of decay. Careful though his plans were, it was on foreign fields that fortune first began to abandon Edward. In 1364 John II of France died at John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, just outside the walls of London. Repayments on John’s massive ransom ceased, and the kingdom of France had a chance to rally under the leadership of a new Valois king, Charles V (r.1364–80). The new king was determined to topple the English, and he was fortunate to find a highly skilled general to assist him. Bertrand du Guesclin was a veteran of the protracted wars of Breton succession, and had fought against the English for more than two decades, facing down no lesser men than Henry Grosmont, duke of Lancaster. Over time he would become the scourge of the English and a master of guerrilla tactics and attritional, negative campaigning that could grind the life out of English invading armies.

  The first theatre in which war resumed was not northern France and Aquitaine, the field of so much earlier success. Rather, England was drawn – through the ambitions of the Black Prince – into a complex and sapping proxy war fought in the hot, disease-ravaged territories of Iberia. A struggle for the Castilian throne erupted between two sons of Alfonso XI. It was contested between the bastard Henry of Trastámara and the incumbent king, his half-brother Pedro the Cruel. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham described Pedro as ‘a vile evildoer and a tyrant’, and his name in the Iberian peninsula was synonymous with cruelty and bloodshed.

  Pedro had inherited the throne from his father in 1350, and switched his realm’s allegiance from its longstanding French alliance to court England in 1362. When Charles V inherited the French throne it suited him very well to punish the Castilian king for his abandonment of the cause. It was an opportunity to reclaim some military initiative; but more important, it offered the hope that the many free companies of violent mercenaries who had been roaming and terrorizing the French countryside would now be drawn away to a new and profitable war in the south. The companies’ presence in France – particularly around Brittany, Normandy and the Loire valley – had for years been a source of chaos and disorder.

  These independent bands of discharged soldiers who fanned out through the French countryside continued to take control of castles, manors and churches, which they used as bases for a military occupation of the surrounding area. They stole, murdered, burned and raped with abandon. Then, once an area had been reduced to destitution, they moved on to inflict misery upon another. Their presence was viewed by many ordinary Frenchmen as a punishment sent from God. It was viewed by the new king as an impediment to any sort of stable government. When the chance presented, therefore, King Charles threw his support behind Henry of Trastámara, sponsoring a bid to depose Pedro. In 1366 this drove the king out of Castile and up into the Black Prince’s arms in Bayonne. Predictably enough, the prince received Pedro as a friend and promptly engaged England in the new war.

  As was usual with the Edwardian wars, fighting for the throne of Castile would prove wildly expensive. The Black Prince had been levying a series of somewhat unpopular fouages (hearth taxes) on Aquitaine since his arrival in 1363 – which did nothing for the unity of his new duchy and the warmth with which his rule was received. In 1366 he boldly agreed to shoulder the entire cost of invading Pedro’s kingdom and expelling the French. In return Pedro gave over his two daughters, Constance and Isabella, as collateral against repayment of the £276,000 expedition. (The girls would later marry the Black Prince’s brothers John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock respectively.) But something about a country as small and relatively poor as Castile ever having the means to cover its share of the costs of war should have struck the prince as improbable.

  The campaign started well. As the army was organizing, on 6 January 1367 Princess Joan gave birth to the Black Prince’s second son. The boy was born in Bordeaux, and named Richard, after the Lionheart, Aquitaine’s most successful son. His baptism was attended by what the Canterbury chronicler William Thorne described as three ‘magi’: King Pedr
o of Spain, King James IV of Majorca and King Richard of Armenia. Three kings at court and a child born on Twelfth Night: these were seen as signs that the baby boy was marked out for great things. It was an auspicious way for his father to start on a campaigning season.

  Within months the prince won the third and in some respects the greatest victory of his military career, at the battle of Najera. With his brother John of Gaunt alongside him, Prince Edward had led an army of Gascon subjects and paid mercenaries over the Pyrenees and down past Logrono to the banks of the river Najerilla, where Henry of Trastámara was waiting.

  The prince was still at the height of his military powers, and at Najera he was aided by Henry of Trastámara’s incompetence. The Castilian ignored a letter from Charles V, explicitly warning him of the dangers of standing to fight the English, whose army, wrote the French king, included ‘the flower of the chivalry of the world’. Indeed it did. Sir John Chandos, Stephen Cusington and the Poitevin nobleman Guichard d’Angle were formidable captains in a combined force of Gascon retainers and English companies. During the descent from the Pyrenees, the Black Prince dubbed 200 new knights among his ranks.

  When these knights emerged from the mountains, Henry of Trastámara panicked. Instead of avoiding battle, he took up defensive positions against the Najerilla river, and prepared for battle: the one thing Charles V had explicitly warned him to avoid. Early in the morning of 3 April, English divisions surprised Henry and du Guesclin, attacking them on the left flank and causing chaos. Under a familiar English assault of heavy longbow fire and fierce attacks by dismounted men-at-arms, the Franco–Castilian force was routed, and then driven back into the river by cavalry charges. At least 5,000 men on Henry’s side were slaughtered or drowned. Henry fled for his life, but du Guesclin was captured, along with almost every other nobleman on the Franco–Castilian side.

  It was another famous triumph for an English prince against a French army. Tactically, it was the best of the Black Prince’s victories, even if the glittering cast of hostages did not quite reach the heights of Poitiers in 1356. The Black Prince had once again shown himself to be agile, ruthless and brave in the thick of battle.

  But if the military victory was complete and glorious, the political and personal consequences of Najera were little short of catastrophic. Although he had retrieved his throne, Pedro the Cruel was unable to raise the money to pay back the Black Prince for his assistance. This left Prince Edward effectively bankrupt, and now under extreme pressure from the Gascon lords who demanded their wages. Even with the sale of Pedro’s jewels and the ransoms of valuable hostages taken at Najera, there was no way that the costs of war could be met.

  Worse, the English army was crippled when the heat of a southern summer broke. Infection and disease, including widespread bouts of dysentery, swept through their ranks and accompanied them as they withdrew back to Bordeaux at the end of a long summer in 1367.

  The maladies afflicted the great as harshly as they did the poor. Some time around Najera, the Black Prince contracted a serious disease – perhaps malaria or more likely dropsy – which lingered and confined him to bed for long stretches for the rest of his life. When he returned to Gascony, a preacher gave a sermon comparing him to the Son of God. ‘No one should flatter even the greatest prince to his face like that,’ Edward later reflected, as sickness racked his body. ‘Fortune may strike him down at any moment and all his famous deeds will then be forgotten and reduced to nothing.’

  So it proved. After the shock inflicted by the illness he picked up on the Najera campaign, the Black Prince was never the same again. The dual consequences of his broken health and bankruptcy were disastrous for the government of Aquitaine and for the broader English position in France. Pedro of Castile had been kept on his throne, but he would not pay the Black Prince a penny for the privilege. Although hostages like du Guesclin realized valuable ransoms, these were but a tiny part of the overall debt. The Black Prince’s only solution was to levy further high and harsh fouages on Aquitaine. These antagonized the local lords and in 1368 they appealed against the Black Prince’s rule to Charles V, as ‘sovereign lord of the Duke and the whole duchy of Aquitaine’. The appeals were a none-too-subtle request for Charles to strike up war against the English in France once again. Charles required little encouragement. In late 1368 French troops massed on the borders of Aquitaine. By spring 1369, hundreds of towns had joined the appeal against Plantagenet rule and large areas of the principality were overrun.

  Meanwhile in Castile, Henry of Trastámara regrouped. In March 1369 he murdered his half-brother Pedro in a tent with a dagger. Soon afterwards Henry and Charles signed a joint treaty providing for a large war fleet to sail on the Gascon coast. Panic spread not only around the coastal towns of Gascony, but up to the south coast of England, where a new threat to the Atlantic and the Channel was once again perceived. The futility of the Black Prince’s Castilian campaign was now painfully exposed, and he was too sick to regroup and defend his lands against the resurgent French. By 1370 he was making preparations to return to England; he came back in January 1371, a broken man.

  By the time he returned, news had reached England that another of his brothers was also lost to the Plantagenet cause. Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence, had found his task in Ireland as arduous as every prince who had attempted to bring English customs and order to the region before him. His wife had died in 1363 and by 1366 he had abandoned the job of managing Ireland as a lost cause. Edward III had arranged a new marriage, a purely mercenary arrangement in which the duke married the thirteen-year-old Violante Visconti, a Pavian heiress and member of the famous Visconti dynasty who were the warlike lords of Milan and scourge of their neighbouring Italian city-states. Lionel and Violante had a magnificent marriage before the doors of Milan Cathedral, and celebrated in great style for several months afterwards. The poet Petrarch was said to have been a guest at one great dinner given by the couple. But the high living proved fatal to Lionel. Within months of the marriage he was dead.

  Queen Philippa, too, was declining. She dislocated her shoulder in a hunting accident in 1357 and never fully recovered. From 1365 she could not move about easily, and by 1367 was relying on litter and barge to travel.

  On 15 August 1369 she died, with Edward and their teenage son Thomas of Woodstock by her side. The king held her hand and wept bitter tears. The girl who had arrived in England four days after Edward II’s funeral had grown up to see her husband and their family rise from puppets of the Mortimer–Isabella regime to become Europe’s most feared dynasty. She had lived a fabulously rich and lavish lifestyle: Froissart claims in his history that her dying wish to the king was that he settle her debts to foreign merchants. Philippa had been a great companion to her husband and a dutiful mother to their many children. Her loss left Edward distraught.

  The king was in poor health himself. From the middle of the decade he had begun to rely ever more heavily on expensive surgeons and doctors – the lot of a man in his sixth decade of life. As his family and friends dropped away around him, Edward began to sink into a closed household life. He was outliving his greatest victories.

  And yet, by 1369, the time had come to fight once more. Indeed, against the onslaughts of Charles V, war was the only response that Edward knew how to give. In a parliament of 1369, the records state: ‘it was agreed by all the prelates and magnates and commons of the shires of England … with the assent of the whole parliament, that the King of England should resume the name of King of England and of France, as he held it before the peace …’ Peace was formally abandoned. The sickly, grieving Edward had somehow to raise his country for a new round of violence. It was to be no easy task.

  The Good Parliament

  The chapter house of Westminster Abbey filled with purposeful occupants. It was 29 April 1376: the second day of parliament. Since Easter, three weeks before, men had been making a political pilgrimage to Westminster from every corner of England. The majority of England’s magnates h
ad arrived to sit in their capacity as the parliamentary lords. They were joined by men of the shires: the knights and gentry who now filled the chapter house as the parliamentary commons.

  The previous day, all parliament had met together. The ailing king had come up from Havering to attend the opening ceremony, but it would be the last that parliament saw of him. Once he left, John of Gaunt represented royal authority. He sat with the other lords in the Painted Chamber at Westminster Palace. The commons, meanwhile, took their place in the abbey chapter house, a large, octagonal stone building in which the monks of the abbey sat every day to pray, read and discuss a chapter of the rule of St Benedict. It was a relic of Henry III’s extensive reworking of the abbey in the troubled 1250s, building work undertaken during that time when his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort had done so much damage to Plantagenet rule in the name of reform.

  It was a magnificent building, described by Matthew Paris as ‘incomparable’. The floor was tiled with figures of kings and queens, the Plantagenet royal arms, and an inscription proclaiming the beauty of the chapter house and the munificence of its royal builder: ‘As a rose is the flower of flowers, so this is the house of houses, which King Henry, friend of Christ and the Holy Trinity dedicated …’