The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  The problem is that, although some of the details are verifiable, most are blatantly incorrect. As Dugdale noted, the countess was called Catherine, not Alice, and it is very unlikely that Edward had not seen her since her marriage for she had been married to his best friend for at least thirteen years. There was no nephew of the earl called 'William Montagu'. There is no evidence of any settlement of the family estates in 1342-44. The version of the story underlying the continental chronicle states that the earl had no heir, which is incorrect. It is very difficult to accept that the countess was at a border fortress during a period of hostility while her husband was overseas. It is even harder to accept that she habitually stayed there. There is no support for the story at all in any English or Scottish chronicle.

  Caught between a string of significant errors and some correct facts, one twentieth-century biographer (Michael Packe) tried very hard to make the story fit. He decided that Dugdale was right - that it was Edward Montagu who was the governor of Wark, who escaped to warn Edward that the castle was about to fall - and added that this was how 'William Montagu' was supposed to be the nephew of the 'countess'. Edward Montagu's wife was indeed called Alice. Moreover she was also a cousin of Edward's, being the daughter of the earl of Norfolk, and so may well have been invited to the marriage tournament at London in August 1342. She was about eighteen years of age, and before her marriage to Montagu had been betrothed to his nephew, William Montagu, son of the earl of Salisbury. Packe did not attempt to tackle the question of why Edward Montagu might have left his royal wife and thirteen-year-old nephew in a border fortress during a period of hostility. He considered two details conclusive. First, le Bel mentions at one point that the young William Montagu had to pass a message to his aunt the 'countess'. And second, Alice was supposedly killed by her husband and several other men about ten years later. Packe decided that, because Edward did not pursue his cousin's killers with dire vengeance, he was somehow compromised by Edward Montagu.

  In all this fact-shuffling and theory-dealing, some fundamental points have been ignored. There are three stories here, rolled into one. They may be connected but they are still separate events: the meeting at Wark, the tournament at London and the rape. One at least - the rape - circulated separately to the others. Therefore we must ask how information about these three events at opposite ends of the country - two of which took place in private — could have reached the person who eventually wrote them down. We might ask why a chronicler of no particularly high status should have known what Edward did or did not do in the countess's bedchamber. Not only that; in order to know what passed between the king and the 'countess' at Wark, the original teller of the tale would have had to be one of the dozen knights picked by Edward to visit the castle with him, or one of the lady's household servants, or a member of the castle garrison. It is exceptionally unlikely that any of these people did not know the woman's name and correct tide. It is equally unlikely that they did not know that the governor of the castle was not the earl's nephew, and that William Montagu was the earl's twelve-year-old son. There are too many errors in describing the family to put them all down to 'Chinese whispers' when other facts about the campaign are correctly related. The only way in which the story of the infatuation can be considered credible is if the names and relationships had all been distorted through having been standardised by an unreliable intermediary in the process of making this story fit with the two other events, namely the accounts of the rape and the tournament at London.

  Taking this approach of assessing the three elements of the story separately, we may come to some more reliable conclusions. Edward did not rape the countess of Salisbury. The record evidence shows that he had very little time after the earl's departure for France to see the countess. In fact it seems likely that the earl and king sailed together: they were certainly both together on Edward's return journey the following spring. After they returned, the earl's relationship with the king did not break down.47 Indeed, in August 1343 Salisbury went abroad on Edward's behalf, as a royal plenipotentiary to see King Alfonso of Castile. It is difficult to believe he would have undertaken this if his feelings had been that of an injured husband, nor that Edward would have trusted him with the appointment in such circumstances. Finally, we may be confident that the story is false by closely examining the information underpinning it. The only possible witnesses who could have related the original rape story would have been Edward's valets (due to his instructions to them in his chamber before the rape) and they would have needed further information about the rape itself, presumably from the countess's maidservants. The story could not have spread from the valets to become a common rumour without circulating in the royal household. So it is significant that in later years Froissart, despite having far better access to the key members of the royal household than le Bel, was unable to find anyone who could corroborate the story. Hence we may be confident that the rape story was a piece of propaganda invented by one of Edward's enemies on the Continent.

  But who was the 'countess' at Wark — if she was a real person - and who was 'Alice'? Is there any truth in the other parts of the story? As noted above, it is probable that Edward's army camped near Wark, and it is possible that this was due to a request to relieve the castle. It is also possible that Edward was briefly infatuated with a high-status lady staying at the castle, who may have been called Alice. He may or may not have invited her and her husband to the tournament at London in mid-August 1342. If so, it is highly unlikely that she was the wife of the earl of Salisbury. Le Bel wrote his chronicle in and after 1352.48 By this time there was probably another love story about Edward III circulating: a tale about the foundation of the Order of the Garter (1349). This did relate to a countess of Salisbury, but she was Joan, the 'Fair Maid of Kent' - the same girl whom Dugdale suggested - and she was only thirteen in 1341. As for the elder countess of Salisbury, it is very unlikely she was at a Scottish border castle while her husband was in custody in France. If the woman at Wark really existed, it is much more likely that she was the wife of the castellan of the castle, and this might have been Sir Edward Montagu. But the evidence amounts to just three very tenuous facts: Wark was a castle held by her husband's brother, Edward had not seen her since her wedding (as le Bel claims), as she was married in 1338 and Edward had been abroad, and she did have a young nephew William Montagu, who is quite likely to have served in, or visited, his uncle's household.

  So how come a story about an infatuation (whether true or false) became mixed up with one about a rape and another about a tournament, and became twisted into a scandal involving the wife of Edward's best friend? The answer to this is simply that the continental rumour mongers of the 1340s and 1350s wanted to present Edward III in an immoral light. The stories together formed a 'catalogue' of Edward's sins - rape, disloyalty to his friend, adultery - which became widely circulated on the Continent. This in itself is not surprising. What is interesting is that le Bel believed the end result, and even Froissart was forced to consider it. Both these men had met Edward. Le Bel had been a footsoldier in his army, and Froissart knew him personally. So it is particularly interesting that le Bel believed this story, and tried partly to excuse it on the grounds that it was 'motivated by love'. This tallies with Froissart's view. He could not believe that Edward had raped the countess but he could believe that Edward was attracted to a noblewoman, and even sufliciently overcome with lust that he attempted a seduction. Edward's liking for women is well-attested. His sexual desire for his wife was evidently compulsive. Furthermore, if we examine the gifts that Edward gave out to members of Philippa's household, we may notice several women benefiting from his largesse. In 1335 he made a grant to Mabel Fitzwarenne, and in 1337 he similarly made grants to Margaret Jorce and Elena Mauley. All these women were 'damsels of Queen Philippa'. Such grants are not suspicious in themselves, but they alert us to the fact that Edward was aware of his wife's female companions, and since none of the grants were ostensibly at Philippa's request we m
ight suspect that Edward himself initiated them. 'Entertaining ladies' (to use Sir Thomas Gray's phrase), in both its sinful and innocent forms, might well have given rise to a single public reputation. Edward acknowledged no illegitimate children in his youth - and so we should not presume he was promiscuous at this time - but he definitely enjoyed and encouraged the multiple flirtations of his sexually-charged court, and he was unashamed about it.

  This is probably the most important thing about these stories. It shows Edward's perceived weakness. No one could accuse him of cowardice. No one could accuse him of failing to listen to his people's demands. No contemporary could accuse him of idleness, personal greed, or even fool-hardiness. Edward's Achilles' heel was his love of female company, for it was possible to build a moral case against him by representing it as promiscuity. The author of the Vow of the Heron knew this well, and painted a picture of Edward ruling over a lascivious court. The poem underlying the Vow story was probably composed in the Low Countries, in the 1340s. It would thus have been written by a countryman and contemporary of Jean le Bel, at about the same time as the rape story which le Bel heard. Le Bel was particularly biased in favour of Edward, but his informant about the rape scene clearly was not. The count of Hainault himself was somewhat ambivalent, despite being Edward's brother-in-law. It seems there were anti-Edward polemicists in Hainault, and one of these took a story he had heard about Edward's brief infatuation with a woman at Wark and turned it into a tale of rape, centred on the family of the famous earl of Salisbury. A Hainaulter audience in 1352 would not have known any better.

  *

  The discussions about the alleged rape of the countess have tended to obscure two important events which took place at this time. The first was the news that William Epworth, an officer of the Irish Exchequer, had been thrown into prison. Ireland had long been in a semi-autonomous state, and the Irish Exchequer had grown steadily poorer over the years, so when Edward tried to increase his revenues from the country by revoking all grants made since the death of Edward I, he was bound to cause a dispute. William Epworth was one of the men ordered on 24 July 1341 to reclaim all royal lands which had been granted out to other lords. Three days later Edward showed his lack of understanding of the Irish situation by issuing a writ which stated that he would 'be better served in Ireland by English ministers having incomes and property in England than by Irishmen, or Englishmen who have married and acquired possessions in Ireland and hold nothing in our kingdom of England'. This was an overt attack on the independent culture of the Irish and Anglo-Irish nobility. They responded with determination. They met in a parliament at Dublin in October, and then another at Kilkenny in November, and put forward a series of carefully written and constructed petitions, laying the blame for the policy at the door of Edward's ministers. These petitions gave Edward cause for reflection, and he realised that he was not in a position to lay down the law in Ireland, not without going there. Over the following few months he backtracked, restoring the territories he had tried to take into royal control, giving into almost all the petitions. As with his dispute with Stratford, however much he believed he was in the right, there was a limit to how far he wanted to push an argument.52

  The second important event of early 1342 was one of the largest tournaments which Edward ever held. It took place at Dunstable, directly after his return from Scotland, on 11-12 February 1342. According to one account, 'all the armed youth of England' were present and no foreigners were invited: die total of knights exceeded two hundred and fifty. In a fuller version of the same chronicle it was noted that the earls of Derby, Warwick, Northampton, Pembroke, Oxford and Suffolk all took part, and the other earls were only excused by reason of old age or illness. The king himself fought as a 'simple knight'. A number of barons from the west of England were present. Even Queen Philippa was there, despite being heavily pregnant again (she gave birth the following month to their eighth child, Blanche). Far in the north, the chroniclers in their monasteries noted it. Stabling alone cost more than £113. A tournament on this scale in February was unusual, for it was almost impossible to set up and complete everything in the short space of daylight. Indeed, it took so long to organise that it was almost dark before the tournament began.

  The reason usually given for the tournament at this time is that it was to celebrate the betrothal of the king's three-year-old son, Lionel of Antwerp, to the eight-year-old heiress of the earldom of Ulster, Elizabeth de Burgh. This is supported by the royal wardrobe accounts. But one feature about this tournament stands out. This is the first tournament at which Edward is known to have used a personal motto. Practically everything made for this tournament was embroidered with the words 'it is as it is', in English. Both the king and his son had state beds: Lionel's had love-knots and leaves on it, powdered with silk roses and his coat of arms. The king's bed was covered in green cloth embroidered with silk dragons which encircled the arms of England and France. Its top sheet had 'four circlets in which there are four angels, a final circlet in the middle covered with the helmet and crest of the king, while the field of this sheet is worked with other circlets and scrolls of silk bearing the legend "it is as it is"

  Perhaps it was the very mysteriousness of the motto which caused the chronicler who described the tournament, Adam Murimuth, to misunderstand its purpose. Although he was no stranger to heraldic events, he thought it was to celebrate the truce with Scotland. That is hardly likely; truces with Scotland were a common event and never had they been celebrated on this scale by Edward, nor would it have been fitting to have the celebration so far from the border. But more than this, the organisation necessarily rules out the tournament being held at such short notice. Just making the costumes would have taken a considerable amount of time. The accounts reveal that Edward's tailor was paid for making 'various robes, tunics, surcoats and many other garments' for the king and his magnates. Many of these were embroidered with 'it is as it is'. Also, another suit of armour was made for the king bearing the arms of the legendary Sir Lionel, echoing the Dunstable tournament of 1334.

  What did it mean, this motto, 'it is as it is'? To date the only historian seriously to have given this any thought assumed that the legend was 'fatalistic' and that its origins were 'probably literary'. A fatalistic message is entirely possible, meaning 'things are as they are and cannot be changed' in a negative, resigned sense. Given his recent Scottish expedition and his possible brief flirtation with a woman at Wark, we might say that the resignation suggested by the phrase reflects his feelings about Scotland, or her, or even the recent chaos in Ireland. But it is very unlikely that all the nobility of England would be gathered for such a purpose. A preferable interpretation is that it relates to the claim on the throne of France: 'it is as it is' being a cold assertion of the immutability of Edward's descent from Philip the Fair. Attractive and sensible as this interpretation would be, it is difficult to see why Edward waited four years after first claiming the tide, and two years after properly claiming it, before making this show, and why he made this demonstration in England, not France, and with no foreigners present, and in the depths of winter.

  Another interpretation is possible. That 'it is as it is' was not fatalistic at all, but exactly the opposite: a celebration. If one puts the stress on the first 'is', the phrase reads as an achievement - 'it is as it is' - meaning 'things have come to be as they should be'. This is supported by Edward's order for twelve red hangings to be made, each one embroidered with 'it is as it is' These were huge: each one was more than twenty feet long and more than ten feet wide. The cost of these twelve banners was almost £30 (the annual income of nine skilled labourers).6' Although the statement was certainly mysterious, Edward wanted everyone to see it, and, for those who understood it, we may assume that it was important.

  It is likely that 'it is as it is' finally announced the death of the old king, Edward II, to those who knew he had survived Berkeley. We cannot be certain about this, but there are a number of details which support the sugg
estion. First and foremost, Edward III finally passed on to his son and heir, Edward of Woodstock, the tide of 'Prince of Wales' - the only tide which his father had never given up - in the next parliament (in May 1343), strongly suggesting the old man had died by then. This was the first parliament for two years, and so it would appear that Edward III had heard about his father's death in the period May 1341-May 1343. Further support for this is that he made a pilgrimage to his father's tomb at Gloucester - his first such pilgrimage - in March 1343, after a near-death experience, indicating that by then his father had very probably been placed in his tomb. An irregularity in a Nottinghamshire chantry ordinance probably arising as a result of Edward IPs survival in 1335 was finally sorted out in January 1343, tempting us to push the terminus ante quern for Edward's death to 1342 at the latest. Given that Edward II was almost certainly still alive in 1339, and probably died in 1341-42, it seems not unreasonable to connect the 'it is as it is' message in February 1342 with the arrival of the news of the death not long before. It may well be that the appearance of Niccolinus Fieschi in London in November 1341 marks the critical moment.