The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  The first £100,000 instalment of King John's ransom was due on 1 November 1359. At the time of sealing the First Treaty of London, Edward had stipulated that every single clause had to be fully accepted and complied with, otherwise he would regard the treaty as being broken. But over the summer the dauphin's government had been brought to the very brink of collapse. First Charles of Navarre had made it clear he was planning to seize the throne. James Pipe's army of marauders had left the villages of the Seine valley in ruins, their men dead, women raped and fields empty of all but the scattered bones of their cattle. Then things had turned utterly horrific. The dauphin himself had faced a revolution in which his ministers were murdered in front of him and he himself was forced to swear allegiance to the mob. The revolution spread into a widespread peasant uprising, the Jacquerie, with terrible destruction and loss of life and property. Even when it was brought under control (by Charles of Navarre, ironically), the tension remained between the Navarrese supporters and the dauphin. The Parisians refused to accept the dauphin back, and prompted a siege of the city which lasted throughout July. The ransom was thus a relatively minor inconvenience in comparison to the complete breakdown of law and order that summer.

  Edward was not inclined to sympathise with the dauphin's plight. What was it to him, if his enemy proved incapable of good government? He had set the ransom; now he wanted it paid, and he refused to reopen negotiations on the matter. His mood was not improved by the funeral of his beloved mother. We will never know exactly how loss or grief may have affected his judgement, but it is reasonable to suppose that his mind was not wholly focused on the French problem in November 1358. The only real pressure for compromise came from King John. Despairing of events back in his kingdom, he now offered Edward whatever he wanted in return for peace.

  In January 1359 the anger within Edward, mixed perhaps with frustration and grief began to rise again at a determined French refusal to pay. But King John still implored him to show restraint. John was his prisoner, but he was also Edward's kinsman and his guest. Edward also liked the man. He gave him presents of barrels of fine wine, lodged him in the Savoy Palace - a residence he himself had once used and which he subsquently had given to the duke of Lancaster - and after the ratification of the First Treaty of London he had invited him to go hunting with him at Windsor. Although Edward gave orders on 2 January to gather bows and arrows at the Tower in readiness for a campaign, and ordered an army of archers and Welsh spearmen to be made ready, he still listened to John. John asked him to discuss terms with him, face to face, excluding all the counsellors and diplomats. Edward assented, knowing an army was on the way. But John said the right things, made the right offer, and on 24 March 1359 the Second Treaty of London was agreed between the two kings. John added Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Touraine and Anjou to the territories already ceded to Edward. This amounted to the entire Angevin Empire at its very height - under Henry II - and thus the greatest extent of the English royal family's lordship. In recognition of this generous provision by John, Edward reduced the ransom due to £500,000 and threw in all the other French prisoners, including the other members of the royal family, for free. The first instalment of £100,000 was rescheduled to 1 August 1359. Edward would then release John in return for the security of ten French noblemen and twenty walled towns.

  It was an agreement which gave Edward everything he had ever hoped to achieve and more, and he had reason to feel satisfied. He ordered one of the French prisoners, Marshal Audrehem, to take the agreement to Paris for ratification by the dauphin. Then, humoured again by the prospect of a permanent settlement which was very much to his advantage, he turned his attention to family celebrations.

  Although now in his forty-eighth year, only one of his children was married, and he had only one legitimate grandchild. This was Philippa, daughter of Lionel and his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, who had been born at Eltham in August 1355. He also had an illegitimate grandson, Roger, who had been born to Edith Willesford, one of the women at Clarendon, after the prince of Wales had taken a fancy to her, but even so, the paucity of descendants was noticeable. The only step he had so far taken to remedy this was the betrothal the previous year of little Philippa to the six-year-old heir of the earl of March, and obviously it would be many years before that match produced offspring. So to make up for lost time he now held a double wedding. On 19 May 1359 (the very day that the Estates General met in Paris to discuss the treaty) Edward's thirteen-year-old daughter Margaret was married at Reading Abbey to the twelve-year-old earl of Pembroke. The following day, in the same church, John of Gaunt (now eighteen) married Blanche, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the duke of Lancaster. All the royal family were there, and many costly gifts of jewellery and goblets were given. Edward himself gave extremely lavish presents to Blanche totalling nearly £400 in value, including 'a large brooch with an eagle and a huge diamond in its breast, garnished with rubies, diamonds and pearls' which alone was valued at £120" Ten days later, at Smithfield, Edward and his four eldest sons dressed up as the mayor and aldermen of London along with nineteen other knights in a great three-day tournament, at which they took on all challengers. Edward was revelling in his victory and the celebration of his family. At times like these, life was one long glorious chivalric parade.

  It was probably while awaiting the ratification of the treaty by the French that Edward visited Westminster Abbey to confirm his decision to be buried there. The prophecy said that he would be buried among the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral. In 1338 he had visited the shrine, but the following year, as relations with the Holy Roman Emperor wore thin, he ruled out any discussion of being buried in Germany, and decided on Westminster. For him, there was clearly no great honour in being buried abroad, even among the Three Kings. He had become the pride of England, for in achieving what was prophesied, he had rendered the prophetic writers' wildest fantasies attainable. Besides, Westminster Abbey was a fine place to be buried. Edward's great-grandparents (Henry III and Eleanor of Provence) and his grandparents (Edward I and Eleanor of Castile) lay there, as did his brother John and two of his own infant children (William of Windsor and Blanche). St Edward the Confessor, the king who founded the abbey, lay there, behind the high altar. Henry III, who had rebuilt the abbey church, lay just to the north of the saint-king. There was a space directly opposite, just to the south of the saint. That would be where he would be buried, he declared. That was where the great chivalric parade of his life would finally come to an end.

  What did Edward expect from the Second Treaty of London? No one really knows. Some writers have confidently asserted that Edward never expected the French to accept it, hoping that they would restart the war. Others have been more circumspect, suggesting that Edward was acting reasonably in reducing the ransom for the French king. However, most of these studies have been war-orientated and thus they have ignored Edward's personal ambitions or the changing attitudes of a man approaching old age. There is no doubt that Edward's many attempts after 1350 to bring the war to a successful and permanent end were genuine. Some proposals were extreme, but the reason for their extremeness was to allow Edward to press for the best deal possible, for unless he began negotiating with excessive demands, he would not arrive at the maximum gains. None of the four peace proposals were put forward because he wanted to resume the war: there were easier and more direct ways of starting fighting than protracted peace negotiations. Thus it must have been with regret that he learnt in May 1359 that the Second Treaty of London would not be ratified by the interim French government.

  The dauphin was determinedly against the peace his father had negotiated, largely because he saw his inheritance being eroded. The Estates General were inclined to agree. They had not expected an escalated series of territorial concessions, they had expected Edward to lessen his demands. The figures for the ransom were so large that they could not acknowledge that Edward had made any concession. They had forgotten in the course of the debate that he did not need to concede anyt
hing at all. The Jacquerie had been none of his doing; rather it had sprung from successive failures of the French government. But such things did not enter the reckoning. What mattered was French public sentiment. When the Estates General and the dauphin refused to accept the Second Treaty of London, they did so mainly out of pride. They had nothing else left with which to fight.

  Edward's final campaign was an ambitious affair. The army was reasonably large - in the region of ten thousand men — and the captains were experienced and numerous. The prince of Wales, the duke of Lancaster and the earl of Northampton were present, as were the earls of Stafford, Warwick and March, and, of course, Lord Manny. Edward's younger sons, Lionel, John and Edmund, were also with him, expected to win their spurs as their elder brother had at Crecy. Given the failure of the supply lines in 1355, Edward went well-prepared, with mobile forges, portable cornmills, movable ovens, lightweight boats for crossing rivers, building materials and a huge volume of foodstuffs. Froissart described it as 'the largest army and best-appointed train of baggage wagons that had ever left England'. Edward declared he would stay in France until he had satisfied his objectives or died in the attempt. The permanent solution to the French problem, which had seemed so close in the mid-1350s, was now within his grasp.

  Edward sailed from Sandwich on 28 October, arriving at Calais on the same day. One week later the army moved out; in three great columns, to begin the devastation. This time, however, their purpose was not to draw the French army to battle. There was no point: there was no effective army in France. The kingdom was economically broken, its currency was in free-fall and large numbers of renegade and volunteer self-serving-armies, like that commanded by James Pipe, were roaming the countryside destroying, plundering and burning. The French administration had difficulty controlling affairs outside Paris, and that city can hardly be said to have been reliable, having so recently tried to rid itself of the dauphin. Edward's purpose in 1359 was a single-minded attempt to demonstrate to the dauphin and the Estates General that they had been foolish to choose war rather than to accept the Guines agreement or the two treaties of London. He went determined to unleash the terrible wrath of a divinely favoured biblical king upon his enemies.

  The dauphin had miscalculated. He soon realised that he had no means to resist the invaders. He had no way of raising an army, coordinating resistance or even rebuilding the strategic fortifications of his kingdom. Moreover, his weary father had ransomed his most able advisers in England and sent them back to relieve him of administrative power. They tried to make the best of the situation, ordering everyone threatened by the invaders to abandon their homes and take what they could with them to the nearest walled town or religious sanctuary. Where a town's walls were decayed beyond repair, the town was to be abandoned before the onslaught began. All the French government could do beyond that was to hope, defend Paris, and pray.

  Their prayers were answered. Rain began to fall hard, for days on end. Even before 1359 Edward would have ranked as one of the most weather-stricken English kings, but now he was truly soaked. The roads of France became quagmires which prevented his army from moving at more than ten miles a day. The three columns of the army embarked on their ritual desecration of property in a sodden mass of discontent, ransacking the houses in deserted villages as the rain lashed down and saturated their clothes. The commanders too were uncomfortable, themselves soaked, and their prize warhorses' backs blistering under their leather saddles. The three battalions found it difficult to maintain contact with one another. It took them a whole month to reach Edward's principal target, the city of Rheims.

  Rheims was the ancient ceremonial place of coronation for the French kings. Edward had brought a crown with him, and there is no doubt he intended to ridicule French objections to the treaty by having himself crowned king in the coronation throne of his ancestors. There could be no greater symbol of his domination over the French monarchy, and no more powerful vindication of his claims to the sovereignty of Gascony and his other French possessions. Thus the English armies closed in on Rheims with a strong will, encircling the city: the duke of Lancaster to the north, the earl of March to the east, the earls of Richmond and Northampton to the north-west and the prince of Wales to the south-west.

  The French within Rheims were panic-stricken when they realised that they were to be singled out for attack. They argued among themselves in fear. The proud archbishop was adamant that his palace and ecclesiastical buildings within the city should not be used for military purposes of any kind. But the man whom the citizens appointed to coordinate the defence was a man of higher calibre. Gaucher de Chatillon was as ruthless in his defence of the city as Edward was in his attack. The walls were strong, but he made them higher and stronger. He commandeered the church buildings, fortified church towers, organised the citizens into watches and defensive units, walled up three of the city's gates and dug ditches around the city walls. Streets were blocked with chains, horses requisitioned (including those belonging to the archbishop) and any property which posed a threat to the security of the city was razed to the ground. There was no king in Rheims, nor was the dauphin present. The last-ditch defence of the dignity of the French monarchy was made in their absence.

  The English had the experience, skill and means to defeat any army which might conceivably be brought against them, but they did not necessarily have the means to defeat a well-defended city. For two days archers poured a deadly rain of arrows at the defenders as the men-at-arms and infantry filled the ditches with timbers to allow them to approach the walls. The brave citizens did what they had to. Parties of men left the gates and went into the ditches to fight and to try to burn the sodden timbers which allowed the English to approach the walls. Between the rain, the bitter cold, the lack of provisions and the bloody desperation of the men of Rheims, the English were beaten back and forced to consider how long they might have to spend waiting in the mud.

  Edward fully understood what made the difference between a successful siege and an unsuccessful one. At Calais he had been able to demonstrate complete superiority through being able to maintain an army for almost a year before the impregnable walls. At Tournai, which also had proved impregnable, he had failed because the city had been well-equipped and his men had grown disillusioned through lack of supplies and money. The question put to him now by Gaucher de Chatillon was whether he was prepared to commit the resources necessary to win Rheims. It would take a long siege, perhaps a whole year, and that would give the French government a chance to reconstitute the French army in sufficient strength to destroy Edward's supply lines, if not directly to attack him. And Edward's supply lines were already proving vulnerable. And at the end of the siege, supposing he was successful, what would he have gained? A city in which he could be crowned like his ancestors but which was strategically worthless. To spend perhaps £200,000 on what would ultimately be a single gesture would be folly, especially when the purpose of that gesture was simply to force the dauphin and Estates General to accept a treaty which King John had already agreed. There had to be another way, and years of devastating France told Edward that there was. A grand march of destruction would bring the French government to its knees.

  On 11 January 1360 Edward ordered his army to withdraw from Rheims and march towards Paris. The siege had failed, Edward had been denied the satisfaction of a coronation, but the cost to the French was to prove very high indeed. Everywhere there was looting, killing and burning, accompanied by some of the most hideous massacres. It is difficult to exaggerate the number and range of atrocities recorded, and many more must have been committed which were never written down. There were some incidents which contain an element of chivalric charm: Lord Burghersh invited the resolute captain of Cormicy to survey the mine he had dug under the castle, pointing out that a few wooden pit props were all that held up the walls of die great tower. And there were English losses along the way. The marshal of the army, the earl of March, having taken the towns of Saint-Florentin and Tonne
rre, died suddenly while besieging Rouvray, and the poet Geoffrey Chaucer was captured while straying a little too far from the main army, requiring Edward to contribute to his ransom. But on the whole the campaign was a horrifying demonstration of die 'smoke and flames of his country' which Edward had promised John in 1355.