The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  Worse was to follow. On 26 February 1361 burning lights had been seen across the sky at midnight. Some said they formed the shape of the cross, and many were afraid. There was an eclipse of the sun, followed by a severe drought. Corn, fruit and hay withered and died in the spring. It was said that not rain but blood fell at Boulogne. Others said that men had seen images of two castles in the sky, from which black and white hosts issued to fight one another. All these strange events were soon explained as forewarnings of a calamitous event. The portents may have been illusory but the calamity itself was not. In May the plague returned.

  It is easy for us to take the view that the plague of 1361 was not as bad as that of 1348-49. After all, people knew what to expect, and would have been less shocked. But for exactly that reason the return of the plague -with the widespread expectation that it would be as bad as 1348-49 - must have been deeply unsettling. People had thought that the plague had gone forever; so with its return, they became aware that it had not, but might return again and again, as indeed it did. Children were particularly vulnerable. Anyone not born before 1349 had no resistance, and one chronicler speaks of the plague being the Children's Plague as a result of the high infant mortality.

  For Edward the return of the plague carried a particular resonance. It challenged him again to show his faith that God would protect him by appearing regularly in public. But would God protect him now that he had won his war? Such reasoning was normal in the spiritual climate of 1361. After the 1360 campaign God had seen fit to summon five Knights of the Garter to his heavenly table, their earthly duties done. Lancaster may even have been killed by the plague, as many chroniclers said. Would God now kill off Edward too?

  During the last visitation of the plague, Edward had ostentatiously held the Order of the Garter tournament at Windsor. Since then the Windsor tournament and mass in St George's Chapel had become a fixture of the royal calendar. With plague once more encroaching on the spirit of the nation, the Windsor tournament again became the focal point of Edward's demonstration that royalty did not shrink from mortal diseases. He seized the opportunity to make the 1361 feast of St George every bit as high-profile as its predecessors. As five Knights of the Garter had recently died, he installed other men in their places, including his three sons, Lionel, John and Edmund. Along with the usual blue robes of the Order, black and scarlet lengths of material were ordered in large quantities, possibly for teams of living knights to joust against mourners or the dead. More than two hundred garter emblems were ordered to be sewn, many furs were trimmed as gifts, and more than eight hundred brooches were made to be given out at the king's will.

  After the tournament festivities Edward went to Sheppey to oversee the foundation laying of his new town and castle. The plague spread, killing thousands. The cemeteries were reopened. Men of substance began to pack up and head off for their most remote estates. On 10 May Edward suspended the actions of all the law courts as a consequence of the pestilence. Many lesser men, panic-stricken by the approach of the disease, seized what they thought might be their last opportunity to go on a pilgrimage, to atone for their sins. In this way they spread the disease further. By the summer it was rife.

  Edward staged two more high-profile events. These took the form of royal marriages. The first, and easiest to arrange, was the wedding at Woodstock of his seventeen-year-old daughter Mary to the young John de Montfort, claimant to the duchy of Brittany, who had grown up at the English court. The second was a much more controversial match: the prince of Wales and Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent. It seems that, not long after Sir Thomas Holland's death, the prince moved in on the widow. This was commonly rumoured to have been a love-match, and it seems almost certain that it was. Joan's marital history was notorious, she had had two husbands already, had given birth to five children and was now about thirty-three years of age. Edward himself had intended his son and heir to marry an heiress from the Low Countries, but the pope had been holding up such a match for years, refusing to grant the necessary dispensation. It was with surprise but no regrets that Edward acquiesced to his son's desire to marry his second cousin. He wrote to the pope that summer to ask permission for the marriage. This was swiftly granted. With great ceremony, the Black Prince and his fair bride were married by the archbishop of Canterbury, at Windsor on 10 October 1361.

  Some chroniclers wrote of their shock at this union. Joan - 'the Virgin of Kent' as one writer sarcastically referred to her - was now set to become queen. Froissart (who probably met her on several occasions) described her as both the most beautiful woman in England and also the most given over to love. Not only was she bigamous and believed to be adulterous, she was profligate too. She was quite capable of spending £200 on a set of jewelled buttons: a show of outrageous flamboyance worthy of Edward himself.'4 But Edward, despite the rumours of her unsuitability, seems to have raised no objection to the match. Indeed, he condoned it, sending his own man to ask for the papal dispensation. After the wedding the couple retired to Berkhamsted for the rest of the year, where Edward visited them after Christmas.

  No matter how many high-profile events Edward held, no matter how much he tried to show that royal business was proceeding as normal, the plague continued. He could not hold back the tide of death which again swept across the country. After the first suspension of the law courts in May, Edward was forced to suspend them again. Law and order suffered. Women whose husbands had been lost to the disease were forced to marry 'strangers' by their manorial bailiffs, or else lose their homes and lands. Edward was forced to suspend the operations of the Exchequer to try to stop the spread of the disease. Taxation and finance suffered. And among the dying there now were people who mattered to Edward. Although he was probably not in the least upset to hear of the death in June of Thomas Lisle, the embittered bishop of Ely, he would have been concerned by the death in September of the bishop of London, Michael Northburgh, co-founder (with Sir Walter Manny) of the London Charterhouse. Far more distressing were the deaths on 4 and 5 October respectively of Sir John Mowbray and Sir Reginald Cobham. The latter especially had been one of the principal architects of the battle of Crecy. A few days later the earl of Hereford died. Two weeks after that, Sir William Fitzwarin, another Knight of the Garter, became another casualty of the plague. The bishop of Worcester was added to the list a month later.

  These deaths were all of little import by comparison with the death of his daughter Mary in September. She was only just married, only seventeen. Shortly afterwards, Edward's youngest daughter Margaret also died. Like her sister, she had not been long married, and, like her sister, she probably died of plague. Sadly the royal family made its way to Abingdon to bury the two royal princesses together in the abbey there. Of Edward's five daughters, he had lost all but one, Isabella.

  Blow after blow had rained down on Edward. Death after death. And the questions about his victory in France were beginning to circulate at court. The problems were merely technical, but mere technicalities had undone the peace process before. There were still unresolved doubts about the actual boundary decisions of certain lands which Edward claimed the French had given up, and he demanded that the French king renounce sovereignty of them. John refused, and so Edward refused formally to renounce his claim on the throne of France until the matter was sorted out. This was not a ploy to allow him to begin the war again, as some writers have suggested, for the authority he issued to his son in Gascony clearly anticipated that his claim on the throne would be given up. But discussions in plague-stricken London in October 1361 were followed by further discussions in Paris, with no solution. An added complication was that many English soldiers of fortune were trying to make money in France in its crisis years, acting as bands of renegade soldiers, with no political affiliation. In November their antics were brought to Edward's attention, who commissioned John Hound and Richard Imworth to arrest any English men-at-arms or archers found plundering in France. Even though Imworth was an utterly ruthless man, later described as 'a tormen
tor without pity', it was not easy to stop these self-serving bands of robbers. Twenty-three years of war had led to an attitude of self-interest and violence towards France. It certainly was impossible to reverse that trend overnight.

  At the beginning of 1362 Edward was in his fiftieth year, heading for that birthday which would bring up his personal jubilee. This was a significant milestone: with it came the unavoidable awareness that he was entering old age. Although fifty might seem barely middle-aged to the majority of modern readers, it was over the hill for most medieval aristocrats. The average age of the five Knights of the Garter who had died in 1360 was forty-three.

  The one positive, creative policy which emerges over the two years leading up to his fiftieth birthday is Edward's strategy of giving his sons positions of dignity and responsibility. If he was deeply upset by the loss of his close friends and daughters - and there is no reason to suppose he was not — he seems to have pushed his energies into furthering his sons' careers. By mid-1362 he had settled his ideas for the eldest three. Edward was to be given the title Prince of Aquitaine in addition to that of Prince of Wales, becoming the resident seigneurial lord of that province. Lionel was to start to put his Irish inheritance to good use, bringing that country back into line with royal authority. And John of Gaunt was to be given the lordship of the north. Clearly Edward's idea was to create a series of lesser kings under his sovereignty. Rather than being a king who ruled only a prince and a dozen or so earls, he would be a king who ruled over several dukes and a prince, just as King John ruled over the dukes of Normandy, Burgundy, Brittany and Orleans.

  The first-filial ship to be launched upon the high seas of international politics was Lionel. In 1360 the Anglo-Irish had been in a desperate situation and had written to Edward urging him to send 'a good sufficient chieftain, stocked and strengthened with men and treasure' to fight the native Irish and restore English rule in central Ireland. As the earl of Ulster, Lionel was the obvious man for the job. Accordingly in March 1361 Edward announced that twenty-two-year-old Lionel would lead an army to Ireland, as King's Lieutenant, and started to make preparations to help him win praise in his first commission. The exportation of corn from Ireland was forbidden in readiness for his imminent arrival. All the sheriffs in England were ordered to proclaim that anyone having lands in Ireland was to sail with Lionel and defend them. All shipping which could threaten the second-in-line to the throne was arrested. A clerk was sent to Ireland to ride around announcing Lionel's arrival. Eventually (after six months) Lionel himself landed, with an army of fifty knights, three hundred men-at-arms and 540 mounted archers. In addition he had with him a thousand bows, three thousand sheaves of the best arrows, a 'copper' (i.e. bronze) gun and sixteen pounds of gunpowder for it, all directed to his wardrobe by his careful father. A further six hundred bows and two thousand sheaves of arrows were despatched in May 1362.

  The job which Edward had given Lionel was a tough one. When the Anglo-Irish had written in 1360, their plea was inspired by years of native Irish attacks and English neglect. But neither did they want heavy-handed English intervention. Although Thomas Rokeby had been briefly successful in taming the wilder forces which roamed the borders of the English jurisdiction in the early 1350s, the plague had ravaged Ireland to the point where rebuilding was required, not just reformation. Edward's instructions of 1350 to reform the land had proved a dead letter: the land was too poor and the people too hard-pressed to obey new laws which were inadequately enforced by a king who had never been to Ireland.

  Lionel set about his task with gusto, first attacking resistance from the native Irish in Wicklow and then in Leinster. But soon his campaigning ground to a halt. There was no great army he could attack, no national unity which had to be tamed. There were many small, disparate lords and petty kings, whose allegiances to the English varied in strength. The only way to tackle these men was to leave small garrisons in the castles controlling the roads and territories they ruled. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the 'English born in Ireland' were a breed apart from the 'English born in England'. While the latter were loyal to Edward, the former (the great majority) were loyal only when it suited them. They had marriage ties to the native Irish, dressed in Irish clothes and spoke Gaelic. To all intents and purposes they had 'gone native'. Lionel was to spend a total of five years wrestling with the problem, installing many garrisons and returning to England to consult with his father. In 1366, with Edward's approval, he finally enacted the major piece of English legislation in medieval Ireland, the Statute of Kilkenny, which encapsulated Edward's instructions of 1342 and 1350 and enforced an absolute distinction between the English and the Irish, prohibiting intermarriage and the use of the Irish language, laws and customs by all the English, wherever they were born. In so doing it recognised native Irish independence through cutting off those parts of Ireland that remained outside royal control and more firmly administering those areas in which the English could exercise jurisdiction. This would remain the basis of English rule in Ireland until 1613.

  Edward's eldest son, the prince of Wales, had long been marked down for duty in Gascony. Ever since his first campaign there, when the Gascon nobles had actually requested his presence, it had seemed the ideal training ground for his princely qualities. Accordingly, the prince did homage for the duchy of Aquitaine, which his father now elevated into a principality, on 19 July 1362. With his wife he then set out for his new domain, where he arrived the following June, having spent the whole winter on his estates in Cornwall. His administration in the duchy began well, ably led by his constable and fellow Garter knight, Sir John Chandos. Nor did Edward wholly give up decision-making over the principality, unable perhaps to relinquish control of the land which his comrades like Manny and Lancaster had fought so hard to secure. One interesting aspect was a code by which Edward could be sure that letters sent to him purporting to be written by the prince were actually written by him. These were to bear one of the prince's mottoes, 'houmont’ (great courage) or 'ich dien' (I serve).

  The goodwill towards the English in the region remained strong for several years. It was visible in 1364, when the prince needed to raise money. He instituted a hearth tax, and a high one at that, which should have been very difficult to impose on areas which had largely evaded paying taxes altogether for a number of years. There were questions raised in the Agenais, and the county of Rodez, where the count of Armagnac forbade his vassals from paying the tax, but otherwise this controversial measure was accepted throughout the principality. The prince's autocratic manner, however, did not endear him greatly to his subjects, and he personally alienated a number of Gascon lords. Nor did he have the administrative and negotiating capabilities of his father. He proved unable to find diplomatic solutions to the boundary disputes occasioned by the Bretigny treaty, and showed himself unwilling or unable to prevent the army of English freebooters from assaulting French possessions on the fringes of the province. In November 1364, when the violence of these freebooting companies had reached desperate levels, the order to put down the violence came not from the prince but from King Edward in England. So it was doubly unwise for the prince to parade himself around in magnificent ostentation: he was undermining his own position by claiming too much credit and undertaking too little responsibility. Thousands turned out to see the christening at Bordeaux of his first-born son, Edward, in 1365, and the occasion should have been used to weld the Gascons more firmly into an English-led unity. But the prince saw the moment as one in which all the glory was for him and his family, not Gascony. Edward of Woodstock had all the courage and martial talent of Edward I and Edward III, but his autocratic attitude and diplomatic skills were reminiscent of Edward II.

  Edward's third son, John of Gaunt, was destined for a northern palatinate, secured on the inheritance of his wife, Blanche, one of the two daughters of the late duke of Lancaster. In April 1362 his inheritance doubled, on the unexpected death of his sister-in-law, Maud. This meant that all of t
he huge palatinate lordship of the duchy of Lancaster - the richest lordship in England - passed to him. Edward had not expected this to happen, and it is possible that he viewed it as unfortunate, as it gave John a greater income and a larger inheritance than his elder brother Lionel could have hoped to enjoy. John was also the sort of man who made enemies for life. Shortly after inheriting the duchy he was accused of poisoning his sister-in-law. Considerable amounts of money and power were hardly likely to teach him to be more circumspect. Nevertheless, from Edward's point of view it was better that such a massive inheritance came to his son rather than to someone outside the royal family. And Edward may have recognised that it might yield some unexpected advantages. He had at various times in the past discussed the possibility of John becoming the heir of David II of Scotland. If that were to become a reality, it would help secure the border, as John of Gaunt would not only be king north of the border but the largest landowner in the area directly south of it. As it happened, when the matter was discussed again in November 1363, it was ruled out by the Scottish parliament, whose members were adamant in their view that they should not have John or any of Edward's sons for their king.