by Ian Mortimer
Edward remained at Havering for the rest of the year. On his sixty-fourth and final birthday, he gave presents of lavish robes to his seven serving physicians and surgeons. It was a far cry from his fiftieth, when he had raised his sons to dukedoms and held a great feast. On 25 January 1377 he completed his fiftieth year as king. The jubilee was not widely celebrated. A general pardon was announced. Sermons of the king's new moral purity were preached. But Edward's mortal frame had become little more than the vessel of his sickness. On 3 February 1377, his impostume abated, and eight days after that he was transported by barge to his palace at Sheen, to be nearer to Windsor. Like his mother in her dying, it had become his ambition to attend one last ceremony of the Order of the Garter. As his boat passed Westminster, all the lords who were then attending parliament in the presence of his grandson came out to wave and cheer him. Within the Painted Chamber, clergymen were once again being appointed to the great offices of state, the impeachments of the previous parliament were being overturned, and parliamentary business was beginning to resume the character of bitter in-fighting and political factions it had known under Edward II. The characters were different: it was Edmund Mortimer, not Roger, leading the Marcher lords, and his enemy was now titled the duke - not earl - of Lancaster; but otherwise it was almost as if Edward III had not reigned.
Edward did manage to attend one more St George's Day celebration at Windsor. On 23 April 1377 he lifted a sword to dub the heirs to the great tides of the kingdom. Before him knelt his two ten-year-old grandsons: Richard of Bordeaux, heir of the late prince, and Henry of
Bolingbroke, son and heir of John of Gaunt. Both of these boys were nominated for the Order of the Garter. Edward also knighted his youngest son, the twelve-year-old Thomas of Woodstock, and the young heirs to the earldoms of Oxford, Salisbury and Stafford, and the heirs to the baronies of Mowbray, Beaumont and Percy. Last, he knighted his own illegitimate son John Southeray. Alice's moment of vindication and recognition had arrived.
Edward was taken back to his palace at Sheen to die. Few visited him. An audience with several Londoners who had proved particularly determined to see him revealed him 'placed in his chair like a statue in position, unable to speak'. He seems to have been swaddled like a baby in cloth of gold and muslin and then nailed into his throne for the occasion. The nails might have been gilded but nevertheless it is a striking image. The fate of the victor of Crecy - England's great hero - was to be nailed, half-alive into his throne to sit, vacantly, enduring his last duties. John of Gaunt and a number of bishops were in attendance that day, and the address to the king was delivered by Robert Ashton. But Edward could not comprehend it. Inside that trussed-up statuesque figure of golden senility, his mind plodded on, slowly, its logic awry. When he had recovered his speech a few days later, he summoned the Londoners to him secretly. He urged them to make a great candle bearing the coat of arms of his son John, and to carry it in a solemn procession to St Paul's Cathedral, and to burn it before a figure of the Virgin. What he meant by this we can only guess, but most Londoners clearly thought he had gone mad. In his moments between lucidity and silence, Alice continued to ply her political dealings. One of her undoubtedly positive achievements was to persuade the king to restore the estates of William of Wykeham, which he had lost as a result of John of Gaunt's accusations after the Good Parliament.
The release for which Edward must have yearned finally came at midsummer. On 2 June he made preparations to commemorate the anniversary of the prince's death. On the 4th he granted his last charter. With him that day were his two younger sons and Nicholas Carew, Henry Percy, the archbishop of Canterbury and the Treasurer and Chancellor. Then they left him in his chamber to listen to the silence. Alice alone remained with him, together with a few household staff and chamber knights. In his bed he still talked of hunting and hawking, and the joys he had known. But on the 21st he suddenly lost the power of speech. He had almost certainly suffered a stroke. He lay in his bed, unable to say or do anything. Alice was with him, and a priest also. According to Walsingham, Alice removed the rings from his fingers before she left. Maybe she did.
Maybe Edward had previously urged her to take them when the time came, a final farewell token of his gratitude for her staying by him. To him they no longer mattered. He was drifting into the oblivion which had consumed everything he truly loved. At the last, after Alice had departed, only the priest remained. There were no earls, dukes, princes, or queens: no sons, no wife, not even his mistress. There were no ambassadors, nor dignitaries, nor trumpets. There was just dust floating in the air of the chamber, and one priest praying at his side. The priest urged him to repent of his sins. He alone heard the dying king whisper his final words. 'Jesu, have pity'
SEVENTEEN
Edward the Gracious
They say that a dying man, at the moment of death, sees his life flash before his eyes. Whether true or not, on hearing of Edward's death, it seems that his subjects saw the reign flash before their eyes in all its glorious achievement. One moment, Thomas Walsingham was writing bitterly 'how distressing for the whole realm of England was the king's fickleness, his infatuation and his shameful behaviour. Oh king, you deserve to be called not master but a slave of the lowest order.' The next, everything was forgiven. Edward was being described as a man of grace.
This sudden turnaround is noticeable even in the arrangements made for his funeral. Absolutely no expense was spared. Everything and everyone was covered in black cloth: the great chamber and chapel at Sheen, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, the royal family, all the hundreds of servants in the royal household, the horse harness and litter to convey Edward's body to London. His body was embalmed 'with balsam and other perfumes and oils to stop it putrefying' by Roger Chandler at a cost of £21. His death-mask was made so that his true likeness, like Philippa's, would be preserved for eternity. This was fixed to a wooden effigy carried at the funeral, dressed in his clothes and shown off, and was later used as the model for his gilt-bronze monumental tomb. His body was wrapped in silk, white 'cloth of Tartar' and red samite, and dressed in cloth of gold. His coffin was lined with red samite. Ceremonial requiem masses were sung at Sheen. When the body was taken to St Paul's via Wandsworth, in a procession which lasted three days (with the cloth specially cut away so his face could be seen), no fewer than one thousand seven hundred torches - amounting to more than three tons of wax - were used at a cost of over £200. Every torch bearer was dressed in black. Bells were rung in every parish. At St Paul's and Westminster, further requiem masses were sung. On the day that his body was finally laid to rest in the church at Westminster, near Philippa's tomb, as he had promised, a great feast was held which cost more than £566: almost twice as much as the great feast at Windsor on St George's Day that year and, with probably the sole exception of the feast at his coronation, more than any other dinner in his whole feast-filled reign. At the time it was probably the most expensive funeral ever held in England.
It marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary personal exaltations which England has ever known. As a transformation of a military man into godlike hero the most obvious comparison is Nelson, four centuries later. But Nelson's apotheosis pales by comparison with that of Edward. For Edward was not just revered as a great battle hero, he became hailed as the archetypal leader of men, in peace as well as war. By the time his monument in Westminster Abbey was complete, about eight years later, he was deemed worthy of the following epitaph:
Here lies the glory of the English, the flower of kings past, the pattern for kings to come, a merciful king, the bringer of peace to his people, Edward III, who attained his jubilee. The undefeated warrior, a second Maccabeus, who prospered while he lived, revived sound rule, and reigned valiantly; now may he attain his heavenly crown.5
Another contemporary, writing at York, described him as
full gracious among all the worthy men of the world, for he passed and shone by virtue and grace given to him from God, above all his pr
edecessors that were noble men and worthy. And he was a well hard-hearted man, for he never dreaded mischance, nor harm, nor the evil fortune that might befall a noble warrior and one so fortunate both on land and at sea. And in all battles and assemblies, with a passing glory and worship, he had ever the victory.
This same writer's view is worth commenting on further, as he was writing a secular chronicle, not a monastic one, and his work proved the most popular of its age. This is therefore as close as we are likely to get to what the proverbial man in the street thought of Edward in the decade or so after his death:
He was meek and benign, homely, sober, and soft to all manner of men, to strangers as well as his own subjects and others that were under his governance. He was devout and holy, both to God and the Holy Church, for he worshipped and maintained the Holy Church and her ministers with all manner of reverences. He was entreatable, and well-advised in temporal and worldly needs, wise in counsel, and discreet, soft, meek and good to speak with. In his deeds and manner full gentle and well-taught, having pity on them that were diseased, generous in giving alms, and busy and curious in building; and full lightly he bore and suffered wrongs and harms. And when he was given to any occupation, he left all other things in the mean time, and held to it. He was seemly of body, and of middling stature, having always to both high- and low-born a good cheer. And there sprang and shone so much grace from him that whatever manner of man beheld his face, or had dreamed of him, he was made hopeful that whatever should happen to him that day should be joyful and to his liking.
The word to note is 'grace'. Many writers use it in describing Edward in retrospect, as they had done in describing his 'gracious' victories in his heyday. A Latin chronicler, drawing from Walsingham's text, broke off to write that Edward 'was glorious, kind, merciful and magnificent above all the kings and princes of the world, and called "The Gracious" on account of that singular grace by which he was exalted'. Such writers were alluding to divine blessing - something beyond mere greatness of action — a greatness and perfection of his nature. Even those who did not refer to him as gracious held him up as a paragon of leadership. A poem written about the time of Edward's death speaks of 'an English ship we had, noble it was and high of tower, it was held in dread throughout Christendom: the rudder was neither oak nor elm but Edward the Third, the noble knight'. Another contemporary piece remembers Edward as 'the flower of earthly warriors... against his foes he was as grim as a leopard, towards his subjects as mild as a lamb'.
It did not take long for Edward to become the stuff of legend. With his grandson's reign proving so divisive and lacking in achievements, Edward's name came to represent a golden age. Thus, although the chroniclers of 1377 may well have been moved by genuine admiration for the king they had just lost, those repeating their words in the 1390s were moved by the need for another such hero king. Moreover, what they needed was not a hero who would spend the last fifteen years of his life in physical and political decline but a hero who remained heroic. So they made Edward into one. Although the Edward III of 1372-77 certainly would not count as a hero in any respect, and the Edward III of 1363-71 would not qualify easily either, these periods of his rule were obliterated. How many people writing about Edward in the 1390s could correctly remember the events of 1333-50? Edward's achievements became legendary. He became a sort of Good King Edward, who provided the model for much of the fifteenth century's folk literature and romance. Such an image was not without a basis in fact, but today we would call it caricature. If the 'real King Arthur' were to march forth from the underworld we should expect to see Edward alongside the mysterious Dark Age warrior of that name, for if the king in the fifteenth-century Arthurian poems (including many of the Arthurian stories which we know today) is based on any single identifiable personality, it is that of Edward III. In legends he became what he aspired to be in life.
So let us leave aside the legends. The hard fact is that Edward was a hugely successful king, even though he had his share of failures and arguments and died in lonely misery. He was prophesied to be a great conqueror in Europe and he became one. He lived up to every expectation of him recorded at his birth by his father's biographer except one: he died aged sixty-four, one year short of the age attained by Henry III. When he came to the throne the model of great kingship was that of his grandfather, Edward I. He eclipsed that and set a new standard for kings everywhere to admire. If he had died in 1363, having won all his victories and achieved his jubilee, and before his achievements had been overshadowed by later disasters, we would probably know him today as Edward the Great.
To rank Edward's achievements is difficult. One of the greatest was certainly his creation of a new model of kingship. The first stage of this - his recovery of English royal authority from its nadir of 1330 - was in itself a huge achievement. It is astounding that Edward at eighteen not only coped with Roger Mortimer and the debacle of his father's secret custody in the hands of potential enemies but managed to preserve his mother's dignity afterwards and then pursued an aggressive foreign policy. After that it is hardly surprising that he weathered the political crisis in 1341 as if it were the passing of a few rainclouds. His vision of monarchy, his championing of the idea of monarchy - in terms of leadership, spirituality, chivalry, patronage, dress, propaganda, and parliamentary authority - not only aided his own family, it provided an example to all of Europe. By combining chivalric adventuring with military leadership, cultural patronage and political responsibility, he brought together all the real and imagined virtues of a Christian king. It made kingship a very demanding art, and one in which a man past middle age could not realistically hope to succeed, but he demonstrated how successful it could be. For the thirty years between 1333 and 1363 he was the greatest exponent of the art of chivalric kingship there ever was.
An equally impressive achievement was his preservation of peace in England for the duration of his long reign. In 1327 he had been exhorted above all else to work for domestic peace. His policy of keeping the war on foreign soil, clearly articulated in 1339, was novel, successful and hugely to the benefit of England. It was not so much the battles in France which mattered; it was the complete absence of fighting in England. Social historians often point to the prosperity brought by the wool trade as the reason why so many great churches were built in England in the mid-fourteenth century; but the wool trade itself (including the booming cloth trade) would not have flourished as it did if it had not been for fifty years of domestic peace and stability. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this. Anyone who assumes that peace was a natural state in the British Isles has only to refer to the preceding and following reigns or the contemporary situations in Ireland and Scotland to see that any weakness in the king's character could easily lead to widespread social, economic and political turmoil.
A third great achievement has to be the status he gave England internationally. In his dealings with the papacy prior to 1346, Edward appears aware of the inferiority of England to France on the international stage, as if he had an international chip on his national shoulder. It was his force of character and his extraordinary determination to play a major role in international politics which changed this. In 1330 France was unquestionably the pre-eminent military kingdom in Europe and the French pope could rely on his links with the French king to dominate Christendom. Edward threatened that spiritual-political alliance more than anyone else. Through his anti-papal legislation and his reinforcement of English royal rights, he helped pave the nation's own religious path, already beginning to diverge from the Catholic Church. Even more importantly for England's national identity, pride and status, he measured up to all his international rivals, be they spiritual, French, Flemish, Brabanter, German, Spanish or Genoese. Even the distant Florentines came to regard England as the military epicentre of Europe.
Edward's fourth major achievement has to be his method of making war. Whether we like it or not, Edward was to warfare what Mozart was to music. He found a new way of doing
things, and it proved as good or better than almost everything that had gone before. Until 26 August 1346 international conflicts were not won or lost by firepower alone, they were won by feudal armies of expensively armoured knights. On that day all this changed. Groups of English peasants and yeomen's sons came to be the breakers of the most heavily armoured noblemen. But more than that, Edward's stroke of genius was to take the tactic of projectile warfare -which his commanders had discovered at Dupplin Moor and which he had used at Halidon Hill — and to combine it with the chevauchee. the twenty-mile-wide front destroying everything in its path as it progressed through enemy territory. Sufficient destruction forced the enemy to attack, and any enemy advancing on a well-ordered army capable of projectile warfare - whether equipped with longbows or guns - was almost certain to be torn to pieces in the crossfire. Such methods gave Edward the confidence to march across France and win his war of rivalry with Philip de Valois. It was the most effective military strategy of the middle ages, which proved just as decisive when employed by Henry V at Agincourt in 1415. When guns replaced longbows as the weapon of choice, it was not Edward's strategy which was outdated, only the means of putting it into action.
A fifth major achievement is the one which historians have always associated with this reign: the development of parliament. This was, of course, only indirectly an achievement of Edward's. But in view of his cast-iron will on the international political scene, he should be given the credit for proving so malleable on the domestic front. The writer who stated that Edward was 'as grim as a leopard' to his overseas enemies and 'mild as a lamb' to his compatriots was thinking along these same lines. Edward won the affections of his people by refusing to compromise with his overseas enemies and willingly compromising with the representatives of his kingdom. Nor should we give all the credit for reform to those who presented the petitions in parliament. Many statutes were initiated by the representatives, but Edward himself initiated some and the decision to enact all of them lay with the king. Furthermore, the status of the commons in relation to the magnates was allowed to change, and this too can be directly connected with Edward's policy of welcoming the rich merchants into noble society, through knighthoods, social codes and parliamentary authority. When the commons had taken part in the deposition of 1327 they were forced into taking such a bold move by an aristocrat, the earl of March. When the commons took action against the corrupt officials around Edward in the Good Parliament, they did it of their own accord, and it was not the earl of March who led the attack, it was his steward, a commoner. Under Edward III, parliament in general and the commons in particular gained a real voice in the government of the realm. Under his father, such participatory government would not have been allowed to emerge, let alone flourish.
