The Plantagenets (68 page)

But as he reached his half-century, Edward was not entirely self-indulgent. He thought a great deal of his people, and the way that they regarded his kingship. The public celebrations of his birthday centred on a parliament dominated by knights, burgesses and citizens, and were given in a spirit of high royal generosity. Meeting in October, it heard large numbers of petitions and sought to remedy as many complaints and grievances as possible. A Statute of Purveyance was finally granted, drastically limiting the most pernicious royal practice of requisitioning in wartime by limiting the forced purchase of food and goods to the king, queen and heir. Royal purveyors were now known as ‘buyers’ – and they operated under a strict code of conduct. This was an easier grant for Edward to make in peacetime than in wartime, to be sure, but the fact that he made it advertised an innate understanding of the hardships of his subjects.

There was more symbolic work, too. During the course of Edward’s lifetime, there had been an important shift in the fabric of life in his kingdom. The language of the realm was moving away from French and towards English. The native tongue – once considered a rude, barbaric dialect unfit for well-born mouths to speak, or administrators to use – was now becoming commonplace. The king spoke it. All the aristocrats of the age understood it. Travelling minstrels singing the newly fashionable English ballads of Robin Hood in noblemen’s halls used the native tongue. Rising dons like John Wyclif, who was beginning to impress his colleagues at Oxford University in the early 1360s, would come to translate the Bible into English. The age of the first great English vernacular poets – Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower and the
Pearl
and
Gawain
poet – was dawning. As a result, Edward used his fiftieth birthday parliament to usher in a new age of English-speaking. The Statute of
Pleading formally changed the spoken language of parliamentary address and arguments in the royal law courts from French to English. (Records were still to be kept in Latin.) It was another populist statute, designed, as it said, to remedy a situation in which ‘the people which do implead … in the king’s court … have no knowledge or understanding of that which is said for them or against them by their Serjeants (lawyers) and other pleaders’.

Finally, Edward turned his mind to his family. Now that he was fifty, it was also time to endow the next generation of Plantagenets, too. And his final act in the birthday parliament was to honour his adult sons with lavish new titles and roles: setting them up to take the helm of the mighty land of England when he was gone.

Edward and Philippa had seen nine of their children reach adulthood. By 1362 six of them were still alive. Young Joan had died in plague agonies during the Black Death, and when a second wave of the plague came back to England in 1361, it killed two of her sisters. The Children’s Plague, as the second wave has been called, wiped out around a quarter of England’s young people, including the seventeen-year-old Princess Mary and fifteen-year-old Princess Margaret. By 1362 that meant only one daughter was left: Isabella, a woman approaching her thirtieth birthday, who had refused to marry a Gascon lord during the 1350s and had withdrawn herself for good from Edward’s diplomatic plans, refusing to marry for anything but love.

Nevertheless, despite the misfortunes and truculence of his daughters, Edward could still boast five healthy Plantagenet princes, and all but the seven-year-old Thomas of Woodstock gained handsome rewards in 1362. The eldest, of course, was the Black Prince. The heir to the throne was also now the finest soldier in England: a strapping veteran of all the great campaigns since 1346, and finally a married man. In 1361 he had been wedded at Windsor, quite scandalously, to his first cousin Joan of Kent. According to the writer known as the Chandos Herald, Joan was ‘a lady of great worth … very beautiful, pleasing and wise’. Not everyone was so kind – and indeed, the marriage was very much for love, rather than political gain. Joan had been married twice before. She already had five children by Sir
Thomas Holland, and her first husband, the earl of Salisbury, was still alive. She was addicted to jewels and spending and brought no beneficial foreign alliances. Moreover, it looked as if the marriage would afford the Black Prince the dubious status of being the first Plantagenet king to be married to a divorced mother since Henry II had wed Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Nevertheless the Black Prince had been well rewarded by his father. He was earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall and prince of Wales by the time of his wedding. His income exceeded £8,000. Since he and Joan had married, they had been living at Kennington, in a brand-new palace designed by the master-mason Henry Yevele – who would become the most brilliant builder of the age. Shortly before the king’s birthday, Edward had awarded them a new home. He settled the duchy of Aquitaine on the Black Prince, with powers that were effectively palatinate. The great warrior kings Richard I and Edward I had cut their teeth in Aquitaine, and the Black Prince had won the greatest battle of the age at Poitiers on its northern borders. For Edward III to send his eldest son as part of his own fiftieth birthday celebrations sent an unequivocal message: the Black Prince’s time for kingship would shortly arrive. Prince Edward and Princess Joan moved to Bordeaux in February 1363.

This was the Black Prince accounted for. But Edward III was a student of his family’s history, and he had plans for the other sons, too. He had read William of Newburgh’s twelfth-century chronicle of early Plantagenet history and now, as his birthday approached, Edward began to put into place his own version of the grand familial strategy that Henry II had conceived for his own children, two hundred years previously. Each was to be awarded a landed inheritance in a different corner of Europe, with the eldest son the mightiest.

On his birthday itself – which fell on the final day of the 1362 parliament – Edward came to parliament with his third and fourth sons, John of Gaunt and Edmund Langley, and proceeded to bestow marvellous new titles upon them. The records of the parliament give us a laconic clue as to the magnificence of the ceremony.

And then the chancellor said to the great men and commons that our lord the king had discussed with some of the great men how God had truly blessed him in many ways, and especially in the begetting of his sons who were of legal age, and he therefore willed their names and honour to increase; that is to say, that his son Lionel [of Antwerp], then being in Ireland, should be named … duke of Clarence …

As the record states, Lionel was abroad. But John of Gaunt and Edmund Langley were present, and they received their honours in person:

And then our said lord the king girded his said son John with a lance, and put on his head a fur cap, and on top a circle of gold and precious stones, and named and made him duke of Lancaster, and gave him a charter of the said name of duke of Lancaster. And then he girded his said son Edmund with a lance, and named and made him earl of Cambridge, and gave him a charter of the name of earl of Cambridge.

Duke of Clarence, duke of Lancaster, earl of Cambridge: these were grand titles indeed. And each of them bore a notional responsibility for a different corner of the Plantagenet dominions.

Lionel of Antwerp’s title was rather novel. The duchy of Clarence was an Irish title that brought with it lands on the west coast of Ireland. (The name Clarence referred to the Clare family from whom the lands were inherited.) When joined to the earldom of Ulster, which Lionel held by virtue of his marriage to Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster, the new duchy of Clarence formed the greatest power bloc in Ireland. By the time his title was announced in parliament, Clarence was already in Dublin, having been appointed lieutenant of Ireland in 1361 and given 50 knights, 300 men-at-arms and 540 mounted archers, with provision to raise more troops in Ireland. His destiny was marked out: he was to expand and maintain Plantagenet power in the wild Irish west. He was the first Plantagenet prince to set foot in the lordship since King John.

John of Gaunt, meanwhile, was raised to duke of Lancaster to replace Henry Grosmont, Edward’s friend and general, who had died, probably of plague, in 1361, aged fifty-one. Gaunt had married Grosmont’s daughter Blanche of Lancaster at Reading Abbey in 1359, and on his father-in-law’s death he had inherited in its entirety one of the largest and most important networks of estates in England. He thus brought back into the immediate royal family the inheritance of Edward II’s nemesis Thomas of Lancaster, which played a vital role in maintaining order and security in the north of England, where the Scottish border was such a regular area of distraction and warfare.

The north, then, was to be Gaunt’s sphere. Edward III demanded on numerous occasions during the 1350s and 1360s that his third son be recognized as heir to King David II of Scotland, who had been released from prison in 1357 but struggled beneath the burden of his onerous ransom obligations. Whether the demand for Gaunt’s promotion to the Scottish Crown was posturing at the negotiating table, by which the Scots could be forced to pay their king’s ransom, or whether it represented something more ambitious on Edward’s part is debatable. But early in the 1360s it seemed likely that while the Black Prince took care of Aquitaine and Lionel duke of Clarence guided policy in Ireland, John of Gaunt was to be groomed for a role that would see him overseeing Scottish defence and affairs.

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.