Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
Edward’s victory at Halidon Hill was the making of him as a man and as a king. He had smashed the Scots even more completely than his grandfather, the ‘hammer of the Scots’, had ever done. He had won Berwick, which was then Scotland’s main port and trading city. And, for the first time in over thirty years, he had freed the north of England from the risk of invasion. But his personal gains were even greater. He had shown himself to be a natural general and leader of men and a master of the new tactics of the longbow. And he had done all this at the age of twenty-one. Already he was hailed as a new Arthur. Would he, like Arthur, reunify Britain? Or would he seek wider fields to conquer?
Edward chose the wider fields of foreign military adventure over domestic consolidation. His next target would be France, the country with which England had been intertwined since the Norman Conquest. War with France offered the chance of rich booty, vast ransoms and the prospect of controlling trade in the English Channel. The French had also taken advantage of England’s recent divisions to chip away at its possessions on the Continent and aid Scotland.
Edward staked his claim in 1340 when he asserted that he was the true king of France as the only male descendant of Philip IV, his grandfather. Not even Edward, however, could have guessed that he was about to start a war that would last a hundred years.
But if Edward and his nobles fought the war, it was the grey men of Parliament who paid for it. Parliament was based, then as now, at the Palace of Westminster. Back in Edward’s reign, Westminster was the king’s principal royal palace. But it was also becoming the home of Parliament too, with a special parliament chamber. What was turning Parliament into a regular institution was Edward’s need for money to fight his wars with France. Edward was willing to do whatever was necessary to persuade members of Parliament to dig their hands deep into their constituents’ pockets. It meant doing deals, greasing palms, slapping backs. Edward’s victories were reported in detail; Parliament was consulted on war diplomacy and ratified the peace treaties with France. It was good politics. But it was more because it turned Edward’s wars into a joint enterprise between the king and the English nation. It made the English monarchy into a national monarchy of which Englishmen could be proud and in which they had a stake and an investment.
The length of Edward’s wars also normalized taxation. Direct taxation, on income and property, continued to be voted only for war. But indirect taxation on trade became permanent, enhancing royal power and extending the scope of royal government. But England was also lucky enough to be a producer and exporter of a valuable raw material: wool. This meant that, by levying heavy export duties, much of the cost of Edward’s wars could be shifted from his English subjects to the foreign purchasers of English wool – who did not, of course, have a vote in Parliament.
Thus, Edward’s war became England’s war. Bishops and priests led patriotic services and prayed for success. Dispatches from the front were read out in every town. And triumphant peals of bells celebrated the news of victories.
It was in August 1346 that Edward’s style of kingship was fully vindicated. The English and the French met at Crécy near Calais. The French were confident that victory was theirs. For they outnumbered the English eight to one.
But Edward had unleashed the full martial potential of his country. Trained in the longbow, fired by the promise of rich plunder and led by a brave and charismatic king, the English army had become a truly terrifying force. Edward knew this, even if his followers could be forgiven for nervousness at the moment of battle. Froissart described how Edward’s powers as a leader overcame their doubts:
Then the king leapt on a palfrey with a white rod in his hand … he rode from rank to rank, desiring every man to take heed that day to his right and honour. He spake it so sweetly and with so good countenance and merry cheer that all such as were discomfited took courage in the seeing and hearing of him.
The French attacked first. But they met an English army fortified by their king and well drilled in tactics. Edward, his teenage son the prince of Wales and the earl of Northampton led the three divisions of dismounted men-at-arms. The French cavalry met these formidable divisions and came under fire from the longbowmen who flanked them. They also faced English cannon – the first use of artillery in a European battle. By nightfall it was over and a witness described the scene:
When … no more shouting … or rallying cries could be heard, the English concluded that the enemy were routed. So they lit great numbers of lanterns and torches because it was very dark … They hailed it as a glorious victory. And several times that night they gave thanks to God for showing them such great mercies …
The French had fled leaving 4000 knights dead. No one bothered to count the humbler men.
The most striking surviving monument of this battle is the great window in Gloucester Cathedral known as the Crécy Window. It was built to commemorate the victory and it contains the shields of King Edward and his companions in arms. In the middle is the coat of arms of King Edward himself, which quarter the lilies of France with the lions of England. Here also are the arms of Lord Badestone, who probably paid for the window out of the fortune he had made from the war in France. For the war in France made England rich and it also remade England.
England had been culturally in the shadow of France ever since the Norman Conquest. But now that France was shattered and defeated, England had gained the confidence to strike out on its own. This, too, is seen in the architecture of Gloucester Cathedral. The window is an early masterpiece of the new English perpendicular style. Indeed, it is more than a window: it is a kind of symphony in which architecture, heraldry and religion all come together into a single hymn of praise to England’s God, to England’s king and to England itself. And Edward was the most English of kings to sit on the throne since the Conquest. He spoke English. And, following his example, even among the nobility ‘Middle English’ was beginning to take over from French.
After Crécy Edward’s popularity reached its zenith. According to the
Walsingham Chronicle
, the English thought that a new sun had risen, because of the abundance of peace in England, the plenitude of goods and the glory of the victories.
The prospect of a land of milk and honey, however, met the forces of nature. In the years following Crécy, Europe was ravaged by the Black Death. A third or more of the population died as bubonic plague returned year after year. Edward’s government responded to the crisis. Legislation helped to relieve the terrible shortage of labourers caused by the plague. And its enforcement changed English law as well: justices of the peace were created to see the emergency laws were obeyed. Edward and his ministers had not only led England to victory abroad, they had created stable government during a period of potential turmoil.
But, as ever, Edward’s eyes were focused across the Channel. English victories came thick and fast in the 1350s. Edward led armies which caught France in a pincer: they advanced from both Normandy and Gascony. He also led an army against the Scots. But it was his son who scored some of the greatest victories of the reign. Edward, the Black Prince, scourged southern France. At the battle of Poitiers in 1356 he once again used superior tactics to defeat a larger French army. It was a famous victory and it should have been decisive. For Jean II, king of France, was captured along with some of the great men of the realm. It was the climax of Edward’s wars, the greatest victories England had achieved for over a century and a half.
Would Edward realize his dream and become king of France? It seemed a possibility. But he was unable to press home the advantage. At the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) he renounced his claims to the French throne but consolidated his considerable territorial gains. For the rest of the reign war continued, but a crushing victory on the scale of Crécy and Poitiers eluded the king and his sons.
The dream of ruling France would continue to haunt English kings and it would have important consequences for the future. But the century of Edwards had reshaped the English monarchy more fundamentally. The king was now more closely identified with the interests of his people and he would never again rule effectively without the consent and cooperation of Parliament. He was expected to fight wars. But they had to be in the national interest – or at least to seem as such. For the most memorable legacy of the Edwards was the forging of a nation that defined itself through war, symbolized in the flag of the soldier-saint, St George.
A superman, like Edward I, could manage it, as could the man’s man, Edward III. But could their successors?
Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI
ON ST GEORGE’S DAY 1377
two young boys stood before the altar in Windsor Castle to be invested with the Order of the Garter – the highest order of chivalry in the land. The ten-year-old Richard was heir to the throne. The eleven-year-old Henry Bolingbroke was his cousin and heir to the most powerful aristocratic family in England. This ceremony marked their entrance on to the public stage.
The future of the English monarchy seemed assured as the two boys swore never to take up arms against each other.
It was a promise they could not keep. Instead cousin clashed with cousin as Henry usurped Richard and made himself king, as Henry IV. The usurpation was the worst crisis in the English monarchy since Magna Carta. Over the next 100 years there were seven kings, and only three of them died in their beds. Three were murdered, one was killed on the field of battle and three followed Henry IV’s own example in violently usurping the throne.
Part of the problem was the size of the royal family. Edward III produced five sons who lived to manhood. Four of them – the Black Prince, Lionel, John of Gaunt and Edmund – would produce princely dynasties which would fight for the throne in a vicious extended family feud that lasted over a hundred years.
These bloody civil wars formed the background to Shakespeare’s series of great history plays and their royal stars: the overweening Richard II, the heroic Henry V, the pathetic Henry VI. In these wars the whole basis of the English monarchy was questioned and upturned and the royal house tore itself apart in a slow and painful suicide.
I
In 1376, Edward III was a shadow of his mighty younger self. The war against France had stalled and the so-called Good Parliament stood up to the king, forcing the dismissal of his councillors, withholding tax and banishing his mistress, Alice Perrers. Worse still, Edward had slumped into feeble-mindedness, the result of a series of strokes. For the first time, the full force of Parliament was unleashed upon the monarchy. It was in no position to resist the storm. Edward was too ill to attend this fractious parliament. And most worryingly of all, nor was his eldest son, the Black Prince.
Edward the Black Prince was the great hope for the future. He was made very much in the image of Edward III – as great a warrior and already an experienced ruler. But, like his father the king, he found his glory days behind him. The victories had dried up. He had declined into chronic ill health. His eldest son, another prince named Edward, had died in France. Then, in the summer of 1376, he too succumbed and died aged forty-five in the middle of the session of the Good Parliament.
In his place his second son, Richard, became heir to the throne. Once again England faced the instability of a boy king. Once again gossip had it that one of the boy’s uncles would seize the crown when the time came. The most likely uncle was John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the father of Henry Bolingbroke. This prospect was headed off by a dazzling display of royal ritual. Honours and titles were showered on the boy: he was made earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall and prince of Wales. He sat above his royal uncles at a banquet and he even opened Parliament on the old king’s behalf.
The investiture of his grandsons Richard and Henry Bolingbroke as knights of the Garter was one of the last acts of Edward III’s life. Two months later the great king died.
One of Richard’s toys was a set of dice loaded so that he always won, and life must have seemed just as rosy for the lad who grew up with a sense of an absolute and untrammelled right to power. At his coronation the crown of Edward the Confessor was placed on the head of the ten-year-old boy and the greatest bishops and earls knelt at his feet to pay him homage. The bishop of Rochester exhorted the nobility in prayer to honour and obey the boy.
And well he might. For there were no rules to dictate what should happen until Richard reached maturity.
Royal power relied on the support of England’s nobility. Chief among them was John of Gaunt, the now oldest surviving son of Edward III. Gaunt had taken a leading role in ruling on behalf of his father in his last days and quietening the voices of dissent which had dared to be raised against the crown. He had a reputation as an authoritarian who was not prepared to tolerate resistance and who was happy to trample on liberties. Gaunt had not been given any official position during his nephew’s minority. But that scarcely mattered. Gaunt was unpopular, but he was feared. For one thing he was of royal blood. But, even more importantly, he had immense power as a private landowner.
The House of Lancaster had thirty castles scattered across England. The jewel in their coronet was Kenilworth, which far outclassed most royal castles in scale and grandeur. The extent of their estates gave them a private army of some four thousand men. Gaunt was therefore the dominant noble in England and his opinions influenced the governance of the state even if he had no formal title to show for it.
Extravagances like Kenilworth were hugely resented by the common people of England. In the last fifty years the Black Death had swept through the country three times, wiping out perhaps half the population. Rents had collapsed and now landowners and the government were trying to recoup their position.