Unruly, p.25
Unruly, page 25
He made a bit of a fuss about it, as you might expect – he became tearful and had to be held upright because the shock had made him weak at the knees – but he was persuaded when the noblemen started saying that, if he resigned the throne, his son would succeed him and the Plantagenet dynasty would continue but, if he didn’t, both he and his son might be sidelined and a new candidate found.
So he agreed to abdicate and his steward of the household, Sir Thomas Blount, ceremonially broke his staff of office in front of everyone. Dramatic. Good work, Sir Thomas – that’s a nifty bit of protocol to come up with on the spur of the moment. And it’s risky. You’ve got to be sure people will get what you’re doing rather than think it’s an accident or a weird moment of temper. It could easily have resulted in a terse ‘Tom, can you please keep still – this is actually quite a stressful moment for everyone.’
Not only did they all realize what was going on but now there was a thing that must be done when kings stop being kings – staffs of office get broken. How reassuring that must have been for the anxious magnates. Suddenly there’s a system and a ceremony, almost like a coronation, so what they were doing can’t be an offence against God and nature after all.
Also, it answered the question that must have occurred to Sir Thomas and many of his predecessors: what is a staff of office actually for? How much of the day-to-day stewarding work involves the use of a stick? Very little, I’d have thought. The stick must, more often than not, have been an impediment – just something you have to put down somewhere in order to do anything that involves two hands. Now everyone knew what it was for: it’s there to be broken when the reign ends. It could act as a warning to future kings – you’re just one snap across the knee away from being busted back to civilian, your majesty! I wonder if, six Edwards later, Wallis Simpson’s fiancé had a stick broken in front of him. Yet another thing for him to whinge to Hitler about.
On 1 February 1327 Edward III, just fourteen years old at that point, was crowned king. Meanwhile his dad was in prison, thinking he should still be king, and his mum, Queen Isabella, was both running the country and very publicly shacked up with her new boyfriend, Roger Mortimer. The teenage king must have been so embarrassed.
If they’d been competent regents, Edward might have been able to cope with it all until he reached the age of majority. But they weren’t. They made a humiliating peace with France and another with Scotland, having fought a terrible military campaign that nearly got Edward himself captured. Plantagenet territory and rights were being frittered away to north and south.
Former King Edward II was also nearly captured, but in his case the attempts were made by well-wishers hoping to restore him to power. He was moved from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle, which Mortimer hoped would be more secure. But the hoping didn’t quite hit the spot so, in September 1327, Mortimer had him murdered just to be on the safe side. Almost certainly, that is. It’s almost certain that it was murder by order of Mortimer and/or Isabella, just as it’s almost certain that the method employed was not red-hot poker up the bottom.
The most disappointing failing in Mortimer and Isabella was that they were obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, awarding themselves vast new estates and, in the case of Mortimer, inventing the new earldom of March (as in the Welsh ‘Marches’, or the border areas) to give to himself.
I don’t understand their reasoning. What were they feathering their nests for? Weren’t they comfortably off already? Didn’t Mortimer realize his only future lay in retaining power and he could do this only by appeasing and ideally impressing the rest of the aristocracy and the adolescent king? Was he hoping to retire on these riches? He was a usurper of royal power – people like that don’t retire. They’re either still running the show or they’re dead.
As Edward got older and more frustrated by the position he found himself in, Mortimer became more presumptuous and tyrannical and deferred to the young king less and less, even in public. When, in March 1330, Mortimer had the Earl of Kent, a son of Edward I, executed, the king realized he had to do something. In October that year, he launched a coup to gain control of his own kingdom. This involved creeping into Nottingham Castle with a bunch of mates, bursting into his mother’s bedroom and arresting Roger.
‘Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer,’ said Isabella, but Edward didn’t. Mortimer was hanged as a traitor at Tyburn, the famous London gallows, roughly where Marble Arch is now, on 29 November 1330. Edward III’s proper rule had begun. It lasted for nearly half a century.
At the other end
Edward III lived too long. His eldest son didn’t live long enough. Those were the big problems at the other end of the reign.
There’d been a hell of a lot of glory, and I’ll get to that, but it had petered out. Then, in 1369, Edward’s wife, Queen Philippa of Hainault, on whom he was exceptionally keen and who had been a very effective partner in his rule, died. The following year, his eldest son’s eldest son Edward who, all being well, would have been Edward V one day, also died. By then his father, Edward Prince of Wales, who, all being well, would have been Edward IV one day, was already ailing from a mysterious chronic illness. In 1376 he died.
Meanwhile Edward III who, all being well, would have stopped being Edward III by now was still just about going. But he was a shadow of his former self, possibly suffering from dementia, or perhaps he’d had a stroke – either way he was relying heavily for the location of his marbles on his mistress, Alice Perrers, and she didn’t always act in the national interest.
The government had been spending vast sums on military campaigns which were no longer proving successful and there was widespread suspicion of corruption in the doddering king’s council. In 1376 a parliament, subsequently known as the Good Parliament, during which the Prince of Wales died (those two facts are not connected, though the name implies the parliamentarians managed to keep their grief under control), made a decent stab at sorting all this out. For the first time, senior royal officials were impeached for corruption and new ministers imposed on the king and an attempt made to separate him from Alice Perrers.
Towards the end of the session, soon after the prince’s death, the commons, an increasingly powerful and confident force within the Good Parliament, made a demand. They wanted his surviving son, Richard of Bordeaux, who was then a nine-year-old boy, to be brought before them and confirmed as the heir apparent. They were worried that Edward III’s eldest surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who had been heading up the regime’s responses to the parliament’s complaints, might otherwise attempt to usurp the throne.
This is interesting. As it happens, John of Gaunt didn’t try to usurp the throne, though he probably considered it. He swore an oath on the Prince of Wales’s deathbed, along with his father, to honour and protect young Richard’s accession. What’s weird is how convinced everyone seems to have been that Gaunt becoming king would be such a terrible idea.
He wasn’t a brilliant man, but he was okay. He was a competent and experienced military leader and politician. In his dealings with the Good Parliament he was a bit unreconstructedly pro-crown, but members of the royal family tend to be like that. The next parliament, Edward III’s last, which is known to posterity as the Bad Parliament, was dominated by Gaunt and reversed many of the Good Parliament’s reforming steps.
So he wasn’t very parliamentarian in his outlook, but still there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have made a decent king and was surely a better bet than a child? But by now the principle of primogeniture was carrying all before it. The realm had got so used to that certainty, that complete knowledge of who the next king is going to be, that it won’t entertain the notion of any other ruler.
John of Gaunt was a senior international figure, a loyal son of Edward III and a major part of the very successful regime Edward had run for the last several decades. Yet the idea of Gaunt becoming king had become heresy because the child Richard, helpless though he was, had the magical primogeniture fairy dust that now trumps the anointing-oil coronation magic. Clearly there was a feeling that, if you go against the righteousness of primogeniture, things might go badly wrong. Needless to say, they did anyway.
Perhaps parliament was now sufficiently self-confident that the magnates and knights actively wanted a child on the throne because they reckoned that would give them the chance to run the country for a bit – keep a control on spending and prevent dynastic ambition on the continent from making everyone go broke. A key figure here was a knight of the shire called Sir Peter de la Mare, the first elected speaker of the House of Commons.
More than anyone else, Peter de la Mare set the Good Parliament’s agenda and he was, by the standards of the day, a very ordinary bloke. He wasn’t an aristocrat or a magnate or anything close to it. He’d been a toll collector and the Earl of March’s steward, and now he had been elected to a position of considerable importance. Doesn’t that have a pleasing, tingly, anachronistic ring to it?
Obviously he was very very high up the social order compared to most people, but it shows that the influence of the commons was giving a much wider cross-section of society access to power, even if it was still a very narrow cross-section by modern standards (the number of Etonians in most contemporary cabinets notwithstanding).
The idea that someone as unposh as de la Mare might be able to instigate rules that directly affected the behaviour of big players like Gaunt and even the king would have been unthinkable a century earlier. The commons were comfortable wielding this power – no sense of deferring to their ‘betters’ seems to hamper them. Primogeniture and coronation carry weight – the king is treated with enormous reverence, but it’s not unthinking reverence. Meanwhile notions of royalty and aristocracy seem to be carrying less weight. As the vertiginous hierarchy of feudalism became simplified – rulers were increasingly holding their lands in full sovereignty, directly below God rather than by paying homage to more senior rulers – there was less respect for aristocrats and relatives of the king. They, the commons seem to think, are not to be trusted.
I’m talking about the confused and discontented end to Edward’s reign before I get to the good bit, because the end makes much of what went before seem futile. It felt splendid at the time but it led nowhere and, for me, it helps to keep that in mind. Edward inherited and bequeathed a bankrupt kingdom, failing to live up to its own unrealistic expectations on the international scene. What happened in between is a detail.
The glorious middle
In between these two periods of disappointment and corruption, there were some stellar triumphs. Edward III and his son Prince Edward were great strategists, warriors and propagandists. They furthered Plantagenet claims in France more forcefully than anyone since Henry II.
The aspect of their success that is most treasured by posterity, in Britain at least, was their knack for winning battles when outnumbered. At Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 smaller English armies thrashed larger French ones due to the senior English royals’ strategic excellence and the brilliance of the English and Welsh longbowmen. The French only had crossbowmen who were comparatively shit, plus men in armour on horses who you’d imagine, from their habit of repeatedly riding into blizzards of arrows, actively wanted to get shot to bits.
As a result of these battles a huge proportion of the senior French aristocracy ended up lying around the French countryside, dead in their armour. And there were other English triumphs: Calais was conquered in 1347, after a long siege, and remained in English hands for over 200 years. At the Battle of Poitiers, King John II of France was captured and taken back to England. In 1360, as part of the Treaty of Brétigny, his ransom was set at 3 million crowns (which roughly equates to ‘Oh mother of God, you are fucking kidding me!’ in today’s money) and he was allowed to go home to try and raise it, on the condition that he left his son, Louis of Anjou, as a hostage.
This was all quite humiliating for the French monarchy, but it got worse. In 1363, Louis managed to escape before the ransom had been paid. Well done him, you might think. That’s not what John II thought. He considered the escape to be dishonourable – it was reneging on an agreement – so the king voluntarily returned to English captivity himself. We can only imagine how annoying the people of France, and his son Louis, found this extravagant act of virtue-signalling. This is finding 10p on the pavement and insisting on handing it in at a local police station raised to the geopolitical level. Then, in 1364, John died in English captivity.
For the French royal family, this was a time of deep crisis. It was compounded by the fact that not everyone accepted that that family, the House of Valois, really was the French royal family. Edward III didn’t. In his view, he was the rightful king of France.
This was a strange state of affairs. On the face of it, Edward III was about as unlike the king of France as it was possible for a king to be. He styled himself, very definitely, as the king of England. He was the first ruler since the Conquest who stressed this Englishness. He was still a French-speaking international blue blood by background, but he spoke and promoted the English language. In the Statute of Pleading of 1362, he changed the language which was to be spoken in England’s law courts and in parliament from the Norman French of the royal court to English.
As with the Declaration of Arbroath, this is a sign of a nascent pre-nationalism developing in Europe. The king was citing and valuing – declaring ownership of – the concept of Englishness. It had taken three centuries for the descendants of William the Conqueror to start doing this. Previously, they emphasized their royalty, their kingliness, their righteous possession of their lands, but didn’t trouble to lay claim to having anything in common with the millions of people whose fate they controlled. God and their right was the order of the day, not issues of nationality, which were deemed beneath the contempt of Plantagenet internationalists. That was changing and Edward was using that change and driving it.
It seems perverse, perhaps hypocritical, that at the same time he was making a dynastic claim to be king of France. Let me try and briefly explain this dynastic claim while we’re here because, as I mentioned before, it resulted in the ludicrous situation that every ruler of England from the mid-fourteenth century until the start of the nineteenth claimed also to be the rightful ruler of France. Half a millennium of delusional bullshit rested on this, which makes the couple of decades for which the United Nations pretended Taiwan was China pale into insignificance.
For all this time, from Edward III onwards, the lions of England on the royal coat of arms were quartered with the fleur-de-lis of the French royal family. And if, as some think, those three lions aren’t all English, but one is for Normandy and one for Aquitaine, lands which the English crown controlled only for fleeting periods during the subsequent centuries, that would make the symbolism of the royal coat of arms over 80 per cent delusional. Well, why not? The first kings, as we’ve seen, were just successful bullies – all the talk of religion and legitimacy is a distraction from that fundamental truth. I find the absurd claim to France of the English monarchs an amusing reminder that all these people with crowns are just chancers.
Now then, the dynastic claim. In itself, it was reasonable: when Charles IV died in 1328, there was no direct male heir. It was the end of the line for the House of Capet, which had been the French royal house for nearly 350 years. Edward III’s mother, Isabella, was Charles’s sister, and the daughter of Philip IV. By Edward’s reckoning, that made him the next eligible male in line. Women were officially not allowed to be the sovereign in France (rather than merely effectively not allowed, which, as we know from Matilda’s experience, was the situation in England), so Isabella was out of the running, but Edward argued that she could still transmit eligibility across the generations from Philip IV to him.
The counterargument, put forward by the French, who reckoned the King of England also being their king would be less than ideal, was that a right can’t be transferred by someone who can’t hold it. If you can’t carry it, you can’t pass it on – it makes sense in physics. So in 1328, after a brief pause to see whether Charles’s pregnant widow would give birth to a boy – it was a girl – Philip VI of Valois was crowned king. He was Charles IV’s cousin, and Philip IV’s nephew, so he was a more distant relative than Edward III, but was related entirely through men.
That was why, in 1340, a few years into his reign, and after he’d paid homage to Philip VI for Aquitaine, Edward suddenly turned round and said he was king of France. It’s opportunism, albeit based on an arguable dynastic claim. (By the way, in case you’re trying to keep track of this blizzard of French kings, the John II I mentioned as having been captured by Edward was Philip VI’s son.)
Edward didn’t behave at all like a Frenchman trying to reclaim his birthright. It would have been tricky to do that, I suppose. He was pushing his Englishness hard at home. He couldn’t claim to also possess an innate Frenchness to go with his innate Englishness. So he didn’t bother to try. He put the fleur-de-lis on all his stuff and went to war – a war in which, whatever the dynastic argument, what was really happening was that the King of England was trying to conquer France.
That’s what spoils Edward and his son’s valiant-underdog image. Yes, they were often outnumbered, and yes they were very brave and militarily astute, but they were also invaders and aggressors. If burglars find themselves outnumbered by the residents of a house they’re attempting to clear out, that doesn’t necessarily make them particularly sympathetic.
Being away from home put the invaders at a disadvantage some of the time, but it also gave them carte blanche to trash the place without destroying their own homes. They perfected a tactic known as the chevauchée, which was basically wasting, that beloved technique of William the Conqueror, but done at speed: an army on horseback cutting a swathe of destruction through the countryside, killing, burning and ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of French peasants. Edward Prince of Wales used the chevauchée particularly effectively and mercilessly, and there is speculation that this is why he came to be known as the Black Prince.
