The Three Edwards
Page 36
The fourth line, however, showed a sterner spirit. By some ridiculous error of judgment the fourth line, shut up behind all the rest of the fleet and in danger of grounding on the mudbanks, had been put under the command of Barbenoire, the ablest and most daring of sea fighters. With a fine display of seamanship, the Genoese commander managed to take some of his ships out through the chaos in front of him and into the open water. Here he engaged in a running battle with the English which lasted through the night. He succeeded in getting away with twenty-four of his ships and in capturing two English craft.
Although the fighting seems to have been one-sided, it was actually a bitter and long-drawn-out affair. The French lost twenty-five thousand men in the conflict, the English four thousand. The ships with the ladies aboard had not remained as far back as prudence should have dictated; it is recorded that twelve of them were among the killed. The king’s first cousin, Thomas de Monthermer, died. Edward himself was supposedly wounded in the thigh but, if that were true, it must have been a slight matter, for he went ashore on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving soon after. One Nele Loring, a squire, was knighted on the spot for conspicuous bravery and granted a pension of £20 a year. On such an occasion, with death and destruction everywhere and valor the order of the day, young Loring* must have performed some extraordinary feat to be singled out in this way.
Philip of France was inland with his army. When word of the disastrous defeat reached the court, his officers and ministers did not relish the task of telling the king. His temper was like tinder, and no one wanted to be the first to bear the brunt of it. Then someone had the happy thought of sending the court jester in with the news.
The wearer of the cap and bells undertook the task and entered the royal presence in a state of apparent indignation.
“Majesty!” he cried. “These cowards of English! These dastards! These fainthearted sons of sheep!”
“What has come over the fool?” asked the king, looking about him in surprise.
“Majesty!” explained the jester. “They would not jump off their ships into the water as our brave Frenchmen did!”
3
But despite this brilliant victory and the destruction of the French fleet, Edward saw the year end in defeat and humiliation. He could not capture either Cambrai or Tournai and finally he concluded a truce for one year with the French, to the great dismay and mortification of his Flemish allies.
Philippa came back with him on this occasion, the royal family making the voyage in a small vessel and with very few servants in attendance. With them was an infant son who had been born the day after the great sea victory at Sluys and named John. He would be called John of Ghent, because it was in that city he uttered his first feeble sounds of life, and common usage would in time corrupt this to John of Gaunt. This infant was destined to play a part in history second only to the first-born son, Edward the Black Prince. The homecomers encountered such stormy weather that it was feared for a time the ship would founder and it actually took nine days to cross the narrow neck of sea and come to anchor at Towerwharf in London.
The queen had been in Flanders a considerable time awaiting the arrival of Master John, some say maintaining a court in the city of Ghent, others declare as a guest in the home of Jacob van Artevelde. If she had been a guest of King Edward’s “gossip,” as van Artevelde was often called, she would have enjoyed as much comfort as could be found at any royal court. The wealthy residents of the tall cities on the plains had established a high degree of luxury. “Liberty never wore a more unamiable countenance,” an English historian would write centuries later, “than among these burghers who abused the strength she had given them by cruelty and violence”; and this was true enough, for the wealthy weavers and goldsmiths and fishmongers were men of dour habit, close-fisted and unscrupulous. But they liked to live well, to sit down at tables groaning with good things to eat, to sleep in the softest of feather beds. The houses of the poorters of Ghent were many stories high. The ground level was usually the shop, behind which the apprentices lived and slept. All the floors above were devoted to the most luxurious living. Most of these imposing stone structures had round towers at one corner and, as a measure of safety, the upper story in the tower could be reached only by a ladder. A burgher who desired seclusion could climb the ladder and draw it up after him, and it would be impossible to reach him without demolishing the floors and walls.
The greatest luxury indulged in by these “unamiable” citizens was their handsome, voluptuous women. The air of the Low Countries seemed to supply a freshness of complexion to the ladies they bred and a roundness of contour which made them desirable in all male eyes. On the streets they bundled themselves up in an excess of modesty, but in their luxurious rooms above the shop level they dressed themselves in the finest cloth their husbands produced and in the sheerest of silks from the East. It was at this exact period that they began wearing diaphanous garments to bed instead of slipping under the covers in a state of nature as had been the universal habit. The nightgown may have been conceived in Paris, where most styles originated, but the fragile materials were made in Flanders, and it was the plump ladies of that corner of the world who first made use of them in this way; and so perhaps the credit belongs to Ghent and not to the capital of style on the Seine.
Whether or not Queen Philippa lived in the van Artevelde household, her fourth son, John, was baptized there. A short time afterward a son, their first, was born to the Arteveldes and the queen acted as godmother, naming him Philip. The Countess of Hainaut, Philippa’s mother, was with her during this residence in Ghent, and it was rumored that her interference had something to do with the failure to capture Tournai. She went to the King of France, who was her brother, and beseeched him to agree to a cessation of hostilities. Then she made the same request to her son-in-law.
It is doubtful if this had anything to do with the failure of the campaign. The two armies came face to face before Tournai, but nothing happened. Edward sent a challenge to “Philip of Valois” to meet him in single combat or accompanied by parties of knights numbering no more than one hundred. Philip contended that the letter was not addressed to him. As a result not a blow was struck.
Edward was falling more deeply in debt all the time. Queen Philippa’s crown was pawned for twenty-five hundred pounds and all her jewels were put up as security for loans. It was even necessary to leave the Earl of Derby behind as security for the money Edward owed the good burghers.
It proved unfortunate for Jacob van Artevelde and for the Flemish alliance that the partnership had not prospered. The other cities began to complain of the engagement into which they had been drawn by his efforts, and even in Ghent a steady chorus of criticism was heard. It was charged that he had made himself a dictator and that he was putting purely personal interests above the welfare of the states. A rumor spread that he was negotiating with Edward to give the Black Prince the title of Count of Flanders. Were the great cities of the lowland plains to be absorbed into the realm of England? The stout burghers liked that idea as little as the thought of being absorbed by the French. In thus finding fault with their truly inspired leader, the rank and file were blind to their own interests. They were listening to the nobility and the buyten-poorters, who thought their privileges were being infringed, and to the unreasoning voice of the mob. Behind the disaffection could always be found the hand of Count Louis, who believed he had been deprived of his hereditary rights; as indeed he had, and a good thing it was.
History, which at first accepted this view that Jacob van Artevelde was ambitious and dictatorial, has since reversed its decision. It is now realized that his intentions were patriotic and that what he aimed to achieve, an enduring union of the Dutch people, was far-seeing and wise. That he did not seek personal aggrandizement was made clear when he resigned his post at Ghent two years after the naval victory at Sluys. His fellow citizens promptly voted him back into office, to share the responsibility with three of his former colleagues.
Taking his post behind one of the windows, he watched through a small aperture the frightening speed with which a mob was collecting in the street below. It was made up almost entirely of the dregs of the population from the crooked lanes of the slums. No effort was being made to retain control or to restrain the noisy people. His white-hooded guards had not come to escort him through the town, and there was no sign of the other hooftmen and their armed bands.
Listening to the cries of the mob, van Artevelde realized that the burden of their complaint was that he had stolen civic funds. This was a canard which had been handed down by his critics among the nobility, that he had not rendered an accounting of public moneys for seven years but instead had been sending the funds to England. There was not a scrap of truth in it.
Finally he threw open the shutters of one of the windows and leaned out so all could see him. There was a brief second of silence and then the air was split with the loud outcries of the mob. As he looked down into the street, which was now black with angry people, Jacob van Artevelde must have realized that for him this was the end. But his regrets would not be for himself but for the failure of the cause he represented. This bold and clear-sighted man knew that only by joining the crowded checkerboard of little states into one strong union could the democratic Dutch people continue to exist surrounded by feudal and militaristic countries. This meant that the opposing forces had won.
He tried to speak, to protest his innocence of the charges they were making. The belligerent townspeople refused to listen. The air was filled instead with their loud cries while stones began to rattle on the walls of the house. The intrepid leader strove to make them hear, but there was no willingness to grant him the chance. The glint of steel showed above the heads of the mob as the infuriated weavers brandished their daggers and pikes in the air.
Perhaps the delay he needed to rally his own partisans and to achieve an orderly hearing would have been possible had he taken refuge in the top floor of his round tower. He did not make use of it, however. Instead he thought it wiser to escape from the house. He stole out to the stables behind the building with the idea of getting away on horseback. His purpose was immediately detected and the cobbled courtyard filled quickly. One of the hoodlums had a poleax in his hands, and it needed no more than one blow to put an end to the life of the man who had done so much for the Flemish people.
His last words were said to have been: “People! Ghent! Flanders!” which gives a summation in dramatic form of his life and purpose.
Once the deed had been done, the mob melted away, awe-struck and repentant. When the streets had cleared, the body was taken to the monastery at Biloke, where he had first preached his doctrine of unity. Later it was removed for burial at the Carthusian monastery at Royghem.
There was a reversal of sentiment almost immediately. Those who had instigated the disorders in the hope of taking power away from him were shocked at the violent reactions of the mob. An expiatory lamp was lighted in the monastery of Biloke and the expense of maintaining it was borne by the top-ranking families, who had always opposed his rise to power: the Westlucs, the de Mays, the Pannebergs, the Pauwels. The lamp was still burning thirty years afterward. But the bloodstained poleax had done more than put an end to the life of the great leader; it had set back for centuries the purpose for which he had worked, the union of the vulnerable Low Countries against aggression.
4
Edward’s financial troubles came to a head before he could resume the war with France on a large scale. He found it necessary to repudiate his debts to his Italian bankers.
The Lombardy bankers, as they were called in England, first came into notice in the reign of Henry III. They engaged in business in the island kingdom in order to buy English wool and after a time Henry employed them in making remittances to the popes. They not only transmitted Peter’s Pence to Rome each year but also, by a system of bills of exchange, placed in the hands of the pontiffs the large sums that the Church in England paid to the papacy. During the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, the house of Frescobaldi in Florence became the financial agents of the English kings. They grew so powerful that public feeling in the country ran high against them and a member of the family, one Amerigo de Frescobaldi, was banished from the kingdom. Edward II began to distribute his business widely when he came to the throne and discovered that he was saddled with debts amounting to £118,000, partly his own, partly those left by his father. The Frescobaldi assumed a large part of the loan made to the king, but he had business relations also with the Peruzzi family and the Spini, both of Florence. Still another Italian banker, Antonio Pessagno of Genoa, loaned Edward II between the years 1313 and 1316 the sum of £36,985. He stood so high in the king’s favor that he acted as buyer for the royal household. It seems also that at one stage he was entrusted with the custody of the king’s jewels (perhaps after the forcible closure of the Knights Templar) and was given a gift of three thousand pounds by Edward for his valuable services.
The public did not like so much favor shown to foreigners, particularly as the acumen of Edward II had come seriously into question by this time. The feeling against the Italians ran so high that the headquarters of the Bardi in London was burned by a mob. This episode created an unwillingness among the Lombardy moneylenders to establish themselves in England, and they gradually closed the shutters over their windows and returned to sunnier climes. Of the sixty-nine institutions which had been represented in the time of Edward I, most of them quite small, only two remained when Edward III came to the throne, the family of Peruzzi and the Society of the Bardi.
The financial transactions in which the first two Edwards had been involved were relatively small and even routine in nature compared with the magnificent scale on which Edward III did business with the foreign bankers. The third Edward had a full-scale war on his hands which necessitated the upkeep of armies and navies and the payment of subsidies to his-allies, not to mention the costs of a most brilliant and extravagant court. So much gold was required that the resources of England were unequal to the drain and the king inevitably turned to the foreign moneylenders. He was given loans on such a huge scale that he realized in 1339 that he could no longer meet his indebtedness. Accordingly on May 6 of that year he issued an edict suspending all payments on his debts, “including that owing to his well-beloved Bardis and Peruzzis.” He owed the two houses the stupendous sum of 900,000 florins. To add to the difficulties of the two banking houses, another monarch was deep in their books, the King of Sicily, who owed each the sum of 100,000 florins.
The city of Florence went into a slump. The financial world of Europe was shaken to the core. The Flemish cities which had entered into alliance with Edward and had loaned him money were so disturbed that they lost faith in the leadership of Ghent’s Jacob van Artevelde, which led to his assassination. Philip of France, with a vulpine smile no doubt, proceeded to make capital of the situation after the manner of Philip the Fair. He accused the Italian bankers in France of usury and extorted large sums from them by way of fines. Believing that this form of bankruptcy meant the end of English pretensions, he was said to have begun plans for turning the tables by invading England. In Florence riots broke out between the grandi and the popolo. The Bardi and the Peruzzi had been the financial backbone of the republic, so the news that both houses were in difficulties had the impact of an earthquake. They had been called “the mercantile pilla
rs of Christendom” and it seemed impossible that they had been reduced so close to failure by the bad faith of one king.
One of the heads of the Peruzzi family, Bonifazio di Tommaso Peruzzi, set out at once for London to discuss the situation with the English ministry. It is evident from brief records in the Peruzzi archives that he failed to obtain any satisfaction. It is not certain that he reached the ear of Edward, who was deep in his international relationships and the preparation of the navy for the invasion of France. The unhappy banker remained in England for over a year and finally died there in October 1340, unquestionably of grief and worry. There had been a brief period when the brilliant victory at Sluys raised expectations. Surely, thought the sad and aging Bonifazio as he pursued his unending peregrinations between the headquarters of the company in the city and the chancellery at Westminster, the king will now be in a position to reopen the question of his indebtedness. Edward did not return to England until the head of the Peruzzi family had died, but it was reported at the time that he was willing to resume the obligations. Parliament, seeing no way out of the morass of debt in which the lavishness of the king had involved the nation, took a negative view. No promises could be obtained from the legislative body of a willingness to pay in the future.
In January 1345 both banking houses gave up the struggle and went into bankruptcy, dragging down with them more banking concerns and many mercantile houses. The Bardi paid seventy per cent to their debtors, but the house of Peruzzi did not do nearly so well. All properties of the two houses were turned over to the creditors, but two years later a settlement was reached. The period precipitated by this great smash has been called the darkest in the annals of that great city.