The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  When the attack was broadened, the English archers shot down the horses of the charging knights, throwing the line into complete confusion. The English foot troops could now creep forward through the thick vines and with their long knives dispatch the knights before they could get themselves disentangled. It was Crécy all over again, but with the English in a still firmer command of the field. The division led by the three princes was thrown into such a turmoil that the marshals, who were actually in charge, saw nothing to be done but to get the royal sons off the field. The result was that the one division fell back on the next and the sanguinary chaos of Crécy was re-enacted.

  It remained for the Captal de Buch to complete the wreckage of French morale. Charging from ambush with a small force of mounted men, he drove headlong into the flank of the second French division. Forgetting their oaths and perhaps confused as to how much land constituted four acres, the knights of the Noble House took to flight, prepared to yield not only four acres but the whole of France.

  “Sir Prince!” said John Chandos quietly. “Push forward: the day is yours. God has given it into your hands.”

  Mounting their horses, the English knights charged down the slope after the prince, crying, “St. George, for Guienne!” The retreat of the French became general, and one body of eight hundred lances galloped off the field without having struck a blow. Soon there was nothing left of that huge and confident army but the troops under the direct charge of the king. These were still capable of winning the battle, being double the size of the whole English army, but for some reason they had no thought but to escape or to sell their lives as dearly as possible. King John cried out to his men to alight and then dismounted himself. His youngest son, Philip (who would survive to cuff a cup-bearer at the English court), was beside him and behaving with great coolness for a lad of fourteen.

  The king finally yielded himself a prisoner to a French knight who had been fighting on the English side, having been banished earlier. There had been excited rumors in the English lines during the battle about the nineteen French knights in black armor, and many of them had been captured or killed. The mystery as to the identity of the king was now solved. The king removed his helmet.

  “Where is my cousin, the Prince Edward?” he asked. Then to the English men-at-arms, who were scuffling to get possession of his person, recognizing the value of the prize, he said: “I pray you take me peaceably to my cousin. I am great enough to enrich you all.”

  The Black Prince had seen to it that his standard was brought down from the crest to serve as a new rallying point. His silk pavilion was raised and here a supper was served to the captive king, the prince waiting on him personally and doing everything possible to set him at ease. During the meal a survey was made of the field and it was learned that the French had left eleven thousand dead, over two thousand of them men of knightly rank. The English loss was low in the hundreds.

  A curious anecdote of the battle has survived. A Welsh soldier named Howell y Twyell had performed so bravely that the Black Prince knighted him on the field and endowed him with a pension. As a further honor, the battle-ax of the Welshman was taken to the Tower of London and every day a full meal was placed beside it for the owner if he should appear. As soon as it was certain that Sir Howell would not come, the food would be distributed to the poor, with instructions to pray for the soul of the rightful partaker. This custom was followed for over two hundred years and was ended with the Reformation.

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  A truce for two years was arranged and the captive king was taken to Bordeaux. Here the winter was spent in tournaments and recreation of all kinds. John hoped he would not be removed from the country, but early in the spring orders were received from King Edward that he was to be brought to England. The prince set sail with his prisoner in April and they landed at Sandwich eleven days later. Desiring to meet the unfortunate John on an informal basis, the English king rode out from London with a hunting party.

  “Sweet Cousin, you are welcome,” he said when the two parties met.

  The citizens of London outdid themselves in their welcome a few days later. Tapestries were hung from all the windows and the twelve prettiest girls in the town were suspended above the streets in cages so they could shower flowers on the victorious Edward and the French king as they passed. John was on a splendid white charger, but Prince Edward contented himself with a black pony. King Edward received them at Westminster Palace and later presided at a great feast. A luxurious river-front palace, called the Savoy, was given to the royal prisoner for his residence. Here he was to remain in great comfort for a very long time.

  There was no comfort for anyone in France. As the fighting was over temporarily, the soldiers who had been engaged in it formed themselves into bands called Free Companies and proceeded to prey on the people, robbing and burning and laying the country bare. Wherever one looked, the fields were black and desolate. The houses were piles of rubble and the fences had given up and were allowing the wild growths of nature to take back their own. Even the sun seemed to have caught the infection and shone with a wan light. Never did one hear, even at dawn when farmyards came alive, the cheerful lowing of cows or the confident cackle of chickens.

  The French soldiers were as active in this freebooting as the English and the mercenaries from other countries. While the land was thus being bled white, the need to raise ransoms for the captured nobility led to new taxes and exactions laid on the overburdened backs of the people.

  The hardships they suffered were so great that finally the peasantry rose in rebellion. Armed with scythes and clubs, the maddened peasants attacked and captured many castles and murdered all the occupants, irrespective of age or sex. This insurrection, which was called the Jacquerie from the name Jacques Bonhomme applied to the tiller of the soil, was suppressed in a thorough and bloody manner in time to prevent it from spreading and attaining the proportions of a civil war. The Jacquerie set off even more significant troubles. The eldest son of the king, Prince Charles, had been made regent in his father’s enforced absence and had taken the title of the dauphin, because the land of Dauphiné had recently been ceded to France. He resorted to many unpopular measures to raise money, including the debasing of the coinage. The people of Paris rose indignantly under the leadership of Stephen Marcel, their provost, and put such pressure behind the States-General (the equivalent of the English Parliament) that radical measures were taken to make the government of the country more democratic. Marcel, who was a combination of patriot and demagogue, went too far, however, and his following fell away from him and in the end he was killed in a riot on the streets of Paris.

  In spite of the dire conditions in France, the people rallied back of the young regent to reject a treaty which had been negotiated in England between the English king and the captive French monarch. The terms included the cession to England of Maine, Touraine, and Poitou in the south and Normandy, Ponthieu, and Calais in the north, which thus established again the Plantagenet empire of the days of Henry II and went a vast step beyond, because the ceded territories would belong to the English king in full sovereignty.

  This rejection in 1360 forced Edward to cross the Channel with another army in an effort to bring the French to terms. Knowing that he could not expect his army to live off a country which had been stripped so thoroughly, he took a long provision train with him, including equipment such as ovens, forges, and mills. The train following the army was six miles in length.

  He met with no resistance in the open but was unable to capture Rheims, his first objective, and so pushed his forces down the Seine with the idea of attacking Paris. The mettlesome Parisiennes organized to defend themselves and succeeded so well that it soon became apparent to Edward that his supplies would be exhausted before he could expect to see his leopards floating above the Louvre. Accordingly he moved down into the fatter lands of the Loire and here he met envoys from the Duke of Normandy with proposals for peace. The dauphin had given in sufficiently to seek be
tter terms, and in May a treaty was finally drawn up and concluded at Bretigny, a small town in the neighborhood of Chartres.

  Although there was some disappointment in England because Edward agreed to abandon his claims to the throne of France, the Treaty of Bretigny was a triumph for the English king. He was confirmed in his possession in full sovereignty of Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, Saintonge, Limousin, Anjoumois, Périgord, Bigorre, Rouerque, Ponthieu, Guisnes, and Calais. The French king agreed to pay a ransom of three millions of gold crowns in six years, and a first payment of six hundred thousand florins was guaranteed by John Galeas Visconti, Duke of Milan, as the price of his marriage with Isabel of France, John’s daughter.

  All this was humiliating to the French people, but they had suffered so much in the wars that they welcomed the peace with much ringing of bells and dancing in the streets.

  Edward returned to England, believing the war to be at an end and the victory his.

  CHAPTER XV

  The Black Prince

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  THE Black Prince caught the fancy of the English people almost from the day of his birth. He became a national hero, and nothing he did, not even the extreme savagery he displayed on several occasions nor the financial disorder of his official as well as his private life, disturbed or diminished the admiration the public had conceived for him. When he came home to die at the age of forty-six, with the dreams of conquest shattered and the star of England in the descent, he was still the idol of the commonality.

  Little is known about him. It is almost impossible to see and understand the man back of that imposing façade. He was brave to a fault. He had certain fixed ideals which nothing could shake or change. He was courteous to those about him and generous to his friends, but there seems to have been little actual warmth in either his courtesy or generosity. Money meant nothing to him and he was always deep in debt. To gratify his generous impulses (“a war-horse called Bayard Bishop to William Montacute,” “a hobby called Dun Crump to a German knight”), he had to permit his stewards to extract every penny they could from his tenants. The peasants on his lands in Cheshire broke out in revolt in 1353 because of the burdens laid upon them. His managers in the stannaries continued to get out tin in large quantities without any record being kept or any payments being made. It was said that in the face of an almost universal admiration his tenants had nothing but detestation for him.

  As a boy he was handsome, strong, and manly. The kind of gossip circulated about the rowdy household of the young Edward II, which got into the chronicles of the day, was never told or believed about this prince, who was so obviously destined for great things. To the people he seemed like a wonderful and flawless painting in oil glimpsed high up in a cathedral gloom. The story of his bravery at Crécy swept over England. The whole nation went mad with joy when he defeated John of France at Poictiers with a handful of men, even though his opponent knew as little of warfare as, say, that fanatical lover of chivalry, Don Quixote himself.

  There are few anecdotes told about him, none which help to a real understanding of the man himself. Had he a sense of humor? He smiled gravely and courteously, but did he ever laugh out loud? Did he enjoy the wine which flowed so freely after the evening meal? Did trivial emotions ever ruffle that stern and handsome countenance? Did his luminous eyes, as blue as the skies of Gascony but as fixed as those of an eagle, ever soften at the sight of a beautiful woman?

  Although he did not marry until he was thirty years of age, it was known that he had two illegitimate sons, Sir John Sounder and Sir Roger Clarendon, and that a hint of a third was conveyed in a household record in 1349 about “a horse called Lyard Hobyn to his own little son Edward.”

  Less is known of a daughter of the Black Prince. Historians have ignored her existence, But there are records which prove her to have been married to one Waleran de Luxemburg, Count of Ligny and St. Pol. In a written challenge issued by the count to King Henry IV he identifies himself as having had as his bride the sister of the “high and powerful Prince Richard, King of England.” The countess’s Christian name, her personality, whether or not she inherited the blond Plantagenet beauty, the royal grace and temper, are lost to the pages of history.

  The possession of illegitimate children was not regarded as a sign of weakness or of dissolute living. It was merely a proof that a small streak of frailty existed after all in that perfect statue of a man.

  He was as extravagant and lavish as his father, but his largess was dispensed with a more regal hand. Because he never seemed to step down from his pedestal, he maintained a higher degree of dignity than his splendid father. Even his closest and most devoted friends, including John Chandos, always had to look up. It may have been that he felt the eyes of posterity on him; or it may have been that he lacked the small common weaknesses. Whatever faults he had were great ones; but it is clear that he did not recognize them as faults.

  As he was handsome in his person and kingly in air and carriage, and most particularly as he always seemed to be riding high in the clouds like a mythological god, he grew rapidly into a legend, a symbol of everything right and fine. He attached men to him with a fanatical devotion but perhaps not with the warm ties of affection which can exist between close friends.

  His father, the king, was said to have a preference for his son John above the other royal princes, even the brilliant first-born. John of Gaunt was a fine knight in his way, tall, handsome, and deeply ambitious, but he was of baser metal. The people of England were more observant and acute in their judgment of the pair. They worshiped the Black Prince to the day of his death, but at the first opportunity they burned to the ground John’s magnificent palace on the Thames, the Savoy.

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  Almost from the day of his birth at Woodstock there had been talk of a suitable marriage for the heir to the throne. At first it was felt that only a French princess would serve, and some preliminary steps were taken to arrange for his union with a daughter of Philip of Valois. Then the inevitability of war between the two nations became apparent and that plan was dropped. There was talk later of marrying him to Margaret, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, or to a daughter of the Count of Flanders. After that the possibility of a match with a princess of the Portuguese royal family was explored, even though the advantages were remote. Some obstacle always developed. Perhaps the well-known tendency of the king to be overdemanding and something less than open and aboveboard in his methods had this effect. Certainly the prince himself was never co-operative. This may have been due to his complete absorption in matters military. He loved horses and dogs, and the fine blade of a sword seemed brighter than a lady’s eyes. Or it may have been due to an early preference he had felt for a cousin, Joan of Kent.

  Joan, who has been mentioned before, was the youngest daughter of Edmund, the half brother of Edward II, who had stood all those grim hours beside the block waiting for Mortimer to find someone base enough to wield the ax. When Mortimer’s turn came to die and Queen Isabella was bundled off to Castle Rising, the girl had been taken in hand by Queen Philippa and raised at court. The prince had not been much at court before that, having a preference for hunting and military exercises which he could indulge in his household at Berkhampstead. As he grew up, however, he became increasingly aware of this fair second cousin, who was two years older than he was and who fluttered about the court in the most beautiful robes of shimmering silk, with bodices embroidered in ermine and the costliest of furs. She was not only very winsome but very gay, and he found her loquacity and easy laughter quite entrancing; although, being silent as well as strong, he did not often share in her gaiety. He began to see less of the hunting fields at Berkhampstead and more of his large stone house on Fish Street in London, which gave him opportunities of appearing at court. It was clear to him, of course, that he could never marry Joan. Even if his parents could be persuaded to such a course, which was highly unlikely, the leaders in Parliament would have frowned on it.

  This is one explanation of the
undefined and rather vague relationship which existed between them. There is another, which has found more general acceptance: that Edward had no more than a cousinly affection for the golden-haired hoyden but that Joan’s eye had been on him from the start and that she was very unhappy because she knew she would never be allowed to marry him, even if she could break down his seeming indifference to her. Whichever is the true one, the time came when Joan had to think seriously of marriage. There was still no evidence of a willingness on the part of the king and queen to permit a match with the heir to the throne. Two contestants had come forward for her hand, the young Earl of Salisbury (the son of the king’s fair Katherine) and Sir John Holland, the steward of the royal household. Both were so madly in love with “the little Jeanette,” as Prince Edward called her, that their struggle for her favor had to be carried finally to Avignon. Holland had gained the upper hand by getting a contract of marriage, but he was summoned to France on the outburst of war before the ceremony could be performed. The Earl of Salisbury took advantage of his absence to enter into a marriage contract with her, and when Holland came back there was a pretty problem to solve. It was referred to Pope Clement VI, who finally gave judgment for Holland. With many regretful glances over her shoulder in the direction of the unattainable Edward, the Fair Maid of Kent allowed the masterful Holland to carry her off.

  That was in 1349. In 1360 Holland died in Normandy, leaving his widow with three children, a son and two daughters. Joan was beautiful enough to be called still the Fair Maid, although she was no longer as slender as she had been and the gold of her hair might have shown some of the tarnish of time had her maids been less zealous in the care of it. She was, after all, only thirty-two years of age and of much physical vitality.