The Black Prince

by David Green

  The prince’s will, as well as the image on the ‘tester’ above his tomb show his dedication to the cult of the Trinity. He bequeathed his soul to God and his saints, most particularly the Trinity and the Virgin. The prince also gave to Canterbury Cathedral an image of the Trinity, and chamber-hangings to be used for hanging in the choir-stalls to serve as a memorial for the prince on the feast of the Trinity and the other principal feasts of the year.

  The Trinity was a cult which was by no means new in the fourteenth century although it seems to have regained some momentum at this time. In late Saxon times All Saints and Holy Trinity had become popular dedications: ‘devotion to the Trinity – manifest still in innumerable paintings and sculptures – flourished greatly until and through the reformation…’11 Other Trinity images associated with the prince can be seen on the frontispiece of a Chandos Herald manuscript, a funerary lead badge, and another showing him worshipping the Trinity within the Garter. It is also evident from the document granting the prince custody of Aquitaine and in his foundation of a chantry with two priests to say masses in the cathedral church of the Holy Trinity in Canterbury. The prince had been born within the quindene of Trinity Sunday and died on the feast itself, at three in the afternoon having been prince of Wales for thirty-three years. Joan was 33 when he married her. It is interesting that the guild of the Trinity was the pre-eminent guild of both Coventry, which the prince held, and Lynn where he had considerable interests.12 Whether or not the prince influenced friends and associates in advocating the cult of the Trinity, many examples can be found of retinue members founding institutions and giving patronage to those with links to the Trinity. Miles Stapleton in c.1360 received a licence to found a perpetual chantry in honour of the Holy Trinity in the parochial church of Ingham, Norfolk. John Willoughby d’Eresby, who fought at Crécy and died three years later, founded a Trinity chapel in Spilsby church, Lincolnshire. John Wingfield, the prince’s business manager, by the terms of his will, had a chapel built and similarly dedicated in 1362. Richard FitzAlan, a military companion, long-standing creditor and official in Wales and the border counties, began the building of a Trinity chapel at Arundel and left provision in his will for its completion. In Cheshire the sisters and fraternity of the Blessed Trinity were associated with Adam Wheteley, the mayor and escheator of Chester, in a petition requesting a licence from the prince to acquire and hold certain lands in perpetuity.13

  The prince’s will also reveals other aspects of his personal religious beliefs and particular friendships. Grants were made to the house of the Bonhommes at Ashridge and to the chapel of St Nicholas at Wallingford. The former were an unusual order; the monastery or college of the Precious Blood at Ashridge had been founded for seven priests in 1283 by the prince’s great-uncle, Edmund, earl of Cornwall. In 1376, the Black Prince augmented the endowments and the number of priests was increased to 20. He appears to have had little direct contact with this house of the order until this time when he became the ‘second founder’. In 1346, a chantry had been founded in the conventual church for the soul of Bartholomew Burghersh snr., after the appropriation of the church of Ambrosden. The foundation had been built on the prince’s land a short distance from Berkhamsted and endowed with Ashridge park and manor.14

  The house at Ashridge was the first of the order but it was not the first house of Bonhommes with which the prince was connected. The order had expanded in the 1350s when two brothers from Ashridge were sent to Edington of which one, John Aylesbury (d. 25 March 1382), received a licence from the bishop of Lincoln in 1358 permitting him to take up office as the first rector. The Ashridge statutes were used at Edington and the unusual azure habit became uniform. However, after the transfer of brethren in 1358 there seems to be little evidence of any real enduring link between the two. There is little agreement as to the actual nature of the observance carried out at the houses. Certainly there was little obviously distinctive, apart from their habit, about them to attract patronage. They followed the Rule of St Augustine, or a very close variant, and normal monastic service was conducted according to the Use of Sarum. Despite the support of William Edington and the Black Prince, they had little or no political influence.15

  The foundation at Edington was converted into a house of Bonhommes, not founded as such. It had originally been created as a college of the Blessed Virgin, St Katherine and All Saints by William Edington, bishop of Winchester, in 1351 as one of the last purely regular religious foundations. The conversion into a monastery of the Bonhommes in 1358 probably occurred at the insistence of the Black Prince, and served ‘to free [the] priests from onerous parochial duties’.16 A charter was given by Robert Wyvill, bishop of Salisbury, in March confirming that it was to become a house of ‘fratres de ordine sancti Augustini, Boni Homines vulgariter nuncupati’.17 A number of individuals with other connections to the prince can be found among records of the order as witnesses to charters and the like. It is surprising that with such luminaries as the prince of Wales and the bishop of Winchester as patrons, the order failed to gain a great deal of support. It was handsomely endowed by the prince who sought little material benefit and indeed handed over control over elections to the brethren. Edington Priory is also renowned for its glazing, which was built c.1358–61.18

  To return to the prince’s will: to Richard (II), he bequeathed three beds, possibly including one with coverings showing a white hart encircled with the arms of Kent and Wake, and chamberhangings embroidered with the arms of Saladin. To Roger Clarendon, his illegitimate son by Edith Willesford, he also bequeathed a bed, as he did to both Robert Walsham, his confessor, and his companion-in-arms, Alan Cheyne. The political iconography of the bed, especially a bed decorated with heraldic images, with their inherent statement of authority, made the gifts highly significant. The prince also requested that the grants and annuities he had given his knights, esquires and other servants should be confirmed. His executors were to be Gaunt (another indication that there was no ‘bad blood’ between them), Edington, John Harewell, bishop of Bath, William Spridlington, bishop of St Asaph, Robert Walsham, Hugh Seagrave, Alan Stokes and John Fordham. The will was witnessed by John, bishop of Hereford, Lewis Clifford, Nicholas Bonde, Nicholas Sarnesfield, and William Walsham.19

  The tomb itself, commissioned by Richard II in the mid-1380s, bears an epitaph at odds with the image and figure of the prince. The epitaph may have been indicative of the prince’s own state of mind and religious concerns. It is certainly indicative of a changing attitude to death in the later fourteenth century and with that the search for a more ‘personal relationship’ with God. It includes the lines;

  … Mais je sui ore poevres et cheitifs

  Parfond en la terre gis

  Ma grande beauté est tut alée,

  Ma char est tut gasté …20

  After the prince’s death, Richard’s childhood did not last long and little is known about it. Much of it was spent in Joan’s household and in the guardianship of three magistri, chosen for him by the Black Prince, namely Guichard d’Angle, Richard Abberbury and Simon Burley.21

  The political turbulence enveloping his father’s household in his early years cannot have affected him greatly, and it is impossible to say if he was aware of the death of his brother, Edward. It is unlikely that he had many memories of Aquitaine and equally improbable that he remembered his father in his pomp. Perhaps this made the comparisons, when he acceded the throne, even more difficult to bear. John Gower in his Vox Clamantis wrote:

  It is also your concern, O king, to be your people’s defender in arms. And in order to defend justice with valour, remember your father’s deed as a model for this … France felt the effects of him; and Spain … was fearful of him. Throwing his foes into disorder, he hurled his troops into the midst of his enemies and broke up their course of march like a lion.22

  His childhood was brief and his time to prepare for the crown was similarly limited. He clearly had a number of common interests with his father. In the few m
onths in which he was prince of Wales after the death of his father and before the demise of Edward III he made payments to two pipers called Henrico and Petirkyn as well as to numerous heralds and minstrels. From the duke of Lancaster, his uncle, and his grandfather he received presents of horses.23

  Richard’s education was in the care of those well versed in chivalric and martial pursuits. In these fields Burley, and particularly d’Angle, had impeccable credentials.24 He had served both the kings of England and France loyally, as Philip of Valois’ seneschal of Saintonge from 1346, at Poitiers, where he was gravely wounded, and in the prince’s service in Aquitaine and at Nájera. In 1372 he was nominated a knight of the Garter and on Richard’s coronation he became earl of Huntingdon.25 It may have been a result of such tutors that the chivalric example was not lost on Richard and he endeavoured to use it for the political advantages it had given his father and grandfather. Unlike them, unfortunately, he lacked the military success by which a king and a knight were judged. The senility of Edward III and the political failures of the Black Prince were forgotten in a haze of military victories. Richard did not have a Poitiers or a Crécy on which to fall back. Indeed, it has been suggested that this had more debilitating consequences and that ‘Richard’s inability to meet the martial standards of his father … was a component of the king’s psychological trauma.’26 However, this is not to suggest that Richard was militarily incapable or certainly a coward, his actions at Mile End in 1381 gives the lie to such an accusation. But it might be argued that Richard’s temperament and disposition and the consequent shape taken by his kingship, the pomp, the ceremony and indeed the chivalry, informed and shaped his conception of monarchy, in a manner which was by no means out of character with the nobility or the style adopted by his father and grandfather; he simply could not substantiate it militarily.

  While Richard was burdened by the reputations of his father and grandfather their legacies to him were inversely although similarly problematic. Political instability was bequeathed by Edward III and insufficient institutional support by the Black Prince. In spite of its size and expense during his militarily active life, the prince did not bequeath a sizeable retinue to his son. The actions of Richard, particularly in the late 1380s and 1390s, reveal his lack of political support. There were a number of important individuals who went on to serve the Black Prince’s son, and a significant number of those who sat on the continual councils during Richard’s minority had begun their careers with the young king’s father. The chamber knights in the first six or seven years of Richard’s reign were mainly his father’s former servants. They included Richard Abberbury, Baldwin Bereford, Nicholas Bonde, John and Simon Burley, Lewis Clifford, Peter Courtenay, John del Hay, Nicholas Sarnesfield, Aubrey Vere and Bernard van Zedeles. Among the former servants of Edward III who served as chamber knights to his successor, Nicholas Dagworth, Robert Roos and Richard Stury all had dealings with the Black Prince as did the new men William Beauchamp, John Holland and William Neville. Nine out of nineteen of Richard’s esquires of the chamber also formerly saw service with the Black Prince, namely John Breton, Roger Coghull, Lambert Fermer, Richard Hampton, John Peytevyn, Adam Ramsey, Philip Walweyn Snr, Richard Wiltshire and William Wyncelowe.27 Indeed, it was many of these who were the focus of attack by the Appellants in 1388. Simon Burley suffered execution and a number of others were required to absent themselves from court including Abberbury, Bereford, Dagworth and Vere. Although they were prominent at court, the remnants of the Black Prince’s retinue that went on to serve his son were neither popular nor powerful. It is probably unfair to suggest it, but the failure of the Black Prince may not only have been the loss of Aquitaine but also the failure to establish a secure retinue and a body of support for Richard. As Goodman has said, ‘His [Richard’s] affinity signally failed to provide effective military support against Henry of Lancaster’s invasion in 1399, and few of his former retainers rallied to support the “Epiphany Plot” in 1400, intended to restore him to the throne.’28 The prince cannot be held responsible for events nearly twenty-five years after his death but a retinue, household or affinity needed foundations from which to grow and a core around which it could develop. This was not something available to Richard and it was not something that he could fashion during the years of his minority; the ‘blunt instrument’ of his Cheshire archers and retainers was no more reliable than the mercenary forces recruited by Chandos and the Black Prince for the Spanish campaign.

  The young king’s close circle of knights also did not have the same military reputation as those of his father and grandfather. Thomas Walsingham called them knights of Venus rather than Mars, more suited to the bedchamber than the battlefield.

  Such men have also been held responsible for the style of Richard’s government and his own elevated conception of his kingship. The Gascon influence may have been important – Guichard d’Angle, Baldwin Raddington, John Devereux and David Craddock had all experienced the regime in Aquitaine, and Simon Burley in particular has been noted in context of his experiences of the Black Prince’s court – and through literary influences such as that of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum. This emphasised a subject’s obligation of obedience, claimed the greatest possible authority for a monarch, stated that all privilege and nobility came from the king and that as the supreme lawgiver he was himself above the law. Certainly both Burley and Michael de la Pole owned copies of Giles’ work. Such concepts also compounded traditions of Roman and civil law more generally. The continuity of personnel may well have had some influence and it may not have been beneficial to a young English monarch thrust prematurely on the throne as their mutual experience was in south-west France and their common frame of reference was far from London.29 However, to emphasise this link does raise questions about the nature of theprince’s court in Bordeaux and/or the ‘despotic’ requirements of service with Richard and behaviour in his presence. If the collapse of the principality of Aquitaine was, if only in part, attributable to the appalling manner in which Edward treated his subjects then it does not seem likely that Burley or anyone else would encourage the young king to follow a pattern of behaviour that had such disastrous consequences. The most regularly cited example and comparison concerns court etiquette and Richard’s demand that subjects should kneel if he so much as glanced at them. It should be noted, however, that this is only evidenced in a single source, as is the Anonimalle Chronicle account of the prince requiring his great magnates to wait for hours on their knees before addressing him.30

  Caroline Barron described Richard’s rule as ‘arbitrary, uncustomary and bore heavily on certain individuals’, but noted that this ‘formed the normal small change of English medieval kingship’ and it was unlikely that it was ‘widely resented or so unpopular as seriously to undermine Richard’s government’.31 Similarly, Nigel Saul has suggested that ’in character and style there was probably little to distinguish it [Richard’s court] from the other main courts of the day’.32

  One of the most striking and yet elusive images of Richard II is in the Wilton Diptych. It has been interpreted in many ways. ‘At the most eccentric end of the scale is [the] suggestion that [the diptych] was commissioned by Richard’s half-sister as a memorial to their mother, Joan of Kent – that the Virgin Mary is a portrait of Joan and the Christ Child is Edward of Angoulême, Richard’s elder brother who died in infancy, handing over his inheritance to him.’33 Portraits of Edward II, Edward III and the Black Prince have also been suggested as providing the models for the saints presenting Richard to Jesus.34 The combination of secular and religious themes is also extremely significant and has engendered considerable debate. Yet, as Nigel Saul says, ‘It is doubtful if Richard saw anything incongruous in this combination of religious and secular imagery. Throughout his reign he viewed kingship in essentially religious terms [and] [h]e was deeply conscious of [its] theocratic roots.’ Furthermore, ‘The fusion of religious and secular ideas, evident in the symbolism and subject-matter of the
Diptych, also found expression in the king’s commitment to the suppression of heresy.’35 This is particularly interesting considering the household in which he was raised and the religious peccadilloes evident therein.

  That household, and perhaps the centre of a circle around which those of less-than-orthodox religious attitude gathered was that of the king’s mother. Joan of Kent has tended to be remembered for the intricacies of her marriages or misremembered for her role in the Order of the Garter. Yet, both she and members of her knights and associates played significant political roles in the last years of Edward III’s reign and after his death in 1377. The construction of the household of the Fair Maid, ‘la plus belle et plus amoreuse’ in all the land, after the death of her second (or third) husband after 1376, is not merely a footnote to the career of the Black Prince but a worthy topic in itself. This is because of Joan’s status after 1377, as the king’s mother in the minority years of her son, as a study of the entourage of one of the great dowagers, and for the careers and particular interests of those who comprised her following. With regard to such interests, it is well known that John Wyclif received the support and favour of John of Gaunt, certainly in February 1377 and again, through the intervention of Princess Joan, in March 1378. It has also been asserted that the Lollard knights, identified by the chroniclers Thomas Walsingham and Henry Knighton, formed a ‘court circle’ in the reign of Richard II that was active in parliament and may have received support or at least shared some views with Thomas of Woodstock, who may not have been the only son of Edward III to have harboured such attitudes. It has also been suggested, although with little evidence, that the ‘prince was a man of vaguely puritanical religion’.36 If so, this may have chimed with Joan’s own sympathies. Among the executors of her will were the Lollard knights, John Clanvowe, William Beauchamp, Lewis Clifford, and Richard Stury, although they also included Robert Braybroke and William of Wickham, bishops of London and Winchester respectively.37 Among the other Lollard knights, William Neville served in Richard’s household as prince of Wales and had long been associated with the family. Reginald Hilton may have been in the prince’s service in the diocese of Lichfield and became controller of Richard’s wardrobe. Thomas Latimer had some connections to the prince and served in the 1355 expedition and in Spain, but this may have been in a ‘freelance’ capacity, while John Montague, who maintained the Wyclifite preacher, Nicholas Hereford, in his house at Shenley, was a knight of the prince’s household from 1354 and Richard’s steward from 1381–6.38