by John Gardner
Men were blissfully proud to be Englishmen in Edward’s day. When he began his reign, English military power was negligible. By the time the yeoman Geoffrey Chaucer came to know King Edward, English fighting men, both knights and infantry, were the joy of the Ringing Isle. English knights, guided by Edward, had learned respect for lowborn archers and dagger fighters—not that any English knight thought an archer his social equal. Serfs who fought bravely were regularly promoted or “released” into freemen, a practice virtually unknown before. On the home front, common men gained power in parliament, and courts of law became considerably more liberal, since mustering troops and raising money for war were both heavily dependent on the commoners’ good will. The result, despite plagues, bad harvests, and failing trade, was a general, often near-hysterical excitement, a great surge of English self-confidence.
Young Geoffrey Chaucer, whatever his sophistication and innate good sense, must have felt the same thrill every other Englishman felt in King Edward’s presence. If he ever believed King Edward wrong—he leaves no sign, but other poets were occasionally critical—he doubted as one of the fiercely loyal opposition. He never for a moment shared the modern historian’s distaste for Edward’s love of ostentation—an objectionable trait in lowborn guildsmen, Chaucer would have said (as in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales), but a noble virtue in a man like Duke Theseus (in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Anelida and Arcite), a godlike man such as Edward III. At sixteen or so he must have believed, as Englishmen twice his age believed, that Edward was a virtually faultless king, a shining gift to England straight from heaven. If the future poet were not already a staunch royalist, through his father’s influence and later Prince Lionel’s, he would have become one the day he met his king.
At some point during his attendance on the countess, Chaucer met Edward’s pride and joy and the darling of all England, young Edward, Prince of Wales, more often in his own day “le Prince d’Angleterre”—later called by Tudor historians (because of his black armor, designed for the joust) “the Black Prince.” He was by all accounts even more handsome than his father, as fanatically chivalric, as fond of jousting and the excitement of war—also beautiful women—and as capable as his father of stirring his followers to heroic loyalty and superhuman courage. He was a hero at Crécy and was made governor of Gascony in 1355, where he went in September with a small, top-notch army (bulky medieval equivalent of the modern commando or terrorist outfit) to make trouble for the French. He spent the autumn pillaging and burning the suburbs of the ancient cities of Narbonne and Carcassonne, then ravaging the Mediterranean provinces. He could lure no French army out to meet him, but he succeeded well in that he humiliated the enemy, kept France disorganized, depleted her resources, temporarily cemented the loyalty of the Gascons to Edward III, and, of course, enriched his raiders. The following year—he was now just twenty-six—he moved further afield, perhaps to meet Henry of Lancaster, blind Henry’s son, and, with Lancaster’s help, strike at central and northwest France. On September 17, 1356—at about the time Chaucer was applying for service with the countess of Ulster—the Black Prince, marching cross-country to Poitiers under a low, brooding sky, his army’s horses loaded down, and every wagon he’d been able to steal piled high with booty, collided with a French reconnaissance party. Despite his overladen outfit’s clumsiness, the Black Prince took prisoners—two French counts—and continued the march. The following day he met, much to his displeasure, the main French army, in the personal command of King John the Good. The French, looking up at the invaders, laughed. Young Edward treated for time. It was a Sunday, and the cardinal nuncios were able to secure a brief truce.
On Monday, as most French historians reconstruct it, and they are probably correct, the Black Prince attempted to break away, but John outflanked him. The English were almost certainly outnumbered by as much as five to one (the point has been disputed), and they were, in any case, battle-weary and laden down with the spoils of their raiding. But the countryside’s numerous old, dark woods and its natural baffle of vineyards still in leaf, with swampy ground stretching between the prince and his enemy, were favorable to defense; and the prince remembered his father’s tactics at Crécy: keep to high ground, with the sun behind your back.
The ensuing battle has been described as the longest and one of the most vicious in all the Middle Ages. Again and again the English broke and fled; again and again the man in black armor, visor lifted, cajoled, inspired, or cursed them back to order. By the force of his will, his own daredevil courage, his near-maniacal faith in the divine right and might of Englishmen, he inspired his troops as no English leader had done since the days of King Alfred. When the archers were out of arrows, they tore arrows from the bodies of fallen men and horses, and fired again; when their lances were broken, the English cavalry fought with splintered stubs, later with looted household knives, hammers and axes, and, in the end, with stones. Such fantastic great-heartedness—if not lunacy—was irresistible: the columns of King John’s huge, seasoned army broke up in disorder and fled. The slaughter was unspeakable, the glory of the victory incomparable. Among the 1,975 prisoners rich enough to be worth taking alive were the king of France, his youngest son, an archbishop, eighteen counts and viscounts, and twenty-one barons.
Le Prince d’Angleterre wintered in Bordeaux, accepted a French truce, and waited on his captive, King John, like a servant. In May he transported his prisoners into Plymouth and made a three-week triumphal progress toward London, hailed along the way by a weeping, hysterically joyful populace. His train of wooden-wheeled, booty-laden carts stretched miles behind him like the glittering tail of a dragon.
There was probably no sign in that glorious prince, when Chaucer first knew him, of what would come later. He was still all chivalry, all beauty, in 1357. But there was tragedy ahead: sickness, mental breakdown, despair. In 1362, when he became sovereign of Gascony, his favoritism—bestowing all important posts not on Gascons but on his own followers—would lead to serious trouble and the eventual loss of Gascony; but that was mere error, not a serious deficiency of character. He was still a man of principle when, in 1367, he fought (victoriously, as always) to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Navarre and refused to surrender those opponents of Pedro whom he’d taken as prisoner, knowing how Pedro would deal with them. (They later managed to assassinate King Pedro.) While in Spain the prince contracted the disease—perhaps tuberculosis—which would eventually kill him; and by 1370, he was grotesquely changed, not just in body but in mind. King Edward’s European vassals and allies were by this time deserting him on every side. Since the prince was ill, apparently close to death, the king had shifted his faith to Prince Edward’s younger brother, conservative John of Gaunt, now duke of Lancaster—his wife having inherited the duchy of Lancaster from her father, Earl Henry. Desperate, perhaps feeling he was running out of time, the Black Prince set his heart on teaching all potential defectors to France one final lesson.
His chance came with the defection of Limoges—a beautiful and prosperous city on the Vienne. Against the urgent pleading of John of Gaunt, his closest friend as well as his brother, the Black Prince organized an expediton and set out at its head, riding on a litter, every jolt sending agony through his body. He found the great gates of the city closed, the walls manned by citizens with makeshift weapons. For a week the prince lay, sleepless and feverish, haggard, perspiring, in his splendid battle tent, cursing his men on as they worked at a tunnel below the walls. At last they set the wooden supports afire, and about dawn, a section of the wall collapsed. The prince’s servants carried the litter across the rubble as the English troops flooded in, wiping out the ineffectual civilian defenders, and, at the prince’s command, began murdering every man, woman, and child in the city. To all pleas for mercy the Black Prince dramatically turned away his face. Only a small number of the leading citizens had inspired the revolt, as the prince knew full well; the common people could do nothing but obey. Yet he order
ed the litter dragged through the town, from street to street and lane to lane, watching the bloody execution of his own wailing subjects.
King Edward’s second son, William, died in infancy. His third son, Prince Lionel, Chaucer, as an attendant to Prince Lionel’s wife, must have known intimately. The man is perhaps the hardest of all Edward’s sons to understand or assess. Historians have almost universally berated him. We read, for instance: “He was lazy, cruel and vain. His good looks had ensured from childhood that there was always a woman to spoil him—first his mother and later his wife and various mistresses.”6 Except for the charge of laziness, the same could of course be said of virtually all of Edward’s sons (and of Edward himself), handsome men, adored by women and extravagantly admired by men, capable of cruelty but also of fits of generosity. He was born in Antwerp in 1338 and given the romantic name “Lionel” perhaps in honor of the Lion of Brabant. Since he could expect little from the paternal estates, he must be advanced by marriage or not at all. He had the terrible luck we know now, by hindsight, to be married off to Elizabeth of Burgh, granddaughter of the Lady Elizabeth of Clare and only child of William of Burgh, earl of Ulster. This gave him, among other things, nominal control of the earldom of Ulster, an area perhaps even less comfortable then than now. King Edward sent him there as lord lieutenant, shortly after Chaucer left the service of Lionel’s wife, and the prince failed miserably.
His rule in Ireland was undoubtedly tyrannical. No native Irishman was permitted to come near him, either in the castle of Dublin or when he moved through the town. He overtaxed his subjects and never appeared without numerous bodyguards, whom he is said to have permitted to rape and pillage as they liked. He manipulated passage of the Statute of Kilkenny, which prohibited all connection, through marriage or otherwise, between the English and the Irish. But bad as all this sounds, it probably reflects fairly standard feeling among the English of the day concerning Irishmen. If Lionel had been a more intelligent, less selfish man, he might have seen that in acting on his whims and prejudices he was sowing dragon’s teeth for future generations; but here Lionel was like his father Edward, of whom it has been said, not unjustly, that along with more endearing boyish qualities “he retained too a certain youthful petulance and shortsightedness, a readiness to sacrifice the future for the present, to give almost any price for what at the moment he passionately desired.”7 If the Black Prince was more noble in his rule of Gascony—more understanding and generous—part of the reason is that he did not fundamentally despise all Gascons as Lionel did the Irish. Lionel, like many medieval Englishmen, judging by the chronicles, hated the Irish—disliked their outlandish dress of furs, the wild-man manners of their warrior chieftains, their reputation (largely unjustified) for treachery. When the enlightened Richard II, toward the end of the century, attempted with some success to understand and conciliate the Irish, his own people reacted with contempt.
For Lionel, things went from bad to worse. Upon the death of Countess Elizabeth, he was married off to the beautiful heiress of the Visconti family—potential heiress, too, of a good part of the fortune of her uncle, the lord of Milan. The dowry offered was two million gold florins, part in advance, along with vast estates in northern Italy. Prince Lionel was married in Milan Cathedral on June 5, 1368. Four months later he was dead, by some reports having “addicted himself overmuch to untimely banquetings,” by others, having been murdered by poison.
When Chaucer first knew him, Prince Lionel had not yet left for Ireland. He was a mother’s boy, certainly, though not necessarily in an ugly sense. He had no overwhelming love of athletics, but he was proud of his older brother, the Black Prince (King Edward’s family, even in times of disagreement, was close), and in many respects Prince Lionel aped his elder brother: the extravagant dress, the arrogance, the flirtations. Lionel was shy, more comfortable with his mother and her intellectual friends than with his heroic father—more sure of his ground when talking about poetry or painting than when talking about war. He was a depressive, an evader. He ate too much, drank too much, avoided responsibility by humor or deep glooms. What Chaucer thought of him is impossible to say, except for this: he was loyal to King Edward’s family all his life, as they were, for the most part, to each other (as all the chronicles remark). Whether or not Chaucer liked Prince Lionel, the probability is that like Queen Philippa, he could easily excuse him.
As we’ve seen already, King Edward’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, was roughly—perhaps almost exactly—Chaucer’s age. It seems highly unlikely that the two did not meet between 1357 and 1359. What they thought of each other no one really knows, but later, in his poetry, Chaucer would treat John of Gaunt as a paragon of virtue. The poet’s first great poem, the Book of the Duchess, is an elegy to Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, daughter of Earl Henry, and a tribute to Gaunt. There is fair evidence that Gaunt and Chaucer became very close friends—not just brothers-in-law, though they became that too, but friends who were like brothers.
Traditionally historians have not liked Gaunt, more swayed by the hostility of the duke’s contemporaries than by Shakespeare’s admiration; but recent historians incline to the view that, with the exception of his father-in-law Henry of Lancaster, Gaunt was perhaps the best man in all the group. He had the usual family faults. He fell in love too easily, though he later became a model of faithfulness to Katherine Swynford, first as lover, later as husband. He was not, as some historians have imagined, a complete military incompetent. His “great march through France,” which some modern historians consider a disaster, was regarded in his own time as a superb feat. His numerous retreats and doubtful compromises show sometimes a tendency toward self-interest (understandable, given his situation), but mainly show a military leader more concerned about his men than about victory at any cost. It is worth remembering that the Black Prince’s glorious victory at Poitiers, when his army of berserkers took the day with stones, came in a battle only joined because retreat was cut off. Gaunt’s battles in Spain, where in the 1380’s he struggled to seize the Castilian crown, were not at all mere “romantic ventures,” much less simply grabs at a foreign throne, as his detractors have suggested (Gaunt had at this time, through marriage to Princess Constance of Castile, a reasonable claim, as such things were then determined); they were, first and foremost, attempts, like those of his brother the Black Prince, to control the Spanish navy and establish against France a second front. Professor Williams says, rightly,
There is no record of [Gaunt’s] ever having betrayed a friend, or swerved in loyalty to a supporter. His continued protection of Wyclif, even after he broke with the Reformer on theological issues, and even after supporting him became unpopular and dangerous, is well-known. His biographer Armitage-Smith speaks of him as one who held the laws of chivalry sacred; who had a fine “knightly modesty”; who was notably courageous; who valued learning; who left behind him a record, in a century that could be savage, “extraordinarily free from acts of violence and oppression”; who sympathized with the poor and the humble; who did many an act of kindness and of charity; and who had a reputation for sincere and profound piety.
Williams adds, again rightly, “We should not feel either surprised or outraged if we find that Chaucer regarded this man as both great and good, and felt honored by his friendship. Rather (if we try to view matters with fourteenth-century eyes), it would have been surprising and even disgraceful of Chaucer not to have esteemed such a man.”8. While England’s beloved King Edward was alive and England felt self-confident (or overconfident), Gaunt was a stabilizing influence, a spokesman against war’s waste of money and human life. When Richard II became king and began to show his colors as an unfashionable pacifist, a stubborn advocate of royal prerogative, and an arrogant intellectual who seems to have detested from the bottom of his heart the rising power of his magnates (though he tried to be just and, by his own by-no-means-dim lights, kingly), Gaunt was a powerful spokesman for compromise and patience.
Gaunt was a lo
ver of ideas and books, and would grow increasingly to be a supporter of inquiry and, as in his concern for Geoffrey Chaucer, a patron of the arts. He believed profoundly—like others in his family—in intellectual exploration; so much so that, years afterward, when Oxford’s leading theological investigator was to be tried for his possibly heretic opinions—opinions with which Gaunt personally disagreed—Gaunt would appear with his army to defend by force, if necessary, what we now call academic freedom. Gaunt was equally dependable in the joust, though he was never as dazzling as his brother the Black Prince or his father. Like all his family, he believed on principle in ritual, pageantry, and ostentatious display; thought it shameful to explain his decisions to inferiors; and could be fierce, though never unjust (by medieval standards) in meting out punishment for wrongdoing. Unlike his relatives—his father, for instance, whose frequently ingenious moneymaking schemes were repeatedly vitiated by graft and inefficiency—Gaunt was murderously efficient, at least in his own personal affairs, in collecting what was due him. Partly for this reason, partly because of his notorious haughtiness—his bold interference in London’s business when John Wyclif was being tried there for heresy—and partly for other, more complicated reasons, Gaunt’s palace on the Savoy would be the number one target of rebellious peasants in 1381. But Gaunt’s haughtiness was for strangers, not friends. Chaucer says of him in the Book of the Duchess: