1. There is no reason to think that his sobriquet, 'the Black Prince', probably occasioned by his black armour, was ever attached to him during his lifetime. Its earliest recorded appearance dates only from the sixteenth century.
The principal threat was to the right wing commanded by the young Prince of Wales, where a number of French knights, together with a group of Germans and Savoyards, had braved the arrows and were now fighting hand-to-hand with the English men-at-arms. At one point, Froissart tells us, the Prince was down on his knees, protected only by his standard-bearer Richard de Beaumont, who sheltered him with the banner of Wales until he once again struggled to his feet; and the Earls of Warwick and Oxford who were fighting beside him dispatched one of their knights, Sir Thomas of Norwich, to the King with an urgent appeal for help. Edward, informed of the situation, asked only whether his son was dead or wounded. On hearing that he was so far unharmed, though fighting desperately for his life, he sent Sir Thomas back to his superiors. 'Give them my command,' he said, 'to let the boy win his spurs; for if God has so ordained it I wish the day to be his, and the honour to go to him and to those in whose charge I have placed him.'
The Prince and his companions finally routed their assailants, who were forced to retire. Meanwhile, in the gathering twilight, King Philip lost all control of the Battle and his army lapsed into confusion. The fighting continued until long after dark; by morning, more than a third of the French army lay dead on the field. Among them - together with the King's brother the Duke of Alencon, his nephew Guy of Blois, the Duke of Lorraine and the Count of Flanders, nine French counts and over fifteen hundred knights — was the blind John of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia, who had insisted on being led into the fray to strike at least one blow with his sword. His entourage, in order not to lose him, had tied his horse's bridle to their own; they had then 'advanced so far forward that they all remained on the field, not one of them escaping alive. They were found the next day, the knights lying round their leader, with their horses still fastened together.' The King's body was washed in warm water and wrapped in a clean linen shroud, and a solemn mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Durham for the repose of his soul; the Prince of Wales, however, appropriated his badge of the three ostrich feathers and the motto Ich Dien — 'I Serve' - which his distant successor still bears to this day.
Dawn brought a heavy fog - not unusual in Picardy in late August - and the Earls of Arundel, Northampton and Suffolk set off with a considerable force of mounted knights to look for the King and for any other important Frenchmen who might be trying to escape. They did not find Philip, but came instead upon the bulk of the French infantry, together with a number of high church dignitaries including the Archbishop of Rouen and the Grand Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. None of these had heard anything of the battle, and at first assumed that they had come upon a group of their own compatriots. They were soon disillusioned; the English were in no mood for mercy. All the churchmen were killed in cold blood, as were the majority of the infantry - four times as many, according to one report, as lost their lives in the main encounter.
King Edward - again according to Froissart - had remained at the windmill that he had chosen for his command post and had not once donned his helmet throughout the battle. Yet it was to him, rather than to his son, that the victory truly belonged. His alone was the strategy that had made it possible, while his coolness under fire and his shrewd tactical sense stood out in marked contrast to the impetuousness and lack of control shown by his adversary.1 It was clear, too, that he better than anyone else understood the way in which warfare was evolving. The development of the longbow, capable in skilled hands of penetrating chain mail - or even a steel breastplate - from a range of a hundred yards or more, meant that henceforth any cavalry charge could be stopped in its tracks. As for artillery, such primitive devices as existed were used exclusively for siege warfare; it would be well over a century before cannon and musketry proved their supremacy over the drawn bowstring, and the balance swung once again in favour of the aggressor rather than the defence.
And what, finally, of King Philip? Twice unhorsed and twice wounded, he had seen his standard-bearer killed in front of him and had fought as valiantly as any of his men. With the help of John, Count of Hainault, he managed to escape from the battlefield and rode under cover of darkness to the castle of Labroye, whose seneschal, roused in the small hours, demanded to know who it was who so insistently sought admittance. 'Open quickly,' answered Philip, 'for I am the
The chronicler of the Abbey of Saint-Denis suggests another reason for the French defeat: 'The common soldiers wore tight shirts, so short that they exposed their private parts every time they bent over. The noblemen, on the other hand, wore hauberks extravagantly decorated and surmounted by vainglorious feathery crests. The Lord God, offended by so much obscenity and vanity, decided to use the King of England as His flail, to beat the French host into the ground.'
fortune of France.' He was indeed. As his son was to prove ten years later at Poitiers, France could ill afford the cost of a captured king.
From Sluys the play wings us forward six years to the preliminaries to the battle of Crecy. A short introductory scene (III.ii), based on a passage in Froissart, shows the local population taking flight at the coming of the English host, after which (III,iii) Edward enters, followed shortly afterwards by his son the Black Prince. The Prince proudly lists to his father the cities he has taken since his arrival in France — in fact, father and son had made the conquests together — and tells him that the French army, 'With full a hundred thousand fighting men', is already being drawn up on the field. No sooner have the words left his Hps than 'King John'1 himself appears with his train. This is another imaginary scene, in which the two kings hurl insults at each other: Edward gives 'John' one last opportunity to give up the French throne
Before the sickle's thrust into the corn
Or that enkindled fury turn to flame?
but his offer is rejected with contempt:
Edward, I know what right thou hast in France,
And ere I basely will resign my crown
This champion field shall be a pool of blood
And all our prospect as a slaughter-house.
Historically there was no meeting of the two kings before the battle; nor do the chroniclers report any rousing speeches made to their respective armies of the kind made by the French King in the play. Imagined too is the ceremonial arming of the Black Prince by Edward and his nobles. Dramatically, on the other hand, the two incidents are more than justified; the arming of the Prince in particular is a brilliant touch. Battles, by their very nature, cannot be satisfactorily presented on a stage (though Shakespeare was to make the attempt on several occasions in the future). It is all the more important for the playwright to provide an adequate build-up, to leave his audience in no doubt as
i. See pp. 18—19 and note, and 23-4.
to the importance of the coming confrontation. Here we are given first a war of words, and then a series of short ceremonies which reflect all the panoply and pageantry of Battle - reminding us, too, of the military qualities of the Black Prince, whose youthful vigour is such that his father names the hardened old warrior Lord Audley to fight at his side.1
The encounter itself is encapsulated in two brief incidents, both in III,iii and both derived from Froissart through Holinshed. The first, only a dozen lines long, shows us the breathless 'King John' with the Duke of Lorraine (who, historically, lost his life on the field, though there is no suggestion of this in the play) watching the flight of the French army - for which they rightly blame the Genoese mercenaries although, if Holinshed is to be believed, the latter certainly had a lot to bear:
The third time againe the Genowaies leapt, and yelled, and went foorth till they came within shot, and fiercelie therwith discharged their crossbowes. Then the English archers stept foorth one pase, and let fhe their arrowes so wholie and so thicke togither, that it seemed to snowe. When
the Genowaies felt the arrowes persing their heads, armes and breasts, manie of them cast downe their crossbowes, and cut the strings, and returned discomfited . . .
Then ye might haue seene the men of armes haue dasht in amongst them, and killed a great number of them, and euer the Englishmen shot where they saw the thickest prease: the sharpe arrowes ran into the men of armes, and into their horsses, and manie fell horsse and man amongst the Genowaies, and still the Englishmen shot. . . The throng was such that one ouerthrew another; also among the Englishmen, there were certeine of the footmen with great kniues, that went in among the men of armes, and killed manie of them as they laie on the ground, both earles, barons, knights, and esquires.
Then, represented at considerably greater length, comes the famous occasion in which King Edward refuses to send help to his beleaguered son, despite an appeal from Audley himself:
Lord Audley - in fact Sir James Audley - is repeatedly presented in the play as an old man: in line 124, Prince Charles of France goes so far as to address him as 'aged impotent'. At the time of Crecy he was in fact in his early thirties.
Audley, content: I will not have a man,
On pain of death, sent forth to succour him:
This is the day ordain'd by destiny
To season his courage with those grievous thoughts, That, if he break out, Nestor's years on earth,
Will make him savour still of this exploit.
The Prince, as we know, never lived Nestor's 'three generations of men'; nor indeed did he fight in the same part of the battle as the old King of Bohemia, whose body he now brings triumphantly to his father as 'this first fruit of my sword, ‘Cropp'd and cut down even at the gate of death'. There is no doubt, however, that he fought magnificently, amply deserving the knighthood that, in the play, his father now bestows upon him. He had in fact been knighted the previous July, shortly after the landing in Normandy; but once again Shakespeare is thinking dramatically rather than historically, and the brief ceremony adds immeasurably to the battle's aftermath.1
As soon as he had buried his dead, Edward advanced to Calais. He had no legal claim to the city: it had never been English. Even the French had long been put off by its marshy approaches and general difficulty of access; it was only in the past century or so that the Counts of Boulogne had recognized its strategic importance and developed it into the prosperous and strongly fortified city that it had now become. But to the King of England, too, its advantages were clear. Standing at the point where the Channel was at its narrowest, only twenty-two miles from the English coast, Calais promised him not only a far more convenient bridgehead than the ports of Flanders, being a good deal nearer to Gascony, but the all-important control of the eastern approach to the straits. It would not, however, be easy in the taking. Behind its formidable walls, protected by a double ditch fed by the sea itself, there waited a strong and determined garrison under an outstandingly able commander (even though he was a martyr to gout) named Jean de
1. It is plain that this scene (Ill.iv) is meant to end without the last six lines - which make no sense in the present context - and belong somewhere else. A possible explanation is suggested in the New Cambridge edition (p. 133) but need not concern us here.
Vienne. A direct assault was obviously out of the question; the only hope lay in a blockade. And so, early in September, the English encamped on the flat and windy marshes and built what was in effect a small wooden village, named by Edward Villeneuve-le-Hardi. (French was still the language of the English court.) The siege threatened to be long, so it was only sensible to make themselves as comfortable as possible.
Winter came, and spring, and summer - and still Calais held out. The blockade proved in the main successful; but the English fleet, constantly patrolling the roadstead, suffered much harassment from Norman privateers and lost no fewer than fifteen vessels during the siege. Already in October 1346 news had reached the camp that the Scots, traditional allies of France, had attempted a diversion by crossing the Tweed and laying waste the County Palatine of Durham. Edward, however, had made no move against them. He had foreseen the danger and when raising troops for his new offensive had deliberately refrained from calling out the northern border levies, whom he had left under the command of the Nevills, the Percys, the Archbishop of York William Zouche and other local magnates, so that they should be ready to deal with just such an emergency. Soon afterwards came a report that these levies had fallen on the Scots at Neville's Cross just outside Durham, cut them to pieces and taken prisoner their King, David II.1 More good news followed: Charles of Blois, the French claimant to the duchy of Brittany, had been captured by Sir Thomas Dagworth at La Roche-Darrien, while in Gascony the French army had given up the siege of Aiguillon and retired across the Loire. Edward, however, had refused to be deflected from Calais. The city was now completely blockaded by land and sea; its only hope, as he well knew, lay in the possibility of a relief expedition - of which, after eleven months, there was still no sign.
Finally, at the end of July 1347, King Philip appeared with his army on the cliff at Sangatte, a mile or two to the west of Calais. He was horrified by what he saw. Villeneuve-le-Hardi had become a veritable town. A network of well laid-out streets surrounded a market place,
1. Another casualty of the battle was the famous Black Rood of Scotland, a piece of the True Cross set in an ebony crucifix which St Margaret, wife of King Malcolm Canmore, had left to the Scottish nation on her death in 1093. The English captured it and deposited it in the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. There it remained till the Reformation, when it was lost and almost certainly destroyed.
where regular markets were held on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There were, writes Froissart, 'haberdashers' and butchers' shops, stalls selling cloth and bread and other necessities, so that almost anything could be bought there. All these things were brought over daily by sea from England, and goods and foodstuffs were also supplied from Flanders.' This prosperous little community could of course have been easily destroyed, had Philip been able to reach it; but Edward, forewarned, had made the necessary dispensations. Loading his ships with archers, catapults and bombards, he had drawn them up in the shallow water along the whole length of coast between Sangatte and Calais, making any advance along the shore impossible. The only other route, through the marshy, swampy ground behind the dunes, depended on a bridge at Nieulay where he had posted his cousin the Earl of Derby (recently arrived from Gascony) with the remaining archers and men-at-arms. The most cursory reconnaissance — effected with the full cooperation of the English - was enough to convince the King of France that the situation was hopeless. He made the usual formal request for a pitched battle at some mutually acceptable spot, but cannot have been surprised when Edward refused it. The next morning he and his army were gone.
The departure of his sovereign told Jean de Vienne all he needed to know. The citizens of Calais were by now near starvation; if Froissart is to be believed, the commander had already expelled 'all poore and meane peple' — those who could not contribute to the defence of the town and simply constituted extra mouths to feed - to the number of 1,700. Further resistance was pointless. He now signalled his readiness to surrender, provided only that the King would promise safe conduct for all the citizens. Edward first refused point-blank: Calais had cost him vast quantities of money and the lives of countless soldiers and sailors, together with almost a year of his own. But when his two envoys, Lord Basset and Sir Walter Manny, returned to report that in that event the city would continue to resist, he relented. Manny — according once again to Froissart — was sent back to Jean de Vienne with new conditions: six of the principal citizens must present themselves before the King, barefoot and bare-headed, with halters round their necks and the keys of the city and of the castle in their hands. With them he would do as he pleased; the rest of the population would be spared.
The English terms were proclaimed in the market place, and immediately the richest of all the burghers, Master Eust
ache de Saint-Pierre, stepped forward. Before long five others had joined him. There and then the six stripped to their shirts and breeches, donned the halters, took the keys and made their way to the gates, led by Jean de Vienne himself mounted on a pony, his sword reversed in token of submission. On their arrival before the King they knelt before him, presented him with the keys and begged for mercy. Edward refused to listen, and ordered their immediate execution; Sir Walter pleaded with him in vain. Only when Queen Philippa, then heavily pregnant, threw herself on her knees before her husband and begged him to spare them did he finally relent.
The Queen thanked him from the bottom of her heart, then rose to her feet and told the six burghers to rise also. She had the halters taken from their necks and led them into her apartment. They were given new clothes and an ample dinner. Then each was presented with six nobles and they were escorted safely through the English army and went to live in various towns in Picardy.1
Shakespeare's Kings Page 5