The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  He marked the beginning of his reign with a series of tournaments, mainly held around London and the south-east. Here he presented himself at once as a knightly king, his court a centre of revelry and fun, romance and martial competition. ‘This king led a gay life in jousts and tournaments and entertaining ladies,’ wrote Sir Thomas Gray. Tournaments would become a near-monthly feature of his reign, each one an occasion for the great men and women of the realm to dress up in splendid costumes, acting out roles as fierce animals, mythical beasts and heavenly beings, rehearsing great stories from history and legend, and cavorting about dressed mischievously as friars, merchants or priests. Large and keenly fought mock battles took place, which both bonded the aristocrats who fought in them and provided valuable training for a time that was to be dominated, once more, by real warfare.

  The king at the centre of it all was a vigorous, athletic, enterprising young man. Most representations of him show a slightly delicate face, with a long, slender nose beneath wide, deep-set eyes and a flat brow. He had a high forehead and in keeping with the times, wore a long beard – described as ‘berry-brown’ by a poem written in the mid-1350s – throughout his adult life. Thick, wavy hair hid his ears and stood out from beneath the fine hat or commander’s helmet that he almost invariably wore. He was an exceptional horseman and a redoubtable warrior – as well as a paragon of chivalric magnificence. He and Queen Philippa had a taste for the finest clothes, which they would have embroidered with slogans and quasi-cryptic royal sayings – some of Edward’s favourite mottoes later in his life included ‘It is as it is’, ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/By Godes soule I am thy man’, and ‘Syker as ye wodebynd’ (Strong as the woodbine). Queen Philippa’s slogans included ‘Ich wyndemuth’ (I wind myself [around you]) and ‘Myn biddeneye’ (My bidding). The coin struck to commemorate Edward’s coronation had featured a slogan that captured the king’s lifelong confidence and ease in his own office: ‘I did not take; I received’.

  Outward show and pageantry was an essential skill for any king, but Edward had a better intuition for it than any of his predecessors – excepting only Henry III. He imported the finest gold cloth from the Far East, and his robes were decorated with exotic animals: leopards, tigers, pelicans and falcons. He loved music, and as his court travelled it rang with minstrels singing, drums and lutes filling the air with sound – the king at the heart of it all, laughing with joy at the spectacle he created. He kept a menagerie which included lions, leopards, a bear and various apes and monkeys. He was as avid a huntsman as any king before him – of his forebears only Henry II could have matched the thrill Edward got from thundering on horseback through his parks, forests and the English countryside, chasing down wild animals to shed their blood. The thousands of pounds he spent on sumptuous costumes and lavish entertainment for himself, his friends and his family combined to create a vision of royal power that was worthy of celebration. In tune with his personal knack for charming the ladies of the court and striking up close, brotherly friendships with the men, Edward began from the earliest days of his personal reign to bind the noblemen and knights of England – the political class with whom all successful kings would cultivate a natural amity – to his rule.

  But Edward III was more than a royal clothes-horse. He was a conventionally educated young aristocrat, versed in the spheres of knowledge and culture that fitted his position. He spoke both English and the courtly language of northern French. Brought up surrounded by scholars such as Richard Bury (who would become one of his closest advisers), he had absorbed what they had taught him. He was literate beyond the simple standard of being able to read in Latin and French: Edward is the first English king to leave us examples of his handwriting. He took his instruction on kingship from the variety of classic texts on governance known as the ‘mirrors for princes’ – books by European scholars analysing the great achievements and ignoble failures of rulers modern and ancient, which were designed to reveal sound principles of leadership to their readers. Edward had been fascinated from his youth by the great heroes of history and mythology, and he was especially taken with a popular fourteenth-century literary staple: the lives of the Nine Worthies. (These consisted of three ‘good pagans’ – Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; three great biblical kings – Joshua, David and Judas Maccabaeus; and three great Christian kings – Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon, the first king of Jerusalem.) He consciously studied the lives of kings and would try to imbue his own reign with their best qualities, while avoiding their failures. Edward was fascinated by the providential quality of history, with its ability both to foreshadow the events of his own life and to set the conditions for the lives of his descendants. His contemporaries, excited by the dash of his Nottingham coup, were eager to see him as fulfilling the prophecies of Merlin – and Edward did not discourage them, visiting Glastonbury in 1331 and inspecting the great tomb of Arthur and Guinevere, which Edward I had commissioned. Indeed, of his Plantagenet ancestors Edward III reserved special veneration for Edward I, sending gold cloth to Westminster to deck his grandfather’s tomb, sharing his tastes for Arthuriana and ensuring that the anniversary of the death of the Hammer of the Scots was never neglected. The leopard – Edward I’s pejorative nickname during his youth – now became a symbol of Edward III’s kingship, in its heraldic form of the lion passant guardant.

  Yet for all this finery, Edward was also aware that kingship was, more than at any time before, a sacred bond between king and realm. As well as parading before his kingdom as a prince in glorious array, Edward was also comfortable adopting the guise of poor knight. At some tournaments he liked to fight incognito – disguised as an ordinary warrior, and competing shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporaries and companions. In his taste for the legends of Arthur, he was careful not to emulate Roger Mortimer’s arrogant assumption of the legendary king’s role. During the 1330s, Edward preferred to identify himself as one of the simple knights of the Round Table – most frequently Sir Lionel. Mortimer had been the first to assign him this role, when at a tournament held in 1329 at Mortimer’s home town of Wigmore the late tyrant had presented the king with a cup bearing Sir Lionel’s arms. That Edward persisted in playing Sir Lionel – wearing the same arms at the tournaments he held throughout the 1330s and christening his third son, born in Antwerp in 1338, by the fabled knight’s name – was a sign that he had not forgotten the values of enterprise and endeavour that had led him to overthrow Mortimer’s rule. It was also, perhaps, a wry joke.

  For the seven years that followed the start of his reign proper in 1330, Edward got to know his realm. The near-ceaseless tourneying drew him close to the political community on both a symbolic and a social level. A fruitful marriage to Queen Philippa, which had produced the young prince Edward of Woodstock in 1330, yielded more children at regular intervals: Isabella of Woodstock was born in May 1332, Joan of the Tower (of London) in late 1333, William of Hatfield (who died young) in December 1336, and Lionel of Antwerp in 1338. But there were wider problems in his realm that required attention beyond mere revelry and warlike posturing. For all the young king’s lusty grandeur, England was beset by troubles. The first three decades of the fourteenth century had been ruinous to the state of the realm and to public order. The Great Famine of 1315–22 had caused widespread misery and death, and the turbulent politics that had dogged Edward II’s reign from his coronation to his death had seen lawlessness thrive. In the Midlands, the Folville gang – a corrupt gentry family from Leicestershire – took to large-scale violence and spoliation, murdering their political enemies with impunity and even taking travelling judges hostage. A similar gang, known as the Cotterils, operated in the Peak District. Various attempts at sending judicial commissions into the shires to restore calm and royal law had met with resistance and collapsed under the strain of endemic abuses of local power.

  In response, Edward showed himself open to radical experiments with judicial reform. The itinerant system of the eyre – slow-moving tr
avelling county courts whose circuits might take seven years or more – was outdated and unwieldy. Instead, Edward listened in the parliament of March 1332 as the chief justice Sir Geoffrey Scrope led a debate on reforming law and order. The system that eventually emerged was one in which permanent royal offices were created in the counties to regulate criminal disorder. The role of keeper of the peace (the predecessors of justices of the peace) sprang from this reform, and it was to these officials – backed by ad hoc royal commissions to deal with special cases such as those of the Folvilles and Cotterils, commissions of oyer and terminer (‘hear and judge’), and sporadic local visitations of the Westminster court of King’s Bench – that the business of local peacekeeping would fall for the rest of the century. The system of English justice was institutionalized further than ever – no king would ever again ride as King John once had, sitting as judge where he chose and literally executing the judicial role of the Crown in person. Yet if the king as judge was fading away, the king as military captain was an idea that Edward determined should be stronger than ever.

  His first target was Ireland. Not for 120 years – since John’s expedition in 1210 – had an English king set foot in the lordship, but violent disorder was rife and the authority of the English king over the Anglo-Norman settler barons had crumbled almost to nothing. During the summer of 1332 plans were drawn up to send a massive invasion force across the Irish Sea to re-establish royal rule. Just at the point of readiness, however, they had to be abandoned. For on 11 August 1332, at Dupplin Moor, near Perth in Scotland, armies supporting the new Scottish king, Robert the Bruce’s son David II (who was Edward’s brother-in-law by marriage to the king’s sister Joanna), clashed with rebel forces known as ‘the Disinherited’. These rebels were made up of Scots who had lost all they had at Bannockburn. They fought under John Balliol’s son Edward and were supported by Edward’s friend and ally Henry Beaumont, a grizzled veteran of every major Scottish battle since Falkirk in 1298.

  The tiny army of the Disinherited – which may have been only 1,500 strong, a tenth of the size of the Bruce forces – won a stunning victory, killing numerous Scottish knights and earls. Balliol was proclaimed king at Scone on 24 September and Scotland sank again into utter disarray. Edward III at once abandoned his plans to invade Ireland, and turned his attention to the northern border. At a parliament held in York in January 1333 he announced his intention to invade Scotland, shattering the truce established in the treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton and reinvigorating the war for mastery that had stuttered so badly since the death of Edward I.

  Between 1333 and 1337 the capital of England became York, as Edward took the whole machine of government north to let him focus on the war. His army combined household troops, feudally summoned nobles with their knights, and foreign mercenaries, including the Hainaulters who had fought during Isabella and Mortimer’s ill-starred campaign. Regular soldiers were raised by array – a form of press gang by which conscripted men were paid a day wage once they set foot outside their home county – and included hobelars (light cavalry), infantry who fought with spears and knives, and archers who rode on horseback before dismounting to fight. Mounted archers would become the most tactically effective and dangerous element of English medieval armies, and during the course of his reign Edward would rely on them as his elite units, raising their status in the army well above the rest of the rank and file. If they were not quite equal to the aristocratic cavalry, mounted archers nevertheless became some of the most respected and feared warriors in Europe during the fourteenth century. They, and the rest of Edward’s armies, were fed and maintained in the field by the purveyance taken throughout the whole realm, a source of perennial grievance for English subjects.

  Edward’s campaign began in the spring of 1333. Throughout the summer his captains – among them William Montagu, Henry Percy and Henry earl of Lancaster’s son Henry Grosmont, barons all roughly of the king’s age and generation – assisted Edward Balliol in raiding across the border. Then the English laid siege to Berwick, before meeting the Scots in battle at Halidon Hill, two miles away.

  The tactics used at Halidon Hill were those developed by Henry Beaumont at Dupplin Moor, and they would serve Edward well during the course of his reign. Although his army was perhaps only half the size of the Scots’, Edward took up strong defensive positions on the hill, with three divisions of dismounted men-at-arms each flanked by dismounted archers. The king commanded the central division, Edward Balliol the left, and the king’s uncle the earl of Norfolk led the right, with the king’s younger brother John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall, beside him. There would be no cavalry charges at the Scottish schiltroms – Bannockburn had taught the English that these were suicidal tactics. Rather, as the massed bands of Scottish spearmen advanced up the hill, the English bowmen loosed a vicious hail of arrows upon them, causing panic and terror, and scattering much of the Scottish advance before it even reached the men-at-arms. By the time hand-to-hand combat was joined the Scots were already tired and terrified. Edward and his men attacked the enemy bravely, and the king fought hand-to-hand against Robert Stewart, the seventeen-year-old steward of Scotland. The battle very swiftly became a rout, with Edward and Balliol’s men remounting their horses and chasing the shattered Scots from the field. By the time the battle was over there had been another bloody slaughter of the finest Scottish nobles and knights, including six earls, whom the king had buried with chivalrous propriety.

  Edward’s victory at Halidon Hill was so complete that he was able to put Edward Balliol on the throne, reclaim Berwick for the English and lay claim to large tracts of territory in the Scottish Lowlands. He spent the second half of 1333 back in the south-east of England, hunting and holding tournaments. Early in 1334 Balliol agreed to return Scotland to full dominion status, making the Scottish Crown once again a dependency of the English. It seemed almost indecently easy.

  Of course, it was not. Since 1326, Scotland had been in alliance with France, and by June 1334, when Edward Balliol performed liege homage to Edward in Newcastle, it was known that the French king Philip VI had snatched the deposed King David II and his wife Joanna from Scotland and given them sanctuary in Normandy, where they were ensconced in Richard the Lionheart’s great fortress at Château Gaillard. In David’s absence, Scottish resistance rallied under Robert Bruce’s grandson, Robert Stewart, and John Randolph, the earl of Moray. Much of the winter of 1334 and the summer of 1335 Edward spent marching an army around the Lowlands in a violent, destructive tour of terror. This was repeated in the Highlands in July 1336, where he burnished his chivalric legend by rescuing a group of ladies held prisoner at Lochindorb castle. There was precious little chivalry to the rest of the brutal campaign. Edward’s tactics – bloody rampages around enemy countryside, burning, looting and killing with no greater strategic purpose than to demoralize enemy civilians – would be exported to the Continent in later years, earning English soldiers a reputation as some of the fiercest in Christendom.

  For all the terror inflicted on the Scots, however, a settlement did not emerge. Edward and his friends – particularly Henry of Grosmont, who was showing himself to be a robust and vigorous captain – were learning the business of war, but they could not compel the Scots to love a Balliol king by slaughter alone. At the heart of the problem lay the alliance between the rebellious Scots and the king of France. For Philip VI, Plantagenet actions in Scotland were bound tightly to the status of Plantagenet dominions in Aquitaine. As long as the English refused to accept full French sovereignty over Gascony, Philip would support the Scots in their own struggle for independence. By 1337 Edward had lost some of his interest in burning Scotland into submission. At the heart of his approach to kingship lay a desire to tackle problems directly and energetically. The problem in 1337 was no longer Scotland. It was France. A new theatre of war tugged at him, irresistibly. The greatest conflict of the Plantagenet years was about to begin.

  New Earls, New Enemies

  When parliament
met in March 1337, a hum of excitement and agitation settled over Westminster. There were reasons to be excited. Radical legislation was to be introduced to the country. A reform of the wool trade was planned. War loomed on two fronts. But more exciting than any of this, at least to observers of the parliament and lovers of the pageantry and show of Plantagenet kingship, was the impending creation of six new peers of the realm.

  Edward III had been king for a decade. For seven of those years he had ruled in his own right. And in his early years, the young man had shown himself to be a willing friend to the aristocracy. At great tournaments he held, he had grown familiar with the wealthy fighting elite of the country – and it was to these sorts of men that he felt naturally closest.

  There had been a general decline in the state of the aristocracy during the previous two generations. Edward I had been distrustful of nobility in general and correspondingly stingy with earldoms. His suspicions of the rights of nobles were never more obvious than in the Quo Warranto inquiries, by which his justices quizzed the barons of the realm about their right to wield powers and jurisdictions that might be deemed to belong to the Crown itself. Edward II had been more inventive and liberal with the great landed titles, but he tended to save his key awards as gifts for his immediate favourites, rather than creating families of great men, who he feared would rival his authority. Edward II had made Gaveston earl of Cornwall, Andrew Harclay earl of Carlisle, Hugh Despenser earl of Winchester and his half-brothers earls of Norfolk and Kent; but of all these only the earl of Norfolk lived past 1330. Furthermore, Edward III’s younger brother, John of Eltham, who had been created earl of Cornwall in 1328, had died of an illness while on campaign in Perth in 1336, and now lay at rest in Westminster Abbey.