The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Unlike his grandfather or father, Edward III saw a greater truth to English kingship, which had all too often been obscured by the eruption of civil wars between the king and his leading magnates. That truth was that there was naturally a community, not a conflict, of interest between a king and his great subjects. At the March 1337 parliament Edward laid out this philosophy in clear terms. He told his assembled lords that ‘among the marks of royalty we consider it to be the chief that, through a due distribution of positions, dignities and offices, it is buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by mighty powers’. Since England had seen a lessening in her pool of noble families headed by formidable earls and barons, he argued, ‘the realm has long suffered a serious decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’.

  Edward announced to the realm that he was taking decisive action to establish a new generation of English nobles, with whom he could share both the prestige and the burdens of kingship. They were all men who had proved their service to him over the ten years of his reign, and in several cases had been at his side since that daring raid on Nottingham castle, when Mortimer was removed. Here were the natural boon companions of an ambitious young king – and they would soon be pressed into action alongside him.

  Six earls were created in parliament. First among them was William Montagu, leader of the 1330 coup. Since that famous October day, Montagu had been demonstrating to the king that he was both a valuable diplomat and a brave soldier in the wars against Scotland, during which he had lost an eye. He had already been rewarded with much booty, patronage and land grants, but now Montagu was raised to the rank of earl of Salisbury.

  Salisbury’s leading co-conspirators from 1330 were similarly rewarded. Robert Ufford became earl of Suffolk and William Clinton was made earl of Huntingdon – a title that had once been held by the Scottish kings. Meanwhile the scions of England’s greatest families were given titles to reflect their status. Henry Grosmont became earl of Derby. William Bohun, another veteran of 1330 and the Scottish wars, became earl of Northampton. Hugh Audley, long-serving soldier and early opponent of Roger Mortimer, was awarded the earldom of Gloucester.

  Alongside the new earls, Edward also innovated with his nobility. Edward and Philippa’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, was a healthy six years old in March 1337. From Tudor times he would be known by the title of the Black Prince, for his (supposedly) black armour and diabolical soldierly reputation. In 1337, however, he was given a new title to reflect his importance as the heir to the throne of England. Edward III created him duke of Cornwall – the first time that the French title duc had been translated to England, and a recognition that the status of the greatest royal earldom now had special, familial status. This was both a rapid regranting of the late John of Eltham’s title, and an implicit statement that never again would a lowly nobody like Gaveston hold so great a royal title.

  A magnificent feast was given to celebrate the new creations, at which hundreds of pounds were spent on food and entertainment. Twenty knights were also created, and everyone rejoiced in style, with separate courts held by Edward and Philippa to honour the moment England had enriched her noble heritage.

  But this unprecedented creation of landed magnates was no fit of idle generosity on Edward’s part. Rather, the situation in 1337 demanded it. The king needed military supporters with resources, mighty households and an obligation to the Crown to fight. Not only was Scotland perpetually turbulent: war with France was once again looming. This time, however, the terms and the stakes of war had escalated, and the personalities arrayed on either side were the most intractable, aggressive and well matched since Richard I had faced off against Philip Augustus at the end of the twelfth century. The Plantagenet world was on the brink of a war that would last not merely for months or years, but for generations.

  The Hundred Years War Begins

  On 26 January 1340, Edward III entered the Flemish city of Ghent, with his entire household accompanying him, including his heavily pregnant queen, who was carrying the couple’s sixth child in ten years. (The boy who would be born during the royal visit, on 6 March 1340, was John of Gaunt – his name deriving from the English name for the town.) A huge ceremony had been prepared for the king’s arrival, and the large open square of the Friday market was being lavishly decorated in expectation of a large crowd.

  A platform was set up in the middle of the square, and all around it hung banners displaying Edward’s royal coat of arms – the symbol that adorned almost everything that was given the royal mark of approval. But these were not the arms with which bystanders would have been familiar.

  For 142 years, since the penultimate year of Richard the Lionheart’s reign, Plantagenet kings had depicted their English sovereignty through three lions passant guardant – commonly known in heraldry as leopards – against a bright red field. Now, there was something radically different about the royal arms. Rather than striding proudly across the whole coat of arms, the leopards had been quartered with the ancient arms of the French Crown: golden fleurs-de-lis against a blue field. Moreover, the French fleurs-de-lis took pride of place, displayed in the upper left and lower right corners of the coat of arms.

  It was a stunning alteration to a generations-old heraldic device. And it left in no doubt the message Edward was about to deliver to the crowd that assembled in the market square.

  Edward walked out onto the stage and stood before the crowd, flanked by the great men of his court and the magistrates of the three most important towns of Flanders. Raising his voice to shout over the hubbub of voices, he called on the townspeople of Ghent to recognize him as the king not only of England, but also of France. He demanded their obedience, and took homage from various Flemings, including Guy of Flanders, half-brother of the count. Edward reassured all those before him that he would respect their liberties and protect their mercantile rights. Then he gave the day over to typically Edwardian celebrations: a jousting contest.

  This event, held in the packed marketplace of Ghent, marked the most profound reimagining of the Plantagenet Crown since Edward I had determined to make himself a modern-day Arthur. Edward’s formal assumption of the royal titles and style of the king of France fundamentally changed relations between the two kingdoms in a way that had not been achieved even under Henry II. And it would spark an exhausting, seemingly endless period of hostility between the two realms, that would become known as the Hundred Years War.

  The roots of the war can be found deep and tangled in the fabric of Plantagenet history and the politics of the Channel in the fourteenth century. The traditional focus of disagreement between the French and English kings was the running dispute over the status of the latter as dukes of Aquitaine. This had been a cause of friction since 1259, when Henry III did homage to Louis IX for the duchy and abandoned the family claims to Normandy, Anjou and the rest of the empire.

  As the fourteenth century matured, English and French interests clashed repeatedly all across north-west Europe. The French Crown was entering a new stage of aggressive expansion. French kings were determined to establish their rights, expand their borders and spread the reach of French political power in a way that had not been attempted since the days of Philip Augustus at the dawn of the thirteenth century. This brought France into direct competition with English interests in trade battles in the Low Countries; in the matter of Scotland, which had been allied with France since 1295; and over control of shipping routes and trade in the Channel, where the English sent wool (and later, cloth) across the sea passages to Flanders, and brought wines back in another direction, from Bordeaux. But beneath all these sources of mutual aggravation lay a more fundamental alteration in the status of the two crowns.

  In France, the death of Charles IV in 1328, followed by Philip VI’s accession, had brought to an end the direct Capetian line that had reigned since the accession of Hugh Capet in 987, throwing open a new age of dynastic uncertainty in the kingdom. Under the rule of Isabella and Mortimer, the young Edward’s visit to
Amiens to do homage for his continental possessions had suggested acceptance of Philip’s claim. Thanks to the violent politics that blighted the beginning of Edward’s reign, his claim to the dual inheritance of the houses of Plantagenet and Capet – which would have made him indisputably the greatest figure in either family’s history, as well as in the history of medieval Europe – had been passed over with barely a whimper.

  By the time Mortimer and Isabella had been removed from power, Philip was established as king. It seemed beyond the power of the young King Edward to start demanding a revision to the French succession, not least because every campaigning season between 1333 and 1337 was taken up by expeditions to Scotland. Instead of hostilities, there had been cautious diplomacy between the two crowns. Exploratory talks were held over a new crusade in 1332, but Philip’s supportive policy towards David Bruce since 1334 was unacceptably provocative.

  Yet this was no one-way provocation: the goading of an English king into a war he did not seek. Indeed, Edward was easily framed by French propagandists as the main protagonist of the drift to war. Since 1334 he had harboured in England Robert of Artois, an ageing but valiant fugitive from French justice, luckless enough to have slipped from being Philip VI’s closest adviser and greatest friend to being his bitterest enemy.

  Robert was offered generous sanctuary by Edward, who valued his knightly bumptiousness and military prowess. But in doing so, he roused the infernal ire of the French king and nobility. A Flemish propaganda poem of the mid-1340s known as The Vows of the Heron blamed Robert for starting the war when he accused Edward of cowardice for failing to claim his rightful inheritance, and it was received by willing ears.

  In The Vows of the Heron it is alleged that at a decadent, amorous banquet, Robert approached the king and presented him with a roasted heron, caught that day by his falcon. ‘I believe I have caught the most cowardly bird,’ the poet has Robert tell the king and his courtiers. ‘When it sees its shadow it is terrified. It cries out and screams as if being put to death … It is my intention to give the heron to the most cowardly one who lives or has ever lived: that is Edward Louis [i.e. Edward III], disinherited of the noble land of France of which he was the rightful heir; but his heart fails him and because of his cowardice he will die without it.’

  Edward’s immediate response in the poem is to swear oaths to ‘cross the sea, my subjects with me … set the country ablaze and … await my mortal enemy, Philip of Valois, who wears the fleur-de-lis … I renounce him, you can be sure of that, for I will make war on him by word and deed.’

  The Vows of the Heron is pure propaganda intended to paint Robert of Artois as a devious provocateur and Edward as a blustering, licentious aggressor. But it graphically evokes the willing belief among its audience that these things were so. And indeed, it was Edward’s harbouring of Robert of Artois that provided Philip with his casus belli. In December 1336 Philip had sent envoys to Gascony to demand Robert’s extradition. The request was refused, and within a year Edward had sent envoys to Paris to ‘Philip of Valois who calls himself king of France’. The diplomats renounced the English king’s homage; Philip’s predictable and immediate response was formally to confiscate Ponthieu and Gascony. War had begun.

  Thus, when Edward stood on the stage in Ghent in 1340, England and France had already theoretically been at war for three years. Much of this had been a phony conflict, as both sides manoeuvred for allies and position. Edward had concentrated his war efforts on the Low Countries, where he paid the count of Hainault, the duke of Brabant and other allies tens of thousands of pounds in bribes to form a grand alliance against the French king. This was a conventional, expensive tactic that Edward bolstered by purchasing the title of Imperial Vicar-General from the Emperor Ludwig IV of Germany – a title that gave him full imperial rights over the lords of the Low Countries. The only significant fighting that had interrupted this costly diplomacy was in autumn 1339, when Edward brought an army to northern France to fight a vicious campaign in the border territories of the Cambrésis and the Vermandois. Philip, meanwhile, had sent troops deep into Gascony, advancing as far south as Bordeaux.

  But these were preliminary skirmishes. The war escalated from 1340, when Edward made his formal claim to the French throne – and it was a war that would continue for more than a century, as the implications of that speech in Ghent played themselves out.

  This was to be something over and above the traditional Anglo–French war. Granted, the struggle was still in essence that between a French king insistent on his rights and a Plantagenet lord of Aquitaine jockeying to offer as little deference as possible. English tactics followed a familiar pattern: bribing lords and princes in Flanders and on the eastern French border to create a military alliance in the north, while preparing an invasion force to campaign in the south. But by activating his dynastic claim to the French throne Edward was about to change the whole terms of engagement between the French and English royal houses.

  By October 1337 he had begun styling himself King of France and England in letters – three years later he made his claim explicit and public in the ceremony at Ghent. This was no longer just a war between lord and vassal. It was to be framed as a war of succession.

  Edward at Sea

  As dusk approached on the evening of 24 June 1340, six months after he had declared himself king of the best part of western Europe, Edward stood aboard his flagship, the cog Thomas – a cog was a type of large merchant vessel with a single square sail – and watched the sea offshore from Sluys, in Flanders, churn with the blood of tens of thousands of Frenchmen. He was wounded in the leg – but it was an injury that was worth the pain. He was watching as a fierce battle raged between the 213 French and Genoese ships of Philip VI’s Great Army of the Sea and around 120 and 160 English sails, which had left East Anglia under his own personal command two days previously. The English were murderously, brilliantly winning.

  Edward had come across the Channel to put an army ashore in Flanders. It was a desperate military action dictated only by extreme circumstance. Two months earlier his friends and allies the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk had been captured during fighting outside the town of Lille. Flanders was overrun by the French, and Queen Philippa was a hostage in Ghent. The Channel was patrolled by French ships that threatened to ruin the English wool trade, and for two years the south coast of England had been plagued by French pirates, who had reduced the town of Southampton to little more than a smouldering shell.

  Edward had been planning a large military invasion for some months. Inevitably, word of the preparations had reached Philip VI, and a huge French fleet, detailed to blockade the ports and prevent the English army from landing, had been gathered from the coasts of Normandy and Picardy. Now, as Edward looked towards the coast, he saw that the French were ordered in a tight position, their vessels anchored and chained together in three lines across the mouth of the river Zwin.

  After a night spent anchored within sight of the intimidating masts and armoured prows of the French fleet, Edward had directed his ships to approach the mouth of the Zwin at around 3 p.m. They came up from the south-west, with the sun and the wind behind them. As he moved into view, Edward must have felt a pang of anxiety – even fear. He was about to fight one of the largest naval forces ever assembled in the Channel. Failure risked utter ruin.

  As Edward’s ship approached the French, he had faced a formidable fleet. In the first line stood some of the largest ships ever launched into the Channel: cogs carrying hundreds of men, with crossbows bristling. They included the Christopher, a giant ship stolen from the English some months earlier. Behind the cogs bobbed the smaller ships; in the third line were merchant boats and the royal galleys.

  The English attacking force at Sluys was composed of a ragtag of great powerful cogs, smaller galleys and an assortment of merchant ships pressed into military service from harbours around the English coast. They had sailed to France against the pleas and warnings of Edward III’s ministers, who had
warned him that the size of the French fleet meant certain death and destruction to the smaller English armada. Edward, stubborn and determined, had set out from the Orwell leaving his advisers – led by Archbishop Stratford of Canterbury – stung by a harsh rebuke: ‘those who are afraid can stay at home’.

  A medieval sea battle was much like a land battle. There was little manoeuvre or pursuit – when two navies came together it was a collision followed by boarding and a desperate, bloody fight at close quarters, in which much the same tactics as those used on a battlefield were employed on the wooden decks of ships. Although there were some large weapons carried on board, to hurl stones and giant crossbow bolts at the enemy, by and large it was bolts and arrows and the violent smash of men-at-arms’ maces and clubs that did the damage. ‘This great naval battle was so fearful,’ wrote the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, ‘that he would have been a fool who dared to watch it even from a distance.’

  The French, commanded by Hugues Quiéret and Nicolas Béhuchet, were undone by their decision to shackle their ships together in three ranks across the mouth of the Zwin, thereby sacrificing all mobility for what seemed – but was not – the security of closely ranked numbers. The two rows of vessels behind the front line were barred from fighting by the ships in front of them, and as the English attacked the French found it impossible to evade a head-on assault.

  Battle was given at close quarters and by deadly means. The air filled with the blast of trumpets, the throb of drums, the fizz of arrows and the splintering sound of huge ships smashing into others. The English fleet attacked the French in waves. Each ship rammed into an enemy vessel, attaching herself with hooks and grappling irons as English archers and French crossbowmen traded hailstorms of vicious arrows and bolts. The bowmen took up high vantage points, either on the raised endcastles of the boat or on the masts, and when they had killed enough of the defenders, men-at-arms clambered aboard the enemy ship to mete out death and destruction at close quarters.