A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The doors of the Prince’s room were opened so that old comrades and all who had served him could attend the passing, and “each one sobbed heartily and wept very tenderly,” and he said to all, “I commend you to my son, who is very young and little, and pray you, as you have served me, to serve him loyally.” He asked the King and Lancaster to swear an oath of support, which they gave without reserve, and all the earls, barons, and bachelors swore it too, and “of lamentation and sighing, of crying aloud and sorrowing, there was a great noise.”

  On the day before the end, the Prince’s last will was completed, adding to the detailed arrangements already made. Though death was but the flight of the soul from its bodily prison, it was customarily accompanied by the most precise care for bequests, funeral, tombstone, and every other aspect of earthly remains, as if anxiety of what was to come sharpened reluctance to leave the world. The Prince’s instructions were unusually detailed: his bed furnishings, including hangings embroidered with the deeds of Saladin, were left to his son, his war-horses were specifically disposed, his funeral procession was designed to the last trumpet, his tomb effigy ordered, with curious ambivalence, to show him “fully armed in the pride of battle … our face meek and our leopard helm placed beneath the head.”

  Attendant bishops urged the dying man to ask forgiveness of God and of all those he had injured. In a last flare of arrogance he refused, then, as the end approached, joined his hands and prayed pardon of God and man. But he could not sustain meekness. When Sir Richard Stury, a Lollard knight who had been among those dismissed from the King’s household by the Good Parliament, and who at some point had evidently fallen foul of the Prince, came to “make his peace,” the Prince said bitterly, “Come, Richard, come and look on what you have long desired to see.” When Stury protested his good will, the Prince replied, “God pay you according to your deserts. Leave me and let me see your face no more.” Begged by his confessors not to die without forgiving, he remained silent and only under pressure muttered at last, “I will do it.” A few hours later, on June 8, 1376, he died aged 46.

  As Earl of Bedford and member of the family, Coucy rode in the mile-long funeral procession with King Edward and the Prince’s brothers behind the hearse drawn by twelve horses. On the monument at Canterbury, where the Prince desired to be buried, were inscribed verses in French on the traditional theme of the evanescence of earthly power: how in life the deceased had great nobility, lands, houses, treasure, silver and gold, but now of all bereft, with beauty gone and flesh wasted, he lies alone, reminding the passerby,

  Such as thou art, so once was I,

  As I am now, so shalt thou be.

  Encased in armor, the effigy speaks differently: in what little can be seen of the face under a drooping mustache and close-covering helmet, there is no glimpse of Christian humility.

  Left between a doddering King and a child heir, with only the hated regent Lancaster at the helm, the nation indulged in grief exaggerated by fear. At a time when defeats at sea had revived fears of French invasion, the English felt bereft of their protector, “for while he lived,” wrote Walsingham, “they feared no inroad of any enemy, even as when he was present they feared no warlike encounter.” Had the Prince lived and kept his health, he could have averted the troubles that were to arise under a child king, but not the social unrest nor the ebbing of victory. Although Walsingham reproached “thou untimely too-eager Death,” death may not have been untimely, for, unlike his father, the Prince died while he still reflected the image of a hero. Froissart called him “the Flower of Chivalry of all the world” and the chronicler of the Quatre Premiers Valois acknowledged him “one of the greatest knights on earth, having renown above all men.” Charles V held a requiem mass for his late enemy in the Sainte Chapelle, attended by himself and the ranks of French nobility.

  What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them. The people of England mourned him because his marvelous capture of a king at Poitiers and his other conquests had dressed them in greatness. Though his famous victory in Spain had proved ephemeral, his empire in Aquitaine had collapsed, and his prowess faded in disease, yet he represented that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.

  The death of the Prince was the turning point in favor of John of Gaunt. While still in session, Parliament took the precaution of having the boy Richard presented to them in person to be confirmed as heir apparent. This being done, the memorable session closed on July 10, having lasted 74 days, the longest of any Parliament up to that time. Its spectacular accomplishment was wiped away the moment it dispersed. With no permanent organization or autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a body as soon as members scattered to shire and town. Its reforms had not been enacted as statutes and, like the reforms of the French Grand Ordinance, were simply rendered null by the hand that regained effective power. By favors or threats, Lancaster won over or neutralized the leading lords of the opposition, except for the Earl of March, who was compelled to resign as Marshal. His place was taken by his onetime ally Sir Henry Percy, who went over to the Duke.

  The Lords’ absence of political principle was the key to the collapse. Lancaster declared the entire parliamentary session invalid, reinstated Lord Latimer and his associates, dismissed the new Council and recalled the old, arrested and imprisoned without trial Sir Peter de la Mare when he attempted a protest, banished Bishop William of Wykeham from court and seized his temporal properties. When, sealing his control, he brought back Alice Perrers to reweave her spell over the King, the bishops who had acted with the Commons “were like dumb dogs unable to bark.”

  Except for impeachment, the work of the Good Parliament left hardly a constitutional trace. Yet in expressing so forcefully, and for its brief moment effectively, the will of the middle class, the role of the Commons strongly impressed the nation and taught an experience of political action that took root.

  Witness to England’s turmoil, Coucy returned to France in the summer or fall of 1376. Given the crisis during his visit, he is unlikely to have obtained a clear statement of what peace terms England was prepared to accept, but he would certainly have brought back a report of a torn and vulnerable nation. He is reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the King of England to offer combat when the truce should end, but to seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so weak or so easy to defeat as at home.”

  Before Coucy left England, King Edward fell ill of a great malady and “all his physicians despaired and did not know how to care for him or what medicines to give him.” Although he recovered spontaneously, the end of the reign was clearly approaching and with it the moment for Coucy’s decision. Whether Isabella returned with him to France or remained with her sinking father is uncertain. Out of respect for his father-in-law, Coucy took no overt action at this time, but immediately on his return he accepted a diplomatic mission to the Count of Flanders in the interests of France against England. By now Coucy was a member of the Royal Council, clearly relied on by Charles V for his perspicacity and diplomacy. The King’s anxieties had been increased by the mental illness of Queen Jeanne who in 1373 was afflicted “so that she lost her mind and her memory.” After many prayers and pilgrimages by her husband who was devoted to her, she recovered her health and senses and was named, in the event of the King’s death, guardian of the Dauphin. She was to be assisted by a Regency Council of fifty composed of prelates, ministers of crown and Parlement, and ten of the “most notable and sufficient” bourgeois of Paris. Twelve of the Council were to be in constant service of the Queen. As a member of the Council, Coucy received an annual wage of 1,000 francs in addition to payments of 500 francs a month on his annual pension of 6,000 francs. At about this time his daughter Marie, heiress of his domain, joined the household of the Queen who took charge of her education along w
ith that of the Dauphin and his brothers and sisters. In April 1377 the records show a payment to Coucy of 2,000 francs, to be deducted from his pension, for furnishing his several castles with crossbows against the event of renewed war.

  Still trying to avert that last calamity, Charles again delegated Coucy as diplomat to re-open negotiations with England, this time without benefit of the royal Dukes, to spare their expensive presence. Over the next six months, from January to June 1377, the parleys met variously at Boulogne, Calais, and halfway between at Montreuil on the coast. As the only lay noble in a group of ministers, Coucy had as his chief colleague Bureau de la Rivière, the Chamberlain, along with two ecclesiastical ministers, the Bishops of Laon and Bayeux, and various members of the Council.

  The English envoys, representing adherents of both Lancaster and the late Prince, were men with whom Coucy was very likely acquainted, from his recent visit to England if not before. Varying from one meeting to another, they included the guardian of the heir to the throne, Sir Guichard d’Angle, a gallant and admired Gascon, long a campaigner with the Black Prince; the Lollard knight Sir Richard Stury, whom Lancaster had reinstated in office; Lord Thomas Percy, a veteran of the French wars and brother of Sir Henry Percy; the Earl of Salisbury; and lastly a trusted servant of the court connected with Lancaster’s entourage, Geoffrey Chaucer.

  Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love, The Book of the Duchess, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French, from which he had translated the Roman de la Rose, something in the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”

  In different circumstances from Langland, Chaucer enjoyed a grant from the King of a daily pitcher of wine and was married to Katherine Swynford’s sister Philippa, a relationship that had brought them both into the ducal household. The Book of the Duchess was a graceful elegy for Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, a well-beloved lady who had died at the age of 27 after bearing seven children. Though its choice of language was considered peculiar, its author lost no favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic of Troilus and Criseyde, adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace with France.

  Poets and writers served frequently as ambassadors because their rhetorical powers conferred distinction on the elaborate speeches required on these occasions. Petrarch had served the Visconti as envoy or at least as ornamental figurehead of a mission. Boccaccio negotiated for Florence with the Pope, and the poet Deschamps acted for Charles V and his successor. Diplomacy was a ceremonial and verbose procedure with great attention paid to juridical detail and points of honor, which may have been one reason why it so often failed to produce agreement.

  The prolonged parleys of 1377 acquainted Coucy with every pivot in the complex relationship of England and France. Offers and counteroffers and intricate bargains were discussed concerning Scotland, Castile, Calais, a proposed new dynasty for Aquitaine under a son of Edward III who would renounce his ties to England, or failing that, a partition, or an exchange of fiefs as complicated as a game of jack-straws. As always since the war began, nuncios of the Pope added their intensive efforts at mediation. Although the French held the upper hand, the English out of weakness and indecision could not be brought to accept any settlement, even a proposed match between Prince Richard and King Charles’s seven-year-old daughter Marie.

  The first parley broke up without progress and reconvened a month later. Twice the truce, due to expire April 1, was prolonged for a month to keep the negotiations alive. The envoys treated earnestly in long working sessions. What was Coucy’s role, what Chaucer’s? Their words have vanished; no record was kept because the discussions, especially regarding the marriage, were secret. Charles’s instructions to his envoys stated that “The King does not wish the marriage to be broached on his part, but if the English mention it, you may listen to what they say and afterwards report to the King.”

  The French offered many proposals, including title to twelve cities of Aquitaine (which England already held), if Edward would give back Calais and all that he had taken in Picardy; either that, they said, “or else nothing.” Stubbornly the English refused, believing that as long as they held their foothold in northern France they could yet return and regain their losses.

  England’s domestic situation during the parleys erupted in a new crisis. Lancaster had suppressed but far from settled English discontents. A new Parliament, sufficiently packed by the Duke to elect his steward as Speaker, obediently granted subsidies in January. The bishops were not so amenable and Wyclif was their target. He had not yet voiced his denial of the Eucharist and the priesthood, but his statement of civil dominion and disendowment was heresy enough. Although his call for reform of clerical abuses and his anti-papism had support among the clergy, they were not going to wait passively to be disendowed. Archbishop Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay of London summoned Wyclif to a convocation in February to answer for his heretical preaching. The recurring struggle of centuries between crown and Church, was now played out again in an uproarious fracas at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  Lancaster hoped to discredit the bishops with the laity. He assigned four Masters of Theology to Wyclif’s defense and proceeded himself in company with the Marshal, Sir Henry Percy, and their armed retinues to attend the hearings at St. Paul’s. A crowd of aroused citizens filled the cathedral, angered by rumors that Lancaster was planning to extend the Marshal’s jurisdiction over the city’s traditional right to maintain public order. Bishop Courtenay was popular with the Londoners, the Duke was not. Anger rose when the armed guard shoved people aside to make way for the Duke and Marshal, followed by a loud quarrel when Courtenay refused the Duke’s demand for a chair for Wyclif. The young and vigorous Bishop, himself the son of an earl and a descendant of Edward I, was not about to take orders inside his own precincts.

  “I will make you bend, you and all the rest of the bishops,” growled Lancaster. The crowd moved and shouted in menace, Lancaster threatened to arrest the disturbers, Courtenay told him if he did so in the cathedral he would be excommunicated. “A little more of this,” the Duke was heard to mutter, “and I will have you dragged out of the church by the hair of your head.” The crowd’s rage exploded, the Duke and Marshal judged it wise to withdraw, Wyclif had not even spoken. Lancaster had succeeded in breaking up the proceedings, which was his object, but at a cost of turning popular sentiment ever more against himself, not against the bishops.

  London seethed, and on news that Percy had arrested a citizen for slandering the Duke, boiled over. A mob gathered in a lynching mood to rush the Savoy Palace, and on its way fell upon a priest who spoke insultingly of Peter de la Mare and beat him to death, as Marcel’s mob had murdered a hapless victim of its rage twenty years before. Warned while dining on oysters at the Savoy, Lancaster and Percy escaped by boat down the Thames to take refuge in the honored halls of the Princess of Wales and her son, where none would venture to assault them. Meanwhile Bishop Courtenay, also warned and fearing a catastrophe for which he might be blamed, had hastened to the Savoy Palace and succeeded in quieting the mob.

  After flight and humiliation, Lancaster required that his authority be restored by a formal apology from the city. The Princess pleaded with the citizens to be reconciled with the Duke for her sake; the King’s sovereignty was invoked; the authorities of London exacted the release of Peter de la Mare as the price of t
heir apology; the clergy regained the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer. Factions were deepened and the state further torn by the affair.

  In the excitement at St. Paul’s, the matter of Wyclif had not been tested. The English prelates, caught between clerical interest and national sentiment, might have been content to let the matter drop, but the papacy was not. In May, Gregory XI issued five Bulls addressed to the English episcopacy and to the King and the University of Oxford, condemning Wyclif’s errors and demanding his arrest. All discussion of his heretical doctrines was to be suppressed and all who supported them removed from office. An issue full of danger was added to all the other sources of strife. The new Parliament was strongly anti-papal; the King, babbling of hawks and hunting instead of attending to the urgent needs of his soul, was dying. For the moment, while England waited uneasily for the change of reign, the bishops held the proceedings against Wyclif in abeyance.

  In France the negotiators held a final meeting in May at Montreuil in the ancient walled castle whose western ramparts faced the sea. The Chancellors of both countries took part, Pierre d’Orgement for France and the Bishop of St. David’s for England. Terms were discussed at length in open session, which Charles wanted so that his final offer should be formally submitted and receive a firm answer. He did not get it. While generous in what it left in English hands, his offer withheld sovereignty over any part of France and insisted on Calais. Concealing rejection in evasion, the English said they lacked final authority and would have to submit the terms to their King. As the event shortly proved, the French must at this point have started preparing for belligerent action. While the talks petered out, the little Princess Marie died in Paris, eliminating the proposed marriage. The parley broke up with no place or date agreed upon for another meeting and no prolongation of the truce.