The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  As it happened, Edward still faced many problems gathering men and money before he could set out. Without him - the undisputed leader -the rest of the confederation was worse than useless, a drain on English resources. It looked as if William Montagu and the doubters would soon be proved right: the heavy expenses of the coalition would hamper Edward's ability to raise an army, not help it. Frustrated by the slowness of gathering troops, Edward ordered the one fleet he had in readiness, under Sir Walter Manny, to set out and harass the French ships and ports. At the same time he urged the army in Aquitaine to seize back all the castles and fortified houses which the French had taken in July. On both fronts Edward's men did his bidding. In Flanders, the tables were almost entirely turned. Eager for battle, Manny's fleet failed to capture Sluys but lured the garrison into combat at Cadsand, where he won a bloody victory, directing his archers to massacre the Flemings assembled on the shore.

  Manny's victory did not make anything easier for Edward. He was still short of men. His lack of money was greatly exacerbated shortly afterwards when Bishop Burghersh, in a rash attempt to shore up the alliance, promised unrealistic amounts of cash to die duke of Brabant and other waverers. They had begun to question Edward's resolve, especially when the cardinals sent by the pope urged him to agree to a truce, and threatened him with everything from excommunication to an alliance between the apostolic see and Philip. The duke of Brabant - whose support for Edward had been kept secret - was just one of those tempted to open an alternative secret diplomatic channel with France. Burghersh panicked, and seized the wool which Conduit and de la Pole were about to sell. Needless to say, having no mercantile skill or experience of his own, and no appreciation of theirs, his efforts to obtain more money than die merchants proved an utter failure.

  Edward was faced with financial disaster. He had already borrowed more than a hundred thousand pounds. But when a king like Edward finds himself in such a predicament, his lifestyle does not alter, nor does his largesse. Edward now rose above his financial problems in style. He paid Sir Walter Manny eight thousand pounds for one single prisoner captured at Cadsand: the half-brother of the count of Flanders. For his games at Christmas 1337 he ordered an artificial forest foliated with gold and silver leaves, as well as more than a hundred masks, some with long beards and others in the forms of baboons' heads, to entertain the court.

  For his games on 13 April 1338 at Havering he built mock siege engines and lavished new clothes on all the participants as usual. But the clothes he ordered for himself raised die art of dressing like a king to such heights that previous superlatives are hardly adequate. His hood, for example, was made of black cloth and

  decorated on one edge with images of tigers holding court made from pearls and embossed with silver and gold, and decorated on another edge with the image of a castle made of pearls with a mounted man riding towards the castle on a horse made of pearls, with trees of pearls and gold between each tiger, and a field and a trefoil of large pearls embroidered well in from the edge.

  No fewer than 389 large pearls, three enormous pearls and five ounces of small pearls were used in making it. The other clothes he and the earls of Salisbury and Derby wore were equally stunning. His only concession to impending financial ruin and his inability to raise enough men to invade France was to answer the cardinals who had so threatened him with an offer not to invade France for two months. Faced with no prospect of obtaining better terms, they accepted.

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  In dealing with the cardinals, Edward told them an extraordinary thing He claimed that any truce he made with France would have to be ratified by parliament, because in England parliament ratified all matters regarding war and peace. The cardinals did not believe him, and presumed this was merely a diplomatic ploy. But, as we have seen, although Edward was grossly exaggerating the legal basis for parliamentary ratification, it was not entirely untrue. Moreover, it was a development of Edward's reign, and very much his own initiative. Mortimer had used parliament to sanction the forced abdication of Edward II in 1327, but war remained outside its remit until Edward had put the question in 1331. From then on, discussions about whether to go to war or not had never excluded parliament's voice. Although any real decision-making still lay with the king, parliament was consulted, if only to determine the strength of support for the king's policy.

  The other point to note about parliament in 1338 is that it was no longer just the lords temporal and spiritual. Commoners played an increasingly important part. When Mortimer had summoned representatives of the shires and towns to the 1327 parliament, they had been drawn together merely to add weight to the voices of the leaders and to depose the king with the assent of all the people. Edward jumped on this idea of popular assent, and encouraged popular representation. By 1338, commoners were summoned to parliament as a matter of course. They met separately to the lords, and they were not consulted on every matter, but they had a presence and a voice. They presented their own petitions, and could expect some answer from the king. In effect, a great bargaining was going on between king and people. The commoners or representatives of the shires and towns - forerunners of modern Members of the House of Commons - wanted grievances addressed, but more importantly they wanted to know that they had a forum for raising complaints. The king wanted popular support for his main policies, and to ensure that taxation would be forthcoming when those policies entailed keeping an army in the field, or bribing continental princes. Edward was offering parliamentary power in return for money and support, and enlarging the representation of parliament to include the wealthy and important provincial townsmen and landowners, as well as the lords and bishops.

  In February 1338 parliament was put to the test. Edward wanted to know whether the representatives of the shires would continue to support his policies in war as well as peacetime. In particular, did parliament support his continental alliances, and his plans to go overseas, and could he rely on parliament to promise further financial support?32 With regard to Scotland he wanted to know whether he had continued support for his new attack on Dunbar Castle, through which the French were supplying the Scots nationalists. This was held by the fearsome Black Agnes, daughter of Sir Thomas Randolph and widow of Patrick of Dunbar. As the name implies, she was no wan Scots lass. As Montagu and four thousand men hammered at the gate with a battering ram and blasted away at the walls, this woman yelled defiance from the battlements at the English and berated her garrison, probably terrifying them more than the enemy. A good handful of women in the mid-fourteenth century were truly militaristic, able to inspire and lead their men in battle as well as most men. Black Agnes was certainly one of them. When a boulder from a siege engine smashed into the battlements near where she was standing, she took a cloth and ostentatiously began to dust the walls.

  Parliament in February 1338 supported Edward wholeheartedly. The Scots were more dangerous than ever. The French were making plans to invade England, and in March the first incursions of their long-awaited onslaught took place. Portsmouth suffered yet again, as did Jersey. Parliament urged Edward to go to the Low Countries to take command of the allied army and once and for all to bring King Philip of France to his knees. On 24 February the truce was extended until midsummer. The cardinals, the pope and King Philip were informed. But on the very same day orders were given for the northern and southern fleets to assemble at Orwell and Great Yarmouth a fortnight after Easter (12 April), ready to set out the following month. And when Bishop Burghersh was given his instructions to take new proposals for peace to the French king in May, the letters he carried were not of a conciliatory nature. In them Edward addressed Philip as 'Philip de Valois, he who calls himself king of France', and stated that he, Edward, had a stronger right to the French throne than Philip. He added his intention to conquer his inheritance by force of arms. In confiscating and trying to seize control of Gascony, Philip had thrown down the gauntlet. Now Edward picked it up.

  There were many delays before he could set out. The fleet prov
ed very difficult to gather, with much corruption on the part of the royal officials who were charged with gathering men, money and materials. Edward's haste may have added to the problem, as men stole what they had been ordered to requisition from others for the king's use, and then took advantage of the need for materials and foodstuffs to sell on what they had already obtained. The problem of 'purveyance' - the requisitioning of food and other necessities for the royal household - became far more widespread as supplies for the forthcoming war were also seized. Edward himself was probably aware of the tension this caused; William Pagula had written in The Mirror of Edward III about the injustice of royal purveyors who would seize a hen from an old woman from which she got four or five eggs a week, or take a sheep from a man who had only taken it to market to pay his rent.35 But Edward was unable or unwilling at present to curb such injustices. He was preoccupied with his political agenda, not the process of carrying it out. In April 1338 he wrote to his friend, Sir Walter Manny, expressing surprise that he had failed to assemble sufficient ships to cross the sea. The Exchequer was still based in York, to which city it had been moved in 1333 during the Scottish wars. And Edward personally contributed to the inefficiencies by removing himself from business. In late March he made another very fast journey to Scotland, travelling from London to Newcastle in less than seven days, and completing the whole journey from London to Berwick and back (more than seven hundred miles) in less than nineteen. If we are right in assuming that this is the 'secret' journey described in the record of his daily alms-giving as taking place in May or June, during which he took the time to go to Darlington to give two cloths of gold spinet to the image of the Virgin in the church there, then we have an explanation for his sudden journey, for it records that the king went 'secretly to Scotland to visit and comfort the garrisons and commanders of certain castles there'. It seems that this was the point at which Edward decided he could spare his Scottish troops no longer, and instructed Montagu to call off the siege if the castle had not capitulated by a certain date. In the hope of speeding up the siege, Montagu told Black Agnes that her brother (who was then a prisoner in England) would be executed beneath the walls of her castle if she did not submit. She laughed and replied that, if they did that, she would not be disappointed, for she would inherit his earldom of Moray. There was no persuading this woman. Montagu realised that if Edward wanted to campaign in France, he would have to give up Dunbar Castle. Black Agnes on her own constituted a whole second front.

  Edward, Philippa, their daughters and most of the royal household -their clerks, their musicians, their cooks, their panders and butlers (including John Chaucer, father of the great poet Geoffrey Chaucer) - and several thousand soldiers assembled at Orwell on 12 July 1338, seven weeks after their original intended date to set sail. Edward gave presents of a pair of decorated silver basins to each of his daughters, Isabella (now aged six) and Joan (now aged four) in the days before travelling. A new seal of absence was struck and delivered to the Treasurer, the previous great seal being delivered to the king on his great ship the Christopher on the 14th. The elaborate arrangements for governing England in his absence (the Walton Ordinances) were drawn up. John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, was appointed chief officer during the regency of the eight-year-old duke of Cornwall. Finally, on 16 July 1338, Edward and his fleet finally cast off and sailed from Orwell, picking up the rest of the fleet from Great Yarmouth a couple of days later. The fleet was numerous, and decked out to create the most striking impression, Edward's great ships carried specially made huge streamers, thirty or forty feet in length, showing the royal arms as well as those of St Edward (on Edward's own ship, the Edward), St Edmund, and St George. The largest of all was decorated with the life of St Thomas and was seventy-five feet in length; this probably adorned the mainmast of his great ship, the Thomas. On the 21st the royal entourage landed at Antwerp, and was received by Edward's allies, all assembled for the occasion. His first night in Brabant was far from a comfortable one: the entire household had to flee the building they were staying in as it burnt down. The new leader of the great confederation of allies against France found himself and his pregnant queen fleeing from their beds in their nightshirts, and being accommodated at the abbey of St Bernard nearby.

  The fire was not an auspicious start to the campaign. Still less auspicious, after the formal greetings, was the allies' support, or, rather their lack of it, which may be accurately characterised as a hesitancy to go to war. Edward was of the opinion that he had paid them well; he wanted to know when they would be ready for action. In particular he planned to lead a preliminary attack on the Cambresis region - which bordered on the south-west of Hainault - in the next few weeks. His allies dithered. They pointed out that much money had been promised, and little had been delivered. They wanted to see his gold before they committed themselves to fight for him. Edward, regarding it as a royal prerogative to distribute largesse without checking his balance of accounts, had to face the fact that they would not be persuaded. They would not fight Philip for prestige alone. The problem was, as Edward knew, that he had very little actual gold.

  Edward could still raise money but it was soon apparent that it would be years, not months, before he could meet his debts in full. Furthermore he had not just to meet his debts, he had to show his allies that he would go on being able to meet them. The Bardi and the Peruzzi banking houses were called upon and advanced a further eight thousand pounds. Paul de Montefiore (an Italian administrator and trusted confidant of Edward) raised another eight thousand. William de la Pole advanced eight times this amount against promised wool customs. Sir Bartholomew Burghersh (brother of the bishop of Lincoln) set about raising money through loans from continental and English magnates with the king. He and Paul de Montefiore mortgaged quantities of royal treasure, including Edward's great crown of gold. Nor was this the most desperate money-raising measure undertaken: back in England his government licensed the clergy in Devon to start digging for buried treasure. No reports of treasure survive, but somehow enough money was raised to fill the royal coffers, and to sustain obligations and payments of more than four hundred thousand pounds over the next year and a half.

  While all this was going on, the Holy Roman Emperor also had begun to have doubts. It was suspected that Edward had promised more than he could afford to the lesser lords of the Low Countries and Germany; it went without saying that he would be even more at a disadvantage when it came to paying for the services of the Holy Roman Emperor. As a result of this information, no doubt passed back to him from his first-class intelligence network, Edward seized the initiative. Rather than wait for his money-gatherers to make careful apologies for him, he had a brief meeting with several of his diffident allies, paid them some small sums, and then took his essential entourage quickly down the Rhine to Cologne, instructing the rest of his household to follow by barge. Entering Cologne, he ostentatiously gave money away, making small but careful donations at the houses of all the orders of friars in the city, offering oblations at the shrines of the cathedral, including the shrine of the Three Kings, where it had been prophesied that he would be buried. To the cathedral itself he made the very generous donation of £67 10s.47 He spent the night in Cologne, and then next day was off again, on his way down to Koblenz. On 30 August he arrived just outside the city, and stayed on the island of Niederwerde, awaiting a response from the emperor. In the meantime he sent gifts to the emperor and the emperor's wife (Philippa's elder sister, Margaret).

  Edward's judgement had been good. His instinct to take immediate action to secure support proved decisive. Through lavishing money publicly on people, living as sumptuously and ostentatiously as he could, and through paying the emperor the next instalment of his treasure, he forced Ludvig's hand. With all his subservient princes and petty kings present, Ludvig could not possibly go back on his earlier agreement. Any thought he had of reopening the auction for his army was ruled out, as Edward's presence and very high profile demanded an immediate
and public response. The affirmation which Edward sought - an official position to confirm his leadership of the allies in the Low Countries - came on 5 September, when he met Ludvig in a great ceremonial meeting in the marketplace at Koblenz. The two leaders processed into the cathedral and Edward, dressed in a robe of scarlet, sat at the foot of the imperial throne. The emperor himself sat in splendour, wearing his crown and holding a sceptre, with a naked sword held aloft behind him by Otto de Cuyk. Edward could not resist one show of independent pride, refusing to kiss the emperor's feet. But this irregularity was quickly smoothed over, and, with most of the great men of Germany watching, Edward was crowned Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire.

  This new tide was worth more than gold to Edward. It was pure and powerful propaganda. That he understood this is evidenced by the fact that he had had fifteen rich robes made in advance to be worn by the emperor, himself, the duke of Brabant and twelve other noble leaders of England and Germany. Two days after his coronation the resplendent king of England rode back across to Antwerp, arriving there on 13 September. Five days later he summoned all his allies, or, rather, his new subjects, to attend him at Herk, in Loos, to hear the Imperial letters. On 12 October they gathered in the town hall. The walls were hung with 'rich and fine cloths, like the king's presence chamber'. The king himself was seated five feet higher than everyone else, and wore his new golden crown. He had the official letters of office read out, appointing him Vicar Imperial for life, lieutenant of die Holy Roman Emperor. His wars were to be treated as wars of the empire. All those subject to the authority of the emperor were to swear fealty to him. The war against the French in the Cambresis would begin the following summer. After all the solemn celebrations, Edward returned to Philippa, now eight months pregnant, at Antwerp at the beginning of November.