The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  Certain artistic works do attest to his patronage. The most glittering and untarnished today are the coins of the realm, in particular the gold coins. From 1344 many attempts were made to establish a successful gold coinage, resulting in a number of highly worked designs: variations on the theme of the king in his boat and a geometrical design on the reverse. In 1351 a new attempt to improve the gold and silver coinage resulted in the renewal of the old silver groat of his grandfather and the introduction of an especially fine series of gold nobles. Of course the skills of the artist who constructs a die for a gold coin are not dissimilar from the skills required to create a seal matrix, and Edward's reign set a new high for that particular art form, not least in his own great seal of the 1360s (the Bretigny seal). To quote the standard work on the subject: 'this remarkably beautiful seal marks the culminating point of excellence in design and execution in the series of Gothic great seals of England'. In the absence of his architectural achievements, his armour, his clothes, his paintings, his music, his jewellery, his ornaments, his books and his clocks, it is perhaps these small items which give us our most unadulterated glimpse of his artistic and cultural patronage.

  There is one further opportunity for us to gaze upon the art of Edward III's kingship. This is his tomb, and the tombs of his wife, brother and eldest son, and to a lesser extent the tombs of his infant children. In some ways it is the most obvious medium to last, and yet in others it is not. Many royal tombs of the period have suffered: those of Queen Isabella and Lionel of Antwerp were lost in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, that of John of Gaunt was lost in the Great Fire of London. But the very highest art of Edward's patronage may be seen in his son's tomb at Canterbury and the two splendid tombs at Westminster. At Canterbury we may look at the prince's armour, and see the sculptured relief of his face. We cannot tell how exact the likeness is but, such is the quality of the work, we can believe that we do see a true representation of the man. We may do the same at Warwick, where the tomb of Thomas Beachamp, earl of Warwick, and his wife Catherine survives intact, replete with a full set of weepers, including portrait images of the Black Prince and probably Edward himself. At Westminster, looking at Edward's and Philippa's faces, we may be sure we look at likenesses. The figure on Edward's tomb monument was sculpted to be realistic, and only tidied slightly. It was based on a death-mask, which is still extant. Philippa's stout figure and friendly face were carved in marble by Jean de Liege during her own lifetime: in other words, carved from life. In this way the idealised faces which sculptors had traditionally placed on dead kings' and queens' tombs came to be supplanted by the likenesses of real people. Edward and Philippa did not need to portray themselves as icons. They themselves had become iconic.

  Edward's development as a cultural patron can thus be seen to have acquired many new dimensions after 1349, the year of the plague. Up until that year most of his expenditure had been on war and the culture of war (the completion of St Stephen's Chapel excepted). From 1350, the last time he actually took part in combat, most of his expenditure was on building and artistic projects for the future. With his buildings came his patronage of painters, sculptors and glaziers on a scale not witnessed in England since the reign of Henry III. By 1370 Edward had spent a total of more than £130,000 on building work, and had created palaces which would continue for the rest of the middle ages to be potent emblems of his kingship.

  The destruction of all this work is hence all the more surprising, and can only really be explained through the misfortune of fire and the damage of neglect, as tastes changed. That we know these buildings existed is a telling case of documents proving more durable than stones. But it is also an indication of how little we should regard what intervening centuries have thought of a dead king. Edward was the greatest English cultural patron of the later middle ages. Those who argued in the twentieth century that his claim on the throne of France was 'absurd' would have had difficulty denying that his preference for a clock-regulated hour and his development of the use of cannon show every indication of a logical and far-sighted mind. Those who regarded him in the nineteenth century as a brutal warmonger would probably have baulked at the thought that he also founded a Cambridge college, maintained a library, and patronised die art of the Italian Renaissance. And contemporary readers whose image of a medieval warrior-king is that of an unkempt savage might well have difficulty reconciling this image with a man who had hot and cold running water in his bathrooms.

  THIRTEEN

  Lawmaker

  When Edward prepared to face parliament in February 1351, he was a very different man to the eighteen-year-old who had so eagerly awaited his first parliament after taking power, twenty years before. Then he had looked to the forum as a proving ground. Now he had proved everything, and parliament had bowed to his kingship. But although representatives were satisfied with his past performance, one of the developing functions of parliament was to question the king on his policy and, if possible, hold him to account. This was the first parliament he had held for three years, and only the third he had attended since 1344. His promise to hold a meeting with representatives every year was looking frail. It was also the first gathering at Westminster since the Black Death. There were men present who wanted to know what could be done to ameliorate the downturn in the kingdom's fortunes. Some may have wondered what their king had done to incur God's wrath, so that England had not been saved from the horrors of the plague. As for Edward himself, he was well aware that the peace in France would not hold. The new French king, John, was bound to try his luck, hoping to show himself more successful in battle than his father. So Edward faced a difficult task. He needed to buy back public confidence, and to reassure parliament, but at the same time he had to convince a country just emerging from economic collapse to grant him a further subsidy towards the war.

  This is, on the surface, how things stood in February 1351. But such an analysis pays no attention to how Edward himself had changed. As Edward's cultural patronage shows, after 1350 he was less anxious to fight and more interested in creating permanent structures. In Shakespeare's famous analogy, Edward was emerging from the fourth age of man, the soldier, 'jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth' and entering the fifth, the justice 'with eyes severe and beard of formal cut'. He said as much in his opening address at that parliament. 'We desire always to do right to our people and to correct wrongs and defaults wherever they may be found in our realm.'

  From Tuesday 15 February Edward began to hear petitions. The first asked him to confirm Magna Carta and the statutes of his ancestors and to revoke the subsidy on the country because of the plague. Predictably enough, Edward agreed to the confirmation of the law but refused to relinquish the tax. The next petition asked him to prevent labourers neglecting their manorial dues in the wake of the plague. Edward responded that a statute would follow. This is interesting: although the remedy to the problem had been devised eighteen months earlier, in the Ordinance of Labourers, it was as a result of a petition in parliament that it became enshrined in law. No less significant was the next petition, which begged Edward to prevent papal appointments to English benefices. Parliament objected to overseas clergy taking the income from their English benefices without even visiting the country. This, of course, had been a cornerstone of Edward's policy since 1344. But whereas then he had merely tried to prevent overseas clergy from taking their positions, now in the Statute of Provisors he made the pope's provisions illegal. A little later another important petition was presented, requesting the return to free trade, a theme from an earlier parliament. Edward assented, and so the Statute of Free Trade was placed firmly on the law books. Three of the most important statutes of the fourteenth century were thus agreed in principle over a couple of mornings' debate.

  Edward's professed desire 'to do right' at that parliament pushed justice high up his list of priorities. This raised some spectres from the past. One was Richard Fitzalan, earl o
f Arundel, whose father Edmund had been done to death by Roger Mortimer without trial way back in 1326. He now wanted confirmation of his inheritance and assurance it would pass to his heirs. Similarly, hovering in the background, was Sir John Maltravers. In June his outlawry was annulled. These were old misjudgements which required correction, which Edward was pleased to consider. Justice of a different sort was needed in the case of Chief Justice William Thorp, who had been arrested and found guilty of corruption the previous year. Edward had declared that corrupt officials would face death, so that was the sentence looming over him when he came to parliament in 1351. Edward, always prepared to order the most extreme punishment, was not always eager to see it carried out. He was therefore looking to remit the death penalty. Thorp was tried before his peers and found guilty, but not sentenced to death. Some years later he was given the chance to redeem himself, and entered Edward's service again.

  From all points of view, the parliament of 1351 was a success. Edward managed to secure his wool subsidy for a further two years, despite pleas not to levy it because of the plague. Those deserving justice received it, those requiring the correction of injustices mostly were satisfied, and those putting forward petitions for new laws were mostly rewarded with a positive result. Questions remained in the air about financial burdens and taxation, but the accommodation reached was acceptable to parliament. So it was fitting that, at the end of the parliament, Edward held a second mass creation of higher lords. Harking back to the parliament of 1337, when he had made six earls and a duke, he now created three earls and a duke. Henry of Lancaster now became the duke of Lancaster, in honour of his great achievements in Gascony. Edward's sons Lionel and John were officially granted the tides held for them since infancy: Earl of Ulster and Earl of Richmond. And Ralph Stafford was raised from his barony to become the earl of Stafford. None of these lords were new, in the sense that they were commoners beforehand, but nevertheless, the raising of three men to comital rank, and the raising of Henry to a dukedom, were all in keeping with the style and largesse of a king whose reign was beginning to be viewed in terms of greatness.

  Not long after King Philip died, Edward had asked the pope to appoint an English cardinal. To put an English voice among the many French ones at Avignon would have been a very sensible move, at least partly correcting the massive pro-French bias there. The pope had responded with a request for Edward to put forward two suitable candidates. Edward suggested William Bateman, the bishop of Norwich, and Ralph Stratford, the bishop of London. The pope, however, saw fit to throw sand in all their faces. On 17 December 1350, in the presence of the newly crowned King John II of France, the twelve cardinals he created included eight more Frenchmen, three Spaniards and one Italian. The English candidates were ignored. In this light it is not surprising that Edward was keen to pass the subsequent petition for a statute prohibiting papal appointments.

  French antagonism was extreme in 1351. The feeling in France - and the fear in England - was that King John needed to begin his reign by taking the fight to the English. In March the French won a minor symbolic victory in Brittany in the 'Battle of the Thirty', a joust between thirty French and thirty English and Breton knights. Another blow was struck for French pride when Sir Thomas Dagworth was ambushed and murdered. But it was the English under Sir John Cheverstone who won the more important victory at Saintes on 1 April 1351, capturing the French commander Guy de Nesle. Unfortunately de Nesle was soon ransomed, and the French reversed the English success by capturing the strategic fortress of Saint-Jean-d'Angely, which had been in English hands since its capture by Lancaster in 1346. The English responded with a few raids in Brittany under Dagworth's successor, Sir Walter Bendey, and around Calais under Lord Manny. It was a situation which could not be called war, yet it was hardly peace.

  Then disaster struck. The English garrison of Calais, commanded by John Beauchamp, was ambushed on its way back from a raid. Beauchamp and several other knights were taken prisoner, leaving Calais undefended. The news was immediately taken to England, where Edward was already concerned about an imminent Flemish switch of allegiance to supporting the French king Emissaries were promptly sent out in all directions. The duke of Lancaster was sent to negotiate with the count of Flanders, heir to the count killed at Crecy, who was more acceptable to his people than his father. Lancaster was told even to offer the hand in marriage of John of Gaunt if it was necessary. The bishop of Norwich and the earl of Huntingdon were despatched to France to seek a permanent peace, hoping thereby to stave off a French advance until Calais could be secured. Edward himself set about raising an army as quickly as he could to secure the town. But the English position was weak. The count of Flanders openly went to King John and threw off his allegiance to England. It was just as well that Bishop Bateman and the earl of Huntingdon were able to secure a truce in September. Edward had suffered two setbacks - Saint-Jean-d'Angely and the Flemish alliance - and King John was able to celebrate in November by establishing a chivalric order of his own, the Order of the Star.

  Edward was undoubtedly relieved not to be going to war in 1351, and he quickly cancelled his plans to take an army to Calais. The amount he was spending on construction at Windsor, Westminster, Calais, Eltham and Henley could not easily be transferred to fund-raising for war. Nevertheless the encroachments and raids of 1351 had alerted him to the dangers of ploughing all his resources into stone and all his time into hunting and domestic politics. A serious attempt to achieve permanent peace with Scotland was on the point of collapse, even when King David was allowed to leave the Tower of London in February 1352 to return to Scotland to try to persuade his subjects to accept Edward's proposals. A message from France in January reminded Edward very forcibly that there might still be occasions when war would prove advantageous. Edward was thus once more mulling over the prospect of war and its costs as parliament arrived at Westminster.

  The parliament of 1352 marks a particularly high point in the relationship between fourteenth-century kings and the country's representatives. A long list of petitions was presented by the representatives in the expectation that Edward would be asking for several years of direct taxation.

  In the past, parliament had been asked to agree to taxes in the belief that the king would then, afterwards, listen to their petitions. This time, the order of things was altered. Edward's Chief Justice, Sir William Shareshull, positively encouraged parliament to prepare petitions for Edward to right wrongs or to amend the law. When parliament eventually came back to Edward the deal was that they would agree to the taxation on the condition that he gave a prompt and favourable reply to their petitions.

  Edward could not be forced into granting petitions, and it remained up to him whether he accepted the deal or not. In theory, he could have simply imposed taxation and refused any and all terms. But there was an excitement about parliament at this time, and the way it was developing held an attraction for Edward too. The petitions presented to him in 1352 contained a ready-made legislative programme, setting straight a large number of outstanding legal matters going right back to the beginning of the reign. The question of preventing feudal aids being levied without parliamentary consent was raised, so was the problem of purveyors for the royal household abusing their positions, and the enforcement of standard weights and measures throughout the country. Debts owing by Italian merchants, sub-standard coinage, the abuses of forest keepers, and the practice of levying men-at-arms from large non-feudal properties were openly discussed. Edward assented to all of these petitions and many others. In fact, every one of the twenty-three chapters of the great statute of 1352 directly related to the list of petitions handed to Edward by parliament. The laws themselves may have been precisely worded by Edward's civil servants but it cannot be denied that Edward had listened to parliament's demands. Parliament had effectively listed what it considered were Edward's legislative shortcomings to date, and Edward - always eager to be seen in a good light - had done what he could to correct them.

 
; In the midst of this long list of laws were several very important pieces of legislation. There was a new Statute of the Clergy and a law allowing for the payment of fines by those guilty of breaking the Statute of Labourers to go towards reducing the amount of direct taxation necessary. But without any doubt the most important statute made at this parliament was the great Statute of Treasons.

  Given the large number of treason trials and executions which took place in the first twenty years of Edward's life, it is surprising that treason had never previously been defined or codified. The word tended to be bandied around very loosely, its references only connected through a sense of a criminal betrayal of trust. But it was clear to all that a servant who murdered his master was not guilty of the same crime as a magnate who went to war with the king. A statute was required to distinguish between general or petty treason and high treason, which was an act against the king and his government. The statute was also required to define exactly what constituted an act against the king. The result was a very interesting list of crimes, in which Edward and his justices referred back to the deeds of Roger Mortimer. Thus we read that High Treason was when a man 'considered or imagined' the death of the king, or of his queen, or their eldest son and heir, or if he violated the queen, the king's eldest unmarried daughter or the wife of his eldest son, or if he went to war with the king in his realm, or adhered to the king's enemies, or if he killed the Chancellor or the Treasurer, or the king's justices, when they were performing their office. These parts of the statute are still in force today. Other parts subsequently repealed state that High Treason included counterfeiting the king's great or privy seal, or coinage of the realm.