The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

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  From Thurrock Edward returned by barge to Westminster. There, on 6 June, he held a feast at which he entertained a number of French lords, as well as the duke of Lancaster and the fourteen-year-old John de Montfort, 'the duke of Brittany', Charles de Blois' rival. Clearly the war was still a talking point. But Edward did not remain at Westminster to discuss the conflict but went down to Wiltshire, where he stayed until August, when he moved to Gloucestershire and the Welsh Marches.

  Edward's lack of energy at this time, and the apparent lack of business conducted should make us wonder what he was doing. On 12 July he had ordered the truce to be prolonged until November, but otherwise all the charters and writs emanating from the government were coming from Westminster. Edward had for some years now established his chancery and its subsequent offices permanently at Westminster, so that all charters were written up there and sealed with the great seal. Letters patent and even letters sealed with the privy seal were written up in the king's absence. Edward himself had a third secretariat, the secret seal, which travelled with him. A high level of business must have been delegated. But even if all the letters emanating from the hall at Westminster were written in response to instructions from Edward's secret seal (which they were not), Edward was certainly not overly busy with paperwork in 1353.

  Given Edward's preferred recreations, it would be reasonable to suggest that he was hunting or falconing. The chroniclers all mention Edward's love of the chase, and we have proof of it in the huge amounts he spent on hunting and the costly garments he commissioned for hunting parties. At about this time he ordered a perch to be constructed inside his chamber at his new house at Rotherhithe for his favourite falcons to sit on. In August he had to pay compensation to one John Forrester, who had owned three pigs until they were killed by Edward's hunting dogs. The following year he ordered the enclosure of the park at Lyndhurst in the New Forest for hunting. But the likelihood of this explanation does not mean that it is the right one. On 31 July 1353, while Edward was at Clarendon Palace near Salisbury, the king's apothecary John of Lucca, was paid £16 16s 8d for various medicines delivered for the king's use.

  Illness is a difficult subject, for the biographer as well as for the sufferer. Had this reference not survived we would not presume Edward was ill at this point in time. Chroniclers - almost always writing in hindsight - tended not to treat illnesses as subjects for comment unless it was a very serious affliction, or coloured the man's personality, or resulted in his death. By comparison, hunting, immorality and tourneying were subjects which they were quite happy to mention in summing up a man's life. As a result we have a picture of medieval knights all heartily and joyfully jousting and hunting together and never once suffering from bad health until they became old or died. This is ironic, given that we also know that these men were charging into each other and seriously wounding each other in peacetime, and brutally maiming each other in war. Many are reported to have been blind in one eye as a result of injuries. Also plague had brought with it a wave of illnesses and morbidity not solely connected with rats. Generally speaking, noblemen born between 1350 and 1450 tended to live shorter lives than their forebears, even if they died peacefully.

  Edward was not exempt from the diseases and ailments floating around fourteenth-century England. He had fallen seriously ill in Scotland in 1345. His awareness of his physical vulnerability meant that he maintained a physician and a surgeon as part of his regular household. The employment of these medical men as officers therefore does not mean that he was ill. One reason to have them on hand was the danger of warfare, as shown by the huge discrepancies between the amounts paid to his medical staff for peacetime and wartime service.4' But another was prophylactic: to maintain the king in good health. The physician advised him about what he should and should not eat at mealtimes, and which astrological periods were the optimum in which to let blood. The surgeon was responsible for his outward appearance, not just his injuries. Even if we knew which medicines were being administered, we would not know how ill he was, or what was wrong with him. All we know for certain is that he required medicines, that his rate of business dropped, and that he left most of his household staff at Salisbury and spent time alone with his closest companions and probably his physician. The other fact we may note is that his illness - whatever it was - did not incapacitate him for long. From Wiltshire he moved into Gloucestershire, and later into Herefordshire. Edward made his trip to the Mortimer shrine at Leintwardine in September. He also went to the shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe at Hereford, then sent his sons to celebrate the obsequies of his late father at Gloucester, and returned to Westminster.

  Edward's principal purposes in summoning his council in September were to oudaw foreign courts dealing with English affairs (the Statute of Praemunire), to request an extension of the subsidy, and to discuss the Ordinance of the Staple. The wool staple - the place where all English wool had to be sold - was currently situated in Bruges, Flanders. In June 1353, while ill in Wiltshire, Edward had decided to return the wool staple to England, thereby satisfying English merchants' demands at the same time as removing an important overseas privilege from the Flemish. By 1353 the count of Flanders (now fully in command in Bruges) had openly sided with John of France, and had refused to renew his alliance with Edward despite the best efforts of the duke of Lancaster. So there was no further advantage in forcing English merchants to export their wool to Flanders only for cloth buyers to have to re-import it at great expense.

  Edward hoped the removal of the staple from Flanders and the establishment of domestic staples for wool, leather, lead and hides would be a sufficient concession to the commons to allow for this business to be dealt with in council. The taxation element meant that the commons had to be involved somehow, but in order to prevent a long list of parliamentary petitions, Edward summoned only a single knight from each shire and a small number of representatives of the towns, and called the meeting a 'great council', not a parliament. The representatives were happy to agree to the removal of the staple from Flanders and the prohibition of courts - especially the courts at Avignon - from dealing with any and all matters touching on English benefices and the rights of the English Crown, and they agreed to the extension of the wool subsidy. What they were not happy with was Edward's attempt to avert the need for holding a full parliament. Petitions were put forward as if Edward had summoned a parliament. Edward realised that he could not avoid his newly acknowledged parliamentary reponsibilities simply by calling a small parliamentary assembly a 'great council'. He listened to the petitions. Hence the council of 1353 ended up passing statutes dealing with the granting of pardons, the sale of cloth, the freedom to import Gascon wine at any port and regrating (selling bad or low-quality goods). And to make sure that Edward recognised how parliament saw its position in the legal framework, he was asked to confirm the Statute of the Staple - an important concession to English merchants - in the next full parliament.

  The reason for going into the details of these parliaments of 1351-53 at some length is to illustrate the deep engagement which existed between king and parliament at this time. Edward was a man who listened to his representatives, and held dialogue with them, even if he did not or could not agree to their demands. Although it is the mass of legislation passed by his grandfather, Edward I that caught the attention of early legal historians, prompting them to call that king 'the English Justinian' (referring to the great Byzantine Emperor who codified the Roman Law), Edward III was no less of a legislator. But his methods were different: he was a lawmaker, not a lawgiver. He made laws by responding to parliamentary demands. Sometimes these demands allowed him to promote his own agenda for legislation; at other times the measures were all but forced upon him as a result of his need to maintain a high level of taxation. Sometimes even he had his own wishes presented to him in the form of a petition from a magnate. But the parliaments of Edward III are remarkable for the breadth and depth of the parliamentary dialogue between king and peop
le. So great was Edward's contribution that one modern scholar has assigned him the tide of 'Second English Justinian', putting him on a footing equal to that of Edward I, the codifier of English Common Law.

  Christmas 1353 was spent at Eltham, feasting every day for the traditional twelve days, and then a few days more. In the new year there was an Epiphany tournament, at which Prince Edward (the Black Prince), Sir John Chandos and Sir James Audley took part, dressed in armour covered with red and black velvet. Later in January Edward made his way into East Anglia. His life had become routine. Success and peace had led to building projects and parliaments becoming the events of his reign. Hunting, feasting, falconry, gift-giving and discussions about diplomatic marriages had become the stuff of his private life. Jousts and war were things of the past. Had his life continued in such a manner, one could look at the rest of it as being simply glitteringly rich, dominated by economic and social issues and architecturally splendid. Fortunately for Edward's biographers, there was more to it than that.

  The origins of the approaching discontent lay in the political machinations of King Charles of Navarre, one of French history's most duplicitous and least likeable characters. He and his equally unlikeable brother Philip were second cousins of King John, being the sons of Philip d'Evreux and his wife Jeanne, daughter of King Louis X. They were thus royal princes on both their father's and their mother's side, and through their mother it had been claimed that Charles had a prior claim to the throne of France before Edward as well as King John.47 Charles was also John's son-in-law. In January 1354 the brothers decided they would murder the constable of France, Charles of Spain, a close confidant of King John. Philip entered the inn at which Charles of Spain was staying and had his men stab him eighty times while he tried to escape, naked, from his chamber. He reported the news to his elder brother, who assumed reponsibility for the killing, claiming he himself had ordered it to be done.

  Charles of Navarre's behaviour was a deliberate antagonism to the French king, and he rightly expected to be castigated for his crime. He therefore sought the support of the duke of Lancaster, to arrange for an English army to invade France if it should come to war. Lancaster referred the question back to Edward. After a little deliberation, Edward put forward excessive demands for supporting Charles, amounting to a division of the whole of France between them, with Edward being crowned king at Rheims. These were acceptable to Charles of Navarre. In the circumstances, he was likely to agree to anything in return for military aid.

  Lancaster was sincere, and himself promised to fight for Charles of Navarre. Edward was also sincere, and promptly gave orders for an army to be raised. Charles himself was anything but sincere. When Cardinal Guy of Boulogne was empowered to make peace with Charles, he used his diplomatic skills to good effect, and managed a cold but clear reconciliation between Charles and John at Mantes, on 22 February. John offered substantial gifts and concessions to Charles, despite his crime, and pardoned him. Then Cardinal Guy left the French royal party to write a sarcastic letter to Lancaster telling him the news. The English had been used and betrayed.

  Lancaster was amazed at Charles of Navarre's abuse of his trust. One of Cardinal Guy's comments - that 'the hole by which he (Lancaster) had hoped to slip into France had now been sealed' — infuriated him, and he responded by pointing out that there were many other holes known to him, and the cardinal could not hope to stop them all. The cardinal -who did not approve of the crimes committed - responded by suggesting that Lancaster might find it advantageous sometime to murder one of Edward Ill's closest friends. It was only half a joke. As the cardinal was well aware, when members of the French royal family murdered royal servants and were rewarded, French politics had reached a new low.

  Lancaster was deeply embarrassed and protested his innocence vehemently. He did not need to worry, Edward had no doubts about his friend's integrity. And Edward - or, more probably, one of his far-sighted negotiators - realised the situation was actually to England's advantage. Looking beyond the mere failure of the invasion to the reasons why the intrigue failed, it was obvious that it was due to the weakness of the French monarchy. John was so desperate for support and so devoid of ideas about how to strengthen his realm that he had paid off a hated murderer and rival rather than risk his opposition. The man who had advised him to do this was Cardinal Guy. If Guy was in the ascendant, shadily dealing with all parties secretly, and if he still understood that sovereignty was the key to peace between England and France, might not Guy be the way to bring King John to heel? Moreover, if Edward, with an army in the field, still went ahead and invaded, did Cardinal Guy not stand to lose the most? Edward saw a golden opportunity, and sent the bishop of Norwich and the earl of Huntingdon to reopen negotiations.

  It was the right thing to do. Within days of the negotiators' arrival at Guines the basis of a permanent settlement had been agreed. Edward was to renounce the war and his claim on the kingdom of France in return for full sovereignty of the whole of Aquitaine, Poitou, Limousin, parts of the Loire and the town and area around Calais. Both series of delegates agreed, and sealed the provisional treaty, and agreed further that the treaty should be ratified by the pope in October. Edward, it would seem, had finally decided what he wanted. After seventeen years of war, the way to peace was clear at last.

  On Wednesday 30 April 1354 Edward entered the Painted Chamber at Westminster and met parliament. The discussions at Guines had been secret, and he was obliged not to reveal their content, so the initial address did not mention what had been agreed. Instead it was announced that there were three principal matters to attend to: the Statute of the Staple, to hear petitions of representatives, and the damage to the realm which had been occasioned by the great cost of the war with France. Edward -unable to restrain himself in this moment of victory — promised to reveal the terms of the proposed treaty before the departure of parliament.

  So parliament went into session. The petitions of Roger Mortimer and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel for the reversal of the sentences on their forebears were read out and agreed, with the result that Roger Mortimer now became the second earl of March. A spin-off was the important law that henceforth no man of whatever estate should be imprisoned or condemned without him first answering charges against him, a law commendable for its brevity (one single sentence) as well as its fairness.5' A further fifteen petitions were granted, ranging from a prohibition on exporting iron to confirmation that the Marcher lords should answer for their Welsh estates to the king (as they always had done in the past), not the prince of Wales. But the great event of the parliament was, without doubt, the moment when the ageing chamberlain, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh, announced to the magnates and prelates that there was now a distinct hope that the war could finally and agreeably be brought to a close. As the king had always placed matters of peace or war before parliament, Burghersh asked aloud: 'Would you assent to a treaty of perpetual peace?' And 'unanimously and entirely' the representatives and magnates responded 'Yes! Yes!'

  There was huge optimism after this. Edward carried on spending money on his buildings and forest enclosures as if he would need it for nothing else. Philippa was pregnant again, expecting their twelfth child, and England was in a relatively prosperous state. The wool staple was restored to England, and the merchants were satisfied. The prospective end of the French war allowed Edward to renew negotiations for the return of David II to Scotland, and to propose a long period of payment for the king's £60,000 ransom, which would prevent the Scots making incursions into northern England for at least nine years. Edward's only anxiety was that King John would change his mind before the pope ratified the treaty. To this end he instructed Lancaster well in advance. He told him exactly how he wished him to approach the pope at the time they would meet, humbly recognising God's goodness to him and stating that he wished to fight God's enemies. If there was any problem in ratifying the treaty of Guines, Lancaster was to give up Edward's claim to Normandy, Cahors, Quercy and Angouleme, and to rene
gotiate other combinations of lands. Any boundary disputes could be submitted to the pope for arbitration. He was ordered to entertain all the great men in Avignon, lavishly giving gifts, distributing wine, so that all would see the richness of the English court. The cost of the trip reflects these exorbitant entertainment expenses, amounting to more than £5,ooo.

  Lancaster arrived in Avignon on Christmas Eve and met the pope at a great feast in the papal palace on Christmas Day. The mood was optimistic, and negotiations began in the papal palace there and then. Meanwhile in England, Philippa gave birth to Edward's seventh son, Thomas, at Woodstock, on 5 January 1355. Edward enthusiastically ordered a great tournament to take place in February, on the occasion of Philippa's churching.54 But not long after this order was given, dire news arrived from Avignon. The French negotiators were not discussing the treaty of Guines.53 Indeed, it was clear that Cardinal Guy was not fully in touch with the king in Paris, and had fallen out of favour. King John was rather thinking that it was now to his advantage to begin the war again, so he could punish Charles of Navarre and launch a massive attack on Gascony. The French negotiators at Avignon were just going through the motions, playing for time.