The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  There was a sense of euphoria about the English court after the arrival of the news from Poitiers. Edward's feeling that the cardinals never truly gave him the respect he deserved, regarding him merely as the king of a little country, was a thing of the past. Suddenly his letters were full of international business. The Holy Roman Emperor sought a treaty. The Navarrese could now be trusted to keep faith. The Scots could now be trusted to negotiate openly with regard to the restitution of King David. The bishop of Ely fled to Avignon, realising that he could not possibly hope to stand up against a man now becoming widely regarded as the greatest king England had ever had. Even the pope recognised that he needed to take a different approach to Edward. He wrote to him in October begging for there now to be peace between 'our most dear son in Christ, John, the illustrious king of France (whom the event of war has made your prisoner) and yourself'. It no longer mattered how 'dear' or 'illustrious' King John was in the pope's eyes. He was still a prisoner.

  King John's capture gave Edward another opportunity to reflect on a permanent peace settlement. The process of the previous years had forced him to decide what precisely he wanted from the war, and under what terms he was prepared to give up his claim to the throne of France. But now the French king was his prisoner what more could he ask for? There would of course have to be a ransom, but beyond that? Which other territories might Edward demand?

  As far as the English were concerned, Edward could ask for what he wanted. There was a joke in circulation which went: 'now the pope has become French and Jesus has become English; soon we'll see who will do more: the pope or Jesus'.3" It was blasphemous, as the chronicler who recorded it admitted, but there did seem to be something of the miraculous about the unending string of victories, and the English were keenly alert to the divine favour shown to their scrupulously religious king. To the medieval mind, as St Peter's successors on Earth for the last half-century had been French, one might have expected the French to be invincible. So for the English to have defeated them in more than a dozen consecutive battles had to be due to more than luck.

  Given this, it is perhaps surprising that Edward's territorial demands were only a little more extensive than those agreed at Guines three years earlier. Although we cannot be certain what was agreed on 18 March 1357, it would appear that, as at Guines, he was prepared to renounce both the claim on the throne of France and the war in return for a recognition of his sovereignty to Aquitaine, Saintonge, Angoumois, Poitou, Limousin, Quercy, Perigord, Bigorre, Guare and the Agenais, with the county of Ponthieu (which had been his mother's dowry), and Calais and Guines and the area immediately around them. This decision seems to have meant that some extra territories were retained under the new proposed treaty. But these were not an absolute demand, they were a negotiating position. It was necessary for Edward to demand more territory than he could reasonably hold because, as Trotsky succinctly put it, 'retreat is possible, when there is something to retreat from'. Most twentieth-century historians thought that Edward's reducing his claims marked a strategic failure. But new research has shown that this long-held opinion was based on repeated misreadings of the terms of all the proposed treaties, including the unimplemented agreements. It would appear rather that Edward, believing the war was now over in both Scotland and France, decided he could afford to be merciful and so aimed to achieve little more than the implementation of the Guines agreement and to exchange his French prisoners for a large but negotiable sum.

  The new truce with France was agreed by the prince at Bordeaux on 23 March. One slight hitch was that the duke of Lancaster was still besieging Rennes, and was reluctant to end operations. He had been there for nearly six months already, and had sworn an oath not to give up before he placed his banner on the battlements. When the news of the truce reached him, he found himself in a quandary. As the most pious of all Edward's generals (he had personally composed a treatise on religious salvation two years earlier, The Book of Holy Medicines) he refused to break his oath. Only in July did he finally agree, achieving a personal compromise between his conscience and the enemy by entering Rennes alone and placing his banner on the battlements for a few minutes before returning to England.

  One group who needed no convincing that Edward had the makings of permanent peace was the English parliament. The euphoria following Poitiers had not yet worn off; in fact if anything it was more intense on 17 April, when parliament met, as the prince was expected shortly to arrive back in England with his royal prisoner. The religious tone was still strong, as the case of Cecilia Ridgeway shows. This woman had been condemned to death for murdering her husband, but she proved her innocence by standing mute and going without food and drink for forty days after being condemned. Edward agreed that "this was a miracle contrary to nature', and pardoned her, presumably to avoid any danger of offending the saintly powers that had conferred such great victories on his people. It was thus in an atmosphere of a divinely favoured England that parliament put forward its petition. Fraudulent sales of wool using false weights were curbed, legal means of gauging quantities of wine were instituted, and the Statute of the Staple was reinforced. Two important measures of long-lasting significance were passed dealing with the laws of probate. Extortionate fees for proving wills were prohibited, and the system whereby the goods of an intestate person were committed to an administrator by the church courts was established. The administrative reform of Ireland was agreed. Edward agreed to protect trades of the fishermen of Great Yarmouth (the Statute of Herrings) and of Blakeney (the Statute of Salt Fish). But the overriding business of April 1357-was peace. Jousts were ordered. Pardons were issued to condemned men in the traditional fashion to celebrate the great victory. And parliament agreed another year's direct taxation (on top of the six years' wool tariff), more out of gratitude than need.

  On 5 May 1357 the prince landed at Plymouth with the king of France and rode slowly in procession towards London through Salisbury, Sherborne and Winchester. Everywhere they were feted. Edward himself sent a secret 'army' of five hundred men dressed in green tunics and armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers to prepare a mock ambush of the royal party on the way to the capital. The prince enjoyed the joke, and when the French king saw them, and asked what sort of men these were, the prince told him they were foresters, living in the forests by choice, and that they waylaid people everyday. The reference to the bows and swords - the weapons for which Robin Hood was famed - suggests Edward was alluding to the Robin Hood stories which were becoming popular at the time. Edward also prepared surprises for the prince and the king on their arrival in London. The mayor and aldermen went out to meet the royal party and to escort them into the city. The aldermen were dressed in elaborate costumes of bright colours, the city conduits were filled with wine, the houses were decorated with armour and bows, gold and silver leaves were scattered by beautiful girls sitting in specially made birdcages hung above the road, and crowds thronged the streets. Everyone wanted to see this procession: one of the greatest public events in their lives.

  Along with the king of France in the prince's train of prisoners were his young son Philip and three other members of the French royal family. Philip - too young to fight - had stood beside his father at Poitiers shouting out 'Look, father, there!' every time a new assailant had approached the hard-pressed king. Eight other counts had been captured in the battle, and, of course, King David of Scotland was still in custody. The sum of all these captive kings and great lords, plus the visiting lords attracted by the anticipated spectacle, made London the centre of European attention, and it led to a whole season of festivities, beginning with a great tournament at Smithfield. Edward really could be said to wear three crowns now, as the old prophecy had foretold, for a captive king was seated on either side of him at the feast. The seventeen-year-old Geoffrey Chaucer was very probably one of the many thousands who watched the tournament, as the future poet had become a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, wife of the king's son Lionel. In Scotland the ef
fects of the English triumph were felt no less keenly, and the destruction of the kingdom's mighty ally so soon after the Burnt Candlemas campaign helped the Scottish parliament to agree to the terms put forward by Edward, resulting in the Treaty of Berwick on 3 October. Edward and Philippa held a great Christmas feast at Malmesbury and went on to Bristol to watch the first tournament in England to be held at night. This was tournament drama taken to its extreme: knights in plate armour with crested helmets on caparisoned horses jousting in lists illuminated by great fires and thousands of torches, the onlookers' faces red in the glow.

  The culmination of all these tournaments and celebrations was the great tournament ordered to take place at Windsor on St George's Day 1358. Edward planned to make this one of the truly great chivalric occasions of his time. The buildings of his new College of St George in the lower ward were now finished, and the stalls of the Knights of the Garter in place. The tournament itself was hosted and proclaimed by the earl of March, one of the leading tournament fighters in the kingdom. Edward issued a proclamation to be taken throughout Christendom that he would offer a safe-conduct to anyone who wished to come to England to watch the tournament. Several Continental dukes came, so too did the king's sister, Queen Joan, and many of the nobility of Gascony, Germany, Hainault and France. Even Edward's ageing mother Isabella stirred herself to attend. The only slight downturn in the glory of the proceedings was an incident involving the duke of Lancaster. While jousting with a knight during a mel6e, another knight charged into him, wounding him severely.

  A few days later, at Windsor, King John ratified the peace treaty which had been negotiated at Westminster, known to historians as the First Treaty of London. Its terms were very similar to the Guines agreement. The proposals of March 1357 had been seen by the dauphin in January, and settled. In reality he had very little choice: he was under huge pressure from the French parliament, barely suppressing a revolt over another reformation of the coinage, and was aware that Charles of Navarre had escaped from prison and was putting himself forward as a rival king. In addition an unofficial army of renegade English, German and Navarrese men-at-arms under the command of an Englishman, James Pipe, was pillaging its way up the Seine towards Paris, in total contravention of the truce. So the terms of the treaty were well-received in the city, where the people were sick of paying for the war, sick of being defeated, and sick to think that their own government still could not defend them from freebooters. The only significant problem remained the question of how to raise the money to pay the king's ransom. Edward had demanded the massive sum of one million marks (£666,667). No doubt his own view was that this was not his problem: he could hardly be expected to ransom the king of France cheaply. Moreover he (Edward) had reason to think that he had been more than generous in not exacting further territorial concessions after Poitiers. That he felt he had been reasonable, and that the First Treaty of London was fair, is important to understanding what happened next in the Anglo-French war.

  Queen Isabella's appearance at the Windsor tournament reminds us that that lady - now sixty-six - was still very much a prominent and active member of the English royal family. One of the most misleading stories of traditional medieval history is that, after the execution of Roger Mortimer in 1330, Edward locked his mother up in Castle Rising, where she went mad and eventually died. This is absolute rot. Although Isabella had been placed under a temporary house arrest at her castle at Berkhamsted in November 1330, she had only remained in that state for a month. Edward was devoted to her, and had her brought to Windsor to join him for that first Christmas after Mortimer's arrest. That this was a genuine closeness, and not just an opportunity for him to gloat over her fall, is shown by his subsequent behaviour towards her, for within a fortnight he had restored her income of £3,000 per year. He spent the next two months with her at Windsor, and often visited her there over the subsequent two years. After that she often visited Castle Rising, which Edward had restored to her along with Hertford, Berkhamsted, Eltham, Leeds, Cheylesmore and many of her other estates, but she was never imprisoned there or at any of these other places. In 1337, Edward raised her annual income to £4,500. By this time she was a frequent visitor to the court, celebrating his birthday with him, joining in his hunting parties, attending religious ceremonies with him, and watching his tournaments. By 1348 she was again considered sufficiently respectable to represent Edward in diplomatic negotiations with France.

  This apparent rehabilitation is made understandable by two facts. First, Edward really had no need to punish her in 1330 as Mortimer had been the one who had posed the threat to his regnal authority, not Isabella. Edward also blamed Mortimer for creating the international dilemma of Edward II’s secret survival. If Isabella had participated in not having her husband murdered, Edward could hardly blame her for that. The second underlying fact is that Edward and Isabella had a lot in common, much more than just being mother and son. Edward's interest in alchemy has already been noted; Isabella was also interested in the subject, and made several attempts to obtain the elixir of life which would preserve her once-famous good looks.43 They both had an interest in spirituality and chivalric literature, as shown by the volumes left by Isabella at her death, which included several religious and Arthurian titles. Like most aristocrats, they were both keen on music: Edward himself kept between five and nine minstrels, and Isabella rewarded liberally the minstrels of all the lords who came to visit her. They were both obsessed even more than their contemporaries with jewels and bejewelled things. In 1357-58 Isabella spent no less than £1,400 on jewellery. The account of her jewels at her death reveals her to have owned many religious pieces - crucifixes, cameos, amulets and rosaries - but also hundreds of non-religious decorative items, such as gold rings with precious stones. One item in particular was described as 'a large brooch containing a thousand pearls'. Edward's and Isabella's similar awareness of the importance of their appearance is highlighted by Isabella maintaining a bathroom, like Edward, and using make-up. Most important of all they knew they were different to other people, for they were royal, and they shared a consciousness of what that royalty meant. It meant divine healing powers, political responsibilities from which one could not run, and (at the extreme) the requirement to put one's life at risk for the kingdom's benefit. To share in such a fundamental and yet minority identity was a powerful bonding force. In any reckoning of the women in Edward's life, Isabella has to loom very large indeed. Thus we may be sure that now Edward was deeply affected by his mother's death.

  Edward remained close to his mother to the very end. The pages of her household account book for the last year of her life show that Edward himself came to dinner with her four times between October 1357 and May 1358. He also sent presents regularly: casks of Gascon wine, a falcon, two caged birds and a wild boar. Her grandchildren came to see her: the prince of Wales came with Edward on 26 October 1357, and by himself on 6 April, and with the duke of Lancaster on 19 April. Lionel came to see his grandmother on 2 March 1358, John of Gaunt on 1 February, and Isabella of Woodstock visited with her father and the earl of March on 29 April. All this amounts to more than mere duty: one feels there was a great deal of goodwill towards the old lady.

  That Queen Isabella remained sane - contrary to the old myth - is amply demonstrated by her appointment to negotiate with France in 1348, her regular pilgrimages to Canterbury and Walsingham, her involvement in the negotiations regarding Charles of Navarre in 1358, her participation in negotiations regarding the peace with France the same year, repeated visits from important individuals, and her travels to Windsor for the great tournament of 1358. Her social life had greatly benefited from the victory of Poitiers, for the prince brought so many members of the French royal family to England as prisoners that she was able to catch up with many of her cousins. But for the last year of her life she had not been a well woman. On 12 March 1358 she had given her surgeon a gift of forty shillings. Four weeks earlier a messenger had been sent to London on three occasions to fet
ch medicines for the queen and to hire a horse to bring her physician, Master Lawrence. At the same time medicines were sought in St Albans. Edward probably knew when he visited her on 20 March that she was dying. By then he would also have known that his sister, Queen Joan of Scotland, was on her way south for the great tournament at Windsor. So close was the family that, even though she had not seen her mother for thirty years, Queen Joan nursed her until her death. In these circumstances, it is remarkable that Isabella attended the Windsor tournament. Obviously the occasion was so great, and so important to Edward, that she did not want to miss it. Perhaps having finally seen her son's kingship reach its zenith, she was content. In August, during another bout of ill-health at Hertford Castle, more medicines were sought. On 20 August she summoned Master Lawrence from Canterbury to come with the utmost speed, but before he arrived, she was dead. She had chosen to have a very powerful draft of medicine administered, in a large quantity. So died Edward's pious, aged, once-beautiful and extraordinary mother, Queen Isabella the Fair, on 22 August 1358.

  Edward cannot have been wholly surprised by the news of her death but he was nevertheless greatly saddened. Her servants each received a large reward from him. He arranged the watching of her corpse at Hertford, and its transfer to the church of the Franciscans in London. He had the streets cleaned in readiness for the arrival of her corpse at the church. Her wish that she should be buried in 'the tunic and mantle of red silk and lined with grey cindon in which she had been married', fifty years earlier, was respected, and the garment was taken from the wardrobe where it had been lovingly preserved all those years. She was buried on 27 November in the presence of Edward, Philippa and the whole royal family. It was the church where her lover's body had briefly lain twenty-eight years earlier, after his execution. In February 1359 Edward commissioned a fine tomb to be constructed for her, with an alabaster effigy, surrounded by metal railings made by the royal smith at the Tower. In later years, on the anniversary of her death, he went to very great lengths to commemorate her. Every year he paid for three hundred wax torches to burn around her tomb, and for clothes for thirty paupers to bear these torches; for five pounds of spices to be burnt by the men staying at her tomb, and for Parisian towels to wrap around the spices while they were awaiting burning. He ordered three cloths of gold to be placed on the tomb on the eve and on the anniversary of her death every year, and on each occasion alms were given to the Franciscans, Augustinians and Carmelites, and to anchorite recluses in London, and to the prisoners in Newgate gaol, and to 'two poor sisters imploring God' for the benefit of the queen's soul. Finally, the heart of Edward II was placed in Isabella's tomb, on her breast. In terms of ceremony, Isabella's death meant more to Edward than anyone else's to date, even that of his much-loved daughter, Joan.