The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  La Rochelle stunned Edward. The myth of English invincibility had been broken. English domination of the seas had come to an end. But just like that other event which had shocked him - the parliamentary disputes of the previous year — he took energy from the opposition. It was widely presumed that the English would now lose Saintonge and Poitou too. According to Froissart, the king was pensive and silent on hearing the news. At length he declared that he would himself lead a powerful army to France, to fight with the French king, and remain there until he had regained all that had been taken from him, or die in the endeavour.

  Edward may well have been reflecting on his grandfather's death, sixty-five years earlier. Then Edward I, faced with the treachery of Robert Bruce in Scotland, had camped on the Scottish border and remained there for the last years of his reign, and actually died while being carried north in a litter at the head of the army. It did not matter then that his army had failed to overwhelm the Scots; what mattered was his personal legacy: he would always be remembered as the king who had died in arms, fighting for his kingdom until the last breath had left his body. That was how Edward III wanted to be remembered too.

  Plans had already been in place for an expedition to France in 1372 even before the La Rochelle defeat. John was to take an army to Castile, Edward himself had the idea of joining the prince in leading an army to Northern France, while Pembroke attacked in the south. With the defeat of Pembroke and the loss of the treasure, everything was concentrated on relieving the town and castle of Thouars, where the remaining loyal Poitevin army was concentrated: The French were already besieging the town. All loyal English and Gascon troops were ordered to meet with the king there. He would die before the walls of Thouars, if necessary, away from parliamentary criticism, the household gossips and petty place-seekers.

  A treaty was signed with the duke of Brittany. John of Gaunt - already forced to give up his scheme of invading Castile - was now required to give up his earldom of Richmond to allow Edward to offer it to the duke. John of Gaunt's reputation slipped. We do not know whether this was because he had fallen in Edward's estimation, or whether Edward had become aware of the common criticism of his son, but it is interesting that Edward seems to have made a decision that, in the event of Prince Edward's death, his only surviving son, the five-year-old Richard of Bordeaux, should be the heir to the throne, not John of Gaunt. Having settled this, Edward made for Sandwich and the boats which would take him on this last expedition to France.

  It would have been interesting to know the outcome if Edward had been able to carry through his plans. He had everyone with him: besides his three eldest sons there were many lords, including the earls of Salisbury, Warwick, Arundel, Suffolk and Stafford. On 30 August he made Richard of Bordeaux guardian of the kingdom, and went on board his flagship, the Grace de Dieu. But three weeks later he was still bobbing about off the coast at Winchelsea. The contrary winds did not let up, his own physical state and that of his eldest son gave him cause for concern, and he learnt that the town of La Rochelle itself had fallen to a besieging French force on 7 September. Edward's world was falling apart around him, and there was nothing in his frailty he could do about it. For another two weeks he tried to sail south. His efforts were in vain. His old adversary the weather was the one thing which had remained dependable all these years. In abject disappointment he called off the campaign.

  From this moment until the Treaty of Bruges, which was agreed on 27 June 1375, the war in France was a series of unmitigated disasters. There were no big battles, just a huge number of minor losses. The conquest of about one third of France had been easy in comparison to the task of defending it. Each castle and town could be attacked individually by a large army, and so geographically dispersed were the English-held castles, they found it very difficult to defend each other. Under du Guesclin a French army of about ten thousand men simply reduced every defence the English had in the region. By the time of the Bruges negotiations, the area of Gascony which Edward governed was actually smaller than that which his father had ruled.

  No one was more aware of the humiliation of the English in France than Edward himself. In his mind the virtues of kingship remained unchanged: a good king should be a strong military leader, able to inspire his men, not an invalid. But Edward could not inspire anyone anymore. When he had been young he had encouraged men to join him in building a new military future for England. At forty he had been hailed a great conqueror, at fifty a great lawmaker, but at sixty he was a great memory. The young nobility of the realm saw him not as an inspiration but as a white-bearded, retired soldier, a man in the sixth age, to return to Shakespeare's theatrical analogy of life: 'the lean and slippered pantaloon, / with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, / his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide / for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice / turning again to childish treble'. Edward may or may not have worn spectacles - they are first known in Europe from about 1300 — but no one could look at him as building anything for the future. His day was done.

  Edward's eldest two sons were similarly acutely aware of the problems. The prince realised that he was now too sick to return to Gascony and lead the English there to victory, and in the parliament of November 1372, straight after the return from the aborted French mission, he publicly gave up all claim to the principality of Aquitaine. John, who had been styled the king of Castile since January 1373, was not at all resigned to such a melancholy future, and remained optimistic for both the English cause in France and his own pretensions in Castile. But he was insufficiently militarily-skilled to lead an army to victory. His most remarkable attempt to inspire his men - and it was indeed remarkable — was his march across the whole of France in 1373. After landing at Calais in July he led the army all the way to Bordeaux, arriving there in January 1374. It was a brave decision. His army risked attack every step of the way. Passing over the Massif Central in winter was especially hard, made all the harder by John's chivalrous but misguided stipulation that all food had to be paid for, so depriving his army of sustenance. Men were tired and undernourished. Most knights lost their horses, and could not carry their armour on foot, so they discarded it in rivers, or bashed it out of shape with their own hands to prevent the enemy using it. By the end, if they had been attacked they could have done nothing except to fall to their knees and beg for mercy. It was a bloodless disaster.

  By September 1374 only Bayonne and Bordeaux remained in English hands, plus two or three castles in Brittany and, of course, the impregnable Calais. In November of that year Edward appointed his son Edmund and the duke of Brittany as his lieutenants throughout France, and there was a campaign in Brittany; but in reality the second French war of Edward's reign was already lost. The fact was that the English military machine needed an active and ambitious warrior-king to lead it. Furthermore, it needed to be aggressive. Without Edward, and confined within the territorial limits of the Treaty of Guines, a defensive war was bound to fail. A measure of how futile the struggle had become by 1375 is the contrasting fortunes of the garrisons of Quimperle and Saint-Sauveur at the very end of the hostilities. At Quimperle one of the leading French commanders, Olivier de Clisson, was so harried by the English that he agreed to surrender the town within eight days unless relieved. News of the truce agreed at Bruges came within that period, and, much to the annoyance of the English, the siege had to be given up. At Saint-Sauveur, the same thing happened but du Guesclin insisted that, as the garrison he was besieging had agreed to surrender before they heard of the truce, they should still do so. And they did. The mighty English military machine had been humbled.

  It has often been said that Edward lost his mind in his final years. This is slightly misleading: he was still sufficiently rational to issue personal instructions in 1374 and retained a degree of lucidity until the last year of his life. But he was not well-informed about the state or government of his kingdom, and his mental health degenerated so that, by 1375, he could not foresee the consequences of his statement
s. His intellectual capacity declined to the point where we would describe him as feeble-minded. This may have been due to a series of strokes, as sometimes suggested, and there is evidence that it was a stroke which finally killed him. But we should be cautious about making a diagnosis of his condition beyond this without some firm medical evidence. There are many degenerative diseases of the mind known today, as well as others which have not been identified. Also, we do not know which diseases were prevalent in the 1370s which are no longer around. Nor can we tell which diseases are around today which were not then. And we have not even tried to understand the hereditary weaknesses of the family, particularly the descendants of the Navarrese royal family.

  The best we can do is to look for evidence for a decline in Edward's mental state. There are indications that in 1374 he was able to issue instructions personally which were enrolled by his secretariat. One example is the reward of a daily pitcher of wine paid on St George's Day 1374 to Geoffrey Chaucer, the great poet. Edward had sent Chaucer to Italy in 1372—73 on a mission to the doge of Genoa (a journey which, incidentally, introduced him to the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante; he may even have met the aged Petrarch and Boccaccio). Shortly afterwards he made him controller of the customs. But Edward's probable enjoyment of Chaucer's poetry does not imply his judgement was sound in all other areas. In particular, it is well-known that in August 1373, while at Woodstock, Edward gave some jewels and fine treasures which had belonged to Philippa to Alice Perrers. Giving his wife's jewels to his mistress has often been held up as an example of his immorality. This was certainly an error of judgement, but it needs to be put in its proper context. What he actually gave were the jewels and chattels of Philippa's which had previously been given (probably by Philippa herself) to Euphemia, wife of Walter Hasleworth. So Edward was actually giving away Euphemia's property, not treasured items from Philippa's undisturbed wardrobe. Nevertheless, the gift was not managed in some quiet way; it was done openly and tactlessly, with a record being enrolled in the patent rolls. Had the gift been due to Alice's persuasion, she would have quietly pocketed the treasures or had them described in some other fashion, so it seems to have been at Edward's personal order. Thus we may certainly blame Edward for tactlessness in this matter. Two months later there was another royal instruction which also almost certainly came from the king rather than someone operating on his behalf. He ordered all the bridges in Oxfordshire to be repaired because he wished to go hawking there. It seems that in late 1373 instructions were being issued by the king and written up in the usual manner. But already Edward's judgement was weak. He could not foresee the consequences of his actions. Hence it is no surprise that the parliament summoned in Edward's name to assemble in late November 1373 was the last he attended. By the time he listened to Chaucer give an account of his journey to Italy, he was an affable, smiling, white-bearded and forgetful old man, beginning to hum to himself the quiet song of a remembered life.

  With Edward incapable of governing, the self-seekers assumed a greater role. Latimer, the chamberlain, not only controlled access to the king, he began increasingly to prevent people from meeting him. Edward still went hunting, and received the occasional visitor, but little or no important business was brought to him. Latimer even developed a system whereby he was allowed to reply in Edward's name to petitions addressed to the king. Latimer also took part in the Bruges negotiations. We have to wonder how much Edward really knew or understood what was agreed in the course of these discussions. He still recognised people, and knew their names and what they did, but important financial and political issues were beyond his comprehension.

  This weakness of intellect allowed the self-seekers around the king to catch the gold falling through the wavering royal fingers. Although we know how much longer Edward had to live, those in positions of authority at the time did not. All they knew was that he would die soon and that they, in all probability, would be replaced. For men like Latimer, this meant that he could not let too many opportunities to enrich himself pass by. Richard Lyons, a friend of Alice in charge of the royal mint, also suspected that he had only a short while to gather an endowment for his future. And no one fits more completely into this category than Alice herself, whose entire position, status, wealth and safety depended on the term of Edward's remaining life.

  No one - contemporarily or historically - has a good word to say about Alice. She may well have been the most self-seeking and corrupt person at Edward's court but that does not mean we should not at least try to understand her situation. And on reflection she certainly deserves more sympathy than she received from the principal writer to describe her, Thomas Walsingham, who detested her. She had met the king when relatively young and perhaps a little naive. Certainly she would have been powerless to prevent his advances towards her when she was serving Philippa. We might even wonder whether the infirm and possibly pain-ridden Philippa suggested to Alice that she might please the king. Edward, after all, could hardly be seen to use the dozen or so regular prostitutes of the royal household, who were common women for the satisfaction of his servants. After Alice gave birth to John of Southeray, she was forever closely linked to Edward, and after Philippa's death, she was apparently his sole bedmate. In short, he needed her, and who was she to deny him, the king? When he began to shower her with presents, and remained faithful to her, what could she do? Here was this great king giving her robes, jewels, status, fame and authority over many servants, and she was not even of a noble family. He had picked her out as a woman, for what she was herself, not because of status or political connections. She must have felt enormously flattered, and privileged to have been raised up as the king's recognised companion, above the wives of knights, barons and earls. Normally a royal mistress was lucky if she had her first bastard child recognised before she was cast aside. For Edward to remain loyal to her was unprecedented. No other medieval king remained as faithful to a single mistress as long as Edward did to Alice.

  Alice was intelligent enough to realise that her way to power and wealth was likely to be short-lived. By 1372 she had grown accustomed to royal living, but in the weeks that Edward was away at sea, trying to sail to France, having announced that he would die there, she must have seen all her hopes disappear. She must have been terrified. At that point she would have had seriously to consider what she would do if he never returned. And although he did return, the question remained in her mind. What would she do when he was dead? He was already past sixty: she had only a limited amount of time to safeguard her position and future. Hence her dealing in property and her use of influence to guarantee a future income. Hence her abuse of her position.

  Contemporaries could not understand their king's love for this woman. He had delivered them victory after victory. They probably did not know how weak his mind was, how innocent and naive he had become in his dotage. The rumour spread around that a certain Dominican friar, who had attended Alice as a physician, dabbled in magical cures and had given her the secret of a potion by which she could bewitch the king. It seems that it was her physical beauty that had originally 'bewitched' Edward, but that was an insufficient explanation for contemporaries. Edward had been surrounded by beautiful women all his life, so why this one? Especially as she was using her influence with the courts to resurrect maintenance -that odious practice of using political power to protect criminals from trial - which Edward himself had stamped out.

  One of Alice's friends was in a similarly tight spot. William Windsor, who had repeatedly been accused by the Irish of extortion, bribery and a host of other crimes, was cleared of any wrongdoing in 1373, perhaps as a result of Alice's intervention in the case. But he remained controversial and unpopular. The Irish pleaded with Edward's government to send the young earl of March to be their governor, and this seems to have been Edward's intention. But in the autumn of that year someone persuaded Edward to send Windsor back to Ireland. The change of appointment was made less than six weeks after Edward's gift to Alice of those controver
sial jewels which had once belonged to Philippa. It seems likely that Alice persuaded him. This is all the more probable when we consider that Alice and William were making property transactions together at this time. And that was not the. half of it. It was probably at this time that Alice, and William secretly married.