FOURTEEN

The Pride of England

ON 10 FEBRUARY 1355 two students were drinking in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford. An argument broke out over the quality of the wine. The students emphasised their dissatisfaction by pouring the unpalatable liquid over the head of the innkeeper. They then broke the jug over his head.¹ Tensions had been simmering for some time between the university and the town, and this proved to be the catalyst for a full-scale riot. More than twenty townsmen and sixty-three scholars died over the next three days. Many others were gravely injured. Even after the fighting had come to an end, the bitterness continued, with the result that many scholars fled and at least twenty students’ halls of residence were burnt down. The bishop of Lincoln placed the town under an interdict, and Edward issued a royal commission to investigate. After due process, Edward ruled in favour of the university, granted it a charter so that it controlled the assize of bread, ale and wine in the town, and ordered the mayor of the town and sixty-three citizens to pay a penny each in recompense every year thereafter in perpetuity, to atone for the students’ deaths.

Edward had sworn to maintain justice, and in the Oxford ‘town v. gown’ case he had to show that he would keep that promise. Nor was his favouring the university unexpected: his old mentor Richard Bury was just one of the hundreds of men whose Oxford education had been useful to Edward. What is noticeable about this event is the way in which justice was administered. It was quick, efficient and absolute. In an age when legal disputes could drag on for years, this was dealt with by the king and finalised within a month. It is reminiscent of the argument between two important subjects in 1332 on the eve of the Scottish war. Edward took control of the situation and quickly forced a solution on both parties. There was no time to waste in protracted subtleties and nuances. Edward wanted to remove the issue so he could focus on the forthcoming campaign.

The collapse of the Treaty of Guines had not just frustrated Edward, it had shocked and enraged him. He had been living the life of the potentate, basking in his glory, and perhaps becoming a little complacent. The failure of the treaty had destroyed his ease of mind. It threatened his policy in Scotland as well as France, and he had no choice but to respond. He ordered David II, who was then at Newcastle, to be taken back to his cell in the Tower, and cancelled the negotiations about his ransom. He made preparations for a fleet to go to Gascony. When two papal nuncios reached England in April, desperately trying to patch up some hope of continuing the truce, Edward took the unusual step of responding in person to their requests. Allowing them to enter his council chamber, while he and his magnates were discussing the proceedings at Oxford, he broke off to tell the nuncios flatly that he had no intention of prolonging the truce. He had frequently been asked for truces by ‘those of France’ (he did not call John a king), and by the cardinals too, and always the French had broken them when it was expedient for them to do so. He would debate the matter with his council, he told them, but that was all. He would let the pope know his decision in his own time, through his own intermediaries. The nuncios were then politely but firmly shown the door.²

Nobody attending that council had any intention of trying to dissuade Edward from his set path. Therefore the next act was to consider how to conduct the approaching war. Edward’s experience told him that a dual attack through Gascony and Normandy was likely to prove most effective, with a third advance through Calais if necessary. Lancaster had had discussions with the king of Navarre at Avignon, and on the strength of their agreement Edward appointed him commander in Normandy, to join forces with the Navarrese. At the same time the Gascon lords asked for the prince of Wales to lead them against the French. This would mean that Lancaster would be in charge in Normandy, although his experience had been obtained in Gascony, and the prince would lead in Gascony, although he had so far only seen conflict in Normandy. But Edward had confidence in both his son and the duke. Besides, the prince would not be alone with the Gascon armies. He would be supported by the earls of Warwick, Suffolk, Salisbury and Oxford, Sir Reginald Cobham, a thousand men-at-arms, a large number of Welshmen and two thousand archers.³ And the general plan was that both leaders should advance to a point in central France at which they would meet up. By then it would matter much less where each had landed.

By 24 June – the end of the truce – Edward’s plans were nearing completion. But then the weather intervened. The prince found himself becalmed off Plymouth, and Lancaster was stuck off Sandwich. During the delay Edward decided that he too would lead an army, and throughout August he was watching his ships bobbing up and down on the waves outside Portsmouth, held up by the wind. But the prolonged bad weather tossed the English one major piece of good fortune. Lancaster’s spies discovered that Charles of Navarre had concocted a secret agreement with King John to betray Lancaster, and to ambush the army after it had landed. Once more the duplicitous Charles had upset Edward’s plans. So Edward redirected Lancaster to Brittany. A few days passed, and then he changed his mind again. He would lead both his own force and Lancaster’s to Calais. Lord Manny and the earl of Northampton would accompany him. They would leave at Michaelmas, after his seasick men had had time to rest. ‘And I want it known throughout France’, he declared, ‘that soon I will arrive there and do battle with John, and lay waste the land as far forward as I can see.’⁴

More delays followed. Edward and his army disembarked at Calais at the end of October. Despite the count of Flanders siding with John, and the collapse of the alliances with Brabant and Germany many years before, news of his arrival attracted volunteers from those countries. This brought the total number of his troops up to about ten thousand.⁵ Edward himself was in an exceedingly confident and aggressive mood. When told that a large French force was gathering at Amiens he declared that he would go there directly ‘and show King John the smoke and flames of his country’.⁶

On 2 November Edward set out on the road to Amiens. Three days later, burning the country and villages all around him, he approached Thérouanne. On the way he was met by a French knight, Sir Jean le Maingre, better known by his nickname Boucicaut. Boucicaut had previously been captured in Gascony and was on parole, and so could not take part in the fighting until he had paid his ransom. But that also meant he was safe from further punishment. He was led to Edward, who demanded to know where King John was. Still at Amiens, Boucicaut replied. Edward expressed his surprise. ‘Holy Mary! Why is he waiting for me there, when he has so great a force and sees his land burned and devastated by so few men?’

Edward knew that Boucicaut had come mainly to spy on the size of his army, so he showed his confidence in his troops by allowing him to survey them. Boucicaut saw that the English were well-equipped, well-armed, experienced and high in morale, even if the army was smaller than that mustering at Amiens. Some accounts say that he thought the English were too few in number to accomplish Edward’s objectives. This is unlikely, given later events, but, whatever Boucicaut actually thought, Edward levelled with him the following day. As the two men watched the English army destroy the countryside around Hesdin, Edward told him that he knew that he was spying, although he was on parole. He added that, given this, he could demand an increased ransom for him. But nevertheless he would let him go, and forgive him his ransom. The condition was that he would go to King John and tell him that Edward expected to see the French arrayed for battle within three days.⁷

Boucicaut did as he was told. But the three days passed, and John did not give battle. He may have been unprepared to do so, awaiting a larger army, or he may simply have been too scared to risk his throne by a head-on confrontation with an English army of ten thousand men. Edward was disappointed. He was also beginning to regret his haste in marching south, for he had left his supply lines prone to attack from the French troops stationed around Calais, and his men had now run out of wine. As soon as the army was reduced to drinking local water from wells and streams, they were prone to illnesses and poisoning. With no sign of a French attack, Edward conferred with his fellow war leaders and decided to try the ploy which had worked at Crécy, to encourage the French to attack them in retreat. He accordingly gave the order to withdraw and encamp outside Calais, destroying everything on the way.

King John rose to the bait. Anxious that he should not be seen in the same light as his father, always shirking battle, he sent his marshal to issue a challenge to Edward. Edward responded with the proposal that he had first made to King Philip in 1340: that the two kings should fight alone, the loser surrendering his claim on the throne of France to the victor. If that was unacceptable, Edward suggested that they each be joined in their struggle by their eldest sons, or perhaps a small number of their chosen knights. Once more, he was pitching his family’s divine right against that of the de Valois, a trial by battle in all but name. This was very unattractive to King John, for how could he and the dauphin, Charles, be expected to take on King Edward – the paragon of knighthood – and the Black Prince, who had won his spurs so dramatically at Crécy? He turned him down. He also turned down the next English proposal, and the next. The strategic initiative had to all intents and purposes become the battle. Neither side was prepared to fight on terms suggested by the other. Neither side was prepared to attack the other on ground which their enemy had chosen.

Outside the walls of Calais, Edward was more anxious to fight than ever, for he now knew that he had made a second miscalculation in his preparations for the campaign, more serious even than jeopardising his supply lines. On 6 November, while he had been boasting to Boucicaut, a group of Scotsmen led by a French knight had broken into Berwick and destroyed much of the town. Suddenly Edward was aware that he was exposed. And it was his own fault. In 1345 he had been much more careful, arranging the defence of the northern border in anticipation of a Scottish attack timed to coincide with his invasion of France. This time he had rushed things, had changed his mind too often, and had not made adequate arrangements, assuming that David II’s custody was a guarantee of peace. He certainly had not foreseen the dangers of small numbers of Frenchmen helping to lead a Scottish attack. Nor did he anticipate that Robert Stewart, the Guardian of Scotland, might want to renew hostilities during King David’s imprisonment, even though that was what the Scots were bound by treaty to do if France was attacked.

Cursing himself, Edward gave the order from Calais for parliament to assemble at Westminster, and issued one last challenge to King John. This too was rejected. The temptation to march forward and attack the French then and there must have been great, but he resisted it. Despite the bravado declarations that he would show John the smoke and flames of his realm, and that he would destroy everything he could see, and despite his showing off to Boucicaut, he was about to leave France hastily, without any reward for his efforts. The thousand volunteers from Germany and the Low Countries were dismayed to see Edward slink away, back to Calais, and back to England, without doing battle. This was not the great warrior-king whose victory they had expected to share.

The 1355 campaign in Normandy was a failure. Edward was not humiliated by the French, but by his own neglect of the necessary strategic precautions. The very fact that he had not covered himself in the glory of another victory was something of a humiliation for the most respected warrior-king in Christendom. Nevertheless, in the circumstances, he did the wise and correct thing. Tactical retreats are rarely glorious but they are often as important as successful battles. If we look at the broader picture, Edward’s fundamental approach to the war had not changed since he first went to the Low Countries in 1338. The strategic bedrock of his entire foreign policy (and it is not inappropriate here to use this term) was, in his own words, that ‘the best way to avoid the inconvenience of war is to pursue it away from your own country’. The attack on Berwick threatened that policy. It brought war back on to English soil, and that was something Edward could not and would not tolerate. He had to stand by his policy of maintaining the war on foreign territory above all else. Therefore, in considering his campaign of 1355, we have to say that Edward was forced to retreat as a result of his own strategic miscalculations but, having acknowledged his failures, he did the wise thing in withdrawing from France to protect his kingdom’s borders.

*

Ten days after challenging King John, Edward was sitting in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, with his magnates and representatives around him. He was in no mood for trifling with merchants or bargaining for a grant. There was a real threat to the kingdom in the north, and he wanted simply to make sure he had the means to attack the Scots and secure the border. He was also still smarting from his enforced withdrawal from France, and determined to ensure financial support for a renewal of his disappointing campaign. The heroic champion Lord Manny was therefore given the task of addressing the assembly and making clear why Edward was demanding a renewed grant of no less than six years’ continuation of the wool subsidy.

Sir Walter was an eloquent man. He related the whole history of the struggle for peace, from the treaty discussed at Guines to the failure to ratify the treaty and the duplicity of Charles of Navarre. He told those present about the problems with the weather, and the attempts to do battle, and the French refusal. To his statement Chief Justice Shareshull added the loss of Berwick and the pressing need to respond to the Scots’ incursion. After these speeches, the commons withdrew, and shortly afterwards assembled in the White Chamber, and responded with the magnates that they had unanimously decided to grant a subsidy on all wool and leather for the full six years. This was an extraordinarily long period of taxation, never previously known. Edward had been given the purse strings of the kingdom.⁸

Of course there were conditions. The grant was followed by a number of petitions for the redress of injustices and other grievances. To most of these Edward gave a cursory answer. But one in particular caught his attention. It was a petition from his second cousin, Lady Wake, the sister of the duke of Lancaster. She claimed that the bishop of Ely had allowed his men to burn down some of her houses. She had taken legal action against him, and he had been ordered to pay £900 in damages. Edward already knew this, and had rebuked the bishop at the time. But since then the bishop’s thugs had murdered one of her servants, William Holm, in a wood near Somersham. Gangs of ruffians were notorious in the early fourteenth century, and Edward had done his best to stamp out organised crime. He had almost entirely eradicated the pattern of magnate-sponsored violence and maintenance (although Sir John Molyns did his best to keep the tradition alive).⁹ But it was unheard of for a bishop to be implicated in repeated acts of gang violence. Edward, roused by the threat to law and order, the dignity of the church and the insult to the royal family, ordered that he himself would deal with the case. He further decreed that he would confiscate the bishop’s temporal possessions, and demanded that the bishop humble himself before him.¹⁰

One week later Edward began his long ride north. His mind was set on wresting Berwick from the Scots and then punishing them for their rebellion. He was also angry with the bishop, who had refused to humble himself or even to apologise for his wrongdoing. He was at Newcastle by the end of December, and the army reached Berwick in the second week of January. Even before they arrived, the Frenchmen who had led the attack on the town had abandoned the Scottish cause, leaving the defenders to beg Edward for their lives. Robert Stewart had not anticipated Edward’s immediate return and defence of his Scottish possessions. Nor had his men anticipated his wrath. The shame Edward felt in retreating from France only increased his anger. When he heard that his Chancellor and Treasurer had hesitated to confiscate the lands of the defiant bishop of Ely, he was pushed to the point of fury. Now Scotland stood to pay the price.

The campaign which followed became infamous in Scotland as ‘Burnt Candlemas’. On 25 January, near Roxburgh Castle, Edward summoned Balliol before him and demanded that he resign the title of King of Scots which he had borne uselessly for the last twenty years.¹¹ Balliol was given a pension and had his debts paid, and then left Scotland ignominiously, never to return. Edward then set about organising a destructive march across Scotland modelled on those he had used in France. An advancing front – twenty miles wide, in which everything was destroyed and burnt – was now employed to punish the Scots. It began at Roxburgh on 26 January and continued day by day until Edward marched into Edinburgh, the lower parts of which he burnt on Candlemas Day (2 February). Then he moved on to Haddington, which he burnt, allowing the fires to consume the friary there. A bitter winter campaign followed as Edward destroyed everything in his path on the way across the lowlands to Carlisle. His men suffered from hunger and thirst, as the Scots destroyed their own stores to prevent the English having them. The situation was made worse by the loss of his supply fleet in bad storms, but Edward made sure he punished the Scots.¹² A plot to ambush him in Ettrick forest failed when another contingent was sent through the danger zone ahead of his own force. The many Englishmen killed in his place were the only consolation for the desperate Scots whose most ardent supporters were now beginning to see the alliance with France as more of a benefit to the French than to themselves.

There is no doubt that the Burnt Candlemas campaign was hugely destructive. But how successful was it? It did not bring the war in Scotland to an end, and it seems strange at first to suppose it could have done. But to judge Edward’s attempt to conclude the Scottish war as a failure on the basis that hostilities were renewed shortly after his death, twenty years later, is nonsensical. So we must ask whether it is possible that Edward believed that Burnt Candlemas would help to bring about a permanent peace. The Scots could not possibly hope to defeat a large English army in the field under Edward’s command, so the devastation cannot be regarded as a means of forcing them into a decisive battle. But Edward could have believed that severe reprisals in themselves would bring the Scots to the negotiating table. Certainly he would have hoped that they would think twice before attacking England again at France’s request. No doubt he also meant to send a very strong signal to the French, to let them know that he was still capable of inflicting dire suffering on his adversaries. But the most telling sign is that, soon after Burnt Candlemas, Edward agreed peace with the Scots and resumed negotiations to allow David to return to his kingdom.¹³ Even more significantly, the negotiations were successful. The conflict with Scotland effectively ended then, not to be resumed during Edward’s lifetime, and David returned to his inheritance. Finally, the day on which David’s ransom was to be paid, in yearly instalments, was Candlemas. This would be a powerful reminder to the Scots of what Edward had done in 1356 and could do again. It may seem strange that such destruction should be committed in the name of peace but Burnt Candlemas does seem to have been carried out with the intention of ending hostilities, at least while the king of England was a warrior.¹⁴

*

Historians often stress how expensive Edward’s campaigns were, largely because the English records survive in great numbers allowing the figures to be discussed in fine detail. Had the French records survived as well, they would have shown that the defence of France was equally expensive. There was an economic war going on at the same time as the military and diplomatic conflict, and by 1355 England had all but won it. Edward had developed an efficient system of raising enough money to afford the war.¹⁵ Neither John nor his father had ever come close to making ends meet. Frequent attempts had been made to raise money for the French royal treasury by devaluing the currency, but successive devaluations had undermined confidence and could not be continued indefinitely. In 1356 King John was bankrupt. When his government attempted to tackle this matter head-on, raising a sales tax and a salt tax, there were widespread riots.¹⁶

John’s troubles were not just financial. He had been personally damaged by the campaigns of 1355, having again failed to meet the English king in battle. A plot to have him murdered, in which Charles of Navarre was involved, failed in December 1355. In March 1356 a second plot was hatched by the Navarrese king and his Norman supporters. Again the plot was foiled, but this time John reacted violently. He felt he had tolerated Charles far beyond the point of reason. He secretly donned armour and took a large number of men to arrest him and his key supporters as they ate a feast on 5 April. Four men including the count of Harcourt were summarily beheaded in front of the king, sending shockwaves through the Norman aristocracy. Charles himself was incarcerated. Back in Normandy his younger brother Philip of Navarre sent word hurriedly to King Edward that he needed protection and was prepared to acknowledge English overlordship in return.

Important as these setbacks were, John’s biggest problem in 1356 was the prince of Wales. Having finally set sail for Gascony on 9 September 1355, the prince had been well-received and successful throughout the duchy. In October he had led a very successful raid through Armagnac, and even reached the walls of Carcassonne before returning to Bordeaux for Christmas, burning everything he could. It was not possible for John to ignore the scale of the devastation: it was even more severe than Burnt Candlemas. Whole towns were destroyed, including Carcassonne itself (although the castle was not attacked) and Limoux, where four thousand houses were burnt. As one newsletter put it, ‘since the beginning of the war there has never been such destruction as on this campaign’.¹⁷The prince’s men had looted huge amounts of treasure and added even more to John’s financial problems. They even stole financial documents from the towns they burnt in order to calculate how much damage they were doing to the French treasury in lost taxes and unpaid revenue.¹⁸

Pleased with the success of his son, and satisfied that he had subdued the Scots, Edward turned his attention once more to the solution of the French war. He needed to persuade the French that they stood to gain more from accepting the Treaty of Guines than from refusing it. A sustained war would force John into this position, for he could not be seen to avoid an English army yet again, and he could barely afford to raise an army of his own. Edward meanwhile could be seen to be building lavish manor houses and castles up and down the Thames, and spending thousands every year on his castles and palaces. Everyone in Europe knew that he was not facing a financial crisis.

Edward’s vision of how to force the French to accept the Treaty of Guines assumed the by-now established form of two simultaneous campaigns: one in the south and one in the north. On 2 May 1356 the pope’s formal envoys to Edward requesting a truce were given the same answer as their predecessors. Six weeks later the first small army of eight hundred archers and five hundred men-at-arms arrived in Normandy under the command of the duke of Lancaster, where they met Sir Robert Knolles with five hundred archers from Brittany, and a small army headed by Philip of Navarre and Godfrey de Harcourt. The 2,300 men under Lancaster had specific targets, such as the relief of the king of Navarre’s castle at Breteuil, but it is unclear whether this small army was meant to do more than reassure the Navarrese and worry the French. No attempt was made to link up with the prince in the south. Having destroyed the town and castle of Verneuil on 5–6 July, Lancaster put his force in readiness, expecting the French army under John to advance. No attack came. The following day the English retreated, leaving King John to consider whether to take his army south to defend Gascony, to resume the siege of Breteuil, or pursue Lancaster back into Normandy.¹⁹

It is probably no coincidence that journals were kept for both Lancaster’s attack and the prince’s.²⁰ It seems that Edward urged the leaders on both expeditions to have their administrative staff keep a daily record of their feats of arms, in addition to the usual newsletters which he expected. Edward probably also gave some general instructions as to how the leaders were to proceed. In Gascony he stipulated that the lands of the countess of Pembroke were not to be touched, nor those of Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, a potential ally. But otherwise he was powerless, unable to affect the outcome in any meaningful way. This made him anxious. A sign of his concern is that now he endowed three chaplains to pray for the safekeeping of the royal family at Durham. Frequently when other men founded chantries and collegiate churches to pray for their families’ souls, they included the king, but it was rare for Edward himself to make a grant for prayers for his family. He had been concerned before Crécy, when he had taken his son on a pilgrimage and ensured that he made his will, but now he was doubly concerned, being so distant.²¹ His own mistakes of the previous year had reminded him that campaigns could go wrong. And he knew that the prince might be thinking that everything had gone wrong again, for Edward had originally planned that he himself would lead an attack in the north in August to take the pressure off the prince in the south. He had failed to do so. On 1 August he sent a letter giving his son the authority to sue for peace, if it came to the worst.²²

As he waited in England for news, a drought which had parched the land since mid-March was followed by torrential rains.²³ The usual stream of routine business was presented to him. Orders were given for Balliol’s pension to be paid, for the bailiffs of Rochester Bridge to allow building materials for the Palace of Westminster to pass freely beneath it, and for one hundred and twenty archers to be selected for the royal bodyguard. Amid the hundreds of writs, open and sealed letters, and charters, we may read that Sir Thomas Rokeby was appointed Justiciar of Ireland, and that Charles de Blois’ ransom was finally settled. Discussions with Philip de Navarre and Geoffrey de Harcourt were concluded. As Edward looked out at the summer downpour, he could only wonder what was happening in Gascony.

It was on or about 10 October that he finally heard the news. It had reached Brittany first, and Lancaster had immediately sent John le Cok of Cherbourg to Edward.²⁴ There had been a great battle, at Poitiers, on 19 September. The English had been victorious. The prince was safe and well. And, incredibly – astoundingly – King John had been captured.

The king of France had been captured. It was extraordinary. It had never happened before. Edward was exultant, absolutely triumphant! He rewarded the messenger with twenty-five marks, and gave orders for the news to be cried around the country. Archbishops and bishops throughout the realm were asked to offer up thanksgivings for the prince’s success. Equally amazed and pleased, they did so, as may be seen in their registers. The whole country was astounded; surely this meant the end – a most glorious end – to the war? Froissart noted that ‘great solemnities were made in all churches and great fires and celebrations were held throughout the land’.²⁵ Two thousand three hundred French knights and men-at-arms had been killed, not including infantry, and two thousand five hundred men of quality had been captured. The figures were so impressive that most writers saw fit to include them in their chronicles.

It was probably Geoffrey Hamelyn – the squire who brought King John’s helmet and surcoat to Westminster – who told Edward the detailed outline of the battle. The prince had set out from Bergerac on 4 August and headed north through Périgueux on a long march to Bourges, believing that he would soon hear that King Edward had landed in the north of France. No word came of a second English attack, and the prince had had to reassess his situation on the basis that he would not receive reinforcements. King John was at Orléans with a large army, having destroyed all the bridges over the Loire, and the count of Poitiers’ army was at Tours, to the west. The bridge at Tours still stood. To cross there would give the prince a chance of marching north to meet Lancaster, whom the prince wrongly believed was nearby. On 7 September he reached the outskirts of Tours, and looked across the Loire, hoping to see Lancaster’s camp fires. There were none. The count of Poitiers refused to be drawn out of Tours. Soon the prince heard that the French royal army was marching south from Orléans. He had no choice but to retreat. The inevitable cardinals, watching like vultures, saw an opportunity, and swooped to offer the prince a chance to sue for peace on terms favourable to the French. He refused, and sent scouts out to search for King John. They found him, at Poitiers, on 18 September. As the prince began to arrange his men on the edge of a wooded hillside, in case of attack, Cardinal Talleyrand returned. He urged the prince to agree with the peace offer he bore. If the prince were to give up his prisoners, and all the land he had captured, and agreed not to make war in France for seven years, he and his men would be spared and allowed to go free. After all, King John had more than fourteen thousand men with him and Prince Edward only six thousand, and only about a thousand archers.²⁶ The prince acknowledged these facts and told the cardinal that he would agree to the terms suggested on one condition: that they were ratified by his father. That it would take at least a month for Edward to hear the terms, let alone agree to them – which he was very unlikely to do – shows that the prince was not serious, he was just playing for time.

On 19 September the French advanced their crossbowmen and shield-bearers. King John had unfurled the Oriflamme and issued the order to put all the English and Gascons to death.²⁷ All prisoners taken were to be killed. The sole exception was to be the prince himself. There was nothing further to be done now in the English camp but to prepare for battle after a night trying to sleep on a hillside in armour. Mass was heard. Prayers were said. Some men took the wagons and carts with their booty down to the river behind their position. The prince went among his men, encouraging them, and dubbing knights.

Two groups of French cavalry had been selected, each five hundred strong, to ride ahead to break up the ranks of archers which, it was suspected, would be arranged on either side of the English position. Their horses had been specially armoured to enable them to do this. But the marshals in charge were unable to see how they could charge into the archers. At first they could not see the English position at all, and so were unsure where it was they were aiming for. They hesitated, and then pride, misinformation and nerves got the better of them, and they charged. As the French crossbowmen came forward, letting fly their deadly bolts at the prince’s men in front of them, the English vanguard under the command of the earl of Warwick charged up the hill on the prince’s right to attack them on their left flank, driving them back towards the main French army. Warwick’s men then found themselves under attack from the first of the two groups of French cavalry. Caught in the open between archers and the charge, they took shelter behind a thick hedge. In the middle of this hedge was a wide gap, through which the French riders now tried to force their way; but the earl of Salisbury anticipated the attack and forced his own men into the breach, fending off both cavalry charges. As the French fell back they impeded the advance of the troops under the dauphin, who nevertheless engaged with the English until his standard-bearer was killed. Then they faltered, and gradually fell back to rejoin the main army.²⁸

King John now staked everything on one huge onslaught. His plan was to concentrate his forces on the English position in front of the prince, hoping to overwhelm and crush them through sheer force of numbers. He ordered the entire French army to advance as one massive battalion. When the size of the French army became obvious to the English, and the word went around that the English archers had run out of arrows, they began to panic. Some shouted that they should flee while they had time, for they were beaten. The prince himself rallied the men, responding that the man who said they were beaten was a liar, for how could they be beaten while he was still alive? In the terrifying minutes before the great wave of the French army came upon them, the English ran forward to yank the arrows out of the corpses and the poor wounded and dying, running back to give them to any archer they could find. Across the wide battlefield men realised that they had to stand together now, or they were lost. The prince knew he needed an element of surprise to swing things his way, and ordered a small contingent under the Garter knight, Sir Jean de Grailly – better known as the lord or ‘Captal’ de Buch – to leave the battlefield and rush to attack the French from behind. But seeing this famous warrior’s banners leaving the battlefield, the English thought that he was fleeing, and they began to shout in dismay. At the critical moment, just when the army was about to break up and run, the prince made one of the bravest, most important and unexpected decisions of the entire war. He controlled the urge to flee by ordering his panic-stricken army to advance. The English and Gascons had to steady their nerves or break ranks. Terrified though they were, uncertain as they were, they did not fail. This was true courage. In spite of their fear they marched as ordered, straight towards the Oriflamme, the symbol which meant their deaths. As they advanced, the Captal de Buch was running unseen around the woods towards the French rear. On marched the prince, his trumpeters beside him, his army around him, gathering in resolution. Then at the critical moment the prince signalled to his trumpeters to sound the charge. Men started running. The mounted contingent charged. Archers loosed their last arrows into the faces of the approaching men, then threw away their bows and drew their knives. Infantry, knights and men-at-arms all rushed forwards, waving swords, maces, spears and axes, shouting the war cry ‘Guienne, St George!’ They crashed into the French infantry, each side furiously intent on one single strategy: to kill every man between them and the enemy leader. In the ensuing struggle, as men wrestled, hit each other with stones, stabbed, slashed and shot each other, it was the English who gradually prevailed. Those who stood by King John were pressed back, without any chance of escape as the Captal de Buch caused confusion in the rear, unfurling the banner of St George in the way of a French retreat. The great men of France fell there, around the billowing Oriflamme, slaughtered as the English and Gascons rushed forward to seize the king. One of the last to die was Geoffrey de Charny, the great knight who had survived Morlaix and Crécy, survived Edward’s battle to protect Calais, and had led the attack on Guines. He was cut down as he stood beside his king, holding up the Oriflamme to the last.

It had been a battle totally unlike all the other English victories of the last twenty-three years. It had not been won by archers arranged on the flanks of the army, although the archers had played their part. It had not been won by men-at-arms holding their ground for hours. It had been won by courage, determination and a clear chain of command, keeping the army under control and using its force efficiently in the face of terrifying danger and near-disaster. It was, to use the duke of Wellington’s expression, a ‘damned near-run thing’. But like that other damned near-run thing, the result was a crushing victory. The news would rock the French pope at Avignon. It would astound all of Europe. And the credit would come to King Edward as well as his son. For he had been the king who had met the challenge of the French and begun the war, he had inspired England to pull together to become a fighting nation, and he had ordered and equipped this campaign and all those which went before against the combined might of France and Scotland. And now he had overcome them both. The kings of both France and Scotland were his prisoners. For the first time in its history, England was more than just the southern part of an island off the northern coast of Europe. It was the dominant military nation in Christendom.

*

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’.²⁹ 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’.³⁰ 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, Périgord, 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.³¹ 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.³²It 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 fêted. 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.³³ 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.³⁴ 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.³⁵

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.³⁶ 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 effects 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.³⁷ 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 mêlée, another knight charged into him, wounding him severely.³⁸

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.³⁹ 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.⁴⁰ 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 visitedCastle 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.⁴¹ By 1348 she was again considered sufficiently respectable to represent Edward in diplomatic negotiations with France.⁴²

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.⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵ 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’.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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 1358.⁴⁸ 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 1358.⁴⁹ 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 fetch 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.⁵⁰Edward 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.⁵¹ 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. ⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ Finally, the heart of Edward II was placed in Isabella’s tomb, on her breast.⁵⁵ 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.

*

The first £100,000 instalment of King John’s ransom was due on 1 November 1359. At the time of sealing the First Treaty of London, Edward had stipulated that every single clause had to be fully accepted and complied with, otherwise he would regard the treaty as being broken.⁵⁶ But over the summer the dauphin’s government had been brought to the very brink of collapse. First Charles of Navarre had made it clear he was planning to seize the throne. James Pipe’s army of marauders had left the villages of the Seine valley in ruins, their men dead, women raped and fields empty of all but the scattered bones of their cattle. Then things had turned utterly horrific. The dauphin himself had faced a revolution in which his ministers were murdered in front of him and he himself was forced to swear allegiance to the mob.⁵⁷ The revolution spread into a widespread peasant uprising, the Jacquerie, with terrible destruction and loss of life and property. Even when it was brought under control (by Charles of Navarre, ironically), the tension remained between the Navarrese supporters and the dauphin. The Parisians refused to accept the dauphin back, and prompted a siege of the city which lasted throughout July. The ransom was thus a relatively minor inconvenience in comparison to the complete breakdown of law and order that summer.

Edward was not inclined to sympathise with the dauphin’s plight. What was it to him, if his enemy proved incapable of good government? He had set the ransom; now he wanted it paid, and he refused to reopen negotiations on the matter. His mood was not improved by the funeral of his beloved mother. We will never know exactly how loss or grief may have affected his judgement, but it is reasonable to suppose that his mind was not wholly focused on the French problem in November 1358. The only real pressure for compromise came from King John. Despairing of events back in his kingdom, he now offered Edward whatever he wanted in return for peace.

In January 1359 the anger within Edward, mixed perhaps with frustration and grief began to rise again at a determined French refusal to pay. But King John still implored him to show restraint. John was his prisoner, but he was also Edward’s kinsman and his guest. Edward also liked the man. He gave him presents of barrels of fine wine, lodged him in the Savoy Palace – a residence he himself had once used and which he subsequently had given to the duke of Lancaster – and after the ratification of the First Treaty of London he had invited him to go hunting with him at Windsor.⁵⁸ Although Edward gave orders on 2 January to gather bows and arrows at the Tower in readiness for a campaign, and ordered an army of archers and Welsh spearmen to be made ready, he still listened to John. John asked him to discuss terms with him, face to face, excluding all the counsellors and diplomats. Edward assented, knowing an army was on the way. But John said the right things, made the right offer, and on 24 March 1359 the Second Treaty of London was agreed between the two kings. John added Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Touraine and Anjou to the territories already ceded to Edward. This amounted to the entire Angevin Empire at its very height – under Henry II – and thus the greatest extent of the English royal family’s lordship. In recognition of this generous provision by John, Edward reduced the ransom due to £500,000 and threw in all the other French prisoners, including the other members of the royal family, for free. The first instalment of £100,000 was rescheduled to 1 August 1359.⁵⁹ Edward would then release John in return for the security of ten French noblemen and twenty walled towns.

It was an agreement which gave Edward everything he had ever hoped to achieve and more, and he had reason to feel satisfied. He ordered one of the French prisoners, Marshal Audrehem, to take the agreement to Paris for ratification by the dauphin. Then, humoured again by the prospect of a permanent settlement which was very much to his advantage, he turned his attention to family celebrations.

Although now in his forty-eighth year, only one of his children was married, and he had only one legitimate grandchild. This was Philippa, daughter of Lionel and his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, who had been born at Eltham in August 1355. He also had an illegitimate grandson, Roger, who had been born to Edith Willesford, one of the women at Clarendon, after the prince of Wales had taken a fancy to her, but even so, the paucity of descendants was noticeable. The only step he had so far taken to remedy this was the betrothal the previous year of little Philippa to the six-year-old heir of the earl of March, and obviously it would be many years before that match produced offspring.⁶⁰ So to make up for lost time he now held a double wedding. On 19 May 1359 (the very day that the Estates General met in Paris to discuss the treaty) Edward’s thirteen-year-old daughter Margaret was married at Reading Abbey to the twelve-year-old earl of Pembroke. The following day, in the same church, John of Gaunt (now eighteen) married Blanche, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the duke of Lancaster. All the royal family were there, and many costly gifts of jewellery and goblets were given. Edward himself gave extremely lavish presents to Blanche totalling nearly £400 in value, including ‘a large brooch with an eagle and a huge diamond in its breast, garnished with rubies, diamonds and pearls’ which alone was valued at £120.⁶¹ Ten days later, at Smithfield, Edward and his four eldest sons dressed up as the mayor and aldermen of London along with nineteen other knights in a great three-day tournament, at which they took on all challengers.⁶² Edward was revelling in his victory and the celebration of his family. At times like these, life was one long glorious chivalric parade.

It was probably while awaiting the ratification of the treaty by the French that Edward visited Westminster Abbey to confirm his decision to be buried there.⁶³ The prophecy said that he would be buried among the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral. In 1338 he had visited the shrine, but the following year, as relations with the Holy Roman Emperor wore thin, he ruled out any discussion of being buried in Germany, and decided on Westminster.⁶⁴ For him, there was clearly no great honour in being buried abroad, even among the Three Kings. He had become the pride of England, for in achieving what was prophesied, he had rendered the prophetic writers’ wildest fantasies attainable. Besides, Westminster Abbey was a fine place to be buried. Edward’s great-grandparents (Henry III and Eleanor of Provence) and his grandparents (Edward I and Eleanor of Castile) lay there, as did his brother John and two of his own infant children (William of Windsor and Blanche). St Edward the Confessor, the king who founded the abbey, lay there, behind the high altar. Henry III, who had rebuilt the abbey church, lay just to the north of the saint-king. There was a space directly opposite, just to the south of the saint. That would be where he would be buried, he declared. That was where the great chivalric parade of his life would finally come to an end.

*

What did Edward expect from the Second Treaty of London? No one really knows. Some writers have confidently asserted that Edward never expected the French to accept it, hoping that they would restart the war. Others have been more circumspect, suggesting that Edward was acting reasonably in reducing the ransom for the French king. However, most of these studies have been war-orientated and thus they have ignored Edward’s personal ambitions or the changing attitudes of a man approaching old age. There is no doubt that Edward’s many attempts after 1350 to bring the war to a successful and permanent end were genuine. Some proposals were extreme, but the reason for their extremeness was to allow Edward to press for the best deal possible, for unless he began negotiating with excessive demands, he would not arrive at the maximum gains. None of the four peace proposals were put forward because he wanted to resume the war: there were easier and more direct ways of starting fighting than protracted peace negotiations. Thus it must have been with regret that he learnt in May 1359 that the Second Treaty of London would not be ratified by the interim French government.

The dauphin was determinedly against the peace his father had negotiated, largely because he saw his inheritance being eroded. The Estates General were inclined to agree. They had not expected an escalated series of territorial concessions, they had expected Edward to lessen his demands. The figures for the ransom were so large that they could not acknowledge that Edward had made any concession. They had forgotten in the course of the debate that he did not need to concede anything at all. The Jacquerie had been none of his doing; rather it had sprung from successive failures of the French government. But such things did not enter the reckoning. What mattered was French public sentiment. When the Estates General and the dauphin refused to accept the Second Treaty of London, they did so mainly out of pride. They had nothing else left with which to fight.

Edward’s final campaign was an ambitious affair. The army was reasonably large – in the region of ten thousand men – and the captains were experienced and numerous. The prince of Wales, the duke of Lancaster and the earl of Northampton were present, as were the earls of Stafford, Warwick and March, and, of course, Lord Manny.⁶⁵ Edward’s younger sons, Lionel, John and Edmund, were also with him, expected to win their spurs as their elder brother had at Crécy. Given the failure of the supply lines in 1355, Edward went well-prepared, with mobile forges, portable cornmills, movable ovens, lightweight boats for crossing rivers, building materials and a huge volume of foodstuffs.⁶⁶ Froissart described it as ‘the largest army and best-appointed train of baggage wagons that had ever left England’. Edward declared he would stay in France until he had satisfied his objectives or died in the attempt. The permanent solution to the French problem, which had seemed so close in the mid-1350s, was now within his grasp.

Edward sailed from Sandwich on 28 October, arriving at Calais on the same day. One week later the army moved out, in three great columns, to begin the devastation. This time, however, their purpose was not to draw the French army to battle. There was no point: there was no effective army in France. The kingdom was economically broken, its currency was in free-fall and large numbers of renegade and volunteer self-serving armies, like that commanded by James Pipe, were roaming the countryside destroying, plundering and burning. The French administration had difficulty controlling affairs outside Paris, and that city can hardly be said to have been reliable, having so recently tried to rid itself of the dauphin. Edward’s purpose in 1359 was a single-minded attempt to demonstrate to the dauphin and the Estates General that they had been foolish to choose war rather than to accept the Guines agreement or the two treaties of London. He went determined to unleash the terrible wrath of a divinely favoured biblical king upon his enemies.

The dauphin had miscalculated. He soon realised that he had no means to resist the invaders. He had no way of raising an army, coordinating resistance or even rebuilding the strategic fortifications of his kingdom. Moreover, his weary father had ransomed his most able advisers in England and sent them back to relieve him of administrative power. They tried to make the best of the situation, ordering everyone threatened by the invaders to abandon their homes and take what they could with them to the nearest walled town or religious sanctuary. Where a town’s walls were decayed beyond repair, the town was to be abandoned before the onslaught began. All the French government could do beyond that was to hope, defend Paris, and pray.

Their prayers were answered. Rain began to fall hard, for days on end. Even before 1359 Edward would have ranked as one of the most weather-stricken English kings, but now he was truly soaked. The roads of France became quagmires which prevented his army from moving at more than ten miles a day. The three columns of the army embarked on their ritual desecration of property in a sodden mass of discontent, ransacking the houses in deserted villages as the rain lashed down and saturated their clothes. The commanders too were uncomfortable, themselves soaked, and their prize warhorses’ backs blistering under their leather saddles. The three battalions found it difficult to maintain contact with one another. It took them a whole month to reach Edward’s principal target, the city of Rheims.

Rheims was the ancient ceremonial place of coronation for the French kings. Edward had brought a crown with him, and there is no doubt he intended to ridicule French objections to the treaty by having himself crowned king in the coronation throne of his ancestors. There could be no greater symbol of his domination over the French monarchy, and no more powerful vindication of his claims to the sovereignty of Gascony and his other French possessions. Thus the English armies closed in on Rheims with a strong will, encircling the city: the duke of Lancaster to the north, the earl of March to the east, the earls of Richmond and Northampton to the north-west and the prince of Wales to the south-west.⁶⁷

The French within Rheims were panic-stricken when they realised that they were to be singled out for attack. They argued among themselves in fear. The proud archbishop was adamant that his palace and ecclesiastical buildings within the city should not be used for military purposes of any kind. But the man whom the citizens appointed to coordinate the defence was a man of higher calibre. Gaucher de Châtillon was as ruthless in his defence of the city as Edward was in his attack. The walls were strong, but he made them higher and stronger. He commandeered the church buildings, fortified church towers, organised the citizens into watches and defensive units, walled up three of the city’s gates and dug ditches around the city walls. Streets were blocked with chains, horses requisitioned (including those belonging to the archbishop) and any property which posed a threat to the security of the city was razed to the ground. There was no king in Rheims, nor was the dauphin present. The last-ditch defence of the dignity of the French monarchy was made in their absence.

The English had the experience, skill and means to defeat any army which might conceivably be brought against them, but they did not necessarily have the means to defeat a well-defended city. For two days archers poured a deadly rain of arrows at the defenders as the men-at-arms and infantry filled the ditches with timbers to allow them to approach the walls. The brave citizens did what they had to. Parties of men left the gates and went into the ditches to fight and to try to burn the sodden timbers which allowed the English to approach the walls. Between the rain, the bitter cold, the lack of provisions and the bloody desperation of the men of Rheims, the English were beaten back and forced to consider how long they might have to spend waiting in the mud.

Edward fully understood what made the difference between a successful siege and an unsuccessful one. At Calais he had been able to demonstrate complete superiority through being able to maintain an army for almost a year before the impregnable walls. At Tournai, which also had proved impregnable, he had failed because the city had been well-equipped and his men had grown disillusioned through lack of supplies and money. The question put to him now by Gaucher de Châtillon was whether he was prepared to commit the resources necessary to win Rheims. It would take a long siege, perhaps a whole year, and that would give the French government a chance to reconstitute the French army in sufficient strength to destroy Edward’s supply lines, if not directly to attack him. And Edward’s supply lines were already proving vulnerable. And at the end of the siege, supposing he was successful, what would he have gained? A city in which he could be crowned like his ancestors but which was strategically worthless. To spend perhaps £200,000 on what would ultimately be a single gesture would be folly, especially when the purpose of that gesture was simply to force the dauphin and Estates General to accept a treaty which King John had already agreed. There had to be another way, and years of devastating France told Edward that there was. A grand march of destruction would bring the French government to its knees.

On 11 January 1360 Edward ordered his army to withdraw from Rheims and march towards Paris. The siege had failed, Edward had been denied the satisfaction of a coronation, but the cost to the French was to prove very high indeed. Everywhere there was looting, killing and burning, accompanied by some of the most hideous massacres. It is difficult to exaggerate the number and range of atrocities recorded, and many more must have been committed which were never written down. There were some incidents which contain an element of chivalric charm: Lord Burghersh invited the resolute captain of Cormicy to survey the mine he had dug under the castle, pointing out that a few wooden pit props were all that held up the walls of the great tower. And there were English losses along the way. The marshal of the army, the earl of March, having taken the towns of Saint-Florentin and Tonnerre, died suddenly while besieging Rouvray, and the poet Geoffrey Chaucer was captured while straying a little too far from the main army, requiring Edward to contribute to his ransom. But on the whole the campaign was a horrifying demonstration of the ‘smoke and flames of his country’ which Edward had promised John in 1355.

It is very easy, tempting even, to regard the campaign of 1359–60 as a failed siege followed by a trail of wanton destruction. It does not appear an edifying form of conflict. We prefer to read of well-conceived daring exercises being successfully and bravely carried out to achieve specific strategic aims. But warfare is very rarely as neat and tidy as that, and often the most effective methods are the most horrific. And there is no doubt that, after lifting the siege, Edward was able to put far more pressure on the French government by using tactics of shock and horror, similar to those adopted by modern generals with superior firepower at their disposal. Each act in itself was wanton and pitiless, but taken together they constituted a powerful strategy which undermined French resistance. Having no army to bring against Edward, the French administration could only respond with diplomatic entreaties, channelled through the services of the papacy. Five weeks spent besieging Rheims had had little or no effect, but five weeks of widespread destruction left France reeling. After seven weeks it began to yield the desired result. A papal delegation came to Edward requesting a peace conference. Edward’s terms were no less than the implementation of the Second Treaty of London, and the French withdrew, professing amazement at his harshness. So the next day the village of Orly was attacked and its population massacred in the parish church. The next day more villages were completely destroyed, their women raped and their men killed. A Benedictine priory where twelve hundred people had taken refuge was burnt by its French garrison after the refugees made an attempt to surrender. Nine hundred died in the fires which the French garrison lit, and the remaining three hundred were killed by the English as they fled. At the gates of Paris a battle between thirty newly dubbed English knights and sixty French knights resulted in the vanquishing of the French. Lord Manny led a contingent to burn the suburbs. All the portents were grim for the French. With the smoke of the burning villages visible to the south, the Parisians started to destroy those last few extra-mural buildings which Manny had left standing.⁶⁸

And then dawned Monday 13 April: Black Monday as it would be known for centuries in England. Even Edward had never seen anything to compare with the weather that day. A storm broke, but it was not just a storm. As the skies darkened and thunder crashed above them, the temperature dropped so suddenly that a wall of ice fell. Huge hailstones rained down, killing men and animals in their thousands. Out in the open, just to the south of Paris, Edward’s men had little hope of finding shelter. With the landscape lit by lightning and the thunder above them, and everywhere ice missiles descending, it must have been terrifying. In later years the chroniclers all wrote in awe of the event. Froissart wrote that ‘it seemed as if the heavens would crack, and the earth open up and swallow everything’.⁶⁹ Thomas of Walsingham stated that several thousand men and horses died. The author of the Eulogium Historiarum wrote that many men died of snow, hail and rain. Henry Knighton wrote that hail killed six thousand horses and a large number of men. Other sources put the number of dead men at one thousand, including the eldest son of the earl of Warwick, who died of injuries sustained in this storm two weeks later.⁷⁰

There is no doubt that Black Monday was a momentous event, and no doubt that it affected Edward’s strategy. But exactly how and to what extent remains a mystery. The view of contemporaries and writers prior to the eighteenth century was that ‘Edward, like a good and pious prince, looked upon it as a loud declaration of divine pleasure: wherefore alighting immediately from his horse, he kneeled down on the ground, and casting his eyes towards the church of Our Lady of Chartres, made a solemn vow to Almighty God that he would now sincerely and absolutely incline his mind to a final peace with France, if he might obtain good conditions.’⁷¹ Twentieth-century writers, less inclined to understand divine signals as a motivation, were far more cynical, and regarded Black Monday simply as an excuse.⁷² But Edward did believe in the connection between God’s will and the weather, six thousand dead horses and up to one thousand dead men in a hailstorm was a clear indication that God was not pleased. Therefore we have to ask, was Edward finally brought to the negotiating table by the difficulties of sustaining an army in the field? Or was it down to his belief that on Black Monday he had been spoken to by God?

Edward was forty-seven years of age. Much had happened since Halidon Hill, after which he had given thanks to God for his first great victory. After that he had gone on many pilgrimages, often after surviving a storm or winning a battle. There is no evidence that this was ever a cynical ploy, to make him look religious, let alone that it was cynically motivated on every single occasion. Such was the regularity of his acts of thanksgiving that we must lay aside the postulation that Edward’s shows of religion were merely routine. His personal religious zeal might not have been unusual, but we must remember that Edward was living in a deeply religious age. He may have been a great warrior, but so was Lancaster, and Lancaster wrote a book on religious salvation. Also Edward’s spirituality had probably increased since the 1330s, not lessened. There had been some significant religious acts over the years, such as donating a figure of St Thomas to Canterbury Cathedral, the pardon to Cecilia Ridgeway, and a commission to search for the body of Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury Abbey in 1345. All these do not force us to believe that Edward was a holy man, but neither do they suggest a cynical approach to manifestations of divine will. Edward certainly believed that there was a connection between extreme, life-threatening storms and divine providence. The most obvious example of this is his four pilgrimages, including one to Canterbury from London on foot, and his gift of a valuable golden ship to each shrine after being saved from the storm in March 1343. Therefore Black Monday may well have been pivotal in convincing Edward that the time had come to stop the destruction, settle his military account and accept the best terms that the French were prepared to offer.

The French were of course fully aware of the effects of the storm, and they had been protected in their houses from the worst of it, but they had seen and suffered enough. If Edward was having problems supplying his army in the field, they all knew that he would simply turn in a new direction and savage another place, another string of villages, another few towns. His armies had swerved this way and that between Rheims and Paris, devastating a huge area. The time had come for them to swallow their pride. The question they placed on the table now was whether the territorial concessions of the First Treaty of London, coupled with the reduced ransom demand of £500,000 for all the French prisoners, would be sufficient to appease Edward? In all probability Edward had already decided that this would be the basis for a permanent peace, but, playing the part of a wrathful, Old Testament king, he could not be seen to acquiesce so easily. As with his acts of mercy, he preferred to be asked to temper his fury by others. According to Froissart, it was his greatest friend, the duke of Lancaster, who now assumed this role. ‘You can press on with your struggle and pass the rest of your life fighting’, the duke is supposed to have said, ‘or you can make terms with your enemy and end the war now with honour.’ Edward had come to the end of his war. He wisely chose the latter.⁷³

The negotiations took place at Brétigny from 1 May 1360 and were finalised on 8 May. Edward agreed in principle to relinquish his claim on the French throne in return for sovereignty of all the territories he had inherited as a vassal and many of those he had subsequently obtained by conquest. Details remained to be sorted out with the captive French king, but Edward was satisfied. He had achieved his aims, and secured everything he had fought for. The claim on the French throne had proved a very powerful negotiating position indeed, but, like the territorial claims of the Second Treaty of London, it had served its purpose, and could now be dispensed with. Edward ordered the English army to march to Honfleur, from which he sailed on 18 May. After landing at Rye, there was feasting in the royal household every day for two weeks.⁷⁴

He had returned in triumph.