SIXTEEN
BY 1370 MANY of the joys in Edward’s life had died, and all his glories were memories. The nation demanded the same high duty, enterprise and success as he had shown in the 1340s but he was an old, sick man. He appeared a feeble shadow of what he had been in 1346. To Edward, obsessed with his physical appearance, this mattered. And it mattered to him that he was no longer surrounded by his entourage of famous knights. Most of his true friends were dead, and more were shortly to follow them to the grave. As he waited sadly at the Tower for Philippa’s body to be rowed down the Thames, Sir John Chandos, one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter, had a sword plunged into his face in a skirmish in Gascony and bled to death. Now only eight of the twenty-five knights who had jousted with him in the Garter tournament of 1349 were still alive, and five of those would die before Edward.1
Edward’s reaction to the deaths and despondency was to cut himself off further from society. There were no new mass-creations of earls, like those of 1337 and 1351, to replace those who had died. No earls were created at all. Edward withdrew from court, spending time alone with his few intimate companions, issuing instructions through a private secretary. The centre of government was at Westminster, the household was almost permanently settled at Windsor, but Edward remained at Havering, Sheen and Eltham, only attending Westminster when he had to. Much regnal business simply was not done. Whereas in the first ten years of his reign he had granted an average of seventy charters every year, and sometimes more than a hundred, in 1370 he granted just three. In this way he became distant from the court, and unapproachable. He no longer heard what men said, or what rumours were circulating. There was no one left of sufficient stature to speak plainly to him. Only his sons, the prince and John of Gaunt, could talk to him with impunity, but the prince was in Gascony and John was circumspect, mindful of his delicate position as the next eldest son and probable guardian of the realm if his elder brother should die.
It was in this atmosphere of unnaturally silent vast palaces and empty council chambers, that Edward’s friendship and devotion came to fix itself on his mistress, Alice Perrers. The sexual satisfaction she gave him was matched by Edward’s increasing dependence on her. Devoid of information about public opinion, she became his principal adviser. Of course, she advised him carefully, telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. She also took care to put in a good word for her growing circle of ambitious friends. Men she knew and liked received lucrative commissions and positions. As time went by she grew in Edward’s estimation, and he trusted her more. She grew bolder. So their relationship became the subject of gossip at Westminster and Windsor: gossip which Edward feared and avoided.
For the moment, however, Edward’s priority was the renewal of the war in France. Exercising his mind on this may well have proved cathartic in the wake of Philippa’s death. Three months after her funeral, in April 1370, he ordered John of Gaunt to take an army to Gascony to reinforce the prince’s position. At the same time, Sir Robert Knolles was ordered to attack from Calais. It was the classic English strategy which Edward had used with such great effect on so many occasions since 1343: a double attack, from the north and the south. Edward saw no reason why it should not work again, if it could be reinforced with treaties with the Low Countries, Germany and Genoa, whose support he now tried to enlist, with varying degrees of success.
Knolles landed at Calais in July with more than four thousand men and set out on a grand destructive campaign at the end of the month. Once again the fires burnt across France, from Saint-Omer to Arras and Noyon. Sir John Seton, a Scotsman fighting for the English, walked unaccompanied into Noyon with his sword drawn and harangued the garrison until they attacked him. He continued fighting alone until his page shouted to him that the army was passing by the town, and he had better stop fighting now if he wanted to catch up with them. Acknowledging his thanks for the sport, Sir John left the corpse-strewn scene and, taking the reins of his horse from his page, rode off to catch up with Knolles. On went the English, burning, looting and generally doing all they could to encourage attack. But King Charles knew better now than to rise to the bait. The English would have to move on, so he ordered his men not to stand in their way. Instead he would sacrifice the villages and let the villagers look out for themselves. By avoiding conflict he not only avoided defeat, he encouraged the English army to collapse in recriminations and dissent. Other English knights blamed Knolles for failing to bring the French to battle. After all, they complained, what did Knolles know about command? He was just a knight, a brigand, a privateer, a commoner. Most English armies were commanded by earls. Knolles had been promoted above his station, they said. The attack in the north moved into Brittany, away from Paris, and broke up into smaller and smaller forces, each to withdraw or to be attacked separately.
The campaign in the south fared differently. John of Gaunt arrived in Gascony at the end of July and met up with the prince. Although he knew his brother was ill, he did not realise quite how grave his condition was. He was shocked to find him bedridden. But the prince was not dead yet. The French army was in the region of Limoges, and the bishop of Limoges had defected to their cause. This roused the prince to fury. He had liked and trusted the bishop so much that he had made him godfather to his eldest son, and he angrily prepared to make his first journey out of Bordeaux for two years. He was carried in a litter at the head of the army to Limoges, where he set about the attack of the city. On 19 September, having dug tunnels beneath the walls, the pit props were fired and the walls crashed down. The English troops poured into the city. The attack was decisive. The bishop of Limoges and the other leading men of the town were brought to the prince in chains, and the city was looted and burnt to the ground. Taking a leaf from his father’s book, the prince sentenced the bishop to death and then waited for the pope to beg for mercy, allowing him to appear magnanimous as well as victorious. But soon everything turned bitter for the prince. Weakened by the journey, his poor health made it impossible for him to carry on. He had to return to Bordeaux, defeated by his own sickness. There he learnt that his son and heir, Edward of Angoulême, had died. Distraught, he made preparations to return to England with his wife and remaining son, Richard of Bordeaux, leaving the chaotic administration of what was left of the principality, including the funeral of his son, in the hands of John of Gaunt.
It is difficult to hold Edward responsible for the lack of achievement in 1370. Perhaps he could have appointed a more able lieutenant in Gascony to take over from the prince. Perhaps he should have foreseen the distrust in Knolles and appointed an earl to lead the northern attack. But there was a limit to how far he could undermine the prince’s position in Aquitaine, and earls with both military experience and physical strength were rare in 1370. The real reason for the failures was far deeper, and tackling it went beyond Edward’s experience. The English were, for the first time, on the defensive. If Gascony was truly a part of Edward’s kingdom then he could only fail with regard to the most important strand of his strategy, which was to keep the war on foreign territory. From now on, unless he continued his war of aggression, pushing further and further into France, the fighting would only be on his lands. The likelihood of his losing was all the greater when he himself was unable to inspire or lead his men, and his principal commanders were all aged and decrepit. So it was that, even though the prince had been successful at Limoges, most of Gascony was overrun and reclaimed for France in the space of a few months. It was no coincidence that Edward failed to achieve the widespread support of European kingdoms in 1370–71, only Juliers and Genoa actively engaging to help him.2
*
There were bound to be recriminations when parliament met at Westminster on 24 February 1371. They had not been summoned for twenty months. Edward might have pretended to those around him that by reckoning the new year from Lady Day (25 March), he had just lived up to his promise, but such a contrived explanation was not likely to wash with the representatives. Since they had last met they had hardly seen their king. Moreover, in the last parliament they had voted a substantial tax to be granted to the king for the prosecution of the war, and what had happened? The loss of almost all of Gascony, and the dispersal to no profit of the northern army. What stood between the French king and the shores of Britain? Were there not invasion plans afoot? Where was the English navy?
The news got worse. Shortly after parliament opened, Edward heard that King David II had died. Edward now had few (if any) allies in Scotland. Every representative at that parliament must have considered this a sure sign that a new army would soon be needed in the north. Edward, huddled in his cloak of glorious victories, was not prepared for the angry onslaught which followed. Scapegoats had to be found. Since no one was prepared to accuse the king himself of poor judgement, his ministers bore the brunt. And what did they all have in common? They were all clergymen. The Chancellor, William of Wykeham, was the bishop of Winchester. The Treasurer, Thomas Brantingham, was the newly appointed bishop of Exeter. The keeper of the privy seal, Peter Lacy, was a canon of Lichfield. What did such men know about the prosecution of war? As ecclesiastics, it was not clear whether they could even be held accountable for their maladministration. The dismissal of the clergy became a demand so strong that Edward was forced to give in to the will of parliament. It dumbfounded him. For the first time since the Crisis of 1341, he wavered, lost confidence and immediately lost the political initiative. On 26 March 1371 he sacked all his trusted ecclesiastical officers and replaced them with younger laymen.
Unknown to all concerned, this decision paved the way for further corruption in the royal household. The men whom Edward selected were the sons of men he had once trusted or the suggestions of his only trusted confidante, Alice. Nicholas Carew took over as keeper of the privy seal. Richard le Scrope took over as Treasurer. Robert Thorp became Chancellor. William Latimer, son of the William Latimer who had assisted Edward in 1330, became his chamberlain. These men were generally in their thirties, less well-educated and more unscrupulous than those they replaced. They saw a golden opportunity to make themselves rich and influential. Later that year John Neville, lord of Raby, stepped into Latimer’s place as steward of the royal household. With that appointment, all was set for the net of the court clique to close in around Edward, and to stifle him from news of the war, his kingdom and his officers’ lining of their own pockets.
It would be wrong to say that all those appointed by Edward at this time were place-seekers and self-interested usurers. Richard le Scrope was the son of a Chief Justice under Edward; he had served as a member of parliament, had fought at Nájera, and knew more than most about financing a war. But his problems were exacerbated by his fellow officers. Latimer stands out as the most corrupt. Although he was experienced in both war and the organisation of manpower, the lure of money was too much for him. He borrowed sums from the Treasury at no interest, then lent it back to Edward for the war effort at high rates, and having pocketed the proceeds, returned the original sum to the Treasury.3 He had the absolute say in who had access to the king, and had sufficient authority to prevent the earl of Pembroke, commander of one of Edward’s armies, from seeing the king in the autumn of 1371. Pembroke had to content himself with an interview with Latimer instead. There were echoes of Hugh Despenser and Roger Mortimer in such behaviour. All it took was for the king to be ill and irresolute and the English government collapsed back into the quagmire of corruption which had characterised it in the years 1322–30.
It was in April 1371, after parliament had broken up, that Edward finally met his son and heir again, after an absence of eight years. It must have been a poignant moment: both knew the other was seriously ill.4 They had argued over the time apart. Edward had been greatly disappointed by his son’s administration in Gascony, and had eventually countermanded his hearth tax in November 1369. The prince likewise had become convinced that his father had lost his diplomatic judgement when Edward sent him yet another treaty with Charles of Navarre, expecting him to seal it, despite the man’s countless broken promises. But father and son loved each other deeply, through royalty, family, mutual respect and long-term devotion. They could now also sympathise with one another in their physical frustration, Edward shuffling around in his echoing halls, the prince carried from place to place, unable to walk. For Edward it was as if his last great friend had come home.
It may well have been the prince’s presence that gave Edward’s self-confidence a boost in the spring of 1371. Maybe the prince pointed out to him how he was being manipulated. Reports of William Windsor’s maladministration in Ireland certainly slipped through the courtiers’ cordon, for Edward took action in the autumn of 1371 to warn Windsor of his dealings, rebuked him for his taxes and extortions, and eventually recalled him.5 And in June, at a council meeting in Winchester, Edward found the strength to tackle the petitions of the 1371 parliament in a direct, strong-minded manner. To the demand that he ban ecclesiastics from office, Edward responded only that he would take advice from his council. To almost every other petition, he replied only that ‘he would be advised’ (meaning nothing would be done in the foreseeable future), or that the existing statutes, customs and laws were sufficient, including his own prerogatives. Even quite reasonable requests, such as the repeal of the statutes prohibiting English merchants from buying wine in Gascony, were dismissed. The demand for the reform of the navy was the one petition to which he was inclined to agree. With his son at his side, Edward recovered his sense of authority, and maintaining it became his chief priority. In his view, parliament needed to be taught a lesson, that they should not presume to thrust policy on him.
There were other reasons for Edward’s recovery of his authority in early 1371. The new Chancellor – poorly educated by comparison with his ecclesiastical predecessors – was forced to admit to one of the biggest and most extraordinary mistakes in the history of accounting. The clerical subsidy of 22s 4d per parish would clearly not raise £50,000 because there were only nine thousand parishes in England, not forty-five thousand. How such a gross error was made beggars belief. The request to reform the navy was made in the wake of rumours of a planned French invasion and a French landing at Portsmouth. As soon as there was a threat of war, it seemed parliament panicked, and sought Edward’s advice and leadership. This not only flattered him, it gave him a sense of purpose. All these things, combined with Alice’s continued attention, helped revitalise him. After attending the solemn commemoration of the anniversary of Philippa’s death, he set about planning the next stage of the war.
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In several of the principal English chronicles there are large gaps at this point in time. Walsingham’s English Chronicle records nothing between the return of the prince in 1371 and the Good Parliament in 1376. Henry Knighton’s chronicle mentions nothing which happened between the death of Lionel in 1368 and Edward’s own death. It is as if, with the benefit of hindsight, these writers wanted simply to pass over the last years of the reign. In the comprehensive work of Joshua Barnes the reason is neatly expressed. He describes the year 1372 as ‘the first inauspicious year of our great Edward’s reign . . .’ Inauspicious is the appropriate word. There were only two pieces of good news: John of Gaunt married Constanza, eldest daughter and heiress of the recently murdered Pedro of Castile, and Edmund of Langley married her younger sister, Isabella. Everything else was awful. In January the great warrior Sir Walter Manny – Lord Manny – died, and was buried at the Charterhouse which he had jointly founded in London. Later in the year the earls of Stafford and Hereford died. John of Gaunt – to whom Edward had delegated much routine business – gave rise to hostile gossip about his ambitious nature and his collusion with the self-seekers around the king. John’s open and shameless adultery with his children’s governess, Katherine Roët, incurred the most vicious criticism, especially when he acknowledged a son by her, John Beaufort. A diplomatic summit near Calais, proposed by the pope, failed to break the deadlock inherent in the combination of French military ascendancy in Aquitaine and Edward’s insistence on the recognition of his sovereignty. The English continued to suffer strategic losses: Monmorillon, Chauvigny, Lussac, Montcontour, Poitiers, Saint-Sevère, Soubise, Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Angoulême, Taillebourg and Saintes to mention just the most significant. In defending Soubise, the Captal de Buch – a hero of Poitiers and a Knight of the Garter – was captured. Worst of all, on 22 June, the English fleet – with all its treasure (the payroll for the Gascon army), its archers, men-at-arms and horses – was utterly destroyed by a Castilian fleet off La Rochelle, on the coast of Gascony. The ships were torn to pieces by gunshot and fire, and the terrified horses in the holds stampeded in the smoke-filled darkness, breaking the smaller vessels apart.6 The commanders, including the earl of Pembroke, were all captured. It was the first major military defeat of Edward’s reign.
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 Grâce 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 Quimperlé and Saint-Sauveur at the very end of the hostilities. At Quimperlé 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 statements. 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.7
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.8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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.12 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.13 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.14
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 controversial 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.
It seems utterly extraordinary to us – as it did to contemporaries – that this woman could betray the king who had given her so much. To look at the matter from her side, we must realise that she was living in fear. As soon as Edward died she would be nothing, and liable to attack from her political enemies. When the king died she could hardly expect members of the royal family to defend her: they would throw her to the dogs. Hence, to marry William Windsor secretly was to guarantee that she would have a protector after Edward’s death. She may have even coerced him: if he did not marry her, she would allow the courts to find him guilty of embezzlement and extortion in Ireland. If this was the case, there would have been very little Windsor could have done. Not even an appeal to the king would have worked, for Edward in his mindlessly smiling state, was besotted with Alice.
The high point of Alice’s public position came in 1375, when she attended a tournament at Smithfield with the king. She rode from the Tower through the city dressed as the Lady of the Sun, to the amazement of the Londoners. Ladies led knights on silver chains: a fitting image, in view of Alice ruling Edward in his old age. She planned further tournament displays for the following year, and manipulated her position to be able to acquire whatever she wanted: clothes, jewels, bedhangings, tapestries. Edward was wholly in her power. His world had shrunk to his immediate horizons, his ambitions dissipated. He was conscious only of Alice, his household servants, and his few surviving family members. With them he participated in hunting, hawking and civilised, courtly entertainment. All else had failed.
*
The Good Parliament met at Westminster on 28 April 1376. Edward remained at Havering, and did not attend (except for the opening ceremony). Nor did the prince, physically too weak for business of any sort. So it fell to John of Gaunt to represent the royal family in the Painted Chamber as the magnates, clergy and knights of the shire gathered for the first time in two-and-a-half years. Edward, so obvious by his absence, became the subject of debate.
There are many ironies about the reign of Edward III, but none more obvious than those which arose in this parliament. The leadership fell to the commons, and especially to the first ever Speaker of the house of commons: Sir Peter de la Mare. He was the steward of the earl of March, Edmund Mortimer, great-grandson of the Roger Mortimer whom Edward had ousted in 1330. The steward of the Mortimers was now lecturing Edward on his adultery, half a century after a Mortimer had been committing adultery with Edward’s mother. And the word which de la Mare used more often than any other to describe the self-seekers around Edward was ‘covyne’ (coven); it was a word which Edward himself had used repeatedly in accusing the first Mortimer and his henchmen of their crimes. The judge had become the criminal, the criminal’s heir the judge. But the biggest irony lay in the fact that Edmund Mortimer himself was now a member of the royal family, having married Philippa, Lionel’s daughter, in 1368. Through his steward, the great-grandson and heir of Roger Mortimer was now speaking up for royal legitimacy and openly decrying an adulterous influence on the Crown.
De la Mare and his associates in the commons had been able to seize the initiative for one very powerful reason. The Bruges treaty only provided for a year-long suspension of hostilities, and without further taxation England would not be able to send an army to France to keep the war on foreign soil. So, when the commons met and flatly refused the subsidy, they were in a very strong position indeed. When John of Gaunt realised that their motive in refusing was a concerted will to move against those who were poorly advising the king, he was furious, and threatened to crush the rebels in the commons. It had to be pointed out to him that, although de la Mare might be a commoner, he had the protection of one of the mightiest men in the land. This was something which John had to consider carefully, for although he was the royal representative at that parliament, the earl of March was now the father of a boy who had a rival claim to the throne. Roger Mortimer, Lionel’s grandson, was arguably next in line after the young Richard of Bordeaux. Gaunt had not yet been formally recognised as second-in-line. Thus he was forced to acknowledge that the political will of parliament, including the commons, could not be stifled.
It is impossible not to be impressed by de la Mare’s courage. With death threats being muttered around him, and John of Gaunt steaming in his pent-up anger above him, he proceeded to accuse Latimer of a string of crimes, including misrule and extortion in Brittany, theft of Breton revenues from the king, negligence in the defence of Saint-Sauveur and Becherel, seizure of wine and money taken from enemy ships which should have come to the king, embezzlement of four-fifths of the ten thousand marks compensation paid by Sir Robert Knolles for the failure of the 1371 campaign, and embezzlement of four-fifths of the ten thousand pound sum paid by the citizens of Bristol to protect their liberties. He was further charged, along with the London merchant and master of the royal mint, Richard Lyons, of taking interest from the Treasury for money which had been given by foreign merchants to the Crown. Both were also charged with sequestrating imported goods for sale through price-fixing monopolies. The immediate dismissal of Latimer was demanded as an absolute condition, as well as that of Lyons. Some called for them to be executed.
John of Gaunt could not dismiss charges of this magnitude, but nor could he simply acquiesce to the demands. He therefore ordered an adjournment. Lyons, seeing his life at risk, sent a bribe of a barrel of gold worth a thousand pounds to the prince of Wales, who had once been his protector. Prince Edward, now drawing close to death, wanted nothing to do with him, and was suspicious of his brother’s motives in adjourning parliament. He refused the bribe. Lyons accordingly sent the gold to the king, whose reputed response was to accept the gift with a smile, saying that he gladly accepted it as Lyons was simply returning what he had stolen from him. ‘He has offered us nothing which is not our own’, Edward said.15
Edward remained largely unaware of the proceedings at Westminster. He would not have known, for example, that Lord Neville, his steward, had tried to make a stand in defending Latimer. Such actions cut no ice with de la Mare. ‘You should not be so concerned with other people’s actions when you may soon find it very difficult to defend your own,’ declared de la Mare. ‘We have not yet discussed your case, nor touched upon your conduct.’ That shut Lord Neville up. But as Neville and Latimer were still in charge of who had access to the king, Edward heard little or nothing about the total of sixty serious charges brought against them until they were dismissed from their offices, arrested, and had all their possessions confiscated. Richard Sturry, one of Edward’s chamber knights, came to tell him of their plight and to plead for his friends. He phrased the news in a way calculated to cause Edward maximum distress. Parliament was seeking his deposition, he told him. They were trying to do to him what they had done to his father.
Deposition. With dishonour. It was what Edward had dreaded all his life. He had strained to do all he could to be a king above criticism in order to avoid that ever happening to him. And yet now, in his feeble-minded state, he saw his worst nightmare coming true. He sought advice from Sturry, who urged him to take immediate action to stop the proceedings in parliament. This would have been very dangerous, and Edward knew it. But what could he do? His distress was exacerbated when it emerged that Alice was being implicated in the accusations levelled against his officers. He saw himself losing those few people whom he trusted, being separated from the one woman he loved, and he himself losing the Crown. He saw himself being left alone, like his father. He implored those with him to take him to Kennington to see his son, the prince, to consult with him. They did so. But on a day which must have torn his heart in two, when he arrived at his son’s palace, he found him dying.
The disease which had debilitated the prince for the last seven years was now about to claim his life. The sight of his bedridden son in agony can only have added to Edward’s pains. He had already buried seven of his children; it was now clear he would soon bury an eighth, his favourite. Edward ordered the prince to be taken to Westminster where they could spend the final days together.
Edward watched his son die in his chamber at the Palace of Westminster. On 7 June the prince made his will, dictating it in French.16 He desired to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral, in the undercroft beneath the shrine of St Thomas the Martyr. He chose a French poem to be inscribed on his tomb, and gave details of how he wanted his funeral to be conducted. He asked for his shield, helmet, sword and surcoat to be placed above his grave. He appointed his brother John one of his executors, the others being ecclesiastics and members of his household. After these details were seen to, he turned to his father and begged him to grant him three last requests. He asked him to confirm all the gifts he had made to members of his household, friends and family, including his illegitimate son, Roger of Clarendon. He asked him to make sure all his debts were paid. And lastly he asked him to protect his nine-year-old son, Richard, his heir.
Edward assented to the requests. The scene was reminiscent of Philippa’s last days, seven years before, when she charged him with a similar series of final duties. As with Philippa, the prince was a part of Edward’s whole life. Roger Mortimer had still ruled England when he had been born. Edward may have recalled the four-year-old boy on his first horse, his little tournament coats made to match those of his father and Lord Montagu. All through the years, his son had made him proud. He may have failed as an administrator in Gascony but he had succeeded in the one field of human endeavour which Edward respected above all others: the battlefield. It had been the prince who had held the English army together that day twenty years earlier, at Poitiers, and brought King John of France as a prisoner to England. And in dying, Prince Edward asked for a simple thing which reminded his father of perhaps the greatest day of his life. He asked that his badge of three ostrich feathers, which he had picked up after the battle of Crécy, would be carved on his tomb, together with the motto he had used that day, ‘Ich Dien’. I serve.
Prince Edward died the following day.
Across the nation the outpouring of grief was genuine and extreme. At St Albans, Thomas Walsingham expressed his pain through literary tears:
Oh what a death to be mourned by the whole kingdom of England. How untimely you are, death, in robbing us of whatever might be seen to be bringing succour to the English. How sad you make the old king, his father, by robbing him of the desire which not only he had, but which the whole nation had, that his firstborn son might sit upon the throne after him and judge the people righteously. What great grief you cause his country, which believes that now he has gone it is bereft of a protector.17
But nowhere was the death of the prince more keenly felt than in Edward’s heart. He too had lost his protector, his son and heir, his last hopes for the future.
Edward was in mourning, grief-stricken and hardly able to communicate with the world. So we can only guess at how he greeted the news that parliament had moved against Alice. Sir Peter de la Mare informed parliament that she had relieved the royal purse of between two and three thousand pounds per year. Her use of maintenance was notorious, and, lest there be any doubt about it, parliament stipulated that she and all women were to be prohibited from protecting those accused in the king’s courts. Then it was revealed that she had secretly married William Windsor. As a marriage had to be consummated in order to be legal, it was universally assumed – and probably true – that they had slept together.
It was shocking, appalling. Had she not been Edward’s mistress, impeachment would surely have followed. But Alice avoided prison and further prosecution on condition that she no longer visited or saw the king. If she did see him, she would lose everything she possessed in England and suffer perpetual exile.18 Hence we may be certain that there came a day when Edward expected Alice to be with him, and asked for her. And he would have been told that his beloved mistress, his Lady of the Sun, could not be brought to him. He could never see her again. She had married another man. Edward had been committing adultery.
This was too much for Edward. The loss, personal and emotional, hurt him deeply, but the sinfulness too, even though he had loved her in good faith. He was lonely and afraid. In a sorrowful scene he swore an oath by the Virgin Mary that he did not know she was married. In his confused and lamentable state he begged for parliament to show her mercy, not to have her executed, both out of love for him and to preserve some vestige of honour. As for William Windsor, Edward summoned him from Ireland.19 He wanted him prosecuted. He now knew that he had been used. Anger tore through his grief-stricken soul. On 18 July he purchased a chest in which he locked up the accusations against Windsor whom he regarded as the true culprit.20 If Edward had any power left him, he would make the man sorry for his betrayal.
*
Among the resolutions of the Good Parliament was a declaration that a council of twelve should advise the king on all matters of weight, thereby reducing the risk of a ‘coven’ appropriating the royal power again. Edward himself sank into a mood of unfocused remorse and grief. He dwelt on the idea that his son’s illness and death were somehow a penance inflicted on him for his treatment of his own father. His loss of Alice seems to have given rise to further grief for his wife. On 6 August he gave instructions to the keeper of the wardrobe to deliver cloths of gold and torchbearers’ clothes for commemorating the anniversaries of the deaths of his mother and Philippa.21 Visitors came and went: some Florentines in exile persuaded him to give them somewhere to stay in London, despite a sentence of excommunication hanging over them. The duke of Brittany left the country without informing him. Edward did not care. He was now waiting for just two things: the burial of his son, which was to take place on 5 October, and his own death.
At the end of September, Edward fell ill at Havering, suffering from an ‘enpostyme’.22 All his physicians despaired of his recovery. Letters were sent out to the clergy on 2 October asking for them to pray for the king.23 On 5 October, the day of his son’s funeral, he appointed trustees to look after his estates. Three days later he gave orders for no fewer than fifty-seven cloths of gold to be offered at churches where his son’s obsequies were being celebrated.24 That same day he made his will.25 For a man who had achieved so much, it is a very modest list of requests. He asked to be buried in the abbey church at Westminster. He asked that sufficient funds be provided to complete the endowment of the Collegiate Church of St Stephen at Westminster, his Cistercian foundation of St Mary Graces by the Tower of London, and the Dominican priory of King’s Langley. He especially gave money to pay for the singing of masses for the souls of himself and Philippa. He confirmed his grandson, Richard of Bordeaux, as his heir and bequeathed him his best bed with all its armorial hangings, as well as four lesser beds and hangings for his hall. To Joan, princess of Wales, he gave a thousand marks, and the free restitution of jewels she had pledged to him. To his ‘very dear daughter’ Isabella, he gave an income of three hundred marks per year until her daughters were married. Everything else he left to his executors to dispose of as they saw fit. His two youngest sons, Edmund and Thomas, were not mentioned, except for a reference in a supplementary document by which Edward settled the inheritance of the throne. After his death, only males were to inherit: first Richard, then John of Gaunt and his sons, and then, failing them, Edmund and his sons, and finally Thomas and his sons. In this way Edward attempted to destroy any claim his granddaughter, Philippa, might have had on the throne, thereby revoking the royal status of the Mortimer earls of March. It was an act of revenge for the proceedings of the Good Parliament, which he believed had been instigated by the Mortimers. But it was also a sign of how bitter and sad the dying king had become, that he should disinherit his own granddaughter.26
In the fourteenth century, wills were normally only made when the sufferer genuinely feared death was close. Thus everyone around him now believed that Edward was about to die. Latimer, whom Edward had appointed one of his executors, was recalled and pardoned. Alice too returned to court at his request. With a council of twelve to guard against maladministration, and Latimer and Neville safely out of office, it was felt that this great king should be allowed some last wishes in his final days. On 16 October a long gown was ordered for him, to guard him against the cold weather.27 More warm clothes, lined with lambskins and furs, were ordered for him three days later. And three days after that, despite so shamefully betraying him, Alice returned to him, and received his pardon.
The remaining eight months of Edward’s life and reign are a sorry tale of his poor health deteriorating further and the country sliding into acrimony and hatred. Had he died shortly after making his will, as he himself expected, no one would have begrudged him having Alice at his bedside. But that she was so easily restored to him, and remained with him for the next eight months, provoked scandal and widespread anxiety. Parliament’s will had been flouted. What had changed? Latimer was with the the king, and John of Gaunt was hunting down the key figures from the Good Parliament. Sir Peter de la Mare was arrested and flung into a dungeon in Nottingham Castle, with no prospect of a trial.28 William of Wykeham lost all his temporal estates. Even the earl of March was forced to surrender his marshal’s staff in view of John of Gaunt’s threats against him. In November Alice tried to secure Edward’s pardon of Richard Lyons. Edward’s chamberlain, Roger Beauchamp, would not let her near the king, but she made such a commotion outside Edward’s chamber that he heard her, shuffled to the door, and opened it. He accepted the petition, and there was nothing Beauchamp could do to stop him reading it. In his simple state, he pardoned Lyons. In Walsingham’s words,
the whole populace desired Alice’s condemnation when they saw that no action was being taken to remedy her wrongdoings, but realised that this evil enchantress, exalted above the cedars of Lebanon, was enjoying extraordinary favour, and all the people of the realm passionately longed for her downfall. 29
Edward remained at Havering for the rest of the year. On his sixty-fourth and final birthday, he gave presents of lavish robes to his seven serving physicians and surgeons.30 It was a far cry from his fiftieth, when he had raised his sons to dukedoms and held a great feast. On 25 January 1377 he completed his fiftieth year as king. The jubilee was not widely celebrated. A general pardon was announced. Sermons of the king’s new moral purity were preached. But Edward’s mortal frame had become little more than the vessel of his sickness. On 3 February 1377, his impostume abated, and eight days after that he was transported by barge to his palace at Sheen, to be nearer to Windsor. Like his mother in her dying, it had become his ambition to attend one last ceremony of the Order of the Garter. As his boat passed Westminster, all the lords who were then attending parliament in the presence of his grandson came out to wave and cheer him.31 Within the Painted Chamber, clergymen were once again being appointed to the great offices of state, the impeachments of the previous parliament were being overturned, and parliamentary business was beginning to resume the character of bitter in-fighting and political factions it had known under Edward II. The characters were different: it was Edmund Mortimer, not Roger, leading the Marcher lords, and his enemy was now titled the duke – not earl – of Lancaster; but otherwise it was almost as if Edward III had not reigned.
Edward did manage to attend one more St George’s Day celebration at Windsor. On 23 April 1377 he lifted a sword to dub the heirs to the great titles of the kingdom. Before him knelt his two ten-year-old grandsons: Richard of Bordeaux, heir of the late prince, and Henry of Bolingbroke, son and heir of John of Gaunt. Both of these boys were nominated for the Order of the Garter. Edward also knighted his youngest son, the twelve-year-old Thomas of Woodstock, and the young heirs to the earldoms of Oxford, Salisbury and Stafford, and the heirs to the baronies of Mowbray, Beaumont and Percy. Last, he knighted his own illegitimate son John Southeray. Alice’s moment of vindication and recognition had arrived.
Edward was taken back to his palace at Sheen to die. Few visited him. An audience with several Londoners who had proved particularly determined to see him revealed him ‘placed in his chair like a statue in position, unable to speak’.32 He seems to have been swaddled like a baby in cloth of gold and muslin and then nailed into his throne for the occasion.33 The nails might have been gilded but nevertheless it is a striking image. The fate of the victor of Crécy – England’s great hero – was to be nailed, half-alive into his throne to sit, vacantly, enduring his last duties. John of Gaunt and a number of bishops were in attendance that day, and the address to the king was delivered by Robert Ashton. But Edward could not comprehend it. Inside that trussed-up statuesque figure of golden senility, his mind plodded on, slowly, its logic awry. When he had recovered his speech a few days later, he summoned the Londoners to him secretly. He urged them to make a great candle bearing the coat of arms of his son John, and to carry it in a solemn procession to St Paul’s Cathedral, and to burn it before a figure of the Virgin. What he meant by this we can only guess, but most Londoners clearly thought he had gone mad. In his moments between lucidity and silence, Alice continued to ply her political dealings. One of her undoubtedly positive achievements was to persuade the king to restore the estates of William of Wykeham, which he had lost as a result of John of Gaunt’s accusations after the Good Parliament.
The release for which Edward must have yearned finally came at midsummer. On 2 June he made preparations to commemorate the anniversay of the prince’s death. On the 4th he granted his last charter. With him that day were his two younger sons and Nicholas Carew, Henry Percy, the archbishop of Canterbury and the Treasurer and Chancellor. Then they left him in his chamber to listen to the silence. Alice alone remained with him, together with a few household staff and chamber knights. In his bed he still talked of hunting and hawking, and the joys he had known. But on the 21st he suddenly lost the power of speech. He had almost certainly suffered a stroke. He lay in his bed, unable to say or do anything. Alice was with him, and a priest also. According to Walsingham, Alice removed the rings from his fingers before she left. Maybe she did. Maybe Edward had previously urged her to take them when the time came, a final farewell token of his gratitude for her staying by him. To him they no longer mattered. He was drifting into the oblivion which had consumed everything he truly loved. At the last, after Alice had departed, only the priest remained. There were no earls, dukes, princes, or queens: no sons, no wife, not even his mistress. There were no ambassadors, nor dignitaries, nor trumpets. There was just dust floating in the air of the chamber, and one priest praying at his side. The priest urged him to repent of his sins. He alone heard the dying king whisper his final words.
‘Jesu, have pity.’