Coucy arrived in England in April 1376 just at the moment when English discontent came to a head in the first impeachment by Parliament of ministers of the crown. In the historic session called the Good Parliament the monarchy discovered that it had drained the cup of public confidence in a government that could neither win the war nor end it.
The failure to conclude peace at Bruges had brought to a climax public resentment of corrupt royal officials, a profitless war, military mismanagement, and waste or embezzlement of the people’s tax money. These were the same ills that twenty years earlier had generated the French Third Estate’s challenge to the monarchy. They found the same opportunity to make themselves felt when the English crown needed a new subsidy to prepare for the prospective end of the truce a year hence. Parliament was summoned for April, and as members gathered, London reverberated with “a great murmur of the people.”
The Sire and Dame de Coucy, who had been welcomed “joyously” at court on their arrival, found themselves in the midst of wrath and crisis surrounding the royal family and focusing on Isabella’s brother, John of Gaunt, otherwise known as the Duke of Lancaster. In place of the sick Prince and senile King, he was the key figure in the royal government who was now held to blame for all that had gone wrong.
Seventy-four knights of the shire and sixty town burgesses made up the Commons of the Good Parliament. Acting with some support from the Lords, they demanded redress of 146 grievances before they would consent to a new subsidy. Their primary demand was the dismissal of venal ministers together with the King’s mistress, who was generally credited with being both venal and a witch. In addition they wanted annual Parliaments, election rather than appointment of members, and a long list of restraints upon arbitrary practices and bad government. Two of their strongest discontents were directed not against the government, but against abuses of a foreign Church hierarchy and the demands of a laboring class grown disobedient and disorderly. These issues, too, were great with significance: one was to lead to the ultimate break with Rome and the other, much sooner, to the Peasants’ Revolt.
The strenuous and jubilant England Coucy had known in the aftermath of Poitiers had grown sadly disgruntled. Pride of conquest and wealth of ransoms had thinned like smoke, buoyant energy and confidence were sunk in quarrels and frivolity, the widened empire had shriveled, English fleets were swept ignominiously from the Channel, bellicose Scots on the border—whom Edward had been fighting even longer than he had the French—were as unsubdued as ever. England’s heroes—Henry of Lancaster, Chandos, the Prince of Wales—were dead or dying; the good Queen was replaced by a strumpet who was believed to have established her dominion over the King by restoring his sexual potency through the enchantments of a friar skilled in the black arts. The once exuberant Edward who had looked down on victory from the windmill at Crécy was now a foolish infatuated old man “not stronger in mind than a boy of eight.” The high tide of success had turned to loss, with every loss paid for by disrupted trade and renewed taxes. A fifty-year reign of incessant warring was coming to a close in a rising sense of wasted effort and misrule.
England by now had caught the contagion of lawlessness which the war had spread upon the continent. Soldiers, returning with the habit but no longer the fruits of pillage, formed small bands to live by robbery, or as retainers of lords and knights who returned to find their demesnes impoverished as a result of the Black Death. A whole generation, from the sack of Caen at Edward’s first landing to the raid in the Aargau, had accustomed itself to brigandage and resorted to it easily at home. According to a complaint in Parliament, companies of men and archers, sometimes under a knight, “do ride in great routs in divers parts of England,” and take possession of manors and lands, ravish women and damsels and bring them into strange counties, “beat and maim and slay the people for to have their wives and their goods,” hold them prisoner for ransom, and “sometimes come before the justices in their sessions in such guise with great force whereby the justices be afraid and not hardy to do the law.” They commit riots and “horrible offenses” whereby the realm is in great trouble, “to the great mischief and grievance of the people.” Royal justice made no serious effort to restrain them because the King was dependent for military forces on the same nobles who were responsible for the disorders.
The resulting breakdown of justice was a major cause of the Commons’ anger. In the Vision of Piers Plowman, which first appeared in 1377, the figure of Peace petitioning against Wrong, in the person of a King’s officer who has carried off his horses and grain and left a tally on the King’s Exchequer in payment, complains that he cannot bring him to law because “he maintaineth his men to murder mine own.” Private lawlessness equally was on the rise. “Tell me,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, a sympathizer of the Commons, “why, in England, so many robberies remain unpunished when in other countries murderers and thieves are commonly hanged? In England the land is inundated by homicides and the feet of men are swift to the shedding of blood.”
Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought them in constant conflict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still held grimly to pre-plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand. Because the provisions against leaving one employment for a better were impossible to enforce, penalties were constantly augmented. Violators who could not be caught were declared outlaws—and made lawless by the verdict. Free peasants took to the nomadic life, leaving a fixed abode so that the statute could not be executed against them, roaming from place to place, seeking day work for good wages where they could get it, resorting to thievery or beggary where they could not, breaking the social bond, living in the classic enmity to authority of Robin Hood for the Sheriff of Nottingham.
It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how “out of great malice” laborers and servants leave at will, and how “if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together.”
To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to Langland, when their fortunes prospered. “They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon,” but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish, “hot-and-hot for the chill of their maw.” Joining with villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for “mutual defense,” and “gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.” A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.
Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more hearths and reduced the tax yield. The recurring outbreaks were beginning to have a cumulative effect on population decline as they did on the deepening gloom of the century. In the poll tax of 1379 four villages of Gloucestershire were recorded as making no returns; in Norfolk six centuries later, five small churches within a day’s visit of each other still stood in deserted silence on the sites of villages abandoned in the 14th century. As before, however, mortality was erratic and there was no lack of land-hungry younger sons, poor relations, and landless tenants ready to take over ownerless property and keep land in cultivation.
Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif. Seen through the telescope of history, he was the most significant Englishman of his time. The materialism of the Church and the worldliness of its representatives were old complaints common to all Europe, but they were sharpened in England by antagonism to a foreign papacy. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were fused into a philosophy and a program.
Master of Balliol when he was 36, he stimulated anti-clericalism and gained attention by his stirring sermons. On the issue of secular versus spiritual authority, he carried further the dangerous thoughts of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and found himself champion of the English struggle against the supremacy of papal law over the King’s courts and against the payment of revenues to the papacy. As King’s chaplain in the 1360s he formulated ideas very attractive to the government on the relationship of church and state. In 1374 he served as the King’s envoy in the effort to reach a settlement with the Pope.
In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By logical progression and in harsh polemic filled with references to the “stinking orders” of the friars and “horned fiends” of the hierarchy, his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God.
Wyclif’s peculiar achievement was to express both national interest and popular feeling. For decades Parliament had complained bitterly of the income withdrawn from England by foreign holders of rich benefices like the haughty Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord. The amount was said to be twice the revenues of the crown, and Church property in England was estimated at a third of the land of the realm. The selling of papal letters of authority by impostors was a wide abuse extended by a regular business in forged papal seals. Immunity of the clergy from civil justice, leaving a lay complainant without redress, was another cause of resentment. Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests. When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to God than the ordinary sinner? Priestly susceptibility was such that when a man confessed adultery, the confessor was not allowed to ask the name of the partner lest he be inclined to take personal advantage of her frailty.
The venality if not lechery of the parish priest was usually a result of his being underpaid, which led to the necessity of selling his services; even the Eucharist might be withheld unless the communicant produced an offering, which made a mockery of the ritual. Judas, it was said, sold the body of Christ for thirty pieces of silver; now priests did it daily for a penny. Frivolity was another complaint: vicars were scolded by their bishops for throwing candle drippings from the upper choir stalls on the heads of those below, or conducting “detestable” parodies of the Divine service “for the purpose of exciting laughter and perhaps of generating discord.” Worldly clerics were censured in 1367 for wearing short tight doublets with long fur- or silk-lined sleeves, costly rings and girdles, embroidered purses, knives resembling swords, colored boots, and even that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.
Great prelates of noble family were as lordly as their lay peers, dressing their retinues in uniform and traveling with squires, clerks, falconers, grooms, messengers, pages, kitchen servants, carters, and porters. Charity was gone from them, wrote Langland; bishops of the Holy Church once apportioned Christ’s patrimony among the poor and needy “but now Avarice keeps the key”; Charity was once found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s lifetime.” His fellow poet John Gower, speaking “for all Christian folk,” denounced absentee priests, and bishops who added to their great incomes by taking bribes from rich adulterers, and arrogant cardinals in their red hats “like a crimson rose opening to the sun; but that red is the color of guilty pride.”
When, from denouncing such priests, Wyclif reached the point of denying the validity of the priesthood itself as necessary to salvation, he was to strike at the foundation of the Church and its interpretation of Christ’s role. From that point he moved ineluctably to the heresy of denying transubstantiation, for without miraculous power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ. From there the rest followed—the non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication, confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences, treasury of merit. All were to be swept away under Wyclif’s broom.
In replacement he offered the Bible in English, translated by his disciples, that it might bring religion to the people in a form they could understand without need of the priest and his meaningless Latin doggerel. No other act of a religious reformer would cut more sharply into the thousand-year establishment of the Christian Church, but this was still some years ahead. In the seventies the movement of dissent called Lollardy, from a word applied to Flemish mystics meaning “mumbler,” was preparing the way. While Lollardy was greatest among the common people and lower clergy, it spread, too, among knights and some great nobles who resented the clergy’s hold on political power. The Earl of Salisbury removed all statues of saints from his chapel, earning the title of “derider of images, scoffer at sacraments,” and there were others called “hatted knights” who refused to uncover when the host was carried through the streets.
Wyclif’s ideas and the crown’s needs fitted together like sword and sheath, accounting for the strange alliance that made him a protégé of John of Gaunt. His theory of disendowment, which maintained that nobles could repossess the lands their ancestors had bequeathed to the Church, put a doctrinal floor under Gaunt’s desire to plunder the rich ecclesiastical establishment. What Henry VIII succeeded in doing a century and a half later, John of Gaunt already had in mind in 1376. Meanwhile the losses of territory in France, for which the clerical Chancellor, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and his fellow ecclesiastics in office were held responsible, served to oust them from government. The Lords in Parliament resolved in 1371 that none but laymen “who could answer for their misdeeds in the King’s courts” could henceforth hold the offices of Chancellor, Treasurer, Barons of the Exchequer, and Clerks of the Privy Council.
The adverse tide in France was not stemmed by the change. Merchants and landed gentry were not happy to see the money squeezed from them in taxes dissipated in the horribles expenses et incredibiles of the Duke of Lancaster and his suite at Bruges. The envoys spent their time—according to the censorious monk of St. Albans, Thomas Walsingham, who hated Lancaster because of his anti-clerical policy—in “rioting … revelling and dancing” at a cost of £20,000. If Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae is suspect for its animus, it is also invaluable for vivid information about a hectic time.
The people’s loyalty was severely tried, too, by purveyance—that is, the King’s right when traveling to commandeer supplies for a number of miles on either side of the road, and also for the provisioning of the army. Purveyors “seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work … on the very bullocks at the plough” so that “men make dole and murmur” at the King’s approach. What had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny. Nobles in charge of military organization profiteered on war contracts, as did royal purveyors and the clerks who made payments from Exchequer funds. Coastal towns suffered from the billeting of troops while they awaited transportation overseas. Trade declined owing to the disruption of shipping, ransoms no longer flowed in a golden stream to nourish the economy, and such ransoms as did come in were kept by the crown to pay English troops and release English prisoners. Installments on King Jean’s ransom had reached only three fifths of the total when King Charles stopped payment on the renewal of war and, indeed, demanded return of the money as reparations. By now England was growing poorer, not richer, from the war.
When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered itself for political action. First it sought strength by association with the Lords, who represented the permanent Parliament and contained a strong anti-Lancaster faction prepared to challenge the Duke. A council of twelve, consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons, was drawn from the Lords to act in concert with the Commons. The lay leader of the group was Coucy’s former ward, the young Earl of March, who was married to Philippa, daughter of Lancaster’s elder brother, the late Duke of Clarence. She stood in line to the crown after the dying Black Prince and his nine-year-old son, Richard. Consequently her husband believed he had reason to fear the Duke of Lancaster, who was popularly credited with a wicked uncle’s designs on the crown.
Lancaster indeed had his sights fixed on a crown, but it was the crown of Castile by right of his marriage to a daughter of the defunct Pedro the Cruel. He already styled himself King of Castile—or Monsieur d’Espagne—and probably had no serious intention of usurping his nephew’s rights; what he wanted was to end the war with France so that he could mobilize England’s forces to gain the Spanish throne. As President of the Royal Council, he was the real head of the government; he controlled his father, the King, by alliance with Alice Perrers and gained a reputation as a libertine by openly maintaining a mistress of his own, Katherine Swynford, widow of a knight killed in Aquitaine, whom he later respectably married and by whom he fathered the Tudor line. He lived in the splendid Savoy Palace on the bank of the Thames and enjoyed its terraces, rose gardens, magnificent collection of jewels, and the rest of the inheritance of his first wife’s father, the first Duke of Lancaster; in short, he possessed all the attributes of power and riches necessary for unpopularity and was widely considered to be a villain. The reputation, like his older brother’s as a paragon of chivalry, was probably overdrawn.
Popular excitement as Parliament convened was heightened by the arrival of the Prince of Wales, who had himself carried to Westminster from his country estate to be present during the session. His purpose, in the shadow of death, was to obtain assurance from Lords and Commons of fealty to his son, but the public believed he had come to support the Commons against his brother, the Duke, whose ambitions he was believed to fear. In fact the Prince’s arrogant temperament was not one likely to welcome interference with the monarchy, but what counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact. Because the challengers in Parliament believed the Prince to be their supporter, they drew assurance and strength from his presence.
The tumultuous assembly was held at Westminster, with the Commons meeting in the chapter house of the abbey and the Lords in the White Chamber of the palace nearby. As Earl of Bedford, Coucy could have taken his place among the Lords at the opening ceremony on April 28, but there is no evidence that he did.
Taking the offensive, the Commons for the first time in its history elected a Speaker in the person of a knight of Herefordshire, Sir Peter de la Mare, who not accidentally was seneschal of the Earl of March. Critical moments often produce men to match the need; Sir Peter proved to be a man of courage, perseverance, and, in Walsingham’s partisan judgment, a “spirit lifted up by God.” On behalf of the whole House he brought charges of malfeasance against two of the King’s ministers, Lord Latimer, the Chamberlain, and Sir Richard Lyons, a rich merchant and member of the Royal Council who acted as the King’s chief agent with the commercial community, and also against Alice Perrers, who, it was said, “has yearly up to 3,000 pounds from the King’s coffers. The realm would greatly profit by her removal.”
Latimer was a great noble and Knight of the Garter, a veteran of Crécy, Auray, and of Lancaster’s long march, a former Constable of Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports. He and Lyons were accused by the Speaker of amassing immense fortunes by schemes and frauds to cheat the revenue, including the acceptance of 20,000 pounds from the King in repayment for a loan of 20,000 marks, the mark being worth two thirds of the pound.
One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.
Infuriated by the presumption of what he called “these low hedge-knights,” Lancaster threatened in private “to give them such a fright that they shall not provoke me again.” He was warned by an adviser that the Commons “have the countenance of the Prince your brother” and the support of the Londoners, who would not allow them to be touched. Biding his time, the Duke visited the Commons next day under a guise so gracious that members stared at him in amazement, but they were not diverted from pursuing the charges against Latimer and Lyons. They summoned as witnesses two former Treasurers and other officials, demanded to examine the public accounts, and conducted the proceedings as a formal trial. When all the evidence had been heard, the Commons cried with one voice, “Lord Duke, now you can see and hear that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons have acted falsely for their own advantage for which we demand remedy and redress!”
When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers. Lyons thought to spike the process by sending the Black Prince a bribe of £1,000 concealed in a barrel of sturgeon. The Prince sent it back, but the King, in more comfortable cynicism, accepted a similar bribe with the jest that he was only taking back his own.
Parliament found the charges proved. The two accused ministers and four subordinates, including Latimer’s son-in-law, Lord Nevill, steward of the King’s household, were judged guilty, dismissed from office and condemned to fines and imprisonment, although Latimer was shortly released on bail provided by a group of his friends. Even Alice Perrers was removed on charges of meddling in the law by sitting alongside judges on the bench and overawing them into decisions in favor of her friends. Miserably the King had to acquiesce in her banishment from court.
The petitions of reform were accepted in the King’s name by John of Gaunt, who for the time being considered that he had insufficient support in the Lords to do otherwise. Besides annual Parliaments, the Commons demanded election of members by the “better folk” of the shires rather than by appointment of the sheriff. The petition for enforcement of the Statute of Laborers, with provisions for arrest and punishment of violators, reflected the growing antagonism between employer and worker. Likewise the growing antagonism to the papacy appeared in the petition for the exclusion of papal tax-collectors and prohibition of the export of money. No petition was made for peace, probably because the Commons believed the recent ill-fortunes in war had been due to the incompetent and corrupt leadership they were now replacing.
To contain John of Gaunt—or “bell the cat,” as it appeared in Langland’s fable—and to maintain the reforms once Parliament had dispersed, a new Council was named of nine lords and prelates including the ex-Chancellor, William of Wykeham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, a rather pedestrian character of non-noble birth. The youth of the Council was characteristic of the early age at which men exercised power. Apart from Wykeham and Sudbury, six of the seven other members, including William Courtenay, Bishop of London, were under the age of 34, two of these under 30, and one, the Earl of March, was 25. Their opponent, the great Duke of Lancaster, was 36, born in the same year as Coucy.
Just as Parliament reached the peak of its accomplishment, the Prince fell into a fatal phase of his disease, complicated by dysentery. He grew so weak that he several times fainted and was thought to be dead. His chambers filled with doctors and surgeons, with the weeping and groaning of his followers and visits of the royal family for the final leave-taking. His sister Isabella and the Sire de Coucy came to the bedside to add their tears. John of Gaunt came, and the two younger brothers, Edmund of Langley, future Duke of York, something of a nonentity, and Thomas of Woodstock, unpleasant, violent, and ill-fated. In a parent’s sad survival, the King came amid “great lamentation” and “no one there could keep from tears in great desolation at the circumstances and the sorrow of the King taking leave of his son forever,” the fifth of his adult children to go before him.*
The doors of the Prince’s room were opened so that old comrades and all who had served him could attend the passing, and “each one sobbed heartily and wept very tenderly,” and he said to all, “I commend you to my son, who is very young and little, and pray you, as you have served me, to serve him loyally.” He asked the King and Lancaster to swear an oath of support, which they gave without reserve, and all the earls, barons, and bachelors swore it too, and “of lamentation and sighing, of crying aloud and sorrowing, there was a great noise.”
On the day before the end, the Prince’s last will was completed, adding to the detailed arrangements already made. Though death was but the flight of the soul from its bodily prison, it was customarily accompanied by the most precise care for bequests, funeral, tombstone, and every other aspect of earthly remains, as if anxiety of what was to come sharpened reluctance to leave the world. The Prince’s instructions were unusually detailed: his bed furnishings, including hangings embroidered with the deeds of Saladin, were left to his son, his war-horses were specifically disposed, his funeral procession was designed to the last trumpet, his tomb effigy ordered, with curious ambivalence, to show him “fully armed in the pride of battle … our face meek and our leopard helm placed beneath the head.”
Attendant bishops urged the dying man to ask forgiveness of God and of all those he had injured. In a last flare of arrogance he refused, then, as the end approached, joined his hands and prayed pardon of God and man. But he could not sustain meekness. When Sir Richard Stury, a Lollard knight who had been among those dismissed from the King’s household by the Good Parliament, and who at some point had evidently fallen foul of the Prince, came to “make his peace,” the Prince said bitterly, “Come, Richard, come and look on what you have long desired to see.” When Stury protested his good will, the Prince replied, “God pay you according to your deserts. Leave me and let me see your face no more.” Begged by his confessors not to die without forgiving, he remained silent and only under pressure muttered at last, “I will do it.” A few hours later, on June 8, 1376, he died aged 46.
As Earl of Bedford and member of the family, Coucy rode in the mile-long funeral procession with King Edward and the Prince’s brothers behind the hearse drawn by twelve horses. On the monument at Canterbury, where the Prince desired to be buried, were inscribed verses in French on the traditional theme of the evanescence of earthly power: how in life the deceased had great nobility, lands, houses, treasure, silver and gold, but now of all bereft, with beauty gone and flesh wasted, he lies alone, reminding the passerby,
Such as thou art, so once was I,
As I am now, so shalt thou be.
Encased in armor, the effigy speaks differently: in what little can be seen of the face under a drooping mustache and close-covering helmet, there is no glimpse of Christian humility.
Left between a doddering King and a child heir, with only the hated regent Lancaster at the helm, the nation indulged in grief exaggerated by fear. At a time when defeats at sea had revived fears of French invasion, the English felt bereft of their protector, “for while he lived,” wrote Walsingham, “they feared no inroad of any enemy, even as when he was present they feared no warlike encounter.” Had the Prince lived and kept his health, he could have averted the troubles that were to arise under a child king, but not the social unrest nor the ebbing of victory. Although Walsingham reproached “thou untimely too-eager Death,” death may not have been untimely, for, unlike his father, the Prince died while he still reflected the image of a hero. Froissart called him “the Flower of Chivalry of all the world” and the chronicler of the Quatre Premiers Valoisacknowledged him “one of the greatest knights on earth, having renown above all men.” Charles V held a requiem mass for his late enemy in the Sainte Chapelle, attended by himself and the ranks of French nobility.
What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them. The people of England mourned him because his marvelous capture of a king at Poitiers and his other conquests had dressed them in greatness. Though his famous victory in Spain had proved ephemeral, his empire in Aquitaine had collapsed, and his prowess faded in disease, yet he represented that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.
The death of the Prince was the turning point in favor of John of Gaunt. While still in session, Parliament took the precaution of having the boy Richard presented to them in person to be confirmed as heir apparent. This being done, the memorable session closed on July 10, having lasted 74 days, the longest of any Parliament up to that time. Its spectacular accomplishment was wiped away the moment it dispersed. With no permanent organization or autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a body as soon as members scattered to shire and town. Its reforms had not been enacted as statutes and, like the reforms of the French Grand Ordinance, were simply rendered null by the hand that regained effective power. By favors or threats, Lancaster won over or neutralized the leading lords of the opposition, except for the Earl of March, who was compelled to resign as Marshal. His place was taken by his onetime ally Sir Henry Percy, who went over to the Duke.
The Lords’ absence of political principle was the key to the collapse. Lancaster declared the entire parliamentary session invalid, reinstated Lord Latimer and his associates, dismissed the new Council and recalled the old, arrested and imprisoned without trial Sir Peter de la Mare when he attempted a protest, banished Bishop William of Wykeham from court and seized his temporal properties. When, sealing his control, he brought back Alice Perrers to reweave her spell over the King, the bishops who had acted with the Commons “were like dumb dogs unable to bark.”
Except for impeachment, the work of the Good Parliament left hardly a constitutional trace. Yet in expressing so forcefully, and for its brief moment effectively, the will of the middle class, the role of the Commons strongly impressed the nation and taught an experience of political action that took root.
Witness to England’s turmoil, Coucy returned to France in the summer or fall of 1376. Given the crisis during his visit, he is unlikely to have obtained a clear statement of what peace terms England was prepared to accept, but he would certainly have brought back a report of a torn and vulnerable nation. He is reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the King of England to offer combat when the truce should end, but to seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so weak or so easy to defeat as at home.”
Before Coucy left England, King Edward fell ill of a great malady and “all his physicians despaired and did not know how to care for him or what medicines to give him.” Although he recovered spontaneously, the end of the reign was clearly approaching and with it the moment for Coucy’s decision. Whether Isabella returned with him to France or remained with her sinking father is uncertain. Out of respect for his father-in-law, Coucy took no overt action at this time, but immediately on his return he accepted a diplomatic mission to the Count of Flanders in the interests of France against England. By now Coucy was a member of the Royal Council, clearly relied on by Charles V for his perspicacity and diplomacy. The King’s anxieties had been increased by the mental illness of Queen Jeanne who in 1373 was afflicted “so that she lost her mind and her memory.” After many prayers and pilgrimages by her husband who was devoted to her, she recovered her health and senses and was named, in the event of the King’s death, guardian of the Dauphin. She was to be assisted by a Regency Council of fifty composed of prelates, ministers of crown and Parlement, and ten of the “most notable and sufficient” bourgeois of Paris. Twelve of the Council were to be in constant service of the Queen. As a member of the Council, Coucy received an annual wage of 1,000 francs in addition to payments of 500 francs a month on his annual pension of 6,000 francs. At about this time his daughter Marie, heiress of his domain, joined the household of the Queen who took charge of her education along with that of the Dauphin and his brothers and sisters. In April 1377 the records show a payment to Coucy of 2,000 francs, to be deducted from his pension, for furnishing his several castles with crossbows against the event of renewed war.
Still trying to avert that last calamity, Charles again delegated Coucy as diplomat to re-open negotiations with England, this time without benefit of the royal Dukes, to spare their expensive presence. Over the next six months, from January to June 1377, the parleys met variously at Boulogne, Calais, and halfway between at Montreuil on the coast. As the only lay noble in a group of ministers, Coucy had as his chief colleague Bureau de la Rivière, the Chamberlain, along with two ecclesiastical ministers, the Bishops of Laon and Bayeux, and various members of the Council.
The English envoys, representing adherents of both Lancaster and the late Prince, were men with whom Coucy was very likely acquainted, from his recent visit to England if not before. Varying from one meeting to another, they included the guardian of the heir to the throne, Sir Guichard d’Angle, a gallant and admired Gascon, long a campaigner with the Black Prince; the Lollard knight Sir Richard Stury, whom Lancaster had reinstated in office; Lord Thomas Percy, a veteran of the French wars and brother of Sir Henry Percy; the Earl of Salisbury; and lastly a trusted servant of the court connected with Lancaster’s entourage, Geoffrey Chaucer.
Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love,The Book of the Duchess, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French, from which he had translated the Roman de la Rose, something in the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”
In different circumstances from Langland, Chaucer enjoyed a grant from the King of a daily pitcher of wine and was married to Katherine Swynford’s sister Philippa, a relationship that had brought them both into the ducal household. The Book of the Duchess was a graceful elegy for Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, a well-beloved lady who had died at the age of 27 after bearing seven children. Though its choice of language was considered peculiar, its author lost no favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic of Troilus and Criseyde, adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace with France.
Poets and writers served frequently as ambassadors because their rhetorical powers conferred distinction on the elaborate speeches required on these occasions. Petrarch had served the Visconti as envoy or at least as ornamental figurehead of a mission. Boccaccio negotiated for Florence with the Pope, and the poet Deschamps acted for Charles V and his successor. Diplomacy was a ceremonial and verbose procedure with great attention paid to juridical detail and points of honor, which may have been one reason why it so often failed to produce agreement.
The prolonged parleys of 1377 acquainted Coucy with every pivot in the complex relationship of England and France. Offers and counteroffers and intricate bargains were discussed concerning Scotland, Castile, Calais, a proposed new dynasty for Aquitaine under a son of Edward III who would renounce his ties to England, or failing that, a partition, or an exchange of fiefs as complicated as a game of jack-straws. As always since the war began, nuncios of the Pope added their intensive efforts at mediation. Although the French held the upper hand, the English out of weakness and indecision could not be brought to accept any settlement, even a proposed match between Prince Richard and King Charles’s seven-year-old daughter Marie.
The first parley broke up without progress and reconvened a month later. Twice the truce, due to expire April 1, was prolonged for a month to keep the negotiations alive. The envoys treated earnestly in long working sessions. What was Coucy’s role, what Chaucer’s? Their words have vanished; no record was kept because the discussions, especially regarding the marriage, were secret. Charles’s instructions to his envoys stated that “The King does not wish the marriage to be broached on his part, but if the English mention it, you may listen to what they say and afterwards report to the King.”
The French offered many proposals, including title to twelve cities of Aquitaine (which England already held), if Edward would give back Calais and all that he had taken in Picardy; either that, they said, “or else nothing.” Stubbornly the English refused, believing that as long as they held their foothold in northern France they could yet return and regain their losses.
England’s domestic situation during the parleys erupted in a new crisis. Lancaster had suppressed but far from settled English discontents. A new Parliament, sufficiently packed by the Duke to elect his steward as Speaker, obediently granted subsidies in January. The bishops were not so amenable and Wyclif was their target. He had not yet voiced his denial of the Eucharist and the priesthood, but his statement of civil dominion and disendowment was heresy enough. Although his call for reform of clerical abuses and his anti-papism had support among the clergy, they were not going to wait passively to be disendowed. Archbishop Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay of London summoned Wyclif to a convocation in February to answer for his heretical preaching. The recurring struggle of centuries between crown and Church, was now played out again in an uproarious fracas at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Lancaster hoped to discredit the bishops with the laity. He assigned four Masters of Theology to Wyclif’s defense and proceeded himself in company with the Marshal, Sir Henry Percy, and their armed retinues to attend the hearings at St. Paul’s. A crowd of aroused citizens filled the cathedral, angered by rumors that Lancaster was planning to extend the Marshal’s jurisdiction over the city’s traditional right to maintain public order. Bishop Courtenay was popular with the Londoners, the Duke was not. Anger rose when the armed guard shoved people aside to make way for the Duke and Marshal, followed by a loud quarrel when Courtenay refused the Duke’s demand for a chair for Wyclif. The young and vigorous Bishop, himself the son of an earl and a descendant of Edward I, was not about to take orders inside his own precincts.
“I will make you bend, you and all the rest of the bishops,” growled Lancaster. The crowd moved and shouted in menace, Lancaster threatened to arrest the disturbers, Courtenay told him if he did so in the cathedral he would be excommunicated. “A little more of this,” the Duke was heard to mutter, “and I will have you dragged out of the church by the hair of your head.” The crowd’s rage exploded, the Duke and Marshal judged it wise to withdraw, Wyclif had not even spoken. Lancaster had succeeded in breaking up the proceedings, which was his object, but at a cost of turning popular sentiment ever more against himself, not against the bishops.
London seethed, and on news that Percy had arrested a citizen for slandering the Duke, boiled over. A mob gathered in a lynching mood to rush the Savoy Palace, and on its way fell upon a priest who spoke insultingly of Peter de la Mare and beat him to death, as Marcel’s mob had murdered a hapless victim of its rage twenty years before. Warned while dining on oysters at the Savoy, Lancaster and Percy escaped by boat down the Thames to take refuge in the honored halls of the Princess of Wales and her son, where none would venture to assault them. Meanwhile Bishop Courtenay, also warned and fearing a catastrophe for which he might be blamed, had hastened to the Savoy Palace and succeeded in quieting the mob.
After flight and humiliation, Lancaster required that his authority be restored by a formal apology from the city. The Princess pleaded with the citizens to be reconciled with the Duke for her sake; the King’s sovereignty was invoked; the authorities of London exacted the release of Peter de la Mare as the price of their apology; the clergy regained the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer. Factions were deepened and the state further torn by the affair.
In the excitement at St. Paul’s, the matter of Wyclif had not been tested. The English prelates, caught between clerical interest and national sentiment, might have been content to let the matter drop, but the papacy was not. In May, Gregory XI issued five Bulls addressed to the English episcopacy and to the King and the University of Oxford, condemning Wyclif’s errors and demanding his arrest. All discussion of his heretical doctrines was to be suppressed and all who supported them removed from office. An issue full of danger was added to all the other sources of strife. The new Parliament was strongly anti-papal; the King, babbling of hawks and hunting instead of attending to the urgent needs of his soul, was dying. For the moment, while England waited uneasily for the change of reign, the bishops held the proceedings against Wyclif in abeyance.
In France the negotiators held a final meeting in May at Montreuil in the ancient walled castle whose western ramparts faced the sea. The Chancellors of both countries took part, Pierre d’Orgement for France and the Bishop of St. David’s for England. Terms were discussed at length in open session, which Charles wanted so that his final offer should be formally submitted and receive a firm answer. He did not get it. While generous in what it left in English hands, his offer withheld sovereignty over any part of France and insisted on Calais. Concealing rejection in evasion, the English said they lacked final authority and would have to submit the terms to their King. As the event shortly proved, the French must at this point have started preparing for belligerent action. While the talks petered out, the little Princess Marie died in Paris, eliminating the proposed marriage. The parley broke up with no place or date agreed upon for another meeting and no prolongation of the truce.
By the time the English envoys reached home, King Edward too had died, on June 23, the penultimate day of the truce. The jubilee year of his reign had passed virtually unnoticed and his death excited hardly more attention. He died deserted by the minions of power, including Alice Perrers, who was said to have stripped the rings from the King’s fingers as she departed. A ten-year-old child mounted the throne, initiating the divisive time that was to spread its wreckage over the next century and confirm Langland’s warning from Holy Writ, “Woe is the land with a youth for its king!”
Isabella de Coucy, summoned from France in April by couriers on “business of extreme urgency,”* was at her father’s side when he died. Shortly before the end, she dispatched couriers to Coucy with news and “important questions” to be settled. On June 26, even before her father’s funeral, she requested and received permission to return to France, evidently with urgent matters to discuss.
The problem for Coucy was more than simply one of allegiance; it was aggravated by great revenues, by bonds of kinship of great importance in that day, and by the oath of fellowship in the Order of the Garter. To repudiate fealty, kinship, and fellowship was no light thing. Other lords, like the Captal de Buch and Clisson, had transferred their loyalty from one side to another, but they were generally Gascons or Bretons or Hainaulters who did not feel themselves basically French or English. Coucy’s own seneschal, the valiant Chanoine de Robersart, turned English while he was in England with Coucy in the 1360s. After swearing homage to Edward III, he coolly returned with Lancaster’s army to ravage Picardy, which a few years earlier he had fought with such verve to defend. He was, however, a native of Hainault.*
Plainly, Coucy could play no great part in his country’s affairs if he maintained neutrality as before. He not only needed to take sides; he doubtless wanted to take sides. National feeling had swelled in the years of French recovery. Writers gloried in the many cities of Picardy, Normandy, and Aquitaine retaken by Charles V. “Not Roland, not Arthur nor Oliver,” exclaims the knight in the Songe du Vergier, a political allegory of 1376, “ever did such deeds of arms as you have done by your wisdom, your power and your prayers!” (and, the author might have added, by Charles’s persuasive use of money). “When you came to the throne the horns and pride of your enemies reached up to heaven. Thanks to God, you have broken their horns and profoundly humiliated them.”
Out of the polarity of war, a sense of French nationhood developed against the foil of England. In a dialogue between a French and an English soldier written about 1370 by the future Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, the Englishman declares that Normandy at least should belong to England and that they are within their rights in this matter. “Hold your peace!” cries the Frenchman. “That is not true. You can hold nothing this side of the sea except by tyranny; the sea is and ought to be your boundary.” That was a new idea. Homage and dynastic marriages were still the form of loyalty, but country was becoming the determinant. No longer could a French noble like Harcourt have so guiltlessly joined and guided the English in invasion of his native land. No longer could Coucy straddle loyalty across the Channel.
Two months after King Edward’s death, Coucy addressed to Richard II a formal renunciation of “all that I hold of you in faith and homage.” Dated August 26, 1377, and presented to Richard by several lords and squires sent by Coucy to witness the delivery, the letter recalled the “alliance” he had had with “my most honored and redoubted lord and father, the King lately deceased (on whom God have mercy),” and continued:
Now it has happened that war has arisen between my natural and sovereign lord, on the one part, and you on the other, at which I grieve more than at anything that could happen in this world, and would it could be remedied, but my lord has commanded and required me to serve him, and acquit myself of my duty, as I am bound to do; whom as you know well I ought not to disobey; so I will serve him to the best of my power as I ought to do.
Wherefore, most honorable and puissant lord, in order that no one may in any wise speak or say a thing against me, or against my honor, I acquaint you with the aforesaid things and return to you all that I may hold from you in faith or homage.
And also, most honored sire, my most honored lord and father above named was pleased to ordain and place me in the most noble company and Order of the Garter; so let it please your most noble and puissant lordship to provide in my place whomsoever you may please, and therein hold me excused.
The double allegiance was broken. In becoming “a good and true Frenchman,” Coucy had chosen a nationality, even if the word did not yet exist. Only one thing was remarkable about the choice: that he parted with his wife along with his English lands and fealty. It has generally been said that he felt obliged to part with her in order to be free to choose France, but this would have been necessary only if Isabella had refused to be reconciled to the loss of their English estates. On renunciation of allegiance, the properties would be subject to confiscation. Everything known about Isabella suggests that this was the determining factor. Her compulsive extravagance, her neurotic dependence on home and on her father’s indulgence—which she may have hoped to transfer onto her brothers and nephew—her insecurity in France make it likely that the separation was her choice, whether or not it was also her husband’s.
What Coucy felt for his vain, spoiled, selfish, willful wife—love, hate, or indifference—no evidence tells. Judging by what is known of her temperament, she was not a lovable Plantagenet, of whom history records few. In any event, she returned to and remained in England with her younger daughter, Philippa, who had always lived there. All her husband’s English estates, “manors, hamlets, honours, domains, towns, lands, tenements, animals, provender, goods and chattels” were forfeited to the crown and cautiously delivered to a trusteeship for Isabella consisting of the Archbishop of York, two bishops, and four other commissioners. Since women were not precluded from owning property in their own right, the arrangement indicates that her brothers mistrusted her habits. The terms provided that the revenues would be paid to her by the trustees “as long as she remains in England.”
Isabella’s indeterminate status as neither wife nor widow lasted only two years. In April 1379 she died in unknown circumstances at the age of 47. All of Coucy’s lands in England were eventually settled on his daughter Philippa.
The French renewed belligerency the instant the truce expired. In combination with the Spanish fleet, they launched a series of raids on England’s south coast even before they learned of King Edward’s death. In an effort to keep that event secret from them during the transfer of power, the English had “stopped incontinent all the passages of the kingdom, letting no one issue from the realm.” The organization required to close all exits must have been considerable, but proved futile since the French had already started.
Under the command of Admiral Jean de Vienne, the French and Spaniards landed at Rye opposite Boulogne on June 29 and subjected it to 24 hours of savagery—burning, looting, killing men, women, and children and carrying off girls to the ships in deliberate emulation of the English savagery inflicted on the towns of France. In the flames, a church of “wonderful beauty” (according to Walsingham) was destroyed. Despite the insistence of a group of French knights who wanted to hold Rye as a permanent base—a kind of Calais in England—the Admiral refused. Occupation was not the French object but destruction and terror to bring the English to a peace treaty, and to prevent reinforcements for Calais, where the French were planning a major attack.
Meeting little effective resistance, the French continued down the south coast, attacking Folkestone, Portsmouth, Weymouth, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and marching ten miles inland to burn Lewes, where they scattered and slaughtered a body of 200 defenders led by the local prior and two knights. After sailing away, they returned a month later to devastate the Isle of Wight off Southampton. The dread that haunted the English out of a dark atavistic terror of ancient Danish raiders and conquering Normans was brought to awful reality.
Weakness of defense was not due to any false sense of security. These were the same towns attacked by the French in previous raids. Moreover in the last six months, as the truce waned, royal decrees had been raising the blackest specters of French invasion, but in the disarray of the time few defense measures had been taken. When the invader came, the fate of the towns did not greatly excite the nobles’ protective efforts. Sir John Arundel, a knight of later infamy, successfully defended Hampton with 400 lances, but not until the citizens at his demand had put up the money in good coin to engage them.
When Lancaster’s castle of Pevensey on the Sussex coast was endangered, the Duke was reported by the ever-hostile Walsingham to have refused to send defenders, with the callous remark, “Let the French burn it. I am rich enough to rebuild it.” The remark sounds invented and as such breathes the same malice toward the nobles as animated another clerical chronicler, Jean de Venette—and for the same reason: failure of the knights to defend the land and people against their enemies. It was no accident that out of these invaded counties, Kent and Sussex, the Peasants’ Revolt was to come.
* The others were Lionel, dead in Italy, Joanna in the Black Death, and two daughters, Margaret, married to the Earl of Pembroke, and Mary, married to the Duke of Brittany.
* It is not entirely clear whether the couriers were sent to her in France or by her from England to her husband in France.
* Robersart settled in England with three sons and founded a line that terminated some 200 years later in Amy Robsart, the ill-fated wife of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.