CHAPTER IV
Edward II had agreed to do homage at Beauvais on 15 August 1325. In early August he travelled to the coast. Shipping was ordered for his passage of the Channel. But as the day approached the Despensers became nervous of allowing the King to leave the country when so many enemies were waiting to prize the government from their grip. At the last moment the plans were changed. A few miles from Dover in the Premonstratensian abbey of Langdon the royal Council met and resolved to tell the French King that Edward had fallen ill. Regrettably, it would be necessary for Edward’s twelve-year-old son, the future Edward III, to be invested with the duchy in his father’s place.1
For the English King and his friends this decision proved to be a serious mistake. The young Prince was placed in the charge of the Bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapledon, an experienced civil servant whose loyalty was beyond question. They left for France on 10 September 1325. A fortnight later Prince Edward did homage to his uncle at Vincennes in the presence of his mother and an assembly of officials and noblemen from both countries. The sequel was less satisfactory. Walter Stapledon’s visit to the French court opened his eyes to some alarming truths. It became clear to him that Isabella had no intention of returning to an England dominated by the Despensers. Nor did she propose to let Stapledon bring the heir to the throne back to his father. Worse than this, it appeared that Edward II could no longer rely on those whom he had sent on diplomatic business to Paris. Many of them nursed private grievances of their own which the freer atmosphere of a foreign capital encouraged them to declare openly. The bishops of Winchester and Norwich and the Earl of Richmond had all decided not to return at the conclusion of their mission, but to remain with the Queen. The Earl of Kent, Edward’s brother, who had been in France throughout the crisis, was about to throw in his lot with them. Roger Mortimer himself, ‘our mortal enemy’ as Edward had it, was openly to be seen among the Queen’s household. He had become Isabella’s principal adviser and was shortly to become her lover. In this ugly atmosphere Stapledon found himself denied access to the Queen and the Prince and threatened with violence by her entourage. In mid-November he fled from Paris in secret and took ship for England disguised as a common traveller.2
A more calculating schemer than Charles IV might have welcomed this turn of events. Charles certainly refused to comply with the importunate and increasingly hysterical requests which Edward II addressed to him demanding the extradition of his wife and son to England. But he was a strait-laced man. He was genuinely shocked when Isabella’s liaison with Mortimer became public knowledge and embarrassed when in the first six months of 1326 she began to recruit mercenaries among the French nobility. What she envisaged was nothing less than an armed invasion of England for the purpose of replacing Edward II on his throne by his son. In May 1326, Isabella showed off her strength at the coronation of the new French Queen. She appeared with a large and showy retinue in which Mortimer held the foremost place, a fact which scandalized onlookers and was duly reported to Edward II by his spies. Shortly after this incident Isabella was banished from the French court and her military preparations in France brought to an end.3
In August, she took up residence outside French territory at Valenciennes in the Imperial county of Hainault. Edward was not reassured. He ordered the removal of French monks from English monastic houses and imposed restrictions on the movements of Frenchmen travelling in and out of England. The French government retaliated by ordering the arrest of all English men and women in France and the confiscation of half their property. On 16 August 1326 the officers of the baillages came for them without warning, knocking up some in their beds in the early hours. They were ‘Christians, labourers, craftsmen of many trades, merchants and good men like the rest of us’, a Parisian lawyer grumbled. Many had taken French spouses. Edward II replied in kind as soon as he heard the news.4
At Valenciennes Isabella and Mortimer began to remake their plans. They proposed to the Count of Hainault, William I, that Prince Edward should be betrothed to his daughter Philippa in return for military assistance. William accepted this offer with alacrity. He had no ties to Edward II and had no objection to making his daughter a queen. He was willing to provide a port of embarkation and a force of some 700 men.5 The men were volunteers, raised by the Count’s brother John. They sailed from Dortrecht on 23 September 1326 and arrived the following day in the Suffolk port of Orwell.
It was a tiny force which should have been defeated without difficulty. But no one was willing to fight for Edward II. The seamen of the southern ports had refused to guard the coasts for hatred of the Despensers. Others joined forces with Isabella and Mortimer and their foreign army. London proclaimed its support for the Queen and erupted into mob violence. Bishop Stapledon was lynched in Cheapside by her partisans. As for Edward II and the Despensers, they were obliged to flee westwards pursued by Isabella and a growing pack. For Mortimer, it was an occasion to avenge five years of defeat, imprisonment and exile. The elder Despenser was caught at Bristol. He was drawn, hanged and quartered. The younger Despenser, having failed to escape to Lundy Island, was tracked down in Glamorganshire. He was perfunctorily tried and executed in the same barbarous fashion as his father. Edward was captured with him. He was kept under guard at Kenilworth while Parliament was summoned to decide what should be done with him. On 13 January 1327 it was resolved that he should be deposed. A few days later he was brought into the hall of Kenilworth Castle to meet his enemies. There, half fainting, his voice stifled by his own groans and tears, he abdicated in favour of his fourteen-year-old son. Real power fell to Mortimer and his mistress.
Among the faults of which Edward II had been accused by the Parliament which deposed him was the neglect of Aquitaine. They said that it was ‘as good as lost by negligence and bad counsel.’ This was hypocrisy. In the last months of Edward’s reign English policy in Gascony had shown fresh vigour. There had been a serious attempt to bully Charles IV into making the final territorial settlement which had been promised in 1325. A new seneschal, Oliver Ingham, had even succeeded in raising an army of Gascons and Spanish mercenaries to invade Saintonge and the Agenais. He had taken a number of strongholds in the name of Prince Edward as Duke of Aquitaine, who was even then residing at the court of France. The abandonment of Aquitaine was in reality the work of Isabella and Mortimer, whose government had greater preoccupations than the prosecution of a distracting, expensive and distant war. They hastened to make peace with France on whatever terms were available. When the final treaty was made on 31 March 1327, it appeared that the English government had bound itself not only to restore Ingham’s conquests but also to pay reparations of 50,000 marks to Charles IV. Of the greater part of the duchy which the French had occupied since 1324 nothing was said. The loss of all but the coastal strip was accepted in silence. To most contemporaries the loss of even that shrunken remnant seemed to be no more than a matter of time.6
Thus inauspiciously began the reign of Edward III. The life of Edward II still had a few more months to run. In April 1327 he was removed to Berkeley Castle and held there until, at the end of September, it was unexpectedly announced that he had died. There is little doubt that he had been smothered on the instructions of Mortimer and with the approval of Queen Isabella. So, when France’s own age of political crisis began in February 1328 with the death of Charles IV the French government had the good fortune to see its principal rival paralysed by the bitter memory of recent disputes and the weakness of illegitimate rulers.
*
Philip the Fair had left three healthy adult sons when he died in 1314, but a combination of circumstances and misfortune wiped out the whole of his line within fourteen years. Louis X died of pneumonia only eighteen months after his father, leaving an infant daughter behind him. His brother, Philip V, was struck down in 1322 by dysentery, the endemic disease of insanitary medieval palaces. He too left only daughters. The third brother, Charles IV, had reigned for only six years when he died from some unknown affliction in February 1328. As the only son of Philip the Fair to survive into his thirties Charles had had a better chance to beget a large family, but he had not done so. His first wife had been put away for adultery after a famous scandal and, although his second wife gave birth to a son in 1324, both mother and child died within a few days. His third wife, Joan of Evreux, was seven months pregnant when Charles died. For the first time in more than three centuries there was no obvious male heir to succeed a king of France.
The splendid obsequies of Charles IV ended on 5 February 1328. A few days afterwards there occurred a fateful meeting in Paris of the great men of the kingdom. The surviving family of the late King was represented by his first cousins the counts of Valois and Evreux, and by the agents of the King of England, who was the son of the dead man’s sister as well as Duke of Aquitaine. There were five other peers of France present, three of whom, the dukes of Brittany, Burgundy and Bourbon, had married into the royal family. Others were bound to it by more distant connections of blood and clientage, the cement of every medieval community. The occasion must have lacked intimacy, but it was as much a family gathering as a council of state. Ostensibly their purpose was limited to the choice of a regent to govern France for the last two months of the Queen’s pregnancy. Yet, although the succession to the throne was not on the agenda it can hardly have been excluded from the discussion, for it was by now clear that if the Queen gave birth to a daughter the child would not inherit the crown.
2 The French royal succession
Although subsequent tradition invested this rule with the force of immemorial antiquity it was a rule of force rather than principle, and one of recent origin. For many years, Frenchwomen had held noble fiefs in their own right without objection, and outside France they had succeeded to kingdoms, including Hungary, Naples and Navarre, which were ruled by cadet branches of the Capetian dynasty. It was therefore far from obvious to contemporaries that Philip V should have become King of France in 1316 instead of the infant daughter of his predecessor. The fact that he did so was due more than anything else to a forceful personality and a large armed following. Even so, Philip had had to buy off his niece’s claims and the protests of some important noblemen with the promise of an expensive endowment. By contrast, in 1322, when Philip himself died his daughters were pushed aside without question. Practice had hardened into law. The question at issue in 1328 was more elusive: if a woman could not inherit the crown, could she nevertheless transmit the right of inheritance to her descendants? The closest male relative of Charles IV was the King of England, who was the only surviving male descendant of Philip the Fair but was descended through his mother, Isabella. The closest male relative after Edward was Philip, Count of Valois, who was Philip the Fair’s nephew and descended from Philip III in unbroken male line. If the rule excluding women from the French throne was justified by their incompetence to govern the state, then there was no reason why that objection should extend to their sons. But perhaps it was justified by some more spiritual attachment to the notion of succession in the uninterrupted male line. Philip of Valois and his supporters asserted that it was. They also demanded that the Count, as the senior male in the line of succession to the throne, should become regent.
Although the question of principle did not have to be decided in February of 1328, those who remembered the events of 1316 knew quite well that if the Count of Valois became regent it would be difficult to prevent him from making himself king should Joan of Evreux give birth to a girl. The English knew this too. Their representatives (probably Edward III’s permanent attorneys at the Parlement of Paris) vigorously pressed their master’s claims to the regency as well as to the succession. There were many ‘learned in civil and canon law’ who agreed with them. But they were silenced. Edward III seems to have had no supporters among those who mattered. None of the princes of the blood espoused his cause. Even his father-in-law, William of Hainault, supported his rival. Philip therefore became regent and when, on 1 April 1328, Joan gave birth to a daughter, he at once assumed the title of king. The only overt opposition to Philip VI’s assumption of the crown came from the turbulent Flemings, now in the last stages of a bloody rebellion. They in their desperation sent the Burgomaster of Bruges to England to offer Edward III their support. The proposal came to nothing, and for his indiscretion the Burgomaster was mutilated, drawn and hanged by order of the French government.
‘The mother had no claim, so neither did the son,’ the chronicler of Saint-Denis judiciously observed. Yet the magnates of 1328, although no doubt glad of a legal basis for their decision, scarcely needed one. There was rather more truth in the chronicler’s other explanation that the French were uneasy about the prospect of a foreign ruler. Edward, although a Frenchman in his own eyes, was certainly foreign to the French. Moreover, he had other things against him. His appointment as regent would have been perverse while he himself was a minor. His accession as king would have brought real power in France to his mother, whose misconduct there was a recent memory. By comparison, Philip of Valois was a man of thirty-five whose father, Charles of Valois, had been a great hero among the higher nobility of France, a pillar of the state and the head of a considerable political connection. By birth, Philip of Valois was entitled to a place at the centre of French political life, while his rival was by birth no more than Philip the Fair’s grandson, an outsider to all but genealogists.7
Whether Philip VI had any other advantages than birth and age was a question often debated in his own day. His early manhood had been passed beneath the shadow of an overpowering father. Charles of Valois had been a man of great energy and unlimited but frustrated ambitions, a life-long soldier commanding French armies in the Low Countries and Gascony and an adventurer for his own account in many other places. An invasion of Italy in 1302 had won him nothing more than an obscure corner in Dante’sInferno.Designs upon the Holy Roman Empire and ambitions to revive and rule the Latin Empire of the east had been only the most spectacular of his many failures, symptoms of a romantic, impulsive temperament and an utter want of political judgement. At home, he was recklessly generous, maintaining an impressive retinue and dying heavily in debt. Some of these qualities were inherited by Philip VI. Although moody, irresolute and unpredictable, in these respects quite unlike Charles, Philip shared his father’s reckless impulsiveness and romantic ambitions. He was also prone to long bouts of nervous uncertainty, insecurity and depression, moods in which his decisions were unusually erratic, even incomprehensible. These depressions seem to have been provoked more often than not by the difficulties of his family life: a strident wife and sickly children of whom he was extravagantly fond. Unfortunately his advisers did not make up for his failings. Philip did not have the Capetians’ talent for choosing subordinates and friends. ‘He was always ready to accept advice from fools,’ said Froissart.8
Contemporaries exaggerated the King’s sensuality and self-indulgence and were certainly wrong to accuse him of lacking interest in affairs of state. Philip was an intensely serious man. What he lacked was judgement and experience. He had not been brought up to be king. His background and interests were those of a great territorial nobleman. His attendances at court and in council had been few, and separated by long periods in his lands in western France. Moreover the new King, although he was a competent knight and had some experience of field service, was not made to be a commander of armies. He was capable of great personal courage, as those who saw him at Crécy could testify. But he was increasingly obese and unfit, and temperamentally averse to the discomforts of campaigning and the uncertainties of the battlefield. His father had bequeathed his most famous sword not to Philip but to the younger brother.9 It was a significant choice. Philip was a thoroughly bad soldier, more so than any other medieval King of France except, perhaps, for the mentally defective Charles VI.
What became plain at a very early stage was that Philip VI was not entirely the master of his own government and needed to tread delicately in a way which had not been required of his predecessors. He owed too much to others for his accession. He owed it to the Count of Flanders to restore him by force to the control of his county. He owed it to the rest of the higher nobility to consult them at length before doing any such thing. He owed it to his friends to order the judicial murder of Pierre Remi, his predecessor’s efficient but low-born, greedy and unpopular finance minister. He owed it to them too to distribute grants of land and cash which even the enormous forfeited estates of the disgraced minister were inadequate to supply. He owed it to countless allies great and small to find jobs for themselves and their protégés in the public service, which consequently underwent an enormous and costly expansion not all of which was warranted by the burden of its work. An English diplomat perceived an important truth when he told his government in 1329 that there would be no change in French policy towards Gascony without the approval of the peerage, the King’s power was ‘so far hedged about’.10
The new King reacted to these pressures in a way which was perhaps predictable, but left him vulnerable when things went wrong. He visibly distrusted his gossiping and often disloyal court and his huge, unwieldy bureaucracy with its constricting procedures. He governed secretively, delegating little, confiding only in his immediate family and a handful of trusted ministers and officials, avoiding public discussion, by-passing the great departments of state as far as he could by the informal cabal, the personal warrant, the private interview. The image of him left by an Aragonese ambassador who was at court in the winter of 1330–1 is telling, and wholly characteristic: the withdrawal into a small room by the great hall, the King’s cousin slipping in behind, the Constable of France locking the door, Philip himself seated with his back to the fire talking freely as the embers glowed in the ambassador’s face, the insistence on absolute secrecy when the decision was made. The contrast with Edward III was striking.11
*
Subsequent events made the rejection of Edward III’s claim to the French throne seem more significant than it really was. At the time, it aroused neither surprise nor indignation in England, where the French interests of the royal house had traditionally been viewed with indifference or suspicion. Only the Queen Mother, Isabella, felt strongly about the issue and her indignation drew its intensity from her own special position as the sister of Charles IV of France. The discarding of her son was a slight all the more galling for having come from her closest blood relations. It was certainly at her instance that in the middle of May 1328 the bishops of Coventry and Worcester were dispatched upon a futile expedition to the French court to claim the Crown in the name of their fifteen-year-old master. They never performed their mission. Upon their arrival in France, they were subjected (so they said) to ugly threats by supporters of Philip VI and left hastily after swearing a notarial protest which recorded what had happened. Later in the year, Philip sent an embassy to England led by the Abbot of Fécamp, a polished rhetorician who later became Pope Clement VI. The Abbot, whose instructions were to summon Edward III to do homage for Aquitaine to the new French King, received a surly response from the Queen Mother, ‘typical of a woman’ says the chronicler. According to one report Isabella said that Edward ‘was the son of a king and would not do homage to the son of a count’. The Abbot remained in England for some time in the hope of a more measured response, then returned home.12
If Philip VI had had his way the duchy would have been confiscated at once. But he was dissuaded from this extreme course by his Council, who no doubt had in mind the threat of their own security implicit in a frontal attack on a peer of France. Instead, a more circumspect course was proposed. Two commissioners, including the Abbot of Fécamp, were sent to the south-west to sequester the Duke’s revenues until such time as Edward III should agree to do homage. At the same time a further embassy was sent to England to threaten Edward with more extreme measures. This put the English in a more realistic frame of mind. Gascony was manifestly indefensible. The enormous treasure which Edward II had hoarded up in his last years had been dissipated. And in the aftermath of two civil wars, public opinion was in no mood to pay for an ambitious foreign policy. When Philip’s second embassy arrived in England in January 1329 Parliament was about to meet at Westminster, an occasion for reviewing past policies and raising taxes to pay for future ones. The advice of the lords of Parliament was unequivocal. Edward’s claim to the French Crown was unsustainable and it was his duty to do homage for his French territory. Edward therefore told the French ambassadors that he would do as Philip asked. He wrote to the French King himself regretting that the pressure of business had prevented him from doing so earlier.13
The English government did not surrender gracefully. They assembled from every department of state an enormous collection of ‘bulls, charters, instruments, rolls and memoranda’ relevant to the act of homage and past dealings with France. The fruits of this research were sent off in advance of the royal party together with a force of lawyers and diplomats to haggle with the French on the exact ramifications of the ceremony. So when Edward III performed his homage to Philip VI in the great Gothic choir of Amiens cathedral on 6 June 1329, he did it in a manner which raised as many new disputes as it resolved old ones. At the high point there was a wrangle reminiscent of the homage of Edward II to Philip V in 1320. Edward III’s ministers wanted him to do homage not only for the lands which he held in southern France but also for those which he ought to hold, by which was meant the ones which had been occupied by French troops since the war of Saint-Sardos. For their part, Philip’s spokesmen declared that homage would not be accepted on these terms. The occupied provinces had been ‘justly acquired by right of war’. The conflict was resolved by an untidy compromise, tolerated only because there was no time to devise anything better. Edward did homage according to the French formula making no reference to the lost provinces. But his spokesman, the Bishop of Lincoln, was allowed to make a short speech of protest, reserving all his master’s rights and handing over a document setting out the homage which the English government thought ought to have been done. Moreover, Edward’s homage was not unqualified. He refused to join his hands between Philip’s, the ceremonial distinction which marked out ‘liege’ homage from simple homage: Edward was recognizing Philip as king of France, but he was recognizing the King of France as his landlord and not as his sovereign. Meanwhile, away from the light of publicity, the English were given private assurances by Philip that all would, in due course, be resolved to their mutual satisfaction. The studied vagueness of the arrangement had the sole advantage of allowing the ceremony to take place and the kings to part on something resembling friendly terms. In the tournament outside Amiens which celebrated their reconciliation the English King, now sixteen years old, carried off all the honours. It was only mock-war.14
The recovery of the conquered territories remained the first priority of English diplomacy throughout the 1330s. These territories included the whole of the Agenais, all the English possessions in southern Périgord and most of Saintonge. Their loss had been a catastrophe for the duchy, as both sides knew. It had severed the main fortresses which were necessary for its defence on the east. It had deprived it of much of its best agricultural land, on which the population depended for their supplies of grain and other foodstuffs. It had removed a large part of the patronage and revenues at the disposal of the Seneschal, severely weakening the government in the face of an unscrupulous and land-hungry nobility. From being a net contributor to the royal revenues, the duchy became a dependency. In the most recent treaty between the two crowns, that of 1326, the French King’s predecessor had promised that he would do what was just with regard to these lands. That, in the opinion of the English, meant nothing less than their restoration without condition.
Perhaps this was asking for too much of one whose filial piety was as strong as Philip’s. He had no intention of disgorging the lost provinces and no intention of allowing matters to rest with the partial homage of June 1329. Within weeks of Edward’s return, Philip gave him a fixed date by which he was to recognize that he owed liege homage for his duchy or submit to the loss of the rest of it. For their part the English government, still controlled by Mortimer and Isabella, sent a number of embassies to France with instructions to put off the evil moment for as long as they could. They also endeavoured to strengthen the defences of Gascony. There was an air of mounting desperation about these attempts. Just after Christmas 1329, the government held a Great Council of magnates at the King’s manor of Eltham where some support was obtained. In the following March, Parliament met at Winchester and deliberated upon the defence of the duchy with results that are difficult to discover from the surviving sources but cannot have been very encouraging. Certainly, no tax was voted, but the peers were buttonholed individually and some of them promised to make personal contributions. Further support was obtained from the towns after a certain amount of bullying. By this means it was possible in April 1330 to send Edward’s thirteen-year-old brother to Gascony as royal lieutenant, together with a decent escort and forty ships.15
At the end of August 1330 negotiations broke down. Edward III had technically been in breach of his feudal obligations since 28 July, when the latest deadline for doing homage had expired. An important embassy, led by the devious Bishop of Norwich, William Ayrmin, had been at the French court for a month and had wholly failed to extract any further postponements from the French King. Edward was declared to be in default. The measured procedure of the Parlement of Paris entitled him to two more summonses before he could be judged in his absence. Philip gave him until 15 December 1330.16
William Ayrmin returned to England to find the court at Nottingham. He reported on the dismal results of his embassy on 6 September 1330. The decision seems to have been taken at once not to yield. On the same day a Great Council of the English peerage was summoned for mid-October to consider further measures for the reinforcement of Gascony. Edward’s Seneschal there was warned to expect from the north either a group of officials come to sequester the duchy or an armed invasion. In the former case, the officials were to be humoured ‘debonerement par bel-parler’ until more vigorous steps were possible; in the latter, the government in Bordeaux was to resist with all its strength.17
It was upon the latter course that Philip VI resolved. At the end of the year 1330, his brother Charles, Count of Alençon, marched south with an army. There was some doubt, even at the time, about the Count’s precise instructions but none about his actions. At some time in the new year, probably in February, he attacked Saintes, the northernmost of the major strongholds defending the approach to Bordeaux. Saintes was defended by a large and well-supplied garrison, but it was taken, apparently without much difficulty, and sacked.18 Rather later it suited Philip VI to say that he had not authorized this attack and had ordered his brother to desist as soon as he had heard about it. But Philip cannot really have expected his brother to hold his army in a state of suspended animation while political developments unfolded in the north, a task quite beyond the organizational resources of a medieval military staff. The real reason for the change of orders was a change of policy in England, the result of another coup d’état which brought Edward III to power in place of his mother and Mortimer.
*
Edward II had been overthrown by a coalition of interests which had nothing else in common than contempt of him and hatred of the Despensers. Once they were in power, this proved to be a fragile foundation for government. The body nominally in control was the Council of Regency, which had been invested by the baronage with power to govern in the King’s name. Its president was the Earl of Lancaster, the brother of the great rebel of Edward II’s reign and the natural leader of a powerful baronial caucus, but ageing and gradually going blind. Partly because of his ineffective stewardship, the Council of Regency had been edged aside by Mortimer and Isabella. They had possession of the young King and were able to install their own protégés in important parts of the administration. The two of them proved to be even more rapacious in their own interests than the Despensers had been. Isabella received an enormous increase in her dower allowance. Mortimer made himself Earl of March in 1328 and built on his own ancestral lands and those forfeited by the Despensers to form what amounted to a private principality in Wales and the western marches. The wealth which came with this sudden access of power was spent on lavish display and on building a party of clients and dependants, the essential foundation of political power. At his ‘Round Table’ tournaments, Mortimer entertained the entire nobility and disported himself like a king. The comparison occurred to more than one contemporary.
But Mortimer’s power was insecure and he knew it. In the winter of 1328–9 he had to suppress an incipient rebellion. The Earl of Lancaster gathered round himself at Bedford an army comprising the King’s uncles, the earls of Kent and Norfolk, and much of the baronage. The two earls, however, were lured away by Isabella and the rebellion collapsed. Many of its supporters fled to France. The motives of the royal uncles in rejoining Mortimer and Isabella can only be guessed: loyalty to the young King, misgivings about another baronial coup. But they were not friends to be relied upon. The following year, the Earl of Kent, a dignified but stupid man, was persuaded by agents provocateurs that his brother Edward II was still alive, and gave his support to a plot to release him. Since the Earl had been one of the army which deposed Edward, his opinion at least had turned full circle. Kent was arrested at the Winchester Parliament of March 1330 and hurriedly condemned to death. Although the Earl was not particularly popular, it was necessary to find a condemned criminal to carry out the sentence; no one else would kill so august a nobleman.
However, the greatest threat to Mortimer’s survival was untouchable: Edward III, who, although a minor, was ceasing to be a cypher. It would be interesting to know what kind of man this remarkable ruler was. But although much was written about Edward III in his lifetime, it was written according to glossy conventions drawn from the received stereotypes of knightly virtue. These conventions completely obscure Edward’s personality just as they do those of his rivals Philip VI and John II of France. For Froissart, Edward was the ‘mighty and valiant King Edward who lived and reigned so nobly and courageously’.19 But a man with such a genius for friendship, who could inspire such extravagant personal loyalty must have been more than the cardboard figure described by Froissart’s phrase. He was a literate, although not a bookish man. He was already a famous horseman, and an enthusiastic participant in tournaments. His triumphs there were recognized even by French chroniclers, sufficient evidence that they were not only due to the deference of his competitors. Much care had evidently been lavished on Edward’s education, but experience must have counted for more than education in Edward’s personality. Five years of being carried about in his mother’s baggage train, first to France, then to the Low Countries and finally in the relentless pursuit of his father across England had given Edward an intensity of experience unusual even by the standards of an age which did not shelter children from violence and cruelty. Edward’s royal dignity had been his mother’s principal asset in bargaining with foreign princes during her exile, and in ruling England after her return. He had become profoundly conscious of it himself, both from training and by reaction against the grubby humiliations of these early years.
Edward married Philippa of Hainault in January 1328, an event which made it necessary to provide him with a household more than nominally his own. Its officers were appointed by the government, but ambition as well as personal sympathy identified some of them with the King himself. His virtual exclusion from official business and the strict tutelage of his mother and Mortimer became increasingly irksome both to him and to them. In September 1329 William Montagu, an ungrateful protégé of Mortimer, was dispatched by the government on a diplomatic mission to the papal court at Avignon. While he was there he took the opportunity to warn the Pope in the course of a secret audience that Edward was not his own master. As a result of this interview Edward’s tutor and amanuensis, Richard Bury, supplied the Pope with a specimen of Edward’s handwriting and a code word (‘Pater Sancte’) by which the Pope could distinguish letters which embodied the King’s own desires from those which were dictated by Mortimer and Isabella.
The summer of 1330, a time of mounting tension in foreign affairs, was also one of intensifying suspicion and unease in England. Mortimer tightened his grip upon the King. Access to him was restricted. Attendants of Mortimer’s choice were appointed to wait upon him, and spies planted among them to report upon his doings. At the beginning of September 1330 Mortimer and Isabella moved to Nottingham, the principal royal fortress of the Midlands, where they installed themselves and a large bodyguard in the keep. Edward was with them and remained under constant observation. In mid-October there was a humiliating public scene. Mortimer had the principal members of Edward’s household interrogated before the Council. He told them that Edward (who was present) was untrustworthy, and accused them of abetting him in a plot against the government. All of them denied it except Montagu, who replied with an evasion. He said that he would do nothing inconsistent with his duty.20
On the night of 19 October 1330 Montagu, leading an armed band of some two dozen companions, penetrated the inner bailey of the castle through an underground culvert with the connivance of the garrison commander. Together with the King, they invaded the Queen Mother’s apartment where they found her preparing for bed. Mortimer was in a nearby room with a handful of adherents. There was a fight. Two of Mortimer’s men were killed and a number of others were wounded. ‘Fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer,’ the Queen Mother is supposed to have cried. Mortimer was taken unharmed, but he was kept under guard and sent to London while a decision was made about what to do with him. On the following morning his supporters were rounded up in their lodgings about the town, the final stage of an enterprise as effortlessly successful as the one which had placed Mortimer himself in power in 1327. Edward issued a proclamation repudiating the acts which Mortimer and Isabella had done in his name and announcing his intention of governing in his person according to ‘justice and reason’21 It is worth noticing the ages of those who helped Edward III to seize power in 1330, many of whom were to become his closest friends and collaborators in three decades of war. The oldest members of the band who can be identified were Robert Ufford (later Earl of Suffolk), who was thirty-two; and John de Nevill, a former retainer of the Earl of Lancaster, who was thirty. Most were much younger. Montagu, the leader, was twenty-eight. John Moleyns must have been in his mid-twenties. Humphrey Bohun, who later became Earl of Hereford and Constable of England, was twenty-one and his two brothers Edward and William were still in their teens. Edward himself was not yet eighteen.
Parliament met in London at the end of November and condemned Mortimer unheard. On 29 November 1330 he became the first person ever to be executed at Tyburn. His adultery with the Queen Mother was an embarrassment best forgotten. Isabella was compelled to surrender the riches which she had accumulated in four years of power and retire to a life of comfortable obscurity at her manors of Hertford and Castle Rising. There, she kept a large establishment and occupied herself in entertaining, hawking and pious works. Decent fictions were scrupulously observed. When she died in 1358, at the age of sixty-six, she was buried in the mantle of red samite lined with yellow silk which she had worn at her wedding.22
*
These events jolted the course of relations between England and France. The Great Council which Mortimer and Isabella had summoned to consider the defence of Gascony had duly assembled in the great hall of Nottingham Castle on 15 October 1330. But it had disbanded inconclusively on the 19th, only a few hours before the coup. The sequel was a period of paralysis, followed by a change of policy. Intransigence in the face of French threats had been a policy particularly associated with the Queen Mother, and its execution with diplomats such as the bishops of Worcester and Norwich, who were her protégés. At the beginning of November 1330, Edward ordered John Shoreditch, a Chancery clerk who was one of the government’s principal experts on Aquitaine, to prepare a dossier on the current state of negotiations with France to be presented to Parliament at the end of the month. Presumably it was duly presented, but the result is not recorded. It would be surprising if Parliament were enthusiastic about the prospect of further quarrels with France. What is clear is that by the beginning of 1331, probably as a result of the dispatch of Charles of Alençon to the south-west, Edward decided to give Philip VI what he wanted. There is no reason to suppose that his heart was not in it. Edward did not yet have his mother’s grudge against the French King, and the immediate problem was to avoid the complete loss of what was left of the duchy for a principle which did not seem to matter. A particularly grand embassy left England in February 1331. It was led by the bishops of Worcester and Norwich and three household knights in Edward’s confidence, including William Montagu. Evidently the surrender was to be a dignified affair. Negotiations took place in Paris under severe pressure. The Count of Alençon was already in the south-west and was thought to be besieging Saintes (the news that he had captured it had not yet arrived). The next line of defence was the Gironde itself, and the fortress towns of Bourg and Blaye on its north shore. Terms were quickly agreed. On 30 March 1331 Edward issued letters explaining that he had not done liege homage in 1329 because he had been advised that there was some doubt about whether he was obliged to do so. But now, having been appraised of the true position, he desired that the homage at Amiens should be treated as liege homage and promised that he and his successors would do homage in due form in future.
The surrender of the English was almost as complete when it came to the territorial dispute. Philip VI promised that he would pardon Edward for his dilatoriness in the matter of liege homage and would revoke the decree of confiscation made in the Parlement. He also promised to lift the sentence of banishment which had been imposed on the individuals concerned in the outrage at the bastide of Saint-Sardos. What Philip did not do was pardon Edward’s father for his conduct in that obscure affair. There was to be another joint judicial commission after the model of the process of Périgueux, which had so acrimoniously failed. The commissioners were to be ordered to effect a mutual restoration of territories seized by force of arms in Aquitaine since the war of Saint-Sardos. But that was as far as Philip would allow the clock to be turned back. The conquests made by the French in the war itself were studiously ignored. All that was said about them was that Edward III might apply to Philip for their restoration at some future time, in which case the French King would do what his predecessor had promised to do in May 1325, namely whatever seemed to him to be proper. Philip had already made it clear what he considered proper. In his view, Edward’s father had been condemned by the due process of law and the lost provinces were held by right of conquest.23
The ambassadors had evidently agreed in Paris that the two kings would meet. But for some reason Edward did not wish this to be generally known. He embarked with the Bishop of Winchester at Dover on 4 April 1331 in conditions of the greatest secrecy, dressed as a merchant and accompanied by only fifteen knights. He left behind him letters patent announcing that he had gone to fulfil a vow of pilgrimage and to do ‘certain other things touching the well-being of ourselves and our kingdom’. Philip VI met Edward at Pont-Sainte-Maxence, a short distance north of Paris, and they rode together to the French King’s hunting lodge at Saint-Christophe in the forest of Halate. The French King was surprisingly accommodating. Edward was spared a fresh act of homage, Philip declaring himself satisfied with an exchange of letters defining the effect of the earlier ceremony. Philip had already recalled his army in the south and promised to indemnify Edward for the sack of Saintes by the Count of Alençon. Alençon had exceeded his authority, it was explained; letters ordering him to desist had unfortunately arrived too late. Some minor bones of contention were removed. Edward expressed his interest in joining with Philip in a crusade against the Spanish Moslems. Philip was duly gratified. The two kings parted friends, or at least ‘not enemies’ as the French official annalist put it.24
The annalist’s doubts were well founded. Only the quarrels of the immediate past had been patched up. The more intractable problems which dated back to 1259 were left untouched. Both sides were well aware of this. When Parliament met at Westminster in September 1331 the Chancellor, John Stratford, delivered in his opening address a magisterial summary of the alternatives available. There were three ways, he said, of settling matters with the King of France: first by submitting all the outstanding disputes to the arbitration of the peers of France and abiding by their decision, as Philip had apparently offered to do; secondly by negotiations leading to a marriage alliance and a permanent treaty; thirdly by war. The lords advised that arbitration and war were both too risky. They suggested that negotiations should resume, and then turned to other business.25
*
No imaginative compromise was likely to emerge from the cumbrous diplomatic procedures of the early fourteenth century. In this dawn of international relations governments were only beginning to place their relations on a regular footing, to apply themselves continually to the business of keeping their friendships in repair instead of doing so spasmodically and late when the occasion arose. There were no permanent embassies to study from close at hand the hopes and fears and changing moods of their adversaries, to report to their governments where there was room for manoeuvre and where there was not. The English kings usually maintained a small corps of lawyers in Paris to transact their extensive business in the Parlement, and latterly some of them had been Englishmen. But while these men could be relied on to report the more public occurrences affecting their master, they were far removed from the political mood of the French royal court. The French kings themselves did not even have this measure of contact with their principal north European rivals.
Instead, negotiations of any importance were conducted by the irregular dispatch of ‘solemn’ ambassadors. This meant stately dignitaries, generally bishops or great noblemen, accompanied by great retinues of servants and hangers-on, and by a small number of permanent officials, sharp and disputatious clerics with satchels of documents. These magnificent affairs were required by the conventions of the time and by the self-esteem of the rulers concerned. But they were usually an unproductive hindrance to good diplomatic relations. Their arrival was attended by great publicity, and although they often had secret as well as public messages to deliver, these rarely remained secret for long. An embassy which failed, failed publicly. The rebuff was the more humiliating for being inflicted before the world, and to such exalted men. If communications had been better, such failures might more often have been avoided. But news travelled slowly, and the reactions of governments were slower still. Solemn embassies moved at a dignified pace while events happened fast. Instructions, which had to be prepared well in advance, were usually fairly narrowly limited. If they were found to be inappropriate, further instructions had to be obtained from home. For these reasons, it was occasionally suggested that important business should be transacted by confidential clerks who could ride post haste without losing face and without exhausting the store rooms of hospitable monasteries on the route. But these occasions were rare, and called for embarrassed apologies. The consequences for Anglo-French relations were serious. The muddle and inconsistency, the unintended tactlessness and ill-timed intransigence, which had propelled the affair of Saint-Sardos to its crisis, had been very largely due to Edward II’s complete ignorance of the way in which his beloved cousin in France was thinking. Both governments were to make similar mistakes in the 1330s, for similar reasons.
The disappearance of most of the archives of the medieval French government makes it difficult to say whether there was anyone charged with the permanent function of watching the progress of the King’s relations with foreign powers. Individual royal councillors were employed on diplomatic missions on an ad hoc basis. None of them was continuously concerned with England, or even with foreign affairs. In the first few years of Philip VI’s reign his main advisers on relations with England were two high-ranking ecclesiastics, Andrea Ghini, successively Bishop of Arras and of Tournai, and Pierre Roger, Abbot of Fécamp, then Archbishop of Rouen. Ghini was a Florentine, a civil lawyer who had worked his way up through the financial service of the French government. At the time of the war of Saint-Sardos he had been Charles IV’s private secretary. He had been to England once, in the autumn of 1323, to threaten Edward II with the forteiture of Aquitaine, and had received the rough end of Edward’s tongue. Thereafter, he was concerned in every significant diplomatic exchange between the two countries until 1334.26 Pierre Roger, who received a very similar rebuff from Queen Isabella in 1328, was a more considerable figure, and his was probably the face which was most familiar to successive English ambassadors. He was a theologian and in his day a famous orator who was often employed as a public spokesman for the French government’s views. It fell to him, on a memorable occasion in the audience hall of the papal palace at Avignon, to make the protest of France at the outset of the Hundred Years War, which he did in cogent and colourful language.27 This was advocacy, and advocacy in time of war by a loyal servant of the French state. At a time when war might still have been avoided, Pierre Roger had been in favour of compromise, but he had been overruled by others whose judgement had been more strongly influenced by law and pride. Moreover, he was a practising bishop, not a permanent royal official, and he had other concerns even when he was at court. He attended to diplomatic occasions as they arose and then passed on to other things.
The English kings were slightly better served. Although there was no department of the government with special responsibility for foreign affairs, a number of individual Chancery clerks were almost continuously employed in seeing to the King’s concerns abroad. Between about 1304 and the outbreak of the Hundred Years War an official known as the Keeper of Processes and Memoranda was responsible for accumulating, preserving and cataloguing a great collection of documents dealing with the problems of Aquitaine and of England’s relations with France. In spite of his nondescript title, this personage was much more than an archivist. Elias Joneston, who held the office in 1331, had been Keeper for twenty-five years and before that had been the clerk of his predecessor. This immensely patient, profoundly pessimistic, rather blinkered man had advised the royal Council at every crisis of Anglo-French relations. He had written numerous and sometimes penetrating summaries of diplomatic problems, had drafted the instructions of most of the important embassies and had accompanied not a few of them in person.28 At a lower level of bureaucratic existence, the same long-serving confidential clerks constantly reappear as the authors of reports prepared for the Council or Parliament, as members of the staff of English embassies to France and occasionally as diplomatic agents in their own right. Here were true experts who had done much for the continuity of English foreign policy in three decades of domestic disturbance.
However, for all their expertise these men had a serious shortcoming which was common to both English and French diplomacy. They were lawyers and antiquarians, students of precedent and form. They possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ancient and complex territorial disputes of England and France. They saw to it that ambassadors were briefed on the precise juridical status of particular castles in the Agenais, on the correct method of setting up joint commissions of enquiry, on the peremptory exceptions that could be taken to proceedings in the Parlement of Paris, on the diplomatic history of every clause in the treaties of Paris and Amiens and the ipsissima verba of every homage which an English king had ever done to a French one. In some of their memoranda one can detect a real relish for the arcane complexities of Gascon affairs. They rarely rose above the technicalities. Except in moments of great stress, when legal forms were obviously beside the point, they looked upon the differences of the two nations not as a political problem calling for a political answer, but as a quest for justice calling for sustained forensic skill. From their superiors, the bishops and noblemen who led the principal embassies, rather more might have been expected. But they were part-time diplomats who depended for their understanding on their clerks, and on their instructions, which were often drafted by their clerks. In 1315 a Chancery clerk prepared a memorandum for Edward II which dealt with the qualities to be looked for in an ambassador to the French court. This man expressed the outlook of this kind when he remarked that, apart from tact and high rank, the main requisite of an ambassador was that he should know his country’s rights.29
Philip VI’s response to the offer of negotiations which Edward III made at the end of 1331 on Parliament’s advice was very casual. The English messengers learned that Philip would consider making concessions of his grace, but not yet and probably not at the request of mere diplomats. Edward would have to come and seek his favour in person. Edward toyed with the idea of making another visit to France, his third since his accession, but then thought better of it and stayed at home. There was very little to be done. Edward had nothing to offer to the French King which was worth the concessions he was demanding. A marriage alliance was offered, but proved to be of little interest. An attempt was made to invite the Pope to determine the dispute as supreme judge, which the Pope declined to do without Philip’s consent. Edward was still not taken entirely seriously in France, and his kingdom must have been viewed by Philip’s councillors as unstable, anarchic and ineffective. Edward had to tread delicately. He was well aware of the constitutional difficulties which earlier Anglo-French wars had provoked, and many of the diplomatic memoranda prepared for him in this period reminded him in case he had forgotten. When Parliament next met, in March 1332, the lords spiritual and temporal were told about Philip’s suggestion of a meeting but expressed no great interest. Edward, they advised, might go to France if that was thought useful, and when his affairs allowed.30
Edward’s ministers were not minded to press the point. The most influential of them by far was the cautious John Stratford, Bishop of Winchester, whom Edward had appointed chancellor almost immediately after the fall of Mortimer. Stratford was a career civil servant, a clever and ambitious ecclesiastical lawyer, not over-scrupulous, who must have been in his early forties when he took office. To the eighteen-year-old King he became a father figure, the phrase which Edward himself used when years later the two men fell out. Stratford was a restraining influence on English policy. He had lived through the disasters of the war of Saint-Sardos as one of the inner circle of Edward II’s advisers. He had been present when Edward III had done homage to the French King at Amiens in 1329 and again at the surreptitious negotiations between the two kings in the forest of Halate. And although the years of diplomatic frustration and immobility were eventually to nurture in his breast a deep distrust and hatred of France, there is little doubt that the evasions and hesitations of these years represented Stratford’s own preference and little doubt that he was right to prefer them. A war in the early 1330s could have ended only in disaster. The prospect was inaction in France and frustrated resignation in England.
The event which disturbed the ordained course of Anglo-French relations was an unexpected but fierce war in Scotland. The war progressively choked off any serious negotiations about Aquitaine. It generated an exaggerated but very real fear that the French would invade southern England. It gave the English aristocracy a taste for fighting and some experience of it. And it produced a weather change in English public opinion, a venomous resentment of France and, for a time, a willingness to indulge it by force of arms and at great expense.
NOTES
1 Chaplais (4), 156n; RF, ii, 603–4, 605–8; Murimuth, Chron., 44.
2 WSS, 243–5, 267–9; Murimuth, Chron., 45–6; Baker, Chron., 20; Vita Edwardi, 142; RF, ii, 615–6, 623, 630–1.
3 Vita Edwardi, 143; RF, ii, 615, 622–3, 630, 631; Bel. Chron., i, 12–13.
4 Chron. anon. Par., 104–7; AN JJ 74/577; RF, ii, 638.
5 *KOF, ii, 502–3; Chronographia, i, 280.
6 Pipewell chron. quoted in M. V. Clarke, Medieval Representation and Consent (1936), 183; Nangis, Chron., ii, 78–9; Chron. anon. Par., 111; Walsingham, Hist., i, 178; Cal. Pap. R. Letters, ii, 479; HGL, ix, 439–41, 443–4; x, 662–7*; RF, ii 700–1 (treaty).
7 Nangis, Chron., ii, 82–4; Grandes Chron., ix, 72–3, 330–1; Viollet, 125–54; Confessions, 46–7, 48 (Flemings).
8 Chron., i, 303.
9 Cazelles (1), 44.
10 Cazelles (1), 71–2.
11 Miret y Sans, ‘Negotiations’, 327.
12 *KOF, xviii, 246; Murimuth, Chron., 94; RF, ii, 743; CPR 1327–30, 338; Nangis, Chron., ii, 105; Grandes Chron., ix, 338.
13 Nangis, Chron., ii, 106; Grandes Chron., ix, 339; Froissart, Chron., i, 90–2; RF, ii, 760.
14 RF, ii, 761, 765; for the assurances, see the proceedings of April and May 1330, ibid., 791–2. Tournament: Chronographia, ii, 12.
15 RF, ii, 775, 783, 784, 789; LE, no. 25; Annales Londinienses, ed. W. Stubbs, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, i (1882), 247–9.
16 RF, ii, 793–4, 797; Mirot and Déprez, Ambassades, no. 15.
17 Mirot and Déprez, Ambassades, nos 16–17; CCR 1330–3, 153; RF, ii, 798–9.
18 Nangis, Chron., ii, 122.
19 Chrons. Abrégées, in KOF, xvii, 2.
20 RP, ii, 52–3; Gray, Scalacronica, 157.
21 RF, ii, 799.
22 Tout (1), v, 247–50.
23 Déprez (1), 71; RF, ii, 805–6, 813; Mirot and Déprez, Ambassades, no. 21; CCR 1330–3, 298; CPR 1330–4, 90–5; PRO C47/28/5, 6, C47/30/2(4); Murimuth, Chron., 63.
24 RF, ii, 815–8; PRO C47/28/2(10); Murimuth, Chron., 63; Chron. anon. Par., 145; Miret y Sans, ‘Negotiations’, 69–71; Nangis, Chron., ii, 143.
25 RP, ii, 6o–1.
26 WSS, 130, 176; RF, ii, 791, 899; CPR 1330–4, 90.
27 BN Ms Lat 3293, fol. 244vo.
28 Cuttino (2), 29–61.
29 Chaplais, Dipl. Practice, 306.
30 RP, ii, 65; CPR 1330–4, 223–4; John XXII, Lettres, nos 4109, 5321 (col. 126); PRO C47/28/5 (17, 18, 36, 41, 44, 50), C47/28/9(2), C47/30/7(9) (memoranda).