Shakespeare's Kings (5 page)
His son and successor, called Edward like his father, was a little over fourteen years old when he found himself the richest and most powerful ruler in Europe. To Scotland he could lay no claim: it had its own line of kings, the reigning monarch at that time being Robert I (the Bruce), who had trounced his father at Bannockburn thirteen years before. Both Ireland and Wales, however - although they continued to give trouble - were theoretically part of Edward's dominions: as was Gascony, which was more important than either, comprising as it did the larger part of south-west France. True, English possessions beyond the Channel were no longer what they once had been. Two centuries before, Edward's great-great-great-grandfather Henry II had claimed,
- John Trevisa, who was born at Berkeley in 1326, writes in his translation (with interpolations) of Higden's
Polychronicon
that Edward was killed 'with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place poster
ialle' - this particularly ghastl
y method having been chosen principally in order that there should be no marks on the body when it was prepared for state burial in Gloucester Cathedral, but also, perhaps, as being appropriate for a suspected sodomite.
either as fiefs by inheritance or through his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, almost half the area of the country we know today, including — as well as Gascony — Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, Guyenne and Toulouse. Since Henry's time, however, much of this had fallen away; now only Gascony was left.
In
1328,
little
more than a year after Edward was crowned, the French King Charles IV died in Paris, leaving — like his two brothers who had preceded him on the throne - no male issue; and suddenly not only the lost provinces but the whole of France seemed to Edward to be just possibly within his reach. He now claimed simply that his own mother, Isabella, the late King's sister, was the rightful heir; the French objected that according to the old Salic Law the crown could not pass to a woman, and that it should therefore go to the son of Charles's uncle, Philip of Valois; whereupon Edward pointed out that even if the Salic Law were to be upheld he himself, as the late King's nephew, was a closer relation than Philip, who was merely a cousin.
It is interesting to speculate how European history would have been changed had Edward's view prevailed, with England and France united under a single crown. But to the French such an outcome was clearly out of the question. Philip, after all, was already Regent; Edward, now sixteen, lived across the sea, was the senior representative of that same house of Plantagenet that in Gascony had caused nothing but trouble, and was in any case still a minor. Philip duly received his coronation as Philip VI at Rheims in May
1328,
and Edward was obliged, albeit relucta
ntly
, to recognize him as King. But this presented another problem — one of the oldest and most intractable of all those inherent in the feudal system, one which had been poisoning Anglo-French relations ever since the days of William the Conqueror: how could a sovereign of one state hold land as the vassal of a sovereign of another? The duties imposed by such vassalage were as difficult for one of them to insist upon as they were distasteful to the other to perform. Edward's
title
to his French lands was not in dispute; but how were those lands held — in full sovereignty or as fiefs?
The French had no doubts on the matter: so far as they were concerned the King of France retained his suzerainty under the formula
superioritas et resortum
,
which allowed the people of Gascony the ultimate right of appeal to Paris. The English, however, refused to accept any such limitation of their authority. Lawyers on both sides of the Channel had been arguing for a century and more, but had succeeded only in smothering the issue under layer after layer of obfuscation, until the only point which was perfe
ctly
clear (though neither side could admit it) was that the problem was insoluble. In
1329
Edward did in fact travel to Amiens, where he did simple homage to Philip; but eight years later, on
24
May
1337,
the French King declared Gascony confiscate to himself 'on account of the many excesses, rebellions and acts of disobedience committed against us and our royal majesty by the King of England, Duke of Aquitaine'. By now tension had been further increased by Edward's invasion of France's
old ally, Scotl
and; and Philip's unilateral action came as the last straw. On
7
October Edward challenged his claim not only to Gascony but to France as well, declaring himself 'King of France and England'. The Hundred Years War had begun.
It is with this declaration that Shakespeare's
Edward III
effectively opens. There is a brief preliminary exchange during which, for the sake of the audience, Edward's claim to the French throne is explained -and its justice confirmed - by Robert, Count of Artois;
2
there then enters the French Ambassador, the Duke of Lorraine, who peremptorily demands that Edward appear within forty days before the King of France to do homage for his dukedom of Guyenne - a summons which is answered in the words that form the epigraph to this chapter. We are thus given a rousing and intensely dramatic opening scene — although two small points must be made in the interests of historical accuracy. First, Edward had actually performed the required homage eight years before (though not in satisfactory form, since he had refused to appear before the French King bare-headed and with ungirt sword); second, despite the fact that both Artois and Lorraine refer to their master as John of Valois, the King of France in
1337
was in fact Philip
- As pointed out in the Introduction, it has never been suggested that every word of the play is by Shakespeare. His name is used loosely throughout this chapter, simply because we cannot get involved here with questions of the authenticity of individual passages.
- In fact Robert was not Count of Artois at all, that county on the death of his grandfather having been assigned to a cousin. In 1334 he had sought refuge in England, where Edward, realizing the value of a renegade French nobleman to his cause, had granted him the earldom of Richmond.
VI; John II succeeded him only in
1350.
1
Neither of these points, however, need concern us overmuch; suffice it to say that the Duke of Lorraine is sent packing and his place at centre-stage taken over by the captain of the
castle
of Roxborough (now Roxburgh), Sir William Montague.
2
With Montague comes the introduction of two more strands of the story: affairs in Scotland and the King's love for the Countess of Salisbury. Montague reports that the league' between the English and the Scots has been 'cracked and dissevered':
Berwick is won; New
castle
spoil'd and lost;
And now the tyrant hath begirt with siege
The castl
e of Roxborough, where enclos'd
The Countess Salisbury is like to perish.
Edward had in fact no league with
Scotland
. On the contrary, fighting had continued sporadically along
the border from soon after Ban
nockburn until in
1328,
with the marriage of Bruce's four-year-old son David - soon to be King David II of
Scotland
- to Edward's sister Joanna, a truce had been declared - only to be broken by the Scots when they captured Berwick in
1332.
Newcastle, on the other hand, did not fall to them until
1341
— the date when, according to Froissart,
3
Sir William Montague appealed to the King for help. But to attach any serious importance to these inaccuracies is to miss the point. The dramatist is not interested in historical exactitude; he is concerned only to set the general scene of almost continuous warfare along the Scottish
- The editor of the New Cambridge edition charitably maintains that 'the existence of Philip VI is deliberately ignored in order to present a single royal French counterpart to Edward in the campaign that lasted from 1337 to 1356.'
- There seems also to have been some confusion in the identity of Montague, but it need not concern us here.
- Jean Froissart, the greatest prose writer of his day, was born at Valenciennes in the county of Hainault around 1337 and was brought to England by Queen Philippa in 1361 as one of her household clerks, remaining there until her death eight years later, though making frequent trips to the continent. He was at the Black Prince's court at Bordeaux when Richard was born there in 1367. His chronicle - which includes long extracts from that of an earlier compatriot, Jean Le Bel - covers the period from 1322 to the end of the century.
border, and of the consequent danger to Edward's subjects throughout the north, rich and poor alike.
Edward thus finds that he has two enemies to fight; of the two, however, he has no doubt that the King of France is by far the more formidable. Against him he orders his eldest son, Edward - whom he calls 'Ned'
1
- to raise a mighty army from every shire in the land, simultaneously arranging for appeals to be made to his father-in-law the Count of Hainault and even to the Holy Roman Emperor, Lewis IV. While such preparations are in train, 'with these forces that I have at hand', he proposes to march against King David, liberating Lady Salisbury from the
castle
in which she is besieged - and on the battlements of which we find her at the opening of scene ii.
The identity of this lady is not so much a mystery as the result of a chaotic confusion on the part of Froissart and other less trustworthy sources.
2
She is probably based on Alice Montague, whose husband Edward was governor of the Earl of Salisbury's
castle
of Wark and whom the King is known to have tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce; but once again it hardly matters. Her eavesdropping on King David and the Duke of Lorraine, as they walk the ramparts below discussing the devastation that they will wreak on England, enables her to taunt them when they flee at the news of Edward's advance; her real purpose, however, is to provide the play with a love interest and to show us the King as a lover as well as a man of action. This theme is continued throughout the long first scene of Act II. It includes much fine poetry and introduces an interesting moral dilemma when the Countess's father, the Earl of Warwick - who is no more a historical character than she is herself- is commanded by the King to persuade his daughter to yield:
I'll say, she must forget her husband Salisbury, If she remember to embrace the king; I'll say, an oath can easily be broken, But not so easily pardoned, being broken; I'll say, it is true charity to love, But not true love to be so charitable;
- Edward, the Black Prince, was seven years old in 1337.
- It is discussed at length in the New Cambridge edition, p. 186.I'll say, his greatness may bear out the shame, But not his kingdom can buy out the sin; I'll say, it is my duty to persuade, But not her honesty to give consent.
But these two scenes - together with that which follows, in which the Countess finally brings Edward to his senses by agreeing to surrender to him only if
he first kills his wife and her husband - are in a sense little more than an extended parenthesis; not until the last dozen lines of Act II do we return to the main business of the play — the war with France.
Although at an early stage Edward had established himself with his family at Antwerp as a forward base, he did not invade French territory until the autumn of
1339.
Invading armies seldom comport themselves well towards local populations, but the English army seems to have behaved worse than most. The countryside was ravaged, villages laid waste. At Origny the local convent was burnt to the ground, the nuns subjected to wholesale rape. Such conduct may have been deliberately intended to provoke the King of France to
Battle
; if so, it very nearly succeeded. When the French army finally caught up with the English near Saint-Quentin, Philip proposed a formal encounter in single combat — the old chivalric tradition was dying hard - at a site to be chosen by Edward; he stipulated only that the field should have neither trees, ditches nor marsh. Edward asked nothing better. He was twenty-five years old, at the peak of his health and vigour, with a passion for war in all its aspects. He was a regular participant at tournaments; and what, after all, was his cousin proposing but a glorified joust? No sooner had the challenge been accepted, however, than Philip had second thoughts. Froissart suggests that he listened to the advice of his uncle Robert of Anjou, King of Naples and a noted astrologer; more probably his scouts simply reported that the English King was a good deal stronger, and the English host far better organized, than he had expected. At all events he returned to Paris. The English, grumbling loudly about French cowardice, retired to Brussels for the winter.
