The Perfect King (5 page)

In such a political atmosphere, on Monday
13
November
1312,
Edward III was born at Windsor. The country's relief was described by the contemporary author of the
Life of Edward the Second:

Amid this uproar, with various rumours flying hither and thither, while one man foretold peace, his neighbour war, there was born to the king a handsome and long looked-for son. He was christened Edward, his father's name
...
This long wished-for birth was timely for us, because by God's will it had two fortunate consequences. It much lessened the grief which had afflicted the king on Piers [Gaveston's] death, and it provided a known heir to the throne.

All across England there was celebration. A monk of St Albans recorded that 'by this birth all England was made joyful
...
and his father was made happy again, for it tempered that sadness he had felt since the death of Piers'.
7
The monk went on: 'On that day his love of the boy began and the memory of Piers began to diminish.' Edward, it would seem, had redeemed the situation. By his very birth he had pulled the country back from the abyss.

These references to Gaveston and the baby being held in comparable affection are interesting, for they echo those chronicles which refer to Edward II loving his friend as a brother or a son. This was certainly close endearment: no one ever accused Edward II of being a cruel father, or uncaring towards his sisters and half-brothers. He had a particular fondness for female family members - especially his stepmother, Queen Margaret - and maintained his old nurse, Alice Leygrave, for many years. His efforts to bring his friends into the royal family by marrying them to his female relatives - Piers Gaveston is the prime, though not the sole, example — further underline how important family ties were to Edward. The royal family was clearly at the heart of his view of his kingdom and the rest of God's Creation. This explains why his son's birth was of such political - as well as personal - significance to him. The king and many of his subjects would have strongly associated the birth of an heir with God's will, and thus it was a blessing, a gift to the kingdom ordained by God. Edward had received divine confirmation that his line would continue. Most important of all, the whole country - including the rebel earls - had to acknowledge this blessing There had to be some fear in the earls' camps that God was favouring the king and, by implication, not his enemies.

Edward, in his joy at hearing this news, granted the man who bore it, John Launge, and his wife, Joan (one of the queen's attendants), the extraordinary sum of eighty pounds yearly for life. This was more than many knights received, and it is perhaps not surprising that the sheriffs of London proved very reluctant to pay it. But such a huge gift to the bearer of the news was money well-spent. Although it was probably motivated by paternal pride, it had propaganda value too. It helped draw attention to the fact that the king now had a son. Even better publicity was the timely presence of the papal legate, Cardinal Nouvel. Edward jumped at the opportunity to have his son and heir baptised by an emissary of the pope. Accordingly, on Thursday
16
November
1312,
Cardinal Nouvel christened young Edward of Windsor in St Edward's Chapel in Windsor
Castle
. For good measure, Edward asked the other peace envoys in the country — Count Louis d'Evreux, the queen's uncle, and the bishop of Poitiers - to be the boy's godfathers. To these he added five more godfathers: John Droxford (bishop of Bath and Wells), Walter Reynolds (bishop of Worcester), John of Brittany (earl of Richmond), Aymer de Valence (earl of Pembroke) and one Hugh Despenser. The last-mentioned was the father of the man of the same name who, nine years later, finally plunged the country into civil war.

Edward's birth was symbolic for other, secular reasons. England in the early fourteenth century was a country in which the future and the past were interwoven with the present in a series of potent and developing stories. Great families knew their history - none more so than the royal family - and they believed that, to a certain extent, they knew their futures too, through prophecy. This was not personal fortune-telling but public prophecy, which soon was circulated as rumour and eventually captured in literary works. In the widely-circulated 'Prophecy of the Six Kings', probably first written down in its earliest form at about the time of Edward's birth, the six kings following King John were ch
aracterised by beasts." Henry II
I was portrayed as a lamb, Edward I as a dragon, Edward II as a goat and Edward
III
as a boar 'who will come out of Windsor'. Although a boar might not strike the modern reader as an animal of great significance, it had huge resonance in the fourteenth century. 'The boar who came out o
f Cornwall' was none other than
King Arthur himself.'* Moreover, 'the boar who will come out of Windsor' was prophesied to have the head and heart of a lion. He would wear 'three crowns' - an oblique reference to the three crowns of the Holy Roman Empire, one iron, one silver and one gold - and be buried at Cologne amongst the tombs of the Three Kings, the Magi, who were then understood to be the first Christian kings.' To many contemporaries, the future was clear: Edward U would lose his kingdom. He would die overseas.'
4
After his death, his successor, Edward of Windsor, would win fame as a warrior-king, become Holy Roman Emperor, and win battles across Europe, regaining the lands which his ancestors had lost. The people of England could have some faith that their newborn prince would grow up not just to be a king but a lion-hearted and victorious one.

The large number of copies of this prophecy allow us to be reasonably confident that Edward knew it. A revision updated in about
1327
was incorporated into the most popular chronicle of the day, the
Brut,
written in the mid
-i330s,
of which Queen Isabella owned a copy at her death.'
5
Later in his life Edward specifically renounced any intention of being buried at the shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, suggesting he knew this was widely expected of him. When personally visiting the shrine in
1338
,
he gave a large amount of money to be spent on upkeep of the building, so that part of the prophecy was familiar to him by then. But whether he believed all of it, totally, is another question. While certainty in such matters is not possible, it is probable that he recognised that true prophetic writing could contain kernels of truth. When declaring that he wished to be buried in Westminster rather than Cologne, he did not merely pass an idle remark: he swore a solemn oath, so he seems to have taken the original prophecy seriously. And there is good evidence that royal prophecies were taken seriously by Edward's father, for Edward II had faith in one prophetic story in particular: the oil of St Thomas.

The story of the oil of St Thomas stated that when Thomas Becket had been in exile, the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a dream. She had announced to him that the fifth king after his time (Edward II) would be a benevolent man who would fight for God's church, and reconquer the Holy Land. To assist this king
and his successors
the Virgin entrusted Becket with an ampulla of sacred oil, and directed him to give it to a monk of St Cyprian's monastery. The monk hid it in the church of St George at Poitiers, with a sheet of metal inscribed with the prophecy itself. After an attempt to steal it had failed, it had come into the possession of the duke of Brabant, Edward IPs brother-in-law, who had brought it to the king's coronation in
1308.
It was not used, however. Ten years later, Edward II claimed that he believed the reason his reign was so unsuccessful was because he, the fifth king after Becket's time, had failed to be anointed with the oil And in so doing he had failed not only his kingdom, himself and his successors but also St Thomas and the Virgin Mary. So anxious was he for some respite from his failure that he wrote to the recently elected Pope John XXII asking whether he would send a cardinal to anoint him with the oil. The pope refused the services of a cardinal, but said that if the king truly believed the story it would not be sinful for him to be anointed. That Edward II raised such a matter privately with the pope suggests his interest in this prophecy was not merely political, but spiritual too. He believed it.'

We do not know how deeply Edward III shared his father's view of this or any other prophecy. It may just be coincidence but the three most important divine figures in Edward Ill's life - the Virgin Mary, St Thomas of Canterbury and St George - all appear in this story. But in an age when most people believed in destiny, Edward would have understood that it was widely held that he would become a military conqueror abroad and a champion of the church, a man whose leadership had been awaited for centuries. It was an utterly traditional role for a king, very similar to that of his grandfather, the majestic and fearsome Edward I; but it was also wrapped in romance and religious mysticism, and thus embodied all the virtues of fourteenth-century kingship.

If there was a fly in the prophetic ointment, it was the day of the birth.
13
November was St Brice's Day, and St Brice was not the sort of saint by whom one would choose to be governed. He was a pupil of the fifth-century saint, St Martin of Tours, and used to tease his master with sarcastic comments, not always stopping short of insult: calling him half-witted, for instance. St Martin responded by praying that Brice would succeed him as bishop of Tours, and prophesying that he would be treated very badly during his episcopacy. So it happened: Bishop Brice was charged at the age of thirty-three with fathering his washerwoman's child. On commanding the baby to speak in the name of Christ to reveal whether he was the father or not, the people accused him of witchcraft and threw him out of the city. Only after spending seven years in exile at the papal palace in Rome did Brice achieve sufficient composure and sanctity to return t
o Tours and rule as a more saintl
y bishop for the rest of his life.'
7
Thus it may have been with some trepidation that each chronicler recorded the feast day of St Brice in connection with their new prince's birth. After all, Edward II had been born on St Mark's Day, and that was hardly any more propitious, being widely regarded as a day of doom.' The author of the
Life of Edward the Second
ended his eulogy on the young prince's birth with the hope that he would 'combine in his person the virtues that characterised in turn his forebears. May he follow the industry of King Henry the second, the well
-
known valour of King Richard, may he reach the age of King Henry [the third], revive the wisdom of King Edward [the first] and remind us of the physical strength and comeliness of his father."
9

The king's instinct was to shower those whom he loved with presents, and so he immediately ordered that the baby be raised to the front rank of the peerage. This was extraordinary. Edward II himself had been sixteen, almost seventeen years old, before he was created earl of Chester; his father had been nearly fifteen. Now his son would bear that title. At the age of twelve days, Edward of Windsor was created an earl. No sooner had this been done than the king set about spending money on preparations for his first family Christmas, ordering almost
£1,250
to be spent on cloth for his and the queen's retainers and those of the young heir. After Christmas the baby was provided with his own household, to maintain him in his position as earl of Chester. By
26
January
1313
— aged just ten weeks - Edward was nominally in charge of dozens of greater and lesser servants.

A large household required maintenance. So the king was able to indulge his demonstration of largesse further by granting his son a number of lucrative incomes. The counties of Flintshire and Cheshire were made over to him along with his title. At the age of eight months he was granted the lordship of the Isle of Wight." At the age of four he was granted a substantial income from the Exchequer, amounting to the rent of the manor of Petworth and the lands of the young heir, Henry Percy. At the age of five he was granted an additional one thousand marks per year
(£666 13s
8d) out of the tin revenues of Cornwall. Edward was very well-provided for, not the richest earl in the kingdom - that was his father's embittered cousin, Thomas, earl of Lancaster — but by no means the poorest.

With all these grants came responsibilities. As the earl of Chester, Edward of Windsor was responsible for the administration of justice in all his lands and across many manors held by others. It is, of course, very unlikely that as a baby he heard any of the king's writs addressed to him, but nevertheless he would have had impressed upon him from the earliest age the fact that he had duties towards others. Rents coming in from his manors in the north were collected by his chamberlain and paid out to his officers and into his own 'wardrobe' or treasury. His officers were responsible for raising men from Cheshire for the king's service. When the king needed to raise men from North Wales for the suppression of the rebel Llywelyn Bren in the spring of
1316,
it was the three-year-old earl of Chester to whom the writ was directed. Similarly, arrangements to allow foodstuffs to be purchased and conveyed away from Chester, or to arrest outlaws travelling in the region, had to be made with his justiciar. The king's reasons for making his son an earl at such a young age were various, and the propaganda element of the outrageousness of the appointment cannot be ignored; but the end result was an education. In later life Edward III would not have been able to remember a time when he was not responsible for the administration of justice, the accrual of revenue from land, and decisions which changed people's lives.