The Plantagenets (60 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
For the seven years that followed the start of his reign proper in 1330, Edward got to know his realm. The near-ceaseless tourneying drew him close to the political community on both a symbolic and a social level. A fruitful marriage to Queen Philippa, which had produced the young prince Edward of Woodstock in 1330, yielded more children at regular intervals: Isabella of Woodstock was born in May 1332, Joan of the Tower (of London) in late 1333, William of Hatfield (who died young) in December 1336, and Lionel of Antwerp in 1338. But there were wider problems in his realm that required attention beyond mere revelry and warlike posturing. For all the young king’s lusty grandeur, England was beset by troubles. The first three decades of the fourteenth century had been ruinous to the state of the realm and to public order. The Great Famine of 1315–22 had caused widespread misery and death, and the turbulent politics that
had dogged Edward II’s reign from his coronation to his death had seen lawlessness thrive. In the Midlands, the Folville gang – a corrupt gentry family from Leicestershire – took to large-scale violence and spoliation, murdering their political enemies with impunity and even taking travelling judges hostage. A similar gang, known as the Cotterils, operated in the Peak District. Various attempts at sending judicial commissions into the shires to restore calm and royal law had met with resistance and collapsed under the strain of endemic abuses of local power.
In response, Edward showed himself open to radical experiments with judicial reform. The itinerant system of the eyre – slow-moving travelling county courts whose circuits might take seven years or more – was outdated and unwieldy. Instead, Edward listened in the parliament of March 1332 as the chief justice Sir Geoffrey Scrope led a debate on reforming law and order. The system that eventually emerged was one in which permanent royal offices were created in the counties to regulate criminal disorder. The role of keeper of the peace (the predecessors of justices of the peace) sprang from this reform, and it was to these officials – backed by ad hoc royal commissions to deal with special cases such as those of the Folvilles and Cotterils, commissions of oyer and terminer (‘hear and judge’), and sporadic local visitations of the Westminster court of King’s Bench – that the business of local peacekeeping would fall for the rest of the century. The system of English justice was institutionalized further than ever – no king would ever again ride as King John once had, sitting as judge where he chose and literally executing the judicial role of the Crown in person. Yet if the king as judge was fading away, the king as military captain was an idea that Edward determined should be stronger than ever.
His first target was Ireland. Not for 120 years – since John’s expedition in 1210 – had an English king set foot in the lordship, but violent disorder was rife and the authority of the English king over the Anglo-Norman settler barons had crumbled almost to nothing. During the summer of 1332 plans were drawn up to send a massive invasion force across the Irish Sea to re-establish royal rule. Just at the point of
readiness, however, they had to be abandoned. For on 11 August 1332, at Dupplin Moor, near Perth in Scotland, armies supporting the new Scottish king, Robert the Bruce’s son David II (who was Edward’s brother-in-law by marriage to the king’s sister Joanna), clashed with rebel forces known as ‘the Disinherited’. These rebels were made up of Scots who had lost all they had at Bannockburn. They fought under John Balliol’s son Edward and were supported by Edward’s friend and ally Henry Beaumont, a grizzled veteran of every major Scottish battle since Falkirk in 1298.
The tiny army of the Disinherited – which may have been only 1,500 strong, a tenth of the size of the Bruce forces – won a stunning victory, killing numerous Scottish knights and earls. Balliol was proclaimed king at Scone on 24 September and Scotland sank again into utter disarray. Edward III at once abandoned his plans to invade Ireland, and turned his attention to the northern border. At a parliament held in York in January 1333 he announced his intention to invade Scotland, shattering the truce established in the treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton and reinvigorating the war for mastery that had stuttered so badly since the death of Edward I.
Between 1333 and 1337 the capital of England became York, as Edward took the whole machine of government north to let him focus on the war. His army combined household troops, feudally summoned nobles with their knights, and foreign mercenaries, including the Hainaulters who had fought during Isabella and Mortimer’s ill-starred campaign. Regular soldiers were raised by array – a form of press gang by which conscripted men were paid a day wage once they set foot outside their home county – and included hobelars (light cavalry), infantry who fought with spears and knives, and archers who rode on horseback before dismounting to fight. Mounted archers would become the most tactically effective and dangerous element of English medieval armies, and during the course of his reign Edward would rely on them as his elite units, raising their status in the army well above the rest of the rank and file. If they were not quite equal to the aristocratic cavalry, mounted archers nevertheless became some of the most respected and feared warriors in Europe
during the fourteenth century. They, and the rest of Edward’s armies, were fed and maintained in the field by the purveyance taken throughout the whole realm, a source of perennial grievance for English subjects.
Edward’s campaign began in the spring of 1333. Throughout the summer his captains – among them William Montagu, Henry Percy and Henry earl of Lancaster’s son Henry Grosmont, barons all roughly of the king’s age and generation – assisted Edward Balliol in raiding across the border. Then the English laid siege to Berwick, before meeting the Scots in battle at Halidon Hill, two miles away.
The tactics used at Halidon Hill were those developed by Henry Beaumont at Dupplin Moor, and they would serve Edward well during the course of his reign. Although his army was perhaps only half the size of the Scots’, Edward took up strong defensive positions on the hill, with three divisions of dismounted men-at-arms each flanked by dismounted archers. The king commanded the central division, Edward Balliol the left, and the king’s uncle the earl of Norfolk led the right, with the king’s younger brother John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall, beside him. There would be no cavalry charges at the Scottish schiltroms – Bannockburn had taught the English that these were suicidal tactics. Rather, as the massed bands of Scottish spearmen advanced up the hill, the English bowmen loosed a vicious hail of arrows upon them, causing panic and terror, and scattering much of the Scottish advance before it even reached the men-at-arms. By the time hand-to-hand combat was joined the Scots were already tired and terrified. Edward and his men attacked the enemy bravely, and the king fought hand-to-hand against Robert Stewart, the seventeen-year-old steward of Scotland. The battle very swiftly became a rout, with Edward and Balliol’s men remounting their horses and chasing the shattered Scots from the field. By the time the battle was over there had been another bloody slaughter of the finest Scottish nobles and knights, including six earls, whom the king had buried with chivalrous propriety.
Edward’s victory at Halidon Hill was so complete that he was able to put Edward Balliol on the throne, reclaim Berwick for the English
and lay claim to large tracts of territory in the Scottish Lowlands. He spent the second half of 1333 back in the south-east of England, hunting and holding tournaments. Early in 1334 Balliol agreed to return Scotland to full dominion status, making the Scottish Crown once again a dependency of the English. It seemed almost indecently easy.
Of course, it was not. Since 1326, Scotland had been in alliance with France, and by June 1334, when Edward Balliol performed liege homage to Edward in Newcastle, it was known that the French king Philip VI had snatched the deposed King David II and his wife Joanna from Scotland and given them sanctuary in Normandy, where they were ensconced in Richard the Lionheart’s great fortress at Château Gaillard. In David’s absence, Scottish resistance rallied under Robert Bruce’s grandson, Robert Stewart, and John Randolph, the earl of Moray. Much of the winter of 1334 and the summer of 1335 Edward spent marching an army around the Lowlands in a violent, destructive tour of terror. This was repeated in the Highlands in July 1336, where he burnished his chivalric legend by rescuing a group of ladies held prisoner at Lochindorb castle. There was precious little chivalry to the rest of the brutal campaign. Edward’s tactics – bloody rampages around enemy countryside, burning, looting and killing with no greater strategic purpose than to demoralize enemy civilians – would be exported to the Continent in later years, earning English soldiers a reputation as some of the fiercest in Christendom.
For all the terror inflicted on the Scots, however, a settlement did not emerge. Edward and his friends – particularly Henry of Grosmont, who was showing himself to be a robust and vigorous captain – were learning the business of war, but they could not compel the Scots to love a Balliol king by slaughter alone. At the heart of the problem lay the alliance between the rebellious Scots and the king of France. For Philip VI, Plantagenet actions in Scotland were bound tightly to the status of Plantagenet dominions in Aquitaine. As long as the English refused to accept full French sovereignty over Gascony, Philip would support the Scots in their own struggle for independence. By 1337 Edward had lost some of his interest in burning Scotland into submission. At the heart of his approach to kingship lay a desire to tackle
problems directly and energetically. The problem in 1337 was no longer Scotland. It was France. A new theatre of war tugged at him, irresistibly. The greatest conflict of the Plantagenet years was about to begin.
When parliament met in March 1337, a hum of excitement and agitation settled over Westminster. There were reasons to be excited. Radical legislation was to be introduced to the country. A reform of the wool trade was planned. War loomed on two fronts. But more exciting than any of this, at least to observers of the parliament and lovers of the pageantry and show of Plantagenet kingship, was the impending creation of six new peers of the realm.
Edward III had been king for a decade. For seven of those years he had ruled in his own right. And in his early years, the young man had shown himself to be a willing friend to the aristocracy. At great tournaments he held, he had grown familiar with the wealthy fighting elite of the country – and it was to these sorts of men that he felt naturally closest.
There had been a general decline in the state of the aristocracy during the previous two generations. Edward I had been distrustful of nobility in general and correspondingly stingy with earldoms. His suspicions of the rights of nobles were never more obvious than in the Quo Warranto inquiries, by which his justices quizzed the barons of the realm about their right to wield powers and jurisdictions that might be deemed to belong to the Crown itself. Edward II had been more inventive and liberal with the great landed titles, but he tended to save his key awards as gifts for his immediate favourites, rather than creating families of great men, who he feared would rival his authority. Edward II had made Gaveston earl of Cornwall, Andrew Harclay earl of Carlisle, Hugh Despenser earl of Winchester and his
half-brothers earls of Norfolk and Kent; but of all these only the earl of Norfolk lived past 1330. Furthermore, Edward III’s younger brother, John of Eltham, who had been created earl of Cornwall in 1328, had died of an illness while on campaign in Perth in 1336, and now lay at rest in Westminster Abbey.
Unlike his grandfather or father, Edward III saw a greater truth to English kingship, which had all too often been obscured by the eruption of civil wars between the king and his leading magnates. That truth was that there was naturally a community, not a conflict, of interest between a king and his great subjects. At the March 1337 parliament Edward laid out this philosophy in clear terms. He told his assembled lords that ‘among the marks of royalty we consider it to be the chief that, through a due distribution of positions, dignities and offices, it is buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by mighty powers’. Since England had seen a lessening in her pool of noble families headed by formidable earls and barons, he argued, ‘the realm has long suffered a serious decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’.
Edward announced to the realm that he was taking decisive action to establish a new generation of English nobles, with whom he could share both the prestige and the burdens of kingship. They were all men who had proved their service to him over the ten years of his reign, and in several cases had been at his side since that daring raid on Nottingham castle, when Mortimer was removed. Here were the natural boon companions of an ambitious young king – and they would soon be pressed into action alongside him.
Six earls were created in parliament. First among them was William Montagu, leader of the 1330 coup. Since that famous October day, Montagu had been demonstrating to the king that he was both a valuable diplomat and a brave soldier in the wars against Scotland, during which he had lost an eye. He had already been rewarded with much booty, patronage and land grants, but now Montagu was raised to the rank of earl of Salisbury.
Salisbury’s leading co-conspirators from 1330 were similarly rewarded. Robert Ufford became earl of Suffolk and William Clinton
was made earl of Huntingdon – a title that had once been held by the Scottish kings. Meanwhile the scions of England’s greatest families were given titles to reflect their status. Henry Grosmont became earl of Derby. William Bohun, another veteran of 1330 and the Scottish wars, became earl of Northampton. Hugh Audley, long-serving soldier and early opponent of Roger Mortimer, was awarded the earldom of Gloucester.
Alongside the new earls, Edward also innovated with his nobility. Edward and Philippa’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, was a healthy six years old in March 1337. From Tudor times he would be known by the title of the Black Prince, for his (supposedly) black armour and diabolical soldierly reputation. In 1337, however, he was given a new title to reflect his importance as the heir to the throne of England. Edward III created him duke of Cornwall – the first time that the French title
duc
had been translated to England, and a recognition that the status of the greatest royal earldom now had special, familial status. This was both a rapid regranting of the late John of Eltham’s title, and an implicit statement that never again would a lowly nobody like Gaveston hold so great a royal title.
