The Plantagenets (63 page)

It was a barbed comment. Rehoboam was famous for having told the people of Israel that: ‘My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions’ (I Kings 12:14). And in case that was too cryptic for Edward, Stratford spelled out the comparison. He accused Edward of breaking Magna Carta and his coronation oath, warning him that ‘what happened to your father, sire, you know well’.

During Christmas and the early spring, Edward held a series of typically lavish tournaments around the country. Meanwhile, a public war of letters continued with Stratford, which included an astonishingly angry assault from Edward and his advisers, which was referred to by Stratford as the
libellus famosus
(‘notorious libel’), and in which the king upgraded his disparagement of the archbishop and accused him of treason.

This was a dangerous situation. Edward was correct to perceive mismanagement in his officials, but to accuse an archbishop of Canterbury of treason incurred the suspicion of tyranny. Stratford refused to be moved by the king’s rage, denied most of the accusations made against him and demanded the right to defend himself in parliament. The fuming king began to fill his letters to the archbishop with personal abuse. The conflict seemed as though it might evoke one of the most infamous episodes in Plantagenet history. Stratford, in his heated opposition to the king, was aware of the precedent his predecessor, Thomas Becket, had set.

Matters came to a head when a parliament was called for March 1341. Using the pretext of non-payment of taxes, Edward attempted to have his servants physically prevent Stratford from entering the Painted Chamber in the palace of Westminster, where parliament
met. Meanwhile, he allowed into the chamber a number of his household servants and advisers, who had no right to sit there. Stratford took up an indignant place directly outside the chamber door, holding his archbishop’s staff and steadfastly refusing to move until he was admitted. For three days a stand-off prevailed, until the earl of Surrey stepped in to mediate, telling the king that: ‘Parliaments were not wont to be like this. For here those who should be foremost are shut out, while there sit other men of low rank who have no business to be here.’ Stratford was eventually permitted to enter the chamber, to hear thirty-two charges of misconduct brought against him.

If Edward felt he had won, however, he was mistaken. During the debates that followed, it became very clear that the wrathful king had overreached. The whole weight of national support lay behind the archbishop. A petition was presented showing that he had the backing of a number of the great magnates and prelates, the community of London and the parliamentary commons. There was little a king who wished to keep his throne could do in the teeth of such opposition. By 3 May 1341 Edward was forced, humiliatingly, to climb down. Through mediation by the earl of Salisbury and other loyalists among the lords, the king was persuaded to take part in a parliamentary reconciliation with the archbishop and agree a programme of reform, in which tax collectors were made accountable to parliament and investigations were launched into purveyance. The king promised that in future, the great ministers of state – the chancellor, treasurer, and judges, the keeper of the privy seal and the leading men of the royal household – were to be sworn in parliament, while lords and royal ministers should not be arrested and judged ‘except in parliament and by their peers’.

Fortunately for Edward, this was the most peaceful end to a full-blown political crisis that had been seen in England since 1297. The drama and rage of his secret entry to the Tower had fizzled into public embarrassment before parliament. He vowed, in the sort of bombastic fashion that would have suited Henry II, that he would never appoint another churchman as a minister, nor indeed any man whom he could not hang, draw and behead when they let him down. But this
was grandstanding, and it ignored the momentous implications that the crisis of 1341 had for both the passage of the French war and the future government of the realm. Edward’s personal quarrel with his archbishop and attempt to punish his ministers had thrown up a principle by which the activities of the Crown’s leading officials could be scrutinized in parliament. A mechanism had been inadvertently established by which England could now settle political crises without descent into bloody civil war.

Moreover, and perhaps rather surprisingly, Edward’s grudging concessions earned him enough political goodwill to negotiate a new source of funding for his wars. Rather than collecting taxes via the levy of a movables tax of a ninth and a forced loan, parliament agreed to grant the king a direct tax on wool – one of the major English exports – which raised an astonishing amount of revenue. Nearly 30,000 wool sacks were appropriated for the Crown to sell on; their value of around £126,000 made this the heaviest tax to be levied on England since the end of King John’s reign.

While all this took place, Queen Philippa was at King’s Langley, where on 5 June 1341 she gave birth to another son. He was given a traditional English name – Edmund – and a tournament was held to celebrate the birth. The assembled nobles then travelled together to London to attend a series of war councils, by which the next stage of the king’s quarrel with France could be advanced. It would not have escaped Edward that his survival of the quarrel with Stratford had been all the more assured by the fact that no great nobleman had risen up to oppose him in the manner of a Thomas of Lancaster or Simon de Montfort. Despite the stresses of Edward’s difficulties in France, the onerous nature of his financial demands and his own hard-headed behaviour towards Archbishop Stratford, the events of 1341 had seen no resort to that armed opposition to the Crown which had occurred as recently as 1328–9, when Henry of Lancaster faced down Roger Mortimer. It had become clear in the teeth of the crisis that Edward enjoyed a powerful and unusually strong relationship with the leading men of his realm. They would, in time, come to enjoy the rewards of that relationship together.

Dominance

In the heat of July 1346 the English army marched through a broken, hell-bright landscape of coastal Normandy. All around them, fields were lit up in ghastly orange by marauding bands of arsonists. Ghost towns and villages lay smashed, burned and looted behind them, abandoned by terrified families. The roads inland teemed with refugees fleeing the maw of destruction that sucked in everything it encountered. Thousands of ordinary soldiers from England and Wales had poured ashore off a massive fleet of 750 ships in mid-July. Their leaders were the English aristocracy and gentry military men, but in visiting terror the mob answered to no master but themselves.

As they marched they spread out across the fertile Norman countryside, fanning across a front twelve to fifteen miles wide to torch or pillage all that they came across. The summer air would have been thick with choking smoke and loud with the screams of those villagers who had been too slow or too feeble to escape. And as the army marched a few miles inland, 200 ships of the English navy hugged the shoreline, provisioning the men on land and disembarking to destroy every settlement they sailed past, until one royal clerk estimated that literally everything within five miles of the coastline had been ruined or plundered.

This had once been Plantagenet land. Long ago, when John was on the throne, it had been raided and burned by the Capetian kings battling their way west. Now John’s great-great-grandson Edward III was exacting his brutal revenge as he shepherded an invasion force of perhaps 10,000 men in the opposite direction: across the duchy of
Normandy, towards the Seine, and on towards the two great cities of Rouen and Paris.

Between 1341 and 1346 war had not abated. Rather, it had intensified. Edward had suffered a setback in Scotland in July 1341, when David II had returned from Normandy to oust Robert Stewart as guardian of the realm. He had re-established the Scottish monarchy of the Bruce family, with whom Edward was forced to agree a three-year truce in 1343. That Edward was not more bullish in the aftermath of his brother-in-law David’s restoration might have been surprising were it not for events across the Channel; for in April 1341 Duke John III of Brittany had died, and Edward had been presented with an opportunity to pursue war with the French via a proxy conflict. The main focus of the war between the houses of Plantagenet and Valois shifted to a succession crisis in Brittany, in which Edward backed John de Montfort and Philip supported his cousin Charles of Blois.

The war of Breton succession lasted, on and off, for five years. The logistical difficulties presented by fighting in north-west France were considerable and cost some significant casualties, including Robert of Artois, the exiled enemy of King Philip VI, who had first encouraged the English king to pursue his claim to the French Crown and had subsequently become a trusted captain in Edward’s armies. Robert died after complications with wounds sustained during an attack on the town of Vannes. For Edward, however, the risks were justified by the cause.

The king’s ambitions were growing. At some point between 1341 and 1343 he had commissioned a copy of William of Newburgh’s history of Henry II’s reign, which recalled the glorious days when kings of England had ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine and Anjou as well as Brittany and greater Aquitaine. The war, in Edward’s mind, was gaining a greater purpose than simply safeguarding the status of his Gascon lands and Ponthieu. Edward was beginning to countenance a full turning-back of the clock, to a time before the 1259 Treaty of Paris – before the loss of Normandy in 1204, even – when his ancestors had ruled over a mighty continental empire. A new gold
coinage issued in 1344 for use on the international exchange markets proclaimed Edward to all the merchants of Europe as ‘king of England and France’. This was becoming more than simply a piece of tactical rhetoric. In 1345 peace talks over Brittany, mediated by Pope Clement VI at Avignon, collapsed, and Edward made ready to escalate hostilities.

A three-pronged attack was planned. William de Bohun, earl of Northampton, led an army into Brittany. Henry Grosmont, earl of Derby, who was fast becoming the king’s best friend and most trusted commander, led another, smaller, expedition south, to Gascony, where he was appointed lieutenant of Aquitaine. Edward himself led a vast force of between 14,000 and 15,000 men across the Channel to Normandy. All in all, these three invasion forces comprised the most substantial military force that had been sent to France since John’s attempt to retake Normandy in 1214.

The character of the English war effort had changed since 1340. Edward had dropped his old-fashioned strategy of alliance-building in the north-west and direct invasion in the south. Alliances were too expensive, allies too prone to defect. One of the casualties of Edward’s exorbitant bribe policy had been the Bardi bank, to whose ruin the English king contributed when he failed to honour the massive debts incurred in part as retainers to his northern allies. By 1346 Edward’s only allies were the pro-English faction in Brittany and the Flemings. Every man sent to fight under the royal arms in 1346 came from England.

Thus the brutal men who landed with the king in St-Vaast-la-Hougue on 12 July 1346 spoke in the same mother tongue. Their battle cry was ‘Saint George!’ (The French cried ‘Montjoie St-Denis!’) They had various specialities: perhaps half were archers trained in their home villages to fire a deadly longbow with some accuracy. Others were engineers, miners, diggers, clerks or servants. Many had been pressed into compulsory service, and some were criminals pardoned for their crimes in return for serving in the field. All were equipped and supplied with a huge wealth of supplies and weapons compulsorily purchased in a fearsome war drive. They brought with
them thousands of white-painted bows and arrows, and more food than they could eat before it rotted.

The army was instructed by Edward on their first landing not to molest the local people, nor to rob shrines and churches, nor to commit wanton arson. The king commanded restraint, lamenting what a royal proclamation called ‘the wretched fate of … his people of France’. But this was a vain hope. Edward had brought with him many old and accomplished soldiers, many heading professional companies of mounted archers, hobelars and men-at-arms, but the king could by no means claim to dispose of a uniformed, well-drilled army. Such was the unprecedented size of the invasion force that there was a sizeable element of press-ganged infantry: poorly equipped and undisciplined villagers, stirred up back in England by constant royal propaganda denouncing Philip VI and the French people as spies and aggressors who wished to invade England, convert the population to French-speakers and incite the Scots to invade the north. No disciplinary instructions on earth could prevent them from tearing Normandy to pieces, like a pack of distempered dogs.

The army marched through the countryside, slaughtering and brutalizing as it went. Flags and lances bobbed above three parties. The rearguard was marshalled by Thomas Hatfield, the warlike bishop of Durham. The king commanded the middle. The vanguard was nominally led by Edward’s eldest son, Edward, prince of Wales and duke of Cornwall. He was sixteen years old, tall and striking, already a brave young man in his father’s mould. He had been knighted as soon as he landed from the ship, alongside some other young men of the campaign: William Montagu, son of the earl of Salisbury; and Roger Mortimer, grandson of the man the coup had displaced. The earls of Northampton and Warwick rode at the Black Prince’s side to guide his hand.

The build-up to Edward’s invasion had been cloaked in secrecy. Very few men had known the destination of his vast army before its departure from the English coast. Philip VI had received information that the king intended to make for Gascony, to reinforce Henry Grosmont (now raised to the earldom of Lancaster after his father’s
death in 1345) in resisting the siege of Aiguillon, deep in the south-west, at the confluence of the rivers Lot and Garonne. Philip’s son John, duke of Normandy, was leading the siege; thus when Edward’s main invasion force landed at St-Vaast-la-Hougue they had found it largely undefended.