FOOTNOTES:
[19] Son of Edward I.'s brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster.
[20] A grandson of one of Henry III.'s foreign relatives.
CHAPTER XIII.
EDWARD III.
1327-1377.
Shameful as the state of the realm had been under the rule of Edward of Carnarvon and his favourites, a yet more disgraceful depth was reached in the years of minority of his son. The young king was only fourteen, and the government fell into the hands of those who had set him on the throne, his mother and her paramour, Roger Mortimer. A council, headed by Henry Earl of Lancaster, was supposed to guide the king's steps, but as a matter of fact he was in Queen Isabella's power, while she was entirely ruled by Mortimer. They were surrounded by a guard of 180 knights, and acted as they pleased in all things. It was only gradually that the nation realized the state of affairs, for the murder of Edward II. was long kept concealed, and the relations of the queen and Mortimer were not at first generally known.
Second Scottish invasion.—"The Shameful Peace."
The first blow to the new government was the renewal of the Scottish war. In 1328, Robert Bruce broke the truce that he had made six years before. He was now growing advanced in age, and was stricken by leprosy, but he sent out, under James "the Black Douglas," a great host, 4000 knights and squires, and 20,000 moss-troopers, all horsed on shaggy Galloway ponies. They harried England as far as the Tees, and successfully eluded Mortimer, who went out against them, taking the young king with him. Outmarching the English day by day, Douglas retired before them across the Northumbrian fells, occasionally harassing his pursuers by night-attacks; he returned home with much plunder, leaving not a cow unlifted nor a house unburnt in all Tynedale. The English host came back foiled and half starved, and Mortimer, not daring to face another campaign, advised the queen to make terms with the Scots. Accordingly "the Shameful Peace" was signed at Northampton, by which England resigned all claims of suzerainty over the Scotch realm, sent back the crown and royal jewels, which Edward I. had carried off to London, and gave the king's sister Joanna to be wed to Bruce's eldest son (1328).
Risings against Mortimer.
Mortimer's failure led to insurrections against him; but they were mere baronial risings, not efforts of the whole people. Henry of Lancaster, who headed the first, was put down and heavily fined for his pains. Edmund, Earl of Kent, then took up the same plan, announcing that he would free his half-brother Edward II., who, as he was persuaded, still survived. But he fell into Mortimer's hands, and was beheaded.
The king asserts himself—Mortimer executed.
It was the young king himself who was destined to put an end to the misrule of his mother and her minion. When he reached the age of eighteen, and realized the shameful tutelage in which he was being held, he resolved to free himself from it by force. While the court lay at Nottingham Castle in October, 1330, he gathered a small band of trustworthy adherents, and at midnight entered the queen's lodgings by a secret stair and seized Mortimer, in spite of his mother's tears and curses. The favourite was sent before his peers, tried, and executed; Isabella was relegated to honourable confinement at Castle-Rising, where she lived for many years after.
Character of Edward III.
King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity—a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. It was many years before the world discovered that he was selfish, thriftless, reckless of his country's needs, and set on gratifying his personal ambition and love of warlike feats to the sacrifice of every other consideration. He was a knight-errant of the type of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, not a statesman and warrior like his grandfather Edward I. In his later years his faculties showed a premature decay, and he fell into the hands of favourites, male and female, who were almost as offensive as the Gavestons and Despensers of the previous generation.
Edward's reign falls into three well-marked periods: the first, 1330-39, is that of his Scottish wars; the second, 1339-60, is that in which he began the famous and unhappy "Hundred Years' War" with France, and himself conducted it up to the brilliant but unwise Peace of Bretigny; the third, 1360-77, that of his declining years, is a time of trouble and misgovernment gradually increasing till Edward sank unregretted into his grave.
War with Scotland.—Battle of Halidon Hill.
Robert Bruce, the terror of the English, had died in 1329, leaving his throne to his son David II., a child of five years. The government fell into the hands of regents, who ill supplied the place of the dead king, and their weakness tempted the survivors of the English party in Scotland to strike a blow. Edward Balliol, the son of the long-dead John Balliol, accordingly made secret offers to Edward III., that he would do homage to him for the Scottish crown, and reign as his vassal, if he were helped to win the land. With Edward's connivance the young Balliol gathered together the Earls of Buchan and Athole, and many other Scottish refugees in England, and took ship to Scotland. He landed in Fife, was joined by his secret friends, beat the regent, the Earl of Mar, and seized the greater part of Scotland. He was crowned at Scone, and forced the young David Bruce to flee over-sea to France to save his life. But soon the national party rose against Balliol, expelled him, and chased him back to England. Edward then took the field in his favour, and met the Scots at Halidon Hill, near Berwick. Here he inflicted on them a crushing defeat, which the English celebrated as a fair revenge for the blow of Bannockburn, for the regent Archibald Douglas, four earls, and many thousand men were left on the field. They fell mainly by the arrows of the English archery, for, having drawn themselves out on a hillside behind a marsh, they stood as a broad target for the bowmen, whom they were unable to reach. The intervening marshy ground prevented their heavy columns of pikemen from advancing, and they were routed without even the chance of coming to handstrokes (July, 1333). This victory made Edward Balliol King of Scotland for a second time; he did homage to his champion, and ceded to him Tweeddale and half Lothian. But the crown won by English help sat uneasily on Balliol's brow. After several years of spasmodic fighting, he was finally driven out of his realm, and took refuge again in England. This time he found less help, for Edward III. was now plunged deep in schemes of another kind.
Nine years of comparative quiet had done much to recover England from the misery it had known in the last reign. The baronage and people were serving the young king loyally, taxation had not yet been heavy, and the success of Halidon Hill had restored the nation's self-respect. Edward himself was flushed by victory and burning for fresh adventures. Hence it came that, neglecting the nearer but less showy task of restoring the English suzerainty over Scotland, he turned to wars over-sea.
Quarrel with France.—The Hundred Years' War begins.
One of the usual frontier-quarrels between French and Gascons had broken out in 1337 on the borders of Aquitaine. In consequence, Philip VI. of France had, like so many of his predecessors, taken measures to support Edward's Scottish enemies, and given shelter to the exiled boy-king, David Bruce. War between England and France was probably inevitable, but Edward chose to make it a life and death struggle, by laying claim to the throne of France and branding Philip VI. as a usurper.
The French succession.—The Salic Law.
The question of the French succession dated from some years back. In 1328 died Edward's uncle, King Charles IV., the last of the direct male descendants of Philip IV. The problem then cropped up for the first time whether the French crown could descend to females, or whether the next male heir must be chosen, although he was but the cousin of the late king. The peers of France adjudged that by the Salic Law, an old custom ascribed to the ancient Franks, only male descent counted in tracing claims to the throne. Accordingly they adjudged the kingdom to Philip of Valois, who was crowned as Philip VI. Edward, as own nephew through his mother to Charles IV., had protested at the time; but he had practically withdrawn his protest by doing homage to Philip for the Duchy of Aquitaine, and thereby acknowledging the justice of the award.
THE FRENCH SUCCESSION, 1337.
| Philip III, 1270-1285. | |||||||||||
| Philip IV., 1285-1314. | Charles, Count of Valois. | ||||||||||
| Louis X., 1314-1316. | Philip V., 1316-1322. | Charles IV., 1312-1328. | Isabella. | Philip of Valois, king 1328-1350. | |||||||
| Jane, Queen of Navarre. | Edward III. | John, 1350-1364. | |||||||||
| Charles, King of Navarre. | |||||||||||
Now, in 1337 Edward began to think of reviving his dormant pretensions to the French crown, though they had two fatal defects. The first was that there had never been any precedent in France for a claim through the female line. The second was that, even if such descents could be counted, one of his mother's brothers had left a daughter, the Queen of Navarre, and the son of that princess had a better female claim than Edward himself. The only way in which this defect could be ignored was by pleading, like Bruce in 1292, that Edward was a generation nearer to the old royal stock than his cousin, Charles, King of Navarre.
Edward claims the French crown.
On this rather futile plea Edward laid solemn claim to the French crown, and declared Philip of Valois a usurper. Perhaps there may be truth in the story which tells that he did not do so from any strong belief in his own theory, but because the Flemings, vassals to the French crown, had declared that they could not aid him, though willing to do so, on account of oaths of fealty sworn to the King of France. If Edward claimed to be king himself, they said, their allegiance and help would be due to him. Whether the tale be true or not, he at any rate made the claim.
In reliance on the assistance of the Flemings, and of their neighbours the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and with the countenance of the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, King Edward determined to land in the Low Countries and attack France from the north. He called out great bodies of soldiery, and took advantage of the devotion that the nation felt for him to raise illegal taxes for their pay. Violating his grandfather's engagements, he took a "tallage" from the towns, and levied a "mal-tolt" or extra customs-duty on the export of wool. In the excitement of the moment, little opposition was made to these high-handed measures.
First campaign.—Naval victory off Sluys.
But Edward's campaign against France proved utterly unsuccessful; his Netherland allies were of little use to him, King Philip refused to risk a battle in the field, and an attack on Cambray was defeated. Edward had to return to England to raise more money; while at home, he heard that a great French fleet had been collected for the conquest of Flanders and a subsequent attack on England. Hastily raising all the ships he could gather from London and the Cinque Ports, the king set sail to seek the enemy. He found them in harbour at the Flemish port of Sluys, and there brought them to action. They had chained their ships in three lines and built up barricades upon them; but, by pretending to fly, Edward induced them to cast loose and follow him, and, when they had got out to sea, turned and attacked. The English archery swept the enemy's decks, and then the king and his knights clambered up, and boarded vessel after vessel till well-nigh the whole French fleet was taken (1340). No such glorious day had been seen since Hubert de Burgh won the battle off Dover 120 years before.
Contest with Parliament.
The victory of Sluys freed England from the danger of invasion, but did nothing more. For when the king landed in Flanders, and pushed forward against France, he again failed to break through the line of strong towns that guarded Philip's frontier, and had to return home foiled. On coming to England he fell into a bitter strife with his Parliament, who were far from contented with the repeated checks in Flanders. Edward began by charging his failure on his ministers and dismissed them all, from the Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury downwards, accusing them of having misappropriated the taxes. He announced that he would bring them to trial, and appointed a special commission for the purpose. This led to a vindication of the ancient right of trial by a man's equals, for John de Stratford, the archbishop, insisted on being tried in Parliament by the barons his peers, and carried his point against the king's strenuous opposition. He was of course acquitted, as nothing could be found against him. The Parliament only consented to grant the king fresh supplies when he swore (1) to let them appoint a committee to audit the accounts of the money; (2) to take no further maltolts or tallages, but confine himself to the duly voted supplies; (3) to choose his ministers only with Parliament's consent, and make them answerable to Parliament for malfeasance in their office (1341). If these conditions had been kept, the crown would have been completely under control of the national council, but Edward shamelessly broke them when fortune turned in his favour.
Edward invades Normandy.—Battle of Crécy.
England had now been five years at war with France, and had gained nothing thereby save the destruction of the French navy at Sluys. France had fared equally badly, and in a lucid moment the kings signed a truce. But both Edward and Philip and their subjects had come to dislike each other so bitterly, that no end could be put to the war till one or other had gained a decisive victory. The struggle was soon renewed on fresh ground—the duchy of Brittany, where a disputed succession had occurred. With strange want of logic, Philip VI. backed the claimant whose pretensions were based on a female descent, and Edward the one who claimed as next male heir under the Salic Law. Thus each supported in Brittany the theory of descent which he repudiated in France. After much indecisive fighting, both in Brittany and on the Gascon border, Edward determined on a new invasion of France in 1345. Giving out that he would sail to Bordeaux, he really landed near Cherbourg, in Normandy, where the enemy was not expecting him. He had determined to fight the campaign with English forces alone, and no longer to rely on untrustworthy continental friends. With 4000 men-at-arms, 10,000 bowmen, and 5000 light Welsh and Irish infantry, he pushed boldly through the land, sacking St. Lo and Caen, and driving the local levies of Normandy before him. But he had cut himself loose from the sea, and as his course drew him into the interior, the French began to muster on all sides of him in great numbers and in high wrath. It was evident that he ran great danger of being surrounded, and would certainly have to fight for his life. When he reached the Seine, King Philip broke down all the bridges to prevent his escape, and it was more by chance than good generalship that the English army succeeded in forcing a passage. Hearing of the vast numbers that were coming against him, Edward now turned north, but he was again checked by the river Somme, and only got across by fighting his way over the dangerous sea-swept ford of Blanchetaque, near the river's mouth, in face of the levies of Picardy. Three days later he was overtaken by the French at Crécy, in the county of Ponthieu, and had to turn and fight. King Philip had brought up a vast army, some 12,000 men-at-arms and 60,000 foot-soldiers, including several thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, who were reckoned the best mercenary troops in Europe. Edward drew up his host on a hillside, north of Crécy, placing his archers in front, with bodies of dismounted men-at-arms to support them; two-thirds of the army were arrayed in the front line, under the nominal command of Edward, Prince of Wales, the fifteen-year-old son and heir of the king. Edward kept the rest in reserve higher up the hill, under his own hand.
The English archers.
Crécy was the first fight which taught the rulers of the continent the worth of the English bowman. When the vast French army came up against them, they easily repelled every attack. First, they riddled with arrows the Genoese cross-bowmen, who could make no stand against them, for the archer could shoot six times before the Genoese could wind up their clumsy arbalests for a second discharge. Then when the French chivalry advanced, they shot down men and horses so fast that it was only at a few points that the enemy ever succeeded in reaching their line, and coming to handstrokes with the Prince of Wales and his dismounted knights. At evening the French fled, routed by less than a third of their numbers, before King Edward and his reserve had occasion to strike a single blow. Edward knighted his son on the field—the first victory of the celebrated "Black Prince," who was to prove as good a soldier as his father. When the French dead were counted, it was discovered that the English archery had slain 11 dukes and counts, 83 barons, 1200 knights, and more than 20,000 of the French soldiery. John, King of Bohemia, who had come to help Philip VI., though he was old and weak of sight, was also among the slain. On the other hand, the English had lost less than a thousand men (August 26, 1346).
BATTLE OF CRÉCY, 1346.
After this splendid victory, King Edward was able to march unmolested through the land. He resolved to end the campaign by taking Calais, the nearest French seaport to the English coast, and one which, if held permanently, would give him an ever-open door into France.
Capture of Calais.
Accordingly, he sat down before Calais, and beleaguered it for many months, till it fell by famine in the next year. The King of France could do nothing to relieve it, and the town had to yield at discretion. The men of Calais had made many piratical descents on England, and Edward was known to bear them a grudge for this. Therefore seven chief burgesses of the place gallantly came forward to bear the brunt of his wrath, and offered themselves to him with halters round their necks, begging him to hang them, but spare the rest of their townsmen. Edward was at first inclined to take these patriotic citizens at their word, but his wife Queen Philippa urged him to gentler counsels, and he let them go. But he drove out of Calais every man who would not own him as king and swear him fealty, and filled their places with English colonists. Thus Calais became an English town, and so remained for more than 200 years, a thorn in the side of France, and an open gate for the invader from beyond the Channel.
Scottish invasion.—Battle of Neville's Cross.
While the siege of Calais had been in progress, the Scots had made a bold attempt to invade the north of England. The young king, David Bruce, grateful for the shelter which Philip VI. had given him in the days of his exile, had crossed the Tweed, in the hope of drawing Edward home, and so robbing him of the results of his campaign in France. But Queen Philippa summoned to her aid all the nobles who had not gone over-sea, and mustered them at Durham. David Bruce pushed forward to meet them, but at Neville's Cross he met with a crushing defeat. Once more it was found that the Scottish pikemen could not stand against the English archery. They were beaten with terrible loss, and the king himself and many of his nobles were taken prisoners and sent to London (October, 1346).
The Black Death.
Edward came back from Calais to England laden with glory and spoil, but all his plunder could not pay for the exhaustion which his heavy taxes and levies of men had brought upon his realm. The nation, however, was blinded to its loss by the glory of Crécy, and the war would probably have been continued with increased energy but for a fearful disaster which befell the land in the year after the fall of Calais. A great plague which men called "the Black Death" came sweeping over Europe from the East, and in the awful havoc which it caused wars were for a time forgotten. England did not suffer worse than France or Italy, yet it is calculated that a full half of her population was stricken down by this unexampled pestilence. Manor-rolls and bishops' registers bear out by their lists in detail the statements which the contemporary chroniclers make at large. We note that in this unhappy year, 1348-9, many parishes had three, and some four successive vicars appointed to them in nine months. We see how, in small villages of 300 or 400 inhabitants, thirty or forty families, from their oldest to their youngest member, were swept away, so that their farms reverted to the lord of the land for want of heirs. We find monasteries in which every soul, from the prior to the youngest novice, died, so that the house was left entirely desolate. And thus we realize that the chroniclers are but telling us sober, unexaggerated facts, when they speak of this as a pestilence such as none had ever seen before, and none is ever like to see again. It seems to have been an eruptive form of that oriental plague which still lingers in Syria and the valley of the Euphrates. It began with great boils breaking out on the groin or under the armpits, culminated in sharp fever and violent retching, and generally carried off its victims within two days.
Rise in wages.—The Statute of Labourers.
It is probable that England did not recover the loss of population which it now sustained for a couple of centuries. But if the nation was dreadfully thinned, the results of the plague were not all in the direction of evil. It certainly raised the position of the lower classes by making labour more scarce, and therefore more valuable. The surviving agricultural labourers were able to demand much higher wages than before, and it was in vain that Parliament, by the foolish Statute of Labourers (1349), tried to prescribe a maximum rate of wages for them, and to prevent employers giving more. Legislation is unable to prevent the necessary working of the laws of political economy, and in spite of the statute the peasant got his advantage.
Renewal of the French war.—The Black Prince.
About the time of the outbreak of the Black Death, the kings of England and France had signed a truce, being moved to turn their thoughts far from war by the terrible havoc that was going on around them. It was six years before they and their peoples could find heart to forget the plague, and once more resumed their reckless struggle. In 1355 Edward made proposals for a definitive peace to King John—Philip VI. had died in 1350—on the terms that he should give up his claims to the French crown, but receive Aquitaine free from all burden of homage to the King of France as suzerain. John refused this reasonable offer, and Edward recommenced his attacks on France. He himself landed at Calais and invaded Picardy, but was ere long recalled home by the news that the Scots also had renewed the war, and were over the Tweed. Edward spent the summer in beating them back and cruelly ravaging the whole of Lothian. Meanwhile, his son, the Black Prince, now a young man of twenty-five, started from Bordeaux and plundered the French province of Languedoc.
In the following year, the Black Prince made a similar incursion into Central France, and swept through the whole country from Limoges to Tours with a small army of 4000 mounted men and 3000 archers. When he turned his face homeward, however, he found that King John with a host of 40,000 men had blocked his road, by getting between him and Bordeaux. Thus intercepted, Prince Edward posted himself on the hill of Maupertuis, near Poictiers, and took up a defensive position. It is probable that the French, with their vastly superior numbers, could have completely surrounded him and starved him into surrender without any need of fighting. But King John, a fierce and reckless prince with none of a general's ability, preferred to take the English by force of arms, and, when they refused to surrender to him, prepared to storm their position.
BATTLE OF POICTIERS, SEP. 1356.
The Battle of Poictiers.
Edward's small army was drawn up behind a tall hedgerow and a ditch on the slope of a ridge, with the archers in front lining the hedgerow, and the men-at-arms behind them. All the latter save 300 were dismounted, as at Crécy. The Earls of Salisbury and Warwick had command of the two divisions which formed the front line, while the prince himself stayed behind with the reserve. John of France, remembering the disaster of Crécy, where the English arrows had slain so many horses, dismounted all his knights save a few hundred, and led them on foot up the hill in three divisions. Only a picked body of horsemen, under the two marshals, D'Audrehem and Clermont, pushed forward in front, to endeavour to ride down the English archers, as the Scottish cavalry had done so successfully at Bannockburn.
Rout of the French.—King John a prisoner.
But, whether on foot or on horse, the French made little way with their attack. The cavalry in advance were all shot down as they tried to push through gaps in the hedge. The first division of the dismounted knights then climbed the slope, but, after severe fighting with the front line of the English, recoiled, unable to force their way over the ditch. They fell back on to the second line behind them, and put it into disorder before it could come near the English. Seeing two-thirds of the French army in this plight, the Prince of Wales resolved to strike a bold blow: he brought up his reserve to the front, and bade his whole army charge downhill on to the huddled mass below them. His quick eye had caught the right moment, for the whole of the French van and second division fled right and left without fighting. Only King John, with the rear line of his army, stood firm. With this body, one more numerous than the whole of his own host, Prince Edward had a fierce fight in the valley. But the French were broken in spirit by the sight of the rout of their van, and gave way when they were charged in the flank by a small body of troops whom Edward had detached to his right for that purpose. They all fled save the king and his young son Philip, who stood their ground for a long time with a small company of faithful vassals, and maintained the fight when all the rest had vanished. John's courageous obstinacy had the natural result: he, his son, and the faithful few about him were all surrounded and taken prisoners. When the English came to reckon up the results of the battle, they found that they had slain 2 dukes, 17 barons, and 2800 knights and men-at-arms, and taken captive a king, a prince, 13 counts, 15 barons, and 2000 knights and men-at-arms. Their own loss did not reach 300 men (September 19, 1356).
Edward returned in triumph to Bordeaux, and afterwards crossed to England, to present his all-important prisoner to the king his father. The prince treated John with great gentleness and courtesy, and did all that he could to avoid wounding his feelings. Nevertheless, he saw that in the pressure that could be brought to bear upon his captive, lay the best hope of winning an honourable and profitable peace from the French. John chafed bitterly at his detention in custody, and got little consolation from finding himself in the company of his ally David, King of Scotland, who had been a prisoner in England for ten years, ever since the battle of Neville's Cross.
Misery and anarchy in France.—The Jacquerie.
The difficulty in negociating a peace did not come from King John, but from the regency which replaced him at Paris. The French did not see why they should sign a humiliating treaty merely in order to deliver a harsh and not very popular king from confinement. But a series of disasters at last forced them to submit. The three years 1357-60 were almost the most miserable that France ever knew. The young Dauphin Charles, a mere lad, proved quite unable to keep order in the land; the barons did what they pleased; hordes of disbanded mercenary soldiers, whom the government could not pay, roamed plundering over the countryside side. The people of Paris broke out into sedition, under a bold citizen named Etienne Marcel, and put the Dauphin himself in durance for a time. Last and worst of all, the peasantry of Central France, driven to despair by the general misery of the times, rose in rebellion against all constituted authority, slew every man of gentle blood that they could lay hands on, and roamed about in huge bands, burning castles and manors, and plundering towns and villages. The horrors of the Jacquerie, [22] as this anarchic revolt was called, bid fair to destroy all government in France, and it was only by a desperate rally that those who had anything to lose succeeded in banding themselves together and crushing the insurgents.
Edward again invades France.—Treaty of Bretigny.
When France had suffered so bitterly from its foes within, Edward of England took a great army across the Channel, and in 1359-60 wasted the whole land as far as Paris and Rheims. But as the French refused to meet him in the field, he won no battles, took few towns, and got little profit from his destructive raid. It was at this juncture that he and the Dauphin at last came to terms. To end the war the French were ready to grant whatever conditions Edward chose to exact. He asked for a ransom of 3,000,000 gold crowns for the person of King John, and for the whole of the duchy of Aquitaine, as Duchess Eleanor had held it in 1154. In return, he would give up his claim on the crown of France, and be content to be independent Duke of Aquitaine only. So all the lands in Southern France which John and Henry III. had lost—Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limoges, Quercy, and the rest,—were restored to the Plantagenets, after being 150 years in French hands. Calais and Ponthieu in the north were also formally ceded to King Edward by this celebrated treaty of Bretigny (May, 1360).
FRANCE 1380.
SHOWING THE ENGLISH BOUNDARIES
AFTER THE TREATY OF BRETIGNY.
It appeared for a moment as if a permanent peace between England and France had been established. King Edward, in return for giving up a claim on the whole of France, which no one had taken very seriously, had won the long-lost lands which his ancestors had never hoped to retake. He had also made an advantageous peace with Scotland, releasing King David for a ransom of 90,000 marks, and the fortresses of Berwick and Roxburgh.
Development of trade.—The Flemish weavers.
Edward's fortune was now at its highest, and his reign promised to have a prosperous and peaceful end. He had reached the age of fifty, and was surrounded by a band of sons who should have been the strength of his old age. Edward the Black Prince he made Duke of Aquitaine; Lionel of Clarence, his second son, was married to the heiress of the great Irish family of de Burgh; John of Gaunt, the third son, was wedded to the heiress of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock, his fifth son, to one of the co-heiresses of the earldom of Hereford. Thus he trusted to identify by intermarriage the interests of the royal house and the greater baronage, not seeing that there was as much probability of his younger sons becoming leaders of baronial factions as of the barons forgetting their old jealousy of the royal house. Meanwhile, however, things went fairly well for some years after the peace of Bretigny. In spite of the vast expenditure of money on the war, and in spite of the ravages of the Black Death, the country was in many ways prosperous. England had enjoyed internal quiet for thirty years; her commerce with Flanders and Gascony was developing; her fleet, in spite of much piracy, was dominant in all the Western seas. The increase of wealth is shown by the fact that Edward III. first of all English monarchs issued a large currency of gold money (1349), and that his "nobles," as the broad thin pieces were called, became the favourite medium of exchange in all North-Western Europe, and formed the model for the gold coins of the Netherlands, part of Germany, and Scotland. Manufactures as well as foreign trade were beginning to grow important; the reign of Edward is always remembered for the development of the weaving industry in Eastern England. He induced many Flemish weavers to settle in Norwich and elsewhere, moved, it is said, by the advice of his Netherlandish queen, Philippa of Hainault. But the main exports of England were still raw material—especially wool and metals—and not manufactured goods. The English trader did not usually sail beyond Norway on the one hand, and North Spain on the other; intercourse with more distant countries was carried on mainly by companies of foreign merchants, of whom the men of the Hanse Towns were the most important. These Germans had a factory in London called the Steelyard, where they dwelt in a body, under strict rules and regulations. It was by them that English goods were taken to the more distant markets on the Baltic or the Mediterranean.
Desultory fighting in Brittany.— Spanish war.
The reasons why the treaty of Bretigny failed to give a permanent settlement of the quarrel between England and France were many. The English pleaded that the French never fulfilled their obligations, for King John found his people very unwilling to raise his huge ransom, and never paid half of it. He returned to England in 1364 to surrender himself in default of payment—for he had a keen sense of honour in such things—and then died. His son, Charles V., at once refused—as was natural—to pay the arrears. But a more fruitful source of quarrelling was the civil war in Brittany, which still lingered on after twenty years of fighting; English and French succours came to help the two rival dukes, and fought each other on Breton soil, though peace reigned elsewhere. The same thing was soon after seen in Spain: Pedro the Cruel, the wicked King of Castile, was attacked by his bastard brother, Henry of Trastamara, who enlisted a great host of French mercenaries, under Bertrand du Guesclin, the best professional soldier in France. Driven out of Castile by the usurper and his allies, Pedro fled to Bordeaux, where the Black Prince was reigning as Duke of Aquitaine. He enlisted the help of the English, who were jealous of French influence in Spain, and bought the aid of Edward's younger brothers, John of Gaunt, who was now a widower, and Edmund of Cambridge, by marrying his two daughters to them. Edward raised a great army of English and Gascons, and crossed the Pyrenees to restore King Pedro. At Najara [23] he routed the French and Castilians, took Bertrand du Guesclin prisoner, and drove Henry of Trastamara out of the land (1367). But the ungrateful Pedro then refused to repay the large sums which Edward had spent in raising his army, and the prince withdrew in wrath to Aquitaine. He took back with him an intermittent fever which he had caught in Spain, and never recovered his health. Left to his own resources, Pedro was soon beset for a second time by his brother and the French; he was captured by treachery, and slain by Henry of Trastamara's own hand.
Rebellion in Aquitaine.—Massacre at Limoges.
Edward had raised vast sums of money from Aquitaine for his Spanish expedition by heavy taxation which sorely vexed his new subjects. For the Poitevins and other French, who had become the unwilling vassals of an English lord by the treaty of Bretigny, were entirely without any sympathy for Edward and his plans. When the prince returned, broken in health and penniless, from Spain, they plotted rebellion against him, with the secret approval of the young King of France. It soon appeared that Edward III. had been unwise in annexing so many districts of purely French feeling and blood to the Gascon duchy. For in 1369-70 Poitou, Limoges, and all the northern half of Aquitaine broke out into rebellion, and Charles V. openly sent out his armies to aid them. The Black Prince took the field in a litter, for he was too weak to ride, and stormed Limoges, where he ordered a horrid massacre of the rebellious citizens, a deed that deeply stained his hitherto untarnished fame. But his strength could carry him no further; he returned helpless to Bordeaux, and presently resigned the duchy of Aquitaine and returned to England, thereto languish for some years, and die at last of his lingering disorder.
Premature decay of the king.
The king himself, though not yet sixty years of age, had fallen into a premature decay both of mind and body, so that his son's early decease was doubly unfortunate. After losing his excellent wife Queen Philippa in 1369, he had sunk into a deep depression, from which he only recovered to fall into the hands of unscrupulous favourites. In private he was governed by his chamberlain, Lord Latimer, and by a lady named Alice Perrers, who had become his mistress; both abused their influence to plunder his coffers and make market of his favour. The higher governance of the realm was mainly in the hands of John of Gaunt, the king's eldest surviving son, a selfish and headstrong prince, who made himself the head of the war-party, and hoped to gather laurels that might vie with those of his elder brother, the Black Prince.
Loss of possessions in France.
The last seven years of Edward's reign (1370-77) were full of disasters abroad and discontent at home. In France the successors of the Black Prince proved utterly unable to maintain their grasp on Aquitaine. Town by town and castle by castle, all the districts that had been won by the treaty of Bretigny passed into the hands of King Charles V. His skilful general Bertrand du Guesclin won his way to success without risking a single pitched battle with the invincible English archery. When John of Gaunt took a great host over to Calais in 1373, the French retired before him by their king's order, and shut themselves up behind stone walls, after sweeping the country bare of provisions. The Duke of Lancaster marched up to the gates of Paris, and then all through Central France down to Bordeaux; but, though he did much damage to the open country, he could not halt to besiege any great town for want of food, and finally reached Guienne with an army half-starved and woefully reduced in numbers. Before King Edward was in his grave his dominions in France had shrunk to a district far smaller than he had held before the "Hundred Years' War" had commenced. Nothing was left save the ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, with the strip of Gascon coast between them; in the north, however, the all-important fortress of Calais was firmly and successfully maintained.
Discontent and intrigue in England.—The Lollards.
Meanwhile there was bitter strife in Parliament at home, for ill success without always brings on discontent within. John of Gaunt, since he was known to sway his father's councils, was forced to bear the brunt of the popular displeasure. It was he who was considered responsible for the misconduct of the French war, the peculations of the king's favourites, and the demands of the crown for increased taxation. The party opposed to him in Parliament counted as its head the good bishop William of Wykeham, who had been Chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and had been driven from office by Lancaster's command. He was supported by the clergy, and by most of the "knights of the shires," who formed the more important half of the House of Commons. It was probably the fact that the clergy were unanimously set against him that led John of Gaunt to seek allies for himself by giving countenance to an attack on the Church, which was just then beginning to develop. This was the anti-papal movement of the Lollards, or Wicliffites, as they were called after their leader John Wicliffe—the "Morning Star of the Reformation." The state of the Papacy and of the Church at large was at this moment very scandalous. The Pope was living no more at Rome, but at Avignon, under the shadow of the French king, and the power of the Papacy was being shamelessly misused for French objects. England had never loved the papal influence, and had still less reason to love it when it was employed for the benefit of her political enemies. The tale of the simony, corruption, and evil living of the papal court had gone forth all over Europe, and provoked even more wrath in England than elsewhere. The English Church itself was far from blameless: there were bishops who were mere statesmen and warriors, and neglected their diocesan work; there were secular clergy who never saw their parishes, and monasteries where religion and sound learning were less regarded than wealth and high living. It was especially the great wealth of the monasteries, and the small profit that it brought the nation, which provoked popular comment. Since the days of the Statute of Mortmain the spirit of the times was changed, and benefactors who desired to leave a good work behind them founded and endowed schools and colleges, and not abbeys as of old. It was John Wicliffe, an Oxford Doctor of Divinity, and sometime master of Balliol College, who gave voice to the popular discontent with the state of the Papacy and the national Church. He taught that the Pope's claim to be God's vicegerent on earth and to guide the consciences of all men was a blasphemous usurpation, because each individual was responsible to Heaven for his own acts and thoughts. "All men," he said in feudal phraseology, "are tenants-in-chief under God, and hold from him all that they are and possess: the Pope claims to be our mesne-lord, and to interfere between us and our divine suzerain, and therein he grievously errs." Wicliffe also held that the Church was far too rich; he thought that her virtue was oppressed by the load of wealth, and advocated a return to apostolic poverty, in which the clergy should surrender the greater part of their enormous endowments. At a later date he developed doubts on the Real Presence and other leading doctrines of the mediaeval Church, but it was mainly as a denouncer of the power of the Papacy and the riches and luxury of the clergy that he became known.
Policy of John of Gaunt.—The Good Parliament.
John of Gaunt's object in favouring Wicliffe was purely political; with the reformer's religious views he can have had little sympathy. But he wished to turn the seething discontent of England into the channel of an attack on the Church, and to keep it from his own doors. For the last twenty years legislation against ecclesiastical grievances had been not infrequent. In 1351 the Statute of Provisors had prohibited the Pope from giving away English benefices to his favourites. In 1353 the First Statute of Praemunire had forbidden English litigants to transfer their disputes to the Church courts abroad. Duke John's attempt to distract the attention of the nation to the reform of matters ecclesiastic was partly successful; we find many proposals in Parliament to strip the Church of part of her overgrown endowments, and utilize them for the service of the state. On this point clerk and layman had many a bitter wrangle. But Lancaster could not altogether keep the storm from beating on himself and his father; in 1376 the "Good Parliament" impeached Latimer and Neville, Edward's favourites and ministers, and removed and fined them. Alice Perrers, the old king's mistress, was at the same time banished. In the following year Lancaster reasserted himself, packed a Parliament with his supporters, and cancelled the condemnation of Latimer, Neville, and Alice Perrers. The Bishop of London in revenge arrested Lancaster's protégé Wicliffe, and began to try him for heresy; but the duke appeared in the court, and so threatened and browbeat the bishop that he was fain to release his prisoner.
But new complications were now at hand; the aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by the death of the old king on January 2, 1377, and political affairs took a new complexion on the accession of his young grandson, Richard II., the only surviving child of the Black Prince.
DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III.
| Edward III. = Philippa of Hainault. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Edward the Black Prince. | Lionel of Clarence = Elizabeth De Burgh. | John of Gaunt = (1) Blanche of Lancaster. (2) Constance of Castile. (3) Catherine Swinford. | Edmund, Duke of York. | Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Richard II., 1377-1399. | Philippa of Clarence = Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. | Henry IV., 1399-1413. | Henry Beaufort, Cardinal, died 1477. | John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset. | Edmund of York, killed at Agincourt. | Richard of Cambridge = Anne Mortimer. | Edmund Earl of Stafford = Anne of Gloucester. | ||||||||||||||||
| Roger of March, killed in Ireland, 1398. | Richard, Duke of York, killed at Wakefield, 1460 = Cicely Neville. | Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, killed at Northampton, 1460. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Edmund of March, died 1425. | Anne Mortimer = Richard, Earl of Cambridge. | Henry V., 1413-1422. | Thomas of Clarence. | John of Bedford. | Humphrey of Gloucester. | John of Somerset, died 1444. | Edmond of Somerset, killed at St. Albans. | Edward IV., 1461-1483. | George of Clarence. | Richard III., 1483-1485. | Humphrey, Earl of Stafford. | ||||||||||||
| See opposite, among descendants of Edmund Duke of York. | Henry VI., 1422-1461. | Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond = Margaret Beaufort. | Edward of Warwick, executed 1499. | Margaret of Salisbury, executed 1541. | Henry, Duke of Buckingham, executed 1483. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Henry, | Edmund, | John, | |||||||||||||||||||||
| killed in the War of the Roses. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Henry VII, 1485-1509 = Elizabth,, daughter of Edward VI. | Edward V. 1483. | Richard of York. | Elizabeth = Henry VII. | Edward, Duke of Buckingham, executed 1521. | |||||||||||||||||||