Meanwhile Edward was engaged abroad in the memorable siege of Calais, the garrison of which, after a blockade of nearly a year, was forced to surrender by famine, on the 4th of August, 1347. All our readers are no doubt familiar with the scene of the appearance in the English camp of Eustace de St. Pierre and his five fellow-townsmen, come to offer themselves, barefoot and bare-headed, and with halters about their necks, as sacrifices to appease the anger of their long-baffled conqueror, in which Queen Philippa again shines forth so nobly. The story rests upon the authority of Froissart, but has no air of improbability or even of much fanciful embellishment. When Sir Walter Manny, we are told, "presented these burgesses to the king, they kneeled down, and held up their hands and said, 'Gentle king, behold here, we six, who were burgesses of Calais, and great merchants, we have brought to you the keys of the town and of the castle, and we submit ourself clearly into your will and pleasure, to save the residue of the people of Calais, who have suffered great pain: Sir, we beseech your grace to have mercy and pity on us through your high nobless.' Then all the earls and barons, and other that were there, wept for pity. The king looked felly on them, for greatly he hated the people of Calais for the great damages and displeasures they had done him on the sea before. Then he commanded their heads to be stricken off. Then every man required the king for mercy, but he would hear no man in that behalf. Then Sir Walter of Manny said, 'Ah, noble king, for God's sake, refrain your courage; ye have the name of sovereign nobless, therefore now do not a thing that should blemish your renown, nor to give cause to some to speak of you villainy; every man will say it is a great cruelty to put to death such honest[18] persons, who by their own wills put themself into your grace to save their country.' Then the king wried away from him, and commanded to send for the hangman, and said, 'They of Calais had caused many of my men to be slain; wherefore these shall die in like wise.' The queen, being great with child, kneeled, down, and sore weeping said, 'Ah! gentle sir, sith I passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you: therefore now I humbly require[19] you, in the honour of the son of the Virgin Mary, and for the love of me, that ye will take mercy of these six burgesses.' The king beheld the queen, and stood still in a study a space, and then said, 'Ah, dame, I would ye had been as now in some other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you; wherefore I give them to you to do your pleasure with them.' Then the queen caused them to be brought into her chamber, and made the halters to be taken fro their necks, and caused them to be new clothed, and gave them their dinner at their leisure; and then she gave each of them six nobles, and made them to be brought out of the host in safeguard, and set at their liberty." Calais, thus won, remained an English town for more than two centuries—till it was lost in the reign of Mary, in the year 1558.
The remaining course of the war with France may be very summarily sketched. After the fall of Calais a succession of armistices or truces suspended hostilities for about six years. Meanwhile King Philip had died in 1350, and been succeeded by his eldest son John. By this time Edward had come to perceive how little impression his brilliant but insulated successes had made upon the real strength of his adversary—how little a way—or, rather, no way at all—he had advanced towards the conquest of France by the mere winning of a great battle or two, and the capture and retention of a single town. In the end of the year 1353, therefore, he renewed more formally an offer which he had already made to Philip, of renouncing his claim to the French crown on condition of being acknowledged as sovereign of Guienne, Poitou, and the other territories in France which the English kings had hitherto held as vassals. The negotiations consumed some time, but ended in nothing: several months were then spent in preparations for the renewal of the war; at last, in October, 1355, the Black Prince, who had been for some years intrusted with the government of Guienne, took the field at the head of an army of sixty thousand men, with which, advancing from his capital of Bordeaux, he made a circuit through Armagnac and Languedoc, spreading devastation wherever he went, and laying, it is affirmed, more than five hundred towns and villages in ashes in the space of seven weeks. In the summer of the next year he proceeded to repeat the same experiment in a different direction: this time the force with which he set out amounted to only about twelve thousand men, and with these he boldly crossed the Garonne, and penetrated into the heart of France. For some weeks he pursued his destructive course without opposition; but, at last, when making for Poictiers, and within a short distance of that city, he suddenly found himself enveloped by a French army, commanded by King John, more than four times as numerous as his own. Then, on the 19th of September, was fought the battle of Poictiers, making that other name worthy to be associated for ever in story and in song with Creci, of which both the extremity of peril and the glorious deliverance were now more than renewed. The French host was beaten back at all points, and in the end utterly routed, scattered, and annihilated by Prince Edward and his handful of English. Most of the chief nobility of France were either slain or captured: King John himself fell into the hands of the victors. The illustrious captive was treated with noble courtesy both by the Black Prince and by the king his father; but, although the extraordinary fortune of Edward had now placed in his power the persons of the kings of both the countries which he had so long been endeavouring to subdue, it soon appeared that he was still as far from the conquest of either as ever. King David was liberated by a treaty concluded in 1357; and in 1360 peace was made with France by the treaty of Bretigny, in which Edward renounced his claim both to the French crown and to the possession of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, on condition of being acknowledged the full sovereign of Guienne, Poitou, and Ponthieu. This treaty set King John at liberty; but three years after, on finding himself unable to pay the instalments due upon the sum that had been agreed upon for his ransom—three million gold crowns—he honourably returned to his imprisonment; and he died in England, in the palace of the Savoy, London, in the beginning of April, 1364. His eldest son immediately mounted the throne of France as Charles V. Charles, from the commencement of his reign, had betrayed a disposition to extricate himself as soon as an opportunity should occur from the obligations of the treaty of Bretigny, the renunciations stipulated by which had never, in fact, been actually made on either side. Meanwhile the course of circumstances favoured his views. The King of England was no longer the man he had been either in ardour or in energy; his heroic son had also fallen into ill health, the effect of exposure in an expedition, to be lamented on every account, which he had made in the winter of 1366-7 into Spain, to assist Pedro the Cruel in his contest for the throne of Castile with his illegitimate brother Enrique; and much disaffection had been excited both in Poitou and Guienne by the severe exactions of the English government, rendered necessary by the expenses of this expedition, and by the debts incurred in the late war. In the beginning of the year 1369 Charles openly took his ground by summoning the Black Prince, as Duke of Aquitaine, to appear in his court as a vassal, and answer the complaints of the people of that duchy. The most memorable event of the short war that followed was the sad and atrocious massacre by the English prince of the inhabitants of Limoges, the capital of his country of the Limosin, after he had recovered the town, which had a short time previously been taken by, or had given itself up to, the French general, the Duke of Berri. "It was great pity," says Froissart, "to see the men, women, and children that kneeled down on their knees before the prince for mercy, but he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them, so that none was heard, but all put to death as they were met withal, and such as were nothing culpable: there was no pity taken of the poor people, who wrought never no manner of treason, yet they bought it dearer than the great personages, such as had done the evil and trespass. There was not so hard a heart within the city of Limoges, an if he had any remembrance of God, but that wept piteously for the great mischief that they saw before their eyen; for mo than three thousand men, women, and children were slain and beheaded that day. God have mercy on their souls! for I trow they were martyrs." Disease by this time seems to have debilitated and perverted the very moral nature of the prince. He was soon after obliged to sheathe his sword, and come home to England, where he lingered, in such debility and suffering as allowed him to take very little actual share in public affairs, although his name remained influential, till his death on the 8th of June, 1376. The war in France, meanwhile, had prospered so ill, that by the year 1374 Edward, who had retained and still used the title of king of that country, had lost all the territory he had ever possessed there, with the exception only of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne, and a few detached localities between those two last-named towns. No peace, however, was ever made while Edward lived. After the death of the Black Prince the chief ascendancy in the government was acquired by his younger brother John of Gaunt (that is, Ghent, the place of his birth), Duke of Lancaster. The king himself, who had lost Queen Philippa in 1369, had, in the weakness of old age, sunk under the dominion of a female favourite, Alice Perrers or Piers. She was a married woman, and had been lady of the bedchamber to Queen Philippa; and she is said to have been eminently distinguished by her wit and talent, as well as by her beauty, an influence to which Edward had all his life been extremely sensible, although in his better days he had at least never allowed it to master the soldier or the king. This artful woman, however, soon acquired so much power over him, and abused it with so much insolence, that shortly before the death of the Black Prince the parliament had passed an ordinance declaring that, whereas complaint had been made before the king that some women had pursued causes and actions in the king's courts by way of maintainance, and for hire and reward, which thing displeased the king, the king forbade that any woman should do it hereafter, "and in particular Alice Perrers, under the penalty of forfeiting all that the said Alice can forfeit, and of being banished out of the realm." Alice, notwithstanding, still remained about the king's person; while Edward, wasting with disease, lay, to quote the words of Stow, "neglecting the benefit of time that God had given him, like as he should never have died; trusting the fond fables of the oft-named Alice when she affirmed he should recover his health, so that at that time he talked rather of hawking and hunting than of any thing that pertained to the saving of his soul; only he granted pardon of death for offences throughout his kingdom to the inhabitants." "Being now," continues this old chronicler, "suddenly taken with the day of his death, he began to have manifest signs thereof; what Alice Piers then did any man may judge, although we set them not down in writing; for, as soon as she saw the king had set foot within death's door, she bethought her of flight; yet before she went, that all men might perceive that she loved not the king for himself, but for that which was his, she took the rings from his fingers which for the royalty of his majesty he was wont to wear. Thus yielding him such thanks for his benefits, she bade him adieu, and so withdrew herself from him. The king, keeping thus at the point of death, was left not only of her the said Alice Piers, but of other the knights and esquires, who had served him, allured more with his gifts than his love. Amongst a thousand, there was only present at that time a certain priest (other of his folks applying the spoil of what they could lay hands on), who, lamenting the king's misery, and inwardly touched with grief of heart for that, amongst so many counsellors which he had, there was none that would minister to him the word of life, came boldly unto him, and admonished him to lift up the eyes as well of his body as of his heart unto God, and with sighs to ask mercy of him, whose majesty he well knew he had grievously offended; whereupon the king, listening to the words of the priest, although he had a little before wanted the use of his tongue, yet then taking strength to him, seemed to speak what was in his mind; and then, what for weakness of his body, contrition of his heart, and sobbing for his sins, his voice and speech failed him, and, scarce half pronouncing the word Jesu, he with this last word made an end of his speech, and yielded up the ghost." He died at Richmond in Surrey (then called Shine or Sheen), about seven o'clock on the evening of Sunday the 21st of June, 1377; leaving the throne to his grandson, Richard II., son of Edward the Black Prince, by his wife Joan, called the Fair Maid of Kent, the daughter of his great uncle Edmund, Earl of Kent, and previously the wife of Thomas Holland, who in her right had assumed the title of Earl of Kent in 1360, but died in the end of the same year, upon which his widow immediately gave her hand to the Prince of Wales.
The children borne to Edward III. by his wife Queen Philippa were, Edward the Black Prince, in 1330; Isabel, who became the wife of Ingelram de Coucy, in 1332; Joan de la Tour, in 1335; William of Hatfield, in 1336; Lionel, afterwards Duke of Clarence, in 1338; Blanche de la Tour, who died in childhood in 1340; John of Ghent, afterwards Duke of Lancaster, in 1340; Edmund, afterwards Duke of York, in 1341; Mary, afterwards Duchess of Bretagne, probably in 1342; Margaret, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, in 1346; William, in 1349; and Thomas, afterwards Duke of Gloucester, in 1355.
It has been observed, in regard to Edward III., by Sir James Mackintosh, that "though his victories left few lasting acquisitions, yet they surrounded the name of his country with a lustre which produced strength and safety; which perhaps also gave a loftier tone to the feelings of England, and a more vigorous activity to her faculties." "During a reign of fifty years," it is added, "Edward III. issued writs of summons, which are extant to this day, to assemble seventy parliaments or great councils: he thus engaged the pride and passions of the parliament and the people so deeply in support of his projects of aggrandisement, that they became his zealous and enthusiastic followers. His ambition was caught by the nation, and men of the humblest station became proud of his brilliant victories. To form and keep up this state of public temper was the mainspring of his domestic administration, and satisfactorily explains the internal tranquillity of England during the forty years of his effective reign. It was the natural consequence of so long and watchful a pursuit of popularity, that most grievances were redressed as soon as felt, that parliamentary authority was yearly strengthened by exercise, and that the minds of the turbulent barons were exclusively turned towards a share in their sovereign's glory. Quiet at home was partly the fruit of fame abroad."
Beyond that of most of our great men, has the fame of Wiclif[20] undergone fierce dispute within the last few years. From regarding him with reverence as "the Morning Star of the Reformation," it has come to be more than questioned whether he was a reformer at all, or whether a certain superior craft was not the motive that incited him throughout his career. It will be convenient to leave the consideration of this matter till we have looked at the leading events of his life, when we shall be better prepared to estimate his character. To assume a controversial tone—as it would be scarcely possible to avoid doing if we entered into the discussion of the various views and statements that have been put forth respecting him—is not at all our intention. We have examined the several statements; we shall be content with expressing our own opinions.