Life of Edward the Black Prince

by Louise Creighton

English Politics.

The England to which the Black Prince returned was in many ways different from the England which he had left. The country had suffered one great loss; the good Queen Philippa, so long the faithful wife of Edward III., had died in 1369. By her wisdom and virtue she had been of great use to the King, and had been beloved through all the kingdom. Deprived of her counsel, Edward fell under the influence of one of the ladies of her bedchamber, Alice Perrers, a woman of great wit and beauty, who ruled him at her will, and who was used as a tool by the different political parties.

It was a melancholy end for the bright, vigorous King to come to. The external splendour and glory of his reign was gone. His court had lost its brilliancy. He himself seemed almost to have sunk into a premature dotage. But though the last years of his reign were not as brilliant as the former years, they are perhaps more important for the history of our country; for in them we see the beginning of a great political struggle, which left most important traces upon the development of our constitution; and we are also able to trace the remarkable increase of the power and influence of Parliament. In these struggles the Black Prince, for the first time in his life, appeared as a politician; and the part which he took in them earned for him as much glory as his victories of Poitiers or Najarez.

All through Edward's reign Parliament had been increasing in power; but we shall not be able to understand the way in which it had developed, unless we go back and try to find out what it was at the beginning of Edward's reign.

There had always been under the Norman kings a Great Council, composed of the chief men of the kingdom, by whose assent and consent the Crown acted. But besides the advice of their nobles, the kings felt the need of the money of their people; and to obtain this the more easily, they summoned some of them to sit side by side with their advisers in the Great Council. The old arrangement of the shires and the shire courts gave a means of getting representatives. First, knights, to be chosen from every shire, were summoned to the meetings of the Great Council; and finally, Simon de Montfort, in 1264, summoned also burgesses from the chief cities.

Edward I.'s pressing need for money drove him to follow the example of Simon de Montfort, and summon these representatives to Parliament for the purpose of obtaining from them more easily grants of money.

This privilege, however, of sending representatives to Parliament was not one which the towns were eager to grasp. The burgesses did not care to leave their business, and undertake an expensive and dangerous journey to attend the Parliament. It was an arrangement more for the King's convenience than for theirs. When they got there they had nothing to do but vote grants of money. It was only slowly, and without any outward struggle, that the knights, who represented the shires, and the burgesses, who represented the cities, came to take any part in legislation. It was in this respect that the reign of Edward III. saw a great change.

In the Parliaments of Edward I. each order had deliberated separately. The clergy, the barons, the knights, and the burgesses made their grants separately. At first the barons and the knights, whose interests were very similar, tended to combine. The importance of the burgesses, however, increased during the reign of Edward II., as the barons needed their aid in the struggle against the Crown. As they increased in importance the knights of the shire seem to have broken off their connexion with the barons, and joined with the burgesses. We do not know how this change was brought about; but in the beginning of the reign of Edward III. we find the knights and burgesses combined together under the name of the Commons.

That the knights of the shire united with the burgesses, and not with the barons, is a fact of immense importance in our constitutional history. Had they united with the barons, the aristocratic party would have been the strongest in the State. As it was, the Commons, the people, were to be the strongest.