The English, unable to break the serried mass of their enemies, feigned a retreat, whereupon the Normans unlashed their ships and hurried in pursuit into the open water. At once the English turned and met them. The battle began when the English admiral, Robert Morley, lay alongside the Christopher, which, after its capture, had been taken into the enemy's service. Soon the ships of both fleets were closely grappled together in a fierce hand-to-hand fight which lasted until after nightfall. The desperate eagerness of the combatants strangely contrasted with the slackness of the campaign in the Thiérache. "This battle," says Froissart, "was right fierce and horrible, for battles by sea are more dangerous and fiercer than battles by land, for at sea there is no retreat nor fleeing; there is no remedy but to fight and abide fortune, and every man to show his prowess." In the end the English won an overwhelming victory, which was completed next morning after more hard fighting. During the night Barbavera and his Genoese put to sea and escaped, but the magnificent Norman fleet was in the hands of the victor. The English loss was small, though it included Thomas of Monthermer, a son of Joan of Acre, and Edward himself was wounded in the thigh. The Norman force was almost annihilated. Quièret fell mortally wounded into Edward's hands; Béhuchet was captured unhurt. A later Norman legend tells how Béhuchet, when brought before the English king, answered some taunt by boxing the king's ears, whereupon the angry monarch hanged him forthwith from the mast of his ship.[1] But the tradition is unsupported by English authorities, and, with all his faults, Edward was not the man to deal thus with a captive knight who had fought his best. Master at last of the sea, Edward landed at Sluys amidst the rejoicings of the Flemings, and made his way to Ghent, where he greeted his wife, and first saw his infant son John, born during his absence, to whom Artevelde stood as godfather.
[1] Luce, Le Soufflet de l'Écluse, in La Frame pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans, 2nd série, pp. 3-15.
Edward's military fame was established over all Europe, and, says the Flemish writer, John van Klerk, "all who spoke the German tongue rejoiced at the defeat of the French". Yet the victory at Sluys was the prelude to a land campaign as ineffective as the raid into the Thiérache. Eager to restore their lost lands to the Flemings, Edward made the mistake of dividing his army. He sent Robert of Artois to effect the reconquest of Artois, while he himself besieged Tournai, which was then in French hands. Robert's attempt to win back the lands of his ancestors was a sorry failure. Defeated outside Saint Omer, he was unable even to invest that town. Almost equally unsuccessful was Edward's siege of Tournai, which resisted with such energy that he was soon at the end of his resources. At last, in despair, Edward challenged Philip VI. to decide their claim to France by single combat. The Valois answered that he would gladly do so if, in the event of his winning, he might obtain Edward's kingdom. In the same spirit of caution, Philip tarried half-way between Saint Omer and Tournai, watching both armies and afraid to strike at either. The armies wore themselves out in this game of waiting until the widowed Countess of Hainault, then abbess of the Cistercian nuns of Fontenelles, was moved by the desolation of the country to intervene between the two kings. The mother of the Queen of England and the sister of the King of France, she succeeded not only by reason of her prayers, but through the refusal of the Duke of Brabant, the Count of Hainault, and the other imperial vassals to remain longer at the war. On September 25, 1340, a truce was signed at the solitary chapel of Esplechin, situated in the open country a little south of Tournai. By it hostilities between both kings and their respective allies were suspended, until midsummer day, 1341. Each king was to enjoy the lands actually in his possession, and commerce was to be carried on as if peace had been made. The most significant clause of the truce was that by which both kings pledged themselves that they "procure not that any innovation be done by the Church of Rome, or by others of Holy Church on either of the said kings. And if our most holy father the pope will do that, the two kings shall prevent it, so far as in them lies."
The truce of Esplechin, renewed until 1345, put an end to the first, or Netherlandish, period of the Hundred Years' War. The imperial alliance, which had failed Edward, was soon to be solemnly dissolved. Early in 1341, Louis of Bavaria revoked Edward's vicariate, and announced his intention of becoming henceforth the friend of his uncle, the King of France. This alliance between Philip and Louis completed the discomfiture of Benedict XII. In 1342 he died, and his successor was Peter Roger, the sometime Archbishop of Rouen, who assumed the title of Clement VI. By persuading Brabant and Hainault to be neutral between France and England, the new pontiff broke up the last remnant of the Anglo-imperial alliance. Even Flanders and England became estranged. Artevelde, who found it a hard matter to govern Flanders after the truce, would willingly have supported Edward. But Edward had henceforth less need of Artevelde than Artevelde had of him. In 1345 Edward again appeared at Sluys and had an interview with him, and then returned to his own country without setting foot on Flemish soil. Artevelde soon afterwards met his death in a popular tumult. His family fled to England, where they lived on a pension from Edward. This was the end of the Anglo-Flemish alliance.
After the treaty of Esplechin, Edward returned to Ghent. The conclusion of military operations was a signal to all his creditors to clamour for immediate settlement of their debts. Neither subsidies nor wool came from England, though the king wrote in piteous terms to his council. Edward was convinced that the real cause of his failure was the remissness of the home government, and resolved to wreak his vengeance on his ministers. He was encouraged to this effect by Bishop Burghersh, who still remembered his old feuds with Archbishop Stratford, and may well have believed that the archbishop, who had a financier's dread of war, had wilfully ruined his rival's diplomacy. But Edward dared not openly return to England, for his Flemish creditors regarded his personal presence as the best security for his debts. He was therefore reduced to the pitiful expedient of running away from them. One day he rode out of Ghent on the pretext of taking exercise, and hurried secretly and without escort to Sluys. Thence he took ship for England, and, after a tempestuous voyage of three days and nights, sailed up the Thames, and landed at the Tower on November 30, 1340, after nightfall. At cockcrow next morning, he summoned his ministers before him, denounced them as false traitors and drove them all from office. The judges were thrown into prison, and with them some of the leading merchants, including William de la Pole of Hull. A special commission, like that of 1289, scrutinised the acts of the royal officials throughout the kingdom, and exacted heavy fines from the many who were found wanting. Nothing but fear of provoking the wrath of the Church prevented Edward from consigning to prison the dismissed chancellor, Robert Stratford, Bishop of Chichester, and the late treasurer, Roger Northburgh, Bishop of Coventry. Their successors were lay knights, the new chancellor, Sir Robert Bourchier, being the first keeper of the great seal who was not a clerk.
Earlier in the year the king had quarrelled with Archbishop Stratford, who resigned the chancellorship. But before Edward sailed from Orwell in June there had been a partial reconciliation, and the king left Stratford president of the council during his absence. When his brother and colleagues were dismissed, the archbishop was at Charing. Conscious that he was the chief object of Edward's vengeance, he at once took sanctuary with the monks of his cathedral. Every effort was made to drag him from his refuge. Some Louvain merchants, to whom he had bound himself for the king's debts, demanded that he should be surrendered to their custody until the money was paid. He was summoned to court and afterwards to parliament. But he prudently remained safe within the walls of Christ Church, and preached a course of sermons to the monks, in which he compared himself to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and hinted at the danger of his incurring his prototype's fate. Edward replied to this challenge by a lengthy pamphlet, called the libellus famosus. The violence and unmeasured terms of the tractate suggest the hand of Bishop Orleton, Stratford's lifelong foe, who had by Burghersh's recent death become the most prominent of the courtly prelates. The archbishop was declared to be the sole cause of the king's failures. He had left Edward without funds, and in trusting to him the king had leant on a broken reed. Stratford justified himself in another sermon in which he invited inquiry and demanded trial by his peers.
Edward so far relented as to issue letters of safe-conduct enabling the archbishop to attend the parliament summoned for April 23, 1341. But when Stratford took his place, the king refused to meet him, and ordered him to answer in the exchequer the complaints brought against him. The lords upheld the primate's cause, and declared that in no circumstances could a peer of parliament be brought to trial elsewhere than in full parliament. Edward's fury abated when he saw that he would get no grant unless he gave way. He restored Stratford to his favour, and acceded to his request that he should answer in parliament and not in the exchequer. The childish controversy ended with the personal victory of the primate and the formal re-assertion of the important principle of trial by peers. But not even then was Edward able to get a subsidy. He was further forced to embody in the statute of the year the doctrines that auditors of the accounts of the royal officers should be elected in parliament, and that all ministers should be chosen by the king, after consultation with his estates, and should resign their offices at each meeting of parliament and be prepared to answer all complaints before it.
Thus the fallen minister brought the estates the greatest triumph over the prerogative won during Edward's reign. Before long Edward was magnanimous enough to resume friendly relations with him, but he was never suffered to take a prominent part in politics. He died in 1348, after spending his later years in the business of his see. It was a strange irony of fate that this worldly and politic ecclesiastic should have perforce become the champion of the rights of the Church and the liberties of the nation. His victory established a remarkable solidarity between the high ecclesiastical party and the popular opposition, which was to last nearly as long as the century. Disgust at this alliance moved Edward to take up the anti-clerical attitude which henceforth marks the policy of the crown until the accession of the house of Lancaster.
The victory of the estates of 1341 was too complete to last. For a medieval king to hand over the business of government to a nominated ministry was in substance a return to the state of things in 1258 or 1312. Edward was not the sort of man to endure the thraldom that his father and great-grandfather had both found intolerable. Even at the moment of sealing the statute, he and his ministers protested that they were not bound to observe laws contrary to the constitution of the realm. Five months later, on October 1, 1341, the king issued letters, revoking the laws of the previous session. "We have never," he impudently declared, "really given our consent to the aforesaid pretended statute. But inasmuch as our rejecting it would have dissolved parliament in confusion, without any business having been transacted, and so all our affairs would have been ruined, we dissembled, as was our duty, and allowed the pretended statute to be sealed." For more than two years he did not venture to face a parliament, but the next gathering of the estates in April, 1343, repealed the offensive acts of 1341. Parliament was so reluctant to ratify the king's high-handed action, that he did not venture to ask it for any extraordinary grant of money. The only other important act of this parliament was a petition from lords and commons, urging the king to check the claims of a French pope, friendly to the "tyrant of France," to exercise ever-increasing rights of patronage over English benefices. The anti-clerical tide was still flowing.
Before parliament met in 1343, the French war had been renewed on another pretext. A new source of trouble arose in a disputed succession to the duchy of Brittany. The duke John III., the grandson of John II. and Edward I.'s sister Beatrice, died in April, 1341. He left no legitimate children, and his succession was claimed by his half-brother, John of Montfort, and his niece Joan of Penthièvre. Montfort, the son of Duke Arthur II. by his second wife, had inherited from his mother the Norman county of Montfort l'Amaury, which became her possession as the representative on the spindle side of the line of Simon de Montfort the Albigensian crusader. Joan was the daughter of Guy, John III.'s brother of the full blood, in whose favour the great county of Penthièvre-Tréguier, including the whole of the north coast of the duchy from the river of Morlaix to within a few miles of the Rance, had been dissociated from the demesne and reconstituted as an appanage.[1] The heiress of Penthièvre thus ruled directly over nearly a sixth of Brittany, and her power was further strengthened by her marriage with Charles of Blois, who, though a younger son, enjoyed great influence as the sister's son of Philip VI., and also by reason of his simple, saintly, honourable, and martial character. The house of Penthièvre not only stood to Brittany as the house of Lancaster stood to England, as the natural head of the higher nobility; it also enjoyed the favour and protection of the French king, who was ever anxious to find friends among the chief sub-tenants of his great vassals. Against so formidable an opponent John of Montfort could only secure his rights by promptitude. Accordingly he made his way to Nantes and, receiving a warm welcome from his burgesses, proclaimed himself duke. Very few of the great feudatories threw in their lot with him. His strength was in the petty noblesse, the townsmen, and the enthusiasm of the Celtic population of La Brétagne bretonnante, which made Léon, Cornouailles, and Vannes the strongholds of his cause. Yet the Penthièvre influence took with it the Breton-speaking inhabitants of the diocese of Tréguier, and the piety of Charles made the clergy, and especially the friars, devoted to him.