The Perfect King (27 page)

Edward's haste was not just due to a desire to catch up with his army, led in his absence by the earl of Lancaster. He was also acutely aware of the growing ambitions of France. Philip had realised the weakness of a policy which committed him to a war in
Scotland
and which he was never prepared to support with force. He had accordingly persuaded the French parliament to act on its resolutions of the previous year to land a French army in Scotland. Invading armies needed landing places where they could enjoy safety and find supplies. Edward thus had plans to destroy any possible form of nourishment within reach of suitable landing places on the east coast of
Scotland
. Abbeys were emptied of their food supplies,
cattl
e slaughtered, corn fields burned. Whole towns were destroyed.

Edward personally saw to the destruction of Aberdeen. Against the vigour of the English army in full destructive flow, the Scots could do nothing. William Keith, Andrew Murray and William Douglas may have felt bitterly angry that Edward was wrecking their countrymen's homes, food supplies and livelihoods but they too would have seen that this was a strategic necessity. The ambition to be a 'perfect' king was not incompatible with the ruthless destruction of food supplies and defensive structures, or any other aspect of the efficient prosecution of a bloody conflict.

While Edward was savaging the north, and chivalrously rescuing the widow of the earl of A
tholl from a siege at Lochindorb
, a great council was held at Northampton. Edward had appointed the archbishop of Canterbury (Chancellor), Henry Burghersh (Treasurer) and his brother, John, to preside at this council, but on one day at least it seems Philippa took charge. Beside the archbishop of Canterbury, seven bishops, and forty-six barons, knights and other magnates were present. They decided another embassy should be sent to France, to seek a compromise to the conflict which was developing. Edward agreed, and sent word accordingly to the bishops of Durham and Winchester. He also summoned his brother to help him in
Scotland
. As a precaution, he placed all the royal
castle
s of southern England on a state of alert, and instructed the earls of Arundel and Surrey to defend their fortifications at Arundel and Lewes.

At die end of the summer, the crisis suddenly worsened. Edward summoned another council to meet at the end of September, this time at Nottingham. The envoys proposed by the previous council had been utterly unsuccessful in trying to get a compromise from Philip, who was determined to go to war. In fact, Philip declared openly to Edward's envoys that he would send an army to help the Scots, and would do all he could to assist them. The French fleet - amassed by Philip to fight the infidel -was now sailing around the southern English ports attacking any English ships they found. Edward wrote to his admirals on
18
August urging them to intercept the enemy and declaring that 'our progenitors, the kings of England, have before these times been lords of the English sea on every side
...
and it would very much grieve us if in this kind of defence our royal honour should be lost'. But Edward's claim to sovereignty of the
seas was of littl
e help to the crews of those merchant vessels which the French caught. Those who were trapped at sea had the choice of the sword or the waves. No merchant was safe. Englishmen in Ghent and Bruges began to be rounded up on the orders of the count of Flanders, Philip's ally. At the height of this extreme panic, which Edward was powerless to control from
Scotland
, he received utterly dreadful news. John of Eltham, his only brother, had died suddenly.

John was just twenty years old. Edward had been fond of him, had raised him to the earldom of Cornwall, and had shared with him the terror of Mortimer's dictatorship. John alone had benefited from a flood of estates and rewards after Mortimer's fall, when Edward was too cautious to distribute largesse to his non-royal friends.
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He had been the Sir Bors to Edward's Sir Lionel: the two brothers growing up under the rule of the usurper 'King Claudas'. John's marriage was a subject to which Edward had given very considerable thought, first favouring
J
eanne, a daughter of the count of Eu, then Mary of Blois, then Mary of Coucy, and lasdy a daughter of King Ferdinand of Castile. John's death also marked the loss of the only one of Edward's brethren still in England. His sister Joan was in France, married to his enemy David II, and Eleanor was married to the count of Guelderland, in the Low Countries. Of his family he had only his wife and three children, his forty-year-old mother, and one uncle left. In this light it is all the more shocking to read of a rumour that the cause of John's death was murder. And a most extraordinary murder too. He was supposed to have been stabbed in a rage by Edward himself.

The shock of this story tends to deflect attention from the impact of John's death on Edward. Edward was exceedingly upset. He ordered nine hundred mas
ses to be said for John's soul.
A year later, John's death was still giving him bad dreams, as his household accountant noted, after extra alms-giving by the king; but the cause of those bad dreams was almost certainly not regret for a knife wielded in rage.
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John had died on
13
September at Perth, and although it is probable that Edward was at Perth at the time, the source of this story,
The Scotichronicon
,
is very doubtful.
It was written about twenty-five years later by John Fordun, a clerk from Aberdeen, which Edward had just burnt to the ground. We therefore have to accept that the truth remained hidden from all Edward's English companions for twenty-five years before being leaked to an embittered and relatively unimportant Scottish clerk. Sir Thomas Gray - writing while a prisoner in
Scotland
in
1355
- stresses that John died a 'good death', which probably implies fortitude in the face of an illness sent by God. Most fourteenth-century English chroniclers record the death; not one of them states he was murdered. Barnes believed that he died of a fever brought on by his military exertions. There is little room for doubt that Fordun's story of Edward stabbing John to death was not a rare fragment of a hideous truth but a choice piece of Scottish propaganda. An inspiration for the theme of the story may be found in Edward's adopted role of Sir Lionel, for this Arthurian knight attempted to kill his brother Sir Bors. In the wake of the destruction of Aberdeen, men from the town may have believed that Edward was so ruthless in destroying the land of which his sister was queen that he
could
have killed his own brother.

Edward probably remained at Perth until the third day after his brother's death. He had sent his wardrobe ahead to Nottingham in readiness for the council to be held there, but still he lingered by the body of his brother. He seems still to have been at Perth on
16
September. This left him a mere eight days to reach Nottingham, more than three hundred miles away. When he finally moved off he hastened south at a breakneck speed.
He entered his council chamber at Nottingham
Castle
on
22
September, tired from a very long journey, distraught, and facing the gaunt faces of men who knew that the kingdom was facing imminent invasion.
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Worse, the Scots had been pricked into action by the French support. Andrew Murray was burning and levelling his own lands - in emulation of Edward at Aberdeen - to stop the English being able to station an army there. The isolated English
castle
s were already under attack. In this climate, it is no wonder that the council granted Edward his taxes without question. Men were raised from the shires. An immense defensive army was conceived, and large sums of money were secured from the Bardi and Peruzzi banking houses as a means of paying troops. Edward summoned naval help from Bayonne. He even wrote to the king of Norway to request that that monarch refuse to supply ships to Philip. In doing so he admitted that he was likely also to face the opposition of the counts of Hainault and Guelderland, his relatives. Far from setting an example of perfect kingship, he now looked very beleaguered indeed.

As it turned out, the invasion threat was more imagined than real. By the end of October the large army ordered for the defence of the country could be sent home, and the naval contingents of the south coast could be safely directed to protect the merchant fleet heading to Gascony. They were to be replaced by ships raised from Great Yarmouth and twenty-four other ports. Further protection measures were made - including a repeated order to Bayonne to send ships, and an order to protect the port of Dartmouth in Devon - and gradually the sense of fear calmed. But as it calmed in England, it grew in Gascony. In the Agenais, fear of attack became reality as a French army was sent to assault Gascon outposts, and plans for the seizure of the whole duchy of Aquitaine were contemplated.
Philip .was now writing to Edward saying that he should expel Robert d'Artois from England, or, rather, send him to France in chains for judgement as an enemy of the French king. In
Scotland
, to which Edward had returned after the council at Nottingham, his rebuilding of Bothwell
Castle
was hampered by constant attacks from William Douglas. For Edward, the glories of war had turned into the long, bitter reproaches of diplomacy.

It was a discomfiting contrast to the glorious tournaments of the years after Mortimer's fall.

Edward left Bothwell in mid-December and came south with his brother's embalmed body.
Philippa travelled with him as far as Hatfield, where they spent Christmas together. Heavily pregnant, she remained at Hatfield while Edward went on with John's corpse to the Tower, arriving on Friday,
10
January. The next morning, he walked with it in a great solemn procession to St Paul's Cathedral, surrounded by clerics and citizens, where it lay the night. The following day, Sunday, he attended mass in its presence. After mass it was taken to Westminster Abbey. The next day solemn exequies were celebrated by the archbishop of Canterbury in the presence of the king and many earls, prelates and barons. Funeral feasts were arranged at Westminster and St Paul's. Finally, on Wednesday
15
January, John of Eltham was laid to rest in St Edmund's Chapel, Westminster. As a mark of respect, Edward commissioned one of two exceptionally fine alabaster effigies for his tomb. The other was for their father, to be incorpor
ated in the tomb at Gloucester.

The day after John was lowered into the stone floor of Westminster Abbey, Philippa gave birth to a second son, William of Hatfield. Edward responded to the good news by making a
journey to Canterbury to give th
anks at the shrine of Becket. But beyond this, the birth of a second son was greeted with muted enthusiasm. The reason is not hard to find. The child was sickly, and dead within weeks. Edward seems to have been disturbed by this, as he decided that his dead baby should not be buried in the family mausoleum at Westminster. Instead he sent its corpse all the way to York Minster. Although grief for a lost new-born was, in medieval times, often less profound than today, it was another blow. God was not favouring Edward. He had lost his brother and now a son. And that was not the end of his worries. The French had attacked Portsmouth and Jersey. In
Scotland
the rebels had won a series of victories against the under-resourced English garrisons. Bothwell
Castle
, only just repaired, was under attack and soon to be destroyed. It was as if Edward had never fought and won at Halidon Hill. His achievements were being undone, the winter had set in very cold, and bad rumours were spreading. It was said that a calf was born with two heads and eight feet. A very bright comet was seen which 'darted forth its rays with terrible streams', as
if a precursor of devastation.
If Edward was a warrior of God, then God required something more from him than this. It is a telling sign that most chroniclers do not mention the birth, let alone the death, of his doomed baby.