The Perfect King (59 page)

From all points of view, the parliament of
1351
was a success. Edward managed to secure his wool subsidy for a further two years, despite pleas not to levy it because of the plague. Those deserving justice received it, those requiring the correction
of injustices mostl
y were satisfied, and those putting forward
petitions for new laws were mostly rewarded with a positive
result. Questions remained in the air about financial burdens and taxation, but the accommodation reached was acceptable to parliament. So it was fitting that, at the end of the parliament, Edward held a second mass creation of higher lords. Harking back to the parliament of
1337,
when he had made six earls and a duke, he now created three earls and a duke. Henry of Lancaster now became the duke of Lancaster, in honour of his great achievements in Gascony. Edward's sons Lionel and John were officially granted the tides held for them since infancy: Earl of Ulster and Earl of Richmond. And Ralph Stafford was raised from his barony to become the earl of Stafford. None of these lords were new, in the sense that they were commoners beforehand, but nevertheless, the raising of three men to comital rank, and the raising of Henry to a dukedom, were all in keeping with the style and largesse of a king whose reign was beginning to be viewed in terms of greatness.

Not long after King Philip died, Edward had asked the pope to appoint an English cardinal.
To
put an English voice among the many French ones at Avignon would have been a very sensible move, at least partly correcting the massive pro-French bias there. The pope had responded with a request for Edward to put forward two suitable candidates. Edward suggested William Bateman, the bishop of Norwich, and Ralph Stratford, the bishop of London. The pope, however, saw fit to throw sand in all their faces. On
17
December
1350,
in the presence of the newly crowned King
J
ohn II of France, the twelve cardinals he created included eight more Frenchmen, three Spaniards and one Italian. The English candidates were ignored. In this light it is not surprising that Edward was keen to pass the subsequent petition for a statute prohibiting papal appointments.

French antagonism was extreme in
1351.
The feeling in France - and the fear in England - was that King John needed to begin his reign by taking the fight to the English. In March the French won a minor symbolic victory in Brittany in the '
Battle
of the Thirty', a joust between thirty French and thirty English and Breton knights. Another blow was struck for French pride when Sir Thomas Dagworth was ambushed and murdered. But it was the English under Sir John Cheverstone who won the more important victory at Saintes on
1
April
1351,
capturing the French commander Guy de Nesle. Unfortunately de Nesle was soon ransomed, and the French reversed the English success by capturing the strategic fortress of Saint-Jean-d'Angely, which had been in English hands since its capture by Lancaster in
1346.
The English responded with a few raids in Brittany under Dagworth's successor, Sir Walter
Bendey, and around Calais under
Lord Manny. It was a situation which could not be called war, yet it was hardly peace.

Then disaster struck. The English garrison of Calais, commanded by John Beauchamp, was ambushed on its way back from a raid. Beauchamp and several other knights were taken prisoner, leaving Calais undefended. The news was immediately taken to England, where Edward was already concerned about an imminent Flemish switch of allegiance to supporting the French king Emissari
es were promptl
y sent out in all directions. The duke of Lancaster was sent to negotiate with the count of Flanders, heir to the count killed at Crecy, who was more acceptable to his people than his father. Lancaster was told even to offer the hand in marriage of John of Gaunt if it was necessary. The bishop of Norwich and the earl of Huntingdon were despatched to France to seek a permanent peace, hoping thereby to stave off a French advance until Calais could be secured. Edward himself set about raising an army as quickly as he could to secure the town. But the English position was weak. The count of Flanders openly went to King John and threw off his allegiance to England. It was just as well that Bishop Bateman and the earl of Huntingdon were able to secure a truce in September. Edward had suffered two setbacks - Saint-Jean-d'Angely and the Flemish alliance - and King John was able to celebrate in November by establishing a chivalric order of his own, the Order of the Star.

Edward was undoubtedly relieved not to be going to war in
1351,
and he quickly cancelled his plans to take an army to Calais. The amount he was spending on construction at Windsor, Westminster, Calais, Eltham and Henley could not easily be transferred to fund-raising for war. Nevertheless the encroachments and raids of
1351
had alerted him to the dangers of ploughing all his resources into stone and all his time into hunting and domestic politics. A serious attempt to achieve permanent peace with
Scotland
was on the point of collapse, even when King David was allowed to leave the Tower of London in February
1352
to return to
Scotland
to try to persuade his subjects to accept Edward's proposals. A message from France in January reminded Edward very forcibly that there might still be occasions when war would prove advantageous. Edward was thus once more mulling over the prospect of war and its costs as parliament arrived at Westminster.

The parliament of
1352
marks a particularly high point in the relationship between fourteenth-century kings and the country's representatives. A long list of petitions was presented by the representatives in the expectation that Edward would be asking for several years of direct taxation.

In the past, parliament had been asked to agree to taxes in the belief that the king would then, afterwards, listen to their petitions. This time, the order of things was altered. Edward's Chief Justice, Sir William Shareshull, positively encouraged parliament to prepare petitions for Edward to right wrongs or to amend the law. When parliament eventually came back to Edward the deal was that they would agree to the taxation on the condition that he gave a prompt and favourable reply to their petitions.

Edward could n
ot be forced into granting petitions, and it remained up to him whether he accepted the deal or not. In theory, he could have simply imposed taxation and refused any and all terms. But there was an excitement about parliament at this time, and the way it was developing held an attraction for Edward too. The petitions presented to him in
1352
contained a ready-made legislative programme, setting straight a large number of outstanding legal matters going right back to the beginning of the reign. The question of preventing feudal aids being levied without parliamentary consent was raised, so was the problem of purveyors for the royal household abusing their positions, and the enforcement of standard weights and measures throughout the country. Debts owing by Italian merchants, sub-standard coinage, the abuses of forest keepers, and the practice of levying men-at-arms from large non-feudal properties were openly discussed. Edward assented to all of these petitions and many others. In fact, every one of the twenty-three chapters of the great statute of
1352
directly
related to the list of petitions handed to Edward by parliament. The laws themselves may have been precisely worded by Edward's civil servants but it cannot be denied that Edward had listened to parliament's demands. Parliament had effectively listed what it considered were Edward's legislative shortcomings to date, and Edward - always eager to be seen in a good light - had done what he could to correct them.

In the midst of this long list of laws were several very important pieces of legislation. There was a new Statute of the Clergy and a law allowing for the payment of fines by those guilty of breaking the Statute of Labourers to go towards reducing the amount of direct taxation necessary. But without any doubt the most important statute made at this parliament was
the great Statute of Treasons.

Given the large number of treason trials and executions which took place in the first twenty years of Edward's life, it is surprising that treason had never previously been defined or codified. The word tended to be bandied around very loosely, its references only connected through a sense of a criminal betrayal of trust. But it was clear to all that a servant who murdered his master was not guilty of the same crime as a magnate who went to war with the king. A statute was required to distinguish between general or petty treason and high treason, which was an act against the king and his government. The statute wa
s also required to define exactl
y what constituted an act against the king. The result was a very interesting list of crimes, in which Edward and his justices referred back
to the deeds of Roger Mortimer.
Thus we read that High Treason was when a man 'c
onsidered or imagined' the death of the king,
or of his queen, or their eldest son and heir, or if he violated the queen, the king's eldest unmarried daughter or the wife of his eldest son, or if he went to war with the king in his realm, or adhered to the king's enemies, or if he killed the Chancellor or the Treasurer, or the king's justices, when they
were performing their office.
These parts of the statute are still in for
ce today. Other parts subsequentl
y repealed state that High Treason included counterfeiting the king's great or privy seal, or coinage of the realm.

Many writers have found it surprising that the Statute of Treasons was passed in
1352,
after twenty-five years of Edward's reign, at the very point when the English monarchy was at its most secure. It had been many years since treason had been a feature of the political landscape. But there was an obvious reason, obvious to contemporaries at least. Sir John Maltravers had been found guilty of treason in his absence; now he had been forgiven. Arundel's father had been declared guilty of treason and was found wrongfully adjudged to have been sentenced. The same could be said for Kent in
1330.
What crime was it that these men had committed? For if it could be so easily reversed, was treason anything more than going against the king's will? In this new, parliamentary age, it was very dangerous if political representatives could be judged guilty of treason for simply disobeying the king.

It thus appears that the Statute of Treasons was a logical consequence of Edward's determination to rule fairly for all, including the survivors of the dictatorship of Mortimer. This is certainly the way that most
modern scholars understand it.
Yet we should not presume that there was no more to it than that. It cannot escape a biographer's attention that in these years
1351-54
Edward revisited the events of
1327-30
several times. Maltravers himself returned from Flanders. The Arundel estates were restored and the dead earl pardoned. In
1352
Edward summoned the chronicler Ranulph Higden, one of the most popular chroniclers of the period, to come to a meeting of the great council 'with all your chronicles and those in your charge to speak and treat with the council concerning matters to be explained to you on our behalf'. The same year a special inquiry was ordered to find out whether the archbishop of Cashel (Ireland) had fulfilled his side of a bargain to endow six chaplains in his cathedral to
celebrate masses for Edward II.
The following year,
Edward himself revisited his father's tomb at Gloucester and remained
in the area for about a month.
In an unprecedented move he sent his sons to celebrate that year's anniversary of the 'death' of Edward II at Gloucester (he being unable to attend in person due to a council meeting at Westminster on the
23rd).
He also paid for offerings to be made on behalf of the dead at Gloucester on the following day, and gave gifts of gold spinet to lay on the tomb on the
24th.
Most interesting of all, he seems to have made two visits to Leintwardine in September and November
1353.
Leintwardine was a small, out-of-the way place in northwest Herefordshire, a long way off Edward's usual routes, especially as he usually confined himself these days to the Thames valley. But Leintwardine was where the elder Roger Mortimer had founded a collegiate chantry to sing masses for himself and his family and Edward and the royal family. It was the place in which the souls of Edward II, Edward III and Mortimer were united. In September Edward gave a cloth of gold at the statue of the Virgin there, and in early November he may have made a second visit to Leintwardine to make an offering at the same figure. Finally in
1353
Roger Mortimer the grandson presented a petition in parliament to have all the processes against his grandfather tried. Edward cannot have been surprised by this, and must have discussed it with the heir in advance, for he not only granted the petition, he went so far as to reverse
all
the accusations against the grandfather on the basis that he had not had a fair trial. At the same time he restored to the grandson the tide of Earl of March which the grandfather had outrageously demanded in
1328.
Had he wished merely to honour the grandson, he could have granted him a new, less contentious tide. But with that reversal of his judgement on Mortimer, Edward was finally able to let go of the terrible events of
1330.
It seems clear that, from Edward's point of view, the Statute of Treasons was part of a wider revisiting of the past, and was not just a legal formality, as usually thought. We might sum up the personal dimension by saying that, having legally codified what constituted a threat to the Crown, Edward could now wipe the slate clean, and reverse those injustices, semi-injustices and dubious measures which he had been forced to commit in
1330
to enforce his royal authority.