The Perfect King (61 page)

Edward seems to have found it difficult to decide. On
4
April
1353
he appointed John Avenel to take over the lieutenancy of Brittany to implement the terms of the agreement with Charles de Blois. He moved off to Chertsey and Windsor, to inspect die progress of his college there and to hold the tournament and celebrations for the feast of St George. Still he had made no decision about France. At Windsor he and Philippa presided over a gathering of the Knights of the Garter and then took the royal barge back down the river to Thurrock, on the north coast of the Thames. Perhaps he was waiting to hear what the French king thought of what had been proposed at Guines? Still he waited, caught in the indecision of not knowing wha
t he wanted, not wanting to settl
e for anything less than the maximum, and not knowing what that maximum might be.

Edward's indecision was justifiable in one respect. In May it became apparent that Guy of Boulogne's proposed compromises were too much for King John. He was outraged that his kingship was expected to suffer on account of his father's failings. French refusal, coupled with distrust of Cardinal Guy, was probably why Edward wavered, and delayed sending back his negotiators. John, eager to shrug off thoughts that he might relinquish sovereignty of parts of France, prepared to put his country back on a war footing. But although the attempt to secure a permanent peace had failed for the time being, it had in one sense been successful. It had posed the question which had to be asked in order for there to be a permanent peace. When all the fighting was done, what terms would Edward find acceptable?

*

From Thurrock Edward returned by barge to Westminster. There, on
6
June, he held a feast at which he entertained a number of French lords, as well as the duke of Lancaster and the fourteen-year-old John de Montfort, 'the duke of Brittany', Charles de Blois' rival. Clearly the war was still a talking point. But Edward did not remain at Westminster to discuss the conflict but went down to Wiltshire, where he stayed until August, when he moved to Gloucestershire and the Welsh Marches.

Edward's lack of energy at this time, and the apparent lack of business conducted should make us wonder what he was doing. On
12
July he had ordered the truce to be prolonged until November, but otherwise all the charters and writs emanating from the government were coming from Westminster. Edward had for some years now established his chancery and
its subsequent offices permanentl
y at Westminster, so that all charters were written up there and sealed with the great seal. Letters patent and even letters sealed with the privy seal were written up in the king's absence. Edward himself had a third secretariat, the secret seal, which travelled with him. A high level of business must have been delegated. But even if all the letters emanating from the hall at Westminster were written in response to instructions from Edward's secret seal (which they were not), Edward was certainly not overly busy with paperwork in
1353.

Given Edward's preferred recreations, it would be reasonable to suggest that he was hunting or falconing. The chroniclers all mention Edward's love of the chase, and we have proof of it in the huge amounts
he spent on hunting and the costl
y garments he commissioned for hunting parties. At about this time he ordered a perch to be constructed inside his chamber at his new house at Rotherhithe for his favourite falcons to sit on. In August he had to pay compensation to one John Forrester, who had owned three pigs until they were killed by Edward's hunting dogs. The following year he ordered the enclosure of the park at Lyndhurst in the New Forest for hunting. But the likelihood of this explanation does not mean that it is the right one. On
31
July
1353,
while Edward was at Clarendon Palace near Salisbury, the king's apothecary John of Lucca, was paid
£16 16s
8d for various medicines delivered for the king's use.

Illness is a difficult subject, for the biographer as well as for the sufferer. Had this reference not survived we would not presume Edward was ill at this point in time. Chroniclers - almost always writing in hindsight - tended not to treat illnesses as subjects for comment unless it was a very serious affliction, or coloured the man's personality, or resulted in his death. By comparison, hunting, immorality and tourneying were subjects which they were quite happy to mention in summing up a man's life. As a result we have a picture of medieval knights all heartily and joyfully jousting and hunting together and never once suffering from bad health until they became old or died. This is ironic, given that we also know that these men were charging into each other and seriously wounding each other in peacetime, and brutally maiming each other in war. Many are reported to have been blind in one eye as a result of injuries. Also plague had brought with it a wave of illnesses and morbidity not solely connected with rats. Generally speaking, noblemen born between
1350
and
1450
tended to live shorter lives than their forebears, even if they died peacefully.

Edward was not exempt from the diseases and ailments floating around fourteenth-century England. He had fallen seriously ill in
Scotland
in
1345.
His awareness of his physical vulnerability meant that he maintained a physician and a surgeon as part of his regular household. The employment of these medical men as officers therefore does not mean that he was ill. One reason to have them on hand was the danger of warfare, as shown by the huge discrepancies between the amounts paid to his medical staff for peacetime and wartime service.
4
' But another was prophylactic: to maintain the king in good health. The physician advised him about what he should and should not eat at mealtimes, and which astrological periods were the optimum in which to let blood. The surgeon was responsible for his outward appearance, not just his injuries. Even if we knew which medicines were being administered, we would not know how ill he was, or what was wrong with him. All we know for certain is that he required medicines, that his rate of business dropped, and that he left most of his household staff at Salisbury and spent time alone with his closest companions and probably his physician. The other fact we may note is that his illness - whatever it was - did not incapacitate him for long. From Wiltshire he moved into Gloucestershire, and later into Herefordshire. Edward made his trip to the Mortimer shrine at Leintwardine in September. He also went to the shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe at Hereford, then sent his sons to celebrate the obsequies of his late father at Gloucester, and returned to Westminster.

Edward's principal purposes in summoning his council in September were to oudaw foreign courts dealing with English affairs (the Statute of Praemunire), to request an extension of the subsidy, and to discuss the Ordinance of the Staple. The wool staple - the place where all English w
ool had to be sold - was currentl
y situated in Bruges, Flanders. In June
1353,
while ill in Wiltshire, Edward had decided to return the wool staple to England, thereby satisfying English merchants' demands at the same time as removing an important overseas privilege from the Flemish. By
1353
the count of Flanders (now fully in command in Bruges) had openly sided with John of France, and had refused to renew his alliance with Edward despite the best efforts of the duke of Lancaster. So there was no further advantage in forcing English merchants to export their wool to Flanders only for cloth buyers to have to re-import it at great expense.

Edward hoped the removal of the staple from Flanders and the establishment of domestic staples for wool, leather, lead and hides would be a sufficient concession to the commons to allow for this business to be dealt with in council. The taxation element meant that the commons had to be involved somehow, but in order to prevent a long list of parliamentary petitions, Edward summoned only a single knight from each shire and a small number of representatives of the towns, and called the meeting a 'great council', not a parliament. The representatives were happy to agree to the removal of the staple from Flanders and the prohibition of courts - especially the courts at Avignon - from dealing with any and all matters touching on English benefices and the rights of the English Crown, and they agreed to the extension of the wool subsidy. What they were not happy with was Edward's attempt to avert the need for holding a full parliament. Petitions were put forward as if Edward
had
summoned a parliament. Edward realised that he could not avoid his newly acknowledged parliamentary reponsibilities simply by calling a small parliamentary assembly a
'great council'. He listened to the petitions. Hence the council of
1353
ended up passing statutes dealing with the granting of pardons, the sale of cloth, the freedom to import Gascon wine at any port and regrating (selling bad or low-quality goods). And to make sure that Edward recognised how parliament saw its position in the legal framework, he was asked to confirm the Statute of the Staple - an important concession to English merchants - in the next full parliament.

The reason for going into the details of these parliaments of
1351-53
at some length is to illustrate the deep engagement which existed between king and parliament at this time. Edward was a man who listened to his representatives, and held dialogue with them, even if he did not or could not agree to their demands. Although it is the mass of legislation passed by his grandfat
her, Edward I
that caught the attention of early legal historians, prompting them to call that king 'the English Justinian' (referring to the great Byzantine Emperor who codified the Roman Law), Edward III was no less of a legislator. But his methods were different: he was a lawmaker, not a lawgiver. He made laws by responding to parliamentary demands. Sometimes these demands allowed him to promote his own agenda for legislation; at other times the measures were all but forced upon him as a result of his need to maintain a high level of taxation. Sometimes even he had his own wishes presented to him in the form of a petition from a magnate. But the parliaments of Edward III are remarkable for the breadth and depth of the parliamentary dialogue between king and people. So great was Edward's contribution that one modern scholar has assigned him the tide of 'Second English Justinian', putting him on a footing equal to that of Edward I, the codifier of English Common Law.

Christmas
1353
was spent at Eltham, feasting every day for the traditional twelve days, and then a few days more. In the new year there was an Epiphany tournament, at which Prince Edward (the Black Prince), Sir John Chandos and Sir James Audley took part, dressed in armour covered with red and black velvet. Later in January Edward made his way into East Anglia. His life had become routine. Success and peace had led to building projects and parliaments becoming the events of his reign. Hunting, feasting, falconry, gift-giving and discussions about diplomatic marriages had become the stuff of his private life. Jousts and war were things of the past. Had his life continued in such a manner, one could look at the rest of it as being simply glitteringly rich, dominated by economic and social issues and architecturally splendid. Fortunately for Edward's biographers, there was more to it than that.

The origins of the approaching discontent lay in the political machinations of King Charles of Navarre, one
of French history's most dupli
citous and least likeable characters. He and his equally unlikeable brother Philip were second cousins of King John, being the sons of Philip d'Evreux and his wife Jeanne, daughter of King Louis X. They were thus royal princes on both their father's and their mother's side, and through their mother it had been claimed that Charles had a prior claim to the throne of France before Edward as well as King John.
47
Charles was also John's son-in-law. In January
1354
the brothers decided they would murder the constable of France, Charles of Spain, a close confidant of King John. Philip entered the inn at which Charles of Spain was staying and had his men stab him eighty times while he tried to escape, naked, from his chamber. He reported the news to his elder brother, who as
sumed repon
sibility for the killing, claiming he himself had ordered it to be done.

Charles of Navarre's behaviour was a deliberate antagonism to the French king, and he ri
ghtly
expected to be castigated for his crime. He therefore sought the support of the duke of Lancaster, to arrange for an English army to invade France if it should come to war. Lancaster referred the question back to Edward. After a little deliberation, Edward put forward excessive demands for supporting Charles, amounting to a division of the whole of France between them, with Edward being crowned king at Rheims. These were acceptable to Charles of Navarre. In the circumstances, he was likely to agree to anything in return for military aid.

Lancaster was sincere, and himself promised to fight for Charles of Navarre. Edw
ard was also sincere, and promptl
y gave orders for an army to be raised. Charles himself was anything but sincere. When Cardinal Guy of Boulogne was empowered to make peace with Charles, he used his diplomatic skills to good effect, and managed a cold but clear reconciliation between Charles and John at Mantes, on
22
February. John offered substantial gifts and concessions to Charles, despite his crime, and pardoned him. Then Cardinal Guy left the French royal party to write a sarcastic letter to Lancaster telling him the news. The English had been used and betrayed.