The Perfect King (69 page)

Edward and his contemporaries had every reason to believe that the subsequent decade would be an age of great achievements. Parliament could expect legal battles, the king could build and live in splendour. Few at the parliament of
1361,
seeing the peace ratified, and realising that English local government had become a reality, could possibly have guessed how the coming year would be marked not by a glorious peace but by tragedy.

*

A
number of Edward's close companions had died over the last year. The young earl of March - marshal of the English army, Knight of the Garter and still only thirty-one - had died in France in
1360.
Edward had his body brought back to England and gave expensive offerings at his burial at Wigmore and at his obsequies at Windsor. In September
1360
another Knight of the Garter, the earl of Northampton, died. He was Edward's contemporary, one of his bravest generals and one of the few men left who had been there with Edward that night when Mortimer had been arrested, thirty years earlier. Edward gave several expensive cloths of gold for his funeral too. Two more Garter knights were buried at the end of the year: Sir John Beauchamp (standard-bearer at Crecy) and the veteran warrior Sir Thomas Holland, husband of the Fair Maid of Kent and the man who had bellowed across the Seine at the French on the Cr6cy campaign. Edward's old friends were disappearing fast.

The biggest blow, however, was Lancaster's death, on
23
March
1361.
Lancaster had been Edward's most trusted friend for about twenty years. He had won several major
battle
s as sole leader, had fought under Edward's banner, been present at the si
ege of Calais, and had won countl
ess skirmishes and minor sieges. He had been one of the six earls created in
1337
and the chief negotiator in Edward's search for peace since
1353.
It was probably his garters which had resulted in the emblem being adopted by Edward's chivalric order. He had wisdom, strength, courage and luck. Furthermore he had that quality which Edward prized above all others: royalty, as the great-grandson of Henry III, like Edward himself. And he had great piety too. In his
The Book of Holy Medicines
he has left us the most detailed first
-
hand account of the character of a great magnate at Edward's court. He was not only literate, he prized being able to write, having taught himself. He could speak English as well as French. He was pious, the general theme of
The Book of Holy Medicines
being a description of how his five senses had become infected with the Seven Deadly Sins. And with almost Pepysian self-deprecat
ing honesty he admitted to exactl
y how this had happened over the course of his life. In his youth he had been tall, slim, good-looking, and vain. He had taken great pleasure in regarding the rings on his fingers and his foot in the stirrup. He had loved dancing and music, and had worn the most exquisite clothes (he thought garters particularly suited him). He had made love to many women, sung songs to them, then 'loved and lost them'. He admitted that he much preferred the embraces of common women to aristocratic ones as they were less censorious of his behaviour. At the time of writing he was in his early fifties, suffering from gout, but still very partial to salmon (his favourite food), spices and strong sauces, and he loved drinking good wine in quantity. Like Edward, in
1360
feasting and hunting were his greatest passions (love-making having fallen by the wayside of middle age), but the song of the nightingale and the scents of roses, musk, violets and lily of the valley were also dear to him. This was the man whom Edward now lost, an intelligent, sensual, brave cousin, a successful commander, the father-in-law of his son John, and his best friend. At his funeral, in the collegiate church at Leicester, Edward gave four cloths of gold Eastern brocade and four of gold brocade of Lucca in his memory.

Worse was to follow. On
26
February
1361
burning lights had been seen across the sky at midnight. Some said they formed the shape of the cross, and many were afraid. There was an eclipse of the sun, followed by a severe drought. Corn, fruit and hay withered and died in the spring. It was said that not rain but blood fell at Boulogne. Others said that men had seen images of two
castle
s in the sky, from which black and white hosts issued to fight one another. All these strange events were soon explained as forewarnings of a calamitous event. The portents may have been illusory but the calamity itself was not. In May the plague returned.

It is easy for us to take the view that the plague of
1361
was not as bad as that of
1348-49.
After all, people knew what to expect, and would have
been less shocked. But for exactl
y that reason the return of the plague -with the widespread expectation that it
would
be as bad as
1348-49
- must have been deeply unsettling. People had thought that the plague had gone forever; so with its return, they became aware that it had not, but might return again and again, as indeed it did. Children were particularly vulnerable. Anyone not born before
1349
had no resistance, and one chronicler speaks of the plague being the Children's Plague as a result of the high infant mortality.

For Edward the return of the plague carried a particular resonance. It challenged him again to show his faith that God would protect him by appearing regularly in public. But would God protect him now that he had won his war? Such reasoning was normal in the spiritual climate of
1361.
After the
1360
campaign God had seen fit to summon five Knights of the Garter to his heavenly table, their earthly duties done. Lancaster may even have been killed by the plague, as many chroniclers said. Would God now kill off Edward too?

During the last visitation of the plague, Edward had ostentatiously held the Order of the Garter tournament at Windsor. Since then the Windsor tournament and mass in St George's Chapel had become a fixture of the royal calendar. With plague once more encroaching on the spirit of the nation, the Windsor tournament again became the focal point of Edward's demonstration that royalty did not shrink from mortal diseases. He seized the opportunity to make the
1361
feast of St George every bit as high-profile as its predecessors. As five
Knights of the Garter had recentl
y died, he installed other men in their places, including his three sons, Lionel, John and Edmund. Along with the usual blue robes of the Order, black and scarlet lengths of material were ordered in large quantities, possibly for teams of living knights to joust against mourners or the dead. More than two hundred garter emblems were ordered to be sewn, many furs were trimmed as gifts, and more than eight hundred brooches were made to b
e given out at the king's will.

After the tournament festivities Edward went to Sheppey to oversee the foundation laying of his new town and
castle
. The plague spread, killing thousands. The cemeteries were reopened. Men of substance began to pack up and head off for their most remote estates. On
10
May Edward suspended the actions of all the law courts as a consequence of the pestilence. Many lesser men, panic-stricken by the approach of the disease, seized what they thought might be their last opportunity to go on a pilgrimage, to atone for their sins. In this way they spread the disease further. By the summer it was rife.

Edward staged two more high-profile events. These took the form of royal marriages. The first, and easiest to arrange, was the wedding at Woodstock of his seventeen-year-old daughter Mary to the young John de Montfort, claimant to the duchy of Brittany, who had grown up at the English court. The second was a much more controversial match: the prince of Wales and Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent. It seems that, not long after Sir Thomas Holland's death, the prince moved in on the widow. This was commonly rumoured to have been a love-match, and it seems almost certain that it was. Joan's marital history was notorious, she had had two husbands already, had given birth to five children and was now about thirty-three years of age. Edward himself had intended his son and heir to marry an heiress from the Low Countries, but the pope had been holding up such a match for years, refusing to grant the necessary dispensation. It was with surprise but no regrets that Edward acquiesced to his son's desire to marry his second cousin. He wrote to the pope that summer to ask permission for the marriage. This was swiftly granted. With great ceremony, the Black Prince and his fair bride were married by the archbishop of Canterbury, at Windsor on
10
October
1361.

Some chroniclers wrote of their shock at this union. Joan - 'the Virgin of Kent' as one writer sarcastically referred to her
- was now set to become queen.
Froissart (who probably met her on several occasions) described her as both the most beautiful woman in England and also the most given over to love. Not only was she bigamous and believed to be adulterous, she was profligate too. She was quite capable of spending
£200
on a set of jewelled buttons: a show of outrageous flamboyance worthy of Edward himself.'
4
But Edward, despite the rumours of her unsuitability, seems to have raised no objection to the match. Indeed, he condoned it, sending his own man to ask for the papal dispensation. After the wedding the couple retired to Berkhamsted for the rest of the year, where Edward visited them after Christmas.

No matter how many high-profile events Edward held, no matter how much he tried to show that royal business was proceeding as normal, the plague continued. He could not hold back the tide of death which again swept across the country. After the first suspension of the law courts in May, Edward was forced to suspend them again. Law and order suffered. Women whose husbands had been lost to the disease were forced to marry 'strangers' by their manorial bailiffs, or else lose their homes and lands. Edward was forced to suspend the operations of the Exchequer to try to stop the spread of the disease. Taxation and finance suffered. And among the dying there now were people who mattered to Edward. Although he was probably not in the least upset to hear of the death in June of Thomas Lisle, the embittered bishop of Ely, he would have been concerned by the death in September of the bishop of London, Michael Northburgh, co-founder (with Sir Walter Manny) of the London Charterhouse. Far more distressing were the deaths on
4
and
5
October respectively of Sir John Mowbray and Sir Reginald Cobham. The latter especially had been one of the principal architects of the
battle
of
Cre
cy.
A few days later the earl of Hereford died. Two weeks after that, Sir William Fitzwarin, another Knight of the Garter, became another casualty of the plague. The bishop of Worcester was added to the list a month later.

These deaths were all of
little
import by comparison with the death of his
daughter Mary in September.
She was only just married, only seventeen. Shortly afterwards, Edward's youngest daughter Margaret also died. Like her sister, she had not been long married, and, like her sister, she probably died of plague. Sadly the royal family made its way to Abingdon to bury the two royal princesses together in the abbey there. Of Edward's five daughters, he had lost all but one, Isabella.

Blow after blow had rained down on Edward. Death after death. And the questions about his victory in France were beginning to circulate at court. The problems were merely technical, but mere technicalities had undone the peace process before. There were still unresolved doubts about the actual boundary decisions of certain lands which Edward claimed the French had given up, and he demanded that the French king renounce sovereignty of them. John refused, and so Edward refused formally to renounce his claim on the throne of France until the matter was sorted out. This was not a ploy to allow him to begin the war again, as some writers have suggested, for the authority he issued to his son in Gascony clearly anticipated that his claim on the throne
w
ould
be given up.
But discussions in plague-stricken London in October
1361
were followed by further discussions in Paris, with no solution. An added complication was that many English soldiers of fortune were trying to make money in France in its crisis years, acting as bands of renegade soldiers, with no political affiliation. In November their antics were brought to Edward's attention, who commissioned John Hound and Richard Imworth to arrest any English men-at-arms or archers found plundering in France. Even though Imworth was an utterly ruthless man, later described as 'a tormentor without pity', it was not easy to stop these
self-serving bands of robbers.
Twenty-three years of war had led to an attitude of self-interest and violence towards France. It certainly was impossible to reverse that trend overnight.

At the beginning of
1362
Edward was in his fiftieth year, heading for that birthday which would bring up his personal jubilee. This was a significant milestone: with it came the unavoidable awareness that he was entering old age. Although fifty might seem barely middle-aged to the majority of modern readers, it was over the hill for most medieval aristocrats. The average age of the five Knights of the Garter who had died in
1360
was forty-three.