The Perfect King (73 page)

Edward had great difficulty coping with so many disasters. Old and sick, he dismissed many members of the royal household. Expenditure on the royal buildings almost entirely ceased. Any money available would be needed for war. The great palaces of state became silent echoing memorials of his glorious victories and the hope they inspired. At Windsor the winter sun of Christmas
1368
refracted through the glass, and lit up the newly painted walls of the dancing chamber in Philippa's apartments, but there was no dancing. Servants' steps rang out as they crossed the empty room. The clock chimed in the Round Tower. The prophecies of his youth had not prepared Edward for this loss of health, children and friends, this loneliness, this death.

But Edward still had his pride. He still had his throne, and he still had his responsibilities. Slowly his mind turned towards the oncoming war. With him that Christmas were the Chancellor, William of Wykeham (now bishop of Winchester), the Treasurer, John Barnet (bishop of Ely), his sons John and Edmund, and the earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Oxford.
These men, together with the earl of Arundel and Guy de Brian, remained with Edward for the next two months as the court moved first to Sheen and then to Westminster. In that time Edward had repeated bouts of illness, his physician John Glaston being sent to fetch more medicines. But despite his personal frailty, Edward was forming the strategy by which he would once again take on his enemies. The earls of Cambridge and Pembroke and Lord Charlton of Powys were among the many lords despatched to the prince of Wales. Richard Imworth and other sergeants-at-arms were ordered to arrest all ships in readiness for an attack on France. On
26
April a ship laden with a cargo of wine - a lavish present from King Charles to Edward - was sent back, the present refused. Archers were selected in their counties, men were arrayed in the towns, stones were ordered to be dug for siege engines, and parliament was summoned to Westminster. On
3
June, Edward asked parliament for its views on the prospect of war. The representatives responded unanimously that they believed Edward should resume the tide King of France, and make war on Charles de Valois.

Preparations gathered momentum. Taxation for the forthcoming war was agreed by parliament. Edward wrote to the prince on
19
Ju
ne that he had reclaimed the titl
e and would invade to reclaim his rights. He seized the revenues of foreign monasteries in England. The peace with
Scotland
was renewed. He sought also an alliance with Flanders, but Charles got there first, and secured the match by marrying his brother to Count Louis's heiress. In Castile his hopes of an alliance had been dashed by the murder of Pedro the Cruel in March
1369,
after which the pro-French Enrique resumed the throne. Aragon, however, was persuaded to remain a neutral partner. But in Gascony itself the prince was already under pressure. Before Pembroke and his reinforcements arrived, the far eastern part of the principality had been overrun. And in late April the French marched into Edward's county of Ponthieu. John of Gaunt was sent to Calais, where he had taken up residence by
16
July. It was expected that the army would follow shortly.

The army did not follow. In mid
J
uly Edward received a message from Philippa. She wanted him near her.

They both knew that she was near death. Her years of suffering were coming to an end. He made his way back up the Thames in the royal barge, towards Windsor. When the boat touched the quay there, the old king was helped out and escorted into the great palace he had built within the walls of his birthplace, and he came to the room where Philippa lay.

When he entered, she saw him, and extended her right hand from beneath the bedclothes, and put it into his right hand. 'We have enjoyed our union in happiness, peace and prosperity', she said. 'I therefore beg of you that when we are separated, you will grant me three requests.' Edward was in tears, but answered 'Lady, whatever you ask, it will be done.' 'My lord', she said, 'I ask you to pay whatever debts I may have outstanding, both in England and overseas. Secondly I beseech you also to fulfil all the bequests or gifts I may have made to churches, both in England and on the Continent, where I have prayed, as well as the legacies I have made to the men and women who have been in my service. And thirdly, when it pleases God to summon you, do not be buried anywhere else but beside my tomb, at Westminster.' Weeping, the king granted his beloved wife her final requests.

Philippa lingered for a few days. Edward suspended the invasion of France while he waited with her. Then on
15
August she died. Edward and their youngest son Thomas of Woodstock were with her at the end. England had lost one of its great treasures, a woman whose spirit was strong and yet never domineering, who managed to keep the peace between her ambitious sons, and who had smoothed Edward's brow as he struggled with his own demons, from the dark figure of the tyrant Mortimer in his early days to the fears and loneliness of his age. She was his oldest and closest companion.

Three months later Edward learnt that another dear friend, Sir Robert Ufford, earl of Suffolk, had died on
4
November. Outside the rain-spattered windows, across the grey cloud-frowned land of England, it had been the worst harvest for half a century. Reports were coming to him that the plague had returned for a third time. On
13
November, the day of his fifty-seventh birthday, plague killed his old friend the earl of Warwick. Edward had outlived almost all his friends and companions in arms. All six of the earls created so joyously and proudly in
1337
were dead. His mother, father, sisters and brother were all dead. His daughters Mary, Margaret and Joan were dead, and his son Lionel. He had buried three other children in infancy. All those who had wished him a long life had unwittingly wished on him this most cruel of fates: to be a man who lived his entire life in the company of friends, children and great men, and watched them die.

Edward prepared for Philippa's funeral with loving care. He could not face leading an army himself, and sent his own retinue across to Calais to join John. But John was more worried about his father than the French, and was back in England by mid-December, intending to spend Christmas with him. John gave precise instructions for a present of thirty fresh rabbits to be presented to his father on Christmas Eve. Edward and John spent Christmas together at King's Langley before being rowed down the river to the Tower of London at the end of the month. Philippa's embalmed body followed from Windsor on
3
January. Edward had ordered that the solemnities were to last six days. But he must have suspected that for him they would never end.

SIXTEEN

A
Tattered
Coat
Upon
a
Stick

By
1370
many of the joys in Edward's life had died, and all his glories were memories. The nation demanded the same high duty, enterprise and success as he had shown in the
1340s
but he was an old, sick man. He appeared a feeble shadow of what he had been in
1346.
To Edward, obsessed with his physical appearance, this mattered. And it mattered to him that he was no longer surrounded by his entourage of famous knights. Most of his true friends were dead, and more were shortly to follow them to the grave. As he waited sadly at the Tower for Philippa's body to be rowed down the Thames, Sir John Chandos, one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter, had a sword plunged into his face in a skirmish in Gascony and bled to death. Now only eight of the twenty-five knights who had jousted with him in the Garter tournament of
1349
were still alive, and five of those would die before Edward.'

Edward's reaction to the deaths and despondency was to cut himself off further from society. There were no new mass-creations of earls, like those of
1337
and
1351,
to replace those who had died. No earls were created at all. Edward withdrew from court, spending time alone with his few intimate companions, issuing instructions through a private secretary. The centre of government was at Westminster, th
e household was almost permanentl
y settled at Windsor, but Edward remained at Havering, Sheen and Eltham, only attending Westminster when he had to. Much regnal business simply was not done. Whereas in the first ten years of his reign he had granted an average of seventy charters every year, and sometimes more than a hundred, in
1370
he granted just three. In this way he became distant from the court, and unapproachable. He no longer heard what men said, or what rumours were circulating. There was no one left of sufficient stature to speak plainly to him. Only his sons, the prince and John of Gaunt, could talk to him with impunity, but the prince was in Gascony and John was circumspect, mindful of his delicate position as the next eldest son and probable guardian of the realm if his elder brother should die.

It was in this atmosphere of unnaturally silent vast palaces and empty council chambers, that Edward's friendship and devotion came to fix itself on his mistress, Alice Perrers. The sexual satisfaction she gave him was matched by Edward's increasing dependence on her. Devoid of information about public opinion, she became his principal adviser. Of course, she advised him carefully, telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. She also took care to put in a good word for her growing circle of ambitious friends. Men she knew and liked received lucrative commissions and positions. As time went by she grew in Edward's estimation, and he trusted her more. She grew bolder. So their relationship became the subject of gossip at Westminster and Windsor: gossip which Edward feared and avoided.

For the moment, however, Edward's priority was the renewal of the war in France. Exercising his mind on this may well have proved cathartic in the wake of Philippa's death. Three months after her funeral, in April
1370,
he ordered John of Gaunt to take an army to Gascony to reinforce the prince's position. At the same time, Sir Robert Knolles was ordered to attack from Calais. It was the classic English strategy which Edward had used with such great effect on so many occasions since
1343:
a double attack, from the north and the south. Edward saw no reason why it should not work again, if it could be reinforced with treaties with the Low Countries, Germany and Genoa, whose support he now tried to enlist, with varying degrees of success.

Knolles landed at Calais in July with more than four thousand men and set out on a grand destructive campaign at the end of the month. Once again the fires burnt across France, from Saint-Omer to Arras and Noyon. Sir John Seton, a Scotsman fighting for the English, walked unaccompanied into Noyon with his sword drawn and harangued the garrison until they attacked him. He continued fighting alone until his page shouted to him that the army was passing by the town, and he had better stop fighting now if he wanted to catch up with them. Acknowledging his thanks for the sport, Sir John left the corpse-strewn scene and, taking the reins of his horse from his page, rode off to catch up with Knolles. On went the English, burning, looting and generally doing all they could to encourage attack. But King Charles knew better now than to rise to the bait. The English would have to move on, so he ordered his men not to stand in their way. Instead he would sacrifice the villages and let the villagers look out for themselves. By avoiding conflict he not only avoided defeat, he encouraged the English army to collapse in recriminations and dissent. Other English knights blamed Knolles for failing to bring the French to
battle
. After all, they complained, what did Knolles know about command? He was just a knight, a brigand, a privateer, a commoner. Most English armies were commanded by earls. Knol
les had been promoted above his
station, they said. The attack in the north moved into Brittany, away from Paris, and broke up into smaller and smaller forces, each to withdraw or to be attacked separately.

The campa
ign in the south fared differentl
y. John of Gaunt arrived in Gascony at the end of July and met up with the prince. Although he knew his brother was ill, he did not realise quite how grave his condition was. He was shocked to find him bedridden. But the prince was not dead yet. The French army was in the region of Limoges, and the bishop of Limoges had defected to their cause. This roused the prince to fury. He had liked and trusted the bishop so much that he had made him godfather to his eldest son, and he angrily prepared to make his first journey out of Bordeaux for two years. He was carried in a Utter at the head of the army to Limoges, where he set about the attack of the city. On
19
September, having dug tunnels beneath the walls, the pit props were fired and the walls crashed down. The English troops poured into the city. The attack was decisive. The bishop of Limoges and the other leading men of the town were brought to the prince in chains, and the city was looted and burnt to the ground. Taking a leaf from his father's book, the prince sentenced the bishop to death and then waited for the pope to beg for mercy, allowing him to appear magnanimous as well as victorious. But soon everything turned bitter for the prince. Weakened by the journey, his poor health made it impossible for him to carry on. He had to return to Bordeaux, defeated by his own sickness. There he learnt that his son and heir, Edward of Angouleme, had died. Distraught, he made preparations to return to England with his wife and remaining son, Richard of Bordeaux, leaving the chaotic administration of what was left of the principality, including the funeral of his son, in the hands of John of Gaunt.