The Perfect King (78 page)

This sudden turnaround is noticeable even in the arrangements made for his funeral. Absolutely no expense was spared. Everything and everyone was covered in black cloth: the great chamber and chapel at Sheen, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, the royal family, all the hundreds of servants in the royal household, the horse harness and litter to convey Edward's body to London. His body was embalmed 'with balsam and other perfumes and oils to stop it putrefying' by Roger Chandler at a cost of
£21.
His death-mask was made so that his true likeness, like Philippa's, would be preserved for eternity. This was fixed to a wooden effigy carried at the funeral, dressed in his clothes and shown off, and was later used as the model for his gilt-bronze monumental tomb. His body was wrapped in silk, white 'cloth of Tartar' and red samite, and dressed in cloth of gold. His coffin was lined with red samite. Ceremonial requiem masses were sung at Sheen. When the body was taken to St Paul's via Wandsworth, in a procession which lasted three days (with the cloth specially cut away so his face could be seen), no fewer than one thousand seven hundred torches - amounting to more than three tons of wax - were used at a cost of over
£200.
Every torch bearer was dressed in black. Bells were rung in every parish. At St Paul's and Westminster, further requiem masses were sung. On the day that his body was finally laid to rest in the church at Westminster, near Philippa's tomb, as he had promised, a great feast was held which cost more than
£566:
almost twice as much as the great feast at Windsor on St George's Day that year and, with probably the sole exception of the feast at his coronation, more than any other dinner in his whole feast-filled reign. At the time it was probably the most expensive funeral ever held in England.

It marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary personal exaltations which England has ever known. As a transformation of a military man into godlike hero the most obvious comparison is Nelson, four centuries later. But Nelson's apotheosis pales by comparison with that of Edward. For Edward was not just revered as a great
battle
hero, he became hailed as the archetypal leader of men, in peace as well as war. By the time his monument in Westminster Abbey was complete, about eight years later, he was deemed worthy of the following epitaph:

Here lies the glory of the English, the flower of kings past, the pattern for kings to come, a merciful king, the bringer of peace to his people, Edward III, who attained his jubilee. The undefeated warrior, a second Maccabeus, who prospered while he lived, revived
sound rule, and reigned valiantl
y; now may he attain his heavenly crown
.5

Another contemporary, writing at York, described him as

full gracious among all the worthy men of the world, for he passed and shone by virtue and grace given to him from God, above all his predecessors that were noble men and worthy. And he was a well hard-hearted man, for he never dreaded mischance, nor harm, nor the evil fortune that might befall a noble warrior and one so fortunate both on land and at sea. And in all
battle
s and assemblies, with a passing glory and worship, he had ever the victory.

This same writer's view is worth commenting on further, as he was writing a secular chronicle, not a monastic one, and his work proved the most popular of its age. This is therefore as close as we are likely to get to what the proverbial man in the street thought of Edward in the decade or so after his death:

He was meek and benign, homely, sober, and soft to all manner of men, to strangers as well as his own subjects and others that were under his governance. He was devout and holy, both to God and the Holy Church, for he worshipped and maintained the Holy Church and her ministers with all manner of reverences. He was entreatable, and w
ell-advised in temporal and worl
dly needs, wise in counsel, and discreet, soft, meek and good to speak with. In his deeds and manner full gentle and well-taught, having pity on them that were diseased, generous in giving alms, and busy and curious in building; and full li
ghtly
he bore and suffered wrongs and harms. And when he was given to any occupation, he left all other things in the mean time, and held to it. He was seemly of body, and of middling stature, having always to both high- and low-born a good cheer. And there sprang and shone so much grace from him that whatever manner of man beheld his face, or had dreamed of him, he was made hopeful that whatever should happen to him that day should be joyful and to his liking.

The word to note is 'grace'. Many writers use it in describing Edward in retrospect, as they had done in describing his 'gracious' victories in his heyday. A Latin chronicler, drawing from Walsingham's text, broke off to write that Edward 'was glorious, kind, merciful and magnificent above all the kings and princes of the world, and called "The Gracious" on account of that singular grace by which he was exalted'. Such writers were alluding to divine blessing - something beyond mere greatness of action — a greatness and perfection of his nature. Even those who did not refer to him as gracious held him up as a paragon of leadership. A poem written about the time of Edward's death speaks of 'an English ship we had, noble it was and high of tower, it was held in dread throughout Christendom: the rudder was neither oak nor elm but Edward the Third, the noble knight'.
Another contemporary piece remembers Edward as 'the flower of earthly warriors
...
against his foes he was as grim as a leopard, towards his subjects as mild as a lamb'.

It did not take long for Edward to become the stuff of legend. With his grandson's reign proving so divisive and lacking in achievements, Edward's name came to represent a golden age. Thus, although the chroniclers of
1377
may well have been moved by genuine admiration for the king they had just lost, those repeating their words in the
1390s
were moved by the need for another such hero king. Moreover, what they needed was not a hero who would spend the last fifteen years of his life in physical and political decline but a hero who remained heroic. So they made Edward into one. Although the Edward III of
1372-77
certainly would not count as a hero in any respect, and the Edward III of
1363-71
would not qualify easily either, these periods of his rule were obliterated. How many people writing about Edward in the
1390s
could correctl
y remember the events of
1333-50?
Edward's achievements became legendary. He became a sort of Good King Edward, who provided the model for much of the fifteenth century's folk literature and romance. Such an image was not without a basis in fact, but today we would call it caricature. If the 'real King Arthur' were to march forth from the underworld we should expect to see Edward alongside the mysterious Dark Age warrior of that name, for if the king in the fifteenth-century Arthurian poems (including many of the Arthurian stories which we know today) is based on any single identifiable personality, it is that of Edward
III
. In legends he became
what he aspired to be in life.

So let us leave aside the legends. The hard fact is that Edward was a hugely successful king, even though he had his share of failures and arguments and died in lonely misery. He was prophesied to be a great conqueror in Europe and he became one. He lived up to every expectation of him recorded at his birth by his father's biographer except one: he died aged sixty-four, one year short of the age attained by
Henry III
. When he came to the throne the model of great kingship was that of his grandfather, Edward I. He eclipsed that and set a new standard for kings everywhere to admire. If he had died in
1363,
having won all his victories and achieved his jubilee, and before his achievements had been overshadowed by later disasters, we would probably know him today as Edward the Great.

To rank Edward's achievements is difficult. One of the greatest was certainly his creation of a new model of kingship. The first st
age of this -
his recovery of English royal authority from its nadir of
1330
- was in itself a huge achievement. It is astounding that Edward at eighteen not only coped with Roger Mortimer and the debacle of his father's secret custody in the hands of potential enemies but managed to preserve his mother's dignity afterwards and then pursued an aggressive foreign policy. After that it is hardly surprising that he weathered the political crisis in
1341
as if it were the passing of a few rainclouds. His vision of monarchy, his championing of the
idea
of monarchy - in terms of leadership, spirituality, chivalry, patronage, dress, propaganda, and parliamentary authority
-
not only aided his own family, it provided an example to all of Europe. By combining chivalric adventuring with military leadership, cultural patronage and political responsibility, he brought together all the real and imagined virtues of a Christian king. It made kingship a very demanding art, and one in which a man past middle age could not realistically hope to succeed, but he demonstrated how successful it could be. For the thirty years between
1333
and
1363
he was the greatest exponent of the art of chivalric kingship there ever was.

An equally impressive achievement was his preservation of peace in England for the duration of his long reign. In
1327
he had been exhorted above all else to work for domestic peace. His policy of keeping the war on foreign soil, clearly articulated in
1339,
was novel, successful and hugely to the benefit of England. It was not so much the battles in France which mattered; it was the complete absence of fighting in England. Social historians often point to the prosperity brought by the wool trade as the reason why so many great churches were built in England in the mid-fourteenth century; but the wool trade itself (including the booming cloth trade) would not have flourished as it did if it had not been for fifty years of domestic peace and stability. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this. Anyone who assumes that peace was a natural state in the British Isles has only to refer to the preceding and following reigns or the contemporary situations in Ireland and Scotland to see that any weakness in the king's character could easily lead to widespread social, economic and political turmoil.

A third great achievement has to be the status he gave England internationally. In his dealings with the papacy prior to
1346,
Edward appears aware of the inferiority of England to France on the international stage, as if he had an international chip on his national shoulder. It was his force of character and his extraordinary determination to play a major role in international politics which changed this. In
1330
France was unquestionably the pre-eminent military kingdom in Europe and the French pope could rely on his links with the French king to dominate Christendom. Edward threatened that spiritual-political alliance more than anyone else. Through his anti-papal legislation and his reinforcement of English royal rights, he helped pave the nation's own religious path, already beginning to diverge from the Cath
olic Church. Even more importantl
y for England's national identity, pride and status, he measured up to all his international rivals, be they spiritual, French, Flemish, Brabanter, German, Spanish or Genoese. Even the distant Florentines came to regard England as the military epicentre of Europe.

Edward's fourth major achievement has to be his method of making war. Whether we like it or not, Edward was to warfare what Mozart was to music. He found a new way of doing things, and it proved as good or better than almost everything that had gone before. Until
26
August
1346
international conflicts were not won or lost by firepower alone, they were won by feudal armies of expensively armoured knights. On that day all this changed. Groups of English peasants and yeomen's sons came to be the breakers of the most heavily armoured noblemen. But more than that, Edward's stroke of genius was to take the tactic of projectile warfare -which his commanders had discovered at Dupplin Moor and which he had used at Halidon Hill — and to combine it with the
chevauchee
.
the twenty-mile-wide front destroying everything in its path as it progressed through enemy territory. Sufficient destruction forced the enemy to attack, and any enemy advancing on a well-ordered army capable of projectile warfare - whether equipped with longbows or guns - was almost certain to be torn to pieces in the crossfire. Such methods gave Edward the confidence to march across France and win his war of rivalry with Philip de Valois. It was the most effective military strategy of the middle ages, which proved just as decisive when employed by Henry V at Agincourt in
1415.
When guns replaced longbows as the weapon of choice, it was not Edward's strategy which was outdated, only the means of putting it into action.

A fifth major achievement is the one which historians have always associated with this reign: the development of parliament. This was, of course, only in
directly
an achievement of Edward's. But in view of his cast-iron will on the international political scene, he should be given the credit for proving so malleable on the domestic front. The writer who stated that Edward was 'as grim as a leopard' to his overseas enemies and 'mild as a lamb' to his compatriots was thinking along these same lines. Edward won the affections of his people by refusing to compromise with his overseas enemies and willingly compromising with the representatives of his kingdom. Nor should we give all the credit for reform to those who presented the petitions in parliament. Many statutes were initiated by the representatives, but Edward himself initiated some and the decision to enact all of them lay with the king. Furthermore, the status of the commons in relation to the magnates was allowed to change, and this too can be
directly
connected with Edward's policy of welcoming the rich merchants into noble society, through knighthoods, social codes and parliamentary authority. When the commons had taken part in the deposition of
1327
they were forced into taking such a bold move by an aristocrat, the earl of March. When the commons took action against the corrupt officials around Edward in the Good Parliament, they did it of their own accord, and it was not the earl of March who led the attack, it was his steward, a commoner. Under Edward III, parliament in general and the commons in particular gained a real voice in the government of the realm. Under his father, such participatory government would not have been allowed to emerge, let alone flourish.