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CHAPTER 1
Childhood
Of all the stages in the life of a resourceful and imaginative individual, childhood is the most important and the most difficult to understand. We need to think about a boy's physical well-being as he developed, as well as his education, social situation and religious outlook. We have to consider his associations with relatives, companions and mentors. With regard to medieval characters, prophecies, feuds and spiritual cults dominated families for generations, and cannot be passed over simply because of their lack of relevance in the modern world. We must understand the strict definitions of hierarchy, and the fighting and leadership skills which noble heirs were expected to display. With regard to royalty, we must also think of the huge weight of public expectation on a young prince. With a growing boy of any class, we must pay a thought to what he simply liked to do, what he found fun. Thus it is fair to say that it is a major failing of all the previous biographies of Edward III that his childhood has either been completely ignored, or covered by a chapter describing his father's shortcomings as a monarch.
It is easy to see why this has happened: there is very little information available on Edward III's early life except his father's rule. However, there is no doubt that Edward's relationship with his father was much more important and complicated than merely seeing at first hand how his father's antagonism of the most important nobles led to civil war. What about his personal feelings towards his father? What about the bonds of trust, rivalry, humour, friendship, mutual support, love and (eventually) gratitude which a son often feels for his father and a father often feels for his son? And what about his relationships with other people, for instance his mother? Existing studies say almost nothing of personal relevance between his birth and baptism in November 1312, and his creation as duke of Aquitaine in September 1325. Practically the only personal facts regularly mentioned about him in this period are his creation as earl of Chester, his first being summoned to parliament at the age of seven, and the supposed appointment of Richard Bury as his tutor. With such a shortage of material, it is not surprising that writers have concentrated on the political turmoil of his father's reign, with the overt or implied understanding that young Edward saw his father make a mess of ruling his realm and vowed to try to do better.
We too can try to do better. For a start we may take a very different view on his relationship with his father, about whom we know much more than Dr Mackinnon, who in 1900 began his biography of Edward III with the line 'A more complete ninny than Edward II has seldom occupied a throne.' Edward II's failings as a king did not arise from stupidity or a desire to be obtuse and overbearing towards his subjects. He was undoubtedly one of the most pious kings of medieval England, deeply conscious of his indebtedness to God for his great status, and a sincere believer in the power of the intervention of the saints. He was a man who loved to be generous, and to be seen to be generous. At the same time he could be cruel, and he did not have much of a capacity for forgiveness, or even toleration. He was capable of huge affection, but preferred genuine closeness to the formal bonds of diplomatic and military friendship. He had a keen sense of humour and a rare ability to express it. In 1305 he wrote to his uncle, Louis d'Evreux, sending him 'a big trotting palfrey which can hardly carry its own weight, and some of our bandy-legged harriers from Wales, who can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and some of our running dogs, which go at a gentle pace: for well we know that you take delight in lazy dogs'. As a young man Edward II's closest companion — and most would say the true love of his life — was the dashing Piers Gaveston, a Gascon knight's son, three years older, who was outrageously witty, unashamedly rude, clever, physically strong, and brilliant enough with a lance to humiliate the proud heirs of England's most important families in the joust, the sport they rated above all others. In the words of a well-informed contemporary, Edward 'adopted Gaveston as a brother' and 'cherished him as a son'. Gaveston in return gave Edward the confidence to be his unconventional self. Above all else, Edward II wished to establish himself as an individual, not a model prince, and in so doing he embarked on a personal rebellion against authority which lasted for much of the rest of his reign.
Gaveston was murdered in June 1312 by the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Hereford, and the country was plunged into turmoil. Many feared the king's wrath: it seemed that the bloodiest of civil wars was about to break out. The king summoned the earls responsible to London to account for themselves, and they responded with armed force. Lancaster came with a thousand horsemen and fifteen hundred foot soldiers; Warwick with troops from the forest of Arden, and Hereford with a crowd of Welsh 'woodland wild men'. Their troops encamped between St Albans and Ware, within marching distance of the city. Edward, at Blackfriars, urged the citizens of London to defend their gates and walls. He summoned parliament to Westminster to discuss the crisis, and the earls of Pembroke and Surrey urged him to make war on those who had authorised the killing. A papal envoy, Cardinal Arnaud Nouvel, arrived at the end of August, and negotiated directly with the rebel earls at St Albans. He persuaded them to meet the king. But when the earls finally arrived in the city, they came heavily armed. The earl of Gloucester, the king's nephew, then took up the duty of chief negotiator. He achieved little, for the king refused to accept that his most cherished friend was a traitor, and the earls refused to acknowledge that their killing amounted to murder. When Edward left London for Windsor, the recriminations and threats of violence still rattled between the upper ranks of the English nobility. Civil war seemed the most probable outcome.
In such a political atmosphere, on Monday 13 November 1312, Edward III was born at Windsor. The country's relief was described by the contemporary author of the Life of Edward the Second:
Amid this uproar, with various rumours flying hither and thither, while one man foretold peace, his neighbour war, there was born to the king a handsome and long looked-for son. He was christened Edward, his father's name ... This long wished-for birth was timely for us, because by God's will it had two fortunate consequences. It much lessened the grief which had afflicted the king on Piers [Gaveston's] death, and it provided a known heir to the throne.
All across England there was celebration. A monk of St Albans recorded that 'by this birth all England was made joyful ... and his father was made happy again, for it tempered that sadness he had felt since the death of Piers'. The monk went on: 'On that day his love of the boy began and the memory of Piers began to diminish.' Edward, it would seem, had redeemed the situation. By his very birth he had pulled the country back from the abyss.
These references to Gaveston and the baby being held in comparable affection are interesting, for they echo those chronicles which refer to Edward II loving his friend as a brother or a son. This was certainly close endearment: no one ever accused Edward II of being a cruel father, or uncaring towards his sisters and half-brothers. He had a particular fondness for female family members — especially his stepmother, Queen Margaret — and maintained his old nurse, Alice Leygrave, for many years. His efforts to bring his friends into the royal family by marrying them to his female relatives — Piers Gaveston is the prime, though not the sole, example — further underline how important family ties were to Edward. The royal family was clearly at the heart of his view of his kingdom and the rest of God's Creation. This explains why his son's birth was of such political — as well as personal — significance to him. The king and many of his subjects would have strongly associated the birth of an heir with God's will, and thus it was a blessing, a gift to the kingdom ordained by God. Edward had received divine confirmation that his line would continue. Most important of all, the whole country — including the rebel earls — had to acknowledge this blessing. There had to be some fear in the earls' camps that God was favouring the king and, by implication, not his enemies.
Edward, in his joy at hearing this news, granted the man who bore it, John Launge, and his wife, Joan (one of the queen's attendants), the extraordinary sum of eighty pounds yearly for life. This was more than many knights received, and it is perhaps not surprising that the sheriffs of London proved very reluctant to pay it. But such a huge gift to the bearer of the news was money well-spent. Although it was probably motivated by paternal pride, it had propaganda value too. It helped draw attention to the fact that the king now had a son. Even better publicity was the timely presence of the papal legate, Cardinal Nouvel. Edward jumped at the opportunity to have his son and heir baptised by an emissary of the pope. Accordingly, on Thursday 16 November 1312, Cardinal Nouvel christened young Edward of Windsor in St Edward's Chapel in Windsor Castle. For good measure, Edward asked the other peace envoys in the country — Count Louis d'Evreux, the queen's uncle, and the bishop of Poitiers — to be the boy's godfathers. To these he added five more godfathers: John Droxford (bishop of Bath and Wells), Walter Reynolds (bishop of Worcester), John of Brittany (earl of Richmond), Aymer de Valence (earl of Pembroke) and one Hugh Despenser. The last-mentioned was the father of the man of the same name who, nine years later, finally plunged the country into civil war.
Edward's birth was symbolic for other, secular reasons. England in the early fourteenth century was a country in which the future and the past were interwoven with the present in a series of potent and developing stories. Great families knew their history — none more so than the royal family — and they believed that, to a certain extent, they knew their futures too, through prophecy. This was not personal fortune-telling but public prophecy, which soon was circulated as rumour and eventually captured in literary works. In the widely-circulated 'Prophecy of the Six Kings', probably first written down in its earliest form at about the time of Edward's birth, the six kings following King John were characterised by beasts. Henry III was portrayed as a lamb, Edward I as a dragon, Edward II as a goat and Edward III as a boar 'who will come out of Windsor'. Although a boar might not strike the modern reader as an animal of great significance, it had huge resonance in the fourteenth century. 'The boar who came out of Cornwall' was none other than King Arthur himself. Moreover, 'the boar who will come out of Windsor' was prophesied to have the head and heart of a lion. He would wear 'three crowns' — an oblique reference to the three crowns of the Holy Roman Empire, one iron, one silver and one gold — and be buried at Cologne amongst the tombs of the Three Kings, the Magi, who were then understood to be the first Christian kings. To many contemporaries, the future was clear: Edward II would lose his kingdom. He would die overseas. After his death, his successor, Edward of Windsor, would win fame as a warrior-king, become Holy Roman Emperor, and win battles across Europe, regaining the lands which his ancestors had lost. The people of England could have some faith that their newborn prince would grow up not just to be a king but a lion-hearted and victorious one.
The large number of copies of this prophecy allow us to be reasonably confident that Edward knew it. A revision updated in about 1327 was incorporated into the most popular chronicle of the day, the Brut, written in the mid-1330s, of which Queen Isabella owned a copy at her death. Later in his life Edward specifically renounced any intention of being buried at the shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, suggesting he knew this was widely expected of him. When personally visiting the shrine in 1338, he gave a large amount of money to be spent on upkeep of the building, so that part of the prophecy was familiar to him by then. But whether he believed all of it, totally, is another question. While certainty in such matters is not possible, it is probable that he recognised that true prophetic writing could contain kernels of truth. When declaring that he wished to be buried in Westminster rather than Cologne, he did not merely pass an idle remark: he swore a solemn oath, so he seems to have taken the original prophecy seriously. And there is good evidence that royal prophecies were taken seriously by Edward's father, for Edward II had faith in one prophetic story in particular: the oil of St Thomas.
The story of the oil of St Thomas stated that when Thomas Becket had been in exile, the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a dream. She had announced to him that the fifth king after his time (Edward II) would be a benevolent man who would fight for God's church, and reconquer the Holy Land. To assist this king and his successors the Virgin entrusted Becket with an ampulla of sacred oil, and directed him to give it to a monk of St Cyprian's monastery. The monk hid it in the church of St George at Poitiers, with a sheet of metal inscribed with the prophecy itself. After an attempt to steal it had failed, it had come into the possession of the duke of Brabant, Edward II's brother-in-law, who had brought it to the king's coronation in 1308. It was not used, however. Ten years later, Edward II claimed that he believed the reason his reign was so unsuccessful was because he, the fifth king after Becket's time, had failed to be anointed with the oil. And in so doing he had failed not only his kingdom, himself and his successors but also St Thomas and the Virgin Mary. So anxious was he for some respite from his failure that he wrote to the recently elected Pope John XXII asking whether he would send a cardinal to anoint him with the oil. The pope refused the services of a cardinal, but said that if the king truly believed the story it would not be sinful for him to be anointed. That Edward II raised such a matter privately with the pope suggests his interest in this prophecy was not merely political, but spiritual too. He believed it.
We do not know how deeply Edward III shared his father's view of this or any other prophecy. It may just be coincidence but the three most important divine figures in Edward III's life — the Virgin Mary, St Thomas of Canterbury and St George — all appear in this story. But in an age when most people believed in destiny, Edward would have understood that it was widely held that he would become a military conqueror abroad and a champion of the church, a man whose leadership had been awaited for centuries. It was an utterly traditional role for a king, very similar to that of his grandfather, the majestic and fearsome Edward I; but it was also wrapped in romance and religious mysticism, and thus embodied all the virtues of fourteenth-century kingship.
If there was a fly in the prophetic ointment, it was the day of the birth. 13 November was St Brice's Day, and St Brice was not the sort of saint by whom one would choose to be governed. He was a pupil of the fifth-century saint, St Martin of Tours, and used to tease his master with sarcastic comments, not always stopping short of insult: calling him half-witted, for instance. St Martin responded by praying that Brice would succeed him as bishop of Tours, and prophesying that he would be treated very badly during his episcopacy. So it happened: Bishop Brice was charged at the age of thirty-three with fathering his washerwoman's child. On commanding the baby to speak in the name of Christ to reveal whether he was the father or not, the people accused him of witchcraft and threw him out of the city. Only after spending seven years in exile at the papal palace in Rome did Brice achieve sufficient composure and sanctity to return to Tours and rule as a more saintly bishop for the rest of his life. Thus it may have been with some trepidation that each chronicler recorded the feast day of St Brice in connection with their new prince's birth. After all, Edward II had been born on St Mark's Day, and that was hardly any more propitious, being widely regarded as a day of doom. The author of the Life of Edward the Second ended his eulogy on the young prince's birth with the hope that he would 'combine in his person the virtues that characterised in turn his forebears. May he follow the industry of King Henry the second, the well-known valour of King Richard, may he reach the age of King Henry [the third], revive the wisdom of King Edward [the first] and remind us of the physical strength and comeliness of his father.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Edward III: The Perfect King"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Ian Mortimer.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
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