A Distant Mirror (56 page)

The tumultuous assembly was held at Westminster, with the Commons meeting in the chapter house of the abbey and the Lords in the White Chamber of the palace nearby. As Earl of Bedford, Coucy could have taken his place among the Lords at the opening ceremony on April 28, but there is no evidence that he did.

Taking the offensive, the Commons for the first time in its history elected a Speaker in the person of a knight of Herefordshire, Sir Peter de la Mare, who not accidentally was seneschal of the Earl of March. Critical moments often produce men to match the need; Sir Peter proved to be a man of courage, perseverance, and, in Walsingham’s
partisan judgment, a “spirit lifted up by God.” On behalf of the whole House he brought charges of malfeasance against two of the King’s ministers, Lord Latimer, the Chamberlain, and Sir Richard Lyons, a rich merchant and member of the Royal Council who acted as the King’s chief agent with the commercial community, and also against Alice Perrers, who, it was said, “has yearly up to 3,000 pounds from the King’s coffers. The realm would greatly profit by her removal.”

Latimer was a great noble and Knight of the Garter, a veteran of Crécy, Auray, and of Lancaster’s long march, a former Constable of Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports. He and Lyons were accused by the Speaker of amassing immense fortunes by schemes and frauds to cheat the revenue, including the acceptance of 20,000 pounds from the King in repayment for a loan of 20,000 marks, the mark being worth two thirds of the pound.

One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.

Infuriated by the presumption of what he called “these low hedge-knights,” Lancaster threatened in private “to give them such a fright that they shall not provoke me again.” He was warned by an adviser that the Commons “have the countenance of the Prince your brother” and the support of the Londoners, who would not allow them to be touched. Biding his time, the Duke visited the Commons next day under a guise so gracious that members stared at him in amazement, but they were not diverted from pursuing the charges against Latimer and Lyons. They summoned as witnesses two former Treasurers and other officials, demanded to examine the public accounts, and conducted the proceedings as a formal trial. When all the evidence had been heard, the Commons cried with one voice, “Lord Duke, now you can see and hear that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons have acted falsely for their own advantage for which we demand remedy and redress!”

When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers. Lyons thought to spike the process by sending the Black Prince a bribe of £1,000 concealed in a barrel
of sturgeon. The Prince sent it back, but the King, in more comfortable cynicism, accepted a similar bribe with the jest that he was only taking back his own.

Parliament found the charges proved. The two accused ministers and four subordinates, including Latimer’s son-in-law, Lord Nevill, steward of the King’s household, were judged guilty, dismissed from office and condemned to fines and imprisonment, although Latimer was shortly released on bail provided by a group of his friends. Even Alice Perrers was removed on charges of meddling in the law by sitting alongside judges on the bench and overawing them into decisions in favor of her friends. Miserably the King had to acquiesce in her banishment from court.

The petitions of reform were accepted in the King’s name by John of Gaunt, who for the time being considered that he had insufficient support in the Lords to do otherwise. Besides annual Parliaments, the Commons demanded election of members by the “better folk” of the shires rather than by appointment of the sheriff. The petition for enforcement of the Statute of Laborers, with provisions for arrest and punishment of violators, reflected the growing antagonism between employer and worker. Likewise the growing antagonism to the papacy appeared in the petition for the exclusion of papal tax-collectors and prohibition of the export of money. No petition was made for peace, probably because the Commons believed the recent ill-fortunes in war had been due to the incompetent and corrupt leadership they were now replacing.

To contain John of Gaunt—or “bell the cat,” as it appeared in Langland’s fable—and to maintain the reforms once Parliament had dispersed, a new Council was named of nine lords and prelates including the ex-Chancellor, William of Wykeham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, a rather pedestrian character of non-noble birth. The youth of the Council was characteristic of the early age at which men exercised power. Apart from Wykeham and Sudbury, six of the seven other members, including William Courtenay, Bishop of London, were under the age of 34, two of these under 30, and one, the Earl of March, was 25. Their opponent, the great Duke of Lancaster, was 36, born in the same year as Coucy.

Just as Parliament reached the peak of its accomplishment, the Prince fell into a fatal phase of his disease, complicated by dysentery. He grew so weak that he several times fainted and was thought to be dead. His chambers filled with doctors and surgeons, with the weeping and groaning of his followers and visits of the royal family for the final leave-taking. His sister Isabella and the Sire de Coucy came to the
bedside to add their tears. John of Gaunt came, and the two younger brothers, Edmund of Langley, future Duke of York, something of a nonentity, and Thomas of Woodstock, unpleasant, violent, and ill-fated. In a parent’s sad survival, the King came amid “great lamentation” and “no one there could keep from tears in great desolation at the circumstances and the sorrow of the King taking leave of his son forever,” the fifth of his adult children to go before him.
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The doors of the Prince’s room were opened so that old comrades and all who had served him could attend the passing, and “each one sobbed heartily and wept very tenderly,” and he said to all, “I commend you to my son, who is very young and little, and pray you, as you have served me, to serve him loyally.” He asked the King and Lancaster to swear an oath of support, which they gave without reserve, and all the earls, barons, and bachelors swore it too, and “of lamentation and sighing, of crying aloud and sorrowing, there was a great noise.”

On the day before the end, the Prince’s last will was completed, adding to the detailed arrangements already made. Though death was but the flight of the soul from its bodily prison, it was customarily accompanied by the most precise care for bequests, funeral, tombstone, and every other aspect of earthly remains, as if anxiety of what was to come sharpened reluctance to leave the world. The Prince’s instructions were unusually detailed: his bed furnishings, including hangings embroidered with the deeds of Saladin, were left to his son, his war-horses were specifically disposed, his funeral procession was designed to the last trumpet, his tomb effigy ordered, with curious ambivalence, to show him “fully armed in the pride of battle … our face meek and our leopard helm placed beneath the head.”

Attendant bishops urged the dying man to ask forgiveness of God and of all those he had injured. In a last flare of arrogance he refused, then, as the end approached, joined his hands and prayed pardon of God and man. But he could not sustain meekness. When Sir Richard Stury, a Lollard knight who had been among those dismissed from the King’s household by the Good Parliament, and who at some point had evidently fallen foul of the Prince, came to “make his peace,” the Prince said bitterly, “Come, Richard, come and look on what you have long desired to see.” When Stury protested his good will, the Prince replied, “God pay you according to your deserts. Leave me and let me
see your face no more.” Begged by his confessors not to die without forgiving, he remained silent and only under pressure muttered at last, “I will do it.” A few hours later, on June 8, 1376, he died aged 46.

As Earl of Bedford and member of the family, Coucy rode in the mile-long funeral procession with King Edward and the Prince’s brothers behind the hearse drawn by twelve horses. On the monument at Canterbury, where the Prince desired to be buried, were inscribed verses in French on the traditional theme of the evanescence of earthly power: how in life the deceased had great nobility, lands, houses, treasure, silver and gold, but now of all bereft, with beauty gone and flesh wasted, he lies alone, reminding the passerby,

Encased in armor, the effigy speaks differently: in what little can be seen of the face under a drooping mustache and close-covering helmet, there is no glimpse of Christian humility.

Left between a doddering King and a child heir, with only the hated regent Lancaster at the helm, the nation indulged in grief exaggerated by fear. At a time when defeats at sea had revived fears of French invasion, the English felt bereft of their protector, “for while he lived,” wrote Walsingham, “they feared no inroad of any enemy, even as when he was present they feared no warlike encounter.” Had the Prince lived and kept his health, he could have averted the troubles that were to arise under a child king, but not the social unrest nor the ebbing of victory. Although Walsingham reproached “thou untimely too-eager Death,” death may not have been untimely, for, unlike his father, the Prince died while he still reflected the image of a hero. Froissart called him “the Flower of Chivalry of all the world” and the chronicler of the
Quatre Premiers Valois
acknowledged him “one of the greatest knights on earth, having renown above all men.” Charles V held a requiem mass for his late enemy in the Sainte Chapelle, attended by himself and the ranks of French nobility.

What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them. The people of England mourned him because his marvelous capture of a king at Poitiers and his other conquests had dressed them in greatness. Though his famous victory in Spain had proved ephemeral, his empire in Aquitaine had collapsed, and his prowess faded in disease, yet he represented
that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.

The death of the Prince was the turning point in favor of John of Gaunt. While still in session, Parliament took the precaution of having the boy Richard presented to them in person to be confirmed as heir apparent. This being done, the memorable session closed on July 10, having lasted 74 days, the longest of any Parliament up to that time. Its spectacular accomplishment was wiped away the moment it dispersed. With no permanent organization or autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a body as soon as members scattered to shire and town. Its reforms had not been enacted as statutes and, like the reforms of the French Grand Ordinance, were simply rendered null by the hand that regained effective power. By favors or threats, Lancaster won over or neutralized the leading lords of the opposition, except for the Earl of March, who was compelled to resign as Marshal. His place was taken by his onetime ally Sir Henry Percy, who went over to the Duke.

The Lords’ absence of political principle was the key to the collapse. Lancaster declared the entire parliamentary session invalid, reinstated Lord Latimer and his associates, dismissed the new Council and recalled the old, arrested and imprisoned without trial Sir Peter de la Mare when he attempted a protest, banished Bishop William of Wykeham from court and seized his temporal properties. When, sealing his control, he brought back Alice Perrers to reweave her spell over the King, the bishops who had acted with the Commons “were like dumb dogs unable to bark.”

Except for impeachment, the work of the Good Parliament left hardly a constitutional trace. Yet in expressing so forcefully, and for its brief moment effectively, the will of the middle class, the role of the Commons strongly impressed the nation and taught an experience of political action that took root.

Witness to England’s turmoil, Coucy returned to France in the summer or fall of 1376. Given the crisis during his visit, he is unlikely to have obtained a clear statement of what peace terms England was prepared to accept, but he would certainly have brought back a report of a torn and vulnerable nation. He is reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the King of England to offer combat when the truce should end, but to seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so weak or so easy to defeat as at home.”

Before Coucy left England, King Edward fell ill of a great malady
and “all his physicians despaired and did not know how to care for him or what medicines to give him.” Although he recovered spontaneously, the end of the reign was clearly approaching and with it the moment for Coucy’s decision. Whether Isabella returned with him to France or remained with her sinking father is uncertain. Out of respect for his father-in-law, Coucy took no overt action at this time, but immediately on his return he accepted a diplomatic mission to the Count of Flanders in the interests of France against England. By now Coucy was a member of the Royal Council, clearly relied on by Charles V for his perspicacity and diplomacy. The King’s anxieties had been increased by the mental illness of Queen Jeanne who in 1373 was afflicted “so that she lost her mind and her memory.” After many prayers and pilgrimages by her husband who was devoted to her, she recovered her health and senses and was named, in the event of the King’s death, guardian of the Dauphin. She was to be assisted by a Regency Council of fifty composed of prelates, ministers of crown and Parlement, and ten of the “most notable and sufficient” bourgeois of Paris. Twelve of the Council were to be in constant service of the Queen. As a member of the Council, Coucy received an annual wage of 1,000 francs in addition to payments of 500 francs a month on his annual pension of 6,000 francs. At about this time his daughter Marie, heiress of his domain, joined the household of the Queen who took charge of her education along with that of the Dauphin and his brothers and sisters. In April 1377 the records show a payment to Coucy of 2,000 francs, to be deducted from his pension, for furnishing his several castles with crossbows against the event of renewed war.