The Perfect King (32 page)

Edward's journey to the Low Countries alarmed Philip. In August he responded by gathering an army and going to Saint-Denis to take the semi-mystical, ceremonial war banner of the Oriflamme. He expected Edward to invade immediately. At that moment Edward was in no position to attack; but this did not make Philip any more comfortable. He tried to shift the confrontation to England, sending fifty ships to Southampton. Several thousand men landed there on a Sunday, while all the inhabitants were at church. They sacked the town, and as the inhabitants left the chu
r
ches they ran away. The French took what they wanted at their leisure. It is recorded that where they found poor people, they killed them, and where they caught any women, they raped them. And where they caught a man of wealth or status, they hanged him in his own house. Then they set the whole town on fire. Guernsey too was taken and its garrisons killed. For Edward, worst of all was the capture of an English wool fleet, five ships, including one of the most prestigious, the
St
George,
and two of his largest and most important: the
Christopher
and his flagship, the
Edward.
The sailors manning the royal vessels surrendered after being outnumbered. Even though Edward's personal clerks were among them, they were all thrown overboard and drowned.

Philip was not the only leader threatened by Edward's move to the Low Countries. The pope too was disappointed to see Edward cross to Brabant. As he shrewdly observed, such a move would force him to start paying his allies, and he would soon want to see some military gain in return for his investment. But what really infuriated the pope was Edward's alliance with Ludvig, the heretic. Regardless of the fact that Philip also would have enlisted Ludvig's support if he had been able to, the furious pope took sides. He wrote to Philip informing him that he had heard, from someone who had been at Koblenz, that Edward was planning to attack France the following May. The pope added that he suspected also that this information might be deliberate misinformation, and so he urged Philip to be cautious. To Edward, he was less cordial, barely concealing his indignation despite his considerable diplomatic skills. He pointed out to Edward again that John XXII had excommunicated Ludvig for good reason. He added that he had offered to take Ludvig back into the Church if only he would give up his support for the anti-pope and be reconciled to the Avignon papacy, but Ludvig was adamant. In this light the pope was amazed that Edward was prepared to go to Germany, risking excommunication. He stressed how hard he had worked to maintain peace between Philip and Edward, sending cardinals to negotiate with them. He called on Edward 'to free himself from the bonds and snares in which he is involved by his relations with Ludvig'.
At the same time (1
November) he wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury asking him to intercede and show the king how wrong he was to accept an office from an excommunicated ruler. He also wrote to the archbishops and bishops in the Low Countries and Germany forbidding them to swear to serve Edward. He also copied all these letters to the cardinals supposed to be negotiating between the two kings. As demonstrations of Benedict's anger went, this was severe.

Edward's principal worry lay in England. As soon as he had set sail, three years of good harvests, combined with a lack of silver in the money supply, had disastrous results. Deflation - crashing prices - set in. With money being sucked out of the kingdom, and Edward's officers impounding wool supplies for shipment to the Low Countries and Italian markets, and the royal purveyors seizing whatever they wanted under cover of it being for the king's campaigns, the country was fast approaching an economic crisis. Coming on top of the three-year taxation granted in
1337,
this meant social catastrophe. And then the winter came, and with it came rain and cold. Where there had been plenty of supplies but no money, now there was neither money nor food.

Edward's reaction to his logistic and economic problems was to blame his advisers. As he saw it, it was not his role to understand why supplies were late, or why money could not be raised; it was his role to enforce discipline on his enforcers, so that his instructions were carried out. In a fit of anger he sacked his treasurer, Robert Wodehouse. This was most unfortunate, as Wodehouse was probably the man responsible for managing what would yet prove to be a turn-around in Edward's ability to raise money from wool in England. Wodehouse wrote to John Molyns lamenting the way he had been treated, and expressly mentioning the king's lack of gratitude for his efforts. It was in a similarly angry mood that Edward responded to the pope's letter, appointing the highest status embassy possible to treat with Philip - Montagu, Richard Bury, the archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Geoffrey le Scrope and Bishop Burghersh - but expressly forbidding them to address Philip as king of France. This was not the same as claiming the throne (as he had done briefly in October
1337),
but it was close.

Under severe pressure on all fronts, including his own companions who doubted his strategy, Edward was beginning to show some of the character traits of his father. He was acting in a high-handed fashion, yet not more so than most kings of the middle ages, but like his father he rounded on men who were genuinely trying to help him. His utter faith in his own royal irreproachability, coupled with his frustration with the faults of his advisers, threatened to cloud his judgement. When frustrated, Edward tended to try to force his will on those around him. Wodehouse was just one example. Another example is his order in May that all debts to him were not to be paid in instalments, in the traditional manner,
but all were to be paid instantl
y and in full, an impossible demand. It is possible to argue that other examples are to be found in his high-handed appropriation of various rights in England, largely in order to raise money. If an heiress was unmarried - whether a spinster or a widow - Edward assumed the right of appointing her husband, partly to raise money, and partly to use the revenue from women's lands to provide an income for his most trusted war commanders. Lands of felons which had formerly reverted to their feudal lord were confiscated outright by the king and used to endow the new and rising members of the nobility. Priories dependent on foreign monasteries had their revenues temporarily confiscated and handed over to provide incomes for Edward's associates. To those who gathered for the parliament at Westminster in February
1339,
it was worrying that Edward was demanding more from them in taxes, and yet not even prepared to return to England to meet them and hear their grievances. Having empowered the commons and given them a voice, he was now running a very great risk by failing to listen to them.

It was at this point th
at Philip invaded Aquitaine for the second time. Believing the pope's advice - that Edward's campaign in the Cambresis would not begin until May - and probably trusting his own spies' validation of this information, he judged it safe to withdraw his forces from the north. Having done so, he threw them into a sustained onslaught on the English forces in the south-west. It was an inspired strategy; Edward was unable to take his army across France and unable to mobilise a seaborne force to defend the duchy. He had also failed strongly to support those who had previously resolutely held out for him, so that their resolve was weaker on this second occasion. He had only one option left open to him: to invade France without delay, diverting Philip's attention from the south-west. He summoned all his allies to gather for an invasion on
18
December, but, to his great anger, the response was n
ot even lukewarm. They had settl
ed their minds on a war in May
1339,
and nothing would move them to risk everything now, in winter.

The strategic drawbacks of the alliance were now apparent. It was holding Edward back from attacking Philip, it was preventing him from taking action against the French fleet, and it was quickly bankrupting him. And it was sapping his moral authority too. It would not be long before he was reduced to
little
more than a paymaster for the German confederacy. He had lost papal support, and had infuriated Philip into attacking England itself as well as English trade. His own kingdom was on the brink of economic turmoil, and he was in grave danger of parliamentary opposition. But even if Edward could now see that he had been wrong, and that he had made mistakes, he
was aware that to give up on th
e alliance now would be a waste of all he had invested. In order to maintain a degree of pressure on Philip through the alliance, it was important for him not to lose his nerve.

Edward's saving grace was that, unlike his father, he had a sense of purpose, and it was a noble purpose by the definitions of the time. He also had a self-belief which allowed him to cope with the problems which he had brought upon himself. He could rant at his ministers, he could sack them and he could even order the council back in England to stop paying die civil servants (which he did, to their shock and indignation), but while he kept focused on England's war with France, and while he continued to inspire those around him, no one was in a position to question him or take action against him. It was this focus, confidence and leadership which now he used to draw himself out of his predicament. He marched to Brussels with his army and threw himself into negotiations for the campaign. When these had proved futile, he declared to his allies that, if they would not fight, then he would. He would lead his army into France, and do
battle
,
with
or without them. He
set down his terms for renewing
negotiations in a final ultimatum. He demanded five things: that the losses on either side should be made good, that friends of either king could freely pass over the lands of both kings, that merchandise should be freely transported, that the king of France should offer no further help to the Scots and that Philip should restore those part
s of Gascony which he had recentl
y occupied. It was not an excessive list; the first three were merely normal affairs. The pope, still in a hostile mood towards Edward, declined to accept the fourth point, advising merely a truce between England and
Scotland
, and preferred not to comment on the fifth point. King Philip refused to accept the ultimatum outright.

Edward, having made up his own mind, and seeing the pope and Philip practically united in their opposition to English interests, now put his own grievances to the pope and the college of cardinals in a long letter dated
1
6
July. He stressed the dangers of war, asserted that he loved the ways of peace ('as God knows'), but claimed that Philip (whom he described as his 'persecutor') had illicitly occupied the throne of France, and therefore threatened war. His basis for this was that although a woman was barred by Roman Law from occupying the throne, this bar only applied to the woman herself, and not her male offspring. If the bar attended to her male offspring, then Jesus had no right to be described as of the line of David, as his mother Mary, bearer of God's child, was the parent through which this claim descended. As Edward was the nephew of the last king, and Philip was a cousin, he had a prior claim, as Philip's was collateral. (Contrary to popular belief his claim had absolutely nothing to do with Salic' Law, a local land inheritance law whose relevance was pretended by French writers in the next century.)
Edward went on to state that he had done nothing to provoke Philip, and that he deplored the invasion of Aquitaine and France's support for the Scottish nationalists. He stressed how wronged he felt. The letter is very revealing, especially the sentences immediately following this claim of self-defence. Edward claimed that:

We only make a shield against him who levelled a deadly blow at our head
...
At this he storms, Holy Father, he storms, is uneasy and complains: he, who sought by his
subtle
devices to find us unadvised and unprepared. But according to the Theory of War, which teaches that the best way to avoid the inconvenience of war is to pursue it away from one's own country, it is more sensible for us to fight our notorious enemy in his own realm, with the joint power of our allies, than it is to wait for him at our own doors.

Here we see the fundamental principle of Edward's strategy clearly spelled out: taking the fight into France protected England. When twentieth-century historians came to assess the 'profit and loss' account of the English during the Hundred Years War, they completely ignored this element of his strategy, only counting Edward's territorial conquests and losses. But Edward could win and lose in France, and have nothing material to show for his troubles at the end of the day, and still would have achieved something because he had protected England from French attack. In this same letter Edward stressed that the more he thought about Philip paying for an army out of money originally gathered to fight the crusade, the more it pained him. Benedict had granted a clerical subsidy for the crusade, and another for the defence against Ludvig, and permitted Philip to use both to fight the English, which rankled with Edward. But no matter how interesting and revealing the letter was, Benedict was having none of it. In keeping with his new policy of favouring the French, he did not even reply.

Edward marched into France on
20
September
1339.
Some of his allies followed him; Ludvig did not. The duke of Brabant was still in negotiations with Philip. Promises for payments were made, promises to leave hostages to ensure final payment were added, and Edward himself was forced to promise that he would remain in the Low Countries as security for the debts he had incurred. The cardinals who had tried hard to bring Edward to accept Philip's absolute rule in France and his right to intervene in
Scotland
remained with him. On the first night Sir Geoffrey le Scrope led one of them, Bertrand de Montfavez, cardinal deacon of St Mary in Aquiro, up a tall tower, showing him the result of the first day's work. It was a dark, moonless night, and as he looked out it was clear that every village for fifteen miles in every direction was on fire. The cardinal was reminded of something he had once declared to Edward in his negotiations: 'the kingdom of France is surrounded by a silken thread which all the power of England will not suffice to break'. Scrope said calmly to the cardinal: 'does it not seem to you that the silken thread encompassing France has broken?' Seeing the terrible outcome of the invasion, the cardinal grew faint, staggered and collapsed.