The Three Edwards (51 page)

In the meantime French aggression in Gascony had come to a standstill, thus vindicating the judgment of the Frenchman Godfrey de Harcourt. As soon as Edward landed on the Cotentin, Philip sent word to his son, John of Normandy, to come to his assistance. Six days before the battle of Crécy was fought the French forces in the south began their march north. They arrived to find the great French army destroyed and Philip himself at Amiens in a state of bitterness and gloom. So deep was the beaten monarch’s dudgeon that no one cared to go near him and no plans could be discussed with him for the relief of Calais. John did not hesitate to beard the defeated lion because he had a grievance to air. Before leaving for the north he had given a safe-conduct to Sir Walter Manny, who wanted to make an overland march to join the English royal forces. Philip had refused to honor his son’s promise. Manny and his party had been laid by the heels at Orleans and were still being held in rigorous confinement.

The prince gave his bitterly depressed father an ultimatum. If Manny was not released at once, he himself would not strike another blow in the French cause. Philip, still in a state of intense irritation, was reluctant to give in; but he finally yielded and even gave Sir Walter some jewelry to the value of a thousand florins for the ill treatment he had received. The English knight accepted on condition that his own king approved.
As soon as he reached the English camp before Calais, Sir Walter informed the king of what had happened.

“Send them back!” commanded the English monarch. “You have no right to keep them. We have enough, the Lord be praised, for you and for ourselves.”

There was no exaggeration in this. The English camp was filled with the loot of northern France. For a long time thereafter the English people would luxuriate in the spoils which were carried home. Every mother or wife of a soldier who fought at Crécy had a bracelet on her arm or a silver cup for her table. Many of them had feather beds, which were regarded as among the very choicest of all the spoils of war. The castles of the nobility were filled with rare things and there were blooded horses in all their stables.

The siege of Calais took a long time. It was a strong position and could be reduced only by starvation. Edward built a town of small wooden huts around it and, to make his men comfortable, had a market place in the center which was open three days a week for the sale of food and clothing from England. Philip of France got an army together from what was left after Crécy and came up behind the English with the intention of compelling them to raise the siege. But back of the English camps were wide marshlands, and the phlegmatic and unimaginative Philip could not find any way to get across. He squatted down with his men beyond the marshlands and, no doubt, spent his time bemoaning the defeat at Crécy. Finally the townspeople, having eaten all the horses and dogs and every rat they could catch in the city, reached the stage where they must yield or starve to death. They had been watching the campfires of Philip’s army at night and hoping against hope that he would do something to help them.

There were only two ready-made approaches to the beleaguered city, and the French king did not propose to try either one. The first was a road along the coast where his troops would be under arrow fire from the English fleet (and they did not want any more of that violent medicine), and the other was a bridge across the marshes called Neuillet, and this was strongly guarded by the English. William the Conqueror had found ways of taking his army across the fens at Ely, a much more difficult feat, but there was no such resourcefulness in Philip. He sulked a little longer while his people in Calais starved, and then broke up camp and returned with all his troops to Amiens.

The governor of the besieged city, Sir Jean de Vienne, had to ask for terms. Edward would listen to nothing at first but unconditional surrender. Calais had been a hotbed of piracy in the past and had sent out ships to prey on English commerce. Now the citizens had cost the English monarch
much in time and lives by the stubbornness of their defense. They must, he declared, be punished as befitted their crimes.

The king’s advisers were against too much severity and Edward finally compromised by demanding that six of the most notable men of Calais come out to him in their shirts and bare feet and with ropes around then-necks. They must bring the keys of the town and castle and place them in his hands.

“On them,” he declared, “I shall work my will. The rest I will receive to my mercy.”

Six of the most highly respected and richest burghers volunteered to be the victims, and they were sent out in their shirts as stipulated, all of them so weak from famine that they could barely walk. They were brought into the presence of the king, who had surrounded himself with the queen and her ladies and all of his captains and best soldiers. There the six old men knelt down before him.

“We bring you the keys,” said one of them, “and put ourselves at your mercy to save the rest of the people who have suffered so hardly.”

The king, whose handsome face was suffused with anger, had his headsman ready. He motioned to him to begin.

Up to this point the story is a familiar one. Many kings in different countries and at divers times had butchered the common people of cities which had resisted too bravely and too long. Edward I had ordered the killing of all the men of Berwick, and the work of extermination was well under way before he relented. Casting ahead some years, Edward the Black Prince would provide a classic example of this kind of savage behavior. He would put all the common people of a captured town to the sword but would pardon the knights. The story of Calais is, therefore, one of many such. It would not have been selected for particular remembrance if all the people around the angry king had not urged that he show mercy, Sir Walter Manny acting as spokesman. The latter did not prevail over the vicious Plantagenet temper, and it remained for Queen Philippa to add her voice. Although she was close to her time with a tenth child, she went down on her knees before Edward and begged earnestly that he show mercy.

The king took a long time to make up his mind and once at least he raised his hand as though signaling to the headsman. Finally, however, and with obvious reluctance, he granted the queen’s request and allowed the hostages to go free.

That this became one of the favorite stories of the period was due, in all likelihood, to the intimate picture of the queen which emerges. Following so soon after the beautiful Eleanor of Castile, to whose memory the costly Eleanor Crosses dotted the great northern road as proof of the undying love of Edward I, and the spectacular and passionate Isabella of
France, who was still living in seclusion at Castle Rising and of whom men in the taverns spoke in whispers as “the she-wolf of France,” Queen Philippa had seemed rather colorless. She was pretty, sweet, and domestic, a typical Dutch girl. But at Calais she showed herself to be brave as well as understanding and compassionate (it took courage to beard Edward in one of his Plantagenet tempers), and the people of England rolled the story over their tongues and kept it green in their memories.

Must a sequel be told, even if it takes much of the gloss from this picture of the fair (and rapidly becoming buxom) queen and shows that she had other qualities common to the hardheaded burghers of the Flanders cities? Edward, with a careless gesture, had given her the six old men to deal with as she pleased. This included their properties as well as their bodies, and she did not scruple to take advantage of the chance thus offered. It is on record that she took over the houses of one of the six, John Daire. As he chose not to become an English citizen and had to leave the city as a result, it is highly improbable that he ever got the property back.

The saga of the border warfare became in this reign a story of the struggle between the strong son of a weak father and the weak son of a strong father. David the Bruce had inherited little of the great quality of his father, Robert. He proceeded, however, to carry out Scotland’s treaty obligation to France when the word spread that Edward III had led an army of invasion into France. He got together a force of fifteen thousand men and led them across the Tyne above Newcastle and down into Durham. The northern barons, under the leadership of the Archbishop of York, assembled in force to meet him and on October 17, 1346, they came face to face at Neville’s Cross. It proved a repetition of a now familiar story. The English archers cut the charging Scots to pieces and scored a complete victory. Many of the nobles of Scotland were killed in the battle and David himself was made a prisoner by an English north-country squire by the name of John Copland.

Following the lead of Froissart, the historian of the Middle Ages, there has been a tendency to give the credit of this victory to Queen Philippa. Circumstantial stories are told of her bravery and coolness; how she rode out on a white charger and inspired the troops with a rousing speech, and how she returned to the battlefield afterward on the same charger. Hearing the story of David’s capture, she is supposed to have demanded of Copland that the royal prisoner be turned over to her. Copland refused and rode forthwith to Calais to explain himself to King Edward. “I hold my land of
you
and not of
her
,” he declared. The king is said to have told
him to return to England forthwith and deliver the royal prisoner into the hands of the queen. With this command went a promise of lands to the value of five hundred pounds a year for the great service rendered the crown.

The reliability of this story has always been questioned because no mention is made of it in the English chronicles; and a gentle queen riding to battle on a white horse is not an episode that any monkish chronicler would overlook, or any kind of historian, in fact. It must be taken into consideration also that the battle of Neville’s Cross was fought on October 17 and that Edward did not land at Sandwich with his queen and family until October 12. The queen could not have been at Durham in time for the fighting.

The captive king was brought to London and paraded through the streets on a handsome black war horse and was then lodged in the Tower of London. He spent the next eleven years as a prisoner in England.

He was not kept in close confinement all the time. His wife, who was Edward’s sister, Joanna (Little Joan Makepeace), was allowed to join him. They lived in various places close to London, always under guard, of course, and at Odiham in Hampshire. As negotiations over the amount of the ransom took an endless time, he was permitted on one occasion to return to Scotland to talk the estates into agreement. All this time there were secret understandings between the two kings about which the estates knew nothing, although they suspected much. David, in fact, was willing to sacrifice Scotland as a condition to his release, and several of the Scottish leaders were partners with him in what was called “the business.” Finally, on July 13, 1354, the ransom was fixed at ninety thousand marks, to be paid in nine yearly installments. Now Scotland was not a rich country and ten thousand marks was a great deal of money to be raised and paid out each year, particularly for a king who was not regarded highly. David ruled for fourteen years after his return and was in debt all the time, sometimes paying nothing, sometimes as little as four thousand marks. Finally he and Edward reached an understanding by which the balance of the ransom could be liquidated without further payments. David was to agree to the transfer of the Scottish crown at his death to an English prince, the one chosen being Edward’s very tall son, Lionel. The Scottish Parliament refused to accept this arrangement, so the two royal conspirators put their heads together on a still more drastic agreement. David promised to settle the succession on Edward himself, with certain precautionary provisions to maintain the independence of Scotland. In consideration of this the balance of the ransom was written off, although David continued to keep up a desultory correspondence with the English chancellery in order to conceal the truth from the dour Scottish
parliamentarians, who would have raised the roof of Edinburgh Castle in their wrath had they known.

In the meantime David’s gentle English queen had died. He married a second time rather promptly, choosing the fascinating widow of a knight of comparatively low degree. Her name was Margaret Logie, and the estates were as little pleased with this choice as they would have been about the secret pact between the two kings. The new queen caused considerable trouble by persuading the king to put her relatives in important posts, and it did not take long for the coterie about the king to get rid of her. They found some basis for a divorce and snipped the marriage bond with legal scissors.

David died in Edinburgh Castle on February 22, 1370, leaving no children.

The secret transaction between the two kings did not play any part in the succession. The Scottish estates promptly chose Robert the Steward, a man of mature years, who was the son of David’s sister, Marjorie. The new king had shown rare promise as a youth and had been widely popular. He was described as “beautiful beyond the sons of men,” in spite of having red eyes (the color of sandalwood, according to Froissart) owing to a caesarian birth after his mother’s death from the fall of a horse; or such was the accepted explanation.

Robert II did not have much chance to display great powers during the nineteen years of his reign. He is chiefly remembered as the founder of the Stuart dynasty which reigned in Scotland for centuries.

David II was forty-seven years old when he died and had been king for forty-one of them; in name, at least.

Edward came back to England after his triumphs at Crécy and Calais in a jubilant mood and was welcomed enthusiastically by the people. Thinking himself entitled, perhaps, to some recreation after the years of strain and struggle, and convinced no doubt that in no other way could his reputation be more widely and permanently enhanced, he proceeded to turn a pet dream into an actuality. He established the Order of the Garter.