The Hundred Years War Read Free Page B

hardhearted in enmity. He was at the same time self-indulgent, a relentless womanizer, who eventually ruined his health. One can only guess at what must have been a Napoleonic confidence in himself and an oddly self-conscious determination to be a hero-king. With all this he was also realistic—his motto was ‘It is as it is’.
    Edward’s glittering court, a constant round of banquets and jousting, provided him with an excellent general staff. His friends, professional soldiers by virtue of their birth and class, knew how his mind worked and had been tested by him on the Scottish campaigns. Although the old feudal structure was dissolving, society was still a military hierarchy and great lords were ex-officio generals. It is significant that in 1338, preparing for a campaign, the King created six new earls. But not all Edward’s commanders were earls. There were men like Sir John Chandos, a poor knight from Derby-shire ; and Sir Thomas Dagworth, ‘a bold professional soldier’, did not come from anything like a noble background, belonging to a family of small Norfolk squires. The Belgian—as we would now term him—Sir Walter Manny (born Gauthier de Masny), who had come from Hainault with Edward’s Queen Philippa and remained as her carver, was another commander of comparatively humble origins.
    One of the more striking foreign ornaments of Edward’s court was the ill-famed Robert of Artois, a French Prince of the Blood who was King Philip’s brother-in-law and ‘his chief and special companion’. According to Jean le Bel, he had done a great deal to obtain the crown for Philip. But in 1330 Robert tried to gain possession of Artois, which had been inherited by his aunt, through forged documents and his fraud was discovered. Two years later the aunt died, supposedly poisoned. Robert was found guilty of her murder, condemned to death and ‘chased out of the realm of France’ as Froissart puts it ; there were allegations, probably justified, of witchcraft. He came to England in 1336, to be warmly welcomed by Edward who made him Earl of Richmond and presented him with three castles and a pension despite Philip’s threat that he was the enemy of anyone who sheltered Robert. The exile is said to have fanned Edward’s growing enmity towards Philip into white heat; ‘He was ever about King Edward and always he counselled him to defy the French King who kept his heritage from him wrongfully.’ It was Robert who, in 1338, stage-managed the Oath of the Heron during a banquet at Windsor, when the entire English court swore to do deeds of valour to help their King regain the crown which three of his uncles had worn. Robert was also a most useful contact with disaffected noblemen in northern France. Years later, Froissart heard how King Edward had had the greatest confidence in ‘Sir Robert’.
    Edward’s Queen was of considerable value as a contact in the Low Countries. Philippa of Hainault had fallen in love with the King when she was only twelve and he fourteen, and they had been married in 1328 ; two years later she bore him the first of their many sons, the future Black Prince. A tall Belgian beauty with a retroussé nose, dark-brown eyes and hair and a winning nature, she remained devoted to her husband despite his many infidelities. Shrewd and sensible, her only faults were a certain extravagance and a taste for over-dressing. As the daughter of William the Good, Count of Hainault, of Holland and of Zeeland, she provided Edward with some extremely useful relations.
    The English saw Flanders much as the French saw Scotland—an ally in the event of war. Edward sent letters to the Imperial nobles of the adjoining Low Countries at the end of 1336, complaining of the French King’s injustice and of his ‘great plot’ against him and his intention of stealing Guyenne. But many of these lords remained faithful friends of Philip VI, so in the spring of 1337 Edward sent carefully chosen envoys to Hainault—sixty