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By Root 1399 0

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.*

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,

Such as thou art, so once was I,

As I am now, so shalt thou be.

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