The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [2]
1
Valois or Plantagenet? 1328—1340
Dare he command a fealty in me?
Tell him the Crown that he usurps is mine,
And where he sets his foot he ought to kneel.
‘Tis not a petty Dukedom that I claim,
But all the whole dominions of the realm;
Which if with grudging he refuse to yield
I’ll take away those borrowed plumes of his
And send him naked to the wilderness.
The Raigne of King Edward III
Sir, does it not seem to you that the silken thread encompassing France is broken?
Sir Geoffrey Scrope
On the first day of February 1328 King Charles IV of France, third son of King Philip the Handsome and last of the Capetian dynasty, lay dying. He had no children but his wife was pregnant. On his deathbed Charles said, ‘If the Queen bears a son he will be King, but if she bears a daughter then the crown belongs to Philip of Valois.’
Philip, Count of Valois, Anjou and Maine, was thirty-five, a tall, handsome nobleman who was famous for magnificence and for prowess in the tournament and on the battlefield. He was a great-grandson of St Louis and King Charles’s first cousin ; his father, Charles of Valois, had not only been a Prince of the Blood Royal but also, because of his second wife, titular Emperor of Constantinople; while Philip’s mother had been a daughter of the Capetian house which ruled Naples. He had inherited vast wealth and estates. Cold and calculating, he was very different from the flashy and incapable knight-errant of popular tradition.
On All Fool’s Day 1328 the widowed Queen gave birth to a posthumous daughter. Philip at once summoned a well-chosen assembly to Paris, who swiftly acknowledged him as their King—Philip VI. They did not know how much misery and destruction they had thereby brought upon France.
Across the Channel an even more dramatic scene took place two years later. Parliament had met at Nottingham in October 1330 and Isabel, the Queen Mother, and her lover Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, who was the real ruler of England, had taken up residence in the castle. On a dark night the eighteen-year-old King Edward III and a band of young lords entered the fortress through a secret passage and, after cutting down the guards, burst into the pregnant Queen Isabel’s bedchamber to seize Mortimer—Edward personally broke down the door with a battle-axe, though he tried to avoid being seen by his mother. Despite Isabel’s plea, ‘Fair son, fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer,’ Roger was hanged, drawn and quartered on the Common Gallows at Tyburn. The young King had at last won control of his kingdom.
Edward had every reason to hate both Mortimer and his mother. The ‘She Wolf of France’ seems always to have despised her husband, Edward II—the loser at Bannockburn, a peculiarly inept ruler and a reputed homosexual. In 1326 she and Mortimer had forced Edward to abdicate, replacing him with his son as a puppet monarch; a year later the deposed King was horribly murdered, being buggered with a red-hot poker. Mortimer, perhaps the nastiest man ever to rule England, had governed by fear; not only had he killed Edward II but he had tricked his brother, the Earl of Kent, into a conspiracy and then legally murdered him. To cap everything he had got the Queen Mother with child. However, Edward was merciful to Isabel, allowing her to withdraw to a luxurious retirement at Castle Rising in Norfolk where he visited her once a year.
Isabel was the link between the Kings of England and France, for she was Philip VI’s first cousin. She was also the late King Charles’s sister and many thought that she or her son should have inherited the throne of France, and not the Valois. At this date there was no problem of nationality: Anglo-Norman French was still a living tongue, spoken and written by the English ruling class until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. It was the first language of Edward III and his sons, probably of his grandsons, and even perhaps of