Biographies & Memoirs

Conclusion

Edward III has not always enjoyed a good press. His modern reputation derives in part from the critical judgements made by William Stubbs in the late nineteenth century:

Edward III was not a statesman, although he possessed some of the qualifications which might have made him a successful one. He was a warrior; ambitious, unscrupulous, selfish, extravagant, and ostentatious. His obligations as a king sat very lightly on him. He felt himself bound by no special duty either to maintain the theory of royal supremacy or to follow a policy which would benefit his people. Like Richard I he valued England primarily as a source of supplies, and he saw no risk in parting with prerogatives which his grandfather would never have resigned.1

Stubbs deliberately diverted attention away from the ‘long and tedious reign’ of this ‘ideal king of chivalry’ and towards those periods he thought more deserving of ‘constitutional’ analysis. Early twentieth-century historians therefore found themselves caught between a whiggish admiration for Edward, under whom parliament first became an essential element in the constitution, and an uneasy feeling that the king’s compromises set the crown on the road to political disaster in the fifteenth century.2 Since Stubbs’s day, Edward’s biographers have generally found it easier to retell the events of the Hundred Years War and to perpetuate the cult of chivalry than to make detailed appraisals of his political achievements. This was George Holmes’s judgement in 1962:

In Edward III the Plantagenet line found its happiest king. Not perhaps the greatest and certainly not the most interesting personality, but the one whose designs coincided best with the temper and opportunities of his time. Edward III did not make great constitutional innovations, like Edward I, and in home affairs he was rather a passive inheritor of the legacy of his grandfather. But, unlike grandfather and father, he was essentially a successful warrior, who loved fighting and was good at it, achieved more than he could reasonably have expected, and surrounded himself with a comradely galaxy of warrior magnates and warrior sons.3

By the time Holmes’s textbook appeared, revisionism was already in fact taking a hold on Edward III’s reign. May McKisack’s volume in the Oxford History of England series, published in 1959, and her well-known lecture, ‘Edward III and the Historians’, presented the reign in a new and altogether more favourable light:

Edward III succeeded, where nearly all his predecessors had failed, in winning and holding the loyalty of his people and the affection of his magnates, even in the years of his decline. He accepted the chivalric and militant ambitions of his age and used them, as he used the devotion of his wife and sons, in the service of his dynasty. He raised that dynasty from unexampled depths of degradation to a place of high renown in western Christendom. . . He blundered badly in his early years but, after 1341, he chose his servants well and favoured them discreetly. He avoided clashes with his parliaments, with the pope, and with the clergy; and, while maintaining his royal rights to the best of his ability, he never permitted himself his grandson’s folly of openly challenging the laws and customs of the realm. . . [His subjects] saw him as the pattern of chivalry and the maker of England’s fame, and when he lay upon his death-bed they mourned the passing of a great English king. It is not altogether easy to share Stubbs’s confidence that they were wrong.4

McKisack’s assessments gave Edward a new stature both as warrior and as politician. The posthumous publication of K.B. McFarlane’s Ford Lectures in 1973 provided a new and considerably more sympathetic analysis of Edward’s relations with the nobility, and G.L. Harriss’s studies of fourteenth-century parliaments have now proved that the king was a particularly perceptive and adroit manager of men.5 Consequently, the modern perspective is considerably more favourable. Michael Prestwich, while stressing the contrast between the political techniques of Edward I and his grandson, has concluded that ‘Edward III was far more than a mere military adventurer; he was a skilful ruler as well as a chivalric hero’.6

There remains, however, an uneasy ambivalence in the minds of many historians. Edward’s single-minded pursuit of military glory is still often seen as a selfish and irresponsible act which not only bled England of her wealth but also seriously weakened the power of the crown. This theme emerges clearly in two textbooks widely read by students of the period: Bertie Wilkinson’s Later Middle Ages in England and M.H. Keen’s England in the Later Middle Ages.7 Indeed, Keen’s summary of Edward, ‘pliant at home in order to admit adventure abroad’, has been the basis of many an essay and examination question on this period. Most recently, Richard W. Kaeuper has picked up the theme again in his stimulating War, Justice, and Public Order. Pointing in particular to the development of parliament, the abandonment of ambitious legislative programmes, the ossification of the tax system, and above all the concession of judicial power to the localities, Kaeuper concludes that compromise was the very keynote of Edward’s reign:

What becomes apparent. . . is how much the sights and sounds of war can mask the levelling off or even the reduction in royal activism and initiative in so many other areas of kingship, a reduction which was necessary as a part of the price-tag attached, however indirectly, to the prosecution of war. . . Edward III secured support for the war he and his nobles wanted so much at least in part by giving the parliamentary commons so much of what they wanted locally. . . The point is not to award praise or blame to Edward III, but to recognize that, however skilful and perceptive he may have been, English kingship of necessity took on a different role by the mid-fourteenth century. Compromise and a scaling-down of efforts other than the war effort were the concomitants of relatively peaceful politics within the realm.8

There is, of course, much to be said for this viewpoint. Indeed, if the word ‘change’ were to be substituted for ‘compromise’, a good deal of what has been argued in earlier chapters of this book could easily be reconciled with the revived Stubbsian tradition. On the other hand, it is as well to point out that very few of the developments that went to make up the late medieval polity either began or ended in the course of this one reign. Many of the themes that have been identified – the development of parliamentary taxation and legislation, the problem of law and order, the political tensions between Church and state, the controversy surrounding royal credit dealings, and so on – find their true origins not in the 1330s but during Edward I’s Scottish and French wars of the 1290s.9Furthermore, it is a mistake to think that the political concessions that Edward III did make – such as the increase in local control over peace-keeping – marked the permanent and inevitable demise of royal authority. In the 1380s, for instance, there was still a substantial debate over whether or not the commissions of the peace were the best means of maintaining law and order in the localities;10 and the more vigorous kings of the fifteenth century, such as Henry V and Edward IV, were to make good use of the king’s bench and special oyer and terminer commissions as a means of counteracting provincial autonomy and investigating corruption among the official classes in the shires.11 Above all, the widespread assumption that Edward III had no grander vision, no higher sense of duty to his successors, needs to be challenged. The painful reconstruction of political society after the civil wars of the 1320s and the faction-fighting of the 1330s; the carefully timed concessions on minor prerogatives and the jealous guarding of the major ones; the adaptation of military and diplomatic strategy to match the growing aspirations of his magnates and sons; and the final appeal for a peaceful transition to the impending minority government in 1377: all these and many other things point to a remarkably consistent and ambitious policy on the part of Edward III.

It is the contention of this book that Edward’s popularity with contemporaries rested on his ability to reconcile that royal policy with public opinion and political reality. Inevitably, most of Edward’s obituaries written between the late fourteenth and sixteen centuries concentrated on his prowess in arms.12 Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to assume that the quartered arms of France and England were perceived as Edward’s only lasting contribution to the monarchy. The king was seen as the bringer of peace as well as war. He restored harmony to his realm by directing the aggression of the military classes away from internal squabbles and towards the maintenance of national security. As a result, his reign witnessed the development of a new community of interests between crown and people. This idea can be seen as early as the 1340s in the writings of the Oxford philosopher Walter Burley, who argued that every Englishman, according to his own degree, ‘ruled in and with the king’.13 The same theme found echoes in an anonymous poem commemorating the death of Edward III, where the commons were likened to the mast of the ship of state, and in the prologue to the B-text of Piers Plowman, where the power of the commonalty was said to have given the king his throne.14Behind these philosophical and literary allusions lay the belief that the welfare of the realm was best preserved in a polity where every person knew his own rights and respected those of others. The fact that political society altered so little between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries gave added credence to the belief that Edward III had created that system of mixed monarchy extolled by Sir John Fortescue and upheld by the opponents of the early Stuarts. It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Joshua Barnes, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge, published his definitive biography of Edward III in 1688, the very year of the Glorious Revolution.15

This book has tried to evaluate Edward III’s achievement less through the formal statements of the statute roll and the rhetoric of the later chroniclers, and more through the reality of contemporary politics. It is difficult to sum up such a large and intangible subject, for politics is made by people, and human nature does not easily conform to generalizations. But it is perhaps admissible to conclude this study by identifying three particular themes that run through our analysis and give this period a special character and unity.

The first is the development of institutions. Edward III’s reign witnessed many changes in the administrative, judicial and political structures of the realm. The most important was undoubtedly the emergence of the commons in parliament. The evolution of a single, central agency capable of representing both the minor landholders and the merchant classes marked a constitutional advance of the greatest importance. From the mid-fourteenth century onwards, the political success of the king depended to a large extent on his relations with parliament. But it is also worth noting that parliament was in active session for a total of only about four years during Edward III’s fifty-year reign (see Appendix 5). Unless we appreciate the extraordinary nature of the institution, we are in severe danger of distorting later medieval politics. Indeed, it is arguable that some of the greatest advances of this period occurred not in the political agencies, but in the permanent administrative offices of the state. The emergence of a unitary financial system co-ordinated by the exchequer, for instance, can be traced to the middle years of Edward III’s reign, as can the development of the council as a more professional body with its own special judicial authority. We should also remember that the separation of convocation from parliament considerably strengthened the king’s hand by isolating the clergy and reducing their influence over high politics. Ultimately, the power of parliament rested on its control of the purse strings. The task of paying for Edward III’s wars undoubtedly gave the commons a new political prominence. However, it also made the king an extremely wealthy man. If it was the abundance or lack of money that raised or depressed kings,16 then Edward III’s position was virtually unrivalled in the whole of the Middle Ages.

The second notable feature of Edward’s regime was that most of the important changes in the structure of politics were carried through by cooperation and consensus. If Englishmen learned anything from the crises of 1215, 1258, 1297, 1311 and 1341, it was that kings, when cornered, could not be trusted. Time and again the community had extracted promises from the crown only to see them ignored, flouted, or even annulled. The reestablishment of political harmony was therefore imperative not only for the advancement of the king’s military ambitions but also for the welfare of his subjects. In the years after 1340, both the commons and the clergy found various ways of restraining the crown and restricting the use of some of its more controversial prerogatives. But it is equally important to remember that such legislation was a gift of grace, and remained effective only so long as the king wished. Edward III never formally acknowledged the commons’ right to judge the plea of necessity or to demand concessions in return for taxes. Nor did he allow parliament the authority to make or unmake legislation. And if the crown was prepared to constrain its prerogative powers, it was only because of the strong financial incentives involved. Almost every statute of the 1340s and 1350s was the result of a tax bargain, permitted by the crown in the sure knowledge that it had once again secured generous funding for the defence of the realm and the upkeep of the court. The political negotiation of Edward’s middle years may have been a bilateral affair, but it was not a dialogue between equals.

The final point to emerge from this discussion therefore concerns the power of the crown. For all the new pressures and challenges raised by the Hundred Years War, it is remarkable how little politics really changed under Edward III. Public opinion was still to a large extent dictated by the king’s ability to reward and restrain the nobility; and apart from certain anxieties in the 1330s and 1370s, the community remained well content with Edward’s policy. There is little to indicate that the new rules concerning aristocratic inheritance weakened the crown, or that the forces of bastard feudalism yet threatened royal influence in the localities. Nor, indeed, was the emergence of the knights and burgesses quite so revolutionary as might at first appear. In the 1330s and 1340s the commons apparently tried to represent the interests and concerns of all the king’s subjects, and thus to give some genuine meaning to that still rather ambiguous phrase, the ‘community of the realm’. But with the development of regular taxation and the sudden economic crisis provoked by the plague, they turned their backs on the peasantry and the urban artisans and pursued policies specifically designed to maintain their own class interests. Consequently, although the number and range of men involved in politics was now greater than before, perceptions and aspirations had actually changed very little. The commons adopted the same attitude as the magnates: namely, that the king should consult them on matters of state, but not bother them with the day-to-day routine of central government. Even in the development of the commissions of the peace, on which so much of the interpretation of Edward III’s reign hangs, it seems that the crown was simply reverting to the long tradition of self-government briefly and not altogether satisfactorily challenged by the monarchy of Edward I. Consequently, it can be argued that while the reign of Edward III witnessed important alterations in the structure of politics and government, it also saw remarkably little change in the real distribution of power.

It is often suggested that Edward III left his successors an impossible task. He depended too much on his military victories as a means of appeasing political opposition and winning financial support, and he was too easily persuaded to compromise powers which might be used to shield the crown in less auspicious times. Unfortunately, Edward’s position as the last common ancestor of the Lancastrian, Yorkist and Tudor kings has led historians to blame him for all sorts of things quite beyond his control. It is still not uncommon to state that he produced too many sons, made them into overmighty subjects, and was thus responsible for the Wars of the Roses. But this is completely to ignore the fact that contemporary chroniclers regarded Edward’s very fecundity as a sign of divine grace, and saw in him all the attributes of the ideal king.17 Similarly, to argue whether or not the Hundred Years War was a diplomatic or economic mistake is to forget the intractable diplomatic problems left over from Edward I’s reign and the equally formidable domestic tensions created by Edward II. Above all, such an argument ignores the contemporary conception of monarchy and the high premium which all the king’s subjects set upon the successful defence of the realm. As Froissart so neatly put it, ‘The English... will never love or honour [their king] unless he is victorious and a lover of arms and war against his neighbours.’18 This study has argued that, beyond the trumpets and the drums, there is another history of this reign. When Edward III’s achievements in domestic politics are finally and fully evaluated alongside his accomplishments in war, he may yet be permitted to re-enter the august and select band of great medieval rulers.

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