Edward III

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward III was born at Windsor Castle on the 13th of November 1312, and a contemporary prophecy described him as "the boar that would come out of Windsor". That image of raw, unstoppable force proved apt. By the time he died on the 21st of June 1377, he had ruled England for fifty years, launched a war with France that would last more than a century, and transformed a kingdom shaken by his father's catastrophic misrule into the most feared military power on the continent. His contemporary Jean Froissart wrote of him in his Chronicles: "His like had not been seen since the days of King Arthur."

  Yet Edward also presided over the Black Death, which killed a third or more of England's population. He watched his greatest captains die one by one, lost most of his French territories, and spent his final years dominated by a mistress named Alice Perrers, a woman whom Parliament accused of taking thousands of pounds in gold and silver each year from the royal treasury. How does a king who was once celebrated as England's greatest ruler end his days so diminished? And what, in the end, did he actually leave behind? Those questions run through his fifty-year story.

• 2. A Father's Ruin

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  King Edward II of England accumulated enemies the way other kings accumulated treasure. His court favourites, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger, drew the hatred of the English nobility. Gaveston was killed in a noble rebellion in 1312. Despenser survived longer but was loathed more deeply. The historian Chris Given-Wilson wrote that, by 1325, the nobility believed that "no landholder could feel safe" under Edward II's regime.

  In September 1324, Queen Isabella, Edward II's own wife, was publicly humiliated when the government declared her an enemy alien and confiscated her estates, almost certainly at Despenser's urging. Her household was disbanded. A contemporary chronicler described Edward II plainly as rex inutilis: a "useless king". Historians W. H. Dunham and C. T. Wood attributed this to his "cruelty and personal faults", observing that "very few, not even his half-brothers or his son, seemed to care about the wretched man".

  Isabella travelled to France in 1325 and conspired there with the exiled Roger Mortimer to depose her husband. She had her son, the young Prince Edward, betrothed to the twelve-year-old Philippa of Hainault to secure diplomatic and military support. When Isabella and Mortimer invaded England, Edward II's forces deserted him. A parliament summoned by the invaders forced the King to relinquish his throne. His son was proclaimed king in London on the 25th of January 1327, and crowned as Edward III at Westminster Abbey on the 1st of February, at the age of fourteen.

• 3. Taking the Throne Back

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  Roger Mortimer, now the de facto ruler of England, used his position to accumulate noble estates and titles. He subjected the young king to open disrespect, and contemporary chroniclers suspected he had designs on the throne itself. The situation grew more dangerous for Edward after Mortimer ordered the execution of Edward's uncle Edmund, Earl of Kent. It was likely these developments, along with the humiliating defeat at the Battle of Stanhope Park and the subsequent Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton with the Scots in 1328, that convinced the King he had to act.

  Edward married Philippa of Hainault at York Minster on the 24th of January 1328. The birth of their first child, Edward of Woodstock, on the 15th of June 1330, only heightened tensions with Mortimer. Later that year, aided by his close companion William Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu, and a small band of trusted men, Edward captured Mortimer by surprise at Nottingham Castle on the 19th of October 1330. Mortimer was executed. Edward's personal reign began.

  The historian Mark Ormrod argued that at this point Edward had had "little instruction in the art of kingship", and doubted that he had seriously engaged with the books on the subject given to him at his betrothal. His reign, Ormrod observed, was to be guided by practical rather than theoretical experience. That practical instinct showed almost immediately: when Edward took power, he found his family, in Ormrod's words, in "complete disarray". His nobility was fractured into factions, weakened by the turbulent years under Edward II. To rebuild loyalty, following the Parliament of March 1337, Edward created six new earls: Hugh de Audley to the Earldom of Gloucester, William de Bohun to Northampton, William de Clinton to Huntingdon, Henry of Grosmont to Derby, William de Montagu to Salisbury, and Robert de Ufford to Suffolk. Bohun, Clinton, Montagu, and Ufford had all played leading roles in the coup against Mortimer, and were among the greatest beneficiaries in terms of grants and estates.

• 4. War With France

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  In 1337, Philip VI of France confiscated Edward's Duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Ponthieu. Rather than offer submission as his father had done, Edward declared himself the rightful heir to the French throne through his mother Isabella, who was the daughter of Philip IV of France. The French rejected this claim based on the precedents for agnatic succession set in 1316 and 1322, and the resulting tensions launched the Hundred Years' War, which would run from 1337 to 1453.

  The first major English victory came at sea. On the 24th of June 1340, the English fleet destroyed a superior French force at the Battle of Sluys, securing control of the English Channel. Up to 16,000 French sailors were killed. The French captain Nicolas Behuchet, who might otherwise have been held for ransom, was hanged from his own yardarm. Edward saw divine favour in the outcome, and a triumphal coin was struck showing him in a ship believed to be Behuchet's own.

  The decisive land victories came six years later. In July 1346, Edward sailed for Normandy with a force of 15,000 men. His army sacked the city of Caen and marched across northern France. At Crecy, just north of the Somme, on the 26th of August, the English defeated a far larger French army under Philip VI. On the 17th of October, a separate English force defeated and captured King David II of Scotland at the Battle of Neville's Cross, securing England's northern frontier. Edward then laid siege to Calais with an army of 32,000 men. The siege began on the 4th of September 1346 and lasted until the town surrendered on the 3rd of August 1347.

  A decade later, in 1356, Edward's eldest son Edward, Prince of Wales, won a further crushing victory at Poitiers. The outnumbered English not only routed the French but captured the French king John II and his youngest son Philip. The French central government came close to total collapse. In 1360, Edward accepted the Treaty of Bretigny, renouncing his claim to the French throne in exchange for his extended French possessions held in full sovereignty.

• 5. Parliament, Law, and the Black Death

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  In 1348, the Black Death struck England with full force, killing a third or more of the country's population. The loss of farm labour drove wages sharply upward, and the great landowners struggled to fill their fields. Parliament responded with the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which fixed wages at their pre-plague level and asserted that lords had first claim on their tenants' labour. The law has been described as an attempt "to legislate against the law of supply and demand", and though it was enforced with vigour in the short term, it eventually failed. The underlying resentment it generated fed directly into the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Recovery from the immediate shock of the plague was swift, thanks in large part to royal administrators such as Treasurer William Edington and Chief Justice William de Shareshull.

  The same mid-reign years produced the Treason Act of 1351, and a significant expansion of the Justices of the Peace. By 1350, these justices had been given power not only to investigate crimes and make arrests but also to try cases, including felonies. An enduring fixture in English local justice had been established.

  Edward's reign was also the period in which Parliament evolved into a genuinely bicameral institution, with a House of Lords and a House of Commons. The Good Parliament of 1376 marked a watershed: the Commons, for the first time, were responsible for precipitating a major political crisis. Both the procedure of impeachment and the office of the Speaker were created there. The financial demands of the Hundred Years' War made Parliament indispensable, since each levy on moveable property required parliamentary approval. The customs on wool exports, which had existed in one form since 1275, became a steadier supplementary revenue, and after the Statute of the Staple of 1353, these too required parliamentary assent. Through this iterative process, a consensus formed: for a tax to be just, the king had to prove its necessity, it had to be granted by the community of the realm, and it had to serve that community's benefit.

• 6. Chivalry and English Identity

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  In January 1344, Edward hosted a great feast at Windsor Castle, attended by lords and a contingent from the City of London. The first evening, all the attending ladies dined together with only two knights, while the other men ate in their tents. Jousting followed over the next three days. According to the chronicler Adam Murimuth, Edward was judged champion of the tournament "not because of his kingly rank but because of his great exertions". The King then announced the founding of a Round Table of King Arthur, to which "certain lords" swore an oath. The first meeting was set for the following Whitsun. Murimuth records that "this work was later stopped for various reasons".

  Around four years later, Edward founded the Order of the Garter, probably in 1348. The wartime experience of the Crecy campaign of 1346-47 appears to have been a determining factor; it has been argued that the total warfare tactics employed at Crecy were contrary to Arthurian ideals, making Arthur a problematic model for Edward at the moment of the Garter's founding. Polydore Vergil records the origin story: the young Joan of Kent dropped her garter at a ball at Calais, and when the crowd mocked her, Edward tied the garter around his own knee and declared honi soit qui mal y pense, which translates as "shame on him who thinks ill of it".

  The war with France also accelerated a broader shift in English identity. A statute in 1362 ordered that English be used in law courts, and in the following year Parliament was opened in English for the first time. William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer all produced vernacular literature in this period. The Anglicisation had its limits: the statute of 1362 was itself written in French, and Parliament continued to open in French as late as 1377. The Order of the Garter also included foreign members, among them John IV, Duke of Brittany, and Robert of Namur.

• 7. Decline and Aftermath

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  The second phase of the Hundred Years' War began in 1369, when the vigorous Charles V of France enlisted Bertrand du Guesclin as Constable of France and methodically reversed England's gains. By the Treaty of Bruges in 1375, England's vast French possessions had been reduced to the coastal towns of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne. At home, Edward increasingly relied on a subordinate named William Wykeham, who became Chancellor in 1367, though Parliament forced his resignation in 1371. The deaths of trusted companions compounded the difficulty: William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Edward's partner in the 1330 coup, had died as early as 1344; Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, perhaps the greatest of Edward's military commanders, died in 1361, most likely of plague.

  Alice Perrers had been appointed to Queen Philippa's household by 1359. After the Queen's death she is believed to have become the King's lover. She maintained an active business life outside the court, particularly as a moneylender, while also accepting gifts from those wishing to advance their causes with the ageing King. The contemporary chronicler Thomas Walsingham described her as a low-born woman who made a fortune from a besotted king. The Good Parliament of 1376 accused her of taking 2,000 to 3,000 pounds in gold and silver per year from the royal treasury. Her gifts from Edward included 50 manors across 25 counties and 20,000 pounds in jewels. She was banished from court during the Good Parliament, though she returned later that same year and remained with Edward until his death. In 1378, during the first year of Richard II's reign, she was put on trial before Parliament, found guilty, sentenced to exile, and had her property forfeited to the Crown.

  Around the 29th of September 1376, Edward fell ill with a large abscess. After a brief recovery in February 1377, he died of a stroke at Sheen on the 21st of June. He was succeeded by his ten-year-old grandson Richard II, since Edward's eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, had died on the 8th of June 1376. The succession order Edward had signed in letters patent that year placed his third son John of Gaunt second in line, passing over Philippa, daughter of his second son Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence. That decision eventually steered the throne toward the House of Lancaster in 1399, while those descended from Lionel formed the basis of the Yorkist claim. The geneticist Adam Rutherford has calculated that Edward had over 300 great-great-grandchildren and more than 20,000 descendants by 1600; by the 21st century, Rutherford estimates, it is "virtually impossible" that a person with a predominantly British ancestry is not descended from Edward III.