The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty Read online

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  Plantagenets

  History of a Dynasty

  J. S. Hamilton

  Contents

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  GENEALOGY

  MAPS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: HENRY III (1216 – 1272)

  CHAPTER 2: EDWARD (1272 – 1307)

  CHAPTER 3: EDWARD II (1307 – 1327)

  CHAPTER 4: EDWARD III (1327 – 1377)

  CHAPTER 5: RICHARD II (1377 – 1399)

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © J S Hamilton, 2010

  All rights reserved.

  Continuum UK

  The Tower Building

  11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  Continuum US

  80 Maiden Lane

  Suite 704, New York, NY 10038

  www.continuumbooks.com

  First published 2010

  Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1441157126

  For Helen, Isla and Ewan,

  in gratitude for their enduring patience,

  encouragement and faith.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to a number of people for their support throughout the overly long period involved in the production of this book. First of all, thanks to Professor Nigel Saul for initially approaching me to undertake the Plantagenet volume in this series. His continuing encouragement and sage advice has been invaluable. I am also grateful to Martin Shepherd and Tony Morris, under whose editorial guidance the book was begun for London Books. In the later stage of production for Continuum, Ben Hayes was instrumental in pushing me forward to the fi nish line at long last. Along the way, several colleagues read and commented on earlier draft s of chapters, and I am particularly grateful to James R. King of Midwestern State University and George B. Stow of LaSalle University for their observations and advice. I am indebted to the written work of a great number of scholars of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England, as will be clear from the bibliography at the end of the volume. Special thanks are also due to Chris Given-Wilson, Mark Ormrod, Seymour Phillips, Philip Morgan and Michael Bennett, each of whom provided suggestions, comments and encouragement at various stages of the project. Finally, I must thank Baylor University.

  Support for this project was provided by a University Research Grant, and I could not have completed the book without the extraordinary eff orts of the research librarians and interlibrary loan specialists in Moody Library. My fi nal thanks go to my wife and children, to whom this book is dedicated.

  JSH

  Waco, Texas, October 2009

  GENEALOGY

  A Simplified Genealogy of the Plantagenet Dynasty, 1216–1399

  MAPS

  Map 1 Plantagenet Britain

  Map 2 Medieval Aquitaine

  INTRODUCTION

  The Plantagenet dynasty derives its name from the Planta genesta, the broom plant that Geoffrey, count of Anjou, apparently used as a personal emblem.

  Geoffrey’s son Henry II may be considered the first Plantagenet king. He and his sons Richard I and John, however, are more commonly referred to as the Angevins, as they continued to control a cross-channel empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the borders of Scotland. For the purposes of this study, the Plantagenet dynasty will be taken to refer to the five kings from Henry III to Richard II who ruled England from 1216 until 1399, when Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who established the Lancastrian dynasty as Henry IV. Each of the Plantagenet kings was faced with his own challenges and opportunities, yet there is a surprising degree of continuity to be found in the outlooks, attitudes and concerns of each of these kings, not least their concern for the Plantagenet dynasty itself.

  Remarkably, three of the five Plantagenets came to the throne as minors: Henry III succeeded John at 9 years of age; Edward III was 14 years old when his father was deposed by his mother Isabella; and Richard II succeeded his grandfather Edward III at 10 years of age. All three of these Plantagenets would have to overcome a variety of obstacles before they were able to assert their royal authority and articulate a vision of kingship that resonated with the political elites of their day. Henry III would be assisted by such able councillors as William Marshal, Hubert de Burgh and the papal legates Guala and Pandulf. Edward III would find himself more overshadowed initially than any other of the dynasty, faced as he was by the dominating presence of Roger Mortimer, first earl of March; it required a daring coup led personally by the king and a small group of his intimate companions to liberate himself from this unwanted tutelage. Richard II would find himself in a constant struggle with members of his own family, particularly his uncles, the younger sons of Edward III, and his cousin Bolingbroke.

  Every one of the Plantagenet kings would face political crises of the first order.

  The political history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be regarded as a commentary on the Magna Carta, the great charter of liberties that King John had been forced to accept in 1215. This was particularly obvious in the case of Henry III, who came to the throne with a French army entrenched on English soil and many of his magnates in open revolt. His repeated confirmation of the Magna Carta transformed it into a fundamental element in the English constitution. Throughout his reign, Henry faced baronial opposition – from the 1250s, led by the mercurial Simon de Montfort – and in the interplay between the king and his baronial foes, parliament began to emerge as a significant representative institution (at least in theory, if not yet always in practice).

  Henry’s son, Edward I, is generally regarded as a powerful, indeed masterful, king, yet he too faced a grave political crisis in 1297, when the marshal and constable – the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, respectively – refused to serve overseas separately from the king’s own army. Edward was forced to confirm Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest in 1297, and again in 1300, in order to restore domestic harmony, but even that might not have been enough had not the Scottish victory at Stirling Bridge shocked the aristocracy into a more cooperative frame of mind. As part of his effort to find broad-based support for taxation to fund his wars, in 1295 he summoned knights of the shire, burgesses and lower clergy to what has become known as the Model Parliament, even though such inclusiveness would not become the norm for many years to come.

  Edward II, certainly the least talented of the Plantagenets, was faced with a seemingly endless series of crises from the outset of his reign. Early on, he was forced to accept the Ordinances of 1311, every bit as great a constraint on his royal prerogative and power as the Provisions of Oxford that Simon de Montfort had imposed on Henry III. The struggle for the enforcement of the Ordinances dominated the politics of the following decade. Finally liberating himself from baronial control after his defeat and destruction of the earl of Lancaster in 1322, Edward II had himself been toppled from the throne by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer within 5 years, shortly thereafter to be deposed and almost certainly murdered.

  Coming to the throne under such circumstances, the young Edward III trod cautiously for much of his reign. Having organized a successful coup against Mortimer in 1330, Edward III struggled to find his balance through the next decade, facing a political crisis largely of his own making in 1340–1341. It is a measure of Edward’s greatness that he managed to learn
from this debacle, adjusting his expectations of the ability of both his ministers and his people to raise never-ending tax revenues for his wars. For the better part of three decades after 1340, before age and circumstances finally caught up with him, Edward would rule in cooperation with his magnates, and the increasingly prominent parliament. Nevertheless, the crisis of the Good Parliament of 1376 indicated the growing confidence and assertiveness of the parliamentary commons.

  Richard II faced many of the same problems that his forebears had encountered with both the magnates and the increasingly vocal gentry now sitting in parliament. His reign was a rollercoaster of highs and lows. That parliament was now a fully mature institution is indicated by the fact that the pivotal events of his reign were played out in the Wonderful Parliament of 1386, the Merciless Parliament of 1388 and the Revenge Parliament of 1397. Controlled by conciliar councils both in his minority and later in the reign, Richard sought to articulate a vision of kingship, perhaps more consciously than any of his predecessors.

  The language of majesty developed at his court, and his artistic patronage of works such as the Wilton Diptych resonate with his sense of his own regality. In the end, however, like Edward II, Richard too was cast down from his throne, soon to be deposed and done away with, but unlike Edward he had no son to whom the crown could pass. His failure to produce an heir spelled the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.

  Each of the Plantagenet kings faced complex diplomatic challenges. Henry III spent his entire life dreaming of recovering the French lands that his father John had lost, but his military resources and leadership were unequal to the task.

  Beyond that, he developed a grand vision of a Plantagenet empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Scottish highlands. His catastrophic involvement in the so-called Sicilian Business of 1258 in which he agreed to buy the Hohenstaufen throne in Sicily from the pope for his younger son Edmund was only the most dramatic manifestation of this vision. His lavish patronage of his wife’s Savoyard uncles and his own Poitevin half-siblings was an equally misguided course of action. Despite the retention of a diminished Aquitaine (or Gascony),1 unlike the Norman and Angevin kings before him, Henry III was an English king, without great lands and revenues beyond the sea. Whereas the Norman kings had routinely spent more than half of their reigns overseas, Henry III spent only 4.5 years in a reign of 56 years on the continent. The great tragedy of the reign is his failure to understand and embrace this new reality.

  Edward I’s interests were more obviously British. At the same time as his Capetian rival Philip IV (1285–1314) narrowed his own focus to France itself, Edward aggressively pursued what might be termed an ‘English Empire.’ He was largely successful in securing control over Wales, as physically embodied in the magnificent castles with which he ringed the country. If, in the end, he was less successful in Scotland, it was not for want of effort, as he essentially conquered the northern kingdom on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, he dedicated himself to consolidating his grip on the remaining Plantagenet territory on the continent, the duchy of Aquitaine. The costs involved were enormous, some £750,000 between 1294 and 1298 alone, as he struggled both to conquer Scotland and save Gascony at the same time. But, in the course of his reign, he developed an administrative machinery that rivalled that of Capetian France and, if it could not produce all of the funds required, it was at least capable of managing and accounting for the resources available with previously unheard-of efficiency.

  The parliament that met at Westminster in February 1305 heard petitions not only from England, but from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands and Gascony.

  Edward II may well have shared the Plantagenet vision of kingship passed down from his father, in which the English crown was to dominate its British neighbours, but he was unable to bring it to realization. Although he campaigned frequently and at great expense in Scotland, most of his efforts were misdirected against an enemy who had no intention to engage in battle; on the one occasion when a major battle did take place, Edward suffered a devastating defeat at Bannockburn. Edward’s penchant to rely on a small number of favourites rather than the broader political community had devastating consequences. Not only did this have an impact on domestic politics; it also influenced international affairs. For instance, Edward’s response to the suppression of the Templars was shaped by his need to garner support from both the pope and the king of France in order to achieve Piers Gaveston’s recall from exile. Although his relations with France were generally cordial, in no small part due to the diplomatic skills of his French wife Isabella, the final crisis of the reign was occasioned by his attachment to the younger Hugh Despenser, a circumstance which led him to send his eldest son and heir Edward to France to perform homage in his stead in 1325 – with profound consequences. Isabella would eventually return with a small army of English political exiles supplemented by mercenaries from Hainault with which she would quickly overthrow her husband and the Despenser regime, demonstrating the isolation of the king and his court both domestically and internationally.

  Edward III, and along with him his eldest son, the Black Prince, still evoke the image of chivalric warfare that was so central to medieval culture. At the outset of his reign, however, Edward faced seemingly insurmountable problems.

  Initially, he had no choice but to acquiesce in the recognition of the claims of Robert Bruce in Scotland and Philip of Valois in France, but after he liberated himself from Roger Mortimer in 1330, he was free to pursue a different course.

  He turned first to Scotland, where he took advantage of Edward Balliol’s claim to the throne to destabilize the Bruce regime. The bigger prize, however, was France. Like his father and grandfather before him, Edward III was primarily concerned with maintaining English rule in Aquitaine. His initial efforts to form a grand coalition on the continent with which to challenge Philip VI proved both enormously expensive and essentially ineffective, leading to the political crisis at home in 1340–1341. By the mid-1340s, however, Edward was pursuing a new policy based on mobility and English resources, and he was to enjoy a series of stunning successes at Crécy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356, where his son Edward, the Black Prince, captured King John II of France. The subsequent treaty of Brétigny restored an enlarged Aquitaine to Edward in full sovereignty. Ultimately, however, the combination of the fragmented nature of his new principality of Aquitaine, along with the greatly superior resources of the Capetians, made Edward’s conquests untenable, and they began to slip away after the renewal of war in 1369.

  In his handling of diplomacy and international affairs, the last Plantagenet reveals himself as something of a paradox. Richard II was a capable soldier, as he demonstrated in Ireland in 1394 and foolishly tried to replicate in 1399. But in the broader scheme of things, and particularly with regard to France, Richard pursued a policy of peace, a policy that was very unpopular with his nobility. At the same time, however, like the first Plantagenet, Henry III, Richard II appears to have had a broader imperial vision. He almost certainly considered himself a serious candidate to become Holy Roman Emperor, yet his subjects failed to share this vision, and may even have stood in its way. It is possible that this more universal rather than insular vision accounts not only for Richard’s first marriage to Anne of Bohemia, but also his second marriage to the very young Isabella of France. Heirs of his body were a lesser consideration to Richard, yet his failure to produce such heirs played a significant role in his ultimate deposition and death.

  Finally, we must consider the Plantagenet dynasty as just that – a living, breathing family enterprise. Henry III found himself essentially orphaned in 1215 following the death of his father and the return of his mother to her native Angoulême. Not surprisingly, he turned to a number of father figures in his youth, men such as William Marshal, Peter des Roches and Hubert de Burgh.

  Even more important in the history of the reign would be his marriage to Eleanor of Provence, whose uncles William, Peter and Boniface of Savoy would so
on come to dominate affairs. Henry’s inordinate generosity to these foreign-born kinsmen, first the Savoyards and then the Poitevins, was out of step with the times. These people were ‘foreigners’ in the eyes of an increasingly ‘English’ political class. Henry’s failure to understand this was a major contributing factor to the crises of the reign. Another family relationship with dire consequences was the marriage of Henry’s sister Eleanor to Simon de Montfort. Henry’s inability or unwillingness to provide Eleanor’s full marriage portion was a crucial factor in Montfort’s drift into opposition. On the other hand, Henry’s cordial relationship with his brother-in-law Louis IX of France provided him with invaluable support at a number of critical points in the reign. More than that, the friendship and rivalry that developed between Henry and Louis certainly influenced Henry’s own conception of kingship. This is seen most clearly in the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey as the Plantagenet royal church, but is also apparent in the king’s personal piety and devotion to his family.

  Edward I had come to the throne in circumstances very different to those that his father had faced as a boy of 9 years old half a century earlier. Edward had played an active role in the political upheavals that had marked the reign of Henry III. He had seen his own position as heir to the throne threatened by Simon de Montfort following the battle of Lewes in 1264; as king, he worked assiduously to strengthen both his sovereignty and the position of the royal family within the kingdom. Edward had married Eleanor of Castile in 1254 and she had already given birth to 7 of her 14 children prior to Edward’s coronation (of the four males, however, only the future Edward II survived childhood).