The first problem facing the new regime in England and the one most in need of a conclusion was the ever-present running sore of the Scots. Robert Bruce had adhered to his promise not to raid England during Isabella’s invasion and subsequent campaign, but now, with the deposition of Edward II, his assurances no longer held, and bands of ferocious Scots were raiding the northern English counties. It seemed that a short and successful war would cement the popularity of the new dynasty, so Edward, his mother and Mortimer began to gather an army in York. The assembly was marred by an argument between English archers and the servants of Flemish men-at-arms sent from Hainault. Fuelled by the endemic English dislike of foreigners, the argument turned to a fight and then to a slaughter, with the archers shooting indiscriminately at anyone who appeared alien. When order was restored, there were three hundred dead in the streets of York, mainly Hainaulters. It was perhaps an omen for the campaign, which began with the English army floundering about over an inhospitable terrain where it mostly poured with rain, trying to find the Scots, who had no intention of fighting an open battle; and ended with an exhausted English army withdrawing. Edward was furious and was said to have wept in frustration.
Now it was increasingly clear to Isabella and to Mortimer that this was an unwinnable war. Even in the glory days of Edward I’s Scottish wars, the Scots had always eventually returned to the fray, and the incessant border raids and the consequent punitive expeditions were a drain on resources and funds that England could ill afford. English emissaries began to negotiate with the Scots, and the result was the Treaty of Northampton, ratified by Edward III in May 1328. The treaty acknowledged Scottish independence and the position of Robert Bruce as king; gave up English overlordship of Scotland (claimed by English kings ever since the Conquest); agreed to the return of various relics, including the Black Rood (a sliver of wood that the Scots believed was from the cross on which Christ was crucified), the Ragman (a parchment admitting submission to Edward I, with the seals of most of the great men of Scotland affixed to it), and the Stone of Scone; and agreed the marriage of Robert Bruce’s four-year-old son, David, to Isabella’s seven-year-old daughter, Joan. In return, Robert Bruce agreed to pay an indemnity of £20,000, or £1.65 million in today’s money (silver standard), for Scottish raids into England and to support England against any enemy except the French. As there was no other likely enemy, this was a rather hollow promise.
In hindsight, the treaty was a piece of pragmatic common sense. If the Scots could not be brought to heel, then give them what they wanted in exchange for perpetual peace and join the two crowns by a marriage deal. Additionally, security in the north would mean that Edward could pursue a French war without constantly having to look over his shoulder. Unfortunately, that was not how it was seen in England. The ‘Shameful Peace’ had given away a princess, acknowledged the success of treason, given up the English crown’s hereditary privileges over Scotland and, crucially, failed to address the rights of English lords who held lands in Scotland. As by the treaty they now had no rights there, these lords styled themselves the ‘Disinherited’. The young Edward made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of the treaty, saying that it was all his mother’s and Mortimer’s doing, and that he frowned on the wedding of his sister and would not attend the ceremony. No doubt some of this was a swift adoption of sloping shoulders once he realized the extent of public opinion, and in any case the London mob prevented the abbot of Westminster from releasing the Stone of Scone. Almost overnight, Isabella’s popularity began to wane, and by extension that of Mortimer.
Hot on the heels of the conclusion of the Scottish war came the news of the death of Charles IV, the last of the Capetian kings who had ruled France for over three hundred years. All three sons of Philip IV, the Fair, had ruled in succession after him and none had produced sons that survived infancy. The next-born child of Philip was Isabella, and she was swift to send emissaries to Paris to register her claim. The stage was set for the Hundred Years War.
When Charles was on his death bed, his wife was pregnant. The king was said to have decreed that, if the child was a boy, then he would succeed, and, if not, the crown of France should pass to the thirty-five-year-old Philip of Valois, count of Anjou and Maine, the son of Charles of Valois, who was a brother of Philip IV. When, two months later, in May 1328, the child was still-born, Philip summoned a carefully chosen assembly of the nobility of France to decide the succession. His own claim was based on his being the grandson of one king and the cousin of three others, whereas Edward III’s mother Isabella was the daughter of a king and the sister of three others; thus, if the succession was to be decided by consanguinity, her claim was the stronger. The so-called Salic Law, which was supposedly part of the legal code of the ancient Merovingian Franks and which forbade descent through the female line, was not trotted out and relied upon until very much later, but it is true that there had never been a queen regnant of France, and when the question had last arisen, in 1316, the girl’s guardian had conveniently withdrawn her claim. Isabella’s emissaries, Bishops Orleton and Northburgh, argued that there was no legal justification for excluding her. They pointed out that the greatest duchies, such as Aquitaine, could be and had been inherited by females, and that other kingdoms – Hungary, Bohemia – had been ruled by females of cadet branches of the Capets. Furthermore, they argued, even if there was justification for excluding a woman, this argument could not be extended to Isabella’s son, who was the closest male descendant of Philip the Fair. This was a sensible shift – claiming the throne for Edward rather than for his mother – for, if the latter’s claim was pressed, then in logic her dead brother’s daughters would also have a claim.
Whatever the legal arguments might have been, the French were determined not to have Isabella on their throne, nor to accept her fifteen-year-old son. Not only was Edward of England a foreigner (although he would not have considered himself such) but he was a mere boy and would simply be the figurehead for his mother and her very dubious (in French eyes) lover, Mortimer. Philip of Valois, on the other hand, was a vigorous adult and a member of one of the greatest families of France. Accordingly, Isabella’s representatives found little support for her claim. Philip of Valois was proclaimed king of France as Philip VI, and the burgomaster of Bruges, who was unwise enough to voice his countrymen’s support for Edward, was mutilated and hanged as a warning to others.
Isabella would never relinquish her and her son’s claim to the throne of France, but for the moment there was very little she could do about it. The unpopularity of the Scottish treaty, the arrival of a queen consort, and Mortimer’s acting in the very way that had persuaded him to oppose and eventually to rebel against Edward II were all conspiring to reduce her influence. The regency council of state ruled in Edward’s name, with neither Isabella nor Mortimer having any official role. As the queen mother, Isabella was of course entitled to make her views known and to be consulted, but, while Mortimer could no doubt have had himself appointed to the council, he seems to have preferred to remain in the background and to exercise power over the king through the boy’s mother, which did at least allow him to avoid blame for unpopular decisions. When the new king of France demanded homage for Aquitaine and Ponthieu on pain of invading Aquitaine, Isabella’s first reaction was to refuse, but, when Philip began to seize the incomes of the wine trade, Edward had no option but to cross to France in 1329 and pay homage in Amiens cathedral. Technically, the act of homage would negate any claim to the French throne, but later it was argued that Edward had not removed his spurs or his crown, nor had he knelt, so the act was meaningless. In any case, he had not done it freely but in the face of force majeure. For the moment, however, neither Edward nor his mother was in any position to press his claim.
The rule of Isabella and Mortimer, at first greeted with acclaim as a relief from the unstable and increasingly oppressive reign of Edward II, was now beginning to be viewed with as much dread as Edward’s and the Despensers’ had been. It was obvious to all that Isabella controlled the young king, and Mortimer controlled Isabella. Isabella’s lands and incomes increased, largely at the expense of the new queen Philippa, who was yet to receive the queen’s dower still held by her mother-in-law, while Mortimer too acquired more land and riches and, by having himself created earl of March, set himself above all other Marcher Lords in precedence. As Isabella was intelligent enough to realize the opposition that such tyrannical behaviour had aroused during her late husband’s reign, one can only suppose that she was in such thrall to Mortimer that she could not or would not curb his ambitions. Even when Mortimer enticed Edmund, earl of Kent, into a bogus plot to rescue his half-brother Edward II – supposedly imprisoned rather than dead – and then had him executed as a traitor, Isabella failed to rein him in. But when rumours began to circulate about her being pregnant by Mortimer – which, if true, was a scandal of enormous proportions – the young king had had enough of being controlled by Mortimer through his mother.
On 15 June 1330, with the court at Woodstock, Queen Philippa gave birth to a son, Edward of Woodstock, the future Black Prince. That same summer, the court moved to Nottingham, and Mortimer issued writs for a meeting of the great council of the realm, with nobles being warned that staying away would attract heavy penalties. Quite what Mortimer hoped to achieve at the council can only be a matter of speculation, but he was aware that he was unpopular, that the young friends of the king were urging him to assert his authority, and that, with the king approaching his majority and with a healthy heir apparent, the rule of Isabella and Mortimer was under threat unless they managed somehow to persuade or intimidate the council into extending it.
The castle at Nottingham, built by William I and improved and extended by his successors, was a formidable structure, and when Mortimer offended the barons still further by informing them that only the king, Isabella, Mortimer and their personal guard were to be accommodated in the castle, with all others lodged in the town, he must have felt that he was quite secure – particularly when Isabella brought new locks for the gates and doors leading to the keep, where the royal family was quartered, and had the keys delivered to her personally each night when the doors had been locked and sentries placed on them. Such tight security did not save them. On the evening of 19 October 1330, the magnates left the castle at the conclusion of the day’s business and the gates were duly locked. Later, a group of the king’s supporters, led by the governor of the castle, whose soldiers had been replaced by Mortimer’s men, entered the castle by way of a tunnel that ran from the town into the castle keep, where they were met by the king and taken to Isabella and Mortimer’s apartments. The king remained outside while his party burst in to find Mortimer in discussion with the chancellor, the bishop of Lincoln. In the ensuing scuffle two of Mortimer’s bodyguard were killed, and Mortimer and the bishop were seized and dragged out through the tunnel. Isabella, meanwhile, is said to have cried in French for her good son to have pity on dear Mortimer – although, as she is said to have called from an adjoining apartment, it is difficult to see how she could have known that the affair had been orchestrated by the king. Next morning, Mortimer’s associates were arrested and the party was taken to the Tower, while the king called a parliament to meet at Westminster and announced that henceforth he would rule fairly and with the advice of the great men of the kingdom. He was just eighteen years of age.
In November 1330, Parliament duly met in London. Mortimer was condemned unheard and sentenced to death, along with two of his most notorious adherents. On 29 November, he was drawn to Tyburn on a hurdle and hanged, as were his two collaborators on Christmas Eve. All three were spared the more exotic refinements of a traitor’s execution and were permitted burial. Edward had taken pains to ensure that no mention of his mother was made in the trials, and she was merely pensioned off to live in some style at Castle Rising. A cursory and unsuccessful attempt was made to find those suspected of murdering Edward II and those complicit in the judicial murder of the earl of Kent, but all had fled abroad except for Sir Thomas Berkeley, the owner of Berkeley Castle where Edward II had met his end, who was put on trial but cleared. There were no more executions. In disposing of the old regime, Edward III was a lot more lenient than his father or Mortimer had been, and in due course many of Mortimer’s adherents were pardoned and their lands and titles restored.
Edward now had to rectify the oppression of his father’s reign and that of Mortimer and Isabella. Many of the officials of the two previous regimes were given a short period in the wilderness but then re-employed if they were able administrators, as many of them were. All land grants made since his accession – made by Edward in name but by Isabella and Mortimer in reality – were cancelled, and laws forbidding duels, unofficial tournaments and the bearing of arms in Parliament were strengthened. Outside the immediate control of the king and his government, England was a lawless land: brigandage was rife, and justices, whether those of Edward II or Mortimer, were corrupt. The exhibition of various body parts of notable persons acted as a salient reminder of the dangers of choosing the wrong side in what had been a violently fluctuating political landscape. Great lords maintained private armies and often behaved very much as they liked, even if they were constantly obliged to jockey for position depending on whose star was in the ascendant at any particular time. Whether Edward III saw war abroad as a way to channel English aggression to the common good, or he was mainly concerned with what he saw as his rightful inheritance through his mother, is irrelevant. In any event, it is clear that from very early on he was intending to take on the French king. Before he could do that, however, he had to ensure that his back door was secure and that, if he took an army to France, he was not going to be invaded by the Scots.
It took Edward four campaigns to be sure that Scotland was safe, but he had to maintain the fiction that the Scots were the aggressors, otherwise by the Treaty of Northampton he would have to return the £20,000 reparations paid by the Scots but actually a loan to them from the pope – a sum long since spent by Isabella. Initially, he hid behind the Disinherited, those holders of lands north of the border who had lost out in the Northampton settlement. They, led by Edward Balliol, son of the deposed king John Balliol, raised an army and landed in Scotland. Openly Edward III condemned the move, refused the Disinherited passage over English territory, and confiscated the estates of their supporters in England (quietly returning them a few months later). At the same time, Edward agreed to liege homage for his French lands, promised various marriage settlements between the French and English royal families, and agreed in principle to going on crusade with Philip. Initially, with Scotland divided and ruled by a regency for the six-year-old king David Bruce, the Disinherited made startling progress, and, although he had by no means conquered all of Scotland, Edward Balliol was nevertheless crowned at Scone in September 1332 and promised homage to Edward III for the whole country. English pretence of non-intervention began to unravel with the arrival of King David and his court as refugees in France. Nevertheless, as the pope was anxious to prevent the two major Christian powers from going to war and had granted the French king a tax on the clergy to fund the projected crusade, a peace of sorts was maintained save for a few insignificant French raids on the Channel Islands and the landing in Scotland of a handful of French horsemen.
Then, in 1333, there was a resurgence of the Bruce faction, which captured Berwick and embarked on the age-old Scottish sport of launching raids into England. Edward was able to claim that it was the Scots, not he, who had broken the treaty, and in went an English army that soundly trounced the Scots at Halidon Hill. Further expeditions followed in 1334, 1335 and 1336 until Edward was able to penetrate to the farthest reaches of the Highlands – much deeper than his illustrious grandfather had ever been able to do, and this time the English did not fall into the trap of trying to fight a guerrilla war with a conventional army. It was increasingly clear to Philip of France that Edward of England not only had no intention of abiding by the Treaty of Northampton, but that he had no intention of joining a crusade either. This entirely correct assessment was reinforced by the presence at the English court of Robert of Artois, who was on the run from Philip of France.
Robert of Artois had once been one of Philip’s closest friends and advisers; now he was his implacable enemy. When Robert’s father, the duke of Artois, died in 1299, the dukedom had passed not to the then fourteen-year-old Robert but to his aunt, the old duke’s sister. Once he was old enough to argue the point, Robert had devoted all his energies to getting the dukedom passed to him. He had tried litigation, persuasion, bribery, blackmail and outright violence, but nothing had worked. He had married Philip’s sister, and, when Philip became king of France, Robert saw his opportunity and wormed his way into the new king’s counsels to the extent that for a period the king would make no decision without consulting him. Robert then made his move and persuaded the king to confiscate the duchy of Artois while his claim was examined anew. Unfortunately for Robert, his aunt died in 1329 and the inheritance passed to the duchess of Burgundy, who, by virtue of her husband being one of the great lords of France, was a much tougher proposition than an aged aunt. Matters were not helped when Robert’s documents purporting to prove his right to the duchy turned out not only to have been forged but also to have been forged under his instructions. Philip had been made a fool of and was furious. A criminal prosecution failed when Robert fled the jurisdiction, hiding out in the Low Countries or anywhere else that would give him shelter and railing against the French king, threatening revolution and the death of the royal family by witchcraft. The understandably vindictive Philip, meanwhile, banned him from all French territories, confiscated his lands, and tried in vain to have him kidnapped or assassinated. Eventually, in 1334, Robert turned up in England, where he was received with interest – but little else – in the court. Edward III was still, at this stage, anxious to placate France, so Robert was ordered to keep his head down and cease his propaganda against Philip, which for two years he did.
By 1336, things had changed. Edward had secured his northern borders against the Scots and had quietly built up a series of alliances with states bordering France, some owing allegiance not to Philip VI but to the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV,21 who was rather less holy now that he had been excommunicated but powerful nonetheless. The enthusiasm of these allies was directly proportional to their distance from France: the German states, with the River Meuse between them and France, were all for it; the count of Flanders, next door to France, was less so. The threat of stopping exports of English wool was deployed to bring the Flemings into line. In France, litigation in the courts was chipping away at the rights of English cities and bishoprics in the disputed lands, and, thanks to the pope, Philip was the owner of a large fleet of ships.
Since 1309, the papacy had been based in Avignon in southern France, whither it had moved to escape the infighting and machinations of the great Roman families who had hitherto dominated the office. From then until the return to Rome in 1378, all the popes would be French, and so would an increasing number of cardinals, often relatives of the reigning pope. Although the south of France was very different in both language and culture from the north, where king and government lay, the English tended to assume that popes were in the French king’s pocket and, while paying lip service to the papacy, regarded any secular actions by it with suspicion. Pope John XXII was querulous and superstitious but a shrewd amasser of riches, and, when he died in December 1334, his treasury was found to be full to overflowing. John’s successor, Benedict XII, concealed behind an obese and drunken exterior sharp political antennae, and in order to keep the peace in Europe and to direct the warlike tendencies of the French and English externally towards the recovery of the Holy Land, rather than internally towards each other, he had happily financed the building of a fleet to transport the crusading army. Then, in March 1336, the pope cancelled the crusade and rescinded his authorization for the clergy to be taxed to finance it. Benedict had concluded that he could not keep the peace between England and France, and that, if Edward of England was not going to join an expedition, then the French king could not take his army abroad. So Philip now had a fleet to use for other purposes, and the ships began to move from Marseilles to the Channel ports. The English knew very well that the move could only presage a sea-borne invasion of England, and Edward began to take measures to deal with it.
Although English kings had long styled themselves ‘Lords of the English Sea’, by the time of Edward III it was an empty title, and at this period of English history there was no great maritime tradition to fall back on. From 1066 until King John lost his lands in France, England controlled directly or through alliances the whole of the Atlantic coast, and, while navies were occasionally raised after that when invasion threatened, they were swiftly disbanded when the threat had passed. It was not that the English were unaware of the security of their sea routes – ships plying between Bordeaux and England hugged the coast rather than cross the Bay of Biscay, hence the importance of a friendly Brittany – it was just that they could not afford to spend much on it. Edward III owned but a handful of ships, with masters (often unpaid for long periods) but no crews, and in the event of a naval threat the defence of the nation at sea depended, in theory at least, upon the Cinque Ports. By ancient decree these ports were required, in exchange for various customs and taxation privileges, to provide fifty-seven vessels between them for fifteen days. In fact, most of the ports had silted up, many of the ships they could provide ostensibly for war were in fact fishing vessels, and evasion of their obligations was widespread. In practice, the king would have to requisition ships from elsewhere – Great Yarmouth was now far more important as a port than any of the Cinque Ports and most of the ships would come from there.
Command of English navies was vested in two admirals, that of the North and that of the South. The posts were usually held either by soldiers, who knew a lot about fighting on land but little about war on the sea, or by influential magnates, who might know very little about any sort of war. Most of the ships impressed for the English navy were cogs, thought to have originally developed from Viking longships. Cogs were wide-beamed, shallow-draught merchant vessels with one mast and a square-rigged sail, built of oak and with a stern rudder. Divided into various sizes ranging from ‘up to 10 tons’ to ‘over 120 tons’, most were relatively small, although there were cogs of 300 tons.22 Being square-rigged, the cog could not sail into the wind, nor was it very manoeuvrable, but it could carry a considerable quantity of cargo, was reasonably resistant to bad weather and heavy seas, and could put in to estuaries and bays that a ship with a deeper draught could not. Most of those assembled to counter the threat of the French fleet were of 100 tons displacement, sixty feet long and twenty wide, with a crew of twenty-five sailors and a fighting element of archers or men-at-arms. Once the cogs were taken into the king’s service, fore and stern castles – wooden towers front and rear – and crows’ nests were added. These were manned by archers and stone-throwers, for English naval tactics were simple: ram any enemy ship, sink it or board it, attack the crew and chuck their bodies overboard, dead or alive.
On 24 May 1337, King Philip announced the confiscation of Aquitaine, stating this to be as punishment for Edward’s failure to fulfil his obligations as a vassal of the French king and for his sheltering of Robert of Artois. It is this act that can be taken as marking the beginning of the Hundred Years War. The English response was to despatch an advance party to the Low Countries to prepare for the reception of an English army which Edward intended to land there later in the year. Eighty-five ships crewed by 2,000 seamen and carrying 1,500 soldiers and a large cargo of wool, which would be sold to pay for the escapade, set sail from Sandwich in November under Sir Walter Manny.
Admiral of the North and responsible for all ports from the Thames to Berwick, Manny was an early example of the sort of men who would make their reputations and fortunes in the coming war. A younger son of minor Hainault aristocracy, he originally came to England as a page to Queen Philippa. Having progressed from being her carver, responsible for her food, to looking after her greyhounds, he was knighted in 1331 and came to prominence as an up-and-coming soldier in Edward Balliol’s army of the Disinherited that invaded Scotland in 1332. He then served in all of Edward III’s Scottish campaigns, did well, and received honours and lucrative appointments as a result. In his mid- to late twenties in 1337, he appears to have been personally brave, unheeding of danger, reckless, flamboyant, as greedy as everyone else at the time, but a competent commander and a good leader of men withal.
Instead, however, of going straight to Dordrecht, on the Rhine south-east of Rotterdam, as he should have done, Manny decided to embark upon a private frolic of his own. First, he attacked the port of Sluys and was repulsed, whereupon he raided the island of Cadzand, east of Zeebrugge, where he captured enough notables to earn himself a tidy sum in ransom later. He then looted the town and burned most of the inhabitants to death, having first locked them up in the church. Lucrative though the venture was to Manny, it achieved little of military value. Having at last landed his party at Dordrecht, the admiral returned to England to prepare to transport the main army.
On 16 July 1338, Edward of England sailed from Walton-on-the-Naze, south of Harwich on the Essex coast. After landing at Antwerp and much to-ing and fro-ing to secure local alliances, the king eventually processed to Coblenz, where in a lavish ceremony in September the Holy Roman Emperor Louis of Bavaria – whose anti-French and anti-papal stance was reinforced by a hefty English bribe – appointed Edward as overlord of all the emperor’s fiefs west of the Rhine. Even Edward’s flat refusal to kiss the emperor’s foot could not mar the occasion. It was now too late for campaigning that year and so, having promised the rulers of the minor states supposedly now allied to him large subsidies for the provision of troops, Edward ordered them to concentrate their contingents north of Brussels in July the following year. The English court settled down in Antwerp for the winter, leaving the king’s clerical staff to reply to the remonstrance of the pope, who objected to Edward’s dealings with the excommunicated emperor and his giving of succour to Robert of Artois. The pope pointed out that previous English kings had come to grief by trusting too much to foreign advice, a clear reference to Edward’s father’s fixation with Piers Gaveston.
Far from the allied armies being on parade in July, it was not until September 1339 that Edward’s army was ready to move, and even then not all the promised participants had turned up. The campaign was exhausting and expensive, and it achieved nothing. Much manoeuvring in Picardy around Cambrai, St Quentin and Buironfosse failed to bring Philip and the French army to battle. A win for Philip would not gain him England, whereas a defeat could lose him France. The longer Edward stayed in France without a decisive battle, the more likely it was that his allies would slip away, and his funds would not last forever. The end of the campaigning season found Edward angry, frustrated and increasingly in debt. His priority now was to raise enough money to continue the war, and also to persuade Flanders that neutrality was not an option.
On 23 January 1340, in the marketplace in Ghent, Edward III proclaimed himself king of England and France. Not only was this a restatement of his mother’s and his own claim to the French throne – one he was egged on to make by Robert of Artois – but, if he was king of France, then the Flemings could not be accused of treason if they fought against Philip, whom Edward claimed to be a usurper. More importantly, given that there were genuine legal doubts as to whether English kings held their French lands in liege homage from the king of France or in full sovereignty, if Edward III was the rightful king of France, then the question was irrelevant.
The French fleur-de-lys was now incorporated into the English royal coat of arms, quartered with the English lions (or leopards), and Edward took as his motto Dieu et Mon Droit – ‘God and my right’ – which has remained the motto of English and then British sovereigns to this day. Oddly, perhaps, Philip did not object to the incorporation of the fleur-de-lys – as the grandson of a French king, Edward was entitled to use it – but he did object to the lions, the symbol of a poor offshore island, being placed in precedence over the arms of the great kingdom of France. In England itself, Edward’s claim was not universally approved; there was widespread distrust and indeed hatred of France, and Parliament had to enact a statute saying that in no circumstances, now or ever in the future, could any Englishman be subject to the laws of France.
Although Philip had no intention of meeting the English army in open battle in northern France, fighting was going on in Gascony, French forces were besieging English castles in the Agenais, and they were active at sea too. Between 1337 and 1339, Rye, Folkestone, Dover, Harwich, Plymouth and the Isle of Wight were all subject to sudden French landings, followed by a brief period of pillage, rape and murder before the raiders set fire to what would burn and took to sea again. In 1338, they took most of the Channel Islands and held them until 1340, and also in 1338 they captured England’s largest ship, the king’s own cog Christopher, along with the Edward. While the English responded by equally bloody raids on Le Tréport and Boulogne, no town on England’s east and south coasts was safe from French raids, usually by galleys which, being powered by rowers, were less subject to wind or tide than were English cogs.
In addition, Edward’s financial situation was precarious. So far, the cost of procuring allies and sending an English expeditionary force to Europe and keeping it there had been met by loans, mainly from Italian bankers and English and Flemish merchants, but these sources were drying up. Some loans were coming due for repayment, more recent loans went only to repay old ones, new ones could only be obtained at exorbitant rates of interest, and the wool brought over by Manny had not fetched as much as had been hoped. Things were so serious that Edward had actually pawned the crown of England in Bruges. He had to tilt the balance of the war in his favour quickly, and the only solution was to raise more money from England and to bring over an army large enough to force a battle. In February 1340, a month after proclaiming himself king of France, Edward returned to England to raise funds. It was a humiliating departure: he had to agree to his queen and a number of his nobles remaining behind as surety for the loans, and he had to promise that he would return with the money or, if without it, that he would subject himself to detention until it was found.
In the almost two years that Edward had been out of England, Parliament had increasingly begun to question the cost of the war, laying down all sorts of conditions before granting yet another tax. Edward met Parliament in March 1340 and deployed his extraordinary ability in managing public opinion to charm the legislators. Explaining that, if the money was not raised, then his honour would be destroyed, his lands in France lost, and he himself imprisoned for debt, and assuring all that he had no intention of combining the two kingdoms nor of taking any action in England in his capacity as king of France, Edward asked for, and received, a tax of a ninth.23 This, in addition to more loans squeezed from the London merchants and a levy on the clergy, would be sufficient for him to carry on the war. He did not even discuss Parliament’s conditions, agreeing to them all without argument.
The troops being assembled to reinforce those already in Europe were a mix of men raised by feudal array, volunteers and paid professionals, both men-at-arms and archers. The reported numbers of men in medieval armies are notoriously unreliable, and the number of English ships said by contemporary chronicles to have been mustered for the crossing vary from 147 (Lanercost)3 to 260 (Le Baker).4 But as the number of French ships is generally agreed to be around 200 and all chroniclers of both sides agree that the French fleet outnumbered that of the English, then 150 is probably the most the English could have had. If we allow that around 50 ships would have been carrying horses, stores and the ladies going out to join the queen and that a 100-ton cog could carry at most 100 men of whom 25 would be crew, then the maximum number of soldiers might have been around 5,000, in the proportion of three archers to two men-at-arms.
By the time Edward and his fleet were ready to leave England, in June 1340, the English knew that the French fleet had been moved to Sluys, now silted up but then the main port for Bruges, north-east of it at the mouth of the Zwin on the south side of the Honde estuary. As the only purpose of stationing the fleet there would be for an invasion of England, or at the very least to prevent an English army from crossing the Channel, Edward decided that he would meet the threat head-on and, rather than avoiding the French ships and landing at Dunkirk or Ostend, would do battle with them.
This was an audacious plan indeed, and, when Edward suggested it, his chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, argued strongly against it; and when he could not change the king’s mind, he resigned his office and returned the Great Seal of England to the king.24 Edward summoned his most experienced admiral, Robert Morley, and asked his opinion. Having previously served Edward II and been party to the coup that deposed him, Morley initially served on land in Edward III’s Scottish wars before taking to the sea. He had shown himself a most accomplished organizer and leader of raids on the French coast and had been appointed Admiral of the North in February 1339. Morley pointed out the dangers of the king’s plan and advised against it, and this opinion was backed up by the very experienced Flemish seaman John Crabbe, originally a mercenary pirate in the Scottish service who had been captured by the English and changed sides and was now the king’s captain. Edward lost his temper and accused all three of plotting against him, telling them that they could stay at home but he was going anyway. He was mollified only when Morley and Crabbe announced that much as they opposed the caper, if the king went, then so would they.
The story of the Battle of Sluys – the first major engagement of the Hundred Years War – is not one that springs to the lips of every English schoolboy, but in its way it is as significant as the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1558 and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. For if it had been lost, the 20,000 troops that Philip of France was amassing to invade England would have found nothing at sea to oppose them and precious little on land once they got there. Like Admiral Jellicoe at Jutland over half a millennium later, Edward III was the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.
Up to this point, despite the improving English ability to mount coastal raids, the French had been superior at sea, and had the Great Army of the Sea, as Philip termed it, been in the Channel a year earlier, things would have been very different. Then, not only would the French have mustered many more ships overall than they did now, but also they would have had many more galleys, swift and manoeuvrable and far more suited to war at sea than the sluggish English cogs. Fortunately for the English, the combination of a revolution in Genoa that had resulted in a regime no longer inclined to hire galleys and crews to the French, and English raids that had burned beached galleys at Boulogne, had left the French with only six galleys, four of their own and two Genoese. In addition, the fleet had twenty-two oared barges, not as manoeuvrable as the galleys but more easily handled than the cogs nonetheless, seven sailing ships specifically built as naval vessels, and 167 requisitioned merchantmen.5 Manning the ships were around 19,000 soldiers and sailors, although only about 500 crossbowmen and 150 men-at-arms were professional soldiers, the rest being mariners, militia and recently impressed recruits.
Knowing that Edward was intending to sail for the Low Countries, the best alternatives open to the French admirals were to blockade English ports or to catch the English fleet at sea and annihilate it. In the event, they did neither. The two French admirals, Quiéret and Béhuchet, elected to take up a defensive posture across the mouth of the three-mile-wide estuary running south-west from the island of Cadzand, deploying their ships in three lines, chained together. Béhuchet, a short, fat Norman, had been a civil servant before showing considerable ability as a leader of raids on the English coast, and Quiéret too was an experienced sailor; but the two men did not get on personally. Both should have known better, for they were relinquishing the opportunity of fighting a sea battle, something at which the French were better than the English despite their shortage of galleys. Instead, they were affording the English the chance to fight a land battle on ships – and the English were very much better at fighting on land than the French. The third commander of the Great Army of the Sea – a Genoese mercenary named Pietro Barbanero, Barbenoire, Barbevaire or Barbavera, depending on the source – was the most experienced practitioner of naval warfare of them all. He urged that such a defensive deployment gave no room for the ships to manoeuvre and that the fleet should put to sea and make use of its numerical advantage to fight the English well away from the shore. He was ignored.
The English fleet sailed from the mouth of the River Orwell at first light on 22 June 1340, with the king aboard the cog Thomas, and hove to off the Flemish coast the following morning at (according to Edward’s despatches) the hour of Tierce, or 0900 hours.25 The two fleets could see each other. Edward first ordered the church militant, in the shape of the bishop of Lincoln, to go ashore, ride the ten miles or so to Bruges, and encourage the Flemings to attack the French from the shore once the English fleet attacked from the sea. Three knights were also landed to observe and report on the French fleet. By early next morning, 24 June, Edward knew the strength and disposition of the French fleet, and he had also received the bishop of Lincoln’s unwelcome news that the citizens of Bruges were adamant that on no account should the English attack such a huge French fleet, for to do so would court disaster. Rather, they said, Edward should wait a few days until he could be reinforced by Flemish ships. The king ignored this advice, but, since to attack at once would mean sailing into the sun, Edward decided to tack out to sea and position himself where the wind and the tide would be at his back. This and the redisposition of the fleet into attack formation took most of the day. Some sources say that the manoeuvring was interpreted by the French as an English retreat and that they began to unchain their own ships in order to pursue; and Barbanero certainly advised a move out to sea. In any event many French ships were still chained together and their fleet was still in a defensive posture when the English, with the wind, the tide and the sun behind them, struck.
Edward had arranged his fleet in line abreast, with one ship full of men-at-arms – infantry – flanked by two of archers. The archers were on the fore and stern castles and in the crow’s nests, and, as the fleets closed, a storm of arrows began to cause casualties among the French. Their crossbowmen replied, but there were insufficient of them and with their much slower rate of fire they were ineffective. When the lines of ships crashed into each other, the English sailors swung their grappling irons and the infantry began to board. This was difficult, as many of the French ships were higher than those of the English, particularly the Spanish vessels of Philip’s Castilian ally, but once on board the raw sailors were no match for the English men-at-arms, most of whose fighting skills had been honed by their participation in the Scottish wars. With sword, mace, short spear and bill, the English infantry captured ship after ship in the first line and recaptured the cog Christopher. Once the colours of Philip of Valois were struck and replaced by the lions and fleur-de-lys of England, panic set in amongst the second line of smaller ships and less experienced crews. By nightfall, most of the ships of the second French line had been captured and those of the third were trying to make their escape. Many soldiers and sailors jumped overboard to avoid the ferocity of the English attack, but a good number of those who managed to swim ashore were bludgeoned to death by the waiting Flemings. Those who could not swim (most, in fact) were drowned, as were many who could swim but were weighed down by their armour. In the darkness some French ships got away, including Barbanero’s galleys, but next morning any remaining in the estuary were swiftly accounted for, and altogether 190 French ships were captured or sunk.
It was a great and overwhelming victory. Edward, and most contemporary chronicles, attributed it to the grace of God, but in truth the French were beaten by their decision to throw away their advantages in numbers and seamanship by confining themselves to the estuary, by the superiority of the English archers’ firepower, and by the experience and fighting abilities of the English infantry once they had boarded the French ships. Sources vary as to the extent of the butcher’s bill. Most of the chronicles give figures between 20,000 and 30,000 French dead, which are far too high. But while a beaten army on land can run away, the only escape at sea is into it, so there may have been as many as 10,000 French dead, wounded and prisoners, or about half the total number engaged, and for days afterwards bodies were being washed ashore. Quiéret was killed in the fighting, but Béhuchet was recognized and held by his captor in the hope of ransom. It was not to be: the scourge of the English coastal towns was not going to get away so lightly and Edward had him hanged on the mast of his own ship. English casualties – remarkably light considering the intensity of the ship-to-ship fighting – were between 400 and 600 killed and wounded, including the king himself, who sustained minor wounds to his thigh and hand.26 While the French could and would still raid English coastal towns, the threat of a full-scale invasion had gone.
To the English, all the auguries for a successful campaign in northern France now seemed favourable. So Edward decided to capture the frontier city of Tournai himself, while Robert of Artois, with Flemish troops bolstered by a small contingent of English archers, would take the city of St Omer. All came to naught. Robert was unable to take St Omer and had to retire back to join Edward, and Edward was unable to take Tournai as he had no siege train. He also had his usual problems over money and had once more to appeal to Parliament in England for another subsidy. There, public opinion, while supportive of the war, was fiercely opposed to yet more taxation; as one chronicle put it, ‘Wherefore you shall know the very truth: the inner love of the people was turned into hate and the common prayers into cursing, for cause that the common people were strongly aggrieved.’6 A grant was forthcoming, however, but not enough to keep the armies in the field, nor to conduct a lengthy siege, and in mid-September, with the weather deteriorating, supplies running low and the less committed allies beginning to hedge their bets, the pope proposed a truce to last until the summer of 1341. Edward was glad to accept and slink back to England. It was an inglorious end to what had been such a promising start; it would not be for another six years that Edward III would achieve such a devastating victory as that of Sluys, and then it would be on land.
