The Perfect King (58 page)

This attitude to the latent power of books - which, incidentally, is not dissimilar to that of his intellectual mentor Richard Bury - is amplified by Edward's attitude to learning The borrowing of a book on the history of Normandy mentioned above quite possibly relates to his own research, as he would have had to know something of the history of Normandy in order to spin the lines he did on the Crecy campaign. In
1332
he paid a clerk to sit down and read through all of Domesday Book to work out which towns had once been royal: not because of any sentiment but so he could think about how to tax them. History was simply a requirement of a king. But his knowledge went further than just kingly necessaries. His interests extended beyond religion, military strategy and good kingship to history and alchemy (an interest he shared with his mother and the earl of Lancaster). His summoning of two alchemists who claimed to have made silver, 'whether they would come willingly or not', should not be taken as a sign of pure covetousness. It should be remembered that a major alchemical text was dedicated to him.
5
' Given Edward's propensity to give books away, and considering the destruction of most medieval manuscripts in the sixteenth century, the non-existence today of a magnificent library of beautifully illuminated royal texts owned by Edward cannot be taken as evidence that his court was an anti-intellectual one, or that Edward himself was not interested in the extension of knowledge. We only need to reflect on Edward's foundation of King's Hall at Cambridge, and Philippa's foundation of Queen's Hall at Oxford, to remind ourselves that this was a court which valued learning.

One vivid extension of this interest in the natural world is to be seen in Edward's collection of wild animals. Edward kept a large menagerie of wild beasts, especially large cats, and even paid for them to be taken with him around the country. In
1333
a payment was recorded 'to the keeper of the king's leopards', and the following year the Italian merchant Dino Forzetti was paid for providing
Edward with an additional two li
ons, three leopards and a mountain cat. In
1334
he took these animals north with him when he moved the royal household to York, and kept them there until he turned his attention to France (at which time they returned to the Tower of London). He also owned a bear, given to him several years earlier by King David of
Scotland
.
In later years the royal menagerie was supplemented by gifts of wild leopards and lions, including a gift of live animals from the Black Prince in
1365.
Of course, nothing of the royal menagerie remains. But even the idea of Edward III as a collector of rare species has been eclipsed by the knowledge that Henry III had an elephant. That all these beasts were kept at the Tower of London is interesting, as there too was the royal lending library. The Tower of London as a resort of learning is perhaps one of the more unpredictable images to arise from a study of the life and interests of Edward III.

So what does survive of Edward's cultural patronage which we can pick up and see for ourselves today? The answer is precious
little
. Almost no trace remains of the music of his court, only the payments to his minstrels and the odd motet. Of all the hundreds of gold and silver enamelled cups and goblets which we read about in the royal records, probably only one example of the type from his reign is still in existence. This belongs to King's Lynn, and, ironically, is known as the King
J
ohn cup, as a result of a confusion with the king who granted King's Lynn its charter. Hardly any cloth survives, except some parts of a horse trapper and some ecclesiastical vestments of the period. All the fantastic gold- and silver-embroidered tournament aketons and other chivalric garments have gone. As for jewellery, of all the choice items which are extant, none can be associated personally with Edward. Some texts survive but these do not make light reading. Rather it is in the literary creations encouraged by the successes of his reign that we may find cultural importance, the poetical works of Chaucer, Gower and Langland, the histories of his exploits in the works of le Baker, Froissart, Gray, Murimuth, Avesbury and the author and translator of the longer
Brut,
and the imaginative works, such as the
Travels of Sir John
Mandeville
of which various copies are known with supposed dedications to Edward.

Certain artistic works do attest to his patronage. The most glittering and untarnished today are the coins of the realm, in particular the gold coins. From
1344
many attempts were made to establish a successful gold coinage, resulting in a number of highly worked designs: variations on the theme of the king in his boat and a geometrical design on the reverse. In
1351
a new attempt to improve the gold and silver coinage resulted in the renewal of the old silver groat of his grandfather and the introduction of an especially fine series of gold nobles. Of course the skills of the artist who constructs a die for a gold coin are not dissimilar from the skills required to create a seal matrix, and Edward's reign set a new high for that particular art form, not least in his own great seal of the
1360s
(the Bretigny seal). To quote the standard work on the subject: 'this remarkably beautiful seal marks the culminating point of excellence in design and execution in the series of Gothic great seals of England'. In the absence of his architectural achievements, his armour, his clothes, his paintings, his music, his jewellery, his ornaments, his books and his clocks, it is perhaps these small items which give us our most unadulterated glimpse of his artistic and cultural patronage.

There is one further opportunity for us to
gaze upon the art of Edward III
's kingship. This is his tomb, and the tombs of his wife, brother and eldest son, and to a lesser extent the tombs of his infant children. In some ways it is the most obvious medium to last, and yet in others it is not. Many royal tombs of the period have suffered: those of Queen Isabella and Lionel of Antwerp were lost in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, that of John of Gaunt was lost in the Great Fire of London. But the very highest art of Edward's patronage may be seen in his son's tomb at Canterbury and the two splendid tombs at Westminster. At Canterbury we may look at the prince's armour, and see the sculptured relief of his face. We cannot tell how exact the likeness is but, such is the quality of the work, we can believe that we do see a true representation of the man. We may do the same at Warwick, where the tomb of Thomas Beachamp, earl of Warwick, and his wife Catherine survives intact, replete with a full set of weepers, including portrait images of the Black Prince and probably Edward himself. At Westminster, looking at Edward's and Philippa's faces, we may be sure we look at likenesses. The figure on Edward's tomb monument was sculpted to be realistic, and only tidied sli
ghtly
. It was based on a death-mask, which is still extant. Philippa's stout figure and friendly face were carved in marble by Jean de Liege during her own lifetime: in other words, carved from life. In this way the idealised faces which sculptors had traditionally placed on dead kings' and queens' tombs came to be supplanted by the likenesses of real people. Edward and Philippa did not need to portray themselves as icons. They themselves had become iconic.

Edward's development as a cultural patron can thus be seen to have acquired many new dimensions after
1349,
the year of the plague. Up until
that
year most of his expenditure had been on war and the culture of war (the completion of St Stephen's Chapel excepted). From
1350,
the last time he actually took part in combat, most of his expenditure was on building and artistic projects for the future. With his buildings came his patronage of painters, sculptors and glaziers on a scale not witnessed in England since the reign of Henry
III
. By
1370
Edward had spent a total of more than
£130,000
on building work, and had created palaces which would continue for the rest of the middle ages to be potent emblems of his kingship.

The destruction of all this work is hence all the more surprising, and can only really be explained through the misfortune of fire and the damage of neglect, as tastes changed. That we know these buildings existed is a telling case of documents proving more durable than stones. But it is also an indication of how
little
we should regard what intervening centuries have thought of a dead king. Edward was the greatest English cultural patron of the later middle ages. Those who argued in the twentieth century that his claim on the throne of France was 'absurd' would have had difficulty denying that his preference for a clock-regulated hour and his development of the use of cannon show every indication of a logical and far-sighted mind. Those who regarded him in the nineteenth century as a brutal warmonger would probably have baulked at the thought that he also founded a Cambridge college, maintained a library, and patronised die art of the Italian Renaissance. And contemporary readers whose image of a medieval warrior-king is that of an unkempt savage might well have difficulty reconciling this image with a man who had hot and cold running water in his bathrooms.

THIRTEEN

Lawmaker

When Edward prepared to face parliament in February
1351,
he was a very different man to the eighteen-year-old who had so eagerly awaited his first parliament after taking power, twenty years before. Then he had looked to the forum as a proving ground. Now he had proved everything, and parliament had bowed to his kingship. But although representatives were satisfied with his past performance, one of the developing functions of parliament was to question the king on his policy and, if possible, hold him to account. This was the first parliament he had held for three years, and only the third he had attended since
1344.
His promise to hold a meeting with representatives every year was looking frail. It was also the first gathering at Westminster since the Black Death. There were men present who wanted to know what could be done to ameliorate the downturn in the kingdom's fortunes. Some may have wondered what their king had done to incur God's wrath, so that England had not been saved from the horrors of the plague. As for Edward himself, he was well aware that the peace in France would not hold. The new French king, John, was bound to try his luck, hoping to show himself more successful in
battle
than his father. So Edward faced a difficult task. He needed to buy back public confidence, and to reassure parliament, but at the same time he had to convince a country just emerging from economic collapse to grant him a further subsidy towards the war.

This is, on the surface, how things stood in February
1351.
But such an analysis pays no attention to how Edward himself had changed. As Edward's cultural patronage shows, after
1350
he was less anxious to fight and more interested in creating permanent structures. In Shakespeare's famous analogy, Edward was emerging from the fourth age of man, the soldier, 'jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth' and entering the fifth, the justice 'with eyes severe and beard of formal cut'. He said as much in his opening address at that parliament. 'We desire always to do right to our people and to correct wrongs and defaults wherever they may be found in our realm.'

From Tuesday
15
February Edward began to hear petitions. The first asked him to confirm Magna Carta and the statutes of his ancestors and to revoke the subsidy on the country because of the plague. Predictably enough, Edward agreed to the confirmation of the law but refused to relinquish the tax. The next petition asked him to prevent labourers neglecting their manorial dues in the wake of the plague. Edward responded that a statute would follow. This is interesting: although the remedy to the problem had been devised eighteen months earlier, in the Ordinance of Labourers, it was as a result of a petition in parliament that it became enshrined in law. No less significant was the next petition, which begged Edward to prevent papal appointments to English benefices. Parliament objected to overseas clergy taking the income from their English benefices without even visiting the country. This, of course, had been a cornerstone of Edward's policy since
1344.
But whereas then he had merely tried to prevent overseas clergy from taking their positions, now in the Statute of Provisors he made the pope's provisions illegal. A little later another important petition was presented, requesting the return to free trade, a theme from an earlier parliament. Edward assented, and so the Statute of Free Trade was placed firmly on the law books. Three of the most important statutes of the fourteenth century were thus agreed in principle over a couple of mornings' debate.

Edward's professed desire 'to do right' at that parliament pushed justice high up his list of priorities. This raised some spectres from the past. One was Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, whose father Edmund had been done to death by Roger Mortimer without trial way back in
1326.
He now wanted confirmation of his inheritance and assurance it would pass to his heirs. Similarly, hovering in the background, was Sir John Maltravers. In June his outlawry was annulled. These were old misjudgements which required correction, which Edward was pleased to consider. Justice of a different sort was needed in the case of Chief Justice William Thorp, who had been arrested and found guilty of corruption the previous year. Edward had declared that corrupt officials would face death, so that was the sentence looming over him when he came to parliament in
1351.
Edward, always prepared to order the most extreme punishment, was not always eager to see it carried out. He was therefore looking to remit the death penalty. Thorp was tried before his peers and found guilty, but not sentenced to death. Some years later he was given the chance to redeem himself, and entered Edward's service again.