The Three Edwards (48 page)

Listening to the cries of the mob, van Artevelde realized that the burden of their complaint was that he had stolen civic funds. This was a canard which had been handed down by his critics among the nobility, that he had not rendered an accounting of public moneys for seven years but instead had been sending the funds to England. There was not a scrap of truth in it.

Finally he threw open the shutters of one of the windows and leaned out so all could see him. There was a brief second of silence and then the air was split with the loud outcries of the mob. As he looked down into the street, which was now black with angry people, Jacob van Artevelde must have realized that for him this was the end. But his regrets would not be for himself but for the failure of the cause he represented. This bold and clear-sighted man knew that only by joining the crowded checkerboard of little states into one strong union could the democratic Dutch people continue to exist surrounded by feudal and militaristic countries. This meant that the opposing forces had won.

He tried to speak, to protest his innocence of the charges they were making. The belligerent townspeople refused to listen. The air was filled instead with their loud cries while stones began to rattle on the walls of the house. The intrepid leader strove to make them hear, but there was no willingness to grant him the chance. The glint of steel showed above the heads of the mob as the infuriated weavers brandished their daggers and pikes in the air.

Perhaps the delay he needed to rally his own partisans and to achieve an orderly hearing would have been possible had he taken refuge in the top floor of his round tower. He did not make use of it, however. Instead he thought it wiser to escape from the house. He stole out to the stables behind the building with the idea of getting away on horseback. His purpose was immediately detected and the cobbled courtyard filled quickly. One of the hoodlums had a poleax in his hands, and it needed no more than one blow to put an end to the life of the man who had done so much for the Flemish people.

His last words were said to have been: “People! Ghent! Flanders!” which gives a summation in dramatic form of his life and purpose.

Once the deed had been done, the mob melted away, awe-struck and repentant. When the streets had cleared, the body was taken to the monastery
at Biloke, where he had first preached his doctrine of unity. Later it was removed for burial at the Carthusian monastery at Royghem.

There was a reversal of sentiment almost immediately. Those who had instigated the disorders in the hope of taking power away from him were shocked at the violent reactions of the mob. An expiatory lamp was lighted in the monastery of Biloke and the expense of maintaining it was borne by the top-ranking families, who had always opposed his rise to power: the Westlucs, the de Mays, the Pannebergs, the Pauwels. The lamp was still burning thirty years afterward. But the bloodstained poleax had done more than put an end to the life of the great leader; it had set back for centuries the purpose for which he had worked, the union of the vulnerable Low Countries against aggression.

Edward’s financial troubles came to a head before he could resume the war with France on a large scale. He found it necessary to repudiate his debts to his Italian bankers.

The Lombardy bankers, as they were called in England, first came into notice in the reign of Henry III. They engaged in business in the island kingdom in order to buy English wool and after a time Henry employed them in making remittances to the popes. They not only transmitted Peter’s Pence to Rome each year but also, by a system of bills of exchange, placed in the hands of the pontiffs the large sums that the Church in England paid to the papacy. During the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, the house of Frescobaldi in Florence became the financial agents of the English kings. They grew so powerful that public feeling in the country ran high against them and a member of the family, one Amerigo de Frescobaldi, was banished from the kingdom. Edward II began to distribute his business widely when he came to the throne and discovered that he was saddled with debts amounting to £118,000, partly his own, partly those left by his father. The Frescobaldi assumed a large part of the loan made to the king, but he had business relations also with the Peruzzi family and the Spini, both of Florence. Still another Italian banker, Antonio Pessagno of Genoa, loaned Edward II between the years 1313 and 1316 the sum of £36,985. He stood so high in the king’s favor that he acted as buyer for the royal household. It seems also that at one stage he was entrusted with the custody of the king’s jewels (perhaps after the forcible closure of the Knights Templar) and was given a gift of three thousand pounds by Edward for his valuable services.

The public did not like so much favor shown to foreigners, particularly as the acumen of Edward II had come seriously into question by this time.
The feeling against the Italians ran so high that the headquarters of the Bardi in London was burned by a mob. This episode created an unwillingness among the Lombardy moneylenders to establish themselves in England, and they gradually closed the shutters over their windows and returned to sunnier climes. Of the sixty-nine institutions which had been represented in the time of Edward I, most of them quite small, only two remained when Edward III came to the throne, the family of Peruzzi and the Society of the Bardi.

The financial transactions in which the first two Edwards had been involved were relatively small and even routine in nature compared with the magnificent scale on which Edward III did business with the foreign bankers. The third Edward had a full-scale war on his hands which necessitated the upkeep of armies and navies and the payment of subsidies to his-allies, not to mention the costs of a most brilliant and extravagant court. So much gold was required that the resources of England were unequal to the drain and the king inevitably turned to the foreign moneylenders. He was given loans on such a huge scale that he realized in 1339 that he could no longer meet his indebtedness. Accordingly on May 6 of that year he issued an edict suspending all payments on his debts, “including that owing to his well-beloved Bardis and Peruzzis.” He owed the two houses the stupendous sum of 900,000 florins. To add to the difficulties of the two banking houses, another monarch was deep in their books, the King of Sicily, who owed each the sum of 100,000 florins.

The city of Florence went into a slump. The financial world of Europe was shaken to the core. The Flemish cities which had entered into alliance with Edward and had loaned him money were so disturbed that they lost faith in the leadership of Ghent’s Jacob van Artevelde, which led to his assassination. Philip of France, with a vulpine smile no doubt, proceeded to make capital of the situation after the manner of Philip the Fair. He accused the Italian bankers in France of usury and extorted large sums from them by way of fines. Believing that this form of bankruptcy meant the end of English pretensions, he was said to have begun plans for turning the tables by invading England. In Florence riots broke out between the
grandi
and the
popolo
. The Bardi and the Peruzzi had been the financial backbone of the republic, so the news that both houses were in difficulties had the impact of an earthquake. They had been called “the mercantile pillars of Christendom” and it seemed impossible that they had been reduced so close to failure by the bad faith of one king.

One of the heads of the Peruzzi family, Bonifazio di Tommaso Peruzzi, set out at once for London to discuss the situation with the English ministry. It is evident from brief records in the Peruzzi archives that he failed to obtain any satisfaction. It is not certain that he reached the ear of Edward, who was deep in his international relationships and the preparation
of the navy for the invasion of France. The unhappy banker remained in England for over a year and finally died there in October 1340, unquestionably of grief and worry. There had been a brief period when the brilliant victory at Sluys raised expectations. Surely, thought the sad and aging Bonifazio as he pursued his unending peregrinations between the headquarters of the company in the city and the chancellery at Westminster, the king will now be in a position to reopen the question of his indebtedness. Edward did not return to England until the head of the Peruzzi family had died, but it was reported at the time that he was willing to resume the obligations. Parliament, seeing no way out of the morass of debt in which the lavishness of the king had involved the nation, took a negative view. No promises could be obtained from the legislative body of a willingness to pay in the future.

In January 1345 both banking houses gave up the struggle and went into bankruptcy, dragging down with them more banking concerns and many mercantile houses. The Bardi paid seventy per cent to their debtors, but the house of Peruzzi did not do nearly so well. All properties of the two houses were turned over to the creditors, but two years later a settlement was reached. The period precipitated by this great smash has been called the darkest in the annals of that great city.

The banking proclivities of the men of Florence could not be extinguished by one great misfortune. More than a century later the family of the Medici arose to outdo the records of the earlier days and place Florence on a much higher pinnacle.

I
N reaching this stage of Edward’s brilliant and reckless reign, it has become apparent that optimism was one of his most marked characteristics. None but a great optimist would have thought of winning the crown of France by force of arms. None would have assumed such an appalling burden of debts unless certain that success would provide the means to pay them off. None but a believer in a personal star would have turned at Crécy to face an army perhaps four times greater than his own.

Optimism had involved the sanguine and lavish king in very great difficulties and perplexities. The curtain had fallen on the last act of the Baliol pretensions to the throne of Scotland, and so the Scottish problem, as viewed from Westminster, remained unsolved. Young David Bruce, Edward’s brother-in-law, had returned in 1341 from his long absence in France, where he and his English wife Joan had occupied Château Gaillard, the great stone fortress on the Seine built by Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Crossing in a ship provided by the French king, David landed at Inverbervie near Montrose. As he and his English wife were a handsome and attractive pair, the people rallied to their cause and David assumed the government for the second time. It became apparent at once, however, that the new hand on the reins was a weak one. No effort was made to control the arrogant nobility, who fought openly among themselves. Edward saw that the weaknesses of David would provide a good pretext for interference but that he would have to wait until the matter of the French succession had been settled.

In the same year that David landed in Scotland, the Duke of Brittany died and two claimants came forward for the post, Charles de Blois and Jean de Montfort. Philip of France threw his support to Charles. Edward declared for Montfort and sent an army over to help the Montfort faction, with Sir Walter Manny in command. Sir Walter thus had his chance to
begin the career which won him a place among the great knights of history. He performed many extraordinary deeds. But in a very short time the whole nature of the struggle changed; the English and the French were fighting it out between themselves and the Bretons had retired to the sidelines, where they watched their land being devastated, their towns ravished, their castles burned. All this was costing Edward dearly in men and money.

The situation at Avignon had also taken a turn for the worse. The new Pope was striving to bring about peace, but Edward was viewing his proposals with a suspicious eye; as well he might, for Avignon was more certainly under French dictation than it had been since the first days of the Babylonish captivity.

John XXII had died in 1334 and an inventory of his estate had revealed a most astonishing hoard. There were eighteen million gold florins in specie and seven million in plate and jewels. When the cardinals went into conclave to appoint a successor, there was no difficulty in agreeing on the Bishop of Porto save that the honest bishop refused to accept with the understanding that he must keep the papacy at Avignon. “I had sooner yield up the cardinalate,” he declared, “than accept the popedom on such conditions.” The cardinals, a large majority of whom were French, turned against him and demanded another vote. It happened that they had not provided themselves with a substitute, so it was agreed that they would not try for any decision on the next ballot. Each man would throw his vote away by putting down any name that appealed to him. By an extraordinary coincidence they all thought of the same man.

“My friends,” said the nominee when the result was announced, “you have chosen an ass.”

His name was James Fournier, a Cistercian abbot, and he was, in reality, a man of much piety and resolution. Taking the title of Benedict XII, he proceeded to spend much of the fabulous wealth left by John in enlarging and beautifying the Pope’s Palace at Avignon. Dying in 1342, he was succeeded by Cardinal Roger, Archbishop of Rouen, who assumed the name of Clement VI. The new pontiff was completely French in his leanings, and it was soon clear to Edward of England that nothing was to be gained through pontifical action. The king was so certain of this that he made an unusual suggestion, one which caused Avignon to overflow with wrath. He was willing to have the Pope act as mediator only if he would do so as a private citizen and not as Pope.

Philip now proceeded to bring things to a head. He sent his son, John of Normandy, with a large army to invade the English provinces of Guienne and Gascony. This was open war. Edward countered by dispatching reinforcements to Gascony under the Earl of Derby. To be sure that there would be good leadership, he detached Sir Walter Manny from his post
in Brittany and sent him with Derby as second-in-command. Manny performed there with his usual boldness and intrepidity, but the French forces were too powerful to be held back. It became apparent that, unless drastic steps were taken, the Aquitanian possessions of the English crown would be swallowed up.