British Monarchs Who Ended Badly, Part 3: Edward III to Henry V

With the reign of Edward III, we reach the golden age of chivalry. Edward created one of the most famous of chivalric orders: The Order of the Garter, around 1348. His methods of warfare were hardly chivalric, however.  

[Image: Edward III with roll of the Order of the Garter, 15th century drawing, Bruges Garter Book]

The Knights of the Garter were the creme de la creme of the nobility and gentry. Naturally, they loved to plunder, kill, and rape peasants, who were not covered by chivalric rules. A lot like the rules of war today, really. 

Edward III provided his knights with a golden opportunity. He went to war with France. French wars had been a common feature of English life since the Norman Conquest, but Edward's war was different. Earlier kings since 1066 had fought in France to protect or sometimes extend their lands in that country. Edward III wanted more: the French throne. Or so he said. 

Now, if you are a diehard English monarchist, you might say he should have had it -- without a fight. To explain why, we must go back to the previous reign. Edward II married a French princess, Isabella, who gave birth to the future Edward III in 1312. * 

When her brother Charles IV died in 1328 without an heir, his closest male relative was Edward III. But the French bypassed Edward and selected Philip of Valois as King. Why? Because Isabella was not a man. 

French hereditary law held that the throne could not be passed to the descendant of a woman, in this case, Edward. He disputed the decision, to no avail. 

In 1337, he began what historians later called the Hundred Years War. It lasted from 1337 to 1453, which, as you will notice, is 116 years. But the Hundred- and Sixteen-Years War is clumsy and hard to remember.  

The Hundred Years War was actually several wars punctuated by years of peace. During the long reign of Edward III, the English won some great victories, like Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), largely due to the skill of their longbowmen, who were hardly chivalric.

In the later years of Edward III's reign the war went badly for the English. Nature made things worse for everybody. Floods, cold weather, famine, disease added to war. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. 

The worst disaster was the plague, or Black Death, which struck Europe in 1347-49 and returned in 1361. About 30 percent of the population died in Western Europe, perhaps more. The plague came back periodically for another 300 years.

In 1376, Edward III's heir, Edward the Black Prince, died after years of chronic illness, possibly malaria or some other infection. He had been the victor at Poitiers and other battles, and was considered the greatest soldier of his time. He was only 45. [Image: Effigy and Tomb of Edward the Black Prince, Canterbury Cathedral]

Edward III, whose health and mind had been failing for some time, died the following year. He had been monarch for 50 years, the second longest reign of the medieval period. 

The throne passed to the ten-year-old son of the Black Prince, Richard II. For several years, Richard was guided by his uncles. Their guidance was not especially helpful. The war in France went badly. The royal finances were mismanaged. In 1381, England was engulfed by the largest Peasant Revolt in its history. 

Peasants, artisans, and laborers rebelled against a regressive poll tax designed to pay for the French war. They were already reeling from the effects of the war, plague, bad weather and government attempts to keep wages down.

The rebels captured London and terrorized the city for several days. They killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer. They burned the Savoy Palace, the magnificent London home of John of Gaunt, Richard's uncle. 

Young King Richard, now 14, met with their representatives and promised to grant their demands. Alas, it was a ploy. At another meeting, the Mayor of London treacherously killed the peasant leader, Wat Tyler. in the confusion that followed, Richard rode up to the rebels and urged them to follow him away from the scene. They did. The rebellion soon collapsed.

[Image: Richard II, Westminster Abbey]

When Richard came of age, he dismissed his uncles and began to rule as well as reign. In the later 1380s, he started to act arbitrarily, leading to charges of tyranny. In retrospect, his biggest mistake was to exile his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke in 1398.   

Bolingbroke was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. When Gaunt died in early 1399, Richard confiscated his vast estates for the Crown, disinheriting Bolingbroke. The estates remain a major part of the monarchy's portfolio. There is even a cabinet minister in charge of it, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. 

In June 1399, with French help, Bolingbroke returned with an army, to claim his inheritance. He defeated and captured Richard in Wales and called a parliament, which declared Richard deposed. Because Richard had no heir, the parliament declared Bolingbroke king as Henry IV. It was the first time the English Parliament chose a monarch, but not the last.

[Image: Henry IV, Bolingbroke, funeral effigy, with his wife Joan of Navarre, Canterbury Cathedral]

Henry IV was the first of three Lancastrian kings. He had promised the deposed Richard that he could live, but a plot to restore the former king changed that. Richard died in Pontefract Castle in 1400. He was likely murdered, possibly starved to death.

Henry IV's problems, and England's, were hardly over. He spent much of his reign fighting off rebellions, some challenging his claim to the throne, a challenge that was to cause problems for several decades. 

His later years were marked by a series of severe illnesses. He suffered from a disfiguring skin disease, possibly leprosy. Henry IV died unhappily in 1413, perhaps of heart disease, aged 46. He left behind a badly divided England.  

His son and heir Henry V (Shakespeare's Prince Hal) sought to unite the English by restarting the Hundred Years War. In 1415 he invaded France. A meticulous planner and a skilled general, Henry inflicted a decisive defeat on a large French army at Agincourt, and  captured key towns and fortresses. Along the way, he made a few great speeches, if we are to believe Shakespeare, play Henry V. 

The French agreed to a compromise peace in 1421. Henry was named heir to the throne and regent. He married a daughter of the French king to seal the deal. Alas, he died the following year. The stated cause of death, "camp fever," could mean several things. He was only 36, but his body was probably worn out by seven years of ceaseless campaigning. 

[Image: Henry V, painted in late 16th or early 17th century. Gotta love the hairdo!]

Henry V left a nine-month-old son as king of England and presumptive heir to the French throne. As the youngest king of England ever, Henry VI could hardly defend his French claim. English nobles who ruled in his name tried, but they lacked Henry V's charisma and skills. 

Slowly, the English began to lose territory to French soldiers inspired by Joan of Arc. By 1453, the only English territory left in France was the port of Calais, which it held until the 1550s. 

With the war in France over, the English reverted to fighting among themselves. During the previous century, powerful noblemen had created private armies of retainers, mercenaries. Instead of fighting for land, they fought for money. Their employers were fighting for the Crown. 

The Game of Thrones was about to heat up.   

*Mel Gibson Fake History Alert. In Braveheart, we are led to believe that Isabella had a one-night stand with William Wallace and that the future Edward III was the son of Braveheart. Edward III was born seven years after Wallace's execution. It must have been a long pregnancy.   

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British Monarchs Who Ended Badly, Part 2: Henry II to Edward II

Henry II, the first Plantagenet monarch, was not only King of England, but lord of much of France as well. He inherited some regions and gained others through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, as feisty a queen as ever lived. 

Historians generally rank Henry II highly for his legal and administrative reforms, but his reign was hardly trouble free. He conducted a long battle with the Church over the legal status of the clergy. The dispute led to the murder of his defiant Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1172, possibly at Henry's instigation. 

Henry did penance for that and survived the uproar. His biggest long-term problem was his family. His sons and wife mounted several rebellions against him, and he died of a stomach ulcer while still at war with them in 1189. More trouble awaited the two sons who succeeded him. 

First came Richard I, the Lion-Hearted. He is notable as the only king to have a statue erected outside Parliament. Today, one has to wonder why. Romantic Victorians idolized him as a gallant knight. But he was a wretched monarch. He spent only six months of his ten-year reign in England and treated the country as a cash cow. The rest of the time he was crusading in the Holy Land or fighting to defend his lands in France. And he was cruel. After the capture of Acre in modern day Israel, he ordered the massacre of 2700 Muslim prisoners. 

Returning from the Crusade, Richard was imprisoned in Germany for about a year, and held for a huge ransom that the English people paid. During a campaign in France a crossbow bolt struck his shoulder. Gangrene set in, and that was his end. He treated his wife badly and had no children. His brother John succeeded him.  

John was the only King John of England, because he was the Evil King John. Before that, he was the Evil Prince John of the Robin Hood stories. That was mostly, if not entirely, mythical, although it rested in part on John's bad reputation. John did plot against his brother Richard to gain power and wealth. Once John was king, he continued to behave badly. He alienated his barons by taxing them without their consent and seducing their wives. I'm not sure which angered them more. It all ended in 1215 at Runneymede Meadow in Surrey. Rebellious barons cornered John and forced him to sign Magna Carta, The Great Charter. 

The Great Charter demanded that the king respect the liberties of his subjects. That mainly meant the nobles. But the Charter did throw in some clauses designed to protect the Church and the "freemen" of the realm. 

Magna Carta effectively declared the principle that the king is not above the law. It also laid the basis for the later development of Parliament by demanding the king consult "the community of the realm" before levying new taxes. 

John soon repudiated the Charter and resumed war with the barons. He died on campaign in 1216. Rumors circulated that he had been poisoned or had died of a "surfeit of peaches," which is better than a surfeit of lampreys. Dysentery, or the Bloody Flux, is another possibility.

John's successor was his nine-year old son. Henry III had the longest reign of any medieval monarch, 58 years. He spent huge sums on building projects and other schemes. He irritated the barons a lot and they mounted several revolts against him. At the Battle of Lewes in 1264, a baronial army led by he Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, captured and imprisoned him for some months. His son Edward was captured as well, but he escaped, defeated the baronial army, killed de Montfort, and released his father. Edward was a man of action. 

Edward I, who succeeded Henry III in 1272, was a tall fellow. One of his nicknames was Longshanks. Edward initiated important legal and administrative reforms. English historians of the Victorian era idolized him as a great monarch, perhaps the greatest, of the medieval period. The Welsh and Scots had and have a different opinion. 

Edward completed the English conquest of Wales and built some amazing castles there, which did have the virtue of being a modern tourist attraction. He also tried to conquer Scotland. His Scottish campaigns earned Edward another nickname, the Hammer of Scots. It also led to the Scottish Wars of Independence and the meteoric rise of William Wallace, "Braveheart." Wallace's army won a stunning victory over an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297.* Things went badly for Wallace after that, however. 

Scottish enemies betrayed him to the English. Edward had him executed for "treason" in 1305. Contrary to the film Braveheart, Edward I did not die while Wallace was being disembowelled, but two years later. 

Some historians have called his son and heir Edward II the worst king in English history. Perhaps, but there was lots of competition for that title. The fact that he was likely gay did not help his reputation, especially with the Victorian historians. Unlike his hyperactive father, he was considered lazy and incompetent. He lost a decisive battle to the Scots and Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, which led to Scottish independence. 

His wife Isabella, a French princess, turned against him and took a noble lover. Along with barons disgruntled by Edward's behavior, they mounted a rebellion against him in 1327. They captured him and imprisoned him in Berkeley Castle. Not long after, they announced that he had died. 

Was Edward II murdered? Probably, but we will never know for sure. One highly unlikely tale claims he escaped, fled to the Continent, and became a hermit. A grislier story, more likely but hardly proved, is that his captors killed him by ramming a red-hot poker into his anus. In any case, he was no longer king.

The throne passed to his teenage son Edward III. He is best known for initiating a long series of wars with France, which historians obsessed with neatness labelled The Hundred Years War. 

*Mel Gibson Fake History Alert: Stirling Bridge was pivotal to the strategy and outcome of the Battle of Stirling Bridge. This seems pretty obvious from the name of the battle. In fact, no bridge, very likely, no Scots victory. In Braveheart, the bridge is missing in action, along with Mel's brain. 

This Church is a Film Star: London's St. Bartholomew's

The Church of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London is probably familiar to you.  Even if you have never been there in person, you almost surely have seen it on the big or little screen. It has been used in many popular films and TV shows, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Amazing Grace, The Other Boleyn Girl, Richard II, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. 

The church's stardom helps explain why it was the first parish church in England to charge tourists an entrance fee.  For a parish church it is quite large, which may explain its attraction to film-makers. Being in the heart of London doesn't hurt either.

The church, which stands just to the south of the famous meat market of Smithfield, dates from 1123, when a man of some wealth named Rahere, founded the Priory of St. Bartholomew, with an attached hospital. Rahere had recovered miraculously from a fever while on a pilgrimage to Rome, and in a dream the saint instructed him to set up a monastic foundation, or so said Rahere. 

The hospital, the oldest in London, is next door inside a high wall. The wall contains a memorial to William Wallace, Braveheart, who was executed for treason nearby, one of many people who met that fate here, including the heretics/martyrs burned under Bloody Mary. 

A statue of Henry VIII, father of Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I, stands over the entrance gate to the hospital, legs splayed, looking very kingly indeed. The statue was his reward for dissolving the monastic foundations and giving the hospital to the City. 

Since Henry’s time the hospital has been a secular establishment, known affectionately as “Bart’s.”  Another interesting and just as old church sits inside the hospital walls known as St. Bartholomew the Less. The “Less” is not a put-down, but was coined to distinguish it from its larger namesake nearby. Both are part of the same parish of the Church of England today.

How convenient. In one little place, you might be cured of illness (not likely), executed (more likely), and given the necessary rites to speed your way to heaven (unlikely).

Just to the south of Bart's Hospital lies the former site of London’s notorious Newgate Prison, now replaced by the Central Criminal Court. But that is another story.