The Plantagenets: The Three Edwards Part 18

A further incentive had arisen through the close trade ties between England and the Low Countries. The French had been looking with covetous eyes at the Flemish wealth and had seen to it that Count Louis of Flanders, sometimes called Louis of Crecy, who exercised a nominal suzerainty over the great cities, was favorable to them. England could not allow the French to become predominant in the best market they had for their wool and had been striving for years to form a firm alliance with the Low Countries.

Finally there was Scotland and the alliance between that country and France.

All that was needed to set the fire ablaze was a pretext, a blow from either side, a bold step, a rash statement. The citizens of London had appointed captains and had set themselves to drill in the expectation of a French fleet landing on the Kentish coast. The Channel Islands were fortified and garrisoned, and new forts were built on the Isle of Wight. King Edward seized the funds which were being held in the cathedrals for a new crusade. Parliament, in a continual state of flurry, granted the subsidies which Edward kept demanding.

To make sure of the good will of the Flemish people, Edward sent a commission headed by the Bishop of Lincoln to discuss terms. The commission traveled in great state and tossed gold about in the best tradition of the king. With the bishop were a number of young English knights who wore red patches over their eyes and answered questions with cold silence. The explanation of this singular conduct was that the young men had sworn to wear the patches and to refrain from giving any information, even on such trivial matters as the weather, until they had performed some worthy deed of arms on French soil. The mission made a strong impression by their liberality but received no promises.

Half of the Low Countries were va.s.sals of the German emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria. Queen Philippa's oldest sister, Margaret, was married to Ludwig and so it was arranged that the two monarchs should meet. That momentous event occurred at Coblenz, where two thrones had been raised on the market place, in the presence of a vast congregation of the n.o.bility of Europe. Standing before Ludwig, who was holding his scepter and had a drawn sword suspended over his head by a mailed knight, Edward put into words for the first time in public his pretensions to the throne of France.

Philip of Valois, declared the English monarch, was withholding from him the duchy of Normandy and the province of Anjou. Not only that, he was keeping unjustly the very crown of France itself.

Ludwig was glad enough to have any charges made against Philip of France, who had refused him homage for the fief of Provence. He expressed his willingness to make Edward vicar-general of all imperial holdings on the left bank of the Rhine. That, of course, was what the English king had been angling for, as it placed the Flemish cities under his charge.

The two monarchs parted, nevertheless, on bad terms. The emperor had been affronted by Edward's refusal to swear fealty to him (which would have meant kissing his foot). For his part, the English king felt he had been treated as an inferior by being asked to stand before the emperor. The matter of the vicar-generals.h.i.+p remained a promise and never did reach the signing stage. Edward returned to England, having spent a fortune in gifts and bribes and all to no good end.

For a very long and very anxious period of time the rulers of England and France were like a pair of knights on horseback at opposite ends of a tilting course, lances in rest, waiting tensely for the signal to set their steeds into motion, one against the other.

There were two men who were very important to Edward at this stage. The first, Jacob van Artevelde of Ghent, was honestly convinced that the conflict was inevitable and believed there would be no lasting peace in Europe until after the clash. The second, Robert of Artois, had a grievance against the French king. A suave, soft-spoken, wily knight, he had set himself the task of convincing Edward he could win the French throne for himself.

Jacob van Artevelde belonged to the poorter cla.s.s of Ghent, the burghers who had acquired wealth over several generations and frequently lived in retirement. Over the door of his tall stone house in the Calanderberg, near the Paddenhoeck or Toad's-Corner, there was the family escutcheon, and he was allowed to sign doc.u.ments with a seal carried on a gold chain. What is more, he had a coat of arms, three hoods d'or on a sable s.h.i.+eld. He had inherited a cloth-weaving business from his father (Ghent had thousands of looms operating in busy times) and the name derived from the village of Arteveldt and certain polder lands reclaimed from the sea. It has been a.s.sumed that his wife brought him a flouris.h.i.+ng plant where metheglin was brewed, a beer sweetened with honey; and on this account he was sometimes inaccurately called the Brewer of Ghent.

An upstanding man of ample girth, with the strong features and broad brow so often encountered in Flemish portraits, he had done nothing to distinguish himself until he reached his fiftieth year. Then the sorry plight of the Flemish cities, caught between the feudal might of France and the need to cultivate the friends.h.i.+p of England, brought him to the fore. Bands of unemployed weavers were parading the streets of Ghent while their families starved in the houses packed so tightly in the crooked alleys of the town, when the word circulated among them that a citizen of some note saw a way to solve their difficulties and that he would explain the next day at the monastery of Biloke. It was Jacob van Artevelde who rose to address them the following day; and almost from the first moment they listened to him without clamor or dissent, recognizing him at once as the leader they had been waiting for so long.

His plan was simple and logical. None of their great cities was capable of standing alone against the French or the English, but if they could clear up the petty jealousies and factional differences which kept the Low Countries broken into small states, their strength would be multiplied many times over. What was needed was an alliance between the cities of Flanders and those of Holland, Brabant, and Hainaut. United, they would be strong enough to defy the French, who wanted to raze their ma.s.sive walls and smash their drawbridges and fill up their moats, and at the same time demand of the English, as the price of their neutrality, a commercial treaty which would keep them supplied with wool at all times. Only by a policy of neutrality and the power to enforce it could the Flemish people continue to exist between the grindstones of France and England.

The defensive strength of the city was based on the maintenance of trained bands in each section under the command of a hooftman and over all a captain-general who was called the beleeder von der Stad. The good burghers, convinced that Jacob van Artevelde was the leader they needed, appointed him at once to the post of beleeder. He was to have a bodyguard of twenty-one men wearing distinctive white hoods. His detractors later declared this body to be a gang of hired thugs he had organized himself. The answer was that four a.s.sistants were appointed at the same time and each had a white-hooded escort, ranging down in number from eighteen to fifteen.

The power of France, represented by Count Louis, took steps immediately to break up this dangerous movement launched in Ghent. Soon thereafter the sentries placed in the high steeple of St. Matilda's Church saw bands of hors.e.m.e.n reconnoitering on the plains outside the walls and wearing the livery of the count. Immediately a bell called Roelandt tolled from the belfry of the church. A couplet, raised on the rim of this huge bell, explained its function: Rolad am I hight [named]; when I call out, there is fire; When I bellow, there is trouble in the Flanders-land.

Old Roelandt bellowed in real earnest on this occasion and the citizens hurriedly a.s.sembled on the Couter, an open s.p.a.ce called the Place of Arms, in the heart of the city. Van Artevelde, the cloth merchant turned civic leader, took hold of the situation as though he had been born a commander of troops. He set the trained bands in motion and led them out through the gate in the ma.s.sive walls. He not only sent the hors.e.m.e.n of Count Louis to the rightabout, but he marched straight to Biervliet, from which town the hostile cavalry had come, and drove out all the troops of the count.

Great leaders have a way of emerging from obscurity when they are badly needed. Flanders was in need of a Jacob van Artevelde. He had heard the call and he stepped out from the looms where the family fortunes had been made and laid aside the ledgers in his countinghouse. No one disputed his right, not even the n.o.bility of Ghent, most of whom kept a finger in the commercial pie and were cla.s.sed as buyten-poorters. He became so powerful that a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate him was hatched on orders direct from Philip of France. That worthy successor to Philip the Fair wrote to Count Louis, "not on any account to let this Jacquemon Darteville act the part of a king or even live." The plot was nipped in the bud and the only effect it had on the stout burghers of Ghent was to increase the white-hooded bodyguard of the new heleeder to twenty-eight men.

Conscious of the solidarity of the communes behind him, van Artevelde called a meeting of representatives from the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres in the monastery of Eeckbout. He had no difficulty in convincing them of the wisdom of armed neutrality. A board, made up of three representatives from each city, was appointed to proceed with the organization of all the Low Countries according to his plan.

Armed neutrality was not what Edward had wanted, but it was the second-best thing. It left him free, at any rate, to deal with France.

The other man, Robert of Artois, might with good reason be called the villain of the piece. He was either that or a victim of the malice of Philip of France. While he was a boy his grandfather was killed at the battle of Courtrai in 1302 and, as Robert's father was already dead, the t.i.tle and lands were given to his aunt, Mahaut of Burgundy. The decision was the work of Philip the Tall of France, who was married to Jeanne, Mahaut's daughter. Mahaut had produced papers from the Bishop of Arras in which it was a.s.serted that the grandfather had wanted her to succeed in lieu of his grandson. When Mahaut died, leaving the t.i.tle to her only child, the afore-mentioned Jeanne, Robert protested bitterly and brought in evidence from a woman named La Divion to the effect that a charter from the old count, granting the t.i.tle to him in the first place, had been stolen by the bishop. There were fifty witnesses to swear that the old man had favored his grandson.

But Philip of Valois, who had succeeded to the throne in the meantime, had a way of dealing with cases of this kind. The woman La Divion was put to the torture until she confessed that the charter was a forgery and then she was burned at the stake. With the key witness thus disposed of, evidence was produced that she had poisoned Mahaut on instructions from Robert. The latter had to fly for his life and crossed the Channel in disguise. He had been a companion of Edward's when they were boys and he went straight to Windsor. The king received him as an old friend.

In the meantime, piling one charge on another, the French king was claiming that Robert and his wife, who was Philip's own sister, had tried to take his life by the oldest trick in the bag of witchcraft, by naming a doll after him and then inserting pins in the frame.

Artois had made many enemies, being proud and quick of tongue, but few people believed the charges brought against him. Certainly Edward did not put any credence in them. He was in a frame of mind to accept anything against the occupant of the French throne, which he was now firmly convinced was his by right. Artois, well entrenched at the English court, took advantage of the opportunity to preach action. "The French throne is yours, take it!" was the advice he poured into the ears of the king. He told Edward of a prediction made by King Robert of Naples, who believed in astrology, that Philip of France would always be defeated in battle if he, Edward of Windsor, led his troops in person against him. "He knows it is true and he trembles!" declared Artois.

This kind of talk served to bolster the resolution of the English king.

2.

There does not seem to have been a formal declaration of war. The two countries drifted into hostilities after many starts and stops. In 1335 Philip of France openly declared his intention of helping the Scots, and about the same time he expelled the English seneschals from Agenois. Edward wrote letters to his allies in which he styled himself King of France. The influence of Jacob van Artevelde had resulted in the expulsion of Count Louis from Flanders. The latter had, however, established his troops at Cadzant under the command of his illegitimate brother Guy. Cadzant was situated between the Zwyn and the mouth of the Scheldt, in a good position to pirate English s.h.i.+pping.

"We will soon settle this," declared Edward, and sent a fleet under the command of Henry of Lancaster (the son of blind Henry Wryneck), with Sir Walter Manny as his chief lieutenant and adviser. Manny will be remembered as the young Hainauter who had come to England in the train of the royal bride and who was known at that time as Sir Wantelet de Mauny. He was a brave and loyal knight and had climbed so high in the service of the English crown that he was now guardian of the Scottish frontier and admiral of the fleet north of the Thames. Edward, who was always generous with those about him, had given the valiant Sir Walter the governors.h.i.+p of Merioneth County and the custody of Harlech Castle. He was still a bachelor knight but later would be permitted to ally himself matrimonially with the royal family, as will be told in due course.

The English s.h.i.+ps sailed boldly into the nest of dikes and sandbanks around Cadzant and, after a sharp encounter, succeeded in capturing most of the men of Count Louis, including his brother. This was the first blood drawn in the great war which would last, with many interruptions and truces, for one hundred years.

A truce of two years was then arranged while the two monarchs eyed each other and professed a desire for peace. They were preparing feverishly for war behind their backs. During this breathing spell Edward proceeded to build up his fences in the Low Countries. Jacob van Artevelde had completed his federation and brought all this strength over to the English side. Before doing so, however, he made it clear to Edward that the time for straddling the issue was over. If he intended to fight for the crown of France he must state his purpose unequivocally, and to this Edward agreed during a conference held in Brussels on January 26, 1340. He quartered the lilies of France on his banner with the leopards of England.

It should be made clear at this point that Edward's diplomacy, although cleverly conceived, was involving him in continuous difficulty. He believed in playing one country against another and in trying to take advantage of them all. He pitted the German emperor against the Pope at Avignon because of a feud which had developed between them. He slyly countered Flanders with Brabant. There was civil war in Brittany and he played a crafty game of chess with the rival claimants. No one could ever be entirely sure where Edward stood, and the result was a lack of unanimity and zeal on the part of the allies he was bringing into the field against France.

This was unfortunate, because van Artevelde had done his work well. The great cities of the Netherlands, including Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Louvain, and many more, had come into the English camp. Their suspicions resulted in a determination to control the initial point of allied strategy.

Philip commanded the Scheldt River with the fortress of Cambrai on the upper branch and Tournai on the lower, thus breaking communications between Flanders and Brabant. The allies, on that account, made it a condition that the war must begin with the capture of Tournai, thus compelling Edward to open the campaign with an attack by water. Antic.i.p.ating this move, the French king gathered a huge fleet at Sluys. There were one hundred and forty s.h.i.+ps of war in the fleet and an enormous number of smaller craft. In command were two Breton buccaneers, Hugues Kiriet and Nicholas Babuchet, and the most noted of sea fighters of the day, the celebrated admiral Barbenoire from Genoa.

The English preparations were made with great care. The Cinque Ports promised twenty-one of their own best s.h.i.+ps and the Thames fleet offered twenty-six, to be ready by mid-Lent. The western ports were to furnish seventy s.h.i.+ps of one hundred tons and upward. A proclamation was made that any man who had been pardoned for a crime must proceed to the nearest port and volunteer for service, on pain of facing the original charge again. This brought them down in droves, with their packs on their backs and clothed in the rough s.h.i.+rts and drawers which const.i.tuted the garb of the sailor. There was equal activity in getting equipment, "espringals, arblasts, actines, blasouns and purkernels." The espringal was a catapult, the arblast the same, the actine something in the way of a clumsy nautical instrument; for the rest, the spelling is suspect.

The fleet was ready by June 10 when the king arrived at Ipswich, accompanied by the queen and a party of ladies who were going to Ghent and would have the escort of the fleet. There was much shaking of heads among the naval authorities over the prospect of meeting the great French armada with such a rag-tag-and-bobtail collection as the English fleet. Sir Robert Morley, who had been made admiral, and John Crabbe, a Scot who shared the responsibility, said they would take the s.h.i.+ps out if the king so ordered but that it would mean death for all of them. The king paid no heed to such lugubrious advice. He boarded the cog Thomas, a strongly built vessel with rounded bows, capable of taking much punishment, though not comfortable to sail in. Between two hundred and two hundred fifty vessels followed the Thomas out to sea, a strange conglomeration indeed. But make no mistake, this was to be one of the memorable moments in English naval history.

About noon on June 22 the English saw behind a projecting ridge the sails of the French fleet. The rigging of the enemy seemed to tower into the sky and the masts were like a deep forest. The English commanders-except the king, who seems to have been an incurable optimist-conceded with glum nods that the odds would be nothing short of desperate. They were still more convinced of this when a reconnoitering party returned from a hasty survey. The French, it was reported, had many s.h.i.+ps of gigantic size, and on board they had at least thirty thousand men, mostly Normans, Bretons, Picards, and Genoese bowmen.

The winds were against them, the tide was out; there was nothing the English could do that day. At dawn the next morning they got under way, the Thomas well in the van. There would have been more confidence in the attacking s.h.i.+ps if they had known of the grievous, the terrible, error the French had made. Brus.h.i.+ng aside the advice of the three experienced naval commanders that they break out into the open where they could smother the English with an excess of power, the French had elected to fight the battle as though they had dry land under their feet. With sandbanks on each side of the bay, the fatuous Gauls were convinced their flanks could not be turned, which seemed to them the most important consideration. Accordingly they had drawn up their fleet in four lines of battle across the mouth of the harbor, linking the s.h.i.+ps together with metal chains! They had filled the watchout turrets with Genoese crossbowmen, believing them the greatest archers in the world.

Most of the English captains were old salts of long experience and they slapped their thighs in delight when they saw the mighty French s.h.i.+ps manacled together like galley slaves. "If one takes fire, they will all go up in flames!" was the general opinion. On the decks of the English vessels, and all the way up into the rigging, were Saxon archers equipped with the first longbows the French had seen. Their bronzed faces were covered with confident grins, particularly when they saw from a distance the Genoese attaching their intricate crossbows to the planking under their feet as an aid in winding them up for use. Three gifts from the feather of the gray goose of England would be hurled into the French s.h.i.+ps for every arrow that came back.

The English s.h.i.+ps sailed in on the starboard tack with the wind behind them. They dropped grappling irons over the sides as soon as contact was made with the enemy; and now the poor Frenchmen found themselves in double bondage, chained to each other and also to the English vessels from which emerged madly shouting islanders with long knives in their teeth. The sound of horn and drum which had greeted the boarders from the Gallic decks died down; nothing now to deaden the vicious zing of the English arrows as they swept up and across the crowded French decks. The fighting which ensued was bitter and sanguinary but quite one-sided.

The English admiral, Morley, had singled out the greatest of the enemy craft, the Christopher, as his opponent, and soon the English colors, flaunting the lilies as well as the leopards, fluttered from the tall masthead. There were three English s.h.i.+ps which the French had captured in their coastal forays-the Edward, the Rose, and the Katherine-and these had been put vaingloriously in the first line of battle. The French must have regretted the gesture, for they were recaptured in rapid sequence, the whole English navy lifting a mighty roar each time the colors dipped.

A large part of the English success was due to the inability of the cross-bowmen to compete with the green-jacketed archers from across the Channel. The hail of steel-tipped arrows cleared the decks ahead of the boarders. The first line of French battle crumbled. The crews jumped over the sides or stood in meek clumps with their arms raised in surrender. Babuchet, who had committed atrocities along the English coast, was captured and strung up to a yardarm, which did nothing to repair the sinking French morale. The second and third lines of battle offered little resistance after the destruction of the first.

The fourth line, however, showed a sterner spirit. By some ridiculous error of judgment the fourth line, shut up behind all the rest of the fleet and in danger of grounding on the mudbanks, had been put under the command of Barbenoire, the ablest and most daring of sea fighters. With a fine display of seamans.h.i.+p, the Genoese commander managed to take some of his s.h.i.+ps out through the chaos in front of him and into the open water. Here he engaged in a running battle with the English which lasted through the night. He succeeded in getting away with twenty-four of his s.h.i.+ps and in capturing two English craft.

Although the fighting seems to have been one-sided, it was actually a bitter and long-drawn-out affair. The French lost twenty-five thousand men in the conflict, the English four thousand. The s.h.i.+ps with the ladies aboard had not remained as far back as prudence should have dictated; it is recorded that twelve of them were among the killed. The king's first cousin, Thomas de Monthermer, died. Edward himself was supposedly wounded in the thigh but, if that were true, it must have been a slight matter, for he went ash.o.r.e on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving soon after. One Nele Loring, a squire, was knighted on the spot for conspicuous bravery and granted a pension of 20 a year. On such an occasion, with death and destruction everywhere and valor the order of the day, young Loring* must have performed some extraordinary feat to be singled out in this way.

Philip of France was inland with his army. When word of the disastrous defeat reached the court, his officers and ministers did not relish the task of telling the king. His temper was like tinder, and no one wanted to be the first to bear the brunt of it. Then someone had the happy thought of sending the court jester in with the news.

The wearer of the cap and bells undertook the task and entered the royal presence in a state of apparent indignation.

"Majesty!" he cried. "These cowards of Englis.h.!.+ These dastards! These fainthearted sons of sheep!"

"What has come over the fool?" asked the king, looking about him in surprise.

"Majesty!" explained the jester. "They would not jump off their s.h.i.+ps into the water as our brave Frenchmen did!"

3.

But despite this brilliant victory and the destruction of the French fleet, Edward saw the year end in defeat and humiliation. He could not capture either Cambrai or Tournai and finally he concluded a truce for one year with the French, to the great dismay and mortification of his Flemish allies.

Philippa came back with him on this occasion, the royal family making the voyage in a small vessel and with very few servants in attendance. With them was an infant son who had been born the day after the great sea victory at Sluys and named John. He would be called John of Ghent, because it was in that city he uttered his first feeble sounds of life, and common usage would in time corrupt this to John of Gaunt. This infant was destined to play a part in history second only to the first-born son, Edward the Black Prince. The homecomers encountered such stormy weather that it was feared for a time the s.h.i.+p would founder and it actually took nine days to cross the narrow neck of sea and come to anchor at Towerwharf in London.

The queen had been in Flanders a considerable time awaiting the arrival of Master John, some say maintaining a court in the city of Ghent, others declare as a guest in the home of Jacob van Artevelde. If she had been a guest of King Edward's "gossip," as van Artevelde was often called, she would have enjoyed as much comfort as could be found at any royal court. The wealthy residents of the tall cities on the plains had established a high degree of luxury. "Liberty never wore a more unamiable countenance," an English historian would write centuries later, "than among these burghers who abused the strength she had given them by cruelty and violence"; and this was true enough, for the wealthy weavers and goldsmiths and fishmongers were men of dour habit, close-fisted and unscrupulous. But they liked to live well, to sit down at tables groaning with good things to eat, to sleep in the softest of feather beds. The houses of the poorters of Ghent were many stories high. The ground level was usually the shop, behind which the apprentices lived and slept. All the floors above were devoted to the most luxurious living. Most of these imposing stone structures had round towers at one corner and, as a measure of safety, the upper story in the tower could be reached only by a ladder. A burgher who desired seclusion could climb the ladder and draw it up after him, and it would be impossible to reach him without demolis.h.i.+ng the floors and walls.

The greatest luxury indulged in by these "unamiable" citizens was their handsome, voluptuous women. The air of the Low Countries seemed to supply a freshness of complexion to the ladies they bred and a roundness of contour which made them desirable in all male eyes. On the streets they bundled themselves up in an excess of modesty, but in their luxurious rooms above the shop level they dressed themselves in the finest cloth their husbands produced and in the sheerest of silks from the East. It was at this exact period that they began wearing diaphanous garments to bed instead of slipping under the covers in a state of nature as had been the universal habit. The nightgown may have been conceived in Paris, where most styles originated, but the fragile materials were made in Flanders, and it was the plump ladies of that corner of the world who first made use of them in this way; and so perhaps the credit belongs to Ghent and not to the capital of style on the Seine.

Whether or not Queen Philippa lived in the van Artevelde household, her fourth son, John, was baptized there. A short time afterward a son, their first, was born to the Arteveldes and the queen acted as G.o.dmother, naming him Philip. The Countess of Hainaut, Philippa's mother, was with her during this residence in Ghent, and it was rumored that her interference had something to do with the failure to capture Tournai. She went to the King of France, who was her brother, and beseeched him to agree to a cessation of hostilities. Then she made the same request to her son-in-law.

It is doubtful if this had anything to do with the failure of the campaign. The two armies came face to face before Tournai, but nothing happened. Edward sent a challenge to "Philip of Valois" to meet him in single combat or accompanied by parties of knights numbering no more than one hundred. Philip contended that the letter was not addressed to him. As a result not a blow was struck.

Edward was falling more deeply in debt all the time. Queen Philippa's crown was p.a.w.ned for twenty-five hundred pounds and all her jewels were put up as security for loans. It was even necessary to leave the Earl of Derby behind as security for the money Edward owed the good burghers.

It proved unfortunate for Jacob van Artevelde and for the Flemish alliance that the partners.h.i.+p had not prospered. The other cities began to complain of the engagement into which they had been drawn by his efforts, and even in Ghent a steady chorus of criticism was heard. It was charged that he had made himself a dictator and that he was putting purely personal interests above the welfare of the states. A rumor spread that he was negotiating with Edward to give the Black Prince the t.i.tle of Count of Flanders. Were the great cities of the lowland plains to be absorbed into the realm of England? The stout burghers liked that idea as little as the thought of being absorbed by the French. In thus finding fault with their truly inspired leader, the rank and file were blind to their own interests. They were listening to the n.o.bility and the buyten-poorters, who thought their privileges were being infringed, and to the unreasoning voice of the mob. Behind the disaffection could always be found the hand of Count Louis, who believed he had been deprived of his hereditary rights; as indeed he had, and a good thing it was.

History, which at first accepted this view that Jacob van Artevelde was ambitious and dictatorial, has since reversed its decision. It is now realized that his intentions were patriotic and that what he aimed to achieve, an enduring union of the Dutch people, was far-seeing and wise. That he did not seek personal aggrandizement was made clear when he resigned his post at Ghent two years after the naval victory at Sluys. His fellow citizens promptly voted him back into office, to share the responsibility with three of his former colleagues.

Returning from a conference with Edward at Sluys, which had been attended by representatives of most of the leading cities, Jacob van Artevelde found a strained atmosphere in his native city. There was no welcome for him. The citizens stood about in silent groups and stared at him, as though to say, "This is the man who thinks to make himself master of us all." A leader of men is always sensitive to public moods, and the great weaver of Ghent knew what the att.i.tude of his one-time friends meant. He rode at once to his stone house on the Calanderberg and ordered the servants to lock the doors and close the shutters.

Taking his post behind one of the windows, he watched through a small aperture the frightening speed with which a mob was collecting in the street below. It was made up almost entirely of the dregs of the population from the crooked lanes of the slums. No effort was being made to retain control or to restrain the noisy people. His white-hooded guards had not come to escort him through the town, and there was no sign of the other hooftmen and their armed bands.

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 n.o.bility, 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 sc.r.a.p 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.

4.

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 a.s.sumed 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 ac.u.men 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 inst.i.tutions 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 leaders.h.i.+p of Ghent's Jacob van Artevelde, which led to his a.s.sa.s.sination. 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 mora.s.s 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.

* Readers of Sir Nigel, Arthur Conan Doyle's novel of these times, will recall how Nigel Loring, serving as squire under the great John Chandos, heard that bravest of knights tell of the fighting that day at Sluys. The name of the valiant squire no doubt suggested to Sir Arthur Doyle the one he gave his romantic hero.

CHAPTER X.

The Great Victory T.

IN 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 a.s.sumed 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 Crecy 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 Chteau Gaillard, the great stone fortress on the Seine built by Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Crossing in a s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumed 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 n.o.bility, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng h.o.a.rd. 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 subst.i.tute, 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 a.s.s."

His name was James Fournier, a Cistercian abbot, and he was, in reality, a man of much piety and resolution. Taking the t.i.tle 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 a.s.sumed 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.