Edward III of England: The King Who Started the Hundred Years' War
Edward III (1312–1377) was King of England from 1327 to 1377 and the ruler who reopened the Anglo-French conflict in 1337. Edward came to the throne as a child after the deposition of his father Edward II, assumed personal rule in October 1330, and within a decade had won the three great English victories of the Edwardian phase — Sluys (1340), Crécy (1346), and Poitiers (1356) — and had set in motion the war that would last, with long interruptions, for more than a century. The second half of his reign was a long political decline: the loss of most of the Brétigny gains, the financial collapse of the early 1370s, the political dominance of John of Gaunt, and the king’s dependence on his mistress Alice Perrers. He died on 21 June 1377, a year after the Black Prince.
The standard biographical treatment is W. M. Ormrod’s Edward III (2011), the most useful single-volume biography in English. The older biography by Mark Orme, Edward III (2011), is shorter but useful. Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. I (1990) and vol. II (1999), is the most detailed treatment of the reign in the context of the war.
Early life and the minority
Edward was born on 13 November 1312 at Windsor Castle, the son of Edward II and Isabella of France. His father was an unpopular king whose personal rule was marked by military failure in Scotland and by the political dominance of his favourites, Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father. Isabella, a determined and capable woman, was not willing to see her son’s inheritance destroyed. In 1325 she travelled to France on a diplomatic mission and refused to return; in 1326 she invaded England at the head of a small force, supported by a coalition of barons opposed to Edward II. Edward II was deposed, and probably murdered in Berkeley Castle in September 1327.
The young Edward was crowned on 1 February 1327, but the real power in the kingdom was exercised by Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. The minority was marked by the disastrous Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton (1328), by which Edward was forced to acknowledge Scottish independence. The regency was also marked by the loss of the duchy of Aquitaine to France, the consequence of the French court’s insistence that the young king perform homage for his continental possessions in person.
Personal rule and the French claim
Edward came of age in 1330 and assumed personal rule by overthrowing the regency of Isabella and Mortimer. On 19 October 1330 he led a small force into Nottingham Castle, arrested Mortimer, and had him executed for treason. Isabella was sent into comfortable retirement at Castle Rising, where she lived until her death in 1358.
The young king’s first priority was to recover the political initiative. The succession crisis of 1328 had set aside Edward’s claim to the French throne in favour of Philip of Valois (Philip VI), on the basis of the Salic Law. Edward had done homage to Philip for the duchy of Aquitaine at Amiens on 6 June 1329, an act that had been a humiliation and that the king was now determined to undo.
The relationship between Edward and Philip deteriorated throughout the early 1330s. The disputed succession to the county of Artois (Robert d’Artois, exiled from France in 1332, was given refuge by Edward), the status of the English pirates in the Channel, French support for Scotland, and the question of whether Edward would do homage for Aquitaine in person, all contributed to a slow escalation. The French confiscation of Aquitaine by the Parlement of Paris on 24 May 1337 was the immediate trigger. Edward renounced his homage to Philip VI on 7 October 1337. He did not, however, formally assume the title “King of France” until the Westminster Parliament of 26 January 1340, when he quartered the French arms with the English and ordered the title used in chancery documents.
The victories
The early years of the war were the high-water mark of English arms, and Edward was personally responsible. The Battle of Sluys (24 June 1340) was a fleet action off the Flemish coast in which the English ships, with their high castles and massed longbowmen, destroyed the French fleet and gave England control of the Channel for the rest of the war. Edward sailed with the fleet and was personally present. Froissart’s figure of 18,000 French dead is rhetorical; the more sober modern estimates put French losses in the low thousands. The result, however, was total: the prospect of a French invasion of England was over.
The Battle of Crécy (26 August 1346) was a land battle in Picardy, fought when Edward was retreating from his chevauchée through Normandy. The English army, perhaps 12,000–15,000 strong, deployed in three divisions on a ridge, with the dismounted men-at-arms behind a screen of longbowmen and sharpened stakes. The French army, much larger, attacked in successive waves and was broken by longbow fire. The young Black Prince, sixteen years old, won his spurs commanding the vanguard. The English followed up the victory with the siege of Calais (1346–1347), which remained in English hands until 1558.
The Battle of Poitiers (19 September 1356) was fought by the Black Prince, returning from a chevauchée through southern France. The English army, perhaps 6,000 strong, defeated a French force of perhaps 12,000–20,000 under King John II, and the French king himself was captured. The ransom of King John, fixed by the Treaty of London in 1359, was the basis of the Treaty of Brétigny (8 May 1360), which ceded Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais to England in full sovereignty in exchange for Edward’s renunciation of the French throne.
The Order of the Garter
The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward in 1348, is one of the most durable institutional legacies of the reign. The order was, in part, a celebration of the great victories of the early war: the original members were drawn from the most distinguished English soldiers of the Edwardian phase, and the annual meeting of the order at Windsor Castle was a major social and political event. The motto Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shame on him who thinks evil of it) is the motto of the British royal family; the order remains the senior order of knighthood in the British honours system.
The founding of the order is also, in the standard reading, the most ambitious moment of English chivalric culture in the Middle Ages. The Garter was modelled on the legendary Round Table of Arthurian tradition, and Edward’s patronage of chivalric culture was the public face of a war effort that was, in the 1340s and 1350s, the most expensive the English crown had ever undertaken.
The decline of the reign
The Treaty of Brétigny was the high point of Edward’s reign. The English were unable to hold the extensive territories they had been granted, and the French, under Charles V and du Guesclin, gradually recovered the lost territories. The Caroline War of 1369–1389 effectively undid the Treaty of Brétigny, and by the time of Edward’s death in 1377 the English position in France had been reduced to a few coastal towns.
The last years of the reign were marked by political decline. Edward’s health began to fail in the late 1360s, and the king was increasingly dependent on his mistress Alice Perrers and on his third son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The Good Parliament of 1376, the first English parliament to impeach ministers of the crown, attempted to reform the government; the reforms were short-lived. The death of the Black Prince in 1376 was a profound blow to the old king, who died on 21 June 1377, succeeded by his grandson Richard II.
The legacy
Edward’s legacy is mixed, and the most useful single treatment of it is Ormrod’s Edward III. The great victories of the reign — Sluys, Crécy, Poitiers — are the political and military foundation of the English claim to be a great power, and they have entered the deep memory of English nationalism. The Order of the Garter remains the most distinguished order of English chivalry. The Black Prince’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, the Garter chapel at Windsor, and the surviving longbowmen’s memorials are the principal physical artefacts.
The long-term consequences of the reign, however, were less positive. The war that Edward began would last for more than a century and would eventually strip the English crown of every continental possession except Calais. The financial strain of the war would contribute to the political instability of the next generation. The French claim to the throne, revived by Edward in 1340, was not formally abandoned until 1801.