JOHN OF GAUNT

1340-1399

KING OF CASTILE AND LEON

DUKE OF AQUITAINE AND LANCASTER EARL OF DERBY LINCOLN AND LEICESTER

SENESCHAL OF ENGLAND

BY

SYDNEY ARMITAGE-SMITH

 CHAPTER VII Trial of Wycliffe—Quarrel with the Church and the City (1376)

CHAPTER VIII Lancaster, Wycliffe and tHe Church

CHAPTER IX Death of Edward III—Accession of Richard II—The Duke’s Retirement (i377)

CHAPTER X The Lancastrian Estates—The Duke’s Household .

Chapter I

NEAR the Antwerp gate of Ghent, at the meeting place of the Lys and Scheldt, lie the ruins of the Abbey of St. Bavon. Little but the cloisters and the baptistery now re­mains of the famous Abbey founded by Saint Amand, once one of the chief seats of Flemish learning, where Eginhardt had found a home, and the bones of the sainted Pharailde had been laid to rest.

For in 1540, to punish the rebellious city of his birth, Charles V ordered the destruction of certain ancient gates, towers and walls no longer needed, and those of the Abbey were among the number condemned. The canons removed their reliquaries to the Cathedral, henceforth to be known by the name of St. Bavon, and the walls of the Abbey were throw down to build a castle which should overawe the turbulent subjects of the Emperor.

But in the fourteenth century the Abbey was a rich foundation enclosing a large area within its precincts. At the beginning of 1340 there was unusual stir within its walls, for the ancient seat of Flemish learning was for the moment the scene of a Court, and the monks of St. Bavon were the hosts of Edward III of England and his Queen Philippa of Hainault.

The Hundred Years War had begun, and King Ed­ward, to quiet the conscience of his Flemish allies, had just assumed the royal style of France^{1 2} and ridden into Ghent with the lilies of France quartered on his shield with the English leopards. For in January a great Parliament was held in Ghent; Holland, Brabant, and the three great cities of Flanders had been leagued together in alliance with England against Louis Count of Flanders, and his suzerain, Philip of Valois.

The alliance was signed at St. Bavon, and the triumph of Artevelde’s policy seemed complete, the commercial union of England and Flanders cemented by the strongest of political ties, when in the great piazza of the city, the Marche du Vendredi, the Flemings did homage to their new suzerain, and swore to obey Edward III as King of France. This was the prelude to the campaign which was to open in the spring, and Edward returned to England to prepare.

Leaving the Queen and her little son Lionel, bom at Antwerp the year before, to the protection of St. Bavon and his new subjects, the King left Flanders on February 20. In March his fourth son, John, was born. With a strange persistence, the name of his birthplace has clung to John Plantagenet from the first. Lionel “ of Antwerp ” is more familiar as Earl of Ulster, or as Duke of Clarence, but for his younger brother posterity has chosen to prefer, to an abundance of territorial titles, the name of the town knov/n to English ears as “ Gaunt,” andJohn of Lancaster is John of Gaunt.

The little child born at St. Bavon in March was an early, if unconscious, witness of his father’s democratic alliance inaugurated a few weeks earlier, for he was held at the font by J ames van Artevelde, nor did the burgesses of Ghent forget that their leader had been god-father to an English prince. The King remained in England until June. The day after he left, St. John the Baptist’s Day, he won a battle memorable in the annals of the English navy, the crushing victory of Sluys, which destroyed the French mari­time power, and gave England the command of the Channel for many years. Flushed with his triumph over the French and Genoese admirals, Edward rode to Ghent to greet the Queen and the son who had been born to him in his absence.

The Queen and her children remained at Ghent during the short campaign of the summer, which ended at the siege of Tournai, a campaign without a battle, for the French and English armies, after facing each other outside Tournai, made terms. King Robert of Naples had dreamed dreams and warned his cousin of France never to engage an English army led by the King in person. Prophecy and policy for the moment agreed, and when Jeanne de Valois came from the cloister to make peace between her brother and her cousin, she succeeded. In September the truce of Esplechin postponed the struggle until June, 1341, and in November the King and Queen and the little Princes Lionel and John returned to England.

A courtly writer of the seventeenth century assures us that Queen Philippa’s fourth child was “a lovely and lively boy.” Probably Philippa thought so, but it is safer to imitate the not unnatural silence of contem­porary chroniclers, who had not yet learned to fix their attention on the King’s fourth son. Isolda Newman, his nurse, has left no reminiscences of the childhood of the great Duke of Lancaster, and curiosity must await his first appearance on the stage of public life. Impatience is soon set at rest, for it was not long before Edward III took the first step towards the family settle­ment completed twenty years later. In 1341 the King declared his intention of marrying Lionel, when of age, to Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter and heir of the Earl of Ulster.Meanwhile, the English lands of John de Montfort, late Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond, were assigned for the maintenance of Lionel and John, and the King’s daughters, Isabella and Joan, under the guardianship of the Queen.

In 1342 John of Gaunt, only in his third year, was granted the Earldom of Richmond in tail, and was duly invested with the “ girding of the sword.” During his minority the Queen was made his guardian. Henceforth John of Gaunt bears the title Earl of Richmond until his alliance with the House of Lancaster brought him an ampler patrimony and a more famous name.

His youth falls in the first period, the heroic age of the Hundred Years War. A child of six when Prince Edward won his spurs at Crecy, his earliest memories must have been those of the great victories which filled men’s minds. 1347 saw the defeat of the Scots at Nevil’s Cross, King David a prisoner, the fall of Calais, and England holding “ the keys of France.” Then, after the victories which were quickening the people with a newly awakened sense of national life, came the Black Death. The age is one of sharply defined contrasts ; the bright­est lights and the darkest shadows meet and touch on the canvas. Between Crecy and Poitiers the Great Plague swept over England, decimating the people.

Coming from the East—fruitful soil of disease and teeming populations—it had reached Italy in 1348, where Boccaccio raised to it a monument of graceful egoism and refined callousness in the Decameron. Traversing Germany and France, it provoked an outburst of gloomy mysticism, to which expression was given by the Flagellants.

If the faint recollections of childhood had any place in the thoughts of the grown man, these things formed their subject: wars and rumours of wars, plague, pestilence, and famine. But childhood did not last long. If life ended sooner in the fourteenth century than in later times, at least the business of life began earlier.

At eighteen Edward had avenged his father, over­thrown the power of Mortimer and Isabella, and begun to rule. At fourteen his son had commanded at Crdcy. John of Gaunt saw his first battle at the age of ten. In 1350 an Invincible Armada of Castilian ships was lying in the roads of Sluys. Nominally there was a truce between England and France and their allies, but a truce made little difference at sea. Since the battle of Sluys English sea-borne commerce had nothing to fear from France, but the wine fleets coming from Bordeaux and the wool fleets passing between England and Flanders had suffered severely at the hands of the Castilians, who had refused Edward’s offer of a dynastic alliance, and disputed his claim to the lordship of the seas — that “Dominium Maris” which was recognized as the birthright of the island kingdom.

To protect his commerce and complete the work done at Sluys, the King got together a fleet and waited for the enemy. Nearly all the principal feudatories were with him, and it is with an evident relish that Froissart tells over the names famous to chivalry: Derby, Hereford, Arundel, a Holland, a Beauchamp, a Neville, and a Percy. John, Earl of Richmond, now in his eleventh year, went to sea with his peers, and was on board Prince Edward’s ship on the day of the battle.

Among innumerable picturesque pages in the Chronicles, perhaps one of the most striking is that in which Frois­sart tells how King Edward waited for the Spaniards on that Sunday in August off the Sussex coast, between Winchelsea and Rye. The King sits on the foredeck of his flagship, the Salle du Roi, with his captains about him, while minstrels play an air brought back from Germany by the gallant Sir John Chandos. Suddenly music is interrupted by a shout from the look-out man : “ A Sail ! ” The King, like Drake on the historic Devon­shire green, will not be interrupted. He calls for wine, and pledges his knights. Soon the whole Spanish fleet, forty sail, with the afternoon sun striking on their canvas, bears down with a fresh north-easter towards the English ships.

With the wind in their favour and their greater tonnage and sail power, they might have swept down the Channel, but they chose to stay and fight. There was no manoeuvring in naval warfare of the fourteenth century. Tactical instructions were comprised in three simple rules: grapple your enemy, board him, and fight it out.

From vespers to nightfall the battle was fought. At its close Edward had won another crushing victory; but it had been a hard fight, and there was scarcely a man in the English fleet who had not a wound to show. One of the incidents of the battle was the danger of the Black Prince. He had grappled a Spaniard, and his own ship was sinking. For long his men could not board the enemy, and it seemed as though Prince Edward, and with him John of Gaunt and the whole crew, must be lost. With the cry of “ Derby to the Rescue! ” Henry of Lan­caster laid his ship alongside and carried the enemy ; the Prince and his little brother were saved—not the last time that the fortunes of John of Gaunt were bound up with those of Henry Plantagenet.

When the battle was over, the King landed at Winchel- sea to bring the news of the victory and the safety of her sons to Queen Philippa. Si passerent celle nuit les seigneurs et les dames en grand revel en fiarlant d'armes et damour.

This was the young Earl of Richmond’s first taste of chivalry. Five years later the apprenticeship in arms was renewed. In the summer of 1355 John of Gaunt was attached to the expeditionary force placed under the command of the Duke of Lancaster with a view to co-operating against the French with Charles the Bad, King of Navarre — who, having quarrelled with his cousin, John, King of France, had concluded a secret treaty with Henry of Lancaster at Avignon the year before, agreeing to surrender his northern port of Cherbourg into English hands.

The young Earl of Richmond doubtless wondered, with the rest of Duke Henry’s captains, where the force would land, for the objective was kept as secret as the treaty which had brought this latest and least desirable ally into the circle of England’s friends, and the Admiral lying with his fleet in the Thames had sealed orders.

In the end nothing was done, for when the fleet got under weigh at the beginning of July and reached the Channel Islands to wait for intelligence from the supposed ally which never came, Charles the Bad made peace with his adversary ; the fleet returned to pay off, nothing done, and the Treaty of Valognes saved Cherbourg for awhile from English occupation. France had parried the thrust, but Edward III returned to the charge, and at the beginning of November landed with an army at Calais to lead a raid through Picardy. Again John of Gaunt took part in the expedition. He was now more than fifteen years of age, old enough to begin fighting in earnest, for this was the occasion on which King Edward’s sword laid knighthood on the shoulder of the young Earl of Richmond. The Black Prince was younger when he won his name upon the field of Cr£cy; but no fame was to be won on this march, for the demonstration in Picardy failed to bring on an engagement, and accomplished nothing more than useless devastation. Further operations were effectually stopped by serious news from home.

On November 6 the Scots had surprised Berwick, the favourite pastime of the Border chiefs, and the King returned at once. After a hasty session of Parliament, Edward marched north, taking once more the Earl of Richmond with him. Christmas was kept at Newcastle- on-Tyne, the rendezvous of the army, and on New Year’s Day the march began. There was little trouble in re­gaining the town, which was not garrisoned or victualled for a siege. On January 13 the keys were given up, and the King marched into Scotland to exact reprisals.

At Roxburgh John of Gaunt witnessed the famous or infamous act of renunciation, whereby Edward Baliol sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, making over to the King of England his rights to the Scottish kingdom and the Baliol inheritance.The first formal documents witnessed by the Earl of Richmond are the letters patent in which Baliol, pleading his age and failing strength, and disguising his hatred of David Bruce under the pretext of a statesmanlike desire of seeing the union of Englishmen and Scots under one ruler, transferred his rights to Edward III.

After Baliol’s surrender the march continued without opposition, to Edinburgh, where the King took up his quarters in the house of that good burgess who, on the eve of the expedition ending at Nevil’s Cross, besought David Bruce to make him Mayor of London.

There John of Gaunt must have seen the charming Countess of Douglas, whose prayers stayed the King’s vengeance and saved Edinburgh from the flames, an act of clemency which thirty years later he himself repeated —saving, without the prayers of a Countess of Douglas, the city which Froissart calls the Paris of Scotland, “ car c’est Paris en Ecosse comment que elle ne soit pas France.”

After this lesson in warfare and chivalry for a time we lose sight of the Earl of Richmond. He was almost certainly in London when the Black Prince returned in the spring of 1357, and the city cheered the hero of Poictiers as he rode in triumph with his royal prisoner, John, King of France. In November of that year John of Gaunt probably shared in the conventional mourning for the Queen Mother Isabella, whose last years of disgrace since Mortimer’s overthrow had been spent in a semi-captivity at Castle Rising, and who died when her grandson was in his nineteenth year.

But far more important than his early apprenticeship in the trade of war was Richmond’s first meeting with one who was to be through life his friend and intimate, Geoffrey Chaucer. It was at Christmas, 1357, that John ’ of Gaunt and Chaucer first came to know each other. Before this the poet may have come under his notice in the King’s household, but at the Christmas feast of 1357 they met in a more intimate manner, for both were staying at Hatfield in Yorkshire with Lionel, now Earl of Ulster in the right of his wife, Elizabeth de Burgh.

Upon Chaucer’s fortunes this meeting had a lasting effect, for the friendship of John of Gaunt secured to him the favour of the Court, so long as his patron lived, and after his death the protection of the new dynasty. But the advantage was not all on one side. It is scarcely fanciful to date from their meeting at Hatfield, and. the friendship which then began, that interest in letters and men of letters which never forsook John of Gaunt among all the cares of military and political ambition. The soldier and politician is touched by the graces of “ more humane ” pursuits: it is this which differentiates him from the rough and uncultured type of men of the age, whose thin veneer of chivalry too often scarcely concealed a rough and brutal nature.

Hitherto the movements of King Edward’s fourth son have been barely followed by a few scattered notices in the chronicles. After 1359 his position changes. All at once he becomes a public character, and for the next forty years he is never for long out of the public eye. The reason for this change lies in his marriage. In planning his children’s marriages, Edward III kept two objects in view : that of strengthening his position abroad by political alliances, and of building up the royal power at home upon the solid basis of territorial power.

It was the first policy which led him to look to the Low Countries. Perhaps the husband of Philippa of Hainault had his prepossessions, but for his attitude to the princes of the Low Countries satisfactory reasons, military and political, could be adduced in support of the dictates of sentiment. Flemish and English commerce were interdependent; and since the short-lived imperial alliance had been discounted, it became all the more desirable to establish friendly relations with the powers lying near the French frontier. With these aims in view, the King in 1340 had proposed to betroth his daughter Isabella to a son of the Count of Flanders, and at the same time had asked the hand of the daughter of the Duke of Brabant for his eldest son, Edward.Those negotiations came to nothing, but eleven years later the same policy was uppermost in the King’s mind, when he despatched his cousin, Henry Duke of Lancaster, to the Count of Flanders, to arrange a marriage between the Count’s daughter and John of Gaunt;

Upon the success or failure of that mission depended the dynastic history of England for the next century. If John of Gaunt had married the Count’s daughter and succeeded in time to the position of a continental potentate, the fortunes of England and of France must have been materially different. Perhaps Artevelde’s dream of an Anglo-Flemish empire might have been realized. But at least one all-important factor would have been removed from the problem of English politics : the House of Lancaster might not have dethroned the Plantagenets ; perhaps the Wars of the Roses would not have been necessary. But a speculative reconstruction of history, however tempting, is unprofitable. Duke Henry did not succeed in winning the daughter of the Count of Flanders for John of Gaunt. Eight years later he gave the hand of his own daughter instead. The first epoch in the public life of John of Gaunt had begun.

Some families owe both the beginning and the continuance of their power to fortunate marriages. That this is true of the Hapsburgs is a commonplace of history. It is equally true of the House of Lancaster, peculiarly so of John of Gaunt himself. His fate is moulded by marriage. The first made him a feudal magnate and shaped the next dozen years of his history. The second, equally momentous, converted the great feudatory into something more, making him the claimant to a continental throne and deciding the bent of his ambition for another dozen years. His public life begins and ends with marriage. To this are due his wealth, his power^ and his prominence, and the multiplicity of those hereditary claims which make up so large a part of the interest of his life.

In this prominence of the dynastic element the story of John of Gaunt is typical of the age. For six years Parliament and the Privy Council are occupied with the dispute of two gentlemen about a certain coat-of-arms. For Sir Henry le Scrope and Robert Grosvenor substi­tute the Kings of England, France, and Castile; for the arms “ azure ov un bende D'or ”—the lilies, the castle triple towered, and the lion rampant; and the private quarrel becomes the international dispute. The nations had not yet learned to fight for religions or for markets : they fought for the hereditary rights of their sovereigns, Valois and Plantagenet fight for the crown of France. Burgundy and Trastamare for the crown of Castile, and minor potentates follow suit. For twenty years Brittany is torn by the dynastic quarrel of the houses of Blois and Montfort.

The dynastic importance of John’s first marriage was the result of the extraordinary position won by the House of Lancaster. Henry Duke of Lancaster was the most prominent man m England. In the wars he had proved himself one of Edward’s ablest generals. His vast wealth and power made him unquestionably the greatest feudatory of the Crown, but he had no male issue. Two daughters were co-heirs of his estates: the elder, Matilda or Maude, married to William Duke of Zealand; the younger, Blanche, whose hand he now gave to John of Gaunt.

The prospect of succeeding to a moiety of the Lancastrian inheritance would have been enough to make the match desirable. But the young Earl of Richmond, we are told, had other motives besides that of ambition.

If Chaucer’s picture is true to the original, Blanche of Lancaster united unusual graces of disposition with a full measure of womanly beauty. The White Lady of the Book of the Dttchess was the flower of English womanhood, a blonde with golden hair, tall, graceful, and with something of that ample richness of form so prized by the taste of the fourteenth century.

It is not unknown for Court poets to use both a poet’s and a courtier’s licence; and Chaucer doubtless wrote with the prepossessions of friendship, but he wrote for those who knew both John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster. His attractive story of the courtship of the Earl therefore may perhaps be accepted : how he met with difficulties, and failed at first (for there is no royal road to love), but, haunted by the “goodty softespeche” and the eyes— Debonair goode glade and sadde, which looked gentleness and forgiveness, persevered and at length succeeeded.

On Sunday, May 19, the marriage was solemnized at Reading by papal dispensation, for John and Blanche were related in the third and fourth degrees of consanguinity.Taking place as it did at a time when England was looking forward to a period of peace, the marriage was eagerly welcomed as an excuse for national rejoicing. Three days’ jousting celebrated the event at Reading, and for three days more rejoicings continued in London. To mark its loyalty to the Sovereign and his family, the City proclaimed a tournament. Mayor, sheriffs, and aidermen undertook to hold the field for three days against all comers. At the appointed time twenty-four knights wearing the cognizance of the City entered the lists. They made good their challenges, but when the tournament was over a surprise was in store for the people. To its astonishment and delight, London found that, in place of the civic officers, the combatants who had upheld the City’s challenge were the King, his four sons, Edward, Lionel, John,, and Edmund, and nineteen of the principal barons of England.

Such at least is the tradition. If it is true, the situation is one of the ironies of history; before very long the cheers of the London crowds were to turn to hisses, and the citizens who in 1359 applauded John of Gaunt as their champion soon came to look upon him as the most determined enemy of their privileges and the foe of all civic liberty.

Chapter II THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

AT daybreak on October 28,1359, the flagship Philip of Dartmouth was hoisting her sails at Sandwich. Edward III was on board, bound for Calais : the last campaign of the first great epoch of the Hundred Years War was beginning. Edward had determined to besiege Rheims. In the cathedral of the ancient city where, from time imme­morial, the Kings of France had received unction and coronation, in the birthplace of the French monarchy, consecrated by tradition and surrounded by the halo of a peculiar sanctity, the King of England aspired to receive the crown of the “ Fleurs de Lys.”

The march from Calais to Rheims has little of military interest ; but the pomp and pageantry of the battle array still live in the pages of Froissart, who describes the English army marching out of Calais “ so great multitude of people that all the country was covered therewith, so richly armed and beseen that it was great joy to behold the fresh shining armours, banners waving in the wind, their companies in good order, riding a soft pace.” At this “ soft pace ” they advanced through Picardy, Artois, and Cambres is to the ecclesiastical capital of France.

In the middle of the fourteenth century a walled city, strongly held and well garrisoned, was almost impreg­nable. Siege warfare reversed the judgment of the stricken field ; the advantage was on the side of the forces of defence. As Rheims was well garrisoned and well provisioned, and the Archbishop made a stout resistance, Edward’s seven weeks’ siege proved fruitless. The camp was broken up, and the English army, turning to the south past Troyes, Tonnerre, and Noyers, marched to Guillon-sur-Serain, making a feint on Burgundy. There, while the English captains amused themselves with hawking and hunting, and fished the streams and rivers for their lenten fare, Philip de Rouvre, Duke of Burgundy, made terms with the invader, and bought three years’ immunity for his lands, which had not yet felt the scourge of the war, at the price of 200,000 francs— and his loyalty to France. It was no part of the King’s plan to invade Burgundy. He took the bribe and turned north-west to Paris. Chal­lenge of battle was steadily refused. Taught by disaster, Charles, Regent of France, refused to risk battle, and was not to be tempted by a demonstration at his gates. From the walls of Paris, within which the populace of the suburbs St. Germain des Pres, Notre Dame des Champs, and St. Marcelle were gathered, his subjects watched the smoke rising from farm and homestead, and the whole country-side from Montlheri to Chatillon in flames. An attempt to besiege Paris was hopeless, and the army turned westward.

Meanwhile famine was wearing away the strength of the invaders. From the Seine to Etampes there was neither man nor food, and by the time that the English had reached Chartres their sufferings from privation and bad weather were intense. On Monday after Easter, one of the most mournful Eastertides that Paris has seen, a terrible storm overtook the army ; the English soldiers never forgot that “ Black Monday,” when fortune seemed to have turned against them. The saints were surely punishing their impiety in violating the lands of Notre Dame de Chartres. The King allowed himself to be persuaded to listen to terms ; on May 8 the treaty con­cluded at Bretigni ended the first phase of the great war. If the sufferings of the invading army had been great, those of the miserable crowds herded together within the walls of the capital had been greater. On Sunday, May 10, the Regent took the oath to ob­serve the treaty; the act, humiliating as it was for France, was hailed “ with a joy unspeakable ” ; throughout Paris the church bells were set ringing, while in Notre Dame the “ Te Deum ” was chanted in thanksgiving for the deliverance. The army returned to England. Apart from its poli­tical results, the campaign had done little to justify the judgment of the Valois Chronicler who calls Edward, “ Le plus sage guerroier du monde et le plus soubtil.” The political results, the terms of Bretigni, might with more justice be attributed to the campaign of 1356 than to that of 1360. It was really the captivity of his father which forced the Regent’s hand. Judged from a stra­tegic point of view, the campaign was a failure. The military education of John of Gaunt had opened with a most unfortunate example. Thirteen years later he was to put into practice the principles of his father, to be confronted with the same difficulties, and to suffer the same failure. But if there had been little generalship, there had been plenty of fighting, and in that the Earl of Richmond had played his part: he had taken his share in the skirmishes and raids on the march—at Rethel, where his friend Geoffrey Chaucer was captured, at the sack of Cernay-en-Dormois, and at the capture of Cormicy; and atRheimshe had commanded one of the three “ battles ” of the besieging army.

When in May he returned with the King to England, and the curtain fell on the first act of the Hundred Years War, his political life was just beginning. In 1360 he received his first summons to Parliament as Earl of Richmond.

Within three years the king’s fourth son was the great­est feudatory in England, and in power, wealth, and position there was no one to dispute his claim to rank as the first subject of the Crown. John was ambitious ; but apart from ambition, he found “greatness thrust upon him.” Forces beyond his control—partly fortune, partly policy—had shaped his des­tinies. The causes of this “ greatness ” were: first, the succession to the Lancastrian inheritance; and second, the removal from England of his two elder brothers, Edward and Lionel.

War, plague, and famine succeed one to another in the Middle Ages with a fearful regularity. For a time war had ceased; but in 1361 the Great Plague, which, since its first appearance in 1349, had never wholly passed away, broke out with more than usual malignancy. The death roll was long; but among many notable victims the most illustrious was Henry the “ Good ” Duke of Lancaster, and the Plague, which enriched William of Wykeham with a dozen prebends, brought to John of Gaunt the greatest inheritance in England. Duke Henry left two daughters and co-heirs, the younger Blanche Countess of Richmond, the elder Matilda or Maude, who had been married first to Ralf, son of the Earl of Stafford, and afterwards to William of Bavaria, son of the Emperor Lewis, and Duke of Zealand. The lands of Duke Henry were divided ,but not for long. Matilda of Lancaster, coming to England to take possession of her patrimony, fell a victim, like her father, to the Plague, and died on April 10, 1362, and all Duke Henry’s lands passed to his younger daughter, now sole heir, and in her right to her husband, John of Gaunt. A few months later John of Gaunt, Earl of Richmond, in his own right and in the right of his wife Earl of Lan­caster, Derby, Lincoln, and Leicester, and High Seneschal of England, was promoted to the dignity held by his father-in-law. In the Parliament of November, 1362, the King created him Duke of Lancaster, and formally invested him with the duchy, by “ girding him with the sword and setting the cap upon his head.”

In the history of the House of Lancaster, with which John of Gaunt now became identified, it is possible to trace, with all due allowance for the difference of circum­stance and divergence of personal temperament, a marked and permanent tradition. Towards the great problem of constitutional government which, since the end of the thirteenth century, the nation had set itself to solve, the Earls of Lancaster had contributed little or nothing. They had good service to record, but there was no con­stitutional fibre in the stock. All were men of great energy. They were pious, with the conventional piety of their age. They were men of strong purpose, and of great ambition. They were gallant soldiers, and perhaps the strongest passion of their race was the love of arms combined with thirst for adventure.

Edmund, the founder of his house, as a child had been trained to thoughts of continental sovereignty. By Papal grant the titular Kingship of Sicily and Apulia is his until Henry III, repenting of a bad bargain, refuses to fight the battles of the Popes against the Hohen- stauflen. A grown man, he longs to exchange the ease of the Savoy for the hardships of the fields of Palestine ; he shares in the glorious illusions of the Crusades, draws his sword against the enemies of the Faith, and fights in the last great battle at Acre. His devotion is vouched for by many besides the Grey Friars of Preston, whose house he founded, or the Sisters of St. Clare at Aidgate. The second Earl, Thomas, shows less knight-errantry than any other of the house : with him home politics and the cares of a vast English domain thrust aside the calls of foreign ambition. For Earl Thomas, though no statesman, has a policy. He asserts the rights which his position, as the greatest feudatory of the Crown, seems to challenge. A council of magnates is to govern Eng­land and the King, and he is to exercise an irregular dictatorship in the Council. But the times are changing, and the ideals of Simon de Montfort no longer satisfy a people awakening to constitutional life. In one thing alone he has the sympathy of all parties—his bitter hatred of upstart royal favourites. He puts Piers Gaveston to death, and his own life pays the forfeit. But the people do not forget. The hard man of few scruples and unmeasured ambition is transformed into a Saint. Blood still flows and miracles are wrought at the tomb of St. Thomas of Lancaster, and the Government of Edward II cannot prevent the worship of Piers Gaveston’s murderer with Simon de Montfort among the martyrs of English liberty.

In the death of the favourite, Henry, third Earl, had no share. But the feud with royal favourites he makes his own. With his brother’s arms he assumes his brother’s quarrel. The Despencers and Mortimer share Gaveston’s fate ; Edward II falls, and Earl Thomas is avenged. Henry, too, has the piety of his father; the new hospital of St. Mary of Leicester is one of the many foundations which prove the devotion of the House of Lancaster to the Church. His son Henry, the first Duke of Lancaster, was the best and greatest of his line. Known to his age as the “ Good Duke,” Henry was the very pattern of the “ parfit gentil knight.” Aspirants for chivalrous distinction came from all parts of Europe to perfect themselves in arms and knighthood in his household—the most magnificent in England, for even in peace Duke Henry retained two hundred knights and esquires in his service. He fought the enemies of England and of the Church. The heathen in Lithuania, and the Moors at Algeciras, Rhodes, Cyprus and the East knew his courage. The favourite of the nation and the hero of the French wars, he was the most notable of Edward’s generals, until his fame began to pale before the rising brilliance of Prince Edward’s star. And in Duke Henry the adventurous daring of the Lancastrian blood was crowned with the ornament of personal saintliness and gentle piety. In a time of sickness he had written a book of devotion, “ Mercy, Grand, Mercy,” recalling the sins for which he prayed forgiveness, and the blessings for which he owed gratitude to Heaven. He built churches and endowed monasteries. The Church was enriched by his bounty and edified by his life, and the poor and oppressed found in him a protector and a friend. Such were the traditions of the house with which J ohn of Gaunt allied himself, and whose name he made pecu liarly his own. The fifth Earl followed in the steps of his kinsmen, and with the heiress of their lands espoused their traditions.

With as little of real statesmanship as Earl Thomas, John of Gaunt stands the foremost of the great feudatories, his influence built on the solid basis of territorial power. In the stormy days of King Richard’s rule he shows the same hatred of royal favourites. What Gaveston and the Despencers were to Earl Thomas and Henry, Robert de Vere is to him. He has the same co­ventional piety ; indeed, in foundations and endowments he surpasses all his predecessors. Above all, he has the Lancastrian love of arms and adventure. The days of the Crusades are over; but as Edmund the Crusader had fought the infidel, John “Captain and Standard-bearer of the Church ” fights the Antipope. Edmund, “ King of Sicily and Apulia,” reappears in John “ King of Castile and Leon.”

Was it policy or the mere caprice of fortune that thrust King Edward’s third surviving son into the foremost rank ? Certainly it seems as though the King had from the first marked out for special favour the son who, with the Plantagenet build and features, inherited to the full the characteristics of his race. If this were so, fate conspired with the King’s preference.

Lionel “ of Antwerp ” was two years older than John “ of Gaunt.” Betrothed in 1342 to the infant heiress of the Earls of Clare and Ulster, Lionel in 1363 went to Ireland as the King’s Lieutenant. After three years’ dreary exile he returned,but not to play the part which might have fallen to him at the English Court. He went to Italy to seek a bride—and to find a grave. In April he married the daughter of Galeazzo, Lord of Milan. Six months later death cheated him of the Italian inheritance. His end was mysterious ; there were dark hints of poison, and perhaps the Lord of Milan knew more than another of the mystery.

The Duke of Clarence scarcely finds a place in the annals of his time ; for history the only significance of his life lies in his first marriage. The heiress of Clare, before her death in 1363, had borne him a daughter, whose issue by the Earl of March came, on the failure of Prince Edward’s line, to inherit the legitimate right to the English throne. The Black Prince, who in 1361 had married his cousin Joan, the “ Fair Maid of Kent,” created Prince of Aquitaine, in 1362 left England to govern the Gascon de­pendency in the same year in which Clarence went to Ireland. John of Gaunt was left at the King’s right hand, with little rivalry to fear from Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge, a colourless character with neither energy nor ambition, or from Thomas of Woodstock, fifteen years his junior. During the few years following his succession to the Lancastrian inheritance John of Gaunt remained in England, enjoying his new dignities and visiting with the Lady Blanche his new lands and lordships.

Questions of the first importance were discussed in Parliament and in the Council; as yet the Duke of Lancaster was content to listen. He was one of the “ Triers of Petitions ” in the Parliament of October, 1362, which recognized English as the language of the . courts of law, and again in October, 1363, when for the first time a Chancellor declared the causes of the sum­mons of Parliament in the mother tongue.

The most significant sign of the times was the growing hostility of England to the Papacy, now transplanted to Avignon, and acting in undisguised alliance with the Court of France. In January, 1365, Parliament forbade English subjects to obey citation to the Papal Court, and declared Papal“ provision ” to English benefices illegal, and when Urban V made his ill-timed demand for the thirty-three years’ arrears of tribute, the Parliament of May, 1366, repudiated once and for all the preposterous claim, which dated from the infamy of King John. At both these Parliaments Lancaster was present. He was the first on the roll of peers summoned to the Parliament which rejected the claim of Urban V to feudal suzerainty over England, the decision for which John Wycliffe, now a Royal chaplain, produced the official apologia. But the real significance of the changing relations between England and the Papacy he did not see; with the principle underlying “ provisors ” and prae­munire he had little sympathy, and, as will be seen, in later years he regarded what was really the quarrel of the nation with Rome as the quarrel of the bishops, and his sympathy was more or less openly on the side of the Popes. But this is a forecast. As yet far more engrossing than politics were the feasts and revels of King Edward’s brilliant Court.

On St. George’s Day, 1361, Lancaster for the first time filled a stall in the Chapel of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor, and took his place at the feast of the Order, clad in a “ scarlet robe embroidered with garters of blue taffeta.” With his brothers Lionel and Edmund he was enrolled in the brotherhood of chivalry, which was to make Windsor another Camelot, to restore the faded glory of King Arthur’s Court, and bind to one another and to the person of the English sovereign the first sol­diers of the lands of chivalry.

England, now at the height of her military fame, was visited by knights from all the nations of Europe. After the Peace signed at Bretigni had been confirmed at Calais, the country was given up to rejoicing. At Smithfield and Windsor there were tournaments and jousts at which French and Bohemian, Spanish and Gascon knights vied with one another and with their English hosts. Hunting in the forests of Sherwood and Rocking­ham was as serious a part of the business of life as the meetings of Parliament.

In one year three kings met at King Edward’s Court—Waldemar III of Denmark, David King of Scots, and Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus. David had come to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham ; he was a suppliant for temporal fovours also, and was begging for a reduction of his ransom. Pierre de Lusignan, after visiting Avignon and Prague, Bruges and Paris, to preach his crusade against the infidel, was entreating King Edward to take the Cross.

At the Savoy, the “ fairest palace in the realm,” which Duke Henry had rebuilt from the spoils of Bergerac, and filled with all the precious things which fourteenth­century luxury could afford, the three kings and the French hostages were entertained by the Duke of Lan­caster. There, doubtless, Chaucer met the Crusader who had won Attalia from the Paynim, and was soon to win Alexandria, and whose untimely end still points a moral in the “ Monke’s Tale.” There, too, the next year the King of France, returning to the land of his captivity, to take the place of the Duke of Anjou, who had broken his parole, lived for the few months that remained to him, and there on April 8, 1364, he died.

By that year the family settlement of Edward III was thought out and almost completed. One thing, however, remained to be done. Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge, the King’s fifth son, had no wife. The search for one brought to John of Gaunt his first experience of diplomacy.

In 1361 Philip “ de Rouvres,” Duke of Burgundy, died, and his line became extinct. Philip left a widow, Mar­garet, only daughter and heiress of Louis III, surnamed de Male, Count of Flanders, Artois, Nevers, and Rethel. On Philip’s death his duchy of Burgundy reverted to the French crown, but the county of Burgundy, a fief of the Empire, was held by the Counts of Flanders, and was therefore part of Margaret’s patrimonyance, comprising fiefs of France and of the Empire, the wealth of Flanders, and lands stretching into the very heart of France, Margaret was unquestionably the most important heiress of the day. Philip’s death left her hand to be the apple of discord at the feast of the Princes of Europe—the prize of successful diplomacy.

Edward III took time by the forelock, and opened negotiations as soon as decency allowed. The match would provide for Edmund, and round off the family settlement. It would strike a fatal blow at the Valois dynasty, and do more for the English cause in the great quarrel than ever Cr£cy or Poictiers had done. Fortune seemed to be smiling on the King’s efforts. By 1364 he had arrived at an understanding with Count Louis, and in the summer a special mission, consisting of the Bishop of London, the Earl of Salisbury, and Henry le Scrope, Warden of Calais, was appointed to go to Flanders and conclude preliminary arrangements. On September 7 the Count met the English envoys at Bruges and came to terms.A fortnight later Lancaster was on his way to Flanders, accredited as envoy extraordinary. The Earl of Cambridge went with him to press the suit.

Count Louis, who was by this time out of humour with his French suzerain, seemed eager for the English alli­ance. At Bruges and Ghent he entertained Lancaster and his would-be son-in-law. Then returning with them to Calais he crossed to Dover, and there, on October 19, formally ratified the marriage treaty. It was agreed that Edmund should marry Margaret of Burgundy in the first week in February, 1365, and that the Earl should receive a suitable provision, consisting of Calais, Guines and Merk, and lands in England and lordships in Ponthieu.

Thus at the outset of his reign Charles V found him­self face to face with a danger which threatened the very existence of his dynasty. The English scheme was far more than a revival of the policy put forward by Arte- velde twenty years before. Political union between England and Flanders was only one of the consequences of an arrangement which would have placed some of the most important fiefs of the French crown in the hands of an English prince, and established the enemy on the frontiers of the kingdom. The treaty had been signed, and the arrangements were almost complete. One small formality alone remained. Edmund and Margaret were related in the third degree of consanguinity, and Papal dispensation was therefore required to legalize their union.

But the Vicar of Christ, who held the power to bind and to loose, lived at Avignon, and Avignon obeyed the commands of Paris. Urban V listened to the repre­sentations of his ally, or his master, and refused dispensation. It is true that a few months before he had granted it under exactly similar circumstances, but now it was found impossible to relax the strictness of canon law. The barrier of relationship could not be surmounted. In vain the marriage was postponed from February to May, and again in May to a later date. The Pope remained inexorable. Negotiations dragged on, but to no purpose. Margaret remained a widow. Gradually the affections of Count Louis, never very stable, for the English alliance cooled, and the importunate demands of his mother, a bitter enemy of England, prevailed.

Eight years later Margaret married Philip the Bold, to whom King John had granted the Duchy of Burgundy. French diplomacy had won the battle ; but it was a victory dearly purchased. In 1383 Louis de Male died, and the coveted inheritance was united with the Duchy of Burgundy, in the hands of the most am­bitious of the Valois princes. Overgrown feudatories like the Dukes of Lancaster and the Dukes of Burgundy proved a thorn in the side of the French monarchy until the fatal success of Charles V was remedied by the policy of Louis XI, and the ghost of the “ Middle Kingdom,” which had come back once more in the fourteenth century to haunt France, was laid once and for all. To a man who had in him the makings of a statesman, insight into political conditions, and the power of measuring and using political forces, the embassy of 1364 would have been an invaluable experience. The wooing of Margaret of Burgundy brought to view a complex of political forces of the first importance. The relations, commercial and political, of England and Flanders; the relations of the Count to his Flemish subjects on the one hand, and his French suzerain on the other ; the power and policy of the Papacy transplanted to Avignon and its value to the Kings of France—all these questions demanded thought of one who aspired to be a ruler in fourteenth-century Europe. That John of Gaunt had the capacity to become a statesman his history unfor­tunately disproves; but one principle at least forced itself upon him during the mission of 1364.

Wycliffe would have seen, and seen with shame and anger, the incongruity between the theory and practice of the head of Catholic Christendom, now using and now withholding foF political purposes a power claiming divine sanction. Lancaster felt no such incongruity, but he had learnt the value of an ally in the Papal Court. The Papacy had turned the scale against England and snatched the prize from her grasp. It was better to have the Pope for a friend than for a foe. This power he spared no effort to conciliate, and when the time came he was able to enlist the forces of the Papacy to serve his am­bition and to use the spiritual weapons of the Church to fight in his cause.

Chapter III. THE INVASION OF CASTILE

AFTER the mission to Flanders in 1364 comes a period of complete inactivity in the life of John of Gaunt. The war was at a standstill, and attendance at two short sessions of Parliament exhausted the Duke’s political cares. Then in 1366 he abandoned this idleness, forced upon him by circumstances, to play a part in one of the great enterprises of the day.

Or n’est pas raison que je faigne

D’un noble voiage d’Espaignce ;

Mais bien est raisons que hom l’emprise ;

Ca,r ce fut la plus noble emprise

Que onques cristiens emprist—

So writes Chandos Herald of the invasion of Castile by the Black Prince, and though a less interested spectator than the domestic herald of Sir John Chandos may not hold, perhaps, that the undertaking rivalled the Crusades, at least its political importance cannot be exaggerated. The story takes us at once from the Savoy and Kenilworth to Burgos and Valladolid ; and as its events left an indelible mark on the character of John of Gaunt, and determined the trend of his ambition, diverting it from its natural channels,, it becomes necessary to plunge into the politics of the Spanish peninsula and to unravel the threads of the dynastic history of Castile and Leon which, a few years later, Lancaster himself helped to tangle.

In the fourteenth century the Iberian peninsula contained five independent kingdoms. Two centuries of uninterrupted conquest had driven the Moors, once masters of all but the impregnable highlands of the Asturias, southwards, and penned 'them within the narrow limits of Granada in the south-east, a refuge permitted to the waning fortunes of the Crescent, until a century later the united forces of the Christian kingdoms drove them out of Spain. In the east the three provinces of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia made up the kingdom of Aragon : in the west, within the same frontiers as those of today, lay Portugal. The little kingdom of Navarre, leaning on the support of a foreign dynasty, maintained its independence in the north, hemmed in on all sides by more powerful neighbours, from whom it was marked off by differences of race, language and tradition. But Navarre, though inferior to the other kingdoms in material strength, was one of the most important factors in Peninsular politics, for the Lord of Pampeluna was also master of Roncevalles ; he held the keys of Spain in his hands, and could open or close the doors of the Pyrenees to the invader. The centre and south-west of Spain was subject to a ruler who styled himself “ King of Castile, Leon, Toledo, Galicia, Seville, Cordova, Murcia, Jaen, Algarve and Algeciras, Lord of Biscay and Molina,” titles which, while indicating the steps by which his power had grown up, betray at the same time the looseness of its political organization.

When, in 1350, Alfonso XI, King of Castile and Leon, after winning Algeciras from the Moors and adding it to his dominions, died at the siege of Gibraltar, the great period of Castilian expansion ended. The kingdom now needed a period of quiet and orderly government, in which to consolidate its strength; at a time, however, when the firm hand of a strong ruler was required, the crown devolved upon a minor, and at sixteen years of age Alfonso’s son, Pedro I, was called to the task of ruling the most ungovernable race in Europe. In Spain, where the soil had been won field by field, village by village, from the Moors, political organization inevitably took a military shape, and feudal government assumed a more extreme form than was to be found elsewhere in Europe. The mesne tenant owed obedience only to his immediate overlord : if a tenant in chief led his men against the Crown, what in him was treason was in them only loyal performance of feudal duty, while between vassal and vassal the right of private warfare had a legal sanction. When Pedro succeeded, the central authority of the Crown was a pretence and government might appear a visionary ideal. Yet, from the task of governing, a task far harder than that of his father Alfonso the Conqueror, or than that of Henry II and Edward I of England, who had the Church or the people to help them, Pedro did not shrink : he made a deliberate effort to crush disorder and its cause, the independence of the nobles, and for fifteen years struggled with the hydra of feudal anarchy. Unfortunately his most inveterate enemies were those of his own blood, for Alfonso had left to him the most fatal of royal inheri­tances—the legacy of a dynastic struggle. Alfonso, for political motives, had married his cousin Maria of Portugal, but his affections were bestowed elsewhere.

So soon as the Queen had borne an heir, Don Pedro, she was thrust aside to make place for the beautiful Leonor de Guzman, who became the mother of a line of royal bastards, nine sons and a daughter, the eldest of whom, Enrique, Count of Trastamare, inevitably became the rival of his legitimate half-brother. The position was invidious ; it was accentuated by the folly of Alfonso, who, leaving Queen Maria and Pedro the Infante in obscurity and neglect, allowed his mistress to keep open court as the uncrowned Queen of Castile, and trained his bastard sons to arms and a public career. Thus the earliest lessons taught to the Infante were those of a deep jealous hatred of the royal mistress and her sons, whose position was an insult to his mother and an injustice to himself. Yet Pedro began his reign with moderation and attempts to conciliate. It was only as his efforts were met with distrust and treachery that his temper hardened, and, wearied with sham reconciliations with Enrique, his brothers and their adher­ents, Pedro adopted harsher measures. Then the King’s true character began to show itself; ungovernable passion, whether of hate or love, swept away the last restraints imposed by conscience or policy; meeting treachery on all sides, he answered it with cunning; whoever thwarted his will was a traitor, and in the code of Pedro the Cruel there was only one penalty—death, without trial or sentence, without respite or delay.

One after another the noble families of Castile reckoned a kinsman struck down by the King’s merciless hand on a charge of disaffection or rebellion ; blood-feuds multiplied, but anarchy continued. And, not content with declaring war on the nobles, the King alienated the second estate. The Church was the enemy of a ruler who cared nothing for ecclesiastical privilege, spared no one for the tonsure, and was reputed to be a scoffer at religion, while catholic sentiment and racial feeling alike were outraged by the conduct of a king who protected the Jews and chose his ministers from them, and who openly allied himself with the infidels of Granada. The Church and the nobles were against him ; the people alone recognised a method in his blood-madness, and applauded his severity to their oppressors, but in Castile the third estate was as useless in political life, as its levies were helpless on the field of battle. Pedro therefore stood alone, and, to complete his isolation; he had forfeited the support of foreign powers. He had consented to marry Blanche of Bourbon, but the day after the wedding he repudiated her to go back to his favourite Maria de Padilla, to whom he swore that he had been secretly married, and when Blanche died in captivity soon after, the guilt of blood was believed to rest upon the King. This France did not forget. Aragon, too, was a bitter enemy of the Castilian king, who had become involved in a long frontier struggle with his most powerful neighbour.

In 1365 Enrique of Trastamare, who had fled to France found every circumstance favouring the attempt, which he had long been planning, to overthrow his brother and reign in his stead. When the Papal summons to Don Pedro to appear at Avignon and answer to the charges laid against him had been contemptuously disregarded, Urban V, declaring Pedro an enemy of the faith, “ bougre et incredule” excommunicated him and gave his kingdom to his half-brother. The King of Aragon, smarting under the loss of his frontier provinces, offered sympathy, a passage through his dominions and financial support. But the determining cause of Enrique’s success lay in the condition of France. From the time of the Peace dates the rise of the ‘‘ free companies,” who under their English, Gascon or Breton leaders were now overrunning France. In vain Urban V had backed the invitation of the King of Hungary, who wished to lead the companies against the Turk; at ease iii “their chamber,” as they called France, they preferred devastation of Christian provinces to the less profitable glories of a crusade. When, however, the prospect of enriching themselves in the yet un­plundered provinces south of the Pyrenees was offered, they accepted gladly.

In December, 1365, Enrique found himself at the head of a formidable mercenary army, consisting of French men at arms, free companies and volunteers from Gascony, Brittany, and even from England, for Jean de Bourbon and the Marshal of France marched side by side with Sir Hugh Calverley, Eustace d’Aubrecicourt, and the Sieur d’Albret. Urban V had bestowed his. blessing and, less willingly, a contribution of two hundred thousand francs on the companies, whom a few months earlier he had cursed, and the army marched through Perpignan and the eastern gate of the Pyrenees to Barcelona, where on New Year’s day, 1366, the King of Aragon feted the leaders and paid a subsidy to the troops. Thence, with an insolent summons to Don Pedro to open the passes to the Pilgrims of God marching to avenge the faith and destroy the infidels of Granada, the invaders advanced to Saragossa, up the valley of the Ebro, which they crossed at Alfaro, to Calahorra, maintaining the name of Crusaders by plundering and murdering all the Jews whom they found. At Calahorra, on March 22, the bastard was proclaimed Enrique II; then, advancing unopposed to Navarette, he sacked Briviesca and continued his victorious march to Burgos itself. It was at Burgos that Pedro had been concen­trating ; but when the usurper was almost upon him, his nerve failed. The summons to arms had met with a poor response, and even among those who had come to protest their loyalty, Pedro knew that many were only waiting their time to desert.

On March 28, in spite of the entreaties of the city, Pedro abandoned Burgos and Red precipitately south­wards to Seville.In the hour of need the King bethought him of his cousin of Portugal, whose son had been betrothed to Beatrix, the eldest of Pedro’s daughters, Infanta of Castile. But the King of Portugal declined to help him, and sent back the Infanta and her dowry, and the utmost that Pedro could obtain was a safe conduct through Portugal to the north. Taking his daughters with him, and as much treasure as he could collect, the King fled to Albuquerque, to find its gates shut in his face, and thence through Chaves and Lamego to Monterrey. There he stood at the parting of the ways, for in Galicia he was still king. Logrono, too, com­manding the Ebro and the Burgos road, was still holding out for the legitimist cause. To march on this faithful city, and rally his forces for a campaign, was the advice of his trusted adviser, the governor of Galicia, Fernando de Castro, brother of the Inez de Castro famous in the annals of Portugal and the verse of Camoens. But Pedro despaired, and not without reason. For the Bastard’s advance had been one of triumph: crowned at Las Huelgas on April 5, he had received the homage of nearly all the hidalgos of Castile at his court at Burgos, where he rewarded their support with a lavish generosity which won him the name Enrique “ el Magnifico.” Then, turning south, he had won Toledo, and as Pedro was flying north, had established himself in Cordova and Seville. Pedro was convinced that resistance was hope­less. From Monterrey he had written the story of his misfortunes to Prince Edward ; he now advanced to Coruna, and without awaiting the arrival of the envoys sent to meet him by the Prince, took ship, coasted to San Sebastian and landed at Bayonne, where he found Sir Thomas Felton, Seneschal of Aquitaine, waiting to receive him.Prince Edward himself rode out of Bordeaux to meet the royal exile, and by the cordiality of his welcome showed that he had already formed his decision on what was perhaps the most fateful issue ever presented to him—the decision to espouse the quarrel of the dethroned king.

The Prince’s motives betray a mixture of policy and sentiment which is characteristic of the age. The Treaty of Calais, as every one knew, could not last for ever, and if, when war broke out again, France were to be supported by a friendly dynasty in Castile, and Aquitaine, fearing for her lines of communication by sea, were to be surrounded north, east and south by hostile powers, the Prince’s position would be one of extreme danger. But apart from considerations of policy, two motives powerfully inclined the Black Prince to support Don Pedro—his feeling for royalty and his feeling for legitimate birth. To Spanish law and Spanish sentiment bastardy might be a matter of small moment, but in England and France this was not so. The Prince saw in Don Pedro the representative of legitimate royalty, and in the usurpation of Don Enrique an outrage upon the social order.

“ Ce n'est pas cose after ant deue ne raisonnable d'un bastart tenir royautone et hiretage et bonier hors de son voyaume et hiretage un sien fr&re, roy et hoi do la terre par loyal manage ; el tout roy el enfant de voy ne le doient voloir ne consentir, car c’est uns grans prcfudisces contre I'estat royal”

So argued the Prince of Wales, who before all his other titles styled himself “ Eldest son of the King of England.

The project of restoring a dethroned king was a matter of policy and principle. It fell in too with the Black Prince’s humour of knight-errantry. Was there not a proph ecy, as old as Merlin’s age, which foretold that the Leopards of England, known to the fields of Crdcy and Maupertuis, should some day float over the battlefields of Spain ? In vain the brave but cautious Sir John Chandos, who had refused to take part in the expedition of 1366, now gave his voice against a policy which would divide the forces of England. Pedro’s appeal for help was accepted by a Parliament at Bordeaux and referred to the home government. At the council which listened to the Prince’s proposal and the apologia. delivered by Don Pedro’s envoys, the Duke of Lancaster was present ; he gave his vote in favour of the project to support the legitimate king and check the growing influence of France in the Peninsula, and he accompanied the envoys who returned to Aquitaine with the royal assent.¹

At Bayonne in September, 1366, a second Parliament discussed the invasion of Castile. There were two routes by which a mounted force could enter Spain ; the eastern door, by which Enrique had entered, and the western door which alone was practicable from Aquitaine. Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, therefore, was invited to the meeting of the Gascon barons, and asked to name his price for opening the pass of Roncevalles.The cession of a couple of provinces and half a dozen frontier towns on the part of Don Pedro bought Charles’ adherence, and in consideration of two hundred thousand florins he agreed to open the passes and lead two thousand Navarrese troops in the invading army. With the Gascon barons, as with the King of Navarre, the enterprise was purely a. matter of business. They were perfectly willing to light for Don Pedro, as many of their comrades had just fought against him, if he made it worth while, and when the exiled king talked freely of the hidden treasures of Castile, the Gascons needed no further argument to convince them of the divine right of kings. Pedro, however, was without resources for the time, and. in a fatal moment Prince Edward undertook to advance not only Navarre’s bribe, but the pay of the mercenary army.This debt Pedro engaged himself to repay by the most solemn oaths, under pain of excommunication and interdict, and until the sum should be discharged he agreed to leave his daughters at Bordeaux, with the families of the Grand Master of Alcfintara and the Chancellor of Castile by way of security, while, to mark his sense of obligation to his generous ally, he granted Prince Edward the province of Biscay and Castro-Urdiales in full sovereignty. A commercial concession and an honorary distinction com­pleted the expression of Pedro’s gratitude ; be agreed that all English subjects should be quit of payment of taxes and customs (save ordinary octroi dues) throughout his dominions, and he granted to the King of Eng­land and his heirs in perpetuity the right of fighting in the vaward of Castilian armies, ordaining that in their absence the standard of England should be borne “ honorific^ f>rout decet ” with the standard of Castile.

The alliance was sealed and the die was cast. Prince Edward began to prepare without delay. Reminded by Chandos that taxation would be an unwise method of raising the supplies he needed, the Prince commanded his plate to be melted down, summoned back his Gascon and English subjects from Trastamarc, and sent Chandos to negotiate with the leaders of the free companies, while John of Gaunt went back to England to raise a body of men for the compaign. Lancaster spared no cost to appear worthily in his brother’s army. To raise supplies he pledged his Honor of Richmond,and at the beginning of November he left England in command of a compact force of four hundred men-at- arms and six hundred archers. After crossing the Channel and landing in Brittany,the Duke marched to Nantes, where the Duke and Duchess of Brittany gave him a send-off, crossed, the Loire, advanced through Poitou and Saintonge, and crossing the Gironde at Blaye entered the capital of Aquitaine just a week after the birth of the Prince’s second son, Richard of Bordeaux. On January io the Black Prince had left Bordeaux to take command of his army concentrated at Dax, and there three days later he welcomed John of Gaunt (who had stayed in Bordeaux only long enough to greet his sister-in-law), and the fine contingent marching under the Lancastrian banner, the only force in the army all ranks of which were English. On the eve of the march the Prince gave a banquet in honour of his brother’s arrival, and there Lancaster for the first time met the Count of Foix. But in spite of festivities and the high hopes of the army, the moment was not without grave anxiety, for no one knew what game the King of Navarre was playing.

At Bayonne, in September, 1366, he had sworn to open the passes to the Prince ; at Santa Cruz de Campezo in January, 1367, for the same bribe he swore to close them. Committed so far as oaths could commit him, first to the Prince and then to Enrique, Charles the Bad was wondering which perjury would be more profitable and less dangerous. But his dream of impartially malevolent neutrality suffered a rough awakening. Sir Hugh Calverly had been the last to leave the Bastard, in obedience to the Prince’s summons, and on his home­ward march through Navarre, knowing Charles’ double­dealing, he sacked Miranda del Arga and Puente la Reina. Navarre thus convinced as to the side on which his immediate interest lay, sent his right-hand man, Don Martin Henriquez de la Carra, to Dax with his excuses. With some difficulty a meeting was arranged between Navarre and Lancaster at St. Jean, when the Duke persuaded him to meet the allies, whom he had betrayed, at Peyrehorade, and in the end the old agree­ments were renewed, Navarre was held to his first promise, and nothing remained to hinder the advance.

It was bleak winter weather when on Monday, Feb­ruary 15, 1367, the vaward of the Prince’s army, some ten thousand strong, under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, began the ascent from St. Jean, and wind and hail beat upon horse and rider as the long line wound through the famous pass where more than five centuries before Roland the Paladin had fallen, and the Basques had cut up the rearward of Charlemagne’s army. But the longest day’s march comes to an end, and before nightfall the Duke had left Roncevalles behind him, and his force, descending the valley of the Arga, debouched upon the march of Pampeluna. The next day, when the Prince, with Don Pedro and the unwilling King of Navarre, led the centre column through the pass, was equally trying, but on Wednesday, 17th, the rearward, under the Gascon Albret and the dethroned King of Majorca, had better weather.For the rest of the week the army remained round Pampeluna, enjoying an abundance of provisions, for which they were not too scrupulous in paying. Meanwhile Charles of Navarre was in an uncomfortable position. In spite of his diplomatic efforts forty thousand men were in his kingdom, most without a keen sense of the rights of property, while he himself stood committed to a side, and he was by no means sure that it was the winning side. It was a case for finesse. From Pampeluna Tudela was not far distant, and a few leagues from Tudela lay Borja over the frontier, a castle given by the King of Aragon to Bertrand du Guesclin, and by him to his cousin Olivier de Mauni. Navarre arrived at an understanding with the lord of Borja, and, by accident, rode too near the frontier. Unfortunately he was captured, and therefore could take no farther part in the invasion ; and while Martin de la Carra, a subordinate who could be dis­owned, took command of the Navarrese contingent, the Queen of Navarre went to the Prince with tears in her eyes to report the disaster and to beg for his rescue?

While this comedy was being played in Navarre the Castilian scouts were not idle. Enrique on the first news of the Prince’s movements had left Burgos and concentrated at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, on the Pampeluna-Logrono-Burgos road, where he found him­self in command of some sixty thousand troops of all arms, heavy Castilian cavalry, light horse and infantry. His mainstay, however, was a picked body of French lances two thousand strong under the command of du Guesclin. The Bastard was confident of success, and wrote a spirited defiance to the English general.Henceforward the movements of three forces have to be followed : the usurper’s army lying at San Domingo, the main body of Prince Edward’s army lying at Pampeluna, and a flying column under Sir Thomas Felton sent to keep in touch with the enemy and report their movements. This latter force struck south-west at once, and relying on the support of the legitimist strong­hold of Logrono, crossed the Ebro there, and took up a position at Navarette. Meanwhile the Prince, who had resolved to follow the Pampeluna-Vitdria-Burgos road, was advancing through Guipuzcoa and Alava under the guidance of Martin de la Carra and his native guides. Traversing the pass of Arruiz, the army reached Salvatierra after a hard march, and after resting there six days continued unopposed to the outskirts of Vitoria. Don Enrique on his part, so soon as the line of the English advance became clear, broke up his camp at San Domingo, marched north to Banares, crossed the Ebro, and took up a strong position at Anastro, near Trevino, thus throwing himself across the road from Vitdria to Burgos, while Sir Thomas Felton, regaining the left bank of the Ebro, rode north to rejoin the army between Salvatierra and Vitoria with the news of the enemy’s movements.

The two armies, though hidden from each other by the rising ground between them, were now within strik­ing distance, and an action seemed imminent. Warned by his scouts of the enemy’s arrival, the Prince marshalled his army for battle, and, in accordance with the usual custom, went through the ceremony of making new knights. With two hundred Englishmen and Gas­cons the King of Castile received knighthood at the hand of the Black Prince, while John of Gaunt also gave the accolade to a dozen captains of his division. It was an anxious moment, for the rearward of the Prince’s army was some seven leagues away to the east, and had the enemy attacked they could never have come into action. But no attack was delivered, and after standing to arms until nightfall the troops were dismissed to their quarters.

The next day an incident occurred which might have proved serious. Don Tello, the Rupert of the Castilian army, a dashing but untrustworthy leader of light horse, got together a body of some six thousand men. and left the Bastard’s camp before dawn to reconnoitre the Prince’s position, and to see what mischief could be done. Successfully evading the Prince’s pickets, he fell upon an outpost of the first division, and then, after cutting up some of Calverly’s men stationed there, advanced to the centre of the line. Soon, however, he had to beat a retreat, for at the first alarm Lancaster had come out of his tent fully armed, and displaying his standard had rallied his men. The attack, thanks to the readi­ness of John of Gaunt,had failed, but Don Tello had not finished yet.

The chief disadvantage of the Prince’s position was the difficulty of getting supplies, and it was the necessity of foraging far afield which led to the first and only reverse of the campaign. For while the army lay on the south-east side of Vitoria facing Sant Roman, Sir Thomas Felton, with a couple of hundred men, had been sent westwards in search of provisions, and, as ill-luck would have it, at Arinez he fell in with Don Tello’s brigade fresh from their exploit in beating up Lancaster’s camp. Felton was at once surrounded, but, in spite of fearful odds, fought the Spaniards with dogged determination from morning to nightfall. It was only after French men-at-arms had been brought up to reinforce Tello’s genetours that the little band of English and Gascons was overpowered. Half of their number, including Felton’s brother, .had fallen; the rest were taken prisoners, after fighting all day with a heroic courage which has never been forgotten, for to this day the spot where they made their last stand retains the name of “ Inglesmendi,” or the “ Grave of the English.”

These two successes, trivial as they were, buoyed the hopes of Enrique, who, hailing them as the prelude to a general defeat of the invading army, could not be brought to listen to the advice sent him by Charles V and urged upon him by his French officers—to avoid a pitched battle, and by closing the passes round Vitoria to starve the English general into surrender. Only disaster had taught Charles V the lesson of inaction, and. Enrique had yet to learn his lesson in the same school. It is true that, as often happens, the Castilian general was forced to qualify military conclusions by political considerations. The dynasty of Trastamare was only a year old ; it had yet to prove its title, and in view of the desertion from the ranks which had taken place (and was to continue), it seemed imperative to strike a de­cisive blow. But the course actually adopted had all the faults of a compromise; Enrique refused to block the passes and trust to inaction; he refused also to sacrifice the advantage of a strong position and attack, and he forgot that there was more than one road to Burgos.

A cold, wet and stormy March had caused intense suffering in the Prince’s camp, where every one was on short rations. The road vid Miranda to Burgos was blocked, and every foraging party that left the lines was cut up. The enemy held a strong position, and showed no signs of intending to abandon it. So the Prince decided, after a week’s delay before Vitdria, to change his line of advance, and by manoeuvre to regain the superiority of position. Suddenly breaking up his camp, he doubled back by a forced march to the south-east over the Sierra de Cantabria by the pass of La Guardia to Viana, and thence after breathing his army for a couple of days, marched into Logrono. The faithful city which com­manded the passage of the Ebro deserved well of Don Pedro, for it was the loyalty of Logrono alone which enabled the Prince to undertake this brilliant flank march which had completely changed the position.

The Bastard was compelled to abandon his position at An astro, and crossing the Ebro at San Vicente to march to the south and throw himself once more across the line of the Prince’s advance from Logrono to Burgos. The position which he chose was at Najera, where the river Najarilla, a tributary of the Ebro, protected his front. Meanwhile the Prince advanced from Logrono to Navarette, and it was there that on April i he sent a letter to the Bastard in answer to the challenge which had reached him at Pampeluna. The cause of legitimate royalty as much as Don Pedro’s misfortunes and the traditional alliance of England and Castile had forced him to intervene in the struggle; Enrique was in arms against the lawful sovereign to whom he had sworn obedience, and unless he would consent to lay down his arms and accept the Prince’s mediation, the quarrel must be referred to the arbitrament of the sword. A dignified reply, dictated in the royal palace of Najera on April 2, set forth the usurper’s apology. Pedro’s misgovernment was notorious, and Enrique would not abandon his self-chosen part of the deliverer of Castile. With this the Bastard crossed the Najarilla and took up a position in the open plain between Najera and Navarette, where he could have free play for his mounted men, and prepared for battle, while the Prince on the morning of Saturday, April 3, advanced to meet him.

The Prince’s army was marshalled in three divisions: the vaward under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, with Sir John Chandos at his right hand ; the centre under the Prince himself, with two wings commanded by the Captal de Buch and Sir Henry Percy respectively ; the rearward under the King of Majorca and the Gascon Armagnac, the three divisions and the two wings being flanked on either side by a strong force of archers, and the whole force, numbering some twenty thousand men, half men-at-arms and half archers, all dismounted. On the Spanish side only the vaward was dismounted. This, consisting of about two thousand men-at-arms, was composed of the French auxiliaries and a picked body of Castilian men-at-arms, including the Knights of the Scarf (the Castilian Garter), the whole being under the command of Bertrand du Guesclin. Enrique commanded the centre in person ; it con­sisted of about fifteen hundred mounted knights, and was supported by two wings, the left led by Don Tello, and the right by the Count of Denia and the Grand Master of Calatrava. In the rear was stationed a mob of Castilian infantry, who proved useless in the battle and an encumbrance in the flight.

The battle array must have presented a fine picture. Chandos Herald had seen many a battle, but none like this, for in his own words—

Unques tel mervaille ne fu,

Ne tiel plenty de poeple vu

Come il ot a cele journée.

La ot mainte baniere ouvrée

Qui fu de cendal et de soye—

and Froissart, who, in spite of his eagerness to follow the army over the Pyrenees, had been sent back from Dax to Bordeaux when the march began, from the Abbey of St. Andrew conjures up the picture of the battlefield on that fateful day, when for the first time Castile was to feel the force of English archery, while even the dull prose of Ayala’s narrative warms into life as he writes of the day when, bearing the banner of the Knights of the Scarf, he saw the red cross of St. George flutter over the crests of the English knights, and heard the battle-cries “ Guyenne, St. George ! ” and “ Castile, Sant Iago ! ” ring in his ears as the two hosts met in the shock of battle.

As the signal was given Lancaster pushed forward his archers, who poured a deadly fire into the ranks of the enemy, enfilading the Castilian vaward as it ad­vanced. Yet in spite of this fusilade, for which the slingers and bowmen of the enemy were no match, Lancaster’s division was borne back a spear’s length as du Guesclin’s Frenchmen charged home, and for a moment the. English van wavered. Soon, however, they held their own again, and the two lines remained locked together in a desperate struggle. It was the disgraceful conduct of the two wings which decided the battle. Appalled by the English archery, Don Tello never drove his charge home, and after the first onset galloped off the field. His loyalty to Don Enrique is not above suspicion, and it is more than probable that on the day of the battle he was thinking more of his own cherished ambition of maintaining an inde­pendent position in his northern lordship of Biscay than of the cause of Trastamare. However this may be, the right wing made no better show, the Count of Denia was wounded and captured, and the Prince, though he had made no attempt to outflank the enemy, was able by wheeling in his two wings to produce the same effect. When Percy and the Cap tai de Buch fell upon du Guesclin’s right and left the issue was certain, and by the time the second lines got into action the battle was virtually decided. In vain Don Enrique with magnificent courage attempted to rally his men, three times leading a charge in person. The Spaniards were flying, and though du Guesclin’s Frenchmen and the Knights of the Scarf stood their ground and fought until they were all killed or captured, the battle was lost, and the army was routed. It was in the pursuit, as usual, that the greatest carnage took place. The narrow bridge over the Najarilla was choked by the infantry, who had been the first to fly, and hundreds of the Bastard’s cavalry were cut down as they fled or drowned as they attempted to cross the river, and eye­witnesses described how from Najera to the Ebro the stream was red with the blood of the slain.

So was won the last and greatest victory of the Black Prince, a victory which sent a thrill of admiration through Europe, compelling friend and foe to see in Edward Plantagenet what Froissart saw in him : “ la. fleur de toute la chevalerie dou monde.” Not only in England, where Najera was celebrated with a tumultuous extravagance of joy, but in Flanders and the Low Countries and in all the states of the Empire the prowess of the Black Prince was the subject of universal acclamation, mingled in France alone with other feelings—regret for the hundreds of brave men who lay lifeless on the field of battle, dismay at the captivity of the heroic Bertrand du Guesclin. The victory which brought such fame to Prince Edward filled his ally with a savage exultation. One day had given him back his kingdom and placed in his hand the lives of those who had driven him from the throne to exile. So at least Pedro hoped, as, for­getting his oath that no Castilian should suffer death save for proved treason, he began to give way to the blood-thirst which possessed him. On the very day of the battle he had met one of the Bastard’s most not­able supporters, Inigo Lopez de Orozco, who had surrendered to a Gascon knight, and in spite of the indignant protest of the captor, whose honour was pledged to protect the Castilian, the king had set upon him, and struck him dead with his own hand. In vain the Prince complained of this violation of the compact, asking Don Pedro if such were the spirit in which he intended to fulfil his engagements, and warning him that he must learn gentler methods if he would keep his throne, for the next day the King put forward a transparent pro­posal to buy all Castilian prisoners from their captors, and when his offer was contemptuously rejected, passionately declared that the Prince was robbing him of the fruits of the victory. The restoration was only a day old, and already the allies were seriously estranged, for with Pedro gratitude was lost in the deeper feeling of disappointed revenge. In a few days this estrange­ment had ripened into a scarcely veiled hostility. On Monday, April 5, the king rode from the battlefield where the army had bivouacked in the enemy’s deserted camp, straight to Burgos ; the Prince halted for a couple of days in Briviesca, and did not reach Burgos until the 7th, when he was quartered in the Convent of Las Huelgas, where a year before the rebels had proclaimed Enrique II, while Lancaster was received in the Dominican Monastery of San Pablo.

It was not long before further ill-feeling resulted from the false position of the allies. Technically the Prince was merely a mercenary in the service of the Castilian King, but he bore himself like a victorious general in a conquered country.Nothing could have been more certain to arouse Pcrdo’s jealous pride, while the Prince on his part did not scruple to show what he thought of the honour of his ally. It had been arranged that all the engagements entered into at Bayonne in September, 1366, and confirmed at Libourne and again at Bayonne just before the start, should be publicly ratified in Burgos, but before the Prince would consent to enter the capital of his ally he required that one of the city gates, with the wall flanking it, should be held by his own soldiers, and when the Prince and Lancaster entered Burgos for the ceremony of ratification they rode at the head of five hundred trusty men-at-arms. However, the promises, for what they were worth, were repeated, and on Sunday, May 2, in the Church of St. Mary the Greater the several instruments were read alone, and Pedro standing before the high altar, with his hand upon the gospels, solemnly swore to fulfil his engagements. Half of his debt to the Prince Pedro was to discharge at the end of a period of four months, during which the army was to remain in the province of Valladolid, while the other half was to be paid at Bayonne in a year’s time. After this compromise Pedro set out for the south, ostensibly to raise supplies to pay the army. Unquestionably the feat of raising the money forthwith would have tasked the powers of a conscientious monarch, but Pedro chose to intensify the difficulty and to disregard the obligation. His progress southwards to Seville was traced in blood ; everywhere those who were barely suspected of sym­pathy with the usurper were cut down without mercy ; even kinship with a rebel was a death warrant, while the cities which were compelled to deliver up hostages to their rightful king were not induced by open suspicion to loose their purse-strings. But financial embarrass­ment alone cannot excuse Pedro’s delay, and only the grossest disloyalty can explain his conduct. If the whole sum required could not be raised at once, Pedro might have advanced a portion; but, in fact, he had no intention of keeping his word. He began by haggling over the value of the treasure, consisting chiefly of jewels and precious stones, which he had carried with him in his flight to Bayonne and had surrendered before the army started. These valuables had been realized at once at enormous loss by the Prince’s captains, but the King insisted on reckoning their value at a full, if not fancy price. After long parleyings between the King’s treasurers and the Prince’s agents over this piece of sharp practice, there came an impudent attempt to evade indisputable obligations. The grant to the Prince of the province of Biscay and Castro-Urdiales was nominally made good when Pedro issued letters commanding his officers to deliver possession, but these letters were accompanied by others less official and more sincere, and when Lord Poynings went to take over the lands in the Prince’s name he was met by a determined resistance, which was admitted to be countenanced by royal authority. Even more shameless and undisguised was the fraud practised upon Sir John Chandos, who had been named Count of Soria. The grant was admitted, but before issuing the necessary letters patent Pedro’s chancellor demanded a chancery fee of ten thousand marcs.

Meanwhile the army remained in the neighbourhood of Burgos, finding provisions daily more difficult to obtain. At first, with a rare and laudable restraint, the Prince had forbidden plunder, refusing, as he said, to make the poor folk pay for the debts of tlieir ruler. But gradually, as Pedro’s ill-faith became more certain, the Prince’s temper hardened, until, faced with the alternative of starvation or plunder, he gave a loose rein to his mercenary forces. The maxim of necessity needs no justification, and, as Chandos Herald tersely puts it—

Un proverbe ai oy noncier,

Que hom doit pur sa femme tencier

Et pur sa viande combatre.

When Burgos was exhausted the army marched on and occupied Amusco, which found supplies for another month, thence moving on to Valladolid, Medina del Campo and Madrigal, levying blackmail on the towns, and plundering the villages far and wide. Meanwhile the privations suffered on the march through Guipuzcoa and Alava, combined with the effects of climate and excess, produced the inevitable outbreak of dysentery. Hundreds of men-at-arms and archers perished, while in the Prince himself symptoms appeared of the lingering illness which nine years later was to prove fatal. Clearly the position could not last. The latest representations to Don Pedro brought back nothing but the request that the Prince would lead his mercenaries, “ ces maledites gens de compagnes” out of Castile, as no subsidy could be raised while they were living on the country, while to the Prince’s demand for a score of strongholds by way of security the King returned a curt refusal. This reply put an end once and for all to relations between the “ allies,” and the Prince, mobilizing his army which was lying round Madrigal, marched eastwards to Soria, near the Aragon frontier. There were indeed imperative reasons for beginning the return march, for disquieting news came from Aquitaine.

For weeks after the battle no one, but a few faithful adherents, knew what had become of Don Enrique? In point of fact he had ridden for his life across the moun­tains to Soria, narrowly escaping capture, and thence by the Calatayud road to Saragossa? Trastamare had no stauncher friend than the House of Luna, and among the members of that House no partizan more devoted than Pedro de Luna (afterwards Pope by the name of Benedict XIII), who guided the fugitive north through Jaca. Once safe across the Pyrenees, Enrique breathed more freely, and looked for a resting-place at Orthez with the Count of Foix. But Foix, while welcoming the foe of Don Pedro, was embarrassed by the enemy of the Black Prince, and hastened to speed the parting guest with money and horses to Toulouse. Something in the chivalrous daring of the fallen king struck the imagination of his contemporaries, who soon weaved round his figure the web of a cycle of romance, telling how in the guise of a pilgrim he wandered from the hills of Lerida to the Biscay shore and to the Mediterranean, how he paid a secret visit to the King of Aragon at Perpignan, and spoke with the great Bertrand in his captivity at Bordeaux. But the legends of the trouvere are indeed less interesting than the facts of history, for Enrique, indomitable where another would have de­spaired, was no sooner overthrown than he began again to plan, to intrigue and work for his restoration. So great was the terror of the Prince’s name that none of the friendly powers dared openly to receive him ; his interview with Urban V at Villeneuve, near Avignon, was secret, and official correctness constrained Charles V, who gave convincing if furtive encouragement to the usurper, to place the Count of Auxerre under arrest for excess of zeal in his cause. But the strongest support came from Louis, Duke of Anjou and Lieutenant of Languedoc. Between Anjou and Trastamare a secret treaty was concluded, directed not only against Prince Edward, but also his brothers, and Lancaster in particular; nor was it long before the alliance began to show practical results. Financed by x4njou, Enrique gathered a few hundred lances about him, and began forthwith to harry Aquitaine from the side of Bigorre.

The manceuvre succeeded. Anxious messages from the Princess Joan recalled the Prince to the protection of his own lands ; but to return direct by the route of the invasion would be both to lose all hold on Don Pedro and to invite the usurper to return by the eastern gate and to repeat his victorious march of 1366. Hence the Prince’s move to the confines of Aragon and the beginning of a new chapter in the history of English relations with the Peninsular powers. So far as foreign affairs are concerned there were two phases of political opinion in Aragon. One party, led by the Infante Don Pedro, the Archbishop of Saragossa and the powerful House of Luna, was devoted to the interests of Trastamare; it was this faction which had obtained a refuge for Juana, Enrique’s Queen, and her children, the eldest of whom, Don Juan, was betrothed to Dona Leonor, daughter of the King of Aragon. “ Pedro, the Ceremonious ” himself, however, was not inclined to sacrifice his kingdom to a losing, if not a lost cause, and when Sir John Chandos and Sir Hugh Calverly arrived on a mission from the Black Prince, they found it no hard task to expel the emigre family of the usurper of Castile. For a time the House of Luna felt their influence paralyzed: Juana finding Saragossa uncom­fortable, went north to join her husband on a more friendly soil. But much more than a strict neutrality in the quarrel of Trastamare and Burgundy was required of Aragon by the English envoys, for the Prince, in­furiated by Pedro’s treachery, was contemplating some­thing like a partition of his dominions. Chandos found Aragon in a state of panic ; his master’s name was one to conjure with throughout the peninsula. So soon as Najera was won and Enrique overthrown, Aragon had feared the worst. Proximus ar det Ucalegon. The rumour of invasion had grown precise enough to forecast the exact intentions of the Black Prince: while he himself looked to the eastern frontier, John of Gaunt, supported by the King of Majorca, so it was believed, would attack Aragon via Tarrazona, and attempt a systematic conquest of the kingdom. These fears and the sense of relief consequent upon the revelations of Prince Edward’s true intentions, made the task of negotiation easy. The King of Aragon welcomed the Prince’s proffered alliance, at once disowned Don Enrique and annulled the betrothal of his daughter to Enrique’s son, agreed to oppose Enrique’s restoration if necessary by force, and seriously discussed the proposal that, if Don Pedro did not make good his promises of repayment and the cession of Biscay and Castro-Urdiales, and did! not also pay an indemnity for the losses suffered by Aragon in the former war, he should unite his forces with those of the Prince in a confederation into which Navarre and Portugal were to be called, should attack Pedro, and partition his dominions. The Infanta Leonor, divorced from the usurper’s son, was by this arrange­ment to be married to Edward Plantagenet, elder son of the Black Prince, and an Anglo-Aragonese dynasty was to be set up in the central kingdom, or what was left of it after partition between the allies.

Thus in August, 1367, England appeared to be on the brink of a new and revolutionary Peninsular policy. That these proposals were never carried further was due to the condition of the Prince’s health and the danger of Aquitaine. But at least for the moment the Prince’s object was served ; he had shut the doors of Aragon on Trastamare, as it seemed, and he had prepared the way for punishing the perjured Castilian King. He was free therefore to return to Aquitaine. No difficulty hampered the retreat. Navarre was unable to offerresistance, and Charles the Bad, having now emerged from his sham captivity at Borja (and, by the way, having cheated Olivier de Mauni of the reward promised for his complaisance), hastened to place him­self at the disposal of the successful general, and to atone by obsequiousness for treachery. Conducting Prince Edward from the southern to the northern limit of his dominions,he bowed the English army out of Navarre at Roncevalles, and the Prince and Lancaster returned through Bayonne to Bordeaux.

So ended the great Castilian expedition of 1367, an episode which marking as it does an epoch in the history of the Hundred Years War, marks also a crisis in the lives of Prince Edward and the Duke of Lancaster. Of its disastrous effects upon the Prince and through him upon tire fortunes of English Aquitaine, more will have to be said hereafter. In the life of J ohn of Gaunt also its importance is scarcely less. He had gained a new and invaluable experience of men and affairs. He had borne himself bravely in battle.

Well served, as he had been, by the ablest of English leaders, the Duke had won some credit as a divisional commander ; in a critical moment he had shown courage and presence of mind. But the experience of 1367 was not confined to the art of war it furnished also a lesson in statecraft. The Black Prince had overwhelmed all material opposition to his will; he had shown himself arbiter of the destinies of kings. Lancaster who, while lacking the force and strength of purpose which alone secure permanence to the work of the statesman, had yet in imagination and in reserve two qualities essential to the diplomatist, burned to imitate the example of one who at a touch had made the whole fabric of the new dynasty collapse, who made and unmade alliances at his will, and by his mere fiat rearranged the relations of the powers. That example was not forgotten, and it worked in the mind of the ambitious Duke, as in October he returned to England and dismissed his men-at-arms and archers to fight all their battles o’er again and to tell the story of Najera to their comrades in the ch aces of Derbyshire and the Lancashire forests.

It seemed then an easy thing to set up and dethrone kings, but, in truth, the brilliance of the Prince’s achieve­ment was illusory and its results ephemeral. No sooner had the Prince crossed the Pyrenees than the reaction began. Enrique soon found himself in command of a second army; in spite of the protests, sincere but inoperative, of the King of Aragon, the usurper a second time crossed the frontier and invaded Castile. A short campaign recovered Leon ; Oviedo and the Asturias accepted the counter-revolution, and though Logrono again held out for the legitimist cause and Galicia made only a nominal surrender, there was nothing to check Enrique’s advance or to hinder his progress to the south. At Toledo du Guesclin, now at liberty, again joined his standard with a body of fine French troops, and the army advanced to the south.

On March 13, 1369, the issue was decided. Instead of the invincible army led by Prince Edward two years before, Pedro had to rely on a heterogeneous mass of untrustworthy Castilian levies, Moorish cavalry, and armed Jews. When the two armies got into touch the legitimist superiority of numbers was useless, for Pedro’s forces were taken by surprise and defeated in detail. Du Guesclin’s Frenchmen easily accounted for the Cas­tilian division ; the Jews fled at the first onset, and the splendid courage of the Moors of Granada, who only came into action when the battle was already decided, only availed to swell the numbers of the slain. Pedro’s own ferocious bravery was useless; his last army was routed, and there was no alternative to flight. With a few faithful followers he reached the Castle of Montiel, but his movements were known and the place was surrounded. The hope of getting past the enemy’s pickets on a dark midnight after the battle proved for­lorn. As a last expedient the King sent an emissary to du Guesclin’s camp with the offer of an immense bribe if he were allowed to escape. The great Breton soldier despised the treachery, but used it. He enticed the King to his tent, and there, with the aid of Olivier de Mauni, du Guesclin’s cousin, Enrique of Trastamare stabbed his brother, the last monarch of the House of Burgundy.

In later days, when the memory of Pedro’s disloyalty to the Black Prince was less present to men’s minds than the motives, both personal and political, which made England the enemy of the usurping dynasty, Geoffrey Chaucer, learning it doubtless from the lips of Constance of Castile, told the story of Pedro’s death—

O noble, O worthy Petro, glorie of Spayne,

Whom fortune heeld so hy in mages tee,

Wei oughten men thy pitous dee th complayne !

Out of thy lond thy brother made thee flee ;

And after, at a sege, by subtiltee,

Thou, were bi tray ed, and lad un-to his tente,

Wher-as he with his owene bond slow thee,

Succeding in thy regne and in thy rente,

The feeld of snow, with thegle blak ther-inne,

Caught with the lyinrod, coloured as the glede,

He brew this cursednes and at this sinne.

The “ wikked nest ” was worker of this node;

Noght Charles Oliver, that ay took hede

Of trouthe and honour, but of Arniorike

Genii on Oliver, corrupt for mede,

Broghte his worthy king in swich a brike.

Like those of old upon whom the curse of blood-guiltiness had fallen, Pedro the Cruel had been driven from crime to crime, never suffered to rest, involving others in his own fall, driven by the results of his deeds to expiate the curse with his own life. Yet in spite of his savagery there is something of real tragedy in his life and death. He stood for a true principle, and he failed, not only because his own character was wanting, but because anything save failure was impossible.

History in Spain was written not by monks, but by gentlemen, and therefore in the verdict of history for Pedro, the enemy of the nobles, there are no extenuating circumstances. But to the people, who remembered his stern justice and forgot the cruelty only shown to their oppressors, Pedro the Cruel was Pedro the Justiciar.

Thus in two years the work of Najera was undone at Montiel; but the dynastic struggle continued, and the blood feud of Burgundy and Trastamare remained, to be renewed a generation later by the son of Enrique the Magnificent and the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, when English soldiers were to fight once more in Spain under the standard of John of Gaunt, and as the old prophecy foretold, the English Leopards were again to be seen on the field of Castile.

A History Of The Life Of Edward The Black Prince :V 1

A history of the life of Edward the Black Prince, and of various events connected therwith, which occurred during the reign of Edward III, King of England :V 2

The history of the life and times of Edward the Third : V1

The history of the life and times of Edward the Third : V2