This victory was followed by a truce for two years, and Edward had time to attend more particularly to the state of his affairs with regard to Scotland. King David had been a prisoner, honourably treated, in England since his capture at the battle of Neville’s Cross. More than once the national party in his country had attempted to come to terms for his release. His character, however, was not such as to induce them to be eager on the matter; and he himself seems to have preferred the comfort of England to the position of King among his unruly subjects. He had been so obsequious, that he had twice during these ten years visited Scotland as Edward’s agent, for the purpose of obtaining, if possible, the submission of those who were contending for his throne. But the Stewart, who was the head of the national party, refused the recognition of English supremacy, and no terms could be arrived at. In 1354 Edward thought he had gained the success of his plan. David was to be released for 90,000 marks. As we have seen, the intervention of the French, followed by the fearful vengeance of Edward in that expedition which is known as the Burnt Candlemas, put an end to this treaty. Now, when all hope of help from France was gone, they renewed their negotiation, and David was at length released upon the promise of 100,000 marks, in ten yearly payments, a promise confirmed by the delivery of important hostages. Edward knew that he was really releasing a willing subject, and that it was probable that the failure of payment, or the party quarrels of the country, would before long put the kingdom into his hands.

He was, at all events, free to act against France. On the capture of its King, that country had fallen into the wildest disorder. The Free Companies, as the hired bodies of soldiery were called, from which both armies had been recruited, freed from their engagements, pillaged the helpless country. In their misery the lower commonalty broke out in fierce insurrections. The people of Paris, under the Provost of the Merchants, Stephen Marcel, enacted those scenes of revolution with which that city has been too often familiar. Wearing the red cap of liberty, the mob burst into the palace, killed two of the Dauphin’s most trusted counsellors before his eyes, and drove that Prince to Compiègne. Charles of Navarre, grandson of Louis X., who was surnamed the Bad, broke from the prison in which he had been confined, made common cause with the Parisian mob, roused his tenants in Normandy, where he had much property, to insurrection, and called in the English King. What with the Jacquerie,[62] the fierce plunderings of the soldiery, the attacks of England, and the riot in Paris, the condition of France was in the last degree terrible. However, the murder of Stephen Marcel in Paris, and the success of the Dauphin in compelling Charles the Bad to enter into treaty with him, somewhat changed the aspect of affairs. Nor would the Dauphin consent to yield any part of France to his English conquerors.

Thus the time of truce wore away in useless negotiations. As it ended, Edward renewed his invasions. Sir Walter Manny poured with an army of German hirelings over Picardy and Artois. Edward, accompanied by all his sons except Thomas, whom he left at home as ruler, pushed into the heart of Champagne, tried in vain to take Rheims, where he hoped to be crowned, and purchased the neutrality of the Duke of Burgundy. But, successful and destructive as these invasions were, they were only vast plundering excursions; there was little systematic action, no gradual conquest of the country, no firm basis of operations. The very destruction which they caused roused the national spirit, and while Edward pushed to Paris, and tried in vain to excite the Dauphin to a general engagement, the Norman fleet was ravaging England in the neighbourhood of Winchelsea. Moreover, the wasted country could not support the invading armies unassisted by a proper commissariat, and as Edward, retiring from before Paris, was met by a fearful tempest, which seems to have forced upon him the difficulties of his position, he expressed himself ready to listen to the terms of peace which the envoys of the Legate and the Dauphin offered him. Thus, on the 8th of May, the great peace of Brétigny was made. The terms were, of course, very favourable to the English. Not only Gascony and Guienne, but all Poitou, with the counties of Xaintonge, Agen, Périgord, Limoges, Cahors, Rovergue, Bigorre, and in the north, Montreuil, Ponthieu, with Calais and Guisnes, were to be the possessions of the English crown, freed from all feudal claims. In return, all claim to the crown of France was given up, together with all claims in Normandy, Touraine, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, and Flanders. King John was to be liberated on the payment of 3,000,000 pieces of gold.[63] Scotland and Flanders were to be left to themselves.

Edward thus appeared, even though he had not made good his claims to the crown, to have regained and put on a better footing the much disputed provinces of the south-west. But it was one thing to make such a treaty and another to secure its being carried out. The very misery of France produced a reaction. Though King John himself returned to France to collect it, his enormous ransom was not forthcoming. The barons of Poitou declared that they would not be severed from the French crown; while the hatred to the English was kept alive by the great bands of discharged soldiers, who, joining themselves to the great Free Companies, swept across France, put the Pope himself to ransom, and finding no congenial employment elsewhere, quartered themselves on the people. At the head of the party who were set against the completion of the treaty was Charles the Dauphin. His accession upon the death of John, who had honourably returned to England when he found himself unable to pay his ransom, marked a change in the national policy of France. Under the new King, it was managed that the renunciations required by the treaty should not be carried out. There were other causes also at work which promised a speedy renewal of the war.

By the treaty it had been expressly stipulated that the quarrel between De Montfort and Charles de Blois might be continued, though it was added, that whichever party conquered was bound to swear fealty to France. Du Guesclin, a soldier of a different class from the ordinary feudal leaders who had risen to eminence during the late wars, was sent to support the claims of Charles. The news of his arrival was at once followed by a similar step on the part of the English. Chandos, an English general, marched from Guienne to support De Montfort. A battle was fought at Auray, in which De Montfort’s party were successful, and Charles de Blois killed. The Free Companies too, of which the best known are those of Calverley and Knowles, still ravaged France, and were a constant cause of complaint. The English themselves had to take part against them, but at length the means taken by King Charles to rid his kingdom of this burden again brought the French and English into contact. The provinces of the south-west of France had been erected into the independent duchy of Aquitaine, and given to the Black Prince, who held his court at Bordeaux. Thither, when driven from his country, Pedro the Cruel, of Castile, betook himself. This king had secured his throne by a series of murders. His natural brother, Henry of Trastamare, had fled and taken refuge with the French King. When Pedro carried his cruelty to the pitch of putting to death his wife, Blanche de Bourbon, a French princess, the court of France had determined to assist Henry to dethrone his brother, and had intrusted Du Guesclin with the duty of enlisting the Free Companies for this purpose. His attempt had been successful; Pedro had taken flight, Henry had ascended the throne. But Pedro, as a fugitive king, found ready support at the hands of the Black Prince, thoroughly imbued with the false chivalry of the day. It was whispered to the Free Companies that their loved commander had an expedition on foot. In numbers they deserted from the French army, and gathered round the Black Prince, who was thus enabled to cross the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles at the head of 30,000 men. The rival armies met at Navarette. The French were completely beaten, Du Guesclin taken prisoner.

But Pedro, again upon the throne, forgot his engagements to his protector, and the Black Prince returned to his duchy, broken in health by the hardships of the campaign, and ruined by its expenses. It became necessary to lay heavy taxes upon his subjects. Those subjects were already discontented; the barons of Poitou objected to the English supremacy, and had applied to Charles as their suzerain. Charles had been fomenting their discontent, and had sent secret envoys to raise a similar feeling among the barons of Ponthieu in the north. To these malcontents were now added the Counts of Armagnac, and other barons of the northern slope of the Pyrenees, who regarded the infliction of the tax as a breach of their privileges; and after keeping the matter in abeyance for a year, till he was ready to strike, King Charles, taking advantage of the non-completion of the renunciations, proceeded to treat the Black Prince as a vassal, and summoned him before his court. The Prince answered he would appear at the head of 60,000 men-at-arms. The threat was idle. Before, in his distressed position, he could make any vigorous preparation, the French troops had begun to conquer the outlying parts of his province, and a declaration of war was at once issued. But several years of peace, during which the exhausted country had begun to recover itself, had disinclined the English to renew the war. The King appears to have grown old before his time, and to have thought only of enjoying in pleasure the fruits of his successful youth. Preparations went on but slowly, while insurrections among the nobles, and the pressure of the French army, continually increased around Guienne. There the Black Prince was so ill that he could not himself take the field. His brother Edmund of Cambridge, Chandos and Knowles, were indeed with him, but could scarcely make head against the insurgents. An attack upon Poitou failed, and Chandos lost his life. None of the English plans met with success. Knowles indeed, placed in command of Calais, marched again successfully to Paris, but the long wars had given birth to a new race of French generals, and Du Guesclin, now Constable, prevented any great success. At length the Black Prince roused himself, and took the field. At his mere name the French armies began to dissolve, and he advanced triumphantly to Limoges, a town he had much favoured, and on which he intended to wreak his vengeance. The wall was mined, and the town taken. Men, women, and children, to the number of 3000, were pitilessly murdered. In the midst of this cruel slaughter, the Prince could show his knighthood by sparing and honouring some French gentlemen who made an unusually gallant resistance. It was his last triumph. Early in 1371 he returned to England, broken and dying. There is no need to trace the progress of the war further. The gradual advance of the French could not be checked. The English armies might march far into the country, as one under Lancaster did in 1373, but the French invariably avoided a general action; and thus, by 1374, England had lost all her possessions in France, with the exception of Calais, Bordeaux and Bayonne, and a few towns upon the Dordogne.

The sequel of the Black Prince’s friendship for Pedro of Castile deserves to be noticed. Upon the withdrawal of the English, Henry of Trastamare again conquered Pedro, and the brothers having met in Henry’s tent, a quarrel ensued, terminating in a personal struggle and the death of Pedro. Henry thus regained the throne; and subsequently two daughters of Pedro married two of Edward’s sons, Lancaster and Cambridge. Upon the Duke of Lancaster’s assuming the title of King of Castile, Henry entered actively into the war, and at a great naval battle off Rochelle in June 1372, completely destroyed the English fleet under the Earl of Pembroke. At length a truce was agreed on, which, though it never ripened into a peace, continued from time to time during the rest of the reign.

A strange change of fortune thus clouded the end of what promised to be a glorious reign. Edward, making war in the spirit of a knight-errant, and trusting completely to the courage of his troops on the day of battle, had neglected all the precautions which the conquest of a country requires. He had been successful neither as a strategist nor as a statesman, and his war with France, adorned with splendid victories, and for one moment promising to establish on a firm footing the English power in the South of France, had ended in a more complete overthrow of that power than had been seen since the time of King John. It was natural that the close of such a reign should be marked by some expressions of discontent among the people. Old before his time, in the hands of a woman of the name of Alice Perrers, whose ostentation was constantly shocking the public eye, Edward had fallen under the influence of bad advisers, and had let the reins of government slip into the hands of John of Gaunt, his third son.

To understand the politics of this time, we have to rid ourselves of both the names and ideas of the present day. The lines which divided classes were much more distinctly marked. Political life was confined entirely to the upper ranks. The House of Commons, which we are in the habit of regarding as a popular assembly, and which was, in fact, the most popular assembly of that time, was in part entirely aristocratic, in part representative of the moneyed interests of the country. Below this no class could make its voice heard at all, and this moneyed and aristocratic House of Commons was only beginning by slow degrees to force itself into political power. It had, in fact, consisted at first of two separate orders,—the knights of the shire, who represented the lesser nobility, and the burgesses. The knights had naturally joined without difficulty in the deliberations of a baronage who were socially their equals; the burgesses had busied themselves almost exclusively with financial questions touching their own order. Various causes had gradually tended to draw the two lower orders together, and by the beginning of the reign of Edward III., the division of Parliament into two Houses, of which the lower consisted of knights and burgesses, had been completed. Indeed, the Act of 1321, passed when Edward II. was victorious over the barons, had acknowledged the claims of the burgesses to share in the proceedings of Parliament. The practical government of the country had hitherto been in the hands of the House of Lords. There were thus three distinct classes, the baronage, the upper or represented commonalty, consisting of knights and burgesses, and the lower commonalty. Power was as yet in the hands of the baronage. When, therefore, no common cause was driving the baronage to united action, as among all governing classes, there was certain to be a difference of view, and the baronage would be divided into parties. On the other hand, the upper Commons, just forcing their way upwards, were inclined to be sometimes subservient to the wishes of the Barons, sometimes ready to join that one of the baronial parties which seemed to give them the greatest promise of political assistance. The lower, or unrepresented Commons, unable to make themselves heard, had been of no political account; although a series of events had lately contributed to put them in such a position that their friendship was worth having, and to enable them soon to speak with arms in their hands, in a way which was very terrible. Each of these classes had its own particular interests, and made their combinations with the other classes to suit the advance of those interests. The Barons desired power, the higher Commons good administration, especially of the finances; the lower Commons such improvements in their position as they afterwards claimed under Wat Tyler. Hitherto, in the main, the interest of the baronage had been the restriction within fixed limits of the royal authority; they had hitherto been the guardians of the constitutional growth of the country, and their rebellions and opposition, whatever selfish leaven may have been mixed with them, deserve to be regarded as efforts towards popular liberty. About the period which we have now reached, this guardianship of the Constitution passed into the hands of the upper Commons. The Barons themselves having now acquired a preponderance in the government, it was their encroachments rather than the King’s which had to be guarded against. In principle, the safeguards of the Constitution had been established by Edward I., and were therefore no longer the subject of contention. The baronage was no longer interested to secure power, but to enjoy a power already secured. They thus fell into parties whose real object was to appropriate that power. For that purpose, like other political parties, the rival Barons would seek to attach to themselves any of the other sections of society, and would therefore adopt those principles and those party cries which seemed to promise them the most success. It becomes, therefore, impossible to say that this or that baronial insurrection was popular or constitutional. For their own objects, the most disorderly Barons might attach themselves to the Commons, to the lower classes, or to the King. Their divisions had, in fact, become party struggles for power.

Now the chief questions at that time exciting England were the position of the Church, the continuation of the war with France, and the management of the finances. On any of these questions the baronage might form itself into parties, which might seek their own advantage by adopting the interests of other sections of society. It is in this way that must be explained the apparent contradictions in the conduct of the Parliament at the close of Edward’s reign. For many years there had been growing a strong dislike to the Church in England. The oppressions of the Popes, the selfish character of their government at Avignon, the loss of spirituality on the part of the higher clergy, from whose ranks the statesmen of the time were largely drawn, and the deterioration of the mendicant orders, together with the idea always prevalent in England of the supremacy of the state, had given birth to a party who desired the pre-eminence in all matters of the laity,—a party which is of course connected with the doctrinal views at this time brought forward by Wicliffe. The existence of this lay party is clearly shown by the proceedings of the year 1340, when for the first time a lay Chancellor, Sir Robert Bouchier, was appointed in the place of Stratford. When the baronage were divided, the natural leaders of the parties were the royal princes. Thus, when circumstances had put the reins of power into the hands of John of Gaunt, he fortified himself by assuming the leadership of the lay party, which found its adherents in all sections of society, but no doubt mainly among the barons, jealous of the great part played in the government by the clergy, the vast wealth which the Church held, and which is calculated at more than a third of the land, and rendered self-confident by their successes in the French war. Already schemes for the confiscation of Church property had been publicly mentioned, and the Commons, with the approbation of John of Gaunt, had in 1371 petitioned for the removal of all the clergy from the higher offices of state. The Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham, had surrendered the great seal, which, together with the offices of the exchequer, had been put into the hands of laymen. There are many proofs that the class which was represented in the Commons partook strongly of the dislike to the Church. But any claim to popularity which Lancaster’s administration might have advanced on this ground was destroyed by their mismanagement of the finances and the disasters of the foreign war. In fact, there is little doubt that the ecclesiastics he had displaced were far better governors than the partisans he had put in their places. Another party was therefore formed, at the head of which was the Black Prince, a party consisting of those who preferred the old system of government, and which included the higher clergy and the financial reformers. It has been pointed out that the disastrous government of John of Gaunt had found its partisans chiefly among the Barons. On the whole, therefore, the Commons attached themselves to the party of the Black Prince. For the time a restoration of good government and well-managed finance seemed to them of more importance than the overthrow of the Church, especially as their interests as a class seemed to lead in the same direction. The struggle came to an issue in the Good Parliament, which met in April 1376. The Commons presented a remonstrance, which, after enumerating their financial grievances, and asserting the mismanagement of the Government, demanded a change in the council; in other words, a change of ministry. The clergy, and William of Wykeham among them, again came into office. They were not content with this, but impeached—and this is the first instance of parliamentary impeachment—Lord Latimer, the Chamberlain. A considerable number of the other officers were arrested and thrown into prison, and Alice Perrers was forbidden to use her influence under pain of banishment. They were still discussing further reforms, when the death of the Black Prince deprived them of their chief support. Afraid that John of Gaunt had views on the succession, they insisted on the immediate recognition of the Black Prince’s son; and a deputation waited on the old King at Eltham to receive an answer to their complaints and petitions. These, as might be expected, were chiefly directed against the encroachments of the Papacy, in hatred to which all parties in England joined. Still the King’s reply shows the influence of the newly restored clerical counsellors. Enough, he said, had been done in the way of legislation, he would continue his personal appeals to the Pope. Parliament then separated.

It at once became plain that the Black Prince’s death had again thrown the power into the hands of John of Gaunt. The power of the new Privy Council disappeared, Lord Latimer was pardoned, Peter de la Mare, the speaker of the Good Parliament, was thrown into prison, William of Wykeham was again driven from the court. The Parliament which assembled next year was thoroughly in the Lancastrian interest. Sir Thomas Hungerford, the Duke’s steward, was elected Speaker, the proceedings against Alice Perrers withdrawn, and a new form of tax—a poll-tax of 4d.—granted. But the clergy did not thus easily yield their ground. They attacked the apostle of the lay party, Wicliffe. He had to appear before Courtenay, Bishop of London, in St. Paul’s. He came, supported by Lancaster and by the Marshall, Henry Percy, a close adherent of that party of which Lancaster was the head. An unseemly brawl arose in the church. Lancaster threatened to drag Courtenay out of the church by the hair. The Londoners were already so ill disposed to Lancaster, that measures were in preparation to remove their mayor, and put the government of the town in the hands of a royal commission. The insult to their Bishop roused them to fury. It was only by Courtenay’s intervention that Lancaster’s house was saved from demolition; and a wretched man was killed under the supposition that he was Henry Percy. Lancaster escaped, and the city had to make some sort of reparation; but the quarrel was scarcely quieted when the King died. Deserted by his mistress, who is said to have torn the rings from his dying hand, and by his servants, the wretched old man died, tended only by a single poor priest.