THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY BY: DAVID GREEN (VIII)

CHAPTER 5

THE MADNESS OF KINGS

KINGSHIP AND ROYAL POWER

1407

The whole of the French nation was saddened by the illness which the king [Charles VI] contracted … for he was till then high in the love and favour of his subjects, and because he was the head the distress was all the more deeply felt. When the head of a body is sick, all the limbs suffer.[1]¹

Jean Froissart, Chroniques

The five English and five French kings who contested the Hundred Years War were hugely significant in shaping the course and outcome of the struggle, and this despite the rise of professional armies and the increasing importance of state institutions, the growth of bureaucracies, representative assemblies and the greater intricacy of local government, and despite the emergence of gunpowder and a major restructuring of the social order. As the French jurist Jean de Terrevermeille (c.1370–1430) wrote, ‘His [the king’s] losses are our [the people’s] ruin, and our safety within him lies.’[2] And yet this was also a period in which the institutions of monarchy and conceptions of kingship were placed under enormous strain. Just as kings shaped the outcome of the war, so the struggle reshaped many of the characteristics of kingship in England and France. The war was coloured by and led to the depositions of three English kings, while the madness of Charles VI all but destroyed France.

To a degree this had always been so; kings had always shaped national destinies and royal failure had often proved disastrous, but rarely were the consequences as crippling as those seen in the reign of Charles VI. The vacuum at the centre of France (at the head of the body politic) caused by the king’s madness led to civil war. This, in turn, allowed Henry V to capture Normandy, and through the subsequent treaty of Troyes in 1420 he almost seized the French throne. The treaty appeared to signal the extinction of the Valois line and the effective annihilation of French kingship.

The consequences of Charles’s madness had become manifest long before this. In 1407

there happened in the city of Paris an event which was more pitiful than any that had occurred for a very long time in the Christian kingdom of France, and that event was the death of one man. Because of it the king and all the princes of his blood and indeed nearly all his people suffered greatly; the kingdom was for a long time divided against itself and much weakened by this strife … I am speaking of the death of the Duc d’Orléans, only brother of the king of France, Charles the Well-Beloved and sixth of his name.[3]

The assassination of Louis, duke of Orléans, by agents of Duke Jean the Fearless of Burgundy on 23 November 1407, was caused, in part, by King Charles’s insanity, and it proved critical in shaping the trajectory of the remainder of the Hundred Years War. Twelve years of civil strife followed, at the end of which Jean himself would be murdered. Killed on the dauphin’s orders on the bridge of Montereau (at the confluence of the Seinne and Yonne rivers) in 1419, his death in its turn led to the Anglo-Burgundian alliance and the Double Monarchy. Clearly, this was not the outcome Jean had intended in 1407. Leaving aside his own murder, he had no wish to place an Englishman on the throne of Clovis (r.481–511), Charlemagne (r.768–814) and St Louis (Louis IX; r.1226–70). Indeed, Jean had no real wish to lessen the French king’s authority, or to take his place; rather he aimed to wield essentially vice-regal power by gaining control of the council that took charge during the king’s increasingly febrile ‘absences’ – the name given to the sometimes protracted bouts of madness Charles VI suffered for thirty years of his reign.

The first indication that all was not well with Charles had come on 5 August 1392 when the king was en route to Brittany, at the head of an army raised to chastise the recalcitrant Duke Jean IV de Montfort (1339–99). In the forest outside Le Mans he suffered the first manifestation of the illness, often diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, which would scar the remainder of his long reign.[4] The day was said to have been very warm and the king was wearied by periodic bouts of fever and lack of sleep. Charles, his brother Louis, the recently appointed duke of Orléans, and a few attendants entered a clearing near the village of Pontvillain. A page, perhaps lulled into sleep, dropped his lance and it fell on another man’s helmet. Hearing the clash of metal, Charles reacted with extraordinary violence. Thinking he was attacked, he lashed out with his sword. None dared restrain him, and swiftly the page and three of his companions were killed. The king also struck Louis and pursued him through the forest. For more than an hour, until completely spent, the king assailed any who came near him before eventually collapsing and falling into a coma.[5]

Having only lately reached his majority, both the king and also his kingdom were wracked by this seizure. His father’s death in 1380 had thrown court and country into conflict as Charles’s uncles vied for control.[6] The two main protagonists in these early days of his reign were the deeply unpopular Louis of Anjou (1339–84), whose ambitions stretched beyond France into Italy, and Philippe the Bold of Burgundy, who wished to use the resources of the royal treasury to carve out an even greater principality for himself in the Low Countries. Courted by both these men were the other princes of the Blood Royal and the key power-brokers, Jean, duke of Berry (1340–1416) and Louis of Bourbon (1337–1410). Louis of Anjou soon left to pursue his Italian dreams, leaving Philippe in control of the government and its extensive resources. By means of some judicious alliances he soon established himself as one of the most powerful princes in Europe. Then, in 1387, Charles VI declared himself of age (he was twenty), ready to assume the duties of government, and he replaced his uncles on the council with men of his own choosing – a group known to Froissart as the Marmousets (men of the king’s chamber). This group, which operated under the political leadership of Olivier de Clisson (constable of France, 1380–92) and the intellectual direction of Philippe de Mézières, sought reform in government and throughout the state.[7] France saw a new balance of power established. Alongside the Marmousets the king’s younger brother, Louis, duke of Touraine, was the main beneficiary of the new regime. Through a great deal of patronage and his valuable marriage in 1389 to Valentina Visconti of Milan, Louis increased his political and territorial influence enormously. Then, just prior to the 1392 Brittany campaign, Louis exchanged (‘upgraded’) Touraine for the duchy of Orléans. When Charles’s madness struck it allowed the rift at the heart of government to be reopened. Louis’ political advancement meant that he now formed the main opposition to Burgundian ambitions, and growing hostility between these power blocs led to his assassination in 1407 on the orders of Jean the Fearless, duke of Burgundy since 1404.

Jean the Fearless (Jean sans Peur) did not (perhaps could not) distance himself from Louis’s murder, but neither did he show any remorse for his actions. On the contrary, he acknowledged his involvement in the affair, defended himself robustly and, rather dramatically, rewarded the principal assassin, Raoul d’Anquetonville, with an annuity ‘in consideration of notable services which … [he] had rendered to the king and [the duke of Burgundy]’.[8] The king, however, during one of his lucid moments, saw things differently: the murder of one of the Blood Royal could not be ignored because it was, in a sense, an attack on his own authority. Throughout the later Middle Ages increasingly grandiose claims, founded on legal argument and expounded in theological doctrine, were made for the extent and (divine) source of French royal power. These led not only to the near sanctification of the king but also conferred certain sacral qualities on his family – those of his blood.[9] The murder of one of the Blood Royal, therefore, even though perpetrated on the orders of the duke of Burgundy, had to be explained or punished. Early in the new year (1408), Jean the Fearless took steps to justify himself. His lawyer Jean Petit drafted a now-famous apologia, claiming the murder had been a judicial execution made in the interests of the state: he accused Orléans of treachery, tyranny and dabbling in black magic. Duke Jean received a warm reception in Paris when he told the same story. Such accusations resonated in this period, and that of sorcery not necessarily the loudest.[10]

From the late thirteenth century the accusation of treason carried increasingly dangerous connotations and, as a result, increasingly brutal punishments in both France and England. Philippe VI had responded to Flemish revolts in 1328 and 1338 – actions he viewed as treacherous – with brutal retribution, torture and execution. It was because of this, in part, that Edward III claimed the French throne in 1340 – to prevent a charge of treason being laid against the Flemings: by pressing his claim they might pledge him their allegiance with fewer qualms.[11] The charge of treason took on greater significance in the later Middle Ages following the use of Roman law to bolster royal authority and elevate the status of the monarch. Capetian lawyers stated that the king was as an emperor (i.e. without superior) in his own kingdom (rex in regno suo est imperator) – a concept later adopted in England. Together with a developing if still abstract idea of the state, such concepts contributed to the greater political fury with which treason (to king and state) was punished. Hanging, drawing and quartering (with certain variations depending on the nature of the crime) was introduced as the sentence for high-profile individuals adjudged guilty of treason.[12]

Both Plantagenet and Valois kings used the threat of the charge of treason as a political weapon, albeit with mixed success. Rulers such as Philippe VI, uncertain of their authority and desperate to prevent any diminution of their status, claimed lèse-majesté to be not only the ‘sister of rebellion and … an act of disloyalty’, but also ‘tantamount to sacrilege’.[13] In England, Edward II and Richard II thought similarly and both used broadly (or barely) defined notions of treason to exert their authority. In their cases this strategy proved disastrously counter-productive and it contributed to their eventual depositions. In 1398 Richard went so far as to declare that ‘the mere allegation of a man’s treason was notorious proof of his guilt’.[14] When determined solely by royal whim, treason, with its threat to life, limb and honour, posed a fundamental danger to the body politic. In particular it inhibited the nobility from playing what its members saw as their proper role, diminishing their opportunities to question, let alone criticise, the king. In England the result of such political impotence might leave only a more direct course of action, namely to dispose of the monarch altogether since no lesser means of complaint remained.[15] In France, although treason charges remained common throughout the period of the Hundred Years War, the reaction against Valois kings tended to be less violent.

The opaque definitions of treason which Edward II and Richard II employed soon came to be seen as tyrannical. Those kings more certain of their positions or more sensitive to the potential divisiveness of such a policy delineated the parameters of the crime much more precisely. Edward III issued the Statute of Treasons (1352): to commit treason was to plot the death of the king, queen, or heir-apparent; to violate the queen or the king’s eldest daughter; to wage war against the king in his realm; to provide direct assistance to the king’s enemies; to counterfeit the privy seal, great seal, or the king’s money; to murder the chancellor, treasurer, or the king’s justices. All other felonies that might be adjudged treasonous were to be brought before Parliament. After the Lancastrian usurpation in 1399, Henry IV returned to this definition.[16]

In France the quasi-divinity of royal power made accusations of treason especially significant. When combined with certain political realities and the spectre of sorcery, which gained even darker connotations in the context of Charles VI’s madness, the accusations which the duke of Burgundy levelled against the murdered Duke Louis proved sufficiently convincing, and on 9 March 1408 Charles offered Jean the Fearless a formal pardon. Unsurprisingly this did nothing to lessen the enmity between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy; indeed, it provoked civil war. Charles’s ‘absences’, therefore, led to a major crisis of kingship, as did the Lancastrian revolution in England. Richard II’s deposition in 1399 proved much more significant than that of Edward II in 1327. Henry IV’s coronation shattered the Plantagenet line of succession, brought turmoil to England and ruptured the Anglo-French truce of 1396, which had been sealed in the same year with King Richard’s marriage to Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter Isabella.

This was merely one occasion when kingship shaped and was shaped by the Hundred Years War. Matters of kingship guided the trajectory of the conflict from its inception. Royal rights lay at the heart of many of the disputes that ignited the war in 1337: the harbouring of Robert d’Artois, the mutual aggravation of Anglo-Flemish and Franco-Scottish relations, the status of Gascony, and the claim to the French throne itself. Some of these issues had been a source of simmering resentment for some time because of conflicting interpretations of the legal relationship between the Plantagenets and Capetians. However, Charles IV’s death in 1328 marked the end of the Capetian dynasty and changed the nature of the Anglo-French struggle. A series of disputes that had centred on the comparative rights of kings over lands in France became, at least in theory, a conflict over the right to rule France itself.

The rumour of war, therefore, grew louder with Philippe VI’s coronation in 1328. It was a ceremony that conferred enormous authority on him: far more than just a political act, in France it was little less than a beatification. In England, by contrast, the anointing of the king never seems to have carried quite the same significance. This was in spite of vigorous attempts to propagate a potent image of holy kingship resting on legal and theological foundations, and augmented by fanciful stories in which angels delivered vials of oil with which to anoint God’s chosen monarch.[17] The spiritual authority conferred by the coronation and fostered by long years of ecclesiastical support meant that the French monarch was portrayed as more akin to a Christian Roman emperor than to other European kings, including his English counterpart.[18]

The more limited nature of English kingship is evident in the oath which the monarch swore at his coronation. In the revised oath of 1308 Edward II promised not only to confirm the laws made by his predecessors, as his forebears had done, but also ‘to maintain and keep the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall choose, and defend and enforce them to the honour of God, to the best of his ability’.[19] This created a new and different form of contract between ruler and ruled. It implied that a change had occurred in the complexion of the body politic and that a new relationship now existed between the constituent parts of that body. By this time a reference to the ‘community of the realm’ implied a more extensive political body than merely the magnates and Privy Council; rather the oath indicated that the king was now answerable, in some way, to his people as a whole. While Edward II and his successors gave no more than the most general considerations to the expectations of the English peasantry, the coronation oath reveals the growing importance of a widening political community – one that would soon begin to express its opinions in Parliament and, with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, through mass action.[20]

Just as the king had to be aware of a changing political constituency, so the people were readjusting their relationship with the monarch. Following the change in the coronation oath the so-called ‘Declaration of 1308’ stated that homage was due to the Crown and the regal office, not to the person of the king. This distinction between office and individual – the notion of the king’s ‘two bodies’ – represents an important change in the conception of English monarchy and it may have facilitated the rash of royal depositions that followed.[21]

The importance of coronations (of king-making) can also be seen in the manner in which they influenced major strategic decisions in the course of the Hundred Years War. In late 1359, after the French rejected the extortionate Second Treaty of London, Edward III landed with one of the largest and best-equipped English expeditionary forces to date and marched on Reims, the coronation city. At the beginning of the war the king may have hoped merely to gain Gascony in full sovereignty and stop French interference in Scotland. As the campaign unfolded his hopes grew; perhaps he envisaged a restoration of the Angevin Empire, and following the capture of Jean II at Poitiers in 1356 his ambitions may, briefly, have extended to the throne of France itself. The siege of Reims, however, failed, as did a subsequent assault on Paris, forcing Edward to come to terms at Brétigny in 1360. The treaty recalibrated English aspirations at least until the French civil war.[22]

An even more dangerous expedition was undertaken to Reims to ensure Charles VII’s coronation. Because of the treaty of Troyes and the conditions appertaining when Charles VI died, his son had not received the crown. In 1429, despite the relief of the siege of Orléans and the dauphinist victory at Patay (18 June 1429), the road to Reims, deep in Burgundian territory, remained perilous.[23] The ceremony, however, was central to Joan of Arc’s mission, and although propagandised and romanticised there is a measure of truth in the image of the halting, hesitant, uncertain dauphin transformed into Charles the Victorious by his coronation.[24] Similarly the immediate although ill-conceived English rejoinder of Henry VI’s ceremony performed in Paris and by an English bishop showed a keen awareness of the political significance of royal investiture.[25]

The coronation – a true coronation, that is – invested a monarch with great political and spiritual authority. It was an office underpinned by legal argument and theological doctrine, both of which evolved and became more closely entwined throughout this period. After being anointed with the Holy Oil, first used to invest Clovis, French kings were permitted to take Communion in both kinds (wine as well as bread), and both French and English monarchs gained the power to heal the king’s evil (the skin disease scrofula). A regular custom of touching those afflicted with scrofula developed in the French royal court under Louis IX. In England, although earlier monarchs claimed or were attributed with healing powers, there is no strong evidence of a similar practice in use before Edward I came to the throne (1272). These sacral powers continued to be utilised during the Hundred Years War and came to indicate a legitimate claim to the French throne. In 1353 one Jehan de Lions avowed Edward III to be the rightful king of France because he could cure scrofula – a declaration for which he was imprisoned. In the Grandes ChroniquesLouis IX’s miraculous powers as king were used not only to emphasise his devotion and humility, but also to demonstrate his Valois successors’ political legitimacy.[26]

Such ceremonies were influenced by biblical, Greek and Roman works regarding the source and extent of royal power. In France, authors such as Nicole d’Oresme, Christine de Pizan and Philippe de Mézières emphasised the pre-eminence of royal power although they recognised the king had responsibilities to his subjects. At Edward III’s court, various governmental theories were proposed in the Speculum Regis, written for him as a young man by either Simon Islip (archbishop of Canterbury, 1349–66) or William of Pagula (d.1332). Thomas Bradwardine (1290–1349) was another who argued in favour of autocratic kingship. In De causa Dei he used Aristotle’s Metaphysics to emphasise the thaumaturgical powers of the English king.[27]

The influence of Roman law was of particular significance in advancing this conception of kingship and promoted strongly by authors such as Giles of Rome (c.1243–1316) and John Wyclif (in De Civili Dominio and De Officio Regis). Giles referred to the prince or the king as a demi-god (semideus), and writers at the court of Charles V used even more extravagant language to exalt royal power.[28] These influenced later practices in England such as Richard II’s insistence in the 1390s on new ceremonial and the use of ‘majesty’ as a term of address. The veracity of the story that Richard demanded his courtiers kneel if he so much as glanced at them has been called into question, but there is little doubt that his reign was seen as tyrannical. In reality, however, his style of government was representative of changing European conceptions of kingship – ones that, at this stage, sat more comfortably in a French rather than an English context.[29] The Valois kings were buttressed in their authority by long years of thaumaturgical ritual and propaganda not evident to the same degree in England. In France the king was above the law and bound by no constraint but ‘the fear of his own conscience’.[30] It is perhaps for this reason that the madness of Charles VI was not a cause for deposition, although, like Richard II, he was clearly thought of as rex inutilis (a useless king).

This combination of divine authority and legal rights offered kings a powerful protection against rebellion, at least in theory, since those who opposed the royal will could be deemed sacrilegious. Clearly, however, this was not sufficient to protect English kings from deposition, which suggests they were not judged as ‘holy’ as their French counterparts. Indeed, in the case of Richard II, he may have been deposed in part because he assumed a style of kingship that had a distinctly French, sacral and hence authoritarian quality. The distinction between the English king’s ‘two bodies’ grew in this period: as the splendour and spiritual resonance of the monarch’s office increased, his hold on that office grew more tenuous.

When Richard II suffered the same political fate as his great-grandfather Edward II, he was portrayed as wanting in both his personae (or bodies) as king – the body politic and the body natural. Richard’s personal limitations and failures were emphasised: he was accused of perjury in respect of his personal and coronation oaths; of sacrilege and sodomy; his mismanagement of the government was said to have led to a loss of royal dignity; and he had failed to uphold the law and liberty of the realm. This included, most damningly, chapter 39 of Magna Carta, which originally stated: ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’ Legal constraints such as Magna Carta prevented the extensive use of Roman law in England: its inferiority to common law ensured English kings could not use it to bolster their authority to the degree enjoyed by the French. It is deeply significant that in 1369 Edward III replaced the phrase ‘no free man’ with ‘no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be’. He promised no one should be dispossessed, imprisoned or put to death without ‘due process of law’, which was the first use of that phrase in the statutes.[31]

Richard had ignored this and attempted to be the source of the law rather than its mouthpiece (rex loquens as opposed to lex loquens). His actions were in accordance with certain Roman legal concepts: Princeps legibus solutus est (‘the king is not bound by laws’) and Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem (‘what the prince decides has the force of law’),[32] but in an English political context in 1399 he could only be adjudged a tyrant. The rule of law, the status of the monarch, his ability to govern, implement justice and defend the country were linked inextricably. Kingship in order to be effective had to be strong, but that strength could be used with ‘evil intent’ and, should it be so, the aristocracy was obligated to defend the proper laws and customs of the realm against tyranny in just the same way as they were required to support a just ruler – by force of arms.

Richard’s deposition, perhaps because he was Charles VI’s son-in-law, was discussed widely in France and horrified the French court. It entrenched the English reputation for moral depravity symbolised by regicide. Guillaume de Rochefort, chancellor of France (d.1492), exaggerated more than a little when he alleged the English had endured twenty-six changes of dynasty since the foundation of their monarchy. Such a ‘stigmata of crime’, he said, could never have taken place in France. His words, however, reflected differing attitudes to kingship on either side of the Channel.[33]

The development of Capetian and Valois claims to monarchical supremacy had taken place over a long period and evolved still further during the Hundred Years War. John of Salisbury’s thirteenth-century notion of the king as the image of God (rex imago Dei) became, by the end of the second decade of the fifteenth century, an avowal of little less than a divine right of royal succession. By comparison, the kings of England, notably Richard II, while at the apex of the political community were an intrinsic part of it and subject to its contractual principles.[34] It was a contract that resulted in the deposition of successive English kings.

The Valois, therefore, may have been vulnerable to attack from abroad but in general the French monarchy rarely gave the impression of being threatened at home. Despite the political and personal disasters of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, no French ruler paid with his life or throne. The later Capetian and early Valois kings created a model of kingship that appeared all but invulnerable to domestic assault.[35] Indeed, growing pride in the king and the Valois dynasty prompted various French authors to delight in the comparative poverty of Plantagenet monarchy and in the degeneracy that led the English to ‘kill their kings’.[36] For this reason, despite his madness, there was no significant attempt to remove Charles VI from the French throne. The civil war that followed the assassination of Louis d’Orléans in 1407 was not a struggle to seize the Crown, merely to control its resources.

The apparent incomprehensibility or impossibility of regicide in France is, though, easily exaggerated – one of many idealistic themes nurtured through long years in the abbey of Saint-Denis and at the University of Paris. The French crown did not rest as easily on the monarch as those propagandists suggested: Charles of Navarre, for one, had no qualms in seeking ‘regime change’ in France, while Charles VII had to face the revolt of the Praguerie.[37] Nonetheless, there is little doubt that the theoretical foundations on which the French monarchy stood – legally and spiritually, if not bureaucratically and financially – were considerably more robust than those that sustained the Plantagenets.

As this suggests, conceptions of royal power differed in England and France, certainly when the war began, and those differences grew as the struggle unfolded. This was in part because the Hundred Years War altered political and social structures in England and France, changes to which monarchies had no immunity. War led to an expansion of government and encouraged greater participation in it as bureaucracies and representative assemblies developed – these institutions vied for power with the monarchies. Furthermore, the war continued for so long that it became a national enterprise for successive generations. This reshaped the martial role of the king and engendered a new sense of national consciousness in England and France (see Chapter 10).

However, although the Hundred Years War wrought many changes, the basic requirements of late medieval kingship remained much as they had been for generations, which is no surprise since much of the glamour of royalty lay in its antiquity. For Sir John Fortescue, the fifteenth-century political theorist, the king’s responsibilities were simple and twofold: ‘the office of king is to fight the battles of his people and to judge them rightfully’.[38] Success in these areas should ensure a successful reign such as that enjoyed by Charles V. Known to posterity as Charles ‘the Wise’, he was wise enough to surround himself with capable men who ensured justice was done and the realm defended. According to Christine de Pizan, the king’s biographer, ‘The king desired to fill his court and his council with just and wise men … [and] for the good conduct of his wars he made men come from every country, seasoned knights wise and expert in the ways of war.’[39] The importance of seeking out and giving heed to good advice had long been recognised.[40] According to Jean Gerson, ‘A king without prudent counsel is like the head of a body without eyes, without ears, and without nose.’[41] By that criterion (and others) Edward II and Richard II were both senseless. Edward ‘resembled his father [Edward I] neither in wit nor valour, but ruled the country in an unbridled fashion, and relied on the advice of certain evil persons … such a man was not worthy to wear the crown and be called king’.[42]

According to John Capgrave (1393–1464), Richard II’s failures were due largely to his injudicious choice of advisers: ‘King Richard was in the habit of promoting worthless and malicious characters, and without either regarding the advantage of the state, or attending to the advice of the lords, afforded a hearing only to those who used, as it were, to colour their faces with the pigment of flattery.’[43] Thomas Walsingham, similarly, described the members of Richard’s household as

knights of Venus rather than Mars, showing more prowess in the bedchamber than on the field of battle, defending themselves more with their tongue than with their lance, being alert with their tongues, but asleep when martial deeds were required. So those who were in the king’s company made no effort to teach him the attributes that befit a great knight. I am not just speaking of skill in wartime but also to the pursuits which especially befit noble kings in peacetime such as hunting or falconry or similar things which increase a king’s reputation.[44]

Such matters were of deep concern to the wider polity, especially the nobility who wished to have the ear of the king and for him to behave appropriately – to be a king was, in no small measure, to appear kingly. Part of Edward III’s success stemmed from his ability to collaborate with the English aristocracy and to bring the political elite together in support of his domestic policies and continental ambitions. This was a policy born of necessity and the result of seeing the dangers of division at first hand in his father’s court. It was also a policy recommended by authors concerned with theories of political governance such as John of Salisbury (c.1120–80), whose highly influential work on the body politic was translated for Charles V.[45] Christine de Pizan used the same image to project an idealised social model: she stressed the need for harmony between the estates, the importance of balance in aristocratic relations and the mutual obligations of ruler and ruled. A prince should care for his subjects, and take note of their wishes, although, Christine noted, this gave them no right to rebel against him.[46] Philippe de Mézières, in similar fashion, used the image of a great ship and its sailors working together under the command of the captain (king) to represent an idealised vision of unity among the French Estates General.[47]

The nature of the relationship between a king and his subjects remained an issue of importance for a long time. For Niccolò Machiavelli at the start of the sixteenth century a prince best controlled his subjects through fear. This idea was far from new; over a hundred years previously Christine de Pizan had reached the same conclusion,[48] as had Jean Froissart, although predictably he expected rather more of his heroes: ‘a lord was to be loved, trusted, feared, served and held in honour by his subjects’.[49]

Charles V, by achieving a measure of national unity and through a judicious choice of counsellors and lieutenants, orchestrated a French military revival from 1369 until his death in 1380. Charles, though, was no great soldier himself, and for many the ideal king was also a warrior. The glamour gained by victory in battle could be a vital element in successful royal government but, in France at least, as the war progressed the importance of national military success outweighed a king’s personal prowess. Throughout the war tactical developments and improvements in military technology intensified the dangers of the battlefield: casualty rates increased and the opportunity to take prisoners declined. This placed all combatants at greater risk, royalty included. For a king, however, capture might be more damaging politically than death. The consequences of the defeat at Poitiers and the imprisonment of Jean II were long remembered. As a result, certainly for Christine de Pizan, the military successes of Charles V’s reign were not compromised by his limited personal involvement. Given the memory of Poitiers, the dangers of indiscriminate missile weapons and the growing threat posed by artillery, she preferred to emphasise prudence (prudentia) over prowess (proèce) as the key virtue of kingship.[50] While it was certainly the case, as Honoré Bonet wrote, that the king of France ‘could not abstain from making war against the king of England without mortal sin for if he were to allow his men to be killed and his kingdom robbed and destroyed, who would pardon such negligence?’,[51] he did not have to do so in person. Certainly, by the time Charles VII came to the throne in 1422, bravery in battle and skill-at-arms were not indispensable requirements of French kingship.[52]

In England, by contrast, it remained a clear political advantage to be recognised as a warrior. Military failure or perceived passivity played important roles in the depositions of English monarchs, while personal success in the field against the nation’s traditional enemies, France and Scotland, added much to a king’s reputation. As a result, Richard II’s policy of peace towards France and failure to live up to the reputation of his father and grandfather, still less to that of the Lionheart, his namesake, undoubtedly compromised his authority. By contrast, Henry V was able to transform the prestige and authority of the English Crown at home and abroad[53].  Like Richard II, Henry VI suffered by comparison with his forebears: contemporaries could scarcely believe he was the son of the victor of Agincourt. Scrabbling for an explanation, they described him as ‘his [French] mother’s stupid offspring, not his father’s, a son greatly degenerated from the father, who did not cultivate the art of war’.[54] This only worsened with the king’s descent into madness, said by some to have been brought on by news of the defeat at Castillon in 1453.[55]

It is clear that numerous fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century authors such as Froissart, Chandos Herald and Thomas Walsingham, writing for English audiences, placed great value on royal martial prowess, and although others such as John Gower saw the main role of the king as that of a governor not a warrior, theirs appears to have been a minority view. In France, by contrast, as the war progressed the expectation lessened that the king would also be the epitome of knighthood, perhaps because, as Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt showed, chivalry (in its traditional, mounted guise) was unlikely to bring victory in an age of infantry and missile weapons. Charles VII became Charles ‘the Victorious’ in large measure because of the potency of Jean Bureau’s artillery train, not his own skill- at- arms. By the end of the war there was a clear distinction between the expectations the peoples of England and France had of their kings – ‘Chivalry [came to] define the English regal style, just as sacramentalism did the French.’[56]

The differences in the military expectations of kings as well as other characteristics of French and English kingship can be seen in royal funerals.[57] Among the most distinctive aspects of services in both countries was the use of a lifelike effigy in place of the deceased king. In England this practice dated back to the funeral of Edward II (1327) and it may have come to French attention following Henry V’s death in 1422; certainly, it was first adopted in France a few months later for Charles VI’s funeral.[58] Thereafter the French rites associated with the effigy appear to have swiftly become more elaborate. In France and England both effigies were dressed in the royal regalia and adorned with the symbols of sovereignty; but in France the effigy was treated as though it was alive – meals were even served in its presence. Because the effigy retained the dignity of monarchy the dauphin – the new king – did not participate in the funeral since it was thought improper/impossible for two kings of France to inhabit the same space simultaneously. Again, the imperial connotations of rule are apparent in this ceremony: French royal funerals display many of the characteristics of Roman apotheosis ceremonies. Through the use of the effigy the illusion of continuity of rule was maintained until the new monarch acceded: Le roi est mort! Vive le roi! The old king, through the effigy, retained his sacred authority and so continued to bear his symbols of office until buried at Saint-Denis.[59] The body of the king was accompanied to his burial by the four presidents of theparlement of Paris – a practice going back to the funeral of Jean le Bon in 1364. They did so ‘because they represent his person in matters of justice, which is the principal member of his crown, and by which he reigns and has seignory [sovereignty]’.[60]

The sacral nature of French kingship was, therefore, evident in royal funerals. By contrast, in England the service revealed the military and chivalric connotations of monarchical power. During the Hundred Years War the tradition began of a knight (or more than one) entering the chapel during the requiem mass. Riding one of the king’s horses, bearing a shield emblazoned with the king’s arms and carrying his standard, he and other knights of the realm offered these tokens at the foot of the royal tomb. This may have begun in 1377 (Edward III) and was certainly performed in 1422 (Henry V). By comparison it was not until 1498 that a French king’s ‘achievements’ were offered up at his funeral. This indicates that English kings (at least the successful ones) conformed to that ‘rather aggressive brand of chivalry’ which differentiated English from French kingship in the later Middle Ages.[61]

Differences in the character of English and French kingship had been evident when the war began in 1337, and they became more apparent as the struggle progressed. The period of the war saw France make the painful transition from ‘feudal’ monarchy to the verge of early modern absolutism. Following an uneven process of disintegration and reconstruction, the power and prosperity of Capetian France were all but broken before the Valois were able to establish (and re-establish) systems of governance centred on the king. This gave the monarch extensive and potentially sole control over the nobility and matters of finance and law – a system that continued to evolve and endured until the end of the ancien régime.[62] In England, by contrast, the further development of the so-called ‘war state’ built on earlier constitutional foundations to create a realm in which the king was bound by the law and ruled with the assent of Parliament – what Fortescue described as a dominum politicum et regale. For Fortescue this did not mean the English king was weaker than his French counterpart; on the contrary, parliamentary support provided the king with enormous financial resources, but it created a political structure in which the king operated within rather than above the law.[63]

These different monarchical models reflect the clash, both intellectual and political, between England and France over the comparative authority of their kings, which was a major cause of the Hundred Years War. The treaties of Le Goulet (1200) and Paris (1259) had established what proved to be a fundamentally untenable and ultimately hostile relationship between the two monarchs and the nations they ruled. This, however, was not apparent immediately. At the Mise of Amiens (1264) Louis IX was called on to judge the legality of a dispute between Henry III and Simon de Montfort (the Provisions of Oxford), which suggests his judicial supremacy was accepted in England at that time. Louis certainly seemed to believe that when Henry III performed liege homage for his French lands in 1259, he subordinated himself as king of England as well as duke of Gascony; Henry may have agreed.[64] Subsequently, of course, the relationship would become much more uncertain as English lawyers sought to divorce later monarchs from this unhappy marriage of (in)convenience.[65]

The death of Charles IV (1328) and the ensuing succession dispute complicated matters still further. In the aftermath of the Valois accession Edward III paid homage to Philippe VI for Gascony and Ponthieu.[66] According to Valois lawyers, this showed an acceptance of the superiority of French kingship and of Philippe’s claim to the French throne. The English later responded that Edward had been a minor at the time, which offered him protection under Roman law, and that he had given homage on condition that this did not harm any of his hereditary rights. Consequently, they argued, he had not renounced his claim to the French throne. This view is reflected in certain chronicle accounts. According to Froissart, ‘The king Edward of England did homage by mouth [i.e. a kiss] and words only, without putting his hands between the hands of the king of France.’ By contrast, this limited form of homage is not shown in illustrations from the Grandes Chroniques: Edward is depicted dressed in royal attire, which suggests he did homage not merely as duke of Gascony but as king of England too.[67]

Edward III himself seems to have acknowledged, quietly perhaps, the political and moral superiority of French kingship – certainly for a French and Flemish audience and certainly when claiming the French throne. Over the course of his reign Edward adjusted his title, proclaiming himself either king of France and England, or king of England and France, depending on circumstances. Similarly, after his usurpation in 1399, Henry IV reversed the title on his great seal to read rex Anglie et Francie, reflecting his need to emphasise greater concern for his English title. However, after 1340 when the claim to the French throne was first proclaimed heraldically, the fleur-de-lys were always given prominence on the royal arms.[68]

This, then, seems an acknowledgement that French kingship was considered in some way(s) superior to English kingship, certainly around the time the war began. Unsurprisingly, the authors of the Grandes Chroniques and various French theorists shared this opinion. Christine de Pizan and others promoted a potent image of sacred royal power. The ‘most Christian king’ (rex christianissimus) secured the nation’s future. The Crown’s superiority rested on its consistent defence of ‘Holy Church’, a link that the canonisation of Louis IX had strengthened, and on its antiquity, particularly its links to Charlemagne, which were embodied in the coronation sword (Joyeuse) and the royal banner (the Oriflamme). Later, Charles V would actively promote a cult of Charlemagne, even referring to him as a saint in 1378.[69]

Antiquity was a potent symbol of power, but monarchs on both sides of the Channel had to negotiate with more immediate political forces at home in order to protect themselves against attack from abroad. The power and status of English and French kings depended in part on the authority of their respective representative assemblies – Parliament and the Estates General. In England the burgeoning authority of Parliament restricted the extension of royal power. The Commons, because of its control over taxation, began to exercise greater influence over the king and the direction of royal policy. Although princely rights were proclaimed and defended with immense vigour throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English monarchs were forced, increasingly, to respond if not accede to parliamentary demands. A series of renowned Parliaments in the last quarter of the fourteenth century showed the changing nature of the political relationship between the king and the ‘community of the realm’. The Good, Wonderful, and Merciless Parliaments (1376, 1386, 1388) revealed the growing power of the Commons as it brought charges of impeachment and attainder against the Crown’s ministers.

A different relationship existed in France between the king and the Estates General. Although subjected to regular military and political setbacks, French monarchical authority grew relatively unfettered, while English kings had to work within new parameters and subject to a new political relationship with the representatives of the ‘community of the realm’. This was a political group that now extended beyond the traditional magnate power bloc. In France provincial loyalties and simple logistics inhibited a comparable rise in the authority of the Estates General. National assemblies had gained little influence in Capetian times, and apart from exceptional periods there was rarely a call for a general assembly of the whole kingdom during the Hundred Years War.[70] This did make it difficult to raise taxes, especially in the years before 1356, but it meant the Estates General gained little influence over the king. Only in the 1340s and 1350s did the Estates General appear to be growing in authority, but it soon succumbed to internal divisions and growing tensions. It became a forum in which individual animosities were fought out, while the revolt of the Jacquerie brought any political actions of the lesser Estates into suspicion. Because of this, once it secured regular and easy access to taxation, French royal power could develop relatively unchecked. This, however, was not a smooth process. Initial steps towards a system of semi-permanent taxation were taken in response to the need to ransom Jean II and, subsequently, to deal with the problem of uncontrolled mercenary activity after the treaty of Brétigny in 1360. This system collapsed with the Armagnac (Orléans)-Burgundian civil war and was only re-established around 1435. Thereafter taxation provided the means for Charles VII to deal with a renewed mercenary threat and drive the English out of France.[71] Taxation was vital for the extension of French royal power: it allowed for the 1445 ordonnances, which paved the way for a standing army, and provided resources to co-opt much of the nobility into the king’s service.[72]

The resources available to kings, therefore, increased very considerably during the Hundred Years War, and they took full advantage of this. Royal households grew in size and complexity, and as the court became fixed in a single or small number of locations its features, luxury, status and the practices observed within its confines developed: in architectural terms, despite the war, military considerations gave way to matters of display and domestic comfort.[73] In the first half of the 1350s, Jean II settled the French court more permanently in and around Paris, and Charles V moved the royal household from the Palais de Justice to the Hôtel Saint-Pol. Around this time the ceremonial of royal visits to the parlement of Paris also became increasingly intricate. Royal space within the grand-chambre of the parlement, from which royal judgments might be passed, was to be clearly demarcated with the paraphernalia of the lit de justice: a canopy, cover, backdrop and pillows, all embroidered with fleurs de lys and the arms of France. This separation of the monarch through the use of draperies was extended to other locations including the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the Salle Saint-Louis of the Palais de Justice, and the Louvre.[74]

In the fourteenth century Paris provided the Valois kings with a degree of security from regular English raids and ensured French kings were in close contact with the institutions of government. As the machinery of national administration became focused on the capital so it was necessary for the king to be nearby. For the same reason, after 1360, once Edward III finished his campaigning career he resided in or around London. Windsor became a favoured residence, the new Camelot, home to the Order of the Garter and a public memorial to the monarchy. The king largely rebuilt the castle between 1350 and 1377 at a cost of over £51,000. He reconstructed the Great Hall and the royal apartments. Edward provided himself with seven chambers, a closet and private chapel; the queen had four chambers, one with an adjoining chapel. Guest quarters and lodgings for senior members of the household were also constructed and furnished to the highest standards. Such developments involved a new use of space within great households. A larger number of rooms with a wider range of functions were assigned and designed for individual use. Edward also undertook impressive redevelopments at Sheen (Richmond) and Eltham (Greenwich), to which Richard II and Henry IV added. These three properties were the chief focus of expenditure on English royal domestic housing in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and became the primary residences of the king, but they were not the only ones: King’s Langley, Woodstock near Oxford, Henley-on-the Heath and Kennington were all improved and extended.[75]

Such new building served not only to demonstrate royal status but also the status of those who served the king. Many aspects of the household were not functional but concerned with ‘religion, display, extravagance, courtesy, gesture and movement, indeed anything that underpinned status and magnificence’.[76] At Windsor one reached the royal presence by progressing through a suite of chambers of increasing quality. In Charles V’s donjon at Vincennes near Paris the same hierarchical progress took place, although vertically rather than horizontally. Such buildings allowed for the performance of ever more complex court ceremonial. Meals and feasting provided opportunities to emphasise royal power as well as the hierarchy that existed beneath the king. Seating and the provision of different qualities of food and drink demonstrated status and played a part in the general ritual of the court. Such questions of status might also be disruptive. At Charles VI’s coronation banquet a scuffle broke out between the dukes of Anjou and Burgundy over precedence and seating.[77] Such activities were a key way by which royal (and noble) power and authority were demonstrated and imposed and, in time, they became one of the main ways by which power and authority were defined.

The religious calendar regulated the court’s annual and daily rhythms in accordance with saints’ days, fasts and festivals, and so the Chapel Royal provided an important ritual setting and forum in which the king’s power could be displayed. Matters of national and international politics also shaped religious ceremony and might influence the design and decoration of royal chapels. The Valois enjoyed the magnificence of the Sainte-Chapelle, built by St Louis (Louis IX) to house the Crown of Thorns and the other relics he had purchased from Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople. In the extraordinary setting of the upper chapel with its breathtaking stained glass a clear symbolic link was presented between Christ and the French monarchs. Furthermore, the Capetians and their successors had taken on the imperial mantle as defenders of Christendom, a theme also emphasised in the glass. The chapel may well have served as a pilgrimage site designed to encourage devotion to the king as much as to the King of Kings.[78]

St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, was completed under the patronage of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault in 1363. Religious, dynastic, domestic and political considerations are evident in the design. On the altar wall to the north, beneath a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, St George was depicted leading a line of royal males consisting of the king and his five sons; the queen and her daughters were shown on the south wall. This important early example of English dynastic portraiture celebrated the royal family and made a powerful political statement. The family were depicted in a French style and Philippa and her daughters were dressed in the French fashion. Perhaps based on a French example at Poissy commissioned by Philippe IV, the wall painting may have been ‘overt display of English fecundity’ – an important statement given the failure of the Capetian line. Just to underline the political intent the quartered arms of England and France were prominently displayed. Given the nature of the Hundred Years War the king’s family, the blood royal, was rebranded in accordance with English political ambitions.[79]

By the end of the war changes in military tactics and technology had altered the nature of warfare, its funding and the composition of royal armies. This, in turn, altered the role and expectations of kings. While numerous guides for rulers (‘mirrors for princes’) show that the main duties of kingship remained the defence of the realm, the maintenance of order and the provision of justice, the means by which these ends were to be achieved, had changed considerably.[80] The war, therefore, placed new and different pressures on monarchs and an awareness of this influenced political and military strategy. For example, the English chevauchées, whatever else their aim, were an assault on French kings – a statement that they could neither defend their realm nor maintain law and order within it.

The changing nature of the Hundred Years War reshaped the contesting views of kingship in England and France. By the early fifteenth century the conflict had evolved from a dynastic and feudal struggle into a national war fought by two kings who claimed identical powers in France. And in some superficial ways the institutions had become more similar. Family ties, for example, had strengthened, a fact both sides emphasised independently through their assertions of links to the Capetians and especially to St Louis. The Milemete treatise, a consideration of the art of kingship, compared Edward III to the young Louis IX, and Edward himself stressed this connection in his letter to the French people in 1340.[81] Henry V was advertised as both a direct descendant of St Louis and a legitimate king of England. After the treaty of Troyes English rulers continued to use dynastic imagery centring on St Louis: the duke of Bedford and the Anglo-French chancery promoted this link on coinage, on posters hung in the city of Paris and in public ceremonies. In other ways, however, the institutions were evolving increasingly distinctly. The conception of the French king as rex christianissimus who governed a holy realm had formed part of French political theory since the later thirteenth century, but it emerged with renewed vigour as a consequence of the Hundred Years War.[82]

Although conceptions of kingship changed over the course of the Hundred Years War, and despite mounting differences between English and French views of ideal monarchs, defence of the realm and of royal rights remained central to the promotion and manifestation of royal authority in the later Middle Ages. The king himself may not always have been a soldier but his ability to put troops into the field was vital to the maintenance and demonstration of monarchical power. The connection between the king and his soldiers was, therefore, crucial – and at no time was its importance greater than in 1415.

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[1] Contemporary Chronicles of the Hundred Years War from the Works of Jean le Bel, Jean Froissart, and Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ed. and trans. P. E. Thompson (London, 1966), 226.

[2] Jean de Terrevermeille, born c.1370 at Nîmes, wrote the Tractatus in about 1418, a work divided into three parts, one being Contra rebelles suorum regum: J. Barbey, La fonction royale. Essence et légitimité d’après les Tractatus de Jean de Terrevermeille (Paris, 1983).

[3] La chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. Douët-d’Arcq, I, 154–5.

[4] Froissart: Chronicles, ed. and trans. Brereton, 392–401; Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, ed. Preest, 289; J. Capgrave, The Chronicle of England, ed. F. C. Hingeston (London, 1858), 254; Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 7.

[5] Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. Lettenhove, XV, 29–30, 35–43; Chronique des quatre premiers Valois (1327–1393), ed. S. Luce (Paris, 1862), 323–4; Sumption, Divided Houses, 798.

[6] For Charles V’s plans for his heir’s minority rule, see Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, ed. D. F. Secours et al., 23 vols (Paris, 1723–1849), VI, 45–9.

[7] Knecht, Valois, 45; J. B. Henneman, ‘The Military Class and the French Monarchy in the Late Middle Ages’, American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 946–65; idem, Olivier de Clisson, 72–85.

[8] See B. Guenée, Un meurtre, une société: l’assassinat du duc d’Orléans, 23 novembre 1407 (Paris, 1992), 185–7; L. Mirot, ‘Raoul d’Anquetonville et le prix de l’assassinat du duc d’Orléans’, BEC, 72 (1911), 445–58.

[9] M. C. E. Jones, ‘The Last Capetians’, New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, 421; Knecht, Valois, 8–9.

[10] Parisian Journal, 47; Monstrelet, Chronique, I, 177–242; Vaughan, John the Fearless, 67–73.

[11] S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France(Cambridge, 1981), 145–6.

[12] N. Saul, The Three Richards (London, 2005), 24–5; W. H. Dunham and C. T. Wood, ‘The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom’s Authority, 1327–1485’, American Historical Review, 81 (1976), 744–6; B. Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. J. Vale (Oxford, 1985), 39; W. Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (Harmondsworth, 1975), 81; W. R. Childs, ‘Resistance and Treason in the Vita Edwardi Secundi’, Thirteenth-Century England, VI, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 1997), 180–1. For further discussion, see J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in the Late Middle Ages(Cambridge, 1970), 1–58; J. S. Bothwell, Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune and the English Nobility, 1075–1455 (Manchester, 2008), esp. 36–46; J. Dunbabin, ‘Government’, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450(Cambridge, 1988), 492; Krynen, L’empire du roi, 384–414.

[13] J. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour and Social Status’, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London, 1965), 37; Knecht, Valois, 8.

[14] Statutes of the Realm, II, 98–9; English Historical Documents, IV: 406; C. D. Ross, ‘Forfeiture for Treason in the Reign of Richard II’, EHR, 71 (1956), 574.

[15] S. J. T. Miller, ‘The Position of the King in Bracton and Beaumanoir’, Speculum, 31 (1956), 267, 293; J. Morrow, History of Political Thought: A Thematic Introduction(Basingstoke, 1998), 279; Cuttler, Law of Treason, 5, 21, 31.

[16] Statutes of the Realm, I, 319–20; C. Given-Wilson, ‘Parliament of Oct. 1399: Text and Translation’, PROME, item 70; Ormrod, Edward III, 364–6.

[17] C. Wilson, ‘The Tomb of Henry IV and the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Medieval Architecture and its Intellectual Context: Studies in Honour of Peter Kidson, ed. E. Fernie and P. Crossley (London, 1990), 181–90; T. A. Sandquist, ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), 330–44.

[18] Although the English service conveyed less authority, in liturgical terms it was very similar to the French. An interesting distinction between the two lies in a reference in the French ceremony to the king’s right to rule over the ‘Saxons, Mercians, and Northumbrians’. According to Theodore Godefroy in his compilation of French coronationordines (1619), this clause was introduced after the election of the dauphin Louis to the throne of England in 1216 (during the baronial war against King John). E. S. Dewick, ed., The Coronation Book of Charles V of France: Cottonian MS Tiberius B. VIII (London, 1889), xvii; E. A. R. Brown, ‘“Franks, Burgundians, and Aquitanians” and the Royal Coronation Ceremony in France’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 82 (1992), 53, 85; Miller, ‘Position of the King in Bracton and Beaumanoir’, 288.

[19] A. Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford, 2002), 256; R. S. Hoyt, ‘The Coronation Oath of 1308’, EHR, 71 (1956), 353–83. There are a number of similarities with the 1308 coronation oath and various tracts on kingship circulating in King John’s reign prior to the drafting of Magna Carta. See Die Gesetze de Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16), I, 635–6. My thanks to David Crouch for drawing my attention to this.

[20] In January 1327, prior to the coronation of Edward III, Archbishop Reynolds preached on the text ‘Vox populi, vox Dei’ (‘the voice of the people [is] the voice of God’), and the medal struck to commemorate the coronation bore the motto ‘Populi dat iura voluntas’ (‘the will of the people gives right’). M. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963), 190 n. 2; C. Valente, ‘The Deposition and Abdication of Edward II’, EHR, 113 (1998), 859.

[21] R. S. Hoyt, ‘The Coronation Oath of 1308: The Background of “les leys et les custumes”’, Traditio, 11 (1955), 235–57; H. G. Richardson, ‘The English Coronation Oath’, Speculum, 24 (1949), 44–75. On the notion of the king’s two bodies and many issues concerning medieval kingship, see E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, repr. 1997).

[22] Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, 385 ff. On Edward III’s imperial ambitions, see Ormrod, Edward III, 414–45.

[23] K. DeVries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (Stroud, 2003), 118–28.

[24] Vale, Charles VII, 45, 51, 56–7, 195–7. At his coronation Charles VII heard Jean Juvénal des Ursins, archbishop of Reims, declare: ‘au regard de vous mon Souverain Seigneur, vous n’êtes pas simplement personne Laye, mais Prélat Ecclésiastique, le premier en votre Royaume qui soit après le Pape, le bras dextre de l’Eglise’. Each successive king for generations heard his consecrator pray at the coronation that ‘this our Prince … be given Peter’s keys and Paul’s doctrine’. D. de Maillane, Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique et de Pratique Bénéficiale conferé avec les maximes et la jurisprudence de France (Paris, 1761), II, 759–60, cited by A. Guinan, ‘The Christian Concept of Kingship as Manifested in the Liturgy of the Western Church: A Fragment in Suggestion’, Harvard Theological Review, 49 (1956), 246.

[25] Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 189–94; A. Curry, ‘The “Coronation Expedition” and Henry VI’s Court in France 1430 to 1432’, The Lancastrian Court, ed. J. Stratford (Donington, 2003), 29–52.

[26] F. Barlow, ‘The King’s Evil’, EHR, 95 (1980), 3, 14, 17, 24–5; Guinan, ‘Christian Concept of Kingship’, 224; A. D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 71.

[27] H. S. Offler, ‘Thomas Bradwardine’s “Victory Sermon” in 1346’, Church and Crown in the Fourteenth Century: Studies in European History and Political Thought, ed. A. I. Doyle (Aldershot, 2000), 2–4; M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999), 130–56; Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 124–5, 159–73; A. Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450(Cambridge, 1992), 9–12, 20–1, 49–51, 77–8; A. D. Menut, ‘Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote. Published from the Text of the Avranches Manuscript 223’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser. 60 (1970), 1–392. See also Guenée,States and Rulers, 37–9, 67; Morrow, History of Political Thought, 132.

[28] A. S. McGrade, ‘Somersaulting Sovereignty: A Note on Reciprocal Lordship in Wyclif’, Church and Sovereignty, ed. D. Wood (Oxford, 1991), 261–8; Harding, Medieval Law, 266; J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy, 1400–1525 (Oxford, 1992), 57; Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 134, 157.

[29] J. Taylor, ‘Richard II in the Chronicles’, Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. A. Goodman and J. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), 21–2; N. Saul, ‘The Kingship of Richard II’, ibid., 40; C. M. Barron, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. J. Taylor and W. Childs (Gloucester, 1990), 145. See Vale,Charles VII, 194–228, for comparison with later Valois practice.

[30] P. S. Lewis, ‘France in the Fifteenth Century: Society and Sovereignty’, Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. Hale, R. Highfield and B. Smalley (London, 1965), 279. ‘The English development from the early thirteenth century onwards showed the preponderance of the feudal function of the king at the expense of his theocratic function.’ Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 149.

[31] N. Perkins, Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), 137. On Richard’s deposition, see Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399; J. Watts, ‘Usurpation in England: A Paradox of State-Growth’, Coups d’état à la fin du Moyen Âge? Aux fondements du pouvoir politique en Europe occidentale, ed. F. Foronda, J.–P. Genet and J. M. Nieto Soria (Madrid, 2005), 51–72; R. V. Turner, ‘The Meaning of Magna Carta since 1215’, History Today, 53 (2003), 29–35.

[32] Dunham and Wood, ‘Right to Rule in England’, 744–6; Guenée, States and Rulers, 81.

[33] M. Bloch, The Royal Touch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York, 1989), 38; J. Le Goff, ‘Le roi dans l’occident médiéval: Caractères originaux’, Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. A. J. Duggan (Exeter, 1993), 140; C. Taylor, ‘Sir John Fortescue and the French Polemical Treatises of the Hundred Years War’, EHR, 114 (1999), 124–5; A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1997), 173.

[34] Guenée, States and Rulers, 39; Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire, 40–5; Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 147.

[35] See C. T. Wood, ‘Regnum Francie: A Problem in Capetian Administrative Usage’, Traditio, 23 (1967), 136–9. ‘Next to the King of France no monarch in Europe was of greater importance from a legal point of view than the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire’: J. Goebel Jr, ‘The Equality of States. II’, Columbia Law Review, 23 (1923), 127.

[36] P. S. Lewis, ‘Two Pieces of Fifteenth-Century Political Iconography: (b) The English Kill their Kings’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 319–20.

[37] Knecht, Valois, 88–91.

[38] Sir J. Fortescue, De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1942), 3. See also E. Powell, Kingship, Law and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989), esp. 30, 36; J. Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du Moyen Âge (1380–1440): Étude de la littérature politique du temps(Paris, 1981), esp. 109–36.

[39] C. de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V, le Sage, ed. E. Hicks and T. Moreau (Paris, 1997), 64; K. Langdon Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot, 2002), 97. See further D. Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto, 2008), 153–83; Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal, 144–54.

[40] See II Chronicles: 10. See also Fifteenth-Century English Translation of Alain Chartier’s ‘Le Traité l’Esperance’ and ‘Le Quadrilogue Invectif’, ed. M. S. Blayney (London, 1974), 80–1; T. Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. C. R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), ll. 4858 ff.; J. Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 1996); J. Coleman, ‘A Culture of Political Counsel: The Case of Fourteenth-Century England’s “Virtuous” Monarchy vs Royal Absolutism and Seventeenth-Century Reinterpretation’, Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Cuttica and G. Burgess (London, 2011), 19–31.

[41] Cited by P. S. Lewis, ‘Jean Juvenal des Ursins and the Common Literary Attitude to Tyranny in Fifteenth-Century France’, Medium Aevum, 34 (1965), 119.

[42] On Edward’s deposition, see Phillips, Edward II, 529–31.

[43] J. Capgrave, The Book of the Illustrious Henries, trans. F.C. Hingeston (London, 1858), 103. See also J. T. Rosenthal, ‘The King’s Wicked Advisors and the Medieval Baronial Rebellions’, Political Science Quarterly, 82 (1967), 595–618.

[44] St Alban’s Chronicle, I, 815; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Knights of Venus’, Medium Aevum, 73 (2004), 290–305.

[45] John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. C. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990); J. Bothwell, Edward III and the English Peerage: Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England (York, 2004), 154–60.

[46] C. de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic, 12–25; Guenée, States and Rulers, 39; Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 123–4.

[47] De Mézières, Letter to Richard II, 60–2, 134–6.

[48] C. de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic, 38–9; C. H. Clough, ‘Late Fifteenth-Century English Monarchs Subject to Italian Renaissance Influence’, England and the Continent: Essays in Memory of Professor Andrew Martindale, ed. J. Mitchell (Stamford, 2000), 301–2.

[49] Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Raynaud, X, pt 2, 213. For further discussion, see P. Ainsworth, ‘Froissardian Perspectives on Late Fourteenth-Century Society’, Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. J. Denton (Toronto, 1999), 56–73.

[50] Forhan, Political Theory of Christine de Pizan, 31, 82–4, 103–8; Krynen, L’empire du roi, 204–24.

[51] Bonet, Tree of Battles, 192.

[52] Vale, Charles VII, 5.

[53] C. D. Fletcher, ‘Manhood and Politics in the Reign of Richard II’, Past and Present, 189 (2005), 3–39; G. L. Harriss, ‘Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship’, Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1985), 1, 19.

[54] J. Wheathamstead, Registrum Abbatiae Johannis Wheathamstede, ed. H. T. Riley (London, 1872), I, 415.

[55] Incerti Scriptoris Chronicon Angliae de Regnis Henrici IV, Henrici V et Henrici VI, ed. J. A. Giles (1848), 44–7; Wolffe, Henry VI, 271; C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Insanity of Henry VI’, Historian, 50 (1996), 8–12.

[56] Saul, Three Richards, 94.

[57] Much of what follows has benefited greatly from Chris Given-Wilson, ‘The Exequies of Edward III and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England’, EHR, 124 (2009), 257–82. The first English royal funeral ordo was written c.1360–70 (De Exequiis Regalibus cum ipsos ex hoc seculo migrare contigerit): P. Binski, ‘The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context’, The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon and L. Monnas (London, 1997), 233–46; R. E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960); M. Gaude-Ferragu, D’or et de cendres: La mort et les funérailles des princes dans le royaume de France au bas Moyen Âge (Lille, 2005), 239–50. For the first funeral of an enthroned monarch after the conclusion of the Hundred Years War, by which time English coronation services clearly had acquired great sacral connotations, see A. F. Sutton, L. Visser-Fuchs with R. A. Griffiths, The Royal Funerals of the House of York at Windsor (London, 2005).

[58] This may have been necessary for political or symbolic reasons: J. Burden, ‘Re-writing a Rite of Passage: The Peculiar Funeral of Edward II’, Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. N. F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (York, 2004), 13–29; P. G. Lindley, ‘Ritual, Regicide and Representation’, Gothic to Renaissance: Essays on Sculpture in England, ed. P. G. Lindley (Stamford, 1995), 110.

[59] R. E. Giesey, ‘The Royal Funeral in Renaissance France’, Renaissance News, 7 (1954), 130–1; idem, Royal Funeral Ceremony, 139–41; idem, ‘The Presidents of Parlement at the Royal Funeral’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 7 (1976), 25–7. For views that suggest the effigy was used primarily for commemorative purposes, see Gaude-Ferragu,D’or et de cendres, 242–9.

[60] Chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V, ed. R. Delachenal, 3 vols (Paris, 1910–14), I, 343.

[61] M. Keen, ‘Chivalry and English Kingship in the Later Middle Ages’, War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, ed. Given-Wilson et al., 265. The display of Edward III’s martial ‘achievements’ may have been influenced by the Black Prince’s funeral in 1376: Green, Edward the Black Prince, 163–4.

[62] Henneman, ‘Military Class and the French Monarchy’, 946; P. S. Lewis, ‘The Failure of the French Medieval Estates’, Past and Present, 23 (1962), 3.

[63] On the ‘war state’, see G. L. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 138 (1993), 28–57. For Fortescue’s life, works and theories, see J. Fortescue, The Governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1885); F. Gilbert, ‘Sir John Fortescue’s dominium regale et politicum’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 2 (1944), 88–97; E. W. Ives, ‘Fortescue, Sir John (c.1397–1479)’, ODNB (online edn, 2005).

[64] C. T. Wood, ‘The Mise of Amiens and Saint Louis’ Theory of Kingship’, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970), 307, 309.

[65] Vale, Origins of the Hundred Years War, 48–63.

[66] Rymer, Foedera, II, iii, 9, 13, 27.

[67] Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, XVIII, 241–2, 246–7; C. Taylor, ‘Edward III and the Plantagenet Claim to the French Throne’, Age of Edward III, ed. Bothwell, 162.

[68] See Krynen, L’empire du roi, esp. 345–414; P. Chaplais, ‘English Diplomatic Documents to the End of Edward III’s Reign’, The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford, 1971), 50–4; M. Michael, ‘The Little Land of England is Preferred before the Great Kingdom of France: The Quartering of the Royal Arms by Edward III’, Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture Presented to Peter Lasko, ed. D. Buckton and T. A. Heslop (Stroud, 1994), 113–26; W. M. Ormrod, ‘A Problem of Precedence: Edward III, the Double Monarchy and the Royal Style’, Age of Edward III, ed. Bothwell, 135–6, 143, 153.

[69] Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 105–5; Hedeman, Royal Image, 1, 98.

[70] J. Bradbury, The Capetians: Kings of France, 987–1328 (London, 2007), 300; Lewis, ‘Failure of the French Medieval Estates’, 8–12.

[71] J. B. Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Development of War Financing, 1322–1356 (Princeton, NJ, 1971); idem, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of John II, 1356–1370(Philadelphia, PA, 1976); idem, ‘Military Class and the French Monarchy’, 947–51, 955.

[72] Vale, Charles VII, 18–19.

[73] C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999), 46–7.

[74] S. Hanley, The Lit de Justice and the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 15–27.

[75] W. M. Ormrod, ‘For Arthur and St George: Edward III, Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter’, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, ed. Saul, 14; John M. Steane, The Archaeology of Power: England and Northern Europe AD 800–1600 (Stroud, 2001), 42–3, 108–9; S. Bond, ‘The Medieval Constables of Windsor Castle’, EHR, 82 (1967), 225–49, esp. 226–8, 234–6, 239, 248.

[76] Woolgar, Great Household, 16, 48, 61, 68.

[77] M. Whitely, ‘The Courts of Edward III of England and Charles V of France: A Comparison of their Architectural Setting and Ceremonial Functions’, Fourteenth-Century England, III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), 153–66; Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, 50; C. Given–Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity, 1360–1413 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1986), 30–3.

[78] M. Cohen, ‘An Indulgence for the Visitor: The Public at the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris’, Speculum, 83 (2008), 840–83.

[79] Vale, Princely Court, 220; V. Sekules, ‘Dynasty and Patrimony in the Self-Construction of an English Queen: Philippa of Hainault and her Images’, England and the Continent in the Middle Ages, ed. Mitchell, 167; L. Benz St John, Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England (New York, 2012), 100–2. See also John Cherry and Neil Stratford, Westminster Kings and the Medieval Palace of Westminster (London, 1995), 28–49.

[80] Fortsecue, De laudibus legum Anglie, 17; Capgrave, Book of the Illustrious Henries, 150; C. de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic, 11. Walter de Milemete’s treatise, De Nobilitatibus Sapientiis et prudentiis Regum (c.1326), offered a model of good kingship to the young Edward III: M. Michael, ‘The Iconography of Kingship in the Walter of Milemete Treatise’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), 36.

[81] In the 1340 letter, posted in northern French churches, Edward III stressed he did not wish to overturn the rights of the French people, but to return the country to the ‘good laws and customs which existed in the time of our ancestor [and] progenitor Saint Louis, king of France.’ Rymer, Foedera, II, 1,108–9, 1,111.

[82] Thompson, Paris and its People, 183; Michael, ‘Iconography of Kingship’, 38; Hedeman, Royal Image, 63, 143, 180.