The Black Prince

Oh fine: your grandfather is one of the most notorious homosexuals in Western history, your dad is straight but known for his wife-swapping parties…and they call you the Black Prince. Sheesh.

The Black Prince was Edward of Woodstock, born A.D. 1330, and if he looked anything like the cover art on this bio, he was a man worth knowing. The book at hand is The Black Prince by Michael Jones, subtitled “England’s Greatest Medieval Warrior.” Which may be a bit of an overstatement, but the Prince really is a man who could have changed the history of both England and France, had he lived longer or his father died earlier. As it is, he is one of the great “what if” tales of history.

It is also an occasionally confusing tale, simply because there are so many guys named Edward involved. The Prince, Edward of Woodstock, was the son of King Edward III of England and grandson of King Edward II; and all three figure prominently in our current book. I gratefully follow our author’s convention of calling Edward of Woodstock simply the Prince.

Jones opens with a flashback from within a flashback, a questionable literary device that takes us to Edward II, the Prince’s grandfather. In our author’s estimation, Edward II was a weak king with little or no military interest; and both Edward III and the Prince pursued an aggressive military posture both to regain ground lost by Edward II, and also to prove their personal strength as opposed to his.

The fact that Edward II was gay is undisputed, and was so even at the time. His first lover was Piers (Peter, in modern English) Gaveston, and when Parliament, the queen, and some foreign muscle finally got rid of him, Edward II took up with Hugh Despenser the Younger. Proving at least that the king didn’t carry a torch, and I’m grateful to Jones for saying out loud that he and Hugh were an item.

Given that Edward II wound up imprisoned and shortly thereafter dead, I should go in with full gay outrage colors flying. Unfortunately it appears Edward II really wasn’t a good king, at least not by the standards of the day. Nobody cared who the monarch had sex with, provided that he (or she) produced a legitimate heir, and that he otherwise honored the diplomatic customs that governed internal and external politics. Edward II ran into diplomatic trouble, unduly rewarding his favorites and slighting everybody else. But he did produce a legitimate heir, Edward III.

The wife swapper. Or at least host of wife-swapping parties.

Tournaments were big under Edward III, he routinely hosted them. Their military aim was to give knights a chance to practice their battle skills, and since they were often international events, tournaments were a chance for the king to size up his national adversaries. They were also popular: these were multiple day affairs, with set rounds of feasting, pageantry, and entertainment. Entire towns got into the spirit of the thing, because although the participants and attendees were noble, gawking at them was free to the masses. Predictably, the Church was against tournaments, not so much because men were killed and maimed, but because with all the drinking and partying there was inevitably a lot of sex going on. As one chronicle of the day said, “…ladies and other gentlewomen were invited. But scarcely any attended with her husband but instead was chosen by some other man, who used her to satisfy his sexual urges.”

The prosecution rests.

Edward’s approach to child rearing was about as creative as his approach to marital relations, at least in regard to his elder son, the Prince. By the time he was three, Edward had made the boy earl of Chester, giving him both personal income and a role in government, and he added duke of Cornwall when the Prince turned seven. Even at his son’s young age, Edward expected service in return for all the titles: he went off to war when the Prince was nine, naming the boy “guardian of England” in the king’s absence. It wasn’t just a ceremonial title: before long, Edward was writing his very young son telling him to go rough up Parliament for more war funding, and apparently the Prince succeeded. At age 13, the Prince was invested Prince of Wales, and by the time he was 16, Edward was taking him off to war.

It was at Crécy, a major victory over France for the English, that we have an indication of Edward’s “no holds barred” approach to both warfare and parenting. After the usual marching and skirmishing, the English faced battle organized in three major divisions, separated from the French by terrain that required the French forces to pass through a narrow gap to engage the English troops. Edward got it in his head that if he could get all the French rushing to the pass at once, they would crush themselves to death trying to get through it. Don’t laugh…he’d done it once before, against the Scots at Dupplin Moor. And in a true Suddenly, Last Summer moment, Edward decided there was no better bait to get them to rush than his own fair son. So he put his 16-year-old son at the front of the center division, the one the French could see from the pass, to lure them in. It worked, the French rushed the pass and were defeated, and Edward gave the Aquitaine, a large and wealthy province, to his son.

A single Prince in possession of a good income must be in want of a good wife. Enter Joan of Kent.

The thing everybody tells you about Joan is what a great beauty she was. I’ll take their word for it…the one image we find of her in The Black Prince is her face run up in plaster as a ceiling medallion. Looking unfortunately like Raymond Burr with a perm, so I’ll assume she was better in the flesh than in plaster. Joan was an old friend of the royal family: Edward’s mother had beheaded Joan’s father, back before Edward came into power on his own. Edward felt bad about it, so he had Joan raised by his close friends the Montagues, the earl of Salisbury and his family. Joan’s first marriage was to the eldest Montagu son, and Edward not only danced at the wedding, he created the couple Lord and Lady Mold, Mold being a county in north Wales. Fast forward a couple of years…old man Montagu passed on, Lord Mold is now the new earl of Salisbury, with Joan as his countess. Edward even took Salisbury off to war with him. A domestic mistake, as it turns out, because in his absence, Joan took up with Sir Thomas Holland. When Joan’s husband, the earl of Salisbury, returned from battle inconveniently alive, Joan and Tom made up the story that they had been secretly married (and had consummated it) before Joan was forcibly wed to the former Lord Mold.

Not even Joan’s mother bought that one…she and the earl of Salisbury appealed to the king and then the pope. Much wrangling ensued; nobody believed the couple, but everybody liked Joan and everybody liked Tom and ultimately the earl was set aside. Joan and Tom had a seemingly happy marriage…they had five children in eleven years. All was well until the plague came through and took out Tom, leaving Joan a very marriageable woman in her early 30s.

Up until this point I had harbored a hope that the Black Prince would turn out to be one of ours, but he and Joan fell for each other big time. Edward wasn’t thrilled…he had planned for the Prince to make a marriage (and thereby military alliance) on continental Europe. The French, perfectly happy to see the English keep their alliances at home, were rapturous, writing a story of the romance between Joan and the Prince that would do Barbara Cartland proud, complete with a heaving bodice. True, there were a few tiny impediments to the marriage…like that Joan’s first husband was still alive, and also Joan and the Prince were cousins (both were grandchildren of Edward II). But everybody liked Joan, and in the end she and the Prince were married.

If the story ended there it would be a happy one. Regrettably it didn’t.

The Prince died of middle age, at least in my estimation…if you’ve had the dubious pleasure of living through that part of life you’ll recognize the symptoms. In his youth the Prince had been brilliant militarily, but now Edward sent him off on a highly ambiguous war in Spain, one that the Prince had tried to talk his father out of. The Prince ultimately won the war, but the cost was crippling, and Edward then decided that his son would have to fund it all himself by taxing the Aquitaine. The Prince’s health began to fail; from exactly what we don’t know, but he was often bedridden. His father Edward became increasingly senile, sometimes issuing pointless orders, sometimes conflicting ones. And then the Prince and Joan's oldest son died, adding depression to illness. The Prince died in June of 1376, never having succeeded to the throne. Edward died a year later.

It is tempting to speculate how history might have played out if the Prince or his elder son had lived, the thought being that either one of them might have been strong enough to hold the Plantagenet dynasty together. Maybe…but Jones makes clear that the world around the latter Plantagenets – Edward, the Prince, and Joan – was changing rapidly. Both Edward and the Prince were warriors, as was their chief adversary, King John II of France. John’s successor, Charles V, was of a new breed, more administrator than soldier. But he managed to goal and hired well, making him an imperfectly understood but effective adversary. And in only a few years Constantinople would fall, changing the world completely.

Edward was succeeded by the Prince’s second son, King Richard II, the subject of another, future book and review. The Black Prince has a sad ending, but I for one was glad to see that the last Plantagenets were every bit as messy and conflicted as the first ones were.

Especially Joan…everybody liked Joan.