A Prince Among Men: Michael Jones Interviewed by Richard Foreman
Can you tell us about the origin of the idea for you to write a biography of the Black Prince, or Edward of Woodstock?
As a military historian, my publishers’ interest in a new biography of the Black Prince gave a wonderful opportunity to write about one of England’s greatest medieval warriors. His victory at Poitiers in 1356, which resulted in the capture of the French king Jean II, was one of the most remarkable English triumphs in the Hundred Years’ War. But the Prince’s martial CV comprised far more than a list of successful battles. To contemporaries he represented the embodiment of knightly virtues, a true ‘flower of chivalry’. In my book I wanted to bring his story to life to a broader audience and also (using fresh chronicle and archive evidence) provide a more positive reappraisal of his accomplishments.
Edward of Woodstock initially made a name for himself through serving at the vanguard during the Battle of Crécy. Edward III may be seen to have been proved right, but was there not an element of risk and foolhardiness at placing so much responsibility on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old?
Yes, this was ‘tough love’, fourteenth-century style. At Crécy, Edward III was deliberately making his sixteen-year-old son a target, to goad the French forward, and they came very close to killing him. The Prince’s standard – which would have been only a few feet away from him – was seized by his opponents but then recovered, and the Prince himself may have been knocked to the ground in the melee and then pulled to his feet again. The chronicler Jean Froissart related the famous story of a desperate messenger warning the king that his son was about to be overwhelmed, and Edward bluntly replying: ‘Let him win his spurs’. We may be reassured to find that – according to another source – the king then relented, and sent forty of his best knights to the Prince’s aid. So yes, it was a calculated risk – but not foolhardy, in the sense of the question: Edward III had put some his most experienced warriors in the vanguard to support his son.
There is more than one explanation as to why Edward of Woodstock was eventually called the Black Prince. Can you tell is about them – and which one do you give most credence to?
Edward III’s oldest son was always known as Edward of Woodstock (after the royal palace where he was born) during his lifetime. The first reference to the sobriquet ‘Black Prince’ occurred in the jottings of the Tudor antiquarian John Leland, and its first appearance in print in the chronicle of Richard Grafton in 1572, nearly two hundred years after his death. Shakespeare (who had consulted Grafton’s work) was attracted to the nickname and used it in his play Henry V, and ever since it has become enshrined in our consciousness. Various explanations have been offered for all this, ranging from the colour of his armour to dark deeds committed against the French. Leland, who first used the term, had just visited the Prince’s tomb at Canterbury Cathedral, and my own view is that it was a pilgrims’ nickname, derived from the ‘badges of peace’ prominently displayed at the base of the memorial, where the badge of the ostrich feather is strikingly displayed against a black backdrop.
The Black Prince had the misfortune to witness the misery of the Black Death. Can you tell us a bit about his life during this calamitous period?
Yes, he lost members of his own family during this terrible onslaught, which killed between a third and a half of England’s population. The response of the Prince and his father was a supreme act of defiance, to found a chivalric order, the Order of the Garter, in the midst of it all. It was a statement of martial valour in the face of a terrifying assailant. And the religious purpose of the Order, to offer intercessionary prayers for the dead, gave it a tremendous spiritual power.
Can you tell us a bit more about some of the prince’s personal virtues and vices? It seems that he may have managed money about as well as Rachel Reeves.
Amongst the Prince’s virtues I would like to highlight his deeply-felt piety, exceptional courage, military acumen and an engaging sense of humour. He married for love, and he and his wife, Joan of Kent, presided over a glittering court in Aquitaine (in south-west France) in the 1360s. They were a fourteenth-century power couple. The Prince was strikingly generous to his followers, and open-handed generosity, or largesse, was seen as a virtue in chivalrous society. But it was also a vice, in that the Prince gave away too much, and was constantly in debt. The lack of a prudent financial reserve would come back to haunt him when war with France was resumed in 1369.
It was a great tragedy, both for his family and also the country, that the prince died so young. The last years of his life were spent plagued by illness. He became a shadow of the man – and warrior – he once was. Also, had Edward of Woodstock ascended to the throne, the country may have experienced a different rule by Richard II. Richard was not so much an apple that fell far from the tree – rather he seemed to land in another orchard. But despite the tragedy of his final years, can you tell us why the Black Prince’s life is one which is worth both remembering and celebrating?
The Prince was ill for the last seven years of his life, suffering from a wasting sickness (possibly rectal cancer) which drained his strength, and led to his death in 1376, a year before his father. If he had remained healthy, and succeeded to the throne, he would have needed to rein in his spending. If this was done, he had all the qualities to make a great king, in particular an instinctive gift for building rapport amongst the aristocracy and bringing them into a world of chivalric renown. The tragedy of the reign of his son, Richard II, was that he imitated the trappings of chivalry without ever understanding their underlying purpose. Where his father had won loyalty, Richard alienated those around him. It was the Black Prince’s embodiment of the values of chivalry – which so impressed his enemies, the French, that they held a solemn Requiem Mass for him on hearing news of his death – that make his story so remarkable.
Michael Jones, the author of The Black Prince, was interviewed by Richard Foreman, the author of Crécy: Men-At-Arms.
