KING JOHN

  Thy fortune not thy force hath conquered us.

  PRINCE EDWARD

  An argument that heaven aids the right.

  HISTORICAL CONTEXT

  The wars of Edward III, in particular the early decades of the Hundred Years War, have engaged attention from the fourteenth century until the present day. Petrarch, writing in 1360, gave this account of the impact of the French defeat at Poitiers:

  In my youth those Britons called English were taken as the most timid of barbarians. Today they are a very bellicose people. They have beaten the ancient military glory of France, in victories so numerous and unheard of that these people formerly inferior to the wretched Scots, in addition to the deplorable catastrophe of a great king [John II] that I cannot recall without sighing, have crushed the realm by fire and steel, and are barely recognisable.11

  The French campaigns of Edward III, culminating in the capture of John II of France, second of the Valois kings, attracted the attention of Petrarch in 1360 as evidence for the emergence of England as a power to reckon with. Edward’s early campaigns had a direct appeal during the anxious century after the accession in 1485 of the house of Tudor. His invasion of France and claim to the French crown told an unequivocal success story, to be invoked in times of national peril. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as Europe once more confronts the challenges of instability, scholarly and popular interest in Edward III and the Black Prince is reflected in the stream of publications devoted to them.12

  The European perspective offered by Petrarch’s comment is absent from Edward III, whose concerns are those of London in the early 1590s, and for which the might of France (4.104) represents no more than a challenge to England’s lesser military strength. In the 1590s, a spirit of nostalgia for a period of military success and glory informed much of the interest. The crisis of the later years of Elizabeth I included anxiety about the continuing threat from Spain (after the defeat of the Spanish Armada), the civil war in France and the unsettled succession.

  The Spanish Armada

  Awareness of topical events in Edward III is shown by direct allusions to the Spanish Armada in Scs 4 and 12. Though the defeat of the Armada was common knowledge, some of the play’s details probably come from the account of the matter by Petruccio Ubaldini (see, e.g., 4.72n., 177n. and LN; also 4.64n., 12.31). More tantalizing, because more oblique, is the introduction into the final scene of Queen Philippa, perhaps armed, perhaps visibly pregnant. An armed queen would have conjured memories of the scene at Tilbury on 9 August 1588 ‘near the end of the Armada scare’, when ‘[m]ounted behind Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, [Elizabeth] rode among her troops, “sometimes with a martial pace, another whiles gently like a woman, holding in her hand the truncheon of a leader” ’ (Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (1993), 239). If Queen Elizabeth was seen as mother of her people, it was in a sense less literal than Queen Philippa. The play’s final word, ‘Queen’, was loaded with a political sense in the post-Armada years that would have ensured enthusiasm, whether or not spectators registered any allusion. It was not until she was long dead that Elizabeth could stride the stage in propria persona, at the end of Thomas Heywood’s staging of the Armada campaign in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part 2.

  Civil war in France

  Events in France after 1589, which provided some part of a motive and context for the composition of Edward III, may also be reflected in the play.13 On 1 August 1589, the murder of Henry III, King of France, brought the Valois dynasty to an end in circumstances that curiously echoed its beginning in 1327. In both instances, the deaths of three brothers, each in turn King of France and all childless, left the succession in dispute. In the 1320s the contenders were Edward III of England (see Fig. 2), nephew of the last three Capetian kings, and Philip of Valois, their first cousin. Edward’s was the stronger blood claim, as son of the dead kings’ sister Isabella (d. 1358), widow of Edward II. Unsurprisingly, the French decided in favour of Philip, barring Edward under the convenient and flexible legal fiction of the Salic law (see 1.22–5n.), which forbade succession through the female line, thus preventing the King of England from ascending the throne of France.

  2Wooden funeral effigy of Edward III

  In the spring of 1593 the Salic Law was once more debated by the French Estates General, though this time it was invoked by the Protestant supporters of Henry to bar the attempts of the Spanish king, Philip II, to secure the French succession for his daughter, the Infanta, in the right of her French mother, daughter of Henry II (Pitts, 170–1). In 1589, the strongest claimant, and in addition the nominated heir to Henry III, was Henry, King of Navarre, brother-in-law to the dead kings by his marriage in 1572 to their sister Marguerite (known to later ages, thanks to Alexandre Dumas, as ‘la reine Margot’). Inconveniently for an heir to the title of Rex Christianissimus (see 12.102 and n.), Henry was a Huguenot and champion of the Protestant cause against the Catholic League, with whom he engaged in a six-year civil war before his kingship was securely established. At the head of the league stood the Guise family, and the Duke of Guise, Henry of Lorraine, played a central role in the traumatic massacre of Huguenots throughout France, but most notoriously in Paris, on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572.14 The newly married Henry of Navarre escaped the massacre, and won the civil war, in part by his very public conversion to Catholicism at Saint Denis on 22 July 1593 (Pitts, 171). As Henry IV, Henry of Navarre was to become one of France’s most successful and best-loved kings, until his reign came to a bloody end in 1610, when, on 14 May, he was stabbed to death in Paris by a Catholic monk, Jean-François Ravaillac.15

  From 1590 to 1593, London was awash with news from France in a spate of pamphlets recounting the latest successes and setbacks of the Protestant king.16 English investment of men and money in Henry’s war sustained interest in a story that echoed with names familiar from the history of the Hundred Years War, including ‘the great ouerthrow giuen by the French king vnto the Leaguers in Poictiers’ in February 1592 (Parmelee, 175). The French ambassador in Sc. 1 of Edward III bears a name, Lorraine, identified with that of the Duke of Guise, and thus with the Catholic League and the 1572 massacre.17 It at once sets up a hidden and anachronistic agenda of Protestant versus Catholic, later reinforced by occasional detail such as Prince Edward’s scorn for the prayer book offered to him on the morning of Poitiers, and his dismissal of its sender, Prince Philip, as ‘no divine extemporal’ (12.115). While far from identifying King Edward with Henry of Bourbon, King of France and Navarre, the play nonetheless intimates English sympathy with the Huguenot cause.

  Some of the place-names in Edward III had been in the news from France in the early 1590s. The introduction, however marginally, of English campaigns in Brittany (1.132–4, 9.1–12, 18.97–103) would have struck a chord in 1593–4, when only the endeavours of Sir John Norris prevented the Spanish from establishing a naval base at Brest. Normandy and Brittany were the theatres of war to which English recruits were most likely to be sent. When Prince Edward and Audley are ordered to ‘Scour to Newhaven’ (3.201), their destination is in France, an anachronistic reference to the port built by Francis I in 1517 at the mouth of the Seine to replace Harfleur, silted up and no longer functioning by the early sixteenth century. This port has been known since the eighteenth century as Le Havre. In 1562 Newhaven was ceded to English control as security for a loan granted to the Huguenots by Elizabeth, who ‘was captivated by the prospect that Newhaven could be held as a bargaining chip to secure the return of Calais’.18 The name became ominous to the Queen, whose first intervention on behalf of the Huguenots was the ill-fated expedition of 1562 under the Earl of Warwick, when the French attacked Newhaven in order to regain it. The ‘Newhaven expedition’ became ‘an unmitigated disaster’ (Hammer, 63–5). The few English survivors who straggled back brought a fresh infection of the plague to England.

  The suffering of citizens under siege as evoked in the Calais scenes of Edward III (Scs 10 and 18) was topical from French news pamphlets, particularly those about the siege of Paris in 1590, one of Henry IV’s early initiatives against the Catholic League (see Fig. 3). The copy of a letter sent into England by a Gentleman, from the town of Saint-Denis in France, Wherein is truly set forth the good success of the King’s Majesty’s forces … With the taking of a Convoy of Victuals sent by the Enemy to succour Paris. And the grievous estate of the said city at this present (1590) specifies how fugitives from the city were received and relieved by the besieging Henry IV:

  there issued out of Parris diuers and sundry times many poore creatures, resembling rather the Anotamies of death, then [than] people possessed with life, so sore were they wasted with famine … that excepting the skinne, there was nothing left to couer their feeble bones … with leaue of the cruell gouernours they issued … out of the Citie, and presenting them selues before the kings souldiers, fel downe at their feet, yeelding them selues to the kings mercy.

  (sig. B3v)

  When the King asks why they have come, they reply,

  forasmuch as they were not able anie longer to indure the grieuous famine whereinto they were brought by the long and deserued siege which his Maiestie mainteined about their City, and being brought so low, that the gouernours could not by reason of their weaknes imploie them in any seruice, they had free liberty to depart the Citie if so they thought it conuenient: as being people that were likely with many more in the Citie, to cause an infection to arise by means of sicknes among the rest of the inhabitants.

  (sig. B4r; cf. 10.9.1–21)

  The King goes on to enquire about the state of provisions in Paris from ‘one of them who was knowne of best iudgement, and that had been of great account in times past’ (sig. B4v; cf. 18.20–1). After hearing the pitiful tale of the suicide of a family, the King despairs: ‘Ah Paris, thy bloud be on thy owne heade, it is thy selfe and not I that hath caused this great calamitie [marginal note: ‘The Parisians causers of their owne distruction’]’ (sig. C3v; cf. 6.27–33, 10.34–5). The moral, in play and pamphlet alike, is that rebellion brings its deserved suppression down on its own head.

  3The siege of Paris: woodcut frontispiece to A brief declaration of the yielding up of St Denis to the French King the 29. of June, 1590

  The spate of news dried instantly with Henry’s conversion in July 1593 (cf. 9.43, ‘Thus once I mean to try a Frenchman’s faith’, and see n.),19 though Elizabeth’s support for his war continued until 1596, when the last English troops returned from France and Henry received from Elizabeth the ironic tribute of the insignia of the ribbon of the Order of the Garter (Pitts, 198). Later in the 1590s, when Englishmen no longer fought under the flag of Henry IV, the French civil wars would themselves become the subjects of popular and controversial plays in London. We know of the most ambitious project only from Henslowe’s records of payments to Michael Drayton and Thomas Dekker from September to November 1598 for the four plays of The Civil Wars in France as well as expenses incurred for staging them (Foakes & Rickert, 98–103). In the early 1600s it would be the turn of George Chapman to dramatize French history for English audiences in his tragedies about Bussy d’Ambois, Charles Duke of Biron and Chabot, Admiral of France.

  The troubles in France had long fascinated the English because of the matters of church and state that were involved … English scholars and poets, attracted, perhaps, by the possibility of selling many books or perhaps themselves feeling forebodings of impending national turmoil, responded to these disquieting developments by creating their own images culled from civil wars of both the classical and the more recent past.

  (Parmelee, 54)

  The English succession and the Scots

  English attention to the news pamphlets was strongly motivated by native concerns, including the unsettled succession. Elizabeth was herself ever more clearly at the end of a dynasty, as the last of the children of Henry VIII: her younger half-brother Edward VI and her elder half-sister Mary I, who had both reigned before her, had both likewise died without issue. Elizabeth’s last serious chance of marriage, to the Duke of Anjou, younger brother of King Henry III, had come to nothing by 1581. Increasingly fantastic hopes for Elizabeth’s eventual marriage and improbable parenthood in her late fifties or early sixties had, by the 1590s, revealed themselves as indeed fantasy. With their fading, the likelihood of a disputed succession visibly increased, although the topic was subject to the strictest censorship and the few publications that broke the ban could not be openly published and acknowledged.20 The execution of the Queen’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, on 8 February 1587 had meanwhile removed the most immediate threat of a Catholic successor.

  In the early 1590s, as Elizabeth sent men and money to support Henry IV in his war against the Catholic League, seeing in him the best safeguard against French or Spanish aggression, it remained unclear who the next monarch of England would be. Underlying concern about the succession is possibly hinted at in Edward III by the presence of a pregnant queen onstage at the end of the play. Furthermore, Prince Edward’s prayer for ‘many princes more’ to be ‘famous for like victories’ (18.220–2) could also be seen as conjuring a vision of an abundance of male heirs. The issue of succession is raised directly by Prince Edward’s father at 8.92–3: ‘This day thou hast confounded me with joy / And proved thyself fit heir unto a king’. Similarly, the play’s repetition of the title ‘Prince of Wales’ (nine times, in Scs 3, 6, 11, 12, 13, 18) emphasizes the Prince’s own position as heir to the throne, while underlining Elizabeth’s lack of such an undisputed heir. The title had lapsed after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509 (his only son, Edward VI, was never formally given it).21 In this context, the suppression of the more familiar sobriquet of ‘Black Prince’ (with the exception of King John’s ‘princely son, black Edward’ at 13.111), used almost invariably in other plays of the period (cf., e.g., 2H6, H5 and Woodstock), gains significance.

  In the 1590s, the Scottish King James VI was among the strongest contenders to succeed Elizabeth. English awareness that the birth of his son Henry on 19 February 1594 would supply England with a potential future Prince of Wales increased his appeal as next King of England. Uncertainty about the date of composition of Edward III, however, precludes any argument that would associate the play’s use of the title with the birth of Prince Henry. Indeed, Edward III shows only a marginal interest in the Scots, whose role is to become allies of the French after allegedly breaking a truce with the English. Brief mentions (1.122–38, 2.193–9, 4.19–22, 10.40–61) and a single short scene (2.6–93) suffice to present King David and Douglas as uncouth, boastful, mercenary, tyrannical, undependable barbarians and their country as a barren, windswept, northern wasteland. Writing of the English stereotype of the Scots, Susan Doran finds all its elements concentrated in a few speeches of Edward III (‘Polemic and prejudice: a Scottish king for an English throne’, in Doran & Kewes, 215–35). At the end of the play, the captive King David II is sent to France (10.54–6, 18.63–82), contrary to the historical record, there to be delivered, speechless and passive, by Copeland as if he were merely a tax or package, ‘the custom of my freight, / The wealthy tribute of my labouring hands’ (18.79–80). No crown of Scotland is added to Edward’s haul. By thus downgrading the Scots, the play manages to evade engagement in the dispute between their claim to autonomy dating from the distant past and English demands for homage for the Scottish crown.22

  In 1593–4 playwrights had no cause yet to deem the succession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England predictable. In 1598 an unspecific complaint came from Edinburgh that ‘the comedians of London should scorn the king and the people of this land in their play’ (E.K. Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.65). This may be a possible hint of a revival of Edward III in the late 1590s, imaginably associated with its reprint in 1599 (a reprint which perpetrated the unhappy misprint ‘Sots’ for ‘Scots’: see 18.64 t.n.). By the turn of the century, prospects of a Scottish succession to the English throne were beginning to change, not least because James VI was now a father of sons. With the eventual accession of James as King James I of England in 1603, Edward III’s short way with the Scots was probably in the longer term a significant cause of its eclipse.

  Historical hindsight

  The capture at the battle of Poitiers (1356) of John II of France and his fourth son, fourteen-year-old Prince Philip, put Edward III in the strongest position of his career to assert his claim to the crown of France. It was a claim he was prepared to renounce, but only in exchange for a level of security of English lordship of Aquitaine and of other territories in northern France, including Calais, sufficient to preclude the risk of renewed war. Failing to win a lasting treaty, in the long view Edward’s was a hollow triumph. By 1558 even Calais, the last English territory in France, had been repossessed (see Fig. 4).

  4Early sixteenth-century view of Calais and its harbour, from BL Cotton MS Augustus I. II, fol. 70r

  Dwindling hopes of regaining Calais were still alive in the 1590s, but nothing else remained to validate the triumphalism of Edward III as more than a distant testimony to the force of English arms. Though Edward III failed to use his advantage, his claim to the French crown was long to survive him, being resurrected as late as the reign of Henry VIII.23 Queen Elizabeth still listed ‘Queen of France’ among her titles. Indeed, British monarchs made use of the French royal title until 1801, and the establishment of the French Republic. Likewise the royal standard continued to show the lions of England quartered with the fleur-de-lys of France as adopted by Edward in 1340 until 1801, long after the last uneasy Bourbon head to wear the crown of France had fallen on the guillotine (see Fig. 5).