Edward the Black Prince

1330 – 1376 · Generation XVII · Prince of Wales

Edward of Woodstock, remembered as the Black Prince, was the eldest son and heir of Edward III and one of the most successful English commanders of the Hundred Years’ War. He was born at Woodstock in Oxfordshire on 15 June 1330 to the king and Queen Philippa of Hainault. His father heaped titles on him early. He became Earl of Chester in 1333 and in 1337 Duke of Cornwall, the first dukedom ever created in England, with a charter tying the duchy to the eldest sons of future kings. In 1343 he was made Prince of Wales. While his father campaigned abroad the boy was named guardian of the realm, although the council did the actual governing.

His first campaign came in July 1346. As soon as the army landed at La Hougue in Normandy his father knighted him, and at Crécy on 26 August the sixteen-year-old commanded the vanguard. According to Froissart, when his hard-pressed division sent for help, the king refused, saying the boy should be left to win his spurs. He was knocked down in the fighting and saved by his standard-bearer, and the day ended in a crushing English victory. He served at the siege of Calais, and in 1348 became one of the founding knights of his father’s new Order of the Garter.

Sent to Gascony as the king’s lieutenant in 1355, he led a long raid, or chevauchée, across southern France that burned and plundered as far as Carcassonne and Narbonne. The next summer he struck north toward the Loire, and near Poitiers on 19 September 1356 his much smaller Anglo-Gascon army, dug in behind hedges and vines, met the army of King John II. The French attacks broke on the English archers, and a flank charge completed the rout. John II and his youngest son were taken prisoner. The prince treated his royal captive with pointed courtesy and brought him to London in triumph in May 1357. He then helped negotiate the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360.

In 1361 he married his cousin Joan, Countess of Kent, a widow with children of her own. The match seems to have been made for love, first in secret and then, after a papal dispensation, at Windsor on 10 October 1361. They had two sons, Edward of Angoulême, who died in childhood, and Richard, born at Bordeaux in 1367. In 1362 Edward III granted him Aquitaine and Gascony as a principality, and the couple kept a lavish court at Bordeaux and Angoulême. His favour to English followers and the cost of his household soon irritated the Gascon nobles.

The turning point came in Spain. Peter I of Castile, driven out by his half-brother Henry of Trastámara and the French, begged for help, and the prince took up his cause. On 3 April 1367 he won a complete victory at Nájera, but Peter never paid what he had promised. While he waited in vain at Valladolid his army was ravaged by dysentery and other disease, and he fell ill himself with a sickness that never fully left him. To cover his debts he imposed a hearth tax in Aquitaine in 1368, and several great lords, the Lord of Albret among them, appealed over his head to Charles V of France. War broke out again in 1369. When Limoges went over to the French in 1370, the prince, too sick to ride, was carried to the siege in a litter. The city was stormed and sacked. Froissart wrote of 3,000 people massacred, though modern historians, drawing on wider evidence, put the dead at perhaps a tenth of that number.

Broken in health, he came home in January 1371, about the time his elder son died, and resigned the principality in 1372. In the Good Parliament of 1376 he backed the Commons in their attack on the king’s ministers and on the influence of his brother John of Gaunt, whose power he feared for his son’s sake. He died on 8 June 1376, a year before his father, so that the crown passed to the young Richard II. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral beneath a gilded effigy in full armour, and his helm, shield, gauntlets and surcoat still survive there.

The name Black Prince is not recorded in his lifetime. It first appears in the notes of the antiquary John Leland in the 1530s or 1540s. It may come from the black field of the shield he used in tournaments, which bore three ostrich feathers, or from the terror his campaigns spread in France. That shield is thought to have inspired the ostrich-feather badge, with the motto Ich dien, “I serve”, still used by Princes of Wales.

Place in the family

Edward the Black Prince was a 4× great-uncle of King Henry VIII.
Edward the Black Prince was the eldest of 3 children of King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault recorded in this archive.

Images

Edward III grants Aquitaine to the Black Prince, from an illuminated initial of about 1390 (British Library, Cotton MS Nero D VI) (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
The Battle of Poitiers, 1356, in a manuscript illustration of the late 1370s (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
The Black Prince as a Knight of the Garter, in armour and the blue Garter mantle, from a manuscript of about 1440–1450 (British Library) (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
The prince’s funeral achievements, helm, surcoat, shield and gauntlets, on display at Canterbury Cathedral (Jononmac46, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Line of descent: King William I The Conqueror → King Henry I → Matilda the Empress → King Henry II → King John → King Henry III → King Edward I Longshanks → King Edward II → King Edward III → Edward the Black Prince.

Parents

King Edward III (1312 – 1377)
Philippa of Hainault (1310 – 1369)

Siblings

John of Gaunt (1340 – 1399)
Edmund of Langley (1341 – 1402)

Partners

Married Joan of Kent (1328 – 1385) in 1361 — one child together

Children

King Richard II (1367 – 1400)

Life

1330 — Born
1361 — Married Joan of Kent
1376 — Died

Sources

Edward the Black Prince · Wikipedia
Edward the Black Prince · World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright)
A Walk Through Time · Canterbury Cathedral