He was born heir to the throne and died at forty-five, still waiting. The day before, he planned his own funeral. A nine-year-old boy took his place.
When Edward of Woodstock entered Canterbury for the last time on 29 September 1376, two mounted warriors rode before him. One carried his arms of war. The other carried his arms of peace. Behind them came the coffin of the prince who had expected to be king.
Edward had been dead for more than three months. He died at Westminster on 8 June 1376, after years of declining health, leaving his elderly father on the throne and his nine-year-old son next in the line of succession. His embalmed body remained at Westminster until it was taken to Canterbury for burial on 29 September.
The procession that awaited him there had been planned by Edward himself.
He had signed his will on 7 June, the day before his death, and described in remarkable detail how his body should pass through Canterbury. Two horses were to precede it, covered with his heraldic trappings. Two men were to ride in his armour and helmets: one representing Edward in war, bearing the quartered arms of England and France; the other representing him in peace, displaying his badge of ostrich feathers.
The living prince could no longer ride through the city. Other men and horses carried the identities he had spent a lifetime creating.
Edward of Woodstock was born in 1330, the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. The name by which he is now remembered, the Black Prince, was not recorded during his lifetime and first appeared much later. To his contemporaries, he was Edward, Prince of Wales: the king's heir, one of the foremost warriors of his age and the embodiment of the chivalric ambitions of Edward III's court.
His public life began early. Edward was created Duke of Cornwall as a child, becoming the first English duke, and was made Prince of Wales in 1343. Three years later, at sixteen, he commanded part of the English army at Crécy.
The French possessed some of the most celebrated heavy cavalry in Europe. Again and again, their forces advanced against an English position defended by dismounted men-at-arms and archers. The English longbow helped break the attacks, and the field filled with members of the French nobility and their allies. Crécy established the military reputation of Edward III, but it also gave his young son the beginning of a legend that would remain attached to him for the rest of his life.
Edward's greatest victory came ten years later.
In 1356, commanding independently in south-western France, he found his army confronted near Poitiers by a much larger force under King John II of France. Edward attempted to negotiate, but the talks failed. On 19 September, the French attacked.
The result was catastrophic for France. The English and Gascon army defeated the French host and captured its king. John II was brought first to Bordeaux and then to England, where his presence became a visible demonstration of English power. His vast ransom and the negotiations following his capture helped lead to the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, through which Edward III secured greatly enlarged territories in France.
The victory at Poitiers placed the prince among the most admired commanders in Europe. He was praised not only for winning the battle but for the courtesy he showed his royal prisoner afterwards. In the chivalric memory cultivated around him, Edward could defeat a king on the battlefield and then honour him at the table.
Yet the splendour of that reputation rested upon a brutal kind of warfare. The campaigns known as chevauchées carried English forces rapidly through French territory, burning settlements, destroying crops and seizing property. Their purpose was partly strategic: to weaken the enemy, provoke battle and demonstrate that the French king could not protect his own subjects. For those who lived in the path of the armies, Edward's military skill arrived as devastation.
His career therefore carried two memories from the beginning. In England, he became the model of a warrior prince. In the lands through which he campaigned, his name could mean fire, plunder and fear.
In 1362, Edward III created an extensive principality in Aquitaine for his son. Edward and his wife, Joan of Kent, established their court at Bordeaux, where they lived with a magnificence suited to rulers who appeared to be building something close to an independent royal state.
Joan was not simply the wife chosen for a future king through international diplomacy. She and Edward were cousins, and their marriage had initially been contracted without the king's permission. After the necessary papal dispensations and a second ceremony, Joan became Princess of Wales and accompanied Edward to Aquitaine.
Their surviving son Richard was born at Bordeaux in January 1367. At that moment, Edward was still only thirty-six, celebrated across Europe and seemingly destined to succeed his father. Joan could reasonably expect to become queen and Richard to inherit after them.
That same year, Edward led an army into Castile in support of the deposed Pedro I. At Nájera, he defeated the forces of Pedro's rival, Henry of Trastámara. It was another spectacular battlefield victory, but the campaign placed an enormous strain upon Edward's health and finances. Pedro failed to provide the money he had promised, while the expense of the expedition followed Edward back to Aquitaine.
To meet his debts, Edward imposed a new hearth tax. Some of the Gascon lords appealed against it to Charles V of France, challenging the authority under which Edward governed them. War resumed, and the English position in France began to contract.
In 1370, Edward recovered Limoges after it defected to the French. The city was sacked and many people were killed. Limoges remains part of Edward's legacy: the dark reverse of the courtesy shown to the captured king at Poitiers.
Edward returned to England ill and physically diminished. He surrendered Aquitaine to his father and withdrew increasingly from military life. The commander who had ridden through France and Spain was no longer strong enough to lead an army, but his name still possessed considerable political weight.
In the final months of his life, that influence became important at home. The Parliament of 1376, later called the Good Parliament, attacked corruption and misgovernment surrounding the ageing Edward III. The prince supported reform and helped secure recognition of his son's place in the succession. After Edward's death, the Commons asked for the young Richard to be brought before Parliament and publicly acknowledged as heir.
England had spent decades expecting the Black Prince to become king. Now the continuation of the direct royal line depended upon a child.
When the funeral procession reached Canterbury, Edward's two armed likenesses passed through streets that the living prince had known well. He had visited the cathedral repeatedly, possessed a particular devotion to the Trinity and had chosen Canterbury as the place where prayers would continue for his soul.
Edward's body was carried inside while vigils, Masses and the other funeral offices were performed.
Edward had asked to be buried in the crypt, near the Chapel of Our Lady Undercroft. That instruction was not followed. His tomb was placed above, in the Trinity Chapel, close to the shrine of Thomas Becket and behind the cathedral's high altar.
Much else was created as he had commanded. His tomb chest was made from Purbeck marble and decorated with alternating shields bearing the royal arms and his ostrich feathers. Above it lay his gilded metal effigy, dressed "fully armed in plate of war," his hands joined in prayer. His helm, shield, surcoat, gauntlets and empty sword scabbard were suspended nearby as his funerary achievements.
Edward's body would lie beneath the warrior he had instructed others to remember.
But his tomb did not speak only of victory. The epitaph chosen for it stripped away the armour, heraldry and reputation. It told the living that Edward had once possessed beauty, riches, land and treasure, but that his flesh had now wasted away. Its warning was simple:
"Such as thou art, sometime was I. Such as I am, such shalt thou be."
The prince who had captured a king, governed Aquitaine and won fame across Europe ordered his tomb to tell every pilgrim that none of it had saved his body from decay.
His death also transformed the lives of those left behind. Joan of Kent was no longer the wife of the heir to the throne. She was the widowed mother of the child upon whom the future of the dynasty rested.
Soon afterwards, Richard was created Prince of Wales. On 21 June 1377, Edward III died, having survived his eldest son by just over a year. Ten-year-old Richard became king.
Joan had gone from wife of the expected king to mother of a child king with extraordinary speed. She remained an influential figure around Richard, working to protect him and to manage the dangerous relationships between the young monarch, his royal uncles and the different branches of her own family.
The effigy that lies at Canterbury was not made in 1376. It was cast about a decade after his death, in the mid-1380s, on the initiative of his son Richard, who had been nine when he lost his father. It copies Edward's own armour, the armour that was hung above his tomb, down to the position of the rivets.
That image still lies in Canterbury Cathedral. The prince appears young, armoured and untouched by illness, his head resting upon his helmet beneath a painted vision of the Trinity. His original heraldic equipment survives nearby, while reproductions hang above the monument.
Edward never wore the English crown. His importance lies partly in that absence. His victories helped define the heroic phase of the Hundred Years' War; his badge and motto became enduring symbols of the princes of Wales; his military campaigns embodied both the splendour and violence of medieval chivalry. His premature death carried a child onto the throne and helped create the unstable politics from which the later crises of Richard II's reign emerged.
On 29 September 1376, Canterbury received two versions of Edward of Woodstock. The first rode before him in armour, carrying the identities of war and peace through the city. The second lay silent inside the coffin.
The warrior remained in metal, heraldry and memory. The man beneath him became what his own epitaph had promised.
