Edward the Fifth
The War for Scotland began the moment Mary stopped breathing. James Stuart, the man who would have become king of Scotland on Robert the Third’s death in 1406, was supported by the nobles of Scotland in his endeavor to sever Scotland’s ties to England, and make himself sovereign of Scotland. When Mary died, he acted quickly, declaring himself King. Parliament reacted badly to this, having taken Scotland’s vassal-like position as a given until then.They declared war on Scotland, and having no experience of actually fighting one, gave responsibility for waging it to Edward. In return for his leadership, Edward forced parliament to enact laws giving the monarch emergency powers in a time of war. One of these emergency powers negated the effects of giving parliament the final say in peacemaking, allowing Edward to make battlefield truces, offering them to an enemy commander, who would then be able to take it his sovereign, and thus institute an actual truce.
Edward then led a 35,000 man army north to Glasgow, destroying James’ army and capturing the rival claimant to the Scottish throne. He had James executed a week later using his emergency powers, although as more of a political measure to distance himself from parliament and to reinstate the sovereignty of the monarch in the minds of the people, than out of fear of an actual possibility of parliament refusing to execute James. It took Edward three years to subjugate the Scottish nobles, and when they finally came to the negotiating table, Edward was no longer content with placing Scotland under English rule, but nominally sovereign. Instead he demanded a full annexation, supported by parliament, which the Scots were forced to accept.
After the war, Edward set upon stripping parliament of its power, and reinstating that of the monarch. He was mostly successful, managing to repeal a large enough amount of the reforms enacted under his mother to feel that parliament would not betray him in his next war the way it had betrayed Mary in the Great French War. In 1429, Edward forced parliament to declare war on France for the last time. For England, and France, King Edward’s War eventually became the bloodiest and most frequently remembered of all the conflicts in the Hundred Years’ War, and would cement parliament’s negative attitude toward the continent.
The war began in England’s favor, as Edward led the largest invasion force ever seen across the channel. He landed at Calais, completely destroying the 25,000 Burgundian soldiers sent by Charles the Seventh of France to occupy the city. Edward then headed straight for Paris, meeting Charles’ forces at Compiègne. The battle became the largest of the entire war, with 57,000 English soldiers arrayed against 76,000 French troops.
The battle began in favor of the English, with the French heading straight for the English lines. The first day of fighting killed almost three times as many French soldiers as it did English troops. Edward seemed close to repeating the victory at Crécy in 1346, but through a cruel twist of luck, French reinforcements arrived early on the second day on Edward’s left flank. The fighting flared up at sunrise, and did not relent until sunset, by which time Edward had lost too many men to win the battle, much less take Paris. The invasion force snuck back toward Calais in the dead of night, exhausted and beaten.
Charles ordered his armies to pursue Edward, and they caught up to him near Etaples. The English force was now so utterly exhausted that the French were able to kill or capture almost all of Edward’s men. The king himself escaped, and made it back to England from Calais with 2,000 men. The first campaign of his war had thus failed, and cost the lives of 55,000 English soldiers. For France however, the cost was much higher, both in lives, land and money.
As Edward had mercilessly reenacted Chicheley’s campaign on the way to Paris, Charles had desperately raised money to pay for an army by any means necessary. The result was that, even though they had won the first battle, France was now essentially bankrupt. Its war effort ran on foreign funds keeping it from having to declare what everybody with a pair of eyes and an understanding of money knew.
Edward had failed to bring England a quick victory, but there was no way that he was going to let that end the war. He still had the Royal Navy, which enjoyed complete dominance of the seas and had placed France under blockade within weeks of the war’s beginning. He also had the English treasury, which had grown to an unprecedented size in Mary’s late reign. With it, he began organizing another invasion.
That invasion left for Calais two years later. It was smaller than the previous one, but equally determined. Edward landed at Calais, and quickly destroyed the Franco-Burgundian forces in the area. Charles once again gathered a force at a feverish pace, and sent any armies he had to counter Edward’s new attempt. This one would more closely resemble Chicheley’s campaign, with Edward maneuvering his way up and down the French coast, laying waste to it as he did. Unfortunately, this campaign would be more short-lived, as Charles caught up to him at the site of his previous defeat, Etaples.
The second battle of Etaples ended in an extremely pyrrhic victory for Edward. Charles was forced to retreat, his larger force having lost more than half its soldiers, but the losses incurred in the fighting meant that Edward would once again have to retreat to Calais and from there to the safety of England. This he did as slowly as possible; burning anything he hadn’t burned on the way there.
After the failure of his second campaign, Edward decided to beat France with a policy of small raids, directed at the French coast. Over the next five years, an estimated 150,000 French people and soldiers died in Edward’s raids, until he finally had the force of grizzled veterans he deemed necessary to achieve victory. His final campaign began in May 1437, one hundred years after Edward the Third’s claiming of the throne.
This campaign too, ended like the others. The major difference was that now Edward’s return was not accepted by parliament. They forced him to end the war, and in the peace treaty of 1439, Edward renounced his claim to the throne of France, and to the English possessions in Aquitaine. Only Calais was left of the Plantagenet line’s French origins.
In the aftermath of the war, parliament stripped Edward of his emergency powers, and went farther than ever in the extension of their power over the monarchy. Edward had suffered his mother’s fate. He was allowed one more war however, when parliament declared war on the long-suffering Norway in order to take the Orkney Islands, and repair a measure of England’s damaged reputation.
The Orkney war was short, and was mostly just a naval blockade of England’s unfortunate enemy. In 1442, Orkney was ceded to the crown, although it would stay a hotbed of revolt for centuries to come. Edward died in 1446, leaving his son, Richard the Third, to handle the fallout of his wars, and eventually become the last Plantagenet to rule England.
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