BOOKS.
BLACK PRINCE.* 'Pi:1mm are certain names which live in the popular imagination as representing a great epoch. Our school-books for generations have taken the Black Prince as the type and the flower of English chivalry. That he was the hero of a great battle and that he captured a King of France are matters of common knowledge, and it is generally believed, not without some reason, that he served his prisoner on bonded knee. This whole mass of information was once acutely summed up in a general knowledge paper by a schoolgirl, whose account of the Black Prince was comprised in the words, "a very pleasant gentleman,"—the nineteenth-century equivalent of the " verray parfyt gentil knight " of the fourteenth. This traditional estimate of the eldest son of Edward III. has not been affected by modern inquiry, and it sums up, not quite completely, but not unfairly, the impression he left on the men of his time. To his contemporaries he was a great soldier, bearing himself as a great soldier should, generous, courtly, magnificent. He charmed the London merchants, not, as Edward IV. was to fascinate their successors, by easy, careless, familiar talk, but with the dignified and splendid courtesy of a great man who knows precisely the right thing to say to his inferiors. There was always a method in his politeness ; it was almost always deliberate, a part of his general policy. The attention he paid to the unfortunate John of France was natural; but it was not the mere spontaneous outburst of a generous and chivalrous spirit. It was agreeable thus to treat his prisoner, but he knew that his courtesy rendered his own and his father's ambitions more easy of attainment ; had it been otherwise, no considerations of chivalry would have saved the French King from an unpleasant time. It was profitable to be on good terms withthe Londoners, and the Black Prince knew that it was a more effective method than the devices adopted by his ancestor who extracted teeth and brought about Magna Charta. His gracious and persuasive courtesy was not, and indeed could not have been, feigned; it was an inspiration, but the spirit was rarely summoned without good reason. There is one famous incident in the life of his ill-fated son, Richard II., which recalls the Black Prince's best manner. "I am your King, I will be your leader," are words which, were the evidence less certain, the Higher Criticism might regard as a traditional remark of the father, adapted by the panegyrist of the son.
The men of his own time associated the Black Prince not only with the glory of French conquest and the splendours of a chivalrous Court, but also with an attempt to help the commonalty of the realm against their oppressors. The last inglorious years of the third Edward form a sad period in the history of mediaeval England. The extravagant expendi- ture of the reign was telling more and more upon the people ; the economic troubles which followed the Black Death were at their height; failure in foreign war added to the discontent caused by maladministration at home. The King was senile, governed by an evil woman and dishonest counsellors ; there was neither help nor hope in him. The people looked con- fidently to the Black Prince, and mistrusted his brother John of Gaunt. It would be easy to argue that the Prince of Wales was responsible for as many of the misfortunes of the kingdom as was the Duke of Lancaster. But in the popular and Parliamentary struggle of 1376 John of Gaunt allied himself with the party of corruption, and the Black Prince gave his countenance to those who represented a force making for righteousness. It was the last public act of his life ; when the Good Parliament met, the Prince lay dying in the Palace of Westminster. He went to his grave as the upholder of national integrity, and in the dark days that followed his countrymen longed for his virile presence, and thought of him as more than a warrior. His name was loved as well as honoured, and something of this popular affection still clings to the traditions of the Black Prince.
Mr. Dunn-Pattison is interested in the Prince as a soldier
• The Black Prince. By B. P. Dunn-Patti:pm. London : Methuen and Co. [is. 6d. net.] and a mediaeval knight rather than as a reformer, and, indeed, his zeal for reform might be described by the enemy as, at the best, a deathbed repentance. The book is not based on any new MS. material, but it contains ample evidence of a careful and judicious survey of the printed authorities for the period, and of an adequate knowledge of what has been written in recent years, both in French and in English. Mr. Dunn-
Pattison is neither a hero-worshipper nor an iconoclast. The dark background of fourteenth-century chivalry has often been painted in lurid colours, and no one will be surprised to hear that the Black Prince was not always " a pleasant gentleman." His latest biographer (there has been, by the way, a singular lack of biographies of the Prince) makes no attempt to explain away the evil. The Black Prince was splendidly extravagant, and his tenants had to pay. " Thus it was," says Mr. Dunn-Pattison, " that he whom the nation idolized for his bravery and generosity, who was regarded throughout Europe as the most humane and courteous warrior of the day, was loathed and execrated by his own tenants and peasantry." Humanity did not go very far ; it was with reluctance that Edward III., according to the familiar story (which there is no reason to doubt), spared the lives of the burgesses of Calais, and the Black Prince was himself guilty of a cruel massacre at Limoges. " Upwards of three thousand men, women, and children," says Froissart, doubtless with the usual inaccuracy as to numbers, " were put to death that day. God have mercy on their souls, for they were veritable martyrs." There arc other instances of the Prince's lack of control over his temper, though no other of such cruelty as this. Yet, high-spirited and hot-tempered as he was, be was in no respect below, and in many ways above, the standards of his day.
The real point of interest, after all, is the Prince's reputa- tion as a soldier, for on that, rather than on any approxima- tion to the ideals of chivalry, rests his abiding fame. This is the subject of which Mr. Dunn-Pattison is best qualified
to treat, and which gives his book its interest and its import- ance. His descriptions of campaigns are clear and lucid, his battle-pieces spirited, and his criticisms just and sane. That his hero was a great soldier he does not doubt :—
"The English armies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries owed to the Black Prince the stereotyping of a system of tactics which was infallible until the introduction of gunpowder, and the enforcement of a system of discipline superior to that of any other country Personal magnetism he possessed to an extra- ordinary degree, and he increased his hold on his men by the care and attention which he spent on their welfare. Organisation was
his forte As a tactician he was as great as his father, and probably greater, for at Poictiers ho showed a quickness of appre- ciation and a power to grasp the psychological moment which must ever be remembered in all ages as one of the greatest feats of military skill known to history. As a strategist, he surpasses the other great soldiers of the day, Edward III. and du Guesclin; for great as they were as leaders of men and commanders on the field of battle, they never seemed to have grasped the elements of strategy The Prince's defence of Aquitaine, both in 1353 and in 1369 and 1370, was based on the sound principle of holding a few strategic points on the frontier, and keeping the mass of his forces well in hand. How sound was his system can best be estimated by the terrible rapidity with which the French regained the country once his controlling hand was removed."
The Black Prince was well served by great commanders, but, as Mr. Dunn-Pattison points out, the choice of subordi- nates is one of the tests of generalship, and there is no reason to believe that any one but the Prince himself deserves the credit of his achievements. He was not only well served, he had also been well taught, and Sir John Chandos, his master in the art of war, accompanied him on most of his campaigns. But there is no falling off after the death of Chandos ; in the
end, Mr. Dunn-Pattison thinks, the pupil was better than the master.
There are one or two points of antiquarian interest on which we should have liked somewhat fuller discussion. One of these is the motto " Ich Dien," about the history of which Mr. Dunn-Pattison does not seem to have made up his mind. " M. K. D. P." has, however, made amends by the following lines, prefixed to the book ;—
" ICH DIEN.
Hero of Crecy's field, and Gartered Knight, First of thy line to lift the Legend high On blazoned crest, through which the Truth doth shine, That princely power and strength in service lie— No kinglier form doth pass through history's page,
Though kingly diadem thou didst not wear— Still England holds her Black Prince high in fame, And every Prince of Wales thy badge cloth bear."
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