6 - Warrior for nation and empire

Summary

‘The victories I won: but where are they?

All that we fought for has been lost again;

My conquests are a half-forgotten dream.

Yet haply, but the bare names of my battles

May strike a spark in English hearts some day,

In the far future.’

In the final scene of Maurice Baring's play, The Black Prince, a dying Edward contemplates his legacy as a warrior. Rather than focus on Edward's earlier victories, the play explores his later life, marred by a lingering illness which affected his ability to wage war and led to the loss of French territories. Baring wrote The Black Prince during the South African War, a period when Britain's lack of efficiency was linked to a perceived endemic weakness in the population that made them militarily inept. In the play, Edward reflects on the transience of victory, but he consoles himself with the knowledge that his military triumphs at Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera may still provide inspiration for future soldiers. Memory and reputation, anxiety and hope, victory and tragedy were all central themes in Baring's work.

From the latter half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, the Black Prince and his late medieval battles became part of a wider reimagining of the British as a martial people. In the late Middle Ages, Edward's victories at Crécy and Poitiers were celebrated in chronicles and poetry, and the prince was depicted as the epitome of European heroic knighthood. While antiquarians and biographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emphasised Edward's prowess as a warrior, it was not until the eighteenth century that popular interest in his battles reached its height amidst growing tension with France, burgeoning nationalism and more conscious empire building. Here, the construction of the late medieval past as a warlike age and the reworking of Edward's battles as part of a longer national struggle became embedded in a story of British triumph and success. The Black Prince's chivalric and princely approach to battle proved to be inspirational.

This chapter begins by exploring the revival of interest in Edward's martial story in the period 1750 to 1830. Edward's image as a war leader as it developed in the eighteenth century highlighted how aristocrats, gentlemen, antiquarians and biographers used Edward's medieval victories to promote their vision of the British as a martial people.