From 1340, English monarchs, beginning with the Plantagenet king Edward III, asserted that they were the rightful kings of France. They fought the Hundred Years' War (13371453), in part, to enforce this claim, but ultimately without success. From the early 16th century, the claim had lost any realistic prospect of fulfilment, although every English and, later, British monarch, from Edward to George III, styled themselves king or queen of France until 1801.
Edward's claim was through his mother, Isabella, sister of the last direct line Capetian king of France, Charles IV. Women were excluded from inheriting the French crown and Edward was Charles's nearest male relative. On Charles's death in 1328, however, the French magnates supported Philip VI, the first king of the House of Valois, a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty. Philip was Charles's nearest male line relative. French jurists later argued that it was a fundamental law of the kingdom that the crown could not be inherited through the female line. This was supposedly based on the 6th-century Frankish legal code known as the Salic law, although the link to the Salic law, which was tenuous in any case, was not made until the 15th century.
Edward spent much of his reign at war with the Valois kings but never secured the crown, although his main concern was to protect his French fief of Gascony. His great-grandson, Henry V, following his crushing victory at Agincourt, was able to impose the Treaty of Troyes on the French in 1420. This stipulated that he and his heirs would succeed the Valois king Charles VI on his death. Both kings died in 1422 and Henry's son, Henry VI, was crowned king of both countries, creating the so-called "dual monarchy". However, he was only recognised as king in northern France. French resistance to the dual monarchy resulted in the English being expelled from France by 1453, ending the Hundred Years' War, but leaving Calais as the last remaining English possession.
Later English invasions to win the French throne failed, the last being by Henry VIII in 1523. Calais was lost in 1558. England and France continued to fight wars but none was over the claim to the crown. The use of the title by English and, later, by British monarchs also continued but was ignored by the French, as the claim ceased to have any practical significance. However, following the French Revolution, the new republican government of France objected to the practice and the title was no longer used from 1801. The claim was finally abandoned the following year.
Background Anglo-French relations
Since the Norman Conquest English kings had held territories in France. These were extensive at the height of the "Angevin Empire" of the House of Plantagenet in the 12th century, leading to a lengthy conflict with the French monarchs. However, by the early 14th century the Plantagenet domains had been reduced to Gascony, also known as the Duchy of Aquitaine, in south-western France and the smaller enclave of Ponthieu in the north.
Until 1259, the English kings held Gascony as allod, that is, effectively, as independent sovereign territory. By the Treaty of Paris in that year, Louis IX of France forced Henry III of England to accept a new status for the duchy as a feudal dependency of the kingdom of France. The lands were then held as a vassal of the French king for which the English king had to do him homage. The disparity between the feudal vassaloverlord relationship and the political reality of both being sovereign kings led to tension and conflict.
Contention over the political status of Gascony on two occasions resulted in war and the French king exercising his right as feudal overlord to confiscate the fief. A dispute in 1294 with Edward I over feudal rights caused Philip IV to order confiscation of the duchy, resulting in the Anglo-French Gascon War. Peace was eventually restored and the duchy returned in 1303. As part of the settlement, Edward I's son, the future Edward II, married Philip's daughter Isabella. However, another dispute and war in 1324 led Philip's son Charles IV to confiscate the duchy from his brother-in-law Edward II but it was again restored three years later.
In 1327, Edward II was deposed and his and Isabella's son, Edward III, became king of England at the age of 14. Edward III's uncle, Charles IV, died the following year.
Succession to the French throne
From the election of Hugh Capet in 987 until 1316, the French crown passed uninterrupted from father to son in the Capetian dynasty, providing, for the time, such unusual dynastic continuity that it has been called the "Capetian miracle". However, this was brought to an end by Louis X dying in 1316 and leaving only a daughter, Joan. His posthumously born son, John, died five days after birth. This created an unprecedented situation as the question of female succession to the crown had never before needed to be considered. Louis's brother, Philip, acted quickly to seize power. He set Joan aside and, after John's death, had himself crowned king, becoming Philip V. He then called an assembly of magnates to ratify his accession, which met four weeks later in early 1317. Recognising political reality, it confirmed Philip as king but, in so doing, the assembly declared "a woman could not succeed to the crown of the kingdom of France." In 1322, Philip V died leaving four daughters and no son. Consistent with the 1317 assembly's declaration, Philip's daughters were set aside by the magnates, and his brother, Charles IV, acceded to the throne.
From the 15th century, French writers began arguing that succession to the throne was, and always had been, governed by Salic law, a 6th-century Frankish legal code, which they claimed prohibited inheritance of the crown by or through a woman. They also claimed that the 1316 and 1322 successions were determined by the application of Salic law. However, Salic law had fallen into obscurity and disuse after the Carolingian era until it was rediscovered by a small group of scholars at the Abbey of St-Denis in the mid-14th century. There is no reliable evidence that Salic law played any part in the successions of 1316 or 1322 and the earliest known link made to it in connection with the succession to the throne is dated to a French treatise written around 1413. Nevertheless, allusions to this law by (1240) and Jean de Vignay (c. 1340), both made in reference to royal succession, suggest that there may have been an earlier awareness of it...
Plantagenet claimants
Edward III's claim
|style="text-align: left;"|Notes:
The first English claim to the French throne was made by the Plantagenet king Edward III. In 1328 Charles IV of France died, leaving only a daughter, Marie; a second daughter, Blanche, was born posthumously. The successions to the French throne in 1316 and 1322 had, by this time, set the clear precedent that a woman could not succeed to the crown. Charles's closest male relative was Edward whose claim to the throne was through his mother, Isabella, Charles's sister. The English representatives in France attempted to press Edward's claim but attracted little support. The French magnates preferred Charles's next closest male relative, his cousin, Philip of Valois, a male line descendant of Charles's grandfather Philip III. Among other objections, the magnates did not want a foreign king, as they saw it, as their monarch. Edward was also still a minor and his accession might put in power his mother Isabella who was unpopular with the French nobles. Nevertheless, they justified their choice on the basis that "the mother had no claim, so neither did the son", according to the chronicler of Saint-Denis.
In the influential mid-15th century tract Pour ce que plusieurs, it was claimed that Philip defeated Edward's claim by citing Salic law and its supposed prohibition on inheriting the crown through a woman. This subsequently became a widely held belief. However, there is no evidence that Salic law played any part in the succession debates of 1328. In any event, Philip acceded to the throne as Philip VI, the first of the Valois kings. Although legal arguments were, no doubt, deployed in the discussions, ultimately the magnates made a political choice, the by-product of which was that the prohibition on women succeeding to the French crown was extended to men claiming the crown through a woman. Edward accepted Philip's accession and did him homage for the Duchy of Aquitaine (Gascony) in 1329.
In 1337, a dispute arose between Philip and Edward regarding Edward's feudal obligations which resulted in Philip ordering the confiscation of Gascony. Edward declared war on Philip in response. In retrospect, this was seen as the opening conflict of the Hundred Years' War that lasted to 1453. While campaigning in the Low Countries in 1340, Edward made his first public declaration that he was claiming the French throne. He had consistently omitted France from his titles prior to 1340, with the exception of a small number of documents sent to his allies in France in October 1337. Indeed, prior to 1337, no one, even in England, seriously doubted that Philip VI was the rightful king of France. However, on 26 January 1340 in a ceremony in the Friday Market in the Flemish city of Ghent, Edward formally proclaimed that he was the true king of France. At the same time Edward quartered his armsthe arms of Englandwith the royal arms of France. His aim, at this point, was probably a tactical one, to encourage Flemish support for his struggle against Philip by supposedly giving his supporters some legal protection: that they were not technically rebelling against the French crown.
Edward's next step was to publish a written statement of his claim, and the justification for it, in a "Manifesto" issued from Ghent on 8 February 1340, "in the first year of our reign over France". The implication was that he was claiming to be king of France only from 1340 rather than from 1328. The Ghent Manifesto declared that Edward was the rightful monarch because he was "closer in blood" to Charles IV than Philip:
He went on to claim he would rule in accordance with French law and on the advice of the French nobles. His aim was to restore peace to the kingdom and he had only resorted to war to defend his rights because of Philip's unreasonableness.
In November 1340, Edward delivered to Pope Benedict XII a document setting out the legal case justifying his claim. This was expanded upon in a more detailed legal brief used at a peace conference in 1344 presided over by Benedict's successor, Pope Clement VI, at the papal palace at Avignon. The legal argument put forward was that a prohibition on inheritance by a female, which was accepted as being a rule of the French succession by virtue of the decision of the 1317 assembly, did not prevent inheritance of the crown through a female. The French had claimed, vaguely, that it had been established by custom that the crown could not be inherited through females. In response, the English lawyers argued that there was no "custom and practice" to be deciphered, only the express enactments of the assemblies in 1317 and 1322. The issue in hand could not have been considered by those bodies because there were no candidates who could have claimed the crown through a female. The English also appealed to principles of Roman law which permitted inheritance through females.
One potential weakness in Edward's claim was that Louis X's daughter, Joan, had given birth in 1332 to a son, Charles of Navarre. Applying the arguments of Edward's lawyers could mean that he had priority over Edward's claim. But the case for Charles of Navarre attracted little attention or support. In 1328, Edward had been the only Capetian descendant to formally declare a counter-claim to Philip of Valois. Joan had not done so, and a retrospective claim by someone who had not been born at that time was seen as dubious.