The Black Prince: hero or villain?

History Extra

The Black Prince’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral depicts Edward III’s son as a resting warrior, a paragon of knightly virtue. The prince conceived the tomb’s design himself but not everyone has bought into his favourable assessment of his life’s achievements. (AKG)

When compiling lists of English heroes, the Black Prince is not a character who immediately springs to mind. Yet in his time, and later centuries, his character was every bit as controversial as another Plantagenet who forged his reputation on the battlefields of France, Henry V. 

 

To his contemporaries, the Black Prince was the hero of the battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera, and the villain of the sacking of the city of Limoges. In his lifetime, Edward III’s eldest son garnered a reputation as a chivalric hero. After his death, he became a focal point for debates about heroism and villainy.

 

At the battle of Crécy in 1346, Edward III placed the 16-year-old Prince Edward in nominal command of part of his army. In the intense fighting, the Black Prince and his men received the brunt of the French attack. Forced to the ground, the prince had to be rescued by his standard bearer.

 

Alerted to the dangers that faced his son, Edward III refused to send reinforcements, stating instead: “Let the boy win his spurs.” The prince performed admirably. As a major English victory over the French, Crécy confirmed his future martial promise, reinforced later when the prince became a founder member of the Order of the Garter. 

 

Ten years later, in 1356, this promise was fulfilled when the 26-year-old prince decisively defeated the French army near the city of Poitiers and captured the French king, John II. This English victory significantly undermined the French cause, and simultaneously helped to establish Edward and his followers’ reputations as warriors. Contemporaries praised the Black Prince’s chivalrous character, in particular his modesty, courage and courtesy on the battlefield. According to the medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, after the battle the Black Prince held a banquet in honour of the captured king and served him dinner. This scene fostered an image of Prince Edward as a humble victor. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Poitiers would be celebrated alongside Agincourt as one of the great English triumphs of the Middle Ages. 

 

So prominent was the Black Prince’s reputation as a warrior that he was asked by King Pedro of Castile to aid him in his fight against his half-brother Henry of Trastamara for the Castilian throne. Prince Edward’s victory at the battle of Nájera on 3 April 1367 sealed his reputation as a successful warrior, though the Spanish campaign resulted in debt and illness for the prince.

 

In the 14th century, Jean Froissart was seminal in helping to craft the Black Prince’s image, much as Shakespeare would later shape Henry V’s. Froissart’s aim, to record the chivalrous deeds of knights, led him to manufacture and embellish scenes of chivalric virtues. However, Froissart’s description of the Black Prince was not unanimously favourable; in fact, he offered a critique as well.

 

Even in his lifetime, contemporaries challenged the Black Prince’s heroic image, recasting him as a villain. Criticism focused on his chevauchée (raiding expedition) in France in 1355–56, a brutal affair designed to demoralise the enemy. Starting in Bordeaux in September 1355, Edward moved across France passing Toulouse, Carcassonne and Narbonne. He focused his attention on towns where he could inflict the most damage with the least resistance. His troops looted, burned property and killed inhabitants. On campaign with the Black Prince in 1355, Sir John Wingfield wrote a letter to the bishop of Winchester proclaiming that “there was never such loss nor destruction as hath been in this raid”.

^{A vision of hell King Edward III and the Black Prince  are depicted as “apocalyptic horsemen ravaging France” in the Angers tapestries, commissioned by Louis D’Anjou in 1373. (Lessing photo archive)} 

 

No mercy

 

The sack of the city of Limoges in 1370 became a second source of contention. Granted Aquitaine by his father in 1362, the Black Prince ruled a principality that stretched across a third of France. The city under the prince’s rule had surrendered to the French – and, for that, Edward decided that it must be punished, first laying siege and then sacking it. Froissart reported that: “Men, women and children flung themselves on their knees before the prince, crying: ‘Have mercy on us, gentle sir!’ But he was so inflamed with anger that he would not listen… and all that could be found were put to the sword.”

 

Froissart records the deaths of over 3,000 men, women and children, though this figure is not corroborated by local sources. All the same, the sack became notorious for its brutality. Edward’s reputation in France was a dark one. The Angers tapestries commissioned by Louis D’Anjou (see left) illustrate the Black Prince and his father as apocalyptic horsemen ravaging France. Commissioned in 1373 when England’s hold on France was waning, they provide a contrast to images presented by the herald of Sir John Chandos, whose poem painted the prince as a hero.

 

In 1376, the Black Prince died at the age of 46 from a lingering illness. Keenly aware of the power of image, Edward sought to craft his own memory, requesting that his tomb be located in Canterbury Cathedral depicting him as a resting knight. His sword, shield and armour were arranged above his tomb, providing a lasting tribute to his feats in war. At his death, the Black Prince was mourned across Europe, and medieval chroniclers did their bit to polish his reputation, lauding his life’s achievements.  

 

However, future debates about what it meant to be a hero had to address the less palatable aspects of Prince Edward’s story. His subsequent reputation, like those of many medieval royals, was shaped in part by Shakespeare, who captured the dual image of the Black Prince as both hero and villain in his plays Richard II and Henry V. Shakespeare’s Black Prince was a consummate warrior who “play’d a tragedy on French soil” as a result of his victories there. This view was upheld in the play Edward III, which is now frequently attributed to Shakespeare. 

 

If the Black Prince’s appearances in Shakespeare’s plays helped make him a prominent figure in England’s medieval story, so did the power of his sobriquet. We know that Prince Edward became the ‘Black Prince’ during the 16th century but what we don’t know is why the name changed when it did and why he earned this name. Later historians have speculated that the sobriquet came from the colour of Edward’s armour and his dark reputation in France.

 

^{A gold coin showing the Black Prince as prince of Aquitaine, minted 1362–72. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France saw Edward  III and the Black Prince issuing a series of gold coins minted in the English-ruled duchy of Aquitaine in south-west France. Aquitanian coins were usually silver but Edward  III wanted to press his claim to the throne of France by challenging the French king’s monopoly of gold issue.}

 

^{This coin was minted after the English king granted his son the rule of Aquitaine. In it, the prince stands beneath a Gothic portico, with two heraldic English leopards at his feet. In the background are four ostrich feathers, formerly the emblem of King John the Blind of Bohemia, which was reputedly adopted by the prince after John’s death fighting with the French at Crécy. (British Museum)}

 

French tensions

 

Interest in the Black Prince as a person in his own right – rather than a character in a play – developed to a greater extent in the 17th century. In 1688, antiquary Joshua Barnes wrote the first authoritative historical biography of Edward III and the Black Prince, which later authors consulted as a key source. Tensions with France and a royal focus on the Middle Ages led to a renewed desire to reconsider the prince’s battles. Barnes pinpointed the prince’s military feats as being central to his heroic image. 

 

The British monarchy of the 18th century, however, proved to be the driving force behind the Black Prince’s re-emergence as a hero. George III commissioned the American artist Benjamin West to produce a series of grand history paintings in the late 1780s chronicling the deeds of King Edward III and his son for the Windsor Castle audience chamber. Fascinated by the medieval past, George saw the reign of Edward III as a time of royal power. His love of the medieval chimed with his wider programme to reinvent ceremony and splendour for the monarchy. West reframed Edward’s heroism in terms of 18th-century gentlemanly virtues, depicting a chivalric Black Prince who was courageous and honourable. 

 

West chose to paint a scene from the aftermath of Crécy, featuring Edward with his father acknowledging the slain John of Bohemia, himself a hero of chivalry. In another painting (above), West depicted the Black Prince meeting his prisoner, the French king John, after the battle of Poitiers. His source, David Hume, whose medieval volume of The History of England was published in 1761, extolled the prince’s heroic character and chose to ignore his battlefield violence. Based on Hume’s written depiction, West portrayed Edward as a moderate and sympathetic gentleman conqueror. Not everyone bought into West’s rather sanitised and bloodless versions of events though – his portrayals of Edward’s battles were criticised at Royal Academy exhibitions for their lack of realism.

 

The robust and masculine warrior, Edward, became a special hero for young soldiers during the Georgian and Regency eras. And the prince was once again celebrated on the stage – William Shirley’s drama of 1750, revived in the late Georgian period, offered him as a model of English masculinity for contemporary soldiers. 

 

^{This painting by Benjamin West shows the Black Prince (right, in feathered helmet) meeting his prisoner, King John of France, following the battle of Poitiers. (Royal Collection)} 

 

National heroes

 

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the Black Prince’s hero-villain dynamic really came to the fore. His image circulated in media of all kinds – from children’s adventure novels to plays. Fascination with national heroes and the Middle Ages spurred a diversity of Black Princes, and Edward became a focus for debates on character and war.

 

Children’s books tended to emphasise the prince’s more attractive qualities in order to teach young children proper behaviour. One of the most popular textbooks of the 19th century, Little Arthur’s History of England (1835), added to Edward’s repertoire of virtues by referring to him as “the bravest and politest prince at that time in the world”.

 

Yet Edward served as a villain as well. His sack of Limoges was used as a lesson about barbarous behaviour – one that the Victorians believed they had safely moved beyond. Children’s author Meredith Jones wrote that at Limoges he was a frightening figure with “angry flashing eyes”, violent and ruthless. 

 

Jones wasn’t the only Victorian to regard Limoges as a ‘blot’ on Edward’s otherwise good character. In a public lecture on the prince’s life in 1852, the canon of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, placed Edward’s brutality in the city within a wider criticism of chivalry, suggesting that it amounted to class violence against the poor. While Stanley stated that the Black Prince was a model knight, he questioned whether Edward could indeed be an appropriate role model for modern men and boys. He concluded that the prince’s successes were greater than his failures. 

 

Many early 20th-century portrayals of Edward were less ambiguous about his legacy. One such was the Black Prince’s statue in Leeds City Square – commissioned by the city’s ex-lord mayor, Colonel T Walter Harding. Harding entertained the possibility of other heroes – Queen Elizabeth I, Simon De Montfort and Henry V – but settled on Edward because he regarded him as a champion of the people and a patriotic warrior – values he wished to instil in the citizens of Leeds.

 

Published in 1917, Henry Newbolt’s Book of the Happy Warrior also placed the Black Prince within a tradition of warrior heroes who happily fought for their nation. The 1929 historical novel, The English Paragon, continued to define Prince Edward as a model of chivalry. Restoration work on the prince’s tomb at Canterbury in the 1930s led to some re-evaluation of his character. But, by now, such debates about his memory lacked the lustre of Victorian discussions. 

 

By the 1950s, Edward as a popular icon was disappearing from public view. Despite this, guidebooks to Canterbury Cathedral kept his memory alive, while the 1955 film, The Dark Avenger, had Errol Flynn play the Black Prince as a medieval cowboy saving the peasants and his lady from cruel French nobles. 

 

Scholarly interest in the Black Prince has remained stronger with the publication of a number of papers and books about the prince’s life and career by John Harvey, Barbara Emerson and Richard Barber in response to the 1976 anniversary of Edward’s death. More recently, David Green has offered a re-evaluation of Edward, highlighting the need to understand the prince within the context of the 14th century.

 

Despite this, the Black Prince’s apotheosis as a prominent figure in the public consciousness undoubtedly occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries when both royals and populace celebrated him. Debates about the nature of heroism and villainy, royalty, chivalry, war and character helped to market Edward’s image. 

 

These debates no longer have the same currency, and for many, Edward is an obscure figure. In today’s more cosmopolitan society, the Black Prince’s story lacks cultural resonance. 

 

However, exploring the Georgian and Victorians’ fascination with Edward allows us to evaluate changing values and ideas about the hero in history. Perhaps now, it is time to revisit the Black Prince’s character once more.

 

^{An illustration from Jean Froissart’s Chronicles shows the battle of Nájera in 1367. It was in this clash between Anglo-Gascon and Franco-Castilian forces, in what is now northern Spain, that the Black Prince sealed his reputation as an accomplished warrior. (Alamy)} 

 

Five medieval war heroes

 

How did their reputations compare with the Black Prince's?

 

King Edward III  

 

Founder of the Order of the Garter and war hero of the 14th century, Edward III ruled England for 50 years. His reputation during his lifetime as an ideal statesman and chivalric hero continued into the 18th century. Victorian criticism of the Hundred Years’ War led them to recast the king as a warmonger.

 

King Henry V  

 

Hero of Agincourt, Henry V’s reputation was crafted by Shakespeare, who presented the king as a consummate warrior. His image has undergone re-evaluation in the 21st century, focusing less on the ‘hero’ of Agincourt, more on his cruelty and coldness. 

 

King John of Bohemia  

 

John fought with the French at Crécy. The quintessential brave knight, John, although blind, had his knights tie their horses to his as he went into battle. Killed alongside his men, his feats were celebrated both in the 14th century and after. According to legend, the Black Prince took John’s feathers, which became the symbol of later princes of Wales.

 

Joan of Arc  

 

Born a peasant, Joan became a heroine in France, leading troops to victory against the English at the siege of Orléans. Her leadership turned the tide of the Hundred Years’ War. Captured by the Burgundians, she was sold to the  English. Charged with heresy and burnt at the stake, Joan was absolved by the pope after her death. The Victorians recast Joan as a martyr and war hero. 

 

King Richard I  

 

An archetypal warrior, Richard Coeur de Lion was known for his battles in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. He spent less than a year of his reign in England and died on campaign in France. Praised for his skill as a warrior, the Victorians questioned his capability as a ruler. 

 

Barbara Gribling is a visiting scholar in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. 

 

Richard III gets a lavish send-off… at last

The Guardian

Elizabeth Day

The skeleton of Richard III, who suffered from scoliosis of the spine. The king’s remains will be reburied at Leicester cathedral this month. Photograph: Reuters

Later this month, 530 years after he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III will finally get a decent burial at Leicester Cathedral, watched by the world’s media. Elizabeth Day goes behind the scenes and meets those involved


Toby Capwell, curator of arms and armour at the Wallace Collection in London, has got used to being ahead of the curve. We are in a taxi on the way to the site of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field and he is talking eloquently about medieval weaponry when he confesses that, at several junctures in his life, his early enthusiasm for some overlooked area of expertise or interest has been hijacked by a later boom in its popularity.
He grew up in Seattle where, as a teenager, he remembers liking all these unknown local indie bands such as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Then he left to go to college, and the indie scene in his home town exploded. Before leaving Seattle, he bought an espresso machine for his college dorm. He got it at a place called Starbucks, a small coffee shop no one outside the city had ever heard of. Then Starbucks became a massive global corporation. The espresso machine broke, Capwell says regretfully, otherwise he’d probably have made a fortune selling it on eBay.
It’s the same thing all over again with Richard III. Capwell has nurtured a lifelong fascination with the Yorkist king who was killed at Bosworth by Henry Tudor’s forces during the Wars of the Roses. As a 15-year-old, he remembers reading Charles Ross’s seminal biography of the late monarch and developing a preoccupation with Richard III, whose body had lain undiscovered for centuries. No one knew exactly how the king had died – contemporary accounts relied on second-hand testimony and were mostly written by foreigners – which just added to the enigma. “When there’s a mystery, it’s galvanising,” Capwell explains. “It’s like the Kennedy assassination.”
At the time, Richard was still an unloved footnote of history, his reputation maligned by Shakespeare and the later Tudor chroniclers who depicted him as an incompetent king and a bloodthirsty hunchback, guilty of killing two young children who threatened his dynastic ambition. An obsession with Richard III wasn’t exactly mainstream for an American teenager in the 1990s. “My parents were somewhat perplexed,” Capwell admits, but, undeterred, he moved to England and became a leading scholar in the field.

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Toby Capwell, curator of arms and armoury at the Wallace Collection in London, and Richard III fanatic. Photograph: Fabio De Paola

And then, in August 2012, the skeleton of Richard III was found underneath a council car park in Leicester by some enterprising archaeologists from the nearby university and suddenly the whole world wanted a bit of him. Now Capwell finds himself at the centre of a growing rumpus surrounding the forthcoming reinterment of the last Plantagenet king: Richard III is due to be buried in Leicester Cathedral later this month, the first ceremonial burial of a British monarch since 1952. There was an unsuccessful high court bid to have him buried in York and rumblings of discontent over the failure to find a place for him in Westminster Abbey, but Leicester won in the end.

 

Channel 4 is planning a week of exclusive live coverage, overseen by Nick Vaughan-Barratt, who has been at the helm of many key royal events in the past, including the televising of the Royal Wedding and the Queen Mother’s funeral. The Archbishop of Canterbury will be presiding over the ceremony and 58 international media organisations have already signed up to be there. The cost is £2.5m, raised through private donations by Leicester Cathedral. The city’s elected mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, can hardly contain his glee: “It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to remind people of what a fantastic place Leicester is.”
Until now, the city’s most celebrated ex-residents were the former England striker and TV presenter Gary Lineker and a man called Daniel Lambert, who was famous for being abnormally large (almost 53 stone when he died in 1809). And Geoffrey Chaucer married his second wife there.
The skeleton in the car park has changed all that. The newly built Richard III visitor centre opposite the cathedral has attracted 40,000 people through its doors since opening in July, many of whom come to gawp at the shallow 1.6m by 30m trench where the late monarch was discovered, now safely screened by thick glass and accompanied by muted choral music. An overhead projection of the outline of his skeleton is beamed into the ditch at regular intervals, like some ghoulish Halloween spectacle.
The funeral cortege will take Richard III’s remains in a lead-lined coffin from Leicester university along a public route designed to retrace the movements of his final days, including the villages around Bosworth, before transporting him along the aptly named King Richard’s Road past such distinguished emporia as Best Price Bathrooms, the Crystal Jade Chinese takeaway and Maroniques hair and tanning salon. The coffin will then lie in state for three days at the cathedral so that the public can pay their respects. The reinterment service on 26 March will see a pre-Reformation Catholic king buried in an Anglican cathedral for the first time and tens of thousands of people are expected to line the streets to witness this historic event.
“It’s not a funeral because there is no body [in the conventional sense],” explains David Monteith, the dean of Leicester Cathedral. “In a funeral it’s very clear that the dominant motif is goodbye – hence our feelings of grief. In this, the dominant motif is much more hello.”
It is a rather startling thought. But for many involved in the rehabilitation of Richard III’s reputation, he does seem to be a living, breathing figure. Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and lifelong Ricardian who was the driving force behind making the archaeological dig happen (she raised £34,000 for the project through sheer will power), has devoted so much of her life to the cause that she has sometimes been accused of not only wanting to discover Richard III’s bones, but to jump them too. “If [people] want to make these assumptions that I’m still in love with him, that’s fine,” she says with a barely suppressed sigh. In the Richard III visitor centre, she is accosted by an excitable group of schoolchildren from South Carolina and a grey-haired, bespectacled woman who calls Langley her “hero”. Langley accepts it all with good grace.
“Do I admire him?” she continues. “I do because he lived the most extraordinary life. He fought through extraordinary circumstances. Yes, he’s a conflicted, complex and flawed individual – we all are. It’s the human condition.”
Langley points out that, during his two short years on the throne, Richard III brought in revolutionary legal principles – the presumption of innocence, the concept of blind justice, the introduction of bail – and insisted that all laws should be translated from Latin or French into English so that his subjects could understand them. He was also the first king to speak his coronation oath in English.

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Richard Knox at the Bosworth battlefield heritage centre. Photograph: Fabio De Paola

These achievements have been overshadowed for centuries by the myths surrounding his character. He has long been the prime suspect for the murder of the princes in the Tower (Langley gives this short shrift: she points out that Henry Tudor had much more to lose from their continued survival). The discovery of his skeleton has become a trigger point for a broader re-evaluation of his legacy.
In Leicester, the turnover of leisure businesses such as hotels and visitor attractions shot up by £482m from 2012 to 2013 and much of the increase was attributed to the “Richard effect”. At the Bosworth battlefield heritage centre’s gift shop, there are Bosworth wine gums on sale and rubber wrist bands on sale emblazoned with “Team Richard III” or “Team Henry VII” so that you can show your allegiance to either the House of York or Lancaster.
“One of my bugbears,” says Richard Knox, the delightfully titled 1485 project officer for Leicester city council, “is that the Battle of Bosworth Field is famous for being the start of the Tudor dynasty and the occasion of Richard III’s death [legend has it that Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII on the battlefield with Richard’s crown, retrieved from a thorn bush] but about 1,000 other people died, probably 950 of whom we have no idea who they were.”
Everyone who works at the centre seems to be called Richard, although they insist it’s not obligatory. Richard Cale, who greets me at reception, says he was the third one to join, “so I’m Richard the third”.
No one seems to mind that the centre is about three miles away from the actual battlefield site. In fact, the closest you can get to the spot where Richard III lost his life is a local farm where some mischievous type has put name plaques on the outbuildings, such as “Tudor Barn”, “York Barn” and “Blackadder Barn”. We hike up a mound of mud and Capwell points out the various ridges Richard would have used to mount his charge.
The discovery of the skeleton has meant experts now have a fairly accurate picture of how he must have died. After using the latest techniques in forensic pathology, bone analysis, radiocarbon dating, genealogy and DNA research, academics at the University of Leicester claimed they were 99.999% certain that the bones in the car park were indeed those of the last Plantagenet king.
The identification process was lengthy and involved tracing an all-female line of descent from Richard III’s sister, Anne of York, so that a mitochondrial DNA sample (longer lasting and more stable than the DNA that exists within our cell nuclei) could be gleaned from a living descendent – in this case, Michael Ibsen, a cabinet-maker living in London, who has hand-carved the coffin in which Richard will be buried. His DNA matched the sample from the skeleton.
The findings also confirmed that the late king did suffer from scoliosis of the spine, meaning that his right shoulder would have been noticeably higher than the left. Although he would have been 5ft 8ins tall in the normal course of events, the scoliosis depressed his height by four inches. This, then, was a king who had to fight inherent challenges in an era when physical deformity was viewed as evidence of a twisted soul.

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A ceremonial procession around Leicestershire will precede the reinterment at Leicester Cathedral. Photograph: Fabio De Paola

Analysis of Richard’s skeleton revealed two major blows to the skull and one to the pelvis. Capwell believes the most likely explanation for his death is that the king’s horse became mired in the swampy mud around Bosworth – hence the famous line in Shakespeare: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Unable to move, he would have been set upon by some of Henry Tudor’s men. He probably lost his helmet or had it forcibly removed. The back of his skull was sliced off – Capwell thinks the weapon would have been a halberd (a type of axe). Medieval battles were, he says, “nasty, horrible things”.
The skeleton also revealed several humiliation wounds, including a sword injury through the right buttock. Richard’s grave was hastily dug and he was buried without a shroud or coffin, in an area too small to lay him out with the dignity usually afforded an anointed king.
Aside from the science, the discovery of Richard’s remains was also the result of astonishing serendipity. At the outset of the archaeological dig, the chances of finding Richard’s grave were miniscule: most of the site of Greyfriars abbey had been built on over the years and the dig was only able to excavate 1% of the total area because of funding limitations. The team expected to find hundreds of unidentified skeletons, but only had clearance to exhume six.
The first ground was broken underneath a letter “R” painted onto a car-parking space to designate it “reserved”. Within five hours of the first day, two parallel human leg bones were discovered. The feet were missing, chopped off by the foundations of a Victorian building that, if it had been built a few inches to the right, would have entirely destroyed the skeleton.

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Philippa Langley at the Richard III visitor centre in Leicester. Photograph: Fabio De Paola

It was 22 August, the same date on which, 527 years previously, the Battle of Bosworth Field had been fought. It was, recalls Carl Vivian, a video producer at the University of Leicester who has been filming the back story (no pun intended), a bank holiday weekend, and permission to continue the exhumation had to be sought from the Ministry of Justice. It took three days for the permission to come through and the skeleton was finally removed from the ground on 25 August.
“After Richard was killed in 1485, his body was put on display for three days,” says Vivian. “Then he was buried.”
On 25 August? “Yep. Of course, there are those who point out the Gregorian and Julian calendars don’t match up, but still…” Vivian trails off.
It makes for a better story? He nods: “It does.”
Channel 4’s week of live programming for the burial of King Richard III begins on Sunday 22 March at 5.30pm with the procession, and culminates on Thursday 26 March from 10am with the live reburial, Richard III: The Burial of the King. For details click here

History Trivia - Roman emperor Septimius Severus dies at York while campaigning to subdue northern Britain

February 4

 211 Roman emperor Septimius Severus died at York while campaigning to subdue northern Britain, leaving the Roman Empire in the hands of his two quarrelsome sons, Caracalla and Geta.

1194 King Richard I of England was freed by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, after being ransomed. Richard did return to England but soon set sail for France where he died five years later.

1586 Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, became governor of Neth (Netherlands).

Dec 11, 1936: Edward VIII abdicates

From History.com

After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a radio address in which he explained, "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.
Edward, born in 1894, was the eldest son of King George V, who became the British sovereign in 1910. Still unmarried as he approached his 40th birthday, he socialized with the fashionable London society of the day. By 1934, he had fallen deeply in love with American socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson, who was married to Ernest Simpson, an English-American businessman who lived with Mrs. Simpson near London. Wallis, who was born in Pennsylvania, had previously married and divorced a U.S. Navy pilot. The royal family disapproved of Edward's married mistress, but by 1936 the prince was intent on marrying Mrs. Simpson. Before he could discuss this intention with his father, George V died, in January 1936, and Edward was proclaimed king.
The new king proved popular with his subjects, and his coronation was scheduled for May 1937. His affair with Mrs. Simpson was reported in American and continental European newspapers, but due to a gentlemen's agreement between the British press and the government, the affair was kept out of British newspapers. On October 27, 1936, Mrs. Simpson obtained a preliminary decree of divorce, presumably with the intent of marrying the king, which precipitated a major scandal. To the Church of England and most British politicians, an American woman twice divorced was unacceptable as a prospective British queen. Winston Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, was the only notable politician to support Edward.
Despite the seemingly united front against him, Edward could not be dissuaded. He proposed a morganatic marriage, in which Wallis would be granted no rights of rank or property, but on December 2, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin rejected the suggestion as impractical. The next day, the scandal broke on the front pages of British newspapers and was discussed openly in Parliament. With no resolution possible, the king renounced the throne on December 10. The next day, Parliament approved the abdication instrument, and Edward VIII's reign came to an end. The new king, George VI, made his older brother the duke of Windsor. On June 3, 1937, the duke of Windsor and Wallis Warfield married at the Château de Cande in France's Loire Valley.
For the next two years, the duke and duchess lived primarily in France but visited other European countries, including Germany, where the duke was honored by Nazi officials in October 1937 and met with Adolf Hitler. After the outbreak of World War II, the duke accepted a position as liaison officer with the French. In June 1940, France fell to the Nazis, and Edward and Wallis went to Spain. During this period, the Nazis concocted a scheme to kidnap Edward with the intention of returning him to the British throne as a puppet king. George VI, like his prime minister, Winston Churchill, was adamantly opposed to any peace with Nazi Germany. Unaware of the Nazi kidnapping plot but conscious of Edward's pre-war Nazi sympathies, Churchill hastily offered Edward the governorship of the Bahamas in the West Indies. The duke and duchess set sail from Lisbon on August 1, 1940, narrowly escaping a Nazi SS team sent to seize them.
In 1945, the duke resigned his post, and the couple moved back to France. They lived mainly in Paris, and Edward made a few visits to England, such as to attend the funerals of King George VI in 1952 and his mother, Queen Mary, in 1953. It was not until 1967 that the duke and duchess were invited by the royal family to attend an official public ceremony, the unveiling of a plaque dedicated to Queen Mary. Edward died in Paris in 1972 but was buried at Frogmore, on the grounds of Windsor Castle. In 1986, Wallis died and was buried at his side

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