Edward Despenser and the lance formation 85
Edward Despenser, The Green Knight and the Lance Formation: Englishmen in Florentine Military Service, 1366-1370
William Caferro
I. Introduction
The decade of the 1360s was an important one for English military involve- ment in Italy. It began with the arrival of the White Company in 1361, after the peace of Brétigny (1360) temporarily halted the Hundred Years War in France. It ended with war in 1369 between Edward lord Despenser and Galeazzo Visconti, ruler of Pavia (r.1354-1378). Despenser had come to Italy the year before with Lionel, duke of Clarence, son of King Edward III (r.1327- 1377), who was betrothed to Galeazzo’s daughter, Violante. Lionel died suddenly after the wedding (October, 1368), touching off an “English revenge.” Accusing their host of poisoning Lionel, members of the duke’s retinue, led by Despenser, refused to give back the lands granted as part of Violante’s dowry. The war inflamed much of Piedmont and northern Italy and reignited tensions between Visconti and his traditional enemies, the marquis of Montferrat and the pope. The events received widespread attention among contemporary Italian writers. The White Company elicited the strongest reaction from local chroniclers, who praised its battle readiness but condemned its cruelty.1 The Company quickly became the most feared of the marauding mercenary bands on the peninsula, ravaging (like Despenser) much of Piedmont, before descending on Tuscany in 1363, where it turned the tide in the Pisan- Florentine war. Meanwhile, Duke Lionel’s wedding, before devolving into war, produced “one of the great moments in culinary history.” The celebra- tory banquet involved fourteen lavish courses, with gilded meat and fish portions. It was attended by an array of notables, including the poet
1 William Caferro, “The Fox and the Lion: The White Company and the Hundred Years War in Italy” in The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2005), 179-209; idem, John Hawkwood, An English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy (Baltimore, 2006); Adrian R. Bell, “The Fourteenth Century Soldier: More Chaucer’s Knight or Medieval Career,” in Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. John France (Leiden, 2008), 301-15. 86 William Caferro Francesco Petrarch, the chronicler Jean Froissart, and perhaps even a young Geoffrey Chaucer, for whom Lionel was an early patron.2 The assembly of famous men has fascinated modern scholars. Literary critics have taken the lead, speculating on the possible effects on Chaucer, who may have gained his first acquaintance with Italian literature there. They have also questioned whether the unknown author of the anonymous alliterative English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or perhaps the poem’s patron or even models for the green knight, attended the event. Candidates for one or the other include Amadeus, the “Green Count” of Savoy, who was Violante’s uncle and helped arrange the union, and Simon Newton, an English knight known as the “green squire” (scudifer viridis), who assisted in marriage negotiations and was from the same region of England as the purported author of the Gawain poem.3 Ann R. Meyer has recently connected Edward Despenser, the head of Lionel’s wedding party, to the Gawain poet, on the basis of their ties to the Northwest Midlands and the circle of King Richard II (r.1377-1399), widely viewed as central to the authorship and patronage of the poem.4 Edward Despenser has the further distinction of being included in the “church militant” (via veritatis) fresco in the Spanish Chapel of the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The fresco, on the eastern wall of the chapel, was painted between the years 1366 and 1369 by the artist Andrea di Bonaiuto.5 Despenser stands toward the middle of the lower section of it, dressed in white, with a garter on his leg, the emblem of King Edward’s Order of Garter, of which he was a member. T.B. Pugh has pointed out the singularity of the portrait, which is the first representation of an Englishman in Italy apart from Thomas Becket.6 It stands as a precursor to the more
2 Albert S. Cook, “The Last Months of Chaucer’s Earliest Patron,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 21 (1916-1917): 1-144. 3 J.R.L. Highfield, “The Green Squire,” Medium Aevum 22 (1953): 18-23; S.R.T.O. D’Ar denne, “The ‘Green Count’ and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Review of English Studies, New Series, 10, no. 38 (1959): 116-17; W.G. Cooke and J.D. Boulton “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Poem for Henry of Grosmont?” Medium Aevum 68 (1999): 42-54. For Italian influences on the Gawain poet, see A.C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1970), 17-18. 4 Ann R. Meyer, “The Despensers and the Gawain Poet: a Gloucestershire link to the Alliterative Master of the Northwest Midlands,” Chaucer Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 413-29. 5 Mary Aquinas Devlin, “An English Knight in the Spanish Chapel in Florence,” Speculum 4, no 3 (July 1929): 270-81; Joseph Polzer, “Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via Veritatis and Dominican Thought in Late Medieval Italy,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 263-89; Joachim Poeschke, Italian Frescoes in the Age of Giotto, 1280-1400 (New York and London, 2005), 362-79. 6 T.B. Pugh, “Edward Despenser (1336-1375),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7550?docPos=2 [accessed May 10, 2010].