1328—1340 Dare he command a fealty in me? Tell him the Crown that he usurps is mine, And where he sets his foot he ought to kneel. ‘Tis not a petty Dukedom that I claim, But all the whole dominions of the realm; Which if with grudging he refuse to yield I’ll take away those borrowed plumes of his And send him naked to the wilderness. The Raigne of King Edward III Sir, does it not seem to you that the silken thread encompassing France is broken? Sir Geoffrey Scrope On the first day of February 1328 King Charles IV of France, third son of King Philip the Handsome and last of the Capetian dynasty, lay dying. He had no children but his wife was pregnant. On his deathbed Charles said, ‘If the Queen bears a son he will be King, but if she bears a daughter then the crown belongs to Philip of Valois.’ Philip, Count of Valois, Anjou and Maine, was thirty-five, a tall, handsome nobleman who was famous for magnificence and for prowess in the tournament and on the battlefield. He was a great-grandson of St Louis and King Charles’s first cousin ; his father, Charles of Valois, had not only been a Prince of the Blood Royal but also, because of his second wife, titular Emperor of Constantinople; while Philip’s mother had been a daughter of the Capetian house which ruled Naples.
