The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  When they grew older the princesses hunted with their parents and became accustomed to the spectacular characteristics of their tall father in the field. He was renowned for his horsemanship, preferring to ride strong and hard-to-manage mounts. Lithe and muscular himself, he could leap into the saddle by placing one hand lightly against the leather. His favorite was a bay named Bayard, but it was gray Lyard he called for when he rode into battle, the great horse of which it is written, “He ever charged forward.” For the hunting field there was Ferrault, a shining blue-black jumper who “could leap over any chain, however high.”

  Falconry had become the favorite sport of the day. William the Conqueror had placed restrictions on hawking, just as he had laid down his vicious Forest Laws. In the previous reign the laws had been relaxed and interest in the sport had become widespread. When Edward rode out to hawk, he was likely to be accompanied by his queen and some of his daughters and many ladies of the court. Ladies became so adept at handling the wild birds that their male companions complained that they were turning falconry into a frivolous and effeminate pastime. With their smaller hands, women could quickly learn to manage the jesses, lunes, and tyrrits—straps, thongs, and rings—the bells to be balanced and also fastened to the birds’ legs. They used the creance, a long thread to draw a bird back to its mistress’s gloved fist, a quick action known as reclaiming the hawk. An important if indolent member of the retinue was always the cadge-boy. From his shoulders was suspended a wooden frame which held, before the start of the hunt, the birds to be used. Among them might be a “falcon gentle” with hooked and notched bill, or a “mewing” falcon just taken out of the mews or enclosure built especially for these birds when they were losing but one feather at a time instead of molting in the wholesale manner of other winged creatures. All the birds on the frame were females and were kept “hood-winked,” the hoods made especially to fit their little heads and to cover their staring, intelligent eyes. Here were peregrines, fast-flying, swift-swooping; or the little merlin whose silhouette against the sky made an exquisite outline; the hobby was sometimes there, too, caught nesting in the southernmost part of England. It was larger than the merlin but not as long-winged as its sister flier, the kestrel. The short-winged, slow-flying goshawk was an especial favorite for the royal fist.

  Once the hunters had reached a cleared space and released their birds, the cadge-boy, with nothing but an empty frame on his back, loafed about for tips. Thus came into general usage the word “cadge.”

  Sometimes Eleanor accompanied Edward to the hunt. Dogs from the royal kennels scurried before them through the woods, English and Italian “gaze” hounds (they hunted by sight rather than scent) with long bodies and noses, precursors of the whippet. There were heavy-set, honey-colored dogs, too, a breed brought to England by returning crusaders and similar in appearance to the modern boxer. Short, crooked-legged little fellows, said to have been bred first in Artois and Flanders, dotted the fields, a dog with a good nose, riotous and headstrong, with a musical bark that brought little underground animals from their nests and lairs. This is called the basset hound today.

  But sometimes the king and his ladies rode out to enjoy the new beauty of the countryside which was being cleared and neatly planted. Often in the fields where the grass had sprouted thickly they would pass flocks of sheep particularly large and sturdy in conformation—the merino sheep from Spain. It was Edward’s chère reine who had first suggested bringing these fine animals from her native Castile, and in time the Cotswold country of England would become noted for them.

  The royal family seemed to be happiest on the wing. There was a constant visiting back and forth from one castle to another. Edward seems to have had an itching heel; he was known to change his place of residence as often as twice in three days. It should be stated that this was not always due to his roving spirit. A king’s train was huge and capable of depleting the food supplies of a royal residence in no time at all.

  Economy might be exercised within the household, but when Edward took his fair ladies on processionals he saw to it that the background was a fitting one. He spent large sums of money, for instance, on two royal barges to be used on the Thames. They were so commodious and elaborate that seventy-four bargemen were needed to operate them. It is recorded also that Ade, the king’s goldsmith, was kept constantly employed in making plate against the time when the marriage of the princess would require a rich show.

  Fashions in dress changed slowly through the Middle Ages. This may have been because the inventive faculty in man was at a standstill. He was beginning to build magnificent cathedrals, to paint pictures, to compose majestic sacred music, to write spirited poetry; but the flowing robes in which men arrayed themselves after escaping the intense discomfort of armor seemed good enough to be let alone. On the accession of Edward II there would be a sudden addiction to French styles and a complete swing over to oddity and extravagance in attire, but while the father was at the helm there was no more than a slow progress. The king himself was indifferent to dress. He shunned such rich and elaborate materials as cloth of gold, cloth of Tarsus, satins, silks, brocades, and trimmings of ermine and vare; he was content with the fine and substantial cloth made from English wool. His queen seems to have followed him in this, as in almost everything else. Perhaps it was because she was with him constantly on his travels, riding astride and finding it necessary to have warm clothes and to encase her slender feet in great, heavy riding boots. Perhaps one so naturally lovely did not feel the need of artificial aids to pulchritude. In any event, she had a preference for loose undergowns with sleeves that buttoned from elbow to wrist, and plain outer gowns lined with something in gay colors. The nonchalant attitude of the royal couple did not put any restrictions on the daughters, however, except that a certain economy was observed in the matter of materials. There is one record of the repairing of Christmas robes for the oldest daughter, one being so far gone that the tailor required seven days to make it presentable.

  There were two tendencies of the day in the matter of costume which should be recorded. The first was the introduction of buttons. Used at first for decoration only, on books and purses and scabbards as well as clothes, the button began to prove its utility in holding clothing closer to the body, thereby providing a greater warmth and accentuating (where the ladies were concerned) the gentle curve of the figure. The button would become of increasing use as time moved along and would be largely responsible for the eccentricities and the fantastic developments of the succeeding reign.

  The second had to do with color. In the warm and scented south the lord of the manor and the troubadour inclined to soft shades and poetic combinations, but in England it was still the day of the solid colors—stout reds, deep blues, and warm greens. The somber brown, which had been much in evidence before, was now left to the friar and the monk. White was not practical and black seems to have been little used. There was a vigor and stimulation about a gathering of any size in England as a result. When men in red and green danced at the Maypole with girls in blue, the eye of the beholder was filled with a beauty which sophisticated fashions could not attain.

  The ladies, of course, were not entirely content to leave things at that. They experimented with head coverings and gradually evolved a round linen cap in place of the simple band about the hair. When the wimple, a hot and unattractive covering of linen or silk, was draped about these caps, the result was not felicitous or comfortable. Better far to have left the hair free to hang down the back.

  2

  Life in the castles might have its moments of picturesque grandeur, as when visiting royalty sat down in the great hall and the tables swarmed with the nobility and the rich churchmen. In the main it was a bare and very uncomfortable existence. Even in the King’s House at Windsor, which Eleanor had bedecked with hangings and rugs, the rooms were cold in winter. So strong were the drafts that the tapestries would be blown about against the damp walls. The sleeping chambers were high up in the tall to
wers and were as small and unpretentious as the niche in the wall where Edward II was said to have been born.

  There were always diversions, of course. During meals there was music from the minstrels’ gallery, provided by the harp, the dulcimer, the jingling frame-drums (generally called timbrels), and the bladder-pipe, which was a small variety of bagpipe and consisted of a double clarinet with a bladder instead of a bag; even sometimes the portative organ, which had just been invented and was so minute that an itinerant musician could carry it about on his back.

  Queen Eleanor had been raised in the court of her half brother, Alfonso of Castile, and so had acquired a taste for the arts and sciences. Alfonso, called El Sabio by his subjects, was both a scholar and a poet and he kept his court filled with learned men. It was not surprising, therefore, that Eleanor had an appetite for culture which did not find much satisfaction in the atmosphere of the English court. Even opportunities for reading were limited, the royal library consisting of three books, and these considered to be of such value that they could not be reached easily; they were locked up with the royal jewels. What were these three precious volumes?

  A book of ancient chronicles, almost certainly in Latin.

  A Latin work on agriculture.

  A copy of fables in French called Romaunt de Guillaume de Conquerant.

  The last named might have interested the members of the family had they been able to get it into their hands; but not very much, because it was made up of very foolish and incredible tales.

  It is on record that both the king and queen played chess. One of the dignitaries of the Knights Templar in France presented Edward with a chessboard made of jasper and men of crystal. The king gave it in turn to Eleanor. The royal couple were inclined to the game, no doubt, by the commonly accepted but erroneous belief of that day that King Solomon had invented it. Chess was, of course, a far different game from the perfect diversion it was to become in later centuries. If the piece now called the queen bore that same name in those early days, Eleanor might have been disposed to demur because it could be moved one square only diagonally and was the weakest piece on the board.

  There is a story that one day Edward was playing a game with one of his knights. Suddenly he sprang from his chair, impelled by a motive he could not later explain. As he moved away, a stone from the ceiling fell on the exact spot where he had been sitting. The safety of Edward was ascribed, of course, to divine intervention. If the incident occurred at Windsor, it might easily have been the work of the uncertain chalk ridge.

  Eleanor strove to become a patroness of the arts and was willing to make personal grants, as large as forty shillings, for literary efforts such as translations from the Latin. An even more useful contribution to the cultural side of life in the country was her introduction of the fork. It has been assumed that this most useful of table articles was not known in England until a much later date, but in a list of the queen’s plate there is mention of forks of crystal and of silver, with handles of ebony or ivory. A later item in the Record Commission includes forks among the domestic articles used by the king.

  The king not only endeavored to keep pace with the cultural activities of his queen but was as amenable to household customs as the most humble of husbands. It was the rule on Easter Monday for the women in all large establishments to surround the master and hoist him, willy-nilly, in a chair and not let him down until he paid them a proper gratuity. This was popularly called “heaving.” One year seven of the queen’s high-placed young ladies took Edward in hand and “heaved” him in his chair amid much laughter and clapping of hands. The king took it with good grace and paid them the handsome sum of fourteen pounds for his release.

  3

  The histories of three of the princesses, Eleanor, Joanna, and Margaret, seem to run in a pattern. In an age when marriages, particularly in royal families, were arranged when the principals were little more than infants, these three daughters of England’s greatest king seem to have found some belated happiness. When the queen died in 1290, Eleanor, as the oldest daughter, became the most important woman of her father’s court. Here, that same year, she was to find sympathy and solace in a Frenchman of great charm, the Duke of Bar-le-Duc, a new and well-considered friend of Edward. He became a constant visitor to the court and they, Eleanor and the duke, had the opportunity of close association. In her babyhood Eleanor had been affianced to the future King Alfonso of Aragon, but they never met and destiny gathered him to his royal fathers. Three years passed and Eleanor happily married the Duke of Bar-le-Duc.

  In April 1290 the fiery-spirited, sloe-eyed Joanna of Acre married England’s most powerful peer, second to the king in importance, Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. Joanna, too, had been given in betrothal at the age of five, to Prince Hartman, son of the king of the Romans. Edward seems to have arranged future marriages for his daughters with no idea of permitting their consummation but as perhaps a help toward some political expediency of the moment. Also, it is often plain that he could not part with his dearly loved daughters. Poor Prince Hartman went skating one winter’s day. The story is that he accidentally fell into open reaches where the water was deep, and drowned.

  Gilbert de Clare was not young when he married Joanna and took her to live at his country retreat in Clerkenwell, not far from the Tower, where the king and queen were again in residence. She left for her new home with great fanfare, laden with royal gifts. Among them were forty golden cups, many more golden clasps, “twenty zones of silk, wrought and trapped with silver to give away to whom she pleased.” Hampers, coffers, baskets, and bags are listed without number. “One sumpter-horse carried her chapel apparatus, another her bed, a third her jewels, a fourth her chamber furniture, a fifth her candles! a sixth her pantry-stores and table linen, and a seventh her kitchen furniture.”

  Joanna was but twenty-three when the old Earl of Gloucester died. After being a widow a year, she secretly married a completely unknown squire in her late husband’s retinue, Ralph de Monthermer. Through this marriage he became possessed in his own right of the earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford. The fact that a royal princess had dared to marry this obscure fellow became a cause célèbre which for a time separated her from the affection of her father. It proved to be a happy marriage, however, leading ultimately to a firm friendship between the new son-in-law and Edward.

  Margaret, the fourth daughter of the king, married John of Brabant, an athletic young man, “stout, handsome, gracious and well-made,” whom she had known during her childhood. The colorful splendor of their wedding celebration—the extravagant costumes, the king and his knights attired in full armor—creates an unforgettable picture. All London seems to have joined the knights with their ladies in marching and singing through the streets of the city and suburbs while more than five hundred minstrels, fools, harpers, violinists, and trumpeters, some English, some foreign, cavorted about the palace grounds. Margaret was a merry child of fifteen years, the duke a few years older. Everything seemed conducive to a happy union. Actually the marriage proved disastrous. Margaret soon found that she was to be but one of many women in her husband’s life. In Brussels, where she eventually went to live, she was “doomed to the mortification of being perpetually surrounded with the bastard sons of her husband.”

  Of the two remaining royal princesses, Elizabeth, Edward’s youngest daughter, married John, Count of Holland, a happy if uneventful union. Mary’s life at four had been prearranged by her parents. She became a nun, veiled at the convent of Ambresbury in 1284, where the queen dowager, Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, had also taken the veil after the death of Henry III. Mary never forgot that she was a royal princess. She was seen everywhere and proved as much of a gadabout as her sisters. Life in the convent did not prohibit an active social existence outside, and she made demands regularly on the king for gifts of money and wine for her personal use. She died at fifty-four, the last survivor of the union of Edward and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile.

&nb
sp; CHAPTER VI

  The Rebirth of Parliamentary Democracy

  1

  IT was from me that he learned it!” cried Simon de Montfort when he issued from the town of Evesham with his small and tired army and found himself facing the converging forces of the then Prince Edward. The heir to the throne of England had indeed learned a great deal about generalship from this uncle who had defied the power of Henry III and had beaten the royalist troops at the earlier and spectacular battle of Lewes. And so Simon de Montfort knew that he would die on that tragic day and that his cause was lost.

  Edward had also learned much from Simon which guided him when he became king. He remembered well a certain great day when his uncle had tried a memorable experiment. On March 8, 1265, a Parliament was assembling which would later be called the Great Parliament. At that historic gathering, common men for the first time sat down with the nobility and the bishops. Simon had summoned from two to four “good and loyal men” from each city and borough to attend and take part in the deliberations. What share they had in the discussions and to what extent their views weighed in the decisions reached are not known. Called “bran-dealers, soap-boilers and clowns” by those who resented this radical step, they nonetheless sat with their betters, if not in full equality, at least to face the same problems. A precedent had been set which would persist until the model for parliamentary rule had been fixed for all time.