Few particulars are known about this epochal gathering. It is unlikely that Simon de Montfort, who was a great man, looked at those common men sitting quietly in their plain cloaks and with their flat cloth caps on their knees and saw in them the forerunners of the elected members who would have the making of all law in their hands centuries later. But if he lacked that full vision, he must have had some part of it.
As a youth Edward had been such an admirer of this uncle he was destined to overthrow and kill at Evesham that the bond between them had once threatened to separate the prince from his somewhat less than admirable father, Henry III. He knew the thoughts which filled the mind of that great leader and innovator. And this may have been why he summoned a Parliament to meet at Shrewsbury in 1282 and included among those to appear two representatives from twenty towns and boroughs. Among the noblemen summoned were eleven earls, ninety-nine barons, and nineteen other men of note. No representatives of the clergy had been instructed to appear, perhaps because the session was being held at the edge of the Marcher country and within the shadow cast by the Welsh wars.
The names of some of the common members have been kept on the record. Henry de Waleys, the mayor of Shrewsbury, was one, as were Gregory Rokesley and one Philip Cessor. It is unfortunate that nothing is known of them beyond that. Waleys had seen the king two years before in connection with a royal loan; he was, in all probability, of some wealth and consequence. Among the others there must have been many of stout character, of vision, of courage, perhaps also some sly individuals who thought only of personal gain, a few even of mean attributes, human nature being what it is. Few, if any, could read or write. All had a share of the humility which alone made life tolerable for those of low degree.
It seems certain that Edward’s move to give the commons representation was not yet a matter of settled policy with him. They were called at a moment of crisis when he felt the need of united support, their function to confer on war problems. It is a clear indication of his attitude that the men from the towns and boroughs were not summoned to take part in parliaments for a long time thereafter.
Then, after eleven years, he went back to the system of triple representation, the nobility, the clergy, and the commons. What had happened in the meantime to change his thinking? Had the vision which had come to Simon de Montfort returned to fill the mind of this able and courageous king? Or had he reached his final decision after observing the results obtained with the more restricted form of deliberative body? It is possible, of course, that the opposition of the higher orders had lessened. Whatever the reason, a Parliament met at Westminster on November 13, 1295, and included men elected to represent the commons, together with seven earls, forty-one barons, and two knights from each shire.
It was significant that the writ of summons began with a quotation from the Code of Justinian: “As the most righteous law, established by the provident circumspection of the sacred princes, exhorts and ordains that that which touches all shall be approved by all, it is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common.” Thus was a great truth laid down which was to continue as the guiding principle through the centuries while parliamentary procedure and power were being tested and corrected and finally brought to a working degree of perfection.
At this great gathering, in order to complete the representation, were the archbishops and bishops, attended (for consultation only) by their archdeacons and proctors.
This momentous gathering is generally referred to as the Model Parliament because it came so close to settling the form which parliamentary deliberations would finally assume. Edward’s plan, to have the three bodies deliberate separately, was the forerunner of the separation finally effected into two houses, the House of Lords, in which the peers and the bishops sat, and the House of Commons.
It was a model Parliament in one other respect: it helped in the selection of Westminster as the one place of meeting. There had been a tendency to wander about in previous reigns, and often the barons had been summoned to Winchester, Northampton, or Oxford. Edward, being so continuously on the wing, had fallen into the habit of holding Parliament wherever he happened to be. There were sessions at Winchester, Northampton, Shrewsbury, Acton Burnell, Bury St. Edmunds, Clipstone in Sherwood Forest, Berwick, and Salisbury. This suited the king’s convenience, but it was exasperating for the barons and bishops to be under the necessity of collecting their people and following the dusty-footed monarch all over the kingdom. The journey had to be made by those on horseback with trains of fifty or more servitors, knights, squires, valets, chirurgeons, confessors, grooms, men-at-arms, and archers. It is hard to conceive how the multitudes which constitute a parliament could be housed and fed in, say, Clipstone, where the king had a hunting lodge with the usual small houses about it, a chapel and a mill, and no towns within easy distance. Even Bury St. Edmunds, which had been a royal town in Saxon times but was still relatively small, was hard pressed by the scores of cavalcades converging on it from every direction. What scrambling there must have been to provide food for so many hearty eaters and to find sleeping quarters for them all! Sometimes the deliberations had to be held in churches, inadequate castles, and even in large barns. If the energetic Edward found himself greeted with glum faces when he stalked in to Parliament to express his royal will, it may often have been the result not of dissent with his program but of the great discomforts the members were suffering. Twenty years of this dancing to the royal tune led to a general acceptance of Westminster as the place to meet.
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The barons of England, who had forced King John to his knees and had been at odds, and sometimes at war, with Henry III all through the long reign of that exasperating monarch, were not entirely in accord with the forward-looking policies of Edward. They were inclined to hang back, to mutter their disagreement, even to adopt open measures of opposition. They were intensely jealous of their rights, and some of Edward’s wise lawmaking seemed to them to tread too heavily on the iron-shod toes of feudal privilege. Nor did they favor the bringing of the bran-dealers and soap-boilers into the halls where the laws were made.
They said so openly at a meeting of Parliament which Edward called for February 25, 1297. He was at Salisbury at the time and accordingly the session was held in that ancient town. War with France had blazed up, owing in part to some hostilities between the sailors of the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, Sandwich, Winchelsea, and Rye) and the fishermen from Normandy. There was a wily and ambitious king on the French throne, Philip IV (all through this phase of history French kings were believed in England to be wily and ambitious), and he made this a pretext to seize Gascony, which was about all that was left to England of the immense possessions Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought with her when she became the wife of Henry II. Negotiations between the two monarchs came to naught and so Edward, needing money badly, took emergency measures to raise it. There were glum and hostile faces when Parliament opened. The two glummest and most hostile were those of the fifth Earl of Norfolk, who was hereditary marshal of England, and the Earl of Hereford, who held the post of constable. When Edward announced that he planned to lead an army into Flanders to fight things out with the French king and would send another army to recover Gascony, the meeting flared into opposition.
It was the marshal, Roger Bigod, who was most outspoken. When all the sons of the great William the Marshal died without issue in the middle years of the century, the post had gone to the son of Matilda, the oldest daughter, who married Hugh Bigod. The son of this marriage died in 1270 and his nephew, Roger, succeeded to the earldom and the baton of marshal. This was the member of the nobility who now took it on himself to oppose his will to that of the king.
He seems to have been lacking in the qualities of the fourth earl, who, although devoid of subtlety and the qualities of leadership, was brave and open in all his dealings. The nephew, who now faced Edward, had a degree of pride which verged on truculence. When Edward told his marshal th
at he was to go with the army to Gascony, Bigod flatly refused.
“With you, O King,” he declared, “I will gladly go. As belongs to me by my hereditary right, I will go in the front of the host before your face.”
Edward regarded the set expression of the marshal and the stiffness of his back and no doubt said to himself: “So! Now what have we here?”
Restraining himself from the peremptory response he would ordinarily have made, the king said, “But without me, you will of course go with the rest.”
“I am not bound to go,” asserted Bigod. “And go, I will not!”
This was too much for the hot Plantagenet temper which Edward had been holding in check. From his great height he looked down on the somewhat squatty figure of the marshal and his eyes began to blaze.
“By God, Sir Earl!” he cried. “You shall go or hang!”
“By God, Sir King!” declared the marshal. “I will neither go nor hang!”
This story is told because of the light it throws on certain phases of the character of the king. With any other of the Plantagenets, this episode would have exploded into violence at this point. Edward was in a white-hot rage but he was able, nonetheless, to handle the situation in a reasonable way. In the first place, he knew he was in no position to quarrel with the baronage, having the French war on his hands and rebellion flaring around his home frontiers. In addition, he knew himself on dangerous ground, having adopted means of raising money which broke the stipulations of the Great Charter.
The result was that Roger Bigod neither went to Gascony nor hanged. In concert with the constable and a number of other prominent barons he got together a party of fifteen hundred men who stood under arms until the issue was settled. This was close to open rebellion. Edward, however, did not fly into the rage which was so common to his grandfather, John of infamous memory, or John’s father, Henry II. Instead he excused the two hereditary officers from performing the duties of their respective posts and appointed temporary substitutes.
At this point Edward made it clear that he had an appreciation of the need to retain the affection of his subjects. He went about it, moreover, with what would be called today a high degree of showmanship. On a platform in front of Westminster Hall he made a public appearance with his son and heir on one side of him and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the other. He proceeded to make an address aimed directly at the hearts of the people.
He had made mistakes, he acknowledged, and he begged his people to forgive him for whatever had been amiss. With tears in his eyes he went on to speak of the belligerence of the French king and what it meant. “I am going to meet danger on your behalf,” he declared, “and I pray you, should I return, receive me as you do now, and I will give you back all that has been taken from you.” He paused dramatically. “And if I do not return, crown my son as your king.”
Archbishop Winchelsey, who had been bitterly debating with the king on what the clergy should pay toward the war, broke into tears at this stage. The young prince wept also, and this mood communicated itself to the great mass of people who had assembled to listen. With one accord the listeners raised their hands high in the air as proof of their complete loyalty.
The barons were not as easily convinced. As soon as Edward had crossed the Channel they drew up a list of grievances and under the leadership of Bigod and Bohun presented it to Prince Edward (then thirteen years of age), who had been appointed regent in his father’s absence. It was demanded of the prince that he agree on behalf of his father to rescind every financial exaction to which they objected, including the imposition of forty shillings on wool, and to confirm the terms of the Great Charter and the Forest Charter. The prince, faced with a baronage in arms, agreed to the stipulations and signed in his father’s name.
The document was then sent to Edward at Ghent, where his army was stationed. Instead of flying into a fury as his high-tempered forebears would have done, he gave the matter due consideration. It was clear to him, of course, that to assent to these demands would be to establish a new conception of taxation; that never again would a king of England be able legally to impose a tax without the consent of Parliament. Without undue delay he signed the document and returned it to England.
The personal pique of Roger Bigod had been the starting point of all of this, but back of his open disobedience had been the determination of the baronage to prevent kings from taxing them at will. A conclusion of the utmost importance had been reached.
But the king did not forget. When the French war was over, having proven as inconclusive as most wars, the king dealt with his difficult marshal. Bigod was deeply in debt and, as he had no children, he was persuaded to execute a will making the king his heir, in return for a settlement of the debts. That done, he found himself relieved of his post of marshal of England. He died, peacefully and in his own bed, a few years later. His landholdings were distributed among the king’s children. The name of Bigod ceased to be included among the great families of England.
CHAPTER VII
The Death of Queen Eleanor
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TROUBLE was brewing in Scotland over the succession to the throne, and Edward was watching the progress of events with a shrewd eye, having a deep interest, as will be explained later. He had decided to have a few days’ hunting in Sherwood Forest (a certain youth who would become known later as Robin Hood was thereabouts but not yet a thorn in the flesh of sheriffs) and he issued summonses for a meeting of Parliament later at Clipstone. The queen, who was often called Eleanor the Faithful, had gone north with him, but when he rode on to Clipstone she remained behind at Harby, a small village in Nottinghamshire, as a guest in the house of a gentleman of the court named Weston. She was seized almost immediately with a lingering fever. Master Leopardo, the queen’s physician, did not consider it serious at first but, becoming alarmed finally, he sent hastily to Lincoln for certain medicines, including a special syrup. The report sent to the king was sufficiently alarming to bring him hurrying to her bedside. He left the Scottish situation still simmering and dismissed Parliament after no more than seven days of deliberation. When he reached Harby it was apparent that his beloved wife had not much longer to live. She died on November 28, in her forty-seventh year.
The king was so stricken with grief that he remained in seclusion for two days, eating and drinking little and turning a white and drawn face to such of his advisers as found it necessary to interrupt his vigil. He wrote, or dictated, a few notes, for one is still in existence addressed to the Abbot of Cluny, in which he says, “We cannot cease to love our consort, now that she is dead, whom we loved so dearly when alive.” The body in the meantime was placed in a coffin filled with aromatic spices, and Edward emerged from his solitary mourning to accompany the cortege to Lincoln. The bier rested that first night at the Priory of St. Catherine close to that city, and it was probably then that the determination became fixed in the king’s mind to express his grief in a memorable manner.
He recalled no doubt that twenty years before the coffin of Louis IX of France, known in history as Saint Louis, had been carried on the shoulders of his devoted followers from Paris to the burying grounds at St. Denis, the bearers being relieved at intervals so that all who so desired could have a share of the burden. Wherever the procession stopped, a cross forty feet high had been set up. This custom was to be followed in France on at least one other occasion, when the great French constable, Bertrand du Guesclin, died in 1380 before Châteauneuf-Randon in Languedoc. His coffin was carried all the way to Paris. So universal was the desire to honor that valiant warrior that everywhere men clamored for a chance to bear a share—knights, citizens, and field hands alike. Across the face of France went that amazing procession, and it was recorded that not one bearer but wept as he bore the weight on a bowed shoulder.
Feeling that his once beautiful and always loving consort was worthy of special remembrance, Edward decided to erect a stone cross of surpassing beauty at every place where her body rested for a night.
Because she had been so well loved by the people of England, he decided also that the work must be entrusted to native hands; a wise decision, for the work of the stone carvers of England could not be surpassed.
The first of the Eleanor Crosses was set up on Swine Green opposite the priory in Lincoln. In addition to the cross, which was the work of one Richard de Stow, master mason, a tomb was built in the Angel Choir in Lincoln Cathedral to contain the viscera of the queen. The second cross was on St. Peter’s Hill near the entrance to the town of Grantham. The third was at Stamford. The fourth was at Geddington, described as “one of the sweetest and quietest villages in England.” This one differed from the others in that the platform for the cross was raised over a bubbling spring.
The fifth was at Hardingstone, about a mile from Northampton, the sixth at Stratford, the seventh at Dunstable where Icknield Way crossed Watling Street, the eighth at St. Albans. The ninth was at Waltham and the tenth at Cheapside in the outskirts of London. The eleventh, and last, was at the village called Cheringe then but now known as Charing. It was the most elaborate and stately of all.
This sorrowful procession had lasted from December 4 until December 14. All the noblemen and the bishops who had attended the Parliament at Clipstone were in the mourning train.
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