The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  When the weary knights from Hainaut came galloping into Avignon, the streets were crowded with priests afoot and on muleback, there were three albs in every attic, and the church bells were competing with the whine of saws and the screech of winches. Architects and master masons and carpenters were trailing dust through the anterooms of the Pope while clerical deputations sat unnoticed and bit their fingernails in impatience.

  Pope John was a tiny man, with hunched shoulders which made him look deformed. He had been born in Cahors, the son of a poor cobbler, and he was still so partial to his old home that seven out of the fifteen cardinals he appointed came from that somewhat insignificant city; an extraordinary thing, surely, for a pope to do. He proceeded now to do something which also seems extraordinary. Instead of letting the Flemish knights wait their turn outside, a matter perhaps of months, he had them in at once. He listened to what they had to tell him, nodded his head, and said “Yes.”

  3

  The Scots had been feeling their oats since Bannockburn. Rome had at last recognized Robert the Bruce as king of the country and there was peace with England, a nominal kind of peace, since the people on both sides of the border paid little attention to it. The succession to the throne had been well established by the arrival of a son who was given the name of David. This Scottish prince was a fine, handsome lad with strong limbs and a will and a fierce temper of his own; all the qualities, in fact, which are looked for in candidates for thrones.

  Immediately after the deposition of Edward II, old Robert the Bruce decided it would be a good thing to teach the new king a lesson. He sent his two eager warriors, the Black Douglas and Randolph, Earl of Moray, down into Northumberland to stir up the Sassenach. Things had indeed changed for the Scots. The whole troop was mounted, even the poorest clansman having some sorry sort of Galloway nag of his own. This was the kind of warfare in which they excelled. They had no kitchens, no food supplies, no lumbering wagons to hamper their movements. Each horseman had his bag of oatmeal and, at the worst, he could sustain himself for a long time on that, cooking it on a metal plate. When luck favored them and they picked up English cattle, they would roast or boil the animals in their skins and each man would then carry a haunch over his shoulder. They came and went like the wind and they left behind them the scent of burning homesteads and the wailing of new-made widows and the weeping of children.

  The English decided to put a stop to this kind of raiding. A large army was raised, nearly sixty thousand men, and Sir John of Hainaut was brought back with a body of trained Flemish cavalry to help. The young king, eager to win his spurs, rode to Durham and assumed command; a nominal command, since Sir John was there to advise him and all the best English generals, none of whom was very good. It might have seemed to a shrewd observer that the powers behind the throne, the ambitious queen and her constant attendant Mortimer, were content to keep the prince busy at something, even to place him at a disadvantage. They did not want him to emerge victorious from the war like his grandfather and that prince of glowing memory, Richard Coeur-de-Lion. It was farthest from their thoughts to supply the people with a young hero, to the end that they, Isabella and her gentle Mortimer, would be shoved into the background.

  He had no chance to win against the Scots. Twenty thousand strong, the horsemen of Douglas and Randolph were never where the English expected to find them. Finally the prince got sound information and caught up with them. He located them in such a strong position back of the Wear River that he dared not attempt a crossing in front of them. After a long wait, hoping the Scots would draw back like chivalrous knights and invite them to come over and fight, the English army waded off through the peat bogs and the marshes to cross at a ford higher up the river. The Scots sidestepped nimbly and were found in a still stronger position at Stanhope Park. By this time the English troops were in a bad way. They had no food and there was no decent forage for their mounts. The great Flanders horses became hopelessly mired whenever they attempted to move. Through it all a persistent and dismal rain continued to fall.

  To cap the English misfortunes, the Black Douglas played one of his most daring tricks on the young king. In the middle of night he rode into the English camp with a small body of horsemen, calling “St. George! St. George!” to deceive the sentries. Three hundred Englishmen were killed before the camp stirred to action. The Black Douglas, whose rashness knew no bounds, found the royal tent and cut his way in through the canvas. Edward wakened to see a tall, grim figure beside his couch. There was an exultant gleam in the dark Douglas eye, and his drawn claymore might have put an early end to the reign of the third Edward if the chaplain had not thrown himself between them, dying to save his royal master. Edward escaped under the canvas of the tent and, as the camp was now fully aroused, the daring Scots took to horse and dashed off into the night, changing their cries to a triumphant “A Douglas! A Douglas!”

  “A little bloodletting,” said the Black Douglas carelessly when he reached his own camp and was questioned by Randolph, his partner in command.

  This was the only bloodletting of the campaign, for the Scots withdrew immediately after and retired to their side of the border.

  Edward, humiliated to the point of tears, took his army back to Durham and then to York. His first campaign had been a failure. He had learned some lessons, however, which would stand him in good stead when later he would face the French on the battlefield of Crécy. Successful war was not a matter of set procedure like a tournament. Two well-equipped armies did not march out as though by appointment to a fair and level field and there fight it out in bloodthirsty comfort. Instead it was a dirty, tricky business, a series of feints and stratagems and efforts to totally mislead the other army. He had seen the Flemish cavalry of John of Hainaut struggling in the mud. He had seen the Scots come and go like will-o’-the-wisps, and he had been misled and tricked and made a mockery of; and he realized, as his grandfather Edward I had after the royal defeat at Lewes, that his whole conception of war must be changed. It was a good thing for England that his ideas had altered completely when the time came to fight at Crécy.

  In the meantime it was decided to make peace with the Scots and have an end to all this bootless border marauding. A Parliament was called at Lincoln to open negotiations. The Florentine bankers, the Bardi, who were now well established in London and had taken over the financial activities once carried on by the unfortunate Templars, agreed to loan the money needed. Sir John and his mercenaries were paid off with a lump sum of fourteen thousand pounds and sent home to Flanders. Edward’s first little war was over.

  4

  The future Queen of England, all a-flutter as a prospective bride should be, was married at her Flemish home to Edward by procuration. The name of the man who served as proxy for the young king has not been recorded, but of course it was all a matter of legal form. The foolish practice of putting the bride into bed and then admitting the proxy under the covers (with a roomful of witnesses, of course) just long enough for him to touch his bare foot to hers would come into use much later in history. The ceremony, such as it was, served as a legal tie and the bride set out forthwith for England. Her clothes were as wonderful as might have been expected, considering that she came from the land where all the finest textiles were made. Her train was an imposing one. She was escorted by her uncle, Sir John, and among her followers was a youth named Sir Wantelet de Mauny, who was her official carver. It will be well to keep this young man in mind. Under the anglicized name of Sir Walter de Manny, he was to prove himself one of the greatest English fighting men in the Hundred Years’ War.

  She had been prepared for a rather barren welcome because her young husband was still in the north over the Scottish troubles and both the queen and her devoted Mortimer had also ridden to York to have a hand in the negotiations. On December 23, 1327, she reached London, where a rousing reception was accorded her. The citizens of London seemed to be incurably sentimental where beautiful foreign queens were concerned, and the flaxen-
haired Philippa was as wildly acclaimed as Isabella had been. The lord mayor presented her with a service of plate worth three hundred pounds. Leaving at once, escorted by the constable of England, John Bohun, Earl of Hereford, the bridal party made slow progress over snowbound roads. It was not until January 24 that Philippa faced her bridegroom before the altar at York Minster with William de Melton, Archbishop of York, performing the ceremony. Few royal brides were as lovely as Philippa. Edward had grown taller in the interval of their separation and seemed more handsome than ever in her eyes, and so she was also a happy bride. He had passed his fifteenth year and she was a year younger, but no one saw anything amiss in this, for it was an age of early marriages and, unfortunately, of early deaths. Such, however, was not to be the fate of this triply blessed pair. Philippa would live in wedlock with Edward forty-one years and would present her illustrious Plantagenet mate with twelve children, eight of whom would survive her.

  She was the most poorly endowed queen ever wed to English king, for Isabella had swept the royal cupboard bare. The queen mother had, of course, been in possession of the dower lands which were reserved for each queen during the lifetime of the king, but she was refusing to relinquish them. The young king, on that account, was put to the necessity of making a promissory arrangement, that lands to yield an income of fifteen thousand pounds a year would be put in Philippa’s hands, including Queenborough on the Thames. Here, on the Isle of Sheppey, Edward would proceed to build his bride a very special palace, one so handsome and elaborate, in fact, that it took nearly forty years to finish.

  The ceremony might have seemed lacking in splendor had it not been for the presence of one hundred noblemen from Scotland who had come to take part in the negotiations for a permanent peace between the two countries. Ordinarily the purses of the gentry of Caledonia were as flat and bare as the moors of that fierce and wild land, but for this occasion they had managed to create a magnificent impression. Their horses were elaborately accoutered and the knights themselves, tawny of hair, gray of eye, and rugged of feature, looked handsome in their homespun doublets looped with the semi-precious stones mined from their granite hills. Certainly, with their heavy claymores at their belts, they seemed a formidable lot, as indeed they were.

  Edward would have liked nothing better than to take his radiant young wife over his saddle and disappear with her like the lost bride of Netherby. But this was impossible. The terms of the peace had to be worked out, and this was to prove a far from easy task. There was a determined glint in the eyes of the Scots and a reminder of Bannockburn in the proud set of their backs. It was clear they were going to have peace on their own terms. The treaty finally evolved was nothing short of a surrender of all the claims and pretensions of the English kings. They gave up for all time the claim to a feudal overlordship of Scotland and agreed to restore at once the thirty-five skins of parchment known as the Ragman Rolls, which carried the signatures of the noblemen who had acknowledged the demands of Edward I. All Scottish heirlooms were to be restored, including the Stone of Scone, the royal regalia, and the piece of the cross of Christ called the Black Rood.

  For their part, the Scots agreed to a marriage between Prince David, the heir to the throne, and Princess Joan, the second daughter of Edward II. Joan was seven years old and David was five, but it was arranged that the princess would be turned over at once to a board of Scottish commissioners so that she could be raised in the royal household. It was conceded also that the estates in Scotland belonging to Englishmen, which had been confiscated during the wars, were to be restored and that King Robert would pay an indemnity to England of twenty thousand pounds in three annual installments.

  Viewed in the light of time, it seems to have been reasonable enough. But the people of England, who had come to regard Scotland as a tributary country, were bitterly resentful. They blamed it on Isabella and Mortimer, believing them to have forced the treaty through Parliament, which had met at York to pass on the terms. It was whispered throughout the country, and universally believed, that the queen put the first installment of the indemnity in her own pocket and that not so much as a Scottish groat (worth no more than threepence at the time) ever reached the treasury at Westminster.

  The terms were fulfilled save the one covering the return of the Stone of Scone. When an effort was made to remove it from the abbey, all London rose in wrath to prevent the surrender. The scales had fallen at last from aldermanic eyes, and for the first time the once beloved Isabella was called on the streets “the Frenchwoman.” When the apprentices, with cudgels on shoulder, surrounded the abbey, they shouted, “Death to Mortimer!” and even “Down with the queen!” The Stone was left under the coronation chair in spite of the treaty.

  The marriage of the young princess, who became known in Scotland as Joan Makepeace, was proceeded with at once. The English court moved north to Berwick in great splendor for the event. Isabella was accompanied by her son, Prince John, her other daughter, Eleanor, and a great train of the nobility. Mortimer stole the show with a train which included one hundred and eighty knights in glittering armor and with gold spurs on their heels. People asked if any of the indemnity money had gone into the rich apparel of the knights, and a rhyme was repeated by the Scottish spectators which ran as follows:

  Longbeards, heartless,

  Gay coats, graceless,

  Painted hoods, witless,

  Maketh England thriftless.

  This confirmed the people of England in their newly aroused contempt for the queen and her paramour. Isabella was said to be a heartless mother for sending her little daughter into exile in the barbarous and uncouth land of the Scots.

  There was another flaw. The King of England and his bride were not present when the marriage took place between the two infants. Edward had taken Philippa to the royal castle of Woodstock and refused to return for the ceremony. Under the bright gold of his hair the young king had a long head. He was keeping himself clear of any blame for the unpopular peace treaty. The country seems to have been willing to absolve him, believing that the fault lay with Isabella and Mortimer.

  CHAPTER II

  Mother and Son

  1

  AT this stage in English history a complete lack of evidence is encountered on a point of the first importance, the relationship between the boy king and his mother. Isabella was running things with an imperious hand and Edward was standing to one side and neither doing nor saying anything to indicate his state of mind. He appeared on the surface to have acquiesced in everything she did until the very last moment, when he stepped in and put an abrupt end to it. It is even suggested in some histories that he did not learn of his mother’s adulterous conduct with Mortimer until he went to France after his marriage to swear fealty to the French king. This is nothing short of absurd. Only a cretin could have been unaware of it in Edward’s place. And this young king, who was to become the most ambitious and one of the ablest of English kings, was a boy of strong character and rare gifts.

  It is not hard to understand the course taken by Isabella which was to result in her ultimate downfall. She was unable to submerge Isabella the woman in Isabella the queen, and the faults of the woman undid the queen. In the telling of the story there seems to be a tendency to underestimate the position she won for herself in England after the fall of Edward II, or at least no desire to measure the full extent of her rise. A country thoroughly weary of the rule of an oafish king and bitterly antagonistic to his greedy favorites suddenly saw his estranged queen, the beautiful, captivating, and diverting consort he had treated so badly, emerge with a small army of volunteers and make a successful landing on the eastern coast. The nobility flocked to her, the common people rallied to her banner, the cities were a unit in lending her support. Whether acting on her own judgment or accepting sound advice from those about her, she handled her campaign so well that Edward was captured without striking a blow and the Despensers were taken and executed. A tendency to believe that the country was shocked by her summ
ary treatment of the two favorites is another absurdity. This was a cruel age and the Despensers were so universally hated that anything short of the elder swinging on the gallows in his armor and the younger dying slowly under the knives of the executioners would not have satisfied. That the queen seized the power of a regent from the council of indecisive and unready men selected by Parliament did not seem to disturb the public; no one had much faith in any of the members of that inept and spineless board. The abdication of Edward was the next step, and to the people it was completely logical and acceptable.

  At this point Isabella was in a position to turn the whole tide of history in her favor. Blanche of Castile had never enjoyed the personal popularity that Isabella had won. She, Blanche, was made regent in her husband’s will and her skillful administration during her son’s minority was not of the showy variety. But now the fair Isabella who had done everything spectacularly well began to do everything spectacularly wrong.

  If she had been completely her father’s daughter she would have succeeded in submerging the woman in the queen. Philip the Fair, that silent and incredible despot, never allowed personal feelings (it is sometimes doubted that he had any) to sway him one inch from his course. Isabella seems to have been willing enough to do anything the Horn-owl of France would have done under the same circumstances, but she lacked the will and the desire to subordinate the woman in her.