A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

by Marc Morris

  It as at this point, famously, that legend has Eleanor of Castile intervening to save her stricken husband; in one version of events she proves her love (and mettle) by sucking the poison from his wound. Sadly, this is almost certainly a retrospective romanticisation. It was first reported half a century later by an Italian writer, and even he was careful to preface his account with the medieval chronicler’s time-honoured disclaimer ‘they say that …’. Other accounts of the scene have Eleanor being led away weeping by John de Vescy, and suggest that it was another of Edward’s close friends, Otto de Grandson, who attempted the sucking operation.92

  Whatever the case, there was nothing at all fanciful about the degree to which Edward’s life had been placed in peril. The day after the assault he drew up his will in anticipation of the worst, and for a time it seemed that the worst would happen. The greatest danger from such injuries was that they would turn gangrenous, and infection would spread to the rest of the body, slowly killing the victim. This apparently started to happen to Edward’s wound, and it seems he was saved only by having the blackened flesh around it cut away. Such a procedure was in itself highly risky – the patient in this instance would have been well aware that, in similar circumstances, a careless surgeon had hastened the demise of his great-uncle Richard. It is arresting to think that, had he not had ready access to the skilled doctors of Acre, Edward would have quite likely died there and then, and the future history of the British Isles, if not of the Middle East, might have been profoundly different.93

  Although his enemy refused to die, Baybars had otherwise achieved his objective. Edward’s injury meant that the English crusade had now definitely reached its end. In truth this was a conclusion that had been apparent ever since the sealing of the truce. Edmund had left for home the following month, and later in the summer other English commanders began to follow suit. Their leader delayed a little while longer. Prevailing headwinds in the eastern Mediterranean meant that the journey home usually took twice as long as the outward voyage – anything up to eight weeks – and Edward would have needed to convalesce for as long as possible before subjecting himself to such an ordeal. Eleanor, too, having recently given birth to a baby daughter, Joan, would have been in no immediate hurry to leave.

  As a summer turned to autumn, however, and a seasonal easterly wind began to blow, the couple finally bade farewell to the Holy Land. In late September they sailed from Acre, and by the start of November they were back in Sicily, where they were again welcomed by Charles of Anjou. Unable to travel quickly because of his wound, and doubtless already starting to enjoy the celebrity status conferred by his miraculous survival, Edward spent Christmas in Charles’s company on the Italian mainland. He was still there early in the new year when messengers arrived from England, and hailed him as their king.94

  The Return of the King

  Henry III had suffered several bouts of ill health in the two years since the departure of his sons, and in consequence had rarely ventured far beyond his palace at Westminster. It was there, in the early days of November, that his final illness took hold. Confined to his chamber for almost a fortnight, he died in the evening of Wednesday 16 November 1272. He was sixty-five years old, and had reigned for fifty-six years. Since his death was not sudden, we may suppose with some confidence that his beloved wife, Queen Eleanor, was with him at the end.1

  The funeral took place the following Sunday in Westminster Abbey, the building upon which Henry had lavished so much money and attention for over a quarter of a century. He had long intended to be buried in the church, and had latterly decided that his final resting place should be the tomb once occupied by Edward the Confessor and recently left vacant by the saint’s translation. In contrast to the rather inglorious scenes that had marred that occasion, Henry’s funeral passed without a hitch. All the leading magnates of the realm were present. The ceremony was magnificent. The king’s body, carried on an open bier, was dressed in robes of red samite, decorated with gold embroidery and precious stones. ‘He shone more gloriously in death than he did in life,’ said one perceptive chronicler.2

  Edward had known that his father was ill. In the spring of 1271 letters had been sent after him by the council in England, urging him to return home. It is highly unlikely, however, that this news reached him before his arrival in the Holy Land, and in due course he would have heard of Henry’s recovery. When, therefore, he landed in Sicily on his return journey, Edward had every reason for hoping to see his father again, and consequently it came as a galling blow in January when he received the news of Henry’s death. According to one chronicler, he wept for his irreplaceable loss, and in a letter written immediately afterwards Edward himself spoke of his ‘bitter sadness’.3 Despite the disagreements that had occasionally arisen between them, and the marked difference in their tastes and abilities, father and son had been very close, and the bond between them had been very strong. For all his faults as a king, Henry had been a doting and affectionate parent. Indeed, blind affection for his family was one of the main factors that had compromised his kingship.

  While Edward’s grief is therefore not surprising, his reaction to his father’s death was, in one respect, highly unusual. A normal response would have been to drop everything and hurry in the direction of Westminster Abbey. By long tradition, the abbey was England’s coronation church: every king since the Norman Conquest, beginning with the Conqueror himself, had been crowned there. The argument for haste was simple: convention also decreed that it was the coronation that made a man a king. Indeed, no king of England had ever been regarded as such until he had gone through with the ceremony. The all-time record for reaching Westminster was set in 1100 by Henry I, who was crowned just three days after the death of his brother, William II. But all would-be kings tended to spur their horses that bit harder when news reached them that the position had become vacant.4

  Until 1272, that is. When Henry III died this ancient tradition was broken. The decision to break it was evidently deliberate and premeditated, and arose as a direct consequence of Edward’s decision to go on crusade. When a king died, his authority died with him. Once Henry III was dead, all government in his name ceased. It would clearly have been intolerable for England to have remained without royal government until Edward’s return (or, for that matter, to assume that he would be returning). Consequently, the matter was decided (although there is no record of it) before the crusaders’ departure. Edward would not have to wait for his coronation; his reign would commence immediately after his father’s death.

  For this is exactly what happened. The day after Henry’s death, Edward’s peace was proclaimed in Westminster Hall. Three days later, in the course of the funeral in Westminster Abbey, the assembled magnates swore allegiance to Edward as their new king. They did this, as they explained in a letter to Edward, before his father’s tomb had been sealed: an interesting point of detail that shows they were already thinking in terms that future generations would reduce to the famous maxim, ‘the king is dead; long live the king’.5

  Similarly, Edward, from the moment he received this letter, understood that his world had changed. He had no crown to wear, nor for that matter any of the other trappings of kingship. Indeed, in his response to the news from England, Edward had to apologise for using Charles of Anjou’s seal to authenticate his letters. But those letters were his first royal act, and began with the words ‘Edward, by the grace of God, king of England’.6

  For the first time, therefore, there was no overriding need for haste. There could be no challenge to Edward’s accession. Not only had his right been formally accepted by the great men of the realm at Westminster. Careful forethought had also ensured that the instruments of royal power were already in his hands. A few months before his son’s departure, Henry III had taken the remarkable step of transferring all the royal castles and counties in England to keepers of Edward’s choosing. As a consequence Edward’s grip on England was quite secure.7

  Nevertheless, a kingdom c
ould not cope without its king forever, especially when it had suffered so many other misfortunes. Henry III was only the leading loss of the last two years. While Edward had cheated death in the Holy Land, the family he left behind had not been so lucky. His eldest son, John, had not survived the summer of 1271, dying soon after his fifth birthday. More serious in the short term, the committee of five men that Edward had left to superintend his affairs had been reduced to three, the chief casualty being its senior member, Richard of Cornwall. Having shouldered much of the burden of government during his brother’s incapacity in 1271, Richard himself had suffered a stroke at the end of the year, and had died the following spring. As a consequence, although Edward’s grip on the provinces was secure, the direction of his affairs at the centre was altogether less robust. In their letter to Edward the remaining regents urged him to make haste, and Edward, in response, promised to hurry.8

  While he was on the Continent, however, it made sense to sort out Continental business, and the first item on his agenda was another fatality. In this case, death was not only an occasion for grief on Edward’s part, but also for anger. His father, his uncle and his son had at least died of natural causes. His cousin, Henry of Almain, had been murdered.

  It had happened in the spring of 1271, soon after Edward had sent Henry from his side in the course of their outward voyage. Henry’s mission, as we have seen, was to superintend affairs in Gascony and, eventually, in England – an additional precaution that was probably deemed necessary in light of the new and uncertain conditions arising from the death of Louis IX and the early return of the French crusaders.9 It is also likely, however, that part of his remit was to deal with the sons of Simon de Montfort, Simon and Guy, last seen fleeing from England in the early months of 1266. In the time since their escape the two brothers had done remarkably well for themselves, carving out new careers in the service of none other than Charles of Anjou, who had found their warlike qualities useful and rewarded them well as a result. Guy, for example, had been appointed as governor of Tuscany, where he had also received generous grants of land, and married a rich heiress.

  When, therefore, Edward in due course had found himself obliged to rely on Charles’s generosity, and his crusading plans to some extent dependent upon his host’s goodwill, the case for a rapprochement with the Montforts had become quite compelling. Later, as king, Edward claimed that the reason he had sent Henry of Almain north was to effect a reconciliation on his behalf. Henry seemed well suited for the task: he was, like Edward himself, a cousin to the two brothers.

  Events, however, had taken a very different turn when the two parties met in Viterbo, not far from Rome, just a few weeks later. Guy de Montfort had come there to meet his lord, Charles of Anjou, who was also travelling with the French court. But when he learned that Henry was also present in the city, Guy sought him out and, finding his cousin hearing mass in the church of St Silvester, stabbed him to death. It was an unpremeditated act of retribution: a hot-blooded response to the cold-blooded killing of his father and brother at Evesham six years before. The victim, unlike the murderer, had not been present at the battle; Henry was simply a convenient royalist target for Guy’s terrible wrath. ‘I have taken my vengeance,’ he said, as he left his cousin dying in the church, before returning to drag the body out into the street, where it received the same mutilation that had been inflicted on his father’s corpse.

  Two years on, and it was Edward who burned with a desire for revenge. The murder had scandalised all of Europe, and both Montforts had once again become fugitives from justice. Simon, the older brother, who was apparently complicit in the murder, had himself died in 1271 (‘like Cain, cursed by God,’ said one English chronicler). Guy, on the other hand, was still at large in Italy, being sheltered by the powerful family of his wife. As Edward set out northwards at the start of 1273, his first thoughts were of laying hands on the killer. Attempts to muster local support for a military campaign, however, came to nothing: the citizens of central Italy were understandably keener that a negotiated solution be found. Edward therefore looked to the help of the papacy, now fully functional once again after the recent election of Gregory X. The new pope was Edward’s friend – he had accompanied Cardinal Ottobuono to England, and preceded the crusaders to Acre – and he received the new king in the city of Orvieto with great ceremony. But in the course of a stay that lasted over two months, nothing could be done to induce Guy’s surrender. Eventually, Edward realised he would have to depart empty handed, and had to content himself with the knowledge that his intended quarry had at least been excommunicated. He would have been less pleased with the later intelligence that the sentence had been lifted and, later still, to learn that Guy had regained his liberty after a number of years in prison. It would, however, surely have grati fied him to know that the notoriety of his cousin’s killer would be everlasting. At the time of Almain’s murder, Dante Alighieri was only a small boy living in Florence. But when he later came to write his Divine Comedy, he condemned Guy de Montfort to the seventh circle of Hell, steeped to the neck in a river of boiling blood.10

  Although he had tarried for many weeks in his quest for justice, Edward left Italy in no great hurry. All along his route crowds flocked to see him, and every city through which he passed – Bologna, Parma and Milan being the major ones – feted him as a hero. As a result, when he eventually crossed the Alps in early June, he encountered a delegation of bishops and nobles from England, who had been expecting to meet their new king in Paris and eventually gone to seek him out. There was clearly considerable anxiety to have Edward back home. The men who met him would have been able to convey some positive news – a parliament had been held in his absence, and the knights and burgesses present had sworn their allegiance – but they would also have brought less glad tidings: magnates feuding with each other, risings in distant parts of the country, and a general increase in lawlessness. The absence of a king was keenly felt.11

  By this stage, however, Edward had already decided that his first priority lay in a different direction. Now that his father was dead, he was not only king of England, he was also – at last! – duke of Aquitaine. Almost twenty years on from his first visit, Edward finally had the title and authority to deal decisively with his French dominions, which were at least as needful of his attention as England, and arguably more so. In any case, it made good sense to attend to them while he was this side of the Channel. Gascony, therefore, was to be Edward’s next stop; England would have to wait a little longer.12

  The first and most crucial matter to attend to in respect of Gascony was its relationship with the neighbouring kingdom of France. Accordingly, having left Eleanor (who was again pregnant) to go straight on to the duchy, Edward headed north to Paris, where towards the end of July he was welcomed by the new French king, Philip III. Some fourteen years earlier their late fathers had met in the same city and agreed a historic peace: a deal by which, as we have seen, Henry III had surrendered his ancestral claims to Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou in return for recognition of his right to hold Gascony from Louis IX. On that occasion, as part of the same agreement, Henry had done homage to Louis. Which is to say, both men had participated in an ancient ritual, practised for centuries in every corner of Europe, by which one individual acknowledged that he or she was in some way subservient to another. On that day – 4 December 1259 – Henry had knelt before Louis, placed his hands within Louis’s hands, and declared that, as far as Gascony was concerned, he was Louis’s man.13

  But what precisely did this mean? Homage could signify as little or as much as either party wanted it to. Neither Henry nor Louis seems to have felt that they had done anything especially novel; both took it as self-evident that the king of France was, or at least ought to be, the overlord of the duke of Gascony.14 And yet, as the treaty they drew up makes manifestly clear, neither had much clue as to what this might entail in practice. When, for example, having promised to do homage to Louis, Henry had tried to specify what ser
vices he would render as a result, words had failed him. ‘We will do appropriate services,’ he had declared vaguely, ‘until it be found what services are due for these things.’ ‘Then we shall be bound to do them,’ he had added, helpfully, ‘just as they have been found.’

  Such was the general tenor of the Treaty of Paris – well-intentioned but mired for the most part in clauses that were hopelessly imprecise or that looked to some later date for their resolution. The latter was especially true of the treaty’s opening section, which endeavoured to answer perhaps the most fundamental question of all: what, territorially speaking, was Gascony? For more than a century its border with France had been debated with swords rather than words. While it was noble of Henry and Louis to have preferred to pick up their pens, it meant that clause after clause began with a hesitant ‘if’. Possession of one disputable district after another was declared to be contingent upon the future decision of this court, the outcome of that inquiry, or (in one particular case) whether the owners in 1259 ended up having children or not.15