by Dan Jones
Yet with the realm seemingly on the brink of chaos, Edward left for the Continent. It was an extraordinarily bold move, but he was not prepared to wait at home while Gascony slipped from his grasp. He sailed for Flanders to begin the northern part of his French invasion on 24 August 1297.
His campaign, long anticipated, turned out to be a futile mess. Despite repeated promises, some of his expensive allies proved less than willing to fight. The king of Germany failed to send help, and Edward’s sailors from East Anglia and the Cinque Ports proved happier to fight among themselves than to fight the enemy. Those Flemish allies who did play a part had been defeated by Philip IV at the battle of Veurne the week before Edward arrived. Soon after arriving on the Continent, Edward was pinned down in Ghent, where there were riots against his leadership. Not long after that, word came from the east that the king of Germany was abandoning the cause altogether.
The coalition collapsed around Edward’s ears, with all the speed if not quite the same drama as the unravelling of John’s northern alliance at Bouvines more than eight decades before. It was expedient as the autumn set in to sue for peace. A truce was announced in October and cemented with an agreement for a two-year suspension of hostilities at the end of January 1298.
The peace with France might have heralded a much-needed period of stability and recovery from the demands of war. But once again, events in Scotland intervened. While Edward was overseas a rebellion had broken out against the earl of Surrey’s Berwick administration. On 11 September 1297 a rebel Scottish army had routed forces under Surrey’s command at Stirling Bridge – a brilliantly chosen battle-site about 100 miles north of Berwick, at a crossing of the river Forth.
Surrey’s leadership had been panicked, lazy and ineffectual. And at Stirling Bridge he and his men were undone by an army led by William Wallace, a common robber and brigand, but a genuine popular hero who had dismissed English negotiators before the battle with the words: ‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace, but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves and to free our kingdom.’
* * *
Wallace’s arrival at the head of the Scottish rebellion in 1297 briefly united the kingdom of Scotland and the kingdom of England. In the north, Wallace was knighted by his countrymen and declared sole guardian of Scotland in the absence of John Balliol, led a movement dedicated to fighting to the death for the cause of reclaiming Scottish kingship from the southern usurpers. South of the border, in York, Edward faced a May parliament. In a spirit of reconciliation he appeased the political community by promising inquests into ministerial abuse and agreeing to uphold the reissues of Magna Carta that his son’s regency government had granted the previous autumn.
To show his commitment to political reform, Edward issued the Confirmation of the Charters, sealed on 10 October 1297 after news had filtered south of Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge. The Confirmation restated both Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – now both documents of legendary status – and added several new clauses, including the abolition of the maltote duty on wool and acceptance that any future tax might be taken only with the ‘common assent of the realm’. On the back of the Confirmation, Edward’s government had also agreed to stop treating the earls who had opposed him with his own deep-felt ‘rancour and indignation’.
By reissuing Magna Carta, Edward’s government had shown it still had a grip on the thirteenth-century Plantagenet pact: military and financial assistance followed on concessions and reform. Now, with Wallace rampant and English control of Scotland on the verge of disintegration, it was time to put that pact to work once again.
The May parliament met in the midst of what was already a highly militarized situation in the north. The exchequer had been moved north from London to York, and was distributing funds to muster an army of more than 30,000 at Roxburgh. They marched at the end of June. Problems with supplies meant that there was more wine than food; before long the Welsh and English contingents in the infantry were fighting each other. Without the naval support they had enjoyed in Wales, the vast armed force marched hungry as it pushed north. All the while William Wallace lay low somewhere in the Scottish hills, falling back and destroying crops and supplies as he went, drawing the English deep into the Scottish interior before waiting for his moment to confront them.
Edward was on the verge of falling back to Edinburgh when he learned that Wallace was camped at Callendar Wood, near Falkirk. He marched his army overnight to meet the Scots early in the morning of 22 July 1298. During a night spent in the open, the king’s horse trampled him and broke two of his ribs. It was a painful reminder of the unpredictability of battle.
Anthony Bek held a morning mass as dawn’s weak light broke on a misty battlefield. Across a patch of boggy ground they saw the Scots arrayed for battle before Callendar Wood, in highly defensive formation. Wallace had his men in four schiltroms: hedgehog formations with long spears bristling outwards. Battle was destined to be fierce and bloody.
Edward attacked the Scots from two directions, splitting his battalions around the bogland in front. The earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln led an attack from the west, while Anthony Bek struck from the east. The Scottish cavalry, not incorporated in the schiltroms, fled the battle. Meanwhile the English split the schiltroms open by firing arrows and crossbow bolts and throwing stones. Once the formations were broken, the Scottish defence disintegrated, and a fearful rout followed. As many as 2,000 infantry were killed on the English side. Slaughter rained down upon the Scots.
The battle was a humiliation for William Wallace, badly denting his military reputation. But the escape of the entire Scottish nobility, as well as Wallace, meant that despite the rivers of blood that fed the bog at Callendar Wood, it could not be counted alongside Dunbar as a total victory for the English. Weak, hungry, diseased and divided, Edward’s army was in no condition to keep the field. Tensions still existed between the king and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, which were exacerbated by Edward’s division of captured Scottish estates. The best the king could do was to fall back to Carlisle, sending an unsuccessful manhunt deep into Scotland in search of the young earl and claimant to the throne, Robert Bruce.
Relapse
By the end of the thirteenth century Edward was sixty years old. He remained tall and imposing, and was all the more striking once his dark blond, wavy hair had turned white in his later years. Always the archetypal virile knight, he continued to add to the large royal family when he married Philip IV’s young daughter Margaret of France in 1299, fulfilling his obligations under the peace made in 1297. The seventeen-year-old Margaret became the first French queen of England, and she was a good companion for the energetic king. After their wedding at Canterbury she accompanied him back to Yorkshire, where in June 1300 a son was born. The boy, Thomas of Brotherton, was named after St Thomas Becket, to whom Margaret had prayed during her labour.
A vast household was set up for Thomas and his younger brother Edmund of Woodstock, who was born the following summer. In keeping with the queen’s extravagant love of fashion and jewels, the princes grew up in elaborate finery. As babies they slept in ornate cradles, draped in scarlet and blue. More than fifty servants attended their household, where they ate and lived well, learning the arts of noble life in the most luxurious surroundings that a doting old man who had fathered fourteen times before, and an enthusiastic young woman with a feel for the extravagances of European aristocracy could provide.
But although Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock grew up in luxury and comfort, they were not the most important of the royal children. That honour fell to Edward of Caernarfon, the eldest surviving son of Edward’s first marriage, to Eleanor of Castile.
In 1300, Edward of Caernarfon was sixteen years old: a fine age to begin adopting some of the responsibilities of kingship. For all the trauma of the 1290s, the boy reached the critical stage of early manhood at an easier time than his father had. Peace had been reached with
France. Wales, his own principality, was largely subdued, with the ramparts of Master James’s castles beginning to loom over Welsh horizons as a symbol of permanent English mastery.
Among the barons, there was still some discontent, but one major source of friction was smoothed in 1302, when a reconciliation was staged between Edward I and Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk. In its place, a series of highly complex disputes over jurisdictions and privileges developed between King Edward and his erstwhile friend and close adviser Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham, who had been central to the pursuit of the Scottish wars. Edward confiscated Bek’s lands in 1305, and showed that he retained the appetite to dominate any magnate, lay or ecclesiastical, who crossed him.
But Scotland still made trouble. English armies were raised to offer battle in 1300, 1301 and 1303, but the Scots had learned their lesson at Falkirk. They refused to fight, and Edward’s capacity to impose a Welsh-style settlement on the northern kingdom was severely limited. There were successes: the young Robert Bruce, grandson of the claimant in the Great Cause, defected to the English in the winter of 1301 – 2; and William Wallace was captured in 1305, violently executed in London and his tarred head stuck on a spike on London Bridge. But Scotland still refused to submit. A new vision, new leadership and new life was needed at the head of English government for the campaign to move on.
Was Edward of Caernarfon prepared for all this? Certainly the heir to the throne was a strong, athletic young man, who had inherited his father’s capability on horseback. He was also a keen adherent of family mythology. In 1301 he commissioned a picture of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket for Chester castle; the following year he received as a gift an illustrated life of Edward the Confessor.
These signs of respect for Plantagenet traditions were not enough to balance the growing fears that Edward of Caernarfon lacked the strengths that had made his father such a successful king. He was not a man for the tournament, which suggested that Edward I’s love of the front line of military skirmishing had not passed on to his eldest surviving son. There were suspicions around court from 1300 that a young companion known as Piers Gaveston was creating a distraction inappropriate to the bearing of a Plantagenet prince. Gaveston encouraged a streak of brattish impetuosity in the prince that others found hard to bear. In 1305, the young Edward created an argument with the king’s chief minister Walter Langton in which he used such ‘gross and harsh’ words to the treasurer’s face that the king threw him out of the court for several months.
Worrying though these were, nevertheless in 1306 it was clear that Edward of Caernarfon had to be thrust to centre-stage. Uproar broke out once again in the northern kingdom, this time occasioned by the vicious murder of John Comyn, lord of Badenoch and erstwhile Guardian of Scotland, who was stabbed to death in front of the altar at the Franciscan church in Dumfries. The murderer was Robert Bruce. Having turned his coat to join the English in 1302, in March 1306 he had himself crowned King Robert I of Scotland in Scone Abbey. The Scottish wars had begun once again.
As Edward made preparations to go to Scotland for yet another campaign, his health began to fail him. As Robert I was crowned, Edward I lay sick in Winchester. From late spring 1306 he was being transported by litter.
Without delay, Edward of Caernarfon began to receive the accoutrements of power. He was granted Gascony in April 1306. At Whitsun he was knighted at Westminster, where he and 300 other young men were belted in a ceremonial passing of the torch to a new generation of Englishmen. The ceremony was known as the Feast of the Swans, since after the meal Edward had a pair of golden swans brought before the assembly. The king promised in Arthurian fashion that he would not rest until he had avenged himself on Bruce; that once he had been avenged, he would lay down his arms in Britain for ever, and travel to the Holy Land to fight the infidel. Young Edward agreed, swearing a similarly Arthurian oath that he would not sleep two nights in the same place until the Scots had been defeated. All the rest of the knights swore their oaths over the golden swans and, to demonstrate their seriousness, forces under the king’s cousin Aymer de Valence were sent north to assert English justice once again over the rebellious Scots.
As he travelled once more to Scotland, however, Edward I went under a cloud. He knew he was getting old, and it was clear that he had run out of time to finish the job he had begun of uniting Britain under one Crown and ushering in a new Arthurian age. The pursuit of Bruce that followed during 1306 and 1307 was to be among the most savage events of his life, in which earls, bishops and women were imprisoned and executed in cruel and humiliating fashion. Yet it was not enough. While the old king’s men struggled hard without success to bring Bruce to justice, his son and heir Edward continued to disappoint him. Violent arguments raged between them, particularly over the son’s inordinate favouring of Gaveston.
On a Friday afternoon on 7 July 1307, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands, on his way north with another massive army, to attempt to smash Robert Bruce. Death came, rather pathetically, as his servants attempted to lift him out of bed for a meal. He had been ill for many months, and despite a valiant attempt to mount his old warhorse and lead troops out of Carlisle at the end of June, he was physically shattered by a lifetime of warfare, uncompromising politicking and energetic leadership. He was sixty-eight years old, and a shadow of the man he had been even two years before.
His son, meanwhile, was nowhere near the war zone, preferring the comforts of south-eastern England, from where he had been forced to send his friend Gaveston into exile on the king’s orders in May 1307.
In life Edward had been a leopard and a lion, a builder and a hammer. He died with Scotland before him, but in all likelihood with his unfulfilled dreams of Jerusalem in his mind.
In death he passed into the realms of legend, like his hero Arthur. He had done more to enhance the mastery and majesty of the Plantagenet Crown than any king since Henry II. He had established some form of English mastery over much of the British Isles, and defended what remained of the Plantagenet dominions overseas. He had understood and taken direction of the political compact of the late thirteenth century, overhauling England’s law and institutions and regularly purging corrupt officials as the price for continued war finance. He had pandered to popular prejudice in 1290 by expelling the Jews. Although he had driven several of his great barons to the brink of armed insurrection, civil war had been averted and the prestige and position of the Crown had never once slipped to the depths it had plumbed under his father.
Of course, everything came at a cost. Edward had stamped his mark on Britain by nearly bankrupting the country and by exercising kingship with appalling cruelty and prejudice. He left the Crown with crippling debts of around £200,000. Even by the standards of the age, he could be a violent and coarse individual. England groaned and grumbled beneath the financial constraints he had imposed upon her. The Scots and the Welsh brooded darkly against overlordship stamped on them from above. But it would not be long before England, if not her neighbours, grew bitterly to rue the leopard’s passing.
PART V
Age of Violence
(1307–1330)
O calamity! To see men lately clothed in purple and fine linen
appear now in rags and, bound in shackles, shut up in prison!
– THE LIFE OF EDWARD II
The King and his Brother
‘You bastard son of a bitch! You want to give lands away? You, who never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!’
These, according to the inventive chronicler Walter of Guisborough, were the words hurled at Edward of Caernarfon by his father, Edward I, during one of their final arguments, in February 1307. According to Guisborough, the younger Edward had approached the king through an intermediary with a request to grant away the county of Ponthieu to his close friend, confidant and fellow knight, Piers Gaveston. Ponthieu had been brought into the Plantagenet family by Eleanor of Castile, young Edward’s m
uch-mourned mother. In fury, the old king had attacked his son, first with words and then with his hands, tearing out clumps of the young man’s hair before throwing him, exhausted, out of the royal presence.
Was this story true? Certainly there were those who were prepared to believe it. Edward of Caernarfon was a curious young man. In some ways he was the image of his father: tall and athletic, a skilled horseman; a good-looking Plantagenet prince who lacked his father’s lisp or his grandfather Henry III’s droopy eye. He was ‘a handsome man and strong in body and limb’, wrote the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle. ‘But he fell short of the qualities and style of his father, for he was concerned not with deeds of chivalry or prowess but only with his own desires.’ Despite his regal good looks, it was clear from the very beginning of his reign until its dramatic conclusion that he was a very poor candidate for kingship.
This was a pity, since when Edward II acceded to the throne he inherited what was potentially a very advantageous set of conditions. His father’s two most troublesome noblemen – the earls of Norfolk and Hereford – had recently died. The greatest remaining earls – Thomas earl of Lancaster and Gilbert earl of Gloucester – were Edward’s cousin and nephew respectively. Archbishop Winchelsea of Canterbury was exiled and Walter Langton, the royal treasurer with whom Edward had clashed in 1305, was swiftly fired, deprived of his lands and imprisoned. There was an imposing debt of around £200,000 hanging over from Edward I’s reign, but a competent king with the goodwill of a new reign would be able to refinance without too much difficulty.
