Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  But de Montfort’s ideas also appealed far beyond the baronial class. And this led him to broaden dramatically the membership of Parliament. Hitherto it had consisted of nobles and bishops. But in 1265 Simon enfranchised new groups. He summoned representatives, of knightly rank, from each county and burgesses or local bigwigs from the more important towns. Such representatives had been summoned before to consult on taxation. But this was the first time they had been invited to discuss and to decide the great affairs of the realm. It was a blatant bid for support for Simon’s revolution from the groups immediately below the magnates – the wider community of the realm. It was also a milestone in the history of Parliament.

  But despite such bold moves, Simon’s revolution was to be short lived. There was a strong royalist party and, for all Simon’s own high ideals, his followers proved to be as selfish and grasping as the king’s fallen favourites. Just as the tide was turning, the king’s son and heir, Edward, escaped from captivity and raised an army. Edward met his fellow loyalists at Ludlow Castle. He made the symbolic promise to uphold Magna Carta and then marched to confront de Montfort’s forces.

  The armies met just north of the town of Evesham. Simon was hoping every minute to be joined by his son at the head of a second force. But the reinforcements never arrived and without them de Montfort’s army was completely overwhelmed by the royalists. De Montfort himself was killed, only fifteen months after his great victory at Lewes.

  A monument was erected to de Montfort in the grounds of Evesham Abbey in the 1960s. And, in 1992, De Montfort University at Leicester also honoured his name. They are signs that, 700 years after his defeat and death, he is not forgotten. Contemporaries remembered him too. Already at the time of his death he was a folk hero. Soon there were reports of miracles at his tomb and his was even compared to that other great scourge of kings – St Thomas Becket. But the royalists hated him and in a grisly revenge they dismembered his body as the corpse of a condemned traitor. It would be less easy, however, to uproot the political ideas that de Montfort had planted.

  The civil war lingered on until 1267, when the last pockets of resistance were rooted out. For the moment the royalists had triumphed. Henry’s humiliation was avenged and the authority of the monarchy was restored – though in practice it would be exercised by the Lord Edward. But there was one final moment of glory left to the old king. In 1269, the new Westminster Abbey, which had cost so much money and political goodwill, was finally consecrated. The king himself and his sons bore the relics of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor, to their magnificent new shrine. Encrusted with gold mosaic and inlaid with precious marbles, the shrine was the work of Italian craftsmen and it spoke of Roman imperial power and grandeur.

  For, despite all the crises of his reign, Henry’s view of his own position remained equally exalted and he still saw himself as combining the powers of pope and emperor in his own kingdom. Many of his nobility, of course (led by Simon de Montfort), had taken the opposite view and they had come very close to victory. It was anyone’s guess which way the balance would swing in future.

  In the space of a century, both Henry II’s empire and the pre-eminent status of the monarch had been undone. Foreign entanglements, family feuds, bids for autocracy and conflicts with churchmen and barons had weakened but not quite broken the authority of the crown. Henry III died in 1272 after a reign of fifty-six years – the longest to date and the third longest of all English monarchs. His body lies in splendour in his beloved Westminster Abbey. His heart was taken to Fontevrault to lie with his Angevin forebears. But their empire and their greatness were now a distant memory.

  Chapter 12

  War Monarchy

  Edward I, Edward II, Edward III

  CAERNARFON CASTLE IN NORTH WALES is not only a great fortress; it is a grand statement. Its vast walls are built out of layers of different-coloured stone in imitation of the walls of the imperial city of Constantinople. And on top of the battlements of the great tower, now worn to stumps by the sea winds and the rain, perch stone sculptures of imperial eagles. For this castle was built by a man whose ambitions were truly imperial, King Edward I, conqueror of Wales and hammer of the Scots.

  Edward was the founder of a line of kings – father, son and grandson – who all bore the Anglo-Saxon or Old English name Edward. And they carried England to new heights of power. They would conquer Wales, Scotland and even France.

  Or at least the first and third Edwards would. But the second Edward, unconventional and self-indulgent, reopened the old debate about royal powers. His weaknesses brought the monarchy to the brink of disaster and may have inflicted a uniquely horrible death on the king.

  Nor was it only gore and glory. For the Edwards were lawgivers as well as soldiers, parliamentarians as well as conquerors, with the result that by the end of the Edwardian century the shape of an England ruled by the parliamentary trinity of king, lords and commons was becoming clear.

  I

  In 1272, Edward I inherited the crown from his father Henry III. When he heard the news he was in southern Italy, returning from the crusades. He did not hurry home. Instead he took part in a particularly vicious tournament in France and made a detour to put down a rebellion in Gascony. It was an appropriate start for a warrior king.

  He did not return to England to be crowned until 1274. His succession was unchallenged but his inheritance was flawed. Edward would never forget his father’s humiliation at the hands of Simon de Montfort. It was Edward who led the royalist fight-back. And it was Edward who learned the painful lesson of what could happen to a weak king.

  These had been Edward’s first in a long line of battles. He had learned early that he would have to fight for the rights of the crown. When he was young he fought like the leopard with speed and cunning; when he got older he fought like the lion with awe-inspiring power. And his physique matched his warlike character: he was six foot two inches tall and blond. He looked like a king, fought like a king and spoke like one. There is a story told that at his coronation he removed the crown from his head and swore that he would never wear it again until he had regained what his father had lost.

  And to do this, Edward’s first task was to reunite his realm, divided by the barons’ revolt. But instead of waging a vendetta against his surviving opponents, he forgave them. He even allowed them to buy back the property that his father had confiscated. The result made Edward appear magnanimous. But it also raised considerable sums for the crown.

  Edward had learned from the rebel barons as well, and he understood that it was in the towns and villages of England that the roots of his power lay. So he decided to reinforce the bonds between king and people by ordering a huge nationwide investigation into official corruption. It would be king and people versus the ‘fat cats’.

  The results were recorded in what are known as the Hundred Rolls. There was a mass of detail, perhaps too much. For example, the Stamford Roll contains a bit of dirt on the bailiff of the town, Hugo Bunting. One of the things he is accused of is levying an illicit toll of five shillings on a certain William Gabbecrocky when he took his millstones through the middle of the town: ‘ducit per medium ville’.

  Now this is just Stamford: multiply for all England and you get information overload. As a consequence few actual prosecutions took place. But it is the PR that was most important. Edward was showing that he cared; that the king’s rights complemented the rights of his subjects and that he was able to guarantee equal justice for all his subjects no matter how humble. There followed a succession of important statutes intended to reform the law. It would be hard to think of a better beginning for a reign or a more effective answer to those, like the baronial revolutionaries of his father’s reign, who claimed that strong royal government meant oppressive royal government.

  Edward’s next task was to restore the authority of the king over the whole of Britain. For in different ways the rulers of Wales and Scotland had taken advantage of Henry III’s weakness to regain power a
nd independence at the expense of their English overlord.

  In 1276, from his wild fastness in Snowdonia, Llwelyn ap Gryffydd had extended his control over most of Wales. But Edward was loath to accept the rise of Wales as an independent power. So he insisted on the homage – or ritual submission – which the rulers of Wales traditionally paid to the kings of England. There resulted a struggle of wills. For Llwelyn, his homage was a bargaining counter in a relationship of semi-equals. For Edward, it was a non-negotiable acknowledgement of his superiority over a subject and inferior. Three more times Prince Llwelyn was summoned to perform homage and three times he refused. Finally, and with plenty of time to make his preparations, Edward declared war.

  Edward mobilized the whole country. Merchants and craftsmen laboured to supply the army. Huge arsenals of weapons were stockpiled. And Llwelyn was no match for the resources of England. In the face of the campaign of 1277 Llwelyn capitulated. Wales was forced to accept English laws, which struck at the heart of Welsh identity and national pride. The settlement was never accepted and the Welsh rebelled in 1282. They were countered with another vast army. There was little hand-to-hand fighting. Instead, Edward laid siege to Llwelyn in Snowdonia and starved him out.

  Edward was not the first king of England to fight the Welsh. But Edward carried the policy to new extremes. There would be no more native princes of Wales acknowledging the vague overlordship of the king of England. Instead, Wales was crushed under the heel of a brutal military occupation. Its symbol was the mighty castles which still dominate the landscape, such as Caernarfon. Designed as much for their dramatic impact as for their military strength, they proclaimed that the Welsh were a subject people ruled over by an English elite.

  Finally, there was Edward’s treatment of the rebel leaders. This was not only spectacularly brutal; it also shows that he was a new kind of king, with the new, harder attitude to kingship that he had learned during his father’s reign. Ever since the Norman Conquest, barons and kings had fought it out with each other with few hard feelings on either side. No longer, because Edward now declared that to wage war against the king was treason. Treason was effectively a new crime for which a new, terrible punishment was devised. And the first to suffer it was Daffydd ap Gryffydd, Prince Llwelyn’s brother.

  Because he had betrayed the king, he was dragged to the place of execution by horses. Because he had killed noblemen he was hanged. And because he had committed murder at Easter he was cut down while still alive, castrated, disembowelled and his entrails burned. Finally, because he had committed crimes in different parts of the kingdom, his body was hacked into four and the quarters distributed throughout the realm.

  The fate of Wales itself was scarcely less harsh. If the Hundred Rolls had shown that Edward was an astute politician, the conquest of Wales showed his savage lion-like strength. Not surprisingly the Welsh brooded under this alien rule. Edward faced repeated rebellions throughout the rest of his reign. None was enough to reverse the conquest.

  Edward’s empire now stretched secure from east to west across the British Isles. But in the south the king of France was threatening Edward’s lands in Gascony while in the north Scotland at last seemed about to fall into his grasp. This struggle on two fronts – to subdue Scotland and preserve his lands in France – was to dominate the remainder of Edward’s reign and, for better and for worse, to shape the reigns of his son and his grandson as well.

  II

  Scotland’s identity is a vexed and troubled subject. With devolution, Edinburgh is once again the seat of a Scottish parliament and the focus of a revived and intensified sense of Scotland’s separate nationhood. But, when Edward came to the throne, that sense of separate identity was not nearly so developed.

  Scotland was an ancient monarchy. But its kings were much intermarried with the English royal house. They had vast landholdings in England; swore fealty to English kings; fought for them as well as against them; and had a say in English councils and parliaments. So were they separate monarchs? Or were they the greatest subjects of the kings of England? In either case, it was a highly ambiguous relationship. But Edward, with his sharp lawyer’s mind and his acute awareness of his own rights, hated ambiguity. When he could he would make the relationship of the king of Scotland and the king of England clear on his own terms and in his own interests.

  And his opportunity came in 1291. The sole heir to the Scottish throne was Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’, granddaughter of King Alexander III of Scotland, who had died in 1286. Edward determined that she should be brought to Scotland and married to his eldest son, Edward of Caernarfon. This came to naught when she died en route to Scotland. The Scottish throne was now vacant. Not to be thwarted, Edward, as feudal overlord of the country, now claimed the right to choose the next ruler. He would be kingmaker in Scotland and he would remake the relations between the two kingdoms.

  Edward chose John Balliol over Robert Bruce and twelve other candidates. Balliol had a good claim. But he was also, as the founder of an Oxford college and a major landowner in England, the most anglicized of the candidates. And this was the real reason Edward chose him.

  But Edward was not content with an anglicized Scottish king. Instead, he made it clear that – even with King John Balliol on the Scottish throne – he remained sovereign lord of Scotland. As such, he, Edward, was finally responsible for justice and good government in Scotland. And he would enforce those responsibilities, just as he enforced his laws in England, by using his own English courts.

  Knowing Edward’s attitude, Scotsmen appealed to him to have their own king’s judgements overruled. Even Balliol’s acquiescence was tested. But when Balliol complained, Edward informed him that he could summon even Balliol himself to appear before him at Westminster. And before long he did just this.

  For Balliol it was a humiliation too far. The Scots were provoked into rebellion and Edward to invasion. Berwick was the first town to fall. It was said that Edward was so angry that the town had resisted him that he fell on them ‘with the anger of a wild boar pursued by dogs’. From Berwick Edward pushed up the coast to Dunbar. The Scots taunted the English troops, calling them tailed dogs. But the castle fell after only a few days. Edward then took his army on a military parade through Scotland. The great fortress of Edinburgh fell after only five days’ siege and Stirling before Edward even arrived. He boasted that Scotland was conquered in only twenty-one weeks.

  Now Edward had achieved what he had probably always wanted: direct rule of Scotland. In an inversion of a coronation, the vestments, symbols and regalia of kingship were stripped off Balliol. Edward was literally un-kinging him. Even more radically, Edward decided to un-kingdom Scotland. First, he removed the Stone of Scone. For 400 years the kings of Scotland had been crowned on this rough sandstone block – rich with legend – known as the Stone of Destiny. Edward took the stone to England and placed it under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey where it remained for the next 700 years. By this gesture Edward was declaring that Scotland had ceased altogether to be a kingdom and become a mere province of England.

  Edward was now at the pinnacle of his power. He was an English Caesar, a new Arthur, a mightier Conqueror.

  Finally, Edward took on the king of France, Philip IV. Philip, in the first example of what became known as the ‘Auld Alliance’, had allied with John Balliol and confiscated Edward’s remaining French territories. With his burning sense of right, Edward was determined to recover every inch.

  To fight his great wars, Edward needed taxation. And the only effective way of raising taxes was to summon a parliament – usually to Westminster. Parliament was necessary constitutionally because Magna Carta laid it down that nobody could be taxed without their consent. It was also necessary practically because it had proved impossible to raise taxes any other way without the taxpayers going on strike.

  As usual, the most important group of taxpayers were the middle earners – the knights or country gentlemen and the leading townsfolk. So, in 1
295, on the eve of the Scottish invasion, Edward summoned representatives of these groups to what became known as the Model Parliament. They would have to pay but they would have a stake in his vision for England.

  The result was that Edward, the most naturally autocratic of kings, followed in the footsteps of the great rebel Simon de Montfort and, in spite of himself, became the father of Parliament.

  It was a shrewd gesture. But fierce guerrilla resistance to the English conquest broke out in Scotland and Edward was forced into war on two fronts against both the Scots and the French. As the costs escalated, the king faced broad-based opposition led by an important group of nobles. To appease them he was forced to reissue Magna Carta and promise once more that there would be no taxation without consultation of the whole realm. These were new political realities and they compelled him to explain his policies, negotiate and compromise. It did not sit easily with his personality. Nevertheless, his obsession with conquering Scotland remained. The policy was increasingly unpopular. But, to pursue it, Edward was prepared to do anything: to raise money outside Parliament as well as through it; even to put at risk his whole carefully constructed relationship with the classes represented in Parliament.

  Finally, in 1305, victory seemed within his grasp. William Wallace, the leader of the Scottish resistance, was betrayed and Edward decided to make an example of him. Wallace was brought on horseback to London and put on trial in Westminster Hall. As was usual in cases of treason, there was no counsel for the accused. Otherwise, both the facts of the case and the forms of law were carefully observed. The judges accused Wallace of having encouraged the Scots to ally with Edward’s enemies, the French; of having invaded England and killed women, children and churchmen; and above all of having traitorously conspired for the king’s death and marched in war with banners flying against him. Wallace indignantly denied that he had ever been a traitor – presumably meaning he had never recognized Edward as king. In the eyes of English lawyers, this only made his crime worse, and he was sentenced to the worst punishment the law could give.