The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

But while King Robert spent the latter half of 1306 on the run, news of him and his band of followers moving from cave to cave, eating roots and berries, and wrapping their feet in animal skins when their shoes wore out, spread across lowlands and highlands, becoming legend. Another fourteenth-century chronicle, John Fordun’s Scotichronicon, reads:

  [After] mishaps, flights, and dangers; hardships and weariness; hunger and thirst; watchings and fastings; nakedness and cold; snares and banishment; [and] the seizing, imprisoning, slaughter, and downfall of his near ones and—even more—dear ones (for all this he had to undergo, when overcome and routed in the beginning of his war) no one, now living, I think recollects, or is equal to rehearsing, all this. Moreover, with all the ill-luck and numberless straits he went through with a glad and dauntless heart . . . in the art of fighting and in vigour of body, Robert had not his match in his time, in any clime.

  By February 1307, accompanied by only a few hundred men, Bruce was ready to return to mainland Scotland; the first reliable sighting of the refugee king was at the start of Lent, which began that year on February 8.

  Scotland’s strategic objective was the same as before: An independent country, free of English control. Scottish tactics, though, were about to change, since fighting set-piece battles with knights on horseback serving as shock troops was destined to be a losing game against an opponent who could field five or ten times as many heavy cavalry. This was a hard truth for the king of Scotland. Robert Bruce had been, before taking the throne, a tourney knight of enormous reputation; possibly the best in Britain, where tournaments—week-long competitions in which dozens of knights fought one another, either singly in jousts, or in melees with up to forty or more on a side—had been one of the keystones of chivalry since the Norman invasion.

  Whatever their actual value as military training (and both Stirling and Courtrai had already revealed the limitations of heavy cavalry), tournaments were unquestionably good at reinforcing a mastery of, and respect for, the shock attack of armed-and-armored knights. The Robert Bruce who had been defeated in 1306 was a product of the tournament world; the one who returned in 1307 was about to transform himself into one of the great guerrilla commanders in history, with notable results for the peasantry of both Scotland and England. The famous verse known as “Good King Robert’s Testament” is an explicit guide to his strategy:

  On foot should be all Scottish war

  Let hill and marsh their foes debar

  And woods as walls prove such an arm

  That enemies do them no harm

  In hidden spots keep every store

  And burn the plainlands them before

  So, when they find the land lie waste

  Needs must they pass away in haste

  Harried by cunning raids at night

  And threatening sounds from every height

  Then, as they leave, with great array

  Smite with the sword and chase away,

  This is the counsel and intent

  Of Good King Robert’s Testament

  “On foot should be all Scottish war.” In May 1307, with only six hundred Scots infantry by his side, King Robert defeated a three thousand–man force led by his old adversary Aymer de Valence in a battle at Loudon Hill in Ayrshire, using the same tactics as Wallace used at Stirling Bridge: channeling English knights along a narrow causeway through a bog, restricting their shock value, and permitting Scottish spearmen to kill both horses and men. It was Bruce’s first major victory and another reminder of the vulnerability of mounted knights.

  If 1307 was the year that rebellion was reborn in Scotland, it marked a very different transformation in England. On July 7, Edward I died. One of his eulogists, John of London, declaimed, “Once with Alexander, king of Macedon, we defeated the kings of the Medes and the Persians and subdued the provinces of the East. Now, at the end of time, with great King Edward, we have borne a ten-year war [and] invaded Scotland and cut down her tyrants at the point of the sword.”

  With the death of Edward I, a man of titanic ambition and even greater fury passed from the earth. It was the bad luck of his successor, the second Edward, to live and rule in his shadow, obliged to continue his father’s policies without anything like his father’s genius for administration, or his force of will. Even worse, he would have to contend, as his father had not, with an able and determined Scottish king, who had mastered a strategy that made English military strength next to useless.

  Two and a half centuries before, the future of Britain had been decided by three of the Norsemen—Duke William of Normandy, King Harold Godwinson, and Harald Hardrada—who had spread throughout Europe as a direct result of the four centuries of the Medieval Warm Period. Now two of William’s descendants—two more Normans, Edward II and Robert Bruce—would do the same.

  Precisely at the moment when the temperate years were about to end.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Douglas’s Larder”

  1307–1312

  In January 1307, six months before his death, Edward Longshanks received an entreaty from his son and heir. Edward the younger had asked his father for permission to give Piers Gaveston a title—not just any title, but one of his own: the county of Ponthieu, which had been part of the dowry of his mother, Eleanor of Castile. King Edward’s response was characteristically tender:

  You baseborn whoreson! Do you want to give lands away now, you who never gained any? As the Lord lives, if it were not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance.

  As reported by the Augustinian monk Walter of Guisborough, the king proceeded to grab his son by the hair, pulling out as much as he could, and then throw him bodily from the room. He next exiled Gaveston, not to return to England except “at the pleasure of the king,” who softened the blow somewhat by providing £66 annually for his living.

  Even so, the king’s death, on July 7, was a liberating event for his son, who recalled his favorite from exile less than a week later. By the end of the month, he issued his first charter, making Gaveston the new earl of Cornwall.* And by the fall, Edward and Gaveston had returned to London, in time for the latter’s marriage to the new king’s fourteen-year-old niece, Margaret de Clare, arranged, according to the Vita, to “strengthen Piers, and surround him with friends.”

  Like so many things involving Edward and Gaveston, the plan backfired: following the wedding, the new king announced a great tournament, at Wallingford, to celebrate the nuptials, which—the Vita again—“roused the earls and barons to still greater hatred of Piers.” With the earls of Surrey, Arundel, and Hereford taking the field against him, Gaveston summoned the “younger and harder knights of the kingdom” to embarrass the presumably older and softer nobles. As one might expect, this failed to endear the king’s favorite to anyone.

  One of the most consistent themes of Piers Gaveston’s life was his unerring talent for giving offense. Most of this was his own doing, but not all. To England’s class-conscious great nobles, his ascent from the minor gentry into the king’s circle was the very definition of social climbing. They were insulted by his investiture as an earl in his own name, and his marriage, less than six weeks later, to the daughter of one of the greatest peers in England.

  Those objections were, however, drowned out by the preparations for another wedding: the far more important marriage between Edward and Isabella of France, to whom he had been betrothed for four years, and which, now that the princess was closer to marriageable age, had been scheduled for the following January.

  The daughter of Philip IV was, in 1308, about twelve years old, though evidence for birthdates as early as 1291 exist. She had been raised in the richest and most cultivated court in Europe, where she had certainly been taught to read and, possibly, to write. She was also widely regarded as the most beautiful princess—possibly the most beautiful woman—in Europe. The French chronicler Godefroy de Paris desc
ribed her as “the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and the Empire.” Walter of Guisborough called her “one of the fairest ladies in the world.” She was certainly one of the best dressed. The trousseau assembled for her wedding included dozens of dresses and seventy-two headdresses. Her personal tailor managed a staff of sixty seamstresses alone, and her Household Book records that they produced, in a single year, fifteen robes, thirty pairs of stockings, thirty-six pairs of shoes, four cloaks, six hoods, six bodices, and enough tunics and underclothes that they used up thirty pounds of candles working after sunset.

  Maintaining such luxury was inevitably going to represent a large and ongoing drain on the royal purse. Isabella’s dowry, negotiated at exhausting length over the preceding four years, included all the lands previously held by Eleanor of Castile before her marriage to Edward I, including the disputed lands in Gascony over which the two kingdoms had been battling for a century, which produced £4,500 annually—more than the wages of two thousand laborers. And that wasn’t all: her father had provided her with at least 18,000 livres tournois, or another £4,500 in gold, jewels, and silverplate—at least £3 million (or $5 million) in modern currency—probably confiscated from the crusading order known as the Knights Templar, two thousand of whom had been arrested in France in November 1307.*

  Here was the woman who brought Edward across the narrow channel separating England from France. He had planned to leave before Christmas 1307, but chose instead to spend the holiday with Gaveston. The favorite had been named to serve as Keeper of the Realm during the time the king would be in France, no doubt cementing the affection of the same nobles who had been humiliated by Gaveston’s friends in the Wallingford tournament two months before. In any event, Edward departed Dover on January 22, and arrived in Boulogne-sur-Mer three days later, the victim of the winter weather that had frozen ports all along Europe’s Baltic coast. In retrospect, it was a bad omen about both the end of the Medieval Warm Period’s mild winters, and the beginning of an exceptionally stormy marriage. In front of the extraordinary assemblage of royalty and nobles—seven different serving monarchs, plus Edward himself; and half a dozen future ones, including three of the bride’s brothers—the two were married by the city’s bishop in his own cathedral church. Eight days of celebrations, feasts, and tournaments followed, until the new king and queen of England departed for home, and their respective coronations.

  Edward and Isabella entered London on February 19 (they had spent two weeks at Eltham Palace, the home of Antony Bek, the bishop of Durham). The capital city was then home to about fifty thousand people, which made it the largest city in Britain, though still smaller than either Granada or Seville in Spain; Venice or Milan in Italy; and much smaller than the new queen’s home in Paris, whose population was at least four times larger. Its most notable structure was still the Tower of London, originally built by William the Conqueror, but much enlarged by Edward I; the first Saint Paul’s Cathedral was still being built in 1308, and would not be completed for four more years. It was typical of the city, which was one large construction zone: Westminster Hall was under reconstruction, as was the Palace of Westminster, whose restoration was personally overseen by Edward II in the months after his father’s death. The Tower of London was being enlarged to accommodate new and luxurious apartments—including a menagerie for the royal pets—to go along with its treasury (not the Treasury, which, with the Exchequer, were in the Palace of Westminster) and arsenal.

  On February 25, 1308, Edward and Isabella were crowned king and queen of England in Westminster Abbey. All the important nobles in England, and many from continental Europe, were in attendance. The king’s scepter was carried by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex; the earl of Lancaster carried the sword Curtana, the ceremonial sword of Edward the Confessor. Henry de Lacy, the earl of Lincoln, carried the royal staff, and the king’s younger brother, Henry, the rod. But the star was Piers Gaveston, the newly made earl of Cornwall; not surprisingly, since he had been picked by Edward to manage the proceedings, and had given himself all the best parts. Dressed in imperial purple, he redeemed the sword Curtana, carried in the crown of Saint Edward, and attached the ceremonial spur to the new sovereign’s right boot as he sat on the throne constructed to house Scotland’s Stone of Destiny. Gaveston’s talent for annoying everyone but the king had reached hitherto unsuspected heights, and this time included both the new queen (who noticed that Gaveston was wearing some of the jewels included in her wedding gifts) and her uncles, the dukes of Evreux and Valois, who were disgusted when the king chose to sit next to Gaveston rather than the queen at the subsequent feast.

  The new king’s coronation rituals were the same as his father’s. His coronation oath was not. It contained a clause additional to the traditional three: a promise “to be held by the just laws and customs that the community of the realm should determine.” Given subsequent events, the plain meaning seems to have been this: England’s highest nobility intended to assert their control over the new king—control that had been essentially invisible with his father.

  At this particular moment in history, the “highest nobility” meant England’s earls, since no more exalted title would exist until 1337. When Edward II was crowned, the realm had sixteen earldoms, but only twelve earls, since a number were doubled up due to inheritance, marriage, or good luck. Chief among them was Thomas, earl of Lancaster, Derby, and Leicester (and, upon the 1311 death of Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln as well). Lancaster was the wealthiest man in the kingdom, except for the king himself, and possibly not even him, with an annual income exceeding £11,000. Only slightly behind Lancaster in stature were Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex, and the husband of Elizabeth Plantagenet, the new king’s sister; and Guy de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. Completing the list were Gaveston himself, the newly made earl of Cornwall; John de Warenne, earl of Surrey; Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke; Edmund FitzAlan, earl of Arundel; Gilbert de Clare, earl of Hertford and Gloucester (and Gaveston’s father-in-law); Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (and Robert Bruce’s father-in-law); John of Brittany, earl of Richmond; and Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford.*

  Before the dishes from the coronation banquet had even been taken away, England’s earls were choosing up sides in what would become the first great conflict of Edward’s reign.

  Half a dozen of the kingdom’s most powerful earls were conspiring against their liege lord in order to accomplish a single goal—the separation of the king and Gaveston. One motive for their sabotage was an understandable discomfort with Gaveston’s youth; the author of the Vita compared Edward II to King Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam, “who rejected the counsel of elders, and followed the advice of the young.” And Gaveston wasn’t just young; he was obnoxious, with a habit of giving less-than-flattering nicknames to his peers: “Burstbelly” for the earl of Lincoln; “old hog” or “the Fiddler” for the earl of Lancaster; the earl of Warwick was “the Black Dog of Arden”; the earl of Pembroke, “Joseph the Jew”; and the earl of Gloucester, “Whoreson,” apparently because his mother had remarried.

  Another reason was tactical. England’s nobles recognized that the new king was far more compliant than his father, who had spent decades reminding his most powerful nobles that they were his vassals, made or broken at his whim. In this, Gaveston was little more than a convenient way to reinforce feudal privileges against the growing power of a relatively weak king. But he was also an inconvenient reminder that the titles on which the increasingly unsteady edifice of feudalism depended conferred only as much status as the last person to receive one. No Roman senator, forced to welcome the emperor Caligula’s horse to their company, was more resentful than England’s earls at the prospect of Piers Gaveston as earl of Cornwall.

  Thus, a newly confident and angry group of earls faced off against the king and his loyalists, at this point still including Lancaster. Within a month, the two sides were arming for war, fortifying the king’s castle at Wind
sor, and breaking bridges across the Thames that might offer lines of attack. In March, the hostile earls—of Warwick, Hereford, Pembroke, and John de Warenne, the last of his family to serve as earl of Surrey—arrived in London, each at the head of a retinue of armed knights. Civil war loomed. In April 1308, the rebellious nobles used the clause that had been added to the king’s coronation oath to demand immediate banishment and forfeiture of titles for Gaveston, whom they termed “a robber of the people and a traitor to his liege lord and his realm.” Unable to resist their pressure, the king agreed to exile his favorite as of June 25, though his acquiescence didn’t prevent him from granting Gaveston the revenues from the king’s lands in Aquitaine, totaling some £4,000 annually, and naming him as lieutenant in Ireland as a going-away present.

  By the summer of 1308, Edward and his nobles were at least partly reconciled, the anger against Gaveston reduced to a simmer. When the archbishop of Canterbury promised Gaveston excommunication if he were to return to England, Edward wrote directly to the pope and had the threat removed. It wasn’t an especially diplomatic bit of diplomacy, and in April 1309, the new parliament presented the king with eleven articles intended to remind him that the precepts of the so-called Great Charters—the Magna Carta, which had been forced upon King John by his nobles in 1215, and the lesser-known Charter of the Forest, signed two years later, during the minority of his son and successor, King Henry III—were still in force.

  The parliaments of the early fourteenth century were, like so many other institutions of that transformative era, about to undergo dramatic change. The so-called Model Parliament that Edward I had called in 1295 not only included the nation’s lords, both secular and ecclesiastic, but established the tradition of sending two knights from each rural county, and two burgesses from each self-governing town, or borough. When it met in April 1309 as a sort of prototype House of Commons, they bullied the new king with a half-dozen statutes intended to reduce the power his more formidable father had exercised.* In return, Edward got what looked like a poor bargain: Gaveston’s return from his exile.