Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  The trouble was that the new king himself had not the slightest intention of being accountable. A regulation-bound monarchy was not for Henry III. Humiliated by what he knew of his father’s unhappy end, a fugitive in his own country skulking around the Fens, the latest Plantagenet was dedicated to the vision of glorious and absolute kingship. As he saw it, he was a ruler consecrated by God, with enough divinity in his fingertips to cure the sick with his touch.

  The keynote project of Henry’s reign was the rebuilding of Edward the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, which he demolished and had redesigned in the new, soaring gothic style - a temple to the historic past and, he hoped, to the magnificent future of England’s kings. Henry installed the Confessor as the patron saint of this triumphal cult of royalty, reburying his remains in a shrine behind the high altar, the centrepiece of the new abbey. Henry even had a mural of Edward painted in his bedroom, so his saintly hero was the last thing he saw before he went to bed and the face that he woke up to in the morning.

  Gazing up at the vaulted arches of Westminster Abbey, one can see that Henry III had a fine taste in architecture. But his judgement was poor when it came to just about everything else. A court jester is said to have remarked that, like Jesus Christ himself, Henry was as wise on the day of his birth as he would ever be. The contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris described him as ‘of medium stature and compact in body. One of his eyelids drooped, hiding some of the dark part of the eyeball. He had robust strength, but was careless in his acts.’

  In the eyes of England’s barons, Henry was particularly careless in the choice of advisers and favourites, who, like his wife Eleanor of Provence, were almost all from southern France. In previous reigns, French dominance at court had reflected the powerbase of William the Conqueror. But King John had lost Normandy, Anjou and all of Aquitaine except for Gascony, the wine region around Bordeaux, and in trying to regain the lost territories Henry proved as much a ‘Softsword’ as his father. His wars, coupled with his ambitious building and the grandiose style of his court, got him hopelessly into debt. His predictable solution - taxation - provoked the predictable response.

  While Henry was formulating his lofty view of royal power, reform was in the air. The notion of a ‘community of the realm’ was taking shape among the thinking classes who were getting more numerous. Educated at the growing number of cathedral schools and in the colleges that were just starting up in the market towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the increasing ranks of graduates went into the Church for the most part. But some found work in the Exchequer and in the other developing offices of government, where the leading lights among the ‘king’s clerks’ took pride in their work. They saw good and efficient government as an aim in itself, and they were starting to ask how this could be maintained when the King himself did not practise it?

  The daring idea of controlling an unreliable monarch had been inherent in the thinking behind Magna Carta’s twenty-five-strong watchdog committee, and as discontent mounted during Henry’s long reign, calls grew to bring back this crucial feature of the Great Charter. By 1258 the fifty-one-year-old king was virtually bankrupt following an expensive foreign-policy adventure in which he had tried to make one of his sons king of Sicily. Now, under pressure from his barons, he finally gave way. Twelve of his nominees met at Oxford with twelve of the discontents to hammer out, Runnymede-style, how ‘our kingdom shall be ordered, rectified, and reformed in keeping with what they think best to enact’.

  The twenty-four-man think tank convened on 11 June 1258 at a moment of great national distress. The previous year’s harvest had been catastrophic, and as the ‘hungry month’ of July approached, famine was becoming widespread. ‘Owing to the shortage of food,’ wrote Matthew Paris, ‘an innumerable multitude of poor people died and dead bodies were found everywhere, swollen through famine and livid, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties and dunghills in the muddy streets.’

  Extreme times produce extreme measures - in the summer of 1258, a ‘New Deal’ for England. The Provisions of Oxford which the twenty-four wise men produced that summer effectively transferred England’s government from Henry to a ‘Council of Fifteen’. These men would appoint the great officers of state, control the Exchequer, supervise the sheriffs and local officials, and have the power of ‘advising the King in good faith regarding the government of the Kingdom’. The Provisions, which count alongside Magna Carta as milestones in England’s constitutional history, were drawn up loyally in the name of the King. But they made a crucial distinction between the human fallibility of any particular king and the superior institution of the Crown, whose job it was to guarantee the well-being of all the people, the ‘community of the realm’.

  One of the twenty-four wise men who had gathered at Oxford and subsequently a member of the Council of Fifteen was the Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort - a prickly and imperious Thomas Becket-like character, who, like Becket, began as his king’s close friend but would end up as his nemesis. Years earlier, de Montfort had secretly wooed and won Henry III’s sister, another Eleanor, and he was never afraid to take on his royal brother-in-law. The two men had savage stand-up rows in public, which de Montfort, with his overbearing manner, tended to win. Henry was rather in awe of him. Being rowed along the Thames one day, the King was overtaken by a thunderstorm and, terrified, ordered his watermen to make for the nearest landing-steps, which happened to belong to a house where de Montfort was staying. ‘I fear the thunder and lightning beyond measure, I know,’ the King candidly confessed as de Montfort came out to greet him. ‘But by God’s head, Sir Earl, I dread you even more.’

  De Montfort came from northern France and had grown up in the same martial atmosphere as Richard the Lionheart. Like Richard, he went on crusade to the Holy Land, and distinguished himself there in battle. He was an inspiring general - and a pious one. He would frequently rise at midnight to spend the hours until dawn in silent vigil and prayer. His best friend was Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who wrote a treatise setting out the difference between good rule and tyranny. De Montfort, who had sipped self-righteousness, it sometimes seemed, with his mother’s milk, came to believe over the years that his royal brother-in-law was little more than a coward and a tyrant. Furthermore, he had no doubt that he alone knew the way to achieve just rule.

  In the aftermath of the Provisions of Oxford this unbending sense of morality stirred up trouble with de Montfort’s fellow-barons. Why should the King alone be subject to outside controls? he asked. What about those barons and lords who abused their authority at the expense of the ordinary people? Needless to say, this was not at all what the barons wanted to hear. When the King, with their backing, enlisted the Pope to absolve him from his oath to the Provisions of Oxford, de Montfort’s coalition fell apart. His critics had complained, with some justification, that he was not above exploiting his eminence for the benefit of his own family, and in October 1261 the earl stalked off to France in disgust, swearing never to return.

  Less than two years later he was back. Henry had reverted to his bad old ways, and now his popularity was lower than ever. On one occasion when his wife tried to sail down the Thames in the royal barge, Londoners went to scoop up the manure that filled the streets in the days before sanitation and expressed their feelings by pelting the Queen with pungent missiles from London Bridge.

  When de Montfort called for a restoration of the Provisions of Oxford, many rallied to his cause. Between 1263 and 1265 England was convulsed by civil war, with de Montfort championing the cause of reform. In May 1264, facing the royal army at Lewes on the Sussex Downs, he ordered his men to prostrate themselves, arms spread out in prayer, before donning armour that bore the holy crosses of the crusaders. The general himself, having injured his leg in a riding accident, had been transported to the battlefield in a cart. His forces were heavily outnumbered. But the rebels’ fervour carried the day. De Montfort took the King’s eldest son Edward (named after the Confessor) as a hostage, and set about
putting the Provisions of Oxford into practice.

  The Provisions had called for the regular summoning of ‘parliament’ - literally a ‘talking-place’ (from the French word parler, to speak) - and it was Simon de Montfort’s Parliament of January 1265 that secured his place in history. This was by no means the first English parliament to be summoned. The term had been used in 1236 to describe the convention of barons, bishops and other worthies whom the King summoned to advise him - it was not unlike the old Anglo-Saxon witan, the council of wise men. But we should not think of this extended royal council as anything like our modern Parliament, with its own identity and its own permanent buildings. In the thirteenth century parliament was called at the king’s pleasure, wherever he happened to be in the country - it was an event rather than an institution.

  But in January 1265, for the first time, came two knights from every shire, along with two burgesses (town representatives) from York, Lincoln and other selected boroughs to parlay in London with the barons, bishops and clergy. Here was the seed of the modern body that now holds the ultimate political authority over our lives, and the gathering was invited to discuss a major question - what to do with Prince Edward, the King’s son, whom Simon had taken hostage after the Battle of Lewes.

  For townsfolk and country landowners to be conferring on the fate of a future king was heady stuff. In the climate of the times it could not last - and Simon’s own followers took fright at the thought of meddling in such mighty matters. In the event, the twenty-five-year-old Edward escaped from captivity and took command of the royal forces, to confront the earl’s depleted troops at Evesham that August. The outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  ‘God have mercy on our souls,’ cried the old general as the immensely larger royal army approached, ‘for our bodies are theirs.’

  Simon de Montfort was killed in the brief and bloody slaughter that followed. His testicles were cut off, to be hung around his nose, and his body was then dismembered, with his feet, head and hands being sent around the country as an object lesson to other rebels. But his dream did not die. What was left of him was buried at Evesham and became a place of pilgrimage. Miracles were reported, and songs were sung about this fearless, awkward, self-righteous French-born grandee, who had undoubtedly enriched himself in his campaigning, but who did at least have a vision of a fairer, more representative land.

  ‘Simon, Simon, you are but sleeping,’ sang the faithful. One day Simon would wake, went the dream, and with him the cause of liberty in England.

  A PRINCE WHO SPEAKS NO WORD OF ENGLISH

  AD 1284

  IN MAY 1265 THE FUTURE KING EDWARD I WAS being held hostage in Hereford Castle. Since the Battle of Lewes the previous May his uncle Simon de Montfort had been detaining him under house arrest. It was a courteous kind of detention - the twenty-five-year-old prince was not actually a prisoner - so when a dealer brought some horses to the castle, his guards saw no harm in letting the young man try them out. The men walked him down to an open space, where he gave them a superb display of horsemanship. The athletic young man, over six feet tall, put each of the animals vigorously through its paces, wheeling, galloping, spurring them on and yanking them into sudden stops and turns, until all but one were exhausted. Then he sprang on to the last remaining fresh horse and rode off to freedom.

  Shrewd calculation and physical prowess were the hallmarks of Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272. His father Henry III had managed the longest reign of any English sovereign yet, but had run the Crown’s authority and its finances into the ground. So when Edward finally succeeded his father, he cannily presented himself as a reformer, ready to implement at least some of the parliamentary principles championed by de Montfort. Edward also looked beyond England, to the island’s furthest shores, ambitious to win control of all Britain. It was this lofty aim that inspired one of the enduring stories of his reign.

  The Normans had always laid theoretical claim to Wales, but the middle years of the thirteenth century had seen a series of native freedom fighters robustly dispute this. In Welsh they called themselves tywysogion, which in the official documents was translated into Latin as principes. So the English - their traditional enemies - described them as ‘princes’ of Wales. In a series of brilliant and brutal campaigns, Edward I defeated the last two Welsh ‘princes’ and ringed north-west Wales with a chain of massive stone castles which stand to this day. They represent the pinnacle of the castle-builder’s art, and it was to the building-site that would be Caernarfon Castle, looking across at the island of Anglesey, that the King brought his pregnant wife Eleanor in the spring of 1284.

  According to the story, Edward had promised the conquered Welsh that he would give them ‘a prince born in Wales who speaks no word of English’, and that April Eleanor duly produced a son, another Edward. From the battlements of Caernarfon Castle, the proud father presented the Welsh with their newborn prince - who spoke not a word of anything. Tradition has it that, far from being insulted, the Welsh were thoroughly delighted by King Edward’s little joke, and that from that day to this all heirs to the English throne have been called Princes of Wales.

  That was the legend, first recorded some two hundred years later, and it is true that the baby prince was born in Wales. But there were no battlements at Caernarfon at that date, only some muddy excavations. More important, the new-born Edward of Caernarfon was not his father’s heir - that distinction belonged to his eleven-year-old brother, Alfonso. It was not until 1301, after Alfonso’s death, that, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, the future Edward II was declared Prince of Wales, and that was in Lincoln, just about as far from Caernarfon as you could get. When Edward became king, he did not name his own son, the future Edward III, Prince of Wales, and in the centuries that followed a number of heirs to the English throne were not given the title.

  It was not until the twentieth century, in fact, that an heir to the English throne was invested as Prince of Wales in Wales. In 1911 the demagogic Welsh politician David Lloyd George invented a fake medieval ceremony especially for the purpose, complete with a striped ‘crusader tent’ and a princely costume that the seventeen-year-old future king, Edward VIII, described as a ‘preposterous rig’. In 1969 Prince Charles wore a more conventional, military uniform, and the crusader tent was replaced by a transparent Perspex awning, the better to televise the pageant, which, commentators told millions of viewers around the world, had been inspired by King Edward I in 1284.

  Edward Longshanks, as he was nicknamed, was a man of impressive capacity, a tall, lean warrior, every inch a king. Like his great-uncle the Lionheart, he went to Palestine as a crusader and displayed both bravery and an ability to organise. With him to the Holy Land he took his wife Eleanor, to whom he was deeply attached. When she died in Northamptonshire in 1290, the King mounted a procession to carry her back to London, marking the occasion by having a series of tall, highly decorated stone crosses built at every spot where the cortège stopped along the way. The last stopping-point before Westminster was in the neighbourhood of Charing, and a replica of the cross stands in front of Charing Cross Station in London today.

  Edward was a man of ferocious temper, notorious for boxing the ears of his children when they displeased him. The royal account book lists repairs to his daughter Elizabeth’s coronet in 1297, after he had hurled it into the fire. His tomb in Westminster Abbey bears the inscription Malleus Scottorum, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’. But his attempts to conquer Scotland did not yield the success that he had enjoyed in Wales, and in a series of bloody campaigns he was held off by the Scottish heroes William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace and Robert the Bruce.

  These setbacks did not deter his people from rating Edward I an English hero, and they even applauded the act of bigotry that is the enduring blot on his reputation to this day. In the course of his unsuccessful Scottish campaigns and his Welsh castle-building programmes, the King found himself in dire financial difficulties and he resorted to desperate measures. Monarchs such a
s Richard I had traditionally tried to protect England’s Jewish communities of merchants and moneylenders against popular prejudice, but in 1290, in return for a large subsidy from Parliament, Edward I agreed to expel England’s Jews. There were some three thousand, it has been estimated, living in about fifteen communities. Some were killed, many were robbed, and Edward himself took about £2000 in proceeds from the houses they were compelled to abandon.

  It was the ugly face of the faith that had inspired Longshanks to go crusading. When a Jew, before the expulsion, went to Parliament to complain about the case of a Jewish boy who had been forcibly baptised a Christian, Edward did not see the problem. ‘The king does not want to revoke the baptism,’ reads the ledger. ‘No enquiries are to be made of anyone, and nothing is to be done.’

  It is a comment to ponder as you look at the beautiful Charing Cross.

  PIERS GAVESTON AND EDWARD II

  AD 1308

  ‘FAIR OF BODY AND GREAT OF STRENGTH’, Edward of Caernarfon, England’s first Prince of Wales, was widely welcomed when he came into his inheritance as King Edward II at the age of twenty-three. But as he made his way down the aisle of Westminster Abbey at the end of February 1308 with his young queen Isabella, daughter of the French king Philip IV, all eyes turned to the individual behind him - Piers Gaveston, a young knight from Gascony. The new king had awarded Gaveston pride of place in his coronation procession, bestowing on him the honour of carrying the crown and sword of Edward the Confessor, and Gaveston, in royal purple splashed with pearls, was certainly dressed for the occasion. His finery was such, wrote one chronicler, that ‘he more resembled the god Mars, than an ordinary mortal’. According to the gossips, King Edward was so fond of Gaveston that he had given him the pick of the presents that he had received at his recent wedding to Isabella. The Queen’s relatives went back to France complaining that Edward loved Gaveston more than he loved his wife.