A Great and Terrible King Read online

  Had Burnell been involved in the negotiations with France in the winter of 1293-94, it is impossible to imagine that they would have been so badly handled. But the great chancellor, after eighteen years in office and a lifetime in Edward's service, had died at Berwick the previous year, towards the end of the Great Cause proceedings. His replacement, John Langton, was no fool but, as a mere chancery clerk, did not command the king's respect as Burnell had done. When the new chancellor advised against the secret deal, Edward simply ignored him.17 In February 1294 the order to surrender Gascony was given: in March English officials packed their bags and started to ship out, dismayed to be handing over towns, cities and hostages to the French on the express orders of their king.

  In fact, throughout the negotiations that winter, Edward seems to have ignored almost everyone, and kept no counsel other than his own. The men who were normally consulted in such matters — the magnates - appear to have sensed that important business had been concluded without their involvement. During Lent the king moved into East Anglia, touring his favourite shrines and churches, praying for a successful outcome to his daring and highly personal diplomatic initiative. At this time, noted one local chronicler, the magnates did not attend his court.

  The denouement came at Easter. Edward had moved into Kent, partly to bid farewell to his eldest daughter and her new husband, but mainly in anxious expectation of good news from France: a safe-conduct from Philip to come to Amiens, to marry his sister, and to receive Gascony back on new, improved terms. The newly-weds sailed, and Easter came and went, but still no messengers arrived from France. Then, on 20 April, a sorry band of Englishmen arrived, led by John of St John, the man who until just a few weeks earlier had been seneschal of Gascony. From the horse's mouth, Edward learned what the king of Frances men had said and done as they had occupied the duchy, and the awful truth finally dawned. 'The king went red,' said the best informed chronicler, 'and became very afraid, because he had acted less than wisely.'20 In France, more or less simultaneously, Edmund of Lancaster was also discovering the enormity of his error, and being told by Philip's counsellors that Gascony would remain in French hands. A few weeks later Edward was condemned in Paris for failing to attend the French king's summons, and the duchy was declared forfeit.

  As the news of the confiscation spread, the English people weighed the evidence available and concluded that their king must have gone mad. 'Up till now,' said one writer, 'Edward . . . had in all his acts shown himself energetic, generous and triumphant, like another Solomon.' His departure from reason, it was popularly decided, was down to that old demon, Lust. The prospect of marrying a beautiful young woman had clearly turned the head of the fifty-four-year-old king.

  Accordingly, when parliament assembled on the last day of May there were extraordinary scenes: Edward, usually so masterful, appeared almost meek, while his magnates, normally so agreeable, were furious. Having not been consulted, they felt no obligation to meet his request for help. According to one well-informed chronicler, it took a public act of contrition from the king to turn the situation around. Before all who were present, Edward swore an oath that he had not acted out of lust for the girl, but in order to have peace with France, without which he could not fulfil his vow to go on crusade. The magnates, moved by this declaration, now promised to help the king win back the lost duchy, saying they would follow him'in life and death'. 'Mount the warhorses!' urged Anthony Bek, the bellicose bishop of Durham. 'Take your lance in your hand!'

  The challenge that lay before them was enormous. France was not Wales. A war there was a fight against a formidable opponent, whose resources, by even the most charitable estimate, were the equal of Edward's own, and in many respects much greater. Moreover, Philip IV was already prepared for war: since 1292 the French king had been building a fleet of galleys. The professed reason for this project had been a desire to assist in the ongoing 'crusade' against Sicily. Now, in retrospect, it was obvious that these ships had been intended all along for a conflict with the king of England.

  Of course, Edward's fury at the French action was fuelled by the knowledge that his own crusade, the true crusade, was now dead in the water. The quest for peace, the years of planning, the endless diplomacy: at a stroke it was all rendered obsolete. In June, the king wrote to the prince of Achaea in Greece, who was to have been an ally in the East, angrily lamenting the sudden change in circumstances.25 The only consolation was that he was comfortably in credit. Conscious of the gargantuan task ahead of him, and resigned to the eclipse of his crusade, Edward determined to do as his enemy had done, and use his crusading resources to fund what was now an inevitable secular conflict. Accordingly, he turned to his bankers, the dependable Riccardi of Lucca, and asked them for the 100,000 marks that they had received from the papacy some three years earlier.

  But the Riccardi, like Edward, had been caught completely off guard. They, like he, had conducted their business on the not unreasonable assumption that Anglo-French relations would remain amicable. The money they had been holding on his behalf was, it seems, tied up in overseas investments, and could no longer be recovered. And so, presumably with a good deal of trepidation, the Italians regretfully informed the king that, in present circumstances, they were unable to meet his request.

  Edward's reaction, sadly, is not recorded, nor is it known for certain when he received this devastating news. The evidence, however, suggests it must have been early, and probably before mid-June, for at that point parliament instituted a series of drastic emergency measures. First, on 12 June, it was ordered that all the wool in the country should be seized; then, four days later, notice was given that all churches were to be searched for monetary deposits - in particular the proceeds of the crusading tax that was still being collected. The king was clearly engaged in a desperate hunt for funds, rendered more frantic by the realisation that his bankers had failed him.The Riccardi themselves may have been granted a period of grace to see if they could recover any of the lost money, but by the autumn Edward had ordered their arrest. They were, he later opined, 'men who had deceived him'. In this way the profitable relationship that had served them both so well for more than two decades, and that had underpinned all of the king's earlier military enterprises, came to an end. The clever system of customs-for-credit was left in tatters.

  More than ever before, Edward needed the voluntary support of his subjects. Thankfully, the English magnates in parliament were as good as their word. One of the first off the mark was Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk. A decade earlier he had rendered the king inestimable good service, not only fighting in Wales but also shipping large quantities of produce from his Irish estates to feed the conquering armies. Now the earl showed himself ready to perform the same task again, ordering his servants in Ireland to buy up all the food they could and ship it to Gascony in advance of his arrival. Edward would need exactly this kind of altruism to be widely replicated if he was to succeed. Throughout June the writs flew, first to England, then to Ireland and Scotland. All the king's lieges were enjoined to be at Portsmouth, ready to sail, on i September.

  By the end of June, when the last of these orders were issued, Edward himself had already arrived in Portsmouth — the great royal naval complex developed a century earlier by his illustrious ancestor, Richard I, for prosecuting a war against France — and was overseeing the build-up of his invasion force. As ever, the troops and clerks of the royal household had sprung into action like a well-oiled machine. They had already been in Portsmouth for over a fortnight, requisitioning warehouses, commandeering horses and carts, and impressing ships. Around the town, fields had been hired to accommodate hundreds of head of catde, driven on the hoof from as far afield as Salisbury. Other produce -pigs, fish, cheese, chickens and some 24,000 eggs was pouring in from local suppliers and from London.

  Already, as well, troops were starting to arrive. 1 September was the date for a general muster: before that, Edward intended to dispatch a smaller, rapid-reaction force to lead
the first assault. As early as 8 June he had summoned a select number of barons to come to him as quickly as possible to this end. Some of these were young men, or must have brought young men with them, for the king knighted certain of them after their arrival in Portsmouth. As Edward explained in letters to his Gascon subjects (dated 1 July), this first force would be led by one such young man, his nephew, John of Brittany, aided by the more experienced John of St John, Gascony's ousted seneschal. The second, larger fleet would then follow, captained by Edmund of Lancaster and the earl of Lincoln. Finally, in the fullness of time, Edward would come to the duchy in person.

  This scheme, however, was disrupted by the appalling weather noted by many chroniclers that summer. In Ireland, monks wrote of a great storm in mid-July that destroyed the crops and caused widespread famine. A writer at Bury St Edmunds confirmed that there was similar dearth and want throughout England. 'Worse still,' he added, 'during August and September there was a continuous drenching downpour of rain.'

  This deluge, and the contrary winds that accompanied it, delayed the departure of the first fleet, probably for several weeks. It was not until the third week of August that the ships were able to put to sea. This meant that they would not be back in time to transport the main muster, which was accordingly postponed from the start of September to the last day of the month. No doubt frustrated by the delay, but glad to have finally blessed his troops and bidden them farewell, the king left Portsmouth on 21 August and went on pilgrimage to Worcester. God's blessing, and the intercession of St Wulfstan, were also deemed necessary for the great English enterprise that was finally under way.

  The Church was much on Edward's mind. The scrutiny of funds that had taken place on 5 July had succeeded in locating such crusade funds as still existed — a useful £32,000. But it had also revealed that the English Church itself was rich, and therefore able to help finance the French war. Finance was still the king's major concern. By this stage he had thought better of his plan to seize all the country's wool, having been persuaded by the mercantile community that an increase in customs duties would be more workable and render better results. But the scale of the increase — a punitive six-fold hike - shows that the need for money remained desperately acute. As the king prepared to leave Portsmouth, therefore, he instructed his clergy — his apparently comfortably off clergy - that he wanted to talk with them in Westminster in one month's time.

  The trip to Worcester was accordingly of short duration: a flying visit to secure the necessary spiritual aid. Meanwhile, the material build-up continued. On his way to and from the cathedral city, Edward ordered the infantry levies that would accompany the second fleet — these were to come fjom Wales. The king's lieutenants there were enjoined to raise as many of the strongest and most powerful men as possible and have them ready at Shrewsbury by the end of September.33

  When Edward returned to Hampshire in the middle of the month, however, it was to news of fresh disaster. The first fleet, once out in the English Channel, had been dashed by the same contrary winds that had earlier delayed its departure. Some ships had been blown back to Portsmouth, but others had been swept as far afield as Plymouth, 150 miles to the west. Weeks after it should have arrived, his rapid-reaction force for Gascony was now scattered along the coast of southern England.

  By itself, this latest setback was probably enough for the king and his advisers to decide that the main muster would have to be postponed indefinitely. There would be no point in having an army assembled at Portsmouth at the end of September without the means to transport it into the war zone. At the same time, it is possible that Edward was aware by this point of a more insidious problem. Some men, it seems, were refusing to obey his summons. The ancient obligation to provide the king with military service, as we have already seen, was limited by time — forty days being the longest period upon which the king could insist. But service was also subject to geographical limits - or so the landowning classes claimed. The question of whether Englishmen were duty bound to fight overseas had arisen on several occasions in the thirteenth century, and in the summer of 1294, prompted by Edward's demand, the argument appears to have flared back into life. In Cambridgeshire, for example, the abbot of Ramsey was distraining his tenants - that is, seizing their horses and cattle — in order to compel them to turn out for the king. When this failed, he confronted the same men with the abbey's own records, which showed that their grandfathers had fought on the Continent over fifty years earlier. But this too produced no compliance and, in desperation, the abbot paid out of his own pocket to send substitute knights to the king in order to fulfil his obligation. In the event, the fact that the muster had been abandoned meant that they were sent home again and told to await further orders, as were presumably the other knights who came to Portsmouth, and the 5,000 Welsh infantry who marched as far as Winchester before being turned back. There was no recorded reaction on Edward's part to the opposition, but he would surely have been aware of it. As he set out for Westminster, therefore, it was probably with the knowledge that he would have to talk with his lay subjects, as well as his clergy, about the extent of their obligation to the Crown.

  But the clergy came first. Edward met the assembled bishops, abbots and lesser churchmen on 21 September, as agreed, and found them champing at the bit. The cause of their ire was the scrutiny of church funds that had taken place in July. The fact that the king had chosen to lay hands on the crusading tax was one thing: a matter for his own conscience and the pope. In their quest for cash, however, royal agents had been quite indiscriminate, and had made off with an additional £11,000 of private deposits. This seizure, moreover, had been handled with gross insensitivity, with the king's men forcing their way into ecclesiastical buildings and breaking open chests with axes. It was an act in many ways reminiscent of Edward's personal smash-and-grab at the Temple Church in London some thirty years earlier, but carried out on a nationwide scale. And, to add insult to injury, it had taken place on a Sunday.

  The king, in response, came close to apologising, and promised redress where offence had been caused. But, as he went on to explain, this was a national emergency — a war forced upon him, a peacemaker and a sworn crusader, by the deceitful king of France. He needed their help, which meant he needed their money. The clergy considered the matter for three days and offered him a tax of 20 per cent.

  Now it was Edward's turn to be angry — so much so that the elderly dean of St Paul's who came to deliver the clergy's response collapsed and died in the royal presence. A troop of knights was dispatched to the assembled churchmen, with the message that Edward wanted half their money, or else they would be outlawed — that is, literally placed outside the king's protection, and exposed to all the dangers of robbery and physical violence that that implied. Anyone wishing to oppose Edward was invited to stand up and identify himself as a breaker of the king's peace. Unsurprisingly, there were no takers. At this critical moment, the English Church lacked a leader: Archbishop Pecham had died almost two years earlier, and his replacement was still in Rome awaiting papal confirmation. Fearing for their safety, the clergymen crumpled and agreed that the tax, unprecedented in its severity, could be levied.

  Shocking as Edward's bullying tactics appear, his anger is readily understandable. Not so long ago, he could have imagined himself in the Holy Land in the autumn of 1294, perhaps even in the Holy City itself. But it had been a year of accumulating disasters: the treacherous occupation of Gascony by the French; the loss of the crusade funds and the consequent collapse of his financial system; the failure, in spite of his preparation and his prayers, of the first fleet to reach the troubled duchy; the rumour, and perhaps more than the rumour, that at least some of his subjects might refuse to fight for its recovery.

  Edward felt every right to be angry. It was now early October, and still no help had reached Gascony. The first fleet was still regrouping in Plymouth; the magnates were talking in Westminster when they should have been fighting in France. There were also
reports of trouble in Wales — apparently some of the infantry ordered to Shrewsbury had revolted. Moreover, whatever money Edward had been able to grab or extort, it was still clearly not enough: on 8 October, the king summoned the knights of the shire to meet in Westminster with the intention of negotiating a new tax.

  One week later, the next hammer blow fell. The trouble in Wales, it transpired, was not local at all, nor was it spontaneous. It was planned, it was national, and it was deadly serious. Three baronial castles had already been taken. The royal castles at Harlech, Conwy and Criccieth were surrounded and under siege. And Caernarfon, the great, unfinished fortress, centre of royal power and symbol of Edward's imperial rule, had fallen. The castle walls were being thrown down. The new English borough burned.

  'The stirrers of this sedition were a duo called Madog and Morgan.' So wrote Walter of Guisborough, one of the most important chroniclers of the last part of Edward's reign, and to some extent he was right. Revolt in north-western Wales had been raised by Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of the late prince of Wales who, rather ambitiously, sought to revive the title for himself. Meanwhile, in the south, the rebels were being led by Morgan ap Maredudd, a disinherited local lord whose particular grudge was against the earl of Gloucester. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that the major spur to action in 1294 was the frustrated ambition of fading Welsh dynasties. More than ever before, the rising was popular. Madog, Morgan and other leaders like them were not exciting a docile people to rebellion: they were riding a tidal wave of popular indignation. Welsh resentment against English rule had been building for over a decade, encouraged by the familiar pattern of oppression and apartheid that had fuelled earlier outbreaks. What had caused it to swell so spectacularly in the early 1290s had been Edward's effort to raise taxes - specifically, the fifteenth granted to him in 1290 for the expulsion of the Jews. There was no tradition of taxation in Wales, and unreasonable assessment had meant that, in some areas at least, the Welsh - a much poorer people to start with -had been expected to pay more than double what had been asked of the English. Collection was culminating in 1294, just as Edward's Continental crisis broke. With what must have been considerable curiosity, the Welsh watched as their oppressors departed from the new towns and castles, leaving behind only the most minimal of garrisons. Then, with what must have been utter amazement, they learned that they would be required to fight - to band together in their thousands and be issued with arms. Unsurprisingly, when the day of the muster arrived, they needed no further encouragement.