A Great and Terrible King Page 4

  Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was Henry Ill's brother-in-law (the king's sister, another Eleanor, was Simon's wife). He was also everything that Henry was not: quick-witted, silver-tongued and, in the words of Matthew Paris, 'famous and experienced in warfare'. His personality and accomplishments had recommended him, particularly to Eleanor of Provence, as the best man for the job of safeguarding Gascony until Edward's coming of age. In the summer of 1248, largely at the queen's behest, Montfort had been appointed by Henry as the royal lieutenant in the duchy.

  It was a bad decision. Tough and clever Montfort may have been, but he was also uncommonly egotistical and inflexibly self-righteous. These qualities, which arose in part from his religious fanaticism, made the earl an ideal crusader — he had already been east once and had vowed to go again - but they rendered him altogether unsuitable for the business of governing Gascony. The lieutenant's authority and resources were limited: local towns and lords, when they grew fractious, needed gentle conciliation. Montfort's method was to fight fire with fire, and very soon the whole duchy was ablaze. Even as Henry III took the cross in March 1250, his brother-in-law was writing to him, explaining how certain Gascons were using guerrilla warfare to cripple his government.

  Henry's initial response was to back Montfort: throughout 1250 the earl was given thousands of pounds to spend on mercenaries and castle-building. But, as the tide of complaints from Gascony swelled, and the rebellion continued to intensify, Henry started to change his mind. Eventually, much to Montfort's anger, the king cut his funding and, at Christmas 1251, the two men had a furious public row. The earl was told to stand down, but returned to the duchy in defiance and wreaked more havoc.

  The escalating crisis in Gascony had grave implications for Henry's crusade, and alarmed those of his subjects who had sworn to go east. In April 1252 their worst fears were confirmed, ironically, by Henry's botched efforts to allay them. At that point the king let it be known that he would definitely be departing, and that to this end he had fixed a firm date. But the date was midsummer 1256, a further four years into the future. The long delay was necessary because, having sent investigators to Gascony, Henry now believed that the only way that the province could be stabilised was with a military expedition led by himself.

  Here too, however, the king ran into extreme difficulty. The fundamental problem was money. War was an expensive business, and Henry III was not a rich king. His private financial resources, which amounted to the rents and sales from his own lands, were by no means great. He could demand extra money from his subjects, but the methods for obtaining it were old fashioned, punitive and unfair. Essentially, the king was reliant on revenues and fines raised by his local officials — foresters, justices and sheriffs - and the more funds that were needed, the more oppressive and unscrupulous these officials had to be. It says a lot that the stories of Robin Hood, in which such men are the villains, originated in Henry's reign.

  The obvious solution was to impose a general levy on everyone — a tax - and Henry's immediate predecessors had on occasion done just that. King Richard and King John had found that they could raise huge sums in this way — England, it bears repeating, was a rich and prosperous country — but such taxes proved highly unpopular, and were regarded as tantamount to robbery. It soon became impossible to impose them without first obtaining a much broader degree of consent than was customary for other political decisions. The solution suggested in King John's reign, that the king should consult with all those who held lands directly from him, proved impracticable. It fell to Henry's ministers to devise a new way of obtaining approval, and, at some point in the period 1237-54, they decided to summon representatives from the counties and towns of England. Around the same time, a new word was coined to describe such assemblies: parliament.

  To his surprise and frustration, however, Henry found that when parliaments were summoned they were not nearly as compliant nor as automatically obliging as he would have liked. Knights of the shires and burgesses from the towns had plenty to say about the oppressiveness of his government, and linked his demands for money to the redress of their grievances. On the issue of Gascony, moreover, they were loath to pay any money at all. The kings of England might have been deeply attached to the duchy, but their English subjects felt no similar affection - to them it was merely an expensive burden. When, in the autumn of 1252, Henry asked for a tax to fund his intended expedition, parliament refused (and, to add insult to injury, pointed out his shortcomings as a warrior). The king was left hamstrung. Caught between rebellion in Gascony on the one hand, and political opposition in England on the other, Henry did what he did best, and dithered.

  Perhaps the only person who could have viewed the king's procrastination with something approaching equanimity was his eldest son. The crisis in Gascony pulled Edward onto the political stage for the first time (Matthew Paris, for example, now begins to notice him properly). In April 1252, as part of his strategy of appeasement, Henry publicly renewed his earlier grant of the duchy to Edward. Those Gascons then in England were summoned to London, and Edward was presented to them as their new lord. He went through the conventional performance expected in such circumstances - receiving oaths of loyalty from the Gascon lords who knelt before him, and distributing valuable gifts as a token of the benefits that his lordship would bring. Edward was twelve going on thirteen at the time; too young, perhaps, to play his role with total conviction, but only just. With every month that Henry delayed, his son grew taller and stronger, more convincing and more politically conscious. When, in the summer of 1252, Henry promised to intervene in Gascony, he was able to envisage an alternative scenario, acceptable to himself as well as to the Gascons, in which Edward would be sent in his stead. Edward may even have been privately pleased that the summer of 1256 was still four years away; it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for seventeen-year-olds to go on crusade.34

  Any immediate hopes that Edward entertained of a larger role as a result of the Gascon crisis, however, were dashed by its rapid escalation in the spring of 1253. Castile, the greatest of the several kingdoms that made up medieval Spain, had for decades been a friendly neighbour on Gascony's southern border. But now it had acquired a new king in the shape of Alfonso X, who had entered into his inheritance the previous year determined to make his mark not only in Spain but also on the wider European stage. With a tenuous claim of his own to Gascony, and almost certainly tempted by invitations from the Gascon rebels, Alfonso found the prospect of extending his power across the Pyrenees impossible to resist. In the spring of 1253 a new rebellion was launched with his backing, and he made it clear that his intention was to invade. Castles and towns fell swiftly in the face of this new assault; in April the people of Bordeaux, Gascony's principal city, wrote a panicked letter to Henry III. If he did not act immediately, they assured him, the duchy would be lost forever. It was a prospect terrifying enough to shake the king into action. Still unable to secure a consensual tax, he resorted to a prerogative to which all lords were entitled and demanded a levy to pay for the knighting of his eldest son. If this gave Edward cause to imagine that this meant the beginning of his military career, however, he was mistaken. When Henry and his hastily assembled army sailed from Portsmouth in August, he left Edward behind, in the care of his mother, who remained in England as regent. 'The boy,' says Matthew Paris, 'stood crying and sobbing on the shore, and would not depart as long as he could see the swelling sails of the ships.'35

  When it finally came down to it, Edward, now fourteen, was still considered a child by his parents; the role they envisaged for him was not knight but pawn. Even as the king sailed to war, his advisers were labouring to make peace. They correctly divined that Alfonso's backing for the Gascon rebels was opportunistic and speculative, and worked throughout the summer and autumn to convince him that his best interests lay in a diplomatic solution. The Spanish king was a slippery customer, repeatedly stalling in the hope of establishing the best terms he could get, but He
nry III had considerable success in putting down the Gascon rebels, and by the start of 1254 Alfonso was ready to settle. He was prepared to drop his support for the rebellion and his claim to Gascony in return for a marriage alliance. His young half-sister — yet another Eleanor — would marry Henry's eldest son.

  Henry had, in fact, envisaged such an alliance from the off. 'Friendship between princes can be obtained in no more fitting manner than by the link of conjugal troth,' he had declared, rather loftily, in the spring of the previous year when commissioning his ambassadors. What he had not anticipated was that such friendship would have to be bought at such a high price. Before he would agree to the marriage, Alfonso demanded that Edward be endowed with lands worth £10,000 a year. This was almost certainly more than Henry had ever intended to give, but, short of other options, he duly consented. On 14 February, still in Gascony, the English king issued a charter that created for his son a great appanage. Its principal component was, of course, Gascony itself, as had long been intended. But, to meet Alfonso's stipulated value, it now also comprised (with certain exceptions) all the royal lands in Ireland and Wales and, in England, the lapsed earldom of Chester, the castle of Bristol and a number of important manors in the Midlands. Nor was this the end of the Spanish king's conditions. Alfonso was also determined to meet his future brother-in-law before the wedding took place, and demanded the privilege of knighting him. Consequently,

  Edward found his position dramatically transformed. At a single stroke he had become the richest landowner in Henry Ill's realm after the king himself. Moreover, the prospect of overseas adventure, denied to him just nine months before, had been reopened. On 29 May he and his mother took ship at Portsmouth and set sail for Gascony.

  The summer of 1254, during which he celebrated his fifteenth birthday, was therefore one of many new experiences for Edward: his first sea voyage, which lasted almost a fortnight and placed him, as never before, at God's mercy; his first glimpse of warfare, for he joined his father on what remained of the frontline, and participated — at least to the extent that he was present — in the reduction of the last rebel strongholds. But what must surely have loomed largest in the young man's mind during these weeks was the thought of his impending marriage. It was, of course, an arranged match, dictated to the greatest possible degree by the exigencies of foreign policy. Nevertheless, it was not a forced arrangement. Constraining couples to marry against their will had been forbidden by the Church since the late twelfth century, a fact to which Edward alluded in July, when the final documents for his betrothal were drawn up. Anxious to prove he was his own man and that no parental arm-twisting had occurred, he affirmed that he had agreed 'willingly and spontaneously' to marry Eleanor, adding, with a chivalrous flourish, 'of whose prudence and beauty we have heard by general report'.

  In late September, having spent several weeks in Bordeaux, Edward set out for Spain. He went without his parents. Henry had already spent too much time and too much money on the pacification of his restless duchy. It was time for him and the queen to return to England, which they duly did a few weeks later. This did not mean, however, that their son travelled unaccompanied. A retinue of lords, the best that could be assembled at short notice, rode with him. Some persons of importance came from England, others from Gascony. Several, by design, were also young men, yet to be knighted, and this was the second matter that would have impinged on Edward: his impending graduation into the ranks of knighthood. Significantly, he travelled to Spain with his tutor-in-arms, Bartholomew Pecche, and two of Bartholomew's sons, who were also due to be dubbed by the Spanish king.

  On 18 October the Anglo-Gascon riding party arrived in Burgos, a city that had until recently prided itself on being the principal residence of Castile's kings, and that still boasted strong attachments to the royal house. Their arrival was too late for any of the planned festivities to coincide with the feast of the translation of Edward the Confessor (13 October), as Henry III had hoped might be the case. Frustratingly, thanks to the silence of Spanish sources, we know almost nothing of what happened next - not even the dates of the ceremonies were registered by local chroniclers. Edward and his companions were in all probability knighted on i November, in the monastery of Las Huelgas, outside the city walls, where the kings of Castile were buried. On the same day, and in the same place (but, again, with the same caveats about probability) Edward met Eleanor for the first time and they were married. Like Edward, we are almost entirely ignorant of any details about Eleanor beyond the general report of her prudence and beauty. We do know that she was a few weeks short of her thirteenth birthday.

  Edward, his new wife and their companions did not tarry for long in Castile after the wedding — no more than a week at most. By 21 November they were back in Gascony, at which point their progress deliberately slowed. With the essential diplomacy of the marriage completed and the threat of Castilian interference finally removed, Edward had no need to rush anywhere. On the contrary, the departure of his parents a few weeks before meant that he was now in charge of the duchy in his own right, and it was therefore important for him to visit its most important towns and impress himself on his people. 'Edward, firstborn son of the illustrious king of England, now ruling in Gascony as prince and lord' - the opening line of the very first document he issued after his return from Spain seems to catch the duchy's new young master in an exultant mood.

  But soon into the new year the spirit of festivity faded, and the serious business of restoring order began. Finding Gascony's finances in a dire state, Edward elected to levy a tax, the pretext (as earlier in England) being his recent elevation to knighthood. By itself this would have been bad enough from the Gascons' point of view; as it was, Edward's demand coincided with another imposed by Henry III to fund his crusade, and the combined burden was enough to spark a fresh round of dissension in the duchy. By the spring of 1255 Edward had been forced on to the defensive: seizing towns, fortifying castles, ordering the construction of ships, and bringing in supplies of material, money and grain from his other new lordship of Ireland. In England, his father was panicked into sending reinforcements of pre-paid knights, even cancelling a tournament in view of what he saw as his son's desperate need for manpower in an hour of peril.

  For such parental assistance — assuming it ever arrived - Edward would presumably have been grateful. By the summer he had quelled the new disturbances and was expanding his authority by dealing with the older rivalries among the Gascons themselves. Not all Henry Ill's interventions, however, can have been so welcome to him. Indeed, the difficulties Edward faced in asserting his authority in Gascony had as much to do with its limited nature as it did to any Gascon resistance. With most of the duchy's officials having been put in place by the king before his departure, little was left to his son's initiative. On the rare occasions when Edward did take independent action, moreover, Henry would intervene from afar and modify his decisions. In the main rebel town of La Reole, for instance, the rebels had held out in the church, and for this reason Edward ordered that the building be razed to the ground. His father, however, immediately overruled him, and submitted the decision on the church to the arbitration of two bishops, with the inevitable result that most of its fabric was spared.42

  Commenting on the amount of land that Henry III had granted to his son, Matthew Paris had been typically withering. Henry, he said, had left himself 'a mutilated little king'. In fact, Henry had been quite canny. While the grant was unquestionably large, it was composed almost entirely of oudying territories where his own authority was debatable; even the castles and manors granted to Edward in England were recent acquisitions to which the king's right was far from unimpeachable. More importantly, Henry had not resigned his position as the chief lord of any of these lands, and had retained the titles — lord of Ireland, duke of Aquitaine — that went with them. Edward's initial, one-off assertion that he was 'the firstborn son of the illustrious king of England, now ruling in Gascony as prince and lord' may have been ju
bilant, but its self-evident awkwardness betrayed the fact that he had no new tide of his own. Indeed, it underlined the fact that his authority was entirely derived from that of his father, who could interfere and overrule at any time. Just like Simon de Montfort before him, Edward was really no more than Henry's lieutenant.

  The way the relationship was supposed to work was spelt out in a letter that the king sent to his son on 17 August 1255. On his way home from Gascony Henry had visited Paris to renew his truce with the king of France, and now that a new three-year ceasefire was in place, Henry felt it was time that Edward moved on. He should go to Ireland, where he could spend the winter reforming and ordering his other new overseas lordship. Gascony could be left in the hands of a lieutenant — indeed, Henry had already appointed a suitable candidate. All this was done at the suggestion of Peter of Savoy, the great-uncle who had micro-managed Edward's affairs since his early infancy. In fact, the letter concluded, all being well, Peter would probably arrive in Gascony in a few weeks' time to help Edward make the necessary arrangements for his departure.