A Great and Terrible King Read online

  'May Wales be accursed of God and St Simon’ For it has always been full of treason!' So rhymed another important north-country chronicler, Peter Langtoft, on hearing of the Welsh rebellion, and one can well imagine similar (albeit less poetic) oaths forming on the lips of his king. By the middle of October Edward realised that the rising in Wales was so serious that the troops and supplies originally intended for Gascony would have to be redeployed. It was a minor blessing, perhaps, that by this date the long-delayed first fleet had finally put out of Plymouth and sailed beyond recall. But writs reached Portsmouth instructing the earls of Lancaster and Lincoln to send their men and materiel westwards; they and the king's other lieges were requested to rendezvous at Worcester, as on previous occasions. Requested, not required: as the scale of the crisis continued to increase, so Edward recognised the need to moderate his natural imperiousness. Fighting the French and the Welsh simultaneously, and having already browbeaten the Church into submission, he could not afford any additional confrontation with his lay magnates. When, after what must have been an intensely frustrating four-week wait, the laity assembled in Westminster to consider the royal request for cash, it was the cue for more concessions. The controversial Quo Warranto inquiry, moderated in return for the last tax, was now dropped altogether — and at a knockdown price. The laity, unlike the clergy, did not lack a leader. When the king asked for a tax of a third, his old sparring partner the earl of Gloucester stepped forward to object. A tenth was all Edward was able to obtain in exchange for abandoning one of his most cherished projects. It must have been with a new, bitter taste in his mouth that, immediately after the tax was agreed, the king set out for Wales.

  The military strategy was by now familiar: three armies, from three bases, would drive into north, south and central Wales. The scale, by contrast, was extraordinarily novel: no fewer than 35,000 foot soldiers were mobilised, a figure that dwarfed the total deployed during the conquest by a factor of four. Leaving his earls to tackle the other theatres, Edward, as ever, commanded the northern assault. With some 5,000 men by his side, the king pushed through the valleys of the interior, while another 16,000 marched along the coastal road. Progress was swift, resistance seemingly slight: within a week or so, his forces were reunited and, as the end of the year approached, Edward drew up his whole army on the eastern edge of the River Conwy.

  There, on the opposite shore, was a sight to lift all their spirits. Conwy Castle, which can only have stood a few feet high at the time of the king's last visit, was now completed. Master James of St George and his fellow masons had worked at lightning speed to finish the fortress, and its close counterpart at Harlech, in just six building seasons. Grafted onto its platform of rock, surrounded on three sides by the sea, Conwy stood like a ship in harbour, its whitewashed walls rising sheer and tall, the royal flags flying from its turrets. When Edward and some of his soldiers crossed the river to celebrate Christmas in the castle's great hall, he may well have reflected that it represented the best £15,000 he had ever spent.

  At the start of the new year (1295) Conwy certainly proved it was worth every penny. In early January, for reasons unknown, the king decided on an immediate advance. Possibly he hoped to relieve Caernarfon, or even the castles further round the coast; perhaps he had intelligence concerning the whereabouts of his enemies on which he aimed to capitalise. Impatience almost certainly played a part — Edward was anxious to deal with Wales so he could return to the business of Gascony. Whatever the case, without waiting for the rest of his army to cross the Conwy, on 7 January the king took such soldiers as he had with him and struck out into the west.

  At some point during this sortie they were attacked. We do not know precisely when, because even the routine royal record-keeping was disrupted as a consequence. Immediate losses were apparently small — it was not the king and his soldiery that were targeted, but their baggage train. This, however, had the effect of creating a more pernicious problem. They were deep inside enemy territory and had been deprived of supplies. Having penetrated as far as Nefyn - ironically, the scene of his earlier victory celebrations — Edward ordered a retreat. By 20 January he and his army were back at Conwy Castle.

  But they were still cut off. Outside the castle walls, the worst storm in living memory raged. 'It was so terrible,' wrote one English chronicler, 'that even men who were a hundred years old could recall nothing similar. 'The harsh conditions meant that no contact could be had with the reinforcements stationed on the opposite side of the estuary. Edward and his troops found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being under siege and running out of rations. Walter of Guisborough has a nice story, not too tall to be entirely incredible, of how the soldiery had set aside the last barrel of wine for the king's personal consumption, but that Edward insisted on sharing with everyone.

  Their isolation was comparatively short lived. By the start of February, if not before, contact with the main army had been re-established and supplies were able to get through.40 During that month ships arrived from Bristol and Chester, Lancashire and Dorset, Ireland and even Gascony. The seaborne operation served to emphasise the wisdom of Edward's choice of coastal sites for his castles; yet it also highlighted the folly of his recent, impetuous foray. After his brush with disaster, the king showed himself in no hurry to move anywhere until victory seemed more certain. By the second week of March his well-fed soldiers were so bored from inactivity that they begged to be allowed out for a bit of adventure. A brief sortie led to the killing of some Welshmen and the recovery of items from the lost baggage train.

  The eagerness of the troops at Conwy was probably encouraged by the knowledge that elsewhere in Wales a renewed English assault was well under way. As early as the middle of February the earl of Hereford had struck out from his base in the south and successfully recovered the town and castle at Abergavenny. A few weeks later, on 6 March, the royal forces in the north-west had marched out of Rhuddlan and into the interior. The best news, however, had emerged from mid-Wales. On 5 March, some eight miles north-west of Montgomery at a place called Maes Moydog, the earl of Warwick had fought a pitched battle with the army of Madog ap Llywelyn. 'They were the best and bravest Welshmen that anyone had seen,' an English eyewitness admitted, but explained that 700 Welsh soldiers fell compared with just seven Englishmen. Madog himself evaded death and capture, but his power had been decisively broken.

  At last, in early April, the king moved out of Conwy. His target was Anglesey, which had been the centre of the revolt in the north. Thanks to the ingenuity of James of St George in the preceding weeks, the island was quickly retaken by amphibious assault, using an armada of ships, pontoons and siege-engines. By 10 April Edward had arrived at Llanfaes, Anglesey's most populous and prosperous settlement, where seven months earlier the rebels had executed the English sheriff. As punishment, the king had the town levelled and its inhabitants moved to a virgin site on the other side of the island that still bears the name Newborough. Llanfaes, for the sake of future security, was to be superseded by another new English plantation, protected by yet another new castle. Within a week of the king's arrival, Master James had begun work on a marshy site christened Beaumaris.

  What followed was also largely an exercise for ensuring future security. In early May Edward set out southwards, probably passing via Criccieth and Harlech to inspect his new and reconditioned castles, both of which had held out for the duration of the revolt, supplied by ships from Ireland. By the middle of the month, some ten miles north of Aberystwyth, the king was reunited with his other commanders — the earl of Warwick and the Rhuddlan garrison under Reginald de Grey - who had pushed right through the Welsh interior to reach the western coast. As he moved through each district, Edward was all the while receiving submissions and taking hostages in large numbers. The pacification process drew to a close in June as the king moved into the south, where he received into his peace the rebel leader Morgan ap Maredudd — much to the chagrin of the earl of Gloucester, who had once ag
ain bungled his allotted task, and now suffered the additional ignominy of having Edward confiscate his lordship of Glamorgan. By midsummer, the business of restoring order was complete. On 30 June the king was back at Conwy, with only a token military force.

  One last place remained to be visited. Until this point, it seems, Edward had not stopped at, and perhaps had not seen, his castle at Caernarfon.51 Now, at last, he was ready to behold the stricken giant. Incomplete at the time of the revolt, Caernarfon had latterly suffered substantial damage at the hands of the rebels. Any wooden buildings are likely to have been destroyed by fire, and the town walls, in particular, must have suffered considerable damage — repairs later came to more than £1,000. But enough masonry remained standing in 1295 for Edward to appreciate that the majestic building he and his masons had envisaged twelve years earlier was well on the way to being realised. The king's last concern that summer was to ensure that enormous resources were earmarked for Master James and his team, so that Caernarfon and the new fortress at Beaumaris could be speedily finished. That done, his tour of inspection complete, and with some 250 Welsh hostages in his custody, Edward returned to England.

  Gascony, of course, was uppermost in his thoughts. During the winter, while he and his magnates had been effectively reconquering Wales, the first fleet had finally arrived in the duchy and had met with moderate success. John of Brittany and John of St John, although they had failed to retake Bordeaux, had managed to recapture several towns along the Gironde estuary and the River Garonne. The onset of spring, however, had brought with it the inevitable French counter-attack: a large army led by the wars principal architect, Charles of Valois, had quickly reversed these gains, and captured some dozen English knights as they were retreating. Within a few days, all that remained in English hands were Bourg and Blaye, two embattled outposts on the Gironde, and Bayonne, the maritime town in the south-western corner of the duchy.

  These places would not be able to hold out for ever, as Edward keenly appreciated. In March, even before the French counter-offensive had begun, the king had been trying to ship excess supplies from Wales to Gascony, where he knew the need was greater. According to one well-informed chronicler, he also succeeded in sending several thousand infantry to the duchy under the command of John de Botetourt, a knight of the royal household. Such measures, however, were only sticking plasters, insufficient to provide anything more than temporary succour to what was, after all, only ever intended to have been an advance expeditionary force. What Gascony needed more than ever was the deployment of the large English army that Edward had ordered, then cancelled, then finally redirected into Wales the previous year. It was probably to discuss this matter more that any other that the king summoned a small, select parliament to meet in Westminster at the start of August.

  This assembly had barely had time to gather when the news arrived that the French were attacking England's south coast. On 2 August Dover was raided and burned. It was a short-lived assault and not too serious. Although some locals lost their lives (including a monk who achieved sainthood as a result), the raiders were successfully repulsed. More than anything else, the attack was ironic in its timing, coinciding as it did with Edward's return to Westminster after an absence of eight months. Prior to his departure for Wales, the king had been visibly anxious at the prospect of leaving England undefended. Before leaving London he had spent a week at the Tower (his longest stay for seventeen years) and en route to Worcester he had ordered the construction of a fleet of galleys. The raid on Dover probably explains why the parliament summoned for the start of August did not get under way until the middle of the month. It certainly explains why the cardinals who had arrived in England a few weeks earlier made little headway in their effort to secure an Anglo-French peace.

  War with France was still the order of the day, and Edward had given some thought as to how it could be successfully prosecuted. Back in February, during his self-enforced sojourn as Conwy Castle, the king had ordered his sheriffs to identify all those men in their districts with lands worth more than £40 a year and warn them to be ready to fight at three weeks' notice. Here, in other words, was a radical attempt on Edward's part to redefine his subjects' obligation to provide him with military service - a move no doubt inspired by the difficulties that had started to emerge the previous year. By such a measure the vagaries of the existing, ancient system, wherein duty was determined by an individual's tenurial relationship with the Crown, would be swept away, replaced by a more straightforward arrangement based on an assessment of landed wealth. The idea was not entirely new: on the eve of the conquest of Wales, and apparently after an argument with his magnates about the terms of their service, the king had contemplated a similar scheme, only to abandon it at an early stage. Now, with the need in Gascony so great, it seemed imperative that the plan be revived in earnest.

  But when the parliament of August 1295 finally settled down to business in the middle of the month, the magnates were already restless. At that very moment, royal tax collectors were moving into their estates in order to collect the tenth that had been granted the previous year. Having responded to the king's 'affectionate request' to fight in Wales at their own expense, the military men evidently expected that they might be excused payment. Yet all that Edward had been prepared to grant them since the campaign's outset were individual, temporary respites that (in the longest cases) had expired on 1 August. It may have been to appease his magnates on this issue that Edward publicly sacked his treasurer (a man already unpopular with the Church and the citizens of London) at the start of the parliament. As a next step, the king may have floated the idea that the demand for tax would indeed be dropped — for those who agreed to serve him in Gascony. On 20 August some men who were already fighting in the duchy received just such an acquittance, as a mark of the king's 'special favour'. Within three days, however, Edward's attempts at persuasion were seen to have failed. When the king ordered some of the assembled magnates to fight in Gascony, fourteen of them — about a quarter of those present — flady refused to go.

  None of these men were especially powerful, nor did they constitute an organised political clique. The most important among them was the earl of Arundel, Richard fitz Alan, but even he was a relatively unimportant figure, a newcomer to the ranks of England's earls and apparently quite hard-up as a result. Poverty - or what passed for poverty among the ruling classes - was likely to have been the chief complaint of all of these men, most of whom can be proved to have fought in Wales earlier in the year. Their stand, though, was probably taken on a matter of principle: namely that, no matter what innovations their king might care to devise, Englishmen were not obliged to provide military service overseas.

  Edward was massively angry at their refusal. On that day - 23 August - he instructed his officials to distrain these men, just as the abbot of Ramsey had done when he had come up against similar refusals the previous year. Distraint by the king, however, meant suffering of an altogether different degree. Armed with a writ from the exchequer, royal agents would move in to an offender's manors and confiscate goods to the value of any outstanding debts to the Crown. Such debts, which might accumulate from one generation to the next, could be huge. Along with the earldom of Arundel, for example, Richard fitz Alan had inherited debts to the Crown in excess of £5,000.

  Whether distraint would solve anything in this instance remained to be seen. Within a week of the confrontation, parliament had broken up, Edward had left Westminster and nothing had been agreed on how to help Gascony.The king remained furious at the men who had refused him — on 3 September he repeated the order to distrain them in even harsher terms - but at the same time he could not afford to allow their opposition to provoke a wider crisis. Things were already threatening to spiral out of control as the summer drew to a close. Before leaving London Edward had instituted new measures to protect the country's coast. His new galleys - fighting ships with 120 oars a piece - were now ready, under the command of William Leybourne, who
was duly accorded the newly coined tide 'admiral of the sea'. They were to be backed up by teams of paid men patrolling the shoreline. Even as orders were going out for their recruitment, however, the French — once again, with impeccable timing — launched attacks on the south coast, striking at Winchelsea and Hythe. These assaults were even less successful than the last, but, taken with the king's new orders, they seemed to confirm that a French invasion was an imminent prospect. By mid-September, from Land's End to Lincolnshire, men stood watch in their thousands, scanning the horizon for French sails. In this tense atmosphere mad rumours started to circulate. In Essex the people of Harwich went into a panic, believing that an invasion was already under way. In Huntingdonshire the prior of St Neots was said to have raised the standard of the king of France above the belfry of his church - a completely malicious rumour, it later turned out, but one that at the time was given credence even by the councillors around the king. These men, above all, had good reason to feel jumpy and suspicious, having just discovered a traitor in their midst. Thomas Turbeville, a knight of the royal household, had been one of those men captured by the French earlier in the year, but had since returned to England, claiming to have escaped. In truth he had been turned, and had come back with the intention of provoking rebellion to coincide with a French landing, and even of kidnapping the king. His treason was uncovered - a messenger betrayed him — and Turbeville was sent to be executed in London. But the episode can only have served to emphasise a crucial point: in this time of great crisis, Edward could not afford to lose the loyalty of his leading men.