A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (24 page)

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On Sunday, 19 August, the day itself dawned. Regrettably, we have no detailed eyewitness accounts of the kind that survive for some other medieval coronations. Past precedent and later example indicate that Edward, accompanied by Eleanor, led by the clergy and the magnates, would have processed the short distance from the palace to the abbey. The new abbey, of course, was Henry III’s greatest legacy, and Edward was the first king to be crowned in it. Henry and his architect had been acutely conscious of Westminster’s long-standing role as the coronation church, and had tailored the new building accordingly. Its ornate north portal was sufficiently huge to admit with ease those processing from the palace; the galleries around its transepts allowed spectators to view the proceedings from on high. The crossing of the church, where much of the ceremony would be acted out, seems to have been rendered deliberately massive for this reason. On the day of Edward’s coronation, as on later occasions, it was very likely filled with a giant wooden stage. This was elevated so that those standing in the nave could observe the king, and – most remarkably – of sufficient height that those earls, barons and knights among the congregation could
ride
underneath it. In seeking to picture Edward’s coronation, we must imagine the north and south transepts of the abbey filled with aristocrats who were not merely elaborately dressed, but apparently mounted on their horses too.
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Once the procession from the palace had passed inside the abbey, the ceremony itself began. In keeping with the grandeur of the setting and the splendid array of the participants, it was a magnificent piece of religious drama. Solemn prayers were intoned, censers were swung, torches and candles burned, glorious anthems rang out. If this all sounds slightly vague, it is because, once again, we cannot say precisely what took place. Indeed, contemporaries would have struggled to do so. The long years from one king’s inauguration to the next gave ample scope for old practices to be forgotten and new ones to be introduced. In the case of Edward’s coronation, one senses that Henry III, as well as designing the theatre, must also have contributed many details to the script. Later medieval kings, for example, would begin by making an offering at the altar of two gold figurines, one of Edward the Confessor, the other of St John the Evangelist – a ‘tradition’ almost certainly introduced in 1274 on the posthumous instructions of the Confessor’s most avid devotee.
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Nevertheless, at the heart the proceedings lay strong strands of contin uity. In its bare essentials, the English coronation service had changed (and has changed) very little across the centuries. The coronation oath, for example – Edward’s next significant act after making his offering at the altar – had been a central part of the service since it was first devised in the tenth century. By this long-established convention, the new king made three basic promises: to protect the Church, to do good justice, and to suppress evil laws and customs. A fourth promise, to protect the rights of the Crown, had been added in the mid-twelfth century. This was, of course, a much more self-interested pledge as far the king was concerned, and one to which Edward would attach much importance later in his reign.
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The next part of the service, the unction, was of similar long standing. Edward would have descended from the stage towards the altar and dis robed down to his undershirt, in order that the archbishop of Canterbury could anoint various bits of his body with holy oil. The most mystical part of the whole ceremony, it took place on a suitably mystical pavement of multicoloured marble mosaic, the work of Italian craftsmen, and another finishing touch supplied by Henry III. The unction was the point where medieval practice drew on biblical precedent: the Old Testament kings, David and Solomon, had been anointed in this way, and, for this reason, the choir in Westminster Abbey sang the anthem
Unxerunt Salomonem
(They Anointed Solomon) while the act was performed. Traditionally this had been the critical part of the service – the religious ritual that transformed a mere man into a king – and Edward, although king in name already, must nevertheless have regarded it as the supreme spiritual moment. At this moment his rule became blessed, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit were bestowed upon him. In more practical terms, it meant that, in addition to the holy oil that had been applied to his breast, shoulders and elbows, Edward also had chrism – an even holier oil – poured over his head, where custom decreed that it must remain for a full seven days.
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Lastly came the investiture: the part of the ceremony where the king was re-dressed in the most elaborate royal fashion and adorned with all manner of symbolic baubles (collectively known as the regalia). These had tended to multiply over the years, with the result that by the thirteenth century the new king was weighed down with glittering ornament. Edward was vested in a golden tunic, girded with a sword, and robed with a mantle woven with gold. A gold ring was placed on his finger, and golden spurs were attached to his heels. Once he was wearing his special coronation gloves, a golden rod and a golden sceptre were placed in his hands. These items had for the most part been wrought in the early thirteenth century but, thanks to the enthusiasm and credulity of Henry III, by 1274 each was believed to have been an original first used by Edward the Confessor himself. When, therefore, Edward was invested with the greatest item of all – described in a later account as ‘a great crown of gold … with precious jewellery of great stones, rubies and emeralds’, he understood this to be the same object once worn by his sainted namesake.
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Edward’s coronation, therefore, for all that it took place in a magnificent new church, and despite the manifold small details of staging introduced by Henry III, was essentially traditional in format and stuck to a time-honoured script. There was, however, one genuine moment of novelty in the proceedings, a deviation so striking that several chroniclers saw fit to record it, even though they recorded nothing else. It was supplied by the king himself, at what was literally the crowning moment. Once the great gold crown had been placed on his head, Edward immediately removed it and set it aside, saying (according to one chronicler) ‘he would never take it up again until he had recovered the lands given away by his father to the earls, barons and knights of England, and to aliens’.
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By this deliberately dramatic act, Edward revealed the policy that would preoccupy him during his first years of government, and to some extent for the rest of his reign: namely, the recovery of things that he believed his father had lost. The chronicler’s implication that the king was concerned only with lands is probably slightly skewed, perhaps through misreporting, perhaps through oversimplification. Henry III, it is true, had granted away plenty of property, both to Englishmen and foreigners: the greatest beneficiaries had been those closest to him, such as Richard of Cornwall, William de Valence and Simon de Montfort. It would have been politically unthinkable, however, for Edward to have taken back these lands from such men or their descendants, and even more inconceivable for him to have implemented what in the fifteenth century would have been called an Act of Resumption, demanding at a stroke the return of all the lands alienated by his father. Edward did have the sense that the Crown could use more land, but he preferred to act privately, and wrangle it out of softer targets.
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What Edward was determined to recover – and what he more likely declared he would recover – were his rights. Chroniclers were apt to confuse lands and rights, since the two often went together.
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In the Middle Ages, landowners might claim all manner of rights and privileges: the right to hold a court, for example, or to take a toll, even the right to do justice on red-handed thieves with their own private gallows. Rights could also be expressed negatively, as the right not to have to do something. Some landowners would claim that they and their tenants did not have to attend the king’s court, or to answer the summons of his officials. Either way, in asserting and maintaining such rights or liberties, there was financial advantage to be had. Holding your own court, for example, meant you received the profits it raised in fines; not attending a royal court meant you avoided paying similar fines to the king.

Such rights and privileges could be very ancient and legitimate; they might also be officially sanctioned by the king. Henry III, when he found it difficult to obtain the support of his greatest subjects, was wont to appease them by granting just such exemptions. Often as not, however, rights and privileges were simply assumed by landowners who sensed that they could get away with it, and this had been the case during much of Henry’s lax rule. Great men in particular had taken excessive liberties, shutting out the king’s agents – his sheriffs, justices and bailiffs – and creating what amounted to their own private fiefdoms.
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Edward was determined not only to halt this tendency (thereby upholding his coronation oath to protect the rights of the Crown), but also to throw it into reverse (hence his vow to recover his father’s losses). He was, of course, well-qualified for the task, by virtue of being a more masterful man than Henry. In the course of the struggle with Simon de Montfort he had fought hard to earn the personal authority that his father had so visibly lacked. There was, as a result, little chance of anyone scaring or dominating Edward in the way that Montfort had scared and dominated Henry. Similarly, Edward’s crusade had further enhanced his standing, cementing his relationships with a powerful circle of friends of the kind his father had never known. The crusaders returned from the East as brothers-in-arms, their loyalties to each other, and above all to their new king, heightened by a sense of having been tested together in a great adventure. With such men to support him, Edward would have no need to resort to his father’s policy of appeasement in order to get his own way.

In the short term, however, Edward’s crusade had exacerbated the problems in England. His four-year absence, and the absence of many other powerful individuals, had deprived royal government of valuable support at a time when such support was most necessary. In his last years, politically as well as physically, Henry III had become weaker than ever. The regency government that succeeded him was weaker still, its authority severely dented by the unfortunate deaths of Richard of Cornwall and his intended replacement, Henry of Almain. As a consequence, the situation in England had continued to worsen. Those magnates who had remained in England – a majority that included all the earls – had usurped more power and appropriated more privileges. In some cases they had begun feuding with each other for local dominance. This, and Edward’s continued absence, had led to another serious problem: a general rise in lawlessness. Murders and robberies had increased, sheriffs had turned a blind eye, the courts had failed to maintain order. Here too, the new king realised, something must be done, and done at once. Hence, according to one chronicler, another royal announcement was made at the coronation. Justice, said Edward, should be maintained everywhere; the guilty, even knights and great men, should be hanged, and justices, bailiffs and sheriffs should take no bribes.
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To help him achieve these aims – restoring justice and royal rights – Edward looked above all to the man who, more than any other, had run the country in his absence. Robert Burnell was a man of modest social origins but great ability and seemingly limitless ambition. A clerk – that is, a man in holy orders – he had joined Edward’s household in the mid-1250s and gradually established himself as its most indispensable administrative member. By 1270, such was his standing that he was considered (by Edward, at least) as the obvious candidate to replace the late archbishop of Canterbury. The monks of Canterbury, alas, had disagreed. Burnell may have been an administrative genius and a charming man to boot, but his charms had in the past worked rather too well on the ladies. At least one mistress and as many as five bastard children were a standing argument against his promotion to England’s highest spiritual office.
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The summer of 1270 had nevertheless been a decisive turning point. Up to that moment Edward had intended to take Burnell with him on crusade; after the Canterbury vacancy he decided that his trusted friend should stay at home. At the very last moment, the young clerk – he was probably not very much older than his master – was appointed as one of the five men responsible for superintending Edward’s affairs during his absence. Before long he was calling the shots for the other members of the committee. Once death had reduced their number to three, Burnell emerged as the natural leader and, when Henry III had subsequently succumbed, the humble clerk from Shropshire effectively replaced him. Official documents thereafter speak of Burnell as ‘occupying the king’s place in England’.
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With Edward back in his kingdom, the obvious role for Burnell was chancellor; a month after the coronation he was appointed to the post. We tend to assume – because the chancellor was later styled Lord Chancellor – that the role was judicial in origin; in fact the remit of the medieval chancellor was far wider than that of his latter-day successors. Originally the job was more akin to that of a modern prime minister. The chancellor was so called because he ran the chancery, or royal writing office. In this capacity he controlled the great seal, the stamp with which the most important royal orders were authenticated. Charters, letters and treaties, as well as writs initiating legal actions originated from within his department, which employed around a hundred lesser clerks, so great was its workload. Put simply, the chancery was the instrument by which the king’s will was articulated. It was essential, therefore, that the chancellor was somebody in whom the king could have absolute trust, and whom other people would find accessible and approachable. Burnell was all these things. Although not faultless in his private life, he was extremely conscientious in his work, particularly when it came to ensuring government was just and fair. Chancellors by tradition were also bishops, so Burnell was in line for further promotion. When the bishop of Bath and Wells died in early December, the new chancellor was speedily elected as his replacement.
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