A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (52 page)

Edward’s mastery had been acknowledged and demonstrated beyond doubt; his two-year scheme to establish Scotland’s subservience was finally complete. The time had now come to consider his last and greatest project, especially in light of Christendom’s recent and appalling loss.

The Struggle for Mastery

W
hile Edward had been duping and bullying the Scots into submission, the Christian communities of the Holy Land had been driven into the sea. On 5 April 1291 the new Egyptian sultan, al-Ashraf Khalil, had drawn up a massive army before the walls of Acre, much as his predecessor Baybars had done twenty years before. On this occasion, however, it was to be no mere display of Muslim might. In the six weeks that followed, the great city was subjected to a sustained siege that heralded nothing less than the total destruction of crusader power. On 18 May the sultan ordered a general assault, and within hours it was all but over. Caught up amid the chaos and the carnage were Otto de Grandson and the small force of English knights that Edward I had sent east the previous summer. Dispatched for diplomatic purposes, these men unexpectedly found themselves fighting for dear life. Otto himself was among the fortunate few who managed to buy their way onto a boat, saving his skin but losing everything else, and sustaining no small damage to his reputation into the bargain. Thousands of others were far less lucky, among them the English esquire seen burning to death inside his armour like tar in a barrel. By the end of May Acre’s last outpost, the Templar stronghold by the sea, had fallen, and by the end of the summer every other city, castle and province had also been taken. So ended the kingdom of Jerusalem and the other colonies of Outremer. In a few short months, two centuries of Christian rule in the East had been brought to an abrupt and inglorious close.

The reaction in the West was one of profound shock. It had been widely appreciated that the situation in the Holy Land was deteriorating, but no one had expected a disaster on a scale such as this. News of Acre’s fall engendered both horror and an acute sense of guilt, and provoked a fresh round of crusade planning and propaganda. The Church, in response to a call from the pope, drew up ambitious schemes for remodelling society in order to recover the lost territories. The threat to Christendom, meanwhile, was emphasised by a sensational and widely circulated letter, purporting to be from the sultan himself, gloating over the slaughter and slavery of Acre’s citizens, and promising that worse was to come.
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No one could have been more startled than Edward I. Just weeks before the disastrous news broke in England, he had dispatched (at what eventually proved to be colossal expense) an embassy to the il-khan Arghun, his putative Mongol ally. (The timing turned out to be doubly unfortunate, for Arghun was already dead.) Nevertheless, once Acre’s fate was known, the king clearly showed himself determined to press ahead with his long-planned expedition. That much is suggested by the letters he exchanged with other sworn crusaders, and especially by the new architectural and artistic works that he decided to commission.
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Not long before, Edward had suddenly cut all funding to Vale Royal Abbey, the foundation closely associated with his original crusading adventure. ‘The king has ceased to concern himself with the works of that church,’ noted one financial official, ‘and henceforth will have nothing to do with them.’ His mysterious decision may have had something to do with the monks’ misuse of money; it certainly freed up funds for the two projects ordained in the spring of 1292. The first was the complete reconstruction of the royal chapel of St Stephen in the Palace of Westminster. The design of the new building was closely modelled on that of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, created half a century earlier by Louis IX in preparation for his first crusade. That Edward was responding to a similar stimulus in 1292 is strongly suggested by the other project he began at precisely the same time. Royal artists at Westminster were also ordered to redecorate the king’s chamber: the room where Henry III had died and where Edward had spent his coronation vigil. To the existing, peaceable wall-paintings that showed the Confessor being crowned and virtues triumphing over vices, extensive new murals were added depicting biblical scenes of war and suffering. Mostly based on stories from the Book of Maccabees, these images were seemingly an allusion to the recent fate of the Christian communities in the Holy Land, and intended to inspire thoughts of vengeance in those who saw them.

They evidently inspired wonder. Two Irish friars who regarded the ‘Painted Chamber’ in the early fourteenth century wrote of their ‘great admiration’ at ‘the greatest royal magnificence’. Similarly awe-struck were the antiquaries who rediscovered the friezes in the early nineteenth century, concealed beneath thick layers of whitewash. And yet, tragically, the inferior copies made by these men are the only visual record we have today of Edward I’s most extensive artistic endeavour: in 1834 the Painted Chamber was consumed by fire, along with St Stephen’s Chapel and the rest of the medieval Palace of Westminster.
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When, therefore, the English king returned from Scotland at the start of 1293, he was still clearly committed to effecting Jerusalem’s recovery. At the same time, it was equally plain that he would not be setting out that summer, as had previously been planned. Scotland was partly to blame: for the past two years Edward’s attention had admittedly been somewhat distracted. Yet a preoccupation with affairs in the north can only go so far in explaining why no material preparations had been made for the East. More significant, probably, was the failure on the part of the papacy to hand over all of the money promised in 1290. The king had, as agreed, received half of the accumulated crusade funds (100,000 marks) in the summer of 1291; but the following year the second instalment had failed to materialise. Presumably this was due to the death, in April 1292, of Pope Nicholas, which itself served to scupper any chance of a new crusade leaving in the immediate future: once again, the college of cardinals had been unable to decide on a successor, and at the start of 1293 they were still debating. Until Christendom had a new leader, and until Edward had received the balance of papal payment, no new departure date was likely to be set. Accordingly, the king’s journey south from Scotland was slow and unhurried. It was not until the middle of April that he arrived back in Westminster, in time for the first proper parliament for over a year.
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The king’s absence meant that there was much routine business to discuss. Top of the agenda, however, was a sudden and mysterious quarrel that had arisen in the past year between English and French sailors. According to one north-country chronicler, trouble had started when a brawl in a Norman port had gone too far: swords had been drawn and one man had ended up dead. Since then, in spite of efforts on Edward’s part to intervene, the dispute had intensified, to the extent that the two maritime communities were now virtually at war with each other. So serious was the problem by the spring of 1293 that the king appointed a high-ranking embassy, including two earls, to cross to France in order to devise a solution. But before it had set out, news arrived of a great battle at sea.
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On 15 May English and Gascon ships had been assailed off the coast of Brittany by a large and overtly hostile Norman fleet. As the men of the Cinque Ports later testified, their attackers had flown red streamers, ‘which everywhere among mariners means killing without quarter and war to the knife’. In the bloody engagement that followed, though, it was the English and Gascons who had evidently had the best of the fighting: several French ships were captured, along with their crews and their cargoes. And the Gascons, for an encore, had gone on to sack the French port of La Rochelle on their way home.
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What had started as a scrap between sailors had escalated into a major diplomatic incident. Soon letters arrived in England from the king of France, requiring the release of those taken prisoner and the restitution of goods. Edward, in response, now proposed three different ways by which the matter might be resolved. First, he offered to do justice in England to any complainants. For obvious reasons, the French were unlikely to accept this, which probably explains Edward’s second suggestion, that the dispute be settled by a joint Anglo-French commission, which would rule according to ‘the Law of the Sea’ (evidently a kind of maritime Marcher law). Lastly, in case neither of these options found favour in France, the king proposed that the quarrel be put to the arbitration of the pope. Edward clearly continued to regard the business as very serious. His threefold offer was carried to France by a new embassy, more legally qualified than the aborted original, which set sail from Dover at the end of July. The king then turned and headed west, to spend what remained of the summer in the comfortable environs of Windsor, Winchester and Corfe, before moving to Bristol in September, where he celebrated the wedding of his eldest daughter, Eleanor, to Henry, count of Bar (in eastern France).
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By the time the court returned to Westminster for the customary autumn parliament, however, it was clear that the English embassy had (metaphorically speaking) run aground. All three of Edward’s proposed solutions had been rejected. Joint commissions, arbitration – these rested on the assumption that this was a matter between two sovereign powers. The French had chosen to see it very differently. In their view it was not a disagreement between two kings, both alike in dignity, but a dispute between the king of France, a superior lord, and the duke of Gascony, his vassal. For this reason, the French had made much of the involvement in the maritime clashes of the men of Bayonne, and had demanded the surrender of the mayor and jurats of the town, as well as one hundred of its citizens. When the Bayonnais had inevitably refused to comply, the French had further upped the ante, demanding the surrender of Bordeaux and the Agenais. This process culminated on 27 October, when Philip IV peremptorily summoned Edward, his disobedient liege-man, to appear before him in Paris.
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The timing of this summons, which must have arrived in Westminster around mid-November, could not have been more ironic. At that very moment, John Balliol, the newly installed king of Scots, was up before the king of England and his parliament in response to a similar summons – obliged to explain why he, Balliol, had acted against one of his own Scottish earls, who had appealed to Edward as his superior lord. Balliol, having meekly accepted English overlordship at the start of the year, but no doubt having had the gravity of his mistake explained to him in the meantime, now put up more of a fight. ‘I am king of the kingdom of Scotland,’ he told the assembled magnates, ‘and I dare not answer … anything concerning my kingdom without the advice of the responsible men of my realm.’ Confronted by King Edward, however, Balliol swiftly buckled, and reaffirmed his vassal status. Indeed, he did not even use his royal title, accepting his position as ‘your man of the realm of Scotland’. Judged in contempt of court, he was sentenced to lose three of his castles and towns. ‘Like a lamb amongst wolves,’ said a contemporary English chronicler, Balliol did not dare to open his mouth.
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The irony was probably not altogether lost on Edward, but he would not have seen the two situations as analogous. In Edward’s view, Balliol was his vassal in every respect: the king of Scotland exercised no authority beyond what was delegated to him by the king of England. The situation on the Continent was seen as very different. Edward, as duke of Gascony, was a vassal of the French king and had always admitted as much. But he was also king of England, in which capacity he answered to no one (except God). He was certainly not about to trot to Paris at the king of France’s command.

What, Edward must have wondered, was Philip playing at? The French king’s summons had not only been unwarranted but gratuitously offensive, failing even to address Edward with his title as duke of Gascony. By November it was creating unnecessary tension in the duchy, where French officials were riding from town to town to read it out and being treated with predictable contempt in return. This was simply not the way the English and French did business. For forty years the two royal families had avoided confrontation by cultivating warm personal relations. Their friendship had blossomed in 1254, when Henry III, passing through Paris, had first met Louis IX. The two men had hit it off immediately, but the real credit for the concord belonged to their queens. Margaret and Eleanor of Provence had also been present in Paris that December, along with their younger sisters Beatrice and Sanchia – respectively the wives of Charles of Anjou and Richard of Cornwall. Louis had looked at their gathering and seen the seeds of a lasting European accord. ‘Have we not married two sisters,’ he said to Henry, ‘and our brothers the other two? All that shall be born of them, sons and daughters, shall be like brothers and sisters.’
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And how wonderfully prophetic these words had proved. Edward I, Philip III and Charles of Salerno had all endeavoured to maintain this spirit of affection and unity, in spite of the powerful contrary forces that had sometimes threatened to pull them apart. When the three of them had met at Amiens in 1279, Philip and Edward had worked diligently to resolve their outstanding differences as lord and vassal. And, of course, when Charles was later captured and imprisoned, it had been his English cousin who had come riding to his rescue.