A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (71 page)

At this the king exploded.

‘You bastard son of a bitch! Now you want to give lands away – you who never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!’

As these words were spoken, says Guisborough, the old man seized his son’s hair in both hands and tore out as much as he could until, at length exhausted, he threw him out.
⁴⁰

Edward’s readiness to lash out was not merely a result of his son’s provocation, nor simply a rage against the dying of the light. His fury was also fuelled by the knowledge that Robert Bruce had returned. At the start of February the fugitive king had re-crossed the Irish Sea and was understood to be at large ‘in the isles off the Scottish coast’. Thanks to the ongoing collaboration of certain clans in that region, his initial moves had met with disaster. A force led by his brothers, Thomas and Alexander Bruce, had been captured in Galloway, and both men were subsequently hanged and beheaded. Yet Bruce himself continued to evade capture, to the immeasurable frustration of his incapacitated opponent, still stranded at Lanercost after five months. In the second week of February Edward had sent withering letters to Aymer de Valence and his other young commanders, expressing utter amazement at their inability to apprehend Bruce, chastising them for their failure to furnish him with news, and suspecting from their silence that they were being excessively cautious.
⁴¹

In fact, as Edward was beginning to realise, it was not the caution of his lieutenants that was causing difficulty, but the total lack of restraint to which he had urged them up to this point. The king’s savage policy of revenge had driven many Scots, whom in other circumstances might have submitted to English justice, into supporting the cause of his enemy. In mid-March, having finally managed to complete his journey to Carlisle, Edward sent out new orders. Apparently, he said, some people had interpreted his recent ordinance for the settlement of Scotland too rigorously; his commanders were now to have it proclaimed that all those who had been ‘compelled’ to rise to rebellion could come in without fear of reprisal. This sudden and wholesale volte-face suggests that the English in the field were experiencing grave difficulties, reaping the whirlwind they had sown by their earlier severity. Bruce had left Scotland the previous year as an unpopular rebel; in 1307 he returned as a potential redeemer.
⁴²

In April news came of the first English reversal. Valence, having learned that Bruce was lurking near Loch Trool in Galloway, and no doubt with the accusation of laxity still ringing in his ears, elected to mount an attack. On this occasion, however, his troops were repulsed by those of the Scottish king and, though their material losses were minor, their credibility was cracked. In the month that followed Bruce cemented his success with two further victories, first beating Valence himself at Loudon Hill on 10 May, and then roundly defeating one of his deputies in Ayrshire a few days later. In each case the English commanders escaped, but the myth of their invincibility had now been shattered. On 15 May a Scottish lord on the English side penned a vivid and alarming summary of the new situation. ‘I hear that Bruce never had the goodwill of his own followers or of the people in general so much as now. It appears that God is with him, for he has destroyed King Edward’s power both among the English and the Scots … May it please God to prolong King Edward’s life, for men say openly that when he is gone the victory will go to Bruce.’
⁴³

This plea to the Almighty to preserve the king, as well as indicating a belief in his almost superhuman ability, also betrays a total absence of faith in his successor. Edward of Caernarfon by this stage had long since left the north-west. In early May he was at Dover, bidding farewell to Piers Gaveston, who was preparing to sail into exile on the king’s orders. The prince had evidently accompanied his favourite with his father’s leave, for he was expected to lead an embassy to France in order to further the peace process. But when, in early June, the command came to abort this mission – no doubt in light of the worsening situation in Scotland – the king’s son showed himself in no hurry to return to the war zone, and remained in the south of England.
⁴⁴

King Edward had reacted to the defeats in Scotland, inevitably, with orders for more troops: a new army was to muster at Carlisle in the middle of July. In the meantime, however, his health again went into decline. According to Walter of Guisborough, the king was now suffering from dysentery, an affliction that all the electuaries, cordials and ointments prepared by his doctors in the past months can have done nothing to alleviate. There can thus have been little celebration in mid-June when Edward passed his sixty-eighth birthday. So grave was his condition that he had become all but invisible, and his seclusion gave rise to the rumour that he was in fact already dead.
⁴⁵

When, at length, these murmurs reached the king’s own ears, they stirred that part of his spirit that was indubitably great. Around 24 June the order was given to prepare for an immediate advance. With the muster date still three weeks into the future, whatever army had assembled in Carlisle can only have been half-formed at best. But leadership was required at once, and Edward had now abandoned the notion that it could be provided by others, least of all by his feckless and still-absent son. Instead, the ailing king rose from his bed to lead his men to war in person. The litter that had borne him on his agonising journey to the Border he rejected, and it was ceremoniously surrendered in Carlisle Cathedral. Edward now mounted his war-horse, as of old, and rode out from the city at the head of his host.
⁴⁶

It was all, of course, a magnificent act, undertaken in defiance – of the rumours, of the Scots, of pain and illness, and thus even of death itself. As such it was unsustainable. The king had headed west out of Carlisle, evidently with the intention of sailing to Scotland across the Solway Firth. But after ten days he had advanced only six miles, and on 6 July he was forced to stop at Burgh by Sands, an isolated settlement close to the Cumbrian coast. In this windswept wilderness Edward spent his last night on Earth. The following day – Friday, the feast of St Thomas – around mid-afternoon, his attendants appeared to help him to eat, but as they lifted the king from his bed, he died in their arms.
⁴⁷

A Great and Terrible King

F
or almost a fortnight Edward’s death remained a closely guarded secret. According to Walter of Guisborough, anyone who spoke of it during this time was imprisoned. Only three letters are known to have been dispatched the following day: one to the queen, one to the earl of Lincoln and one to the prince of Wales. This last was received on 11 July, and Edward of Caernarfon set out at once for the north-west, arriving a week later to mourn over the body. It was not until 20 July that his rule was proclaimed in Carlisle Castle, and the veil of secrecy surrounding his father’s death was lifted.
¹

As the news spread throughout England, it elicited a chorus of despair. ‘Death has taken him, alas!’ cried Peter Langtoft. ‘My heart is in desolation,’ wrote another Englishman in French. ‘Me thuncheth that deth hath don us wrong,’ said yet another in his native tongue. When messengers found the pope in Poitiers he was reportedly unable to stand on account of his grief. During the last days of July prayers and sermons were recited in Poitiers Cathedral – the first of their kind to be said for any king at the Curia – and across the city the bells rang out. Back in England Edward’s body began its long journey southwards from Burgh by Sands, led by the bishop of Coventry, and slowed by a crowd of lamenting subjects.
²

Edward of Caernarfon was able to accompany this procession only during its opening stages; after a few days he had to return to Carlisle in order to lead the abandoned host. Their expedition, however, proved short lived and uneventful, and no doubt the English troops were deeply dispirited. They advanced into south-western Scotland, but Bruce wisely chose to remain hidden, and less than a month had elapsed before the campaign was called to a halt. The new king returned to the Border, where he paused to receive the homages of loyalist Scots, and then continued south to attend his father’s funeral.
³

Since the start of August Edward’s corpse had lain embalmed in Waltham Abbey in Essex, not far from London. Around 18 October it began the final stage of its journey. On entering the capital it was received with maximum honour, resting for consecutive nights in the priory of Holy Trinity and St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as being taken to other city churches besides. At length it was brought to Westminster Abbey, where the funeral was held on Friday, 27 October. The service, says Guisborough, was attended by magnates of all lands and diverse regions, and Edward was laid to rest amongst his fathers.
⁴

Contemporaries were in no doubt: this was a farewell to a truly great king.
Edwardus Magnus
was a phrase that sprang readily and naturally to the minds of men from Westminster to the far west of Ireland. Some went further still. Peter Langtoft averred that there had been no greater king since the time of Arthur, and in Poitiers one of the pope’s preachers ventured that his subject had been no less and perhaps more worthy of praise than Alexander. In Westminster itself, meanwhile, there was no such hesitation. According to the local writer who composed the longest lament of all, Edward had been entirely without equal, outshining not only Arthur and Alexander but also Brutus, Solomon and Richard the Lionheart. ‘We should perceive him to surpass all the kings of the earth who came before him,’ was this author’s unstinting conclusion.
⁵

On what basis did this conclusion rest? Several obituarists went on to justify their superlative assessment and, unsurprisingly, one reason stood out above all others. Edward, as Guisborough put it, had been a king ‘most strong’. ‘The most renowned combatant on steed,’ opined Peter Langtoft, ‘he had no equal as a knight in armour.’ ‘King Edward was an outstanding warrior from his adolescence,’ added the Westminster eulogist, ‘in tournaments most mighty, in war most pugnacious.’ That these and other authors were right to remember their former leader as a valiant fighter is hardly open to doubt. Evidence of Edward’s courage and prowess in arms is abundant across his entire career. His personal participation in tournaments appears to have ended in 1273, after an especially bloody encounter at Chalon-sur-Saône in France drew condemnation from the pope. But the king had continued to throw himself into the even deadlier business of war regardless of the risks involved. As late as 1304, as his Westminster obituary recalled, he had very nearly been killed by crossbow bolts and other projectiles during the siege of Stirling. It is especially noteworthy that in respect of his valour Edward’s reputation was not simply the work of flatterers. After the Battle of Lewes in 1264, even his enemies had acknowledged that ‘he was not slow to attack in the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none’.
⁶

Of course, physical strength, and even valour, while crucial, were by themselves insufficient: tyrants could also be strong and courageous. To be truly useful these qualities had to be combined with wisdom, and here too the obituarists were in agreement. Edward was the wisest and most prudent king, said Guisborough; ‘full of understanding’, added Langtoft, while another author affirmed that ‘all the things he did, he wisely brought them to an end’.
⁷
Again, it is difficult in general terms to disagree with this assessment. Wisdom is clearly a more subjective quality than valour; what seems wise to one person at a particular time may seem less wise to another, or in retrospect. The fundamental measure of Edward’s wisdom, however, is that he was a good judge of other people. He could spot frauds (such as the knight who claimed to have been cured of blindness at the tomb of Henry III), and he had a talent for selecting men of outstanding ability to serve him. As one of the preachers in Poitiers put it: ‘He did not rule in a frivolous state of mind, nor under the influence of flatterers … but with the prudent counsel of good and wise men.’ Certain names spring immediately to mind. Robert Burnell, the longest serving chancellor until the eight eenth century; Otto de Grandson, a brave soldier and a brilliant statesman. Both had served Edward since his youth, at a time when his faculty for recruiting the right people was already demonstrably superior to that of his father. Roger Leybourne, Roger Clifford, Roger Mortimer – many of those whom he bound to his side were men of his own warlike stamp. Yet Edward also proved adept at choosing the best lawyers and clerics to serve at his court. His wisdom was such that he could channel their differing talents and satisfy their considerable (and often competing) ambitions.
⁸

The corollary of this – contrary to what some historians have asserted – is that Edward’s lordship was emphatically good. A king who shared their longing for feats of arms, adventure and the pursuit of noble causes – this was a king worth serving for his own sake. Unlike his father, Edward had no need to buy loyalty with lavish grants of land or money. He had friends but not favourites. As his Westminster obituarist explained, men would come from all over the king’s dominions simply in the hope of joining the company of his knights. But those who served him well Edward did reward generously. The extensive new lordships given to Henry de Lacy, Reginald de Grey and John de Warenne in Wales, or to Thomas de Clare in Ireland, are a standing argument against the spurious notion that Edward was somehow lacking in largesse.
⁹