The Plantagenets (42 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
For Edward, however, the myth of an Anglicized Arthur was more than just a matter for entertainment and courtly discussion. It was a mental template for his whole approach to kingship. Just as Henry III had grown fixated upon the Confessor as his guide, inspiration and saviour, so Edward would see the world through the prism of his own particular version of Arthurianism. It was as convenient a myth for
him to cleave to as had been the Confessor to his father, for his problems were Arthur’s in mirror-image. Arthur, to put it crudely, had been a Welsh king whose mission was to crush the English. Edward, in 1277, faced the opposite task.
In the summer of 1277, Edward assembled his first great army. More than 15,000 men, equipped with horses, supplies and vicious weaponry, advanced along the coast road from Chester into north Wales. Above them fluttered the multiplicity of banners and flags that marked out the various components of the feudal host. They rumbled towards Gwynedd to root out and crush the ‘rebel and disturber of the peace’, Llywelyn the Last, prince of Wales.
This was a national army, agreed upon by Edward, his magnates and an assembly of the knights of the shire at one of the twice-yearly parliaments he held almost every Easter and Michaelmas from the start of his reign until its end. On or around 12 November 1176, the English had declared war upon Llywelyn, determined to stamp on this troublesome prince in the name of security and stability for the kingdom. Edward had been unable to raise more than a handful of his household knights when he made the journey to Palestine. But he found that, with the support of his barons and knights in parliament behind him, he could take the whole might of England to war against the Welsh.
Wales had been a constant problem for the Plantagenets. As every English king since the Norman invasion had found, to control or even pacify Wales was a task that required immense resources, time and will. Since King John’s advances against the Welsh during the brief period of his British mastery, English power beyond the Marches had been slipping away. The greatest strides had been made during the first half of Henry III’s reign by Llywelyn the Great, who was effectively sole ruler of Wales from his power base in the north-western province of Gwynedd until he died in 1240. Subsequently, during the Barons’ Wars, Llywelyn the Great’s grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd – also known as Llywelyn the Last – had allied with de Montfort to take further advantage of the English Crown’s weakened position. The Treaty of Montgomery, sealed as Henry’s realm was being pacified in
1267, had cemented Welsh gains during peacetime. In fact, the Treaty of Montgomery was, from Llywelyn’s point of view, one of the great treaties in Welsh history: Llywelyn was acknowledged as prince of Wales in his own right, with direct control over Gwynedd and feudal lordship over almost every other lord in Wales.
The Treaty of Montgomery was irksome to Edward for many reasons. Personally it had compelled him to give up land of his own in Wales. Viewed in the context of kingship, it represented a damaging loss of the Crown’s rights, of the kind that he had sworn a holy coronation oath to reverse.
This alone might have justified a war of reconquest. If further cause were needed, throughout the early 1270s Llywelyn piled on further provocations. He invaded English baronies in Shropshire and the Marches, antagonizing important Marcher lords including Roger Mortimer and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford. In 1270 Llywelyn invaded Glamorgan, causing a rift with his erstwhile ally, Gilbert, earl of Gloucester. At home Llywelyn quarrelled with his brothers: imprisoning one, Owain, and forcing the other, Dafydd, into exile at the English court. But Llywelyn himself refused to go anywhere near Edward’s presence, despite repeated requests that he do so. Neither would he pay the English Crown the 15,000 marks due to it under the terms of the Treaty of Montgomery.
In a final, fatal act of overreach, in 1275 Llywelyn gave Edward an indisputable
casus belli
. Having reached his fifties without producing an heir, he began negotiations to bring Eleanor de Montfort to Wales. The daughter of the late Simon de Montfort, Eleanor was a potent symbol of the damage the Welsh had done to the royal family by their alliances during the Barons’ Wars. She had been betrothed to Llywelyn in 1267, but was living in exile in France. In 1275 she was married to the Welshman by proxy, and at the end of the year she set out from the Continent to meet her husband.
It was an impressive litany of provocation, and Edward was compelled to respond. He headed off Eleanor by having her ship captured in the Bristol Channel and imprisoning the good lady at Windsor. But preventing a marriage between the Welsh prince and
the de Montfort daughter was not enough. Edward needed to put Llywelyn firmly back in his place.
Edward invaded Wales in 1277 and marched his army through the summer down the coast road from Chester. Shadowing the knights, soldiers and supply wagons on their march along the coast was a fleet of ships that served both to blockade the Welsh from escape or reprovision via Ireland and to keep the enormous English army well supplied on their march west.
The whole campaign was supremely well organized. Edward’s constant military companions managed the logistics. Crusading men such as Roger Clifford, Otto de Grandison and John de Vescy combined with civil war veterans like William de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. They based themselves at Worcester, and began to gather a terrifying arsenal with which to batter Llywelyn into submission. Confident that his longstanding allies were up to the job, Edward showed that he had something of his father in him. He allowed them to organize the war muster while he toured the shrines of East Anglia, praying before Henry’s favourite relics, and giving a passable impression of a man of peace.
But peace was not what was planned at Worcester. Hundreds of thousands of crossbow bolts were ordered from Gloucestershire. Warhorses were bought in the specialist markets in France, wheat and oats ordered from the justiciar of Ireland. Vehicles were requisitioned from private owners all over England. The royal mints produced silver pennies to pay the many thousands of soldiers drafted to fight for England’s security and the Plantagenet family’s honour. It was a mark of Llywelyn’s fractured authority that Edward’s royal infantry included around 9,000 Welsh mercenaries.
More important even than the infantry, however, were the large teams of engineers, who were engaged with the purpose of cutting a path through north Wales along which Edward’s huge advance might be made. Guarded by crossbowmen and knights, teams of men from the English interior constructed a huge road along which the invading army could roll. They felled the thick, silent woodlands that overhung the regular routes to Snowdonia, clearing a way that was in places
hundreds of feet wide, and now rendered impervious to Welsh guerrilla tactics, which relied upon swooping out of the trees to slash and hack at an unguarded enemy before disappearing. At Flint, where Henry II had almost been killed by just such tactics, a great timber fortress was begun as a forward base of operations.
The whole effort was a magnificent achievement of military requisitioning, planning and engineering. In pure numerical terms Edward’s army was not as strong as the armies that marched on Toulouse for Henry II or mustered for the Third Crusade under Richard I. But the campaign was conducted with deadly logistical intent to neuter Llywelyn’s only fighting option. He could not hope to harry an army on the move by use of guerrilla tactics, for Edward’s engineers had blown his cover.
The army marched deep into Llywelyn’s territory. Throughout August they cut a path from Flint to Rhuddlan, and then on to Conwy. As they ground their way into Gwynedd they gradually cut off supplies and movement of men, surrounding the Welsh and starving them into submission. At every main outpost they stopped and engineers began digging to create sites on which permanent castles could later be constructed.
Llywelyn fell back into the mountains. Edward pushed forward to the river Conwy and camped at Deganwy. This was deep into enemy territory, where Welsh regard for Plantagenet rule was shown starkly by the silhouette of a ruined castle Henry III had once built on the spot.
Soon the lesser Welsh princes started fleeing Llywelyn’s cause. The decisive blow was struck in early September, when Edwardian marines disembarked on Anglesey, occupied the island and harvested the grain crop there, thus capturing the richest farmland in Wales and simultaneously emptying the granary of Gwynedd. It was enough to persuade Llywelyn that the English king was an opponent to be taken seriously. He surrendered within days, and on 9 November agreed to a truce at Rhuddlan. He was allowed to keep Gwynedd, but virtually everything else was taken from him. Llywelyn submitted to a fine of £50,000, as well as abandoning his claims to the Four Cantrefs – the four small
counties that bordered Gwynedd – and everything that Edward had seized on his march west. The disputes with his brothers Owain and Dafydd were to be settled and, in recognition of the supremacy of the English king over the Welsh prince, Llywelyn agreed to do homage to Edward not only on his borders at Rhuddlan, but back at Westminster, at the seat of English governance and power.
Llywelyn had been sorely beaten, and the treaty was, from Edward’s point of view, a satisfactory way to end the expedition. To solidify the English position, castles were planned in Aberystwyth and Builth, Flint and Rhuddlan. The English now had military outposts bristling on the outskirts of Welsh territory. The 1277 invasion had been an impressive success. Little did Llywelyn know that this was only the beginning.
Edward was delighted at his victory over Llywelyn. He celebrated in Easter 1278 with an eerie ceremony at twilight in Glastonbury Abbey on 19 April, at which the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere was opened. According to the local chronicler Adam of Domerham, the skeletons were found side by side, each in a casket with their images and arms painted on the sides. The following day, the piles of bones were moved to a grand new resting place in the abbey. The new tomb was destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries, but the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland described it as made from black marble with two lions at each end and an effigy of Arthur himself at the top. The ceremony fairly pulsed with messages about the new regime: on the one hand, the King Arthur whom the Welsh so venerated was dead; but on the other, he was to live long in Edward. As the king and Queen Eleanor venerated the piles of bones in Glastonbury Abbey, they sought to stitch the myth of Arthur into the fabric of Plantagenet family lore. It was a well-contrived end to a brutally effective campaign.
In the aftermath of Edward’s first victory over Llywelyn, he turned his attention to domestic affairs. His chancellor Robert Burnell was pressing ahead with the first stages of a sweeping programme of legal reform, and three extremely wide-ranging statutes were passed in 1275, 1278 and 1279 (known respectively as the first Statute of Westminster, the Statute of Gloucester and the Statute of Mortmain). They dealt with matters as diverse as rules on land tenure, ensuring free elections to parliament and the right of all free men, rich or poor,
to justice (Westminster); establishing a new system of eyres to travel the country investigating abuses of royal rights (Gloucester); and preventing land from being granted to the Church in order to avoid feudal dues and taxes (Mortmain). They marked the start of a legal revolution by statute, which would continue for more than a decade.
The matter of the Church also began to vex the King. He was prevented from promoting Burnell to archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Nicholas III, and had to accept the difficult and extremely pious Franciscan friar John Pecham as archbishop instead. Pecham was a highly principled ecclesiastical politician and a strict observer of the Franciscan rule. He refused all personal property (which meant that he had no income, and was thus constantly in crippling debt to Italian bankers), insisted on extremely strict discipline from the English clergy, and believed that he had a divine mission to root out corruption and abuse in the Church, most notably among those clergy who grew rich from pluralism – the practice of holding multiple benefices. His view on relations between Church and Crown was pithily alluded to in his official seal, which had an image of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket on the reverse.
Unsurprisingly, Pecham clashed numerous times with Edward from the very beginning of his tenure as archbishop. His stance on pluralism irritated the king, who gained a good deal of advantage from being able to award his royal clerks multiple lucrative posts in the Church as reward for their work. There was also a long-running battle over the jurisdictions of royal and Church courts – a battle which had its roots in the same issues that had animated Becket against Henry II – and Pecham frequently expressed to the king his frustration at royal ministers’ reluctance to help enforce sanctions against those (numerous) people whom he had excommunicated from the Church. In autumn 1279 a furious argument blew up in which Pecham was forced to back down over his demand that a copy of Magna Carta should be hung in all of England’s cathedrals and collegiate churches.
Fortunately, despite their equally strong characters, Edward and Pecham were diplomatic enough to ensure that their relationship
never spilled over into the murderous hostility that had ended Henry and Becket’s. Indeed, despite their political differences, they were generally on good terms, and on some matters they agreed wholeheartedly. One such matter was the character of the Welsh, whom both king and archbishop considered unreconstructed savages. It was as well for his survival that Pecham took such a view, for in 1282 Edward’s war with Wales once more exploded, this time in an even bloodier form.
On the weekend before Easter 1282, during the night preceding Palm Sunday, Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd – a former ally at the English court – appeared unexpectedly at Hawarden castle. The residence of Edward’s ally Roger Clifford loomed in the darkness, a great 40-foot stone keep on top of its rounded motte. The Welsh prince had been expected as an Easter guest, but he turned up early, in company and armed. In the dead of night, Dafydd led a band of men in storming the castle, seizing Clifford from his bed and filling the corridors of the stone fortress with the stifled screams of men whose throats were slit in the dark. This was no Easter visit. It was a declaration of war.
