A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (13 page)

In early May, therefore, as Edward was struggling to bring relief to his besieged castles in north Wales, Montfort was mustering armed opposition in the heart of Henry III’s kingdom. With his instinctive grasp for good publicity, the earl rallied his new army of malcontents at Oxford, where the reform programme had been launched almost five years before, and where they now renewed their oaths to uphold the Provisions. A letter was immediately dispatched to the king demanding that he denounce as mortal enemies all those who refused to do the same. The equally swift refusal this elicited provided the necessary pretext. In the first week of June, under Montfort’s direction, Clifford, Leybourne and their companions unleashed a series of devastating attacks on the lands of the queen and her supporters. In time-honoured medieval fashion, they burned crops and buildings, reducing to ashes their enemies’ economic assets. Hostages were also taken: the opening attack saw the Savoyard bishop of Hereford dragged from his cathedral and carried off to imprisonment at one of Clifford’s castles.
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This new and ferocious firestorm caught the royal family completely off guard. Edward, for his part, responded swiftly, abandoning the war in Wales and racing south-east. His first thought was to secure the loyalty of the Channel ports and thus keep open the way for further foreign aid. Obtaining reinforcements, however, would take time, and this, like other commodities, was fast running out. When Edward rejoined his parents in London a few days later, he found a desperate situation. Henry and Eleanor had fled to the Tower, but it was not a well-planned move of the kind they had made two years before. Then the Tower had been well stocked and well garrisoned; now it was empty of both food and soldiers. Money, too, was in short supply, and without it even the existing foreign mercenaries that Edward had with him could not be retained for much longer. Ordinarily, the royal family could have turned to the rich citizens of London for support. But, at this moment, according to one chronicler, ‘there was no one in the city who would give them a halfpennyworth of credit’. London’s ruling oligarchy, although instinctively royalist, correctly surmised that this attitude placed them out of step with the rest of their fellow citizens. In the streets of the capital, as across the country as a whole, anti-royal and anti-foreign feeling was running high, especially after Edward’s arrival with his mercenary army of Frenchmen.
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It was London, rather than its unwelcome royal residents, that received an ultimatum from Montfort in the last week of June. Were they for or against the Provisions of Oxford? The city’s rulers decided that they were indeed in favour, and sent a delegation to the Tower to persuade the king that he should do likewise, at the same time urging him to get rid of his son’s foreign knights. Henry was inclined to agree. By this stage the raids on royalist property were no longer confined to the west of England. Now there was plundering and devastation of royalist property in East Anglia too. With no provisions and no money, submission to the demands of Montfort and his allies seemed to be the only way out of the spiralling crisis.
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Before the king could make his decision, however, his eldest son had determined on independent action. On 29 June Edward and his followers rode to the New Temple, which lay to the west of the city just outside its walls. The chief headquarters in England of the famous crusading order of the Templars, the Temple was also favoured by the wealthy as a place of deposit for their riches. This, indeed, gave Edward his argument for admission. Finding the doors locked on his arrival, he obtained the keys by claiming he had come to view his mother’s jewels. It was a lie. Once inside, Edward’s men used iron hammers to smash open the chests, and seized, by one estimate, almost a thousand pounds. They then sped with their loot to Windsor Castle, which they proceeded to stock by similar methods, raiding the surrounding countryside for supplies. By resorting to deceit and robbery, Edward had obtained what his father in London lacked: the wherewithal – so he hoped – to resist Montfort.
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But Montfort was too good a general to have his fire drawn by this distraction. Moving south, the earl and his cohorts skirted Windsor and made instead for Kent, where they took all the ports except Dover – the mighty castle and its royalist garrison held out. In London, meanwhile, the situation had descended into total chaos. The raid on the Temple, an outrageous act of royal presumption, had triggered the feared revolution. Within hours of Edward’s departure the lesser citizens had taken to the streets and begun attacking and looting the properties of prominent royalists and foreigners. On 4 July, still trapped in the Tower, Henry III agreed to submit to the demands of his enemies. These had now expanded in line with Montfort’s estimation of his own success and the virulence of the xenophobia he had unleashed. Having begun their protest by demanding that the realm should be governed only by ‘native-born men’, the opposition now insisted on nothing less than the total expulsion of all foreigners, ‘never to return’.
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The king might meekly accept this new provision; his Provençal queen could never do so. In any case, she was made of sterner stuff than her husband. Even as Montfort’s forces advanced on the capital, Eleanor of Provence decided she would rather take a stand with her eldest son. On 13 July she and a small number of attendants set out from the Tower by boat, intent on following the Thames upstream to Windsor. But word of her departure travelled more quickly than the queen herself. By the time she reached London Bridge, a hostile crowd was waiting, and, as her the barge tried to pass beneath, they let fly with insults, eggs and stones. Realising that her life was in danger, the queen abandoned her voyage and took refuge in the palace of the bishop of London.
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The royal family was beaten. Two days later Montfort and his forces entered London, and Henry and Eleanor submitted. Within a week, acting on Henry’s orders, the garrison at Dover Castle had also surrendered. Only Edward, with his army of French knights at Windsor, continued to resist, though with an increasing awareness that resistance might prove useless. Their desperate attempt to take Bristol a few days before London’s fall had failed in the face of opposition from the town’s angry citizens. News of the loss of Dover, which ended all hope of aid from abroad, must have coincided with news of Montfort’s advance: the earl and his army, now marching under royal banners, left London on 24 July, intending to besiege Windsor. There was no choice but to agree to terms. The demand for the expulsion of all foreigners had been devised chiefly with this moment in mind. As Edward himself rejoined his parents, his army of French knights were escorted to the coast, having sworn ‘never to return’.
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Montfort was now effectively in charge of the kingdom. In a few short months, through a skilful combination of violence and xenophobic rabble-rousing, he had achieved the mastery over Henry III that had eluded him for the past two years. Flushed with success, he began reordering government along lines of his own choosing, promoting his friends to high office and granting them custody of key royal castles. Faced with this monopoly of force, the best that the king and his family could manage was a secret appeal for help to the king of France. This, too, however, proved futile. King Louis obligingly summoned Henry and his family to Boulogne, along with Montfort and his supporters, only to surprise everyone by ruling that the July settlement should stand. The royalist attempt to discredit Montfort had actually succeeded in granting his government a measure of international legitimacy.
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Back home, however, support for the earl’s regime was already evaporating. The blitzkrieg of the summer may have been devastatingly effective in military terms, but it had left a bitter legacy of recrimination in its wake. Those whose lands and property had been despoiled wanted compensation, but the new government was insufficiently organised to provide redress. A specially convened parliament at the start of September had found no way forward. At the start of October the archbishop of Canterbury – a Savoyard himself, and hence a victim of the attacks – ordered the excommunication of those who had taken part in the raids, including Montfort, whom he named as the chief culprit. In simple terms, Montfort was unable to sort out the mess his coup had caused.
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More dangerous still to the earl was the internal collapse of his own party. The men who had invited him back to England – Roger Clifford, Roger Leybourne and their ilk – did not care in the slightest for the Provisions of Oxford, nor, for that matter, for any of their leader’s private grievances. Their sole ambition had been to revenge themselves on the queen and to restore their relationship with her eldest son. With the exile of the foreign knights from Windsor, the way for reconciliation became clear. Once again, Montfort had failed to foresee the logical conclusion of his actions. Within weeks of his surrender Edward had settled his difference with Clifford, Leybourne and the rest. In an agreement on 18 August, they swore ‘to be his friends in all his affairs’.
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This was apparently kept secret from Montfort. By this stage, reconciliation between Edward and his uncle was no longer an option. It was over two years since the spring of 1261, when their close alliance had been ended by Edward’s defection. Perhaps the earl regarded his godson as an ungrateful turncoat from that moment onwards. If so, there is no evidence of reciprocal hostility: Edward had continued to act as if conflicted, and had showed no sign of sympathy for his parents in their struggle against his uncle. It was only in 1263 that we can be certain that his neutrality came to an end. That summer Montfort had revealed a whole new dimension to his malevolence and opportunism. In pursuit of his private feud with Henry III, the earl had seen fit to exploit Edward’s difficulties in Wales as well as his rift with his friends. As a consequence, the English position in north Wales was now entirely lost – late in the summer, Llywelyn had finally achieved his long-sought supremacy in the Four Cantrefs by destroying the castles at Dyserth and Deganwy. Montfort had also, by his willingness to provoke more widespread hostility to royal authority, endangered the life of the queen: the episode at London Bridge had a profound impact on Edward, and he would never forgive those responsible. Aside from its obvious psychological effect, an attack on an anointed queen was something that Edward, as a future king, could not allow to pass. Montfort had not only usurped the power of the Crown; he had also besmirched its dignity. For this reason, above all, he had to be stopped.
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In mid-October, as a new parliament assembled in Westminster, Edward put his plan into action. He moved with sly circumspection: Montfort, attended by large numbers of armed Londoners, still had the monopoly of force. Claiming, therefore, that he wanted to see his wife, Edward made his way to Windsor. Very soon he was joined by the friends he had won back in the summer, and by Henry III, who left Westminster the next morning. Then the floodgates burst. Almost all the magnates who had come to parliament came over to the king’s side. Few of them can have been taken in by Henry’s declaration that he intended to uphold the Provisions of Oxford, and some of them, it was said, had been bribed by Edward with promises of land. Most of those who now rallied to Windsor, however, were attracted by neither idealism nor greed but by a desire to end the chaos Montfort had created. The need now was for stable and properly constituted government which only a king could provide.
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From a military point of view this new royalist party looked unstoppable. In November Henry and Edward took Oxford and Winchester, and by December they were threatening Dover and London itself. Montfort had been outmanoeuvred and also left massively outnumbered. Apart from his own sons and a handful of long-standing friends, the men who continued to stand by him were for the most part ideologues: radical churchmen and hot-headed young knights who believed in the Provisions as a just and holy cause. Staring defeat in the face, Montfort now in his turn pushed for a new arbitration by the king of France. His wish was granted, and early in the new year Henry, Edward and the numerous royalist party crossed the Channel to argue their case against the much smaller band of Montfortians. Alas for the latter group, Louis IX had changed his mind. Since his earlier intervention, the French king had been lobbied by the royalists who had remained resident at his court during the autumn – Eleanor of Provence, after her close encounter with the London mob, must have been particularly persuasive. Accordingly, judgement went in favour of Henry III: kings should rule unfettered, Louis declared, and as such the Provisions should be quashed entirely. The decision – the so-called ‘Mise of Amiens’ – was not quite a total disaster for Montfort: to some extent it helped the earl by confirming him as the only hope for those who truly believed in reform. After its publication more men joined his side, a few even returning from the royalist camp. In general terms, however, the verdict
was
disastrous. Its uncompromising severity left Montfort and his acolytes with no option but to go to war.
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The fighting began at once in a predetermined theatre. Immediately before his departure for France, Henry III had set out to distract Montfort by striking hard at his personal interests. The king’s well-chosen instrument for this task was Roger Mortimer, one of the most significant of the new royalists recruited the previous autumn. Mortimer was a Marcher lord – indeed,
the
Marcher lord par excellence, a man with a fearsome reputation in arms. As such he might have been expected to have joined Edward’s circle at an earlier date, but personal grievances, first with Henry, later with Edward himself, had served to keep him in the opposition camp. All that had been quickly forgotten in December, however, when Henry had given Mortimer permission to seize three valuable royal manors in Herefordshire. It was a doubly astute move, for the manors in question had previously been granted to Montfort. At a stroke, the king had cemented the support of one redoubtable warrior and simultaneously set him against another. The clash was as swift as it was inevitable. Within days of the decision at Amiens, Montfort struck back, sending his sons to attack Mortimer’s other estates and castles. Other royalists and Montfortians quickly piled into the fray. Before Henry III had returned from Amiens, the March was already in flames, with near disastrous consequences. Edward, having rushed home ahead of his father, came close to being captured at Gloucester. Trapped in the castle, he escaped only because of the naive chivalry of his assailants, who granted him a truce and withdrew.
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