A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (23 page)

The first and most crucial matter to attend to in respect of Gascony was its relationship with the neighbouring kingdom of France. Accordingly, having left Eleanor (who was again pregnant) to go straight on to the duchy, Edward headed north to Paris, where towards the end of July he was welcomed by the new French king, Philip III. Some fourteen years earlier their late fathers had met in the same city and agreed a historic peace: a deal by which, as we have seen, Henry III had surrendered his ancestral claims to Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou in return for recognition of his right to hold Gascony from Louis IX. On that occasion, as part of the same agreement, Henry had done homage to Louis. Which is to say, both men had participated in an ancient ritual, practised for centuries in every corner of Europe, by which one individual acknowledged that he or she was in some way subservient to another. On that day – 4 December 1259 – Henry had knelt before Louis, placed his hands within Louis’s hands, and declared that, as far as Gascony was concerned, he was Louis’s man.
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But what precisely did this mean? Homage could signify as little or as much as either party wanted it to. Neither Henry nor Louis seems to have felt that they had done anything especially novel; both took it as self-evident that the king of France was, or at least ought to be, the overlord of the duke of Gascony.
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And yet, as the treaty they drew up makes manifestly clear, neither had much clue as to what this might entail in practice. When, for example, having promised to do homage to Louis, Henry had tried to specify what services he would render as a result, words had failed him. ‘We will do appropriate services,’ he had declared vaguely, ‘until it be found what services are due for these things.’ ‘Then we shall be bound to do them,’ he had added, helpfully, ‘just as they have been found.’

Such was the general tenor of the Treaty of Paris – well-intentioned but mired for the most part in clauses that were hopelessly imprecise or that looked to some later date for their resolution. The latter was especially true of the treaty’s opening section, which endeavoured to answer perhaps the most fundamental question of all: what, territorially speaking, was Gascony? For more than a century its border with France had been debated with swords rather than words. While it was noble of Henry and Louis to have preferred to pick up their pens, it meant that clause after clause began with a hesitant ‘if’. Possession of one disputable district after another was declared to be contingent upon the future decision of this court, the outcome of that inquiry, or (in one particular case) whether the owners in 1259 ended up having children or not.
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Fourteen years on, and almost nothing had been done to resolve these problems. Henry III had sealed the treaty only to be distracted for a decade by domestic politics in England. While, therefore, there was no question of either Edward or Philip refusing to abide by the deal – both of them had been signatories in 1259 – it did mean that they had an immense amount of fine detail to work out, and therein the devil lurked. Accordingly, when Edward came to Paris to repeat his father’s performance, he chose his words with care. ‘Lord king,’ he said to Philip, ‘I do homage to you for all the lands I ought to hold from you.’
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It was with the intention of beginning the process of clarification that Edward left Paris for Gascony in August. Just as he had done homage to Philip as his king, he now required his subjects within the duchy to do the same to him as their duke. He also let it be known that he wanted to create a written record of the services they owed. ‘By voice of herald and by sound of trumpet’, his tenants were advised to assemble at his coming and furnish him with the requisite information. Having passed through Bordeaux – where, as well as accepting the homages of the citizenry, he was presumably received with some pomp – Edward proceeded further south to the town of St Sever, where he received the same acknowledgement from the leading lords of the duchy, and where the laborious process of registering their obligations began.
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At this point, however, his plans were rudely interrupted by the rebellion of the greatest lord in Gascony (after Edward himself, that is). Gaston de Béarn, whose lands lay in the hills along the duchy’s southern border, had a history of causing trouble. He had been, for example, the chief ringleader of local resistance during the unpopular rule of Simon de Montfort. The reason for his recalcitrance in 1273 is altogether less certain, but it seems to have stemmed from an escalating disagreement with the duchy’s abrasive new seneschal, Luke de Tany. (Before his departure on crusade, Edward had appointed his old friend Roger Leybourne as lieutenant in Gascony, but Leybourne had been another of the many unexpected casualties during Edward’s absence, dying in the autumn of 1271.) Whatever the precise cause, Gaston refused to appear before Edward, forcing the new duke to break off his administrative business and embark on a punitive military expedition.

This took a long time. Although Gaston was initially brought to heel within a matter of weeks, he immediately broke the terms of his surrender and retreated to his castles in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Flushing him out involved a series of sieges that kept Edward occupied throughout the autumn and into the winter. It was not until the beginning of 1274 that the rebellious vicomte was finally cornered and once again forced to submit.

Nor was that the end of the matter. After his second surrender, Gaston immediately appealed to Philip III, and the French king obliged him by revoking his dispute with Edward to Paris. In this way, Gaston exposed and exploited the great chink in Edward’s armour: namely, the non-absolute nature of his authority. Here was the most pernicious effect of the Treaty of Paris. If the duke of Gascony was properly subordinate to the king of France, it followed that any Gascon who was disgruntled by a ducal decision could appeal to the higher judgement of the French king’s court. Edward could do all he might to limit this tendency, but he could not deny the fundamental principal. In 1274, therefore, much to his chagrin, he had no option but to abandon his attempt to discipline Gaston de Béarn and leave the matter in the hands of his lawyers.
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It was time to move on. With the winter now wasted by his fruitless pursuit of Gaston, Edward had to abandon his intention of returning to England by Easter. Instead he spent the spring completing the interrupted survey of his ducal rights, which culminated in March with a parliament in Bordeaux. In April he and Eleanor left Gascony, but on their way north there was more delay in Limoges, a once debatable area of ducal authority, where the oppressed citizens were keen to acknowledge Edward as their lord, but the oppressive local viscountess would have none of it. The result was yet another appeal to Philip III, who must have been pleased at the frequency with which opportunities to display his superiority were accumulating. It was not until the end of July that Edward reached the French coast and took ship to England.
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His year in France had not been a complete waste of time. During his stay in the south Edward had taken the opportunity to cultivate good relations with his neighbours, the kings of Navarre and Aragon, and had concluded alliances with both. Eleanor, meanwhile, had been pleased to meet up with her half-brother, Alfonso X of Castile, for the first time in twenty years. The Spanish king had travelled to meet her at Bayonne, where he had become the godfather to her newly delivered third son: Alfonso junior had been sent back to England ahead of his parents in June.
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In overall terms, however, the visit to Gascony had been a frustrating one. Edward had made a start on consolidating his authority within the duchy, but there was still much work to be done. Moreover, with regard to the all-important issue of his relationship with the king of France, things seemed more complicated than ever, and the questions of territory and authority remained to be satisfactorily answered.

When Edward landed at Dover on 2 August 1274 it was clearly to a tremendous sense of popular excitement. ‘Behold, he shines like a new Richard!’ enthused one Londoner in a song written shortly before the new king’s arrival. But it was not merely the fact that Englishmen now had not one but two crusading heroes to boast about; nor was it that, after almost four years of absence, Edward had kept his public in England waiting for such a very long time. It was probably not even the palpable sense of relief at his safe return, and the prospect of better royal rule that only a resident king could provide. Important though all these factors were, they must for the moment have taken second place to the sheer visceral thrill that accompanied the knowledge that the country was about to witness a coronation.
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Coronations were by their nature rare events, but in this particular instance the wait had been quite exceptional. Almost four decades had elapsed since the ceremony staged in 1236 for Eleanor of Provence, and Eleanor had only been a queen consort. To recollect the coronation of a reigning monarch would have been a feat beyond the memories of most Englishmen, for it was well over half a century since the young Henry III had been transformed from a boy of nine into a king.

Edward, of course, by virtue of the groundbreaking decision taken before his departure, was considered a king already. This did not mean, however, that in his case a coronation was in any way redundant or unnecessary: quite the contrary. The royal title may have passed to him, as his writs proclaimed, ‘by the grace of God’, but it still remained to call upon the Almighty to bless his rule, and for that the ancient, mystical rite of a coronation remained essential. Moreover, the fact that there was no longer the need to rush matters meant that those responsible for orchestrating the ceremony had months rather than days to make their preparations, and this in turn meant that the scale of the celebrations could be truly majestic. If there was a quantum leap in the history of the coronation as a royal spectacle, this was it.

On Saturday, 18 August Edward and his entourage rode into London. The mayor and citizens had adorned their city ‘without consideration of cost’ with silks and cloth of gold. Not just the citizens themselves, we are told, but all the magnates of the kingdom, both clerks and laymen, had gathered in the capital to cheer the arrival of their new king. Unfortunately, only one chronicler set these events down in any detail, and he was evidently somewhat overwhelmed by the spectacle, declaring that ‘neither tongue nor pen’ would suffice to describe it. He does, however, mention the ‘multifarious inventions’ that had been prepared in Edward’s honour, which sound a lot like the kind of pageants that are generally held to be the preserve of later coronations.

The fact that Edward had entered London on a Saturday was also highly significant. Very likely what our tongue-tied correspondent was witnessing was the birth of the custom whereby a new king would ride from the Tower of London to Westminster on the day before his coronation. The king’s ministers had certainly taken the trouble to spruce up the Tower in advance of his arrival, and, at Edward’s express request, the mayor had cleared the clutter from Cheapside – London’s main market, and the east–west thoroughfare along which later ‘vigil processions’ would pass. This being the case, Edward would seem to have begun another new tradition in 1274; one that would last until the seventeenth century.
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In processing ceremoniously through London, Edward was following a fashion laid down by his father, who had loved to indulge in such showy excesses – spectacle being one of the few things that Henry III could usually be relied upon to get right, and a way of compensating for his political failures. On several important occasions during his reign – the reception of Eleanor of Castile in 1255, for example – the late king had staged similarly elaborate parades through the capital. Henry’s contribution, moreover, went beyond the provision of general precedents. In fact, much of the detailed long-term planning for Edward’s coronation can be traced back to his father’s initiative.
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As an example, consider where and how Edward spent the night before his coronation. When the procession ended, the king and his household would have installed themselves in the Palace of Westminster, where Edward would have prepared himself for a solemn spiritual exercise akin to the one he had performed in Burgos some twenty years before. Just like a young man about to be knighted, so too with a king about to crowned: he was expected to spend the night before the ceremony in quiet contemplation, reflecting on the responsibilities that went with the awesome status about to be conferred upon him.

The location for this time-honoured tradition would have been the king’s bedchamber in the palace – later known, for reasons that will become apparent, as the Painted Chamber. It was here that Henry III had died, and in 1274 his spirit still hung about the walls. Some ten years earlier, the old king had caused the room to be redecorated. A disastrous fire that had ripped through the palace in 1263 had provided the excuse, and Henry’s life-threatening illness the same year had suggested a suitable theme. On the wall directly behind the royal bed, the king’s painters had created a coronation scene. The subject, naturally, was Edward the Confessor, being crowned by a crowd of bishops. On either side, outside of the curtains that closed around the bed, King Solomon’s guards stood watch. Henry’s aim, we must assume, was to provide his son with appropriate images on which to reflect during his vigil. Edward was to ponder the example of the Confessor, and the wisdom of Solomon.
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