A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (40 page)

This intervention by the king of Aragon dragged in the king of France. Philip III was Charles of Anjou’s overlord (for Anjou itself) and, more to the point, his nephew. He had warned Aragon in advance that any action taken against Sicily would be regarded as an attack on France. Since King Peter had chosen to ignore this admonition, a new war across the Pyrenees threatened.

Such a war was actively encouraged by the papacy, the last player in this international crisis. Rome had long regarded Sicily as its own special preserve; it was the pope, and no one else (certainly not the Sicilians) who should decide who ruled there, and Charles of Anjou had long been the approved papal candidate. The fact that Pope Martin was a Frenchman merely reinforced his determination to see Angevin power on the island restored. In short order, he excommunicated Peter of Aragon, then deprived him – which is to say, he declared that the king should rule no more – and empowered the French to put the sentence into effect. In 1284, therefore, Philip III began dutifully to raise an army and fleet to attack his southern neighbour. By the start of 1285 his stores were assembled on the Mediterranean coast, his ships were set to sail, and an army of 8,000 men was mustering, ready to march.
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Edward had done his utmost to discourage an escalating conflict in which both sides had looked to him for help. Peter of Aragon regarded the English king as a friend (for years they had been planning the wedding of their eldest children); Philip III claimed Edward’s allegiance as a cousin and, more contentiously, as his overlord (for Gascony). Most troubling of all, Pope Martin had designated the war against Aragon as a crusade. Edward had previously been able to offer his apologies to all three, explaining that he was preoccupied with the rebellion of his own subjects in Wales. But now, at the start of 1285, he was faced with two equally unappealing alternatives. Either he could offend one side by backing the other, or he could do nothing, and watch as the papacy squandered its carefully husbanded crusading funds on a war between Europe’s Christian kings.
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Edward was certainly not inclined to fight, but nor was it in his nature to stand aside and do nothing. His stay at Bristol during Christmas 1284, surrounded by his great magnates, was more than just a culmination of that autumn’s royal progress around Wales. Locals (if not later historians) were proud to regard it as a parliament, indicating that the festivities must have been mixed with much serious debate. The question under discussion was what should be done about the imminent conflict on the Continent. And, by the start of the new year, the king had decided on a course of action.
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He had decided, it seems, to intervene in person to stop the war. In early January Edward departed from Bristol, leaving the chancery behind him in his haste, and sped eastwards across southern England. After a fleeting visit to London, he rode on to Dover, from where he intended to cross to France. This was clearly not a military mission: no troops were raised, and the letters of protection issued to the king’s small entourage were set to expire at Easter. What Edward appeared to have had in mind was an eleventh-hour meeting with Philip III, by which he hoped to talk his cousin out of launching his invasion.
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This being the case, he must have been disappointed. By the middle of February the king had left Kent for East Anglia, where he remained for the next two months. Contemporary chroniclers and modern his torians have speculated as to why he suddenly changed course in this way. What seems most likely is that, after several weeks of waiting, he received word from Philip, telling him not to come. Denied the opportunity to petition the French king in person, Edward embarked on the only other route that remained open to him. The shrines and altars of Norfolk and Suffolk were a favourite recourse when divine assistance was required.
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No doubt frustrated by his inability to intercede, but still hopeful perhaps that war was not yet inevitable, Edward summoned a parliament to meet in May 1285 – one of the most important of his entire reign. Apart from his brief visit in January, the king had not been seen in London for over three years; at the same time, because of the prolonged emergency in Wales, much of the normal business of government had necessarily been retarded. The long delay, the need for a fresh start and, once again, a desire to celebrate his great victory: Edward acknowledged all of these by the spectacle he staged to mark parliament’s opening.

On Friday, 4 May, the king, together with the queen, set off on foot from the Tower of London – still decorated with the mouldering heads of Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffudd – towards Westminster Abbey. With them walked all the magnates of the land and no fewer than fourteen bishops, while at the front of the procession went Archbishop Pecham, carrying before him the most precious of the many relics that had once belonged to the vanquished princes. The Croes Naid, as it was known, was believed to be a piece of the cross on which Christ himself had been crucified. Placed at first on the abbey’s high altar, at some point thereafter it was committed to the keeping of the nuns of St Helena at Bishopsgate. Here, again, Edward was advertising his awareness, and his command, of history: it was Helena’s special claim to have been the discoverer of the True Cross. That she was also known to have been the mother of the Emperor Constantine was merely a fitting coincidence.
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Having staged what amounted to a virtual re-enactment of his corona tion procession, the king and his parliament settled down to business. First on the agenda was the situation in Europe, and the question of whether Edward, as duke of Gascony, was really obliged to respond to the military summons of the king of France. As with most aspects of their complex relationship, there was no certain answer, but the Gascons themselves were clearly very concerned: already they had sent word to Edward, emphasising the dangers and subjugation that would undoubtedly ensue should he accede to the French demand. No doubt many English magnates, like the king himself, also viewed such a prospect with considerable unease. It was decided, therefore, to reply in uncertain terms. Before the end of May, English ambassadors were dispatched to Paris with an offer of debate. It is also likely that they took with them the message that Edward’s offer to act as an arbitrator between France and Aragon still stood.
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While they waited for a response, there was much domestic business to transact. The king, it was noted, confirmed many of the charters of his ancestors in this parliament and knighted many of the sons of his magnates. New laws were also promulgated. The second Statute of Westminster sought to provide a comprehensive statement on questions relating to land law, while a new Statute of Merchants laid down proced ures for those trying to recover their debts.
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The most dramatic legal and mercantile developments, however, were those that affected the city of London. The capital and its citizens, as we have already seen, had a love–hate relationship with England’s kings – a standing disagreement about the proper limits of royal power and civic liberty. London had long claimed special rights of self-government – the right to elect its own mayor, and its own sheriffs – and when the Crown needed popular support, it tended to agree with the city’s estimation of its own independence. When, on the other hand, the Crown felt strong or vengeful, it acted as if these rights did not exist. Henry III, for example, had suspended London’s liberties at least ten times during the course of his reign. As this high number suggests, however, such suspensions were only ever temporary. Even Henry’s most wrathful intervention – his punishment of the capital in the wake of its support for Simon de Montfort – was soon moderated, and within five years the mayor and sheriffs were restored to their full independence.
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London had more reason to fear the coming of Henry’s son – the dislike between Edward and the citizens ran much deeper, a result of their attack on his mother and his bloody retribution at Lewes. And yet, once the new reign had started, the capital’s worst fears were not realised. The king’s massive redevelopment of the Tower – begun not long after his accession, and largely finished by the summer of 1285 – radiated the threat of royal power, but thus far there had been no direct assault on the city’s franchise.
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During his first decade, Edward had been content to meddle in London’s politics indirectly. Soon after the coronation, for example, Mayor Henry le Waleys (‘the Welshman’) – an instinctive authoritarian of whom the king thought highly – was voted out and replaced by the more moderate and conservative Gregory of Ruxley. Edward had responded by gradually packing the city’s narrow electing council with royalists, with the result that, in 1281, Waleys was returned to office.
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Edward had two quite specific objectives in getting his own mayor elected. The first was to make the capital more competitive. Full civic privileges extended to only a narrow and self-sustaining oligarchy, which protected the vested interests of a few long-established families, while denying a fair and free market to both lesser citizens (such as fish mongers and cordwainers) and foreign merchants (such as the Riccardi). The king’s second objective was to reduce crime. London was growing rapidly in the thirteenth century – its population had probably doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 in the time since Edward’s birth – and rapidly growing more lawless. At best this manifested itself in noisy and violent games being played in the streets; at worst, it meant armed gangs roaming around after dark, and hiring themselves out to settle – and hence to perpetuate – civic feuds. Waleys, as Edward’s placeman, responded with a series of hardline measures: tougher sentences for curfew-breakers, plus the building of a brand-new prison. The Londoners responded, once again, by voting him out, and returning to power his more lenient predecessor. Given the choice, it seems, the citizens prized liberty more highly than public order.
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Such a line would have been difficult to defend before Edward I at the best of times; in the charged atmosphere that existed in 1285 it proved impossible. Not only did the king return that spring at the height of his power; he also came back, after his long absence, to a capital recently rocked by scandal. The previous twelve months had witnessed rioting in the streets, a break-out from Newgate Prison, and a notorious murder in which several leading councillors were implicated. It was a sufficiently damning litany of failure to merit some form of intervention on the part of the Crown, but Edward used it as his pretext for going much further than anybody expected. At the start of the summer the king announced that he was appointing a special commission to look into matters of law and order, but before it sat he ordered the enclosure of St Paul’s Churchyard – the area where, since time immemorial, London’s public assemblies had been held. On the last day of June, Mayor Ruxley resigned his office in protest and remonstrated with the royal commissioners at the Tower. They, in response, ordered the detention of some eighty Londoners and announced that the city was being taken into the king’s hands. The following day royal officers, headed by a new royal warden, moved in. London was now Edward’s city, to be governed as he alone saw fit.
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The same day, with parliament finished and the capital constrained, Edward left Westminster and embarked on a more leisurely round of summertime activities. Along with his family – all his daughters, and even the little Lord Edward – the king went on pilgrimage to Canterbury, where he marked the feast of Thomas Becket by presenting four gold figures at the saint’s shrine (Edward the Confessor and St John for the sake of Henry III; St George and his horse for their help in conquering Wales). A week at Leeds Castle and some hunting in Hampshire were followed by another family occasion at Amesbury in Wiltshire, where Edward’s six-year-old daughter Mary was veiled as a nun (a move that pleased his mother, who had a strong attachment to Amesbury, far more than it pleased his wife).
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Finally, as the summer drew to a close, the king was reunited with his magnates at Winchester Castle. Because their gathering saw more law-and-order legislation (the Statute of Winchester), it has sometimes been mistaken for a parliament. In fact, this was a more select assembly, almost exclusively secular and military in character. It was, in all probability, the occasion for another chivalric celebration of the conquest of Wales: a much grander restaging of the smaller scale tournament held at Nefyn the previous year. And, although we cannot be entirely certain, it was most likely the event for which Edward had fashioned a real Round Table, eighteen feet across and weighing three-quarters of a ton. Repainted in the sixteenth century and restored in the twentieth, it now hangs on the wall of Winchester’s Great Hall. Around this table, for several glorious days that September, the king and his knights must have feasted.
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Throughout these leisured weeks of summer, Edward had, of course, been waiting for news from across the Channel. By the time the court reached Winchester he had heard the worst: France had begun its invasion of Aragon. Neither the death of Charles of Anjou (which had occurred in January) nor the death of Pope Martin IV (in March) had been enough to dent Philip III’s resolve, and Edward’s ambassadors had come too late: by the time they had reached Paris, the French king and his army were already crossing the Pyrenees. The knowledge that a fratricidal war among Christians was under way must have soured the celebrations at Winchester. By this French action, English plans for a new crusade seemed irreparably compromised.
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