A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (41 page)

But, just a month or so later, Edward – by this point on the Isle of Wight – received fresh intelligence, at once terrible and hopeful. Philip III was dead. The French king and his troops had barely entered Aragon before being struck by plague, and forced into an ignominious retreat. Like his father Louis, Philip had died in the midst of a diseased and defeated army, his crusade a similarly misdirected disaster. It was a lucky escape for Peter of Aragon, who must have breathed a sigh of relief – but little else. On 10 November, just six weeks after the death of his rival, the Spanish king also gave up the ghost.
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Thus, by Christmas, which the English court spent in Exeter, Edward would have known that all four protagonists in the great European feud were dead. The issues that had divided them, of course, still remained, but the war, for the moment, had ground to halt. Moreover, Philip III and Peter of Aragon had both been succeeded by young sons – a teenager and a twenty-year-old – who might hesitate before continuing their fathers’ fight. What a difference, then, a year had made. Peace, which had seemed such a forlorn hope the previous Christmas, was suddenly a much stronger prospect.
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According to one chronicler, the solemn French embassy that arrived in Westminster in February urged Edward to cross the Channel as soon as possible in order to act as peacemaker; if so, then the contrast with the previous year, when the king’s overtures had been rebuffed, was even more pleasing. In any case, Edward now had to go to France: as duke of Gascony, he was obliged to do homage to the new French king. Accordingly, a short parliament was called for April, in which the king’s cousin, Edmund of Cornwall (Richard of Cornwall’s younger son) was entrusted with the custody of the kingdom. Edward then went immediately to Dover and, on 13 May, set sail for France.
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We are well informed about Edward’s Continental visit, thanks to the voluminous surviving records of his household. These tell us, among many other things, that the king travelled to France in great state, taking with him not only the queen and close advisers like Burnell, Vescy and Grandson; his entourage also included several earls, including his brother the earl of Lancaster, his friend the earl of Lincoln, and his uncle, William de Valence – an earl in all but name. Even Gilbert de Clare, the prickly earl of Gloucester, had agreed to accompany the royal party, at least as far as Paris. These men and their attendants, combined with the already large staff of the royal household, made for a total contingent that numbered well into four figures. It took several days to ferry them all, and at least 1,000 horses, across the Channel. Eight ships were needed for the kitchen equipment.
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Once in France, this great company rode first to Amiens, where they were greeted by the new French king. Philip IV, son of Philip III, although already knighted and married before his father’s death, was still only seventeen years old at the time of his recent coronation. Dazzlingly beautiful – Philip le Bel (the Fair), his countrymen called him – he was also apparently painfully shy. This reserve may explain why some people found him aloof; later in his reign the king was famously described by a hostile French bishop, who caustically compared him to an owl. ‘The handsomest man in the world, [he] can do nothing except stare at men.’
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Nevertheless, the new French king seemed to hit it off reasonably well with his second cousin. From Amiens, Edward and Philip moved quickly to Paris, where the English court remained for several weeks, lodged on the Left Bank, in the monastery of St Germain-des-Prés. The length of their stay, the feasts thrown by both kings, and Edward’s repeated boat trips across the Seine to visit Philip at his palace of the Louvre – all of this has been taken as good evidence that genial relations were being maintained and developed.
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No doubt they were, at least in some quarters. But the duration of the visit and the frequency of contact is also as likely to have been the result of the arduous negotiations that were taking place on two fronts. In the first place, there was the delicate matter of the relationship between France and Gascony, which required renewal, but which had also been tested by the recent French demands for military service. When Edward did homage to Philip on 5 June, he had been careful, once again, to use words that were imprecise and conditional. ‘I become your man for the lands which I hold overseas,’ the English king had said, ‘according to the terms of the peace made between our ancestors.’ Before he did so, Robert Burnell had made the English position more explicit, explaining that they considered that France had not fulfilled its obligations under the Treaty of Paris; that, indeed, Edward’s rights had been threatened by French behaviour and that, for this reason, some Englishmen had advised their king to challenge Philip’s claim to homage. It was a bold opening statement that must have occasioned much debate.
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More intractable still was the question of peace between France and Aragon. Philip IV himself appears to have been opposed to his father’s war (his mother, who had died when Philip was a small child, had been Aragonese), and the Aragonese, for their part, were willing to talk (their ambassadors were in Paris). As far as the papacy was concerned, however, the struggle should continue as long as Aragon remained defiant over Sicily – the root cause of all the contention – and the Aragonese were equally adamant that the island would not be relinquished.
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On this issue the Aragonese could afford to be dogmatic. At an earlier stage in the fight for Sicily, the fortunes of war had dealt them a card that trumped all others. In June 1284 a naval battle had been fought off the coast of Naples between the Aragonese fleet and the forces of Sicily’s ousted overlord, Charles of Anjou. Charles himself was not present at this engagement, but his namesake son and heir was. Victory had gone to Aragon, and Charles, prince of Salerno, had been captured in the course of the fighting.
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Two years on and Charles of Salerno was still being held in an Aragonese prison. His continued detention was a source of great concern to his immediate family, and to his cousin, Edward I. The two men had met on at least one occasion (a tournament in 1279) and had evidently got on well. When, in 1281, it had looked as if another French feud would pull them into rival camps, the king had written to the prince, expressing his reluctance to get involved. ‘My heart is not in it,’ he told his cousin, ‘on account of the love between you and me.’ At a more practical level, Edward knew that there could be no crusade to the Holy Land while Charles – now nominally a king after the death of his father in 1284 – continued in his confinement. The prospect of his liberation, however, looked bleak. Unless Aragon agreed to withdraw from Sicily, the papacy would not drop its anathema; unless the papacy dropped its anathema, Aragon would not agree to Charles’s release.
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There was no way, therefore, that Edward could have brokered a conclusive peace agreement during his stay in Paris that summer. Nevertheless, after several weeks of negotiation, he did succeed in arranging a ceasefire. In the last fortnight of July, having been empowered by both Philip IV and the Aragonese ambassadors, the English king ordained a truce that would begin in August and last until September the following year. This was at least a start: one which gave him just over twelve months to broker something more decisive.
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A few days later similarly patient bargaining on Anglo-French relations also bore fruit. Philip IV made concessions to Edward involving his jurisdiction as overlord, and also regarding the lands promised to the English king under the long-standing peace treaty. Edward’s rights in Saintonge (that is, the area around Saintes, a town on Gascony’s northern frontier) were finally acknowledged, while Edward, for his part, agreed to drop his claim to Quercy, a region to the east of the duchy, in return for an annual payment of several hundred pounds.
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This breakthrough on both fronts in Paris was accompanied by equally encouraging news from a third direction. Around this time, the English must have learned that the new pope, Honorius IV, had improved on the financial package offered by his predecessor. The papacy was now prepared to grant Edward a new six-year crusading tax, provided that he took up the cross by May the following year. If this was not quite everything the king wanted – he wrote back asking for payment in advance – it was nevertheless excellent news. When the English court finally quit the French capital at the end of July, there must have been a general consensus that they had already achieved a great deal.
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Their next destination was Gascony, but they set off in no great hurry. Having bought himself some time, Edward chose to spend it partly on pilgrimage. From Paris he led his retinue south-east, to the city of Auxerre and the abbey of Pontigny (where Edmund of Abingdon, the archbishop of Canterbury who had officiated at Edward’s baptism, lay buried). From there they went west, and along the River Loire to Fontevrault, burial place of Edward’s Angevin ancestors (Henry II and Richard the Lionheart). Consequently, it was September before the king started south in the direction of his own lands. These, of course, had expanded greatly since his last visit twelve years earlier, and Edward, as was his wont, made a special effort to appear in each new area under his lordship, inspecting its management and impressing himself on the inhabitants. From mid-September to mid-October he toured newly acquired Saintonge; then, in the later part of the autumn, he moved east along the Dordogne, until he reached the Agenais, ceded to him in 1279. By 15 November he had reached Agen itself, and he stayed in the city, or its environs, for a month. Not until mid-December did he head up the River Garonne towards Bordeaux, and in the event the English court spent Christmas and the New Year in the small town of St Macaire.
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If his itinerary sounds laid back and listless, this is probably because it was partly so. No one was more anxious than Edward to settle the great problems of Europe, but the wheels of international diplomacy turned slowly, not least because of the distances involved. It took weeks, running into months, for letters and ambassadors to pass through the Pyrenees to Aragon or across the Alps to Rome. When, in early January, the king finally reached Bordeaux, there were some preliminary talks with an Aragonese delegation. But, once they had departed, Edward necessarily focused his attentions on Gascony which, as usual, had problems of its own. John de Grilly, the seneschal appointed in 1278, had proved capable but corrupt; removed before the king’s arrival, he was put on trial the following year. For royal and ducal officials, at least, there was much work to be getting on with. Edward himself spent most of February exploring the far reaches of the Médoc. At one point in March we catch him hunting wolves.
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At Easter, however, events suddenly and dramatically sped up. Once again, we are able to reconstruct what happened in forensic detail thanks to the records of the royal household. On Wednesday, 2 April, the king came back to Bordeaux in time to celebrate Easter on the Sunday. Two days after his arrival the Aragonese ambassadors also returned, in what even the dry financial accounts acknowledge was ‘a solemn embassy’: some eighty-three men and forty-six horses were accommodated in the city at Edward’s expense. Perhaps, like the king himself, they were entertained by the little boy who was paid two shillings for playing the bagpipes, or the damsel who received seven pence for her dancing.
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Then came Easter Sunday itself – a day of such drama that it made the news back home in England. As the best-informed chronicler explains, ‘a great misfortune befell the king’. Edward, we are told, was standing with his nobles in a certain solar (the topmost room in a tower) when the floor beneath their feet suddenly fell away. The assembled company tumbled from an estimated height of eighty feet. Some of them were crushed, some suffered broken bones. Three knights were said to have been killed, while others apparently walked away unscathed. As for Edward himself, he was not nearly so unlucky, nor quite so fortunate. Found under a Gascon knight who had broken his leg, the king emerged from the wreckage with a broken collarbone.
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