A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (53 page)

With this long history of family friendship in mind, it was perfectly natural that Edward should entrust the task of calming Anglo-French relations in 1293 to his brother: Edmund of Lancaster was, of course, part of the same circle of cousins. He was, moreover, in some respects better qualified in this respect than Edward himself. In 1275, following the death of his first wife, Edmund had married into the French aristocracy, taking as his second wife Blanche of Artois, countess of Champagne. Blanche, a widow herself, had a daughter called Jeanne of Navarre, who had subsequently become the wife of Philip IV. Thus Edmund was not only second-cousin to the king of France, but also stepfather to the French queen.
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And he was in Paris in the autumn of 1293. No doubt thinking that his brother’s entrée into the highest circles of French royal power might prove useful, Edward had dispatched Edmund in the summer, an informal attaché to the official English embassy. Now that the formal, legalistic pleading had apparently failed, the king looked to his brother to play the family card.
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And so, early in the new year 1294, Edmund sat down to negotiate with his wife, his stepdaughter and Mary of Brabant (Philip III’s widow and stepmother of Philip IV). In friendly fashion, the earl and the three royal ladies devised a secret scheme that would simultaneously salve wounded French pride, simplify the relationship of England and France over Gascony, and strengthen the existing bonds of amity between the two Crowns. Together they agreed that several important Gascon towns, including Bordeaux, would be surrendered to Philip, along with a score of Gascon hostages. Edward would submit to this public dressing-down on the private understanding that it would be quickly reversed. A summit meeting between the two kings would follow at Amiens, as of old, and Philip would regrant Gascony to Edward on new, favourable terms that would reduce the likelihood of future contention. Lastly, to seal the deal, Edward would marry Philip’s sister, Margaret. Honour would be satisfied, stability would be secured, and the family settlement created by Henry III and Louis IX would be renewed for generations to come.
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In all of this, the English king, his brother and the royal ladies of France were deceived. Their secret negotiations at the start of 1294 were not the beginning of a new period of friendship, but the last part of a carefully contrived plot to deprive Edward of his Continental dominions. A crucial player in this plot was Philip IV himself. Throughout the secret negotiations the French king looked in several times on Edmund and the ladies, to reassure them that the harsh words and aggressive noises being made by his council were all a front, necessary for appearances’ sake. The reality, he averred, was the confidential business they had in hand, and all would soon be well. A question mark hangs over Philip’s sincerity. Either he was a brilliant actor and an accomplished liar who intended to deprive Edward all along; or he may genuinely have intended to honour the secret deal but been overruled by his own council. One thing is certain: whether he was part of it or not, there was powerful faction at Philip’s court that had gained the upper hand in the 1290s, and its aim was the destruction of Edward I’s rule in Gascony.
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At its head was Philip’s younger brother, Charles of Valois. He most of all had special reason to hate the English. When, a decade earlier, France had been preparing to invade Aragon in order to remove its excommunicated king, Charles, then thirteen years old, had been crowned as his anticipated replacement. Subsequently, however, his crown had been bartered away by Edward I during the negotiations for a European peace. The rest of the Continent, including his older brother Philip, may have been pleased, but Charles was evidently not. As one modern historian has memorably put it, ‘he had been addressed as a king when he was still in his teens and had never quite recovered from the experience’. Even in 1294, by which time he was in his mid-twenties, Charles was still refusing to relinquish his royal title. And, though the prospect of realising his claim was long gone, he was determined to revenge himself on the man he regarded as responsible for his loss. English chroniclers recognised Charles as the author of the war at sea. The Normans who had plundered English ships and killed their crews had been acting on his orders, said one writer. ‘He persecuted the English with an inveterate hatred,’ wrote another.
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None of this would have mattered so very much had Charles been a lone loose cannon. But the fact was that, by the 1290s, his ‘inveterate hatred’ was shared by many others at the French court. Edward’s last trip to the Continent, a triumph in English eyes, had been viewed as so much grandstanding by envious Frenchmen. Philip IV, like Edward, might have intended to preserve amicable relations, but he too was surrounded by aggressive royal lawyers, whose
raison d’être
was to push the rights of the French Crown to their utmost logical limits. Such men must have been particularly annoyed by the swagger of the English king’s entourage during their visit to Paris in 1286. Robert Burnell’s speech, querying the extent of Edward’s vassalic obligations on the eve of his homage for Gascony, was seen as a gauntlet thrown down. Charles of Valois and his co-conspirators were now ready to pick it up.
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Had Burnell been involved in the negotiations with France in the winter of 1293–94, it is impossible to imagine that they would have been so badly handled. But the great chancellor, after eighteen years in office and a lifetime in Edward’s service, had died at Berwick the previous year, towards the end of the Great Cause proceedings. His replacement, John Langton, was no fool but, as a mere chancery clerk, did not command the king’s respect as Burnell had done. When the new chancellor advised against the secret deal, Edward simply ignored him.
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In February 1294 the order to surrender Gascony was given: in March English officials packed their bags and started to ship out, dismayed to be handing over towns, cities and hostages to the French on the express orders of their king.
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In fact, throughout the negotiations that winter, Edward seems to have ignored almost everyone, and kept no counsel other than his own. The men who were normally consulted in such matters – the magnates – appear to have sensed that important business had been concluded without their involvement. During Lent the king moved into East Anglia, touring his favourite shrines and churches, praying for a successful outcome to his daring and highly personal diplomatic initiative. At this time, noted one local chronicler, the magnates did not attend his court.
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The denouement came at Easter. Edward had moved into Kent, partly to bid farewell to his eldest daughter and her new husband, but mainly in anxious expectation of good news from France: a safe-conduct from Philip to come to Amiens, to marry his sister, and to receive Gascony back on new, improved terms. The newly-weds sailed, and Easter came and went, but still no messengers arrived from France. Then, on 20 April, a sorry band of Englishmen arrived, led by John of St John, the man who until just a few weeks earlier had been seneschal of Gascony. From the horse’s mouth, Edward learned what the king of France’s men had said and done as they had occupied the duchy, and the awful truth finally dawned. ‘The king went red,’ said the best informed chronicler, ‘and became very afraid, because he had acted less than wisely.’
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In France, more or less simultaneously, Edmund of Lancaster was also discovering the enormity of his error, and being told by Philip’s counsellors that Gascony would remain in French hands. A few weeks later Edward was condemned in Paris for failing to attend the French king’s summons, and the duchy was declared forfeit.
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As the news of the confiscation spread, the English people weighed the evidence available and concluded that their king must have gone mad. ‘Up till now,’ said one writer, ‘Edward … had in all his acts shown himself energetic, generous and triumphant, like another Solomon.’ His departure from reason, it was popularly decided, was down to that old demon, Lust. The prospect of marrying a beautiful young woman had clearly turned the head of the fifty-four-year-old king.
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Accordingly, when parliament assembled on the last day of May there were extraordinary scenes: Edward, usually so masterful, appeared almost meek, while his magnates, normally so agreeable, were furious. Having not been consulted, they felt no obligation to meet his request for help. According to one well-informed chronicler, it took a public act of contrition from the king to turn the situation around. Before all who were present, Edward swore an oath that he had not acted out of lust for the girl, but in order to have peace with France, without which he could not fulfil his vow to go on crusade. The magnates, moved by this declaration, now promised to help the king win back the lost duchy, saying they would follow him ‘in life and death’. ‘Mount the warhorses!’ urged Anthony Bek, the bellicose bishop of Durham. ‘Take your lance in your hand!’
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The challenge that lay before them was enormous. France was not Wales. A war there was a fight against a formidable opponent, whose resources, by even the most charitable estimate, were the equal of Edward’s own, and in many respects much greater. Moreover, Philip IV was already prepared for war: since 1292 the French king had been building a fleet of galleys. The professed reason for this project had been a desire to assist in the ongoing ‘crusade’ against Sicily. Now, in retrospect, it was obvious that these ships had been intended all along for a conflict with the king of England.
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Of course, Edward’s fury at the French action was fuelled by the knowledge that his own crusade, the true crusade, was now dead in the water. The quest for peace, the years of planning, the endless diplomacy: at a stroke it was all rendered obsolete. In June, the king wrote to the prince of Achaea in Greece, who was to have been an ally in the East, angrily lamenting the sudden change in circumstances.
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The only con solation was that he was comfortably in credit. Conscious of the gargantuan task ahead of him, and resigned to the eclipse of his crusade, Edward determined to do as his enemy had done, and use his crusad ing resources to fund what was now an inevitable secular conflict. Accordingly, he turned to his bankers, the dependable Riccardi of Lucca, and asked them for the 100,000 marks that they had received from the papacy some three years earlier.

But the Riccardi, like Edward, had been caught completely off guard. They, like he, had conducted their business on the not unreasonable assumption that Anglo-French relations would remain amicable. The money they had been holding on his behalf was, it seems, tied up in overseas investments, and could no longer be recovered. And so, presumably with a good deal of trepidation, the Italians regretfully informed the king that, in present circumstances, they were unable to meet his request.

Edward’s reaction, sadly, is not recorded, nor is it known for certain when he received this devastating news. The evidence, however, suggests it must have been early, and probably before mid-June, for at that point parliament instituted a series of drastic emergency measures. First, on 12 June, it was ordered that all the wool in the country should be seized; then, four days later, notice was given that all churches were to be searched for monetary deposits – in particular the proceeds of the crusading tax that was still being collected. The king was clearly engaged in a desperate hunt for funds, rendered more frantic by the realisation that his bankers had failed him. The Riccardi themselves may have been granted a period of grace to see if they could recover any of the lost money, but by the autumn Edward had ordered their arrest. They were, he later opined, ‘men who had deceived him’. In this way the profitable relationship that had served them both so well for more than two decades, and that had underpinned all of the king’s earlier military enterprises, came to an end. The clever system of customs-for-credit was left in tatters.
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More than ever before, Edward needed the voluntary support of his subjects. Thankfully, the English magnates in parliament were as good as their word. One of the first off the mark was Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk. A decade earlier he had rendered the king inestimable good service, not only fighting in Wales but also shipping large quantities of produce from his Irish estates to feed the conquering armies. Now the earl showed himself ready to perform the same task again, ordering his servants in Ireland to buy up all the food they could and ship it to Gascony in advance of his arrival. Edward would need exactly this kind of altruism to be widely replicated if he was to succeed. Throughout June the writs flew, first to England, then to Ireland and Scotland. All the king’s lieges were enjoined to be at Portsmouth, ready to sail, on 1 September.
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By the end of June, when the last of these orders were issued, Edward himself had already arrived in Portsmouth – the great royal naval complex developed a century earlier by his illustrious ancestor, Richard I, for prosecuting a war against France – and was overseeing the build-up of his invasion force. As ever, the troops and clerks of the royal household had sprung into action like a well-oiled machine. They had already been in Portsmouth for over a fortnight, requisitioning warehouses, commandeering horses and carts, and impressing ships. Around the town, fields had been hired to accommodate hundreds of head of cattle, driven on the hoof from as far afield as Salisbury. Other produce – pigs, fish, cheese, chickens and some 24,000 eggs was pouring in from local suppliers and from London.
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