A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (6 page)

Any immediate hopes that Edward entertained of a larger role as a result of the Gascon crisis, however, were dashed by its rapid escalation in the spring of 1253. Castile, the greatest of the several kingdoms that made up medieval Spain, had for decades been a friendly neighbour on Gascony’s southern border. But now it had acquired a new king in the shape of Alfonso X, who had entered into his inheritance the previous year determined to make his mark not only in Spain but also on the wider European stage. With a tenuous claim of his own to Gascony, and almost certainly tempted by invitations from the Gascon rebels, Alfonso found the prospect of extending his power across the Pyrenees impossible to resist. In the spring of 1253 a new rebellion was launched with his backing, and he made it clear that his intention was to invade. Castles and towns fell swiftly in the face of this new assault; in April the people of Bordeaux, Gascony’s principal city, wrote a panicked letter to Henry III. If he did not act immediately, they assured him, the duchy would be lost forever. It was a prospect terrifying enough to shake the king into action. Still unable to secure a consensual tax, he resorted to a prerogative to which all lords were entitled and demanded a levy to pay for the knighting of his eldest son. If this gave Edward cause to imagine that this meant the beginning of his military career, however, he was mistaken. When Henry and his hastily assembled army sailed from Portsmouth in August, he left Edward behind, in the care of his mother, who remained in England as regent. ‘The boy,’ says Matthew Paris, ‘stood crying and sobbing on the shore, and would not depart as long as he could see the swelling sails of the ships.’
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When it finally came down to it, Edward, now fourteen, was still considered a child by his parents; the role they envisaged for him was not knight but pawn. Even as the king sailed to war, his advisers were labouring to make peace. They correctly divined that Alfonso’s backing for the Gascon rebels was opportunistic and speculative, and worked throughout the summer and autumn to convince him that his best interests lay in a diplomatic solution. The Spanish king was a slippery customer, repeatedly stalling in the hope of establishing the best terms he could get, but Henry III had considerable success in putting down the Gascon rebels, and by the start of 1254 Alfonso was ready to settle. He was prepared to drop his support for the rebellion and his claim to Gascony in return for a marriage alliance. His young half-sister – yet another Eleanor – would marry Henry’s eldest son.
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Henry had, in fact, envisaged such an alliance from the off. ‘Friendship between princes can be obtained in no more fitting manner than by the link of conjugal troth,’ he had declared, rather loftily, in the spring of the previous year when commissioning his ambassadors. What he had not anticipated was that such friendship would have to be bought at such a high price. Before he would agree to the marriage, Alfonso demanded that Edward be endowed with lands worth £10,000 a year. This was almost certainly more than Henry had ever intended to give, but, short of other options, he duly consented. On 14 February, still in Gascony, the English king issued a charter that created for his son a great appanage. Its principal component was, of course, Gascony itself, as had long been intended. But, to meet Alfonso’s stipulated value, it now also comprised (with certain exceptions) all the royal lands in Ireland and Wales and, in England, the lapsed earldom of Chester, the castle of Bristol and a number of important manors in the Midlands. Nor was this the end of the Spanish king’s conditions. Alfonso was also determined to meet his future brother-in-law before the wedding took place, and demanded the privilege of knighting him. Consequently, Edward found his position dramatically transformed. At a single stroke he had become the richest landowner in Henry III’s realm after the king himself. Moreover, the prospect of overseas adventure, denied to him just nine months before, had been reopened. On 29 May he and his mother took ship at Portsmouth and set sail for Gascony.
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The summer of 1254, during which he celebrated his fifteenth birthday, was therefore one of many new experiences for Edward: his first sea voyage, which lasted almost a fortnight and placed him, as never before, at God’s mercy; his first glimpse of warfare, for he joined his father on what remained of the frontline, and participated – at least to the extent that he was present – in the reduction of the last rebel strongholds. But what must surely have loomed largest in the young man’s mind during these weeks was the thought of his impending marriage. It was, of course, an arranged match, dictated to the greatest possible degree by the exigencies of foreign policy. Nevertheless, it was not a forced arrangement. Constraining couples to marry against their will had been forbidden by the Church since the late twelfth century, a fact to which Edward alluded in July, when the final documents for his betrothal were drawn up. Anxious to prove he was his own man and that no parental arm-twisting had occurred, he affirmed that he had agreed ‘willingly and spontaneously’ to marry Eleanor, adding, with a chivalrous flourish, ‘of whose prudence and beauty we have heard by general report’.
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In late September, having spent several weeks in Bordeaux, Edward set out for Spain. He went without his parents. Henry had already spent too much time and too much money on the pacification of his restless duchy. It was time for him and the queen to return to England, which they duly did a few weeks later. This did not mean, however, that their son travelled unaccompanied. A retinue of lords, the best that could be assembled at short notice, rode with him. Some persons of importance came from England, others from Gascony. Several, by design, were also young men, yet to be knighted, and this was the second matter that would have impinged on Edward: his impending graduation into the ranks of knighthood. Significantly, he travelled to Spain with his tutor-in-arms, Bartholomew Pecche, and two of Bartholomew’s sons, who were also due to be dubbed by the Spanish king.

On 18 October the Anglo-Gascon riding party arrived in Burgos, a city that had until recently prided itself on being the principal residence of Castile’s kings, and that still boasted strong attachments to the royal house. Their arrival was too late for any of the planned festivities to coincide with the feast of the translation of Edward the Confessor (13 October), as Henry III had hoped might be the case. Frustratingly, thanks to the silence of Spanish sources, we know almost nothing of what happened next – not even the dates of the ceremonies were registered by local chroniclers. Edward and his companions were in all probability knighted on 1 November, in the monastery of Las Huelgas, outside the city walls, where the kings of Castile were buried. On the same day, and in the same place (but, again, with the same caveats about probability) Edward met Eleanor for the first time and they were married. Like Edward, we are almost entirely ignorant of any details about Eleanor beyond the general report of her prudence and beauty. We do know that she was a few weeks short of her thirteenth birthday.
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Edward, his new wife and their companions did not tarry for long in Castile after the wedding – no more than a week at most. By 21 November they were back in Gascony, at which point their progress deliberately slowed. With the essential diplomacy of the marriage completed and the threat of Castilian interference finally removed, Edward had no need to rush anywhere. On the contrary, the departure of his parents a few weeks before meant that he was now in charge of the duchy in his own right, and it was therefore important for him to visit its most important towns and impress himself on his people. ‘Edward, firstborn son of the illustrious king of England, now ruling in Gascony as prince and lord’ – the opening line of the very first document he issued after his return from Spain seems to catch the duchy’s new young master in an exultant mood.
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But soon into the new year the spirit of festivity faded, and the serious business of restoring order began. Finding Gascony’s finances in a dire state, Edward elected to levy a tax, the pretext (as earlier in England) being his recent elevation to knighthood. By itself this would have been bad enough from the Gascons’ point of view; as it was, Edward’s demand coincided with another imposed by Henry III to fund his crusade, and the combined burden was enough to spark a fresh round of dissension in the duchy. By the spring of 1255 Edward had been forced on to the defensive: seizing towns, fortifying castles, ordering the construction of ships, and bringing in supplies of material, money and grain from his other new lordship of Ireland. In England, his father was panicked into sending reinforcements of pre-paid knights, even cancelling a tournament in view of what he saw as his son’s desperate need for manpower in an hour of peril.
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For such parental assistance – assuming it ever arrived – Edward would presumably have been grateful. By the summer he had quelled the new disturbances and was expanding his authority by dealing with the older rivalries among the Gascons themselves. Not all Henry III’s interventions, however, can have been so welcome to him. Indeed, the difficulties Edward faced in asserting his authority in Gascony had as much to do with its limited nature as it did to any Gascon resistance. With most of the duchy’s officials having been put in place by the king before his departure, little was left to his son’s initiative. On the rare occasions when Edward did take independent action, moreover, Henry would intervene from afar and modify his decisions. In the main rebel town of La Réole, for instance, the rebels had held out in the church, and for this reason Edward ordered that the building be razed to the ground. His father, however, immediately overruled him, and submitted the decision on the church to the arbitration of two bishops, with the inevitable result that most of its fabric was spared.
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Commenting on the amount of land that Henry III had granted to his son, Matthew Paris had been typically withering. Henry, he said, had left himself ‘a mutilated little king’. In fact, Henry had been quite canny. While the grant was unquestionably large, it was composed almost entirely of outlying territories where his own authority was debatable; even the castles and manors granted to Edward in England were recent acquisitions to which the king’s right was far from unimpeachable. More importantly, Henry had not resigned his position as the chief lord of any of these lands, and had retained the titles – lord of Ireland, duke of Aquitaine – that went with them. Edward’s initial, one-off assertion that he was ‘the firstborn son of the illustrious king of England, now ruling in Gascony as prince and lord’ may have been jubilant, but its self-evident awkwardness betrayed the fact that he had no new title of his own. Indeed, it underlined the fact that his authority was entirely derived from that of his father, who could interfere and overrule at any time. Just like Simon de Montfort before him, Edward was really no more than Henry’s lieutenant.
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The way the relationship was supposed to work was spelt out in a letter that the king sent to his son on 17 August 1255. On his way home from Gascony Henry had visited Paris to renew his truce with the king of France, and now that a new three-year ceasefire was in place, Henry felt it was time that Edward moved on. He should go to Ireland, where he could spend the winter reforming and ordering his other new overseas lordship. Gascony could be left in the hands of a lieutenant – indeed, Henry had already appointed a suitable candidate. All this was done at the suggestion of Peter of Savoy, the great-uncle who had micro-managed Edward’s affairs since his early infancy. In fact, the letter concluded, all being well, Peter would probably arrive in Gascony in a few weeks’ time to help Edward make the necessary arrangements for his departure.
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Although nothing was said in Henry’s letter, it must have been communicated to Edward privately that the king expected him to go to Ireland on his own – that is, without his new wife. Just days after writing to his son, the king began to make preparations for the reception of Eleanor of Castile in England. This decision is not unduly surprising: Ireland was a wild place, only half tamed, and therefore perhaps regarded as an unsuitable destination for a Spanish princess. There was, however, another and perhaps more likely reason for wishing to keep the couple apart. At the end of May, Eleanor, who was thirteen and a half, had almost certainly given birth to a premature daughter.
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She, it seems, had not been as fortunate as her namesake in avoiding the risks that went with early consummation. The sad news would have reached England later in the summer, and Edward’s parents would doubtless have felt the strong urge to advise and protect. A period of abstinence after their own example must have seemed a good idea, but could not be instituted with any effectiveness until Edward and Eleanor were back in England. In the meantime, a six-month separation would be a good start. Such thinking on the part of the king and queen would be understandable, even sensible. But given the young couple’s strong attachment, as witnessed by their almost total inseparability in later years, Edward can only have regarded this as yet another unnecessary instance of parental interference, and a further mockery of his supposed independence. He certainly decided to resist it.

In accordance with the wishes of Henry III, Eleanor of Castile was dispatched to England, probably in late September – she arrived safe and sound at Dover on 9 October. Her departure must have coincided with the arrival in Gascony, as promised, of Peter of Savoy, who for the next month proceeded to help Edward finalise the arrangements for his own exit.
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Peter, however, had not seen his great-nephew for at least a year, and may have been surprised by the picture with which he was now presented. At sixteen years old, Edward had probably attained the physical attributes for which he was later famous. He was broad browed and broad chested, blond haired and handsome, despite having inherited a drooping eyelid from his father. Beyond all this, though, he had grown to be mightily tall. Edward, said one contemporary, ‘towered head and shoulders above the average’, and an eighteenth-century exhumation of his body confirmed that he was, in fact, six foot two inches tall – hence, of course, his (apparently) popular nickname, Longshanks. In terms of appearance, it is even possible that Edward, left to his own devices, had begun to dress differently: as an adult, he reportedly eschewed the kind of rich and ostentatious garments that his parents had provided for him as a child.
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It must have quickly become clear to Peter of Savoy that his protégé had developed in all kinds of directions and could no longer be manipulated with the same ease. Edward left Gascony at the end of October, but not for Ireland as his parents and Peter had planned. Instead, he travelled northwards through France, and from there he crossed to England. By the end of November he was in London, where the citizens received him with the same pomp that had greeted the arrival of his wife just six weeks before.
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