A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (65 page)

That was certainly the way that the king saw it, and he came to parliament prepared to argue his case. Edward had never trusted the flexible collective memory of his subjects. His first recourse had always been to the written record, and it was to the written record that he now once again turned. In the months leading up to the Lincoln assembly, royal clerks had been ferreting through their rolls, and even leafing through the venerable pages of the Domesday Book, in a quest for evidence with which the findings of the perambulation could be challenged.
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On this occasion, however, the king’s resort to the documents had come too late; the time for negotiation had passed. Edward’s continual evasiveness and demonstrable bad faith in recent years had eroded his subjects’ goodwill and trust, and with it their willingness to compromise. It was now politically unrealistic for him to imagine that the country would accept anything less than a full endorsement of the perambulators’ findings. The fact that he may have had a strong case for contesting them was as irrelevant as it was ironic. The king had finally been backed into a corner, and faced a stark choice: approve the perambulation in its entirety, or forego the much-needed tax.

In desperation, Edward threw the challenge back into the face of his opponents. They too, he reminded them, were bound by their oaths of homage to uphold the rights of the Crown, just as he was bound to uphold them by his coronation oath. He would let the perambulation stand, but only if his critics advised him to do so; the responsibility for forcing his hand would thus be theirs. A committee of twenty-six men (its membership unknown, but presumably including Bigod and Winchelsea, both of whom were present) agonised, afraid they might one day be accused of treachery for their actions, and begged the king to take the decision himself. But Edward remained stubborn to the last, saying ‘he had no desire to ease his people with what was his’. In the end, therefore, the decision was left to the committee, and they chose the Charters over the Crown. On 14 February 1301 the king issued a new confirmation, and ordered that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter should stand ‘in all their points’. The findings of the perambulation, it was announced, would become effective without delay; ‘the community’ would be put in possession of what had become their Forest.
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It is important to keep the scale of Edward’s defeat in perspective. What had happened to him in 1301 was nothing like what had happened to his father in 1258. During the great crisis of his reign Henry III had been reduced to a mere cipher, and executive power had been seized by his barons. Edward, by contrast, had been beaten only on a single issue; in all other respects he remained very much the imperious master of his own affairs. Indeed, when the Lincoln parliament had dared to complain about Walter Langton, the king’s palpably corrupt chief minister, and called for his dismissal, Edward had flown into an indignant rage, and silenced his critics with an impromptu lecture on the proper nature of lordship. ‘Perhaps everyone should have a crown,’ had been his sarcastic suggestion.
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Nevertheless, defeat on the Charters, and in particular on the issue of the Forest, was painful and humiliating for a king who attached such overriding importance to the Crown’s rights and the sacred oath he had sworn to uphold them. Edward would never forget how ‘the stress of great necessity’ in 1301 had led to ‘the surrender of his hereditary right’. Nor would he forgive those whom he regarded as having forced this surrender upon him.
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Although Edward considered the Lincoln parliament to be the lowest point in his political fortunes, it did at least solve his financial crisis – a new tax was set for collection in the autumn – and silence his domestic critics. His international affairs, on the other hand – the threefold problem posed by France, Scotland and the papacy – remained in seemingly insoluble disarray. It was now well over two years since the pope had ruled in favour of Gascony’s return, yet the French had still not surrendered possession. That left Edward reliant on continued papal pressure but, given his recently declared support for the Scots, Boniface now seemed an uncertain advocate for English interests. What if he were to insist on the Scots’ inclusion in the Anglo-French peace? The French had been arguing in favour of such a move for the past two years, almost certainly as a cynical tactic to frustrate the whole process. Even now, in the spring of 1301, French and Scottish ambassadors were meeting at Canterbury to put the suggestion of a three-way peace to Edward’s own representatives.
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Edward, naturally, had no intention of accepting their proposal, nor even of renewing his truce with the Scots, which was set to expire in May. It had been expressly for the purpose of subduing his northern enemies that he had compromised his coronation oath; the first writs of summons for a new campaign had been sent out on the very day that the unpalatable deal with parliament had been struck. The king’s utter antipathy towards further negotiation is evident from his absence. At the time of the Canterbury talks Edward was in the west Midlands, having gone to Gloucestershire for the funeral of his cousin, Edmund of Cornwall – a black event more in keeping with his general mood.
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Having reached its lowest point, however, the wheel of fortune began to turn slowly but perceptibly in the king’s favour. Soon after the Canterbury talks had ended, Edward was joined in the Severn Valley by several old and loyal friends, chief among whom was the earl of Lincoln, Henry de Lacy. Some six months earlier Lacy and his colleagues had been dispatched to the papal court, partly to fortify the existing English embassy there, and partly to offer a preliminary response to Boniface’s censorious letter. They now returned with glad tidings. Although nothing decisive had been achieved in relation to either Gascony or Scotland, the earl and his party had received a far more favourable reception from the pope than his letter had led them to expect, and this goodwill had translated into an immediate and tangible advantage. Boniface had lately joined Edward in his desire to subjugate a small but troublesome neighbour – in this case, the ever-tumultuous kingdom of Sicily – and to this end he had been trying for several months to levy a 10 per cent tax on all the churches of Europe. The ambassadors had therefore been able to strike a deal. It had been agreed that the pope could raise his tax in England for the next three years – and that half the profits would go to the king.
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Here was excellent news! For the past five years the English Church, guided by Winchelsea, had refused to vote Edward any financial aid at all, on the grounds that such grants required prior papal approval. Now, on the pope’s express authority, the clergy would be obliged to furnish the Crown with a three-year tax of 10 per cent. This was definitely one in the eye for the stiff-necked archbishop and his supporters. Moreover, gloating apart, it meant a huge and unforeseen addition to the royal war-chest, already about to be replenished by the recent parliamentary subsidy. Together, these taxes would provide the king with the funds for a decisive Scottish campaign.

It only remained to wait for the return of his son. Edward of Caernarfon, lately turned seventeen, had grown to be tall, good-looking and physically accomplished, and his father – fast approaching sixty-three – had evidently decided that a transfer of authority would be timely. During the controversial Lincoln parliament the king had endowed his eldest boy with a substantial appanage, much as his own father had done almost half a century earlier. The grant included the earldom of Chester, but its principal component was the royal estate in Wales, and as such it came with a new title. ‘Prince of Wales’, used in the past only by the rulers of Gwynedd, was now revived for the heir to the English throne (in which capacity it has been used ever since). Young Edward, of course, born in Caernarfon, had been predestined for some kind of role in Wales, but he had not been back to the land of his birth until this moment. In April 1301 he returned to the principality, there to receive the homages of the Welsh themselves and also of the lords of the March. One month later he rejoined his father, who had been occupying himself in the Severn Valley with pilgrimages and hunting. They met at Kenilworth Castle, where the queen and other members of the royal family were also in residence. A fortnight later they rode north. Edward of Caernarfon had participated in the previous campaign, but his role, as nominal commander of one battalion, had been only a minor one. Now, as prince, his responsibility was greatly enlarged. As the king himself had explained in a letter to the earl of Lincoln, he hoped that his son would have ‘the chief honour of taming the pride of the Scots’.
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Edward’s plan, revealed by his letters, was ambitious. Two separate armies, one led by the newly invested prince, the other by the king himself, would advance into Scotland from both ends of the Border, taking the south of the country in a pincer that would close at Stirling. From there they would march together into the north, leaving the rebels with nowhere left to run. This was to be the decisive campaign.
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The forces were accordingly formidable. For his own army Edward individually summoned over a thousand English landowners to provide cavalry service (a request that, now that the king had answered their criticisms, would be difficult to refuse). Royal recruiting officers, meanwhile, eventually rounded up some 7,500 foot soldiers – a figure not terribly impressive by itself, perhaps, but on this occasion the English were not fighting alone. Edward of Caernarfon’s army was mostly drawn from his new dominions in Wales and the March, and it was considerably larger than that commanded by his father; total expenditure suggests that the prince had almost twice as many infantry. Nor, moreover, was it just the Welsh who were rejoining the fray. For the first time since 1296, the justiciar of Ireland had been ordered to assemble an army, and the magnates of Ireland had been induced to participate by the pardon of their debts to the Crown. Some 650 additional horse and 1,600 extra foot were as a result ready to cross the Irish Sea. From every obedient quarter of Edward’s ‘British’ empire, men and
matériel
were being marshalled in great quantities so that the one remaining rebel province should finally be subjugated.
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The prince’s army, mustered in Carlisle at midsummer, got off to an impressive start. Avoiding the route through Galloway that had proved problematic the previous year, they marched straight across country to the western seaboard, where they linked arms with their Irish allies. By the end of July Robert Bruce’s castle at Ayr, unmolested since 1298, had fallen in the face of their combined onslaught, and, within four further weeks, the neighbouring castle at Turnberry – Bruce’s birthplace – had also surrendered.
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The king’s army, by contrast, was making somewhat slower progress. From his base at Berwick, Edward had set out on a similar inland route, obliging his host to hack its way through the vastness of Selkirk Forest, wherein Wallace and his fellow brigands had for a long time lurked. Nonetheless, by 21 August the English had reached Glasgow, and Edward was thus only thirty miles from his son’s army. Indeed, the two forces were close enough to communicate: on 2 September, the king heard news of Turnberry’s fall, and gave thanks for it in Glasgow Cathedral.
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The pincer, however, was never fully closed. On 7 September a Scottish army appeared outside Lochmaben and began besieging the English garrison there. This, it seems, halted the northern advance of Edward of Caernarfon’s army and drew it back south – they could hardly push on with hostile forces attacking positions to their rear. A fortnight later and Lochmaben had been made secure again, but by this time the prince himself was heading further south, reportedly on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Ninian at Whithorn. This was not necessarily as dilatory as it sounds: the process of subjugating Scotland involved the appropriation of its regalia and relics, and such symbolic larceny was clearly feared by the Scots on this occasion. But it did mean that there was now no hope of the two hosts uniting.
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The king’s men, meanwhile, were beset by the more familiar problem of dwindling resources. Even before Edward had reached Glasgow, various English sheriffs had been ordered, in menacing terms, to see that more merchants brought their wares north of the Border. At the same time, in every other theatre, supplies were being squeezed in a desperate attempt to shore up the king’s army. On 28 August the crossbowmen and archers at Berwick mutinied, having received no pay for a month. Yet by early September, when Edward began besieging Bothwell – a mighty stone fortress near Glasgow, seized by the Scots at the start of the year – two-thirds of his infantry had deserted.
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Once Bothwell had surrendered, therefore – and the castle’s reduction took a further fortnight – the king decided to go for broke, and marched what remained of his army straight for Stirling. Elsewhere in Scotland, at Edinburgh and at Berwick, his officials strained to procure the engines and other equipment necessary to mount an effective siege. But in the end shortage of funds forced Edward to stop in October at Dunipace, some six miles short of his target. For three weeks he waited for fresh supplies to arrive, his mounting anger brilliantly illuminated by a series of increasingly irate letters to the exchequer. He is astonished, he says, that they have sent so little money; every time they have sent some it has been too little; they should ensure that their inefficiency does not cause him to withdraw; he has been unable to keep his promises to pay his men; every day more of them desert. The tirade concludes on 16 October with Edward in full King Lear mode, speculating in his impotence about what might have been. ‘But for lack of money,’ he blustered, ‘we would have bridged the Forth’, and had the river been crossed, ‘we are sure that we would have done such exploits against our enemies that our business would have reached an honourable and satisfactory conclusion.’
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