A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (7 page)

In spite of his best-laid plans, therefore, Henry III found himself celebrating Christmas not only with his new daughter-in-law, but also in the company of his firstborn son, who was seemingly determined to test the limits of his independence. That Christmas their first recorded quarrel arose. Its cue was a row between the merchants of Gascony, who complained – to Edward – that royal customs officers were seizing their goods without payment. The officers responded by seeking out their employer – Henry – before whom they denied the accusations, while at the same time reminding him that ‘there is only one king in England who has the power to administer justice’. The heart of the matter, in short, was the scope of Edward’s own authority, and the extent to which it was subordinate to that of his father. When Edward raised the issue in person with Henry, the king theatrically recalled the misfortunes of his grandfather Henry II, whose sons had famously rebelled against him. Edward, of course, was nowhere near rebellion, and very soon the affair was calmed. But he remained chafing at his restraints, anxious to play a more visible role, and to exercise greater power. According to Matthew Paris, who took it as a bad omen, Edward increased the size of his own retinue at this time, and now rode accompanied by 200 horsemen.
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Paris was seeing bad omens everywhere in England that winter. Recording the reception of Eleanor of Castile in October, the dyspeptic monk had noted that the Londoners had laughed derisively at the fashions of her Spanish entourage (their installation of carpets in her chambers being especially worthy of scorn). Wiser heads, said Paris – by which he meant himself – were more troubled by the wider problem of which Eleanor’s advent was merely the latest regrettable symptom, namely, the king’s preference for surrounding himself with undesirable foreigners. First there had been Henry’s own queen, whose arrival twenty years earlier had occasioned an influx of Savoyards – not only great men like Peter of Savoy and Archbishop Boniface, but dozens of other lesser individuals who had come to England in search of advantageous marriages, pensions and positions at court. Now, it seemed, a similar invasion of Spaniards was imminent.
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Far more harmful to the kingdom’s health than either of these groups, however, were the foreigners who had arrived in the interim. In the spring of 1247 Henry III had been pleased to welcome into England some of the children of his mother’s second marriage. Isabella of Angoulême, having abandoned Henry and his siblings thirty years earlier, had nevertheless gone on to have more sons and daughters by her second husband – nine more, to be precise – and these young men and women faced poor prospects in their native Poitou, diminished as it was by French expansion. Henry had shown no hesitation in inviting five of their number to cross the Channel and enjoy all the bounty he was able to bestow. To his half-brothers Aymer and William de Valence, the king was especially generous: Aymer, at Henry’s insistence, was elected as bishop of Winchester (the opposition was stiff because Aymer was neither well-educated nor yet out of his teens); William, meanwhile, the king promoted into the upper echelons of secular society, granting him lands, pensions, and the marriage of a rich heiress. Pensions were also promised to two other half-brothers, Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan, and Henry’s half-sister, Alice, was granted the future earl of Surrey as her husband.
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By promoting the Lusignans (as his half-siblings are collectively known) in this way, Henry was storing up for himself a world of trouble. It was not simply that the king’s open-handed generosity was excessive; the problem with such profligacy was that it placed Henry’s family in direct competition for patronage with the family of his queen, and sparked a bitter rivalry between them that the king could neither comprehend nor control. It had already led to a notorious incident in 1252 when Aymer and his brothers had sought to settle a row with Archbishop Boniface by attacking two of his manors and roughing up several of his servants. The resort to violence was all too typical of the Lusignans, and so too was the king’s readiness to excuse it. Henry regarded all his relatives with a simple, blind affection, but he was particularly indulgent of his half-brothers. They, more than anyone, had helped him to crush the rebellion in Gascony, and as a consequence the king had returned to England more determined than ever to see them raised and rewarded.
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Edward, for this reason, remained extremely wary of the Lusignans, seeing in their hunger for land a major threat to his own newly created network of lordships.
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Nevertheless, the young lord with the large retinue of horsemen was evidently attracted by the glamorous aura of violence of the kind his half-uncles projected. The next occasion on which we catch up with Edward is in June 1256, a fortnight before his seventeenth birthday, at which point we find him participating in his first tournament. The event, which took place at Blyth in Nottinghamshire, had been specially arranged on his behalf, and was probably given the go-ahead only after a certain amount of special pleading: in general Henry III disapproved of tournaments, and almost always took steps to ban them. According to Matthew Paris, the meeting at Blyth was intended as an introduction to the ‘laws of chivalry’. Edward must already have been an accomplished horseman and proficient in the use of weapons. What he needed, and what a tournament offered, was the opportunity to put these skills into practice, to demonstrate his capacity for prowess and courage, and to learn the strategic arts of war. Thirteenth-century tournaments had little in common with those of the later Middle Ages, where the emphasis was on entertainment and individual jousting. Such spectacles were becoming more popular in Edward’s day, but tournaments were still for the most part what they had always been – mock battles. Over a wide area, two teams would set about trying to outwit and capture each other, just as they would in a genuine engagement. To this extent, tournaments approxi mated today’s militaristic team-building exercises, but they differed in being far more dangerous. Even though participants wore armour and used blunted weapons, there was still ample scope for serious injury or worse. Edward appears to have escaped unscathed from his debut at Blyth (deference to the heir to the throne no doubt played its part), but others were not so lucky. Paris reports that many of the participants were very badly wounded, and noted that by Christmas several of them were dead.
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From Nottinghamshire the newly blooded knight and his companions rode north to continue their adventures in Scotland. Edward had no territorial interests to look to there, as he did in Ireland and in Wales. Scotland was a kingdom in its own right, and recognised as such by the kings of England. This was not so much a diplomatic visit, however, as a social call. Five years earlier Edward’s younger sister, Margaret, had been married to Alexander III, king of Scots. At that time they had all been children – the groom aged ten, the bride aged eleven and her older brother aged twelve – and so were all in their mid-teens at the time of Edward’s trip. Although we cannot say for sure, it seems likely that Edward would have taken Eleanor with him on this northern jaunt and that one of his main reasons for visiting his sister was to introduce her to his own wife. The trip lasted only a few weeks, and next to nothing is known about their activities, but Edward’s appearance at Whithorn in south-western Scotland is suggestive. He can only have been drawn there by the shrine of St Ninian, so the possibility exists that the two young couples had embarked on a pilgrimage together.
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Short and obscure though it is, this northern excursion serves to emphasise an important point, namely that the kingdoms of Scotland and England rubbed along quite well in the thirteenth century. The English did not regard their northern neighbours as equals, nor were they. Scotland was a much poorer and less populous country than England, its kings far less powerful. Henry III, in giving his daughter away in 1251, had hammered this point home by organising a wedding ceremony at York of unparalleled magnificence. Preparations had begun six months in advance, with supplies ordered from all over England as well as from the Continent. (Edward had been part of the spectacle that day, dressed, like his knightly attendants, from head to toe in gold.)
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Henry at that time was still hoping to go on crusade and intended before his departure to impress upon his new ten-year-old son-in-law, albeit benevolently, the supreme power of the English Crown. Nonetheless, the very fact of the marriage proved that the kings of Scots were regarded as part of the civilised club of European rulers. They and their nobles demonstrated their credentials for membership by speaking French. In the towns of Scotland, especially in the Lowlands, most Scots spoke English. In ways that were crucially important, Scotland was very alike to England.
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By contrast, the next stop on Edward’s itinerary in 1256 was very different. From Whithorn Edward travelled south, arriving at his lordship of Chester by mid-July, from where he moved into Wales. Geographically, of course, there were similarities between Wales and Scotland that a first-time visitor would have readily appreciated, and this meant that economically, too, they had certain similarities – Wales, like Scotland, was poor in comparison with England. Culturally, however, Wales was very different from both its near neighbours. Perhaps most obviously, the Welsh spoke Welsh, even at the highest social levels. This was a source of pride to the Welsh themselves, but to the French-speaking kings and nobles of England and Scotland it sounded like so much incomprehensible babble.
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More perplexing still for English and Scottish onlookers, and far more problematic, were Welsh social attitudes, which stood in sharp opposition to their own. Take, for instance, the rules governing inheritance. In England and Scotland, and indeed almost everywhere else in western Europe, the rule was primogeniture: firstborn sons inherited estates in their entirety. This was hard on any younger brothers or sisters, but had the great advantage of keeping a family’s lands intact from one generation to the next. In Wales, by contrast, the rule was ‘partibility’: every male member of the family – not just sons and brothers, but uncles and nephews too – expected his portion of the spoils, and rules of precedence were only loosely defined. This meant that the death of a Welsh landowner was almost always followed by a violent, sometimes fratricidal struggle, as each male kinsman strove to claim the lion’s share.
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The result of this idiosyncratic approach to inheritance was that Welsh politics were wont to be tumultuous. The fact that partibility applied at the highest levels was one of the main reasons why there was no single political authority in Wales as there was in England and Scotland. Welsh poets spoke of their country as if it were neatly divided into three kingdoms, but this was a broad simplification; the reality was a complex patchwork of petty lordships. Occasionally one ruler might, through force of arms, diplomacy or sheer good luck, contrive to establish something greater. But such constructs were always temporary. When a successful Welsh ruler died, his work was swiftly undone by the general carve-up that inevitably followed.
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Such cultural and political differences meant that the English found it difficult to do business with the Welsh as they did with the Scots. Inherent instability meant that amicable relations were hard to sustain. The king of England could marry his daughter to the king of Scots, safe in the knowledge that her rights would be guaranteed; but he would not give her away to a Welsh ruler, no matter how great, for who knew how long his greatness might last?
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And yet, if the English found the practice of partibility baffling, they were far more troubled when the Welsh showed any signs of abandoning it. From the start of the thirteenth century, up until the time of Edward’s birth, there had been a worrying (from the English point of view) movement in the direction of pan-Welsh political unity. Gwynedd, the most remote and traditional of Wales’s three ancient ‘kingdoms’, had extended its power from the mountains of Snowdonia to cover much of the rest of the country. When, therefore, the architect of this expansion, Llywelyn the Great, had died in 1240, Henry III had been quick to intervene and undo his work. In the years that followed, Gwynedd was torn down to size, and its pretensions to leadership were crushed. Llywelyn’s descendants were forcibly persuaded to follow traditional Welsh practice and share power among themselves. Lesser Welsh rulers who had formerly acknowledged Llywelyn’s mastery were disabused, and obliged to recognise that their proper overlord was, in actual fact, the king of England. Most contentiously, Henry confiscated and kept for himself a large and comparatively prosperous area of north Wales. Known as
Perfeddwlad
(middle country) to the Welsh, and as the Four Cantrefs to the English, this region between the rivers Dee and Conwy had been contested by both sides for hundreds of years, but Henry was determined that from that point on the English would retain it for good. The Four Cantrefs, he declared, were an inseparable part of the Crown of England, and to give force to this assertion he built two new royal castles there, one at Dyserth, the other at Deganwy. At the same time, lordship in the region was made more exacting. From their base at Chester, royal officials introduced English customs and practices, including more punitive financial demands. By 1254, when the Four Cantrefs (or ‘the king’s new conquest in Wales’, as they were now also being termed) were handed over to Edward as part of his endowment, the castles were complete, and the process of anglicisation well advanced. At the time of Edward’s visit two years later, his officials there were in a supremely confident mood. According to chronicle reports, his chief steward boasted openly before the king and queen that he had the Welsh in the palm of his hand.
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