A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (73 page)

Having won the struggle for power with Montfort, Edward had two main motives that would occupy him for the rest of his life. One was the recovery of Jerusalem; the other was the recovery of the rights of the Crown. The former, however misguided it may seem today, was regarded as the highest ideal of Edward’s age, and by pursuing it he won lasting international fame. The latter was made manifest at the moment of his coronation, and prosecuted with vigour in the months and years that followed. In England, the effort was cleverly handled. By presenting the Crown as the friend of the oppressed, the new king won widespread popular support, and this enabled him to begin recouping his father’s losses. Magnates who had usurped royal rights were made to answer for their actions; smaller landowners, meanwhile, thanks to the development of parliament, were given a greater voice, and in turn became Edward’s most consistent allies. For the first time since the Norman Conquest, England had a government that was perceived to be working in the interests of the majority of its subjects.

The consequence was that a minority of subjects suffered. In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country’s Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it is true, the first European leader to carry out an expulsion on a nationwide scale, but this only goes to show that he was a powerful ruler of a precociously united kingdom. Other kings, earls and counts before him had expelled Jews to the furthest extent of their more limited authority. To say this much is not to deny that Edward was a thorough-going anti-Semite: he was, as his pogrom of 1279 proves all too clearly. It is merely to emphasise that, in his anti-Semitism, Edward was altogether conventional. A bigoted man, he lived in a bigoted age, and was king of a bigoted people. Abhorrent as it seems to us today, the fact that ‘he expelled the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’ was regarded by his Westminster obituarist as one of Edward’s most commendable achievements.
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Chief among his achievements in contemporary eyes, however, was his success in war – and war, of course, was another consequence of Edward’s determination to recover his rights. ‘The most victorious king’, ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’ – Edward was, as one poet put it, ‘a king who knew much of war’, and in war all his talents – bravery, strong leadership, eloquence, strategic sense, organisational ability – came to the fore. The result, as we can appreciate in retrospect, was conflict on an uncommonly awesome scale: the largest armies seen in Britain until the seventeenth century, and the most spectacular chain of castles ever constructed.
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With the possible exception of historians, who tend to get swept along by all the excitement, modern observers would probably be less ready in their praise. But to thirteenth-century Englishmen, who perceived themselves to be surrounded by many perils, it was more important to have a warlike king than a peaceable one. Edward, said one preacher admiringly, ‘tried to war down and subdue all those who wished to throw his people into confusion’. As the author of
The Song of Caerlaverock
explained poetically, the king confronting his enemies was like the three lions embroidered in gold on the red of his banner – dreadful, fierce and cruel. The Westminster obituarist put it in even more telegraphic terms. Edward, he said, was peaceable to the obedient, but to the sons of pride he was indeed ‘a terrible king’.
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The sons of pride in the first instance were the princes of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his brother Dafydd, whose dynasty Edward warred down to the point of extinction. Whether he was justified in doing so has been a much-debated question in modern times. Contemporary Englishmen, as we have already seen, entertained no such doubts. To them the Welsh did not seem to be an oppressed people; rather they were considered to be an immoral, lazy, anarchic, turbulent and faithless race – ‘that domestic enemy’, as one vitriolic cleric put it, ‘the disturber of English peace’. In view of such hostile attitudes, one is bound to wonder just how important the king’s own contribution really was. It is doubtful whether Wales would have been conquered so thoroughly, so ruthlessly, so swiftly and so successfully had Edward I died in the Holy Land. It is equally doubtful that it would have survived as an independent power even had that been the case. By the time Edward arrived home in 1274, his peace with Llywelyn was already compromised by clashes in the March, and the March itself was a reminder that the English and the Welsh had been at loggerheads for more than two centuries. To this extent, both the king of England and the princes of Wales were representatives of their respective peoples. The Welsh, in truth, had too far to travel, economically and socially, for the English to cease regarding them as barbarians. Consequently, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which native power in Wales could have endured. Whether by sudden conquest or slow erosion, English domination seems a foregone conclusion.
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It seems equally certain that England would have eventually gone to war with France, though here too the historian has the advantage of hindsight. To Edward himself it seemed more natural that the two kingdoms should get along well. Their courts shared a common chivalric culture, and the royal families had been happily intermarried for two generations. In retrospect, however, the four decades of peace from 1254 to 1294 seem like a remarkable but brief interruption to long centuries of hostility. Edward certainly did not want a war with France; he worked hard in the first half of his reign to try to minimise friction with his Continental overlord, and gave Gascony the best government it had experienced for over a hundred years. But the same forces of nationalism and bigotry that were making the English increasingly intolerant of the Welsh and the Jews were also growing apace in France, and by the early 1290s they had infected the French court. This happened in secret, of course, so Edward’s failure to foresee the coming conflict should not be held too strongly against him. His only mistake was to negotiate without consulting his councillors, and for this his subjects chastised him accordingly (up to this point, said one chronicler, he had seemed like another Solomon). Yet when they too realised that the seizure of Gascony was the result of French trickery, they soon forgave him. ‘King of France, thou hadst sin,’ said one English poet in 1307, ‘to hinder the will of King Edward to go to the Holy Land’, and there can be no doubt that this was a fair judgement.
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The expulsion of the Jews, the conquest of Wales, the resumption of war with France: all required Edward I in order to occur precisely how and when they did, but all might easily have happened without him. What would have been almost impossible to foresee in, say, 1272, and what might well not have happened had, for example, Edward died in Acre that summer, was that England should go to war with Scotland. It was not just that the English and Scottish royal families had been intermarrying for several generations, nor even that similarly convivial cross-border relations had been maintained by their respective aristocracies. For a century and more before Edward’s day, Scotland had been busily approximating itself to England: welcoming English settlers and adopting English customs. Here the trend was not one of growing intolerance, but of increasing convergence.

For this reason alone, the mid-point of Edward’s reign stands to be regarded as a watershed moment in British history. The year 1290 was eventful in so many ways. It saw the king’s compromise over his Quo Warranto campaign, the finalisation of his plans for a second crusade, and the total expulsion of all England’s Jews. At a more personal level, it also witnessed the marriage of two of his daughters and the death of his beloved queen. All of these events, however, paled in significance compared to the death in September that year of Margaret, the Maid of Norway, heiress to the Scottish throne and intended bride of Edward of Caernarfon.

Had the Maid lived, and had this marriage taken place, the ramifications would have been far-reaching: a union of the Crowns, three centuries before the eventual union of 1603, only far more natural and amicable; Robert Bruce and John Balliol fighting alongside Edward I in a future war against France, just as their fathers and brothers had fought alongside him at Lewes and in the Holy Land; the French war resolved more swiftly as a result, and Edward travelling east for a second time, again with Scotsmen in his company. Nor is it unrealistic to imagine a more distant future, in which nobles from both nations, cousins in spirit as well as in blood, went on to tackle together the problematic peoples to the west whom both regarded as barbarians. In Edward I’s own day, his friend John de Vescy had participated not only in the conquest of Wales but also in the Scottish conquest of the Isle of Man, fighting under the banner of Alexander III. A future king of an Anglo-Scottish realm, leading an integrated Anglo-Scottish aristocracy, might well have dealt decisively with the ‘wild Irish’ or ‘wild Scots’ of the Western Isles, resulting in a British Isles that was precociously united.
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But none of this was to be. It happened that the Maid died, and Edward decided to lord it over the Scots, with fatal consequences. It meant that his war with France was far more protracted and expensive than it otherwise need have been, and it meant that he was committed to a war of conquest in Scotland that he lacked the resources to win. The combination of these two conflicts, moreover, had a disastrous impact on his other dominions, undoing much of the constructive work the king had carried out earlier in his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military service; Ireland was bled dry in the quest for supplies; England was taxed more heavily in the space of four years than it had been in the previous two decades, as well as being made to bear other oppressive burdens besides. Edward argued bitterly with the Church and with his magnates, and brought his people to the brink of rebellion, while in Wales rebellion actually occurred. Throughout this time, the king himself began to act in an unrestrained manner, bullying when persuasion failed, going back on his word, and becoming massively angry in the face of mounting opposition. ‘Either you will go or you will hang!’ he told Roger Bigod in front of a stunned parliament at Salisbury.

Eventually, in England, much of Edward’s behaviour was excused. ‘We know you to be a good and prudent prince,’ said Bigod in 1300, presumably remembering the king’s earlier record as a consensus builder rather than his more recent arbitrary acts. It was precisely because he had been such an excellent ruler before the crisis that Edward retained or recovered the loyalty of most of his subjects. Moreover, as he entered his seventh decade, he found that his contemporaries were dying out, and the new generation at his court had less desire to contradict a king who had already attained legendary status. The prime example in this category is provided by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and namesake son of Roger Bigod’s erstwhile ally. The old earl had died in 1298 apparently urging his offspring not to abandon the struggle for the Charters, but Humphrey junior did nothing of the sort. Instead he moved swiftly to ingratiate himself with Edward, supporting the king in war and marrying his widowed daughter, Elizabeth, in 1302. By 1306 he had acquired the status of favourite son-in-law; in the spring of that year he was rewarded with Robert Bruce’s forfeited estates.
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Men like Humphrey de Bohun, or for that matter Roger Bigod, did not doubt that Edward had been right to act as he did in Scotland. They too had read their copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth and knew that the kings of England had the right to rule the whole of Britain (indeed, they argued as much in a collective letter to the pope in 1301).
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They shared in Edward’s triumph in 1304 and did not doubt his greatness because war in the north subsequently re-erupted. Success seemed all but secured at the time of the king’s death in 1307. It only remained to take out Bruce and the two kingdoms that he had briefly ruled would once again be united.

But Edward’s legacy, largely because of his action in Scotland, was not one of unity but of profound and lasting division. In Ireland English power was already in retreat by 1307, such was the damage that the Scottish wars had caused to the colony, and in the decades that followed the lordship there went into steep decline. Crown revenues fell sharply. Within a year of the king’s death it was deemed necessary to bring the rolls of the Dublin exchequer inside the castle at night on account of the threat of war. Ultimately royal government would contract to a small area confined by ‘the Pale’, and although some English settlers continued to live beyond it, they found a settled English way of life impossible to maintain. Those dwelling in towns developed a permanent siege mentality, living in constant fear of attack from ‘the wild Irish, our enemies’. Meanwhile, those English magnates who remained in Ireland survived only by compromising with the natives, adopting Irish political customs and an overtly Irish way of life. They sported Gaelic names and learned to speak the language; some even found fame as composers of Gaelic poetry.
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In Wales, by contrast, there was no such compromise, and the result was a society in some respects even more bitterly divided. At a political level, English power prevailed: there could be no arguing with the wholesale nature of the conquest that Edward had inflicted. Welsh lords who wished to do so could play subordinate roles, serving as sheriffs in the new colonial administration, or even as knights in the royal household. But at a popular level there was no such mutual understanding; culturally, Wales and England remained worlds apart. As in Ireland, the English settlers locked themselves away in the new Edwardian boroughs, always suspicious of native intentions. The people of Caernarfon complained in 1345 that they suffered daily from ‘the malevolence and enmity of the Welsh’. When uprisings occurred, as they did in 1316 and more famously in 1400, the English were always able to crush and contain them. But the Crown had no interest in Wales beyond maintaining the divided status quo. Nothing symbolises the revised limits of royal ambition in the principality better than the fate of its two principal castles. Caernarfon and Beaumaris, incomplete at the time of Edward’s death, were left in that state by his successors. In 1330 building work on both sites was abandoned forever.
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