A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (8 page)

Edward’s stay in Wales, like his stay in Scotland, was brief: by early August he was back in Chester, and by the end of summer he was back in London. His father was also there at that time, together with many other great lords. The city, says Matthew Paris, had been ornamented in honour of their coming. On 29 August a great feast was thrown in Westminster. The king and queen were in attendance, along with all their children: even Margaret and her husband, King Alexander, were present, at the end of a short visit to England. The royal family, when occasion demanded, was still able to present a united front.
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But the tensions among them were many, serious and multiplying. Between Edward and Henry the struggle for authority went on unabated. Behind the king’s back, for example, Edward had begun to interfere in the municipal politics of Bordeaux. Within a fortnight of the Westminster feast, he had struck a secret deal favouring one city faction above the other, undermining his father’s efforts to reconcile the rival parties. The tussle between father and son, moreover, was leading to wider problems in England. Edward’s hunger for power was driving him to irresponsible excesses and creating scandal in the country at large. Matthew Paris tells one tale, much cited in modern histories, of how Edward, out riding one day with his gang of thuggish followers, encountered another young man and ordered his gratuitous mutilation. The story looks vague – no names or places are given – and we might charitably interpret it as exaggerated gossip. But there are plenty of other stories about the bad behaviour of Edward’s household at this time that are all too credible, and that are corroborated by administrative accounts of the damage they caused.
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Henry, meanwhile, continued to exhibit his own brand of irresponsibility by failing to take action where it was needed most. Naturally, he failed to curb his son’s excesses, just as he failed to correct the bad behaviour of his Lusignan half-brothers. But that was not all. It was now over six years since the king had vowed to go on crusade, and over four years since he had assured more committed crusaders that they would be leaving at midsummer 1256. Here, too, therefore, Henry was seen to have failed. The departure date had passed, and no preparations for an expedition were in place: such gold treasure as the king had amassed for the East had been spent saving Gascony. Not that this deterred Henry, whose inability to take appropriate action was exceeded only by his propensity for embarking on preposterous personal initiatives. In spite of his insolvency, the king was now pursuing a new scheme to install his younger son, Edmund, on the throne of Sicily. The pope, who had suggested the project, had assured Henry that it was a perfectly acceptable alternative to fighting in the Holy Land. The king’s subjects in England, however, begged to differ: when parliament was asked to fund the ludicrous adventure the response was a flat refusal. Unable to obtain money by consensual means, Henry demanded more and more fines from his sheriffs, justices and foresters. With each day that passed, throughout the whole kingdom, his government became ever more oppressive and unpopular.
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Then, lastly, there was the queen. Eleanor of Provence was now thirty-three years old, poised precisely between her teenaged son and a husband approaching his fiftieth year. More mature than Edward, more vigorous than Henry, Eleanor was in many respects no less irresponsible than either. A harsh and exacting landlord, she showed no sympathy for the English in their suffering, reciprocating the lack of affection they had shown her since the start. The slip of a girl from those days was gone: in her place stood a grown woman, and behind her a powerful network of expatriate Savoyards. To these people – her own people – the queen did feel responsible, and in recent developments she saw great danger to their position. Her husband favoured his hateful half-brothers, and her son was running out of control. Edward, from the moment of his birth, had been the source of all her power and influence. The more he began to pull away from her, the more she prepared to tighten her embrace.
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The Family Feud

T
he trouble began in Wales. The view expressed in 1256 by Edward’s chief steward that everything there was progressing according to plan and that the Welsh were in the palm of his hands was, of course, the view of an insensitive and complacent Englishman. To the Welsh of the Four Cantrefs it seemed rather that they were under the heel of the oppressor’s boot. For the past decade, ever since Henry III had confiscated their homeland, they had been complaining of the unjust behaviour of royal officials, yet nothing had been done to alleviate their distress. Once the region had been transferred to Edward’s control, matters had, if anything, become worse, and it may well be that his visit in the summer of 1256 was the final straw. Until that moment the Welsh might have hoped, like the Gascons, that a new young lord would bring a turn-around in their desperate circumstances. If so, they must have been sadly disillusioned by the arrogant swagger of Edward and his gang of unruly followers. Expectations had been raised, only to be dashed. The people of the Perfeddwlad realised that they would have to look elsewhere in their search for a saviour.
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The obvious candidate was not far to seek. Across the River Conwy, the people of Gwynedd had acquired a new, dynamic and undisputed leader. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, grandson of Llywelyn the Great, had also suffered the experience of being brought low by the English. In 1247, following Henry III’s military intervention, he had been obliged to share what little remained of his grandfather’s power with his older brother, Owain. Since that time, however, he had worked secretly and assiduously to revive the fortunes of his dynasty. Supremacy in Gwynedd itself had been assured in the summer of 1255 when Llywelyn, then in his early thirties, had defeated Owain in battle and had him cast into prison. Yet victory in arms had not solved all his problems. He still had other, younger brothers to provide for, and only a diminished patrimony that he was unwilling to divide. Llywelyn and his family needed more land, just as surely as the men and women of the Four Cantrefs needed better lordship. The result was not hard to foresee. At the start of November 1256 Llywelyn led his army across the Conwy and swept east through the area of English occupation. Within a matter of days the region was completely in his hands. Only the new English castles at Dyserth and Deganwy held out.
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The English court was at Windsor when the news broke. Henry III favoured a diplomatic response and wrote to Llywelyn expressing his surprise and disappointment. As for his son’s reaction, we have the testimony of Matthew Paris: ‘Edward was determined to check the impetuous rashness of the Welsh, to punish their presumption, and to wage war against them to their extermination.’ Such intentions, though, were frustrated by the onset of foul weather. ‘The whole winter that year,’ Paris explained, ‘was so wet and stormy that the entire country of Wales … was utterly inaccessible to the English, and thus Edward’s labour and expenditure of money were fruitless and of no avail.’
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Money was, in fact, the truly insurmountable problem. Edward had immediately recognised that his own financial resources would be insufficient for a war in Wales. His first instinct had been to rush to his uncle, Richard of Cornwall, who had furnished him with a loan of 4,000 marks (£2,666). But by December it was all was gone, and Richard had no more money to give, so Edward turned to his parents for aid. Their money, however, was tied up in the disastrous scheme to obtain the throne of Sicily for Edward’s younger brother. The grandeur of his folly in embarking on this project was starting to dawn on Henry, in line with the mounting criticism it was attracting from his subjects. In January 1257, for example, his latest request for funds was rejected by a specially convened assembly of Cistercian abbots. In such circumstances, the king would have already been ill disposed to hear his eldest son’s appeal for assistance. As it was, given their recent tussles over authority, and Edward’s express desire for greater independence, he was also able to relish the irony of the situation. When, in February, Edward again beseeched his father for assistance in Wales, Henry could not resist the obvious rejoinder. ‘What is it to me?’ he reportedly demanded. ‘The land is yours by my gift.’ The rebellion, he advised, was an opportunity to be seized; Edward should make a name for himself, so that his enemies might fear him in the future. ‘As for me,’ the king concluded, ‘I am concerned with other business.’ Edward, in short, was on his own.
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Llywelyn, meanwhile, was winning lots of new friends. Other dispossessed Welsh lords were flocking to his banner, and he was restoring them to their lands, ‘keeping nothing for himself but fame and honour’, in the words of a Welsh chronicler. Having driven the English out of north Wales, Llywelyn was now pushing south. In December and January he had marched his forces into Deheubarth and Powys, the two other ancient ‘kingdoms’ of Wales. By February their success was such that they were able to launch attacks on the English lordships along the south Welsh coast. In Kidwelly and in Gower the foreigners were thrown onto the defensive, and the castle at Swansea was burned to the ground. Llywelyn’s power and fame were growing daily. ‘The Welsh followed him,’ said one English writer, ‘as if they were glued to him.’
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His drive into south Wales brought Llywelyn into a new arena of contention with his principal adversary. Edward’s endowment had also included a number of lordships and castles in the south, and it was from these positions – principally his castles at Carmarthen and Cardigan – that the king’s son elected to strike back. Cardigan, in particular, located on the west coast, had the advantage that it could be supplied from Ireland, and this process was already under way when the English counteroffensive was launched at the end of May. Edward himself was still in Westminster at the time, and just as well, for the result was an unmitigated disaster. No sooner had his troops set out from Carmarthen than they came under heavy attack from the Welsh, and when, on 2 June, the two sides met in open battle, Edward’s army, including its commander, was completely wiped out.
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The killing of so many Englishmen, especially ones of rank, meant that the war in Wales was no longer something that Henry III could reasonably ignore. The king now accepted that he would have to intervene in person, and to this end a royal army was ordered to muster at Chester in August. In the middle of that month both father and son advanced into north Wales at the head of these forces, intending to strike at the heart of Llywelyn’s power. Here too, however, the English response failed as a result of its undue haste. Although the king’s host quickly regained control of the Four Cantrefs, raising the sieges of Dyserth and Deganwy in the process, it lacked the supplies to progress any further. Ships that should have arrived from Ireland failed to appear. After vainly scanning the horizon at Deganwy for a week, Henry announced that he was giving up. Less than a month after they had set out from Chester, his army began their retreat, harassed all the while by attacks from the Welsh. By October the king was back in Westminster.
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The failure of the English assault left Llywelyn stronger than ever. As the royal armies withdrew, the Welsh leader was able to reoccupy the Four Cantrefs and resume his attacks on their two castles. More than this, however, he could now plausibly maintain that his power was irresistible. Those Welsh lords who had until this point regarded themselves merely as his allies were persuaded – no doubt forcibly in some cases – that Llywelyn was, in fact, their rightful superior. Throughout the winter of 1257–58, Llywelyn concentrated on eliciting such admissions, seeking to transform his military triumph into something greater still – an acknowledged political supremacy. By March his purpose was achieved, and he was trying out a new title to match his enhanced status. No longer simply ‘lord of Snowdon’, he was now, in addition, ‘prince of Wales’.
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During those same winter months, Edward was also redefining himself and his relationship with those around him. The fiasco in Wales had made one thing abundantly clear: his parents, and especially his mother, had failed him, and not only on the issue of money. Eleanor and her Savoyard circle had controlled Edward’s affairs since the day he was born. His administration and estates, including those in Wales now lost to Llywelyn, had from the first been administered by men of his mother’s choosing. Edward was now determined that this would no longer be the case. As he prepared for a renewed offensive in the spring, he began to reshape his entourage along lines of his own devising, introducing men who possessed the kind of talents that he personally prized. Henry of Almain, son of Richard of Cornwall, the cousin with whom Edward had grown up at Windsor, was one such. But there were also brand-new associates with whom Edward had come into contact only by virtue of the outbreak of war. These men were the lords of the March of Wales.
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