Authors: Thomas B. Costain
The winter which followed the discomfiture and flight of Robert the Bruce was a period when the face of the furious warrior receded and the able and discriminating Edward appeared instead. He began looking into domestic affairs and decided, among other things, that his people were being charged too much for food. Accordingly he drew up and issued an order: the best soles were to cost no more than threepence a dozen, pickled herrings were to be available at twenty for a penny. Small items, these, but significant of the workings of the royal mind; no detail was too casual for his attention.
Edward had always been intensely fond and proud of his pretty fair-haired daughters, and now only three of them were left: Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth. It was with the greatest gratification that the old king learned of the birth of a daughter on May 4 in the once royal city of Winchester. He was so delighted with this gift from his young French consort that he gave forty shillings to the low-born messenger who brought him the news. It was at his request that the child was named Eleanor after his first wife and his well-loved oldest daughter, both long since dead. Queen Marguerite lacked all wifely pettiness and was quite content to let him have his way. The child was christened in great state, in a coverlet of cloth of gold, and then displayed in a cradle, covered with ermine and wrapped snugly in a counterpane of cloth of gold. She was, it is believed,
a wonderfully pretty child, as fair as any of the dozen or more little blond princesses born into this family.
The royal nursery for the second family of the king was at Northampton. The following month the new daughter had to be conveyed there from Winchester. Edward took the most practical interest in the arrangements for the journey. A special litter of green cloth, lined with crimson silk, was provided for the infant, and a gilded cradle. The litter was slung on silken cords between two horses, and so the royal infant rode in as much comfort as possible. It was a very slow trip, for the king had admonished those in charge to take the utmost care of his daughter; in fact, it consumed sixteen days to cover the ninety-odd miles between the two cities. To be doubly sure, the old king sent many letters to the keeper of the Princess Eleanor, one Adeline de Venise, giving instructions about all the precautions he deemed necessary.
The little Eleanor was only four days old when the king, sick and weary as he was and immersed in state detail, began to negotiate for her marriage. He wrote first to the widowed Duchess of Burgundy, proposing a match with her son Robert, who was to succeed to that ancient title in course of time. Letters went back and forth between the two parents, and it was finally agreed that England would provide a dowry of ten thousand marks and five thousand more for the bride’s attire. On these terms the marriage would take place when the two infants had reached a suitable age.
This, perhaps, was the real Edward; the affectionate father, the keen administrator, the careful custodian of the interests of all his people. But the other Edward was due to return and to keep possession of the royal mind and mood until the rapidly approaching end of this tempestuous life. Word reached him that nothing he had done to enforce peace in Scotland had been effective. Undaunted by the heads of their slaughtered leaders turned northward with sightless eyes from the tops of castles and bridges, not in any sense deterred by the thought of the brave and high-spirited Countess of Buchan subsisting in cramped discomfort in her cross-barred cage, save to entertain a smoldering determination to set her free; fearing nothing, the Scots were stirring again.
Robert Bruce had emerged from somewhere in the islands off Scotland’s stormy west coast and had made a successful landing. With him was Sir James Douglas, the second member of what was to become a truly historic partnership, Robert the Bruce and the Black Douglas. They had few men with them and so they faced the most frightening odds, for the glens of the north as well as the hills and mosses of the Lowlands swarmed with the English and their sympathizers. The desperate pair performed remarkable exploits which have been told and retold until every proper Scot can
recite them word for word. Aymer de Valence was still in charge of affairs in the north country. After being defeated in a defile called the Steps of Trool, he came back to Carlisle, which Edward had reached by painful stages in a horse litter. The acerbic tongue of the sick monarch sent him promptly to the rightabout, but only to meet Bruce and Douglas again and to lose a quite brisk skirmish at Loudoun Hill.
This was too much for Edward. By God’s good grace, was he alone capable of commanding the army he was assembling for the final thrust into Scotland? It was to be the largest and best-trained force that England had ever seen. It should not be difficult for his fumbling and not too alert fourth cousin to accomplish the complete subjection of the stubborn Scots. But De Valence was doing nothing of any merit, so the tired king reconciled himself to another summer in the field. He presented his horse litter to the cathedral at Carlisle and slowly and painfully climbed into the saddle.
The word that the king was growing weaker had reached all parts of England. It came to the anxious ears of the queen, who was staying with her young family at Northampton, and to the nuns at Ambresbury, where the sixth daughter of the king, the Princess Mary, had taken the veil. The princess had not been forgotten; in fact, she lived a busy life. She paid regular visits to her royal father and received presents from him, of money, special foods, even horses. Although she wore nothing but the black serge robe of the Benedictines, she had luxurious quarters. At night she slept in a wide bed with hangings of satin and tapestry and she had her own pantry and her own staff of servants. She was, moreover, a great traveler and was probably as often on the road as at her post in the convent.
The princess and the new queen had become the closest of friends and they decided to make a pilgrimage together to the shrines of St. Thomas at Canterbury and Dover, hoping they could avert the threat to the king’s life by prayerful intercessions. It was a long train which set out for the purpose, and a long journey lay ahead of them, more than a hundred miles. The queen took her two young sons with her but left her infant daughter, about whose safety the king had been so solicitous, in the comfort and warmth of her ermine-draped cradle. They were not alone in their efforts to stay the hand of death. At all the shrines in England the subjects of Edward were praying for his recovery.
In the meantime the still impatient though desperately ill king was making small progress with his army. In the first two days he spent in the saddle he covered no more than four miles. Realizing that this rate of
progress would never get his forces into contact with the enemy, he had a second litter improvised and rode in it, in great discomfort, the third day. His pain was so severe, however, that the train had to proceed at a snail’s pace, and by the end of the third day they had done no better than reach Burgh-by-Sands. From here they could see the water of the Solway Firth, beyond which lay Scotland.
The king was now so weak that he could go no farther. He allowed himself to be carried from the litter to a bed, and there he prepared himself for death. Although he prayed earnestly for the welfare of his soul and composed messages of farewell for the members of his family, he remained the warrior king to the end. His spirit was as indomitable as ever, as was evident from the orders he gave his son.
One hundred English knights were to go to the Crusades, under oath to remain a full year. They were to take his heart with them.
Piers Gaveston was not to be recalled to England without the consent of Parliament.
His final injunction was, “Wrap my bones in a hammock and have them carried before the army, so I may still lead the way to victory!”
He died on July 7, two days after his devoted wife and daughter had started far in the south on their long pilgrimage of intercession for him.
Ten days after his death an inventory was made of the possessions the old king had carried with him. They consisted for the most part of holy relics: a purse containing a thorn from the crown of Christ, a sliver of wood from the holy cross, one of the nails from the cross, a bone from the arm of St. Osith, one from the head of St. Lawrence, a fragment of the sponge which was lifted to Christ on the cross—more than a hundred relics in all. No monarch could have been more devout, nor more assiduous as a collector.
His sixty-eight years had been years of storm and stress, filled with the rattle of arms, the thunder of cavalry, the dip and toss of transport ships, the bitter clash of wills; but the good he did would never end, while the hatred aroused by his ambition would subside in the course of time, and so the scales inclined heavily in his favor when his record came to be weighed. It must still be said that he was a great king.
Many years after, when the independence of Scotland had finally been achieved, Robert the Bruce paid a great compliment to the memory of Edward I. “I am more afraid,” he declared, “of the bones of the father dead, than of the living son; and, by all the saints, it was more difficult to get half a foot of land from the old king than a whole kingdom from the son!”
E
DWARD was twenty-three when he looked on the dead face of his father and realized that he was now Edward II and King of England. The thought failed to sober or inspire him. He proceeded, in fact, to disregard all the commands of the dying warrior, his first act being the recall of Piers de Gaveston. He never turned a hand to organize the party of one hundred knights who were to take his father’s heart to the Holy Land. The vehement demand made by the dying monarch that his bones should be carried in front of the army was disregarded. Instead the young king escorted the bier to York, from where it was sent on to London for burial later in Westminster Abbey.
Edward then returned to Carlisle, where the army of invasion awaited his orders. He had little stomach for this military heritage that had come into his hands, being in no sense a soldier, but he must at least make a gesture, so he led the army into Ayr; the word “led” being purely rhetorical, for the second Edward, unlike his martial father, who had ridden his steed Bayard over the walls of Berwick and through the moss at Falkirk, preferred to direct his army from the rear. They reached Cumnock and camped there for several weeks, receiving the vows of fealty of some of the Scottish noblemen and considering what to do next. The decision was to do nothing. In spite of the commands left by the old king, the army retired to Carlisle on the supposition that any activities among the Scots were local and sporadic.
Immediately a bonnet appeared from behind every bush. As soon as the back of the somewhat less than soldierly new king had been turned, Bruce was at work in the Highlands, leading many successful forays. The Black Douglas, commanding in the south, recaptured his castle in Douglasdale by a ruse which delighted every Scottish heart. Leading his men by a secret footpath, he came to a dark shaw which overlooked the gray-towered
castle. Here they waited while a small party went forward in wagons filled with fodder. The garrison, being in need of supplies, threw open the gates. When the wagons came to a stop in the gateway, the drivers drew their pikes and long dirks from under the hay and held the space open while the Douglas and his men charged through the green bracken and took the castle with little difficulty.
In London the new king piled mistake on mistake. Here his lost friend awaited him, Brother Perrot in a coat of rich material from the East and a plume in his hat, and his mind filled with all the latest quips and anecdotes. The reunion was most affectionate and the king conferred on Gaveston the earldom of Cornwall; a most injudicious act, for this title had always been reserved for members of the royal family and it carried with it, moreover, an interest in the tin mines of Cornwall, those great stannaries from which came the close-packed bundles conveyed every day down the tin trail to the markets of Europe. Then he betrothed the gay jackanapes from Gascony to a member of the royal family, his niece, Margaret of Gloucester. Margaret was the daughter of his giddy and willful sister, Joanna of Acre. At first the girl seemed willing enough, for Master Perrot was handsome and high of spirits. Later the marriage would become a source of much trouble.
The new broom, wielded in the reckless hands of the young king, disposed of all the high officers of state. It swept his old critic, Bishop Langton, right out of the treasury and into the Tower of London. As a successor to Langton, Edward offered his baronage another bitter pill to swallow in the person of Walter Reynolds, a man of low station and mean attributes, who will be remembered as one of his wine-bibbing mentors.
Of all the kings of England, Edward II was one of the least fitted for the post and certainly one of the most poorly trained. He never grew up, but at no time did he show the enthusiasms and the touch of ideality which the perennial juvenile will often display. His concern seems to have been with his personal interests and pleasures and he had no conception of what it meant to be a king. If anyone had said to him that a king, after all, was no more than the representative of the ruling class, he would have thrown back his handsome head and laughed loudly. Nevertheless, the nobility still held to this conviction. “By God, Sir King,” Roger Bigod had said to Edward I, “I will neither go nor hang!” The first Edward had realized the need to curb the power of the feudal families and had been far-seeing enough to broaden the base of representation in Parliament by the introduction of commoners. The baronage still remained the dominant
force in Parliament, of course, and it would take centuries of experiment and growth before the Commons could assume control. In the meantime only as strong a ruler as Edward I could hold his barons in check. The second Edward lacked the qualities which would have enabled him to follow in his father’s footsteps. He seemed to hold the old belief that a king could do no wrong, and it amused him to see Piers de Gaveston strutting about and taunting the nobility. He and his gossip would show the haughty earls and barons who was now the master in England!