The Three Edwards (42 page)

It is on record that the dowager queen spent some time at Berkhampstead, while Castle Rising was being refitted for her use, that she went to
reside at the royal castle of Eltham when she needed a change of air, which happened regularly. She went to Pontefract, and on at least one occasion she spent Christmas at Windsor with her son and his family. In 1344 she celebrated Edward’s birthday with him at Norwich. She made numerous pilgrimages to holy shrines, particularly Our Lady of Walsingham.

She was never permitted to take any part in state matters, even when the chancellery or Parliament had knotty points to unravel rising from things she had done while acting as regent. In 1348 the King of France made the suggestion that Isabella and the dowager queen of France be entrusted with the mediation of a peace between the two countries. The suggestion found no favor with Edward. He had conceived a low opinion of his mother’s judgment in matters of statecraft. Had he been inclined to the proposal, his advisers would have combated the idea warmly and unanimously.

The slipping of power through hands which have become accustomed to it is one of the hardest things to bear, which is why rulers were so prompt to stamp out anything that bore the faintest scent of treason and to punish with extremes of cruelty anyone who strove to reduce by one iota the royal power. It hardly needs saying, therefore, that Isabella could not have been happy in the seclusion forced upon her. But she does not seem to have complained. If she had loaded her son with reproaches on the occasions of his visits to her, he would soon have fallen into the habit of finding excuses for not going.

She had gambled for high stakes and had lost. That she was willing to pay the price of failure without recriminations is one item, though not a weighty one, to enter on the credit side of the ledger. One other item: she gave no cause for scandal during those last and lonely years of her life.

In the last phase of her life the dowager queen’s mind turned to religious observance and to doing penance for the wicked deeds of which she had been guilty. She took the vows of the order of Santa Clara and during the final years she wore the traditional garb. The Poor Clares, as the members were called, lived lives of toil and self-sacrifice and poverty, nursing the indigent and tending the lepers and subsisting on charity. They never allowed time to ease their code, as had been done in the Franciscan order from which they sprang. It is certain, therefore, that the queen had been taken into the third order of St. Francis, which was open to lay penitents and did not involve any participation in the arduous duties of those noble ladies, the Poor Clares.

Isabella died at Castle Rising on August 22, 1358, at the age of sixty-three, a ripe age indeed for those days. She had lived in seclusion for twenty-eight years and had done nothing to justify criticism. She had expressed a desire to be buried in the church of the Grey Friars at Newgate in London. With the general willingness to find fault in every particular, some historians have surmised that this was due to the reception there of the mangled remains of Mortimer after his execution. There is doubt whether he was actually taken to Newgate or to a Franciscan church in either Shrewsbury or Coventry. In any event, his widow was permitted to remove the body for permanent interment in the Austin Priory at Wigmore in November 1331, a year after his death. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that this was the reason for Isabella’s choice. A better reason is that she would be permitted burial at the Grey Friars in the robes of the order; a precaution against the prying fingers of the devil, whose interest the erring queen had good reason to fear. Queen Marguerite, the second consort of Edward I, was Isabella’s aunt and was buried there, as it was through her munificence that the edifice had been raised. This may have been a reason for Isabella’s desire.

She had made the request that the heart of the murdered Edward should rest on her breast, and this is accepted as the last evidence of her hypocrisy. Isabella always spoke her mind and did whatever the selfishness or malice in her prompted her to do, but a hypocrite she was not. It seems more reasonable and kindly to assume that after twenty-eight years to think over the past she had a sincere desire to do this much penance.

Edward saw to it that his mother was buried with proper pomp. The streets of London which the funeral procession would cross were thoroughly cleaned. The body was laid in the choir at the Grey Friars and a magnificent tomb of alabaster was raised over it.

It is asserted in some careless records that Isabella’s second daughter, Joanna, Queen of Scotland, survived her by a few days only and that they were interred in Newgate on the same day, the two biers being placed side by side at the high altar. A moving picture, surely; but with one flaw. Queen Joanna did not die until 1362, four years after her mother.

There was little mourning for the deceased queen. If Edward or any member of the royal family attended the services, there is no record of it. The interment was quiet, and this was to be expected, for Isabella of France would be called in history the most wicked of English queens. The best tribute that could have been paid her was that she was not wholly bad. Perhaps—who knows?—a witness to this paused beside her bier to drop a tear to her memory: the little Thomeline who had been saved from the sad fate of so many war orphans and had been sent by the fair queen to London to be raised.

T
HE peace with Scotland did not last long.

Robert the Bruce had died on June 7, 1329, in his castle at Cardross near Dumbarton. There had been some comfort for him in his last days, although he was not to know that the Pope on June 13 of that year issued a bull confirming his sovereignty in Scotland with the right of anointment at coronation. Cardross was less grim than most Scottish castles. It had brightly painted rooms and glass in the windows and a great tester bed from which the dying monarch could look out at the hills of the country he had fought for so long.

Before dying Robert laid injunctions of various kinds on his followers. They were to swear fealty to his young son David. Randolph of Moray was to act as regent during the boy’s minority. That he chose Randolph and not Douglas as regent was not because of any preference. He had a still more personal and binding duty to lay on the sturdy shoulders of that fine knight whose skill in arms was so great that his face, after a lifetime of cut and slash and come again, carried not so much as a single marring wound. The king had always wanted to go on the Crusades, and this was now impossible. On the Black Douglas, therefore, he laid this sacred duty: he was to go in his king’s stead, carrying the heart of the Bruce to be buried by the Holy Sepulcher.

For all the leaders of the Scottish people, he left a set of rules and regulations to be used in the defense of the land which became known in later years as Good King Robert’s Testament. These wise directions, which had grown out of all the long struggles by burn and glen, were put into verse by a native bard, the first lines of which ran:

It was thus made clear that the lessons of war had been truly learned by the great Scot. The mounted knight, with shining cuirass and jingling spurs, would never win Scotland’s battles. It was on the sturdy foot soldier that reliance must be placed.

The Black Douglas set off gladly to carry out his dead leader’s injunction. That he was unable to do so was the fault of the times. In all the capitals of Europe there was talk of more crusades, but no effort was being made to fight them. The clock of crusading zeal had finally run down and become silent. Douglas could not undertake a one-man invasion but he decided to do the next best thing, to lend his sword in the wars in Spain against the Moors. His eagerness for a clash with the bronzed warriors who had conquered and held a large share of Spanish territory led him to get too far in advance of his troop. The Moors wheeled about and cut him off.

The Douglas was a great fighting man from the mop of black hair on his brow, which had gained him his name, to the tips of his steel-clad feet. He had, moreover, the fatalistic attitude of most true soldiers. Looking ahead at the jeering, racing horsemen flourishing their curved scimitars in the air, he knew that this was the end. He must go down as befitted the race and the family from which he sprang.

Unclasping from his neck the silver casket in which the heart of Bruce was enclosed, he threw it far ahead of him into the ranks of the eager Moslems. Shouting in his high, lisping voice, “A Douglas! A Douglas! I follow or die!” he urged his steed against the oncoming horsemen.

That he succeeded in cutting his way through the van of the enemy was made clear after the battle was over. Pierced by a multitude of wounds, his body lay on the ground above the silver casket.

Someone has written, “First in the death that men should die, such is the Douglas’s right.” Not the valiant Sir James himself, however. There was nothing vainglorious about him. He did his fighting in the field and not around the roaring fires where men sat of winter nights to recount their deeds.

The heart of Robert the Bruce was carried back to Scotland by one of the survivors, where it was ultimately buried beneath the altar of Melrose Abbey. The right was granted to the family of Douglas to carry a bleeding heart with a crown on their shields thereafter.

The peace which had seemed so final before Robert the Bruce died was not to stand against the conditions which now developed. Philip, the first of the Valois kings of France, seemed set on bringing about war with England, and the English were not averse to upholding with their arms the claim of Edward to the French throne. Over all of western Europe hung the gathering clouds of the Hundred Years’ War. Scotland’s treaty
obligations with France made it impossible for her to stand aloof; and so it was to start all over again, the marching and countermarching back and forth across the border, the harrying of adjoining lands, while hate mounted again in the people of both races.

More fighting with the Scots was inevitable but what set the embers to blazing was the appearance in England of Edward de Baliol, son of the John who had reigned briefly over Scotland and who will be remembered best by his nickname of King Toom Tabard. That ineffective man had been dead for many years, and his son Edward had been living on the estates left him in France. The death of Robert the Bruce seemed to present an opportunity for the Baliol claims to be asserted again, and Lord Beaumont arranged an audience at Westminster between King Edward and the Scottish claimant. Baliol, who was as spineless and as lacking in patriotism as his father, offered to do homage to Edward as his liege lord if he were helped to regain the throne.

Edward was guilty of a skillful example of double-dealing at this point. Openly he rejected the Baliol offer and declared his intention of abiding by the treaty of Northampton. He even went to the extent of ordering that Baliol’s adherents should be prevented from crossing the border. Secretly he encouraged Baliol to proceed with his plans. He knew the time was ripe for action. King David was a boy and Randolph of Moray, the valiant regent, had died and his place had been filled by Donald, Earl of Mar, who was known to be an indecisive and rather feeble individual. There was in England the nucleus of an army of invasion, the holders of lands in Scotland who had been awarded their confiscated estates by the treaty but had not yet received them.

With the stealthy connivance, therefore, of the English king, Edward de Baliol got together an army of sorts. As his chief lieutenants he had three brisk noblemen, the afore-mentioned Henry de Beaumont, the Lord Wake of Liddell, and Gilbert de Umfraville. They recruited a force of something over three thousand men and sailed northward from the mouth of the Humber. Landing in Fife, they surprised the army of the Earl of Mar at Dupplin Moor and gave him a sound drubbing. The victory was so complete that the opposition to the Baliol claims broke up and he was crowned as Edward I of Scotland at Scone on September 24, 1332.

Edward of England had to come out into the open then. He met the new monarch at Roxburgh on November 23 to receive homage as the overlord of the land. Thus young Edward found himself in the same position
that his grandfather had occupied on several occasions, the openly acknowledged sovereign lord of Scotland.

But a Baliol was always a weak reed on which to lean. Edward of that ilk allowed himself to be surprised at Annan by a hastily organized army of Scottish patriots under the command of Archibald Douglas, a younger brother of the great Black Douglas. He was the first of that long line of remarkable men who held the title of Earl of Angus down through Scottish history, including Archibald the Grim, that great old Archibald called Bell-the-Cat, another familiarly known as Archibald Greysteel, and finally that handsome fair-haired Archibald who married Margaret Tudor and became a stormy petrel throughout the reign in England of Henry VIII. This particular Archibald was not an astute general, but he succeeded in smashing the Baliol forces and chasing their leader back over the border. The pursuit took the Scots well down into Cumberland.

Edward now realized that he would have to take control himself. Declaring that the Scots had broken the treaty (and writing to that effect to the Pope, because he would have had to pay a fine of twenty thousand pounds to the pontiff if he had been guilty himself), he moved with a large army into Scotland. He came face to face with the bold but overly rash Archibald Douglas at Halidon Hill to the west of the town of Dunse.

The military career of Edward III would seem to consist largely of getting himself into a position of extreme jeopardy, as at Crécy, and then extricating himself by great courage and resolution and the employment of brilliant battle tactics. It was so at Halidon Hill, his first victory of any great importance. He was in peril of being surrounded by the enemy and hemmed in by natural obstacles. East of his army was the sea and Berwick with its Scottish garrison, eager to emerge and join in against him. South of him lay the Tweed, and to the north the army of Douglas, which far outnumbered the English.