Edward II: The Unconventional King (3 page)

Edward of Caernarfon was not born as heir to his father’s throne. That honour belonged to his ten-year-old brother Alfonso, born in Bayonne in south-west France in November 1273 and named after his uncle and godfather Alfonso X of Castile. Alfonso of Bayonne’s sudden death on 19 August 1284, while Edward I was arranging a future marriage for him with Count Floris V of Holland’s daughter Margaret, came as a shock to his grieving parents and to the people of England, who for a decade had grown accustomed to the idea that one day a King Alfonso would rule over them. Two other sons of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, John and Henry, had died in 1271 and 1274 at the ages of five and six respectively. At four months old, Edward of Caernarfon became his father’s sole male heir and next in line to the throne, and having lost three boys in childhood, Edward I must have been desperately worried about his remaining son’s welfare and the future of his dynasty. Luckily, Edward of Caernarfon was a sturdy, healthy child who is only known to have been ill once in childhood, when he came down with tertian fever shortly before he turned ten.
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As well as their four sons, Edward I and Queen Eleanor had at least ten daughters, five or more of whom – Katherine, Joan, Berengaria and others whose names are unknown – died in childhood. Five survived: Eleanor, born in 1269 and fifteen years Edward of Caernarfon’s senior; Joan of Acre, born in the Holy Land in 1272; Margaret, born in 1275; Mary, born in 1279; and Elizabeth of Rhuddlan, born in August 1282 and only twenty months older than Edward.

Edward left Wales when he was a few months old and didn’t return until just before his seventeenth birthday in April 1301. There is no truth to the often-repeated tale that his father tricked the people of North Wales by promising them a prince who spoke no English, then presenting them with his newborn son; this story was invented 300 years later.
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Edward of Caernarfon was not created prince of Wales (and earl of Chester) until 7 February 1301. He may have been conceived in Caernarfon as well as born there, as his father’s itinerary demonstrates that he and the queen spent much of July and August 1283 in the town.
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Edward’s very existence was threatened eight months before his birth in late August 1283 when a fire broke out in his parents’ bedchamber one night at Caergwrle Castle, and the royal couple barely escaped with their lives.
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Even before he was created Prince of Wales and returned there, Edward of Caernarfon was remembered in the land of his birth: in 1290 when he was six, a man from Caernarfon brought him a gift of six herons, and in 1300 the constable of Conwy sent him a gift of two greyhounds.
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Many of Edward’s letters for the years 1304/05, when he was at the beginning of his twenties, fortuitously survive, and a famous one to Philip IV of France’s half-brother Louis of Evreux shows him poking gentle affectionate fun at Wales:

We send you a big trotting palfrey which can hardly carry its own weight, and some of our bandy-legged harriers from Wales, who can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and some of our running dogs which go at a gentle pace – for well we know that you take delight in lazy dogs. And, dear cousin, if you want anything else from our land of Wales, we can send you plenty of wild lads, if you wish, who will well know how to teach breeding to the young heirs and heiresses of great lords.
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This letter has often been misunderstood in modern times, but clearly demonstrates Edward’s sense of humour and ability to share a joke with a man he knew well; Evreux was his second cousin and frequent correspondent.

Edward was only two years old when in May 1286 his parents left England and sailed to the king’s duchy of Aquitaine, in south-west France. They didn’t return until late July 1289, and sixteen months later Queen Eleanor died, at Harby in Nottinghamshire on 28 November 1290, aged forty-nine.
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Her body was buried at Westminster Abbey and her viscera at Lincoln Cathedral, and her heart was given, with that of her son Alfonso, to the Dominican friars of London. Her grieving husband movingly referred to her in a letter as ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’, and remained a widower for nine years.
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In her memory, the king built the famous Eleanor Crosses at the dozen places where her funeral procession had rested on the way to Westminster, three of which still survive, and the queen’s magnificent brass effigy can be seen to this day at Westminster Abbey. Only six of her fourteen or more children outlived her. Six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon inherited Eleanor’s county of Ponthieu, which she had in turn inherited from her mother Joan, Queen of Castile, and became count of Ponthieu, his first title. Ponthieu was a small but strategically important county in northern France bordering Normandy, with its capital at Abbeville, in the modern department of Somme and region of Picardy.

Edward can barely have known his half-Spanish, half-French mother, and seven months after her death his paternal grandmother Eleanor of Provence, widow of Henry III and the only one of his grandparents still alive when Edward was born, also died. Eleanor of Provence was a devoted mother and grandmother who took an interest in Edward’s welfare, once asking her son Edward I to allow the boy to remain in the south of England while the king travelled north, on the grounds that his health might be at risk in the bleaker northern climate and its ‘bad air’.
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The lack of a maternal figure as he grew up may well have affected Edward emotionally, and in a 1305 letter to his much older kinswoman Agnes de Valence, he rather poignantly called her his ‘good mother’ and promised that he would do whatever he could for her, ‘as a son who would gladly do and procure whatever could turn to your profit and honour’.
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Throughout Edward’s childhood, his older sisters also left his company as they married, though he remained on close and affectionate terms with at least some of them into adulthood. Eleanor, although betrothed for many years to the Spanish king Alfonso III of Aragon, wed Henri III, count of Bar in eastern France, and had two children before her death in 1298. Joan of Acre was betrothed in childhood to Hartmann von Hapsburg, son of the German king Rudolf I, but he drowned in 1281 and she married instead Gilbert ‘the Red’ de Clare, earl of Gloucester, with whom she had four children. She outraged her father in 1297 by secretly marrying a humble squire named Ralph Monthermer, while the king was negotiating for her to marry the count of Savoy, and had another four children with him. Margaret married John II, duke of Brabant in modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands, and had one child, Duke John III. Mary became a reluctant nun at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire. Elizabeth married firstly John I, count of Holland, who died childless aged fifteen, and secondly Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, with whom she had ten children. Edward I married his second wife Marguerite of France, half-sister of Philip IV, in September 1299, when he was sixty and she twenty, and Edward of Caernarfon fifteen. Queen Marguerite was the mother of Edward’s half-siblings, Thomas of Brotherton, born in 1300 and sixteen years Edward’s junior, Edmund of Woodstock, born in 1301, and Eleanor, born in 1306 when their father Edward I was almost sixty-seven, who died when she was five.

Edward of Caernarfon himself was betrothed three times in childhood in furtherance of his father’s foreign policy. His first fiancée, when he was five, was his cousin Margaret the ‘Maid of Norway’, daughter of Erik II of Norway and granddaughter of Alexander III of Scotland. On the death of Alexander – Edward I’s brother-in-law – in March 1286, Margaret became queen of Scotland in her own right, but died in September 1290 at the age of only seven. It is fascinating to contemplate how different British history might be if Margaret had lived to adulthood and married Edward, and whether England and Scotland would have been united centuries earlier than really happened. Edward was next betrothed in 1291, when he was seven, to Blanche, another half-sister of Philip IV of France. Philip and Edward I went to war in 1294, and this engagement was broken off and Edward betrothed instead to Philippa, daughter of Edward I’s ally the count of Flanders. This in turn was ended in 1297 when Edward I and Philip IV made peace. Edward’s fourth betrothal in 1299 was the one which ultimately ended in marriage.

Edward lived at the centre of a large household of many dozens of people, as was appropriate for the heir to the throne. His tutor was Sir Guy Ferre and he may also have been taught by Dominican friars, and although we know little about his education, there is no reason to assume that it was lacking in any way or that Edward was ignorant and stupid.
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Although we have no direct evidence that Edward could write – the earliest extant example of a king of England’s handwriting is his son Edward III’s, from 1329 – we may assume that he could. His sisters Eleanor and Mary and his sister-in-law Margaret Wake were able to write, and it would be odd if the future king of England had less education than his sisters and especially if he had less than a woman from the baronial house of Wake.
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The St Albans chronicler tells a story that in 1317 a woman on horseback placed a letter in front of Edward, who began to read it out loud: proof that he could indeed read, as his powerful chamberlain and ‘favourite’ of the 1320s, Hugh Despenser, certainly could.
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Edward’s strong interest in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge is hardly the sign of an uneducated man unconcerned with learning, and he also supported the archbishop of Dublin in his creation of a university there, which was formally established in 1312.
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Edward’s native language was French, or rather the version of it used by the medieval English elite, now known as Anglo-Norman. He would have learnt Latin and presumably could also speak fluent English, though as with his ability to write, there is no direct evidence for this.

During his childhood Edward spent the winter at one place, often Langley near St Albans in Hertfordshire, and in spring and summer travelled around the south of England and the Midlands, rarely spending more than a night or two in each town. The size of the future king’s household and the amount of food and drink required for them could prove onerous to local inhabitants as he travelled around the country: in 1294, when Edward was ten and had spent a few weeks at Langley and St Albans, the Dunstable annalist complained, ‘Two hundred dishes a day were not sufficient for his kitchen. Whatever he spent on himself and his followers he took without paying for it.’
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Even as a child Edward regularly entertained many magnates and prelates, who visited him with retinues of their own. His extant household accounts of 1292/93 show that, for example, Edward Balliol, son of the king of Scotland John Balliol, visited him on 17 May 1293; a week later, the bishop of Jebail in Syria dined with him; and Edward’s sister Mary the nun, his cousins Thomas and Henry of Lancaster (sons of Edward I’s brother Edmund) and his brother-in-law John of Brabant (who married Edward’s sister Margaret in 1290) arrived in June. The three boys stayed for a few days with large retinues who all had to be provided with food, drink, accommodation, and lodging and fodder for their horses, to the exasperation of Edward’s clerk, who recorded their presence daily as ‘they are staying’, ‘they are still here’ and ‘here they are still. And this day is burdensome.’
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A few weeks later, the clerk recorded somewhat vaguely that nine-year-old Edward dined with ‘a monk and some other monks’.
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As well as all the relatives, nobles and prelates who regularly visited Edward of Caernarfon, there were highborn children who lived in his household with him, at least for a while. In 1290 when he was six, he had the company of, among others, Maud Chaworth (born 1282), granddaughter of the earl of Warwick, who married Edward’s cousin Henry of Lancaster in or before 1297; Eleanor de Burgh, eldest daughter of the earl of Ulster; and Humphrey de Bohun, heir to the earldom of Hereford, who would marry Edward’s sister Elizabeth in 1302.
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In the early 1300s, the earl of Gloucester’s nephew Gilbert de Clare, lord of Thomond in Ireland, and Piers Gaveston from a noble family of Béarn were among the members of Edward’s household, and according to the much later chronicler Jean Froissart, Edward’s notorious favourite Hugh Despenser also lived in the future king’s household as a boy or young man.

Edward of Caernarfon’s childhood came to an end and his public life began in earnest in August 1297 at the age of thirteen, when his father departed from the kingdom with an army to campaign against the French and Philip IV in Flanders. Edward was left behind as nominal regent in the king’s absence, not an easy position, given the many crises in England that year: defeat by William Wallace at Stirling Bridge and a mighty row between Edward I and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, among much else.
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On 7 February 1301, Edward was granted all the royal lands in Wales and the earldom of Chester, and from that point on, was always known as the prince of Wales. A few weeks later he finally revisited the land of his birth – though not, in fact, Caernarfon itself, where he never set foot again – when he travelled there to take the homage and fealty of his Welsh tenants.
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More lands and titles came on 7 April 1306, when Edward I gave the duchy of Aquitaine to his eldest son.
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Edward of Caernarfon was now prince of Wales, duke of Aquitaine, earl of Chester and count of Ponthieu, and at Pentecost, 22 May 1306, a month after his twenty-second birthday, he was knighted at Westminster with almost 300 other young men.
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The appreciative chronicler Piers Langtoft described the mass knighting and the banquet afterwards as the most splendid sight seen in Britain since King Arthur was crowned at Caerleon.
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Edward of Caernarfon was knighted by his father in a private ceremony in the chapel of Westminster Palace, and the king then girded his son with the sword-belt, and Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, and Edward’s brother-in-law Humphrey de Bohun fastened on his spurs. Then, before the high altar in the abbey church itself, Edward knighted all the other young men, who were supposed to have spent the previous night awake and in prayerful contemplation, but instead filled the New Temple church with the noise of talking, shouting, laughing and trumpet calls. Among the men knighted in May 1306 were Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, Edward’s favourites; the earls of Surrey and Arundel; and Roger Mortimer, who twenty years later would bring down the king.
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To entertain the new knights at a lavish banquet in Westminster Hall afterwards, Edward I hired eighty minstrels, who included Pearl in the Eye, William Without Manners, Reginald the Liar, Edward of Caernarfon’s trumpeters Januche and Gillot, his
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(a Welsh stringed instrument) player Nagary and his harper Amekyn, the famous acrobat Matilda Makejoy, and others called Gaunsaillie, Grendone, Fairfax, Mahu of the North and ‘the minstrel with the bells’.
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A list of silk items handed out at this time to some members of the royal family gives an idea of the colourful splendour of Edward’s surroundings: he received five pieces of yellow silk for lining a quilt, one piece of green for lining his cloak, five pieces of red to make a curtain for his bed and ten pieces of various colours to make two mattresses.
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