The Plantagenets (40 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
The young Edward was therefore known both to his supporters and his detractors not as a lionheart, but as a leopard: fierce but changeable. A song written in praise of him around the time of his coronation described him as ‘warlike as a pard, sweet as a spikenard’. And the author of the pro-Montfort ‘Song of Lewes’ elaborated on the theme: ‘He is a lion by his pride and ferocity; by his inconstancy and changeableness he is a pard, not holding steadily his word or promise, and excusing himself with fair words …’
The first demand placed on Edward following the victory at Evesham was to aid in the process of healing his father’s divided realm. Evesham might have killed and scattered the Montforts, but the realm was still in a state of civil war, and the role of men like
Edward, his brother Edmund and loyalists such as their cousin Henry of Almain would be vital in re-establishing royal governance. Their task was not to be an easy one. Pockets of rebellion existed all over the country. And in September 1265, Henry III made a highly divisive statement at a Winchester parliament, declaring that all Montfortian rebels were to be permanently disinherited, and their land distributed to men who had proven their loyalty to the Crown.
A student of his own family’s history would have pointed Henry III towards his grandfather Henry II’s contrasting efforts to cauterize the wounds of the Shipwreck in the 1150s, or even the Great Revolt of 1173–4. Then the Plantagenet patriarch had settled his troubled realms by offering justice, peace and reconciliation to the barons who had defied him, not permanent exile to the defeated parties. Henry III now did the opposite: he refused to re-accommodate those who had rebelled. This ruined nearly 300 families in a stroke. Rather than settling the realm, it merely encouraged disaffection among the losers and revenge among the royalists, which in turn prolonged the war against Henry’s rule.
Edward’s part in the aftermath of Evesham was characteristically ambiguous. He had wept after the battle at the loss of so many lives, and in the days that followed he acted with clemency when leading Montfortians approached him begging not to be disinherited for their part in the rebellion. Yet despite his better instincts, when Henry III announced the terms of revenge on the Montfortians, Edward and his supporters opened their arms for reward and the prince was by his father’s side for much of the questionable retribution that took place during the autumn of 1265. In London, he accepted a share of the spoils when Henry ruthlessly dispossessed disloyal citizens: a number of Edward’s supporters received rebels’ confiscated houses and Edward took custody of the mayor.
As land and property changed hands across England, many of the dispossessed rebels found themselves quite literally in the woods, living outdoors in guerrilla bands that would have resembled those from the popular ballads of Robin Hood. The main centre of Montfortian resistance was at Kenilworth castle, but before the
royalists could make a full attack, they had to bring the rest of the country under control. By Christmas 1265 pockets of revolt were breaking out all over England and Edward was kept on the move helping to snuff out the flames of resistance. The distressed rebels had come to be known as the Disinherited, and as Edward took charge of numerous operations against them, he came to realize that conciliation was a more powerful tool than sheer bloody-minded aggression. In December he found one group of rebels camped out in the marsh-lands of Axholme in Lincolnshire, and convinced them to surrender without bloodshed. Joining Roger Leybourne in subduing the Cinque Ports in the new year 1266, Edward tempered his ally’s capable but violent siegecraft with promises of pardons and liberty in exchange for submission.
Unfortunately, Edward was swimming against a powerful tide, dragged by Henry III’s misguided desire for revenge. By Easter 1266 there were rebellions across a central belt of England, from East Anglia to the Midlands, and military action once again became the only feasible solution. Towards the end of May, at Alton Wood in Hampshire, Edward crowned a victory over a rebel band by fighting their leader Adam Gurdon – an experienced knight – in single hand-to-hand combat. Although the political significance of this duel was limited, it became one of the more memorable events of the civil war. The two men did battle in a forest clearing, watched by Edward’s supporters, who were cut off from him behind a ditch. The tale of this impossibly glamorous fight was embellished during later years, and it was said that Edward had been so impressed with Gurdon’s martial skill that he had given him favour and fortune once the fight was over. The truth is that Edward beat Gurdon into submission, hanged his rebellious friends, then gave the defeated knight to his mother the queen, from whom Gurdon had to buy back his freedom and possessions at an onerous price.
Slowly, though, the royalists grew more secure, and by the middle of the summer they could make their advance on the great castle at Kenilworth, a vast fortress that had been fortified by King John and subsequently by Simon de Montfort with the intention of making it
impervious to siegecraft. It was defended by huge walls and fortifications and a massive man-made lake, and garrisoned by more than 1,000 men. Cracking the defences was likely to take months of dirty, technical engineering work. Trebuchets and huge wooden siege towers with gantries from which archers could fire were brought in and the site, overseen by Edward’s younger brother Edmund, teemed with miners and engineers. Special barges from Chester were used to try and storm the castle across its water defences, and the food supplies of counties across the Midlands were severely drained as the besiegers maintained a full feudal muster outside the fortress walls. Yet it was an effort in which Edward the soldier had little part to play. He remained on duty stamping out isolated rebellions in East Anglia, and enjoying the summer with his wife, who gave birth to their first boy on 14 July. The couple rather provocatively named the child John.
After months of expensive, draining effort, it became clear that Kenilworth could only be starved into submission – a painful process that could take more than a year. With the Disinherited still causing problems all over England, conciliatory tactics were once more foisted upon the royalists. The wisest political head among them was that of the papal legate Ottobuono, who alongside Henry of Almain led a committee to produce a peace that would bring out the rebels from the stinking fortress and somehow reconcile them with those royalists who had been awarded their lands and possessions. They produced the Dictum of Kenilworth. Set out in forty-one clauses, the Dictum was formally addressed from England’s leading loyalist bishops and barons to the king, the realm and the Holy Church. It defended the king’s right to ‘freely exercise his lordship, authority and royal power without impediment or contradiction’, but asked him to ‘appoint such men to do justice and give judgement as do not seek things for themselves but things which are of God and justice’. After the obligatory request that the king obey Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, the Dictum went on to set out the means by which rebels who had followed de Montfort could be rehabilitated and restored to their lands – ‘that the course to be followed is not disinheritance, but redemption’. It allowed the Disinherited to buy back their confiscated
lands, or what portions of them they could afford, albeit at the severe rate of between five and seven times the land’s value, payable to the royalists who had been granted the lands since confiscation. These were hardly generous terms, but they at least provided a mechanism for restoring peace. The Dictum was given and made public in front of the castle walls on 31 October 1266. The garrison in the castle surrendered, dirty, freezing and starving, in the middle of December.
It was an important step towards peace, which had been achieved by consensus and negotiation, rather than the bloody grind of military force. There was a brief moment of crisis in the spring when the earl of Gloucester invaded London in protest against the fact that the Disinherited were being forced to pay their entire fines before they were allowed to enter into their confiscated property. But the danger was averted thanks to the interventions of Ottobuono, who persuaded England’s better-off barons to pay into a distress fund to assist the Disinherited, and Richard earl of Cornwall, who negotiated an amendment to the Dictum of Kenilworth allowing rebels to return to their lands at once, rather than at the end of their terms of repayment. As Gloucester was persuaded to withdraw from the capital and Henry made his way in, it was clear that the peace process had truly begun.
With Henry and Edward now in firmly conciliatory mood, the Dictum of Kenilworth was followed in September 1267 by the Treaty of Montgomery, which brought peace with Wales by conceding vast feudal power to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The Welsh prince had been allied with de Montfort and made great headway in establishing his power over Gwynedd during the turbulent years of the Barons’ Wars. Rather than attempt to force Llywelyn into a humiliating peace, he was now granted extensive control and territory in north-west Wales, in return for a tribute of 25,000 marks. The price to Edward of this was immense, for it effectively gutted his personal power beyond the Marches. This was a situation that he would take much trouble to reverse later in his reign, but for the sake of peace, in 1267 he gritted his teeth and consented.
Two months later, the final plank of rehabilitation and reform was put in place when the Statute of Marlborough was issued, again with
Edward’s approval, if not his detailed involvement. The statute was a vast and influential set of legal provisions touching on areas of government that had been under discussion since 1258. Marlborough recognized in its preamble that ‘the realm of England, oppressed of late by many tribulations and unprofitable dissensions, needs amendment of its laws and legal rules so that the peace and tranquillity of its people may be preserved’. The statute that followed touched in its twenty-nine detailed chapters on a wide range of legal matters, from the jurisdiction of courts and the supremacy of royal justice in matters of distraint to matters of wardships, charter repeal and communal fines. The language was highly technical, concerning matters of procedure, precedent and jurisdiction. It was not a statute of such fundamental principle as Magna Carta, but it began a long process of statutory reform that would carry on until the end of the century.
For Edward, however, twenty-eight years old in 1267 and approaching the prime of life, the world was still a place for making war, rather than law. Paradoxically, now that the realm was beginning a long process of healing after the violent uproar of the last decade, it had less to offer him. Peace had been made both with the rebel barons and the Welsh, and Henry III had settled back into making expensive plans for a new tomb for Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, to which the saint’s body would be transferred on 13 October 1269. This left few opportunities for the prince and his friends to further their military reputations. Edward, his brother Edmund and his cousin Henry of Almain jointly sponsored an edict allowing tournaments to be held in England, but this was still not quite enough to sate their appetites for military adventure. If Edward wished to continue his soldierly career, he must look further afield, to the Holy Land. Since 1267 King Louis IX had been planning a new crusade, due to leave Europe in 1270 with the aim of beating back the advances of the Mamluk sultan Baybars, who had pushed deep into what remained of the Christian states in Outremer.
This, for Edward, was a field of war in which he could gild his reputation. Deeply intoxicated by the promise of glory in the East, he scraped together cash from whatever sources he could in an effort to
fit out a crusader army. This included taking a £17,000 loan from Louis IX himself, repayable from the revenues of Bordeaux. After Easter in 1270, Edward and his fellow crusaders succeeded, with the utmost effort, in convincing the knights of the shire gathered in a highly sceptical parliament to grant them a crusader tax. The price was a renewal of Magna Carta and a limitation on Jewish moneylending, which gave the shire landowners enough respite from debt to be able to afford their contributions to Edward’s adventure. From the end of May, England sprang into action and Edward prepared to depart. He submitted to arbitration to settle a long-running and bitter dispute that had blown up between himself and Gilbert, earl of Gloucester. He put his lands into trust under a committee headed by his uncle Richard, earl of Cornwall, and – since Eleanor of Castile was determined to come on crusade with her husband – he also named Richard as guardian of his three young children – John, aged four, Henry, aged two, and a baby called Eleanor. Finally, on 20 August 1170, the royal crusading party set sail from Dover, leaving the cares of England far behind them, and headed towards the dusty land of spiritual warfare in the East.
Edward’s crusade started under a cloud. He travelled to the Holy Land via a familiar path: through the south of France to Sicily, graveyard of his father’s ambition, with the intention of moving on to Outremer via Cyprus. Before he had even reached Sicily, however, he discovered that the crusade as a pan-European venture had begun to unravel. Louis IX’s army was travelling several weeks ahead of Edward’s, and when Louis passed through Sicily he met up with his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, who had succeeded where Henry III had failed and claimed the Sicilian throne. While Edward was still marching through France, Charles managed to convince his brother Louis to divert his mission from Outremer to Tunis, where various enemies of Sicily were hiding from justice.
The French set sail assuming an easy victory, but just days after landing on the north African coast, Louis IX died of a plague that swept through the French army. In shock, Charles led the crusade back to Sicily, only for the majority of the French fleet to be smashed by a storm while in harbour at Trapani. Edward, Henry of Almain and the rest of the English arrived in Sicily in November 1270 to find the French in utter disarray. They wintered on the island, hoping that the spring might bring better fortune, but they were helpless when, in January 1271, Louis’s timid 25-year-old son, now King Philip III, decided that providence was against the French and turned for home, leading his men overland through Italy back to Paris.