The Plantagenets (46 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
Edward, however, was overreaching. It was all very well to stamp England’s might on the kingdom of Scotland, but his uncompromising stance crushed Balliol between two irreconcilable positions. The Scottish king was expected to be a sop to Edward’s Arthurian ambitions, while simultaneously standing up for the independence of the Scottish Crown. The effect would ultimately be to destroy Balliol’s kingship and drive the whole of Scotland into fierce opposition to the English. Far from embedding his authority deep into Scottish affairs, Edward was driving the Scots into the arms of the French.
The sea routes across the English Channel and along the Atlantic coast of France were major trading arteries during the thirteenth century, as merchants from the wealthy countries of Europe ferried goods between far-flung territories, risking rough conditions and the peril of the open seas to make profits in port towns and markets from Flanders to the Iberian peninsula and beyond. Mercantile activity was constant, and traders of all nationalities rubbed regularly alongside one another. During the early 1290s, however, a fierce trade war broke out between various shipping merchants of England, Normandy, Flanders, Gascony and Castile. It resulted in running battles and pirate raiding from the Cinque Ports to Lisbon. The seaways and estuaries turned dangerously violent as banners of war were raised and private naval battles spilled the blood of all nations into the sea.
The causes of the shipping war are now obscure. Trouble began between English and Norman sailors with a scuffle in Normandy in 1292. It escalated during the following year, until on 15 May 1293 a series of skirmishes were fought between private armies flying English and Norman banners. At this point, the seriousness of the disorder demanded government intervention. Edward, who had little desire to be drawn into a national conflict by the activity of pirate traders, made every effort to appease. An English embassy was sent to France with the aim of arranging peace with Philip IV, who had acceded to the French throne aged seventeen when his father Philip III died after contracting dysentery during an invasion of Aragon in 1285.
Philip IV viewed Edward from much the same lofty position that Edward viewed the kings of Scotland. Philip was a handsome king whose popular epithet – Le Bel, ‘The Fair’ – he shared with Geoffrey, count of Anjou, founder of the house of Plantagenet. But this handsome demeanour masked a cold, inflexible personality. Dante called him ‘the Pest of France’, and the bishop of Pamiers wrote: ‘He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.’ During the course of his reign, Philip would persecute numerous groups and subjects who offended his authority. He tortured Knights Templar and suppressed their order. In 1306 he rounded up and expelled the French Jews (although they were invited back in 1315). And in the notorious Tour de Nesle affair he had three of his daughters-in-law imprisoned for adultery, while their supposed lovers were tortured to death in public.
This, then, was a man whose intransigence and capacity for ruthless cruelty perhaps exceeded even Edward’s. And although Edward did homage to Philip for Gascony in a lavish ceremony in 1286, the world was entering an age in which France would once again prove too small for a Plantagenet and Capetian king to cohabit peacefully.
It was ironic that Edward was attempting to stamp his own feudal lordship on John Balliol when Philip moved to humiliate him in Gascony. Using the shipping war as a pretext, Philip demanded that he be allowed to pass judgement on a number of Gascon citizens and officials who had been involved in violent attacks. When they were not delivered to him, he summoned Edward to appear before a French
parlement
shortly after Christmas 1293. Edward sent his brother Edmund earl of Lancaster to negotiate with Philip on his behalf. But Philip negotiated in bad faith. The English were offered a deal whereby Edward professed publicly to renounce Gascony and hand over towns and fortresses, sealing the bargain by marrying Philip’s sister, the eleven-year-old Margaret of France. The French indicated that with public honour satisfied, they would then hand back their Gascon gains and drop the summons for Edward to appear before the
parlement
.
The English were spectacularly gulled. Their naivety in placing such extraordinary trust in a French monarchy that was brazenly
aggressive and expansionist is puzzling. Indeed, so marvellous was it to the chroniclers of the time that they concluded that the English king must have been consumed by lust for the young French princess he was promised, so that like his grandfather King John seizing the prepubescent Isabella of Angoulême, Edward was prepared to let politics go hang under the lure of youthful flesh.
Such explanations fail to allow for the fact that Edward was a hard-bitten politician, keen to explore any political position that would free up the diplomatic channels for his new crusade. Whatever the motivation, the English were still fooled. The summons to the
parlement
was not withdrawn, but rather renewed and repeated. When Edward refused to humiliate himself before Philip in precisely the fashion that he himself had humiliated John Balliol, England and France found themselves once again at war.
Both sides made rapid war preparations. Edward dragged out the old thirteenth-century war plans: forming alliances and coalitions with princes surrounding north and eastern France, and launching a direct invasion to defend and consolidate territory in the south. His diplomats, under Anthony Bek, began to negotiate with the king of Germany and the magnates of the Low Countries and Burgundy. Cash payments and marriage alliances were promised in exchange for cooperation against Philip IV. Meanwhile, the muster went out for an English invasion force.
This plan had worked for Richard I, but conspicuously failed for John and Henry III. It would prove little more successful for Edward, because – like many a ruler before and after him – he had grown dangerously overstretched. In October 1294 a force was sent to Gascony under the king’s inexperienced nephew John of Brittany, but it was smaller than had been intended. Events had turned his gaze elsewhere. Troops that were needed in south-west France had to remain at home to keep order in Wales.
A month before John of Brittany set sail, a massive Welsh rebellion broke out under Madog ap Llywelyn, a very distant relative of Llywelyn the Last. Madog claimed to be the successor to Llywelyn’s titles, but in reality he led a tax revolt against a heavy duty that had
been levied on movable property in 1292. The final instalment of the tax was being collected from Wales in September 1294, and it came along with a demand for Welshmen to go and fight in Gascony.
Madog joined forces with other minor Welsh princes. Cynan ap Maredudd, Maelgwyn ap Rhys and Morgan ap Maredudd were not prominent native magnates, but Edward had effectively wiped out the top layer of Welsh nobility after the 1282 invasion and there were few other choices. Madog’s men attacked the new English castles all over Wales. All of the major new constructions held out, but it was still necessary for Edward to divert a great portion of the Gascon invasion force to Worcester, so that they could deal with the Welsh. This was a severe drain on his resources, and here was the crux of the matter: Edward might be the most powerful man in Wales, but even before the French hostilities began, his hopes of mounting a swift and robust defence of his lands on the Continent were choking on the fruits of his mastery in the British Isles.
Edward’s third Welsh invasion, which began as winter set in at the end of 1294, was the largest of the reign. His men marched into Wales in December, sticking to the old tactics of large assaults from Chester to Conwy by the royal army, while royalist lords launched semi-independent attacks through the Marches in the south.
There were minor setbacks during the invasion. The Welsh managed to capture a good portion of the English baggage train. Edward was besieged during the winter in Conwy castle, which was cut off from reinforcement by heavy floods. Here he was said to have refused his small ration of wine, instead insisting that it be divided equally between his men, while he drank water sweetened with honey. It was a safe gesture to make. When the floods receded, the siege was easily relieved.
The spring, inevitably, brought victory for the English. On 5 March troops commanded by the earl of Warwick defeated Madog’s men in a battle at Maes Moydog. ‘They were the best and bravest Welsh that anyone has seen,’ wrote one observer, in a newsletter preserved in the Hagnaby chronicle. But faced with an English war machine confident in its methods and secure in its infrastructure, they were unable to
prolong the rebellion. After Maes Moydog, Edward felt comfortable in venturing out from Conwy, leading a tour of Wales where he mopped up the collapsing insurgency in a three-month journey around the principality. By mid-June 1295 Wales was subdued and the rebel leaders captured.
Victory had once more come with very little serious opposition. But Edward had been forced to spend more vast sums: in excess of £54,000 on the campaign, with a further £11,300 spent on building Beaumaris castle on Anglesey between 1295 and 1300. He had also lost precious time in his war for Gascony.
Time and money were now running pitifully short. Gascony desperately needed reinforcement by the sort of large army that Edward had just redeployed to Wales. Worse, the south coast of England was attacked by French ships in August 1295: Dover was burned and several people killed. But when he reached parliament at Westminster that month, he encountered a maddeningly familiar attitude: about a quarter of the English magnates declared themselves completely unwilling to serve the Crown on an overseas invasion. The thirteenth century’s great complaint rang as loud in 1295 as it had in 1214: Gascony was the king’s business, not England’s.
Edward was furious. He imposed harsh financial sanctions against those who would not help him pay for the campaign in Gascony, and ordered a fleet of new fighting galleys to bolster his coastal defences. But panic was spreading. As government stuttered, rumours began to circulate that a full French invasion of England was already under way. A knight of the household, Thomas Turberville, was discovered to have been spying for the enemy. Watches were kept the length of the south coast, from Kent to Cornwall, as anxious men and women scanned the horizons for the flags and sails of a French fleet come to destroy the realm.
In desperation, Edward turned to a tactic that had always served him well in the past. He chose concessions and consultation. At the end of November, he called a vast assembly of barons and bishops, knights and burgesses, men of the shires, and representatives of the towns and cities to a parliament. It was the largest political gathering
Edward had convened since he had plotted the Welsh invasion, and he came in conciliatory mood, promising that no one should end up out of pocket on account of campaigning with the king. The writs that summoned the men to what was much later called the Model Parliament appealed to a sense of national danger: ‘The King of France, not satisfied with the treacherous invasion of Gascony, has prepared a mighty fleet and army for the purpose of invading England and wiping the English tongue from the face of the earth.’
The whole of England, then, was called upon to come and protect the kingdom from the perfidious French. But by the time the country answered the king’s summons and parliament met, the Gascon cause had once again been overtaken by a crisis closer to home. No sooner had Edward restored his rule in Wales than his puppet king John Balliol was stripped of power in Scotland. War with France had once more to be postponed as Edward turned his attention elsewhere.
His war with Scotland sprang from many causes. Chief among them was the king’s pride. Edward’s desire to put his mark on the affairs of the northern kingdom went a long way beyond the assertion of his legal right. As the muster for war in Gascony began in the summer of 1294, he had issued his summons to John Balliol and eighteen other Scottish magnates to provide feudal military service against the French. The war with Wales prevented the summons taking effect, but it was another example of Edward’s rigour in applying his royal rights in Scotland, rather than allow their simple theoretical existence.
As Edward grew more belligerent, John Balliol’s position in Scotland grew weaker. A man who could not resist Scotland’s neighbour, concluded the Scottish magnates, was simply not a king. In 1295 they stripped Balliol of power and re-established a twelve-man council to rule the country in his name.
It was a glaring failure on Edward’s part not to realize that by bullying the Scottish king he had enthroned he would fatally undermine the entire office of Scottish kingship all over again. Perhaps he really could not see the analogy between his treatment of Balliol and the demands being made by the French Crown in Gascony. But Edward’s
inability to empathize with the pressures brought to bear on his opponents was the cause of most of the rebellions and crises of his reign. In 1295 he managed to drive together two enemies who would remain in one another’s arms for the following 365 years. In February 1296 the Scottish government ratified a treaty of friendship with France. The Auld Alliance was born.
Edward’s army marched north towards Scotland in February 1296, with the intention of teaching his rebellious vassal kingdom a painful and lasting lesson for its defiance of his rule and its impertinence in allying with the French. The king’s arrival brought fuzzy border allegiances into focus. The boundary between Scotland and England was a political and not a cultural one – in a zone of changeable loyalties there was no clear and lasting border at which one crossed from one kingdom to another. But if the border was vague, the bloody consequences of war were very real.
As Edward approached with his army, the Scots began their campaign by sending raiding parties into Northumberland, terrorizing and destroying villages around Carlisle. The English preferred to wait until Easter’s festivities were complete before joining battle. Their first assault was on Berwick-upon-Tweed, a border town in the north-east of England that had been endlessly disputed between the two kingdoms, partly because it was an excellent base from which to launch attacks either north or south, depending upon who held it. The battle of Berwick, like the short, decisive and violent campaign it began, was a savage and bloodthirsty affair, which would live long in the memories of song-writers and chroniclers on both sides of the national divide.