The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (25 page)

The king now marched south, having apparently disposed of both of the King of France’s allies, to prepare for war in Gascony. But in England he found that his war plans were resisted by both the clergy and the baronage. They had evidently taken Edward’s injunction that what touches all must be approved by all strongly to heart. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsea, declared that in accordance with Pope Boniface VIII’s most recent bull the English clergy would pay no more taxes to the lay ruler. The Constable of England, Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and Marshal of England, and most of the rest of the great magnates meeting in Parliament at Salisbury in 1297 refused to go to Gascony as ordered. Edward stormed off there by himself. Denied money by the estates of the realm he financed the French expedition by the illegal tax known as the Maltolt: this entailed his soldiers confiscating all the merchants’ wool and releasing it in return for gold.

But the English magnates were the king’s equal in decisive behaviour. As soon as Edward was in Gascony, encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bohun and Bigod took his son Edward of Caernarvon prisoner and refused to release him until the king had reissued Magna Carta. They also insisted on the addition of new provisions: that the Maltolt be abolished and that henceforth it be deemed illegal to raise taxes without the permission of Parliament (in place of the twenty-five barons of Magna Carta). This process is known as the
Confirmatio Cartarum
. Edward I was in no position to refuse, and authorized the Confirmation without further ado.

His troubles were far from over. A great popular rebellion in Scotland brought Longshanks hurrying back from the continent. Under a Scottish knight named Sir William Wallace (known as Braveheart) a series of risings had broken out all over the country, and at the decisive battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297 Wallace dramatically defeated the king’s representative in Scotland, Earl Warenne. By the end of the year Scotland had expelled the English, and Wallace was burning all their border towns.

Wallace’s supporters tended to be ordinary people, rather than Scots nobles who frequently held estates in England as well as Scotland and therefore had every reason for not antagonizing the English king. Indeed, most of his ragged army were so impoverished that they could not afford a horse. But Wallace himself was a tactician of genius, and the Battle of Falkirk the following year was a very close-run thing. Only Edward I’s employment of archers trained in the esoteric art of the longbow, whose superiority he had first observed during the Welsh wars, defeated Wallace’s use of squares and pikes designed to impale the superb English cavalry.

Problems with the baronage soon required the king’s presence in the south. It was not until 1303 that he could return to the north and make sure of his Scottish kingdom. By now he was a sick man. Though he was in his late sixties, an elderly man by the standards of those days, he refused to be borne in the litter that his advisers felt would be appropriate for the long journey north. Instead he rode at the head of the army to besiege Stirling Castle, the key to the country’s defences. So close was the king to the castle walls during the siege that a crossbow bolt lodged itself in his saddle. But, though his men begged him to retire, the stiff-backed old warrior refused, and sat on his charger day after day watching as the Scots threw Greek fire and boiling oil at their attackers.

When Stirling at last fell, the conquest of Scotland seemed a foregone conclusion. Wallace was captured, taken south and hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head joined Prince Llywelyn’s above the gate at the Tower of London. English rule was reimposed. Scotland was divided into four areas to be governed overall by Edward I’s nephew John of Brittany, while Edward left for the south. But no sooner had he departed than a new revolt broke out, led by another of Scotland’s greatest heroes, Robert the Bruce.

Bruce, grandson of John Balliol’s rival, had initially been one of the Scots nobles who supported English rule in Scotland, until the brutality with which English soldiers treated the Scots aroused his ire (great ladies like the Countess of Buchan had been humiliated by being kept in cages suspended from castle walls). In 1306, during an assignation between Bruce and John Comyn in a lonely church in Dumfries to hatch a plot against English rule, the hot-tempered Bruce murdered Comyn. Comyn also had a claim to the Scottish throne and Bruce seems to have been unable to prevent himself seizing the moment to put paid to his rival. Although Bruce was rendered an outlaw by this act, which was made more heinous by being committed on holy ground, the ordinary people began to rally to him, with many joining him at his hideout in the hills.

From there an irresistible momentum seized the Scots. Fighting broke out everywhere, the English were expelled from the country, and at the end of that year Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scotland at Scone.

Although Edward I was by now almost seventy years of age and his health was poor, his will was as strong as ever. For the third time he set out from the south to enforce his rule on the recalcitrant Scots. But on 7 July 1307 he died at Burgh on Sands within sight of his goal. The fierce old king had demanded that his bones be boiled down so they could be carried before the English army when they crossed the border on their way north. His son, Edward II, was made of rather different stuff. Despite his promise to his father to continue his campaign, he abandoned it and retreated south to the company of a handsome Gascon knight called Piers Gaveston.

Edward I had managed the baronage or feudal party fairly well. But the son who inherited the throne had none of his father’s strategic skills nor the English Justinian’s serious-mindedness. As might have been expected with such a father, Edward II had been well educated in warfare and kingship, but his character remained incurably frivolous. Although his reign lasted twenty years, he reigned rather than ruled, and early on lost the battle for power.

Edward II was twenty-three years old when he came to the throne. He was nearly as tall and handsome a man as Longshanks, but he had inherited nothing of his strength of character and was very easily influenced. He admired Piers Gaveston for his ready wit and sharp tongue, though the Gascon’s insolence was precisely what made him loathed by the English baronage. Upon his father’s death Edward II’s first action after abandoning the Scottish campaign was to recall Gaveston, whom his father had banished for his decadence, back to court. He married him to his niece and reinstated him with full honours and estates and the royal earldom of Cornwall. But Gaveston’s relentless search for pleasure with his boon companion the king soon had the royal government grinding to a halt, and by 1308 the barons in Parliament were calling for his expulsion from the kingdom.

Edward II hurriedly ensured Gaveston’s removal from the country by appointing him to the governorship of Ireland, and offered many concessions to Parliament if the Gascon knight were allowed back to England. But, though Gaveston was permitted to return, by 1310 the barons in Parliament were insisting on a new programme of reforms to be set out by a steering committee of the baronage and bishops called the Lords Ordainers. A year later this new committee pronounced that Gaveston was to be exiled permanently, that all ministers were to be appointed on their advice and that the king was not to make war or leave the country without their permission. Though Edward ordered Gaveston back into the country, the barons besieged the favourite in Scarborough Castle and soon after murdered him. Edward II made a few feeble attempts to avenge himself on the baronage, but he was more dependent on them than ever to push back the Scots who, under Robert the Bruce, were threatening to occupy northern England.

According to the story, the audacious Bruce was encouraged to persevere in his campaign under almost impossible conditions when he was hiding out in an old croft in Galloway watching a spider spin its web. By 1314 he and his followers had conquered most of Scotland and crucially won over the majority of the Scottish baronage to his side. All the castles with which Edward had garrisoned the country were in his men’s hands except for Stirling, a stronghold of enormous strategic value because it was the gateway to the Highlands. Even the languorous Edward II saw that he would have to lead an army north to rescue his garrison. In the meantime Robert the Bruce, though considerably outnumbered, had prepared the ground to draw the English army into a trap. He would defeat them before they could relieve the siege.

The Scottish army was drawn up in a strong position on rising ground behind the little stream or burn of the Bannock, a tributary of the River Forth. Separating the two armies was a very marshy piece of land full of bogs and pools which Bruce had made more treacherous by secretly digging pits and lining them with stakes. All went according to Bruce’s plan: the English cavalry charged and came to grief on the sharpened stakes. Meanwhile the Scots cavalry destroyed the formidable English and Welsh bowmen, Edward having failed to protect them with infantry.

The English army was already in a state of panic-stricken confusion when over the horizon appeared what seemed to be fresh Scottish reinforcements, though they were only camp followers dressed up. The English nerve broke completely. The king himself set a poor example to his men when his armoured figure, the distinctive gold crown encircling his steel helmet, was seen hurrying away from the battlefield. At this his armies also turned and ran. It was a total rout. Next day the exhausted English garrison of Stirling Castle opened its gates to Robert the Bruce. He was king of an independent Scotland in fact as well as name.

The humiliation of the Battle of Bannockburn put more power than ever into the hands of the Lords Ordainer, who were now controlled by Edward’s first cousin Thomas of Lancaster, son of Edward I’s brother Edmund. Under Lancaster’s influence the Lords Ordainer proved just as inadequate as the king at governing efficiently. The rule of law on which Edward I had prided himself began to fall away, as private wars between the king’s and Lancaster’s retainers took the place of peace. The whole of the English administration began to collapse, and the north of England was increasingly subject to lightning border raids by the Scots. To add to the atmosphere of catastrophe and chaos, 1315 and 1316 were years of famine, with incessant rain throughout those summers preventing the corn from ripening. Even the royal household experienced difficulties in obtaining bread. Thousands of people died and the misery was intensified when cattle disease broke out all over the country. The beasts were slaughtered in their thousands to prevent it spreading further.

A moderate party now arose among the barons headed by the Earl of Pembroke, who sought to control the king by a new council and curtail Thomas of Lancaster’s activities. But Edward II began to favour over the rest two barons of Pembroke’s party, brothers named Despenser, showering them with titles and lands. In 1321 a full Parliament met, led by Thomas of Lancaster, to launch an attack on the Despensers and banish the new favourites. Showing unexpected spirit, the king went to war against Lancaster’s chief supporters and the Despensers’ chief enemies, two marcher lords named Roger Mortimer and the Earl of Hereford (son of the magnate who had resisted Edward I). He crossed the Severn, crushed Mortimer and recalled the Despensers in triumph, while Thomas of Lancaster fled north. But at Boroughbridge the king’s men caught up with Lancaster, dragged him out of the church where he was claiming sanctuary and struck off his head before his castle at Pontefract.

Edward and his new favourites now seemed secure. All the leaders of what could have been a serious rebellion were either in the Tower, like Mortimer, or dead. For the next four years the Despensers ruled England in the weak king’s name. Courting popular favour for their support, at a Parliament held at York in 1322 they annulled the ordinances imposed on the king by the Lords Ordainer on the ground that they had been passed by a Parliament of barons only. They declared the ‘commonality of the realm’–that is, shire knights and burgesses–had to be involved in such decisions if they were to become law. This was another important step in the development of the powers of the Commons.

Nevertheless the Despensers had many of the faults which had made Piers Gaveston loathed. They were arrogant and greedy and just as keen to accumulate any lands and titles in their master’s gift. In order to end the chaos caused in the Borders by the Scots raids, Edward II made an attempt at invading Scotland, only for it to end in humiliation. The Scots chased him out of the country having refused to do battle, and very nearly took him prisoner at Byland Abbey. In 1323 a truce was effected between the two countries, a
de facto
admission that England recognized Robert the Bruce as king. Meanwhile under the Despensers’ lackadaisical rule the infrastructure of the government appeared to be rotting before the nation’s eyes. Taxes were not paid, the courts did not pursue justice and officials were detested.

The situation needed only a leader to turn this simmering resentment into rebellion. In 1324 such a leader emerged in the shape of the marcher lord Roger Mortimer, Lancaster’s old henchman, when he escaped from the Tower of London to join many exiled Lancastrians in Paris. By coincidence Edward II’s estranged wife Isabella was there with her son, the future Edward III, visiting her brother, the French king Charles IV, so that Edward might do homage for Gascony and Ponthieu. She and Mortimer were united by their hatred of the Despensers: the queen because of their power over her husband, Mortimer because they had confiscated his estates.

A natural alliance was soon supplemented by passion. Ignoring the king’s pleas to return, Queen Isabella began to live openly with Mortimer and plot the invasion of England to rid the country of the Despensers. But the flagrant behaviour of the wife of the King of England with a rebel aroused great unease at the French court, and beyond. Charles IV was only too delighted to obey the pope and expel his sister, who was becoming known as the ‘She-wolf of France’. Taking her thirteen-year-old son Edward with her, Isabella went to Hainault and betrothed him to the Count of Hainault’s daughter Philippa. Given such an alliance to the important country of England, the count was only too glad to provide soldiers for Isabella’s and Mortimer’s invasion of England on behalf of Prince Edward.

Proclaiming that she and Mortimer had come to liberate the nation from the tyranny of the Despensers, in 1326 Queen Isabella landed at Orwell in Essex and advanced to London. She was rapidly joined by all the most important magnates of the kingdom, including Thomas of Lancaster’s brother Henry. Meanwhile Londoners not only opened their gates to Isabella and Mortimer but murdered one of Edward II’s envoys, the Bishop of Exeter. Against such a united opposition, the king’s party was powerless. Edward II and the Despensers now made for the west hoping to reach the safety of the Despenser estates in Glamorgan, but all were captured. The two Despensers were summarily executed, the younger brother’s mutilated body being hung from gallows fifty feet high. Edward was brought back in chains to London and his reign declared to be at an end. Prince Edward, a gauche but soldierly youth apparently under his fascinating mother’s spell, was declared Edward III.

Edward II was meanwhile transported under heavy guard from one castle in the west to another. Before long the new government decided that alive he offered too much of a rallying point to their enemies, and in 1327 he was put to death at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire by means of a red-hot poker which was stuck up him. It is said that his screams as he died were so loud that they could be heard for miles around. In order to pre-empt claims that he had been murdered, Mortimer–who was in effect the ruler of England–ordered Edward II’s naked corpse to be exhibited. And indeed there was no visible mark on it. After this, the body was buried quietly in the Abbey Church of Gloucester.