BOOKS BY THOMAS B. COSTAIN
THE THREE EDWARDS:
The Pageant of England
BELOW THE SALT
STORIES TO REMEMBER
(with John Beecroft)
THE TONTINE
THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE
THE WHITE AND THE GOLD:
The French Regime in Canada
THE SILVER CHALICE
THE MAGNIFICENT CENTURY:
The Pageant of England
SON OF A HUNDRED KINGS
THE CONQUERORS:
The Pageant of England
HIGH TOWERS
THE MONEYMAN
THE BLACK ROSE
RIDE WITH ME
JOSHUA: A Biography
(with Rogers MacVeagh)
FOR MY GREAT FOLLY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 58–12035
COPYRIGHT © 1958 BY THOMAS B. COSTAIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
eISBN: 978-0-307-80056-5
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Illustrations
BOOK ONE: EDWARD THE FIRST I. A Proper King Is Crowned
II. The English Justinian—and the Queen Who Had Many Handsome Children
III. The English and the Welsh
IV. A Prince Is Born
V. The Plantagenets at Home
VI. The Rebirth of Parliamentary Democracy
VII. The Death of Queen Eleanor
VIII. A Vacant Throne in Scotland
IX. The Start of the Scottish Wars
X. William Wallace
XI. The Miracle at Stirling Bridge
XII. Edward and the Horn-Owl
XIII. The Defeat and Death of Wallace
XIV. Edward Takes a Second Wife
XV. The Prince of Wales and Brother Perrot
XVI. Last Stages of an Eventful Reign
XVII. Robert the Bruce
XVIII. The Death of Edward
BOOK TWO: EDWARD THE SECOND I. The New King Makes Many Mistakes
II. The Marriage of Edward
III. The Death of the Favorite
IV. The Great Scandal of the Middle Ages
V. Bannockburn
VI. After Bannockburn
VII. The New Favorite
VIII. The King in the Saddle
IX. The Royal Triangle
X. The Fall of the King
XI. The Deposition and Death of the King
BOOK THREE: EDWARD THE THIRD I. Hamlet on the Steps of the Throne
II. Mother and Son
III. The Cloak of Iniquity
IV. The Royal Hamlet Strikes
V. The Chatelaine of Castle Rising
VI. The Embers Rekindled
VII. The Great Emergence
VIII. The Merchant Prince
IX. The Inevitable War
X. The Great Victory
XI. The Aftermath of the Victory
XII. The Royal Household
XIII. The Black Death
XIV. The Battle of Poictiers and the Peace of Bretigny
XV. The Black Prince
XVI. These Great Fighters
XVII. Some Incidental Achievements in the Course of a Long Reign
XVIII. The Days of Decline
XIX. John Wycliffe
XX. The Death of the King
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE THREE EDWARDS: Genealogical Table
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
The Ruins of Norham Castle
The Battle of Stirling
The Battle of Bannockburn
The Battle of Crécy
The Battle of Poictiers
HALFTONE ILLUSTRATIONS
The White Tower, Tower of London
Constable Tower and Moat, Dover Castle
Kenilworth Castle
Caernarvon Castle
Conway Castle
The Coronation Chair and Stone of Scone in Westminster Abbey
Edinburgh Castle
Map of London in 1300
The “Eleanor Cross,” at Waltham Cross, Herts
Stirling Castle, Scotland
Aerial view of Windsor Castle
Berkeley Castle
The chamber above the entrance to the Keep of Berkeley Castle
Castle Rising, Norfolk
Corfe Castle, Dorset
BOOK ONE
Edward the First
CHAPTER I
A Proper King Is Crowned
1
THE Crusades were running down like an unwound clock. For nearly two hundred years men had been suffering and dying under the blistering sun of the desert without gaining any lasting results. Only the hold that saintly King Louis of France had on the hearts and minds of men had made another effort possible in this year of grace 1270; and the fact that he had again unfurled the flag with the gallant cross brings to the fore a young man who was to play a very great part in history.
Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England, had taken the cross at once. He was granted a subsidy by Parliament and on August 11 had sailed from Dover with a small band of zealous Englishmen. King Louis had taken his army to Africa earlier with the intention of striking into the Holy Land through Egypt. Edward’s wife, the lovely Eleanor of Castile, had also gone ahead.
When the little English fleet arrived off Tunis, the prince learned that the great French king was dead. The blood burned fiercely in his veins when he was told that the son who had succeeded him had decided to abandon the crusade and was taking back to France the army his father had raised.
“By the blood of God!” cried Edward in a fine Plantagenet rage. “Though all my fellow soldiers and countrymen desert me, I will enter Acre with Fowin, the groom of my palfrey, and I will keep my word and my oath to the death!”
He was thirty-one years old; tall and long-legged, and with the handsome head of the Plantagenets, the golden hair, the blazing blue eyes, and the finely chiseled features. As would soon be made clear, he had all the good qualities of his family and few of their many bad ones; and he had something no Plantagenet had ever before possessed—a true sense of the responsibility of kingship, with a desire to rule justly and well when his turn came. He was going to make a great king, this Edward, perhaps England’s greatest.
He found that, after all, he could depend on the aid of more than Fowin. Every man in the company responded when he announced his intention of going on. And on they went, a sorry little force of slightly more than a thousand men, a few knights, a few stout English bowmen, a few Frisians. Could anything have been more rash and foolhardy? But on the other hand nothing would have served so well to kindle again the guttering light of crusading zeal; if the spark, alas, had not been so close to total extinction.
It was particularly daring because all of the Near East had been roused to fighting pitch by the efforts of a far more dangerous leader than the chivalrous Saladin who had opposed Richard of the Lion-Heart. A former slave in Egypt named Bibars had risen from the ranks of the Mamelukes (a body of professional fighting men) and had made himself sultan. Bibars was cruel, unscrupulous, fiercely ambitious, and incredibly able. He meant to weld the Near East into an entity under his own control and to put an end for all time to these troublesome irruptions of knights in chain mail.
Nothing daunted, Edward and his gallant one thousand (“It is magnificent but it is not war,” someone might have said on this occasion also) landed the following year, 1271, near Acre, a city still held by Christians but now under siege. So fiercely did the little force strike that the Mussulmen retreated and Edward marched triumphantly into the beleaguered city. The start of his desperate venture had been successful.
Kn
owing that he must strike quickly, for Bibars would soon be stretching out his steel-pointed claws to scoop him in, Edward carried the cross up the dusty road to Nazareth, which he captured. It was not a strategic victory, but there was a great moral advantage in having the home of Christ once more in Christian hands. A body of Saracens attacked them on the way back but were driven off. Edward then struck at the strong city of Haifa and won a second victory there. All this was indeed magnificent and it should have brought the laggard knights of Christendom to his aid. But the spirit had gone out of crusading, and the news that an English loon with long legs and a stout heart was striving to do with a thousand men what a hundred thousand had failed to do before him did not strike any spark.
On the evening of June 17 Edward sat alone in his tent, unarmed, wearing only a tunic, for the heat of the day had turned the desert into a furnace. He knew that a messenger was coming from the emir of Jaffa to propose terms of peace, and he knew also that he would have to accept them. Such reinforcements as had reached him had been pitifully small, and all about him the bearded sons of the Prophet were gathering, ready to strike.
He recognized the envoy who presented himself in the entrance of the royal pavilion, a plausible fellow who had already paid him four visits and was therefore above suspicion. It may have been that the offer to negotiate was no more than a ruse. At any rate, the turbaned visitor drew a knife from his belt and struck savagely at the unprepared prince. Edward took the blow on his arm and had succeeded in killing the assassin with the same knife before his attendants came to his assistance.
The knife had been poisoned and in a few days the prince’s arm had swollen to a great size and the flesh had turned dark and gangrenous. His wife sat at his couch and wept bitterly. She had loved him from the day they had taken the marriage vows; Edward, a tall youth with his blond locks clipped short below his ears, she the ten-year-old infanta with great dark eyes.
“Can I not be cured?” asked Edward when his surgeons grouped themselves about his couch and shook their heads and muttered.
Fortunately one of them thought so. When he proposed a heroic operation the prince agreed but said that Eleanor must not remain in the room. It was a measure of her devotion that she had to be removed forcibly before the surgeon took a knife and cut away all the flesh from around the wound. The story that it was Eleanor herself who saved the prince by sucking the poison from the wound is not generally accepted, but there is no reason to think that she would have hesitated had the thought occurred to her, so completely did she love him. He did survive, fortunately, and in a very few days was able to sit up again.
Bibars could have crushed the little band of Englishmen, but he had gained respect for their fighting spirit and instead he proposed a truce to last for ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten minutes. Edward, thin and weak and discouraged, could do nothing but accept. Accordingly he signed the papers and on August 15 he went sadly on board his ship and set sail for Sicily. Another of the long series of crusades had come to an end; the smallest, the least important perhaps, but certainly the most daring and courageous.
2
While in Sicily, Edward received tragic intelligence from England. Three deaths were reported: that of his father, King Henry III; his uncle, Richard of Cornwall; and his first-born son, John, who had been left in England and had succumbed to one of the illnesses which kept infant mortality so high. Charles of Sicily was amazed that Edward’s grief appeared greater for his father than for his promising young son.
“The Lord who gave me these can give me other children,” said Edward, “but a father can never be restored.”
This was the highest encomium ever paid that unreliable, bickering old weathercock of a king, but it did not sound strange to those who understood the relationship between father and son. At home Henry had been a fond and indulgent parent and Edward had loved him deeply.
The new king did not return at once, for the message from England made it clear that he was under no compunction to hurry. Henry had been buried in the abbey-church of Westminster, close to the tomb of Edward the Confessor, and the nobility had sworn fealty to his successor at the foot of the high altar, the first time in English history that the reign of a new king had begun with the death of the incumbent. The people of England were ready to welcome him with open arms. They were proud of his military exploits and they spoke gratefully of his merits. He was even a learned man, they said. Did he not speak three languages, French, Latin, even English, each with “the silver tongue of oratory”? His reign, so ran the common report, would “shine with great luster.”
The new king, accordingly, took his time about returning. He spent some months in Rome seeking papal punishment for the murder of his cousin, Henry of Almaine, by Guy, son of the dead Simon de Montfort.* He engaged in some spirited jousting in France and paid homage to the king of that country for the lands he still held there. He visited Gascony and chastised a disobedient underlord, one Gaston of Béarn. Finally, on August 2, 1274, he landed at Dover and was given a loud and warm welcome.
A large part of the welcome was for Eleanor. The people of England had not taken to her when she first came from Spain as a girl bride. They knew that the old king, Edward’s father, who was an absurd spendthrift, had depleted the royal treasury to give banquets for her and to have quarters fitted up for her in Windsor Castle in the Spanish habit, with costly tapestries, and carpets on the floors and with raised hearths and wardrobes and oriel windows. Moreover, on this first appearance, the infanta had brought a train of Spanish officials with her, little men of “hideous mien” who rode, not on horses like proper men, but on mules like monkeys!
This time they welcomed the mature and beautiful young woman who came ashore with the king. They cheered themselves hoarse when they saw the hungry affection with which both king and queen received the two surviving children of the three they had left behind; Eleanor, the oldest, who was developing into a rare beauty and who would always be the apple of her father’s eye (he would even break off a match with the heir to the Spanish throne because he could not bear to have her go so far away), and the second son, who had been named Henry and who was a very sickly and wan little boy.
It was decided to hurry the coronation because Edward, back at last, had a world of things on his mind. Carpenters were set to work building frame kitchens at Westminster where food could be prepared for everyone, even the poorest apprentice in London. When the king arrived with a long train of barons and knights at the same time that King Alexander of Scotland put in an appearance with an equally long train of Scottish noblemen, it was decided to indulge jointly in an extraordinary act of generosity. The horses in both parties were turned loose while heralds announced that whoever caught one could keep it. The knights, it is said, grew hilarious watching while rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves fought to get possession of the lordly steeds.
There was in Westminster a slab of marble called the King’s Bench. As the first step in the ceremony, Edward was seated atop it on a white chair and proclaimed king. Then, accompanied by his glowing and lovely queen (for he had decided to set a precedent and have her crowned with him), he crossed from the palace to the abbey under a canopy carried by four of the most powerful noblemen in the kingdom. The old king had been an inveterate builder, and a good one (he would have been a much better architect than a king), and had spent his last days in turning the abbey into an edifice of surpassing beauty. The original high altar had been extended and an apsidal chancel added. In the center of this new chancel, on earth which had been brought from the Holy Land for the purpose, a tomb of great magnificence had been raised for Edward the Confessor. Over this again a vast triforium was erected. It was in the dimly lit beauty of this new royal chapel that the returned crusader and his queen took their vows. Eleanor was in the customary white and gold, and her dusky eyes shone with content as she sat beside Edward on the falstool while Kilwardby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preached to them.
There
was a legend in Ireland that when a new king was seated on the Lia Fail, the coronation stone on the sacred hill of Tara, the stone remained silent if he was a true successor but groaned aloud if he was a pretender. The people who had come out from London on this fine morning to see the crowning were so well content with Edward that they might not have felt surprise if the marble of the King’s Bench had suddenly acquired this capacity to discriminate and had cried aloud, “This is indeed a proper king!”
Although he had loitered on his way home, the new king’s head had been filled with a great project which later would justify the motto Pactum Serva carved upon his tomb. The laws of England needed attention and he had brought in his train two men who could assist him in the work of amendment and codification which he saw was necessary. One was Francesco Accursi, the son of a famous Italian jurist, who learnedly occupied the chair of law at Bologna. He was destined for Oxford, where he would lecture on law and be available for advice on the major task which lay ahead. The second was a capable and bland young churchman named Robert Burnell, who had been of great assistance to Edward in the years before the prince went off to the Crusades. Edward was so convinced of the capacity of Burnell that he interrupted his departure in 1270 to ride at top speed to Canterbury when the death of Boniface of Savoy (an uncle of his mother’s who had been foisted on the English people by royal pressure) left the archbishopric vacant. Edward was determined to have Burnell succeed the much-execrated Boniface. When he arrived, however, the monks had already gone into secret conference behind locked doors in the chapter house, so that, as they declared, they could achieve a spiritual communion in making their selection. The impatient prince thumped loudly on the door and, receiving no response, had it broken down. He then demanded of the indignant clerks that they select Burnell as the man best qualified for the exalted post.
There had been another occasion when the monks of Canterbury, filled with a sense of their own importance, had met secretly at midnight and selected their sub-prior Reginald and had then packed him off to Rome to get the papal consecration, thus precipitating the situation which resulted in the final selection of that greatest of archbishops, Stephen Langton. They listened to Edward in aggrieved silence and, as soon as he had withdrawn, they proceeded to elect their prior, Adam of Chillenden. But priors and sub-priors were not deemed of fit caliber for the archiepiscopal honors, and so again a pope, Gregory X, stepped in and selected a member of the Dominican order, Robert Kilwardby.
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