As he had been declared an outlaw, he was not allowed to make any answer in his own defense. This arbitrary regulation was one that might have been amended in the code so well compiled by the English Justinian (one’s admiration for the great Edward sinks to its lowest point at this moment), but it would have made no difference. The fate of Wallace had already been determined and the trial was no more than a formality. He was found guilty by the five judges who sat on the case and was condemned to die by the now familiar method; he was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
The sentence was carried out with not so much as an hour’s delay. Wallace was taken from Westminster to the Tower and then through streets crowded with avid watchers to Smithfield, being dragged the whole distance on a hurdle at the heels of the horses. The gallows at Smithfield had been raised high so that the multitude which assembled could see the body turn at the end of the hempen rope. He was cut down before dead and was then mutilated in the manner prescribed by law. His head was struck from his lifeless trunk and was hoist on a spear point above London Bridge.
Edward was one of the very few men in London who did not see Wallace die.
The body was cut into quarters and distributed for display in Stirling, Perth, Newcastle, and Berwick. They might at least have sent his head to Scotland, where his sightless eyes would have been turned to the land for which he had done so much.
CHAPTER XIV
Edward Takes a Second Wife
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And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.
Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favored.
And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.
IT is not likely that Edward had ever heard the story of Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and the double apprenticeship he had to serve. Copies of the Vulgate were few and far between in the land. One was not included in the three volumes which made up the royal library, but there may have been a copy, securely chained, in the chapel at Westminster. The king was not a scholar and his knowledge of Latin was scanty at best.
If he had known the story, he would have recognized the pattern which began to develop out of the frantic letters he received from his brother, Edmund of Lancaster, in Paris. A truce had been signed between the two countries, by which Edward was to marry the engaging and beautiful Blanche and his son and heir was to marry Isabella, the daughter of Philip, who was showing promise of becoming as lovely as her aunt. Edward was so set on Blanche as his second wife that he agreed on his part to give Gas cony to Philip! This was an incredible deal, for the Plantagenets were not only acquisitive but bitterly retentive and they had never been known to give anything away willingly. Gascony was one of the gems in the Plantagenet crown, and to give it away was such a prodigal gesture that Edward’s advisers must have thought him temporarily bereft of his senses.
Edmund’s uneasiness can be easily understood, therefore, when he found it necessary to report to Edward that Philip was becoming evasive in the matter of the agreement. Gascony had already been turned over to France, but the king’s brother was dismayed to find the French court buzzing with other plans for the marriage of the self-willed Blanche. Rodolphus, Duke of Austria, had asked for her hand, and it was freely said that Blanche favored the Austrian match, in the expectation that Rodolphus would someday become the Holy Roman emperor.
Deeply apologetic over what he considered his failure as a diplomat, Edmund finally sent on to Edward an amended treaty of marriage in which the name of the younger sister, Marguerite, was inserted in place of Blanche. This change was probably not the fault of Philip. The truth of the matter was that the fair Blanche had put her foot down. She had no intention of marrying an old husband, even if he did happen to be the great Edward of England.
Edward discovered thus that elderly kings, like beggars, cannot be choosers. It was a blow to his pride that Blanche would have none of him, and it was a long and bitter time before he brought himself to the point of taking the younger sister instead. The matter had to be referred to the Pope finally, who settled it by laying an injunction on Philip to return the provinces that Edward had relinquished and on Edward to accept Marguerite as his wife, with a portion of fifteen thousand pounds left to her by her father, Philip the Hardy. Edward decided to make the best of a bad bargain, and agreed.
The younger sister traveled to England in great state with a long train, including three ladies of the bedchamber and four maids of honor, all of noble blood. Philip was not known to show much affection under any circumstances, but he seems to have been fond of his little sister May, as she was called at the French court. He did not make any trouble over the matter of that truly regal dower she was taking out of the kingdom.
The wedding took place at Canterbury on September 8, 1299. The very young bride was endowed with her marriage portion at the door of the cathedral, as was the custom.
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The story up to this point had followed the same lines as Jacob’s romance. Marguerite was probably no better favored than the tender-eyed Leah of the Bible episode while Edward’s fancy had been fixed on Blanche as firmly as Jacob’s had been on Rachel. But the outcome was much happier. Unlike Leah, who became scrawny and sallow and bitter of tongue with the years, Marguerite matured into an attractive and very sweet woman. Her nose was a mite too long for real beauty, but her eyes were large and bright; and the truth of the matter was that Edward became well content with his child bride. Marguerite seems to have loved her elderly bridegroom devotedly, and so the marriage was an almost immediate success. Perhaps the fact that Blanche’s husband never became anything more important than King of Bohemia, which was rather humble compared to the throne of England, was not unwelcome news to the kingly Jacob. When the beautiful Blanche died in 1305, he expressed himself as deeply sorrowful because “she was the sister of his beloved consort, Queen Marguerite.”
Edward had to leave for more campaigning in Scotland a week after the wedding, leaving his bride in the royal apartments in the Tower of London and enjoining his officers in charge that “no petitioners from the city should presume to approach, lest the person of the queen be endangered by the contagion being brought from the infected air of the city.” The contagion was smallpox, which was raging in that most unsanitary of towns. The younger Edward, one feels, might have expressed some concern for the welfare of the citizens, who could not take refuge in the Tower, and perhaps have enjoined the officers to do something about holding the plague in check.
The next year the new queen went to Scotland with Edward, who was well content to have her thus fall into the familiar habit of his beloved Eleanor. She did not stay long in that war-torn land, for her accouchement was near. She traveled back to Yorkshire and to Cawood Castle, a truly amazing pile of medieval masonry. Here a prince was born who was named Thomas and from whom the Howards, the top-ranking family in the English peerage, would stem.
The next year the queen was at Woodstock and gave birth to a second son, who was given the name of Edmund after the perplexed negotiator of the marriage bond. Fortunately the sons of the somewhat frail Marguerite were born with a better heritage of health than the three sickly little sons that Eleanor had first brought into the world. Thomas and Edmund seem to have been stout lads and had no difficulty in surviving the usual ills of infancy.
Edward became quite uxorious, as elderly husbands so often do. He even developed a greater interest in music because his Marguerite was fond of it. The young queen had brought a minstrel with her from France who was known as Guy of the Psaltery. Edward enjoyed the fine programs that Master Guy provided and settled on him a yearly stipend of twenty-eight shillings. He also allotted three horses for the minstrel’s use when the royal family went on their travels. The royal liking for music was shown in other directions, as witness an item in the royal household accounts: “To Melioro, the harper of Sir John Mautravers, for playing on the ha
rp while the king was bled, 20s.”
The queen bore one more child, a daughter who was named Eleanor, after the first wife; there did not seem to be any jealousy or pettiness in the king’s new consort. The little princess, sad to relate, died in a few days.
Memories of Queen Marguerite have to do largely with her continual intercessions on behalf of people who fell into the king’s displeasure. The Rolls carry many such references as, “we pardon him solely at the request of our dearest consort.” It was due to her that a ban laid on the city of Winchester, because a hostage from France had been allowed to escape, was lifted. Edward was getting very testy and he had not only taken the city’s charter away but had imprisoned the mayor in the Marshalsea and had fined him three hundred marks, a great fortune in those days. Marguerite pleaded with the king until his displeasure was removed from both the city and its unfortunate mayor.
There can be no doubt that she did much to alleviate the king’s burdens during his last years. Her affection for him was very real, for after his death she wrote, “When Edward died, all men died for me.”
CHAPTER XV
The Prince of Wales and Brother Perrot
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EDWARD was not entirely pleased with the way his son was growing up. The prince was entirely normal in a physical sense. From the time he outgrew his Welsh cradle he had been a healthy, rosy boy. He lengthened out fast and seemed likely to approach his tall father in stature. He was not dissolute and he was liked by those about him. But there was something missing in him; he was not princely; in fact, it was becoming clear that he had a common streak which showed in his tastes. He did not take to books and reading. He did not care for swordplay. He was like a blunt weapon when he should instead have been capable of taking a steel-like edge.
At the age of five he had been given a household of his own, and the men at the head of it had not been chosen with the necessary care. It was a large household at King’s Langley; seven knights, nine sergeants, as well as minstrels, hunters, grooms and cooks, and of course the upper echelon of administrators, magisters, and tutors. It cost the state in excess of two thousand pounds yearly. In one year this hearty circle consumed 239 casks of wine, not to mention ale and beer. The household seemed inclined to practical jokes, in which the prince himself took an active part. He went about on his travels (they usually visited as many as fifty places in the course of a year) with Genoese fiddlers to provide music and a tame lion. There was always a great deal of gambling going on with dice, and the young Edward did not seem too adept at it. He was always in debt. A rowdy and raucous household, in fact. The great-grandfather of the prince, King John of infamous memory, had a curious tendency to clown at the most inappropriate, even solemn, times; perhaps this accounted for the noisy antics of the prince and his liking for low company.
Perhaps he should have been a farmer instead of heir to a great throne. He was much more interested in horses and cattle and in a camel kept in the royal stables (how it came to be there, or why, was a mystery) than he was in the not too persistent efforts of Master Walter Reynolds to teach him Latin. He was happier helping to plant turnips than in discussing the strategy of a campaign; a fact that caused people to recall that he had been born on St. Mark’s Day, when long processions were held with crosses swathed in black and prayers were said for good weather and fine harvests.
In one respect only did the young prince run true to form. Like most youths of royal blood, he was interested in his wardrobe. As it happened, the world was seeing a sudden revolution in men’s apparel. The ladies, perhaps because they were preached at from the pulpit and partly because husbands had not yet been educated to spending money to clothe their wives, continued wearing modest long robes which seldom allowed as much as the tip of a toe to show and fitted snugly up under the chin. But suddenly the young men of blue blood and wealth began to support an extravaganza of fashion. The first indications of it seem to have come from France, where even in those days the tailors were an enterprising and imaginative lot. The first step was the introduction of the cote-hardie, a close-fitting garment like a waistcoat which fell some distance below the waist but exposed to view the masculine leg in tight-fitting hose. With this foppish fashion, as it was called in conservative circles, went a positive frenzy for fantastic color schemes. The cote-hardie could be parti-colored, red on one side and perhaps tan on the other. The shades would be reversed for the hose. Sometimes greater extremes were reached with diagonal and vertical bars of contrasting colors. In these garments the young men of fashion strutted about like animated chessboards. Their shoes, moreover, had such long toes that they curled up in front. This queer fashion was carried to such extremes in later years that the tips had to be tied to the ankles with silken cords. Their hoods were supplied with long tassels which had to be tied around the neck and became known as liri-pipes.
Young Edward was tall and straight and his legs were well turned, so he became a leader in this rather silly revolution.
The king did everything possible to train the boy along the right lines. When the prince was thirteen years old, as we have already said, the father had to take an army to the continent to strike a blow for his Flemish allies, and before leaving he appointed his son regent. It happened to be a troubled time, one crisis following another. Warenne got himself thoroughly beaten by Wallace at Stirling Bridge; the barons became incensed with the king’s attitude in levying taxes without parliamentary sanction and insisted on a confirmation of the Great Charter and the Forest Charter. A Confirmatio cartarum was laid before the youthful regent, and on the advice of the chief officers of the crown he signed it in his father’s name; an act which Edward confirmed later. The boy, in fact, seems to have behaved with proper decorum and even a trace of dignity.
The king began to devote a great deal of time to the education of the young Edward in all matters of statecraft and personal conduct. In one year he addressed no fewer than seven hundred letters to his heir, full of sage advice and often couched in terms of sharp reproof.
Almost from the time he was born there was much speculation as to his matrimonial future. First a marriage arrangement was made by which he would wed the Maid of Norway, but this eminently satisfactory plan became null when the little princess died before reaching Scotland. Then Edward conceived the idea that his son should marry the daughter of Guy de Dampierre, hereditary ruler of Flanders, whose name was Philippa, although she seems to have been called the little Philippine. The King of France put a stop to that by swooping down on the Flemish cities and taking Guy and his daughter prisoners. The father was imprisoned for most of his life and the little Philippine became a member of the French royal household. Finally it was settled that the heir to the English throne was to marry Isabella of France, Philip’s daughter, who was called Isabella the Fair.
King Edward had every reason to know that the Capetian family tree had sprouted something strange and fearsome in Philip the Fair. That the daughter of this cruel and capricious monarch might take after him in character as well as in looks should have given Edward reason to pause and wonder. Would the lovely and sophisticated Isabella be a suitable mate for his undeniably naïve son?
The king made two great mistakes in his efforts to map the future life of his long-legged heir. This was the first.
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From the time Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine and so became ruler of all the western provinces of France, the princes of the Plantagenet line had spent most of their time abroad. Richard of the Lion-Heart was seldom in England, not even when he became king. Edward would have followed this example if the troubles in which his father had involved himself with the barons in England had not made it necessary for him to stay at home and fight the king’s battles. Both of these high-spirited and brave princes had preferred to live in the south, making the old Roman city of Bordeaux their headquarters but being much of the time in Gascony. Life was gracious and comfortable in that great city on the Garonne, with its soft airs and golden sunlight b
eating down so warmly on the leaves of the plane trees; with its wealth and culture. It was pleasant to sit on the open terrace of a low, white stone palace and look out over the lands of the triangle where the grapes grew; much more desirable, in fact, than to be housed in a tall, frowning, mysterious hotel in malodorous Paris or in a grimly frowning Norman castle in foggy London. There was another reason: the companionship they found in the knights and cadets of Gascony who had the minstrel strain in them but were nonetheless long-headed, shrewd, and gallant.
One of these old retainers of Edward’s, a certain Arnold de Gaveston, put in an appearance in London in a destitute condition, having escaped from a French prison. He was accompanied by a son called Piers or Perrot. In striving to provide for this unfortunate old comrade-in-arms Edward took the boy into his household as a squire. The boy behaved himself so well that the king decided he would be a suitable companion for his own son. It seemed to the king that the handsome and accomplished Gascon youth would introduce a better note into the oafish household at King’s Langley, where they were still emptying five casks of wine weekly and keeping the dice rolling on the trestle table both above and below the salt. So Piers de Gaveston was sent to live there as a comrade for the prince; and this was the second of the two grave errors of which the king was guilty.
With the first glance that passed between them, Piers de Gaveston gained a complete ascendancy over the young prince. He was one of the figures who appear frequently in history and who can only be described perfectly by a modern word, incandescent. A prime example of this was a long-legged and decorative young man named George Villiers who would come along in the reign of James I and be given the title of Duke of Buckingham. A room seemed to light up when men of this caliber entered. They were always handsome and filled with amusing talk. The youthful Gascon had these qualities. He was, moreover, adept at games and the use of weapons.
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