The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  The royal nursery for the second family of the king was at Northampton. The following month the new daughter had to be conveyed there from Winchester. Edward took the most practical interest in the arrangements for the journey. A special litter of green cloth, lined with crimson silk, was provided for the infant, and a gilded cradle. The litter was slung on silken cords between two horses, and so the royal infant rode in as much comfort as possible. It was a very slow trip, for the king had admonished those in charge to take the utmost care of his daughter; in fact, it consumed sixteen days to cover the ninety-odd miles between the two cities. To be doubly sure, the old king sent many letters to the keeper of the Princess Eleanor, one Adeline de Venise, giving instructions about all the precautions he deemed necessary.

  The little Eleanor was only four days old when the king, sick and weary as he was and immersed in state detail, began to negotiate for her marriage. He wrote first to the widowed Duchess of Burgundy, proposing a match with her son Robert, who was to succeed to that ancient title in course of time. Letters went back and forth between the two parents, and it was finally agreed that England would provide a dowry of ten thousand marks and five thousand more for the bride’s attire. On these terms the marriage would take place when the two infants had reached a suitable age.

  This, perhaps, was the real Edward; the affectionate father, the keen administrator, the careful custodian of the interests of all his people. But the other Edward was due to return and to keep possession of the royal mind and mood until the rapidly approaching end of this tempestuous life. Word reached him that nothing he had done to enforce peace in Scotland had been effective. Undaunted by the heads of their slaughtered leaders turned northward with sightless eyes from the tops of castles and bridges, not in any sense deterred by the thought of the brave and high-spirited Countess of Buchan subsisting in cramped discomfort in her cross-barred cage, save to entertain a smoldering determination to set her free; fearing nothing, the Scots were stirring again.

  Robert Bruce had emerged from somewhere in the islands off Scotland’s stormy west coast and had made a successful landing. With him was Sir James Douglas, the second member of what was to become a truly historic partnership, Robert the Bruce and the Black Douglas. They had few men with them and so they faced the most frightening odds, for the glens of the north as well as the hills and mosses of the Lowlands swarmed with the English and their sympathizers. The desperate pair performed remarkable exploits which have been told and retold until every proper Scot can recite them word for word. Aymer de Valence was still in charge of affairs in the north country. After being defeated in a defile called the Steps of Trool, he came back to Carlisle, which Edward had reached by painful stages in a horse litter. The acerbic tongue of the sick monarch sent him promptly to the rightabout, but only to meet Bruce and Douglas again and to lose a quite brisk skirmish at Loudoun Hill.

  This was too much for Edward. By God’s good grace, was he alone capable of commanding the army he was assembling for the final thrust into Scotland? It was to be the largest and best-trained force that England had ever seen. It should not be difficult for his fumbling and not too alert fourth cousin to accomplish the complete subjection of the stubborn Scots. But De Valence was doing nothing of any merit, so the tired king reconciled himself to another summer in the field. He presented his horse litter to the cathedral at Carlisle and slowly and painfully climbed into the saddle.

  2

  The word that the king was growing weaker had reached all parts of England. It came to the anxious ears of the queen, who was staying with her young family at Northampton, and to the nuns at Ambresbury, where the sixth daughter of the king, the Princess Mary, had taken the veil. The princess had not been forgotten; in fact, she lived a busy life. She paid regular visits to her royal father and received presents from him, of money, special foods, even horses. Although she wore nothing but the black serge robe of the Benedictines, she had luxurious quarters. At night she slept in a wide bed with hangings of satin and tapestry and she had her own pantry and her own staff of servants. She was, moreover, a great traveler and was probably as often on the road as at her post in the convent.

  The princess and the new queen had become the closest of friends and they decided to make a pilgrimage together to the shrines of St. Thomas at Canterbury and Dover, hoping they could avert the threat to the king’s life by prayerful intercessions. It was a long train which set out for the purpose, and a long journey lay ahead of them, more than a hundred miles. The queen took her two young sons with her but left her infant daughter, about whose safety the king had been so solicitous, in the comfort and warmth of her ermine-draped cradle. They were not alone in their efforts to stay the hand of death. At all the shrines in England the subjects of Edward were praying for his recovery.

  In the meantime the still impatient though desperately ill king was making small progress with his army. In the first two days he spent in the saddle he covered no more than four miles. Realizing that this rate of progress would never get his forces into contact with the enemy, he had a second litter improvised and rode in it, in great discomfort, the third day. His pain was so severe, however, that the train had to proceed at a snail’s pace, and by the end of the third day they had done no better than reach Burgh-by-Sands. From here they could see the water of the Solway Firth, beyond which lay Scotland.

  The king was now so weak that he could go no farther. He allowed himself to be carried from the litter to a bed, and there he prepared himself for death. Although he prayed earnestly for the welfare of his soul and composed messages of farewell for the members of his family, he remained the warrior king to the end. His spirit was as indomitable as ever, as was evident from the orders he gave his son.

  One hundred English knights were to go to the Crusades, under oath to remain a full year. They were to take his heart with them.

  Piers Gaveston was not to be recalled to England without the consent of Parliament.

  His final injunction was, “Wrap my bones in a hammock and have them carried before the army, so I may still lead the way to victory!”

  He died on July 7, two days after his devoted wife and daughter had started far in the south on their long pilgrimage of intercession for him.

  Ten days after his death an inventory was made of the possessions the old king had carried with him. They consisted for the most part of holy relics: a purse containing a thorn from the crown of Christ, a sliver of wood from the holy cross, one of the nails from the cross, a bone from the arm of St. Osith, one from the head of St. Lawrence, a fragment of the sponge which was lifted to Christ on the cross—more than a hundred relics in all. No monarch could have been more devout, nor more assiduous as a collector.

  His sixty-eight years had been years of storm and stress, filled with the rattle of arms, the thunder of cavalry, the dip and toss of transport ships, the bitter clash of wills; but the good he did would never end, while the hatred aroused by his ambition would subside in the course of time, and so the scales inclined heavily in his favor when his record came to be weighed. It must still be said that he was a great king.

  Many years after, when the independence of Scotland had finally been achieved, Robert the Bruce paid a great compliment to the memory of Edward I. “I am more afraid,” he declared, “of the bones of the father dead, than of the living son; and, by all the saints, it was more difficult to get half a foot of land from the old king than a whole kingdom from the son!”

  BOOK TWO

  Edward the Second

  CHAPTER I

  The New King Makes Many Mistakes

  1

  EDWARD was twenty-three when he looked on the dead face of his father and realized that he was now Edward II and King of England. The thought failed to sober or inspire him. He proceeded, in fact, to disregard all the commands of the dying warrior, his first act being the recall of Piers de Gaveston. He never turned a hand to organize the party of one hundred knights who were to take his father’s heart to the
Holy Land. The vehement demand made by the dying monarch that his bones should be carried in front of the army was disregarded. Instead the young king escorted the bier to York, from where it was sent on to London for burial later in Westminster Abbey.

  Edward then returned to Carlisle, where the army of invasion awaited his orders. He had little stomach for this military heritage that had come into his hands, being in no sense a soldier, but he must at least make a gesture, so he led the army into Ayr; the word “led” being purely rhetorical, for the second Edward, unlike his martial father, who had ridden his steed Bayard over the walls of Berwick and through the moss at Falkirk, preferred to direct his army from the rear. They reached Cumnock and camped there for several weeks, receiving the vows of fealty of some of the Scottish noblemen and considering what to do next. The decision was to do nothing. In spite of the commands left by the old king, the army retired to Carlisle on the supposition that any activities among the Scots were local and sporadic.

  Immediately a bonnet appeared from behind every bush. As soon as the back of the somewhat less than soldierly new king had been turned, Bruce was at work in the Highlands, leading many successful forays. The Black Douglas, commanding in the south, recaptured his castle in Douglasdale by a ruse which delighted every Scottish heart. Leading his men by a secret footpath, he came to a dark shaw which overlooked the gray-towered castle. Here they waited while a small party went forward in wagons filled with fodder. The garrison, being in need of supplies, threw open the gates. When the wagons came to a stop in the gateway, the drivers drew their pikes and long dirks from under the hay and held the space open while the Douglas and his men charged through the green bracken and took the castle with little difficulty.

  In London the new king piled mistake on mistake. Here his lost friend awaited him, Brother Perrot in a coat of rich material from the East and a plume in his hat, and his mind filled with all the latest quips and anecdotes. The reunion was most affectionate and the king conferred on Gaveston the earldom of Cornwall; a most injudicious act, for this title had always been reserved for members of the royal family and it carried with it, moreover, an interest in the tin mines of Cornwall, those great stannaries from which came the close-packed bundles conveyed every day down the tin trail to the markets of Europe. Then he betrothed the gay jackanapes from Gascony to a member of the royal family, his niece, Margaret of Gloucester. Margaret was the daughter of his giddy and willful sister, Joanna of Acre. At first the girl seemed willing enough, for Master Perrot was handsome and high of spirits. Later the marriage would become a source of much trouble.

  The new broom, wielded in the reckless hands of the young king, disposed of all the high officers of state. It swept his old critic, Bishop Langton, right out of the treasury and into the Tower of London. As a successor to Langton, Edward offered his baronage another bitter pill to swallow in the person of Walter Reynolds, a man of low station and mean attributes, who will be remembered as one of his wine-bibbing mentors.

  2

  Of all the kings of England, Edward II was one of the least fitted for the post and certainly one of the most poorly trained. He never grew up, but at no time did he show the enthusiasms and the touch of ideality which the perennial juvenile will often display. His concern seems to have been with his personal interests and pleasures and he had no conception of what it meant to be a king. If anyone had said to him that a king, after all, was no more than the representative of the ruling class, he would have thrown back his handsome head and laughed loudly. Nevertheless, the nobility still held to this conviction. “By God, Sir King,” Roger Bigod had said to Edward I, “I will neither go nor hang!” The first Edward had realized the need to curb the power of the feudal families and had been far-seeing enough to broaden the base of representation in Parliament by the introduction of commoners. The baronage still remained the dominant force in Parliament, of course, and it would take centuries of experiment and growth before the Commons could assume control. In the meantime only as strong a ruler as Edward I could hold his barons in check. The second Edward lacked the qualities which would have enabled him to follow in his father’s footsteps. He seemed to hold the old belief that a king could do no wrong, and it amused him to see Piers de Gaveston strutting about and taunting the nobility. He and his gossip would show the haughty earls and barons who was now the master in England!

  The favorite went so far as to give offense to the one man who of all others should have been exempt from his insults. Thomas of Lancaster was a first cousin of the king, being the son of Prince Edmund, a brother of Edward I. He was hereditary high steward of England and the holder of five earldoms, including Lancaster, Leicester, and Derby. He entertained on a lavish scale. In that connection it is interesting to quote some figures from the accounts of his cofferers. In one year they paid out 3,405 pounds for food. In addition it was found necessary to lay down 369 pipes of red wine and two of white. White wine was reserved for invalids and children. Ladies liked the stout red wine as well as did their menfolk, particularly if it was well spiced and mulled. These were enormous expenditures for those days. Lancaster’s great castle at Pontefract must have been filled with guests at all seasons, and the accommodations of its eight towers must have been strained to provide sleeping quarters.

  Lancaster was a man of overweening ambition but entirely lacking in the qualities which must go with the achievement of high objectives; an insensitive, coarse, violent fellow, lethargic in person and dull of wit. Because of his rank, however, he was the most powerful man in the kingdom and certainly should never have been selected by the upstart Gascon as a butt for his jests.

  Royal families are no different from others in certain human respects. They have their divisions and feuds, they seethe with jealousies, they indulge in gossip and innuendo. The faults of the head of the family are well known to all the collateral branches, the brothers and uncles and cousins. Cousin Lancaster was the leader of the opposition where Edward II was concerned. He knew all about that young man’s record and thought poorly of him from every standpoint.

  When Edward announced after his coronation that he now desired to begin the business of administration, there was a tendency among the nobility, many of whom had found Gaveston amusing, to regard this as a happy omen. They were even willing to make financial grants, despite the fact that Edward had depleted the treasury to get funds for his favorite. Two of the barons stood out, Cousin Lancaster and Hugh le Despenser.

  “Wait and see,” grumbled the holder of five earldoms, whose feelings were still raw from the antics of Master Piers.

  He was right. The country would soon discover that the reins of government had passed into the most careless and incompetent of hands.

  CHAPTER II

  The Marriage of Edward

  1

  THE short reign of Edward II—1307–27—was an unfruitful period, a time of military defeat and constitutional inertia. But it reads like a play or a novel because of the conflicts which arose between the leading figures on the stage, Edward himself and his favorites, his beautiful but false queen, Isabella the Fair, and her paramour, and that glum exponent of discontent, Cousin Lancaster. The story of these people is a series of climaxes, all violent and unhappy; but, it must be added, engrossing and exciting.

  The story begins with an almost incredible error of judgment on the part of the king. When he had completed arrangements for his marriage to Isabella of France by agreeing to wed her at Boulogne, he faced the need of appointing a regent to act in his absence as custodian of the Great Seal and to exercise power in certain contingencies. It had been the invariable rule to appoint a member of the royal family when a suitable one existed, generally the queen or the heir to the throne. The logical selection, therefore, was Cousin Lancaster. Partly to express his dislike of that consistently hostile prince, and partly to pay a tribute to his favorite, Edward selected Gaveston for that highest of honors!

  2

  In the cathedral of Boulogne, the illustri
ous company was literally carried away by the beauty of the contracting parties. Edward was tall, well formed, handsome. Isabella, although only thirteen years of age, was incomparably beautiful; as fair as her father had been but with nothing of the cold perfection of feature which so often accompanies golden hair. There was a piquancy of feature and a sparkle generally about her. Later it would be realized that she was as hard, as flawless, and as sharp-edged as a diamond; but in her first blooming none of this showed. She was magnificently attired in blue and gold. The crown on her head, sparkling with precious stones, was only one of two which her father, generous for once, had given her. The other was packed away with a large assortment of gold and silver articles. Her ladies-in-waiting had been babbling about the contents of the chests in which her clothes were kept. Ah, what gowns of velvet with gold embroidery, of sunny cloth from the East, of rich materials from the looms of Flanders! Never had a bride been so richly endowed.

  The company was a distinguished one. Philip the Fair in rose cloth, a huge figure of a man with his once fair complexion turned florid in a face as round as a wheel of country cheese; the kings of the Romans, of Sicily, of Navarre, and their queens; the Archduke of Austria; Charles of Valois and his tribe of marriageable daughters; Louis of Evreux; the Duke of Brabant; the dowager Queen Marguerite of England, proud of the success she had made of her marriage with the first Edward; and an immense assemblage of princes and princesses and counts and lords.