The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

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  It happened that before Bannockburn the Earl of Lancaster had displayed his lack of patriotism in a rather extraordinary way. He did not accompany the royal army and he did not send any of his men. Instead he assembled quite a considerable army at his castle of Pontefract in the openly expressed belief that if Edward were successful against the Scots he would return with his victorious army and compel the barons to give up the concessions they had won from him. This sorry pretense paid him golden dividends. Edward returned a fugitive to face an angry Parliament at York; and there was Lancaster with his fresh troops to make sure of the king’s submission. It was said that the earl had stood on the battlements of Pontefract as the defeated Edward passed and had jeered at him.

  The recalcitrant barons contented themselves at York with demanding the dismissal of the king’s chief officers. Archbishop Reynolds, who had been filling the role of chancellor as well, had to surrender the Great Seal to John de Sandale. This mediocre individual did nothing outstandingly right in his term of four years, nor anything particularly wrong. He was guilty of one error of common decency in using his position to get delicacies for his table in the middle of the famine. Two purchasers were sent out to all parts of the country to take the best poultry they could get their hands on, with letters patent under the Great Seal to compel compliance. While England starved, the good chancellor lived, literally, off the fat of the land.

  Walter of Norwich took Sandale’s place as treasurer. Most of the sheriffs were dismissed also and replaced by nominees of the barons; to be more exact, the selections of the great Earl of Lancaster.

  A general Parliament was held next year from January to March, and here the work begun at York was followed to the logical conclusion with great thoroughness. Hugh le Despenser, who had been standing very high in the king’s favor, was dismissed from the council, and the same fate was meted out to Walter Langton. Lancaster was appointed commander-in-chief against the Scots. When Edward accepted these conditions, a reasonable grant was made to him. It was stipulated, however, that the ordinances must be observed and that the expenditure of the money thus obtained should be governed by the Ordainers. The prime humiliation was the setting of an allowance of ten pounds a day for the upkeep of the royal household.

  Lancaster followed up his advantage the next year when a special session of Parliament was held at Lincoln. Here he was appointed head of the council to govern all the acts of the king.

  Edward’s cousin had won a complete victory. The king was now under his thumb. Lancaster had made himself the power behind the throne.

  But his use of this authority soon made it clear that he was a man of most limited capacity. None of the steps he took to alleviate the distress of the nation during the famine had any usefulness. He objected to everything without having alternatives to suggest. He seldom attended the meetings of Parliament or council and, when he did, was invariably many days late, causing endless delays. In fact, he was like the critic who has bullied the administration for years from the opposition bench and then makes a sorry failure of it when he gets into power himself.

  It was whispered also that he had accepted a bribe of forty thousand pounds to hamper English operations against Scotland. This charge can be set aside as pure invention. Where would the poverty-stricken King of Scotland get such an enormous sum for such a purpose? It was very clear that Lancaster’s failure in the Scottish campaign was not deliberate but had been due to his utter lack of military capacity.

  To make matters worse, he found himself involved at this time in a private war. He had married Alice, the handsome twelve-year-old daughter of Henry de Lacy, and through her had inherited the earldoms of Lincoln and Salisbury. It was not a happy marriage. They had no children, and the good earl indulged himself in one illicit romance after another. About the time he began to realize that holding the reins of power was not an unmixed advantage, the lady ran away from their castle at Caneford in Dorset. There was one trait in Lancaster’s character that everyone knew: he would pursue a personal grudge with unrelenting bitterness to the end of his days. His wife’s defection roused him to unusual fury and he accused the Earl of Warenne of carrying her off. Warenne denied this but he did acknowledge that he had assisted the lady in making her escape. Lancaster refused to believe him and proceeded to burn the Warenne lands. He even seized the earl’s castle at Knaresborough.

  It turned out later that Warenne had told the truth. The lady disappeared from sight, but when Lancaster died she emerged from hiding and married the man she had loved all the time. He was a landless squire, lame moreover, named Ebulo le Strange. It is not likely that the runaway countess lived happily ever after. The path of one who stooped low enough to marry a mere squire was almost certain to be a thorny one.

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  During this unsettled period Queen Isabella seems to have become reconciled to the role she was fated to play. She certainly felt no depth of affection for Edward, but on the surface at least she was a dutiful wife. She occasionally wrote to her brother, who had succeeded to the French throne, but in none of the letters is there a reference to how she felt. There is this on which to base an opinion: after the birth of the second son, John of Eltham, she brought two daughters into the world. Eleanor, the first, was born at Woodstock in 1318. The second, named Joanna, was born in the Tower of London in 1321, a gloomy place for what should have been a joyous and festive event, and one little to the taste of the beautiful mother.

  At the same time it was no secret that she looked with favor on the Earl of Lancaster. He was, in the first place, her own cousin through his mother of Artois. He had taken it on himself to rid the country of the hated Gaveston, and that endeared him to the queen, although she may have been politic enough to dissemble her feelings. Undoubtedly she considered the ambitious earl an instrument to keep her husband in order, for Isabella had no illusions about the character of the man she had married.

  In spite of her political views the beautiful queen was, if not a model wife, an obedient and useful consort during the years which followed Bannockburn and saw the ripening of the feud between the king and his cousin. There had never been a hint that she took any illicit interest in other men. She might have glanced slyly out of the corner of a starry eye at stout London aldermen and swished her scented wiliecoats at court receptions, but this was no more than the habitual exercise in mass subjugation in which beautiful women indulge, and it was never done for the sole benefit of one candidate for favors. In view of Edward’s shortcomings as a husband, this is much to her credit. She was striving, quite clearly, to make the best of a quite bad bargain.

  Eleanor, the first of the two princesses, resembled her parents in looks only. She was gentle in disposition and manner and with the patience to accept with grace the adversities of an unkind life. That she was gentle was made clear by the equanimity with which she accepted the failures of two efforts made by her father to secure brilliant marriages for her. The first was with Alfonso V, the young King of Castile, the second with Prince John, heir to the throne of France. Both efforts failed through dower disputes, and so the little Eleanor lost the opportunity to wear a queenly crown.

  It was made clear that she was unusually pretty when Raynald II, Earl of Gueldres and Zutphen, provinces in the Netherlands, came to England on a visit. This is taking a plunge some years ahead of our story. A strong and stocky Low Countryman, Raynald was generally known as Reynaldus de Fusco-Capite, which meant Raynald the Black-Haired; and, as it was later learned, he was not an admirable character in many respects. In fact, he had headed an opposition party to the rule of his somewhat wander-witted father and had taken over the government himself. The poor old man was confined to prison for six years until he died.

  Raynald had recently become a widower. Not more than one glance at the quiet, blue-eyed princess was needed to bring him to the point of an avowal. He asked, begged, beseeched, and finally demanded the fair Eleanor as his wife. So determinedly did he press his suit that t
he match was finally arranged.

  It is fortunate that a record was kept of the wardrobe and appointments of the little princess, for it offers a detailed view of the elaborate sham with which the bareness, discomfort, and ugliness of life, even for rulers and their families, were hidden under a pretense of elegance.

  She was going to the land where the finest and richest of cloth was woven, the land of great industrial cities and immense trading fleets. It behooved the English, therefore, to see that she did them credit. Her bridal trousseau (the word meant no more than “bundle” at that time, but there does not seem to have been any other in use to convey the exact meaning) was large and varied and beautiful. Never before had such clothes been made, at least not for an English princess. The materials represented the weaving artistry of the whole known world. There were samite and baudequin and the richest velvets and brocades from the East. There were silks from far Cathay which held imprisoned the ardent rays of a distant sun and were called variously Kiss-me and Fairy’s Eye and Beyond-the-sea. There were substantial materials which were still startlingly attractive, called Camelot (an English make) and Camocas and Turkey cloth. The materials from Turkey were in a great variety of shades, including deep reds and greens, bewitching blues, and less determinate shades such as pansy, canary, and summer gray.

  Consider, first, her wedding gown. It was made of Spanish cloth of gold, a perfect match for her hair, and was embroidered in colors with some, at least, of the divine skill which went into the modeling of the tiny snowflake. To wear over this dazzling robe there was a short mantle of crimson velvet, also decorated by skilled though sometimes tired fingers. Her veil was of the finest lace, as delicate as the pattern on a frosted pane and so fragile that it would be little short of sacrilege to stretch it on the frames of the tall hairdresses which ladies were beginning to wear.

  There were dozens of other costumes for less ceremonial use: a mantle with hood made of blue Brussels cloth and trimmed with ermine, completely suited to displaying the fair English charm of the bride; a surtunic of cloth of gold on which hunting scenes with stags and dogs had been embroidered; a pair of pelisses of green cloth with strings of golden beads, for use in autumnal days before the cold of winter made it necessary for princesses to conceal their charms under heavy cloaks equipped with the device to hold clothes together and insure warmth which the French would improve later and call the toute-autour. And there were, of course, an infinite variety of caps and gloves and shoes. In the matter of shoes there were many pairs of the finest Cordovan leather which had been brought into use in England in the days of the fair Eleanor of Castile.

  But it was in other directions that the most affectionate ingenuity had been called upon to make certain the little princess (she was under fifteen at that time) would properly impress the rich and observant burghers of the Low Countries. There was, in particular, her chariot. It was not one of the ugly whirlicotes which were coming into use in both England and France and were little more than chairs on wheels. Eleanor was to have for her own use, on ceremonial occasions and when the weather was fine, a very special coach, painted most gaily with the coats of arms of both countries. It was lined inside with purple velvet on which gold stars glistened. A degree even of comfort for the occupant had been attained. There were silken curtains at the side windows, cushions for her feet, and supports to grasp when the roads were rough and the coach rocked and swayed like a ship at sea.

  Even more special and feminine was the bed which had been made for her. It was covered with green velvet in which the lions of England had been combined in a design with the crowned lions of Gueldres. There were voluminous curtains of Tripoli silk on the sides, for protection from night drafts and staff curiosity. This latter was a point of some moment, for of privacy in royal apartments there was none. Rising in the morning and retiring at night were events shared with the ladies and gentlemen in waiting, of whom there were many. Each had special and sometimes hereditary duties, such as holding the chemise of their lady or coming forward at the right moment with the kingly boots. Even after retirement a number of male aides slept in an adjoining room, two or three to a bed, with swords drawn and ready in case an attempt were made at assassination. In an equally accessible closet were a bevy of ladies, for visits to the oratory or the bishop’s throne during the night could not be undertaken unaccompanied.

  It was quite probable, of course, that Eleanor found she was expected to share the ancestral bed of the earls of Gueldres.

  Life on the continent was more sumptuous than in England, but it had been seen to that the delicate palate of little Eleanor was protected. There is in the Wardrobe Roll of the year a long list of the items contained in her larder for the journey, including cloves, ginger, cinnamon, saffron, dates, figs, raisins from Corinth, and many pounds of white loaf sugar, particularly the much-prized variety from Cyprus.

  As has been said before, a glimpse at the wedding plans for Princess Eleanor at this point involves a view of the future. The king, her father, was dead when her betrothal took place, and her mother was being held in Castle Rising, for reasons which will be reached later. The affection and perception shown in preparing the girl for her venture alone into a strange country was due, therefore, to the admirable wife, Philippa of Hainaut, who had been found for the older son of the family.

  The princess did not go alone exactly. Her train was large enough to fill many vessels when she sailed from Sandwich for the port of Helvoet-sluys in May 1332. With her were William Zouch of Mortimer, Sir Constantine Mortimer, who was to act as her household steward, Robert Tong, her treasurer, eight knights and as many ladies-in-waiting, one hundred and thirty-six men servants, including minstrels, squires, and pages, and a host of women servants.

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  The marriage of the Princess Eleanor was not a happy one, although it started well. Her husband, proud of the eminent birth of his lovely bride, brought her to his palace in the city of Nimeguen, where she was enthusiastically received by his subjects. In course of time, largely through English influence, he was elevated to the rank of duke. This gave him the right to issue coinage and to control forests and added greatly to the pride of the new duke, who proceeded to institute hereditary offices such as marshal, chamberlain, cup-bearer, and steward. He purchased or conquered adjacent lands and added many fortresses to his holdings. He was, in fact, a capable ruler, strengthening the dikes, making better use of wastelands and turf bogs, and dividing common lands and forests among the poorer people. These enlightened measures not only brought immigrants in large numbers but added to the ducal revenues.

  He had four daughters by his first marriage, and so it was an event for wide and boisterous rejoicing when the little Eleanor gave birth to a son. The child was named Raynald and, when a second son arrived two years later, he was called Edward after the English kings.

  Raynald would have been better suited, perhaps, with a wife of vivacious ways or even one of unpredictable character who would match his tempers and provide zest to the daily life of the huge ducal palace. The sweetness and social timidity of his fair English wife (the result, it was believed, of her unhappy life at home) seemed to pall on him. Two years after the arrival of his second son, Duke Raynald had his consort moved to a separate house in a part of the city far from the palace. The reason he gave was that she had contracted leprosy. As she was allowed to take her sons with her, this was a most transparent excuse. No examination of her condition had been made by the court physicians, and so the duke’s subjects waited until the real reason came out. Raynald was taking steps to obtain a divorce. He had already selected a livelier woman to take the fair Eleanor’s place.

  Eleanor, who had accepted her dismissal with gentle resignation at first, was stirred to action at this point. She arrayed herself in no more than a single garment of the flimsiest material and over this threw a warm mantle. Taking her two young sons with her, she came to the palace on a day when Raynald had summoned all his nobles for consultation.


  “I am your mistress and lady,” she said proudly to the guards at the gates and the well-fed custodians of the duke’s dignity who strove to stop her in the halls.

  So, without being announced, she came through the door and into the company of her husband and the attendant nobles. Leading her small sons by the hand, she walked forward until she stood by the chair at the head of the table where Raynald sat.