The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  Isabella died at Castle Rising on August 22, 1358, at the age of sixty-three, a ripe age indeed for those days. She had lived in seclusion for twenty-eight years and had done nothing to justify criticism. She had expressed a desire to be buried in the church of the Grey Friars at Newgate in London. With the general willingness to find fault in every particular, some historians have surmised that this was due to the reception there of the mangled remains of Mortimer after his execution. There is doubt whether he was actually taken to Newgate or to a Franciscan church in either Shrewsbury or Coventry. In any event, his widow was permitted to remove the body for permanent interment in the Austin Priory at Wigmore in November 1331, a year after his death. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that this was the reason for Isabella’s choice. A better reason is that she would be permitted burial at the Grey Friars in the robes of the order; a precaution against the prying fingers of the devil, whose interest the erring queen had good reason to fear. Queen Marguerite, the second consort of Edward I, was Isabella’s aunt and was buried there, as it was through her munificence that the edifice had been raised. This may have been a reason for Isabella’s desire.

  She had made the request that the heart of the murdered Edward should rest on her breast, and this is accepted as the last evidence of her hypocrisy. Isabella always spoke her mind and did whatever the selfishness or malice in her prompted her to do, but a hypocrite she was not. It seems more reasonable and kindly to assume that after twenty-eight years to think over the past she had a sincere desire to do this much penance.

  Edward saw to it that his mother was buried with proper pomp. The streets of London which the funeral procession would cross were thoroughly cleaned. The body was laid in the choir at the Grey Friars and a magnificent tomb of alabaster was raised over it.

  It is asserted in some careless records that Isabella’s second daughter, Joanna, Queen of Scotland, survived her by a few days only and that they were interred in Newgate on the same day, the two biers being placed side by side at the high altar. A moving picture, surely; but with one flaw. Queen Joanna did not die until 1362, four years after her mother.

  There was little mourning for the deceased queen. If Edward or any member of the royal family attended the services, there is no record of it. The interment was quiet, and this was to be expected, for Isabella of France would be called in history the most wicked of English queens. The best tribute that could have been paid her was that she was not wholly bad. Perhaps—who knows?—a witness to this paused beside her bier to drop a tear to her memory: the little Thomeline who had been saved from the sad fate of so many war orphans and had been sent by the fair queen to London to be raised.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Embers Rekindled

  1

  THE peace with Scotland did not last long.

  Robert the Bruce had died on June 7, 1329, in his castle at Cardross near Dumbarton. There had been some comfort for him in his last days, although he was not to know that the Pope on June 13 of that year issued a bull confirming his sovereignty in Scotland with the right of anointment at coronation. Cardross was less grim than most Scottish castles. It had brightly painted rooms and glass in the windows and a great tester bed from which the dying monarch could look out at the hills of the country he had fought for so long.

  Before dying Robert laid injunctions of various kinds on his followers. They were to swear fealty to his young son David. Randolph of Moray was to act as regent during the boy’s minority. That he chose Randolph and not Douglas as regent was not because of any preference. He had a still more personal and binding duty to lay on the sturdy shoulders of that fine knight whose skill in arms was so great that his face, after a lifetime of cut and slash and come again, carried not so much as a single marring wound. The king had always wanted to go on the Crusades, and this was now impossible. On the Black Douglas, therefore, he laid this sacred duty: he was to go in his king’s stead, carrying the heart of the Bruce to be buried by the Holy Sepulcher.

  For all the leaders of the Scottish people, he left a set of rules and regulations to be used in the defense of the land which became known in later years as Good King Robert’s Testament. These wise directions, which had grown out of all the long struggles by burn and glen, were put into verse by a native bard, the first lines of which ran:

  On foot should be all Scottish war,

  By hill and moss themselves to ware:

  Let woods for walls be; bow and spear

  And battle-axe their fighting gear.

  It was thus made clear that the lessons of war had been truly learned by the great Scot. The mounted knight, with shining cuirass and jingling spurs, would never win Scotland’s battles. It was on the sturdy foot soldier that reliance must be placed.

  The Black Douglas set off gladly to carry out his dead leader’s injunction. That he was unable to do so was the fault of the times. In all the capitals of Europe there was talk of more crusades, but no effort was being made to fight them. The clock of crusading zeal had finally run down and become silent. Douglas could not undertake a one-man invasion but he decided to do the next best thing, to lend his sword in the wars in Spain against the Moors. His eagerness for a clash with the bronzed warriors who had conquered and held a large share of Spanish territory led him to get too far in advance of his troop. The Moors wheeled about and cut him off.

  The Douglas was a great fighting man from the mop of black hair on his brow, which had gained him his name, to the tips of his steel-clad feet. He had, moreover, the fatalistic attitude of most true soldiers. Looking ahead at the jeering, racing horsemen flourishing their curved scimitars in the air, he knew that this was the end. He must go down as befitted the race and the family from which he sprang.

  Unclasping from his neck the silver casket in which the heart of Bruce was enclosed, he threw it far ahead of him into the ranks of the eager Moslems. Shouting in his high, lisping voice, “A Douglas! A Douglas! I follow or die!” he urged his steed against the oncoming horsemen.

  That he succeeded in cutting his way through the van of the enemy was made clear after the battle was over. Pierced by a multitude of wounds, his body lay on the ground above the silver casket.

  Someone has written, “First in the death that men should die, such is the Douglas’s right.” Not the valiant Sir James himself, however. There was nothing vainglorious about him. He did his fighting in the field and not around the roaring fires where men sat of winter nights to recount their deeds.

  The heart of Robert the Bruce was carried back to Scotland by one of the survivors, where it was ultimately buried beneath the altar of Melrose Abbey. The right was granted to the family of Douglas to carry a bleeding heart with a crown on their shields thereafter.

  The peace which had seemed so final before Robert the Bruce died was not to stand against the conditions which now developed. Philip, the first of the Valois kings of France, seemed set on bringing about war with England, and the English were not averse to upholding with their arms the claim of Edward to the French throne. Over all of western Europe hung the gathering clouds of the Hundred Years’ War. Scotland’s treaty obligations with France made it impossible for her to stand aloof; and so it was to start all over again, the marching and countermarching back and forth across the border, the harrying of adjoining lands, while hate mounted again in the people of both races.

  2

  More fighting with the Scots was inevitable but what set the embers to blazing was the appearance in England of Edward de Baliol, son of the John who had reigned briefly over Scotland and who will be remembered best by his nickname of King Toom Tabard. That ineffective man had been dead for many years, and his son Edward had been living on the estates left him in France. The death of Robert the Bruce seemed to present an opportunity for the Baliol claims to be asserted again, and Lord Beaumont arranged an audience at Westminster between King Edward and the Scottish claimant. Baliol, who was as spineless and as lacking in patriotism as his father, offered to do homage to
Edward as his liege lord if he were helped to regain the throne.

  Edward was guilty of a skillful example of double-dealing at this point. Openly he rejected the Baliol offer and declared his intention of abiding by the treaty of Northampton. He even went to the extent of ordering that Baliol’s adherents should be prevented from crossing the border. Secretly he encouraged Baliol to proceed with his plans. He knew the time was ripe for action. King David was a boy and Randolph of Moray, the valiant regent, had died and his place had been filled by Donald, Earl of Mar, who was known to be an indecisive and rather feeble individual. There was in England the nucleus of an army of invasion, the holders of lands in Scotland who had been awarded their confiscated estates by the treaty but had not yet received them.

  With the stealthy connivance, therefore, of the English king, Edward de Baliol got together an army of sorts. As his chief lieutenants he had three brisk noblemen, the afore-mentioned Henry de Beaumont, the Lord Wake of Liddell, and Gilbert de Umfraville. They recruited a force of something over three thousand men and sailed northward from the mouth of the Humber. Landing in Fife, they surprised the army of the Earl of Mar at Dupplin Moor and gave him a sound drubbing. The victory was so complete that the opposition to the Baliol claims broke up and he was crowned as Edward I of Scotland at Scone on September 24, 1332.

  Edward of England had to come out into the open then. He met the new monarch at Roxburgh on November 23 to receive homage as the overlord of the land. Thus young Edward found himself in the same position that his grandfather had occupied on several occasions, the openly acknowledged sovereign lord of Scotland.

  But a Baliol was always a weak reed on which to lean. Edward of that ilk allowed himself to be surprised at Annan by a hastily organized army of Scottish patriots under the command of Archibald Douglas, a younger brother of the great Black Douglas. He was the first of that long line of remarkable men who held the title of Earl of Angus down through Scottish history, including Archibald the Grim, that great old Archibald called Bell-the-Cat, another familiarly known as Archibald Greysteel, and finally that handsome fair-haired Archibald who married Margaret Tudor and became a stormy petrel throughout the reign in England of Henry VIII. This particular Archibald was not an astute general, but he succeeded in smashing the Baliol forces and chasing their leader back over the border. The pursuit took the Scots well down into Cumberland.

  Edward now realized that he would have to take control himself. Declaring that the Scots had broken the treaty (and writing to that effect to the Pope, because he would have had to pay a fine of twenty thousand pounds to the pontiff if he had been guilty himself), he moved with a large army into Scotland. He came face to face with the bold but overly rash Archibald Douglas at Halidon Hill to the west of the town of Dunse.

  The military career of Edward III would seem to consist largely of getting himself into a position of extreme jeopardy, as at Crécy, and then extricating himself by great courage and resolution and the employment of brilliant battle tactics. It was so at Halidon Hill, his first victory of any great importance. He was in peril of being surrounded by the enemy and hemmed in by natural obstacles. East of his army was the sea and Berwick with its Scottish garrison, eager to emerge and join in against him. South of him lay the Tweed, and to the north the army of Douglas, which far outnumbered the English.

  Douglas, overconfident, having learned little or nothing from Good King Robert’s Testament, led his men down over marshy lands to attack the English. Edward had benefited from experience sufficiently to put his reliance in his archers and foot soldiers. The English army was drawn up in four battles, with the bowmen on the flanks; everyone afoot, even the young king himself, who stood in the van. Flushed with his victory at Annan, the brave Douglas charged across marshy land to strike the English all along the line. The Scots ran into a rain of arrows from the English longbows which decimated their ranks. Their losses were so heavy, in fact, that they fell back in a complete rout. The Scottish nobles had led then-clans into the battle. Many of them fell victims to the deadly fruit of the English yew, and it was said afterward that no leader was left to recruit or lead a body of men.

  Berwick surrendered at once. Such of the nobility as were still alive gave in their submissions. David, the boy king, had to flee, reaching France ultimately, where he was welcomed by King Philip. In the treaty which resulted all of Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to England, the counties of Roxburgh, Peebles, Dumfries, and Edinburgh—the whole, in fact, of ancient Lothian. Baliol came back to climb on the throne for the second time.

  At the age of twenty-two Edward III had completed the work of his grandfather.

  Edward de Baliol must have been the original Humpty-Dumpty, for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put him back permanently on the throne from which he kept tumbling.

  The second disruption of his inglorious reign occurred when Andrew Moray, who had been with Wallace in the first days of Scottish resistance, emerged from semi-retirement and took over command of the northern forces. Moray marched through the Highlands and drove far enough south to raid Cumberland, sweeping the inept Baliol before him. It became so difficult to gather up the pieces, stick them together, and take this puppet king back for seating again on this difficult throne that finally the English king despaired. Baliol then agreed to surrender the kingdom into Edward’s hands by delivering to the English monarch a portion of its soil along with the golden crown. In return for this abject betrayal of his country he received a payment of five thousand marks and a pension of two thousand pounds a year for the balance of his life. This weak son of an ineffectual father lived until 1367 on estates granted to him near Wheatly in England. He left no issue, which may be considered a fortunate thing for Scotland, as the old dynastic dispute thus came to an end. It is recorded that he devoted his declining years to the pleasures of hunting.

  CHAPTER VII

  The Great Emergence

  1

  THERE was a man in Bristol in these days, a citizen of modest consequence, having no title and no great wealth and no trace whatever of noble blood in his veins, who nevertheless was destined to have his name more widely remembered down the centuries than all the Plantagenets combined, with all their chancellors, statesmen, generals, and bishops thrown in for good measure. This was because his name had been applied to a most useful article that he manufactured. His name was Thomas Blanket.

  This circumstance is recalled because it is part of the story of an emergence which was taking place in England and equally in all parts of what was called the civilized world. It was not long, a mere matter of a century or two, since men had shaken off the ignorance and lethargy of the dark ages and had begun to look into their inner selves, to paint, to compose, to sing, to inquire into the first elements of science and to demand political rights, above all else to build; to raise high into the sky the most magnificent of cathedrals with the tall spires which seemed a symbol of their desire to reach the truth. Now this emergence was taking a new form. The ways of living were changing and beginning to bear a traceable resemblance to modern conditions. This had started with an expansion of trade and the acquirement of wealth among those who had never known the meaning of ease, the men of business and their workers.

  Some historians are disposed to give much of the credit to Edward III, calling him the father of English commerce. This is allowing him too much praise. Edward, if the truth must be told, took little interest in such menial matters. He was a soldier king, holding fast to feudal rights and feudal wealth, which came from ownership of the land. This new wealth he did not understand, and approved only so far as it provided him with new sources of crown revenue.

  It is possible his marriage to Philippa had something to do with it. It had brought England into closer contact with the lands from which she came, where the stout burghers taught the world a lesson, defending themselves and their walled cities and their weaving machines from the armies, first of France and later of Spain.
Edward began to see the need for England to share more fully in the profits of trade; but of real concern for the prosperity of the common people, he had little or none.

  Consider first where commerce stood in the first stages of Edward’s reign. England’s exports were almost exclusively of raw materials and her imports entirely of manufactured goods, which put her in the inferior position of an agricultural nation. Statistics of 1354 place the exports at £212,338s 5d and imports at £38,383 16s 10d. Wool represented thirteen fourteenths of the export total, and the share collected by the crown was £81,846s 12d, or nearly 40 per cent. It was no wonder that the term “woolsack” was applied in course of time to the seat occupied by the chancellor in the House of Lords.

  It was fortunate for England that she produced so much wool and of such superior quality. Only Spain had anything to offer of a corresponding excellence, and it may have been because of the merino sheep brought to England by Eleanor, the Castilian queen of Edward I, that English sheep now carried such fine wool on their broad backs; that, and the rich grazing lands that the island kingdom had for them. Another reason undoubtedly was the existence of one hundred Cistercian monasteries throughout the country. The Cistercians had broken away from the Benedictines when they saw that the members of the older order were getting lax in their devotions and too hearty at their meals. The Cistercian monk divided his time between his devotions and working in the fields. They were great sheep raisers, and it seems certain that they studied breeding and grading and gradually raised the standards in England. They probably were the first to cross the English breeds with the Spanish merinos. Although they were against the accumulation of property and refused to accept rents or tithes, wealth nevertheless began to reward their industry, as witness the beautiful monasteries they built at Fountains, Rievaulx, Tintern, and Furness. In the larger English monasteries the monks used lay brothers to help in the field work, sometimes as many as three hundred. The lay member was never ordained but lived beside the choir monks, without taking part in the canonical offices.