The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  From Imprisonment to Evesham

  The year 1264 was the lowest point that the Plantagenet dynasty had reached. After the battle of Lewes, the king was disempowered. Queen Eleanor was exiled, plotting unsuccessfully in France to raise an invasion force to retake the kingdom. The Lord Edward, Henry of Almain and Richard earl of Cornwall were imprisoned at de Montfort’s pleasure. England remained unsettled, violent and poorly ruled. Civil war continued to flare in the aftermath of Lewes, and the chronicles of the time teem with stories of the countryside burning, castles besieged and the coasts guarded for fear of foreigners arriving to plunder the fractured land.

  De Montfort did not – could not possibly – find his form of quasi-kingship a straightforward affair. He was a private lord attempting to take control of a public office. Although he controlled the king and the Great Seal, his mandate to govern came from defeating his own lord in battle. He was by his very nature a divisive figure. Edward had forged close personal bonds with the Marcher lords – men like Sir Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Roger Clifford and Roger Leybourne – and all were set implacably against de Montfort’s rule. Their numbers soon began to grow as the angry young nobles who had fought with the earl at Lewes slowly began to drift away. In the aftermath of victory they found that a de Montfort administration solved nothing. Government was just as partisan, if not more so, as it had been when Henry was in league with the Lusignans. Whether in the name of imposing security or aggrandizing his family, Montfort divided the spoils of victory unfairly, awarding to himself and his sons Simon the younger and Henry lands, territories and castles taken from the royal party.

  Most aggrieved by this was Gilbert de Clare, the twenty-year-old earl of Gloucester. Clare had been deprived of his inheritance during the king’s resurgence in 1262, which had driven him into rebellion with de Montfort in May 1263. He had fought with huge distinction on the rebel side at Lewes, and was rewarded with a role in government that befitted the massive landed power that the Gloucester estates gave him throughout England. Yet Gloucester soon developed deep reservations about de Montfort’s autocratic rule. He disapproved of his use of foreign knights, and he had particular reservations about keeping Edward in prison at Dover castle and, subsequently, Wallingford. De Montfort attempted to allay these concerns by releasing Edward from physical captivity in March 1265, but he did so with prohibitively onerous conditions: Edward was deprived of most of his royal lands, which were grabbed by the de Montforts; furthermore, although he was no longer to be locked in a castle cell, he remained sentenced to perpetual escort by de Montfort’s son Henry. By the beginning of 1265 Gloucester and many others like him began to fear that the de Montforts had designs on far more than reform of the realm: they were thought now to be aiming at the Crown itself.

  In February 1265 Gloucester left Montfort’s court and travelled west to his Welsh estates, claiming that they were being ravaged by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. He refused to attend a tournament in April, and by the end of May it was clear that he had abandoned de Montfort’s cause entirely and had begun plotting with the loyal Marcher lords to free Edward to advance the Royalist cause.

  On 28 May, Edward, who had been permitted visitors under the more relaxed conditions of his supervision order, went riding at Hereford, in the heart of Marcher country. He was accompanied as usual by his minder-cum-jailer Henry de Montfort, but the group of knightly friends that joined him also included Gloucester’s younger brother Thomas de Clare. Edward left for the expedition in a buoyant mood, as if all the problems that beset him and his dynasty lay light on his shoulders. As the young men rode, they began to play a game: each was allowed to try out every horse, to determine which of the animals was the fastest.

  As amusing a game as this was, it had a more practical purpose: it allowed Edward to find the mount best suited to a dash for freedom. When he found it, he lost no time. Digging his heels into its side he shouted to his captors: ‘Lordings I bid you good day! Greet my father well, and tell him I hope to see him soon and release him from custody!’ And with that, he galloped expertly into the distance, accompanied by a handful of friends who were in on the plan. They picked up Edward’s Marcher ally Sir Roger Mortimer, who was hiding in the woods nearby. Together they rode to Mortimer’s castle at Wigmore, then on to Ludlow, where he met Gloucester and swore to him that if they could rid the realm of de Montfort, he would restore good old laws, abolish evil customs, expel aliens from the realm and entrust government to native Englishmen. This promise was almost exactly what the barons who had stormed into his father’s presence at Westminster in 1258 had demanded. Finally, Edward had found his middle ground.

  The accord between Edward and Gloucester formed the basis of a new royal coalition, composed of returned royalist exiles under William de Valence and the Marcher lords who had never seen de Montfort’s rule as much more than another version of Hubert de Burgh or Peter des Roches’s grasping administrations. They would fight on their own territory: the Marches. As de Montfort scrambled for an army to resist the resurgent royalists, Edward’s men set up their defences. They destroyed every crossing to the Severn, limiting the field of battle by cutting off most of England and trapping de Montfort on the western, Welsh, bank.

  Throughout the summer, a showdown loomed. De Montfort, who still held Henry III, was chased around Wales by Edward’s army; the earl played for time, requesting foot soldiers from Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, while his son, the younger Simon de Montfort, raised a reinforcing cavalry from the east. But the de Montforts were on the defensive, pursued by a coalition renewed in its vigour by the presence of the bellicose prince.

  On 1 August the royalists attacked the younger Simon at Kenilworth. The army was billeted in the great Midlands fortress, while Simon himself lodged in the nearby priory. Believing that Edward’s men were at a safe distance in Worcester, Simon’s men were unprepared for attack. They did not realize that Edward and Gloucester had spies among them, including a female transvestite called Margoth. At dawn, while the Montfortians were either sleeping – or in Simon the younger’s case, awake but not yet dressed – hoofs sounded outside the priory. Simon saved his skin by rowing naked from the scene of the assault and taking refuge in the castle. Many of his knights showed no such improvisational nous. They, along with their banners, were captured by the royalists.

  When the elder de Montfort heard that his son’s reinforcements had been attacked, he was shaken. A crisis was now imminent. There was a scramble to unite the two branches of the Montfortian army and to escape the territory in which Edward and Gloucester had the earl penned. De Montfort finally found a place to ford the Severn, and pushed east towards Worcester. Edward’s army was no more than a few miles away. On the night of 3 August de Montfort moved once more, this time south to Evesham.

  On 4 August they paused for breakfast at Evesham Abbey, positioned in a loop of the river Avon. Above them, the skies were dark and pregnant with rain. A thunderstorm was brewing. A lookout was stationed on the tower, watching through the gloom for the approach either of Edward, or of the younger Simon’s army. Three hours after dawn, the cry went up from the ground. Simon the younger’s banners had been spotted in the distance. The day was saved.

  Or was it? From high in the tower, the lookout shouted fatal news: this was not Simon approaching, but Edward’s army, marching under the banners stolen at Kenilworth.

  De Montfort raced to the lookout tower to watch Edward’s men approach, red crosses pinned to their armour in imitation of the white crosses worn by the rebel army at Lewes. Impressed by their discipline and the well-drilled advance, the earl declared in typically grand style: ‘By the arm of St James, they are advancing well. They have not learned that from themselves, but were taught it by me.’ This was not simply the arrogance of a commander; de Montfort knew that he was outmanoeuvred, and was shortly to be beaten.

  Escape was impossible. On the south bank of the Avon, Mortimer led a detachment that blocked escape via the bridge. Trapped in the river’s loop, d
e Montfort’s men watched as Edward’s army moved into their positions, commanding the high ground of Green Hill, to the north of the abbey. De Montfort’s men faced the royalists defiantly. They were outnumbered by three to one. Their only chance was to rely on the fact that they had King Henry at their centre, and hope that this inspired some caution among Edward’s men. Everything, now, came down to this. De Montfort and his men awaited the descent of Edward and Gloucester.

  They did not have to wait long. As the thunderclouds broke above them, and a violent storm drenched the battlefield, Edward’s men attacked.

  Both sides fought conspicuously bravely, in cold, soaking conditions. De Montfort threw himself into the fight with as much aggression as he had shown at any time during his long career, but the numbers, combined with the superior generalship of Edward and Gloucester, overwhelmed him. He watched as his young knights were dragged from their horses and stabbed to death. His son Henry was slaughtered, and his son Guy captured. The king, whose armour identified him as a Montfortian, was wounded, but lived as he bellowed his name to the knight who would have killed him.

  There would be no reprieve for de Montfort himself. A twelve-man hit squad stalked the battlefield, independent of Edward’s main army, their sole aim to find the earl and cut him down. It was Roger Mortimer who found him. His lance juddered into the earl’s neck, killing him where he stood. The body was then mutilated in sickening fashion. News reached the mayor and sheriffs of London that ‘the head of the earl of Leicester … was severed from his body, and his testicles cut off and hung on either side of his nose; and in such guise the head was sent [as a trophy] to the wife of Sir Roger Mortimer at Wigmore Castle. His hands and feet were also cut off and sent to divers places to enemies of his, as a great mark of dishonour to the deceased; the trunk of his body, and that only, was given for burial in the church of Evesham [abbey].’ Within weeks, a rather improbable cult of sainthood had grown up around de Montfort’s grave, and miracles were reported stemming both from the earl’s burial site and the battleground where he was slain.

  At the end of the day the battlefield lay strewn with high-born cadavers, proud men lying dead in the summer rain. De Montfort, his son Henry and key rebel allies such as Henry Despenser, Ralph Basset and Peter de Montfort were all killed. Many more were captured and wounded. The king had been returned, joyfully, to his son Edward, and was sent for recuperation in Gloucester and Marlborough castles, where he busied himself with the typically Henrician business of restoring altar-plates.

  Power in England, meanwhile, passed to yet another quasi-king. This time, however, it was a man of the blood royal. The Lord Edward, who had for so long swung between the competing factions in England’s mid-century crisis, now moved closer than ever before to the political centre. He was not king yet, and nor was he even unquestionably the dominant voice in English government. But the heir to the throne had proven himself, during the fourteen months that divided Lewes and Evesham, to be a pragmatic politician and a fierce soldier.

  The Leopard

  The young prince who moved into the spotlight during the 1260s was considered an enigma by many of his contemporaries. He had grown up in the country, and had been intimately involved in the political turmoil of his father’s reign. While some men thought he had performed with valour, others considered him an odious, treacherous turncoat. Matthew Paris on the one hand wrote that ‘Edward was a man of lofty stature, of great courage and daring, and strong beyond measure,’ but there were also notorious stories of a foolish youth whose supporters invaded priories at Wallingford and Southwark without permission, mutilated strangers they passed in the road, and stole food from the ordinary people of England; a prince who was glamorous and fond of the tournament but by instincts frivolous and cruel.

  Edward was physically very striking. Although he had been a sickly child, as an adult he stood a clear head above his fellow men – at 6' 2" it is clear why he would later be nicknamed ‘Longshanks’ by the Scots. He was broad and powerful, his physique a testament to many long hours spent on the tournament field, where he had competed since he was seventeen. He had been married at fifteen to Eleanor of Castile, two years his junior, and would prove both a virile father and a doting husband. Although his blond hair no longer attested to the Plantagenet inheritance of Henry II, his droopy eyelid, inherited from his father, was an unmistakable family badge. Thanks to his eccentric father, Edward had been named after one of his ancient ancestors: St Edward the Confessor. In temperament he was a ferocious soldier: rather like his famous great-uncle Richard the Lionheart, whose image was painted all over the palaces and hunting lodges of Edward’s childhood. He had the Plantagenet temper in perhaps its most potent form. It was said that in a fit of rage he once literally frightened a man to death. He was a brave and skilful fighter and a competent battlefield commander. He had shown during his escape from the de Montforts and on the path to Evesham that he was an inspiring leader of men as well as a vengeful conqueror, who would not hesitate to impose brutal violence on the vanquished.

  His reputation, then, was mighty but not wholly enviable. Edward’s slippery course through the political crises preceding the Barons’ War had earned him a reputation as a shifty politician. That he had flipped his allegiance numerous times in the struggles between his father’s party and the reformers was less about duplicitous malice than about the profound political confusion that was caused by his closeness both to his mother’s Savoyard relations and his father’s Lusignan favourites; nevertheless it would not be easily forgotten. During the course of the war he had frequently broken his word in order to wrest political or military advantage, and had done so on famous occasions. At the siege of Gloucester in 1264, a landmark engagement on the way to Evesham, he had relied on the chivalry of a surrounding rebel army to escape imprisonment, then promptly broken a sworn truce to hold the town’s citizens to ransom.

  The young Edward was therefore known both to his supporters and his detractors not as a lionheart, but as a leopard: fierce but changeable. A song written in praise of him around the time of his coronation described him as ‘warlike as a pard, sweet as a spikenard’. And the author of the pro-Montfort ‘Song of Lewes’ elaborated on the theme: ‘He is a lion by his pride and ferocity; by his inconstancy and changeableness he is a pard, not holding steadily his word or promise, and excusing himself with fair words …’

  The first demand placed on Edward following the victory at Evesham was to aid in the process of healing his father’s divided realm. Evesham might have killed and scattered the Montforts, but the realm was still in a state of civil war, and the role of men like Edward, his brother Edmund and loyalists such as their cousin Henry of Almain would be vital in re-establishing royal governance. Their task was not to be an easy one. Pockets of rebellion existed all over the country. And in September 1265, Henry III made a highly divisive statement at a Winchester parliament, declaring that all Montfortian rebels were to be permanently disinherited, and their land distributed to men who had proven their loyalty to the Crown.

  A student of his own family’s history would have pointed Henry III towards his grandfather Henry II’s contrasting efforts to cauterize the wounds of the Shipwreck in the 1150s, or even the Great Revolt of 1173–4. Then the Plantagenet patriarch had settled his troubled realms by offering justice, peace and reconciliation to the barons who had defied him, not permanent exile to the defeated parties. Henry III now did the opposite: he refused to re-accommodate those who had rebelled. This ruined nearly 300 families in a stroke. Rather than settling the realm, it merely encouraged disaffection among the losers and revenge among the royalists, which in turn prolonged the war against Henry’s rule.

  Edward’s part in the aftermath of Evesham was characteristically ambiguous. He had wept after the battle at the loss of so many lives, and in the days that followed he acted with clemency when leading Montfortians approached him begging not to be disinherited for their part in the rebellion. Yet despite his better instinct
s, when Henry III announced the terms of revenge on the Montfortians, Edward and his supporters opened their arms for reward and the prince was by his father’s side for much of the questionable retribution that took place during the autumn of 1265. In London, he accepted a share of the spoils when Henry ruthlessly dispossessed disloyal citizens: a number of Edward’s supporters received rebels’ confiscated houses and Edward took custody of the mayor.

  As land and property changed hands across England, many of the dispossessed rebels found themselves quite literally in the woods, living outdoors in guerrilla bands that would have resembled those from the popular ballads of Robin Hood. The main centre of Montfortian resistance was at Kenilworth castle, but before the royalists could make a full attack, they had to bring the rest of the country under control. By Christmas 1265 pockets of revolt were breaking out all over England and Edward was kept on the move helping to snuff out the flames of resistance. The distressed rebels had come to be known as the Disinherited, and as Edward took charge of numerous operations against them, he came to realize that conciliation was a more powerful tool than sheer bloody-minded aggression. In December he found one group of rebels camped out in the marsh-lands of Axholme in Lincolnshire, and convinced them to surrender without bloodshed. Joining Roger Leybourne in subduing the Cinque Ports in the new year 1266, Edward tempered his ally’s capable but violent siegecraft with promises of pardons and liberty in exchange for submission.

  Unfortunately, Edward was swimming against a powerful tide, dragged by Henry III’s misguided desire for revenge. By Easter 1266 there were rebellions across a central belt of England, from East Anglia to the Midlands, and military action once again became the only feasible solution. Towards the end of May, at Alton Wood in Hampshire, Edward crowned a victory over a rebel band by fighting their leader Adam Gurdon – an experienced knight – in single hand-to-hand combat. Although the political significance of this duel was limited, it became one of the more memorable events of the civil war. The two men did battle in a forest clearing, watched by Edward’s supporters, who were cut off from him behind a ditch. The tale of this impossibly glamorous fight was embellished during later years, and it was said that Edward had been so impressed with Gurdon’s martial skill that he had given him favour and fortune once the fight was over. The truth is that Edward beat Gurdon into submission, hanged his rebellious friends, then gave the defeated knight to his mother the queen, from whom Gurdon had to buy back his freedom and possessions at an onerous price.