The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Victory had once more come with very little serious opposition. But Edward had been forced to spend more vast sums: in excess of £54,000 on the campaign, with a further £11,300 spent on building Beaumaris castle on Anglesey between 1295 and 1300. He had also lost precious time in his war for Gascony.

  Time and money were now running pitifully short. Gascony desperately needed reinforcement by the sort of large army that Edward had just redeployed to Wales. Worse, the south coast of England was attacked by French ships in August 1295: Dover was burned and several people killed. But when he reached parliament at Westminster that month, he encountered a maddeningly familiar attitude: about a quarter of the English magnates declared themselves completely unwilling to serve the Crown on an overseas invasion. The thirteenth century’s great complaint rang as loud in 1295 as it had in 1214: Gascony was the king’s business, not England’s.

  Edward was furious. He imposed harsh financial sanctions against those who would not help him pay for the campaign in Gascony, and ordered a fleet of new fighting galleys to bolster his coastal defences. But panic was spreading. As government stuttered, rumours began to circulate that a full French invasion of England was already under way. A knight of the household, Thomas Turberville, was discovered to have been spying for the enemy. Watches were kept the length of the south coast, from Kent to Cornwall, as anxious men and women scanned the horizons for the flags and sails of a French fleet come to destroy the realm.

  In desperation, Edward turned to a tactic that had always served him well in the past. He chose concessions and consultation. At the end of November, he called a vast assembly of barons and bishops, knights and burgesses, men of the shires, and representatives of the towns and cities to a parliament. It was the largest political gathering Edward had convened since he had plotted the Welsh invasion, and he came in conciliatory mood, promising that no one should end up out of pocket on account of campaigning with the king. The writs that summoned the men to what was much later called the Model Parliament appealed to a sense of national danger: ‘The King of France, not satisfied with the treacherous invasion of Gascony, has prepared a mighty fleet and army for the purpose of invading England and wiping the English tongue from the face of the earth.’

  The whole of England, then, was called upon to come and protect the kingdom from the perfidious French. But by the time the country answered the king’s summons and parliament met, the Gascon cause had once again been overtaken by a crisis closer to home. No sooner had Edward restored his rule in Wales than his puppet king John Balliol was stripped of power in Scotland. War with France had once more to be postponed as Edward turned his attention elsewhere.

  His war with Scotland sprang from many causes. Chief among them was the king’s pride. Edward’s desire to put his mark on the affairs of the northern kingdom went a long way beyond the assertion of his legal right. As the muster for war in Gascony began in the summer of 1294, he had issued his summons to John Balliol and eighteen other Scottish magnates to provide feudal military service against the French. The war with Wales prevented the summons taking effect, but it was another example of Edward’s rigour in applying his royal rights in Scotland, rather than allow their simple theoretical existence.

  As Edward grew more belligerent, John Balliol’s position in Scotland grew weaker. A man who could not resist Scotland’s neighbour, concluded the Scottish magnates, was simply not a king. In 1295 they stripped Balliol of power and re-established a twelve-man council to rule the country in his name.

  It was a glaring failure on Edward’s part not to realize that by bullying the Scottish king he had enthroned he would fatally undermine the entire office of Scottish kingship all over again. Perhaps he really could not see the analogy between his treatment of Balliol and the demands being made by the French Crown in Gascony. But Edward’s inability to empathize with the pressures brought to bear on his opponents was the cause of most of the rebellions and crises of his reign. In 1295 he managed to drive together two enemies who would remain in one another’s arms for the following 365 years. In February 1296 the Scottish government ratified a treaty of friendship with France. The Auld Alliance was born.

  The Conquest of Scotland

  Edward’s army marched north towards Scotland in February 1296, with the intention of teaching his rebellious vassal kingdom a painful and lasting lesson for its defiance of his rule and its impertinence in allying with the French. The king’s arrival brought fuzzy border allegiances into focus. The boundary between Scotland and England was a political and not a cultural one – in a zone of changeable loyalties there was no clear and lasting border at which one crossed from one kingdom to another. But if the border was vague, the bloody consequences of war were very real.

  As Edward approached with his army, the Scots began their campaign by sending raiding parties into Northumberland, terrorizing and destroying villages around Carlisle. The English preferred to wait until Easter’s festivities were complete before joining battle. Their first assault was on Berwick-upon-Tweed, a border town in the north-east of England that had been endlessly disputed between the two kingdoms, partly because it was an excellent base from which to launch attacks either north or south, depending upon who held it. The battle of Berwick, like the short, decisive and violent campaign it began, was a savage and bloodthirsty affair, which would live long in the memories of song-writers and chroniclers on both sides of the national divide.

  It took place on Friday 30 March 1296, a month to the day after Edward had arrived in the Scottish borders, and it did not start well. As the tall, white-haired King Edward, not far from his sixtieth birthday, was busily knighting some young men in the customary pre-battle fashion, the sea’s grey horizon was daubed all at once with thick smoke. It was belching from three English ships that had begun the battle prematurely when one ran aground near the town and was stormed and burned by jubilant Scots.

  From this beginning, the battle raged on with fierce violence. The streets of the harbour town were painted with blood as Edward’s army, captained by Robert, Lord Clifford, advanced to the sound of trumpets. They slaughtered the men of Berwick in their thousands, and were later accused by their enemies of having killed women and children too, including a pregnant woman who was said to have been hacked to pieces. The Scots had mocked the English as they made their preparations for war around the town, but they did not mock them once the fighting began. They were ripped to shreds in the streets, the bodies too numerous to bury. Corpses were thrown down wells and tipped into the sea as the town fell to a hideous and terrible massacre. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough estimated that 11,060 were slain before the clergy of the town managed to plead successfully for mercy.

  If it was bleak for the Scots, it was highly satisfactory for the English. After the battle, the English diggers who built a large defensive ditch around the captured town were very cheerful. The ditch they dug was 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep, and the king had wheeled the first barrow of earth himself. It was a symbol of English strength and victory over the Scots, and the workers sang a gleeful song as they worked. The chronicler Peter Langtoft recorded fragments of their verse:

  Scattered are the Scots

  Huddled in their huts

  Never thrive will they:

  Right if I read,

  They tumbled in Tweed

  That lived by the sea!

  This was the manner of Edward’s conquest of Scotland. Edward’s army numbered around 30,000 strong and he marched it through the northern kingdom wreaking death on all that opposed him.

  Mockery and insults flew between both sides. The Scots called the English ‘tailed dogs’, since it was common knowledge in the Middle Ages that Englishmen had tails. But the English had something less fictitious: a sophisticated war machine that the Scots failed utterly to match. After the rout of Berwick, Edward received a message from John Balliol, renouncing his homage in bitter terms. News reports came from other parts of the border region of burning and slaughter i
n the fields of Northumbria. Scottish raiding parties supposedly repaid English atrocities by burning 200 schoolboys alive in a church.

  A point was fixed for the next engagement of the campaign when three prominent Scottish earls seized the castle at Dunbar – an ancient stone fortification that perched on a rocky outcrop on the east coast and had been a castle site since Roman days. Edward sent the earl of Surrey north to besiege it. When Surrey was attacked by forces sent by Balliol, the result was another humiliating rout for the Scots. The three earls in the castle garrison were all captured, along with numerous barons, bannerets and knights. Peter Langtoft wrote that: ‘The Earls [were] sent to the Tower of London … Others [were] sent to different castles two by two, mounted together on a hackney, some with their feet fettered in carts.’ It was a dismal way for prisoners to be transported and a potent symbol of the crushing defeat that Edward was inflicting on the Scots.

  After Dunbar, Scottish resistance melted. The short and largely processional English campaign lasted twenty-one weeks. Edward paraded ceremonially about the kingdom, taking his troops as far north as Elgin and Banff. Much of the Scots’ brittle defence must be ascribed to the weakness of John Balliol, who was strung out by Edward’s efforts to undermine his authority and the subsequent confiscation of state power by the council. In a process that was split over two dates and four locations – 2 and 10 July 1296 at Kincardine, Stracathro, Brechin and Montrose – Balliol was publicly and ceremonially humiliated. His coat of arms was ripped from his tabard, for which he earned the Scottish nickname ‘Toom [Empty] Tabard’. He was sent to join the captive earls in the Tower of London. And most devastatingly of all, Edward’s men took the government records from Edinburgh and all the Scottish royal regalia, including the sacred enthronement stone from Scone.

  The Stone of Destiny was carried south to Westminster Abbey, and incorporated into a special Coronation Chair. Plantagenet power would henceforth be transferred through a piece of furniture containing Scottish kingship’s most revered relic. Instead of installing a new king in Scotland, Edward decided that he would rule directly, as he did in Wales. The heir and namesake of old Robert Bruce, who had confronted Balliol in court for the kingship, had fought in Edward’s army, hoping that an English victory would place him on the throne in Balliol’s place. Now he was contemptuously dismissed. ‘Do you think we have nothing better to do than to win kingdoms for you?’ Edward asked him.

  A gloriously reconstructed Berwick was to be the centre of English power, beginning with a parliament held in the town, at which thousands of Scots travelled south to swear their fealty directly to Edward. A new network of English governance and administration was imposed under the direction of the earl of Surrey. As he handed over the seal of Scotland to Surrey, Edward joked that ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd.’ The Scots had been clinically disposed of. At last, after two years of firefighting, Edward was once more ready to take the fight to France.

  Crisis Point

  Parliament met at Salisbury in February 1297. It met to face a king who was determined that after years of delay and distraction, his war against Philip IV of France should finally be realized. That took money, and money took consensus. ‘What touches all should be approved by all’ was Edward’s new motto when summoning gatherings of his political community. And what Edward demanded at parliaments now really did touch everyone in England.

  The French situation required immediate action. After several years of diplomacy, Edward had stitched together a coalition of northern allies, which had been completed the previous month when the twelve-year-old count of Holland was married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth while the court was in Ipswich. Holland joined the king of Germany, various Burgundian lords and the counts of Guelders and Flanders in coalition, and they could not begin their action against Philip too soon. Gascony was in terrible danger, and on 30 January English forces under the earl of Lincoln had suffered a disastrous ambush and defeat between Bayonne and Bonnegarde. Urgent relief was needed.

  Unfortunately for Edward the parliamentary gathering at Salisbury was hardly one of a realm hungry for further glory to match that achieved in Scotland. Rather, the mood he encountered was one of anger, exasperation and stubborn refusal to cooperate in funding yet another expensive war.

  England was racked by disaffection. Every estate of the country had suffered Edward’s onerous demands for war funding, and by the late 1290s spending had run wild. Even before the Scottish campaign was accounted for, recent war costs had amounted to something in the region of £250,000. Edward had incurred debts of at least £75,000 just in assembling his northern coalition on the Continent; the actual business of campaigning in France and Gascony was going to cost far more.

  Edward’s taxes had therefore been regular and extremely severe. Massive customs duties known popularly as the maltote (bad toll) were levied on wool, driving down the price paid by merchants to ordinary farmers and suppliers. Two heavy taxes had been raised in 1295 and 1296. Since 1294 royal officials had been seizing food and equipment in a programme of forced requisition known as the prise (seizure). ‘Many were the oppressions inflicted on the people of the land,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. The financial exactions had hit the whole country hard. The clergy had been first to refuse to cooperate any further.

  Since the death of Archbishop Pecham of Canterbury on 8 December 1292, the English Church had been led by a new primate: Robert Winchelsea, a top-ranking intellectual and academic with a temper and sharpness of mind to match Edward’s own. Using as his justification a papal bull issued by Pope Boniface VIII, which condemned kings who taxed the Church, Winchelsea led the English clergy into outright refusal to grant Edward any financial assistance for his French campaigns. Edward flew into a fury, declared every member of the English clergy outlawed and sent his officers across the country to seize their temporal property. ‘No justice was dispensed to the clergy … and clerks suffered many wrongs,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. ‘The religious were also robbed of their horses on the king’s highway and got no justice until they redeemed themselves and got the king’s protection.’ It was a minor victory for Edward, but soon he was bedevilled by further resistance.

  At the Salisbury parliament the king asked his magnates to go and fight in Gascony while he led the campaign in northern France. His brother Edmund, who had led an English expedition to defend the southern duchy in early 1296, had died the previous summer. He intended to attack Philip from two points, and this necessarily required a division of his forces. It was a tactic that had been suggested twice before, in 1294 and 1295, and on both occasions there had been pockets of discontent or refusal. Barons and knights could be persuaded to fight alongside the king, but to be sent to fight in a foreign land on their own was felt to be beyond both the call of duty and their legal obligation. In 1297 Edward was faced with mass desertion. Led by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, the magnates put it to him that he had no right to demand feudal military service of them in Gascony when he himself intended to fight in northern France. Bigod’s argument was particularly pertinent, since, as he pointed out, in his office of earl marshal he was obliged to serve alongside the king, but not independently of him. Walter of Guisborough recounted their exchange:

  ‘“With you will I gladly go, O King, in front of you in the first line of battle as belongs to me by hereditary right,” he said.

  ‘“You will go without me too, with the others,” Edward replied.

  ‘“I am not bound, neither is it my will, O King, to march without you,” said the earl. Enraged, the king burst out, so it is said, with these words: “By God, O Earl, either you will go or you will hang!”

  ‘“By the same oath,” replied Norfolk, “I will neither go nor hang.”’

  Bigod had touched the heart of the matter: for all the king’s might and will, he was bound by his own law, which stated clearly that his barons were not obliged to serve without him. Edward was furious, but he pressed
ahead with his attempts to send aid to Gascony and plan a campaign in northern France. He impounded clerical property and called in all debts owed him by the lay magnates. For their part, some of the clergy and four of the most important nobles – the earls of Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – dug in their heels and refused to cooperate with war preparations.

  Parliament broke up in March 1297, and was recalled to meet in Westminster in July. By then Edward had made peace with Archbishop Winchelsea and some of the earls. It was agreed that he could levy a lay tax in return for a reissue of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. On Sunday 14 July the king stood on a wooden stage outside Westminster Hall and spoke to large crowds of his subjects. He pleaded his case, acknowledged that he had made mistakes, but insisted that he acted only for the good of the country. The chronicler Peter Langtoft reports that he told his listeners: ‘I am castle for you, and wall, and house.’ Archbishop Winchelsea stood beside the king in tears, as Edward proclaimed that he was going to France to fight and asked everyone present to swear allegiance to the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon in his absence.

  Not everyone was convinced, and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, who had been dismissed from their pre-eminent military offices of state of marshal and constable of England, remained intransigent. They began to compile a list of grievances, known as the Remonstrances. In August Edward, in belligerent desperation, ordered another harsh tax on the Church and a general levy of an eighth of movable income, and sent out orders for the seizure of £50,000 worth of wool sacks from the country. He claimed that the measures were justified in parliament; his opponents snorted derisively that this ‘parliament’ amounted to no more than ‘the people stood about in his chamber’. On 22 August the opposition earls burst into the exchequer at Westminster, forbidding the collection either of wool or of the eighth and raging against a king who they said was tallaging them like serfs. The country was slipping rapidly towards civil war.