The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

  Simon de Montfort

  Unexpectedly, Simon de Montfort, who had fallen out with Gloucester and gone abroad, returned to England in January 1260 and insisted on a parliament being held in the king’s absence. It met the next month, confirming the Provisions. The council decided that Henry must be under surveillance between parliaments and, besides appointing sheriffs and castellans who were sympathetic to their ideas, set up a committee to oversee his finances. The king complained angrily that they were taking all his powers away.

  Simon was an alarming opponent, a gigantic personality, austere, pious, with unusual histrionic gifts and a brilliant brain – the friend of intellectuals such as the mathematician Bishop Grosseteste and the Franciscan don Adam Marsh, who was his confessor. In 1241 he had so impressed the barons of the Holy Land that they petitioned their absentee king, the emperor Frederick, to appoint him bailli (regent) of the kingdom of Jerusalem, while as Lieutenant of Gascony he had been dreaded by its unruly nobles. He despised Henry, saying he should be locked up in the same way as a famously inept French monarch of long ago, Charles the Simple. ‘I’m horribly frightened of thunder and lightning but, by God’s head, I’m more frightened of you than all the thunder and lightning in the world’, the king once told him.25 What inspired Simon to support the ‘commune of England’ was what he had seen in Palestine, where barons shared power with their king.

  The situation deteriorated. Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, attacked the Marcher lords, while it was rumoured that the Lusignans were invading the West Country and the Lord Edward would seize the throne. Both rumours were false, but the baronial council put London on a defence footing. Henry returned in April 1260, his mercenaries occupying the Tower, and was reconciled with Edward after keeping him at a distance for some days – worried lest affection might blind his judgement. (He said that if he saw his son he could not resist embracing him.) He hoped to have Simon tried as a traitor at a parliament held in July, but Louis intervened on the earl’s behalf. Once again, Simon left England.

  The king’s absence in France had widened the rift between magnates and knights, and Henry began to regain control. In April a bull arrived from Pope Alexander IV, absolving him from his oath to obey the Provisions, while another bull threatening to excommunicate anyone who tried to reduce his authority was read at Paul’s Cross. Henry replaced the justiciar and the chancellor, installed royalist castellans and ordered a general eyre (an investigation by judges) to examine the reforms. He even allowed the Lusignan William de Valence to return.

  There was a violent reaction by the knights, which Simon returned to lead. In August Henry issued a proclamation, complaining that he had been slandered and defending his right to replace officials. In September, when three knights from each shire were summoned to an assembly at Windsor, he told them he wanted peace, and in November he outwitted the earl by promising reforms. Neither side made progress during 1262, despite Simon reappearing at the autumn parliament and Henry being forced to confirm the Provisions shortly after Christmas. In spring 1263 he refused to confirm them again, so at Whitsun Simon once more returned to England. He led an armed rising that ended in stalemate after the Lord Edward reoccupied Windsor Castle. Richard of Cornwall – the ‘King of Germany’ – negotiated a truce.

  A wish for reform remained strong, however, especially among clerics – who warmly supported Simon. So did the Londoners, who in July stoned the queen’s barge as she was being rowed up the Thames from the Tower to Windsor: the mayor had to rescue her. When Simon was trapped by royal troops in Southwark in December 1263 and feared for his life, he was saved by Londoners who let him into the City. After months of sporadic civil war, in desperation both sides asked King Louis to arbitrate, swearing to accept his decision. In January 1264 at the ‘Mise’ (Trial) of Amiens, Louis found in favour of his brother-in-law, who was present, annulling the Provisions of Oxford while stipulating that he must not take revenge. Simon and a number of barons refused to accept the verdict, however, and when Henry held an assembly at Oxford in March they demanded the Provisions, then rose in revolt.

  Since both the King of France and the pope had decided against them, their cause had lost its legitimacy. Supported by the upper nobility, Henry secured the Midlands, capturing Northampton in April. He then marched south, where he was joined by a contingent from the Cinque Ports. En route, during an ambush, the king’s favourite cook was killed by an arrow, and in a rare moment of savagery Henry had 300 captured archers beheaded in his presence.

  On 14 May 1264, at Offham Hill near Lewes in Sussex, Simon de Montfort’s 600 men-at-arms and 4,400 foot soldiers, who had occupied the summit during the night, routed twice as many royal troops. The king had been so confident that he displayed the banner of the ‘Dragon’, ordering his men to give no quarter. However, the Lord Edward weakened his father’s front by an undisciplined charge against the Londoners on the right. According to William Rishanger, he ‘thirsted for their blood because of the way they had insulted his mother, and chased them for four miles’.26 Beaten back after trying to attack uphill, the rest of the royal army disintegrated, fleeing down to Lewes. Simon killed or captured nearly 3,000, mainly foot soldiers. His prisoners included the king, Edward and Richard of Cornwall.

  In June a parliament established a council of nine, chosen by three electors (the Bishop of Chichester, the new Earl of Gloucester and Simon) to direct the king, who could no longer appoint officers of state or household officers without their approval. These measures were confirmed by Simon’s Great Parliament at the start of 1265, which was broader based than any previous assembly, with two knights elected by the shire court of every county and two burgesses from every city or borough. Threatened with deposition, Henry agreed to everything demanded by the ‘Steward of England’, as Simon styled himself.

  Simon’s defeat

  Few barons had attended the parliament, as Simon was jeopardizing their interests by relying on knights and burgesses. They also knew that Henry III was a puppet, a prisoner of the earl. The North and the West never acknowledged Simon’s government, while Queen Eleanor was raising troops in France and the Marcher lords were his enemies. His position improved at the end of 1264 when he forced the Marchers to accept his authority, but just after Easter 1265 his most powerful ally, the Earl of Gloucester, quarrelled with him – arguing that, as a foreigner, Simon had no right to rule England. In response, Simon marched westward, to seize Gloucester’s castles in Glamorgan and obtain reinforcements from Llewelyn. He brought the Lord Edward with him.

  At the end of May 1265 Edward made a dramatic escape from Hereford, using an exceptionally fast horse to outdistance the gaolers who had taken him out for exercise, and reached the Mortimers. Joined by Gloucester’s men, he rode south with the Marchers to confront Simon in a complex campaign of manoeuvres and skirmishes. Surprising and destroying a large body of troops under Simon’s son at Kenilworth, Edward then trapped Simon himself with his army (unwillingly accompanied by King Henry) on 4 August, encircling them in a bend of the River Avon near Evesham.

  ‘God have mercy on our souls because our bodies are theirs’, groaned Earl Simon. During a thunderstorm Edward’s troops killed or captured over 3,000 of the earl’s men after they failed to break out. Simon was among the dead. His followers had wanted the king to die with them. Without a surcoat, his face hidden by a close-fitting helmet, he was unrecognizable, and after being wounded in the neck only just saved his life by shouting, ‘I am Henry, the old king of England – for the love of God, don’t hit me!’27 The earl’s body was castrated by one of the victors, Sir William Maltravers, who chopped off Simon’s head and limbs and nailed his genitalia to his face. The so-called ‘baronial party’ died with him.

  Simon de Montfort had been a hero to many. The poor blessed him for making the law more accessible; the knights were grateful for their summons to parliament and rescue from overbearing magnates. ‘A mighty man, prudent, far seeing’, commented William Rishanger (Matthew Paris
’s successor at St Albans), saying how often the earl was in church, how he always asked monks and friars to pray for him, how he was a close friend of the holy Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste. ‘Once he swore [to observe the Provisions of Oxford] Simon stood firm as a strong pillar, and neither bribes nor flattery could make him join other barons in betraying his oath to reform the kingdom.’ It is odd to find so warm a tribute from the pedestrian Rishanger.28 This flattering view persisted: the Victorians regarded Simon as founder of the House of Commons.

  In contrast, the Osney canon Thomas Wykes saw him as a criminal who plundered the realm and despised fellow barons as ‘fickle and unstable – he never stopped calling them unreliable wretches’.29 To him, they were nonentities, wax in his terrible hands. What makes Wykes plausible is his objectivity. He was as horrified by Henry letting London Jews be massacred in 1263 as he was by Simon taking a share of their stolen goods. Even the earl’s admirer Stubbs writes that ‘If Simon had lived longer the prospect of a throne might have opened before him, and he might have become a destroyer rather than a saviour.’30

  In a parliament at Winchester in September, Henry confiscated 254 estates, which shows how many knights fought against him. Some held out in Kenilworth Castle, so in October 1266 he issued the Dictum of Kenilworth, allowing rebels to buy back their lands for a few years’ rent. (It also threatened to excommunicate anyone who venerated Simon as a saint.) The Kenilworth garrison surrendered in December, but even then a small band went on holding out on the Isle of Ely. When the Earl of Gloucester occupied London in April 1267, demanding fairer treatment of the ‘dispossessed’, he was joined by a few irreconcilables. But Gloucester submitted in June, the Ely men in July.

  Henry’s triumph

  At a parliament held at Marlborough in November, forgetting the humiliations of nearly a decade (and what amounted to an attempt to murder him at Evesham), the king granted the demands of the Mad Parliament nine years before, redressing the knights’ grievances. There were no reprisals, a magnanimity for which he seldom receives credit. The dispossessed recovered their estates, while after paying fines the Londoners were regranted their privileges. Peace was made with Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, recognized as Prince of Wales.

  Henry’s victory had been inevitable as the barons did not want to be ruled by knights. By 1268 his regime was so secure that the Lord Edward felt confident enough to take a vow to go on Crusade. During the two years before he sailed, he was the last of the strong personalities who dominated Henry – no King of England ever enjoyed a happier relationship with his heir. In October 1269 at Westminster Abbey, with Prince Edmund and Richard of Cornwall, father and son carried on their shoulders the relics of Edward the Confessor to his new shrine in the apse behind the altar, although the new abbey church was only partially built. It was the realization of Henry’s dream.

  He died at Westminster in November 1272 after the longest reign England had ever known. As an Angevin he left instructions for his heart to be interred at Fontevrault, but as heir of the pre-Conquest kings he was buried at Westminster Abbey in coronation robes and wrapped in cloth of gold, interred in the tomb he had designed near the shrine of his ‘friend’ the Confessor. The funeral displayed all the elegant pomp that was his lasting gift to the English monarchy.

  Retrospect

  There was no Angevin demon in Henry III. Modern historians have a soft spot for him, a recent biographer discerning ‘a lack of foresight and a basic goodness of heart’.31 The best verdict is still Maurice Powicke’s. ‘When all is said and done, Henry remains a decent man . . . The simplicity which could by turns amuse and madden those who had to do with him maintained him in the end. He got through all his troubles and left England more prosperous, more united, more peaceful, more beautiful than it was when he was a child.’32

  PART 2

  Plantagenet Britain?

  6

  The Hammer – Edward I

  the tall, lithe, sinewy creature described by his contemporaries, fine and attractive, clear and emphatic in speech, uncertain in temper, reasonable in counsel

  Sir Maurice Powicke1

  King of all Britain

  In March 1304 Edward I held a parliament at St Andrew’s ‘where he proclaimed his peace’.2 It was attended by 129 major Scottish landowners, who had been summoned by Edward as King of England, including most of their earls, barons, bishops and abbots, among them the Earl of Carrick – Robert the Bruce.3 Scotland no longer existed as a separate kingdom.

  Until recently Edward I ranked with Alfred the Great in the national myth. There was plenty of the family demon about him when angry, but with his superb physique and dynamism he seemed more like a daemon from Greek mythology – halfway between man and god. We think of him as conqueror of Wales and ‘Hammer of the Scots’, forgetting his role as lawgiver, for he was very much the heir of his great-grandfather, Henry II. The Jacobean jurist, Sir Edward Coke, called him ‘The English Justinian’, and if Edward cannot take all the credit for the law’s progress during his reign, he certainly drove it. Unfortunately, he rarely comes alive in the chronicles because there was no one of Matthew Paris’s calibre to guess at what was in his mind.

  Early years

  Born in 1239, as a young man Edward seemed so unstable that Matthew Paris dreaded how he might turn out. Having been close to the Lusignans, he joined the reformers and Simon de Montfort, then rallied to his father – whoever wrote the Song of Lewes in 1264 jeered that he changed his loyalties as the fabulous Pard did its spots. But when a former supporter of Simon, Sir Adam Gurdon, one of the ‘dispossessed’ who had taken to highway robbery, ambushed the prince in a Hampshire forest, Edward not only worsted Gurdon in single combat, but turned him into a loyal supporter. In any case, outwitting and destroying de Montfort was no small achievement.

  Crusader

  In the summer of 1270 Edward crossed to France, then sailed from Aigues-Mortes to join the Eighth Crusade at the siege of Tunis, where he learned that its leader, his uncle Louis IX, had just died. He sailed on to Palestine, landing at the capital, Acre, in May 1271 with less than a thousand troops. The kingdom of Jerusalem, now a mere strip of land along the coast, was reeling from the attacks of Sultan Baibars of Egypt, a Kipchak Turk who sometimes skinned prisoners alive. All that Edward could do was to lead a few raids.

  Nevertheless, in June 1272 Baibars tried to murder him, using a Muslim whom the English trusted. Coming to his tent late at night when he was alone, the man stabbed him with a poisoned dagger, and, although Edward killed his assailant, he nearly died. The story of his wife sucking the venom from his wound is improbable – more likely, the flesh around it was cut away – but he made a complete recovery.

  When Edward left Acre for Sicily in September 1272, the kingdom of Jerusalem was no more secure than when he arrived, but he had gained enormous prestige. He also made useful friends – Archbishop Tebaldo Visconti, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and Fra’ Joseph de Chauncy, Prior of the Knights Hospitaller of England, whom he made his treasurer. He had learned, too, how impregnable castles supplied from the sea could protect exposed territory.

  In Sicily, news came of the deaths of his five-year-old son John and of King Henry. When the Sicilian king, Charles of Anjou, marvelled that Edward mourned his child so little and his father so much, he answered that he could beget another son but fathers were irreplaceable. At Orvieto he was greeted magnificently by his friend Visconti, now Pope Gregory X. He also received a warm welcome in Savoy from his mother’s kindred, staying at the count’s new castle of St Georges d’Esperance and meeting its architect, James of St George. In France, the Count of Chalons-sur-Marne tried to seize him during a tournament, hoping to extract a rich ransom – instead, Edward captured the count. At Paris he paid neatly phrased homage to St Louis’s son, Philip III, ‘for all the lands I ought to hold from you’.4

  Landing at Dover on 2 August 1274, Edward and Eleanor were crowned at Westminster a fortnight later. As Stubbs says, ‘He had all the powe
rs of Henry II without his vices and he had too that sympathy with the people whom he ruled.’5 The ceremony was attended by the King of Scots, Alexander III, who paid homage.

  The start of the reign

  By now central government was increasingly sophisticated, with the Exchequer for revenue, the Chancery for law and administration, and the Wardrobe for the executive. Edward found the right man to manage these departments, a young chancery clerk from Shropshire, Robert Burnell, who understood what he wanted. When appointed chancellor (in place of justiciar), Burnell established the Chancery court at London so that it no longer accompanied the king on progress. Ignoring Burnell’s greed and scandalous private life, Edward got the best out of him, even if eventually it cost the Crown over eighty manors.

  The upheavals of the 1260s had resulted in a dramatic rise in murder, robbery, rape and arson. Edward’s solution was a team of judges who prosecuted on the slightest evidence of wrongdoing. Accompanied by the judges of King’s Bench, he spent the winter on progress through the Midlands and southern England, finding so much proof of extortion, bribery, embezzlement and wrongful imprisonment that he dismissed nineteen sheriffs. Equipped with a list of forty questions supplied by him, commissioners investigated abuses in each hundred, especially of Crown rights and revenues by local landowners, and of extortion by bailiffs (sheriffs’ officials). Tagged by countless parchment slips with the seals of those who made depositions, their reports – the Hundred Rolls – became known as the ‘ragman rolls’.