Later, he persuaded the Frescobaldi at Florence to lend him large sums, again in return for wool duties, but insolvency loomed. The only hope was taxing his subjects, but he had to secure their consent. ‘After 1215 the next great halting place in the history of the national assembly is the year 1295’, wrote Maitland, referring to the Model Parliament at Westminster in which earls, barons and knights agreed to give a twelfth of their movable goods to pay for war with France, burgesses agreeing on an eighth.14 Yet it is anachronistic to think of Edward as founding parliamentary government – he soon reverted to sporadic bursts of arbitrary taxation.
At the same time, he did his best to stimulate the economy, issuing a new coinage in 1279 and introducing a Statute of Merchants in 1285 that ordered debtors to pay bills on pain of imprisonment or distraint. Aware that Winchelsea, with a bigger fleet than any other Cinque Port, was vanishing under the sea, Edward began building a town and haven in 1283 to replace it, employing an architect who had built fortified towns (bastides) for him in Gascony. Laid out on a grid pattern, it was given seventy huge cellars to encourage the wine trade with Bordeaux.
The deaths of Eleanor of Castile and Robert Burnell
In autumn 1290 Eleanor of Castile fell gravely ill near Lincoln and Edward hurried north to be with her, but she died before he arrived. Heartbroken, he rode with her corpse to Westminster, and later had a stone cross (originally wooden) erected at each halting place. A contemporary translator of Langtoft’s chronicle comments. ‘On fell things he thought and wax[ed] heavy as lead . . . His solace was all [be]reft that she from him was gone.’15
Robert Burnell died in 1292. Three years later his place was taken by Walter Langton, Keeper of the Wardrobe, who became treasurer and Bishop of Lichfield. Even greedier than Burnell, he aroused widespread dislike. Later he was charged with adultery and murder – helping his mistress to strangle her husband – besides being accused of ‘intercourse with the devil’ whose backside he was said to have kissed; but he was acquitted. The king ignored these peccadilloes, regarding Walter as his eyes and ears.
Gascony
Another blow was Philip IV’s abandonment of the family entente. Guyenne (Gascony) had been Edward’s patrimony when he was a boy. He knew it well, having spent 1254–6 there, besides visiting it on his way back from the Crusades. As a French-speaking Englishman, with southern blood from his mother and grandmother, he felt at home there. He visited again from 1286 to 1289, overhauling the region’s administration, improving its legal system, building bastides and exacting homage from its noblemen – many of whom had fought for him in Wales.
The sphinx-like Philip ‘the Handsome’, who succeeded his father as king in 1285, was the most formidable man in Europe; he later bridled the papacy and destroyed the Templars. His forebears had conquered most of the Plantagenet lands and he wanted Gascony too, despite Edward paying homage for it. In 1293 mercantile rivalry erupted in a pirate war, during which Gascon sailors sacked La Rochelle and a Cinque Ports fleet routed a Norman flotilla. Philip saw his chance. Marching into the Agenais and Perigord, he seized Bordeaux, then summoned the English king to Paris for trial as a contumacious vassal.
Still believing in the family entente, Edward sent his brother Edmund of Lancaster, who brokered a peace deal. To show good faith, Gascony’s border strongholds were temporarily surrendered to Philip, who was allowed to station small, token forces in important towns, while Edward would marry Philip’s sister Margaret on the understanding that the duchy was to be inherited by their children. The French king promised to return Gascony within forty days and cancel Edward’s summons to Paris.
However, Philip then occupied towns all over the duchy. War followed, sieges and skirmishes rather than battles, and a campaign at sea, Edward building thirty galleys, each with sixty oars a side. But his army had to be diverted to crush the Welsh rising of 1294 so that most of Gascony stayed in enemy hands. Edward’s next move was an alliance with the Count of Flanders and the Rhineland princes, whereupon Philip withdrew most of his troops to guard his northern frontier. When the Germans did not cooperate, Edward abandoned his plan of attacking from the north and in 1297 agreed a truce with Philip, who five years later – after a terrible defeat by the Flemish at Courtrai – returned Gascony to him.
In 1299 Edward married Philip’s half-sister, Margaret of France. Peter Langtoft says he had hoped to marry her elder sister Blanche, sending envoys to Paris to learn if she was pretty and had a good figure. They reported that ‘in body, in face, in leg, in hand, in foot, no fairer creature could found in the whole world’.16 Sadly, Blanche preferred to marry the Duke of Austria, who was expected to become emperor. But Edward’s second marriage was unusually happy, despite his bride being forty years younger than him. He doted on ‘the lady Margaret in whose least finger there is more goodness and beauty, whoever sees her, than in the fair Idoine whom Amadas loved’.17 When she went down with measles, he warned the doctor not to let her travel before she was fully cured or ‘by God’s thigh, you’ll pay for it’,18 while he was always giving her presents despite her extravagance. Margaret returned his affection, seeing him as a father figure, and nursed him devotedly during his last years. They had two sons and a daughter.
Civil war?
The king grew increasingly autocratic, seizing woolsacks, sheepskins and hides awaiting export, which he released only on payment of a fine. Confiscating all coined money in cathedral or abbey treasuries, he demanded that the clergy pay half their annual income or be outlawed. When the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsey, obtained a bull forbidding clergy to pay taxes without papal approval, Edward again threatened them with outlawry, and they paid.
Throughout the Gascon campaign, his attitude towards his subjects was, ‘I am castle for you and wall and house, while you are barbican and gate’, and they were in duty bound to help him.19 But the lords refused to accept any obligation to fight beyond the seas. When in February 1297, at a council of the baronage in Salisbury, he ordered Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, to cross to Gascony while he himself led a force to Flanders, Bigod declined. ‘By God, earl, you shall either go or hang!’, shouted the king. ‘By God, O king’, Bigod shouted back, ‘I shall neither go nor hang!’20 The council broke up and, joined by Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford and thirty other magnates, Bigod assembled 1,500 men-at-arms at Montgomery before marching to London. There the two leaders declared in July that they would not serve in Gascony or Flanders and would resist attempts to seize their goods. Angrily, Edward took away Bigod’s office as Earl Marshal of England and Bohun’s as constable.
A week later, during a public reconciliation with Archbishop Winchelsey on a platform outside Westminster Hall, Edward tried persuasion. Admitting his subjects might not be entirely happy at the way he ruled, he told the crowd that taxes were needed to defend them. ‘And now I am going to risk my life for you. I beg you, if I return, receive me as you have now and I will restore all I have taken. If I don’t return, crown my son as your king.’21 He then repeated his demands for money. Despite the tears that greeted the speech, the earls produced a document of remonstrance against high taxes. Even so, Edward extracted funds for his expedition, levying a tax on the clergy which they had not agreed. In August, when he joined his invasion fleet at Portsmouth, the earls went to the Exchequer to prevent further taxes being collected and drew up another remonstrance, De Tallagio. Civil war seemed inevitable, but the opposition lacked a Simon de Montfort.
An unexpected disaster came to the king’s rescue while he was in Flanders, when the Scots destroyed an English army at Stirling Bridge. The north country faced invasion and the magnates rallied to Edward. As soon as he returned from Flanders, he made sure of their loyalty by promising to confirm both Magna Carta and the Forest Charter.
Scotland
The king had neither time nor resources to waste on Ireland, where English settlers and native Irish went on fighting without respite, although in 1292 the Anglo-Irish lords granted him a subsidy while he used tro
ops supplied by them in Wales and in Gascony. Crushing Madog and thwarting Philip were demanding enough.
Alexander III, King of Scots had died in 1286 after a fall from his horse. His heir was his baby granddaughter Margaret, the Fair Maid of Norway, and for the moment Scotland was governed by six guardians, who in 1290 announced her betrothal to Edward’s eldest son. But Margaret died the same year. Relations between England and Scotland were friendly, the two previous kings having married English princesses, so it seemed reasonable for the Scots to ask Edward to arbitrate on the ‘Great Cause’ and decide who should inherit the throne.
Although one Scots chronicler thought Edward had already announced his intention of subjugating Scotland, it is unlikely.22 What he wanted at this stage was to be overlord in fact and not just name. Amiably enough, at Norham in Northumberland he met the Scots magnates, who recognized him as sovereign lord while their country’s throne was vacant. The two main candidates, both descended from David I, were John Balliol, a great English baron with a Scots wife of royal blood, and Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale. Edward decided in favour of Balliol, who was crowned King of Scots at Scone on St Andrew’s Day 1292.
Edward’s conditions were unworkable. John had to pay homage as his vassal (in the way he himself did to Philip IV for Gascony), supply troops to fight his enemies and let the Scots appeal to him from their own courts in disputed cases. In 1293 Balliol obeyed a summons to Westminster to attend an appeal by Macduff of Fife against impeachment by the Scottish parliament and, although he refused to discuss Macduff’s case, his attendance angered the Scots. Two years later Scotland was infuriated when, as feudal overlord, Edward ordered King John and twenty of his lords to come to London and serve in Gascony. The Scots responded by giving John twelve advisers, who turned him into a puppet king. Not only did they ally with Philip IV (the start of the Auld Alliance), but in 1296 they made Balliol withdraw his homage to the King of England.
Edward ordered John to meet him at Berwick, storming the city when he failed to appear and massacring 12,000 men and women. Shortly afterwards, the Earl of Surrey routed a Scots army at Dunbar with a single charge. In despair, Balliol begged Edward’s forgiveness, submitting to ceremonial ‘degradation’ at Montrose in July, during which the Lion of Scotland was torn from his surcoat – earning him the name ‘Toom Tabard’ (Empty Coat). Then he was sent to the Tower of London.
In August Edward held a Scottish parliament amid the ruins of Berwick, where the Scottish lords swore fealty to him and were allowed to keep their lands on condition they attended the parliament of England at Bury St Edmunds in November. Edward went home with the Stone of Scone and the Black Rood of St Margaret, entrusting the country to three Englishmen – Surrey as guardian of the land, Walter of Amersham as chancellor and Hugh de Cressingham as treasurer. Edward had united the British isles, claimed an Austin canon at Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire, Peter Langtoft, writing joyfully that it had been prophesied by Merlin. This may have been the king’s view, but it was not that of the Scots,23 especially after Cressingham began levying heavy taxes.
In May 1297 William Wallace, a man of knightly family said by an English chronicler to be already a blood-stained brigand,24 murdered the English sheriff of Lanark. Raising a small army with Andrew Moray, he waited for the Earl of Surrey and Hugh de Cressingham, who marched north in September with 15,000 troops to put him down. When Hugh led the English vanguard across Stirling Bridge over the Forth near Cambuskenneth, they were cut off by Wallace’s 5,000 men and annihilated. (An English source says Wallace had the skin flayed from Cressingham’s body, ‘head to heel’, to make a sword belt.) Surrey fled with what was left of the royal army.
Seizing Berwick, Wallace ravaged Northumberland and Cumberland, burning and killing, while all Scotland rose in revolt. English troops withdrew, only a few castles holding out, although closely besieged. Garrisons who surrendered to Wallace after being promised their lives were massacred. Calling himself Guardian of the Realm, he tried to re-establish law and order in Balliol’s name, but the Scots magnates were afraid to join him.
Although nearly sixty, which was advanced old age, Edward was still vigorous, a commander who slept on the bare ground like his men. Although about to attack King Philip, he hurried home from Flanders, and in July 1298 he confronted Wallace at Falkirk in Stirlingshire with 2,500 men-at-arms and 16,000 foot soldiers. These included archers and a big contingent of Welshmen skilled at pursuing a defeated enemy over rough country. Wallace, with about 10,000 pike-men and as few as 200 horse, adopted defensive tactics, positioning his infantry in ‘schiltrons’ (hedgehog-like rings), which proved disastrous. After routing the enemy’s mounted troops, Edward used his archers to shoot down the pike-men at close range and his men-at-arms finished off the survivors. While English casualties were very low, 5,000 Scots were killed or wounded, although Wallace escaped into the moors and forests.
His place was taken by two joint-guardians, Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick (not to be confused with his grandson) and John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, who fought back with raids and ambushes, avoiding pitched battles. Edward won, however, because of superior resources and merciless determination. He did not see himself as an invader, but as a king asserting his rights over rebels.
Problems at home
Walter Langton at the Exchequer and John Droxford, Keeper of the Wardrobe, raised as much cash as they could from Crown revenues but it was insufficient. When the subsidy for which Edward asked the Lincoln parliament of 1301 was reluctantly agreed, a bill of complaint demanded that Magna Carta be more strictly interpreted and the Forest Laws become fairer. There was also a plea for Langton’s dismissal, which the king angrily rejected. Even so, his subjects supported the Scottish war and there were no more clashes of this sort.
The clergy were another matter. Aware that Archbishop Winchelsey had encouraged the trouble at Lincoln, Edward grew even angrier when he produced a letter from Pope Boniface claiming that Scotland had always been a papal fief and ordering Edward to restore Balliol. Unctuously, Winchelsey told the king to obey ‘in the name of Mount Zion and Jerusalem’, to which Edward retorted, ‘For Zion’s sake I will not be silent and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be at rest, but with all my strength I shall defend my right.’25 Finally, a new pope, Clement V, who as a Gascon was well disposed towards Edward, endorsed his Scottish policy and allowed a further tax on English clergy, calling the archbishop to Rome on a matter of discipline so that he was effectively in exile.
Edward would not tolerate independent minded prelates. In 1304, after giving a post to a papal instead of a royal nominee, Archbishop Corbridge of York emerged from an interview with the king so shaken that he took to his bed and died. When Bishop Bek of Durham, who had accompanied Edward to the Holy Land and been invaluable in dealing with the Scots, refused to accept his judgement on a dispute, the king confiscated his estates.
The monks of Westminster were a nuisance in their own way. In 1303 they helped an Oxfordshire merchant, Richard Puddlicott, and his gang to dig a tunnel into the crypt that held the royal treasure, stealing plate, jewels and coins worth £100,000. The gang were caught and hanged after the objects appeared on the London market. Although spared the death penalty, ten monks went to the Tower.
The final conquest of Scotland
Edward was perfectly sincere when he explained in a letter to the pope that English monarchs took precedence over Scottish monarchs as descendants of the eldest son of the Trojan Brutus, Britain’s first king, whereas Scottish monarchs only descended from a second son. This was clearly stated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae whose veracity was only questioned by a few lunatic intellectuals. No doubt Edward treated with contempt a counter-claim by the Scots that their pedigree outdid descent from Brutus because they descended from Pharaoh’s daughter, Scotia, through her son Erk.
Edward sometimes took part in the campaigns that followed Falkirk. In May 1303 he began a final conquest of Scotland, a military progres
s in strength through Perth, Brechin and Aberdeen up to the Moray Firth. In January 1304, led by the guardian of the realm John Comyn, the Scottish nobility surrendered en bloc, on the understanding their country’s laws and liberties would be as in King Alexander’s time. A parliament was held at St Andrew’s where, instead of threatening the assembly, Edward was at his most diplomatic. Scots who submitted were regranted their lands, while a joint Anglo-Scots committee was to meet at Westminster and plan a new form of government for Scotland. Pope Boniface VIII ordered the Scottish bishops to end their quarrel with Edward. Until now they had opposed him, their envoys trying to persuade Rome of their cause’s justice, but Boniface needed England’s support against Philip of France. Prelates such as Wishart of Glasgow, who for years had striven for independence, attended the St Andrew’s parliament.
Edward intended to rule Scotland in the way he did Ireland. There would be a Scottish parliament, but statutes made in England would be enforced by the king’s lieutenant as they were across the Irish Sea. Petitions (like Irish and Gascon petitions) would be heard by the English parliament. John of Brittany was lieutenant and the Earl of Atholl was justiciar north of the Forth, while Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, was sheriff of Ayr and Lanark.
In July the last opposition ended with the fall of Stirling Castle, besieged since April. A crossbow bolt had gone through Edward’s clothes while riding round the walls and a stone from a mangonel frightened his horse into throwing him. Undeterred, he had ordered his son to strip the lead off the roofs of local churches, to use as counterweights for his trebuchets – siege machines that hurled boulders and Greek fire. When the castle surrendered, he controlled the whole country apart from the trackless Highlands.26
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