A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (12 page)

In making this difficult choice, Edward could not help but be swayed, like William de Valence, by his own self-interest. For over two years he had sought to recruit other vigorous young knights to his banner, and the process of rewarding them had imposed a serious drain on his finances. According to one chronicler, ‘the tongue could scarcely convey’ the sums Edward had spent during the crisis of the previous Easter. His recent tour of the international tournament circuit would have demanded similar lavish expenditure and may have dealt a final and fatal blow. Whatever the precise cause, Edward stood on the brink of bankruptcy in the spring of 1261, and knew that solvency could proceed from only one source. Towards the end of May his decision was made. Following Valence’s example, Edward rejoined his parents’ side.
⁴⁵

For his parents, their son’s defection could not have been more timely. It was at precisely this moment that Henry also welcomed the return of a messenger he had secretly sent abroad at the start of the year. A few days later, the court moved from London to Winchester, and there, on 12 June, the king revealed his true colours. He now held in his hands a letter from the pope, absolving him from his oath to the Provisions of Oxford, and annulling all the initiatives introduced since 1258. The repeated professions of respect for the reform programme made throughout the spring had been entirely duplicitous. Henry declared that he would rule his kingdom as of old, without his council, as he alone saw fit.
⁴⁶

The close coincidence begs an important question: did Edward know of his parents’ dishonest intention before his decision to switch sides or learn of it only afterwards? One chronicler has it that he was disgusted by their conduct and, on discovering that he too had been absolved from obeying the Provisions by the pope’s letter, promptly re-swore his oath to uphold them. Unfortunately, however, this particular writer was rather confused, especially when it came to chronology, and presents the episode as if it occurred before Edward’s defection.
⁴⁷
Another annalist says that Edward was won over by his mother’s flattery, which might also be taken to suggest that he was deceived. Other individuals close to the king were, for certain, taken in by his stance during the spring. Hugh Bigod, brother of the earl of Norfolk, was one such. But as soon as Henry showed his hand at Winchester, such men showed their disgust by rejoining Montfort and Clare. Edward did not do so. Instead, as civil war threatened, he left the country.
⁴⁸

His decision to go abroad at this moment would seem to be the best indication that Edward did indeed feel duped. He could not rejoin the opposition; some of his reasons for deserting them still stood, and he also had to maintain what was left of his pride. At the same time, he was not prepared to assist his parents by fighting against his former allies. As the summer of 1261 progressed, and news of the king’s duplicity spread, the opposition became more potent and more popular. Montfort orchestrated widespread resistance to the king’s government, installing his own supporters in the counties to challenge the king’s sheriffs, and attempting to summon a parliament in defiance of royal authority. Henry and Eleanor responded by planning to bring in forces from overseas; foreign knights were expected to land at Dover in the first week of November. In all of this, though, Edward took no part. As the crisis in England deepened, he went to Gascony and busied himself with the duchy’s internal problems. There is no sign that he raised any troops for his parents. When November arrived he was still far away, attending to a dispute on the foothills of the Pyrenees. As the crisis at home approached its climax, Edward’s continued absence suggests that he had washed his hands of the whole affair.
⁴⁹

In the event there was no fighting in England. War was avoided when the earl of Gloucester, whose alliance with Montfort had seemed improbable from the start, reverted to type and rejoined the king – thanks, it was said, to bribes promised him by the queen. This final desertion compromised the opposition to the extent that further resistance became useless. Those men who remained with Montfort sought terms with the king, drawn in by Henry’s promise of arbitration on the issue of the reform. Montfort himself, however, refused to submit. He had tried arbitration in the past and got nowhere. To obtain satisfaction of his personal grievances against Henry, the earl had to win power over him. That had not happened; the latest round had gone to the king. Deeply disappointed, and accusing his erstwhile allies of breaking their oaths, Montfort left for France, leaving an uneasy peace to settle on Henry’s kingdom.
⁵⁰

And so 1261 drew to a close. For Henry and Eleanor it had been a year of great triumph. By guile and cunning, they had outmanoeuvred their opponents and overturned all the restrictions placed on royal authority. For Montfort, by contrast, the wheel had turned full circle. His refusal (on this occasion) to compromise may have bolstered his image in the country at large, and indeed his image of himself, but it had left him bereft of allies and facing a possibly permanent exile.
⁵¹

If Montfort felt isolated by the end of 1261, so too did his former protégé. One of the most galling developments in the past twelve months for Edward had been the very small number of his supporters that had been prepared to join him in desertion. His closest friends – Henry of Almain, for example – had remained in opposition. The same was true of the Marcher lords, such as Roger Clifford, who had joined his household in 1257 and contributed much to its martial reputation. That winter, as Edward celebrated Christmas and the New Year in Bordeaux, he must have contrasted the festivities with those of the previous year, when he and his friends had stopped in the city midway through their tour of the tournament fields. In spite of the collapse of Montfort’s party and the peace made between the opposition and the king, there had as yet been no rapprochement between Edward and his former supporters.
⁵²

Nor was any rapprochement likely to occur, thanks to the vigorous scrutiny to which his parents had been subjecting his affairs in his absence. In the autumn of 1261 Henry and Eleanor began an audit of Edward’s finances, and attributed the disarray they uncovered to profligacy and peculation on the part of his erstwhile acquaintances. Roger Clifford was one of the men who stood accused. Another was Roger Leybourne, who until the summer had been the steward of Edward’s estates. Leybourne, in particular, was marked out as the chief culprit and charged with repaying the very heavy sum of £1,820. There was more to this than simply righting Edward’s finances after a period of heavy and (quite possibly) irresponsible expenditure. The queen, especially, had never approved of the violent and unruly element in her son’s household; men who (as she saw it) had encouraged him not only in squandering his money but also in his general disobedience. Having succeeded in dividing Edward from their company in 1261, she was now determined to keep them apart by driving further wedges between them. One well-informed chronicler blamed Eleanor for inciting her son against Leybourne and, if this was the case, by the spring of 1262 she had succeeded. In April Edward himself revoked a grant of land that he had made to his former steward some eighteen months before, a sure sign that the esteem that the gift had originally symbolised was now lost.
⁵³

Edward by this time was back in England, having returned towards the end of February. His primary concern seems to have been his parents’ ongoing re-arrangement of his lands and finances. Henry and Eleanor, although they did not try to impose the same strict controls on their son as before, nonetheless took steps that were clearly intended to limit his ability for independent action, at least in the immediate future. In June 1262, for example, they contrived to reduce the size of his landed estate. Edward was persuaded to surrender, for three years, sizeable parts of his endowment, in return for which he was compensated with a slice of royal revenue. Significantly, the major losses were all in England and Wales. His territories in Gascony and Ireland were unaffected, and the intention may well have been to try and confine Edward’s political ambitions to these overseas dominions. England was only recently pacified; his continued presence there might serve as a rallying point for further trouble. As it was, he had little incentive to stay. Immediately after this new deal had been agreed, he returned to France.
⁵⁴

Estranged from his friends, deprived of his lands, and lacking any obvious political purpose, in the summer of 1262 Edward entered one of the most listless stages of his adult life. He did at least find some new companions with whom to share it. Since the winter of 1260 there had been a number of French knights in his household. Edward now increased their number, to the point where new recruits from Burgundy, Champagne and Flanders became the dominant element.
⁵⁵
With this new entourage, he once again took to the tournament field. According to one hostile English chronicler, the new tour began badly, with Edward himself being beaten and gravely wounded soon after his arrival in France. Nothing points to a concern with any more serious pursuits – there is no evidence, for example, to suggest that on this occasion Edward paid a visit to Gascony to attend in person to the duchy’s affairs. It would be unfair to describe his activities as frivolous, but he does appear directionless, cut adrift. Much of the summer and autumn he spent in Paris, to where his parents had travelled in pursuance of their feud with Simon de Montfort. Inevitably the arbitration proposed between the earl and his in-laws failed, collapsing in a blizzard of mutual recrimination. In December Henry and Eleanor returned to England, leaving Montfort angry and unreconciled in his political isolation. Their son, however, did not go with them. He too lingered on the Continent, saying he would come back at a later date. The reasons for Edward’s self-imposed exile also remained in place: he saw no urgent need to hurry home.
⁵⁶

But then he had not heard the latest of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The prince, already impatient for a permanent peace with England, had concluded by the autumn of 1262 that he had been wasting his time. The English had not respected the truces they had granted him; the Marcher lords were attacking his lands. It is even possible that Llywelyn had learned of Henry III’s opinion, expressed in a letter during the summer, that the recent Welsh conquests were illegitimate and must be reversed. Either way, the prince was now angry enough to throw off all restraint. At the end of November he and his army overran the whole of the middle March, raiding and burning into Herefordshire. The Welsh war against England had been resumed on the fullest scale.
⁵⁷
Henry III received this bad news as soon as he landed in England, a few days before Christmas. Already in an ill-humour – an epidemic in Paris had nearly killed him, and had carried off scores of his friends and servants – the king immediately dispatched a petulant letter to his eldest son, chiding him for his complacency in remaining abroad while his lands in Wales burned. This was hardly fair, but then Henry’s barbs hardly mattered: all Edward saw was the opportunity he had been waiting for, a chance to win renown and respect in an arena where he had once been humiliated. On 24 February he landed at Dover, and by the start of April he had arrived in the March.
⁵⁸

But his return had unseen and far-reaching side effects. As in Wales, so too in England: everywhere there was deep dissatisfaction with Henry III’s rule. The king, in restoring himself to power the previous year, had gone too far. Overthrowing his council was one thing; but Henry had also swept away all the good work of reform – the aspect of the Provisions that had proved so very popular from the first. By the summer of 1262 men had begun openly to denounce the royal regime, prompting a government crackdown in response. Henry himself was an obvious target for public reproach, but in his subjects’ eyes the real villains were his foreign advisers. It was Queen Eleanor and her Savoyard circle who were correctly perceived as the principal architects of the king’s return to unfettered power.
⁵⁹

In this general atmosphere of hostility, nobody harboured greater resentment against the government than Edward’s former friends. Roger Clifford, Roger Leybourne and their companions were still incensed at the way they had been parted from their former leader and harassed on the orders of his mother. By the second half of 1262 they were already demonstrating signs of being dangerously disaffected, going about in arms and holding unlicensed tournaments. The country as a whole was combustible, but these desperadoes were the explosive charge.
⁶⁰

Edward’s return lit the fuse. A new war with Wales had given his former friends cause to hope for reconciliation, confident in the expectation that he would need their military services, as of old. But Edward, when he returned, came accompanied by his new associates – the French knights with whom he had taken up during his months of exile. This proved too much for the likes of Clifford and Leybourne to stomach – yet more foreigners coming into the kingdom, reaping the rewards and the favours that should rightfully have been their own. Desperation drove them into direct action. A ready-made banner was to hand in the form of the Provisions of Oxford – a scheme concocted in part to rid the land of undesirable foreigners. All they lacked was a leader, but the obvious candidate was not far to seek. On 25 April, in response to their call, Simon de Montfort returned to England.
⁶¹