A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (15 page)

The ceremony in Westminster Hall was an empty show – Edward was allowed no more liberty after his release from captivity than his closely supervised father – but it was probably responsible for pushing Gloucester into decisive action. Around this moment he quit the court and went west to his own estates in Wales. Montfort was alive to the danger – this was the same region where the Marchers, having reneged on their promise to go to Ireland, were continuing to cause trouble. Within a few weeks the old earl took his private army of followers, along with Henry III and Edward, and went west in pursuit of his erstwhile ally. His hope was a peaceful reconciliation, and for a brief moment in early May talks with Gloucester seemed to promise such a prospect. But then came the news that a force of royalist exiles, led by William de Valence, had landed in Pembrokeshire – a region under Gloucester’s control. Immediately, the scales fell from Montfort’s eyes. His enemies were clearly in collusion, and a new plot to restore Henry III was already under way.
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Montfort perceived all of this quickly, and moved to Hereford, where he began to make preparations for the expected military action. What he failed to see developing, however, was the most important element of the royalist plan. Perhaps fearing his chances in a fight, the earl seems to have continued to hope for a compromise with Gloucester, and to have further imagined that this might be brokered with the help of his godson. In the last week of May Edward was permitted to receive a string of visitors, including his friends Clifford and Leybourne, as well as Gloucester’s younger brother, Thomas. The extent to which Montfort’s optimism was in this respect misplaced was revealed on 28 May, when Edward and Thomas were permitted to ride out from Hereford in order to exercise their horses. They proceeded to ride each animal, including those of their guards, until all were exhausted. All that is, except one, which Edward promptly mounted and galloped away from his captors. ‘Lordings, I bid you good day!’ he reportedly shouted. ‘Greet my father well, and tell him I hope to see him soon, to release him from custody!’ It was clearly a precisely planned escape. In woods outside the city Edward found Roger Mortimer lying in wait, and together they sped north to Ludlow, where they met Gloucester. There a new alliance was struck. The earl would help recover the kingdom if Edward would swear to uphold its established laws, banish aliens and rule only through natives. Edward readily assented. The manifesto, while crude, preserved the popular demands of the reformers without placing any serious constraints on the power of a future king.
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Montfort was left reeling by his catastrophic error, and watched helplessly as his various royalist enemies – the recently returned exiles, the recalcitrant Marchers – now rushed to join Edward, Mortimer and Gloucester. Against such a formidable coalition, the earl and his small force in Hereford could do nothing. To survive, they needed to move back east, where Montfort could muster more support. Their opponents, however, acted swiftly to prevent such a plan. In June Edward and his allies mounted a lightning campaign to seize control of the River Severn: every bridge was broken and every boat beached on the eastern shore. By the end of the month they had their quarry trapped behind an impassable north–south line, and in July they moved in for the kill. Montfort had no option but to retreat. In the weeks that followed he was reduced to moving his tiny army, and the reluctant Henry III, around south Wales, pursued all the while by Edward and his companions.
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The endgame took place in the opening days of August. The start of the month found Montfort back at Hereford, still trapped, but now hopeful of deliverance. The cavalry was coming. The earl’s namesake son, Simon, had received his father’s call for help and was advancing westwards with reinforcements. Already their approach had forced Edward to move back to Worcester, and the line of the Severn, in antici pation of this new threat.
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Alas, Montfort had not counted on the inexperience of his offspring and the daring of his enemies. On 1 August news reached Edward that young Simon had arrived at Kenilworth, his father’s great fortress in the Midlands, but had failed to ensconce himself safely within its walls: confident that conflict was still a day’s ride away, the intended relief force had camped in the town and were availing themselves of its comfortable beds and baths. This was too good an opportunity for the royalists to waste. Setting off at once with only a cavalry force, Edward and his allies rode through the night from Worcester to Kenilworth – a distance of some thirty-five miles – and fell upon the sleeping Montfortian army at dawn. The rout was not quite total: young Simon saved his own skin by rowing, naked, across the castle’s moat, and others must have had similar lucky escapes. Nevertheless, the raid was a striking success: a great many Montfortian knights were caught napping, and Edward returned to Worcester on 2August with numerous high-ranking captives.
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But by this time Montfort had crossed the Severn. Having seized the opportunity presented by his enemies’ temporary absence, the earl was now camped on the river’s eastern shore. He was, in fact, only a few miles south of Worcester, but Edward, after his exhausting dash through the night, was unable to contemplate pushing himself or his forces any further. Both armies therefore spent an uneasy twenty-four hours resting in close proximity. During this time, Montfort heard the news from Kenilworth, and not all of it was bad. In spite of its losses, his son’s army was still intact. The hope of uniting their two forces therefore remained undimmed, and with this end in mind the earl began to move his army on the evening of 3 August. Marching under cover of darkness, he aimed to give his enemies the slip for a final time. At dawn the next day, which broke around 5 a.m., his forces arrived in Evesham, and there they paused for breakfast.
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Three hours later, their spirits suddenly soared: on the horizon were spotted the advancing banners of young Simon’s army. Their stealthy night-time manoeuvres, it seemed, had been a success. With these reinforcements, they would stand a fighting chance. But then, with equal suddenness, all hope evaporated. From the top of the tower of Evesham Abbey, the lookout called down to Montfort in despair. ‘We are all dead men, for it is not your son, as you believed.’
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It was Edward. The royalist army had not been given the slip at all. On the contrary, they had silently shadowed their opponents throughout the night, all the while remaining undetected. Playing the advantage of surprise for all it was worth, they had advanced the last few miles under the banners captured at Kenilworth two days before. Now, at last, the lengthy game of cat-and-mouse of the past two months was over: Montfort was trapped. Evesham lies in a loop of the River Avon, closed in from every direction except the north, and it was here, at the top of the hill, that Edward and Gloucester lined up their army.
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The old sorcerer had been out-generalled by both his former apprentices, and he knew it. ‘How skilfully they are advancing,’ he exclaimed, before adding, with characteristic arrogance, ‘They learned that from me!’ His only possible escape route was the bridge at the southern end of the town, but there was not nearly enough time to get a whole army across it. The earl and his cavalry might flee and leave the others to their fate, but the loss of prestige would spell the end of his career. In any case, flight was hardly Montfort’s style. Instead, he rallied his forces for a final time and marched north out of Evesham, up the hill, to face his foes. The sky darkened and a thunderstorm broke.
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Montfort’s chances at Evesham were terrible. The element of surprise and the command of the high ground, both so useful to him at Lewes, had this time been seized by his enemies. Once again, his forces were outnumbered three to one. When the two sides engaged, the wide royalist frontline quickly absorbed and enveloped the smaller Montfortian force. Defeat was inevitable.
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So too was death. Well before the first blow had been struck, Edward had let it be known that, on this occasion, the normal rules of chivalric warfare were to be suspended. No quarter was to be given, no surrender accepted. Consequently, as the royalists closed in, the killing began. Montfort’s young knights were dragged from their horses, stripped of their armour and stabbed. At least thirty of them perished in this way, an orgy of blood-letting not seen for centuries. Montfort himself, meanwhile, had received the special honour of a dedicated death-squad – a dozen men, ‘the strongest and most intrepid in arms’, chosen by Edward and Gloucester on the eve of battle, whose sole task was to find the earl and kill him. Yet in the end it was Roger Mortimer, the pugnacious Marcher lord with the personal grudge, who struck the killer blow, running Montfort through the neck with his lance. Others then fell on the earl’s lifeless body, hacking off his hands, feet and head. In a final piece of grotesque savagery, his genitals were cut off and placed in his mouth, and the severed head was dispatched to Mortimer’s wife as a grisly token of her husband’s triumph.
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Amid such brutal carnage, there were few survivors. One man dressed in Montfortian armour had a miraculous escape, but not before he had been wounded in the shoulder. ‘I am Henry of Winchester, your king!’ he cried. ‘Do not kill me!’ Roger Leybourne immediately intervened and saved the stricken monarch, but it was Edward himself who led his father away from the battlefield.
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Meanwhile, all around them, the killing continued to rage. Those fleeing across the fields were cut down as they ran. In the town, too, the streets were thick with the slaughtered. Even those who sought sanctuary in the abbey church were not spared. ‘The choir, the walls, the cross, the statues and the altars were sprayed with the blood of the wounded and the dead,’ wrote one horrified eyewitness. ‘From the bodies around the high altar, a stream of blood ran right down into the crypts.’

‘The murder of Evesham,’ wrote another, ‘for battle it was none.’
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Civil Peace and Holy War

T
he quantity and the quality of blood spilt at Evesham rendered it a decisive victory; the dead can neither negotiate nor stage a comeback. Montfort’s ghost would haunt his killers for some time to come, but his gory end meant that he could trouble them only in the improbable guise of a popular saint. Likewise, the simultaneous dispatch of so many of the earl’s diehard supporters seemed to herald a new political dawn. Edward’s triumph in battle ensured that his father, though physically traumatised, was restored to full and unfettered power. The schemes to limit the king’s authority, begun in 1258 and repeatedly challenged, modified and reinstated thereafter, had also perished. Whatever future the idea of reform might have, it would not be imposed on the Crown by force. God had granted victory to the royalists. Henceforth the monopoly of might lay with Henry and his son.
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It should have been a relatively straightforward matter to transform this military supremacy into a lasting peace. In the end, Montfort had been a man more feared than loved. Even before Evesham his regime had been close to the point of collapse, hamstrung by a lack of genuinely loyal support. When news of the earl’s death broke, men who had been biding their time during his rule came swiftly back to the king’s side. At Windsor Castle the garrison surrendered at once, as did the troops holding the Tower of London. Only at Kenilworth Castle, to which Simon de Montfort junior had retreated, was stronger resistance expected, and even here there was hope for the royalists in the depth of their enemies’ despair. Young Simon had arrived at Evesham too late, but still in time to witness his father’s head being paraded on the point of a spear – a sight, it was said, that left him unable to eat or drink for days.
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The mercy that Montfort had been denied in his final encounter would be the essential ingredient in making a firm peace. If at that instant chivalry had been suspended for the sake of political convenience, it was now imperative that it be revived for the same reason. Edward seems to have been well aware of this. For him, the killing at Evesham, as well as being a means to an end, had also been a cathartic moment. He may not have mourned the passing of his uncle, but he is said to have wept openly for the loss of so many others, including his sometime friend Henry de Montfort, who had died fighting alongside his father. Accordingly, in the aftermath of battle, Edward was minded to be merciful. When several leading Montfortians, including the earl’s former steward, approached him just three days later, he promised them his protection, and assured them that neither they nor their goods would be harmed. They duly agreed to submit, and thus the surrender of two more garrisons – those at Berkhamsted and Wallingford – was secured.
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For such men, the fact that Edward’s concessionary attitude extended not only to their persons but also to their property was crucially important. Disinheritance, more so even than death, was the rebel’s greatest fear, for it entailed lasting shame and the end of his family’s fortune. Consequently it was also the offended overlord’s greatest threat, and one that in 1265 Henry III was in a strong position to invoke. In the immediate wake of Evesham the king had authorised the seizure of all lands held by his enemies. Royalists had rushed from the battlefield to occupy the manors of those who were known, or even merely believed, to be Montfortians. The reappropriation was startlingly swift. In a matter of weeks more than a thousand properties were confiscated.
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