A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (35 page)

So it was that, three months later, Edward and Eleanor crossed the Channel and travelled to the northern French city of Amiens in order to meet with King Philip. It was a timely rendezvous in more ways than one. A few weeks earlier, news had arrived in England of the death of Eleanor’s mother, Joan of Dammartin. Joan, although a former queen of Castile, was not herself Castilian. She originally hailed from France, and it was to France that she had returned in 1254, to rule the small county of Ponthieu, which belonged to her by hereditary right. Now, by the same right, the county passed to Eleanor, who was able to do homage to Philip III at Amiens, and visit the newly acquired lordship, which lay nearby. As for the main purpose of the visit – the very necessary clarification of Franco-Gascon relations – this was a resounding success. Philip made significant concessions on several scores, but none more so than by his agreement to cede the Agenais. This large and prosperous swathe of territory, lying on Gascony’s eastern border and centred on the city of Agen, was due to Edward under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, and had been his chief demand during the past five years. The French king’s readiness to let it go was testimony to the hard work of Burnell and Grandson, but it also proved that the warm personal relations achieved between Henry III and Louis IX were being carefully maintained by their sons. The meeting at Amiens was a diplomatic triumph. The two courts came together in feasts and banquets, tournaments and jousts, as well as high religious ceremonies in the city’s cathedral.
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Edward returned to England just in time for his fortieth birthday; such celebrations as there were must have taken place at Dover Castle. One wonders if the anniversary and the location gave him pause to take stock. It was almost five years since his last landing at Dover, when he had returned as a new king to take up his father’s crown and to confront a host of problems, the roots of which in some cases stretched back a generation or more. Five years on, and most of those problems had been solved. In England, royal authority had been restored, political and provincial unrest quietened, and the Crown’s finances placed on a new and secure footing. In Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been reduced to obedience, his inflated principality torn down to its proper size. Gascony, thanks to the king’s friends, was now at peace, and relations with France were in an excellent state.
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For the first time since his boyhood, Edward discovered he had little to do. In the months after his return from Amiens there was no urgent business to be getting on with. Indeed, if we consider the four-year period after the war with Wales, 1278–81, as a whole, we see a remarkably regular pattern. Parliaments meet every Easter and autumn, without fail and without controversy. By providing an outlet for his subjects’ grievances, Edward had ensured that they did not mount up. There were, of course, some disagreements. The new archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, who replaced Robert Kilwardby in 1279, brought an earnest desire for reform to his role that to some extent set him against royal interests and antagonised the king. But the dispute, such as it was, did not impair relations between the two men, let alone more general relations between Church and State. It was a measure of the clergy’s goodwill that in 1280, having resisted the request since the start of his reign, they finally obliged Edward with a grant of taxation.
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Similarly, the king’s resumption in 1278–79 of his investigation into the rights and liberties that went with landholding gave some concern to his lay magnates. Yet an examination of the witness lists to Edward’s charters shows that all his earls, and other great men besides, continued to attend his court, and not just when parliament was in session. The king was firm with his magnates, as he was with his prelates, but he remained friendly with both, and did not make his father’s mistake of alienating either group.
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And as for Edward himself: never was he more leisured. An examination of his itinerary in this period shows him devoid of any major political agenda. It was seemingly for want of anything better to do in the summer and autumn of 1280 that he embarked on a tour of northern England, taking in Carlisle, Newcastle, Durham, Lincoln and York. In January 1281 he travelled to East Anglia to visit his preferred places of pilgrimage. Edward remained, at forty, as vigorous as ever. On several occasions during these years we catch him on what are evidently hunting trips, in Essex, Northamptonshire and the New Forest. And even when he was in Westminster, it cannot have been all business. At least some of his time there must have been spent enjoying the new Royal Mews that he had established at Charing (the site on which Trafalgar Square now stands). Arranged around a garden courtyard, complete with an elaborate ornamental bird bath at its centre, this home for his hawks and their keepers must have afforded the king many hours of pleasure. Of all his various pastimes, falconry was clearly the favourite.
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The leisured lifestyle of the queen in these years is also evident. For the most part Eleanor’s interests, like her itinerary, overlapped with those of her husband. She too, for example, liked to hunt, though she used dogs rather more than he did, and she probably preferred the bow whereas he reportedly favoured the sword. Something more of Eleanor’s individual tastes can be gleaned from the accounts of her estate management. The occasional purchase of citrus fruits and olive oil from overseas merchants suggest the appetites acquired in childhood were not wholly forgotten. Similarly, her employment of two Spanish gardeners at her manor of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire (visited several times in 1280– 81) and the creation there of ditches and wells may imply an attempt to reproduce in England the kind of water gardens favoured in southern Castile. Perhaps most evocative of royal tastes, however, is the way in which the king and the queen together transformed Leeds Castle in Kent. Acquired by Eleanor in 1278 and rebuilt with her husband’s help in the years that followed, Leeds became a veritable pleasure palace (an aspect it retains today, despite considerable modern alterations). The inclusion of a bath for the king may hint at another attempt to recreate something of that same Spanish style in balmy Kent, but the castle’s most notable features – its wide moat and its isolated ‘gloriette’ of privy apartments – indicate that Edward and Eleanor’s tastes were chiefly informed by their shared love of romance and fantasy.
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These easy days would have allowed both the king and the queen to spend more time with their children. Since her return to England, Eleanor’s relentless round of pregnancies had continued: new and lasting additions to the royal nursery in the late 1270s came in the shape of Margaret (b. 1275) and Mary (b. 1279). Edward’s visits to Windsor and Woodstock, while by no means rare, remained occasional, so neither baby daughter would have seen much of their father, nor perhaps their mother. But the same was not necessarily true of their older siblings. By the end of the decade, Eleanor (b. 1269), Joan (b. 1271) and Alfonso (b. 1273) would have been old enough to accompany the court as it travelled, at least for short periods, and certainly able to join their parents for Christmas, Easter and other festivities.
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Perhaps, therefore, it was with his family that Edward paid his mysterious springtime visits to Gloucestershire. From 1278 until 1282, and always in the month of March, the king spent an average of two to three weeks each year at Quenington and Down Ampney, two manors in the neighbourhood of Cirencester. Since these visits had no discernible purpose, political, religious or otherwise, the assumption is that they too were a luxury afforded by the relative calm of these years, a regular period of relaxation in a rural locale for a king and queen whose tastes, when given free rein, tended towards escapism.
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Such freedom could not last forever. It was just after leaving Down Ampney in March 1282 that Edward began to receive urgent messages from every corner of Wales.

While Edward’s existence had become increasingly easy, Llywelyn’s life had become correspondingly hard. Publicly, the post-war relationship between the two men had been all smiles and handshakes; privately, the prince felt unduly put upon. On the day of his wedding, for example (a spectacle already contrived in part for English amusement), Llywelyn, so he later alleged, was ‘compelled by fear’ into making additional written concessions to the king, in contravention of their earlier peace agreement.

Further indignities and irritations had followed. Llywelyn’s messengers were arrested without reason at Chester; his huntsmen were maltreated by the king’s men near Aberystwyth. Most trying of the prince’s patience was his legal effort to recover a strip of territory on his south-eastern border (Arwystli) from his old adversary, Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. The case, Llywelyn contended, should be decided by Welsh law. Not so, said Gruffudd: English law should apply. Edward, in his capacity as supreme judge, responded by ordering one inquiry after another, repeatedly adjourning his decision, but always obliging the prince to jump through the tangled loops of English judicial procedure. After four years of pleading, Llywelyn had achieved nothing, and it was beginning to tell on his patience. Once a great man, he knew the war had made him small, but latterly he had been made to feel it.
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And yet, irritating though the prince’s experiences undoubtedly were, they were nothing compared to the oppressions being endured elsewhere in Wales. New English castles thrusting their way skywards; intolerant English administrators trying to govern their districts in line with their own notions of normality: outside of Snowdonia, the Welsh were suffering on an altogether different scale. Indeed, that they ‘were treated more cruelly than the Saracens by the king’s bailiffs and other royal officers’, was one later complaint. To the men of the north-east it was a throwback to the worst days of the 1250s, when Henry III had imposed a similar regime on the Four Cantrefs. To their countrymen in south and west Wales, it was domination of a kind they had neither experienced nor anticipated. Life under Llywelyn had seemed taxing at the time, but now, with the advent of English officialdom, the prince’s rule was assuming the retrospective aspect of a golden age.
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We scarcely need to look for specific reasons for such oppression. Edward was in general terms anxious to avoid his father’s mistakes; he did not set out deliberately to provoke Wales, its inhabitants or its prince. Nor, in all probability, did the men whom he appointed to administer his conquests. But both the king and his lieutenants were conditioned from birth to regard the Welsh as an inferior race. If they preferred to conduct business along English lines, it was because those lines were to them self-evidently more sensible than the backward and barbarous ways of a people whose language, habits and culture they could not comprehend.

Nevertheless, specific reasons did exist. Just as Llywelyn felt belittled by Edward, so Edward felt antagonised by Llywelyn. From the king’s perspective, it seemed that the prince was engaged in a deliberate attempt to test the limits of their peace agreement, and was trying to force him into a judgement that would damage the rights of his Crown. When Llywelyn reactivated his plea for Arwystli in the autumn of 1281, Edward’s patience – febrile at the best of times – seems to have snapped. He responded by removing the justiciar of Chester and replacing him with the hard-liner Reginald de Grey. The result was an immediate intensification of the English grip on north-east Wales.
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This change had little direct impact on Llywelyn, ensconced as he was in Snowdonia. It did, however, affect his younger brother. Dafydd ap Gruffudd, prickly by nature, already considered himself a man hard done by. The English failure to cross the Conwy in 1277 had denied him the prize he most desired, his rightful share of Gwynedd. In acknowledgement of this disappointment, Edward had granted him lands in lieu; but since this compensation amounted to two of the Four Cantrefs, it meant that Dafydd’s lordship bordered that of the king himself. Consequently it was Dafydd rather than his brother who bore the full brunt of the new and high-handed English regime at Chester. In later letters to the archbishop of Canterbury Dafydd complained of how, on one occasion, the justiciar had wrongly accused him of harbouring fugitives; of how, at another time, his woods had been chopped down and sold off by the justiciar’s men; and of how, most contentiously, he had been summoned to be judged at the king’s court at Chester for lands that he held in Wales.
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Dafydd was not alone in feeling mightily oppressed. Elsewhere in Wales, wherever newly extended English power marched with that of the natives, other Welsh lords, some of whom had helped to bring down Llywelyn, also wondered at their newly straitened circumstances. Rhys Wyndod, the southern lord who lost no fewer than three castles in 1277, complained that six of his men had been killed by the English and yet no amends had been made. Faced with such injustices, such men, like Dafydd himself, began to borrow from the script written by Llywelyn. They were unable to obtain redress; they were compelled to attend English courts; their own law was being denied. And, if their law was being denied, it followed that their identity as a people was being denied. ‘Let the law of Wales be unchanged,’ Dafydd told Edward I, ‘like the laws of other nations.’ It was a powerful and popular idea for a downtrodden people. In the spring of 1282, it became their cry to arms.
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