A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (5 page)

Edward’s understanding of the history of crusading would have been limited to what he heard in popular tales. From these he would have known, for example, how the knights of the First Crusade had travelled thousands of miles, overcome unimaginable hardships, and eventually succeeded in liberating Jerusalem. Likewise he would have heard the equally famous stories of the Third Crusade, the attempt to retake Jerusalem after its fall in 1187 – an ultimately unsuccessful mission, but one redeemed by the heroic exploits of Richard the Lionheart. King Richard, of course, provided a family connection with crusading, being the uncle of Henry III, but by Edward’s day he had been dead for almost half a century. An altogether more vital link with crusading existed, however, in the form of Edward’s own Uncle Richard, Henry’s younger brother.

Richard, earl of Cornwall (or Richard of Cornwall, as he is usually known) had left England on crusade in the summer of 1240, before Edward’s first birthday. It was, in fact, thanks to Edward’s arrival that the earl’s departure had become a feasible proposition, because before that moment he had been first in line to the throne. Alas, when it came to fighting, Richard had more in common with his older brother than his illustrious namesake, and as a consequence there was no military action of any consequence in the course of his expedition. But Richard was far more intelligent than Henry, and was especially skilled at negotiation. Indeed, such was his diplomatic ability that, during his brief stay in the Holy Land, the earl negotiated the return of Jerusalem. The deal proved short lived – the city fell again four years later – but at the time it secured Richard an international reputation for statesmanship, and he returned to England in 1242 garlanded with laurels and convinced of his own triumphant success. Moreover, he returned full of the wonders he had seen: bands of musicians riding on the back of elephants, Saracen girls who danced on balls. The earl told these tales to Matthew Paris, who wrote them down, and we can be fairly certain he would have shared them with his nephew as well: Richard, as well as being Edward’s uncle, was one of the more important of his many godparents, and the two of them became very close.
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Henry III was predictably more muted in his enthusiasm for crusaders and crusading than his brother and most of his other subjects. He possessed the requisite piety in abundance, but lacked the necessary penchant for violence. In the late 1240s, however, in the wake of Jerusalem’s recent fall, the pressure on him to participate was becoming irresistible. Many English noblemen were ready to go east under their own banners, or even to join the expedition of Louis IX, king of France, who set sail for the Holy Land in 1248. This last, in particular, really threw down the gauntlet to Henry, for the French king was his great rival. Would he, the king of England, stand idly by while King Louis took all the glory? With national and dynastic pride at stake, Henry eventually decided that the answer was no. In March 1250, in a grand public ceremony, the king surprised his subjects and took the cross. Many other nobles and knights also took their vows at the same time, and crusade fever soon took hold of the whole court. Within a few weeks, Queen Eleanor had borrowed a copy of
The Song of Antioch
, a romance history of the First Crusade. The following year Henry began to commission new wall-paintings in many of his castles and palaces, featuring scenes from the same story, or episodes from the life of Richard the Lionheart. Wherever an impressionable eleven-year-old looked or listened, there was an exhortation to go on crusade.

Having taken his vow, Henry III could not depart at once. A crusade was not a whimsical jaunt; on the contrary, it was the undertaking of a lifetime, and required many months, running into years, of careful preparation. Crusaders had to be sure, above all, of two things. First, that they had enough money to fund their expedition. To this end, Henry made economies in his expenditure, and began to save up a gold treasure (gold having greater currency in the East than the silver coinage used in the West). Second, a crusader needed to ensure that his lands would be safe and secure during his absence. Here Henry had less success, and soon found himself running into deep difficulties. These difficulties, however, even as they cast the king’s crusade into doubt, were the making of his eldest son.
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Henry III was first and foremost king of England, but he was also lord of other lands besides. In Ireland, for example, English adventurers had carved out new domains in the last decades of the twelfth century, and Henry’s grandfather, Henry II, had intervened to ensure that the English Crown had the whip hand. In Wales too, the English had made consider able inroads in the course of the twelfth century, with the result that large parts of the south and east of the country were ruled by English lords or royal officials. Neither of these ‘British’ zones, however, was a cause for concern in 1250; they, like England, seemed secure. The problem that loomed in 1250 lay across the Channel with Henry’s ancestral lands on the Continent.
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Ever since 1066, when Duke William of Normandy had seized the throne of England, English kings had held extensive lands in what is now France. In the course of the twelfth century they had expanded their empire further and further south, until eventually their power reached the Pyrenees. Henry II, the chief architect of this expansion, had ended up with more lands in France than the king of France himself, and this, naturally, was the main cause of Anglo-French antagonism. The balance of power, however, had been dramatically reversed in the next generation. Henry II’s son, the incompetent King John, had lost almost all the lands his father had assembled. Within a decade of John’s death in 1216, and before his son – Henry III – had come of age, all that remained of a once great family inheritance was the south-western corner of France, known as Aquitaine, or Gascony.
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Seen in this light, Gascony was a much diminished rump, but regarded on its own the duchy was an extensive possession, stretching over 150 miles from north to south and around half that distance from east to west. Henry III jealously guarded this last remnant of his Continental inheritance, and sought anxiously to protect it by extending his influence elsewhere in the region. It had been for this reason, and to keep up the continuing competition with France, that the king had sought a wife from Provence: eighteen months before Henry had married Eleanor, King Louis had married her elder sister, Margaret. One day, Henry hoped, he would regain the territories his father had lost. It was with this ambition that he had set out for France during Edward’s infancy – a disastrous adventure that had served only to underline his reputation as a military bungler. In the meantime, what mattered most was conserving Gascony. This was a particular priority for Eleanor and her advising uncle, Peter of Savoy, for they had long determined that the duchy should one day go to Edward. Almost from the moment of his birth they had seen off other would-be claimants – principally Richard of Cornwall – and, soon after his tenth birthday, their labours were rewarded: in September 1249, Henry III made a formal grant of Gascony to his eldest son. But by the time the king took the cross some six months later, affairs in the duchy were spinning out of control. Rebellion was beginning to rage, imperilling both Edward’s inheritance and Henry’s crusade. Its cause was Simon de Montfort.
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Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was Henry III’s brother-in-law (the king’s sister, another Eleanor, was Simon’s wife). He was also everything that Henry was not: quick-witted, silver-tongued and, in the words of Matthew Paris, ‘famous and experienced in warfare’. His personality and accomplishments had recommended him, particularly to Eleanor of Provence, as the best man for the job of safeguarding Gascony until Edward’s coming of age. In the summer of 1248, largely at the queen’s behest, Montfort had been appointed by Henry as the royal lieutenant in the duchy.
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It was a bad decision. Tough and clever Montfort may have been, but he was also uncommonly egotistical and inflexibly self-righteous. These qualities, which arose in part from his religious fanaticism, made the earl an ideal crusader – he had already been east once and had vowed to go again – but they rendered him altogether unsuitable for the business of governing Gascony. The lieutenant’s authority and resources were limited: local towns and lords, when they grew fractious, needed gentle conciliation. Montfort’s method was to fight fire with fire, and very soon the whole duchy was ablaze. Even as Henry III took the cross in March 1250, his brother-in-law was writing to him, explaining how certain Gascons were using guerrilla warfare to cripple his government.
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Henry’s initial response was to back Montfort: throughout 1250 the earl was given thousands of pounds to spend on mercenaries and castle-building. But, as the tide of complaints from Gascony swelled, and the rebellion continued to intensify, Henry started to change his mind. Eventually, much to Montfort’s anger, the king cut his funding and, at Christmas 1251, the two men had a furious public row. The earl was told to stand down, but returned to the duchy in defiance and wreaked more havoc.
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The escalating crisis in Gascony had grave implications for Henry’s crusade, and alarmed those of his subjects who had sworn to go east. In April 1252 their worst fears were confirmed, ironically, by Henry’s botched efforts to allay them. At that point the king let it be known that he would definitely be departing, and that to this end he had fixed a firm date. But the date was midsummer 1256, a further four years into the future. The long delay was necessary because, having sent investigators to Gascony, Henry now believed that the only way that the province could be stabilised was with a military expedition led by himself.
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Here too, however, the king ran into extreme difficulty. The fundamental problem was money. War was an expensive business, and Henry III was not a rich king. His private financial resources, which amounted to the rents and sales from his own lands, were by no means great. He could demand extra money from his subjects, but the methods for obtaining it were old fashioned, punitive and unfair. Essentially, the king was reliant on revenues and fines raised by his local officials – foresters, justices and sheriffs – and the more funds that were needed, the more oppressive and unscrupulous these officials had to be. It says a lot that the stories of Robin Hood, in which such men are the villains, originated in Henry’s reign.
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The obvious solution was to impose a general levy on everyone – a tax – and Henry’s immediate predecessors had on occasion done just that. King Richard and King John had found that they could raise huge sums in this way – England, it bears repeating, was a rich and prosperous country – but such taxes proved highly unpopular, and were regarded as tantamount to robbery. It soon became impossible to impose them without first obtaining a much broader degree of consent than was customary for other political decisions. The solution suggested in King John’s reign, that the king should consult with all those who held lands directly from him, proved impracticable. It fell to Henry’s ministers to devise a new way of obtaining approval, and, at some point in the period 1237–54, they decided to summon representatives from the counties and towns of England. Around the same time, a new word was coined to describe such assemblies: parliament.
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To his surprise and frustration, however, Henry found that when parliaments were summoned they were not nearly as compliant nor as automatically obliging as he would have liked. Knights of the shires and burgesses from the towns had plenty to say about the oppressiveness of his government, and linked his demands for money to the redress of their grievances. On the issue of Gascony, moreover, they were loath to pay any money at all. The kings of England might have been deeply attached to the duchy, but their English subjects felt no similar affection – to them it was merely an expensive burden. When, in the autumn of 1252, Henry asked for a tax to fund his intended expedition, parliament refused (and, to add insult to injury, pointed out his short comings as a warrior). The king was left hamstrung. Caught between rebellion in Gascony on the one hand, and political opposition in England on the other, Henry did what he did best, and dithered.
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Perhaps the only person who could have viewed the king’s procrastination with something approaching equanimity was his eldest son. The crisis in Gascony pulled Edward onto the political stage for the first time (Matthew Paris, for example, now begins to notice him properly). In April 1252, as part of his strategy of appeasement, Henry publicly renewed his earlier grant of the duchy to Edward. Those Gascons then in England were summoned to London, and Edward was presented to them as their new lord. He went through the conventional performance expected in such circumstances – receiving oaths of loyalty from the Gascon lords who knelt before him, and distributing valuable gifts as a token of the benefits that his lordship would bring. Edward was twelve going on thirteen at the time; too young, perhaps, to play his role with total conviction, but only just. With every month that Henry delayed, his son grew taller and stronger, more convincing and more politically conscious. When, in the summer of 1252, Henry promised to intervene in Gascony, he was able to envisage an alternative scenario, acceptable to himself as well as to the Gascons, in which Edward would be sent in his stead. Edward may even have been privately pleased that the summer of 1256 was still four years away; it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for seventeen-year-olds to go on crusade.
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