The Three Edwards (14 page)

He returned in time to witness what seemed the final collapse of the Scottish defense. Stirling Castle, which had been holding out valiantly, fell into English hands. Comyn the Red and most of the barons laid down their arms and threw themselves on the king’s mercy. Wallace found himself almost alone in his refusal to submit.

The obduracy of this lone figure had ruffled the feelings of the English king beyond the point of endurance. Edward let it be known that nothing less than the immediate elimination of Wallace would suffice. The records mention many instances of grants paid to cover the cost of raids undertaken for the sole purpose of his capture. The remittance of punishments which had been meted out to various titleholders was promised if they would aid in the capture of the fugitive.

And now one John de Menteith takes the center of the stage. He was a younger son of Walter Stewart, Earl of Menteith, and had fought against the English in the earliest stages of the struggle. Later he was said to have been a “gossip” of Wallace’s, which could be construed as meaning that he was in the confidence of the latter. In 1304 he was back in favor with
Edward and was made sheriff of Dumbarton, an important post. The story is that he entered into an agreement with Aymer de Valence, who was in command of the English army, to capture Wallace, then in hiding not far away. They worked, apparently, with a servant of Wallace’s named Jack Short, who held a grudge against his master. The latter brought the word to Menteith that the fugitive was near Glasgow at a place called Robroyston and offered to lead the way to him.

There is a strange lack of detail about the story of the capture of Wallace. The only explanation that fits the few facts known is that he was in a tavern and that Menteith identified him to the English troops who had been summoned. It is said that he “turned the loaf” (or, in Scottish terms,
whummled the bannock
) as a signal. This brings up a picture of Menteith eating in the tavern and keeping a close watch on the door. As soon as he saw Wallace enter, he carelessly picked up the loaf and turned it end to end. Wallace had not expected to find any but friends and was not prepared to defend himself. The mighty claymore remained in its scabbard as the English swarmed about him and pinioned his arms.

He was loaded with irons and taken at once to London. One report has it that Menteith himself took his prisoner to the English capital; another, that he made the journey in the train of the king. The latter explanation seems unlikely and has only one scrap of evidence to support it. For centuries thereafter the arch over the gateway into Carlisle Castle was pointed out as the spot where Wallace spent a long cold night chained in an open cart, there being no room for him inside.

The general belief in Menteith’s guilt was substantiated by the honors which Edward proceeded to heap on him. Among other favors, he was made sheriff of Dumbarton for life. As a final evidence of the king’s gratitude, he was given the earldom of Lennox.

The wheels of justice, so called, moved with lightning speed in disposing of the Scottish patriot. The day after his arrival in London, August 22, 1305, he was taken to the great hall at Westminster. A scaffold had been erected at one end and he was placed there, wearing a laurel wreath, a form of mockery typical of the period. Charges were made against him of being a traitor to the king (he had sworn allegiance only to the King of Scotland and so could not be a traitor to Edward), of sedition, homicides, depredations, fires, and felonies.

As he had been declared an outlaw, he was not allowed to make any answer in his own defense. This arbitrary regulation was one that might have been amended in the code so well compiled by the English Justinian (one’s admiration for the great Edward sinks to its lowest point at this moment), but it would have made no difference. The fate of Wallace had already been determined and the trial was no more than a formality. He was found guilty by the five judges who sat on the case and was condemned
to die by the now familiar method; he was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

The sentence was carried out with not so much as an hour’s delay. Wallace was taken from Westminster to the Tower and then through streets crowded with avid watchers to Smithfield, being dragged the whole distance on a hurdle at the heels of the horses. The gallows at Smithfield had been raised high so that the multitude which assembled could see the body turn at the end of the hempen rope. He was cut down before dead and was then mutilated in the manner prescribed by law. His head was struck from his lifeless trunk and was hoist on a spear point above London Bridge.

Edward was one of the very few men in London who did not see Wallace die.

The body was cut into quarters and distributed for display in Stirling, Perth, Newcastle, and Berwick. They might at least have sent his head to Scotland, where his sightless eyes would have been turned to the land for which he had done so much.

I
T is not likely that Edward had ever heard the story of Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and the double apprenticeship he had to serve. Copies of the Vulgate were few and far between in the land. One was not included in the three volumes which made up the royal library, but there may have been a copy, securely chained, in the chapel at Westminster. The king was not a scholar and his knowledge of Latin was scanty at best.

If he had known the story, he would have recognized the pattern which began to develop out of the frantic letters he received from his brother, Edmund of Lancaster, in Paris. A truce had been signed between the two countries, by which Edward was to marry the engaging and beautiful Blanche and his son and heir was to marry Isabella, the daughter of Philip, who was showing promise of becoming as lovely as her aunt. Edward was so set on Blanche as his second wife that he agreed on his part to give Gas cony to Philip! This was an incredible deal, for the Plantagenets were not only acquisitive but bitterly retentive and they had never been known to give anything away willingly. Gascony was one of the gems in the Plantagenet crown, and to give it away was such a prodigal gesture that Edward’s advisers must have thought him temporarily bereft of his senses.

Edmund’s uneasiness can be easily understood, therefore, when he
found it necessary to report to Edward that Philip was becoming evasive in the matter of the agreement. Gascony had already been turned over to France, but the king’s brother was dismayed to find the French court buzzing with other plans for the marriage of the self-willed Blanche. Rodolphus, Duke of Austria, had asked for her hand, and it was freely said that Blanche favored the Austrian match, in the expectation that Rodolphus would someday become the Holy Roman emperor.

Deeply apologetic over what he considered his failure as a diplomat, Edmund finally sent on to Edward an amended treaty of marriage in which the name of the younger sister, Marguerite, was inserted in place of Blanche. This change was probably not the fault of Philip. The truth of the matter was that the fair Blanche had put her foot down. She had no intention of marrying an old husband, even if he did happen to be the great Edward of England.

Edward discovered thus that elderly kings, like beggars, cannot be choosers. It was a blow to his pride that Blanche would have none of him, and it was a long and bitter time before he brought himself to the point of taking the younger sister instead. The matter had to be referred to the Pope finally, who settled it by laying an injunction on Philip to return the provinces that Edward had relinquished and on Edward to accept Marguerite as his wife, with a portion of fifteen thousand pounds left to her by her father, Philip the Hardy. Edward decided to make the best of a bad bargain, and agreed.

The younger sister traveled to England in great state with a long train, including three ladies of the bedchamber and four maids of honor, all of noble blood. Philip was not known to show much affection under any circumstances, but he seems to have been fond of his little sister May, as she was called at the French court. He did not make any trouble over the matter of that truly regal dower she was taking out of the kingdom.

The wedding took place at Canterbury on September 8, 1299. The very young bride was endowed with her marriage portion at the door of the cathedral, as was the custom.

The story up to this point had followed the same lines as Jacob’s romance. Marguerite was probably no better favored than the tender-eyed Leah of the Bible episode while Edward’s fancy had been fixed on Blanche as firmly as Jacob’s had been on Rachel. But the outcome was much happier. Unlike Leah, who became scrawny and sallow and bitter of tongue with the years, Marguerite matured into an attractive and very sweet woman. Her nose was a mite too long for real beauty, but her eyes were
large and bright; and the truth of the matter was that Edward became well content with his child bride. Marguerite seems to have loved her elderly bridegroom devotedly, and so the marriage was an almost immediate success. Perhaps the fact that Blanche’s husband never became anything more important than King of Bohemia, which was rather humble compared to the throne of England, was not unwelcome news to the kingly Jacob. When the beautiful Blanche died in 1305, he expressed himself as deeply sorrowful because “she was the sister of his beloved consort, Queen Marguerite.”

Edward had to leave for more campaigning in Scotland a week after the wedding, leaving his bride in the royal apartments in the Tower of London and enjoining his officers in charge that “no petitioners from the city should presume to approach, lest the person of the queen be endangered by the contagion being brought from the infected air of the city.” The contagion was smallpox, which was raging in that most unsanitary of towns. The younger Edward, one feels, might have expressed some concern for the welfare of the citizens, who could not take refuge in the Tower, and perhaps have enjoined the officers to do something about holding the plague in check.

The next year the new queen went to Scotland with Edward, who was well content to have her thus fall into the familiar habit of his beloved Eleanor. She did not stay long in that war-torn land, for her accouchement was near. She traveled back to Yorkshire and to Cawood Castle, a truly amazing pile of medieval masonry. Here a prince was born who was named Thomas and from whom the Howards, the top-ranking family in the English peerage, would stem.

The next year the queen was at Woodstock and gave birth to a second son, who was given the name of Edmund after the perplexed negotiator of the marriage bond. Fortunately the sons of the somewhat frail Marguerite were born with a better heritage of health than the three sickly little sons that Eleanor had first brought into the world. Thomas and Edmund seem to have been stout lads and had no difficulty in surviving the usual ills of infancy.

Edward became quite uxorious, as elderly husbands so often do. He even developed a greater interest in music because his Marguerite was fond of it. The young queen had brought a minstrel with her from France who was known as Guy of the Psaltery. Edward enjoyed the fine programs that Master Guy provided and settled on him a yearly stipend of twenty-eight shillings. He also allotted three horses for the minstrel’s use when the royal family went on their travels. The royal liking for music was shown in other directions, as witness an item in the royal household accounts: “To Melioro, the harper of Sir John Mautravers, for playing on the harp while the king was bled, 20s.”

The queen bore one more child, a daughter who was named Eleanor, after the first wife; there did not seem to be any jealousy or pettiness in the king’s new consort. The little princess, sad to relate, died in a few days.

Memories of Queen Marguerite have to do largely with her continual intercessions on behalf of people who fell into the king’s displeasure. The Rolls carry many such references as, “we pardon him solely at the request of our dearest consort.” It was due to her that a ban laid on the city of Winchester, because a hostage from France had been allowed to escape, was lifted. Edward was getting very testy and he had not only taken the city’s charter away but had imprisoned the mayor in the Marshalsea and had fined him three hundred marks, a great fortune in those days. Marguerite pleaded with the king until his displeasure was removed from both the city and its unfortunate mayor.

There can be no doubt that she did much to alleviate the king’s burdens during his last years. Her affection for him was very real, for after his death she wrote, “When Edward died, all men died for me.”

E
DWARD was not entirely pleased with the way his son was growing up. The prince was entirely normal in a physical sense. From the time he outgrew his Welsh cradle he had been a healthy, rosy boy. He lengthened out fast and seemed likely to approach his tall father in stature. He was not dissolute and he was liked by those about him. But there was something missing in him; he was not princely; in fact, it was becoming clear that he had a common streak which showed in his tastes. He did not take to books and reading. He did not care for swordplay. He was like a blunt weapon when he should instead have been capable of taking a steel-like edge.

At the age of five he had been given a household of his own, and the men at the head of it had not been chosen with the necessary care. It was a large household at King’s Langley; seven knights, nine sergeants, as well as minstrels, hunters, grooms and cooks, and of course the upper echelon of administrators, magisters, and tutors. It cost the state in excess of two thousand pounds yearly. In one year this hearty circle consumed 239 casks of wine, not to mention ale and beer. The household seemed inclined to practical jokes, in which the prince himself took an active part. He went about on his travels (they usually visited as many as fifty places in the course of a year) with Genoese fiddlers to provide music and a tame lion. There was always a great deal of gambling going on with dice, and the young Edward did not seem too adept at it. He was always in debt. A rowdy and raucous household, in fact. The great-grandfather of the prince, King John of infamous memory, had a curious tendency to clown at the most inappropriate, even solemn, times; perhaps this accounted for the noisy antics of the prince and his liking for low company.