The Three Edwards (36 page)

One day in mid-September, Thomas of Berkeley came to the cell in which the royal prisoner was confined. He had been seeing little of Edward. The trio of keepers appointed by Mortimer—Maltravers, Gurney, and Ogle—had taken things into their own hands. It seems certain that Berkeley had a genuine feeling of sympathy for his unfortunate guest. He said with regret that he must be absent for some time on affairs of his own but would return as soon as possible. Edward’s hand clung to that of the owner of the castle as though he realized that his last friend was deserting him.

Life had already become a burden to the prisoner. His clothing was shoddy and always damp. The food served him was sometimes so nauseous that he could not eat it. On at least one occasion he had been brought cold and muddy water from the moat to shave with and his protests had been disregarded.

With Berkeley away, there was no one to temper the grim routine of Edward’s days or to stand between him and the other three, particularly the man Ogle, who had made his mysterious appearance a short time before. No one seemed to know exactly why he had come, but Edward had more than a suspicion of the truth and undoubtedly shuddered whenever the man came near him.

As soon as Berkeley departed, the atmosphere of the castle changed. No longer was the lonely prisoner treated with even an outward semblance of respect. Orders were barked at him and rough hands were always ready to enforce them. As a final evidence of hostility, he was removed to a small and dark cell in a wing of the castle devoted to domestic arrangements. It was over the charnelhouse, and the odors which came up from below made it difficult for the new occupant to breathe. The one window looked out on an empty corner of the courtyard, a bleak prospect of damp wall and slimy paving stones. It must have been apparent now that his three grim custodians had one purpose only in mind.

On the night of September 21 the other inmates of the castle were aroused from their slumbers by shrieks coming from the malodorous cell in which the deposed king was confined. Horror and agony were in the sounds. It is said that the outcries of the dying man were so loud that
they reached to ears in the village nearby and that people hid their heads under their bedclothing, knowing full well what this meant. Edward of Caernarvon, once Edward of England, was dying a violent death.

In the morning it was given out that he had expired during the night of natural causes. The guards and domestics were allowed to view the body, laid out on a disordered bed in the cell. None failed to notice that the features of the dead man were still contorted with violence and pain.

Many stories were circulated throughout the country as to the manner in which the murder had been committed. One circumstantial account, contained in a chronicle prepared some thirty years after the event, seemed to fit the known facts and was generally believed. It is given for what it is worth, in the absence of any official explanation.

The three assassins waited until their victim was sound asleep and then flung a table over him, which was held down by two of them to prevent him from moving. The third man then proceeded to burn out his inside organs with a red-hot bar of iron. As it was inserted through a horn, no marks of violence were made on the surface of the body.

John Thody, Abbot of Gloucester, claimed the body and took it away in his own chariot. Later there was a burial of much stateliness and pomp in the Abbey of St. Peter’s. There was gold leaf on the coffin and lions of pure gold on the hearse; but nothing could be done to remove the imprint of horror on the once handsome features of this weak and unfortunate king, nor to allay the wave of grief and anger which swept over the country.

T
HE foul deed which brought to a close the days of that poor shadow of a king, Edward II, inaugurated a reign which would touch the peaks. Edward III was the most spectacular of the Plantagenets; fair, of goodly proportions, with a face, so it was said, of a demi-god; a conqueror, brave, vainglorious, extravagant, ostentatious; somewhat shallow of character, lacking, at any rate, the deep sense of kingly responsibility which has kept the memory of his grandfather so green. It must have been a great sight to watch the third Edward riding in a tournament, his lance expert and deadly, his delight in the sport so keen. Or to observe him in his brilliant and gay court, strutting like a peacock in the velvets he loved, the double-piled new varieties from Lucca and Genoa; his voice richly modulated, his laughter spontaneous, an intimate look in his eye for every pretty lady.

These were the days when chivalry reached its greatest height in England. The armies with which Edward defeated the French and came so close to establishing his claim to the French throne were filled with knights of spirit and repute, knights-errant in the fullest sense of the word, about whom much will be told later. One of the stories of the period which is repeated with the most gusto concerns a beautiful lady of the court who had dressed herself for a ball with such splendor that a line from
Piers Plowman
seems to fit her: “Her array ravished me, such richness saw I never.” But the lady’s dress had beauties which did not show on the surface, and when she lost a most necessary part of her attire, a delicate thing of rich silk with jewels nestling in its rosebuds, and the king found it, he was inspired (or so runs the story) to form the Order of the Garter, which has been the only rival for the legendary Round Table of Arthurian days. It may be recorded also that only the most perfunctory efforts were made to capture a Frenchwoman of high
rank who set herself up as a pirate in and around the Channel. Was she not a lady and beautiful, forsooth?

But the rise of chivalry was no more than the flare-up before its final extinction. The brave knights were certain, no doubt, that they had won Crécy and Poictiers, but a realistic vision would have taught them a different story. Those great battles were won by stout-limbed, brawny-backed, sun-bronzed fellows of low degree who wore lincoln-green jerkins and had a deadly skill with a new weapon called the longbow. The chivalry of France died under the lethal hail of English arrows, without realizing that the fine bloom of chivalry withered with their passing. An insignificant item is found (without foundation) in Froissart. The English, he reports, had something very strange called cannon; long-snouted barrels of bronze which spewed forth shells under the compulsive force of a substance that a very great Englishman named Roger Bacon had discovered a century before, gunpowder. But the longbow and the death-dealing powder would soon revolutionize warfare and change it from the sport of knights to a much deadlier business: the clash of great armies and the use of artillery which would cover battlefields with smoke and cut wide swaths of death in the serried ranks. A form of conflict in which the exquisite rules of chivalry would have no part at all.

The fifty long years of Edward’s reign make robust telling after the shambles of his father’s rule, although the third Edward took no interest in constitutional matters, granting rights to his subjects with a careless flourish of his pen and then trampling on them with equally careless steel-shod feet. But progress was made under these conditions toward democratic understandings. It was a period also of commercial expansion, a prosaic phase of life in which the king, strangely enough, seemed to take a great deal of interest. Perhaps his consort, Philippa, who came from the Low Countries, where business had become the most important part of life, had influenced him in that direction. His chief interests remained, however, diplomacy and war; and because he was skillful in the one and bold and lucky in the other, he scaled the heights.

Alexandre Dumas, the elder, has asserted that a man reaches the full prime of life between his forty-sixth and forty-eighth years. When Edward III was forty-six he held on St. George’s Day at Windsor the most magnificent tournament of the age and competed mightily himself. That Christmas he had among his guests the kings of France and Scotland, both of whom had been taken prisoners in their wars with England and were being held in captivity; and he was entertaining at the moment proposals of peace by which he would have been awarded all of the southeast of France in full sovereignty. This would have restored to him the Angevin empire which had been lost by John and Henry III. The novelist seems to have been right as far as Edward was concerned. When the
yule log was dragged into the hall and the three monarchs watched the merrymaking over their goblets of hippocras (a cordial highly spiced and strained through a hippocratian bag of cloth or linen), the English king was at his zenith.

For four years the young king was supposed to be under the guidance of the council which had been set up by Parliament, but in reality there was a regency in operation. Queen Isabella had expected to be made regent, and when that honor was denied her she had proceeded coolly to assume all the powers and responsibilities of the post, with Mortimer always at her right hand. The boy seems to have acquiesced. In any event, he did nothing immediately to express disapproval or to interfere with his mother’s highhandedness. He even allowed her to appropriate for herself nearly all of the royal funds, two thirds of everything, in fact.

What was the young king thinking as he watched his still beautiful and still popular mother (although the first rumblings of discontent were being heard in the land) assume all the powers of the throne? What were his feelings toward the strutting, arrogant Mortimer, who was proving himself more dangerous and grasping than Gaveston or the Despensers had ever been? Above all else, what did he think of the relationship between them? If he did not know they were living in almost open sin, his were the only eyes in the kingdom which had failed to detect the truth.

Edward, it may be taken for granted, was watching everything and biding his time. A Hamlet in his early teens, he was not in a position to act at once. He knew the fierce temper and the savage methods of Mortimer and he had seen how dilatory and feeble were the men who made up the council. He might be as roughly thrust aside as his father had been. Did he want to share the fate of Arthur of Brittany, who had stood in the way of John of infamous memory? All the qualities he would later display were developing in the young king and would manifest themselves when he felt it safe to make his move. In the meantime he did not mope as Hamlet had done. There was no mooning about the battlements of the White Tower, no soliloquizing at midnight in the ghostly lunar light through the arches of the great hall at Westminster. He was bestirring himself in many ways. And he was watching the men about him, weighing their merits and the courage they had in them, considering, discarding, and finally selecting the few he could take into his confidence.

There were two things he could do while he waited. He could lead an army against the Scots, who had come down in full force and with fire
and sword into the northern counties. And he could take the necessary steps to marry his Philippa.

Queen Isabella, who had reason to know the Plantagenet ways, was apprehensive of her son. She wanted to keep him in the background as long as possible, but she saw the need to have him occupied. Accordingly she took his proposed marriage in hand and persuaded the members of the council that a daughter of the house of Hainaut would be the most suitable wife for him. Care was taken not to let the members know that the young king’s mind was already made up. It was their business, not his, to find him a wife. The document finally drawn up gave their consent to a match with “a daughter of that nobleman, William, Count of Hainaut, Holland and Zealand and Lord of Friesland.” No mention was made of Philippa. Any one of the four daughters apparently would suit the council. The next step was to send a deputation to Count William to lay the proposal before him, and Adam of Orleton was selected to head it.

It will be remembered that when King John sent a deputation to Rome to aid in selecting an Archbishop of Canterbury he told them they could vote for anyone they desired,
provided it was the king’s candidate
. Adam of Orleton was given secret instructions of a similar nature. Use your own judgment, Sir Bishop, in selecting one of the four, provided it is Philippa.

The deputation traveled to Valenciennes, where Count William resided with his bevy of pretty daughters, and there was much solemn discussion as to which one was to be selected. It is likely that Philippa did not worry, remembering the long talks she had had with the handsome young prince, their rambles together in the gardens, the vows of fidelity he had sworn. Adam of Orleton finally gave his head an owl-like shake and announced the selection of the fairest, the most apple-cheeked, the somewhat plumper one of the four.

Then the matter of the Pope’s sanction came up, for the two mothers were cousins-german and so within the bounds of consanguinity. It was decided to send messengers at once to Avignon to win the papal nod, for an urgency was recognized in getting the matter settled without delay. Edward, after all, was a boy in years and not allowed to make his own decisions. His mother was no longer a suppliant for military aid and she might change her mind in favor of a more important match. And finally there was Mortimer, with daughters of his own and a willingness, possibly, to solidify his position by marrying the prince to one of them. Two Flemish knights and a parcel of clerks were sent off on horseback with instructions to ride fast and long and get the papal consent before London could change its mind.

British poets have been partial to recording the stories of urgent rides. There is the midnight race from Ghent to Aix, the horseback perambulations
of John Gilpin, and the mad ride of Tarn o’ Shanter. Some bard should have selected the journey of the two knights of Hainaut. They had to cover the whole face of France, starting at Valenciennes, traversing the full depth of Burgundy, then through Auvergne, striking sparks from the rocky roads and pausing only long enough to bawl for relays, passing Rheims, Troyes, Dijon, and Lyons, and coming finally to the city of Avignon perched high on the banks of the mighty Rhone; Avignon, once called the windy city because it lay directly in the path of the hot mistral which blew across the Mediterranean, but was now the new home of the popes.