THE FIRST EDWARDIANS
Stephen Roberts takes us on a tour through the lives and times of England’s first three King Edwards, the father, son and grandson who ruled the country during some of the most tumultuous years of the medieval age
Steve Roberts is passionate about the royals of yesteryear and here he investigates the diverse reigns of Kings Edward I, II and III
The First Edwardians. I don’t know whether anyone’s called them that before but I’m thinking of the first three Edwards who sat on the English throne from 1272 to 1377, a period of just over a century. They were three generations, father, son and grandson; the first and last martial and mighty, the one in between a dismal failure. They resembled a sandwich: two marvellous pieces of bloomer bread with a distasteful filling. In fact, this will be a tale of four Edwards, as we should also have had the martial ‘Edward IV’, the famed Black Prince, but he died of dysentery a year before his father, Edward III. We’d have to wait until the Wars of the Roses for Edward IV.
Evesham
Our story starts with Henry III, son of King John, and one of our longest reigning monarchs. The ‘Son of Magna Carta’, as he’s been dubbed, had a reign pretty much book-ended by
Prince Edward overcomes and kills a would-be assassin in 1272 during his participation in the Crusades. It was just a few months before Edward learned that his father, Henry III, had died, and that he was King of England
civil war. The 1st Barons’ War (1215-17) was in progress when he acceded aged nine. His father had tried to wriggle out of the provisions of Magna Carta and his barons held him to account.
Henry’s own version of misrule saw him nearly toppled in the 2nd Barons’ War (1264-67). Henry, a hostage of the rebel leader, Simon de Montfort, wandered the field at Evesham, in serious danger of being cleaved, but was saved by his son, the 26-year-old Prince Edward, the future Edward I. Henry was restored to his throne, whilst de Montfort, oft lauded as the ‘father of parliamentary democracy’, lay in bits on the bloody battlefield. The real winner that day, though (4 August 1265) was Edward, a young man who learned that a king
should be mighty, and a fledgling parliament accommodated.
Born at Westminster around 17 June 1239, Edward married Eleanor of Castile in 1254 and received from his proud father all of Gascony, Ireland and Wales as he was groomed for power. It
was in Wales, fighting against the fractious inhabitants, that Edward learned how to fight, command and inspire loyalty. At a parliament (Oxford, 1258) he supported his father against the barons who were making noises, but then began to sympathise with de Montfort to whom he was related (de Montfort having married Henry III’S sister). At the Battle of Lewes (1264) both Henry and Edward were captured, but the wily prince was subsequently able to engineer his escape in order to plan de Montfort’s miserable denouement at Evesham.
The Welsh
Edward fitted in a stint on crusade and was still overseas when his father died on 16 November 1272. Edward was now aged 33. It would be 1274 before he’d return home to sit on his throne. When Edward was crowned he received homage from the Scottish king, Alexander III, albeit only for lands he held in England, but not from the troublesome Welsh prince, Llewelyn, who managed to stall until 1276.
Edward may have had one eye on sorting out unruly neighbours already, so wisely made sure everything was neat and tidy, embarking on a process