EDWARDIAN TRIVIA
Edward I was fascinated by the legends of King Arthur, holding ‘Round Table’ events in 1284 and 1302, which involved tourneys and feasting. He commissioned ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ which hangs in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle.
When Edward I’s first wife, Eleanor, died the king erected a series of 12 stone crosses (the ‘Eleanor Crosses’) along the route of her funerary cortege, each one representing an overnight stop. The last, Charing Cross, gave its name to a railway station.
Edward II was our first monarch to take a keen interest in the theatre although none of the plays he attended have survived.
It was Edward III’S claim that ‘our progenitors, Kings of England, were lords of the English sea on every side’ that is the historical origin of Britannia’s claim to ‘rule the waves’.
of European peace-making, plus ‘domestic consolidation and financial as well as legal reform’ that makes his reign stick out as a paragon compared to his forebears.
Llewelyn got his comeuppance in 1282, defeated and killed, and two years later, in 1284, the Statute of Wales saw the principality annexed to the English crown. It was a redletter year for Edward, as his son, the future Edward II, was also born, and in Wales too. He’d be the first heir to the English throne styled ‘Prince of Wales’, which must have stuck in the craw of any patriotic Welshman. We have Edward I to thank for many of the most imposing Welsh castles, as he literally stamped his redoubtable foot on the landscape, embarking on a spree of castle-building to cement his conquest. Conway, Harlech and Carnarvon were just three that started shooting up in the 1280s.
The Hammer of the Scots
Edward certainly brooked neither incompetence nor corruption and, in a reform of his judiciary, most of his judges were sent packing. Sadly, so too were the Jews in 1290, around 16,000 banished allegedly because of ‘extortionate usury’. He’d already hanged a few hundred for forgery and money-clipping. This is all repulsive to us today, but
I suppose we should do the king the service of judging him by the standards of the time. Pragmatism was certainly at work, as expulsion meant forfeitures which were of financial benefit to the crown. It’s not solely simple prejudice. Englishmen who murdered any of the departing outcasts were brought to justice and executed.
Known to us as ‘Longshanks’ because of his tall frame, he would also be dubbed ‘The Hammer of the Scots’ once he got into his warlike stride. Adjudicating over claimants to the Scottish throne, Edward plumped for John Balliol over Robert the Bruce. Balliol paid homage for his whole kingdom. Edward definitely had a vision of a Britain in which one monarch would in effect be an overlord (him). If he sounds tough and manly, he was, but he was also not averse to buying toys for his children. He was brains as well as brawn: he was fond of playing chess.
France was also a problem. Its king, Philip IV, was flexing his muscles, forcing Edward to prepare. In 1295 he called a parliament, an even more representative assembly than anything de Montfort summoned, so lauded as the ‘Model Parliament’. Before he could think of crossing the Channel, though, his northern border had erupted, the frustrated Scots finally opting for open revolt. Edward earned
his moniker by marching north, capturing Berwick, penetrating to the Highlands, and forcing Balliol’s surrender. He returned to Berwick with booty that included the Scottish coronation stone. Eager to tackle the French, the king was frustrated by barons and clergy who refused to play ball; meanwhile the Scottish problem refused to go away, the north erupting once more courtesy of William Wallace, the ‘Braveheart’ of filmography. Having won a great victory at Stirling Bridge (1297), Wallace was defeated at Falkirk (1298). He’d eventually be taken by the English and hanged, drawn and quartered in London (1305).
The ever-resourceful Edward tried to defuse the Scottish situation by arranging for its representatives to sit in the English parliament, also in 1305. The Scots though were not for turning and Robert the Bruce declared his hand, murdering his rival for the throne, John Comyn, in 1306, then as king maintaining a ceaseless and bitter struggle against the English. Edward wearily marched north again, but died on 7 July 1307 near Carlisle. It would now fall to the first English Prince of Wales to sort out the malcontent Scots. There was initial enthusiasm at the accession of the handsome 23-year-old Edward II, a cultured monarch who liked the theatre. It wouldn’t last.
Edward of Caernarvon
Created Prince of Wales in 1301, Edward of Caernarvon would accompany his redoubtable father on his Scottish forays, but was absent at his death, and then declined to carry out his dying wish, to convey his bones with his army until the Scots had been subdued. Edward had him buried in Westminster Abbey, a slab being inscribed ‘Eduardus primus, Scotorum malleus hic est’ (Edward I, Hammer of the Scots’).
Edward II was no hammer, but a rather less striking implement from the kingly toolbox. Instead of the rigours of campaigning he preferred loafing about with his ‘favourite’ Piers Gaveston, whom he created Earl of Cornwall. When Edward headed for France in 1308 to marry Philip
IV’S daughter, Isabella, the so-called ‘She Wolf of France’, beautiful but Machiavellian before Machiavelli, and cruel to boot, it was Gaveston who remained behind as the kingdom’s guardian. This was an affront to England’s nobility who finally got their man in 1312, capturing and executing Gaveston.
The She Wolf
Matters deteriorated for the king who found the resolve to attack Scotland in 1314, only to be humiliated at Bannockburn (24 June) by Robert the Bruce, a decisive moment that secured the independence of Scotland. Poor Edward I must have been spinning in his Westminster grave. The Bruce followed up his great victory by capturing Berwick (1318), rolling back the conquests of the English monarch’s formidable father. Astrologers must have had a field day with Edward II as the Welsh and Irish followed the Scottish lead, rising in revolt to an accompaniment of ‘famine and pestilence’ (the ‘Great Famine’ occurred over 1314-15).
The malleable Edward made a comeback from 1321 with the assistance of his latest favourites, the Despensers, effecting a truce with Scotland and turning his attention to France where Isabella’s brother, the new French king, Charles IV, was making aggressive noises about Edward’s possessions in France. Enter the She Wolf.
Charles seized Edward’s territories whereupon the English king naively sent Isabella to negotiate a settlement. Isabella, though, detested her husband, hated the Despensers with a passion and was smitten with one of Edward’s disaffected nobles, Roger Mortimer. Having secured the heir to the throne, the future Edward III, who was then aged 13, the She Wolf made landfall on the Suffolk coast with a large band of rebels in September 1326. The Despensers were executed and Edward himself forced to abdicate before he was miserably assassinated within the confines of Berkeley Castle (21 September 1327), the story being that he had a red hot poker inserted into his innards. The king had perished wretchedly if this is true: a fitting epitaph to a reign pockmarked by foolishness and extravagance.
Leviathan
There was a revengeful leviathan in the wings. Young Prince Edward had been born at Windsor on 13 November 1312 and bided his time. He’d been crowned aged 14, on 29 January 1327, while his supplanted father was still alive. The country was governed though by Isabella and Mortimer, the puppet-masters who should have been wary of the puppet.
Edward married Phillipa of Hainault in 1328, then, two years later, in a ruthless palace coup straight out of his mother’s textbook, Mortimer was seized and executed, and his mother banished. Edward was now in personal control of affairs and would do much to restore the monarchy’s prestige after his late-father’s misrule. Later in his reign (1344) Edward III is alleged to have said: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (Evil be to him who evil thinks). It might have been a commentary on his parents.
Edward showed that he took after his grandfather, not his father, by defeating the Scots at Halidon Hill (1333), forcing another Baliol, Edward Baliol, to do homage for his possessions. Across the Channel, Charles IV had died without an heir, prompting Edward III to stick his bid in, claiming the throne in lieu of his mother, the dead king’s sister. I know, it sounds a bit tenuous, and it was, but it was enough to precipitate the Hundred Years’ War with the French. Edward duly declared war against the new king, Philip VI, in 1337, raising dosh for the venture via various ingenious means (forced loans, tallage or land tax and pinching wool).
Whereas his grandfather favoured creating a greater Britain with himself as top dog and fought wars reluctantly for that purpose, Edward III made no bones about his ambitions to wrestle France from the French. It would lead to a prolonged war, with off periods, that would last for 115 years, but was still known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453).
The Hundred Years’ War
The Hundred Years’ War saw a number of notable English victories during Edward’s reign, although how effective it all was in the end is a moot point. There was the naval victory at Sluys (1340), in the same year that Edward adopted the title ‘King of France’, followed by the two great victorious land battles at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), an advance to the gates of Paris and the capture of Calais. The fall of Calais after a siege of almost a year (134647) was the setting for the pitiable scene of the ‘Burghers of Calais’, six men who surrendered themselves to the king in return for the lives of their fellow citizens. It’s possible that Edward intended to execute them until his queen interceded on their behalf or that it was just political theatre intended to show off the king’s magnanimity.
Those two battles also featured the king’s son, our fourth Edward, the famed ‘Black Prince’, and the last of those victories at Poitiers also saw the latest French king, John II, taken prisoner. At Crécy, the 16-year-old Black Prince had been in the thickest of the fighting, prompting his father to declare: ‘Let the boy win his spurs’. This oral tradition was not recorded until the publication of Froissart’s Chronicles in 1369, so its provenance is disputed, however, I’d like to believe it was true. One thing that’s definitely true is that Edward III was responsible for a new way of war as the English longbowman made his presence felt.
A period of almost unbroken success also saw the Scots defeated again, at Neville’s Cross (1346) with their latest king, David II, captured. Both the Scots and French kings would be ransomed, David in 1357, and John in 1360, although John returned to captivity when his ransom couldn’t be paid, eventually dying in London in 1364. Some enemies you couldn’t see, though, and the Black Death’s arrival on the south coast of England in 1348 would see at least one third of the country’s population carried off by the following year. Pandemics are nothing new: they just travel faster today.
Unfulfilled ambitions
It was the last phase of Edward III’S reign that was the least successful, as his energies tired, and he was left rueing his ambitions for both Scotland and France, all unfulfilled (the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360 saw Edward finally renounce his claim to the French throne, in return for the far-lesser prize of just being able to hold on to his French domains). The public finances, blitzed by the almost constant need to keep armies in the field, were in a parlous state. Edward fell out with his parliament and from 1366 fell into the arms of a lover, Alice Perrers, described as ‘rapacious’ (greedily grasping). Governance fell to the king’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. I rather think Edward I would have been spinning in that grave again. The Black Prince was not to be Edward IV, dying of dysentery on 8 June 1376, another blow to the king, who followed him about a year later on 21 June 1377, having had his own personal battle with gathering senility. The king may have died, aged 64, but he’d played his part in making England more English, with English becoming the language of instruction in schools from c.1350 and legal pleadings also being in English from 1362.
The throne passed to Prince Richard, the ten-year-old son of the Black Prince, who would accede as Richard II. We were just four years away from the Peasants’ Revolt, but that, as they say, is another story.
The first Edwardian era had come to an end.
References
Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1974)
A Dictionary of British History (Ed. J.P. Kenyon, 1981)
Quotations in History (A. & V. Palmer, 1976)
The Plantagenets (J. Harvey, 1948)