Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
Henry was confronted with a litany of complaints in Parliament. This was the name – given more and more consistently – to the specially convened assemblies of barons and bishops which had begun with Magna Carta. On this occasion, according to Matthew Paris, Henry tried to wheedle his way out of this crisis:
The king, on reflection, acknowledged the truth of the accusations, although late, and humbled himself, declaring that he had been too often imposed upon by evil counsel, and he promised and made oath at the altar of the shrine of St Edward, that he would fully and properly amend his old errors, and show favour and kindness to his natural subjects. But his frequent transgressions rendered him entirely unworthy of belief, and as the nobles had not yet learned what knot to bind their Proteus with (for it was an arduous and difficult matter) the parliament was prorogued …
It met again at Oxford. As if to mirror the disorder in government, the weather had been foul all summer. Harvests failed and there was widespread death and disease. The barons, meanwhile, armed themselves against the Lusignans. The council at Oxford drew up a revolutionary new way of governing the country that was intended to turn England into a crowned republic. And Henry, despite his high view of kingship, had no choice but to agree. The ‘Provisions of Oxford’, as the new constitutional blueprint was known, looked back to Anglo-Saxon England with its tradition of a strong national community. They also looked abroad to Germany and Italy, where new self-governing communes or city-states like Florence or Venice were appearing.
The result was to leave Henry as king, but king in name only. Instead, his powers would be exercised by an elected council of fifteen which would in turn answer to parliaments meeting at three set intervals a year. No other European kingdom had tried such an audacious constitutional experiment and no other king had been subject to such humiliation. Henry had experienced the rule of the barons before. But then he was nine years old. Now, at the age of fifty-one, he was being treated like a minor once more and deemed incapable of ruling like an adult.
Henry was left isolated in the crisis when his Lusignan half-brothers fled the fury of the barons. Once again he affected to retreat into a life of simple piety. He embarked on a tour of holy places and abbeys, as he had done before when power was taken out of his hands in 1234.
But, behind this religious front, the king was determined to avenge himself. The only way was force. And in 1264 the two sides confronted each other outside Lewes in East Sussex. Inspired by de Montfort’s leadership and wearing the crusader’s cross, his army quickly reduced the king’s forces to a broken rabble.
After the battle Henry took refuge at Lewes Priory. There he was joined by his son Edward, who had been victorious in his section of the battle but had been unable to save the day for his father. Would the royalists give in or would they try to resume the fight? To concentrate minds, Simon’s troops shot off a volley of burning arrows, which set fire to the roof of the priory church.
Intimidated and surrounded, Henry decided to surrender. But Simon’s terms were harsh. Henry had to swear once again to submit to the baronial government agreed at the Provisions of Oxford. Still worse, to make sure that this time he kept his word, he was compelled to hand over his son Edward as hostage for his good behaviour. The king of England was now a puppet with only the trappings of kingship as Simon in the name of defending freedom ruled both king and kingdom. Not even John had sunk so low.
Simon was now free to impose his own vision of monarchy on Henry. The king was reduced to a mere figurehead while all power was exercised by Simon’s baronial clique, who claimed to be acting in the name of the whole community of England.
But de Montfort’s ideas also appealed far beyond the baronial class. And this led him to broaden dramatically the membership of Parliament. Hitherto it had consisted of nobles and bishops. But in 1265 Simon enfranchised new groups. He summoned representatives, of knightly rank, from each county and burgesses or local bigwigs from the more important towns. Such representatives had been summoned before to consult on taxation. But this was the first time they had been invited to discuss and to decide the great affairs of the realm. It was a blatant bid for support for Simon’s revolution from the groups immediately below the magnates – the wider community of the realm. It was also a milestone in the history of Parliament.
But despite such bold moves, Simon’s revolution was to be short lived. There was a strong royalist party and, for all Simon’s own high ideals, his followers proved to be as selfish and grasping as the king’s fallen favourites. Just as the tide was turning, the king’s son and heir, Edward, escaped from captivity and raised an army. Edward met his fellow loyalists at Ludlow Castle. He made the symbolic promise to uphold Magna Carta and then marched to confront de Montfort’s forces.
The armies met just north of the town of Evesham. Simon was hoping every minute to be joined by his son at the head of a second force. But the reinforcements never arrived and without them de Montfort’s army was completely overwhelmed by the royalists. De Montfort himself was killed, only fifteen months after his great victory at Lewes.
A monument was erected to de Montfort in the grounds of Evesham Abbey in the 1960s. And, in 1992, De Montfort University at Leicester also honoured his name. They are signs that, 700 years after his defeat and death, he is not forgotten. Contemporaries remembered him too. Already at the time of his death he was a folk hero. Soon there were reports of miracles at his tomb and his was even compared to that other great scourge of kings – St Thomas Becket. But the royalists hated him and in a grisly revenge they dismembered his body as the corpse of a condemned traitor. It would be less easy, however, to uproot the political ideas that de Montfort had planted.
The civil war lingered on until 1267, when the last pockets of resistance were rooted out. For the moment the royalists had triumphed. Henry’s humiliation was avenged and the authority of the monarchy was restored – though in practice it would be exercised by the Lord Edward. But there was one final moment of glory left to the old king. In 1269, the new Westminster Abbey, which had cost so much money and political goodwill, was finally consecrated. The king himself and his sons bore the relics of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor, to their magnificent new shrine. Encrusted with gold mosaic and inlaid with precious marbles, the shrine was the work of Italian craftsmen and it spoke of Roman imperial power and grandeur.
For, despite all the crises of his reign, Henry’s view of his own position remained equally exalted and he still saw himself as combining the powers of pope and emperor in his own kingdom. Many of his nobility, of course (led by Simon de Montfort), had taken the opposite view and they had come very close to victory. It was anyone’s guess which way the balance would swing in future.
In the space of a century, both Henry II’s empire and the pre-eminent status of the monarch had been undone. Foreign entanglements, family feuds, bids for autocracy and conflicts with churchmen and barons had weakened but not quite broken the authority of the crown. Henry III died in 1272 after a reign of fifty-six years – the longest to date and the third longest of all English monarchs. His body lies in splendour in his beloved Westminster Abbey. His heart was taken to Fontevrault to lie with his Angevin forebears. But their empire and their greatness were now a distant memory.
Edward I, Edward II, Edward III
CAERNARFON CASTLE IN NORTH WALES
is not only a great fortress; it is a grand statement. Its vast walls are built out of layers of different-coloured stone in imitation of the walls of the imperial city of Constantinople. And on top of the battlements of the great tower, now worn to stumps by the sea winds and the rain, perch stone sculptures of imperial eagles. For this castle was built by a man whose ambitions were truly imperial, King Edward I, conqueror of Wales and hammer of the Scots.
Edward was the founder of a line of kings – father, son and grandson – who all bore the Anglo-Saxon or Old English name Edward. And they carried England to new heights of power. They would conquer Wales, Scotland and even France.
Or at least the first and third Edwards would. But the second Edward, unconventional and self-indulgent, reopened the old debate about royal powers. His weaknesses brought the monarchy to the brink of disaster and may have inflicted a uniquely horrible death on the king.
Nor was it only gore and glory. For the Edwards were lawgivers as well as soldiers, parliamentarians as well as conquerors, with the result that by the end of the Edwardian century the shape of an England ruled by the parliamentary trinity of king, lords and commons was becoming clear.
I
In 1272, Edward I inherited the crown from his father Henry III. When he heard the news he was in southern Italy, returning from the crusades. He did not hurry home. Instead he took part in a particularly vicious tournament in France and made a detour to put down a rebellion in Gascony. It was an appropriate start for a warrior king.
He did not return to England to be crowned until 1274. His succession was unchallenged but his inheritance was flawed. Edward would never forget his father’s humiliation at the hands of Simon de Montfort. It was Edward who led the royalist fight-back. And it was Edward who learned the painful lesson of what could happen to a weak king.
These had been Edward’s first in a long line of battles. He had learned early that he would have to fight for the rights of the crown. When he was young he fought like the leopard with speed and cunning; when he got older he fought like the lion with awe-inspiring power. And his physique matched his warlike character: he was six foot two inches tall and blond. He looked like a king, fought like a king and spoke like one. There is a story told that at his coronation he removed the crown from his head and swore that he would never wear it again until he had regained what his father had lost.
And to do this, Edward’s first task was to reunite his realm, divided by the barons’ revolt. But instead of waging a vendetta against his surviving opponents, he forgave them. He even allowed them to buy back the property that his father had confiscated. The result made Edward appear magnanimous. But it also raised considerable sums for the crown.
Edward had learned from the rebel barons as well, and he understood that it was in the towns and villages of England that the roots of his power lay. So he decided to reinforce the bonds between king and people by ordering a huge nationwide investigation into official corruption. It would be king and people versus the ‘fat cats’.
The results were recorded in what are known as the Hundred Rolls. There was a mass of detail, perhaps too much. For example, the Stamford Roll contains a bit of dirt on the bailiff of the town, Hugo Bunting. One of the things he is accused of is levying an illicit toll of five shillings on a certain William Gabbecrocky when he took his millstones through the middle of the town: ‘
ducit per medium ville
’.
Now this is just Stamford: multiply for all England and you get information overload. As a consequence few actual prosecutions took place. But it is the PR that was most important. Edward was showing that he cared; that the king’s rights complemented the rights of his subjects and that he was able to guarantee equal justice for all his subjects no matter how humble. There followed a succession of important statutes intended to reform the law. It would be hard to think of a better beginning for a reign or a more effective answer to those, like the baronial revolutionaries of his father’s reign, who claimed that strong royal government meant oppressive royal government.
Edward’s next task was to restore the authority of the king over the whole of Britain. For in different ways the rulers of Wales and Scotland had taken advantage of Henry III’s weakness to regain power and independence at the expense of their English overlord.
In 1276, from his wild fastness in Snowdonia, Llwelyn ap Gryffydd had extended his control over most of Wales. But Edward was loath to accept the rise of Wales as an independent power. So he insisted on the homage – or ritual submission – which the rulers of Wales traditionally paid to the kings of England. There resulted a struggle of wills. For Llwelyn, his homage was a bargaining counter in a relationship of semi-equals. For Edward, it was a non-negotiable acknowledgement of his superiority over a subject and inferior. Three more times Prince Llwelyn was summoned to perform homage and three times he refused. Finally, and with plenty of time to make his preparations, Edward declared war.
Edward mobilized the whole country. Merchants and craftsmen laboured to supply the army. Huge arsenals of weapons were stockpiled. And Llwelyn was no match for the resources of England. In the face of the campaign of 1277 Llwelyn capitulated. Wales was forced to accept English laws, which struck at the heart of Welsh identity and national pride. The settlement was never accepted and the Welsh rebelled in 1282. They were countered with another vast army. There was little hand-to-hand fighting. Instead, Edward laid siege to Llwelyn in Snowdonia and starved him out.
Edward was not the first king of England to fight the Welsh. But Edward carried the policy to new extremes. There would be no more native princes of Wales acknowledging the vague overlordship of the king of England. Instead, Wales was crushed under the heel of a brutal military occupation. Its symbol was the mighty castles which still dominate the landscape, such as Caernarfon. Designed as much for their dramatic impact as for their military strength, they proclaimed that the Welsh were a subject people ruled over by an English elite.
Finally, there was Edward’s treatment of the rebel leaders. This was not only spectacularly brutal; it also shows that he was a new kind of king, with the new, harder attitude to kingship that he had learned during his father’s reign. Ever since the Norman Conquest, barons and kings had fought it out with each other with few hard feelings on either side. No longer, because Edward now declared that to wage war against the king was treason. Treason was effectively a new crime for which a new, terrible punishment was devised. And the first to suffer it was Daffydd ap Gryffydd, Prince Llwelyn’s brother.