Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (35 page)

Because he had betrayed the king, he was dragged to the place of execution by horses. Because he had killed noblemen he was hanged. And because he had committed murder at Easter he was cut down while still alive, castrated, disembowelled and his entrails burned. Finally, because he had committed crimes in different parts of the kingdom, his body was hacked into four and the quarters distributed throughout the realm.

The fate of Wales itself was scarcely less harsh. If the Hundred Rolls had shown that Edward was an astute politician, the conquest of Wales showed his savage lion-like strength. Not surprisingly the Welsh brooded under this alien rule. Edward faced repeated rebellions throughout the rest of his reign. None was enough to reverse the conquest.

Edward’s empire now stretched secure from east to west across the British Isles. But in the south the king of France was threatening Edward’s lands in Gascony while in the north Scotland at last seemed about to fall into his grasp. This struggle on two fronts – to subdue Scotland and preserve his lands in France – was to dominate the remainder of Edward’s reign and, for better and for worse, to shape the reigns of his son and his grandson as well.

II

Scotland’s identity is a vexed and troubled subject. With devolution, Edinburgh is once again the seat of a Scottish parliament and the focus of a revived and intensified sense of Scotland’s separate nationhood. But, when Edward came to the throne, that sense of separate identity was not nearly so developed.

Scotland was an ancient monarchy. But its kings were much intermarried with the English royal house. They had vast landholdings in England; swore fealty to English kings; fought for them as well as against them; and had a say in English councils and parliaments. So were they separate monarchs? Or were they the greatest subjects of the kings of England? In either case, it was a highly ambiguous relationship. But Edward, with his sharp lawyer’s mind and his acute awareness of his own rights, hated ambiguity. When he could he would make the relationship of the king of Scotland and the king of England clear on his own terms and in his own interests.

And his opportunity came in 1291. The sole heir to the Scottish throne was Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’, granddaughter of King Alexander III of Scotland, who had died in 1286. Edward determined that she should be brought to Scotland and married to his eldest son, Edward of Caernarfon. This came to naught when she died en route to Scotland. The Scottish throne was now vacant. Not to be thwarted, Edward, as feudal overlord of the country, now claimed the right to choose the next ruler. He would be kingmaker in Scotland and he would remake the relations between the two kingdoms.

Edward chose John Balliol over Robert Bruce and twelve other candidates. Balliol had a good claim. But he was also, as the founder of an Oxford college and a major landowner in England, the most anglicized of the candidates. And this was the real reason Edward chose him.

But Edward was not content with an anglicized Scottish king. Instead, he made it clear that – even with King John Balliol on the Scottish throne –
he
remained sovereign lord of Scotland. As such, he, Edward, was finally responsible for justice and good government in Scotland. And he would enforce those responsibilities, just as he enforced his laws in England, by using his own English courts.

Knowing Edward’s attitude, Scotsmen appealed to him to have their own king’s judgements overruled. Even Balliol’s acquiescence was tested. But when Balliol complained, Edward informed him that he could summon even Balliol himself to appear before him at Westminster. And before long he did just this.

For Balliol it was a humiliation too far. The Scots were provoked into rebellion and Edward to invasion. Berwick was the first town to fall. It was said that Edward was so angry that the town had resisted him that he fell on them ‘with the anger of a wild boar pursued by dogs’. From Berwick Edward pushed up the coast to Dunbar. The Scots taunted the English troops, calling them tailed dogs. But the castle fell after only a few days. Edward then took his army on a military parade through Scotland. The great fortress of Edinburgh fell after only five days’ siege and Stirling before Edward even arrived. He boasted that Scotland was conquered in only twenty-one weeks.

Now Edward had achieved what he had probably always wanted: direct rule of Scotland. In an inversion of a coronation, the vestments, symbols and regalia of kingship were stripped off Balliol. Edward was literally un-kinging him. Even more radically, Edward decided to un-kingdom Scotland. First, he removed the Stone of Scone. For 400 years the kings of Scotland had been crowned on this rough sandstone block – rich with legend – known as the Stone of Destiny. Edward took the stone to England and placed it under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey where it remained for the next 700 years. By this gesture Edward was declaring that Scotland had ceased altogether to be a kingdom and become a mere province of England.

Edward was now at the pinnacle of his power. He was an English Caesar, a new Arthur, a mightier Conqueror.

Finally, Edward took on the king of France, Philip IV. Philip, in the first example of what became known as the ‘Auld Alliance’, had allied with John Balliol and confiscated Edward’s remaining French territories. With his burning sense of right, Edward was determined to recover every inch.

To fight his great wars, Edward needed taxation. And the only effective way of raising taxes was to summon a parliament – usually to Westminster. Parliament was necessary constitutionally because Magna Carta laid it down that nobody could be taxed without their consent. It was also necessary practically because it had proved impossible to raise taxes any other way without the taxpayers going on strike.

As usual, the most important group of taxpayers were the middle earners – the knights or country gentlemen and the leading townsfolk. So, in 1295, on the eve of the Scottish invasion, Edward summoned representatives of these groups to what became known as the Model Parliament. They would have to pay but they would have a stake in his vision for England.

The result was that Edward, the most naturally autocratic of kings, followed in the footsteps of the great rebel Simon de Montfort and, in spite of himself, became the father of Parliament.

It was a shrewd gesture. But fierce guerrilla resistance to the English conquest broke out in Scotland and Edward was forced into war on two fronts against both the Scots and the French. As the costs escalated, the king faced broad-based opposition led by an important group of nobles. To appease them he was forced to reissue Magna Carta and promise once more that there would be no taxation without consultation of the whole realm. These were new political realities and they compelled him to explain his policies, negotiate and compromise. It did not sit easily with his personality. Nevertheless, his obsession with conquering Scotland remained. The policy was increasingly unpopular. But, to pursue it, Edward was prepared to do anything: to raise money outside Parliament as well as through it; even to put at risk his whole carefully constructed relationship with the classes represented in Parliament.

Finally, in 1305, victory seemed within his grasp. William Wallace, the leader of the Scottish resistance, was betrayed and Edward decided to make an example of him. Wallace was brought on horseback to London and put on trial in Westminster Hall. As was usual in cases of treason, there was no counsel for the accused. Otherwise, both the facts of the case and the forms of law were carefully observed. The judges accused Wallace of having encouraged the Scots to ally with Edward’s enemies, the French; of having invaded England and killed women, children and churchmen; and above all of having traitorously conspired for the king’s death and marched in war with banners flying against him. Wallace indignantly denied that he had ever been a traitor – presumably meaning he had never recognized Edward as king. In the eyes of English lawyers, this only made his crime worse, and he was sentenced to the worst punishment the law could give.

At Smithfield, now London’s meat market, Wallace was subject to the same horrific form of execution as the Welsh rebel Daffydd: he too was hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered.

It was a graphic message of what happened to those who crossed the king. But it also made Wallace a martyr. No sooner had Edward dealt with Wallace than a dangerous new enemy took his place: Robert the Bruce. Despite the absence of the Scottish crown and the Stone of Destiny, Bruce had himself crowned king of Scots in 1306. He continued to harry the English; Edward retaliated with punitive campaigns and brutal reprisals. For, as with Wales earlier, he saw Scottish resistance not as war but as rebellion against his legitimate rule.

It was on his way north in 1307 to wage yet another war against Bruce that Edward died at the age of sixty-eight. There is a story that his last wish was that his body should be boiled until the bones were clean of flesh and his skeleton be carried at the head of every English army until the Scots were finally crushed. It didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, his body was buried in his father’s great church, Westminster Abbey. Inscribed on his tomb were the words ‘
Malleus Scoturum
’, ‘Hammer of the Scots’. What Edward had done was right and just by his standards. But he had the weakness of his strength. If he had been less rigid and less hammer-like the union of England and Scotland, so close in 1291, might have come about smoothly and naturally. And both countries would have been spared centuries of war, bloodshed and devastation.

But that is asking Edward to be other than he was. He was a supremely self-confident king, with a clear sense of the power and rights of the crown. He may be remembered for his wars but his legacy was much greater. At home, Edward reaffirmed, sometimes in spite of himself, the direct bonds between the crown and people. Abroad, his victories began to foster a sense of national pride.

But how would England cope with his successor, a man ruled by private obsessions rather than royal ambition?

III

Edward I would have been a difficult act to follow for any son. But Edward II was particularly ill equipped to step into his father’s shoes. He may have looked like his father – tall, handsome and strong – but they had little else in common. Even his recreations were odd. He shunned the traditional pastimes of princes, preferring ‘common pursuits’ like rowing, swimming and boatbuilding.

At the beginning of Edward’s reign the contrast of character with his father was not necessarily seen as a bad thing. Edward I had undoubtedly been a great king. But, especially in his later years, England had paid a terrible price for his driving ambition and men were looking forward to a quieter life under his apparently more accommodating son.

The symbol of the change was the new oath which Edward swore at his coronation. Out went Edward I’s ringing promise to defend the rights of the crown; in came a new oath that the king would uphold and defend ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. ‘I so agree and promise,’ Edward swore. In those few words he had abandoned any claim to absolute royal power and he undertook instead to rule by consent and in cooperation with the nobles. A brave new world, it seemed, had dawned.

But Edward lacked – for good and ill – not only his father’s strength of will; he also had a worrying personality flaw. This was evident even at his coronation. He was crowned with his wife Isabella by his side. But it was his childhood friend, Piers Gaveston, who stole the show. Edward had eyes and ears only for Piers, and Piers in turn gave himself the airs and graces of a royal favourite. He even wore purple robes at the coronation rather than the traditional gold. To add injury to insult Edward then presented Piers with the best of his new wife’s jewels and wedding presents.

Whether or not the relationship between Piers and Edward was homosexual in our sense of the word is unclear. No contemporary explicitly says that it was. But they probably came as near as they could. One describes Edward’s feelings for his favourite as like ‘the love, that surpasses the love of a woman’. Another wrote: ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another. Jonathan cherished David. But we do not read that they were immoderate. Our king, however, was incapable of moderate favour and on account of Piers was said to forget himself …’

In short, Edward and Piers were breaking the rules and they were offending those who saw themselves as the guardians of the rules: the English nobility. The nobility wanted reform, and their grievances focused on Piers. They also saw it as an opportunity to exert power over the new monarch. Only two months after the celebrations of the coronation, the nobility delivered an ultimatum to their new king: either exile Piers or face civil war. Their loyalty, they said, was to the monarchy, not to the king.

Not exactly in the spirit of the demands, Gaveston was sent to Ireland to rule it on behalf of the king. But Edward was not to be browbeaten. He had, it turned out after all, inherited his father’s determination as well as his looks. But only in small things: Edward I had aimed to conquer Wales and Scotland; the summit of Edward II’s ambition was to keep his adored Piers by his side. For this there were no depths to which he would not sink. He cajoled, bribed and threatened his nobles. He conceded further measures of reform. Finally, they relented and allowed Piers to return.

Overjoyed, the king rode to Chester to be reunited with his friend. But Piers and Edward had learned nothing. Together they resumed war against the Scots, thereby placing strain on the tax system and reviving the opposition which had faced Edward I. Edward also ignored his vague promises of reform, while Gaveston refused to conciliate the nobility. Instead he continued to treat the leading magnates of the country with contempt. He gave them nicknames: Burst Belly, Joseph the Jew, the Cuckold’s Bird and the Black Dog of Arden. This amused Edward. But it made deadly enemies of his targets.

Piers’s mockery of the nobility was the classic response of the outsider confronted by a clique of crusty old insiders. The English nobility saw government as being rather like a club. Membership, they felt, should be limited to people of the ‘right’ background: in other words to nobles like themselves. And everyone should obey the rules, including the king himself. And the first and most important rule was to respect the rights and privileges, together with the sensitivities and values, of the nobility themselves. This attitude was of course selfish and class-ridden. But it was the only way that the idea of royal government as responsible government could be given real meaning. Only the nobility were strong enough to hold the king to account, and in the circumstances of 1310 this meant forcing him, by violence if necessary, to get rid of Piers Gaveston.