Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (36 page)

In March Edward was forced to send Piers away as the nobility strengthened their forces. Edward remained and agreed to surrender. Twenty-one Lords Ordainer worked out a document containing forty-one clauses. It was almost a rerun of 1258 when Henry III’s personal rule was picked apart. The king was not allowed to make any gifts without the approval of Parliament; the revenue was taken out of the king’s hands; and he was not allowed to make war or even leave the kingdom without permission. This was a savage limitation of Edward’s sovereignty. But even worse was the Ordainers’ all-out attack on ‘evil counsellors’, who, they said, had set the kingdom on the course to ruin. Gaveston was named. He was the ‘evident enemy’ of the monarchy and the people. And he was to be exiled, not just from England but all Edward’s domains.

Edward had to accept the Ordinances. But he could not give Piers up to the noble mob. He played for time. But the storm was gathering. The nobles and bishops met at St Paul’s Cathedral in March 1313 and ordered the arrest of Piers.

Edward and Piers fled north, Edward abandoning his pregnant wife, Isabella, to his enemies. She would not forget the insult. But it was all for nothing. Piers was caught and taken prisoner by the earl of Warwick – the man whom he had mocked as ‘the Black Dog’. There was no formal trial. Instead Warwick and four nobles decided his fate. The verdict was death and he was beheaded at Blacklow Hill near Warwick.

Edward was grief-stricken at Gaveston’s murder. But it was more than a personal loss. He had also lost face as king. Gaveston was the thing in the world that had mattered most to him. But he had not been powerful enough, or feared enough, to protect his life or to avenge his death. What was the authority of such a king worth?

Edward, under attack at home, decided to try to recover his position abroad. Bruce’s long guerrilla campaign in Scotland was at last bearing fruit: he drove the English from key castles; he even dared strike across the border with devastating raids.

Edward and his nobles sank their differences sufficiently to mount a vast punitive expedition against Scotland. Here in the field of battle, Edward might yet redeem himself. The English and Scottish armies met on 23 June 1314 just outside Stirling. Much to the English surprise, the Scots took the initiative. At daybreak it was they who advanced. But then Edward’s surprise turned to amazement. Edward was reported as saying ‘they kneel and ask for mercy’. One of his Scottish officials knew his countrymen better and replied: ‘they ask for mercy but not from you. To God they pray, for them it’s death or victory.’

The battle began and the English knights charged the Scots’ front line. But the Scots held firm. Unable to break the front rank, the English withdrew. But their retreat turned into a rout. Encumbered by heavy armour, many men drowned in the boggy ground. The losses were huge and Bannockburn became infamous as England’s most shameful defeat by the Scots.

Leaving his troops to be massacred, Edward fled from the field of battle and, with only a handful of followers, rode desperately for Dunbar. He took refuge overnight in the castle, which was in friendly hands. The following morning he set sail for England.

The war with Scotland had given Edward the opportunity to redeem his reputation. Instead the shattering defeat of Bannockburn sent it to new depths. He proved to be as bad a general as he was a politician and his flight made him seem like a coward as well. He now appeared unmanly as well as unkingly. The political consequences were inescapable. Immediately after Bannockburn Edward was forced to swallow the Ordinances and accept that he had sacrificed his sovereignty. There were also other, more insidious, developments. How, people began to ask, could such a creature as this be the son of the great Edward? And they answered their own question by saying that he wasn’t, that he was a changeling and not royal at all. And thus began the rumours about the king’s birth which his own fondness for such peasant activities as rowing, thatching, fishing and boatbuilding seemed only to confirm.

Nor was Edward any more successful as a husband. As a young bride Isabella had had to accept her husband’s devotion to Piers. But by the 1320s she was older, wiser and, crucially, the mother of the heir to the throne. Edward had also acquired a new favourite, Hugh Despenser. Like Piers, Despenser was given gifts and power. And once again the nobility sensed danger. It led to civil war, from which Edward managed to emerge victorious. He slipped free of the restraints imposed by the Ordinances. The result was autocratic royal government, another pointless campaign against Scotland and more power for the favoured Despenser.

The young Hugh Despenser achieved extraordinary influence over Edward. Enraged by this renewed humiliation, Isabella had taken a lover, Roger Mortimer, earl of March. She said that the ‘bond’ of holy matrimony had been broken by an ‘intruder’. She vowed to be avenged and fled to France with Mortimer. And there they planned their invasion of England. In September 1326 Isabella landed in England and met with little resistance. Marching through a tired and war-weary country, she seized the crown in the name of her and Edward’s eldest son, a third Edward.

Isabella and Mortimer had no difficulty in seizing the throne. But it proved less easy to justify their actions as there was no constitutional machinery to depose a crowned and anointed king. This meant they had to resort to the astonishing legal innovation of the Articles of Accusation. The articles accused the king, the fount of justice, of a series of high crimes against his country. Instead of good government by good laws he had ruled by evil counsel. Instead of justice he had sent noblemen to shameful and illegal deaths. He had lost Scotland and Gascony and he had oppressed and impoverished England. In short, he had broken his coronation oath – here treated as a solemn contract with his people and his country – and he must pay the price. For the first time in English history a reigning monarch was formally deposed from the throne.

Edward’s miserable state was described in a poem which he may have written himself.

In winter woe befell me
By cruel fortune threatened
My life now lies a ruin.
Once I was feared and dreaded
But now all men despise me
And call me a crownless king
A laughing stock to all.

Edward was imprisoned in the Guard Room in the keep of Berkeley Castle. He soon escaped but was recaptured. Thereafter his imprisonment became stricter and heavy locks and bolts were bought for the doors. Finally he was murdered. It could not, of course, be seen as murder and pains were taken to leave as few marks as possible on the body. According to most contemporary accounts he was pressed down with a table with heavy weights and suffocated. But another account, written only thirty years after his death, suggests a more horrible end. The king was held head down; a hollow instrument, like the end of a trumpet, was forced into his fundament and a red-hot poker thrust up it into his bowels. The Articles of Accusation had been a kind of inversion of Edward’s coronation oath: if this story is true then his death was a vile parody of the pleasures he was supposed to have enjoyed with Piers Gaveston.

IV

In April 1331, a three-day tournament was proclaimed in the name of the new king, Edward III. His father, Edward II, had banned the tournament, preferring more rustic pastimes. But Edward III excelled at the joust. Indeed, while Edward II had disappointed the traditional expectations of what a king should be, Edward III embodied the perfect contemporary image of kingship. Like Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria after him, Edward personified the values of his age. Edwardian England was an age of knights and fantasy castles, of honours and arms, of pageantry and jousts. It was a culture and a country rooted in war. And leading the country into battle was a hero king, Edward III.

Despite the revolution that placed him on the throne, Edward had to fight to rule as well as reign. His mother’s lover Mortimer had taken effective control of the kingdom in 1327. Edward was then only fourteen. Nevertheless, Mortimer saw the boy king as a threat. Edward was kept under the strictest control, watched and followed. Mortimer hoarded power and land for himself, lording over king and nobility alike. It was a new tyranny for England. And Edward had to use guile and subterfuge to break these bonds. He reached out to the nobility, building up support. In 1330, Mortimer got wind of the conspiracy against him. He summoned the king to Nottingham to interrogate the young man before a great council – that is, a parliament without the representatives of the commons. Overnight, however, Edward and his band got into Nottingham Castle through an underground tunnel. They surprised Mortimer the dictator, overpowered him, and had him arrested. He was condemned and executed as a common criminal at Tyburn.

Edward had won control by shrewdness and personal bravery. It was a fine start to his personal rule.

After the disasters of his father’s reign it was natural that Edward would model himself on his grandfather, the heroic warrior king Edward I. But it was a return with a difference. Edward had none of his grandfather’s ruthless driving energy or his stiff-backed authoritarianism either. Instead he cultivated an easy, winning charm. He was a good family man with a pretty wife and a rapidly growing brood of fine sons. He was capable of striking populist gestures, such as when he entered a town in triumph, not on horseback, but on foot and leading his wife and eldest son by the hand. And he would meet the humblest knight in the tournament, man to man, and win. In short, Edward was the perfect gentleman, affable, sporting and brave, who would rule England as the first among equals of his nobility.

This was a quiet revolution. For Edward, there would be no divisive, upstart favourite like Piers Gaveston. Instead Edward, unlike Mortimer, unlike his father or even his grandfather, truly accepted that he had to work in harmony with the nobility. Indeed, to do so was a pleasure as well as a duty.

The result was that Edward encouraged an aristocratic culture, which bound the king and nobles together. Its most vivid expression was in heraldry and coats of arms.

Originally a man’s coat of arms had the purely practical function of identifying him on the battlefield when he was encased in a suit of armour. But soon a whole world of meaning was added. A man’s coat of arms showed who his ancestors were; whom he had married; whether he was an elder or younger son and what honours he had won. Edward III was an aficionado of all this and he established a new order of chivalry based on the legend, then of course believed to be true, of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was called the Order of the Garter.

The story goes that at a court ball a lady let slip her garter, which fell to the floor. Amidst the laughter, the king himself bent down, retrieved it and silenced the titters by saying
Honi soi qui mal y pense
: ‘shame be to him who thinks evil of it’. Be that as it may, the Garter with its blue-and-gold ribbon encircling a man’s coat of arms became the supreme mark of noble honour. And St George, the saint of soldiers and nobles, to whom the Order of the Garter was dedicated, became the patron saint of England.

But all this glamour and glitz masked a darker, deadlier imperative. Edward and his nobles belonged to a killing culture in which a man gained honour and respect by slaughter. Sport, in particular, was all about the kill. A man killed animals in the hunt and came near to killing human beings in the joust and the tournament. And war, where a man killed for real, was the noblest sport of them all.

Recording this society, in which spectacle, slaughter and romance were intertwined like threads of black and gold and red, was the chronicler Jean Froissart. He was born at Valenciennes in Hainault and he wrote in French, which still clung on as the principal language of the English elite. His
Chroniques
covered the years 1327 to 1400; eventually totalled some three million words and dealt with a vast and crowded panorama of events in England, Scotland, France, Spain, the Low Countries and beyond. Froissart himself lived through over sixty of those years, and he was widely travelled in the countries he described. He began his career in the household of Edward III’s queen, Philippa, who was also a native of Hainault, and he knew all the principal players in events. He interviewed the heralds and generals and listened to the tales of old soldiers. He consulted records and treaties; visited the harbours and battlefields and was a familiar figure in the houses and palaces of the great. Eventually, like almost all previous historians, he became a priest and may even have spent his last days in a monastery. But it is impossible to think of anyone less cloistered or more completely at home in the world of chivalry whose values he celebrated and whose decline he mourned.

His subject therefore was war – and the pleasure rather than the pity of war. No one described it better or better recognized its importance. Especially in England. ‘The English’, Froissart wrote, ‘will never love and honour their king unless he be victorious and a lover of arms and war against their neighbours and especially against such as are great and richer than themselves.’

Edward first turned his war machine against Scotland. Scotland had eluded his grandfather, Edward I, and defeated and humiliated his father, Edward II. So for Edward, war with Scotland was a matter of honour. Edward took personal charge of his armies and managed to instil them with his own military enthusiasm, from the nobles at the top to the ordinary common soldier at the bottom. And it was the common soldier who largely won Edward’s wars, thanks to a powerful new weapon: the longbow.

Edward understood the value of the longbow and later in his reign he passed an act which banned other village sports, such as football and bowls, to force a concentration on archery. The border town of Berwick, now back in Scottish hands, was Edward’s first target. On Halidon Hill, just outside the town, the English and Scots met. It was the first victory for Edward and his longbow. As the Scots approached, the English archers fired their deadly wave of arrows with devastating impact. England’s honour, lost at Bannockburn, was restored.