The Three Edwards (16 page)

Then the situation changed. Boniface died, partly as a result of the French king’s attempt to have him kidnaped and carried into France. In 1305 the choice fell on a Gascon, Bertrand de Goth, who was Archbishop of Bordeaux and who took the name of Clement V. His selection, without any doubt, had been due to French influence and gold. His first two acts of any moment were evidence of this. Instead of going at once to Rome, he had his coronation at Lyons and then returned to Bordeaux. Here he filled the cardinalate with Frenchmen. Winchelsey found himself without papal support in his struggle with the king. Edward had at an earlier stage ordered the sheriffs to confiscate the lay fees in the province of Canterbury, with the result that the archbishop had found it necessary to subsist on charity. Even his horses had been seized and he had been forced to travel on foot, which was particularly trying to one of his increasing corpulence. Two of Winchelsey’s most active enemies, Bishop Langton of Lichfield, who acted as treasurer, and the Earl of Lincoln, were sent to Lyons to represent Edward at the new Pope’s coronation, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to poison Clement’s mind against the archbishop; which, under the circumstances, was not a difficult thing to do. The new Pope lost no time in acting. On February 12 he suspended the archbishop from all his functions and summoned him to appear before the curia within two months. During Winchelsey’s last visit to London, Archbishop Greenfield of York came down and triumphantly paraded the streets of the city with his cross carried erect in front of him.

The primate’s first move on receiving the summons from the Pope was to see Edward and beg for his aid. The king received him in what contemporary writers called his
torve
mood. He displayed no trace of cordiality. His eyes were hot with anger, his words incisive and unfriendly. He proceeded to go over the archbishop’s record in full detail, stressing every move he had made to oppose the royal will. The archbishop is reported to have broken down and wept copiously.

Early historians gave a different reason for the bitter anger of the king. It was said he produced a letter which Winchelsey had written to one of the two earls Bigod and Bohun at the time they set themselves up in opposition to the king’s will. It was no less than a proposal to remove the king and put the young prince on the throne in his place. There was no documentary proof of this, and the story has since been ignored as too impossible to believe. If the primate had been indiscreet enough to broach such a suggestion, he would not have been so foolhardy as to put it in writing. The king’s reaction also would have been much more drastic. A charge of treason would have been laid against Winchelsey without any doubt.

The situation was taking on a dramatic resemblance to that which led to the murder of Thomas à Becket. Edward made it clear that he could no longer abide the presence of the primate in the kingdom and that he had no intention of interceding for him with the Pope. The upshot was that Winchelsey, pale and shaken from this exhibition of royal wrath, left London and made preparations to obey the papal summons.

The primate crossed the waters to Bordeaux, where the Pope was still holding his court. He refused Winchelsey an audience in curt and unfriendly manner. This reception, coming on top of everything else, affected the archbishop so adversely that he suffered a stroke.

If the quick communications of modern days had been possible then, there would have been much holding of breaths in ecclesiastical palaces and state chancelleries, for at this point the parallel with the Becket case became startlingly close. If the old archbishop had died, there would have been a general belief that he had been persecuted to death by his unfriendly king and the indifferent pontiff. The wave of horror which swept the Christian world when Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral would not have been equaled, but the indignation would have been deep and lasting. Edward was so complex in character that it is impossible to say what his reaction might have been in that event. Fortunately for the king, the primate did not die: it was Edward himself who heard the call to another life while Winchelsey continued to await the Pope’s pleasure. It seems that the archbishop had told his followers that he had had a vision of the king’s death and so he was prepared for it. He recovered
from the effects of the stroke rather quickly when the confirmation of his vision was received.

The trouble Edward was having with the barons was not concerned with anything they were doing at this time; it went back to the sharp encounters of the past. When he gave instructions to the delegation being sent to attend the coronation of Pope Clement at Lyons, he asked them to discuss with the pontiff a matter which “lay deep in his heart.” He still felt the humiliation of being compelled to agree to the
Confirmatio cartarum
. He had only agreed, he declared, because of the dire straits he was in at the time, and he still felt that the barons had taken advantage of his position. What he desired, in short, was to be relieved of the oath he had taken at the time. It did not prove a hard matter to arrange. The Gascon-born Pope granted him the absolution at once.

This was a familiar situation to anyone whose memory went back to the previous reign. Henry III, that weathercock king, had on many occasions broken the restrictions placed upon him by the Great Charter and, on being brought to heel by the barons, had abjectly sworn oaths to sin no more. The ink would hardly be dry on his signature when messengers would be on their way to Rome to ask for absolution of his vows. This was always granted him and so he had no hesitation about breaking his oath whenever it seemed advantageous to do so.

This was outrageous behavior, but in a weak and fickle king it came to be accepted. But here was Edward preparing to follow in the same path, and that was a different matter. Edward was a strong king and not one from whom such shabby tactics were expected.

Did it mean that a belief in autocratic rule was so deeply rooted in all kings that even Edward, the most enlightened monarch of his day, was no different from any others in this respect? Did it mean that, when he was improving and codifying the laws, he was acting with a reservation, a secret conviction that he himself would be above any of the restrictions established? Or did it mean that he had outlived that fine phase of his life and now lacked the clear sense of kingly responsibility with which he had begun his reign?

The last explanation seems the most likely. He was old and short-tempered and resentful of anything that stood in his way. He was seeing the past in a different light, remembering the rebuffs and losses he had sustained and thinking less of the triumphs and satisfactions. Certainly the refusal of the Scots to lay down their arms and acknowledge themselves conquered was a contributing factor.

Edward’s dissatisfaction with his heir had been increasing with the years. The prince had grown into a reasonable facsimile of his father, being tall and of a handsome and sometimes impressive appearance; but there the resemblance seems to have stopped. His physical strength was great, but he did not enjoy using it in martial exercises. He was not then, and never would be, a soldier. Instead he liked to employ his great muscles in manual ways. He could shoe a horse, and enjoyed doing so, and he could thatch a house. Horses, in fact, were a passion with him, and his household records are full of information about his interest in breeding them. From the Earl Warenne, the loser at Stirling Bridge, he purchased a fine stud, and from one of his sisters he secured a white greyhound of which he became very fond. These interests were commendable enough in their way and, if he had been lucky enough to have been born the son of a country gentleman of no great prominence, he might have gone through life without attracting any unfavorable notice. It was his great misfortune that he had been born a prince, and with bad appetites that developed inordinately because of the power that came into his hands.

The king strove to instill in him a love of order and a capacity for attention to administrative detail, against the day when the complexities of the justiciary and the chancellery at Westminster would demand his attention. This does not appear to have been in any degree successful. Edward II remained to the end of his days incapable of any such concentration.

The greatest of the old king’s worries was the vulgarity of his son’s tastes and the low-grade associations into which they plunged him. There is a wardrobe item, dated 1298, of a payment of two shillings to Maude Make-joy for dancing before the prince in King’s Hall at Ipswich. This is the only reference available to this particular episode, but it is not difficult to reconstruct the scene: the royal youth of fourteen, already tall and stout of limb, dressed no doubt in parti-colored hose and with the richest of materials on his back, lolling in his seat and laughing in loud approval of the sinuous twistings and stampings of Madame Maude, and calling to one of the familiars of the household to drop a suitable reward into the probably not too clean palm of the lady; with, in all probability, his tutors seated in the idle circle, grinning and slapping their spindly thighs. This seems the only explanation to account for the listing of such a minor item in the household accounts. The official who gave the money to the dancer
would not expect to be paid for it by the prince and would take this method of making certain of reimbursement.

There is a record also of compensation paid to one of the court fools because he had been made the butt of some particularly painful horseplay on the part of the prince.

The king seems to have been most particularly distressed by the freedom of talk indulged in by his son. Edward was not one of the strong and silent young men. He liked to talk. In fact, he seems to have been a bit of a babbler and would speak freely of anything he had heard, even though it might be in the nature of a secret of state. Undoubtedly it reached the stage where interested parties, even the envoys of foreign states, made a point of learning the gossip of the princely household.

On the credit side of the ledger there were instances where he showed flashes of nobler impulses. He was generous and sometimes kind. It must be added, however, that such intervals were brief and could not be construed as an indication of the real character of this most frivolous of all the Plantagenets.

The members of this kingly family seem to have been subject to a rule of rotation. Henry III was the son of John, the worst of kings, and the father of the best, Edward I. The unfortunate prince with whom these brief references are concerned was an outward copy of his father but with no solidity or fineness of character. Nonetheless, he in turn was to beget the great conqueror king, Edward III. What is known of the youth and the formative years of Edward II leaves a feeling of pity for this princeling to whom dignity was burdensome and who had no inner reserves of power to draw upon when faced with the grave responsibilities of kingship. His father seems to have sensed this, for he alternated firmness with kindly understanding in his efforts to train his successor.

Perhaps Queen Eleanor was partly to blame. She was so completely the wife that she had little time left for the care of her children. Edward, it is evident, was left without much motherly attention while the devoted queen accompanied her beloved husband on his state processionals and his incessant campaigns.

T
HE family of the Bruces, second choice in that arbitration for a crown, had never been reconciled to the selection of John de Baliol as King of Scotland. The grandfather had died in 1295 and had been followed by his son, the Earl of Carrick, in 1304, leaving the grandson, who is known in history as Robert the Bruce, to continue the family pretensions.

The Earl of Carrick had been a romantic figure. He contracted a marriage with the widowed Countess of Carrick when she was a royal ward, without the king’s consent. The story ran that he was hunting on her estates and she saw him there for the first time, falling in love with him so completely and violently that she instructed her men to abduct him. They were man and wife when they appeared again in the public eye. Though some skeptics declared this was all a ruse to cover up the fact that Bruce had married her with no regard to the royal wardship, it seems to have been a love match. At any rate, they brought into the world five sons, four of whom were destined to die violently in the struggle for Scottish freedom, and five daughters, all of whom married husbands of high lineage.

The Earl of Carrick was so little reconciled to the decision in favor of Baliol that he made an excuse to go to Norway when Baliol summoned his first Parliament. After that ineffective monarch ran foul of Edward’s power and was sent into exile, Carrick demanded the reversion of the crown. But Edward had other plans. He was reported to have responded in verse:

After that the second Bruce seems to have receded into a purely minor part and died quietly, and unhappily, on his English estates.

The grandson in the meantime had been turning his coat with a regularity that made his career a difficult one to follow. At one stage he would be superintending the English efforts to breach the stout walls of Stirling Castle with the machines King Edward had brought up from England, called by such expressive names as the
Tout-de-Monde
, the
Parson
, and the
Lup-de-Guerre
. At another he would be sharing the guardianship of Scotland with Comyn the Red in open defiance of the English king. He was forgiven several times and taken back into the king’s peace. Edward, in fact, showed a degree of patience with him that is hard to reconcile with his harsh treatment of others.

Then things began to clarify for the sole guardian of the Bruce holdings and claims. Wallace, who had stood by Baliol, had been executed. Baliol himself was falling into blindness in exile at Castle Gaillard in Normandy and had lost interest in Scottish affairs. Comyn the Red, who now took on himself the Baliol claims because of a distant relationship, was a ruffler and a hothead. Robert the Bruce, no longer content to play small parts in the sanguinary drama, stalked to center stage and assumed the leading role.