The Three Edwards (6 page)

There is a story that one day Edward was playing a game with one of his knights. Suddenly he sprang from his chair, impelled by a motive he could not later explain. As he moved away, a stone from the ceiling fell on the exact spot where he had been sitting. The safety of Edward was ascribed, of course, to divine intervention. If the incident occurred at Windsor, it might easily have been the work of the uncertain chalk ridge.

Eleanor strove to become a patroness of the arts and was willing to make personal grants, as large as forty shillings, for literary efforts such as translations from the Latin. An even more useful contribution to the cultural side of life in the country was her introduction of the fork. It has been assumed that this most useful of table articles was not known in England until a much later date, but in a list of the queen’s plate there is mention of forks of crystal and of silver, with handles of ebony or ivory. A later item in the Record Commission includes forks among the domestic articles used by the king.

The king not only endeavored to keep pace with the cultural activities of his queen but was as amenable to household customs as the most humble of husbands. It was the rule on Easter Monday for the women in all large establishments to surround the master and hoist him, willy-nilly, in a chair and not let him down until he paid them a proper gratuity. This was popularly called “heaving.” One year seven of the queen’s high-placed young ladies took Edward in hand and “heaved” him in his chair amid much laughter and clapping of hands. The king took it with good grace and paid them the handsome sum of fourteen pounds for his release.

The histories of three of the princesses, Eleanor, Joanna, and Margaret, seem to run in a pattern. In an age when marriages, particularly in royal families, were arranged when the principals were little more than infants, these three daughters of England’s greatest king seem to have found some belated happiness. When the queen died in 1290, Eleanor, as the oldest daughter, became the most important woman of her father’s court. Here, that same year, she was to find sympathy and solace in a Frenchman of great charm, the Duke of Bar-le-Duc, a new and well-considered friend of Edward. He became a constant visitor to the court and they, Eleanor and the duke, had the opportunity of close association. In her babyhood Eleanor had been affianced to the future King Alfonso of Aragon, but they
never met and destiny gathered him to his royal fathers. Three years passed and Eleanor happily married the Duke of Bar-le-Duc.

In April 1290 the fiery-spirited, sloe-eyed Joanna of Acre married England’s most powerful peer, second to the king in importance, Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. Joanna, too, had been given in betrothal at the age of five, to Prince Hartman, son of the king of the Romans. Edward seems to have arranged future marriages for his daughters with no idea of permitting their consummation but as perhaps a help toward some political expediency of the moment. Also, it is often plain that he could not part with his dearly loved daughters. Poor Prince Hartman went skating one winter’s day. The story is that he accidentally fell into open reaches where the water was deep, and drowned.

Gilbert de Clare was not young when he married Joanna and took her to live at his country retreat in Clerkenwell, not far from the Tower, where the king and queen were again in residence. She left for her new home with great fanfare, laden with royal gifts. Among them were forty golden cups, many more golden clasps, “twenty zones of silk, wrought and trapped with silver to give away to whom she pleased.” Hampers, coffers, baskets, and bags are listed without number. “One sumpter-horse carried her chapel apparatus, another her bed, a third her jewels, a fourth her chamber furniture, a fifth her
candles!
a sixth her pantry-stores and table linen, and a seventh her kitchen furniture.”

Joanna was but twenty-three when the old Earl of Gloucester died. After being a widow a year, she secretly married a completely unknown squire in her late husband’s retinue, Ralph de Monthermer. Through this marriage he became possessed in his own right of the earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford. The fact that a royal princess had dared to marry this obscure fellow became a
cause célèbre
which for a time separated her from the affection of her father. It proved to be a happy marriage, however, leading ultimately to a firm friendship between the new son-in-law and Edward.

Margaret, the fourth daughter of the king, married John of Brabant, an athletic young man, “stout, handsome, gracious and well-made,” whom she had known during her childhood. The colorful splendor of their wedding celebration—the extravagant costumes, the king and his knights attired in full armor—creates an unforgettable picture. All London seems to have joined the knights with their ladies in marching and singing through the streets of the city and suburbs while more than five hundred minstrels, fools, harpers, violinists, and trumpeters, some English, some foreign, cavorted about the palace grounds. Margaret was a merry child of fifteen years, the duke a few years older. Everything seemed conducive to a happy union. Actually the marriage proved disastrous. Margaret soon found that she was to be but one of many women in her husband’s life. In
Brussels, where she eventually went to live, she was “doomed to the mortification of being perpetually surrounded with the bastard sons of her husband.”

Of the two remaining royal princesses, Elizabeth, Edward’s youngest daughter, married John, Count of Holland, a happy if uneventful union. Mary’s life at four had been prearranged by her parents. She became a nun, veiled at the convent of Ambresbury in 1284, where the queen dowager, Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, had also taken the veil after the death of Henry III. Mary never forgot that she was a royal princess. She was seen everywhere and proved as much of a gadabout as her sisters. Life in the convent did not prohibit an active social existence outside, and she made demands regularly on the king for gifts of money and wine for her personal use. She died at fifty-four, the last survivor of the union of Edward and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile.

I
T was from me that he learned it!” cried Simon de Montfort when he issued from the town of Evesham with his small and tired army and found himself facing the converging forces of the then Prince Edward. The heir to the throne of England had indeed learned a great deal about generalship from this uncle who had defied the power of Henry III and had beaten the royalist troops at the earlier and spectacular battle of Lewes. And so Simon de Montfort knew that he would die on that tragic day and that his cause was lost.

Edward had also learned much from Simon which guided him when he became king. He remembered well a certain great day when his uncle had tried a memorable experiment. On March 8, 1265, a Parliament was assembling which would later be called the Great Parliament. At that historic gathering, common men for the first time sat down with the nobility and the bishops. Simon had summoned from two to four “good and loyal men” from each city and borough to attend and take part in the deliberations. What share they had in the discussions and to what extent their views weighed in the decisions reached are not known. Called “bran-dealers, soap-boilers and clowns” by those who resented this radical step, they nonetheless sat with their betters, if not in full equality, at least to face the same problems. A precedent had been set which would persist until the model for parliamentary rule had been fixed for all time.

Few particulars are known about this epochal gathering. It is unlikely that Simon de Montfort, who was a great man, looked at those common men sitting quietly in their plain cloaks and with their flat cloth caps on their knees and saw in them the forerunners of the elected members who would have the making of all law in their hands centuries later. But if he lacked that full vision, he must have had some part of it.

As a youth Edward had been such an admirer of this uncle he was
destined to overthrow and kill at Evesham that the bond between them had once threatened to separate the prince from his somewhat less than admirable father, Henry III. He knew the thoughts which filled the mind of that great leader and innovator. And this may have been why he summoned a Parliament to meet at Shrewsbury in 1282 and included among those to appear two representatives from twenty towns and boroughs. Among the noblemen summoned were eleven earls, ninety-nine barons, and nineteen other men of note. No representatives of the clergy had been instructed to appear, perhaps because the session was being held at the edge of the Marcher country and within the shadow cast by the Welsh wars.

The names of some of the common members have been kept on the record. Henry de Waleys, the mayor of Shrewsbury, was one, as were Gregory Rokesley and one Philip Cessor. It is unfortunate that nothing is known of them beyond that. Waleys had seen the king two years before in connection with a royal loan; he was, in all probability, of some wealth and consequence. Among the others there must have been many of stout character, of vision, of courage, perhaps also some sly individuals who thought only of personal gain, a few even of mean attributes, human nature being what it is. Few, if any, could read or write. All had a share of the humility which alone made life tolerable for those of low degree.

It seems certain that Edward’s move to give the commons representation was not yet a matter of settled policy with him. They were called at a moment of crisis when he felt the need of united support, their function to confer on war problems. It is a clear indication of his attitude that the men from the towns and boroughs were not summoned to take part in parliaments for a long time thereafter.

Then, after eleven years, he went back to the system of triple representation, the nobility, the clergy, and the commons. What had happened in the meantime to change his thinking? Had the vision which had come to Simon de Montfort returned to fill the mind of this able and courageous king? Or had he reached his final decision after observing the results obtained with the more restricted form of deliberative body? It is possible, of course, that the opposition of the higher orders had lessened. Whatever the reason, a Parliament met at Westminster on November 13, 1295, and included men elected to represent the commons, together with seven earls, forty-one barons, and two knights from each shire.

It was significant that the writ of summons began with a quotation from the Code of Justinian: “As the most righteous law, established by the provident circumspection of the sacred princes, exhorts and ordains that that which touches all shall be approved by all, it is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common.” Thus was a great truth laid down which was to continue as the guiding principle
through the centuries while parliamentary procedure and power were being tested and corrected and finally brought to a working degree of perfection.

At this great gathering, in order to complete the representation, were the archbishops and bishops, attended (for consultation only) by their archdeacons and proctors.

This momentous gathering is generally referred to as the Model Parliament because it came so close to settling the form which parliamentary deliberations would finally assume. Edward’s plan, to have the three bodies deliberate separately, was the forerunner of the separation finally effected into two houses, the House of Lords, in which the peers and the bishops sat, and the House of Commons.

It was a model Parliament in one other respect: it helped in the selection of Westminster as the one place of meeting. There had been a tendency to wander about in previous reigns, and often the barons had been summoned to Winchester, Northampton, or Oxford. Edward, being so continuously on the wing, had fallen into the habit of holding Parliament wherever he happened to be. There were sessions at Winchester, Northampton, Shrewsbury, Acton Burnell, Bury St. Edmunds, Clipstone in Sherwood Forest, Berwick, and Salisbury. This suited the king’s convenience, but it was exasperating for the barons and bishops to be under the necessity of collecting their people and following the dusty-footed monarch all over the kingdom. The journey had to be made by those on horseback with trains of fifty or more servitors, knights, squires, valets, chirurgeons, confessors, grooms, men-at-arms, and archers. It is hard to conceive how the multitudes which constitute a parliament could be housed and fed in, say, Clipstone, where the king had a hunting lodge with the usual small houses about it, a chapel and a mill, and no towns within easy distance. Even Bury St. Edmunds, which had been a royal town in Saxon times but was still relatively small, was hard pressed by the scores of cavalcades converging on it from every direction. What scrambling there must have been to provide food for so many hearty eaters and to find sleeping quarters for them all! Sometimes the deliberations had to be held in churches, inadequate castles, and even in large barns. If the energetic Edward found himself greeted with glum faces when he stalked in to Parliament to express his royal will, it may often have been the result not of dissent with his program but of the great discomforts the members were suffering. Twenty years of this dancing to the royal tune led to a general acceptance of Westminster as the place to meet.

The barons of England, who had forced King John to his knees and had been at odds, and sometimes at war, with Henry III all through the long reign of that exasperating monarch, were not entirely in accord with the forward-looking policies of Edward. They were inclined to hang back, to mutter their disagreement, even to adopt open measures of opposition. They were intensely jealous of their rights, and some of Edward’s wise lawmaking seemed to them to tread too heavily on the iron-shod toes of feudal privilege. Nor did they favor the bringing of the bran-dealers and soap-boilers into the halls where the laws were made.

They said so openly at a meeting of Parliament which Edward called for February 25, 1297. He was at Salisbury at the time and accordingly the session was held in that ancient town. War with France had blazed up, owing in part to some hostilities between the sailors of the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, Sandwich, Winchelsea, and Rye) and the fishermen from Normandy. There was a wily and ambitious king on the French throne, Philip IV (all through this phase of history French kings were believed in England to be wily and ambitious), and he made this a pretext to seize Gascony, which was about all that was left to England of the immense possessions Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought with her when she became the wife of Henry II. Negotiations between the two monarchs came to naught and so Edward, needing money badly, took emergency measures to raise it. There were glum and hostile faces when Parliament opened. The two glummest and most hostile were those of the fifth Earl of Norfolk, who was hereditary marshal of England, and the Earl of Hereford, who held the post of constable. When Edward announced that he planned to lead an army into Flanders to fight things out with the French king and would send another army to recover Gascony, the meeting flared into opposition.