MASTER NEGATIVE NO . 92 -80534 MICROFILMED 1 992 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: TOUT, THOMAS FREDERICK TITLE: EDWARD THE FIRST PLACE: LONDON DA TE : 1893 Master Negative # COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record Restrictions on Use: re 4 Tout, Thomas Frederick, 1855- 1529. Edward the First, by Professor T. F. Tout. London I and New York, Macmillan and CO., 1893. 1903. I vi, 238 p. m'"". (Half-title: Twelve English statesmen) t t " !-^942.055-— £kxp3r-in College Study. :>92K92 Copy in Barnard College Library* T 1. F/lwarcl i, king of England, 1239-1307. • 2. Gt. Brit.— Hist— Edward I, 1272-1307. ■] Library of Congress v; 3-28828 lO , DA231.A2T7 - ^ (.-> '/J COimnUro ON NEXT CARD TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE: ^Sf/?? <^ REDUCTION RATIO: IMAGE PLACEMENT: IAQJa) IB IIB DATE FILMED: .^S/y_i=z INITIALS :ZZyp. '7X FILMED BY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE. CT _XE Association for Information and image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 h Centimeter im 1 iiiiliiii 2 iiiilii 1 II 3 iiliiiiliii 4 5 6 7 iliiii iiiiliiii ml III III 1 t1 mif T'Ci" 'r rrtTi 1 1 II 1 1 1 1 Inches 1 1.0 l.i 1.25 9 10 11 12 13 14 liiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliii i[j iiiliiiiliiii I I I I I I I I I I I 11^ 11111= 2.8 2.5 llp-° IIIM 3.2 2.2 1 63 3.6 l^ If III 4.0 2.0 ^0 li ^ t^tilA 1.8 1.4 1.6 15 mm > MfiNUFflCTURED TQ FlIIM STfiNDRRDS BY fiPPLIED IMPIG^, INC. \ i fuil J [inJ| j ug ( [iriJf ]ifi] | pjiJ)[iriJf ]iiTI m I u 1^ li 11 la 1 m M THE LIBRARIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY u li 11 u fi ^ / 9';^^ Cbelbe (BixQli^i ^tuMmtn EDWARD THE FIRST EDWAED THE FIEST BY Professor T. F. TOUT 3Lont(on MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1893 A II righ is reseti'ed EDWAED THE FIEST BY Professor T. R TOUT iLontron MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1893 A II righ is reserred 9^^. OSS ■ •^ ^ 4 ^^H ~ ^1 ^v .;<9 ^ V' ^^1 ^ V ^m 5 f^?-^B '^ 1 s fl i CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE Early Years— 1239-1258 CHAPTEli 11 Edward and the Barons' Wars — 1258-1267 26 CHAPTER III Edward as a Crusader — 1268-1272 45 CHAPTER IV The King and his Work 58 CHAPTER V Edward's Continental Policy — 1272-1289 . 86 CHAPTER VI The Conquest and Settlement of the Principality OP Wales— 1274-1301 107 Yl EDWARD I 11 CHAPTER VII Edward^s Legislation — 1275-1290 PAGE . 120 CHAPTER VIII Edward and the Three Estates— The Develop- ment OF the Parliamentary System . . 135 CHAPTER IX Edward and the Church — 1272-1294 . CHAPTER X The Scottish Overlordship — 1286-1292 CHAPTER XI The Years of Crisis— 1293-1297 CHAPTER XII The Conquest of Scotland — 1297-1305 CHAPTER XIII The End of the Eeign — 1305-1307 INDEX . 149 1 k Si 164 179 199 219 231 CHAPTER I early years 1239-1258 Edward I. was born at Westminster on 17th June 1239. He was the first offspring of the marriage of Henry III. with Eleanor of Provence. Henry had long held in special reverence King Edward the Confessor, whose pious, weak, but amiable character in some ways is suggestive of his own. He therefore at once bade the child be called Edward, in memory of the holy king whose ashes reposed in the neighbouring abbey of St. Peter's. A papal legate performed the baptismal ceremony, and among the sponsors was the great Simon of Montfort, Earl of Leicester, newly reconciled to his royal brother- in-law after his audacious marriage with the widowed Countess Eleanor of Pembroke, King Henry's sister. Exceptional rejoicings attended the birth of the heir to the crown, for many feared that the young Queen was barren, and all were glad that a man-child, born on English soil and bearing an English name, had come into the world to settle the question of the succession to the throne. Significantly passing over the long line of foreign rulers who had borne sway in England since the & B EDWARD I CHAP. Norman Conquest, an English chronicler gleefully traced back young Edward's genealogy to Alfred, the greatest of the old English kings. The laws of the good King Edward, after whom the child had been named, had been the rallying cry of more than one generation of oppressed and down-trodden Englishmen. It was hoped that a new King Edward might renew the golden age of the holy Confessor. Groaning under weak and irresolute rule, wounded in all their dearest national aspirations. Englishmen looked forward from the dull present to the possibilities of a happier and brighter future. Nor were such hopes doomed to the dis- appointment which so commonly waits upon those who reckon upon the goodwill of princes. The son of the weak Henry and the greedy and unpopular Eleanor was destined to become the greatest of English monarchs. Henry HI. in many Avays reminds us of Charles I. There is'^in both kings the same strict religious principle, the same high standard of private life, the same strong and pure domestic affections, the same inteUigent, artistic temperament, the same graciousness, refinement, and love of culture. But a complete paralysis of will, an utter absence of straightforwardness, manliness, resolution, and clearness of vision, made Henry even more unfitted than Charles to act as ruler of England. Like Charles, Henry could never see that the times were changing. He held ideas of his own rights that the sons of the men who had wrested the Great Charter from King John could never allow to pass unquestioned. But it was not the policy so much as the want of policy of Henry that gave his subjects most offence. Thirteenth -century England had no I EARLY YEARS 8 objection to a strong king, who, clearly grasping the identity of interest between himself and his people, strove with might and main to grapple with anarchy and lawlessness, and drive the people into the ways of sound rule and good order. Henry IH. w^as too feeble, too frivolous, too idle, to be such a king. Moreover, he was jealous and suspicious of all able men. He was afraid to allow his ministers to exercise the powers that he was too weak to use himself. He strove to rule personally through clerks, dependents, and foreign favourites. The result was an almost complete collapse of all sound rule. While the material and spiritual activities of the nation were alike rapidly expanding, the strong centralised government which Henry H. had handed down to his sons was smitten with palsy. The begging friars were working out a great religious revival. The young enthusiasm of the Oxford masters had made England the home of an intellectual activity that could only be paralleled in the great University of Paris. Roger Bacon was preparing the way for English medicine and science. Vast and noble minsters in the new Pointed style were arising throughout the land, and proclaiming the culmination of media3val art. The English tongue was again becoming a vehicle for original literature, while in the learned Latin and the noble French a vigorous and abundant crop of great works were written by Englishmen. Englishmen were again conscious of national life and national unity. But with the weak Henry on the throne political progress that should match the rapid movement of the greatest and most constructive period of the Middle Ages could only be obtained through revolution. EDWARD I CHAP. Henry III. was himself in full sympathy with at least the religious and artistic movements of his time. His love of English saints, his anxiety to uphold English power abroad, shows that he was no mere foreigner, as has so often been said. But his wife and his mother, a Proven9al and a Poitevin, exercised an unhappy influence upon him. The Proven9al and Savoyard uncles of his wife, his Poitevin half-brothers by his mother's second marriage, claimed the chief places in his court and councils, and aspired to the greatest offices, estates, and di-nities in the land. Henry's superstitious fear of papal authority, combined with a shrewd sense of the temporal benefits to be got from close friendship with the spiritual head of the Church, exposed England to the invasion of a swarm of greedy foreign ecclesiastics. The very good points of Henry told against his popu- larity as a king. His appreciation of the great position of the Roman Church, his sympathy for the great wave of religion and culture which radiated from the France of St.°Louis, and exercised an influence over western Europe only second to that exercised by the France of Rousseau and Voltaire, led Henry to a love of foreign manners and methods that became increasingly repug- nant to his nobles. The barons of England might talk French at home, and vie with Henry in their love of French ways, but French-speaking Englishmen of the thirteenth century were no more good French- men in the political sense than the French-speaking Vaudois or Genevese of to-day. Since the loss of Nor- mandy under John, most of the English barons had become sound English patriots and enemies of French political influence, however fully they shared in I EARLY YEARS 6 the international civilisation of the French-speaking world. Queen Eleanor of Provence exercised over Henry HI. the same fatal influence that Henrietta Maria wielded over Charles I. She was indeed a stronger and less frivolous character than her antitype. She inherited the subtle will and the bright poetic nature of her father, Raymond Berenger IV., the last Count of Provence of the native line, and himself not the meanest of the poets in the soft and melodious Proven9al tongue. From her mother, Beatrice of Savoy, came the harder, clearer, more grasping temperament which was already a characteristic of the rising house of Savoy. She was one of four fair sisters, who all in their turn became queens. " Quattro figlie ebbe, e ciascuna regina, Ramondo Beringliieri." Eleanor's elder sister Margaret was the wife of Louis IX., Ijetter known as St. Louis, then at the height of his power, and the strongest king who had ever as yet reigned in France. Her next sister, Sanchia, married Henry Ill's only brother, Earl Richard of CornAvall ; while her youngest sister took the rich inheritance of Provence to her husband, Charles of Anjou, the brother of Louis IX. and the future conqueror of Sicily. But despite her French connections by marriage, Eleanor cannot herself be described as French in any strict sense of the word. Her family had long headed the unavailing struggle against the extension of North French influence into Languedoc and Provence. But a foreign girl from the south who never understood the ways and manners of Englishmen, and was, moreover, proud, greedy, 6 EDWAKD 1 CHAP. C, extravagant, and overbearing, could not but exercise an evil influence over her weak, irresolute, and uxorious husband. With all their faults, Henry and Eleanor were devoted to each other, and set an example of family life that was rare in those days of brutality and violence. They showed no less devotion to their children, and all thi-ough his life Edward was bound by the strongest ties of duty and aff'ection to his kindly, affectionate, and loving father, and his proud, high-spirited, and passion- ate mother. Henry and Eleanor kept their son more about them than was usual in the formal households of the time. Up to the age of seven Edward was mainly brought up at Windsor under the care of Hugh Giffard. He s°eems to have been delicate, and to have suffered some severe illnesses. When he was seven he fell sick at Beaulieu Abbey, whither he had been taken by his mother to be present at the dedication of the church. For three weeks he lay in danger, and his mother, ^ to the scandal of the strict Cistercians, insisted on staying in the convent that she might nurse him. A year later Edward was dangerously ill in London, and, at the King's request, prayers were off'ered up for his recovery in all the monasteries in and near the city. But as he grew older Edward got over his childish weakness. He became a tall, active, handsome boy, with bright flaxen locks, and proud, rather domineering manners. Nor was his education neglected. French, Latin, and English he could understand with equal facility, and, despite a stammer, he became ultimately an eloquent speaker in at least French and English. There is little evidence of his literary atUinments and scanty proof I EARLY YEARS 7 of any love of books. Probably he was all through his life fonder of action than of speculation. But he certainly must have gone through that elaborate drillincr in the routine of business which he afterwards strove in vain to enforce on his unhappy son. We are still more certain that he went through a careful legal training, perhaps under the guidance of the chancery clerk, Robert Burnell, who became his chaplain and confidential servant and to whom he was ever warmly attached. His father's real religious feeling ensured for Edward a strict religious education. The home lessons of purity and piety took a deep root, and all through his life Edward was honourably distinguished by the u})rightness of his private life and the strength and fervour of his religious principles. Nor were the martial exercises which became a prince neglected. From an early age Edward became famous throughout Christendom as the bravest and most dexterous of warriors. He gained many notable successes in tourna- ments against some of the doughtiest champions of the day. He was equally expert in hawking and hunting, a fearless and dexterous horseman, and a proficient in all martial and manly sports, especially those that had in them a spice of danger. Among his most ordinary companions were his cousin, Henry of Almaine, the son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who was soon to become the titular king of the Romans, and his other cousins, the four young Montforts, of Avhom the eldest, Henry de Montfort, was nearly his own age. The Montforts Avere fierce, violent, brutal youths, and marked out for stormy and ill-fated careers. Not less violent were Edward's young Poitevin uncles, the Lusignans, the It 8 EDWARD I CHAP. EARLY YEARS 9 ' i I \^ r !0 t 11 offspring of his father's mother, Isabella of Angouleme, by her second marriage with the Count of La Marche, and who came, like the Savoyard kinsfolk of Henry's wife, to share the bounty of their half-brother the King. Edward himself was not unmarked by the same taint in early manhood. After he had been given a household of his own, the violence and brutality of his followers involved their master in an unpopularity which was not quite undeserved. With lordly good nature, Edward bestowed his confidence on ruffianly officials, who op- pressed and robbed his tenants in his name. Nor were his own acts blameless. Strange tales were told of the lawless deeds wrought by the heir to the throne out of mere love of mischief or wanton cruelty. The progresses of the Lord Edward with his band of 200 horsemen, mostly foreigners, were like the movements of a desolating plague. Not even Louis of France, the invader of England in King Henry's youth, had taken about with him such a band of ruffians and desperadoes. No common man had any rights that such high-spirited gentlemen could regard as sacred. They stole the horses, the waggons, and the provisions that came nearest to their hands. Even monks were spoiled and maltreated by these reckless youths. One day, when Edward paid a visit to his uncle Eichard at AVallingford, his followers took violent possession of the neighbouring priory, and, driving out and insulting the lawful owners, stole their food, destroyed their property, and beat their servants. On another occasion Edward was passing along a road, and, out of mere wantonness, ordered his followers to cut off an ear and pluck out an eye of a harmless youth who had happened to cross his path. The most gloomy forebodings were expressed as to what would happen under so headstrong and reckless a ruler. But if courtly complacency is wont to magnify the virtues of young princes, common gossip is at least as apt to exag- gerate their vices. Regard for human suffering was a very rare quality in the Middle Ages, at least outside church and cloister. Yet it is hard to believe that Edward was guilty of anything worse than youthful carelessness, and overweening pride in his exalted position. Badly served he may well have been, and all through his life it was among his chiefest misfortunes that the execution of his plans had to be confided to agents quite unworthy to give proper effect to them. But with all his love of joustings and hunting, events show that he seldom neglected his serious business. Men lived short lives in the Middle Ages, and corre- spondingly began their active career at an exceedingly early age. The mediseval prince or noble was often a warrior, a practised statesman, a husband and a father when still little more than a mere boy. This was the case with Edward. He was only eight when his father began to think of providing him with a wife. But the negotiations entered upon in 1247 for a marriage between the young Edward and a daughter of the Duke of Brabant led to no result. AVhen Edward was about thirteen, fresh marriage negotiations were begun with Alfonso X., King of Castile. This prince was a descend- ant of Eleanor, daughter of Henry H., from whose marriage with King Alfonso VHI. of Castile had resulted a long and intimate connection between England and Castile, which coloured the whole of our foreign policy up to the Reformation. But marriage connections 10 EDWARD I CHAP. EARLY YEARS 11 i It involved not only relations of kinship but unpleasant claims of right. Alfonso X. was the most powerful of the Spanish kings, an able, vigorous, active, and aggressive ruler. The compilation of the code of the Siete Partidas made his reign an epoch in the history of Castile, while his adventurous disposition led him later to accept the doubtful advantage of election to the Holy Roman Empire in rivalry to Edward's uncle. Earl Kichard of Cornwall. The same restless and aggressive spirit Alfonso now showed by entertaining the appeals of the rebellious Gascon subjects of the English King, who called upon him to vindicate his claims to the duchy as the heir of Eleanor of Guienne. It was even believed in England that Alfonso proposed to invade England with an army of Castilians and Saracens. Henry thought it wise to remove the possibilities of a conflict, and restore the old friendly relations with Castile by a proposal to marry Edward to Alfonso's half- sister Eleanor, the daughter of King Ferdinand the Saint by his second wife Joan of Ponthieu, a young girl already reputed to possess great beauty, goodness, and sound sense, and who was, moreover, in right of her mother, heiress of the rich counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil in Western Picardy. That Edward himself might not go landless to the marriage, Henry conferred upon his son such extensive territories that he became, men said, no better than a mutilated king. In 1253 Henry sailed to Gascony, hoping to appease some disturbances that were then raging there, and conclude the match. Edward, who was taken to Portsmouth to see his father depart, stood weeping upon the shore as the ship sailed away, and would not leave it as long as a sail could still be seen. Queen Eleanor remained in England to look after her son and the realm. The next year the mar- riage treaty was signed, and in the early summer of 1254 Edward sailed with his mother and his uncle. Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury, to join his father in Gascony. In August he went to Alfonso's court at Burgos to carry on his suit in person. His mother still accompanied him. Alfonso received them with great pomp and festivity, examined the youth in his skill and knowledge, and conferred upon him the honour of knighthood. In October he was married to Eleanor at the monastery of Las Huelgas, and shortly afterwards returned with his wife to Bordeaux, whence a year later they returned to En^dand. The marriage thus concluded between the royal children proved one of the happiest in English history. Edward and Eleanor rivalled Henry and Eleanor in the warmth of their attachment and the purity of their domestic lives. They were scarcely ever separated, Eleanor making it her pride to share in the toils and dangers of her husband. On her death, after thirty-five years of happy wedlock, Edward experienced the most poignant grief. His whole character changed for the worse after the removal of the faithful partner of his youth and early manhood. In the thirteenth century a king's son did not form a member of a special royal caste. He had no distinctive title and was brought up very much like any other 'young man of high birth. The old English word " ^theling " had ceased to be used as the appropriate designation of the son of a crowned and anointed king. The vaguer modern word " prince " did not come into use for many centuries later. The eldest son of the w 12 EDWARD I CHAr. EARLY YEARS 13 ! 1 English king had no higher title than the vague appella- tion of "lord," which he shared with a whole host of feudal chieftains, great and small, with the bishops, abbots, judges, and even the masters and doctors of the universities. To speak of our hero as " Prince Edward " is an anachronism, though sometimes it is a convenient one. Contemporaries were content to call him '' the Lord Edward, the first-born son of the King," or, more shortly, " the Lord Edward." It is best to imitate their example. The provision for a mediaeval king's son was not made by grants and pensions from a civil list, but by the conference of large estates and territories, which he was expected to manage as a landlord, if not also to rule as a feudal chieftain. It was only through the successful administration of his domains that he could expect to get an adequate income for himself. The privilege of receiving the revenue of his appanage thus involved the duty of hard work in its government. It was, more- over, a very common practice all over Europe to confer upon the youthful heir some outlying and semi-independ- ent portion of the royal dominions that was not strictly a part of the main kingdom, and which gave the young prince a wide and free field to learn how to govern and prepare himself for the larger task of ruling the kingdom itself. A familiar though later example is the grant to the French king's heirs of the outlying district of Dauphiny, whence their well-known title of Dauphin. In the next century it became the custom in England to confer on the king's eldest son the Principality of Wales. But long before this had grown into a regular fashion, long before the Principality was in the king's hands to bestow, a similar practice had arisen. The lavish grants of territory made, as we have seen, to Edward between 1252 and 1254 had not simply the object of providing him with an adequate revenue to keep his court in due state with his young wife. They were also made with the design of giving him experience as a ruler in those districts of his father's dominions where the most valuable experience could be got. The ample provision made for Edward included indeed certain English cities such as Bristol, Stamford, and Grantham. But these were but an insignificant portion of the whole. The real importance of the grants lies in the gift to Edward of all Ireland, the earldom of Chester, the king's lands in Wales, the islands of Jersey and Guernsey with their dependencies, and the whole of Gascony with the island of Oleron, and whatever rights the king still had over all the other lands taken from his predecessors by the kings of France. It was, in short, the transference from Henry to Edward of all those parts of the British Islands outside England itself where the English King had any claim to rule. Along with these outlying dependencies, went every vestige that remained of the Norman inheritance of William the Bastard and the Aquitanian inheritance of Eleanor of Guienne. Edward was thus made the representative of the claims still brought forward from time to time for the restitution of the great Angevin Empire, reduced to insignificance by the heedless folly of John and the watchful aggressions of the French kings. The results of both series of grants were of unspeakable import- ance for the future history of Edward, and indeed for the future destinies of the British Islands. It was perhaps the greatest work of Edward's life to revive and 14 EDWAKD I CHAP. EARLY YEARS 15 If! ,'i 11 extend the policy of the great West Saxon kings before the Conquest of reducing the whole British Islands under the rule of the English King. The firmness and clear- ness with which Edward persisted in this policy may in no small measure be attributed to his early experience as ruler of Wales, Chester, and Ireland. Hardly second in importance to the imperial schemes of Edward in Britain was the firm policy with which he upheld England in a foremost place in the councils of Europe. Thts again can be traced back to his early experiences as a ruler of the English King's dominions in France. That he thought the real acquisition of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland more important and more worthy objects than vain attempts to renew the Angevin Empire on the Continent is perhaps almost equally true of his later policy. His early Gascon training gave him opportuni- ties for reforming the institutions and developing the resources of his great feudal duchy, while it could not but convince him of the real limitations imposed upon his power in the south of France. It is important to realise the exact position of the lands made over by Henry to Edward when the young prince was started on his active career. The appanage he received was a large one, but it was so unprofitable that Henry had to promise his son that the value of the lands settled on him should not fall short of 15,000 marks. In fact, Edward's whole lordship was in such a disturbed state that the maintenance of law and order within it could only be assured by means of lavish subsidies from the royal Exchequer. Such subsidies Henry was in no condition to make. The impossible task was therefore assigned to Edward and his advisers of reducing Ireland, Wales, and Gascony with their own resources ; while at the same time it was necessary that sufficient revenue should be derived from these poor and disturbed regions to provide for the support of their lord's household. Ireland Avas of all Edward's dominions in the most hopeless position. The first energies of the Norman conquerors of the twelfth century had been exhausted, and, though the great Norman houses still ruled extensive territories, they had begun to experience the attraction of Irish influence, and besides the hibernicisation of the Norman lords, the native septs were coming down from the hills and disputing with their new masters the domination of the plain country. But the power of the English crown had become insignificant alike over Norman lord and Irish chieftain. Edward's deputy at Dublin could command the obedience of neither. The Celtic chieftains upheld the tribal anarchy of the old Irish septs. The Norman lords saw their ideal of government in a political feudalism which gave the great landlord every regalian right, and necessarily involved the complete disintegration of all central authority. The central power was weak, foreign, and unpopular. These complicated evils had reduced the unhappy island to a state of confusion almost worse than that which had prevailed in the wild times of independence, before Strongbow and his associates had crossed the St. George's Channel. To grapple seriously with such difficulties was beyond the strength of Edward's advisers. They paid little attention to Ireland, preferring to concentrate their eff"orts on the smaller and more accessible territory of Wales. I \ 16 EDWARD I CHAP. The plans of Edward's advisers in Wales for the reduction of Wales were made possible by the grant of the great earldom of Chester. Ever since the Conquest Chester had been a district standing by itself. It was a palatine earldom, set up by the Conqueror to keep in check the wild Welshmen. With this object the Earl was given an almost absolute control of the civil and military resources of his shire. His duties to the Crown were discharged by simple homage and service. He held Cheshire as freely by his sword as the King held England by his crown. This position is in all. respects analogous to that of the practically independent feudal chieftains of France or Germany. The result was that Cheshire became a great military state. Its population were famed for their violence, turbulence, and martial powers. Headed by their fierce lords, the Cheshiremen had conquered nearly all Wales between the Dee and the Conway, though a later wave of Welsh enthusiasm had driven the invaders back almost to the walls of Chester. But the great line of Earls of Chester was now extinct. The bestowal of lapsed fiefs was among the most important of the prerogatives of the Crown. It was no small gain to the royal cause that Henry was thus able to invest his son with the rich fair and fertile Palatinate. It involved revenue, soldiers, influence, dignity, and the status of the greatest of English earls. It gave the new Earl of Chester means to make good the vaguer grant of " Wales." Wales included all the exceptional jurisdictions of the western peninsula, largely but by no means ex- clusively inhabited by Welshmen. In thinking of the Wales of the thirteenth century, we must forget the EARLY YEARS 17 modern boundary which separates the twelve or thirteen counties of the Wales of to-day from the modern England. This boundary goes no farther back than the reign of Henry VIII. Thirteenth -century Wales included much that is now England, while some parts of what is now Wales were then English ground. Beyond the vague and undefined western limits of Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Gloucestershire, every- thing was Wales. Before the Norman Conquest Wales had been ruled by a swarm of petty Celtic chieftains, whose energies were consumed in fruitless fights with each other, the true " battles of kites and crows " of British history. All owed a nominal allegiance to the Endish kincs. but this lax feudal tie did not prevent them plundering and devastating the English border whenever a fair opportunity was offered. But the strong rule of William I. and his sons brought about a great change. The Norman Conquest of England Avas followed by the Norman Conquest of "Wales. A swarm of Norman adventurers crossed over the border and drove the Welsh from the fair plains to the barren uplands. The mutual jealousies of the petty Welsh kings and princes made national union impossible, and without union effectual resistance to the Normans was hardly to be thought of. But the Norman Conquerors w^ere as little united as the Welsh that they displaced. As in Ireland, the ideal of feudal lord and clan chieftain had this in common that it involved an infinite division of political power. The Norman conquerors of Wales fought for their own hands and Avere almost independent of the kings of England. They set up therefore a 18 EDWARD I CHAP. whole host of petty states, over which they ruled like little kings. These small Norman principalities on Welsh ground were known as the Lordships Marcher, and the"" whole district as the Marches of Wales, though the original idea of the March as a border was largely lost sight of in an age when the Welsh Marches included the districts so remote from the Enghsh border as a great part of the modern Pembrokeshire. The most important of the Lordships Marcher of Wales were the palatine earldom of Pembroke and the great lordship of Glamorgan, whose lords were not called Earls only because they had already that title from their English earldom of Gloucester. Next in importance was the lordship of Brecon, an appendage to the earldom of Hereford. More to the north the great family of Mortimer bore sway in Shropshire and the Middle Marches. The Four Cantreds of Perveddwlad (the plain country) Rhos, Rhuvoniog, Duffryn Clwyd, and Tygeingl, which roughly corre- sponded to the modern Denbighshire and Flintshire, depended on the Earls of Chester. All southern and eastern Wales was thus March ground. The Norman Conquest also indirectly affected Welsh Wales. It finally forced the native Welsh to unite among each other as the only alternative to complete subjection. A -reat national and literary revival broke out in Celtic Wales. The lords of Gwynedd, whose rule included the mountain fastnesses of Snowdon and Merioneth and the rich corn-lands of Anglesey, became the leaders of the Welsh national revival. Bit by bit the old jealousies of tribe and tribe, of north and south, were removed. At last all Welshmen looked up to the lords EARLY YEARS 19 of Snowdon as the champions of the national cause against the restless and oppressive French invaders. Llywelyn ab lorwerth, the greatest of Welsh princes, cleverly used this new feeling of national unity to extend his north Welsh principality at the expense of the now divided and quarrelsome Marchers. He pushed his successes eastwards to the walls of Chester, and southwards to the shores of Carmarthen Bay, thus forcing a wedge of Welsh territory through parts of the modern Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire, though the royal stronghold of Car- marthen still checked his onward progress. But while his praises were chanted by the native bards as the hero of the Cymric race, Llywelyn never forgot that he was not only a national Welsh prince but a great feudal English lord. He accordingly allied himself with the baronial opposition to English kings, and took a prominent part in the struggle for Magna Charta, clauses of which ensured him many important privileges. Before his death in 1240 he was proud to call himself prince of all Wales. His son David (1240-1246), born of his English wife Joan, King John's bastard daughter, was hardly strong enough to uphold Llywelyn's power. But after his death a full-blooded Welshman again ac- quired the Principality. The new prince was David's nephew Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, the son of Llywelyn ab lorwerth's favourite son by a Welsh mother. For nearly forty years (1246-1282) Llywelyn ab Gruffydd strove to maintain the policy, both national and feudal, of his grandfather. But at the time we are now dealing with he had not attained any very great measure of success. The twofold division of Wales into the Principahty EDWARD I CHAP. 20 and the Marches must never be lost sight of if we wish o understand the Welsh policy of Edward I. We mu .emember that the Principality did not hen mean as . does in its loose modern use, the whole of W ales but t tly the districts ruled over by the Prince of Wales LlTwe'yn ab Gruffydd. At this time that region roughly ^omnr Ld what now constitutes the three shires of Aniet Carnarvon, and Merioneth. The Four Can- tef Ini the lands between the Dovey and Carmarthen Srd fallen into the hands of the English l.mg^ and ,,ere now the main districts granted to Ed^^ard Award's Welsh lands therefore included a great dea ^ Ihat is now Denbighshire and Flintshire, and o what is now Cardiganshire and Carmarthcnslnr.^ Bu beyond these royal dominions were the M^n^he ' ^^^ term meaning not simply the border districts but all term mea ^ Norman lords on those parts of Wales luled oAcr oy feudal principles. A few of these may have fallen by lapse into Edward's hands, but the real significance o Hrry's grant was that it included all the recent acquisitions from the restless Princes o ^^ ales. Edward had already vigorous and able, though fierce .nd unscrupulous, advisers. His ministers now formed ana uns ^ -^ ^j^^ institutions into their a scheme of iiitioaucing luuon^ .11= in Wiles The current phrase (well r:^tCr: to .he seventeen* cent.,) te\™gh,g E„gli.h 1.W into a -"''^ J" "J^J^ the district in question "slure ground. Edwards ll^X,eiJson,U to attaeh the Fou,. Cautreds to he eonnty of Chester. »hile they set up a „e,v sh,re ,vhieh the centre was Carmarthen, but ,vh.ch was fo lonveuience sake split up later into the counties of EARLY YEARS 21 Cardigan and Carmarthen. So sovereign a remedy was English law considered for the chronic anarchy of Wales, that some Welshmen had actually begged Henry to introduce it into their land. But the whole weight of national feeling clung to the rough rude laws of Howel the Good, which the Welsh regarded as the basis of their jurisprudence. While Edward's officers were establishing their hundredmoots and their shiremoots, his Welsh subjects took counsel together and declared that they would never give up the laws of their fathers. The violence and greed with which Edward's deputy, Geoffrey Langley, sought to bring in the new system completed their disgust. In their despair they turned to Llywelyn, who gleefully welcomed a chance of winning back the dominions of his grandfather. In the autumn of 1256 Llywelyn's troops poured down from the heights of Snowdon over the Four Cantreds. The plain country submitted through the goodwill of the native inhabit- ants for the invaders. Two castles alone, Dyserth (near Rhyl) and Deganwy (near Llandudno), held out for Earl Edward. Edward hurried from the delights of the tourney and tiltyard to defend his inheritance. But he had no money and no men to cope with the trained warriors of Llywelyn. He soon exhausted a loan that he obtained from his rich uncle Richard, and earnestly besought his father to come to his assistance. " What business is it of mine ? " answered Henry ; ^' I have given you the land. You must act for yourself." But next year Henry was prevailed upon to accompany Edward in an expedition to North Wales. Father and son penetrated to the sorely beleaguered castle of Deganwy, where they spent EDWARD I CHAP. EARLY YEARS 28 22 son.e time. But on their retirement the Welsh agam became masters of all the land but a few castles. It was Edrrd's first campaign, an inglorious begmmng for so .Zl a martial career. But it gave the young ea fa uabb experience in Welsh warfare, and may well lave f^rst opened his eyes to the weakness and mcom- p Ice of I father as a king. It left him discredited overwhelmed with debt, and eager to barter away part o Ws pltrirnony for ready money. But it showed hzm the tlC which Llywelyn might some day be conquered I it showed him still more clearly how Wales, f and It snowea u tIip 61 he drew up an elaborate series of statutes for Bordeaux which, while taking away from the citizens EARLY YEARS 26 ft r the right of choosing their own mayor, gave them in compensation full protection from the exactions of the royal officials. The need of such protection had been brought home to Edward by the bitter complaints which the wine merchants of Bordeaux now presented to him of the ruin to their trade caused by the exactions of the king's officials. Edward eagerly espoused their cause, and plainly told his father that such exactions must cease. For the first time his sense of the impolicy of Henry's conduct prompted him to break through the strong ties of affection Avhich bound liim to the fondest and most indulgent of fathers. Henry was bitterly offended. "My own flesh and blood," he exclaimed with a sigh, " are assailing me ; the times of my grandfather, whose children waged war against him, are surely coming back." Nothing shows more clearly the impracticable and hopeless attitude of the old king than these foolish and petulant remarks. But the time Avas coming when Edward's faithfulness to his father was to endure far sterner trials than this. The time of his aj^prenticeship was over. With the beginning of the great dispute between Henry and his barons, Edward enters into his real political career. CHAP. II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 27 CHAPTER II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 1258-1267 THE personal government of Henry HI. had now lasted for more than five and twenty years. Year after yea his weak and nerveless rule had become worse. He I-e the nation neither strong government nor popu a :ontrol A feeble attempt at despotism had brought about a chronic state of anarchy. Extravagance, nepotism, incompetence had reigned supreme. Many and loud had been the protests that the wiser among l^e churchmen and the nobler among the baronage had raised against the weak king's misdomgs. But the Tyranny of Henry was not of that severe and grmdmg S Jiich invites immediate and strenuous resistance :ren at the expense of revolution. And the opposition ...antinginunity of P^ic^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ -^j;. Thus it was that, despite the piotests oi ^ Richard Marshal, the despairing lamentations of he sainted Edmund of Abingdon, the "-« ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ niinciations of Bishop Grosseteste, and the spnit d a tion of Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry was stil aWe to go on in his evil ways. But new complications now presented themselves which at last brought about the final crisis. The return of Simon de Montfort from Gascony, thoroughly and for ever at feud with his royal brother-in-law, gave the opposition a leader of matchless ability, resourcefulness, energy, and daring. The vain attempt of Henry to procure for his second son Edmund the crown of Sicily had imposed a new and a crushing burden upon the scanty resources of the kingdom. The popes, who used Edmund as a tool to drive out the heirs of their hated enemy, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, from the Sicilian throne, pledged Henry's credit to the uttermost, and sent legates to England to demand the fulfilment of his promises. This led to the famous Parliaments of Barons of 1258. At London, in the spring, Henry was forced to accept a commission of reform. At Oxford, in the summer, a new constitu- tion was drawn up and forced upon the reluctant monarch. By the Provisions of Oxford the whole power of the Crown was put into the hands of a committee of fifteen barons. The king's household was set in order, his alien kinsmen and favourites were driven beyond sea, and the custody of royal castles entrusted to Englishmen alone. A sweeping scheme of further reformation was drawn up for the future. A few months' vigorous action reduced the would-be despot to a position of utter powerlessness. Edward was now in his twentieth year. It is pro- bable that he was already dimly conscious of his father's deficiencies, but his filial aff'cction and his pride of power alike prompted him to vigorously oppose the audacious designs of the barons. But he soon found himself swept away by the torrent. In vain he set himself against iM EDWARD I CHAP. II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 29 28 the expulsion of his familiar friends and companion, his uncL the Lusignans. The barons forced h.m to t^ part in the siege of Winchester Castle, from which his rlvin uncle? made their last unavailing resistance After their expulsion he gave his reluctv.it oath to observe the Provisions of Oxford. It must have been a Suer humiliation to him to be compelled to accept the appointment of four baronial councillors, special y ommissioned to reform his turbulent and disorderly household. But with all his loyalty he could no sacrifice enough to satisfy the exacting affection of his f:ih father: A hot quarrel broke out between the king and his son, though it was soon ended by an affectionate reconciliation in the chapter-house at Win- ch ter Yet each outburst of foolish petulance on Henry's part eould not but be a fresh inducement to Edward to take up a line of his own. In his passive action in 1258 he had abundant opportunity to win fresh exp ri nee. The removal of his Poitevin and Provencal k ns^ Ik threw him back on more English and more capable advisers. Next year he began to play an inde- ^''"TheVCisions of Oxford had not satisfied everybody. The revolution had been carried out by a ring of great Lis and barons, who thought, like the ^^^^S- ;^ eighteenth century, that the transference of power to themselves had made the constitution so p^iect th further improvements were not to be hoped or. This las not tZ view of the Earl of Leicester but as a new In and a foreigner his influence was far inferior to Zt of Richard o1 Clare, the Earl of Gloucester, whose aft possessions and vigorous personal character made him the natural head of the English aristocracy. But new classes of the community now entered for the first time into the arena of practical politics. The country gentlemen of knightly rank, the natural leaders of the unrepresented masses of the nation, had already begun to get political experience from the new fashion of summoning knights of the shire to treat with the king in general parliaments. They now began to murmur loudly that the old grievances under which the nation had groaned so long were in no wise removed by the change of leaders. These men, ''the community of the bachelorhood of England," addressed to Edward a long petition for further reform, and denounced the barons for breaking their word and working merely "for their own good and the harm of the king." Edward answered that he was ready to die for the good of the commonwealth, but that though he had sworn to the Provisions with the utmost unwillingness, he was resolved to keep his oath. He took up their cause with his usual impetuous ardour, and thus dissociated himself from the mere courtier party. One result of his energetic action was a further though small instalment of reform in the Provisions of Westminster. It is significant that while Henry simply swore to observe these Provisions, Edward added to his acceptance an oath that he would advise and aid Earl Simon against all men. Perhaps the most important immediate result of this move- ment was that it brought Edward into temporary relations with his uncle Montfort. It is hard to say that Edward's object was simply to divide his father's enemies and so break down the slavery to which the Crown had been subjected, though no doubt this EDWARD I CHAP. II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 81 I 30 If A\f\ follow from his action. But for a time r e w ' olplete breach between Edward and Henry a complete harmony of action between t^ Ws son and Earl Simon. Queen Eleanor, who could not°forTve her son's desertion of her Provencal kms- oll S up Henry against Edward. Glouce^-';j Simon's declared enemy, did his best to widen the brea h. Something like civil war seemed like y o Wko^ be- tween the followers of Gloucester and those of E^w^^d- ;: five weeks and more the Londoners sought to ke^. fhe peace by closing their gates and guarding them w>th '^^ ThTabsr of Henry in France, whither he lu.d gone to negotiate a peace with Ins b-th-.law S L . still further complicated matters. Theie ^^^'J - a treaty by which he formally renounced all claims on No nn dy and Poitou, thus giving up those pretension thcT f'ew years before he had -solemnly handed Tver to his son Simon hotly opposed the peac. It not- likely that Edward was very ^-^^^^^^^ \ J;/ both Edward and Simon became parties to the treaty Dotn riuwdi ^ abandoned and solemnly renounced their share in claims. ^f T^r.O things got worse. Henry and In the spring of 12()U tilings ^ Eleanor were informed, as they were travelling back to The storv was an outrageous fiction, but it thorou.niy ZZ^ He.,, »h« .i..-. ™ .he F..K s o,.e 0. *» Channel. <»™g '» -. ^^^ ^^^^ ^, timely intervention ot kichara oi v^t^i %'i. the Romans, convinced Henry that his suspicions were exaggerated. Henry was much offended with Edward. On his arrival in London he sternly refused to see his son, who was lodging with Simon outside the city walls. But the weak head and good heart of the king could not long endure such unnatural estrangement. '' Do not let my son appear before me," he exclaimed, ''for if I see him, I shall not be able to refrain from kissing him." After a fortnight father and son were reconciled. Edward gradually dropped his connections with Simon, though he kept up his feud with Gloucester until the death of Earl Richard in 1262. Disgusted at the troubles that had resulted from his first active intervention in politics, Edward withdrew for a time from public affairs, and again sought distraction in his favourite amusement of the tiltyard. He now went to France for a great tourna- ment, in which he came off badly. Again in 1262 he went abroad for the same purpose. He proved victor in several mock encounters, but in one he received a serious wound. Henry HI. had long wearied of his inglorious degra- dation at the hands of the Fifteen, and had for some time been engaged in secret intrigues against the con- stitution which he had sworn to observe. His last scruples were removed when two successive popes absolved both him and his son Edward from their oaths. On 2nd May 1262 Henry solemnly proclaimed to the sheriffs the tidings of his absolution from his obligations. But later in the year, on learning that the young Earl Gilbert, who had just succeeded his father in the Gloucester estates and title, had thrown himself warmly on the side of Leicester, Henry again confirmed the EDWAKD 1 CHAP. 32 ^ ' ^ few montlis later lie was again at work Provisions. A fe^^ nioian Whitsuntide undermining the new constitution. ^J 1 oA*^ nnPii civil war had broken out. 1. i,r nf foroinn mercenaries, he hasteneu u.i^- a body ot toreigu wiiitc^intide in a fruit- ""^ rrSJo . ttll H *e »<-. o. the !1 IX Glouce'stcr to Uke tl,. oath o. aUcg,a„ce rS^rf, ~hich Hcry, »ith sins*.- -.t «l^. an armj. ai t^ Thames iust below Eicbmond, Middlesex bank of the Thamej- ^^^^^ ^^^^ hov)in<^ thus to separate M^vara at ^ ■' 1 -ci.nnnr who had taken refuge in the Henry and Eleano , who Londoners, Tower of London from the tury oi w tho were nearly all staunch partisans of Ear Simon. On rr^ean^, apparently with the ob3ect of joining foreigner ana i ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ f^^,,^ ?'t' r th^ Cr The incident is mainly memor- :f for 's eS on Edward, who bitterly resented able for its enect w -pipnnor and became the foul indignitie, heaped "P™ ^^0 ' a„ ^^ , .worn foe to London ""^ ' J* f^'^^ „xtrao,dina,y his life. Edward now applied himseii II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 83 dexterity to win over Leicester's followers, and suc- ceeded in creating a strong party for himself, of which the backbone was the fierce Lords Marcher of Wales, who might well have looked upon Edward as their natural leader, and who had already fought by his side against Llywelyn. In revenge Simon forced a close alliance with the Prince of AVales, and promised him his daughter as a wife. Thus Llywelyn fought for the baronial cause, just as his grandfather Llywelyn ab lorwerth had joined the nobles arrayed against John in the first struggle for the Charter. Meanwhile fresh truces were made, only to be broken ; and fresh parliaments assembled, only to be dissolved amidst riot and confusion. Edward's tactics had so far succeeded that neither side was strong enough to get the better of the other. At last, in December, all parties agreed to submit their disputes to the arbitration of St. Louis. Edward sailed with his father for France, suffering severely during liis passage from the storms of December! Eariy in 1264 the French king, as might have been expected, annulled the Provisions, and declared on all points in favour of Henry HI. Leicester, as might equally have been anticipated, refused to be bound by the arbitration to which he had sworn. On his taking up arms, Edward hurried back to England to defend his father's cause. He was already the practical leader of the royalists, and the outbreak of civil war now forced him still more fully to the front. He alone could take the lead in the king's council, for he alone could form a royalist party. There had been no party for Henry as long as he ruled through foreigners and favourites, any more than there was any party for Charles I. in the days 34 EDWARD I CHAP. of Ship Money, the Bishops' Wars, and the first session of the Long Parliament. Edward did effectually for his father what Hyde and Falkland did less successfully for Charles I. He showed the nation that Earl Simon was not the only reformer, and that the mass of the barons were not reformers at all. He upheld a con- stitutional royalism which allowed for national progress but discouraged revolution. But the bad traditions of long years of misgovernment still clave to his following, and the hot revengeful fire of youth still coloured the political conduct of Edward with personal motives. Despite his gallant fight he did not this time succeed, and it was well for England that the early failure of Edward preceded his later triumph. The campaign of 12G4 was begun by Earl Simon, who, half despairing at the threatened break up of his party through Edward's intrigues, was resolved to con- quer or perish. " Though all men quit me," he exclaimed, " I will remain with my four sons and fight for the good cause which I have sworn to defend for the honour of Holy Church and the welfare of the realm." While Simon himself marshalled the levies of the south, his eldest son Henry operated in the west in conjunction with Llywelyn of Wales, and his second son Simon raised a force in the Midlands at Kenilworth. Edward hurried to the west, to join his friends the Lords Marcher in the fight against Henry Montfort and Llywelyn. He strove to throw himself into Gloucester Castle, the town, which commanded the passage over the Severn, being already in the hands of the barons. But though he gained his point, his numbers were too small to enable him to maintain his position, and he II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 85 i was forced to beg for a truce from his cousin. Henry Montfort chivalrously, or rashly, granted an armistice. But on the withdrawal of Henry to Kenilworth Edward treacherously broke the truce, and regained possession of the town. Master of the chief crossing over the Lower Severn, he could now turn his atten- tion to the more general campaign. He soon joined his father at Oxford, where he drove out all the masters and scholars, who, headed by their Chancellor, Thomas of Cantilupe, were enthusiastic partisans of the popular cause. Thence father and son marched against North- ampton, where the younger Simon now was. Edward easily captured the town and took his cousin prisoner, having great trouble to save his life in the wild confusion of the storm. He now devastated the earldom of Leicester with fire and sword. But the royal forces were soon called off to the south, where Eochester, the key of Kent, was in danger of falling into the hands of Earl Simon. The king easily relieved Eochester, and wandered aimlessly through Kent and Sussex, seeking, thouo-h with little success, to win over the hostile Cinque Ports, and striving to open communications with Queen Eleanor, who was collecting an army of foreign mercenaries in the Flemish harbours. But his soldiers suffered severely from lack of food and forage. As his troops plodded wearily through the deep lanes and dense copses of the Weald, they were much harassed by Simon's light armed Welsh archers, who lurked in every hedge and thicket and inflicted severe losses upon them. At last the weary host rested at Lewes. Edward took up his quarters in the castle to the north of the town, while his father, 36 EDWARD I CHAP. 11 EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 37 with whom was his uncle Richard, King of the Romans, occupied the priory, on the southern side of Lewes. Earl Simon had retired from Rochester to the capital, whence he marched south with an army reinforced by a host of Londoners, all fresh and eager for battle, though but little accustomed to warfare. On 1 3th May he slept at Fletching, a village nine miles to the north of Lewes. Thence, early on the morning of 14th May, Montfort marched across the South Downs, hoping to surprise the town. Lewes is situated on the right bank of the Ousc, which here makes a bend that almost encircles the town. To the west and north the South Downs sink gradually down in the form of a natural amphitheatre until they form the gap in which the town is built. The army of the barons swept swiftly across the bare rolling chalk downs, hoping to attack the castle and priory simultaneously. But their movements were discovered, and the royalists poured out of the town, ready to fight out the battle upon the open plain. Simon fixed his standard upon the hill, hoping that its con- spicuous position would tempt the royalist attack. But while he gathered the mass of his army on the right wing which operated from the west against the defenders of the priory, he massed around the standard the un- trained though enthusiastic Londoners. All turned out as Simon had expected. Edward, the real general of the royalists, at once fell into the trap, and charged with the flower of the host the dense masses grouped around the Earl's standard. With him was his gallant cousin Henry of Almaine. The Londoners were smitten with panic and fled in confusion ; while Edward, de- ) lighted to revenge on the citizens the insults they had heaped upon his mother, pursued them vigorously for four miles, giving no quarter and inflicting terrible losses upon them. At last, tired out with slaughter, his weary troops marched back into Lewes. But they found that in their absence Earl Simon had forced the royal positions, captured the priory in which the king had taken up his quarters, and driven the King of the Romans to take refuge in a mill, where he was soon forced to surrender. Edward's troops now dispersed in a panic. Next day the Mise of Lewes was drawn up, by which the Provisions of Oxford were renewed, and Henry again forced to delegate his power to a baronial committee. One of the articles provided that Edward and Henry of Almaine were to be given up as hostages for the good behaviour of the Lords Marcher, who were still in arms in the west. On 16th May Edward sur- rendered. He and his cousin were put under the care of Henry IMontfort, who shut them up at Dover and treated them as captives rather than hostages, and less honourably than was becoming. Edward was afterwards removed to Kenilworth, where his aunt, the Countess of Leicester, seems to have dealt with him more considerately than her son. A new constitution was soon drawn up which put all power in the hands of three grand electors, and their nominees a council of nine. But the Marchers still held out ; Queen Eleanor and her mercenaries still threatened invasion, and the pope fulminated anathemas against Simon and his adherents. Accordingly Simon found it necessary to repose further trust in the people. Hence he summoned his famous Parliament of January 38 EDWARD I CHAP. II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 39 1265, in which for the first time knights of the shire and representatives of the burgesses sat side by side, and deliberated in common with the bishops and barons who favoured the popular party. No one now thinks that Simon's parliamentary convention was the first House of Commons, but it marks an important era in the development of our parliamentary institu- tions. Besides being the completest Parliament that had hitherto been summoned, it is the first popular Parliament consciously gathered together to deal with a great poli- tical crisis. It is not too much, therefore, to regard it as the first occasion on which the rulers of England delib- erately took the people into partnership with them. It taught a lesson that was never eff'aced from the mind of the impatient prisoner at Kenilworth. In this Parliament it was arranged that Edward was to surrender his earldom of Chester to Leicester and to be speedily released from captivity. But the dark ambi- tions of Leicester and the brutal violence of his sons had again split up the popular party. No one could ever work long with Earl Simon. Gilbert of Gloucester's youthful enthusiasm for his brilliant mentor had now worn oflf. After a violent quarrel he retired in anger to his estates and joined the Marchers. Leicester accordingly marched to the west, taking Edward with him by way of precaution. About Whitsuntide Edward was at Hereford, under the custody of Thomas of Clare, the brother of the Earl of Gloucester, by whose media- tion a secret understanding was arrived at for his escape. One day Edward went outside the city, attended by Thomas and a few knights, for the sake of taking exer- cise. The conversation turned on horsemanship, and Edward, as if to try their paces, rode in turn all the horses of the party. At last he found out which steed was the swiftest and strongest, and, mounting hastily upon it, rode off as hard as he could. His guardians soon saw that they were duped, and galloped after him in pursuit. But Edward had got too good a start and was too well mounted to run much risk of capture. Before long he joined a band of armed Marchers, who were Avaiting for him in a wood, and conducted him safely to the Mortimers' stronghold of Wigmore. He now made terms with the Earl of Gloucester. At Ludlow Edward solemnly swore that, if he obtained the victory, he would cause to be observed all the good old laws of the land, would do away with all evil customs, expel all aliens from the king's castles, court, and council, and take care that England should be ruled by English- men. It was an eventful moment. This treaty of Ludlow, marking the formal acceptance by Edward of the popular programme, completed the transformation of parties which, through Edward's influence, had been slowly working ever since 1259. Henceforth it was not Leicester but Edward who best represents the cause of orderly national progress. Leicester with all his great- ness had made himself impossible, and his designs were more and more suspected. Henry becomes henceforth a mere puppet in his son's hands. And Edward, in taking his promises, had no mere intention of outbidding the rival faction or "dishing the Whigs." His whole future shows that he had convinced himself that the policy he swore to uphold at Ludlow was the right one. Henceforth the English monarchy becomes both national and progressive. 40 EDWARD I CHAP. Leicester soon saw that the game was up, but man- fully resolved to die fighting for the good old cause. A vast army gathered together under the standards of Edward and Gloucester. By the capture of Gloucester town, they hemmed up Leicester on the right bank of the Severn, and cut him off from his son Simon, who was collecting another army in the Midlands. While Leicester was marching wearily up and down the Severn, hoping to find a passage, Edward on 1st August surprised the younger Simon at Kenilworth, and almost annihilated his army, though he failed to capture the castle, into which Simon escaped. Meanwhile Leicester had succeeded in crossing the Severn, and had marched as far as Evesham on his road to Kenilworth, hoping to join forces with his son. There he learnt of the younger Simon's misfortunes. Conscious that his last hour was come, the great Earl prepared with his handful of worn- out and dispirited troops to sell his life dearly to the victorious Marchers. The situation of Evesham with respect to the Avon is not altogether dissimilar to that of Lewes with respect to the Ouse. The river makes a great curve to the south, and Evesham is situated on the right bank towards the southern sweep of the reach. On 4th August the battle of Evesham was fought. Edward had taken the lesson of Lewes to heart, and had marshalled his superior forces with consummate prudence. He himself occupied in force the sort of isthmus formed by the windin^-s of the Avon a little to the north of Evesham. This cut off Leicester's only retreat by land, while Gloucester, who was posted with the rest of the army on the left bank of the river beyond the town, cut off all ^i It EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 41 possibility of escape over Evesham bridge. Leicester himself could not but admire his enemies' tactics. *' By the arm of St. James," he swore, " they come on cun- ningly. Yet they have not taught themselves that order of battle, but have learnt it from me." The battle was short but sharp. Edward and Gloucester advanced simultaneously to the attack amidst a terrible blare of trumpets. Slowly but surely the little army of Leicester was surrounded and overwhelmed. Earl Simon died fighting bravely. At his side perished his first-born son Henry, the old playmate and companion-of-arms of the victor. Guy, the third son, was captured terribly wounded. The army of the good cause was annihilated, and Edward by one day of victory undid the efforts of seven years of struggle. Henry HL was now restored to liberty, though it was, in truth, little more than a change of masters. Henceforth he was to act as the puppet of his son instead of his brother-in-law. But years and misfortunes had still further relaxed the will of the old king, and Edward was so careful to pay him due deference, so affectionate and devoted to him, that all trace of former jealousy was removed, and perfect harmony remained between father and son until the end of Henry's life. One more difficulty still stood in the way of a complete settlement. The wild thirst of the victors for vengeance forced the vanquished to fight till the bitter end. A freneral sentence of forfeiture drove the remnants of the baronial party to renew their resistance in the autumn. The dead Earl's stronghold of Kenilworth was the chief centre of the renewed struggle, but the younger Simon held out amidst the marshy fastnesses of the Isle of ; i i i ■I 42 EDWARD I CHAP. m t Axholme. By building long wooden bridges over the slu£r2:ish streams that cut off Axholme from the mainland, Edward procured in November his cousin's surrender. In the spring Edward won a great fight against the men of Winchelsea, which resulted in the surrender of the Cinque Ports. He then turned his arms against a famous freebooter, an outlawed knight named Adam Gurdon, who headed a band of desperadoes that lurked in the Hampshire forests on the pretext of upholding to the last the good cause. Edward came upon Gurdon's camp in the neighbourhood of Alton. Thoroughly delighted with the adventure, he rushed impetuously for- ward, heedless of the fact that his followers had got separ- ated from him by a deep ditch. He engaged in personal conflict with his doughty antagonist, and having wounded him, captured him after a sharp tussle, and, delighted with his bravery and daring, treated him with all honour, tending his wounds, and regarding him as his guest rather than his captured enemy. But the non- knightly followers of Adam were hanged on the nearest trees by Edward's orders. Meanwhile Kenilworth still held out. Its long resistance at last taught Edward that clemency was not only right but politic. After failing to storm the castle, Edward ofTered the '' Disinherited " to restore them their lands on condition of their paying a fine amounting to five years' rental. The general acceptance of the terms of this " Dictum de Kenilworth " practically ended the English rising. But a few desperadoes, specially exempted from the pardon, still strove to hold the Isle of Ely as their fellows had previously held Axholme. They maintained their posi- tion so bravely that Edward was forced to go in person ! II EDWARD AND THE BARONS' WARS 43 to the siege. By building causeways of wattles over the marshy fenland, he secured an access to the strong- hold of the Disinherited. Treachery did something more. But clemency finally ended the struggle. Edward at last offered the enemy the terms of Kenil- worth, whereupon they surrendered. This ended the war in England. But Llywelyn of Wales still stood out in the west, and as long as he was in arms the cause of the Montforts could not be said to be dead. But the papal legate Ottobon, who had already done good work for peace, now offered his powerful intervention, which both Edward and Llywelyn hastened to accept. By the Treaty of Shrewsbury terms of exceptional liberality were offered to, and accepted by Llywelyn. In this treaty Henry recognised Llywelyn as prince of all Wales, and allowed him to receive the homage of all the Welsh barons save the degenerate representatives of the old line of princes of the south, who were still allowed the greater dignity of immediate vassals of the Crown. Edward's old territory of the Four Cantreds was fully surrendered to him, though this course left Edward nothing of his Welsh estates save the lands round Carmarthen. It was a great day of triumph for the Welsh national cause. It was also a great day of rejoicing to Edward, Avho thus by a noble surrender concluded his great work of peace and reconciliation. For the rest of the old king's reign the land remained in profound peace, thanks to the wise policy of Edward in identifying the monarchy with the more solid and per- manent parts of the policy of the dead Earl of Leicester. In the nine years of struggle Edward's character had become matured and his experience ripened. He had IL 44 EDWARD I CHAi'. II already shown that he ranked among the first knights, generals, and statesmen of Christendom. Now that the swords of his followers were turned to ploughshares and their lances to reaping-hooks, Edward again went back to his old pastime of the tournament. But he soon resolved to consecrate to a higher purpose the sword which he had so often wielded against his kinsfolk and his countrymen, or in the savage sports of the tiltyard. In June 1268 Edward took the crusader's vow to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the insults of Islam. , CHAPTER III EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 1268-1272 The great age of crusading had long passed away. It was no longer possible, as it had been two hundred years before, for a crusading prince to win with his sword a fair Eastern province. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had never recovered the deadly blows inflicted upon it by Saladin. The hosts of Islam had been long united, and opposed to the pious fury of the Christians as ardent a zeal, as devoted a bravery, and a far greater knowledge of the country and of the means of warfare appropriate to it. Yet the crusading impulse had by no means died away. All through the thirteenth century it remained the highest ideal of Christian knighthood to renounce all conflict with fellow -Christians and fight the good fight of the Holy Cross against the blasphemous infidels who profaned the sepulchre of the Lord. The great Military Orders, whose establishments were scattered throughout Christendom, provided a constant stream of ardent and devoted recruits, and kept up a very necessary permanent element in the crusading forces. The greatest of the popes, the holiest of the saints, the 46 EDWARD I CHAP. Ill EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 47 h i' ll mightiest of the kings of the greatest age of mediaeval Christendom were unwearied in their efforts to keep alive the holy war. But the growing complications of Western politics kept princes at home, though the con- stant degeneracy of the Eastern Christians necessitated a continual stream of new pilgrims if any effectual resistance were to be made to the ever - increasing aggressions of Islam. The result was that the thirteenth- century Crusades assume a character of their own. They are no longer, as they once had been, the united effort of Western Europe. They are rather the results of individual piety and enterprise, a constant stream of petty expeditions rather than the occasional rush of a mighty army. They were seldom or never successful. All that the most ardent crusader could hope for was to discharge his personal vows or stay for a short time the advancing flood of Islam. There is then in the abortive Crusades of the age of Edward 1. a higher and more exalted character than in the great military promenades of an earlier age. There was no longer the prospect of an Eastern kingdom to attract a selfish Bohemund, or the hopes of sharing in the spoils of a mighty empire to inspire the greed of the Venetian trader. It was purely a work of piety and self-sacrifice, tempered by love of adventure. Death, sickness, defeat were the common lot of the Eastern pilgrim. Yet the constant flow of crusaders never slackened for a day ; and conscious of the futility of individual effort, the noblest minds of Christendom looked forward eagerly to the time when the great monarchs of Europe would again lay aside their feuds and unite with one accord in a pious effort to ransom the Holy Sepulchre. But the hoped-for moment never came, and as time rolled on, the crusading impulse, though still affecting exalted and adventurous souls, seemed to have lost its hold on the great masses of the people. It is significant that the Mendicant Orders, whose great work among the poor gave them a grasp over reality which no other class possessed, had not, as a rule, the crusading fervour of the older religious bodies. Some, at least, of them saw that there was plenty of opportunity for pious enthusiasm at home. To relieve the daily miseries of the humble toilers at their own doors was a higher call upon men of religion than the pursuit of visionary ideals beyond sea. And with the growth of wider views of nature and religion that intense power possessed by the early Middle Ages of embodying its faith in concrete external acts became fainter. Many began to question whether piety might not be better employed than in the rough violence of crusading warfare. The religion of love was beginning to vie with the religion of war. The best and the worst of motives combined to slacken crusading enthusiasm. France was now the greatest power in Christendom, and the best representative of the Christian ideals of the age. The Crusades had always been mainly a French movement, and now in their decline became more of a French movement than ever. The saintly hero who sat on the French throne was the only monarch in Christen- dom who had both the power and the will to lead a new great Crusade. In his early manhood St. Louis had failed miserably in his first Crusade in Egypt. He was now bent on consecrating his old age by a second crusading effort. At his command a Crusade was preached through- 48 EDWARD I CHAP. Ill EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 49 ! i' ii out Europe. It seemed as if the twelfth century had become renewed. Edward was among the first to respond to the per- sistency of St. Louis. He had long been bound by the strongest ties of gratitude and affection to the great kinc^ who had come to his father's rescue in the ex- tremity of his fortunes, and he was not unmindful of the tie of blood that bound him to the husband of his mother's sister. Edward's own strict religious training, his own exalted personal piety, bent him strongly in the same direction. It may even be that remorse for the violence of his youth may have contributed to induce him to direct the arms that had shed so much English blood against the infidel, to slay whom was a work of piety. His keen love of adventure was no lomrer satisfied with the violent distractions of the tilt- yard. Anyhow he took the cross with enthusiasm, and with him the noblest and bravest of his countrymen assumed the sacred symbol. Unlike Edward, all did not fulfil their vow. Edward took the cross in 1268, but two years more elapsed before he could start for the Holy Land. During this interval the zeal of the faithful was stirred up to undertake the Crusade by wandering preachers of the two great orders of friars. But there were still some troubles at home that delayed the departure of the crusaders; especially there was a struggle between Edward and the fierce and restless Gilbert of Gloucester, who declared that he would not go on Crusade and leave his estates exposed to the devastations of the AVelsh. But the main difficulty in Edward's way was a financial one. The civil war had so exhausted the country that he found it impossible to collect the funds to fit out an expedition worthy of the cause and of his rank. His father was hopelessly involved in debt, and was in no condition to incur fresh liabilities. At last Edward was constrained to have recourse to St. Louis. In return for a large advance, Edward pledged himself to follow the French king as Duke of Aquitaine, and submit himself and his followers to the jurisdiction of his uncle. At last, in August 1270, Edward set off from Dover, travelling first to Gascony, to set in order the affairs of his duchy, and thence through the rough hill country of Northern Spain to Aignes Mortes, near the mouth of the Rhone, whence St. Louis had already sailed on his Crusade. Among the French king's followers were his son Philip, and his brother Charles of Anjou, whom the favour of the pope had raised to that kingdom of Sicily, which Edward's brother Edmund had been too weak to re- tain. Edward was accompanied by his gallant cousin Henry of Almaine. At Aifjues Mortes Edward learnt that St. Louis had diverted his arms from Palestine to Tunis, and was encamped at Carthage engaged in a fierce struggle with the Mohammedan Sultan of Tunis, whose nearness to the kingdom of Sicily made him a dangerous neighbour to Charles of Anjou, if not to the Christian world at large. Edward sailed at once over the Mediterranean, but on his arrival he found that St. Louis had died of fever, and that his son, the new king, Philip the Hardy, had been led by his politic uncle, Charles of Anjou, to conclude a truce with the infidels. The sickness that raged throughout the camp was the pretext for this E 50 EDWARD I CHAP. ill EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 51 inglorious surrender, but though the chiefs approved of the politic step, the mass of the pilgrim host cried hotly against the worldhness of their leaders that had betrayed the good cause. Edward fully shared their indignation. "By God's blood," he swore, "though all my fellow- soldiers and countrymen desert me, I will go to Acre with Fowin my groom, and keep my word and my oath to the death." Very reluctantly he bade his little fleet of thirteen ships set sail for Trapani in Sicily with the great French host. But the morning after their arrival off the Sicilian port a fearful storm arose. The fleet, anchored in the insecure roadstead of Trapani, suff'ered terribly. For three days the tempest raged. The crusaders' ships were driven from their anchorage and sunk like stones by the fury of the waves. Twenty- eight ships were destroyed. In one alone it was believed that a thousand pilgrims went down. But the hand of God protected Edward's little squadron. It was universally regarded as a divine sanction to Edward's in- dignation at the unworthy peace that not a single English ship was wrecked. A fortnight later King Philip left Trapani, taking with him in melancholy procession the corpses of his father and brother, to which were soon added the bodies of his wife and child. With him went Henry of Almaine, newly appointed as Edward's seneschal of Gascony. But a few weeks later Henry was brutally murdered by the reckless sons of Simon de Montfort, as he was praying in a church at Viterbo. All Christen- dom was terribly moved by the assassination. It showed that the fires of the civil war were not yet extinct. Edward remained for the rest of the severe season at Trapani, whence he sailed in the early South Italian \ spring for the Holy Land. The Christian lordships in the Levant were reduced by this time to the slenderest proportions, though the old titles still remained to testify to the great empire that had been established by the first crusaders. There was still a nominal King of Jerusalem, an off'shoot of that same house of Lusignan with which Edward had been, through his grandmother's second marriage, so intimately connected. But Cyprus was the real centre of this power. On the mainland a few coast towns, conspicuous among which was the great city of Acre, alone paid obedience to the King of Jerusalem, while of the numerous great feudatories who had once supported the throne of the Godfreys and Baldwins, the united principality of Antioch and Tripoli alone remained, and had of late sustained a severe shock by the capture of Antioch in 1268 by the indefatigable Sultan Bibars, who, despite the con- stant threatenings of the vast swarms of Mongol bar- barians from Central Asia, never lost an opportunity of turning his scimitar against the Christian colonists. But Acre even in the days of its ruin Avas no unworthy memorial of the great age of the Latin rule in the East. There was still centred the great trade between East and Westwhich the Crusades had opened up. There were still churches, palaces, castles, market-halls, storehouses, and huge walls of defence that bore vivid testimony to the greatness of the Latins as builders and architects. It was still one of the great towns of Christendom. The keen- eyed traders of Italy, the strenuous monastic soldiers of the great Military Orders, the fanatical and enthusiastic pilgrims, the lax and luxurious descendants of the original Frankish settlers, still jostled each other in its ^* \-J^ 52 EDWARD I CHAP. narrow and crowded streets. The strange contrasts of the Crusades, the superhuman virtue and the bestial vices, that alike found their representatives in the strange medley that followed the crusading host, were still brilliantly depicted in the daily life of its inhabitants. But Acre was still so strong that Sultan Bibars stopped short in his career of conquest as he approached its walls, and turned his arms against Cyprus. Not till all the other outposts of Eastern Christendom were overthrown would he assail the strong and rich merchant city. Edward on his voyage from Sicily first touched at Cyprus, and thence sailed direct to Acre. The English chroniclers who followed his fortunes exaggerate the difficulties of the city, and even suggest that it was closely besieged by the Sultan. But Bibars had ventured no farther than to attack and capture some of the neighbouring castles. No sooner had Edward arrived at Acre than a formidable attack of the Mongols on Northern Syria called away Bibars' army, while his fleet failed in their attack on Cyprus. Edward's little band inspired the men of Acre with a fresh enthusiasm. With the English prince at its head, the crusading army ventured on three forays, which penetrated deep into the heart of Mohammedan Palestine. But they were mere plundering expeditions, and had no great influence on the fortunes of the war. Moreover, the English died off like flies from the heat and from thirst, while others perished from their intemperate use of fruit, grapes, and honey. In the most successful of the forays Edward failed to capture a Saracen tower, and Bibars exultingly rejoiced that if the crusaders were not able with so large a force to secure a single castle, there was but little prospect I III EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 53 of their conquering so great a territory as the kingdom of Jerusalem. At last the politic Charles of Anjou, the author of the truce at Tunis, sent messengers offering his mediation to bring about a peace. The Latin Christians of Syria eagerly welcomed their intervention, and their good offices induced Bibars to consent to a truce for ten years, which at least allowed Acre to carry on its commerce and rest awhile before the stru2:o:le was renewed. The truce was signed in April 1272, but Edward refused to be a party to it. As in the camp at Carthage, he would have no share with the un- believer. He preferred to stand aside in proud and unreasonable isolation, while more practical politicians concluded the unworthy pact. His brother Edmund [since 1267 Earl of Lancaster], who had joined Edward at Acre, now hurried home to England, but Edward, always accompanied by the faithful Eleanor, still tarried in Syria, hoping against hope for fresh adventures. The Sultan was disappointed at Edward's remaining at Acre, and did not scruple to send an assassin to seek his life. It was probably at Bibars' instigation that the Emir of Jaffa, one of the Sultan's great officials, now excited Edward's interest by professing an anxiety to become a Christian, and repeatedly sent to Acre an emissary, who could speak French, to treat with him on the matter. But the messenger was a satellite of the Old Man of the Mountain and versed in every diabolical art of the East. One hot evening in June 1272 — it happened to be Edward's birthday — the envoy of the Emir approached his abode with an urgent message from his master. He was forthwith admitted into Edward's bedroom, and found the prince sitting on 54 EDWARD I CHAP. his bed, with uncovered head and clad only in a light tunic. The Mohammedan handed over a letter to Edward and bent low as he respectfully answered his questions. He put his hand to his belt as if to draw out another letter, but instead he quickly pulled out a poisoned dagger, which he aimed at Edward's heart. Edward was quick enough to ward off the blow with his arm, on which he received a deep wound. But he at once kicked down the assassin as he was threatening another blow. He then wrested the dagger from him and slew him with his own weapon. The attendants rushed in and found their master covered with blood and the murderer dead on the ground. The prince's minstrel dashed out the assassin's brains with a stool, and Edward rebuked him for striking a dead man. The Master of the Temple soon hurried in with precious drugs and smooth proi)hecies of recovery. Next day Edward made his will. But after some days the flesh around the wounded arm grew black and threatening. The surgeons exchanged uneasy whispers, and sadness fell on every countenance. '' What are you whispering about?" cried Edward. " Can I not be cured? Speak out and fear not." One of the doctors, an English- man, answered, "You may be cured, but only at the price of intense suffering." Edward at once put himself in that surgeon's hands and bade him do all that he thought necessary. Thereupon the surgeon ordered Eleanor out of the room, and she was led away weeping and wailing.^ 1 The well-known story that Edward owed his cure to Eleanor's devotion in sucking the poison from his wounds, is only found in somewhat late writers, and is inferior in authority and probability to the account given in the text. A Flemish writer attributes the III EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 55 "It is better, lady," said the bystanders, " that you should weep than the whole of England." Next morning the same surgeon cut away all the blackened flesh from the prince's arm, consoling him with the promise that in fifteen days he would again be able tomoiuit his horse. From that hour Edward rapidly recovered, though his constitution was permanently enfeebled, and many years later sharp attacks of sickness were traced back by his physicians to the effect of the assassin's blow. Sultan Bibars hardly believed that his enemy had escaped the well-planned assassination, but sent some of his chief counsellors to offer his congratulations. Edward received them civilly, but as they bowed low before him he said in English, *' You pay me worship, but yet you love me not." But he prudently avoided making the treacherous act a pretext for renewing the war. Alarmins: letters now reached Edward from home. Old King Henry wrote that his physicians despaired of pro- longing his life, and urged his first-born to return home without delay. Accordingly Edward left Acre about the middle of August 1272, and after a voyage of seven weeks again landed at Trapani in Sicily, where he was magnifi- cently entertained by his uncle, Charles of Anjou. But sad news now came from England. First came the tidings of the death of his elder son John, a bright and beautiful boy, whom he had left behind with his uncle, King Richard. Then followed the intelligence of the death of the King of the Ptomans, and soon that of King Henry as well. But the news must also have come how on the old king's death King Edward had been peaceably proclaimed, and sucking of the poison from Edward's wounds to Othoof Grandison, one of his Savoyard followers. 56 EDWARD I CHAP. Ill EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 57 everywhere accepted with rejoicings. The long and weary years of probation were at last over, and Edward, at the age of thirty-three, had at last ascended the throne that he was so brilliantly qualified to adorn. Fresh duties and responsibilities crowded upon the new king, but he never forgot that he had been a crusader, and never quite despaired of a new Crusade on a grander scale and with a happier result. A comrade of his pilgrimage at Acre, the holy and wise Archdeacon Theobald of Liege, had now been called to the papal throne. As he had bade farewell to Edward and his brother soldiers of the Cross, he had in the touching words of the Psalmist bound himself never to forget Jerusalem in her sorrows. On his way through Italy Edward visited his old friend and reported to him the sad condition of tlie Holy Land. Gregory X. — this was the name Theobald now assumed as pope — was not un- mindful of his vows, and laboured with single-minded earnestness to appease the feuds of Christendom that all Christian people might unite in a holy Avar. The good pope saw his highest expectations realised when in 1274 he presided over a General Council at Lyons, which healed for a time the schism of the Eastern and Western churches, solemnly called Europe to arm against Islam, and imposed on the whole Western Church the obligation of devoting for six years a tenth of its revenues for the purposes of the Crusade. The Crusade was preached in every land in Christendom. In barbarous Finland and distant Iceland the wandering apostles of the Holy War pressed on their hearers to the sacred work. But the good pope died, and the fierce strife of faction again invaded the papal court. Neither would the ■^ i^ princes of Europe set a term to their mutual jealousies to further the great work. Year after year the hope of a great Crusade became fainter. The crusading tenth was seized by temporal princes for temporal uses : even Edward did not scruple in his necessity to lay profane hands on the sacred treasure. The Latin Christians of the Holy Land saw with dismay that the stream of armed pilgrims fell off rather than grew. The un- natural union of Orthodox Greek and Catholic Latin soon broke asunder. At last the Mohammedans swooped down upon their prey. In 1289 the fall of Tripoli completed the ruin of the northern principality of the Christians. In 1291 Acre itself succumbed after a fear- ful siege. With the fall of the great merchant city fell the last vestiges of the kingdom of Godfrey of Bouillon. Henceforth the crusaders' ambition was at best a pious wish, a hope that could not be satisfied. And the brightest visions of mediseval Christendom became obscured when the Moslem ruled Avithout a rival over the lands once hallowed by the sacred presence of the Redeemer. ^ CHAPTEE IV THE KING AND HIS WORK We have now followed with some minuteness the bio- graphy of Edward before his accession to the throne. No part of his life throws so great a light on his character and career, or illustrates more clearly the grounds on which we reckon Edward among the greatest of English statesmen. His long years of apprenticeship had not simply formed his character. They had also suggested the main lines of the policy on which he was to act for the whole of his long reign. It is not too much to say that every important aspect of Edward's work as king had been already foreshadowed in his work as a king's son. He had risen superior to his early failures in the field and in the council chamber. His first defeats had given him that power of adapting his tactics to circumstances which is his chief claim to be called a great commander. The Welsh policy suggested to him by his advisers when yet a mere boy contains in substance the Welsh policy of his reign. His early dealings with the fierce Llywelyn and his early eff'orts to make his Welsh lands shire-ground need only a slight develop- ment to become the policy which had its final outcome CHAP. IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 59 in the defeat and death of the Welsh prince and the annexation of the principality to the Crown. In the same way Edward's early experiences in Gascony sug- gested to him the whole of his subsequent policy for the consolidation and security of his Aquitainian possessions. Moreover, his constant dealings with the princes of Europe, most of them his near kinsfolk, cannot but have brought before his mind the main principles of that able and successful foreign policy which is one of the greatest results of his reign. And it is already a commonplace that the experience of the Barons' Wars substantially created the home policy of Edward's later life. To strengthen and develop the royal power ; to widen the hold of the king on the nation by taking the people themselves into partnership with him in the administra- tion of his inheritance ; to work out under happier auspices the great ideas of Montfort, and to turn schemes meant to bring about a revolution into devices for the regular government of the realm ; to stand forth, above all, as the truly national king, who ruled through the advice of his own nobles and scorned the foreign favourite and para- site — such were among the main lines of Edward's work as a king. Every detail almost of his constitutional policy had been already made clear to him during the life of his father. The lack of good laws during his father's days had impressed upon him the need of legis- lation, while the want of good government had made him realise the supreme importance of establishing sound administration. Thus it was, with plans already formed and ambitions already formulated, that Edward entered in 1272 into the great position of an English king. He was already resolved to make England supreme in 60 EDWARD I CHAP. Britain and England the mediator of Europe. He had already become a national constitutional ruler of a free and high-spirited people. Thirty-three years of battling with the world had now formed both the body and mind of Edward. He looked every inch a king. The chroniclers speak with enthusi- asm of the beauty and dignity of his person. He was a man of unusual and commanding height. Like another Saul, he overtopped most of his subjects by a head and shoulders. His frame was cast in a strong but elegant mould and was admirably proportioned. He had the long sinewy arms that make a good swordsman. His long lean legs, which won for him the popular nickname of Longshanks, gave him that firm grip over the saddle that makes the consummate horseman. All through his life he was as upright as a dart. His chest was broad and vaulted. Constant exercise and incessant activity kept down any disposition to corpulence, and down to his death he retained the slim regular proportions of his youth. His flowing hair shone in extreme youth like burnished silver. It gradually assumed a yellow tinge, and by the time he had reached manhood had attained a deep black colour, which again turned in old age to a snowy whiteness. He never showed any ten- dency to baldness, and the white hair of his age was as thick and abundant as the yellow tresses of his youth. His forehead was broad and high. His features were refined and regular. The onlj^ thing that marred their perfect beauty was a slight droop of the left eyelid, which he had inherited from his father. His dark eyes, soft and dovelike when he was at rest, shot forth fire like the eyes of a lion when he was moved to anger. They IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 61 remained undimmed to extreme old age. His nose was large, well-shaped, and aquiline. His teeth remained strong and firm down to the day of his death. His com- plexion was dark, clear, and pale, and was thought to indicate his clioleric temperament. His voice had a slight stammer in it, but when animated he could quite overcome this impediment, and speak with a simple and natural eloquence that often moved his susceptible auditors to tears. Edward's character was cast in a grand and simple mould. His general instincts were high-minded, noble, and generous. Like most mediaeval heroes, he was a man of strong emotions, and the rough wear and tear of a long life did not destroy, though perhaps they deadened, the deep affections and the loving heart half hidden by his pride and passion. He was the best of sons, fathers, and husbands. He was the most faithful and generous of friends. His chief fault in those rela- tions was his slowness to see anything blameworthy in those whom he loved, or even in those who had rendered him useful service. His private life was absolutely pure and without reproach. His public action, always able, was, with a few exceptions, strictly upright and honour- able. He had almost a passion for truth and justice, and it was not for nothing that " keep troth " was inscribed upon his tomb. A character so strong, a will so firm as Edward's could not be without its faults. Many of these pro- ceeded from the extraordinary impetuosity and violence which lay at the bottom of Edward's temperament. This disposition accounts for a good deal of the wanton and brutal violence of the doings which so scandalised right- 62 EDWARD I CHAP. thinking men in his extreme youth. It accounts for many of those grave defects of character brought out with such uncompromising clearness and precision by the nameless partisan of Simon de Montfort, who wrote that Song of Lewes which best explains to us the standpoint of the baronial party. To this hostile writer Edward was "a lion in i)ride and fierceness, not slow in attacking the strongest places, and fearing the onslaught of no man." But there was a less noble side to his character. He was, says the song- writer, ^'a panther in inconstancy and changeableness." ''When he is in a strait he pro- mises whatever you wish, but as soon as he escapes he repudiates his promise." In this respect Edward never quite got the better of the evil tendencies of his youth. The violation of his oath after the capture of Gloucester in 1264 is too faithfully paralleled by the treacherous way in which, a few years before his death, he obtained papal absolution from his oath to observe Magna Carta and the Forest Charter as enlarged and developed in 1297. Moreover, Edward was always excessively rash, impulsive, hot-headed, passionate, and even vindictive. Yet a humble submission or the frank acknowledgment of an offence at once mollified him, however furious was his wrath. One day when he was a young man he was hawking on the banks of a certain river. One of his companions, posted on the other bank of the stream to that occupied by Edward, blunderingly let free a hawk, which had seized a wild duck amidst the osier-beds. Edward grew angry, abused and threatened his follower. But the careless falconer, seeing that neither bridge nor ford was near, answered impudently, '' It is well for me that the river divides us." Edward burst into a furious IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 63 rage, plunged with his horse into the unknown depths of the stream, and having successfully crossed over, climbed with difficulty up the steep bank hollowed out by the action of the water. The luckless follower fled in terror, but Edward pursued him with drawn sword, and soon caught him up. But his anger was at once ended when the man uncovered his head and knelt humbly to implore his master's forgiveness. Edward put back his sword in the scabbard, and soon lord and follower were back at the river bank seeking with the utmost harmony to bring back the strayed hawk. Many years later Edward was moved to anger by the clumsiness of one of the squires attending him on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Margaret. He seized a stick and soundly belaboured the unlucky squire with it, inflicting on him such injury that, when the fit of temper was over, he heartily repented of his violence and sought to heal his servant's wounds by a present of the very considerable sum of <£13 : 6 : 8. Edward hated his enemies quite as heartily as he loved his friends, and liked power so well that he grew quite mad at the least opposition or contradiction. He was always terribly in earnest, and being quite convinced of the honour and integrity of his own ends, was always ready to impute unworthy motives to his opponents, and was, in fact, opposed so unscrupulously that he often had good reason for his worst susj)icions. Edward also possessed that strange power, often found in tempera- ments like his, of persuading himself that what he desired was right, and that the means which he selected to attain a good end were necessarily consecrated by the excellence of his object. " The wiles or tricks," sang the partisan 64 EDWARD I CHAP. IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 65 / critic of his youth, *'by which he is advanced, he calls prudence, and the way whereby he attains his end, crooked though it be, seems to him straight and open. Whatever he h'kes he says is lawful, and he thinks that he is released from the law, as though he were greater than the king." Edward was never a very reflective or thoughtful man. Like many great men of action, he took the course that seemed to him the most likely to lead him straight to his end, and did not ponder too much over its lawfulness. But so far as he pondered over his courses at all, he sought honestly to live accord- ing to the law, and there have been few prophecies more signally falsified than that of the writer of the Song of Lewes, who foretold that Edward's reign would be a most miserable one for England, inasmuch as his wish was to be a king above the law. Edward was proud of his hiirh standard of honour and truthfulness, and as compared with his contemporaries, his boast is in no wise a vain one. But if those who saw in Edward a lawless self-seeker were but blind judges, still more have those erred who saw in him a cold-blooded, calculating, and scheming lawyer, heedless of justice so long as he could get formal right on his side. It is not in such ways that the right clue can be attained for the appreciation of his ardent and impetuous character. Edward was very conscious of his royal dignity, and proud and ambitious to no ordinary degree. But there was little that was mean or sordid even in the lowest of his ambitions. The aristocratic contempt for men of mean birth and humble station, which had been so unpleasant a feature of his early manhood, he almost outlived ; though at times of danger and difficulty, when the Welsh troops « showed signs of mutiny before Falkirk, or when the weavers of Ghent, rising against the oppressions of his soldiers, threatened his very life, it flashed forth again with something of its old insolence and scorn. But there was very little in Edward of that miserable class feeling that was so unlovely a feature among the knights and gentlemen that supported the court of his grandson. Edward loved his people, and possessed many popular qualities that endeared him to them. Though constantly beset by troubles and difficulties, he seldom lost his cheerfulness, except to sorrow for the loss of those dear to him. Down to an advanced age he joined in the rough and not very refined practical jokes and merriments of mediaeval society. One Easter Monday he suff'ered five ladies of the court to make him their mock prisoner, and bought his redemption by a liberal present to his captors. Nor was he less gracious to his followers of low degree. One day in a merry mood, as he was setting out for the hunt, he gave his horse to his washerwoman, Matilda of Waltham, on the condition of her riding a race on the king's hunter and defeating the other com- petitors. His ready eloquence was in itself a means of delighting his people. No less commendable were his earnestness and indefatigability at the seat of judgment. He delighted in unravelling a knotty point of law, and prided himself upon his zeal for the poor and oppressed. He gloried in his reputation for clemency. He really sought to identify himself with every rank of his people, and this great endeavour made him a thoroughly national king. Edward had the good luck to pass through a sterner discipline and a stricter apprenticeship than commonly \' 66 EDWARD I CHAP. IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 67 t- I falls to the lot of those called to ascend an hereditary throne. He thus learnt to put a curb upon his feelings, and repress the first rush of his angry passions in a way that speaks most strongly for the strength of his char- acter and the nobleness of his aims. His self-restraint in his middle life was, for such a man, admiral)le. As misfortunes gathered around him he became less able to conceal or check his emotions ; but down to the last he withstood oi)position that might well have ruined the temper of a calmer and milder man. Not only had he to face the opposition of large sections of his sub- jects, and the enmity of powerful kings and nations — his private affairs were always made miserable by the millstone of debt which hung round his neck from his first entrance into public life, and from which he could never free himself down to his dying day. The burden which Edward had inherited from his father was sufficiently overwhelming. He increased it by the oblicrations which he had been forced to incur durins: his Crusade. When he came to the throne he found himself hopelessly in the hands of the greedy companies of Lombard bankers, who had begun to push themselves into the position which had hitherto been mono})olised by Jewish usurers. In after years Edward formed so man}^ great designs that he was always more and more in want of money. From this perpetual indebtedness sprang half the defects of Edward's character, and more than half of the difficulties of his reign. Edward's poverty accounts for his troubles with the Londoners, his eagerness to 0{)en up new taxes, and the ever- increasing discontent of his subjects. He handed on the burden to his son, and the weight which the ' great father had hardly been able to bear proved too overwhelming for his weak and incompetent suc- cessor. The limited character of Edward's means made necessary a life of the utmost frugality and sobriety. Edward's own personal tastes drew him strongly in the same direction. He was always rigidly economical, and even upon occasions parsimonious. But on state occa- sions his hospitality was truly regal, and he found enough money to keep up a good stud of horses, though he was ever lavish in giving them away to his friends and kins- folk. He was particularly bountiful to poor knights, feeling the full force of the strong tie which bound the knighthood of Christendom together in a single brother- hood of equals. The simplicity of his attire suggested the simplicity of his daily life. After his coronation Edward never once wore his crown, thinking that the dignity which it gave to his royal state was more than counterbalanced by the heaviness of the great bauble. He wore the plainest clothes. He did not affect the royal purple, but, like a common man, was clad in a plain short-sleeved tunic bordered with fur, and all of the same colour. One day he was asked by a hermit why he affected such ordinary garb. '' I should not be a better man," answered Edward, ''however splendidly I was dressed." The same simplicity was manifested in all his habits of life ; but for all that Edward was keenly conscious of his royal dignity, and there were few who could venture to presume upon his easy familiarity. His court was very free from the luxury and extravagance which are the besetting sins of courts. Though many of Edward's followers were vicious and corrupt men, they were with 68 EDWARD I CHAP. I hardly an exception hard workers and earnest poli- ticians. The tournament in early life, hunting and hawking until the end of his career, were Edward's favourite diversions. As a sportsman his special delight was in chasing down deer on horseback, and, on catching them up, slaughtering them with his sword. His strong love of 'the chase made him as jealous as the Norman kings in keeping up his forests and maintaining the forest laws in their old oppressive rigour. His constant indulgence in field sports and manly exercises secured him splendid health, though his infancy had been sickly and though his wound in the Holy Land gave him trouble for many years. The same careful way of life, combined with strict frugality and temperance, secured for Edward a green old age. He had attained what in the Middle Ages was the very advanced age of sixty-seven before there were any signs of his constitution breaking down. Edward was deeply and unaffectedly reHgious. His piety was shown not only in his assiduity in attendance at mass and in his zeal in going on pilgrimages, but in his large and unostentatious charities (all the more credit- able when we remember his chronic state of debt), and in the whole tone and tenor of his daily life. Straitened as were his resources, Edward was able to make grants to the two English universities, to the Knights of St. John, and to many famous monasteries, such as Durham, Glastonbury, Westminster, and St. Alban's. He was the refounder of the Cistercian abbey of Conway, when the needs of his Welsh pohcy involved the absorption of the old home of the monks in his new castle and forti- fications. He contributed largely towards the cost of IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 69 the new church and buildings erected by the monks on the opposite bank of the Conway river at Meynam. But his great work as a monastic patron was the founda- tion of the Cistercian abbey of Vale Eoyal, in a deep and secluded hollow of the valley of the Weaver, in the very heart of his own earldom of Chester. This pious under- taking Edward began in 1266, in fulfilment of a vow which he had made when exposed to great peril of ship- wreck ; but lack of means made the progress of the work slow, and it was not until 1277 that the monks were able to enter into the full possession of their founder's bounty. But while Edward thus practically showed his sympathy for the older religious orders, he was, like most men of his age, strongly under the influence of the mendicant friars. His confessors were generally Dominicans, but the Franciscans, in whose great church in London he treasured up the heart of his beloved Eleanor, were also largely in his confidence. Like a good Englishman, Edward reverenced most of all saints of English birth, such as St. John of Beverley, to whose shrine he was never weary of making pil- grimages, and above all, St. Edward the Confessor, his namesake and predecessor. His religion was of that half- martial kind which is so characteristic of the early Middle Ages, but which was already becoming more rare owing to the new types of spiritual perfection held up by the saints among the Mendicant Orders. This element gave a reality and fervidness to Edward's constant aspirations after a Crusade. What in the mouth of Philip the Fair or Clement V. was the merest hypocrisy or conventionality, was to Edward an honest and sincere recognition of the clear ideal of the duty of a Christian knight. And 70 EDWARD I CHAP. If Edward was all too ready to read his crusading ambitions into his everyday wars. Llywelyn or Robert Bruce were to him men accursed by Holy Church, and he saw too readily a high religious impulse in what was largely the prompting of his own ambition and revenge. But a respect for ecclesiastical authority, which hampered his dealings with popes and archbishops, was at least a very real thing. Not even the barefaced partisanship of a series of fiercely Guelfic popes, not even the per- sistent and wearing opposition which Edward's own prelates so constantly offered to his pohcy, could quite eradicate from Edward's mind the deep lessons of respect for the authority of the Holy See and the spiritual in- dependence of the English episcopate which had been so firmly ingrained into his mind in youth. But Edward, with all his spirit of reverence, was singularly free from the grosser superstitions of his time. On one occasion a beggar pretended that his sight had been restored through his prayers at the tomb of Henry HI., and Queen Eleanor of Provence was delighted that this miracle attested her dead husband's claim to sanctity. But Edward drove the beggar away in anger, saying, " My father would rather have had such a lying knave blinded than have given him back his sight." Edward piously saw in all the many hairbreadth escapes of his adventurous hfe the direct finger of Providence, and, with something of a fatalist's contempt of danger, exposed himself to the worst risks of battle and siege. When his horse was shot by a missile from Stirling Castle, his followers begged him to withdraw from the range of its walls. But Edward answered in Biblical phrase, "A thousand shall fall beside me, and ten thou- rv THE KING AND HIS WORK 71 sand at my right hand, but their arrows shall not come nigh unto me to do me hurt, for the Lord is with me." One day in his youth he was playing chess with a certain knight in a vaulted chamber. Without any particular reason, he arose from his seat and went to the other end of the room. Thereupon a huge stone crashed down from the roof, destroying the chair on which Edward had been sitting. He attributed his preservation to Our Lady of Walsingham, whom he held ever afterwards in special honour. Edward was pre-eminently a man of action, but he was by no means altogether lacking in intellectual and artistic tastes. He certainly had a familiar knowledge of English, French, and Latin. Possibly he also knew Spanish, in which tongue he sometimes corresponded with his brother-in-law Alfonso of Castile. He was no great lover of books and no very bountiful patron of men of letters ; yet he seems to have had some taste for the romances of chivalry, delighting in the legends of knights and paladins, in histories of such as those of Tancred the Crusader, in devotional treatises, and in books on agriculture. It was from a manuscript belonging to Edward at the time of his Crusade, that Rustician of Pisa made his well-known abridgment of the vast cycle of Breton romances, a work which attained a great success, and which, translated into Italian, afforded the material for a large number of poems. Nor should Edward's interest in English history be forgotten, or his care for the safe preservation of the national archives under proper custody. He was much more a patron of art than of letters, showing a particu- lar taste for richly decorated sculpture, as seen in the =;- • » J ' .fja i feKj-ii^^si .- 72 EDWARD I CHAP. crosses commemorating Queen Eleanor, and perhaps still better in the exquisite statuary on the magnificent tombs of his father, wife, and brother in Westminster Abbey, the work apparently of an Italian artist. He completed his father's rebuilding of Westminster, but lack of means prevented his indulging in the expensive taste of building on a large scale. He was also fond of music, supplementing his English trumpeters and harpers with German fiddlers, and rejoicing, even in his hostile progresses in Scotland, when seven women met him on the wayside, and sang before him the songs of their country, as they had been Avont to do in the days of King Alexander. There is no need to expatiate upon Edward's claims to statesmanship. Contemporaries compared him to Henry H., and certainly no other one of our earlier kings can be rightly put in the same high place as Edward. But though there is a real relation between the work of Henry and that of Edward, and though Henry was perhaps the greater and more original mind of the two, yet Edward's task was complicated by diffi- culties of a subtle kind to which Henry had been a complete stranger. It was Edward's difficult task to adjust the despotism which Henry had set up to meet the national aspirations after liberty, and the popular cry to control the state which in the twelfth century had not yet arisen. That Edward abundantly suc- ceeded in his difficult task will be sufficiently clear in nearly every page of the history of his reign. Without any great originality of character, without that insight and foresight which genius alone can give, Edward was able to apply to the great problems of statecraft an '4 IT THE KIISTG AND HIS WORK 73 intellect of a high order, clear, logical, orderly, and decisive. But his character was stronger than his intellect, and his tenacity of purpose and pertinacity in conduct were seldom excelled by the excitable kings and statesmen of the Middle Ages. It is a common- place to dwell on the legislative mind of Edward. But it is a very superficial view of the great king's character that regards him simply as a mere lawyer, even a great lawyer like his friend Bishop Burnell. It would be truer to say that Edward's chief merit as a legislator is that he knew how to follow the lines laid down by his ministers and judges. The statute-book tells us nothing of motives and springs of conduct, but it is hard not to believe that the main merit of Edward's work as a lawgiver belongs to his advisers. Theirs at least was the initiative. It is merit enough in a born king that he knew whose advice to follow and in what direction he was to go. The personal characteristics of Edward come out even more in his statecraft and his generalship than in his legislation. As a soldier Edward's character is perhaps most completely seen. He was the true knight of chivalry, brave to recklessness, careless of his life, careless of all ulterior consequences, throwing his whole soul into the fierce rush of the feudal charge which scattered the Londoners at Lewes, or wrestling hand to hand in long and doubtful struggle with the fierce Adam Gurdon or the treacherous Count of Chalon. But with increasing experience the knightly hero grew into a real general. The same power of self-restraint, which marks every side of Edward's character, enabled him to curb the rash valour which he had learnt in the tourney and tilt-yard, 74 EDWARD I CHAP. and aspire to a degree of tactical and strategic skill rare indeed in the age in which he lived. His greatest military qualities were his capacity of profiting by adverse experience, and his rare skill in varying his method of warfare to meet the tactics adopted by the enemy. In his continental campaigns, Edward remained to the end a mere captain of feudal chivalry. But he very clearly realised that there were times and places Avhere the heavily - armed mounted knight was of little military value. His early defeats by the light- armed and nimble Welsh footmen taught him the value of a dexterous and daring irregular infantry, and suggested to him that policy of carrying on Welsh warfare like a great siege, which proved so irresistible in 1277 and 1282. Moreover, Edward paid a high tribute to the conquered Welsh in the large use which he made of them in all his subsequent campaigns, and notably in the wars in Scotland and Flanders. In the same way Edward had the quickness and the skill to borrow from Montfort the tactics that had proved fatal to his own and his father's cause at Lewes, and, bettering his lesson, he turned his uncle's teaching against him in his cleverly won victory at Evesham. In his old age Edward was not too proud to learn another lesson. He had the eyes to discern that the close array of the Scottish infantry at Falkirk could not be broken by the mere rush of a cavalry charge. He won the crowning victory of his life by his skilful employment of archers to break up the squares of the Scots with their missiles. His combination of the heavy cavalry of England with the light infantry and archers of Wales prepared the way for the more complete working out of this system IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 75 which resulted from the famous English victories during the Hundred Years' War with France. The two chief lines of military progress in subsequent generations lay in the development of a trained force of infantry and in the increase of the efficiency of the bowman. In both these respects Edward is a forerunner, though perhaps a half-blind one, of the improvements in the art of war which marked the next two centuries. The great men of the thirteenth century embody the best ideals of the Middle Ages, but there is also some- thing modern in their character and ambitions. Edward himself partakes of this twofold nature. As a man he seems almost purely mediaeval. Yet as an English states- man he could conceive the idea of a national state ruled by a strong king, but controlled by a popular Parliament. As a diplomatist he could grasp the conception of a European equilibrium, to be maintained by a judicious policy of mediation on the part of his island kingdom. As a British patriot he longed for the time when Eng- land, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland were all parts of the same kingdom. As a warrior he dimly foreshadowed the battle array of Crecy or Agincourt. And many- sided as was his activity, there was a perfect balance and harmony between the various elements of his policy. His eulogisers and detractors have, as a rule, fixed on some one side of his policy, and confined their praise or blame to that side alone. It is only when we take in his character as a whole, that we can fully realise how real are his claims to be regarded as a " greatest of the Plantagenets." No rulers of England save William the Conqueror, Henry II., Henry VIIL, and Cromwell, can be compared with him, either as regards force of character and 76 EDWARD I CHAP. strength of intellect, or as regards the greatness and the permanence of their influence on the history of our land. Edward's family and court next demand our attention. He was strongly amenable to domestic influence, and the weak and tender sides of his father's character continued to have an influence for good over him many years after experience had taught him the folly and evil of his father's policy. His mother, Eleanor of Provence, continued to have a strong hold over him until her death in 1291. His close affection and devotion to his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, need not be further dwelt upon. He w^as warmly attached to his sister Margaret, the wife of Alex- ander III. of Scotland, and his care for the welfare of his nephew, John of Brittany, is the best proof that Edward was equally devoted to his other sister Beatrice, the wife of the Duke of Brittany. Edward's only brother, Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, was not quite the man to exercise a strong influence over any one ; but Edward's care for his brother's interests is seen in the vast estates which gradually accumulated round the founder of the sjreatest baronial house of mediaeval En^dand, and in the trust wdth which he allowed Edmund to manage his diplomacy and lead his armies at the most critical period of his reign. Edmund himself was Earl of Lancaster and Leicester and Derby, receiving after Evesham the confiscated titles and estates of Simon de Montf ort and Robert Ferrers. By arranging the marriage of Edmund's heir, Thomas, wdth the heiress of his most trusted follower, Henry Lacy, the Earl of Lincoln, Edward still further increased the greatness of the Lancastrian house, and made possible that extraordinary combination of power which Earl Thomas, as the head of the Lords IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 77 Ordainers, was able to bring to bear against Edward H. Nor was Edward inattentive to his more distant kinsfolk. His uncle Eichard, King of the Eomans, had a real in- fluence over him. He was devotedly attached to Richard's eldest son, his cousin, Henry of Almaine, and strove hard to avenge his tragic death. Richard's younger son and successor. Earl Edmund of Cornwall, had always a high place in his cousin's affections and counsels. Edward was the father of a large family, though but few of his children attained manhood, and only three reached middle life. By Eleanor he had thirteen children, four sons and nine daughters. But of the four sons, the two eldest, John (1266-1272) and Henry (died 1274), both died in early boyhood. Alfonso, the third son, born in 1273 at Bayonne, died in 1284, a few months after the birth of his youngest brother, Edward of Carnarvon (born 1284), less fortunate in his unglorious life than his brothers in their early graves. Of Eleanor's nine daughters, four died as children. Of those that survived the eldest was Eleanor, born in 1264, and married to the Count of Bar in 1293. She died in her thirty-fifth year. The next was Joan of Acre, born in 1272 during her father's Crusade, and destined in her childhood to be the bride of Hartmann, the son of Rudolf of Hapsburg. She was married in 1290 to Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, Edward's old ally in the struggle against Montfort, who was nearly thirty years older than herself. After Gloucester's death, in 1295, Joan gave herself to the simple knight, Ralph of Monthermer. Edward was very angry at his daughter's disparagement, and threw Ralph into prison ; but Joan defended herself wath great spirit and energy, and her father, who loved his children, soon relented, I mail A I ~i 78 EDWARD I CHAP. and finally gave his low-born son-in-law the custody of the great Gloucester inheritance. She died in the same year as her father, transmitting to her son, the young Earl Gilbert, who died so gallantly on the field of Ban- nockburn, some spark of her father's great spirit. The next daughter, Margaret (1275-1318), married Duke John of Brabant in 1290, and hved to the then respect- able age of forty-three. Mary, the fourth daughter, born in 1279, was doomed from early childhood to take the veil at Amesbury to please her grandmother, Eleanor of Provence, who ended her life in semi -monastic retire- ment in that famous convent. Edward was unwilling to sacrifice the child, but yielded to his mother's pressure. She attained at least her fifty-fourth year, an age far greater than that reached by her brothers and sisters. The youngest daughter, Elizabeth^ surnamed the Welsh- woman, born at Ehuddlan in 1282, was married first to John, Count of Holland (1297), and secondly to Humphrey, Earl of Hereford (1302). She died in 1316. Eleanor of Castile died in 1290, and after nine years of solitude Edward married a second time in 1299. But his second marriage was partly at least the result of political calculations ; and Edward's second queen, Margaret of France, the sister of Philip the Fair, is a far more shadowy figure in our history than the gracious Eleanor of Castile. She is vaguely de- scribed as a " fair and marvellously virtuous lady." A girl of eighteen married to an old man of sixty could never stand in the place of the faithful partner of Edward's youth. She bore Edward three children. The eldest, Thomas, born at Brotherton in Yorkshire in 1300, became Earl of Norfolk, and died in 1338. The second, Edmund, IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 79 was born at Woodstock in 1301, and was made Earl of Kent. His unlucky end in 1330 is one of the worst stains on the regency of Mortimer and Isabella on behalf of the young Edward HI. The third child of the second marriage was a daughter named Eleanor, born in 130G, who died when quite a child. Edward's plans for the settlement of his family are of great historical importance. The younger sons he provided for with English earldoms, while the daughters were married to foreign princes whose alliance was of importance, or to great English earls, that their tendency to join the opposition ranks might be counterbalanced by their close personal connection with the royal house. In this respect Edward's policy anticipates that of Edward HI. But like the more famous family settle- ment of Edward HI. it was something of a failure. Edward's ministers fill a large part in the history of his reign ; though the scanty chronicles and the bare and formal legal records, from which we get most of our information, make it hard for us to assign to the king and his helpers their due share of merit, and render it almost impossible for us to get any very clear notion of the personal characteristics of even the greatest states- men that stood round Edward's throne. Edward's own kinsfolk take a considerable position among his counsellors. His brother Edmund of Lancaster, his representative in Guienne ; his cousin Edmund of Cornwall, the regent during his long absence between 1286 and 1289 ; his nephew John of Brittany, his faithful vicegerent during the most critical period of his dealings with Scotland, all served Edward with the utmost loyalty, and were entirely trusted by him. Even the foreign 80 EDWARD I CHAP. IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 81 relatives, who after the storms of the Barons' Wars scarcely- dared to show their faces in England, still continued to enjoy Edward's confidence abroad. All through his reign, the Lusignans helped him in Gascony. His cousin, Count Amadeus the Great of Savoy, rendered him most important assistance in his later foreign policy. From that same Savoyard land came John de Grailly, the faithful seneschal of Aquitaine, and Otho of Grandison, or Grandson, who came from the town famous in after ages for the crushing defeat of Charles the Bold by the Swiss confederates, and who was a very important figure in the diplomatic history of the latter part of Edward's reign. At home Edward's chief ministers were Englishmen, for the most part ecclesiastics, and though of gentle birth they but seldom belonged to the highest orders of society. Foremost amongst them is Robert Burnell, the Shropshire squire's son, who became the most dexterous of Chancery lawyers, and who, attaching himself to Edward when he was still but Earl of Chester and Duke of Aquitaine, remained united to him by the closest ties of personal friendship and harmony of policy until his death in 1292. Edward loved Burnell so well that he strove, even before his father's death, to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, and as soon as he became king secured for him the chancellorship and the bishopric of Bath and Wells. Burnell was undoubtedly a consummate lawyer, a skilful diplomatist, and a thoroughly faithful minister; but his private character was stained by licentiousness and greed, that stand in strong contrast to the purity and economy of the king. Even his wonderful munifi- cence did not make Burnell popular; yet there is no single minister of whom we can say more clearly that he was a necessary element in the greatness of the reign. He probably deserves the largest share of the credit of the great legislative achievements of Edward I. Burnell is the highest type of Edward's lawyer- statesmen. Next to him comes John Kirkby, Bishop of Ely, the subtle financier, to whose doings we shall often again have occasion to refer. Judges like Hengham and Britton, and civilians like the Italian legist Francesco Accursi— of whom we shall speak later— filled a sub- ordinate position in Edward's court, and while sivino- technical details and scientific form to their master's work, had no great share in determining its spirit. After Burnell, the three leading ministers of Edward were Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, and Walter Langton, Bishop of Lichfield. Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, was the only one of the great earls who remained unswervingly faithful to Edward, and who, despite his great name and vast estates, never shirked labour or trouble in the service of his master. He was courteous, handsome, and active, as brave in war as ripe in counsel. He fought for Edward's cause, both as a general and as a diplomatist. In Wales, Scotland, and France we find constant traces of his activity. When Edward became king, Lincoln had but barely attained his majority. Until his death in 1311, he never faltered in his alledance ; his reirard for the father leading him to give what support he could to Edward IL, even when the young king most flagrantly went against his father's policy. Unfor- tunate in his domestic life, Lincoln lost his two sons by violent deaths ; and by the surrender of his two earl- doms of Lincoln and SaHsbury to his daughter Alice, G 82 EDWAUD I CHAP. IV THE KING AND HIS WORK 83 whom Edward married to his own nephew Thomas of Lancaster, the old earl handed over to the royal house the great estates, which all through his life had been devoted to the loyal service of the Crown. Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, is another striking fi «»*t fc i hi 90 EDWARD I CHAP. More formidable than the war of Limoges was the war of Beam, whose Viscount Gaston, the leader of the feudal vassals of Edward, had contemptuously ignored a sentence of the ducal court, and held out defiantly in his Pyrenean strongholds. Edward led an army against his rebellious subject, and though he lost many men and horses from want of food, and from the difficulty of carrying on his campaign on the rough hillsides and deep-cut valleys of the Bearnese highlands, succeeded in reducing his enemy to the greatest extremities. There- upon Gaston followed the example of the Viscountess of Limoges, and appealed to the French court. Philip then forbade Edward to pursue his attack on Gaston pending the hearing of the suit. Edward's ministers grew indig- nant, and urged their lord to disregard a command so injurious to his dignity. But the king's love of law triumphed over the impatience of his servants. He made a truce with Gaston, and having no further business in Aquitaine, started for England, travelling overland through France. On his way he negotiated at Montreuil-sur-Mer a treaty with the Count of Flanders, which settled an old-standing dispute that had for some time excluded English wool from the Flemish markets. On 2nd August 1274 he crossed over to Dover. Queen Eleanor had accompanied him in all his journeys. The appeal of Gaston of Beam dragged on for some time in the Parliament of Paris, the highest law-court of the King of France. The French lawyers wished well to the viscount's suit, but their strict regard for feudal propriety made it hard for them to overlook the violence, both of speech and act, which had marked Gaston's treatment of his immediate suze- t EDWARD'S CONTINENTAL POLICY 91 rain. Finally Philip advised Gaston to go to London, make his submission to Edward, and excuse himself for his misdeeds. Edward received his vassal's submission, but with characteristic lawyer -like subtlety he main- tained that the submission was equivalent to a renuncia- tion of Gaston's appeal to Paris, and that the sole point remaining was to determine the viscount's punishment. Philip saw that he was outwitted, but the situation became less strained since a personal reconciliation had followed Gaston's humiliation to Edward. The appeal was silently dropped, and in 1279 Gaston was formally reinstated by Edward in the fiefs which his contumacy had forfeited. The real triumph rested with the English king, and Gaston, for some years at least, kept the peace. In 1279 the long-standing difficulties between Edward and Philip were brought to a satisfactory conclusion. In May Edward and Eleanor crossed over the Channel and took possession of the county of Ponthieu, which had just fallen to the queen as the heiress of her mother, Joan, the Dowager Queen of Castile and Leon and Countess of Ponthieu, who had just died. This county, whose capital was Abbeville, included a fertile region on the lower Somme. Philip of France now came to Amiens, where he was joined by Edward. On 23rd May the Treaty of Amiens, for which the diplomatists had long been working, was signed by the two kings. By it Philip ceded Agen and the Agenais outright, thus adding to Edward's lands the fair and fruitful plain of the middle Garonne. The French king also promised to submit Edward's claims over Quercy to a commission of inquiry, which eight years later assigned to Edward I 92 EDWARD I CHAP. EDWARD'S CONTmENTAL POLICY 93 a large number of fiefs in the lower and richer parts of that region. Philip also renounced the oath of allegiance which he had demanded in 1275 of the Aquitanian vassals of Edward, a concession which he made with the more grace as very few of Edward's subjects had condescended to take an oath so con- trary to French feudal custom. Moreover, he confirmed Eleanor in her newly won county of Ponthieu. In return for these great concessions, Edward solemnly abandoned all further claims on French territory. Thus the disputes which had been going on since the time when Philip Augustus had driven King John out of Normandy were finally brought to an end. Every important subject of contention between the two kings was removed. Edward had won great reputation both by the firmness and moderation with which he had pursued his ends. He had gained no small advantages in return for very shadowy renunciations, and had shown clearly to all Europe that the English king was not to be trifled with. During the years of unfriendly negotiations between England and France, Edward had sought to strengthen himself on every side against a possible attack of his overlord. He had renewed friendly relations with his brother-in-law, Alfonso the Wise of Castile, though he had sought to protect the widowed queen Blanche of Navarre from the aggressions of her powerful neighbour. He had sought in 1273 to marry Blanche's daughter, the infant queen Joan, now nominal sovereign of Navarre and Champagne, to one of his sons, but though he failed in this, he succeeded in 1275 in marry- ing Blanche herself to his own brother, Edmund of Lancaster. Blanche was not allowed by the French to exercise her rights as guardian of her daughter in Navarre, but she still ruled over her husband's county of Champagne in her daughter's name, and Edmund was now associated with her as regent of one of the most important fiefs of the French crown, and, until his daughter-in-law attained her majority, he practically held the position of one of the great peers of France, and insured a powerful influence being exercised in his favour in all dealings with that country. Moreover, Edward had firm friends at Philip's court. Philip's mother, Margaret of Provence, was a sister of Edward's mother Eleanor. She was an enthusiast for the English alliance, and the strong influence which she possessed over her sluggish son, during the early years of his reign, may well be the chief reason that prevented the ever smouldering animosities of the two kings from breaking out into open war. But Margaret, like all her kindred, was a strong partisan of her family interests, and never turned her eyes away from those lands between the Alps and Rhone, which were now gradually slipping into French hands. She joined with her sister Eleanor in cordially hating Charles of Anjou, who had, with the hand of their youngest sister Beatrice, filched from the elder sisters the rich country of Provence, which he had used as a stepping-stone to his kingdom of Naples. Now Edward also hated the Angevin, who had supplanted his brother Edmund in his Italian kingdom, and had backed up the ruffianly Montforts, the murderers of his cousin Henry of Almaine. Urged on by his mother, who still exercised real influence over him, Edward willingly fell into any > 0j m» n m , -