If you've ever wondered how a fourteenth-century king of England (born in Wales) came to inherit a county in northern France from his Spanish mother - and be honest, this vexatious question has been keeping you awake at night, hasn't it? - here's everything you need to know. ;-)
The county of Ponthieu no longer exists on the political map of France; it is part of the region of Picardy and is located in the modern départements of Somme and Pas-de-Calais. Its main town is Abbeville and its former port (now inland) is Montreuil-sur-Mer. In Edward II's time and before, it was a small county with a strategic importance beyond its size because it bordered Normandy. The battle of Crécy in 1346 took place in Ponthieu, so Edward III was on home ground, as it were, having been granted the county by his father on 2 September 1325.
We're going to go back to 1195, when Alais (or Alix or Alys, etc) of France married Guillaume or William Talvas, count of Ponthieu. Alais was the younger daughter of Louis VII of France and his second queen Constance of Castile, who died shortly after her birth on 4 October 1160; Alais's elder sister Marguerite married Henry the Young King, son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had of course once been married to Alais and Marguerite's father Louis VII and had two daughters with him. (I wonder how many married couples in history have had half-siblings in common.) Anyway, Alais was betrothed for many years to Henry the Young King's brother Richard Lionheart, but he refused to marry her and in 1195 finally sent her back to her younger half-brother Philip Augustus, king of France, on the (spurious?) grounds that she had borne a child to his father Henry II. Philip immediately arranged Alais's marriage to William, count of Ponthieu, and the couple married on 20 August 1195. Alais was then a few weeks short of thirty-five, William a youth of probably sixteen. He was the great-great-grandson of the notorious Robert de Bellême, a Norman baron who also owned lands in England and was imprisoned by Henry I in the early 1100s having committed all kinds of atrocities in Normandy; Robert's wife Agnes was the heiress of Ponthieu. A previous count of Ponthieu, Guy, Robert de Bellême's father-in-law, played a small but vital role in English history in the 1060s, when he imprisoned a shipwrecked Harold Godwinson and delivered him to Duke William of Normandy, later the Conqueror.
It is likely that Philip Augustus was hoping or expecting that Alais and William's marriage would remain childless so that he could gain control of Ponthieu, but a daughter, Marie, was born to the couple sometime between 1197 and 1199 when Alais was in her late thirties and William still probably under twenty (Marie's date of birth is sometimes given as April 1199). Marie was their only child, or at least their only child who survived to adulthood, and was thus the heir to Ponthieu when Count William died in 1221 (the date of Alais of France's death is unfortunately not recorded; I hope she found some happiness with her much younger husband after being publicly humiliated by her long-term fiancé). Marie married Simon de Dammartin, count of Aumale, and had probably seven children, of whom four daughters lived to adulthood. Marie and Simon's eldest surviving child, who was born in about 1216 to 1220 and was heiress to Ponthieu, was Jeanne de Dammartin, who is usually known as Joan of Ponthieu in English. In 1235 Joan was betrothed to Henry III of England, who hoped to use Ponthieu as a springboard to regain control of the duchy of Normandy, which his father King John had lost to the French in 1204. The regent and queen mother of France, Blanche of Castile, would not allow that, however, and threatened to invade Ponthieu if the marriage went ahead. Henry III married Eleanor of Provence instead, and Countess Joan married Queen Blanche's nephew the widowed King Fernando III of Castile and Leon in 1237. Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, and Fernando III and Joan of Ponthieu, are Edward II's grandparents.
Joan's father Simon de Dammartin died in 1239, having lived long enough to see his eldest daughter become queen of Castile and Leon, and her mother Marie, Alais of France's child, in 1251. Joan became countess of Ponthieu in her own right (one major difference between inheritance law in France and England is apparent here: in France the eldest daughter inherited everything, whereas in England the inheritance would have been divided equally among the sisters, the law of primogeniture applying only to males). Joan's husband Fernando III had had ten children with his first queen Elisabeth or Beatriz of Swabia - granddaughter of two emperors, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelos - and with Joan he had five more. Two, Juan and Ximen, died in infancy. The others were Fernando, who was born in 1238 or 1239; Leonor (or Eleanor), born probably in late 1241; and Luis, born before 31 March 1243. These children were the great-grandchildren of Alais of France and William Talvas.
Queen Joan was widowed on 30 May 1252 when Fernando III died in Seville, still only in her early or mid-thirties, and returned to her native Ponthieu in October 1254 following a dispute with her stepson Alfonso X over her dower lands, shortly before her twelve or thirteen-year-old daughter infanta doña Leonor married the future Edward I of England. Joan married secondly John de Nesle, lord of Falvy, and died on 16 March 1279 at the age of about sixty. Her granddaughter Joan of Acre, Edward I and Eleanor of Castile's second surviving daughter, had been living with her in Ponthieu, and returned to England on her grandmother's death. Joan's sons Fernando and Luis both predeceased her, so that her only living child in 1279 was her daughter, the twelfth of Fernando III's fifteen children, Eleanor of Castile, queen of England. On 21 March, five days after Joan's death, an entry on the Patent Roll gives "[p]ower to Edmund, earl of Lancaster and count of Champagne, the king's brother, and John de Brittannia, earl of Richmond, to exact from Philip [III], king of France, the king's kinsman, the county of Ponthieu, which by the death of Joan, queen of Castile and countess of Ponthieu, falls by hereditary right to Eleanor, the king's consort." [1] And thus the Spanish infanta and queen of England, lady of Ireland and duchess of Aquitaine succeeded as countess of Ponthieu in her own right.
Fernando of Castile, Eleanor's elder brother, had married Laure de Montfort, niece of the famous Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, brother-in-law of Henry III of England. They had a son, John of Ponthieu, who was born around 1264, around the time his father died. Eleanor's younger brother Luis, lord of Marchena, married Juana Gomez, lady of Gatón, but had no children when he died sometime in the mid to late 1270s. So at the time of Queen Joan's death in 1279, rightful posession of Ponthieu came down to either her daughter, Queen Eleanor, or her grandson, John of Ponthieu (whose fate it ultimately was to be one of the many French noblemen killed at the battle of Courtrai in July 1302). The daughter was preferred, though John of Ponthieu did inherit the county of Aumale, which had belonged to his grandfather Simon de Dammartin, and received 14,000 livres in compensation for Ponthieu from his aunt Eleanor in 1281. A daughter taking precedence over a grandson was not unusual in France at this time: Mahaut (1268-1329), daughter of Robert II, count of Artois, inherited the county on the death of her father in 1302 in preference to her nephew Robert (1287-1342), son of her dead brother, who spent many years unsuccessfully battling her for the county.
On Queen Eleanor's death on 28 November 1290, the county of Ponthieu passed by right to her only surviving son Edward of Caernarfon, then aged six. On 3 February 1291, envoys were appointed on behalf of "Edward, the king's son, lord of Ponthieu, with the consent and authority of the king as his guardian" to pay homage to Philip IV of France on his behalf, and on 21 June Edward I made a "[g]rant to Edmund [of Lancaster, his brother], the king's kinsman, of the county of Ponthieu during the minority of Edward, the king's son and heir." [2] Edward of Caernarfon lost his county from 1294 to 1299 when his father was at war with Philip IV and Philip seized English-owned lands in France, but in the Treaty of Montreuil of June 1299 - the same treaty which mooted his future marriage to Philip's daughter Isabella - it was given back to him.
Edward II remained count of Ponthieu until 2 September 1325, when he granted the county to his twelve-year-old son Edward of Windsor prior to sending him to France to pay homage for it and Gascony (i.e., what remained of the duchy of Aquitaine, which he inherited from his father Edward I and his great-great-grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine) to Charles IV. And thus it came about that a Welsh-born king of England inherited lands in northern France from his Spanish mother, and thus it also came about that the discarded and humiliated fiancée Alais of France became as much an ancestor of the English royal house as Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine are. She was Edward II's great-great-grandmother. Richard Lionheart's brother King John was Edward's great-grandfather.
Sources
1) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1272-1281, p. 306; Hilda Johnstone, 'The County of Ponthieu 1272-1307', English Historical Review, 29 (1914), p. 437.
2) Patent Rolls 1281-1292, pp. 420, 435; Johnstone, 'County of Ponthieu', p. 447.
27 February, 2013
20 February, 2013
The Paternity of Edward I Revisited
Firstly, I'd just like to say a big 'thank you very much' to David Crowther at The History of England (see also here, here and here) for this fantastic mention of me and my blog: "Then there's a quite amazing blog, Edward II by Kathryn Warner. Slightly chippy it must be said, but brilliantly written, incredibly comprehensive and easy to find whatever information you want. The best history blog I have come across by some distance." I'm blushing! How very kind! And I think the 'slightly chippy' comment is entirely fair and reasonable. :)
Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about the, to me, deeply irritating tendency in modern historical fiction to portray numerous medieval kings of England as not really the sons of their fathers. The post focused particularly on a series of four novels about Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester killed at the battle of Evesham in 1265, which portray him as the real father of King Edward I, who was in reality his nephew by marriage. My friend Sarah has also written two great posts about this, here and here.
As I've said before, if the author's theory about Edward I's parentage was confined to the pages of her novels and clearly just fictional, I'd roll my eyes a lot and sigh in exasperation and let it be, but she's been posting all over the internet - on her website and blog, Facebook, Amazon and numerous guest posts on blogs - that her 'discovery' that Edward I was Simon de Montfort's son and not Henry III's has a strong foundation in fact. In fairness, she's never stated that it's certain truth, which would be difficult without having been present in Eleanor of Provence's bedchamber nine months before Edward I's birth in June 1239, but on the basis that she's presenting it as an entirely plausible and probable version of history, I think it's perfectly reasonable for me and others to judge her novel and in particular this theory against the standards the author has claimed for it; she has not said her novel is fiction based loosely on real people, but that it's historically accurate and that her theory of Edward I's paternity has historical validity. Sarah reports that she frequently gets blog searches looking for something like 'Simon de Montfort was Edward I's father' in much the same way that I get searches for 'William Wallace was Edward III's father'. Lately I've been digging through the thirteenth-century chancery rolls again with regard to this matter and found some information, which I present here.
The author's theory that Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester was Edward I's father hinges on the fact that Henry III and presumably his queen Eleanor of Provence were staying at Kenilworth Castle between 9 and 15 September (according to the author) 1238, a little over nine months before the birth of their eldest child Edward on 17 June 1239. The author has repeated on her website, in the 'Historical Context' section of her first novel, on Amazon and Facebook and elsewhere that Kenilworth in September 1238 was Simon de Montfort's 'home'. It wasn't. The author claims to have more than thirty years' experience of reading primary sources relating to the era she writes about, so it's odd that she's never noticed Kenilworth wasn't granted to Montfort until 13 February 1244 (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1232-1247, p. 419), and even then he was only appointed warden of the castle: "The like [appointment during pleasure] of S. earl of Leicester to the custody of the castle of Kenilleworth". Henry III did not grant Kenilworth Castle to Simon outright, as his own possession, until 9 November 1253 (Patent Rolls 1247-1258, p. 250): "Grant to Simon de Monte Forti, earl of Leicester, and Eleanor his wife, of the manor of Odiham and the castle of Kenillewurth for the lives of both or either of them." (Henry had granted Kenilworth to his sister Countess Eleanor in her own right, not to her and Simon, on 9 January 1248: "Grant to her of the castle of Kenillewurth to keep for her life." Patent Rolls 1247-1258, p. 5.)
An entry on the Fine Roll of February 1241 (membrane 25/802), an order from the king, states that one Philip de Lacelles "is to keep Kenilworth Castle" as its warden, so clearly Kenilworth was still a royal castle then; ditto April 1242, when Gilbert de Segrave replaced Lacelles (Patent Rolls 1232-1247, pp. 280, 284). On the Patent Roll of 7 April 1242 (Ibid., p. 294), we find an acknowledgement by Segrave that he "has received from the king the castle of Kenillewuth to keep in his fealty, during pleasure, in this form, to wit, that he will surrender it to none but the king during his life, and in case of the king's death during the said custody to none but Queen Eleanor to the use of the king's heir, and in case she cannot come personally, to none but one of the queen's uncles not of the fealty of the king of France, to the use of the said heir." (That is, the future Edward I, then aged two years and ten months.) This makes it absolutely, completely certain that Kenilworth Castle was still in the possession of King Henry III in 1242 and that at this time he intended it to pass eventually to his son the future Edward I - he changed his mind in 1248 and gave it to his sister, as noted above - and it definitely did not belong to Montfort then. Montfort replaced Segrave as custodian of the castle in February 1244, as also noted above. The famous chronicler Matthew Paris does say that while Simon de Montfort was away from England in 1238 - he returned from Italy on 14 October, St Calixtus's day - his wife Eleanor "lay concealed, in a state of pregnancy, at Kenilworth castle", where she gave birth to their eldest child Henry in Advent (ed. J.A. Giles, pp. 124, 139, 155). Presumably Henry III was accommodating his sister at Kenilworth as a guest, in much the same way as his grandson Edward II accommodated his favourite niece Eleanor Despenser at his palace of Sheen in late 1325 when she was pregnant; Eleanor is named in the king's chamber account on 2 December as then staying at the palace, and gave birth, almost certainly at Sheen, on or before the 19th. Evidently, then as now, people liked to invite close relatives they were very fond of to stay at their homes. The warden of Kenilworth Castle in 1238, as far as I can tell, was William de Lucy, who was appointed by the king on 24 April 1236 (Fine Rolls, membrane 20/243).
The author, as well as stating definitively that the king and queen were at Kenilworth from 9 to 15 September 1238 which may or may not be true, claims in her first novel that the Patent Rolls have 'large lacunae' from 30 August to 12 September that year, and that this, combined with (supposedly) other missing entries from the Charter and Liberate Rolls and other sources for these days, means that there was 'a deliberate concealment of the king's location in early September'. Actually the Patent Rolls 1232-1247, pp. 231-233, would appear to record Henry III's presence at the following: Winchester on 31 August 1238; Kingsclere on 2 September; Woodstock on 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 September; Kenilworth on the 15th; Coventry on the 17th. As 'deliberate concealments' of the king's whereabouts go, this is not particularly impressive. According to the author, "[t]he seemingly coordinated absence of information for the period from August 30 to September 6 suggests intent. I offer it as yet another piece in the circumstantial evidence of the queen's visit to Kenilworth in September 1238, and the resulting birth of Edward nine months later" and also "[b]oth King Henry and Edward I would have had good reason to want evidence of the queen's stay at Kenilworth destroyed." Errrm. I found Henry at Winchester, Kingsclere and Woodstock on those dates in about two minutes. 30 August to 6 September 1238 would be a very early conception for a baby born on 17 June 1239, so I'm not sure why anyone would want to hide the king's whereabouts between those dates anyway. The Rolls only very rarely record where the queen was, and we don't know for certain that she accompanied her husband to Kenilworth in September 1238, though it's very probable that she did. We certainly don't know that Simon de Montfort was there with the royal couple, and it's extremely unlikely that he was; if Matthew Paris is correct, he only returned to England a month later in mid-October 1238. All of this seems a remarkably thin basis for insisting that Queen Eleanor and Montfort were certainly together at Kenilworth and most probably had relations that resulted in the birth of Edward I the following June. And if Henry III was at Kenilworth, which he certainly was, and his sister was there too, how could their respective spouses have committed adultery together without them or anyone else noticing? Royal lack of privacy in the Middle Ages and all that?
The author has also claimed that "A Pipe Roll entry in November 1238 concerned a payment to a physician who guaranteed that if the Queen and King drank an herbal tisane and prayed at the tomb of Saint Edward the queen's barrenness would be cured...seven months later the Queen was reported (by Matthew Paris) to have given birth to a remarkably strapping infant, clearly not puny and premature. Christened Edward for the saint who worked this miraculous birth, that child would reign as Edward I, King of England." According to her, this is proof that Eleanor had deceived the king and that Simon de Montfort and not he was the father of her child. Maybe I'm just being thick and obtuse, but I really don't get the logic of this. In November 1238, Queen Eleanor was only a few weeks along in her pregnancy and perhaps hadn't yet realised she was pregnant, hence her asking a physician for help. Or perhaps the visit to the physician for his tisane had taken place months earlier and the payment only now recorded. At any rate, it seems to me a decidedly odd basis for assuming that Henry III was not the father of his son Edward I. Clearly Henry III was not infertile or incapable, as his and Eleanor's next child Margaret, future queen of Scotland, was born a mere fifteen months after Edward in September 1240, with Beatrice following in June 1242 and Edmund in January 1245 (and the little girl Katherine, who died young, after a long gap in November 1253).
The author's speculation about Edward I's paternity is also based on a deliberate alteration of Matthew Paris's account of Eleanor of Provence's churching in August 1239 following Edward's birth. At this event, Henry III furiously accused Simon de Montfort of seducing his (Henry's) sister Eleanor - they had married early the previous year - which the author constructs as Henry actually wishing to accuse Montfort of seducing his wife, but at the last moment realising he needed an heir and therefore substituting the word 'sister'. This tale involves the archbishop of Canterbury hearing the queen's first confession for many months and immediately breaking the sacred seal of confidentiality and telling the king that she had committed adultery with Montfort. It makes perfect psychological sense to me, though not to the author who is evidently baffled that Henry would raise an issue which had supposedly been resolved many months earlier, that the king might at first have been pleased with the romance of his sister's love marriage, then belatedly realised, and become angry and upset when he did so, that her marriage could and should have been used to benefit England in a political alliance with another country (Henry's other sisters Joan and Isabella were married to the king of Scotland and the Holy Roman Emperor). And it is hardly unknown for an argument to be seemingly resolved and finished only for one party to start feeling aggrieved again hours or days or weeks or months later and revive the argument, which is what Henry seems, to me, to have done here. I don't know all that much about Henry's personality, but his grandson Edward II often let his heart rule his head and let his emotions get the better of him, in ways that might also seem puzzling to people more level-headed and less prone to intense, seemingly contradictory feelings. As a very emotional person myself, I really don't see how Henry III's behaviour at his queen's churching is so inexplicable that we have to start inventing daft theories to make sense of it.
So to sum up, for the author to claim that Kenilworth Castle was Simon de Montfort's 'home' in September 1238, a massive fifteen years before it was actually granted to him outright and more than five years before he was even appointed its custodian, is wildly inaccurate; when the king was there nine months before the birth of his eldest son, it was still a royal castle. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever therefore to suppose that Simon de Montfort was anywhere near Queen Eleanor at the time she conceived Edward I. OK, fine, if a writer still wants to make up a fictional tale that her hero was the true father of a king of England, that's her prerogative, but she shouldn't pretend that this story has any basis whatsoever in fact. When one examines the Patent and Fine Rolls of the 1230s to 1250s, any notion that Kenilworth Castle belonged to Simon de Montfort at the time Henry III and presumably Queen Eleanor stayed there in September 1238 simply melts away, taking with it any and all foundation of the author's oft-repeated theory that Montfort fathered Edward I. Let me reiterate that if this theory was to be found solely within the pages of her novels, I wouldn't have dedicated anywhere near as much space to demolishing it, but because she has so often claimed in so many places online that her theory has historical validity and has often written 'Simon de Montfort was probably the father of Edward I' as though it's a factual statement, I felt I had to alert readers who might otherwise believe there is evidence supporting it to its complete lack of foundation. We're talking about Edward II's grandparents, after all. I have a strong personal interest.
The author also claims that there was much gossip current in the thirteenth century to the effect that Montfort was Edward I's father. I am unaware of any evidence for this. She thinks that Henry III and Eleanor of Provence's second son Edmund, earl of Lancaster (1245-1296) actually was Henry's son. If Edmund really had been Henry's only true son, this would have given him and his son and heir Thomas (c. 1278-1322) a very strong claim to the English throne. Edmund was totally loyal to his brother Edward I all his life, but his son Thomas of Lancaster was a thorn in the side of his cousin Edward II (Edward I's son) for almost a decade and a half; the two men battled for control of the English government for much of the 1310s, and Edward ended up having Thomas beheaded for treason in 1322. Given the endless hostility between the king and his wealthy, powerful cousin, if Thomas had had even the slightest inkling that his uncle Edward I was not really of royal birth and his father Edmund was, he most certainly would gleefully have used this fact against Edward II as much and as often as he could. As the holder of five earldoms and the richest man in England, Thomas had an enormously strong power base, many of whom would most likely have supported him had he decided to make a bid for the throne on the basis that Edward II, grandson of Simon de Montfort and not of Henry III, had no claim to it. The fact that Thomas never did any such thing nor ever even hinted at his uncle's non-royal paternity demonstrates that he had simply never heard this supposed gossip about Edward I being fathered by Montfort. Are we supposed to believe that a lot of people knew or guessed that Edmund of Lancaster was Henry III's only true son, but this never reached the ears of Edmund's own son? Nonsense. The slur of not being of royal birth was never thrown at Edward I either at any time during his long life, not even during his crisis with his barons of 1297/98. Why would his enemies have not used this supposed 'gossip' if they'd ever heard of it?
As for the mad claim that 'for 700 years it was a hanging crime' to speak Simon de Montfort's name, I point at it and laugh. Just one thing: Edward II, when staying in Yorkshire in 1323, paid a group of women several shillings for singing songs about Montfort for him. (It isn't clear from the entry in his chamber account whether he requested songs about Montfort from them, or whether the earl was the women's own choice of subject.) I asked the author for her source for this jaw-dropping claim on Amazon and Facebook a while ago, as have several others, and received the reply "Perhaps he paid them to make it clear to them he wasn't going to hang them. As their songs may well have named Montfort as Edward II's grandfather, he had good reason to be curious."
Can you imagine the reaction of any king of England on being told to his face that his grandmother was an adulteress and his grandfather a cuckold and his father not of royal blood, meaning that neither his father nor he had any right to occupy the throne? Can you even imagine? It's utter madness to suggest that a group of Edward II's subjects with no power or political influence whatsoever would have dared to say to him directly 'Yes, my lord king, as you call yourself though you have no right, your father was a bastard not of royal birth, because your grandmother, the one you remember with great affection because she showed such love and concern for you as a child, committed adultery with her brother-in-law'. Edward did not hang or in any way threaten the women who sang for him, but for sure he would have done if they'd had the effrontery to tell him something like that. And in the political climate of 1323, when Edward was having to deal with the fact that a great many of his subjects believed the executed Thomas of Lancaster to be a murdered saint who performed miracles to the great benefit of the English people, and with his brother and heir Henry very much alive and still a thorn in Edward's side, any declaration that the Lancasters had a superior claim to the throne would have been a remarkably sensitive issue. You can tell from the way Edward I's subjects treated him and especially the way the Lancasters behaved that no-one had the slightest reason to believe that Edward was not Henry III's son, in the same way that you can tell from the way people behaved towards Edward III that no-one had the slightest reason to believe that he was not Edward II's son. There was no gossip that Edward I was not his father's son, and there was no gossip that Edward III was not his father's son. These are silly, highly implausible modern inventions which - siiiiigh - we have to accept in fiction, but should always challenge whenever anyone tries to claim that they have any basis at all in fact.
EDITED TO ADD, 2 March 2013: the author's long Facebook post responding to my review claims that the castle of Kenilworth was given by Henry III to his sister Eleanor and her husband Simon de Montfort as a wedding gift in the spring of 1238. She does not cite a source for this statement, which is not surprising, as there isn't one, and it's her own invention. I have recently also looked through the Close Rolls in addition to the Patent, Fine and Charter Rolls, Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous and other thirteenth-century primary sources which I looked at for my review, and they confirm my statement in it that Kenilworth was still a royal castle in 1238 and did *not* belong to Simon de Montfort at that time or until a few years later.
On 4 March 1238 (Calendar of Close Rolls 1237-1242, p. 31), we find an order to the constable of Kenilworth Castle to send some bream "from the king's fishponds at Kenilworth" to the bishop of Worcester. Far more significantly, however, on 22 July and again on 23 September 1238 (Ibid., pp. 78, 103, 105) we find another order from the king to his constable of Kenilworth Castle, ordering him to give one Geoffrey de Langley six, later raised to twenty, oak trees from "the king's enclosure at Kenilworth", 'haya regis de Kenilleworth' in the Latin original, "of the king's gift", 'de dono regis'. The entry of 23 September concludes "Witness the king at Wenlock, 4 September", 'Teste rege apud Wenlok', xxiij. die Septembris.' September 1238 is exactly the month that Ashe continues to claim that the castle of Kenilworth belonged to Montfort and that he was there with Queen Eleanor (of Provence) to father Edward I, but as we see here from the Close Roll, it was a royal castle at the time, in the possession of Henry III. Why and how would the king be ordering his constable of the castle to take oak from the "king's enclosure of Kenilworth" as a gift to someone if it belonged to Montfort? Obviously, he wouldn't. The author is wrong to say that Kenilworth Castle was Montfort's in September 1238; primary source evidence issued by Henry III's own government at this time demonstrates conclusively that the castle belonged to the king then and until he granted it to his sister Eleanor de Montfort in 1248 and to her and her husband Simon jointly in 1253, as I wrote above.
The author claims in her Facebook post responding to my review that "the 1244 citation of the granting of Kenilworth to Simon de Montfort refers to the return of the castle to him after his return from exile 1239-1244." Nope; the entry on the Patent Roll of 13 February 1244 that I've previously cited states perfectly clearly "The like [the previous entry says 'Appointment during pleasure'] of S. earl of Leicester to the custody of the castle of Kenilleworth, with like mandate to the tenants of the castellany. And G. de Segrave, who had the custody of the said castle, has letters patent testifying that he surrendered the castle to the king at Wudestok on Saturday before Ash Wednesday." This makes it apparent that Kenilworth was a royal castle of which Montfort was being appointed constable, or keeper, or warden, or custodian, however we decide to translate the Latin word 'constabulario'. If the castle was Montfort's own property being returned to him, this would be apparent from the wording of the grant, and it wouldn't state that he had 'custody' of the castle (if that's how this passage is interpreted, then the castle's previous owner would seemingly be the Gilbert de Segrave mentioned here, which of course he wasn't - he was its constable, being replaced by Montfort). If Kenilworth had indeed previously belonged to Montfort as the author claims and was now being returned to him following his return to England from exile, this would also be apparent; when the king took (temporary or permanent) custody of someone else's lands, castles and chattels, there were legal procedures which had to be followed and recorded. There would be an order to the king's escheator to take Kenilworth into the king's hands when Montfort left the country, for example, and a corresponding order to return it to him some years later. None of this documentation exists for Kenilworth, for the very simple reason that Simon de Montfort didn't own it until much later. There is therefore absolutely no reason to suppose that Montfort was anywhere near Kenilworth Castle and Queen Eleanor in September 1238, and absolutely no reason to doubt the statement that he was still in Italy at this time which appears in the contemporary chronicle of Matthew Paris, who, as the author herself has pointed out, knew Montfort personally. And, therefore, absolutely no reason whatsoever to suppose that he was Edward I's real father. Can we please, please, put this extraordinarily silly notion to rest now?
Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about the, to me, deeply irritating tendency in modern historical fiction to portray numerous medieval kings of England as not really the sons of their fathers. The post focused particularly on a series of four novels about Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester killed at the battle of Evesham in 1265, which portray him as the real father of King Edward I, who was in reality his nephew by marriage. My friend Sarah has also written two great posts about this, here and here.
As I've said before, if the author's theory about Edward I's parentage was confined to the pages of her novels and clearly just fictional, I'd roll my eyes a lot and sigh in exasperation and let it be, but she's been posting all over the internet - on her website and blog, Facebook, Amazon and numerous guest posts on blogs - that her 'discovery' that Edward I was Simon de Montfort's son and not Henry III's has a strong foundation in fact. In fairness, she's never stated that it's certain truth, which would be difficult without having been present in Eleanor of Provence's bedchamber nine months before Edward I's birth in June 1239, but on the basis that she's presenting it as an entirely plausible and probable version of history, I think it's perfectly reasonable for me and others to judge her novel and in particular this theory against the standards the author has claimed for it; she has not said her novel is fiction based loosely on real people, but that it's historically accurate and that her theory of Edward I's paternity has historical validity. Sarah reports that she frequently gets blog searches looking for something like 'Simon de Montfort was Edward I's father' in much the same way that I get searches for 'William Wallace was Edward III's father'. Lately I've been digging through the thirteenth-century chancery rolls again with regard to this matter and found some information, which I present here.
The author's theory that Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester was Edward I's father hinges on the fact that Henry III and presumably his queen Eleanor of Provence were staying at Kenilworth Castle between 9 and 15 September (according to the author) 1238, a little over nine months before the birth of their eldest child Edward on 17 June 1239. The author has repeated on her website, in the 'Historical Context' section of her first novel, on Amazon and Facebook and elsewhere that Kenilworth in September 1238 was Simon de Montfort's 'home'. It wasn't. The author claims to have more than thirty years' experience of reading primary sources relating to the era she writes about, so it's odd that she's never noticed Kenilworth wasn't granted to Montfort until 13 February 1244 (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1232-1247, p. 419), and even then he was only appointed warden of the castle: "The like [appointment during pleasure] of S. earl of Leicester to the custody of the castle of Kenilleworth". Henry III did not grant Kenilworth Castle to Simon outright, as his own possession, until 9 November 1253 (Patent Rolls 1247-1258, p. 250): "Grant to Simon de Monte Forti, earl of Leicester, and Eleanor his wife, of the manor of Odiham and the castle of Kenillewurth for the lives of both or either of them." (Henry had granted Kenilworth to his sister Countess Eleanor in her own right, not to her and Simon, on 9 January 1248: "Grant to her of the castle of Kenillewurth to keep for her life." Patent Rolls 1247-1258, p. 5.)
An entry on the Fine Roll of February 1241 (membrane 25/802), an order from the king, states that one Philip de Lacelles "is to keep Kenilworth Castle" as its warden, so clearly Kenilworth was still a royal castle then; ditto April 1242, when Gilbert de Segrave replaced Lacelles (Patent Rolls 1232-1247, pp. 280, 284). On the Patent Roll of 7 April 1242 (Ibid., p. 294), we find an acknowledgement by Segrave that he "has received from the king the castle of Kenillewuth to keep in his fealty, during pleasure, in this form, to wit, that he will surrender it to none but the king during his life, and in case of the king's death during the said custody to none but Queen Eleanor to the use of the king's heir, and in case she cannot come personally, to none but one of the queen's uncles not of the fealty of the king of France, to the use of the said heir." (That is, the future Edward I, then aged two years and ten months.) This makes it absolutely, completely certain that Kenilworth Castle was still in the possession of King Henry III in 1242 and that at this time he intended it to pass eventually to his son the future Edward I - he changed his mind in 1248 and gave it to his sister, as noted above - and it definitely did not belong to Montfort then. Montfort replaced Segrave as custodian of the castle in February 1244, as also noted above. The famous chronicler Matthew Paris does say that while Simon de Montfort was away from England in 1238 - he returned from Italy on 14 October, St Calixtus's day - his wife Eleanor "lay concealed, in a state of pregnancy, at Kenilworth castle", where she gave birth to their eldest child Henry in Advent (ed. J.A. Giles, pp. 124, 139, 155). Presumably Henry III was accommodating his sister at Kenilworth as a guest, in much the same way as his grandson Edward II accommodated his favourite niece Eleanor Despenser at his palace of Sheen in late 1325 when she was pregnant; Eleanor is named in the king's chamber account on 2 December as then staying at the palace, and gave birth, almost certainly at Sheen, on or before the 19th. Evidently, then as now, people liked to invite close relatives they were very fond of to stay at their homes. The warden of Kenilworth Castle in 1238, as far as I can tell, was William de Lucy, who was appointed by the king on 24 April 1236 (Fine Rolls, membrane 20/243).
The author, as well as stating definitively that the king and queen were at Kenilworth from 9 to 15 September 1238 which may or may not be true, claims in her first novel that the Patent Rolls have 'large lacunae' from 30 August to 12 September that year, and that this, combined with (supposedly) other missing entries from the Charter and Liberate Rolls and other sources for these days, means that there was 'a deliberate concealment of the king's location in early September'. Actually the Patent Rolls 1232-1247, pp. 231-233, would appear to record Henry III's presence at the following: Winchester on 31 August 1238; Kingsclere on 2 September; Woodstock on 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 September; Kenilworth on the 15th; Coventry on the 17th. As 'deliberate concealments' of the king's whereabouts go, this is not particularly impressive. According to the author, "[t]he seemingly coordinated absence of information for the period from August 30 to September 6 suggests intent. I offer it as yet another piece in the circumstantial evidence of the queen's visit to Kenilworth in September 1238, and the resulting birth of Edward nine months later" and also "[b]oth King Henry and Edward I would have had good reason to want evidence of the queen's stay at Kenilworth destroyed." Errrm. I found Henry at Winchester, Kingsclere and Woodstock on those dates in about two minutes. 30 August to 6 September 1238 would be a very early conception for a baby born on 17 June 1239, so I'm not sure why anyone would want to hide the king's whereabouts between those dates anyway. The Rolls only very rarely record where the queen was, and we don't know for certain that she accompanied her husband to Kenilworth in September 1238, though it's very probable that she did. We certainly don't know that Simon de Montfort was there with the royal couple, and it's extremely unlikely that he was; if Matthew Paris is correct, he only returned to England a month later in mid-October 1238. All of this seems a remarkably thin basis for insisting that Queen Eleanor and Montfort were certainly together at Kenilworth and most probably had relations that resulted in the birth of Edward I the following June. And if Henry III was at Kenilworth, which he certainly was, and his sister was there too, how could their respective spouses have committed adultery together without them or anyone else noticing? Royal lack of privacy in the Middle Ages and all that?
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| 'Kenilworth was Montfort's home'. Nope, not in September 1238, nor for a long time afterwards. The Patent Roll citation is wrong (should be p. 233). |
The author has also claimed that "A Pipe Roll entry in November 1238 concerned a payment to a physician who guaranteed that if the Queen and King drank an herbal tisane and prayed at the tomb of Saint Edward the queen's barrenness would be cured...seven months later the Queen was reported (by Matthew Paris) to have given birth to a remarkably strapping infant, clearly not puny and premature. Christened Edward for the saint who worked this miraculous birth, that child would reign as Edward I, King of England." According to her, this is proof that Eleanor had deceived the king and that Simon de Montfort and not he was the father of her child. Maybe I'm just being thick and obtuse, but I really don't get the logic of this. In November 1238, Queen Eleanor was only a few weeks along in her pregnancy and perhaps hadn't yet realised she was pregnant, hence her asking a physician for help. Or perhaps the visit to the physician for his tisane had taken place months earlier and the payment only now recorded. At any rate, it seems to me a decidedly odd basis for assuming that Henry III was not the father of his son Edward I. Clearly Henry III was not infertile or incapable, as his and Eleanor's next child Margaret, future queen of Scotland, was born a mere fifteen months after Edward in September 1240, with Beatrice following in June 1242 and Edmund in January 1245 (and the little girl Katherine, who died young, after a long gap in November 1253).
The author's speculation about Edward I's paternity is also based on a deliberate alteration of Matthew Paris's account of Eleanor of Provence's churching in August 1239 following Edward's birth. At this event, Henry III furiously accused Simon de Montfort of seducing his (Henry's) sister Eleanor - they had married early the previous year - which the author constructs as Henry actually wishing to accuse Montfort of seducing his wife, but at the last moment realising he needed an heir and therefore substituting the word 'sister'. This tale involves the archbishop of Canterbury hearing the queen's first confession for many months and immediately breaking the sacred seal of confidentiality and telling the king that she had committed adultery with Montfort. It makes perfect psychological sense to me, though not to the author who is evidently baffled that Henry would raise an issue which had supposedly been resolved many months earlier, that the king might at first have been pleased with the romance of his sister's love marriage, then belatedly realised, and become angry and upset when he did so, that her marriage could and should have been used to benefit England in a political alliance with another country (Henry's other sisters Joan and Isabella were married to the king of Scotland and the Holy Roman Emperor). And it is hardly unknown for an argument to be seemingly resolved and finished only for one party to start feeling aggrieved again hours or days or weeks or months later and revive the argument, which is what Henry seems, to me, to have done here. I don't know all that much about Henry's personality, but his grandson Edward II often let his heart rule his head and let his emotions get the better of him, in ways that might also seem puzzling to people more level-headed and less prone to intense, seemingly contradictory feelings. As a very emotional person myself, I really don't see how Henry III's behaviour at his queen's churching is so inexplicable that we have to start inventing daft theories to make sense of it.
So to sum up, for the author to claim that Kenilworth Castle was Simon de Montfort's 'home' in September 1238, a massive fifteen years before it was actually granted to him outright and more than five years before he was even appointed its custodian, is wildly inaccurate; when the king was there nine months before the birth of his eldest son, it was still a royal castle. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever therefore to suppose that Simon de Montfort was anywhere near Queen Eleanor at the time she conceived Edward I. OK, fine, if a writer still wants to make up a fictional tale that her hero was the true father of a king of England, that's her prerogative, but she shouldn't pretend that this story has any basis whatsoever in fact. When one examines the Patent and Fine Rolls of the 1230s to 1250s, any notion that Kenilworth Castle belonged to Simon de Montfort at the time Henry III and presumably Queen Eleanor stayed there in September 1238 simply melts away, taking with it any and all foundation of the author's oft-repeated theory that Montfort fathered Edward I. Let me reiterate that if this theory was to be found solely within the pages of her novels, I wouldn't have dedicated anywhere near as much space to demolishing it, but because she has so often claimed in so many places online that her theory has historical validity and has often written 'Simon de Montfort was probably the father of Edward I' as though it's a factual statement, I felt I had to alert readers who might otherwise believe there is evidence supporting it to its complete lack of foundation. We're talking about Edward II's grandparents, after all. I have a strong personal interest.
The author also claims that there was much gossip current in the thirteenth century to the effect that Montfort was Edward I's father. I am unaware of any evidence for this. She thinks that Henry III and Eleanor of Provence's second son Edmund, earl of Lancaster (1245-1296) actually was Henry's son. If Edmund really had been Henry's only true son, this would have given him and his son and heir Thomas (c. 1278-1322) a very strong claim to the English throne. Edmund was totally loyal to his brother Edward I all his life, but his son Thomas of Lancaster was a thorn in the side of his cousin Edward II (Edward I's son) for almost a decade and a half; the two men battled for control of the English government for much of the 1310s, and Edward ended up having Thomas beheaded for treason in 1322. Given the endless hostility between the king and his wealthy, powerful cousin, if Thomas had had even the slightest inkling that his uncle Edward I was not really of royal birth and his father Edmund was, he most certainly would gleefully have used this fact against Edward II as much and as often as he could. As the holder of five earldoms and the richest man in England, Thomas had an enormously strong power base, many of whom would most likely have supported him had he decided to make a bid for the throne on the basis that Edward II, grandson of Simon de Montfort and not of Henry III, had no claim to it. The fact that Thomas never did any such thing nor ever even hinted at his uncle's non-royal paternity demonstrates that he had simply never heard this supposed gossip about Edward I being fathered by Montfort. Are we supposed to believe that a lot of people knew or guessed that Edmund of Lancaster was Henry III's only true son, but this never reached the ears of Edmund's own son? Nonsense. The slur of not being of royal birth was never thrown at Edward I either at any time during his long life, not even during his crisis with his barons of 1297/98. Why would his enemies have not used this supposed 'gossip' if they'd ever heard of it?
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| Say what? |
Can you imagine the reaction of any king of England on being told to his face that his grandmother was an adulteress and his grandfather a cuckold and his father not of royal blood, meaning that neither his father nor he had any right to occupy the throne? Can you even imagine? It's utter madness to suggest that a group of Edward II's subjects with no power or political influence whatsoever would have dared to say to him directly 'Yes, my lord king, as you call yourself though you have no right, your father was a bastard not of royal birth, because your grandmother, the one you remember with great affection because she showed such love and concern for you as a child, committed adultery with her brother-in-law'. Edward did not hang or in any way threaten the women who sang for him, but for sure he would have done if they'd had the effrontery to tell him something like that. And in the political climate of 1323, when Edward was having to deal with the fact that a great many of his subjects believed the executed Thomas of Lancaster to be a murdered saint who performed miracles to the great benefit of the English people, and with his brother and heir Henry very much alive and still a thorn in Edward's side, any declaration that the Lancasters had a superior claim to the throne would have been a remarkably sensitive issue. You can tell from the way Edward I's subjects treated him and especially the way the Lancasters behaved that no-one had the slightest reason to believe that Edward was not Henry III's son, in the same way that you can tell from the way people behaved towards Edward III that no-one had the slightest reason to believe that he was not Edward II's son. There was no gossip that Edward I was not his father's son, and there was no gossip that Edward III was not his father's son. These are silly, highly implausible modern inventions which - siiiiigh - we have to accept in fiction, but should always challenge whenever anyone tries to claim that they have any basis at all in fact.
EDITED TO ADD, 2 March 2013: the author's long Facebook post responding to my review claims that the castle of Kenilworth was given by Henry III to his sister Eleanor and her husband Simon de Montfort as a wedding gift in the spring of 1238. She does not cite a source for this statement, which is not surprising, as there isn't one, and it's her own invention. I have recently also looked through the Close Rolls in addition to the Patent, Fine and Charter Rolls, Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous and other thirteenth-century primary sources which I looked at for my review, and they confirm my statement in it that Kenilworth was still a royal castle in 1238 and did *not* belong to Simon de Montfort at that time or until a few years later.
On 4 March 1238 (Calendar of Close Rolls 1237-1242, p. 31), we find an order to the constable of Kenilworth Castle to send some bream "from the king's fishponds at Kenilworth" to the bishop of Worcester. Far more significantly, however, on 22 July and again on 23 September 1238 (Ibid., pp. 78, 103, 105) we find another order from the king to his constable of Kenilworth Castle, ordering him to give one Geoffrey de Langley six, later raised to twenty, oak trees from "the king's enclosure at Kenilworth", 'haya regis de Kenilleworth' in the Latin original, "of the king's gift", 'de dono regis'. The entry of 23 September concludes "Witness the king at Wenlock, 4 September", 'Teste rege apud Wenlok', xxiij. die Septembris.' September 1238 is exactly the month that Ashe continues to claim that the castle of Kenilworth belonged to Montfort and that he was there with Queen Eleanor (of Provence) to father Edward I, but as we see here from the Close Roll, it was a royal castle at the time, in the possession of Henry III. Why and how would the king be ordering his constable of the castle to take oak from the "king's enclosure of Kenilworth" as a gift to someone if it belonged to Montfort? Obviously, he wouldn't. The author is wrong to say that Kenilworth Castle was Montfort's in September 1238; primary source evidence issued by Henry III's own government at this time demonstrates conclusively that the castle belonged to the king then and until he granted it to his sister Eleanor de Montfort in 1248 and to her and her husband Simon jointly in 1253, as I wrote above.
The author claims in her Facebook post responding to my review that "the 1244 citation of the granting of Kenilworth to Simon de Montfort refers to the return of the castle to him after his return from exile 1239-1244." Nope; the entry on the Patent Roll of 13 February 1244 that I've previously cited states perfectly clearly "The like [the previous entry says 'Appointment during pleasure'] of S. earl of Leicester to the custody of the castle of Kenilleworth, with like mandate to the tenants of the castellany. And G. de Segrave, who had the custody of the said castle, has letters patent testifying that he surrendered the castle to the king at Wudestok on Saturday before Ash Wednesday." This makes it apparent that Kenilworth was a royal castle of which Montfort was being appointed constable, or keeper, or warden, or custodian, however we decide to translate the Latin word 'constabulario'. If the castle was Montfort's own property being returned to him, this would be apparent from the wording of the grant, and it wouldn't state that he had 'custody' of the castle (if that's how this passage is interpreted, then the castle's previous owner would seemingly be the Gilbert de Segrave mentioned here, which of course he wasn't - he was its constable, being replaced by Montfort). If Kenilworth had indeed previously belonged to Montfort as the author claims and was now being returned to him following his return to England from exile, this would also be apparent; when the king took (temporary or permanent) custody of someone else's lands, castles and chattels, there were legal procedures which had to be followed and recorded. There would be an order to the king's escheator to take Kenilworth into the king's hands when Montfort left the country, for example, and a corresponding order to return it to him some years later. None of this documentation exists for Kenilworth, for the very simple reason that Simon de Montfort didn't own it until much later. There is therefore absolutely no reason to suppose that Montfort was anywhere near Kenilworth Castle and Queen Eleanor in September 1238, and absolutely no reason to doubt the statement that he was still in Italy at this time which appears in the contemporary chronicle of Matthew Paris, who, as the author herself has pointed out, knew Montfort personally. And, therefore, absolutely no reason whatsoever to suppose that he was Edward I's real father. Can we please, please, put this extraordinarily silly notion to rest now?
13 February, 2013
Was Edward II planning to execute Roger Mortimer in 1323?
It is indeed possible that Edward II was intending to execute Roger Mortimer in 1323; it's just nowhere near as certain a fact as is often stated nowadays. Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower of London on 1 August 1323 and made his way to the continent to his relatives the Fiennes brothers, who gave him refuge, and remained on the continent until he and Queen Isabella launched their invasion of her husband's kingdom in September 1326. He and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk had been imprisoned in the Tower since 13 February 1322 (yes, today is the anniversary), three weeks after they surrendered to Edward II at Shrewsbury during the Contrariant rebellion. Mortimer of Chirk died in the Tower on 3 August 1326, just a few weeks before his nephew's invasion of England, but I very much doubt that we should assume vengeful foul play on the part of Edward II or the Despensers; Chirk had played an important role in Edward I's Welsh wars of the early 1280s and must have been about seventy in August 1326, and had outlived all his siblings by decades. The 'community of Wales' presented a petition to Edward II sometime in 1322, saying that they had heard the two Roger Mortimers' lands would be restored to them, and because of the threats the two men had made against them, the Welshmen would be ruined and no longer able to live on their lands if this were true. They asked the king not to give the Mortimers their lands and lordships back, or the Welshmen would defend themselves against them if necessary. Edward assured them that the Mortimers would remain in his keeping and that he would "ordain what is to the benefit of his subjects." [1] On 14 July 1322, five men – the mayor of London, three justices of the court of Common Pleas and the chief baron of the exchequer – condemned Roger Mortimer and his uncle Mortimer of Chirk to death. Eight days later, Edward II commuted their sentence to life imprisonment, which would prove in 1326 to have been one of the worst mistakes he ever made. [2] It's a fascinating 'what if': if Roger Mortimer had been executed in 1322, who if anyone would have rebelled against Edward in his place, and would Edward ever have been forced to abdicate or would his reign have continued for a few more troubled years?
Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower of London by feeding his guards sedatives in their wine one night; five days after the escape, Stephen Segrave, constable of the Tower, was still seriously ill from the sedatives. [3] Edward II, 225 miles away at Kirkham in Yorkshire, heard the news five days later on 6 August, and ordered all the sheriffs and keepers of the peace in England and the bailiffs of fifteen ports to pursue Mortimer with hue and cry and take him dead or alive. [4] For a long time, he had no idea where Mortimer had gone, and assuming that he had fled to Wales, ordered the loyal Welshmen Rhys ap Gruffudd and Gruffudd Llwyd to search for him there. [5] On 26 August, he told his half-brother the earl of Kent that he thought Mortimer was in Ireland, and, afraid that Mortimer's escape was only the first of many Contrariants breaking prison - Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder had almost escaped from Wallingford Castle earlier in 1323 - also told the constables of no fewer than eighty castles to guard their charges safely. [6]
It is of course possible that in 1323 Edward II (and the Despensers) decided that Roger Mortimer was too dangerous to be allowed to live any longer, especially after the near-escape of Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder some months previously. But no official sources confirm it, and it is not a certain fact that Roger would have been executed had he not escaped but rather, unsubstantiated gossip reported in some chronicles but not others. I'm not sure if I believe the story or not, and I do wonder if it's something else based on hindsight, on chroniclers' knowledge that Roger Mortimer was the man who was to bring down Edward II several years later. (This is one reason why it's such a shame that a leaf of the Vita Edwardi Secundi is missing at this point, as it ends abruptly in late 1325 and the author didn't know that Mortimer would lead an invasion of England some months later.) It's apparent from Edward II's reaction in August 1323 that he was desperate to recapture Mortimer, but neither he nor anyone else at the time could have guessed just how dangerous the lord of Wigmore would be to him three years later. Whatever the truth of the situation and whatever Edward II's intentions towards Roger Mortimer in 1323, it's a reminder that much of what we believe we know about Edward's reign turns out not to be certain fact at all when closely examined.
Sources
1) The National Archives SC 8/6/255.
2) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 249. The judgement against the Mortimers is printed (in the original French) in James Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: Its Character and Policy (1918), p. 565.
3) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 13. This entry says that Segrave and "many others" in the Tower had been "poisoned by artifice."
4) Ibid., p. 132.
5) Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 335.
6) Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 133.
7) Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (1982), p. 20, citing Flores Historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard, vol. iii (1890), p. 217.
8) The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie (1906), p. 231.
9) Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E. M. Thompson (1889), p. 40.
10) Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as Recorded by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight, ed. Herbert Maxwell (1907) p. 72; The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell (1913), p. 251; Le Livere de Reis de Britanie e le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. John Glover (1865), p. 349; Annales Paulini 1307-1340 in W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, vol. 1 (1882), pp. 3-5-306.
11) The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307-41, from Brotherton Collection MS 29, ed. W. R. Childs and J. Taylor (1991), p. 116.
12) F.D. Blackley, 'Isabella and the Bishop of Exeter', in T.A. Sandqvist and M.R. Powicke, eds., Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (1969), p. 221.
Several fourteenth-century chronicles claim that Edward had been intending to execute Roger Mortimer, who was therefore compelled to escape days before the sentence was due to be carried out, while others do not mention an impending execution. The account in the Westminster chronicle Flores Historiarum (which was viciously hostile to Edward II) of Roger Mortimer's deliverance from the Tower owes little to reality and everything to the Bible: by happy coincidence Roger escaped on the feast day of St Peter in Chains, the day on which St Peter was rescued from Herod's prison by an angel, and the chronicler does little more than copy various verses of Acts of the Apostles relating to this event into his chronicle: "The king sent his detestable cruel officials to the Tower of London, intending to bring forth the younger Roger after a few days to the people and condemn him to a violent death. And when the king would have brought him forth, behold on the night of St Peter ad Vincula, the Holy Ghost came…and raised him up. And Roger, leaving, followed him, which was done by Christ...". [7] This can hardly be taken seriously as a realistic narrative of what happened in August 1323 or as evidence that Edward II was genuinely intending to put Roger Mortimer to death.
Whether the king really did intend Roger's death, or if this was merely a rumour that found its way into several chronicles or was an invention to explain his dramatic escape and make it even more dramatic, is not clear; the Brut chronicle, somewhat implausibly, has Mortimer fleeing the day before his execution was due to be carried out. (This chronicle does include the detail that the constable Stephen Segrave and his men were given sedatives in their drink and says that they slept for two days and two nights while Mortimer escaped over the river Thames, though it gets the date of Mortimer's escape wrong by a week.) [8] Unfortunately, a leaf of the very well-informed Vita Edwardi Secundi is missing where the author might have discussed the escape. Adam Murimuth, a royal clerk and chronicler who must have come to know Mortimer well after 1326, says only that he escaped and fled to France and does not mention an impending execution. [9] The Scalacronica says only that he escaped; Lanercost says that Roger was "a baron of the king of England, who had fled from him previously to France to save his life", so evidently had heard the story of a possible execution; the Sempringham annalist does not mention an execution, stating correctly that Roger (oddly called 'Sir Roger Mortimer, the father') escaped on 1 August at night, crossed the Thames and fled to France; the Annales Paulini also does not mention an execution when describing Mortimer's escape. [10] The Anonimalle, a contination of the Brut which includes the story that Roger was to be executed, reports a rumour that Edward had sent letters declaring that Roger was due to have been drawn and hanged (traigne et pendu) a few days after his escape. [11]
Whether the king really did intend Roger's death, or if this was merely a rumour that found its way into several chronicles or was an invention to explain his dramatic escape and make it even more dramatic, is not clear; the Brut chronicle, somewhat implausibly, has Mortimer fleeing the day before his execution was due to be carried out. (This chronicle does include the detail that the constable Stephen Segrave and his men were given sedatives in their drink and says that they slept for two days and two nights while Mortimer escaped over the river Thames, though it gets the date of Mortimer's escape wrong by a week.) [8] Unfortunately, a leaf of the very well-informed Vita Edwardi Secundi is missing where the author might have discussed the escape. Adam Murimuth, a royal clerk and chronicler who must have come to know Mortimer well after 1326, says only that he escaped and fled to France and does not mention an impending execution. [9] The Scalacronica says only that he escaped; Lanercost says that Roger was "a baron of the king of England, who had fled from him previously to France to save his life", so evidently had heard the story of a possible execution; the Sempringham annalist does not mention an execution, stating correctly that Roger (oddly called 'Sir Roger Mortimer, the father') escaped on 1 August at night, crossed the Thames and fled to France; the Annales Paulini also does not mention an execution when describing Mortimer's escape. [10] The Anonimalle, a contination of the Brut which includes the story that Roger was to be executed, reports a rumour that Edward had sent letters declaring that Roger was due to have been drawn and hanged (traigne et pendu) a few days after his escape. [11]
So evidently some chroniclers had never heard a story of an impending execution, and of the ones who had, it is not clear what their source was. There is nothing in any official record to confirm that Edward was planning Roger's death; the letters mentioned in the Anonimalle that he was demanding Roger's execution have not survived (if indeed they ever existed) and there is nothing at all in the chancery rolls or other government documents to suggest any renewed legal process against Roger Mortimer that might have led to his hanging or any desire on the king's part to have him dead. Historians have wondered whether Queen Isabella had anything to do with Mortimer's escape, but the first people to suggest that she did – indeed, the first people to suggest that she had any kind of relationship with Mortimer before late 1325 – were the dramatists Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton in the 1590s. [12] Isabella was not in or near the Tower of London at the time that Mortimer escaped, as is sometimes stated; she was probably with her husband in Yorkshire at the time, and if she had been involved in Mortimer’s escape in some way, she would hardly have been so stupid as to be anywhere nearby. Certainly it never occurred to Edward that she might be involved, and although Isabella was no doubt capable of deceiving her husband, given the extremely thorough investigation conducted after the escape it seems highly unlikely that she could have been involved without this fact being discovered. It is in my opinion extremely unlikely (though not impossible) that Queen Isabella had anything to do with Roger Mortimer's escape, which is a theory based solely on knowledge of their later relationship with the benefit of several centuries' hindsight.
Sources
1) The National Archives SC 8/6/255.
2) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 249. The judgement against the Mortimers is printed (in the original French) in James Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: Its Character and Policy (1918), p. 565.
3) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 13. This entry says that Segrave and "many others" in the Tower had been "poisoned by artifice."
4) Ibid., p. 132.
5) Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 335.
6) Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 133.
7) Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (1982), p. 20, citing Flores Historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard, vol. iii (1890), p. 217.
8) The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie (1906), p. 231.
9) Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E. M. Thompson (1889), p. 40.
10) Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as Recorded by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight, ed. Herbert Maxwell (1907) p. 72; The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell (1913), p. 251; Le Livere de Reis de Britanie e le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. John Glover (1865), p. 349; Annales Paulini 1307-1340 in W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, vol. 1 (1882), pp. 3-5-306.
11) The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307-41, from Brotherton Collection MS 29, ed. W. R. Childs and J. Taylor (1991), p. 116.
12) F.D. Blackley, 'Isabella and the Bishop of Exeter', in T.A. Sandqvist and M.R. Powicke, eds., Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (1969), p. 221.
07 February, 2013
Mythbuster 6: Isabella saw her husband kissing Piers Gaveston
On 7 February 1301, sixteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon was created prince of Wales. On 7 February 1308, 705 years ago today, Edward II and his new queen Isabella of France arrived in England after marrying in Boulogne, and Isabella got her first look at the country that would be her home for the next half a century. They landed in Dover, where Piers Gaveston, as regent, had summoned a number of noble men and women to greet them, including the king's sister Elizabeth, countess of Hereford and his first cousin (and Isabella's uncle) Henry, younger brother of Thomas, earl of Lancaster.
Pretty well every novel ever written about Edward and Isabella, and a few works of non-fiction too, features a Compulsory Scene wherein the young queen is horrified, shocked and distressed to see her new husband embracing and kissing Piers Gaveston, who is, she now realises, her husband's lover. According to the St Albans and Bridlington chroniclers, Edward did indeed "run to Piers among them, giving him kisses and repeated embraces; he was adored with a singular familiarity. Which special familiarity, already known to the magnates, furnished fuel to their jealousy." [1] Whether Isabella saw this happen, however, is highly debatable, as she and Edward came ashore from their ship in separate barges, or perhaps had travelled all the way across the Channel separately, as this entry on the Fine Roll [2] makes clear:
"Be it remembered that on Wednesday after the Purification, 1 Edward II, the king, returning from beyond seas, to wit, from Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he took to wife Isabel, daughter of the king of France, touched at Dover in his barge about the ninth hour*, Hugh le Despenser [the Elder] and the lord of Castellione in Gascony being in his company, and the queen a little afterward touched there with certain ladies accompanying her."
*i.e. around 3pm.
Most likely, by the time Isabella arrived 'a little afterward' the embracing and kissing had already finished. Regarding Edward II's behaviour on seeing Piers Gaveston again for the first time in, ooooh, ages (actually it was only sixteen days), it is not automatically the case that he was greeting his lover and everyone knew it. It was not the kissing and embracing themselves that were the problem or that caused shocked, offended comment – the early fourteenth century was a tactile age and kissing on the lips was a common way even for two men to greet each other, with no necessary implications of sexual desire – but that Edward singled Piers out for special attention and kissed and embraced his friend more than he kissed and embraced the other barons. [3]
What Isabella thought of Piers Gaveston, then or ever, is impossible to say for sure as we have no words of her own on the subject. There is a widespread assumption nowadays that Isabella must have hated and resented Piers, and seen him as her rival for her husband's affections and as somehow 'taking her rightful place', but this is merely speculation with no evidence behind it, however often the notion is given spurious credence by being repeated in books and on television *cough Helen Castor cough*. It is of course entirely possible that Isabella did dislike and resent Piers, but it is emphatically not a certain fact. On 29 October 1311, a few days before Piers was forced into his third exile, Isabella sent a letter to the receiver of Ponthieu, the revenues of which county which Edward had granted her a few weeks after their wedding in 1308, "concerning the affairs of the earl of Cornwall." [4] Apparently she had agreed to help Piers in his exile, at least financially, and perhaps in the naming of him as 'earl of Cornwall', which title had been stripped from him, we may see some sympathy on Isabella's part to her husband's 'favourite'. Or possibly Isabella was thrilled that Piers was being sent into exile yet again and considered naming him 'earl of Cornwall' and giving him some money a small price to pay to be rid of him. I have no idea how Isabella felt about Piers, and neither does anyone else, whatever they might claim and state as fact.
Sources
1) Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley (1866), p. 65; J.S. Hamilton, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall 1307-1312: Politics and Patronage in the Reign of Edward II (1988), p. 47; Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon Auctore Canonico Bridlingtoniensi, in W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, volume 2 (1883), p. 210.
2) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1307-1319, p. 14.
3) See Jochen Burgtorf, 'With my Life, his Joyes Began and Ended: Piers Gaveston and King Edward II of England Revisited', in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. Nigel Saul (2008), pp. 46-47.
4) The Household Book of Queen Isabella of England, ed. F. D. Blackley and G. Hermansen (1971), p. 208.
Pretty well every novel ever written about Edward and Isabella, and a few works of non-fiction too, features a Compulsory Scene wherein the young queen is horrified, shocked and distressed to see her new husband embracing and kissing Piers Gaveston, who is, she now realises, her husband's lover. According to the St Albans and Bridlington chroniclers, Edward did indeed "run to Piers among them, giving him kisses and repeated embraces; he was adored with a singular familiarity. Which special familiarity, already known to the magnates, furnished fuel to their jealousy." [1] Whether Isabella saw this happen, however, is highly debatable, as she and Edward came ashore from their ship in separate barges, or perhaps had travelled all the way across the Channel separately, as this entry on the Fine Roll [2] makes clear:
"Be it remembered that on Wednesday after the Purification, 1 Edward II, the king, returning from beyond seas, to wit, from Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he took to wife Isabel, daughter of the king of France, touched at Dover in his barge about the ninth hour*, Hugh le Despenser [the Elder] and the lord of Castellione in Gascony being in his company, and the queen a little afterward touched there with certain ladies accompanying her."
*i.e. around 3pm.
Most likely, by the time Isabella arrived 'a little afterward' the embracing and kissing had already finished. Regarding Edward II's behaviour on seeing Piers Gaveston again for the first time in, ooooh, ages (actually it was only sixteen days), it is not automatically the case that he was greeting his lover and everyone knew it. It was not the kissing and embracing themselves that were the problem or that caused shocked, offended comment – the early fourteenth century was a tactile age and kissing on the lips was a common way even for two men to greet each other, with no necessary implications of sexual desire – but that Edward singled Piers out for special attention and kissed and embraced his friend more than he kissed and embraced the other barons. [3]
What Isabella thought of Piers Gaveston, then or ever, is impossible to say for sure as we have no words of her own on the subject. There is a widespread assumption nowadays that Isabella must have hated and resented Piers, and seen him as her rival for her husband's affections and as somehow 'taking her rightful place', but this is merely speculation with no evidence behind it, however often the notion is given spurious credence by being repeated in books and on television *cough Helen Castor cough*. It is of course entirely possible that Isabella did dislike and resent Piers, but it is emphatically not a certain fact. On 29 October 1311, a few days before Piers was forced into his third exile, Isabella sent a letter to the receiver of Ponthieu, the revenues of which county which Edward had granted her a few weeks after their wedding in 1308, "concerning the affairs of the earl of Cornwall." [4] Apparently she had agreed to help Piers in his exile, at least financially, and perhaps in the naming of him as 'earl of Cornwall', which title had been stripped from him, we may see some sympathy on Isabella's part to her husband's 'favourite'. Or possibly Isabella was thrilled that Piers was being sent into exile yet again and considered naming him 'earl of Cornwall' and giving him some money a small price to pay to be rid of him. I have no idea how Isabella felt about Piers, and neither does anyone else, whatever they might claim and state as fact.
Sources
1) Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley (1866), p. 65; J.S. Hamilton, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall 1307-1312: Politics and Patronage in the Reign of Edward II (1988), p. 47; Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon Auctore Canonico Bridlingtoniensi, in W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, volume 2 (1883), p. 210.
2) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1307-1319, p. 14.
3) See Jochen Burgtorf, 'With my Life, his Joyes Began and Ended: Piers Gaveston and King Edward II of England Revisited', in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. Nigel Saul (2008), pp. 46-47.
4) The Household Book of Queen Isabella of England, ed. F. D. Blackley and G. Hermansen (1971), p. 208.
31 January, 2013
Dear Edward II Detractors...
...I just have some questions for you. I'd be grateful if you could take the time to read what I write below and think about what it is precisely that you think Edward II did wrong in the situations I describe. (If you could read this post as well, which covers a lot of the points I make here, and maybe this one too, that would be really helpful.)
I've seen it stated more times than I can count online and in books (both fiction and non-fiction) that Edward II cruelly neglected Isabella after their wedding in January 1308 because he didn't fall madly in love with her and consummate their marriage immediately. There was a gap of a little over four years between their wedding and the conception of their first child Edward III, and you seem to think this is bizarre and unaccountable, and somehow wrong and bad of Edward, and proof of what a callous heartless neglectful uncaring husband he must have been and how he must have made Isabella suffer, and how this gap of four years must be attributable to his love of men in general or Piers Gaveston in particular, which love prevented him doing his marital duty, to the detriment of poor sad suffering Isabella. I've lost count of the number of novels I've read which begin with Isabella upset at her wedding because her gorgeous new husband inexplicably shows no interest in her.
I've seen it stated more times than I can count online and in books (both fiction and non-fiction) that Edward II cruelly neglected Isabella after their wedding in January 1308 because he didn't fall madly in love with her and consummate their marriage immediately. There was a gap of a little over four years between their wedding and the conception of their first child Edward III, and you seem to think this is bizarre and unaccountable, and somehow wrong and bad of Edward, and proof of what a callous heartless neglectful uncaring husband he must have been and how he must have made Isabella suffer, and how this gap of four years must be attributable to his love of men in general or Piers Gaveston in particular, which love prevented him doing his marital duty, to the detriment of poor sad suffering Isabella. I've lost count of the number of novels I've read which begin with Isabella upset at her wedding because her gorgeous new husband inexplicably shows no interest in her.
Let me remind you that at the time of her wedding on 25 January 1308, Isabella was twelve years old. TWELVE. Her date of birth has been estimated by her biographer Paul Doherty as late 1295 or even the beginning of 1296, so she hadn't long turned twelve when she married, either. Edward was twenty-three going on twenty-four, twice her age. So let me ask you, do you really think it would have been better if Edward, this grown adult in his twenties, had consummated his marriage to such a terribly young girl immediately? Has it honestly never occurred to you that not consummating it was a humane act, and that he may have been unwilling to force this very young girl to go through pregnancy and childbirth, and that maybe she simply wasn't fertile yet? That perhaps her father Philip IV had forbidden consummation until she was older? Would Edward II really be a better person in your eyes if he'd fawned all over a prepubescent girl half his age? Do you think Isabella would have been happier if she'd been forced into a regular sex life not long after she turned twelve? If she'd had to face the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth (assuming she was even fertile) at such a young age? By way of comparison, Edward's three de Clare nieces all married at thirteen and bore their first children at sixteen or seventeen. None of his sisters gave birth before the end of their teens at the earliest.
And just be totally honest with me here: if Edward had made Isabella bear a child within a year or two of their marriage when she was still barely into her teens, wouldn't you then be shouting 'paedophile' and 'pervert' at him? Wouldn't you be furious that he would so cavalierly ignore the health and well-being of his young queen and risk the possibility that she would be unable to bear more children and possibly die in the attempt to bear the first one? Wouldn't consummating the marriage have been much more callous and cruel than not doing so? So please, can you tell me exactly what it is that you think Edward should have done? It seems to me that you think his not having sex with a twelve-year-old makes him a heartless neglectful husband and Isabella a poor little victim forced to 'compete' with someone else for Edward's affections, yet you cannot possibly prefer him to have had sex with a prepubescent. I simply don't believe that. So what do you think he should have done? What would have been the 'right' time for them to consummate their marriage and become parents, in your eyes? Do you really think that sixteen is too old for Isabella to have become pregnant for the first time, and if so, what do you think would have been a more suitable age? Edward and Isabella's daughter Eleanor of Woodstock gave birth to her first child the month before her fifteenth birthday; do you find this preferable, and think that Duke Reynald (then well over forty) must have been a better and more caring husband than his father-in-law because he made a fourteen-year-old pregnant? What would have been the right time for Edward to begin a sex life with Isabella that wouldn't make him look like either a child-molesting pervert or a callous husband thoughtlessly ignoring his wife to you?
I'm afraid I can't help feeling that what bothers and offends you is not really that you think Edward 'ignored' his wife for four years, but that he so openly and obviously loved a man, and that you think this man was a 'rival' to Isabella for the king's affections, which you find icky. Because when I look at, for example, Edward and Isabella's granddaughter-in-law Constanza of Castile, arriving in England as a king's daughter, also very young (though not as young as Isabella), to marry John of Gaunt, I see a very similar situation: the rightful queen of Castile and duchess of Lancaster arrived in her new country to find her new husband already in an intense, long-term relationship with another person, which continued for Constanza's entire married life and produced children regularly for a few years. Yet I never ever see you weeping and wailing over Constanza's 'neglect' and 'suffering' and the 'insult' and humiliation she endured at her husband's hands; on the contrary, you seem to find her husband's adulterous relationship romantic and fabulous and one of the most amazing love stories ever. But then, of course, John's 'favourite' Katherine Swynford was a woman. You point out that John had only married Constanza for political reasons and couldn't help being in love with someone else, but of course, exactly the same thing applies to Edward II, so why the massive difference in attitude? I also often see you talking about how wonderfully romantic Roger Mortimer and Isabella of France's relationship supposedly was (I'm really not convinced, personally), but you rarely if ever talk about Roger's wife of twenty-five years, Joan Geneville. I see comments from you like "Roger Mortimer fulfilled her [Isabella's] idea of romantic love which was unfulfilled by Edward" and "Isabella was married to a fastidiously gay guy who begat children on her - note not with her - as a painful duty. Roger Mortimer came as a happy thunderbolt into a bleak life", with not a mention of Roger's wife and how she might have suffered emotional pain and humiliation from seeing her husband in a long-term relationship with another woman and being her 'happy thunderbolt'. It looks pretty strange to complain about the bad time you think Isabella had in her marriage being ignored by a husband in love with someone else, and then laud her allegedly passionate and wildly romantic relationship with a man who himself already had a wife and a dozen children. And please note, you don't and can't have the faintest idea whether Edward II enjoyed having intercourse with Isabella or not, so it looks pretty silly to make statements like Edward 'begat children on her, not with her, as a painful duty' as though you have a webcam set up in their bedchamber.
Here's something else I've seen you say:
"Isabella is married off to Edward II at the age of thirteen - and soon discovers that as far as her husband is concerned, she is simply a brood mare for his children. He'd rather spend his time with his lover, Piers Gaveston." (Funny how we never get something like "Joan Geneville is married off to Roger Mortimer at the age of fifteen - and discovers after a quarter of a century of loyal support, a dozen pregnancies and imprisonment on Roger's behalf that as far as her husband is concerned, she is simply a brood mare for his children. He'd rather spend his time with his lover, Isabella of France.")
"I hate how people call Isabella of France homophobic for deposing her husband Edward II. Imagine being used as a broodmare by a gay dude." (My query as to who, precisely, has ever called Isabella 'homophobic' went sadly unanswered. It was in 'some documentary', apparently. I really, really doubt that anyone has ever said anything like this.)
Edward II and Isabella of France had four children, well spaced out: they were born in November 1312, August 1316, June 1318 and July 1321. (Additionally, Isabella may have had a miscarriage in November 1313, when pennyroyal was bought for her.) How exactly does four, perhaps five pregnancies in almost twenty years of marriage equate to being a 'brood mare'? If we're going to use idiotic terms like 'brood mare', why are you applying it to a woman who as far as we know was pregnant no more than four or five times? Surely better candidates would be Eleanor of Castile (fourteen or fifteen children), Philippa of Hainault (twelve children) or Joan Geneville Mortimer (twelve children) - they're somehow not 'brood mares' to you, but a woman with four children is? In which way was Isabella a 'brood mare' more than any other queen or noblewoman? Oh wait, I think I know the answer to that one: is it that you think it's not a problem to be a 'brood mare' if your husband's assumed to be straight?
So on the one hand, you complain that Edward II took too long to consummate his marriage, then you declare that he was only interested in Isabella as a 'brood mare'. If that were the case, why did he delay consummation for so long then? Surely a man who only wants to use his wife as a 'brood mare' would be keen to get going as soon as possible, regardless of her extreme youth? Again, I can't avoid the feeling that what you really object to is that Edward loved men and may have preferred having sex with them to his queen. May. We really don't know that, and we can't know that. Edward may have enjoyed intercourse with Isabella enormously for all we know. As I've pointed out before, they conceived the future Edward III during Lent when intercourse was forbidden, which hardly suggests that Edward slept with his wife unwillingly (Lent gave him the perfect excuse to avoid it if he wanted to). During their visit to France in 1313, they overslept one morning which made Edward arrive late for a meeting with Isabella's father Philip IV, and another night, they were sleeping together naked when their pavilion caught fire and Edward scooped up Isabella in his arms and rushed outside with her, though they were both still naked. Sounds to me like their marital relations were perfectly normal and intimate, and Edward fathered an illegitimate son called Adam so evidently wasn't repulsed by intercourse with women. Please do remember we don't and can't know anything about Edward and Isabella's sex life, except that they had intercourse four (or five) times to produce their children. And please do remember that you don't know anything about Isabella and Roger Mortimer's sex life either, assuming they had one, or about Edward and Piers Gaveston's sex life either, assuming they had one. You don't actually know that Roger fulfilled Isabella sexually and/or romantically in ways which Edward II didn't or couldn't or wouldn't. He might have done, yes, but basically that's only romanticised modern speculation. (And also, you can't possibly know and state as fact that Roger was 'unequivocally heterosexual'.) Alison Weir's book about Isabella also suggests that "intercourse [between Isabella and Edward] must have been infrequent" because of their "widely spaced" children, and that "Edward never visited her bed regularly," even though Isabella was, allegedly, "highly sexed." Haha. The things some people say!
So, Edward humanely waited till Isabella was old enough to bear children without risk, which meant that by the time their eldest child was born he himself was at the fairly advanced age of twenty-eight and, if he'd been able to marry a woman who was around his own age, could well have had an heir a decade or more earlier. Then they had four children with long enough spaces between them to allow Isabella's body to rest and recover, which manages at one and the same time in the eyes of you, his detractors, to be a) proof that he wasn't interested in his poor little wife (even though she was soooo beautiful and every other man on the planet lusted after her!) or in having sex with her, which must have been so terrible for her given her high sex drive, and b) proof that he thought of her as nothing more than a brood mare. Hmmm, curious. So it would have been better if Isabella had borne a child every year then? After all, if you're going to treat someone as a brood mare', you might as well do it properly. It may be, who knows, that Isabella wasn't particularly fertile, or that she had miscarriages we don't know about (it's likely though not certain that she had one in November 1313). Her five-year relationship with Roger Mortimer, which is always nowadays assumed on little evidence to have been certainly sexual, produced no children, unless you count the unproven claim that she was pregnant at the time of their downfall in October 1330. Even if that's true, it had taken her nearly five years (since their relationship began in about late 1325) to become pregnant. Admittedly Isabella was thirty to thirty-five between 1325 and 1330 and perhaps less fertile than she had been when younger, but if her relationship with Roger was the intensely, passionately sexual one her fans nowadays like to think it was, and she was the 'highly sexed' person she's claimed to be, that's still a heck of a long delay.
All kings needed heirs, y'know. Edward II would have been failing in his duty to his kingdom if he hadn't fathered at least one son to succeed him, and so would Isabella. You do know, don't you, that Isabella was a woman who lived in the fourteenth century, who had known since she was two or three years old that it was her destiny to marry the king of England in a political alliance between their countries, and bear his children? You do realise that she wasn't a twenty-first-century woman with modern ideas and attitudes who time-travelled back 700 years? You do realise she'd find your accusations that her husband treated her as a 'brood mare' utterly ludicrous? (I really doubt that Isabella would recognise herself at all in the way many of her modern fans like to write her.) You accuse Edward of treating her as a 'brood mare', but I have a feeling that if for whatever reason he and Isabella had had no children, you'd be weeping and wailing instead at the tragedy of her enforced childlessness, and cursing Edward's vile behaviour and neglect of her and her sexual needs. Her apparently being so 'highly sexed' and all. So what in your opinion would have been the correct number of children for Edward II to have had with Isabella? So that in your mind he'd be neither a neglectful husband not sleeping with his tragic abandoned sexy wife often enough, nor treating her like a brood mare and risking her health by making her pregnant too often? Six? Eight? What?
And just be totally honest with me here: if Edward had made Isabella bear a child within a year or two of their marriage when she was still barely into her teens, wouldn't you then be shouting 'paedophile' and 'pervert' at him? Wouldn't you be furious that he would so cavalierly ignore the health and well-being of his young queen and risk the possibility that she would be unable to bear more children and possibly die in the attempt to bear the first one? Wouldn't consummating the marriage have been much more callous and cruel than not doing so? So please, can you tell me exactly what it is that you think Edward should have done? It seems to me that you think his not having sex with a twelve-year-old makes him a heartless neglectful husband and Isabella a poor little victim forced to 'compete' with someone else for Edward's affections, yet you cannot possibly prefer him to have had sex with a prepubescent. I simply don't believe that. So what do you think he should have done? What would have been the 'right' time for them to consummate their marriage and become parents, in your eyes? Do you really think that sixteen is too old for Isabella to have become pregnant for the first time, and if so, what do you think would have been a more suitable age? Edward and Isabella's daughter Eleanor of Woodstock gave birth to her first child the month before her fifteenth birthday; do you find this preferable, and think that Duke Reynald (then well over forty) must have been a better and more caring husband than his father-in-law because he made a fourteen-year-old pregnant? What would have been the right time for Edward to begin a sex life with Isabella that wouldn't make him look like either a child-molesting pervert or a callous husband thoughtlessly ignoring his wife to you?
I'm afraid I can't help feeling that what bothers and offends you is not really that you think Edward 'ignored' his wife for four years, but that he so openly and obviously loved a man, and that you think this man was a 'rival' to Isabella for the king's affections, which you find icky. Because when I look at, for example, Edward and Isabella's granddaughter-in-law Constanza of Castile, arriving in England as a king's daughter, also very young (though not as young as Isabella), to marry John of Gaunt, I see a very similar situation: the rightful queen of Castile and duchess of Lancaster arrived in her new country to find her new husband already in an intense, long-term relationship with another person, which continued for Constanza's entire married life and produced children regularly for a few years. Yet I never ever see you weeping and wailing over Constanza's 'neglect' and 'suffering' and the 'insult' and humiliation she endured at her husband's hands; on the contrary, you seem to find her husband's adulterous relationship romantic and fabulous and one of the most amazing love stories ever. But then, of course, John's 'favourite' Katherine Swynford was a woman. You point out that John had only married Constanza for political reasons and couldn't help being in love with someone else, but of course, exactly the same thing applies to Edward II, so why the massive difference in attitude? I also often see you talking about how wonderfully romantic Roger Mortimer and Isabella of France's relationship supposedly was (I'm really not convinced, personally), but you rarely if ever talk about Roger's wife of twenty-five years, Joan Geneville. I see comments from you like "Roger Mortimer fulfilled her [Isabella's] idea of romantic love which was unfulfilled by Edward" and "Isabella was married to a fastidiously gay guy who begat children on her - note not with her - as a painful duty. Roger Mortimer came as a happy thunderbolt into a bleak life", with not a mention of Roger's wife and how she might have suffered emotional pain and humiliation from seeing her husband in a long-term relationship with another woman and being her 'happy thunderbolt'. It looks pretty strange to complain about the bad time you think Isabella had in her marriage being ignored by a husband in love with someone else, and then laud her allegedly passionate and wildly romantic relationship with a man who himself already had a wife and a dozen children. And please note, you don't and can't have the faintest idea whether Edward II enjoyed having intercourse with Isabella or not, so it looks pretty silly to make statements like Edward 'begat children on her, not with her, as a painful duty' as though you have a webcam set up in their bedchamber.
Here's something else I've seen you say:
"Isabella is married off to Edward II at the age of thirteen - and soon discovers that as far as her husband is concerned, she is simply a brood mare for his children. He'd rather spend his time with his lover, Piers Gaveston." (Funny how we never get something like "Joan Geneville is married off to Roger Mortimer at the age of fifteen - and discovers after a quarter of a century of loyal support, a dozen pregnancies and imprisonment on Roger's behalf that as far as her husband is concerned, she is simply a brood mare for his children. He'd rather spend his time with his lover, Isabella of France.")
"I hate how people call Isabella of France homophobic for deposing her husband Edward II. Imagine being used as a broodmare by a gay dude." (My query as to who, precisely, has ever called Isabella 'homophobic' went sadly unanswered. It was in 'some documentary', apparently. I really, really doubt that anyone has ever said anything like this.)
Edward II and Isabella of France had four children, well spaced out: they were born in November 1312, August 1316, June 1318 and July 1321. (Additionally, Isabella may have had a miscarriage in November 1313, when pennyroyal was bought for her.) How exactly does four, perhaps five pregnancies in almost twenty years of marriage equate to being a 'brood mare'? If we're going to use idiotic terms like 'brood mare', why are you applying it to a woman who as far as we know was pregnant no more than four or five times? Surely better candidates would be Eleanor of Castile (fourteen or fifteen children), Philippa of Hainault (twelve children) or Joan Geneville Mortimer (twelve children) - they're somehow not 'brood mares' to you, but a woman with four children is? In which way was Isabella a 'brood mare' more than any other queen or noblewoman? Oh wait, I think I know the answer to that one: is it that you think it's not a problem to be a 'brood mare' if your husband's assumed to be straight?
So on the one hand, you complain that Edward II took too long to consummate his marriage, then you declare that he was only interested in Isabella as a 'brood mare'. If that were the case, why did he delay consummation for so long then? Surely a man who only wants to use his wife as a 'brood mare' would be keen to get going as soon as possible, regardless of her extreme youth? Again, I can't avoid the feeling that what you really object to is that Edward loved men and may have preferred having sex with them to his queen. May. We really don't know that, and we can't know that. Edward may have enjoyed intercourse with Isabella enormously for all we know. As I've pointed out before, they conceived the future Edward III during Lent when intercourse was forbidden, which hardly suggests that Edward slept with his wife unwillingly (Lent gave him the perfect excuse to avoid it if he wanted to). During their visit to France in 1313, they overslept one morning which made Edward arrive late for a meeting with Isabella's father Philip IV, and another night, they were sleeping together naked when their pavilion caught fire and Edward scooped up Isabella in his arms and rushed outside with her, though they were both still naked. Sounds to me like their marital relations were perfectly normal and intimate, and Edward fathered an illegitimate son called Adam so evidently wasn't repulsed by intercourse with women. Please do remember we don't and can't know anything about Edward and Isabella's sex life, except that they had intercourse four (or five) times to produce their children. And please do remember that you don't know anything about Isabella and Roger Mortimer's sex life either, assuming they had one, or about Edward and Piers Gaveston's sex life either, assuming they had one. You don't actually know that Roger fulfilled Isabella sexually and/or romantically in ways which Edward II didn't or couldn't or wouldn't. He might have done, yes, but basically that's only romanticised modern speculation. (And also, you can't possibly know and state as fact that Roger was 'unequivocally heterosexual'.) Alison Weir's book about Isabella also suggests that "intercourse [between Isabella and Edward] must have been infrequent" because of their "widely spaced" children, and that "Edward never visited her bed regularly," even though Isabella was, allegedly, "highly sexed." Haha. The things some people say!
So, Edward humanely waited till Isabella was old enough to bear children without risk, which meant that by the time their eldest child was born he himself was at the fairly advanced age of twenty-eight and, if he'd been able to marry a woman who was around his own age, could well have had an heir a decade or more earlier. Then they had four children with long enough spaces between them to allow Isabella's body to rest and recover, which manages at one and the same time in the eyes of you, his detractors, to be a) proof that he wasn't interested in his poor little wife (even though she was soooo beautiful and every other man on the planet lusted after her!) or in having sex with her, which must have been so terrible for her given her high sex drive, and b) proof that he thought of her as nothing more than a brood mare. Hmmm, curious. So it would have been better if Isabella had borne a child every year then? After all, if you're going to treat someone as a brood mare', you might as well do it properly. It may be, who knows, that Isabella wasn't particularly fertile, or that she had miscarriages we don't know about (it's likely though not certain that she had one in November 1313). Her five-year relationship with Roger Mortimer, which is always nowadays assumed on little evidence to have been certainly sexual, produced no children, unless you count the unproven claim that she was pregnant at the time of their downfall in October 1330. Even if that's true, it had taken her nearly five years (since their relationship began in about late 1325) to become pregnant. Admittedly Isabella was thirty to thirty-five between 1325 and 1330 and perhaps less fertile than she had been when younger, but if her relationship with Roger was the intensely, passionately sexual one her fans nowadays like to think it was, and she was the 'highly sexed' person she's claimed to be, that's still a heck of a long delay.
All kings needed heirs, y'know. Edward II would have been failing in his duty to his kingdom if he hadn't fathered at least one son to succeed him, and so would Isabella. You do know, don't you, that Isabella was a woman who lived in the fourteenth century, who had known since she was two or three years old that it was her destiny to marry the king of England in a political alliance between their countries, and bear his children? You do realise that she wasn't a twenty-first-century woman with modern ideas and attitudes who time-travelled back 700 years? You do realise she'd find your accusations that her husband treated her as a 'brood mare' utterly ludicrous? (I really doubt that Isabella would recognise herself at all in the way many of her modern fans like to write her.) You accuse Edward of treating her as a 'brood mare', but I have a feeling that if for whatever reason he and Isabella had had no children, you'd be weeping and wailing instead at the tragedy of her enforced childlessness, and cursing Edward's vile behaviour and neglect of her and her sexual needs. Her apparently being so 'highly sexed' and all. So what in your opinion would have been the correct number of children for Edward II to have had with Isabella? So that in your mind he'd be neither a neglectful husband not sleeping with his tragic abandoned sexy wife often enough, nor treating her like a brood mare and risking her health by making her pregnant too often? Six? Eight? What?
You see, I just don't know what it is you think Edward should have done. In 1308 as a twenty-three-year-old he married, for political reasons arranged between his father, Isabella's father and the pope all the way back in 1298, a twelve-year-old girl he'd never met before. It must have been hard for Isabella to move to another country permanently and have to make a life with this emotional, unpredictable and difficult man who was already deeply involved with someone else, and I do feel a lot of sympathy for her. But think, it can't have been easy for Edward either. In their rush to wail about the 'tragic pawns' medieval royal women supposedly were because they had arranged marriages, people nowadays forget that men had no more choice in the matter than their wives did either. An arranged marriage means it's arranged on both sides, it's not forced on the woman's side and voluntary on the man's. Edward had to marry this young girl and forge a relationship with her, and have children with her, whether he wanted to or not. You call Isabella his 'brood mare', but why isn't Edward a 'brood stallion' then? Most of the evidence that he 'neglected' her at the start of their marriage comes from the fact that he talked to Piers Gaveston at their wedding banquet more than he did to her, and the alleged complaint of her uncles Valois and Evreux that he preferred Piers' couch to hers (according to the St Paul's annalist; no letters from the two men exist to confirm this allegation). As to the latter, I dealt with that above - it's hardly reasonable to criticise a man in his twenties for not wanting to sleep with a girl of just turned twelve. And as for the banquet, well, wouldn't you perhaps prefer to talk to a close friend you've known for at least a decade and who's near your own age than to a twelve-year-old you don't know? Do you, as an adult, find twelve-year-olds exciting and stimulating company? Isabella was probably more mature than your average modern twelve-year-old, but still, there's a limit as to how mature, interesting and knowledgeable anyone can be at that age. Might it not be, perhaps, that Edward was feeling awkward and shy and found it easier to talk to a person he knew really well and cared deeply for than to a child? Does it always have to be deliberate and callous neglect and contempt for his wife, do you always have to interpret everything Edward ever did in the most negative and critical light possible? Yes, he loved Piers Gaveston, but that doesn't have to make Piers and Isabella 'rivals' for his affection, and it certainly doesn't have to mean therefore that Isabella meant nothing to Edward, that he had no space in his heart left over for any feelings for her. I've even seen Edward and Isabella's marriage called a "grotesque travesty", which made me laugh out loud at the stupidity. I don't have enough space to discuss it here, but for many years there's much evidence of mutual affection and support between the couple - their marriage ended badly but that doesn't mean it was an utter disaster from start to finish. Human beings are complex, human relationships are complex. Don't reduce them to such silly one-dimensional characterisations.
Finally, one thing I'd dearly love to know: why you so often assume that a man described by fourteenth-century chroniclers as "one of the strongest men in his realm," "a handsome man, of outstanding strength," "tall and strong, a fine figure of a handsome man" and so on, a man who by all evidence was tall, well-built, muscular, enormously strong and a huge fan of the outdoors and exacting physical exercise - why this man must somehow have really been feminine and girly, a cowardly weakling who snivelled, whined, mewled and threw tantrums. Have you seen a fourteenth-century primary source that I've somehow missed, which states that he ever behaved like this? Because I've got to say, if there isn't, these things you say about him look very much like unpleasant prejudices based on what you think his sexual orientation was and stereotypes of how you think gay men are supposed to behave. So please do cite that missing source for me. Because I'd hate to think that you form your opinion of a man who lived 700 years ago on modern attitudes that frankly - sorry to be so harsh but here it is - look bigoted to me.
Yours sincerely,
Kathryn.
Finally, one thing I'd dearly love to know: why you so often assume that a man described by fourteenth-century chroniclers as "one of the strongest men in his realm," "a handsome man, of outstanding strength," "tall and strong, a fine figure of a handsome man" and so on, a man who by all evidence was tall, well-built, muscular, enormously strong and a huge fan of the outdoors and exacting physical exercise - why this man must somehow have really been feminine and girly, a cowardly weakling who snivelled, whined, mewled and threw tantrums. Have you seen a fourteenth-century primary source that I've somehow missed, which states that he ever behaved like this? Because I've got to say, if there isn't, these things you say about him look very much like unpleasant prejudices based on what you think his sexual orientation was and stereotypes of how you think gay men are supposed to behave. So please do cite that missing source for me. Because I'd hate to think that you form your opinion of a man who lived 700 years ago on modern attitudes that frankly - sorry to be so harsh but here it is - look bigoted to me.
Yours sincerely,
Kathryn.
27 January, 2013
Mythbuster 5: Edward II was trying to annul his marriage to Isabella in 1325
I'm reposting this one from September 2011 as number five of my Edward II Mythbuster series.
This statement in two chronicles is often repeated as fact in secondary sources, as yet another grievance Isabella of France had against her husband Edward II, along with supposedly 'removing' her children from her (rather than just setting up households for them in normal fashion), confiscating her lands and giving her a smaller income to live on (he did do that), and so on. Let's look at this logically. Why exactly would Edward II have wanted to annul his marriage to Isabella in 1325? What benefits could he have gained from it? Precisely none. He would, however, have suffered a whole pile of negative consequences. Edward was at war with Isabella's brother Charles IV of France from the autumn of 1323 (although military action did not begin until the summer of 1324) until a peace treaty was signed in June 1325. As Edward's biographer Seymour Phillips points out, "An attempted divorce in the conditions of 1325 would have been political madness, since it would have meant the repudiation of all agreements between England and France, which Edward and Isabella's marriage had been intended to strengthen, and would have plunged England into an immediate war with France" (shortly after peace had finally been established between the two countries). [2] Even during Edward's war with Isabella's brother, over Gascony, there is no reason to suppose that he considered annulment, or that it would have gained him anything. The only possible grounds Edward could have had for an annulment of his marriage in 1325 was consanguinity, as he and Isabella were second cousins once removed. They had been granted a papal dispensation for this, however. An annulment would have meant that their marriage had never been valid in the first place (as a marriage then could not simply be ended, in the way we understand divorce), which would have made Edward and Isabella's children illegitimate. Edward II spent much of 1325 negotiating marriages for three of their children with the royal houses of Spain. Why on earth would he have risked making them illegitimate? Why would he have acted in such fashion as to harm the position and status of his elder son and heir Edward of Windsor?
No proof of the two chroniclers' statement that Edward was trying to annul his marriage in 1325 has ever been discovered in the Vatican archives, nor is there any evidence that he ever wrote to the pope regarding this matter. He did send Thomas Dunheved to Pope John XXII in Avignon in 1325, it's true - but to complain about Alexander Bicknor, the archbishop of Dublin, whom Edward held responsible for his half-brother the earl of Kent's surrender at La Réole in September 1324, and who was not afraid to make his intense dislike of Hugh Despenser the Younger obvious and public. (Bicknor boasted that were he not a cleric, he would challenge Despenser to a duel.) John XXII, who made Dunheved a papal chaplain while he was visiting the papal court, wrote to Edward II in October 1325: "To the king, whose letters sent by Thomas Dunhevede, a Friar Preacher, the pope has received. The matter touching Alexander, archbishop of Dublin, cannot be heard in camera, but must be laid before the consistory...". [3] The Lanercost chronicler says that Edward also sent Robert Baldock to the pope regarding an annulment of his marriage. Baldock was chancellor of England from August 1323 until October 1326 [4], and did not leave the country, to my knowledge.
As for other chroniclers, the very well-informed author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi does not mention or even hint at an intended annulment. Neither does the royal clerk and chronicler Adam Murimuth, who knew the royal couple well and who visited the papal court in 1324. Neither does the author of the Flores Historiarum, who loathed Edward and who would have jumped on a chance to condemn him for humiliating his wife in this fashion. Neither does any other chronicler, even Jean Froissart, who a few decades later invented a tale of Isabella secretly fleeing to France from Winchelsea with her son in 1325, to escape from Edward's mistreatment of her (in fact she departed from Dover with a large retinue and, of course, Edward's full knowledge and consent). When Thomas Dunheved wrote to Edward II on 7 October 1325, he did not mention an annulment. [5] Edward was debating with his counsellors, by the end of 1324, the possibility of sending Queen Isabella to France to negotiate with her brother, and she departed for her homeland the following March. Why then would he suddenly decide to annul his marriage to her? It wasn't until late 1325 that it became apparent that the queen did not intend to return to England. Isabella herself wrote to her husband from France on 5 February 1326, addressing him as "our very dear and very sweet lord and friend" (nostre treschier et tresdouche seignur et amy) and informing him that although she wished nothing more than to return to his company and live and die with him, she did not dare, because of her fear of Hugh Despenser. Isabella did not mention that Edward was trying to annul their marriage; neither did any letters her brother Charles IV sent to Edward around this time or earlier (and Charles would have been utterly furious at this horrendous insult to his sister). [6] At Hugh Despenser's trial in November 1326, he was not accused of attempting to procure an annulment of Edward and Isabella's marriage. Why would Isabella not charge him with this, if he had done it? It was the gravest and most humiliating crime Despenser could have committed against her.
The Lanercost chronicler in his convent in the far north, although a useful source for events in Scotland and Scottish raids in the north of England, knew little of what had been going on at court a couple of decades earlier, while the Pauline annalist was merely reporting a rumour he had heard (ut vulgariter dicebatur), not stating it as definitive truth. Plenty of rumours were flying around England in 1325/26, including one reported in the Brut that Edward II intended to strangle his wife and his son Edward of Windsor to death. Edward was, apparently, informed of this after his deposition, and was - as any normal human being would be when accused of something as monstrous as wishing to murder his own child - deeply upset and horrified ("God knows, I thought it never, and now I would that I were dead! So would God that I were! For then were all my sorrow passed.") [7] Just because rumours existed does not automatically make them true, and it's a shame that writers continue to declare as fact that Edward was trying to divorce his wife without considering the ample evidence that he was doing no such thing, and without considering the logical implications and consequences of this act. It does fit so nicely into the popular Victim!Isabella school of thought, though, doesn't it? Precisely why Edward would have wanted to annul his marriage to the queen in 1325 and what he would have gained from it in exchange for taking such a huge risk is never actually explained; his supposed neglect of his queen and the nastiness of Hugh Despenser appear to be enough reason. Alison Weir claims in her biography of Isabella that "Lanercost's statement is to some extent corroborated by the fact that Dunheved was sent to the papal Curia on secret business at this time," but fails to notice the papal letter which demonstrates that Dunheved delivered Edward's letters regarding the archbishop of Dublin to the pope, and somehow confuses Thomas with his secular brother Stephen (as Lanercost clearly and correctly refers to the Dunheved brother in question as Thomas, I can't help but wonder how carefully she looked at the sources). Of course, it's entirely possible that Thomas Dunheved discussed other matters with the pope on the king's behalf, but we have no evidence, besides a rumour repeated in two chronicles written some years later, that an annulment of the king and queen's marriage was one of them.
I believe it is virtually certain that Edward II was not intending to annul his marriage in 1325; he had no reason to do so, and the consequences would have been disastrous for him, his children and his kingdom. Having said that, it is just possible that he was considering this course of action in the summer of 1326, by which time he knew that Isabella was going to betroth their son to the count of Hainault's daughter without his consent and invade his kingdom with an army. It's perhaps hardly surprising if he then decided that an annulment would solve his problems, and that even making his children and in particular his elder son and heir illegitimate would be worth it. I hasten to add there is no actual evidence that he was planning to ask the pope for an annulment and this is mere speculation: again, there are no documents in either the Vatican or England to confirm it. Edward met the bishop of Rochester, his ally Hamo Hethe, at Boxley Down in Kent in June 1326, and he and Hugh Despenser the Younger rode with the bishop back to Rochester. Edward asked Hethe if it were true that there had once been a queen who had disobeyed her husband and had therefore been deposed from her royal dignity. Hethe was having none of it, and retorted that whoever had told the king this had given him very bad advice. [8] This does sound as if perhaps Edward was then considering the possibility of annulment. This may be confirmed by two letters Edward sent to his son in 1326, then in France with Isabella (whether willingly or not). The first, written on 18 March, orders the thirteen-year-old not to marry without his father's consent, and to obey Edward "under pain of forfeiting all that he may to the king...". The second, written on 19 June, ends with the words "if the king find him contrary or disobedient hereafter to his will, by what counsel soever it may be, he will ordain in such wise that Edward [of Windsor] shall feel it all the days of his life, and that all other sons shall take example thereby of disobeying their lords and fathers." [9]
Do these letters, and Edward's remark to the bishop of Rochester, imply that Edward was now indeed considering an annulment of his marriage? I don't know, and if Edward did think along these lines, he took no action, and it's highly doubtful that the pope would have consented to annul his marriage anyway. If they do imply that a possible annulment was on the king's mind, it must be noted that this was months after Isabella had defied Edward and refused to return to him, and was planning an invasion of his kingdom. However justified Isabella may have thought her actions, seen from Edward's perspective it's hardly surprising that he was furious with her and (perhaps unfairly, given how young the boy was) with his son, even to the extent that he was willing to infuriate Isabella's brother Charles IV by annulling the marriage and willing to disinherit his son and thereby avert the threat to himself by making the boy illegitimate. If an annulment of Edward II and Isabella of France's marriage was ever on the cards, it came as a consequence of Isabella's actions against her husband, and was not a cause of them.
Sources
1) The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell, p. 249; Annales Paulini 1307-1340, in W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, volume 1, p. 337.
2) Seymour Phillips, Edward II, p. 483 note 169.
3) Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-1341, pp. 474, 479.
4) T.F. Tout, The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History, p. 327.
5) F.D. Blackley, 'Isabella and the Bishop of Exeter', in T. A. Sandqvist and M. R. Powicke, eds., Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, p. 226.
6) Isabella's letter is cited in Phillips, Edward II, p. 491. For Charles IV's correspondence with Edward II in the 1320s, see Pierre Chaplais, ed., The War of Saint-Sardos (1323-1325): Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents.
7) The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie, volume 1, pp. 252-253.
8) Roy Martin Haines, 'Bishops and politics in the reign of Edward II: Hamo de Hethe, Henry Wharton, and the 'Historia Roffensis'', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 605-606.
9) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 576-578.
23 January, 2013
The battle of Bannockburn, and why Edward II was NOT a coward (guest post)
Here's Sami Parkkonen again, with some thoughts on Edward II's defeat at the battle of Bannockburn in June 1314. I'd also like to link to my friend Colin's three posts about the battle of Byland on 14 October 1322, where Edward II's army was again defeated by Robert Bruce's: part one; part two; part three. Colin uses his excellent local knowledge, complete with maps, to speculate about what was really going on, and provides a different take on the usual Edward II, "ever chicken-hearted and luckless in war" (Chronicle of Lanercost), being a totally incompetent idiot blah blah. I'm really grateful to both Sami and Colin for providing such terrific new perspectives on these two battles, especially as what I know about battles and military tactics would fit on a postage stamp so I'm incapable of providing any new insights into them myself. A recent article, incidentally, also suggests that "we may have done [Edward II] a dis-service" in judging his tactics at Bannockburn.
So here's Sami's thought-provoking post, with thanks again to him for taking the time and trouble to put so much work into it. And see what he says at the end: Edward II was not a physical coward, quite the contrary. Take THAT, detractors who say he was! I had the misfortune recently to read a self-published novel about Edward's queen Isabella in which she calls her husband "cowardly" and says that "he shied from battle because the sight of blood made him queasy." This is the kind of dire written-by-numbers Edward/Isabella novel that exist by the truckload, by a writer who doesn't have enough skill to make Isabella and Roger Mortimer sympathetic characters without turning Edward into a weak feeble cowardly 'snivelling' caricature - the kind of novel where every myth that has ever existed about Edward II is repeated, the kind of novel which contains prejudices that say far more about the person who perpetuates them than they do about Edward. At the risk of sounding really kiddish and stupid, I'm ROFLMAO at that 'queasy' quotation from it. Oh, and at the bit where a painting of Edward doesn't look much like the real him, "being much more muscular." I wonder how the author thinks that "one of the strongest men in his realm," "a handsome man, of outstanding strength," who went rowing and swimming and digging, could actually have been much more muscular than he already was. But of course, Edward loved men! He couldn't possibly have been strong and muscular then, not like our manly hetero hero Rog!
Anyway, I'm waffling. Here's Sami's Bannockburn post.
*
In the summer of 1314 King Edward II of England was mustering a huge army in order to invade Scotland. Once again, most of his earls did not attend. They stayed at home or had something more important to do than face the enemy about whom they had been complaining for many years. These mightiest men of the realm had been accusing the king of cowardice but had refused to join him in any war against Scotland. They had been sabotaging the king's efforts for seven years, but now the king was determined. He would go to Scotland, with or without those crybabies. It is easy to imagine Edward's motives. He had been hearing all those complaints and rumours, all that talk behind his back how he did not dare to fight against Robert the Bruce. It did not matter that he had wanted to do so many times or that the barons had made it impossible. He was to blame. So, when he heard the news that the commander of Stirling Castle had made a deal with Edward the Bruce that he would hand over the castle to the Scots if there was no relief before St.John's day in 1314, Edward knew this was his best chance.
His army was big, even without the earls who stayed behind. Estimates range from twenty to thirty thousand. Out of these some 2000 - 2500 were knights on horses, medieval shock troops, the elite. The only commander ever to stop a full charge by a full cavalry had been William Wallace with his schiltrons. A schiltron was basically a falang, foot soldier formation, were the spears were pointing outwards and men stood side by side, three to four ranks deep. Scottish schiltrons were different from Alexander the Great's Macedonian falangs in that they were round and could change formation if needed, where as Alexanders had been rigid squares. When we think of a medieval knight we see him in his fine armour, shining and awesome, with his long lance and wide shield. What we do not see is that he has a page, a shield carrier, a servant who leads his war horse and there's the knight without his armour, riding his other horse. So for every knight there was five horses. 2000 knights and men at arms on horseback meant around ten thousand horses in the army.
Now if you are serving in infantry as a spearman or archer, you walk behind those horses. Those horses produce a lot of waste and you along with tens of thousands of men march splashing on their urine and slipping on their manure all day long, from dawn till dusk. There are very few breaks, perhaps once a day for eating or quick drinks, but usually it is after the stop in the evening. By then you are so exhausted that you probably just drop down and fall asleep. Before you have had time to eat, you are woken up and told to get back in line and the march continues. And this goes on and on for days. Some men break their feet, ankles, their footwear shreds into pieces, their soles bleed, some just keel over and die. That is the reality of the medieval army on the move.
Edward II was an inexperienced commander. He had led some troops at least nominally during his father's wars in Scotland but more than likely others had taken care of the practicalities of running the army. So in order to reach Stirling by the set date, Edward and other noblemen on horses pushed the pace during the march. He probably did not understand how hard it was for the foot soldiers, but kept on going like a mad man. He wanted to fight. He was determined to get there on time. Nothing was going to stop him this time. It is also very likely that he trusted that his officers were running the army with the best skill and everything was in order. After all, it was a given. He was paying for men to do exactly that. Even most of the foot soldiers were on the pay roll by this time, rank and file earning 2 pennies a day and archers 3.
One of the earls who had answered his call was Aymer de Valence who had been at odds with the king previously, mainly because Edward had taken his lands in Scotland and given them to Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was now dead, had been for two years, and seemingly everything was OK between them. Valence was considered to be a good soldier, good officer and valiant warrior. Another earl who answered to the call was the young earl of Gloucester. He was Edward's nephew and one of the most valiant knights of the realm. He had served in his grandfather Edward Longshanks' army at the age of fifteen and everyone held him in high esteem. He had been a stout supporter of Edward II and when Edward had been in France in 1313, he had been the regent. The earl of Hereford was thirty-eight in 1314 and was also in the army marching north. He was Constable of England and he had been one of the mediators between the king and other barons during the crisis of 1312. Despite being not totally loyal to the king during the Gaveston years, this time he was enthusiastic and joined in quickly with a full force.
Alongside these three, the top commanders of the English army were Sir Robert Clifford and Sir Henry Beaumont, who commanded jointly the second cavalry division of the army. Clifford had been in Scotland with the old king and had some battlefield success but he had been against Piers Gaveston with most of the barons. Beaumont was Edward's cousin and was appointed to command the second division with Clifford. He had a personal stake in this war since he had estates in Scotland via Comyn family in which he had married into. The Scottish Sir Ingram of Umfraville was also present and one of the senior advisers and officers to the king. He had plenty of experience of fighting against the Bruces and in Scotland. He had been fighting since 1299, also against the English, but now with them.
Alongside these men there were mercenaries from continent, thousands of Irish warriors, Welsh and soldiers from all over England. Most famous of the continental knights was Giles d'Argentan, a knight rated as number three in the whole Christendom, right after the Scottish commander Robert the Bruce. He was the epitome of knighthood, straight out of Hollywood, incorruptible, chivalrous and handsome, all of which suited well during jousts and single combats, but not that well in a big battle. There were also many many younger knights in the army. They were ambitious and full of ideas of bravery and glory. They wanted to fight and show off their bravery and skills, get recognition and perhaps rewards from the king himself. They were also full of themselves. After all, this was one of the biggest English armies ever, the king was leading them in person, and who were the Scots? Raiders and thieves, hillbillies and ragtags with no decent weapons, training or class. It is good to remember that medieval society at large was a society of young people. Most of the population was under thirty years old. This applied to the soldiers as well as knights. Give weapons to a few thousand young men and send them anywhere with no other orders than to fight and you have a picture of the medieval knights and what they were all about.
And then there were those tens of thousands of foot soldiers. They were commanded by men at arms, sergeants, or by men who were appointed to command them. They served in groups of twenty or more. Some formed in companies of plus hundred men. Some knights commanded some formations too, depending if they were his levy or not. But the knights spoke French, or Anglo-Gascon, as well as did the nobles. Some of them spoke fluent English but most refused to use it. French was the language of the nobility, just like Latin was the language of the church. Very few ordinary foot soldiers spoke any French at all. But that was not all. There were thousands of Irishmen and Welsh speaking their own languages. In fact, if you came from Cornwall, you could not understand a word a Yorkshireman was telling you. All of these men formed the king's army. Thousands and thousands of men speaking dialects and languages alien to each other. And when we remember that these were not trained men of modern armies, that they were not drilled for months at anything, lucky if they had practised at all, we can see what kind of chaos this marching horde was.
They were not marching in unison or at the same pace, nor in neat interwalls or formations. They were just trying to keep up with the rest of the army. Famously rich noblemen on their horses, humble foot soldiers walking barefoot in the dust and stink of tens of thousands of animals. Yes, there were thousands of animals too. Thousands of horses for the cavalry and hundreds of smaller horses pulling carriages and carts, thick big bulls, oxen, pulling big and decorated wagons of the nobility, almost like medieval caravans. Contemporary sources speak of the army stretching for twenty miles along the dry and rock-hard road, with dust clouds reaching the sky. Another tells that there were 106 wagons each pulled with six horses, plus 110 wagons each pulled by eight oxen. In 1300 Edward I had needed 3000 horse shoes and 50,000 nails for them. Now they needed even more. The noise made by this medieval monster was ear-splitting. Thousands of animals huffing and puffing, screaming and making noises, tens of thousands of feet stomping on the ground, men shouting, officers shouting, horns blowing and musicians playing. Yes, musicians followed armies every where.
No doubt that when Edward looked at this army of his from some hill top and saw its humongous size, he must have felt confident. His father raised a bigger army only once, perhaps, but this was the biggest anyone could remember. Edward knew that the Scots were following them. The Scottish horsemen were seen on distant hill tops and ridges, it was more than certain that the Scots were in those woods and forests, lurking there, watching in owe this tremendous power play of English might. But that was fine with Edward. He was not trying to hide. He was showing off. He was telling by this march to Robert the Bruce: I am coming and I bring the whole of England with me. Unfortunately for Edward, Robert the Bruce was the one man he could not intimidate. At the lowest point of his rebellion, Bruce had had only twelve men with him and still he did not quit nor gave up. He fought with those twelve men, until he had a few dozen, then a few hundred and now a few thousand. He knew that numbers were just numbers and that smaller force could defeat bigger ones.
Robert the Bruce had trained his forces. He had equipped them as well as he could and could afford to. He had drilled them over and over again and most of all, he had instilled fighting spirit into them. The Scottish men served in schiltrons of roughly one thousand men in each. They served under the direct command of their feudal lord. All the men in a schiltron were from the same area and spoke same dialect, many of them knew each other well. There were brothers, sons and fathers, uncles and cousins in the schiltrons. Whole families might have been in them. Just like the Spartans in the old days, the Scots knew the men around them well and had known them all their lives. In the battle this was a big asset. Men were no longer fighting for some obscure idea but for each other, and Robert the Bruce knew this. He had divided his army in five schiltrons of which he commanded the biggest. He also had perhaps half of thousand riders, not a cavalry in the same sense as the English one, but never the less a riding force for fast action around the battle field where ever such was needed. His biggest advantage over Edward was that his commanders were his companions and supporters. They all knew each other well and they all knew what they were about to do. There was no confusion, no hesitation, no second guessing. Everyone knew what was expected of him, every one knew his mission and place in the battlefield, and they all knew their men well. Most important of all was the battlefield. They all knew it intimately. They had chosen it. They had trained on it. They had been around it for some time. There were no surprises, no sudden unexpected knobs or ditches, pools or streams. They mastered it.
The confident English army approached Stirling just in time. The road to the castle went directly ahead through rising hills and on the right side of the English was vast flatland beyond of which they could see the hills on which Stirling castle was resting. Edward must have felt like a winner. Not only he was at in time but the Scots were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was a bit disappointed that those raiders had ran to the hills again. He came to fight. But that was just the impression. When the English vanguard crossed the deep and narrow gully of Bannockburn, small river that cut trough the landscape, and began to rise towards the hills, the Scots were there waiting for them in full formation. Front of his schiltron was a lone horseman, an officer, Robert the Bruce none the less. What the English vanguard should have done is to stop and call for the king, have a counsel what to do and then proceed as planned. It did neither. The vanguard was commanded by the younger knights who were burning with the desire for glory. The nephew of the earl of Hereford, Henry de Bohun, was among them too. And he decided to get the glory right now. De Bohun attacked Bruce straight on with some visions of glory shading his mind. He did not know Robert the Bruce. He was too young to understand that this much older man was a killer. They clashed before their men. Bohun lost half of his head and Bruce broke the saft of his battle axe when splitting the young knights skull all through his steel helmet. Seeing this Bohun's squire tried to get to his master but was killed by the Scots who advanced in formation. This was sensational, schiltrons had been stationary and defensive formations before, but not single one of the vanguards told this to the king or his officers. That was a huge and disastrous mistake. The Scots had dug small pot holes all around the road so when the English tried to advance, they had to stick with the road and face Bruce's schiltron head on. That was no match. The English fought bravely, they did not yield easily. but in the end they had to retreat. The Scots had drawn the first blood. Robert the Bruce had done it personally perhaps echoing his alleged words before the battle: Let us do or die!
But Edward was not the incompetent moron he has been painted to be. He had sent another English troop through the vast open land below the hills towards Stirling. If these could get in, the deal would be done and Bruce would have lost his bet. But Bruce was not a moron either. He could see from his higher position this cavalry force racing towards Stirling and sent Moray's schiltron to stop them. Lord Moray and his men emerged from the woods and assumed position blocking the direct road, but they were out in the open. The English could have easily ride around them, they could have raced and passed by them as they were coming out from the woods. But they did not. This cavalry troop was commanded by Clifford and Beaumont. What they saw was a small bunch of hillbillies stepping out from the shadows and offering themselves as a nice target for the knights in shining armour.
- Let us wait a little, let them come on, give them room, Beaumont allegedly said. The veteran knight sir Thomas Grey saw it differently.
- My lord, give them what you like want now and I am afraid in short while they will have everything, he said. To no avail. No one was listening. The younger knights wanted to fight, they wanted the glory and they wanted blood and they wanted it right now!
- Flee then! Flee now if you are afraid, Beaumont shouted at Grey and this was an grave insult to any knight.
- Fear will not make me flee, my lord, veteran knight answered and headed straight on into the schiltron. On his side was Sir William Deyncourt. Grey's horse was impaled on the scottish spears and Deyncourt himself died along with his horse. The Scots pulled Grey inside the schiltron and took him as a prisoner, first one of the battle.
English knights on their heavy horses attacked the schiltron, rode around it and tried to smash it with fury, but the spearmen kept their positions, they did not flinch, and they were well-trained. More and more English cavalry came to the fight and Moray formed the traditional schiltron formation, static circular falang. The knights were enraged to see that nothing they did broke the formation and they started to hurl they weapons at the Scots. They threw axes, maces and even swords at them but nothing came from it. They needed archers badly, otherwise this would be a repetition of the previous battle of Stirling when William Wallace had stopped the English cavalry this way. The Scots instead shot them from within the schiltron with their short bows. Men and horses fell down, from the arrows and spears, and every now and then some daredevil Scot rushed out from the formation and finished off a helpless knight who was pinned under his horse near by. Some were dragged into the schiltron. This only added the fuel to the rage of the knights. James Douglas, another Scottish commander saw from the high ground Moray's schiltron almost submerged with the English cavalry and asked permission to help out. At first Bruce did not see the need but eventually gave the order. As Douglas brought his schiltron out from the woods, the English were amazed and confused. Some turned to face this new threat, some were unsure what to do, and at this moment Moray saw that the English cavalry had lost its cohesion. He went on the attack and smashed the cavalry formation in half with his foot soldiers. Douglas held back and gave the honor of the field to Moray and his men. Some of the English horsemen galloped to the safety of Stirling while some made their way back to the main army. Day one was over.
Edward realised that this really was going to be it. He would have his fight after all. The Scots had blocked the main road, they had blocked the lesser path through the open country and were willing to fight. All right, then. Let's get it on! Except it was late and night would fall soon. Edward and his commanders knew that up on the hills and in the woods the Scots would be unbeatable. The only option was to draw them out in the open and the enemy had shown its willingness to do just that earlier today. There was open land just below the hills, on the plain beyond Bannockburn. Edward gave the order for the army to move in there and take the positions along the said lesser road, facing the ridge line on the west. Easier said than done. Bannockburn was not that wide but was deep and had sharp enbankments. Soldiers raided nearby houses and tore off everything that could be used as a bridge. Doors and planks, everything useful was taken. Slowly the army began to cross over, like a huge giant in a slow motion. The tents and wagons of the nobility had to be taken across but most of the supplies and other stuff was left on the other side of the river. There was simply no way they could have been brought over at the same time when tens of thousands of men did the same manoeuvre.
Darkness fell and the king and his retinue ate nicely in their tents, surrounded by their servants and from their silver wares and golden cups. They discussed about the fighting that day, perhaps made some plans for next day, but nothing like a real battle plan. No orders were issued, written down, taken to the lower command or even between those noble men. They ate well and drank a bit wine, probably listened to some music, fully confident that the dawn would bring them the smashing victory. There was a war council of sorts but what happened is unclear. Perhaps these noble men were tired and got little tipsy from the wine, but when young Gloucester joined some others saying that they should wait for another day and get organised before getting on with the business of war, Edward, probably remembering the accusations of cowardice he had been showered with for past years, replied by asking was Gloucester a coward. This did not go well at all and would have serious consequences the next day. But it was not just an accusation by a stupid king. Edward was not totally lost. He knew that an army this big would eventually start to crumble, men would slip away, go looking for food or loot, even desert, so longer they stayed doing nothing, less cohesive they became. He also knew that there would be a battle next day, whether they wanted or not, so the idea that they could somehow rest and talk about things in peace for one more day was impossible.
Just to show that Edward was not the numbskull everyone seems to think he was, when he had written his military writs he had asked specially for foot soldiers. He had pointed out that cavalry would have difficulties in the terrain the Scots favored and that their battle tactics were designed against the cavalry. Therefore Edward wanted as many foot soldiers as possible. This was the first time any king had thought anything like that. It was a revolution in the military thinking, at least on the English side. His own son, Edward III, put it in action by making his army fight on foot from Halidon Hill to Crécy. It also served the English well in Agincourt many decades later. For some reason this has been neglected by most writers completely. Before the whole operation, Edward had known that it would be infantry, not the cavalry, which would decide the outcome, and he was absolutely right. He had asked infantry to counter the Scottish tactics. But many writers simply do not even mention this nor the fact that it was Edward II who was first to say out loud that perhaps the heavy cavalry of the nobles was no longer the deciding force it had been for the past few centuries. It was Edward who was first to say that the infantry of common men will be the most important part of the army.
At the same time thousands of men tried to get into the area behind the nobles' wagons and tents. They were pushing and cursing in the dark, some fell into the river, few drowned, and after they had managed to get across, they found themselves on a slushing wet floodplain among thousands of men just like them, loitering here and there and wondering what was going on. From the viewpoint of the king and his commanders this was an excellent place to camp. Wide open land in front, coming battle field of their choice they believed, and protected from both sides by a river. Bannockburn in the south and Pellstream in the north. What they did not see was that the area behind them was almost a swamp, marshy bog, and that it had not enough room for the army. More and more men came in to that area and more more tightly they were packed up. These men did not get sleep, they did not get food and they could not light fires because the soil was wet and there was no wood. Disaster was beginning to form, right behind the king's position. Then there were also the events of the day. Rank and file had seen the empty horses, they had heard the rumours and they had also heard the official version announced by the heralds. There had been a little skirmish, a small insignificant touch with the enemy, nothing more. And yet every man in the army realised that those rubbish Scots had given a beating to the cream of the army. They had beaten the knights, best trained and equipped warriors in the world. Many men dozed off nervously, some could not sleep at all. Some were so exhausted that they slept in the muddy and soggy ground in spite of the wet and mosquitoes. On the Scottish side there was a slight possibility for optimism. The had bested the feared English knights on two fights and during the night Sir Alexander Seton, a Scotsman who had been in the English army, appeared on the Scottish camp with some good news. Seton told Bruce and his commanders about the difficulties the English were having out on the carse, how tightly packed they were, about the wet ground, hunger among the rank and file and how the English nobles were still not believing that they were in trouble at all. It was sweet music to the ears of Robert the Bruce.
At the next dawn something odd happened. The Scots came out from the woods up on ridge and came down to the flat lands. The English could clearly see three schiltrons advancing across the open land. What they did not see was the schiltron of Robert the Bruce right behind these three or that one more schiltron was moving on the right of their position. The English did not understand that the enemy was going to close them in to the salient. There were some Scottish bowmen front of the formations but they did little damage since their short bows could not even reach the main English position. Some english archers moved out to counter their actions and for a while arrows flew back and forth on no man's land between the two armies. But all in all, the response of the English was very slow and almost apathetic. According to many writers, this was also Edward's fault. Not so. General alarm was not sounded. That was not his job. There were supposed to be guards to take care of that. His commanders and captains were supposed to be alert and ready for anything. They were not. Perhaps they simply overslept, or perhaps they were not that good at all.
Finally the word reached Edward that the Scots were coming with banners flying, flags fluttering in the wind. Edward came to see what was going on and could only marvel the sight. Scottish host seemed so small compared to his mighty army. There were no wagons, no cavalry, nothing but tightly packed formations of foot soldiers. It seemed almost suicidal, but then again, he had not seen them in action a day before. We do not know what he had been told about the defeats of the previous day, but it is very clear that Edward did not take them so seriously as he should have. Perhaps he had been told some excuses. Perhaps he had received wrong information, maybe he was not told about the moving schiltrons at all. So it seems. He was genuinely surprised to see them advancing across the open land towards him.
- What? Will those Scots fight? he shouted at the people around him. One of them was Sir Ingram Umfraville, himself a Scot.
- Of truth, sir, now I see the most marvellous sight by far that I ever beheld. Scotsmen undertaking to fight against the might of England and to give battle in the hard open land, he said. Perhaps he had his doubts for he proposed that the English army should retreat behind the wagons and wait when the Scots would stop to loot them and then attack. Edward thought that as silly and it was. There was no way his forward troops could withdraw into the mass of men behind the wagons. Besides, king Edward was not going to take any steps backwards now that he finally got his fight.
All of a sudden the schiltrons stopped and all the Scots knelt down. Edward was puzzled and tried to joke about it. Perhaps they had come to do homage and pray for mercy. Sir Umfraville was not in the mood for joking. He had been fighting Robert the Bruce many years and could see that the Scots had come out for a fight.
- You are right. They ask for mercy, but not from you. They cry to God for forgiveness. I tell you one thing for certain, yonder men will win all or die. None shall flee for fear of death, sir Umfraville said to Edward.
When the Scottish schiltrons got up and resumed their advance, Edward knew that the time had come.
- Now so be it, he said. - We shall see presently.
So the guards had not sounded the alarm when the Scots had come out. The king was simply woken up by informing him that, by the way, the enemy is approaching. It seems that most of the nobles were unaware of the situation. It was Edward himself who gave the alarm and ordered call to arms. Younger knights saw a new chance to make history, to ride to the glory, and they were the first to get into their armour and on their horses. The young earl of Gloucester was really hot, the king had accused him of cowardice, and he did not even wait his servants to pull over his coat of arms. He got up on his horse and wanted to charge, not waiting for anyone's orders or command. Hereford told him that as a Constable of England it was his duty to start the action, but young knight was not in the mood for listening to anyone. Gloucester called archers for support and without waiting for them or anyone rode straight at the schiltron front of them. He was impaled on the spears right away. But he was not the only one. Sir Robert Clifford, probably fuming from the loss of the previous contest, rode with the young earl and crashed on the schiltron, only to die. Sir Edward Mauley, the steward of the king's household, also rode to glory and death. So did a Scotsman Sir John Comyn, son of the contender Red Comyn, whose father had been murdered by Robert the Bruce himself. They were not the only ones and the battle had not even started yet with full force.
Seeing his knights being mauled so badly, Edward did something very few English or any other kings ever did. He geared up, put on his helmet and rode in to the worst fighting with his personal retinue. Remember, this was a man with enormous physical strength, he was believed to be one of the strongest men in the realm, and he was big and tall. He had his plate armour on, his shield, his huge war horse under him, his ten feet long lance pointed to the enemy and off he went. The battle was not easing up, it was getting more and more intense by every moment. The Scottish schiltrons did not just stop, they moved. After every attack by English horse, the Scots took a step or two forward, pushing the English back. The more cavalry got up to them, less space there was in front of the schiltrons. Someone ordered archers to move up, but they could not hurt the Scots. They tried to shoot high arching fire, over the cavalry which was between them and the Scots, but the arrows flew over the enemy. They tried to shoot directly but only managed to shoot more Englishmen in the back than the advancing Scots. At some point some commander of the archers understood how serious the situation was and sent archers cross the Pellstream on north side of the salient. It is not known how many they were, perhaps few hundred or couple thousand, but when they opened up on the left flank of the Scots, it began to show. Each archer could shoot ten arrows a minute and one thousand archers meant ten thousand arrows a minute. This could have changed the whole battle. But Robert the Bruce had been thinking about the English archers. When he saw how badly Douglas's schiltron was mauled by the archers, he sent his light cavalry to attack them. Scottish cavalry was no match against the English cavalry but for this job it was more than fit. Those light-footed small horses carried the men across the carse with stunning speed and the English archers panicked and fled, some towards Stirling and some across the Pellstream back to the army. There they were met with blows and mocking. After that the Scottish horse patrolled the north side of the Pellstream and kept the English in the trap, for that it was.
There has been lot of speculation where the actual battle took place and the official version places it in a wrong place. The only place where this battle was physically possible was between the Bannockburn and Pellstream, probably where the gap between the streams is narrowest, some one thousand paces wide. Every account and testimony states this. Most of all, the battle itself proves it. Had it taken place anywhere else, the Scots would have lost. The English would have had more space to use their thousands of archers and foot soldiers, the English cavalry would have been able to ride around the Scottish forces, just like in Falkirk, but that did not happen here. The only explanation is that they did not have room to manoeuvre their troops. And the only reasonable explanation for that is that they were pinned between these two streams. And when the Scots pushed forward, the more compact the English army became. In the reports there are stories how the English cavalry was so tightly packed that the knights could not even swing their swords or maces. It was a huge massive mob compressed into a smaller space by every minute. And all the time more and more riders pushed forward, more men at arms tried to get forward, thousands of men tried to push and push. And on the other side the Scots pushed against this smouldering cauldron of men, horses and weapons.
Edward was in the thick of it. He was right there where the action was fiercest, on the front line. There was not much room, if he tried to turn his horse, it was perhaps impossible because there was another knight right there pushing on. He swung his sword, maybe lost it in the melee, and the Scots stabbed their sharp spears at him from all around. He was grabbed by the enemy and used his war mace to smash their safts, arms and heads. His horse was killed and he fell pell mell at the feet of thousands of men and horses, all stomping and smashing the dead and the wounded alike under them. It is a testimony of his character and physical strength that he could get up, fight his way out from that horrible crush and smashing, and stay alive in that chaos and murder. And what he did when he was safe? Perhaps he drank something to quench his thirst, most likely so, but what he did was get a new horse and get back in to the fight. Sir Roger Northburgh, king's shield-carrier, was lost in action. Scots grabbed the harness of the horse, they grabbed the housings, and Edward swung his heavy mace like a mad man to get them away.
Actually, we can be pretty certain that at this moment he was a complete mad man, crazed by the fighting, a berserker just like all of them, hitting furiously all over, trying to smash foot soldiers with his huge horse. He was in the fiercest fighting from the start of the morning and went back after losing a horse from under him, and kept on fighting like no-one. One could ask if this is the man they call a coward today? Is this the no good man, who was soft and feminine, so much so that he was no good at all? Is this the king they claim was afraid of everyone and unable to make up his mind? Is this the yelping and shrieking fashion stylist from the movie Braveheart? No. This was a true warrior king. Just like in the old days of Vikings and Saxons, when the kings had fought right in the front line of any combat. That is what Edward was on that day, 24th of June, year 1314. But of course, he was not a Viking king nor he was a Saxon king. He should have been a medieval king, leading and directing the course of the battle from behind, not fighting hand to hand combat. That was a mistake and his fault. In his absence, nobody was giving out orders or directing the troops. That was a recipe for a disaster, though it is good to ask where were those experienced commanders and officers who could have given orders in the king's name. Yep. They were missing in action too. So it was also their fault.
All of a sudden the heart of the English army was broken. It happened for two reasons. First of all, just when there was a sort of stalemate on the fighting, thousands more Scots appeared out from no where. The English could not have known that these were so called small folk whom Robert the Bruce had taken off from the field but who now came out expecting the looting. All the English saw was thousands of more Scots joining in. At that moment the king's escort made a quick decision. The king had to be taken to safety. His capture would be a national embarrassment and disgrace and these noble men were determined to avoid that. I personally believe that Edward would have not been taken alive. He would have fought till the end that day. Perhaps some other time he could have surrendered, given up, perhaps cried, but not on this day. He would have gone down fighting. King Edward refused to leave the field. Aymer de Valence grabbed his horse and together with some 500 knights rode out from the field with the king protesting and opposing the idea. Edward himself still wanted to fight but the die was cast. He was taken off by his knights. This broke the heart of the English army. Giles d'Argentan, that valiant and shining example of the knighthood, escorted the king to the safety across the Pellstream and said that he had to return since his honor did not allow him to quit the fight. He did not quit. He rode back in and was killed by the schiltron of Edward Bruce right after.
So here we have it. The famous Battle of Bannockburn, which was called the battle of Stirling at the time. King Edward fought as hard as any man on that day. He put his life on the line. Not just once or twice but for the most of the duration of the battle. He did not flee nor he escaped like so many writers claim. He was taken off by his noble men, the senior knights. He protested, he refused to leave, but they led his horse away. Naturally, when he cooled off, Edward probably understood that those men were right, but at that moment he had wanted to fight on. Considering what a disaster the battle was, how many thousands of English died on that day, it was a catastrophe for the king and his country. And as it was, the responsibility fell on the king. It was all his fault. Everything was his doing and because of the weakness of his character. Really? Where was the earl of Lancaster, hero of so many present-day writers, who could have brought thousands of men into the fight? Norfolk was only fourteen at that time so perhaps his absence is understandable, but what about the others? If they had joined in, the English army would have been much stronger. Perhaps Earl Thomas of Lancaster could have been able to direct the force better? Perhaps seeing the overwhelming combined force of England Robert the Bruce would have been thinking twice of the fight? We know that he had been thinking of retreating just before the battle.
We will never know. Those earls were absent. Robert the Bruce decided to fight. The English lost. Edward II took the blame, despite the fact that all those "experienced" and "more qualified" knights and noble men in his army did nothing during those dramatic and decisive hours during the battle. They had zero impact on the result despite them being there. Instead they did what everybody else was doing: fight. Some were killed, others not. The king did the same. But for some reason he was a coward and fled, and left his army behind, when these other nobles and earls were OK doing the same things. Really?
But we also know one thing for absolute sure: Edward of Caernarfon was not a coward but a true warrior. He proved that on the bloody field of Bannockburn.
So here's Sami's thought-provoking post, with thanks again to him for taking the time and trouble to put so much work into it. And see what he says at the end: Edward II was not a physical coward, quite the contrary. Take THAT, detractors who say he was! I had the misfortune recently to read a self-published novel about Edward's queen Isabella in which she calls her husband "cowardly" and says that "he shied from battle because the sight of blood made him queasy." This is the kind of dire written-by-numbers Edward/Isabella novel that exist by the truckload, by a writer who doesn't have enough skill to make Isabella and Roger Mortimer sympathetic characters without turning Edward into a weak feeble cowardly 'snivelling' caricature - the kind of novel where every myth that has ever existed about Edward II is repeated, the kind of novel which contains prejudices that say far more about the person who perpetuates them than they do about Edward. At the risk of sounding really kiddish and stupid, I'm ROFLMAO at that 'queasy' quotation from it. Oh, and at the bit where a painting of Edward doesn't look much like the real him, "being much more muscular." I wonder how the author thinks that "one of the strongest men in his realm," "a handsome man, of outstanding strength," who went rowing and swimming and digging, could actually have been much more muscular than he already was. But of course, Edward loved men! He couldn't possibly have been strong and muscular then, not like our manly hetero hero Rog!
Anyway, I'm waffling. Here's Sami's Bannockburn post.
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In the summer of 1314 King Edward II of England was mustering a huge army in order to invade Scotland. Once again, most of his earls did not attend. They stayed at home or had something more important to do than face the enemy about whom they had been complaining for many years. These mightiest men of the realm had been accusing the king of cowardice but had refused to join him in any war against Scotland. They had been sabotaging the king's efforts for seven years, but now the king was determined. He would go to Scotland, with or without those crybabies. It is easy to imagine Edward's motives. He had been hearing all those complaints and rumours, all that talk behind his back how he did not dare to fight against Robert the Bruce. It did not matter that he had wanted to do so many times or that the barons had made it impossible. He was to blame. So, when he heard the news that the commander of Stirling Castle had made a deal with Edward the Bruce that he would hand over the castle to the Scots if there was no relief before St.John's day in 1314, Edward knew this was his best chance.
His army was big, even without the earls who stayed behind. Estimates range from twenty to thirty thousand. Out of these some 2000 - 2500 were knights on horses, medieval shock troops, the elite. The only commander ever to stop a full charge by a full cavalry had been William Wallace with his schiltrons. A schiltron was basically a falang, foot soldier formation, were the spears were pointing outwards and men stood side by side, three to four ranks deep. Scottish schiltrons were different from Alexander the Great's Macedonian falangs in that they were round and could change formation if needed, where as Alexanders had been rigid squares. When we think of a medieval knight we see him in his fine armour, shining and awesome, with his long lance and wide shield. What we do not see is that he has a page, a shield carrier, a servant who leads his war horse and there's the knight without his armour, riding his other horse. So for every knight there was five horses. 2000 knights and men at arms on horseback meant around ten thousand horses in the army.
Now if you are serving in infantry as a spearman or archer, you walk behind those horses. Those horses produce a lot of waste and you along with tens of thousands of men march splashing on their urine and slipping on their manure all day long, from dawn till dusk. There are very few breaks, perhaps once a day for eating or quick drinks, but usually it is after the stop in the evening. By then you are so exhausted that you probably just drop down and fall asleep. Before you have had time to eat, you are woken up and told to get back in line and the march continues. And this goes on and on for days. Some men break their feet, ankles, their footwear shreds into pieces, their soles bleed, some just keel over and die. That is the reality of the medieval army on the move.
Edward II was an inexperienced commander. He had led some troops at least nominally during his father's wars in Scotland but more than likely others had taken care of the practicalities of running the army. So in order to reach Stirling by the set date, Edward and other noblemen on horses pushed the pace during the march. He probably did not understand how hard it was for the foot soldiers, but kept on going like a mad man. He wanted to fight. He was determined to get there on time. Nothing was going to stop him this time. It is also very likely that he trusted that his officers were running the army with the best skill and everything was in order. After all, it was a given. He was paying for men to do exactly that. Even most of the foot soldiers were on the pay roll by this time, rank and file earning 2 pennies a day and archers 3.
One of the earls who had answered his call was Aymer de Valence who had been at odds with the king previously, mainly because Edward had taken his lands in Scotland and given them to Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was now dead, had been for two years, and seemingly everything was OK between them. Valence was considered to be a good soldier, good officer and valiant warrior. Another earl who answered to the call was the young earl of Gloucester. He was Edward's nephew and one of the most valiant knights of the realm. He had served in his grandfather Edward Longshanks' army at the age of fifteen and everyone held him in high esteem. He had been a stout supporter of Edward II and when Edward had been in France in 1313, he had been the regent. The earl of Hereford was thirty-eight in 1314 and was also in the army marching north. He was Constable of England and he had been one of the mediators between the king and other barons during the crisis of 1312. Despite being not totally loyal to the king during the Gaveston years, this time he was enthusiastic and joined in quickly with a full force.
Alongside these three, the top commanders of the English army were Sir Robert Clifford and Sir Henry Beaumont, who commanded jointly the second cavalry division of the army. Clifford had been in Scotland with the old king and had some battlefield success but he had been against Piers Gaveston with most of the barons. Beaumont was Edward's cousin and was appointed to command the second division with Clifford. He had a personal stake in this war since he had estates in Scotland via Comyn family in which he had married into. The Scottish Sir Ingram of Umfraville was also present and one of the senior advisers and officers to the king. He had plenty of experience of fighting against the Bruces and in Scotland. He had been fighting since 1299, also against the English, but now with them.
Alongside these men there were mercenaries from continent, thousands of Irish warriors, Welsh and soldiers from all over England. Most famous of the continental knights was Giles d'Argentan, a knight rated as number three in the whole Christendom, right after the Scottish commander Robert the Bruce. He was the epitome of knighthood, straight out of Hollywood, incorruptible, chivalrous and handsome, all of which suited well during jousts and single combats, but not that well in a big battle. There were also many many younger knights in the army. They were ambitious and full of ideas of bravery and glory. They wanted to fight and show off their bravery and skills, get recognition and perhaps rewards from the king himself. They were also full of themselves. After all, this was one of the biggest English armies ever, the king was leading them in person, and who were the Scots? Raiders and thieves, hillbillies and ragtags with no decent weapons, training or class. It is good to remember that medieval society at large was a society of young people. Most of the population was under thirty years old. This applied to the soldiers as well as knights. Give weapons to a few thousand young men and send them anywhere with no other orders than to fight and you have a picture of the medieval knights and what they were all about.
And then there were those tens of thousands of foot soldiers. They were commanded by men at arms, sergeants, or by men who were appointed to command them. They served in groups of twenty or more. Some formed in companies of plus hundred men. Some knights commanded some formations too, depending if they were his levy or not. But the knights spoke French, or Anglo-Gascon, as well as did the nobles. Some of them spoke fluent English but most refused to use it. French was the language of the nobility, just like Latin was the language of the church. Very few ordinary foot soldiers spoke any French at all. But that was not all. There were thousands of Irishmen and Welsh speaking their own languages. In fact, if you came from Cornwall, you could not understand a word a Yorkshireman was telling you. All of these men formed the king's army. Thousands and thousands of men speaking dialects and languages alien to each other. And when we remember that these were not trained men of modern armies, that they were not drilled for months at anything, lucky if they had practised at all, we can see what kind of chaos this marching horde was.
They were not marching in unison or at the same pace, nor in neat interwalls or formations. They were just trying to keep up with the rest of the army. Famously rich noblemen on their horses, humble foot soldiers walking barefoot in the dust and stink of tens of thousands of animals. Yes, there were thousands of animals too. Thousands of horses for the cavalry and hundreds of smaller horses pulling carriages and carts, thick big bulls, oxen, pulling big and decorated wagons of the nobility, almost like medieval caravans. Contemporary sources speak of the army stretching for twenty miles along the dry and rock-hard road, with dust clouds reaching the sky. Another tells that there were 106 wagons each pulled with six horses, plus 110 wagons each pulled by eight oxen. In 1300 Edward I had needed 3000 horse shoes and 50,000 nails for them. Now they needed even more. The noise made by this medieval monster was ear-splitting. Thousands of animals huffing and puffing, screaming and making noises, tens of thousands of feet stomping on the ground, men shouting, officers shouting, horns blowing and musicians playing. Yes, musicians followed armies every where.
No doubt that when Edward looked at this army of his from some hill top and saw its humongous size, he must have felt confident. His father raised a bigger army only once, perhaps, but this was the biggest anyone could remember. Edward knew that the Scots were following them. The Scottish horsemen were seen on distant hill tops and ridges, it was more than certain that the Scots were in those woods and forests, lurking there, watching in owe this tremendous power play of English might. But that was fine with Edward. He was not trying to hide. He was showing off. He was telling by this march to Robert the Bruce: I am coming and I bring the whole of England with me. Unfortunately for Edward, Robert the Bruce was the one man he could not intimidate. At the lowest point of his rebellion, Bruce had had only twelve men with him and still he did not quit nor gave up. He fought with those twelve men, until he had a few dozen, then a few hundred and now a few thousand. He knew that numbers were just numbers and that smaller force could defeat bigger ones.
Robert the Bruce had trained his forces. He had equipped them as well as he could and could afford to. He had drilled them over and over again and most of all, he had instilled fighting spirit into them. The Scottish men served in schiltrons of roughly one thousand men in each. They served under the direct command of their feudal lord. All the men in a schiltron were from the same area and spoke same dialect, many of them knew each other well. There were brothers, sons and fathers, uncles and cousins in the schiltrons. Whole families might have been in them. Just like the Spartans in the old days, the Scots knew the men around them well and had known them all their lives. In the battle this was a big asset. Men were no longer fighting for some obscure idea but for each other, and Robert the Bruce knew this. He had divided his army in five schiltrons of which he commanded the biggest. He also had perhaps half of thousand riders, not a cavalry in the same sense as the English one, but never the less a riding force for fast action around the battle field where ever such was needed. His biggest advantage over Edward was that his commanders were his companions and supporters. They all knew each other well and they all knew what they were about to do. There was no confusion, no hesitation, no second guessing. Everyone knew what was expected of him, every one knew his mission and place in the battlefield, and they all knew their men well. Most important of all was the battlefield. They all knew it intimately. They had chosen it. They had trained on it. They had been around it for some time. There were no surprises, no sudden unexpected knobs or ditches, pools or streams. They mastered it.
The confident English army approached Stirling just in time. The road to the castle went directly ahead through rising hills and on the right side of the English was vast flatland beyond of which they could see the hills on which Stirling castle was resting. Edward must have felt like a winner. Not only he was at in time but the Scots were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was a bit disappointed that those raiders had ran to the hills again. He came to fight. But that was just the impression. When the English vanguard crossed the deep and narrow gully of Bannockburn, small river that cut trough the landscape, and began to rise towards the hills, the Scots were there waiting for them in full formation. Front of his schiltron was a lone horseman, an officer, Robert the Bruce none the less. What the English vanguard should have done is to stop and call for the king, have a counsel what to do and then proceed as planned. It did neither. The vanguard was commanded by the younger knights who were burning with the desire for glory. The nephew of the earl of Hereford, Henry de Bohun, was among them too. And he decided to get the glory right now. De Bohun attacked Bruce straight on with some visions of glory shading his mind. He did not know Robert the Bruce. He was too young to understand that this much older man was a killer. They clashed before their men. Bohun lost half of his head and Bruce broke the saft of his battle axe when splitting the young knights skull all through his steel helmet. Seeing this Bohun's squire tried to get to his master but was killed by the Scots who advanced in formation. This was sensational, schiltrons had been stationary and defensive formations before, but not single one of the vanguards told this to the king or his officers. That was a huge and disastrous mistake. The Scots had dug small pot holes all around the road so when the English tried to advance, they had to stick with the road and face Bruce's schiltron head on. That was no match. The English fought bravely, they did not yield easily. but in the end they had to retreat. The Scots had drawn the first blood. Robert the Bruce had done it personally perhaps echoing his alleged words before the battle: Let us do or die!
But Edward was not the incompetent moron he has been painted to be. He had sent another English troop through the vast open land below the hills towards Stirling. If these could get in, the deal would be done and Bruce would have lost his bet. But Bruce was not a moron either. He could see from his higher position this cavalry force racing towards Stirling and sent Moray's schiltron to stop them. Lord Moray and his men emerged from the woods and assumed position blocking the direct road, but they were out in the open. The English could have easily ride around them, they could have raced and passed by them as they were coming out from the woods. But they did not. This cavalry troop was commanded by Clifford and Beaumont. What they saw was a small bunch of hillbillies stepping out from the shadows and offering themselves as a nice target for the knights in shining armour.
- Let us wait a little, let them come on, give them room, Beaumont allegedly said. The veteran knight sir Thomas Grey saw it differently.
- My lord, give them what you like want now and I am afraid in short while they will have everything, he said. To no avail. No one was listening. The younger knights wanted to fight, they wanted the glory and they wanted blood and they wanted it right now!
- Flee then! Flee now if you are afraid, Beaumont shouted at Grey and this was an grave insult to any knight.
- Fear will not make me flee, my lord, veteran knight answered and headed straight on into the schiltron. On his side was Sir William Deyncourt. Grey's horse was impaled on the scottish spears and Deyncourt himself died along with his horse. The Scots pulled Grey inside the schiltron and took him as a prisoner, first one of the battle.
English knights on their heavy horses attacked the schiltron, rode around it and tried to smash it with fury, but the spearmen kept their positions, they did not flinch, and they were well-trained. More and more English cavalry came to the fight and Moray formed the traditional schiltron formation, static circular falang. The knights were enraged to see that nothing they did broke the formation and they started to hurl they weapons at the Scots. They threw axes, maces and even swords at them but nothing came from it. They needed archers badly, otherwise this would be a repetition of the previous battle of Stirling when William Wallace had stopped the English cavalry this way. The Scots instead shot them from within the schiltron with their short bows. Men and horses fell down, from the arrows and spears, and every now and then some daredevil Scot rushed out from the formation and finished off a helpless knight who was pinned under his horse near by. Some were dragged into the schiltron. This only added the fuel to the rage of the knights. James Douglas, another Scottish commander saw from the high ground Moray's schiltron almost submerged with the English cavalry and asked permission to help out. At first Bruce did not see the need but eventually gave the order. As Douglas brought his schiltron out from the woods, the English were amazed and confused. Some turned to face this new threat, some were unsure what to do, and at this moment Moray saw that the English cavalry had lost its cohesion. He went on the attack and smashed the cavalry formation in half with his foot soldiers. Douglas held back and gave the honor of the field to Moray and his men. Some of the English horsemen galloped to the safety of Stirling while some made their way back to the main army. Day one was over.
Edward realised that this really was going to be it. He would have his fight after all. The Scots had blocked the main road, they had blocked the lesser path through the open country and were willing to fight. All right, then. Let's get it on! Except it was late and night would fall soon. Edward and his commanders knew that up on the hills and in the woods the Scots would be unbeatable. The only option was to draw them out in the open and the enemy had shown its willingness to do just that earlier today. There was open land just below the hills, on the plain beyond Bannockburn. Edward gave the order for the army to move in there and take the positions along the said lesser road, facing the ridge line on the west. Easier said than done. Bannockburn was not that wide but was deep and had sharp enbankments. Soldiers raided nearby houses and tore off everything that could be used as a bridge. Doors and planks, everything useful was taken. Slowly the army began to cross over, like a huge giant in a slow motion. The tents and wagons of the nobility had to be taken across but most of the supplies and other stuff was left on the other side of the river. There was simply no way they could have been brought over at the same time when tens of thousands of men did the same manoeuvre.
Darkness fell and the king and his retinue ate nicely in their tents, surrounded by their servants and from their silver wares and golden cups. They discussed about the fighting that day, perhaps made some plans for next day, but nothing like a real battle plan. No orders were issued, written down, taken to the lower command or even between those noble men. They ate well and drank a bit wine, probably listened to some music, fully confident that the dawn would bring them the smashing victory. There was a war council of sorts but what happened is unclear. Perhaps these noble men were tired and got little tipsy from the wine, but when young Gloucester joined some others saying that they should wait for another day and get organised before getting on with the business of war, Edward, probably remembering the accusations of cowardice he had been showered with for past years, replied by asking was Gloucester a coward. This did not go well at all and would have serious consequences the next day. But it was not just an accusation by a stupid king. Edward was not totally lost. He knew that an army this big would eventually start to crumble, men would slip away, go looking for food or loot, even desert, so longer they stayed doing nothing, less cohesive they became. He also knew that there would be a battle next day, whether they wanted or not, so the idea that they could somehow rest and talk about things in peace for one more day was impossible.
Just to show that Edward was not the numbskull everyone seems to think he was, when he had written his military writs he had asked specially for foot soldiers. He had pointed out that cavalry would have difficulties in the terrain the Scots favored and that their battle tactics were designed against the cavalry. Therefore Edward wanted as many foot soldiers as possible. This was the first time any king had thought anything like that. It was a revolution in the military thinking, at least on the English side. His own son, Edward III, put it in action by making his army fight on foot from Halidon Hill to Crécy. It also served the English well in Agincourt many decades later. For some reason this has been neglected by most writers completely. Before the whole operation, Edward had known that it would be infantry, not the cavalry, which would decide the outcome, and he was absolutely right. He had asked infantry to counter the Scottish tactics. But many writers simply do not even mention this nor the fact that it was Edward II who was first to say out loud that perhaps the heavy cavalry of the nobles was no longer the deciding force it had been for the past few centuries. It was Edward who was first to say that the infantry of common men will be the most important part of the army.
At the same time thousands of men tried to get into the area behind the nobles' wagons and tents. They were pushing and cursing in the dark, some fell into the river, few drowned, and after they had managed to get across, they found themselves on a slushing wet floodplain among thousands of men just like them, loitering here and there and wondering what was going on. From the viewpoint of the king and his commanders this was an excellent place to camp. Wide open land in front, coming battle field of their choice they believed, and protected from both sides by a river. Bannockburn in the south and Pellstream in the north. What they did not see was that the area behind them was almost a swamp, marshy bog, and that it had not enough room for the army. More and more men came in to that area and more more tightly they were packed up. These men did not get sleep, they did not get food and they could not light fires because the soil was wet and there was no wood. Disaster was beginning to form, right behind the king's position. Then there were also the events of the day. Rank and file had seen the empty horses, they had heard the rumours and they had also heard the official version announced by the heralds. There had been a little skirmish, a small insignificant touch with the enemy, nothing more. And yet every man in the army realised that those rubbish Scots had given a beating to the cream of the army. They had beaten the knights, best trained and equipped warriors in the world. Many men dozed off nervously, some could not sleep at all. Some were so exhausted that they slept in the muddy and soggy ground in spite of the wet and mosquitoes. On the Scottish side there was a slight possibility for optimism. The had bested the feared English knights on two fights and during the night Sir Alexander Seton, a Scotsman who had been in the English army, appeared on the Scottish camp with some good news. Seton told Bruce and his commanders about the difficulties the English were having out on the carse, how tightly packed they were, about the wet ground, hunger among the rank and file and how the English nobles were still not believing that they were in trouble at all. It was sweet music to the ears of Robert the Bruce.
At the next dawn something odd happened. The Scots came out from the woods up on ridge and came down to the flat lands. The English could clearly see three schiltrons advancing across the open land. What they did not see was the schiltron of Robert the Bruce right behind these three or that one more schiltron was moving on the right of their position. The English did not understand that the enemy was going to close them in to the salient. There were some Scottish bowmen front of the formations but they did little damage since their short bows could not even reach the main English position. Some english archers moved out to counter their actions and for a while arrows flew back and forth on no man's land between the two armies. But all in all, the response of the English was very slow and almost apathetic. According to many writers, this was also Edward's fault. Not so. General alarm was not sounded. That was not his job. There were supposed to be guards to take care of that. His commanders and captains were supposed to be alert and ready for anything. They were not. Perhaps they simply overslept, or perhaps they were not that good at all.
Finally the word reached Edward that the Scots were coming with banners flying, flags fluttering in the wind. Edward came to see what was going on and could only marvel the sight. Scottish host seemed so small compared to his mighty army. There were no wagons, no cavalry, nothing but tightly packed formations of foot soldiers. It seemed almost suicidal, but then again, he had not seen them in action a day before. We do not know what he had been told about the defeats of the previous day, but it is very clear that Edward did not take them so seriously as he should have. Perhaps he had been told some excuses. Perhaps he had received wrong information, maybe he was not told about the moving schiltrons at all. So it seems. He was genuinely surprised to see them advancing across the open land towards him.
- What? Will those Scots fight? he shouted at the people around him. One of them was Sir Ingram Umfraville, himself a Scot.
- Of truth, sir, now I see the most marvellous sight by far that I ever beheld. Scotsmen undertaking to fight against the might of England and to give battle in the hard open land, he said. Perhaps he had his doubts for he proposed that the English army should retreat behind the wagons and wait when the Scots would stop to loot them and then attack. Edward thought that as silly and it was. There was no way his forward troops could withdraw into the mass of men behind the wagons. Besides, king Edward was not going to take any steps backwards now that he finally got his fight.
All of a sudden the schiltrons stopped and all the Scots knelt down. Edward was puzzled and tried to joke about it. Perhaps they had come to do homage and pray for mercy. Sir Umfraville was not in the mood for joking. He had been fighting Robert the Bruce many years and could see that the Scots had come out for a fight.
- You are right. They ask for mercy, but not from you. They cry to God for forgiveness. I tell you one thing for certain, yonder men will win all or die. None shall flee for fear of death, sir Umfraville said to Edward.
When the Scottish schiltrons got up and resumed their advance, Edward knew that the time had come.
- Now so be it, he said. - We shall see presently.
So the guards had not sounded the alarm when the Scots had come out. The king was simply woken up by informing him that, by the way, the enemy is approaching. It seems that most of the nobles were unaware of the situation. It was Edward himself who gave the alarm and ordered call to arms. Younger knights saw a new chance to make history, to ride to the glory, and they were the first to get into their armour and on their horses. The young earl of Gloucester was really hot, the king had accused him of cowardice, and he did not even wait his servants to pull over his coat of arms. He got up on his horse and wanted to charge, not waiting for anyone's orders or command. Hereford told him that as a Constable of England it was his duty to start the action, but young knight was not in the mood for listening to anyone. Gloucester called archers for support and without waiting for them or anyone rode straight at the schiltron front of them. He was impaled on the spears right away. But he was not the only one. Sir Robert Clifford, probably fuming from the loss of the previous contest, rode with the young earl and crashed on the schiltron, only to die. Sir Edward Mauley, the steward of the king's household, also rode to glory and death. So did a Scotsman Sir John Comyn, son of the contender Red Comyn, whose father had been murdered by Robert the Bruce himself. They were not the only ones and the battle had not even started yet with full force.
Seeing his knights being mauled so badly, Edward did something very few English or any other kings ever did. He geared up, put on his helmet and rode in to the worst fighting with his personal retinue. Remember, this was a man with enormous physical strength, he was believed to be one of the strongest men in the realm, and he was big and tall. He had his plate armour on, his shield, his huge war horse under him, his ten feet long lance pointed to the enemy and off he went. The battle was not easing up, it was getting more and more intense by every moment. The Scottish schiltrons did not just stop, they moved. After every attack by English horse, the Scots took a step or two forward, pushing the English back. The more cavalry got up to them, less space there was in front of the schiltrons. Someone ordered archers to move up, but they could not hurt the Scots. They tried to shoot high arching fire, over the cavalry which was between them and the Scots, but the arrows flew over the enemy. They tried to shoot directly but only managed to shoot more Englishmen in the back than the advancing Scots. At some point some commander of the archers understood how serious the situation was and sent archers cross the Pellstream on north side of the salient. It is not known how many they were, perhaps few hundred or couple thousand, but when they opened up on the left flank of the Scots, it began to show. Each archer could shoot ten arrows a minute and one thousand archers meant ten thousand arrows a minute. This could have changed the whole battle. But Robert the Bruce had been thinking about the English archers. When he saw how badly Douglas's schiltron was mauled by the archers, he sent his light cavalry to attack them. Scottish cavalry was no match against the English cavalry but for this job it was more than fit. Those light-footed small horses carried the men across the carse with stunning speed and the English archers panicked and fled, some towards Stirling and some across the Pellstream back to the army. There they were met with blows and mocking. After that the Scottish horse patrolled the north side of the Pellstream and kept the English in the trap, for that it was.
There has been lot of speculation where the actual battle took place and the official version places it in a wrong place. The only place where this battle was physically possible was between the Bannockburn and Pellstream, probably where the gap between the streams is narrowest, some one thousand paces wide. Every account and testimony states this. Most of all, the battle itself proves it. Had it taken place anywhere else, the Scots would have lost. The English would have had more space to use their thousands of archers and foot soldiers, the English cavalry would have been able to ride around the Scottish forces, just like in Falkirk, but that did not happen here. The only explanation is that they did not have room to manoeuvre their troops. And the only reasonable explanation for that is that they were pinned between these two streams. And when the Scots pushed forward, the more compact the English army became. In the reports there are stories how the English cavalry was so tightly packed that the knights could not even swing their swords or maces. It was a huge massive mob compressed into a smaller space by every minute. And all the time more and more riders pushed forward, more men at arms tried to get forward, thousands of men tried to push and push. And on the other side the Scots pushed against this smouldering cauldron of men, horses and weapons.
Edward was in the thick of it. He was right there where the action was fiercest, on the front line. There was not much room, if he tried to turn his horse, it was perhaps impossible because there was another knight right there pushing on. He swung his sword, maybe lost it in the melee, and the Scots stabbed their sharp spears at him from all around. He was grabbed by the enemy and used his war mace to smash their safts, arms and heads. His horse was killed and he fell pell mell at the feet of thousands of men and horses, all stomping and smashing the dead and the wounded alike under them. It is a testimony of his character and physical strength that he could get up, fight his way out from that horrible crush and smashing, and stay alive in that chaos and murder. And what he did when he was safe? Perhaps he drank something to quench his thirst, most likely so, but what he did was get a new horse and get back in to the fight. Sir Roger Northburgh, king's shield-carrier, was lost in action. Scots grabbed the harness of the horse, they grabbed the housings, and Edward swung his heavy mace like a mad man to get them away.
Actually, we can be pretty certain that at this moment he was a complete mad man, crazed by the fighting, a berserker just like all of them, hitting furiously all over, trying to smash foot soldiers with his huge horse. He was in the fiercest fighting from the start of the morning and went back after losing a horse from under him, and kept on fighting like no-one. One could ask if this is the man they call a coward today? Is this the no good man, who was soft and feminine, so much so that he was no good at all? Is this the king they claim was afraid of everyone and unable to make up his mind? Is this the yelping and shrieking fashion stylist from the movie Braveheart? No. This was a true warrior king. Just like in the old days of Vikings and Saxons, when the kings had fought right in the front line of any combat. That is what Edward was on that day, 24th of June, year 1314. But of course, he was not a Viking king nor he was a Saxon king. He should have been a medieval king, leading and directing the course of the battle from behind, not fighting hand to hand combat. That was a mistake and his fault. In his absence, nobody was giving out orders or directing the troops. That was a recipe for a disaster, though it is good to ask where were those experienced commanders and officers who could have given orders in the king's name. Yep. They were missing in action too. So it was also their fault.
All of a sudden the heart of the English army was broken. It happened for two reasons. First of all, just when there was a sort of stalemate on the fighting, thousands more Scots appeared out from no where. The English could not have known that these were so called small folk whom Robert the Bruce had taken off from the field but who now came out expecting the looting. All the English saw was thousands of more Scots joining in. At that moment the king's escort made a quick decision. The king had to be taken to safety. His capture would be a national embarrassment and disgrace and these noble men were determined to avoid that. I personally believe that Edward would have not been taken alive. He would have fought till the end that day. Perhaps some other time he could have surrendered, given up, perhaps cried, but not on this day. He would have gone down fighting. King Edward refused to leave the field. Aymer de Valence grabbed his horse and together with some 500 knights rode out from the field with the king protesting and opposing the idea. Edward himself still wanted to fight but the die was cast. He was taken off by his knights. This broke the heart of the English army. Giles d'Argentan, that valiant and shining example of the knighthood, escorted the king to the safety across the Pellstream and said that he had to return since his honor did not allow him to quit the fight. He did not quit. He rode back in and was killed by the schiltron of Edward Bruce right after.
So here we have it. The famous Battle of Bannockburn, which was called the battle of Stirling at the time. King Edward fought as hard as any man on that day. He put his life on the line. Not just once or twice but for the most of the duration of the battle. He did not flee nor he escaped like so many writers claim. He was taken off by his noble men, the senior knights. He protested, he refused to leave, but they led his horse away. Naturally, when he cooled off, Edward probably understood that those men were right, but at that moment he had wanted to fight on. Considering what a disaster the battle was, how many thousands of English died on that day, it was a catastrophe for the king and his country. And as it was, the responsibility fell on the king. It was all his fault. Everything was his doing and because of the weakness of his character. Really? Where was the earl of Lancaster, hero of so many present-day writers, who could have brought thousands of men into the fight? Norfolk was only fourteen at that time so perhaps his absence is understandable, but what about the others? If they had joined in, the English army would have been much stronger. Perhaps Earl Thomas of Lancaster could have been able to direct the force better? Perhaps seeing the overwhelming combined force of England Robert the Bruce would have been thinking twice of the fight? We know that he had been thinking of retreating just before the battle.
We will never know. Those earls were absent. Robert the Bruce decided to fight. The English lost. Edward II took the blame, despite the fact that all those "experienced" and "more qualified" knights and noble men in his army did nothing during those dramatic and decisive hours during the battle. They had zero impact on the result despite them being there. Instead they did what everybody else was doing: fight. Some were killed, others not. The king did the same. But for some reason he was a coward and fled, and left his army behind, when these other nobles and earls were OK doing the same things. Really?
But we also know one thing for absolute sure: Edward of Caernarfon was not a coward but a true warrior. He proved that on the bloody field of Bannockburn.
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