The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

Edward was thirty-three years old at the time of his father’s death. He had been for eighteen years a married man; his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was the sister of that Alfonso the Wise who had been the competitor of Richard of Cornwall for the imperial crown, a noble and faithful lady. He himself was a tall, strong man, an adept in all knightly accomplishments, brave to rashness, and now skilled and experienced in war. His crusade had not been a successful one. Late in starting, he had reached the African coast in the autumn of 1270, to find Lewis IX. dead, and the hopes of the pilgrims already waning. After spending the winter in Sicily, he had, in May, 1271, gone on, like Richard Cœur de Lion, to Acre, and had spent more than a year in an attempt to retrieve the fortunes of the Frank kingdom. It was quite in vain. Mutual jealousies and universal mistrust had eaten out the heart of the Crusaders. A few dashing exploits, and a few almost wanton inroads, could do little more than exasperate the hatred of the Moslem. Edward played his part as a knight, but he had neither force nor opportunity to do more. Still he made himself feared; and an attempt at assassination in June, 1272, warned him of the risks he was running. An emissary of the Sultan Bibars struck him in his tent. The weapon was poisoned, it was said, and the story was told and believed, that his faithful queen, who had followed him in his pilgrimage, had sucked the poison from the wound. Two months later he sailed homewards, thoroughly disappointed, and heavily burdened with the cost of his expedition. He was slowly proceeding on his way, when, at Capua, in January, 1273, he received the news of his father’s death and of the death of his eldest son John, a boy of six. Quickening his pace, he went on at once to Rome, visited the Pope at Orvieto, and crossed by the Mont Cenis pass to Lyons; thence to Paris, where he did homage to King Philip III. for his French provinces; and then into Gascony, where he was delayed for another year before he could come to England to be crowned.

Administration
of the
kingdom
during
Edward’s
absence.

England was still at rest. The royal dignity of Henry III. passed on at once to his son. There was no formal interregnum such as had always occurred before, between the death of the old king and the coronation of the new. Edward was proclaimed without being waited for. The king’s peace was maintained by the royal council, and the three ministers to whom, before he started, he had committed the defence of his private interests, undertook to govern England in his stead. Archbishop Giffard of York, Roger Mortimer, the great lord of the Welsh Marches, who had helped him so well in 1265, and Robert Burnell, his confidential chaplain, the man who was to be his prime minister during half his reign, acted as regents in his place, and were at once recognised by the baronage and nation as his agents. Competitor there was none. Gilbert of Gloucester, the brilliant and somewhat erratic earl who had tried to act as arbiter in the last scenes of the barons’ war, and had lost the confidence of both parties, had sworn to King Henry on his death-bed that he would maintain the rights of Edward. He, as the first baron of the kingdom, took the oath of allegiance to the new king at his father’s funeral. Early in 1273 a great assembly of all estates of the realm, an assembly not only of barons and prelates, but of knightly representatives of the shires and citizens deputed by every city, met at Westminster, and bound themselves by the same oath. One or two faint reports of local tumult served only to mark the profoundness of the general peace. The government worked in quiet; even money was raised without much murmuring.

Coronation of
Edward.

On August 2, 1274, Edward I. landed at Dover, and on the 19th he was crowned. At once the work of his reign began. He was a warrior and a lawgiver by nature, education, and opportunity; the exigencies of the time made him a financier also; and the occasion speedily arose for him to display his powers in each capacity.

Turbulence of
the Welsh
princes.

The princes of North Wales had long been a sharp thorn in the side of England. Neither force nor friendly alliance had been strong enough to keep them quiet. The love of independence, the inheritance of proud, although illusory traditions, the attachment of an affectionate people, the possession of remote mountain fastnesses, the antipathy as strongly felt towards the Norman as it had been towards the Saxon, combined to prevent either peace or submission. All the other races had combined on the soil of Britain, the Welsh would not. The demands of feudal homage made by the kings of England were evaded or repudiated; the intermarriages, by which Henry II. and John had tried to help on a national agreement had in every case failed. In every internal difficulty of English politics the Welsh princes had done their best to embarrass the action of the kings; they had intrigued with every aspirant for power, had been in league with every rebel. At the beginning of the reign of Henry III. they had conspired with Falkes de Breauté against the Marshalls; at the close of it they were in intimate alliance with the Montforts. Not only so; the necessity of guarding the Welsh border had caused the English kings to found on the March a number of feudal lordships, which were privileged to exercise almost sovereign jurisdictions, and exempted from the common operations of the English law. The Mortimers at Chirk and Wigmore, the Bohuns at Hereford and Brecon, the Marshalls at Pembroke, and the Clares in Glamorgan, were out of the reach of the king, and often turned against one another the arms which had been given them to overawe the Welsh. There they had an open ground for combats which they could not wage where English law was strong. So long as the Welsh were left free to rebel the Marchers must be left free to fight.

Rebellion of
Llewelyn,
Prince of
North Wales,
and his brother
David.

Edward had long known this. He too had been put in the position of a Marcher. His father had given him, in 1254, a great territory in Wales, between Dee and Conway, and into it he had tried, with signal ill success, to introduce English laws. He probably knew that one of his greatest tasks, when he came to the crown, would be this. And he had not to wait for his opportunity. Llewelyn, the prince of North Wales, had, by the assistance given to Simon de Montfort earned as his reward a recognition of his independence, subject only to the ancient feudal obligations. All the advantages won during the early years of Henry III. had been thus surrendered. When the tide turned Llewelyn had done homage to Henry; but when he was invited, in 1273, to perform the usual service to the new king, he refused; and again, in 1274 and 1275, he evaded the royal summons. In 1276, under the joint pressure of excommunication and a great army which Edward brought against him, he made a formal submission; performed the homage, and received, as a pledge of amity the hand of Eleanor de Montfort in marriage. But Eleanor, although she was Edward’s cousin, was Earl Simon’s daughter, and scarcely qualified to be a peacemaker. Another adviser of rebellion was found in Llewelyn’s brother David, who had hitherto taken part with the English, and had received special favors and promotion from Edward himself. The reconciliation of Edward and Llewelyn had put an end to his hopes of supplanting his brother, and he had drawn closer to him, in order to entangle him in a rebellion for which he was always ready. The peace made in 1277 lasted about four years. In 1282 the brothers rose, seized the border castles of Hawarden, Flint, and Rhuddlan, and captured the Justiciar of Wales, Roger Clifford. Edward saw then that his time was come. He marched into North Wales, carrying with him the courts of law and the exchequer, and transferring the seat of government for the time to Shrewsbury. He left nothing undone that might give the expedition the character of a national effort. He collected forces on all sides; he assembled the estates of the realm, clergy, lords, and commons, and prevailed on them to furnish liberal supplies; he obtained sentence of excommunication from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Welsh made a brave defence, and, had it not been for the almost accidental capture and murder of Llewelyn in December, England might have found the task too hard for her. The death of Llewelyn, however, and the capture of David in the following June, deprived the Welsh of their leaders, and they submitted.

Conquest of
Wales.