Hanging out with Matilda

When it comes to the Plantagenet boys, certain clichés abound. Bad King John is the wicked softsword who lost all his lands in France and ran away from every fight. Henry III is a pious mediocrity (for pious read ‘dull’) whose fifty-plus years on the throne amount to one big blur in the public imagination. Edward I is the hawkish, hard-driving Hammer of the Scots, more machine than man - yes that is a dorky Star Wars reference - and the most ideal Hollywood foil since Basil Rathbone.

"You've come to Nottingham once too often, pal."

Clichés exist for a reason, of course, and it can be just as tiresome to play the revisionist. There is some truth in the above, but not the whole truth. Others will stand surety for John and Henry, but for my sins I chose to specialise in Longshanks. The result has been quite the study in human behaviour, in which plenty of complete strangers have felt obliged to tell me exactly what they think; not only of Edward, but the deplorable state of my personal morality and intellectual standards. I am grateful, of course.  

Talking of human behaviours - and the point of this post - it may come as no surprise to discover that Edward was just as fallible as anyone else. Peel back the clichés, delve deeper into the records, and a human being emerges. In recent months I have been researching the war against France from 1294-1303, Edward’s most difficult and expensive campaign and a complete misfire according to most historians. The ‘grand flop’, as Michael Prestwich memorably put it.

Well. It wasn’t as floppy as all that, in my humble opinion. No more so than any other Angevin expedition from the days of John to Edward II, and at least Longshanks came away with a result. That’s for another time, but today I wanted to talk about his peculiar behaviour in the aftermath of the campaign.

Kissing cousins...

In October 1297, after several weeks of messy to and fro, Edward struck a truce with his enemy, Philip IV of France. The ceasefire was temporary, and followed by several more rounds of talks over the following months. A final agreement was reached at Tournai in February 1298, nowadays a city in western Belgium near the French border.

It might be assumed these talks were conducted in an atmosphere of tension and barely concealed hostility. Far from it. Edward and Philip were cousins, after all, and the war was essentially a family quarrel. A Dutch eyewitness, Lodewijk van Velthem, describes the negotiations as one long round of glittering feasts and parties, in which Edward spent money like it was going out of style. He staged a particularly magnificent feast at Saint-Bavon, where nobles from all over Europe danced and drank the night away. Edward’s allies, Count Guy of Flanders and the duke of Brabant joined in the festivities, though none could rival the brilliance of Edward’s feasts. 

Edward had certainly come prepared to entertain. The accounts for the Flanders expedition show he brought a well-equipped squadron of minstrels and dancers. Two were from the household of the earl of Lincoln, while one was an acrobatic dancer or saltatrix with the intriguing name of Matilda Makejoy.

It seems Edward was in no hurry to go home, to face angry barons and William Wallace raging in his fury. While the king enjoyed himself over the winter months, counter-operations against Wallace were entrusted to Earl Warenne. Rickety old Warenne hated Scotland - the weather played hell with his joints - and had already lost his dentures at Stirling Bridge. But he was the man on the spot, and had to labour on the Godforsaken northern border while Edward played tag with Mistress Makejoy.

The king’s behaviour at this time drew sharp criticism from contemporaries. Pierre Langtoft, usually an admirer, slammed Edward for:

“Idleness and feigned delay, and long morning’s sleep,

Delight in luxury, and surfeit in the evenings,

Trust in felons, compassion for enemies,

Self-will in act and counsel…”

This is all very reminiscent of Edward’s forebears. Similar charges of sloth and debauchery were aimed at grandpa John, while Henry III was nobody’s idea of a dynamic warrior-king. Yet the Angevins were a complex brood, and not so easy to pigeonhole; John and Henry were capable of astonishing bursts of energy, to the bewilderment of monkish chroniclers such as Matthew Paris.  Like every good little tabloid hack, he wanted everything simple and one-dimensional. Poor Matthew: one can easily picture him sweating and cursing as he desperately struck out the offending bits from his chronicle, after Henry asked to see it.

The same behaviour patterns can be discerned in Edward, who did eventually put his dancers back in their box and return to duty. But fathers live in sons, as Philip Augustus remarks to Henry II in the Lion in Winter, and we might do well to think a little harder about these people. Because they were people, not automatons or walking clichés.

Finding Jerusalem

The Commendiato Lamentabilis in Transitu Magni Regis Edwardi is a lengthy eulogy to Edward I of England, composed shortly after his death in 1307 by John of London. John was a clerk in the service of Edward’s widowed consort, Margaret of France. His text was widely copied and distributed about England at the time, and presents a highly complex image of fourteenth-century kingship.

The text consists of a short summary or preface followed by eight lamentations, proffered respectively by the Pope, the kings of Christendom, Queen Margaret, the prelates, earls and barons, clergy, and general laity, each highlighting different aspects of royal virtue. Edward is presented as the greatest of kings, comparable to Arthur and various Biblical figures. His people, the Pope exhorted, should now grieve as Job had grieved over the loss of his sons, Abraham over the death of Sarah, Judah over the death of Josiah, and Christ over Lazarus.

Edward’s deeds in life, so often portrayed as negative or even wicked in modern times, are shown as proof of his greatness. His crusade, the conquest of Wales, the wars against the Scots and the expulsion of the Jews are all celebrated. The Commendiato is a form of propaganda, of course, but we should not fall into the trap of imagining that Edward’s contemporaries thought as we do. So far as they were concerned, his war-mongering and bigotry - as his more extreme critics might put it - were ideal traits in a king.

The dominant theme is Edward’s piety and desire to rescue the Holy Land. His Christian enemies, especially Philip IV of France, are condemned as enemies of holy church and worse than Saracens. Philip had, after all, prevented Edward from liberating Jerusalem. There is some basis for this hyperbole: Edward did genuinely plan to go on crusade again in 1293, but the outbreak of war with France prevented it.

A depiction of Jerusalem

Interestingly, the Commendiato is echoed by another eulogy for Edward, composed in Anglo-Norman. This repeats the charge against Philip and expresses the hope that, even in death, Edward’s spirit might yet find its way to the Holy Land:

“Place à Dieu en Trinité,/Que vostre fiz en pust conquere/Jerusalem la digne cite,/E passer en la seinte tere!”

The sheer length of the Commendiato is unusual for royal eulogies at this time. One comparison is the panegyric for King Wenceslas II of Bohemia (died 1305), who was praised in similar terms. He, too, was a pious king who had aggressively expanded his territory: not for reasons of mere empire-building, but because he loved justice and hated evil-doers. The peculiar emphasis on mercy and clemency, as necessary adjuncts to brutal wars of conquest, may come across as laughable hypocrisy to us. Yet these were the traits and behaviours required of successful kings.

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Sent home to think again

In 1266, while civil war was still raging in England, a much more obscure conflict blew up on the southern borders of Gascony. This region had long been a bone of contention: the duchy of Gascony was held by the Plantagenet king-dukes of England, but the kingdoms south of the Pyrenees had their own designs on it. In 1244 Theobald ‘the Troubadour’ of Navarre had attempted to invade Gascony, but was sent packing by the English seneschal, Nicholas de Molis.

Almost twenty years later, Theobald’s successor Theobald II decided to have another go. He was handed the opportunity by Henry III’s distractions in England and Wales, though Theobald arguably left it a bit late. The ideal time to invade Gascony was in 1264-5, when Henry was Simon de Montfort’s captive. After the battle of Evesham in August 1265 Henry was a free man again, though he still had plenty of work to do in England.

Over the winter months of 1265, Theobald worked on luring the nobles of southern Gascony away from Henry’s allegiance. Many of these nobles had blood ties to the royal families of Navarre and Castile, and their loyalty to the English regime was always suspect. In December 1265 Theobald gained the homage and fealty of the Count of Comminges and the Count of Astarac. He also intrigued with the ever-troublesome Gaston VII Moncada, Viscount of Béarn. In return for supporting his claim to the county of Bigorre, Theobald persuaded Gaston to betroth his daughter Constance to the king’s brother, Henry the Fat. Henry’s nickname suggests he wasn’t exactly love’s young dream, but then Constance didn’t have much say in the matter.

In the summer of 1266, even as Henry laid siege to Kenilworth in England, the Navarrese launched their invasion. Theobald’s army laid siege to the castle of Lourdes (pictured), strategically placed to guard the seven valleys of the Lavedan in the Pyrenees. Meanwhile his partisans clashed with Henry’s supporters in the sea-port of Bayonne. The lord Arnaud-Guillaume, another Gascon noble with Navarrese connections, opened the gates of his castle of Grammont to the enemy.

 

The situation was rescued by the king of France, Louis IX, whose intervention forced the warring parties to agree to a truce on 19 December. Jean de Grailly, a Savoyard knight in the Lord Edward’s household, also played an important role. Jean had been permitted to settle in Gascony in 1262, and in February 1267 he negotiated a new marriage contract between Constance and Henry of Almaine, the English king’s nephew. This effectively severed Gaston de Béarn’s alliance with Navarre, and sent King Theobald home to think again.

 

 

The would-be King of Scots

Another snippet from my work in progress, this time on the death of Floris V of Holland, would-be King of Scots and unwise recipient of French gold. 

"At the same time Edward took drastic steps to bring Holland back into his coalition. His first response to the defection of Count Floris had been to impose a trade embargo on Holland. In the spring he entered into a conspiracy with certain Dutch noblemen. Floris was unpopular with many of his own nobles, principally Gijsbrecht van Amstel, Hermann van Woerden and Gerard van Velzen. The Duke of Brabant, Floris’s rival for the profits of the English wool trade, was also involved. Van Velzen had some personal grudge against Floris, and within a few years rumours circulated that Floris had raped his wife. It is not possible, on the basis of currently available source evidence, to establish the truth of this accusation. However, the story was mentioned as rumour in Lodewijk van Velthelm’s continuation of Maerlants Spiegel historiael (circa 1315), and manuscript A of a Dutch rhyming chronicle, van de Rijmkroniek (circa 1330-1340).

The conspiracy against Floris was organised by Jan de Cuyck, an important envoy and diplomat in English service. Their plan was to kidnap Floris and smuggle him over to England, where he would be forced to break the alliance with Philip or resign his title to his anglophile son, John. In June 1296 Floris was captured by the conspirators while out hunting and imprisoned at Muiden castle, near Amsterdam. News quickly spread of the incident. On 27 June, when they tried to move their captive to a safer place, the conspirators were confronted by an angry mob. They panicked, stabbed Floris multiple times and left him to die in a ditch.

Edward’s involvement in the kidnapping is scarcely beyond doubt. The organiser, Jan de Cuyck, was in receipt of a payment of 200 l.t. per year from the king, and Edward stood to profit from Floris’s removal. The murder appears to have been a mistake, done on the spur of the moment, but it served Edward’s purpose just as well. He had the dead man’s son, John, in his custody, and within a few months would use him to renew the Dutch alliance."