Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II

“I am not bound to keep my word with a traitor,” said Henry—words which put Simon into a passion, and he replied:

“It is a lie! and whoever said so, I will compel to eat his words. Who can believe you to be a Christian prince? Do you ever go to confession?”

“A Christian I am; I have often been to confession.”

“Vain confession, without repentance and reparation!”

“I repent of nothing so much,” cried the King, “as having fattened one who has so little gratitude and so much ill manners.”

The friends of Simon checked further reply. Henry’s wrath was like straw on fire; but he forgot that by it he lighted a flame more enduring, though at first less visible; and he was vexed when the offended Montfort removed his eldest son, Henry, from court. However, Gascony was wanted as a government for Prince Edward, who was only thirteen years old, and therefore Leicester was forced to resign, though he would not do so without full compensation, such as Henry was ill able to afford. Yet, affronted as he was, when the office of high steward of France was offered to him, he would not accept it, by the advice of Grosteste, lest he should seem unfaithful to his master.

To carry Prince Edward to Guienne was at present Henry’s favorite scheme, and for this end every means of raising money was resorted to. The King met the parliament, as he had done often before, with entreaties for a grant to enable him to go and redeem the Holy Sepulchre; but this had been far too frequently tried, and was unnoticed; so he next tried the bribe of confirmation of the charters. All the assembly went to Westminster Abbey, the bishops and abbots carrying tapers, and there the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced sentence of excommunication against whosoever should infringe these charters. As he spoke, the tapers were dashed at once on the ground, with the words, “May his soul who incurs this sentence be thus extinguished for ever!” while Henry added, “So help me God! I will keep these charters, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, as I am a king crowned and anointed.”

Yet a few days after, when the parliament was dismissed and the money in his hands, the temptation to transgress the charter again occurred. His conscience was still overawed, and he hesitated; but his uncles and half-brothers bade him remember that, while he kept his oath, he was but the shadow of a King, and that, should he scruple, three hundred marks sent to the Pope would purchase his dispensation and discharge him of guilt.

There was real need in Guienne; for Alfonso, King of Castile, had set up a claim to that county, and threatened to invade it. Arriving there, Henry gained some advantages, and concluded a peace, which was to be sealed by a marriage between Edward of England and Dona Leonor of Castile, Alfonso’s sister. Young as they were—Edward only fourteen and Leonor still younger—they were at once brought to Burgos and there united; after which a tournament was held, and the prince received knighthood from the sword of Alfonso. Bringing his bride back to his father at Bordeaux, Edward was received with a full display of luxury; all Henry’s money, and more too, having been laid out on the banquetting, so that the King himself stood aghast, and dismally answered one of his English guests, “Say no more! What would they think of it in England?”

The young bride, Eleanor, as the English called her, was brought to England, while Edward remained in Guienne, sometimes visiting the French court, and going wherever tournaments or knightly exercises invited him. He was far better thus employed, and in intercourse with St. Louis, than in the miserable quarrels, expedients, and perplexities, at home; and thus he grew up generous, chivalrous, and devout, his whole character strongly influenced by the example he had seen at Paris. His features were fair, and of the noblest cast, perfectly regular, and only blemished by a slight trace of his father’s drooping eyelid; the expression full of fire and sweetness, though at times somewhat stern. His height exceeded that of any man in England, and his strength was in proportion; he was perfectly skilled in all martial exercises, and we are told that he could leap into the saddle when in full armor without putting his hand on it.

All the wealth in the family had always been in the hands of Prince Richard, Earl of Cornwall, whose tin mines yielded such a revenue that he was esteemed the richest prince in Europe. He had wisely refused the Pope’s offer of the crown of Sicily; but at this time, the death of Friedrich II., and of his son Conrad, leaving vacant the imperial crown, he was so far allured by it, that he set off to offer himself as a candidate, carrying with him thirty-two wagons, each drawn by eight horses, and laden with a hogshead of gold. Judiciously distributed, it purchased his election by the Archbishop of Mainz and some of the electors, while others gave their votes to Alfonso of Castile, whose offers had been also considerable.

Alfonso thenceforth was called El Emperador, and Richard was generally known as King of the Romans, and his son as Henry d’Almayne, or of Germany; but the Germans took no notice of either claimant beyond taking their presents, and the only consequence was, that Richard was a poorer man, and that his brother, the King, was ruined.

It was in 1258, while Richard was gone to be crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, that the long-gathering peril began to burst. There had been a severe famine, which added to the general discontent; and though Richard sent home forty vessels laden with corn, his absence was severely felt, and his mediation was missed. The King saw Simon de Montfort in conference with the nobles, and feared the consequences. Once, when overtaken by a sudden storm on his way to the Tower, Henry was forced to take refuge at Durham House, then the abode of the Earl, who came down to meet him, bidding him not to be alarmed, as the storm was over.

“Much as I dread thunder and lightning, I fear thee more than all,” said the poor King.

“My Lord,” said Montfort, “you have no need to dread your only true friend, who would save you from the destruction your false councillors are preparing for you.”

These words were better understood when, on the 2d of May, Henry, on going to meet his parliament at Westminster, found all his Barons sheathed in full armor, and their swords drawn. These they laid aside on his entrance, but when he demanded, “What means this? Am I your prisoner?” Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, a proud, violent man, who had once before given the lie to the King, answered:

“Not so, sir; but your love of foreigners, and your own extravagance, have brought great misery on the realm. We therefore demand that the powers of government be entrusted to a committee of Barons and Prelates, who may correct abuses and enact sound laws.”

William de Valence, one of Henry’s half-brothers, took upon him to reply, and high words passed between him and the Earl of Leicester; but the royal party were overmatched, and were obliged to consent to give a commission to reform the state to twenty-four persons, half from the King’s council, and half to be chosen by the Barons themselves, in a parliament to be held at Oxford.

This meeting, noted in history as the Mad Parliament, commenced on the 11th of June, and the Barons brought to it their bands of armed retainers, so as to overpower all resistance. The regulations were made entirely at their will, and the chief were thus: That parliaments should assemble thrice a year, that four knights from each county should lay before them every grievance, and that they should overlook all the accounts of the Chancellor and Treasurer. For the next twelve years this committee were to take to themselves the power of disposing of the government of the royal castles, of revoking any grant made without their consent, and of forbidding the great seal to be affixed to any charter—the same species of restraint as that under which King John had been placed at Runnymede.

The King’s half-brothers would not yield up the castles in their possession, but Montfort told William de Valence that he would have them, or his head, and brought charges against them before the council, which so alarmed them, that they all fled to Wolvesham Castle, belonging to Aymar, as intended Bishop of Winchester. Thither the Barons pursued them, and, making them prisoners, sent them out of the realm, with only six thousand marks in their possession.

Their defeat proved how vain was resistance, and the whole royal family were obliged to swear to observe the Acts of Oxford, as they were called. The King’s nephew, Henry d’Almayne, protested that they were of no force in the absence of his father, the King of the Romans. “Let your father look to himself,” said Leicester. “If he refuse to act with the Barons of England, not a foot of land shall he have in the whole realm.”

And accordingly, on his return, Richard was not allowed to land till he had promised to take the oath, which he did at Dover, in the presence of the King and Barons.

Queen Eleanor expressed herself petulantly as to the oath, and Prince Edward was scarcely persuaded to take it; but at length he was forced to yield, and having done so, retired from the kingdom in grief and vexation; for, having sworn it, he meant to abide by it, not being as well accustomed to oaths and dispensations as his father, who, of course, quickly sent to Rome for absolution.

On the other hand, when the twenty-four had to swear to it, the most backward to do so was Simon de Montfort himself, who probably discerned that the pledge was likely to be a mere mockery. When he at length consented, it was with the words, “By the arm of St. James, though I take this oath, the last, and by compulsion, yet I will so observe it that none shall be able to impeach me.”

Prince Edward might have said the same; he even incurred the displeasure of his mother for refusing to elude or transgress his oath, and was for a time accused of having joined the Barons’ party. Meanwhile, the King and Queen were constantly and needlessly affronting their subjects. “What! are you so bold with me, Sir Earl?” said the King to Roger Bigod. “Do you not know I could issue my royal warrant for threshing out all your corn?”

“Ay,” returned the Earl; “and could not I send you the heads of the threshers?”

The hot-tempered, light-minded Queen Eleanor’s open contempt of the English drew upon her such hatred, that vituperative ballads were made on her, some of which have come down to our times. One attacks even her virtue as a wife, and another is entitled a “Warning against Pride, being the Fall of Queen Eleanor, who for her pride sank into the earth at Charing Cross, and rose again at Queenhithe, after killing the Lady Mayoress.” Unfortunately, popular inaccuracy has imputed her errors to the gentle Eleanor of Castile, her daughter-in-law, and thus the ballad calls her wife to Edward I., instead of Henry III. “A Spanish dame,” was a term that might fairly be applied to the Provençal Eleanor, whose language was nearly akin to Spanish, and whose luxury was sufficient to lead to the accusation of

  “Bringing in fashions strange and new,  With golden garments bright;”

And that

  “The wheat, that daily made her bread  Was bolted twenty times:  The food that fed this stately dame  Was boiled in costly wines.  The water that did spring from ground  She would not touch at all,  But washed her hands with dew of heaven  That on sweet roses fall.  She bathed her body many a time  In fountains filled with milk,  And every day did change attire  In costly Median silk.”

Eleanor of Provence, when “drest in her brief authority” as Lady Chancellor, had arbitrarily imprisoned the Lord Mayor, and this the ballad converts into a persecution of the unfortunate Lady Mayoress,

  whom she sent”—into Wales with speed,  And kept her secret there,  And used her still more cruelly  Than ever man did bear.  She mude her wash, she made her starch,  She made her drudge alway,  She made her nurse up children small,  And labor night and day,”and in conclusion slew her by means of two snakes.

Afterward her coach stood still in London, and could not move, when she was accused of the crime, and, denying it, sunk into the ground, and rose again at Queenhithe; after which she languished for twenty days, and made full confession of her sins!

The real disaster that befell Queen Eleanor in London was an attack by the mob as she was going down the Thames in her barge. She was pelted with rotten eggs, sheeps’ bones, and all kinds of offal, with loud cries of “Drown the witch!” and at length even stones and beams from some houses building on the bank assailed her, and she was forced, to return in speed to the Tower.

Prince Edward was not always blameless. He had been employed against the Welsh, and after the campaign, not knowing whither to turn for means of paying his troops, he broke into the chests of the Knights Templars, to whom his mother’s jewels had been pledged, and carried off not only these, but much property besides that had been committed to the keeping of the order by other parties.

As to the unfortunate Jews, each party considered them fair game; and there were frequent attacks upon them, and frightful massacres, when the choice of death or of Christianity was offered to them, and the Barons seized their treasures. The curses of Deuteronomy, of the trembling heart, and the uncertainty of life and possession, were indeed fulfilled on the unhappy race.

For four years the committee of twenty-four held their power with few fluctuations, until matters were driven to extremity by a proposal to render the present state of things permanent, and at the same time by an attack on the property of the moderate and popular King of the Romans on the part of the Barons.

On this the royal party determined to submit the dispute to the arbitration of the King of France, whose wise and fair judgments were so universally famed that the Barons readily consented, with the exception of Leicester, who was convinced that Louis would incline to the side of Henry, both as fellow-king and as brother-in-law, and therefore refused to attend the conference, or to consider himself bound by its decisions.

The judgment of Louis IX, was perfectly just and moderate. He declared that Magna Charta was indeed binding on the King of England, and that he had no right to transgress it; but that the coercion in which he had been placed by the Mad Parliament was illegal, and that the Acts of Oxford were null, since no subjects had a right to deprive their sovereign of the custody of his castles, nor of the choice of his ministers.

As Montfort had foreseen, the Barons would not accept this decision, and its sole effect was to release Prince Edward’s conscience, and open the way to civil war. The two Eleanors, of Provence and Castile, were left under the charge of St. Louis; and their namesakes of the other party, the Countess of Leicester and her daughter, the Damoiselle de Montfort, fortified themselves in their castle of Kenilworth, while arms were taken up on either side.

Leicester, who held that the guilt of perjury rested with the other party, and who had with him the clergy opposed to the Italian usurpation, deemed it a holy war, and marked the breasts of his soldiers with white crosses, imagining himself the champion of the truth, as he had been taught to think himself, when bearing his first arms under his father in what was esteemed the Provençal Crusade. Alas, when honorable and devout minds have the fine edge of conscience blunted! Thus did the gallant and beloved “Sir Simon the Righteous” become a traitor and a rebel.

The scholars of Oxford, who had not at all forgotten their quarrel with king and legate, came out en masse under the banner of the University (for once disloyal), to join Leicester’s second son, Simon, who was collecting a body of troops to lead to his father in London.

Prince Edward, however, attacked them at Northampton, and effected a breach in the wall. Young Montfort attempted a desperate sally, but was defeated, and his life only saved by his cousin, the Prince, who extricated him from beneath his fallen steed, and made him prisoner.

The King and Prince next marched to seize the Cinque Ports, and, while in Sussex, Leicester followed them, and came up with them in a hollow valley near Lewes. Here, with a sort of satire, the Barons sent to offer the King 30,000 marks if he would make peace, and a like sum to the King of the Romans if he would bring him to terms. The proposals were angrily repelled by Edward, who, with accusations of his godfather as traitor and “foi menti,” sent him a personal challenge.

Leicester spent the night in prayer, and in early morning knighted Gilbert de Clare, the young Earl of Gloucester, who was at this time enthusiastically attached to him. The battle then began, each army being arrayed in three divisions. Prince Edward and Henry d’Almayne were opposed to their two cousins, Henry and Guy de Montfort, with the bands from London. Mindful of the outrage that his mother had sustained from the citizens, Edward charged them furiously, and pursued them with great slaughter, never drawing rein till he reached Croydon.

But, as they rode back to Lewes, the impetuous young soldiers beheld a sight very different from their triumphant anticipations. The field was scattered with the corpses of the Royalists, and the white-crossed troops of the Barons were closely gathered round the castle and priory of Lewes. In dismay, William and Guy de Lusignan turned their horses, and rode off to embark at Pevensey. Seven hundred men followed them, and Edward and Henry were left with the sole support of Roger Mortimer, a Welsh-border friend of the former, with his followers.

The hot pursuit of the fugitive plunderers had ruined the day. Montfort had concentrated his forces, and had totally routed the two kings; Richard was already his prisoner, and Henry had no chance of holding out in the priory. The princes undauntedly strove to collect their shattered forces, and break through to his rescue, but were forced to desist by a message that, on their first attack, the head of the King of the Romans should be struck off.

To save his life, the two cousins therefore agreed to a treaty called the Mise of Lewes, May 15th, 1264, by which they gave themselves up to the Barons as hostages for their fathers, stipulating that the matter at issue should be decided by deputies from the King of France, and that the prisoners on either side should be set free.

Now began the great trial of Simon de Montfort—that of power and prosperity—and he failed under it. Whatever might have been his first intentions in taking up arms, he now proved himself unwilling to lay aside the authority placed in his hands, even though he violated his oaths in maintaining it, and incurred the sentence of excommunication which the Pope launched against him. But when the most saintly English bishops of their own time had died under it, it lost its power on the conscience.

No measures were taken for the French arbitration, nor were the prisoners set free. The King of the Romans was confined at Kenilworth, and the two young princes at Dover, the custody of which castle was committed to one of their cousins, the Montforts, who allowed them no amusement but the companionship of Thomas de Clare, the young brother of the Earl of Gloucester. King Henry was indeed nominally at liberty, but watched perpetually by Leicester’s guards, and not allowed to take a step or to write a letter without his superintendence; and when the Mayor of London swore fealty to him, it was with the words, “As long as he was good to them.” Edward was made, on promise of liberation, to swear to terms far harder than even the Acts of Oxford, and when the bitter oath had been taken, he was pronounced at full liberty, and then carried off, under as close a guard as ever, to Wallingford Castle.

Queen Eleanor was acting with great spirit abroad, gathering money and collecting troops in hopes of better times, and seven knights still held out Bristol for the King. They made a sudden expedition to Wallingford, in hopes of rescuing the Prince; but the garrison were on the alert, and called out to them that, if they wanted the prince, they might have him, but only tied hand and foot, and shot from a mangonel; and Edward himself, appearing on the walls, declared that, if they wished to save his life, they must retreat.

This violent threat went beyond the instructions of Leicester, who removed his nephew from the keeping of this garrison, and placed him at Kenilworth.

But Simon was made to feel that he had little control over his followers, and especially over his wild sons, who had learnt no respect to authority at all, and outran in their violence even the doings of the Lusignan family. Henry de Montfort seized all the wool in England, which was sold for his profit, while Simon and Guy fitted out a fleet and plundered the vessels in the Channel, without distinction of English or foreigners, and thus turned aside the popularity which Leicester had hitherto enjoyed in London. The Barons, too, already discontented at having only changed their masters, so as to have the mighty Montfort over them instead of the weak Plantagenet, could not bear with the additional lawlessness of sons who made themselves vile without restraint. A violent quarrel arose between these youths and Earl Gilbert de Clare, who challenged them to a joust at Dunstable; but their father, dreading fatal consequences, forbade it, and Gloucester retired to his estates in high displeasure.

Here he was joined by his brother Thomas, who came full of descriptions of the princely courtesy and sweetness of manner of the royal Edward, which contrasted so strongly with the presumption of his upstart cousins that the young Earl was brought over to concert measures with the Prince’s friend, Roger Mortimer.

In order to overawe the Welsh borderers, who were much attached to Edward, Simon had carried his captive to Hereford Castle, whither Thomas de Clare now returned as his attendant, taking with him a noble steed, provided by Mortimer, with a message that his friends would be on the alert to receive him at a certain spot.

Edward mounted his horse, rode out with his guard, set them to race, and looked on as umpire, till, their steeds being duly tired, he galloped off, and the last they saw of him was far in advance meeting with a party of spears, beneath the pennon of Mortimer. And now the Earl of Leicester experienced that “success but signifies vicissitude.” After his reign of one year, his fall was rapid.

The Earl of Gloucester had at once joined Edward, and in vain did Leicester use the King’s name in calling on the military tenants of the Crown; only a small proportion of his old partisans came to his aid, and he remained on the banks of the Severn, waiting to be joined by his son Simon, who had been besieging Pevensey, but now marched to his aid.

On his way, young Simon summoned Winchester, but was refused admittance. However, the treacherous monks of St. Swithin’s let in his forces through a window of their convent on the wall, and the city was horribly sacked, especially the Jewry. Afterward he went to the family castle of Kenilworth, where he awaited orders from his father. A woman named Margot informed the Prince that it was the habit of Simon and his knights to sleep outside the walls, for the convenience of bathing in the summer mornings; and Edward, suddenly making a night-march, fell upon them while in the very act, and took most of them prisoners, Simon just escaping into the castle with his pages in their shirts and drawers, all his baggage and treasures being taken.

Ignorant of this disaster, the Earl of Leicester proceeded, in hopes of effecting a junction with his son, and had just arrived at Evesham when banners were seen in the distance. Nicholas, his barber, who pretended to have some knowledge of heraldry, declared that they belonged to Sir Simon’s troops; but the Earl, not fully satisfied, bade him mount the church-steeple and look from thence. The affrighted barber recognized the Lions of England, the red chevrons of De Clare, the azure bars of Mortimer, waving over a forest of lances.

“We are dead men, my Lord,” he said, as he descended.

And truly, when the Earl beheld the marshalling of the hostile array, he could not help exclaiming, “They have learnt this style from me! Now God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are the Prince’s!”