By the end of the thirteenth century Edward was sixty years old. He remained tall and imposing, and was all the more striking once his dark blond, wavy hair had turned white in his later years. Always the archetypal virile knight, he continued to add to the large royal family when he married Philip IV’s young daughter Margaret of France in 1299, fulfilling his obligations under the peace made in 1297. The seventeen-year-old Margaret became the first French queen of England, and she was a good companion for the energetic king. After their wedding at Canterbury she accompanied him back to Yorkshire, where in June 1300 a son was born. The boy, Thomas of Brotherton, was named after St Thomas Becket, to whom Margaret had prayed during her labour.
A vast household was set up for Thomas and his younger brother Edmund of Woodstock, who was born the following summer. In keeping with the queen’s extravagant love of fashion and jewels, the princes grew up in elaborate finery. As babies they slept in ornate cradles, draped in scarlet and blue. More than fifty servants attended their household, where they ate and lived well, learning the arts of noble life in the most luxurious surroundings that a doting old man who had fathered fourteen times before, and an enthusiastic young woman with a feel for the extravagances of European aristocracy could provide.
But although Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock grew up in luxury and comfort, they were not the most important of the royal children. That honour fell to Edward of Caernarfon, the eldest surviving son of Edward’s first marriage, to Eleanor of Castile.
In 1300, Edward of Caernarfon was sixteen years old: a fine age to begin adopting some of the responsibilities of kingship. For all the trauma of the 1290s, the boy reached the critical stage of early manhood at an easier time than his father had. Peace had been reached with France. Wales, his own principality, was largely subdued, with the ramparts of Master James’s castles beginning to loom over Welsh horizons as a symbol of permanent English mastery.
Among the barons, there was still some discontent, but one major source of friction was smoothed in 1302, when a reconciliation was staged between Edward I and Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk. In its place, a series of highly complex disputes over jurisdictions and privileges developed between King Edward and his erstwhile friend and close adviser Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham, who had been central to the pursuit of the Scottish wars. Edward confiscated Bek’s lands in 1305, and showed that he retained the appetite to dominate any magnate, lay or ecclesiastical, who crossed him.
But Scotland still made trouble. English armies were raised to offer battle in 1300, 1301 and 1303, but the Scots had learned their lesson at Falkirk. They refused to fight, and Edward’s capacity to impose a Welsh-style settlement on the northern kingdom was severely limited. There were successes: the young Robert Bruce, grandson of the claimant in the Great Cause, defected to the English in the winter of 1301 – 2; and William Wallace was captured in 1305, violently executed in London and his tarred head stuck on a spike on London Bridge. But Scotland still refused to submit. A new vision, new leadership and new life was needed at the head of English government for the campaign to move on.
Was Edward of Caernarfon prepared for all this? Certainly the heir to the throne was a strong, athletic young man, who had inherited his father’s capability on horseback. He was also a keen adherent of family mythology. In 1301 he commissioned a picture of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket for Chester castle; the following year he received as a gift an illustrated life of Edward the Confessor.
These signs of respect for Plantagenet traditions were not enough to balance the growing fears that Edward of Caernarfon lacked the strengths that had made his father such a successful king. He was not a man for the tournament, which suggested that Edward I’s love of the front line of military skirmishing had not passed on to his eldest surviving son. There were suspicions around court from 1300 that a young companion known as Piers Gaveston was creating a distraction inappropriate to the bearing of a Plantagenet prince. Gaveston encouraged a streak of brattish impetuosity in the prince that others found hard to bear. In 1305, the young Edward created an argument with the king’s chief minister Walter Langton in which he used such ‘gross and harsh’ words to the treasurer’s face that the king threw him out of the court for several months.
Worrying though these were, nevertheless in 1306 it was clear that Edward of Caernarfon had to be thrust to centre-stage. Uproar broke out once again in the northern kingdom, this time occasioned by the vicious murder of John Comyn, lord of Badenoch and erstwhile Guardian of Scotland, who was stabbed to death in front of the altar at the Franciscan church in Dumfries. The murderer was Robert Bruce. Having turned his coat to join the English in 1302, in March 1306 he had himself crowned King Robert I of Scotland in Scone Abbey. The Scottish wars had begun once again.
As Edward made preparations to go to Scotland for yet another campaign, his health began to fail him. As Robert I was crowned, Edward I lay sick in Winchester. From late spring 1306 he was being transported by litter.
Without delay, Edward of Caernarfon began to receive the accoutrements of power. He was granted Gascony in April 1306. At Whitsun he was knighted at Westminster, where he and 300 other young men were belted in a ceremonial passing of the torch to a new generation of Englishmen. The ceremony was known as the Feast of the Swans, since after the meal Edward had a pair of golden swans brought before the assembly. The king promised in Arthurian fashion that he would not rest until he had avenged himself on Bruce; that once he had been avenged, he would lay down his arms in Britain for ever, and travel to the Holy Land to fight the infidel. Young Edward agreed, swearing a similarly Arthurian oath that he would not sleep two nights in the same place until the Scots had been defeated. All the rest of the knights swore their oaths over the golden swans and, to demonstrate their seriousness, forces under the king’s cousin Aymer de Valence were sent north to assert English justice once again over the rebellious Scots.
As he travelled once more to Scotland, however, Edward I went under a cloud. He knew he was getting old, and it was clear that he had run out of time to finish the job he had begun of uniting Britain under one Crown and ushering in a new Arthurian age. The pursuit of Bruce that followed during 1306 and 1307 was to be among the most savage events of his life, in which earls, bishops and women were imprisoned and executed in cruel and humiliating fashion. Yet it was not enough. While the old king’s men struggled hard without success to bring Bruce to justice, his son and heir Edward continued to disappoint him. Violent arguments raged between them, particularly over the son’s inordinate favouring of Gaveston.
On a Friday afternoon on 7 July 1307, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands, on his way north with another massive army, to attempt to smash Robert Bruce. Death came, rather pathetically, as his servants attempted to lift him out of bed for a meal. He had been ill for many months, and despite a valiant attempt to mount his old warhorse and lead troops out of Carlisle at the end of June, he was physically shattered by a lifetime of warfare, uncompromising politicking and energetic leadership. He was sixty-eight years old, and a shadow of the man he had been even two years before.
His son, meanwhile, was nowhere near the war zone, preferring the comforts of south-eastern England, from where he had been forced to send his friend Gaveston into exile on the king’s orders in May 1307.
In life Edward had been a leopard and a lion, a builder and a hammer. He died with Scotland before him, but in all likelihood with his unfulfilled dreams of Jerusalem in his mind.
In death he passed into the realms of legend, like his hero Arthur. He had done more to enhance the mastery and majesty of the Plantagenet Crown than any king since Henry II. He had established some form of English mastery over much of the British Isles, and defended what remained of the Plantagenet dominions overseas. He had understood and taken direction of the political compact of the late thirteenth century, overhauling England’s law and institutions and regularly purging corrupt officials as the price for continued war finance. He had pandered to popular prejudice in 1290 by expelling the Jews. Although he had driven several of his great barons to the brink of armed insurrection, civil war had been averted and the prestige and position of the Crown had never once slipped to the depths it had plumbed under his father.
Of course, everything came at a cost. Edward had stamped his mark on Britain by nearly bankrupting the country and by exercising kingship with appalling cruelty and prejudice. He left the Crown with crippling debts of around £200,000. Even by the standards of the age, he could be a violent and coarse individual. England groaned and grumbled beneath the financial constraints he had imposed upon her. The Scots and the Welsh brooded darkly against overlordship stamped on them from above. But it would not be long before England, if not her neighbours, grew bitterly to rue the leopard’s passing.