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Lion or Leopard? Apprenticeship in Civil War

A lion by pride and fierceness, he is by inconstancy and changeableness a leopard, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech. When he is in a strait he promises whatever you wish, but as soon as he has escaped he renounces his promise.1

So wrote a contemporary commentator on Edward’s leading (if somewhat inconsistent) role during the political conflict and civil war of his father’s reign – events which would shape Edward’s kingship.

In 1249, at the tender age of ten, Edward became one of the greatest landholders in the King of England’s dominions when he was granted Gascony. However, Simon de Montfort, his uncle by marriage, had been appointed the previous year as king’s lieutenant in Gascony for a seven-year term, and remained in control. In 1252, the grant was reconfirmed, this time with the condition that ‘Edward and his heirs shall in no way alienate the said land … from the king’s crown, to which they shall ever remain united’.² This was intended to reassure the Gascons that the duchy of Aquitaine, of which they were subjects, would remain central to the interests of the English crown. Nevertheless, de Montfort’s abrasive and domineering style of lordship provoked rebellion; Henry III removed him from office (albeit with a substantial pay-off), and in August 1253 led an army to Gascony to restore English authority. According to the contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris, a disconsolate Edward watched his father’s ship until it had sailed over the horizon – disconsolate, probably, because at the age fourteen he was still being denied any part in the affairs of what was nominally his own lordship.3

The following year, Edward became an even wealthier landholder, as a result of his marriage. His bride was Eleanor, half-sister of Alfonso X, King of Castile. As for most medieval princes, Edward’s marriage was determined by the demands of diplomacy. Alfonso was the great-great-grandson of Henry II of England; by virtue of this descent, he laid claim to Gascony. Henry III therefore needed to conciliate him. Aware that his claim was weak, Alfonso was prepared to bargain it away for a marriage alliance. To support the happy couple in a suitable estate, Edward was to be provided with lands worth 15,000 marks (£10,000). To this end, Henry added to the grant of Gascony most of Ireland and extensive lands in Wales, including the ‘Four Cantrefs’, between the Conwy and the Dee, bordering Cheshire. Edward now held virtually all the lands of the kings of England beyond the realm, as well as a generous estate within England itself. Thus lavishly endowed, Edward was finally allowed to sail to Gascony in May 1254. He spent some months there, gaining his first military experience on the only successful expedition his father ever led, to subdue the remaining rebels. It was not until late September that Edward set out for Castile, where he was knighted by Alfonso, and married to the thirteen-year-old Eleanor.

This was a particularly generous endowment for a royal heir; and the chronicler Matthew Paris, never at a loss for a put-down, commented that, after granting away so much to his son, Henry ‘seemed like a mutilated kinglet’.4 Yet, although his landed endowment included the earldom of Chester, Edward was not accorded any formal title. When as a young man Richard (the future Cœur de Lion, Edward’s great-uncle) had been granted Gascony, he was installed as Duke of Aquitaine. However, Edward was formally styled as just the king’s eldest son (for instance, in a charter issued in 1255: ‘Edward, first-born son and heir of Lord Henry, illustrious King of England’⁵). More generally, he was referred to simply as Lord Edward, the honorific ‘lord’ being habitually accorded to anyone with a claim to a degree of social distinction, down to the lowliest knight.

In fact, despite the apparent generosity of the grant – and despite Matthew Paris’s jibe – Henry retained his authority and title over the lands: quite literally, for he continued to use the title ‘King of England, Lord of Ireland and Duke of Aquitaine’. Edward’s authority over his own administration remained firmly constrained. Henry constantly interfered with the appointment of officials, countermanding Edward’s appointments and installing his own candidates. He also interfered in Edward’s government of Gascony, to the point where he and his son were each trying to implement contradictory policies in the lordship. Crucially, as in 1252, the grant was made on condition that ‘no one … should be able to lay any claim or right at any time in any of the said lands and castles, but they should remain in entirety to the kings of England in perpetuity’.6 This restriction was based on the doctrine, developing across Europe, that a king should not grant away crown lands. The grant to Edward did not breach this rule, for in the course of time he himself would become king, and so the lands would automatically return to the crown. However, medieval lordship depended on patronage: a lord was expected to reward his followers. Edward was hampered in fulfilling such expectations, for these restrictions prevented him from rewarding his own followers with lands, while his father’s interference prevented him from rewarding them with offices. This must have been particularly galling considering Henry’s careless extravagance in rewarding his own Lusignan and Savoyard favourites with lands, offices and financial and legal favours. And while most of these grants were not made from crown lands (and so were not in outright breach of the injunction against diminishing the crown estate), many royal rights and dues were delegated or granted away – or, indeed, simply usurped by the beneficiaries of Henry’s selective generosity.

During this time, Edward came increasingly under the influence of his mother, Queen Eleanor, and her Savoyard relatives, in the ever more rancorous factional politics of the royal court. Eleanor promoted the appointment of the high-handed and unscrupulous Sir Geoffrey de Langley as steward of Edward’s Welsh lands. By autumn 1256, Langley had provoked rebellion in the Four Cantrefs, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, ruler of the Welsh principality of Gwynedd, seized the opportunity to invade. Edward lacked the resources to face such a challenge; an expedition led by one of his ministers ended in disaster when his army was annihilated. Matthew Paris opined that ‘Edward was not a little ashamed and hurt by the rebellion and rising of the Welsh, because he was called lord of Wales, but had not been able to restrain their rebelliousness’.7 With their quarrel over Gascony still rankling, Henry initially refused to help his son, enquiring coldly, ‘What is it to me? The land is yours by my grant.’⁸ However, the Welsh victory forced him to react, and in August 1257 he led an expedition into Gwynedd, accompanied by Edward. Typically for Henry’s military exploits, it was badly planned; the army rapidly ran out of supplies and had to make an ignominious withdrawal. The experience at least provided Edward with a valuable object lesson on the importance of logistics in warfare – a lesson which he would take to heart.

The war did little to bring Edward closer to his father. It did, however, draw him away from the influence of the Savoyards, into allegiance with their rivals, his Lusignan uncles; they lent him the money to finance his campaigns, which his perpetually cash-strapped father could not afford. In June 1256, just before his seventeenth birthday, Edward had taken part in his first tournament, and he now began to acquire his own following – a coterie of like-minded young noblemen, enthusiastic tourneyers, trained in war. These included his cousin Henry of Almain and John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, both closely linked with the Lusignans; and English lords of the Welsh Marches such as Hamo le Strange and Roger Clifford, bound to Edward by their shared interests in Wales.

Granted vast estates by his father, but permitted only a subordinate role in governing them, Edward – like so many royal heirs-in-waiting before and after him – had neither real power nor real responsibility. Unrestrained by his father’s government, which was (even by the standards of the time) notoriously lax and weak in punishing the misdeeds of noblemen and their followers, Edward’s aristocratic gang developed a reputation for ill-disciplined and violent rowdiness. In a grim catalogue of their misdeeds, Matthew Paris paraphrased Luke’s Gospel (23:31), commenting: ‘If he does such things when he is green, what can be expected when he is seasoned?’9

In 1258, political crisis erupted. It had been brewing for years, for Henry was seen as naïve, easily led and overly partial to his favourites; and his government was widely regarded as corrupt, arbitrary, partisan, and diplomatically and militarily incompetent to boot. Unable to persuade any parliaments to make grants of taxation, the royal administration had resorted to financial expedients regarded as akin to extortion. Many royal officials were on the take, abusing their power to obstruct any attempt to bring them to account. Those who had the king’s ear were able to get away with murder – quite literally in some cases – and Henry’s Lusignan half-brothers were among the chief culprits.

This all came to a head on 30 April, when a sworn confederation of seven magnates confronted the king at Westminster. Their spokesman, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, demanded that ‘the caitiff and intolerable Poitevins [i.e. the Lusignans], and all foreigners, be put to flight from your face and ours as though from the face of a lion’.10 They also demanded that Henry and Edward swear an oath to accept reform, and put forward a detailed programme, the Provisions of Oxford, at a specially summoned parliament in June.

From the start, the reform movement was entangled with factional conflict and complicated by personal ambitions and animosities. It thus presented Edward with a dilemma: on one side were his half-uncles, the Lusignans; on the other, among the confederation demanding their exile, were his great-uncle Peter of Savoy and his uncle Simon de Montfort, who would emerge as the leader of the reform movement. It is one of the more telling ironies of English history – one apparently lost on contemporaries – that this self-consciously English political movement, brought together in part by a common resentment of foreigners, should be led by a Frenchman. Edward initially sided with the Lusignans, who had bailed him out in his hour of need, and against the reformers, who were bent on shackling the authority of the king. It was only when the Lusignans were forced into exile that he could finally be brought to swear the reformers’ oath.

Meanwhile, as Henry’s problems increased at home, he sought to reduce his difficulties abroad. Relations with France had been improving since the two countries had last come to blows in 1242, and a permanent peace settlement was sealed by the Treaty of Paris, finally ratified in October 1259. Henry agreed to renounce his claims to the lands lost by King John, including Normandy, and to perform homage to the King of France for Gascony. Consequently, Henry was now a peer of the French realm. These terms affected Edward’s inheritance, and were to have a profound effect on his relations with France, for, as a result of the treaty, on his father’s death he too would become a liege of the French crown.

Edward was persuaded to agree to the treaty by May 1260 – albeit with great reluctance; but by this time, he was publicly espousing the cause of the reform movement. In August, he sent a writ to his justice in Cheshire, ordering him to ensure that ‘common justice’ was done in a particular case before him. The preamble reads as a statement of reformist principle:

If, on account of the influence of any person, common justice is denied to any one of our subjects by us or by our bailiffs, we lose the favour both of God and man, and our lordship is belittled. We wish therefore that common justice shall be exhibited to everyone.11

He nailed his colours even more firmly to the mast in October, when a faction calling itself the ‘community of the bachelors of England’¹² appealed to him, complaining of the failure to implement the promised reforms. Edward replied that, although he had sworn his oath to accept reform unwillingly, he was now ready to stand by it, and, indeed, to risk death for the community of the realm. Soon after, he issued a letter recording his oath to give aid and counsel to de Montfort.

Edward may have adopted reforming ideals as a means of throwing off the shackles imposed on him by his father. Certainly, he took advantage of Henry’s departure for France (to finalize the peace agreement) to rearrange his affairs to his own liking, appointing the violent and lawless Sir Roger Leyburn as his steward. Rumours reached Henry that his son was plotting to depose him. However, on his return, he was reconciled with Edward, who was packed off to France, where he devoted himself to the tournament, in the company of the Lusignans. Yet, when he returned to England in the spring of 1261, he briefly allied himself with de Montfort again, before coming back to his father’s side. Once again, he was despatched to the continent, this time to Gascony, where he achieved a measure of success in restoring English authority.

It was these changes of allegiance which earned Edward a reputation for leopard-like inconstancy and untrustworthiness. But his position was an awkward one. As England lurched towards civil war, it became increasingly difficult to find a clear path through the tangled thickets of his conflicting personal and political loyalties. These difficulties were compounded by the parlous state of his finances. It is true that this was in large part down to his own extravagance. But lavish expenditure was necessary to maintain the status befitting the first-born son of the illustrious King of England. Largesse was considered an indispensable virtue in a lord (provided always that it was dispensed with prudence); and given the restrictions on rewarding his followers with lands or office, he had little option but to be open-handed with gifts instead.

These difficulties came to a head when Edward returned to England in the spring of 1262. His steward, Sir Roger Leyburn, was now charged on Henry’s authority with defrauding Edward, and Henry ordered him to reimburse the massive sum of £1,820. Edward had also granted him a manor in Kent; this was now recovered, on the king’s orders, because it had originally been granted to Edward on condition that it should not be alienated. Within a year, Leyburn had joined de Montfort. Worse still, his prosecution only served to estrange many of Edward’s other followers, and John de Warenne, Henry of Almain, Roger Clifford and Hamo le Strange soon followed suit.

However, it is by no means easy to distinguish cause from effect. Leyburn may have been scapegoated because of pre-existing Montfortian sympathies; nor is it clear that Edward was directly involved in the proceedings against him. According to one account, he was himself turned against Leyburn by the malicious reports of his mother, Queen Eleanor, who regarded these followers as a bad influence.13 It is perhaps unsurprising that Edward returned to the continent again, to spend his time (and money) on the tournament circuit, an altogether more congenial arena than the treacherous shifting sands of English politics.

Edward came back from France early in 1263; and this time he brought with him a force of French mercenaries to serve in another campaign against the Welsh. But their presence further alienated his former allies, the Marcher lords, who refused to fight alongside them, and the expedition proved another inglorious failure. Shortly afterwards, Edward found a different use for his mercenaries, pitting them against de Montfort’s supporters, as the country descended into civil war. In this time of crisis, he resorted to the kind of arbitrary expedient which would lead to bitter controversy in the later years of his kingship: in order to pay his men, he seized nearly £1,000 deposited by various individuals for safekeeping at the Templars’ church in London.

By August, Edward had managed to win his followers back to his side, including Leyburn. Two chroniclers record that he achieved this by the straightforward expedient of bribing them; a third suggests that he was simply very persuasive.14 Certainly, Edward showed a willingness to compromise; they were not required to break their oaths to uphold the Provisions of Oxford. He also dismissed his foreign mercenaries, whose unpopularity made them a liability. In fact, his erstwhile followers’ return to the royalist fold may have been prompted by de Montfort’s plans for an alliance with the native Welsh leader, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd – an anathema to Marcher lords such as le Strange.

When negotiations between Henry and the reformers broke down, it was agreed to put the dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX of France. Edward accompanied his father to France, where, in January 1264, Louis delivered a verdict which totally vindicated the royalist position. Unsurprisingly, this proved unacceptable to de Montfort, and open war broke out. Edward took a leading role on his father’s side, and managed to compound his reputation for untrustworthiness; on at least two occasions, when he had been caught at a disadvantage, he made temporary truces with his opponents – only to throw them over and take up arms again as soon as he had extricated himself.

The fighting reached a climax on 14 May 1264, when Henry’s forces met with de Montfort’s at Lewes, in Sussex. Edward, commanding one of the divisions of the royal army, led a fierce attack, routed his opponents and pursued them from the battlefield. Unfortunately, in his absence, the rest of the army was then defeated. When he finally rallied his men and returned, it was to find that his uncle, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, had been captured, and his father was trapped in Lewes Priory. Henry was forced to come to terms, and de Montfort took charge of the government – an overruling of the king’s authority unprecedented in English history. This had grave implications for Edward’s own prospects, not least because the terms were to remain in force ‘also during the reign of Lord Edward when he shall have become king, until a date which shall be settled hereafter’.15 In the meantime, Edward was to be kept as a hostage to ensure Henry’s compliance, and to prevent Edward himself from trying to overturn the settlement.

Edward managed to escape from custody in May 1265, with the connivance of a Marcher ally, Roger Mortimer. Allowed to go out riding with his guards, he insisted on trying out all the horses, to see which was the fastest; once he had thoroughly tired out all but one, he rode off on it, leaving his guards behind. Rapidly rallying support in the Marches, he first defeated the forces led by de Montfort’s son Simon, at Kenilworth; then, using the banners he captured there to disguise his forces, he advanced on de Montfort himself, at Evesham, in Worcestershire. Battle was joined on 4 August, and de Montfort was slaughtered along with hundreds of his supporters. This marked the turning point of the civil war; and the following two years saw Edward take a leading role in mopping up resistance and putting down new risings.

By now, Edward was also playing a leading role in governing the realm; Henry was old and in obviously declining health, and there was a real threat that civil war would break out again. Nevertheless, on 24 June 1268, at Parliament at Northampton, Edward took the cross, along with some of the leading magnates of the realm, including his brother Edmund. Their uncle, Louis IX of France, a seasoned crusader, had taken the cross again in 1267, and encouraged Edward to follow his example. However, crusading was extremely costly and exceedingly risky, and letting both the king’s surviving sons go off on crusade together was considered ill-advised. Consequently, both Henry and the pope initially opposed Edward’s departure, suggesting that Edmund should lead the English crusaders instead. Edward, however, was insistent. And he got his way. Undoubtedly, he was sincerely committed to the religious ideals of crusading. However, he must also have welcomed the opportunity for such an honourable chivalric adventure, in which he could act independently, free from interference by his father, and unconstrained by the hatreds and rancours of English politics.

Edward’s approach to recruiting his crusading army was methodical and businesslike. He sealed indentures (written contracts – see here) with eighteen captains, paying them to raise a total of 225 knights. These captains included his close relatives Edmund, Henry of Almain and William de Valence. The rest were mainly longstanding associates and followers, such as Roger Leyburn and the Marcher lords Roger Clifford and Hamo le Strange. He would also be accompanied by his wife, Eleanor of Castile. Only after protracted negotiations was a tax to pay for this finally agreed, in the Parliament of April 1270 – the first time the laity had made a grant of taxation since 1237. Nevertheless, taxes took months to collect, and in the meantime Edward had to borrow money from Louis IX; in return, he bound himself to be at Aigues-Mortes, on the Mediterranean coast of France, by 15 August, to serve on the crusade ‘as one of the barons of his realm’.¹⁶ Edward had clearly come to accept the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which he had bitterly opposed at the time. That he was now prepared to subordinate himself so publicly to the King of France was a mark of the dramatic improvement in Anglo-French relations.

Unfortunately, by the time Edward eventually reached Aigues-Mortes, at the end of September, Louis’s crusade had long since departed, but for Tunis, rather than the Holy Land. In fact, it had already met with disaster – for Louis had died of dysentery in the North African heat. Edward finally caught up with the expedition only to find that, to his intense frustration, a truce had just been sealed. It was agreed that the crusaders should make their way to Acre, the last major crusader outpost in the Holy Land. However, the French fleet was wrecked in a storm, and in the face of such persistent misfortune, they gave up and went home. Stubbornly, Edward pressed on, eventually reaching Acre in May 1271.

Having come all this way, he found that without the French, his army, though very welcome, was not considered remotely large enough to persuade the defenders of Acre to risk an offensive. Over the next year, Edward led a couple of raids, and built a tower on the city walls. But such exploits achieved little, and in May 1272 Acre’s defenders negotiated a ten-year truce. An Egyptian commentator noted that Edward ‘was not pleased when the peace was made and did not become a party to it’.17 His intransigence threatened to undermine the agreement; and it was probably for this reason that he was knifed by a Muslim assassin, on 17 June, his thirty-third birthday. According to a later – and sadly, probably apocryphal – account, Eleanor saved her husband’s life by sucking poison from his wound. By now, it was obvious even to Edward that there was no prospect of further action, and in September, when he had sufficiently recovered, he set sail for Europe.

In terms of improving the dire position of the remnants of the crusader kingdoms, Edward’s expedition achieved next to nothing. On the other hand, it did not end in outright failure, and his efforts brought him enormous prestige and renown across Christendom, with French troubadours lauding him as ‘the best lance in all the world’.¹⁸ On his death in 1307, a verse elegy lamented: ‘Jerusalem, you have lost the flower of your chivalry.’19 On a more practical level, his crusade gave Edward valuable experience of raising, financing and leading an expedition. And on a personal level, he formed close bonds with many of his companions, who would serve him well throughout his reign – men such as the former Montfortian rebel John de Vescy; the Savoyard Sir Otto de Grandison; and Anthony Bek, future Bishop of Durham. He had also displayed the stubbornness which would characterize the latter part of his reign, pursuing a military campaign with single-minded determination, regardless of changing circumstances and political and diplomatic realities.

The journey home was a long one. Edward had got as far as Sicily when news reached him of the death of his father, Henry III, on 16 November 1272. Back in England, after the king’s funeral in Westminster Abbey:

Gilbert and John, Earl of Gloucester and Earl Warenne, and all the clergy and the people, quickly went to the high altar and swore fealty to Edward, the king’s first-born son, though they were wholly ignorant whether he was still alive.²⁰

They would have to wait for more than eighteen months before they saw their new king.