On the night of 17 June 1239, Eleanor, Queen of England, gave birth to a son. Eleanor’s father was the Count of Provence. The baby’s father, Henry III, was the great-grandson of the Frenchman Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (who, legend had it, was descended from the Devil). Henry was also Duke of Aquitaine, by right of which title he ruled Gascony, a region of south-west France which stretched from Bordeaux to the Spanish border. He would also have been Duke of Normandy – had not his father, King John, lost the duchy in 1205.
His continental ancestry notwithstanding, the boy would become the first King of England since the Conquest to bear an English name. He was named after Edward the Confessor (who died in 1066, and was canonized in 1161). The pious Henry III had a particular reverence for English saints; Edward’s younger brother was named Edmund, after the martyred king of the East Angles (d. 869). But these were not just English saints; they were royal English saints. Despite their French descent, the Plantagenets considered themselves the heirs of the pre-Conquest royal dynasty, as descendants of Matilda, granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, King of England (for a few months) in 1016. And a familial connection to a royal saint was worth emphasizing at a time when the prestige of English kingship had been sadly diminished by the disasters of King John’s reign.
Edward enjoyed close family ties with much of the royalty of Western Christendom. His paternal aunts, Joan and Isabella, were married, respectively, to Alexander II, King of Scots, and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. His uncle, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, would be elected as emperor in 1257 (though his election was disputed). Edward’s closest connections, however, were with France. His maternal aunt, Margaret, was Queen of France, the wife of Louis IX; and he grew up in a court dominated by Frenchmen. Perhaps the most prominent were Henry III’s Lusignan half-brothers: William de Valence, husband of the Countess of Pembroke; and Aymer de Lusignan, bishop of the immensely wealthy see of Winchester. Both owed their advancement entirely to Henry. A rival faction comprised Queen Eleanor’s maternal relatives. Her uncle, Peter, Count of Savoy, had been granted the Yorkshire lordship of Richmond; and his brother Boniface was Archbishop of Canterbury. But the man who would have the greatest impact on Edward’s early career was Simon de Montfort, a younger son of the seigneur of Montfort l’Amaury, near Paris. The family were heirs to the earldom of Leicester; and it was in pursuit of this claim that Simon came to England. He rapidly gained Henry’s favour, and the hand of his sister, Edward’s aunt Eleanor.
Little is known about Edward’s upbringing and education. Despite his English name, he would habitually have spoken French, the language of a court and nobility steeped in French culture. Indeed, French was literally his mother tongue, for Queen Eleanor may never have learned to speak English. He would have learned to read both French and Latin, but would probably not have been taught to write (a separate and mechanical skill, hardly fitting for a king, who could call on clerks to write at his dictation). Certainly, he practised those knightly skills so widely admired in a king; unlike his father, the decidedly unmartial Henry, Edward revelled in the tournament, and was an enthusiastic participant in this dangerous and warlike sport.
Edward’s accomplishments are extolled in a fulsome quill-portrait by the English scholar Nicholas Trevet, writing soon after the king’s death:
He was a man of proven judgement in conducting business, and dedicated to the practice of arms from adolescence, through which he had gained for himself a reputation for knighthood far surpassing all the other rulers of his time across Christendom … His speech was lisping, yet in debate he did not lack for effective and persuasive eloquence.
Trevet also describes Edward’s appearance in considerable detail:
He was of elegant form and commanding stature, standing head and shoulders above the common people. He was adorned with hair which in adolescence turned from a nearly silver colour to a golden yellow; became black when he was a young man; and in old age turned to the whiteness of a swan. He had a wide brow, and regular features, except that the eyelid of the left eye drooped, reflecting his father’s similar appearance … Long of arm in proportion to a supple body, no one was more apt to the use of the sword, which he wielded with a wiry vigour. His belly protruded, and the length of his legs kept him from being unseated by the jumping and galloping of the most spirited horses.1
His unusual height was widely commented on; the sobriquet ‘Longshanks’ (‘Long Legs’) was coined in his lifetime.
Edward would grow up to be a uxorious man. He had some fourteen children by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, of whom six survived into adulthood: five daughters and a son, Edward of Caernarvon (the future Edward II). He also left two surviving sons by his second wife, Margaret of France. He seems not to have maintained a mistress, though one chronicle does credit him with fathering a bastard – John de Botetourt, a prominent knight in his household from the 1280s – but such a moral lapse was far from unusual in a king.
He was notably indulgent to his daughters; they were married off much later than was usual for princesses, and were maintained in a lavish style (which, of course, added to the lustre of Edward’s court). One of them, Mary, was put into a nunnery at the age of six; nevertheless, she was a frequent visitor at court, where Edward regularly paid her gambling debts. As in any family, there were occasional arguments. He is recorded as paying for the repair of a coronet belonging to his daughter Elizabeth, after he had thrown it into a fire in a fit of rage. And he fell out with his daughter Joan, when after the death of her husband, the Earl of Gloucester, she secretly married Sir Ralph de Monthermer, a humble knight of the earl’s household. But Edward soon forgave the couple, and – seeing the advantage of having one of England’s largest noble estates in the hands of a man beholden to him – allowed Ralph to use the title Earl of Gloucester in his wife’s right.
Edward I’s relations with his son Edward proved rather more difficult. In another fit of rage in 1307 (the last year of his life), he is said to have called him a ‘base-born whoreson’2 and to have pulled out hanks of his hair. It is a curious insult for a father to hurl at his son, especially by so beloved a wife, and the story may well have improved with the telling (though certainly the king was much given to swearing: ‘by God’s blood’ was one of his favourite oaths). The argument concerned Piers Gaveston, the son of a Gascon nobleman, attached to the royal household. Edward considered that his son was extravagantly generous to Gaveston; in particular, he had tried to grant him the county of Ponthieu in Picardy, inherited from his mother. Favouritism and injudicious patronage were grievous faults in Edward I’s eyes, for these had been instrumental in shaping the turbulent political climate in which he himself had grown up.