Parliament met at Salisbury in February 1297. It met to face a king who was determined that after years of delay and distraction, his war against Philip IV of France should finally be realized. That took money, and money took consensus. ‘What touches all should be approved by all’ was Edward’s new motto when summoning gatherings of his political community. And what Edward demanded at parliaments now really did touch everyone in England.
The French situation required immediate action. After several years of diplomacy, Edward had stitched together a coalition of northern allies, which had been completed the previous month when the twelve-year-old count of Holland was married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth while the court was in Ipswich. Holland joined the king of Germany, various Burgundian lords and the counts of Guelders and Flanders in coalition, and they could not begin their action against Philip too soon. Gascony was in terrible danger, and on 30 January English forces under the earl of Lincoln had suffered a disastrous ambush and defeat between Bayonne and Bonnegarde. Urgent relief was needed.
Unfortunately for Edward the parliamentary gathering at Salisbury was hardly one of a realm hungry for further glory to match that achieved in Scotland. Rather, the mood he encountered was one of anger, exasperation and stubborn refusal to cooperate in funding yet another expensive war.
England was racked by disaffection. Every estate of the country had suffered Edward’s onerous demands for war funding, and by the late 1290s spending had run wild. Even before the Scottish campaign was accounted for, recent war costs had amounted to something in the region of £250,000. Edward had incurred debts of at least £75,000 just in assembling his northern coalition on the Continent; the actual business of campaigning in France and Gascony was going to cost far more.
Edward’s taxes had therefore been regular and extremely severe. Massive customs duties known popularly as the maltote (bad toll) were levied on wool, driving down the price paid by merchants to ordinary farmers and suppliers. Two heavy taxes had been raised in 1295 and 1296. Since 1294 royal officials had been seizing food and equipment in a programme of forced requisition known as the prise (seizure). ‘Many were the oppressions inflicted on the people of the land,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. The financial exactions had hit the whole country hard. The clergy had been first to refuse to cooperate any further.
Since the death of Archbishop Pecham of Canterbury on 8 December 1292, the English Church had been led by a new primate: Robert Winchelsea, a top-ranking intellectual and academic with a temper and sharpness of mind to match Edward’s own. Using as his justification a papal bull issued by Pope Boniface VIII, which condemned kings who taxed the Church, Winchelsea led the English clergy into outright refusal to grant Edward any financial assistance for his French campaigns. Edward flew into a fury, declared every member of the English clergy outlawed and sent his officers across the country to seize their temporal property. ‘No justice was dispensed to the clergy … and clerks suffered many wrongs,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. ‘The religious were also robbed of their horses on the king’s highway and got no justice until they redeemed themselves and got the king’s protection.’ It was a minor victory for Edward, but soon he was bedevilled by further resistance.
At the Salisbury parliament the king asked his magnates to go and fight in Gascony while he led the campaign in northern France. His brother Edmund, who had led an English expedition to defend the southern duchy in early 1296, had died the previous summer. He intended to attack Philip from two points, and this necessarily required a division of his forces. It was a tactic that had been suggested twice before, in 1294 and 1295, and on both occasions there had been pockets of discontent or refusal. Barons and knights could be persuaded to fight alongside the king, but to be sent to fight in a foreign land on their own was felt to be beyond both the call of duty and their legal obligation. In 1297 Edward was faced with mass desertion. Led by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, the magnates put it to him that he had no right to demand feudal military service of them in Gascony when he himself intended to fight in northern France. Bigod’s argument was particularly pertinent, since, as he pointed out, in his office of earl marshal he was obliged to serve alongside the king, but not independently of him. Walter of Guisborough recounted their exchange:
‘“With you will I gladly go, O King, in front of you in the first line of battle as belongs to me by hereditary right,” he said.
‘“You will go without me too, with the others,” Edward replied.
‘“I am not bound, neither is it my will, O King, to march without you,” said the earl. Enraged, the king burst out, so it is said, with these words: “By God, O Earl, either you will go or you will hang!”
‘“By the same oath,” replied Norfolk, “I will neither go nor hang.”’
Bigod had touched the heart of the matter: for all the king’s might and will, he was bound by his own law, which stated clearly that his barons were not obliged to serve without him. Edward was furious, but he pressed ahead with his attempts to send aid to Gascony and plan a campaign in northern France. He impounded clerical property and called in all debts owed him by the lay magnates. For their part, some of the clergy and four of the most important nobles – the earls of Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – dug in their heels and refused to cooperate with war preparations.
Parliament broke up in March 1297, and was recalled to meet in Westminster in July. By then Edward had made peace with Archbishop Winchelsea and some of the earls. It was agreed that he could levy a lay tax in return for a reissue of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. On Sunday 14 July the king stood on a wooden stage outside Westminster Hall and spoke to large crowds of his subjects. He pleaded his case, acknowledged that he had made mistakes, but insisted that he acted only for the good of the country. The chronicler Peter Langtoft reports that he told his listeners: ‘I am castle for you, and wall, and house.’ Archbishop Winchelsea stood beside the king in tears, as Edward proclaimed that he was going to France to fight and asked everyone present to swear allegiance to the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon in his absence.
Not everyone was convinced, and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, who had been dismissed from their pre-eminent military offices of state of marshal and constable of England, remained intransigent. They began to compile a list of grievances, known as the Remonstrances. In August Edward, in belligerent desperation, ordered another harsh tax on the Church and a general levy of an eighth of movable income, and sent out orders for the seizure of £50,000 worth of wool sacks from the country. He claimed that the measures were justified in parliament; his opponents snorted derisively that this ‘parliament’ amounted to no more than ‘the people stood about in his chamber’. On 22 August the opposition earls burst into the exchequer at Westminster, forbidding the collection either of wool or of the eighth and raging against a king who they said was tallaging them like serfs. The country was slipping rapidly towards civil war.
Yet with the realm seemingly on the brink of chaos, Edward left for the Continent. It was an extraordinarily bold move, but he was not prepared to wait at home while Gascony slipped from his grasp. He sailed for Flanders to begin the northern part of his French invasion on 24 August 1297.
His campaign, long anticipated, turned out to be a futile mess. Despite repeated promises, some of his expensive allies proved less than willing to fight. The king of Germany failed to send help, and Edward’s sailors from East Anglia and the Cinque Ports proved happier to fight among themselves than to fight the enemy. Those Flemish allies who did play a part had been defeated by Philip IV at the battle of Veurne the week before Edward arrived. Soon after arriving on the Continent, Edward was pinned down in Ghent, where there were riots against his leadership. Not long after that, word came from the east that the king of Germany was abandoning the cause altogether.
The coalition collapsed around Edward’s ears, with all the speed if not quite the same drama as the unravelling of John’s northern alliance at Bouvines more than eight decades before. It was expedient as the autumn set in to sue for peace. A truce was announced in October and cemented with an agreement for a two-year suspension of hostilities at the end of January 1298.
The peace with France might have heralded a much-needed period of stability and recovery from the demands of war. But once again, events in Scotland intervened. While Edward was overseas a rebellion had broken out against the earl of Surrey’s Berwick administration. On 11 September 1297 a rebel Scottish army had routed forces under Surrey’s command at Stirling Bridge – a brilliantly chosen battle-site about 100 miles north of Berwick, at a crossing of the river Forth.
Surrey’s leadership had been panicked, lazy and ineffectual. And at Stirling Bridge he and his men were undone by an army led by William Wallace, a common robber and brigand, but a genuine popular hero who had dismissed English negotiators before the battle with the words: ‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace, but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves and to free our kingdom.’
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Wallace’s arrival at the head of the Scottish rebellion in 1297 briefly united the kingdom of Scotland and the kingdom of England. In the north, Wallace was knighted by his countrymen and declared sole guardian of Scotland in the absence of John Balliol, led a movement dedicated to fighting to the death for the cause of reclaiming Scottish kingship from the southern usurpers. South of the border, in York, Edward faced a May parliament. In a spirit of reconciliation he appeased the political community by promising inquests into ministerial abuse and agreeing to uphold the reissues of Magna Carta that his son’s regency government had granted the previous autumn.
To show his commitment to political reform, Edward issued the Confirmation of the Charters, sealed on 10 October 1297 after news had filtered south of Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge. The Confirmation restated both Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – now both documents of legendary status – and added several new clauses, including the abolition of the maltote duty on wool and acceptance that any future tax might be taken only with the ‘common assent of the realm’. On the back of the Confirmation, Edward’s government had also agreed to stop treating the earls who had opposed him with his own deep-felt ‘rancour and indignation’.
By reissuing Magna Carta, Edward’s government had shown it still had a grip on the thirteenth-century Plantagenet pact: military and financial assistance followed on concessions and reform. Now, with Wallace rampant and English control of Scotland on the verge of disintegration, it was time to put that pact to work once again.
The May parliament met in the midst of what was already a highly militarized situation in the north. The exchequer had been moved north from London to York, and was distributing funds to muster an army of more than 30,000 at Roxburgh. They marched at the end of June. Problems with supplies meant that there was more wine than food; before long the Welsh and English contingents in the infantry were fighting each other. Without the naval support they had enjoyed in Wales, the vast armed force marched hungry as it pushed north. All the while William Wallace lay low somewhere in the Scottish hills, falling back and destroying crops and supplies as he went, drawing the English deep into the Scottish interior before waiting for his moment to confront them.
Edward was on the verge of falling back to Edinburgh when he learned that Wallace was camped at Callendar Wood, near Falkirk. He marched his army overnight to meet the Scots early in the morning of 22 July 1298. During a night spent in the open, the king’s horse trampled him and broke two of his ribs. It was a painful reminder of the unpredictability of battle.
Anthony Bek held a morning mass as dawn’s weak light broke on a misty battlefield. Across a patch of boggy ground they saw the Scots arrayed for battle before Callendar Wood, in highly defensive formation. Wallace had his men in four schiltroms: hedgehog formations with long spears bristling outwards. Battle was destined to be fierce and bloody.
Edward attacked the Scots from two directions, splitting his battalions around the bogland in front. The earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln led an attack from the west, while Anthony Bek struck from the east. The Scottish cavalry, not incorporated in the schiltroms, fled the battle. Meanwhile the English split the schiltroms open by firing arrows and crossbow bolts and throwing stones. Once the formations were broken, the Scottish defence disintegrated, and a fearful rout followed. As many as 2,000 infantry were killed on the English side. Slaughter rained down upon the Scots.
The battle was a humiliation for William Wallace, badly denting his military reputation. But the escape of the entire Scottish nobility, as well as Wallace, meant that despite the rivers of blood that fed the bog at Callendar Wood, it could not be counted alongside Dunbar as a total victory for the English. Weak, hungry, diseased and divided, Edward’s army was in no condition to keep the field. Tensions still existed between the king and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, which were exacerbated by Edward’s division of captured Scottish estates. The best the king could do was to fall back to Carlisle, sending an unsuccessful manhunt deep into Scotland in search of the young earl and claimant to the throne, Robert Bruce.