Hanging out with Matilda

When it comes to the Plantagenet boys, certain clichés abound. Bad King John is the wicked softsword who lost all his lands in France and ran away from every fight. Henry III is a pious mediocrity (for pious read ‘dull’) whose fifty-plus years on the throne amount to one big blur in the public imagination. Edward I is the hawkish, hard-driving Hammer of the Scots, more machine than man - yes that is a dorky Star Wars reference - and the most ideal Hollywood foil since Basil Rathbone.

"You've come to Nottingham once too often, pal."

Clichés exist for a reason, of course, and it can be just as tiresome to play the revisionist. There is some truth in the above, but not the whole truth. Others will stand surety for John and Henry, but for my sins I chose to specialise in Longshanks. The result has been quite the study in human behaviour, in which plenty of complete strangers have felt obliged to tell me exactly what they think; not only of Edward, but the deplorable state of my personal morality and intellectual standards. I am grateful, of course.  

Talking of human behaviours - and the point of this post - it may come as no surprise to discover that Edward was just as fallible as anyone else. Peel back the clichés, delve deeper into the records, and a human being emerges. In recent months I have been researching the war against France from 1294-1303, Edward’s most difficult and expensive campaign and a complete misfire according to most historians. The ‘grand flop’, as Michael Prestwich memorably put it.

Well. It wasn’t as floppy as all that, in my humble opinion. No more so than any other Angevin expedition from the days of John to Edward II, and at least Longshanks came away with a result. That’s for another time, but today I wanted to talk about his peculiar behaviour in the aftermath of the campaign.

Kissing cousins...

In October 1297, after several weeks of messy to and fro, Edward struck a truce with his enemy, Philip IV of France. The ceasefire was temporary, and followed by several more rounds of talks over the following months. A final agreement was reached at Tournai in February 1298, nowadays a city in western Belgium near the French border.

It might be assumed these talks were conducted in an atmosphere of tension and barely concealed hostility. Far from it. Edward and Philip were cousins, after all, and the war was essentially a family quarrel. A Dutch eyewitness, Lodewijk van Velthem, describes the negotiations as one long round of glittering feasts and parties, in which Edward spent money like it was going out of style. He staged a particularly magnificent feast at Saint-Bavon, where nobles from all over Europe danced and drank the night away. Edward’s allies, Count Guy of Flanders and the duke of Brabant joined in the festivities, though none could rival the brilliance of Edward’s feasts. 

Edward had certainly come prepared to entertain. The accounts for the Flanders expedition show he brought a well-equipped squadron of minstrels and dancers. Two were from the household of the earl of Lincoln, while one was an acrobatic dancer or saltatrix with the intriguing name of Matilda Makejoy.

It seems Edward was in no hurry to go home, to face angry barons and William Wallace raging in his fury. While the king enjoyed himself over the winter months, counter-operations against Wallace were entrusted to Earl Warenne. Rickety old Warenne hated Scotland - the weather played hell with his joints - and had already lost his dentures at Stirling Bridge. But he was the man on the spot, and had to labour on the Godforsaken northern border while Edward played tag with Mistress Makejoy.

The king’s behaviour at this time drew sharp criticism from contemporaries. Pierre Langtoft, usually an admirer, slammed Edward for:

“Idleness and feigned delay, and long morning’s sleep,

Delight in luxury, and surfeit in the evenings,

Trust in felons, compassion for enemies,

Self-will in act and counsel…”

This is all very reminiscent of Edward’s forebears. Similar charges of sloth and debauchery were aimed at grandpa John, while Henry III was nobody’s idea of a dynamic warrior-king. Yet the Angevins were a complex brood, and not so easy to pigeonhole; John and Henry were capable of astonishing bursts of energy, to the bewilderment of monkish chroniclers such as Matthew Paris.  Like every good little tabloid hack, he wanted everything simple and one-dimensional. Poor Matthew: one can easily picture him sweating and cursing as he desperately struck out the offending bits from his chronicle, after Henry asked to see it.

The same behaviour patterns can be discerned in Edward, who did eventually put his dancers back in their box and return to duty. But fathers live in sons, as Philip Augustus remarks to Henry II in the Lion in Winter, and we might do well to think a little harder about these people. Because they were people, not automatons or walking clichés.