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Late in 1306 King Edward I of England, old Longshanks, was heading for Scotland. He wanted one last shot at capturing Robert Bruce, whose family he had already imprisoned. But it was not to be. Realising that his death was approaching, he made his son Edward swear that his body be boiled in a large cauldron and the bones preserved. Thereafter, every time the Scots rose against him, he should summon his people and carry into battle his father’s bones. That did not happen. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, his tomb laconically inscribed “Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots. Keep Troth”.
All the while, high above the ramparts of the castle at Berwick-on-Tweed in a sturdy wood and metal cage, swung the body of Isabella, Countess of Carrick and Buchan. At Scone Abbey in Perth, she had proudly placed the crown of Scotland on the head of Robert Bruce: her punishment was to provide “in life and after death, a spectacle for passers-by, and eternal shame”.
The 14th was to be a century scarred by such savage and inventive cruelty. We have for some years been exhaustively instructed in the creative punishments invented by the Tudors. In truth, their forerunners, the comparatively underexposed Plantagenets, who claimed both French and English ancestry, were the real masters of those arts. They were also, if anything, even more dynastically ambitious and calculating. There was a strong belief that not only Scotland but Wales, Ireland and most of France — even parts of Spain — should be theirs to rule. Marriages and other alliances were calculated to fulfil such schemes, but the preferred method was always warfare.
It is nearly 50 years since Barbara Tuchman’s compendious history of the same period, A Distant Mirror, which first suggested that it is possible to see our present woes foreshadowed in the remote past. At half the length, Helen Carr’s informative, anecdotal and entertaining book has a narrower focus but perhaps an even broader aim: “to access the emotions and humanity” of the people who lived through it.
To this end, she enlists writers and artists of the time, and sheds some light on the lives of lesser mortals. However, the main emphasis of Sceptred Isle is firmly on the three monarchs who dominate the period, all of them descendants of that belligerent ancestor who gloried in being likened to a blunt instrument.
Poor Edward II, who reigned from 1307-27, emerges as an endearing, empathetic king, preferring a spot of roofing or sea swimming to hammering anyone; a gentle uxorious fellow, but easily led, stubborn and tragically susceptible to the manipulative friendship of unscrupulous men. A hopeless soldier, notoriously defeated in the gruesome slaughter at Bannockburn, his posthumous reputation was further damaged by lurid stories of his degrading murder with a white-hot poker — which prove to be a common medieval trope and unlikely to be true.
His son, the third Edward was less modest. Monarch for an impressive 50 years, he saw himself as the new King Arthur, champion of Crécy and saviour of the realm. He founded a new Round Table, then the prestigious Order of the Garter; spending lavishly and taxing his people ruthlessly, he held tournaments and encouraged young men to learn the arts of war and to bond together as gallant knights.
In May 1337, declaring what was to be known as the Hundred Years’ war, he rampaged through France, successfully besieged Calais, and won back Aquitaine — while bringing about utter devastation everywhere he and his army went. Heroic he may have been, in his own eyes at least, but as Carr remarks: “It is difficult, now, not to be struck by the futility and waste of it all.”
And just as he seemed unstoppable, something beyond his control changed everything. Carried by fleas in baggage trains from the Far East and indiscriminate in its virulence, bubonic plague — the Black Death — tore through Europe, killing half the population and fatally decimating the feudal system that had for centuries provided soldiers for warrior kings. Those who survived were less biddable, more demanding and deeply discontented.
It fell to the young Richard II — grandson of Edward III — to tackle the problem. Yet despite his courage in personally confronting the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, the last of the Plantagenets became, Carr says, “the most insecure king ever to sit on England’s throne”, foolish, savage and ultimately pathetic.
So many of the events of that tumultuous century find echoes today. The disconcerting rise of autocratic and unscrupulous tyrants; the sense that victory over a country that has been despoiled and virtually destroyed is not a victory anyone would want; even the arrival of a deadly pandemic.
What, in the end, does it all achieve, all this warfare, this loss of life, this vaulting ambition? Back comes the answer, whispered down the centuries: it amounts to very little. Very little at all.
Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century by Helen Carr Hutchinson Heinemann £25, 384 pages
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