The Three Edwards by Thomas B. Costain Read Free Book Online Page A

the moment. Also, it is often plain that he could not part with his dearly loved daughters. Poor Prince Hartman went skating one winter’s day. The story is that he accidentally fell into open reaches where the water was deep, and drowned.
    Gilbert de Clare was not young when he married Joanna and took her to live at his country retreat in Clerkenwell, not far from the Tower, where the king and queen were again in residence. She left for her new home with great fanfare, laden with royal gifts. Among them were forty golden cups, many more golden clasps, “twenty zones of silk, wrought and trapped with silver to give away to whom she pleased.” Hampers, coffers, baskets, and bags are listed without number. “One sumpter-horse carried her chapel apparatus, another her bed, a third her jewels, a fourth her chamber furniture, a fifth her
candles!
a sixth her pantry-stores and table linen, and a seventh her kitchen furniture.”
    Joanna was but twenty-three when the old Earl of Gloucester died. After being a widow a year, she secretly married a completely unknown squire in her late husband’s retinue, Ralph de Monthermer. Through this marriage he became possessed in his own right of the earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford. The fact that a royal princess had dared to marry this obscure fellow became a
cause célèbre
which for a time separated her from the affection of her father. It proved to be a happy marriage, however, leading ultimately to a firm friendship between the new son-in-law and Edward.
    Margaret, the fourth daughter of the king, married John of Brabant, an athletic young man, “stout, handsome, gracious and well-made,” whom she had known during her childhood. The colorful splendor of their wedding celebration—the extravagant costumes, the king and his knights attired in full armor—creates an unforgettable picture. All London seems to have joined the knights with their ladies in marching and singing through the streets of the city and suburbs while more than five hundred minstrels, fools, harpers, violinists, and trumpeters, some English, some foreign, cavorted about the palace grounds. Margaret was a merry child of fifteen years, the duke a few years older. Everything seemed conducive to a happy union. Actually the marriage proved disastrous. Margaret soon found that she was to be but one of many women in her husband’s life. InBrussels, where she eventually went to live, she was “doomed to the mortification of being perpetually surrounded with the bastard sons of her husband.”
    Of the two remaining royal princesses, Elizabeth, Edward’s youngest daughter, married John, Count of Holland, a happy if uneventful union. Mary’s life at four had been prearranged by her parents. She became a nun, veiled at the convent of Ambresbury in 1284, where the queen dowager, Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, had also taken the veil after the death of Henry III. Mary never forgot that she was a royal princess. She was seen everywhere and proved as much of a gadabout as her sisters. Life in the convent did not prohibit an active social existence outside, and she made demands regularly on the king for gifts of money and wine for her personal use. She died at fifty-four, the last survivor of the union of Edward and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile.

CHAPTER VI
The Rebirth of Parliamentary Democracy
1
    I T was from me that he learned it!” cried Simon de Montfort when he issued from the town of Evesham with his small and tired army and found himself facing the converging forces of the then Prince Edward. The heir to the throne of England had indeed learned a great deal about generalship from this uncle who had defied the power of Henry III and had beaten the royalist troops at the earlier and spectacular battle of Lewes. And so Simon de Montfort knew that he would die on that tragic day and that his cause was lost.
    Edward had also learned much from Simon which guided him when he became king. He remembered well