♂Edward of England

Edward of England (17 June 1239 – 7 July 1307), King Edward I, nicknamed Longshanks, was King of England from 1272 until his death, a soldier king who conquered Wales, fought the Scots and summoned the shires and boroughs to his parliaments. He was the twenty-second great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Joan of England (1272–1307).

Early life and marriage

Edward was born at Westminster, the son and heir of King Henry III^W and Eleanor of Provence. On 18 October 1254, at fifteen, he married Eleanor of Castile^W, a daughter of King Fernando III of Castile and Leon, at the monastery of Las Huelgas^W in Spain. That same year Alfonso X, King of Castile, gave up all his rights in Gascony to him. Edward and Eleanor had fifteen or sixteen children, several of whom died in childhood.

When the barons rose against his father under Simon de Montfort^W, Edward at first took Montfort’s side, then turned to support the king. Father and son were both taken prisoner at the Battle of Lewes^W on 14 May 1264.

The crusade

Edward took the cross on 24 June 1268 and sailed on 11 August 1270 for the crusade^W, and he remained in the Holy Land until 15 August 1272. Eleanor went with him. A daughter was born to them in Palestine shortly after they arrived there in May 1271 and died within a few months, and their daughter Joan was born at Acre the next spring. At home their eldest son, John, died at Wallingford on 3 August 1271, in the care of Edward’s uncle Richard, Earl of Cornwall.

On the way home, in the kingdom of Sicily, Edward learned that his father had died and that he was king. Henry III had died on 16 November 1272, and Edward took nearly two more years to come home: he paid homage at Paris to his cousin, King Philippe III of France, for his French lands, landed at Dover on 2 August 1274, and was crowned at Westminster on 19 August 1274.

King of England

Having learned from the civil war of his father’s reign, Edward set out to restore royal authority. He held inquiries into the right by which landowners held their jurisdictions and overhauled the civil and criminal law, and from 1275 to the end of his reign he summoned representatives of the shires and boroughs to his parliaments. In 1277 he defeated Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales^W, and in the early 1280s he conquered his principality and annexed it to the English crown. In 1279 he and Eleanor traveled to Paris so that she could do homage to the French king for the county of Ponthieu^W, her inheritance from her mother.

Eleanor died at Harby in Nottinghamshire on 28 November 1290 and was buried at Westminster Abbey on 17 December. Her body was carried from Lincoln to Westminster in stages, and the king commanded a cross to be raised in every town where her body rested on the way. Three of these Eleanor crosses^W, at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham, still stand.

Scotland and the last years

The end of the direct Scottish royal line in 1290 let Edward press his claim to be overlord of Scotland, but his choice as King of the Scots, John de Balliol^W, resisted him. In 1296 Edward invaded Scotland and deposed Balliol. William Wallace raised a rebellion and was defeated by Edward at Falkirk^W in 1298, and in 1306 Robert de Brus rebelled and was crowned king. From 1294 Edward was also at war with Philippe IV of France over Gascony, and his heavy demands for service and money alienated his English subjects in his later years.

On 8 September 1299, at Canterbury Cathedral, Edward married a second wife, Margaret of France^W, a daughter of King Philippe III, born in 1279. They had three children. Edward made a will and died at Burgh-on-Sands, near Carlisle in Cumberland, on 7 July 1307, and he was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Notes

Sources

Edward’s birth, parentage, both marriages, his career as prince and king, the children of both marriages and his death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, ENGLAND 5, pp. 49–55, with his father’s death at ENGLAND 4, p. 42. Joan’s birth at Acre is from Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 4, p. 198. These are printed genealogies of the medieval royal family and nobility, citing the chronicles, the patent and close rolls, Rymer’s Foedera and Edward’s own will. The account of Eleanor’s funeral procession and the crosses is from a 1902 paper of the East Herts Archaeological Society, as Richardson cites it (p. 52).

His birth date

Richardson gives his birth as 17/18 June 1239. The Chronicle of St. Werburgh at Chester, as he cites it, says Edward “was born on the morrow of S. Botolph [June 18]”, which is the day after the date given above.