A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (72 page)

Masterful in the management of his own household, Edward was no less competent in managing the wider political community. He took care, for example, to involve his greatest magnates in the running of the realm, consulting them in council on matters of importance. He proved able to handle the prickliest of characters, placating them where possible, overruling them when necessary. Thus Gilbert de Clare was allowed to lead armies in south Wales and to marry the king’s daughter, but given a severe dressing-down when he failed to respect the Crown’s authority.

An important part of Edward’s success as a leader, also mentioned by his Westminster obituarist, was his ready eloquence. According to a later writer, the king had some form of mild speech impediment – possibly a lisp. If this was so, it clearly did not affect his powers of persuasion. One thinks of his success in talking round former Montfortians in the wake of a bitter civil war – men like John de Vescy, who went on to follow Edward for the rest of his days. One also recollects the broad Christian coalition he built in the Holy Land, and his speech outside Westminster Hall that moved an archbishop to tears. It is a pity that no one preserved any of the pre-battle harangues that the king must surely have delivered, for he was clearly an orator of considerable skill.
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Eloquence, of course, had been held against him by his Montfortian enemies. Edward was said to ‘cloak himself in pleasant speech’ but then go back on his word. This, the author of
The Song of Lewes
opined, showed that he thought himself above the law, and prompted the lament, ‘O Edward, thou dost wish to become a king without law; verily, they would be wretched who were ruled by such a king’. But to judge from his obituaries, these fears had been unfounded. Edward was lauded in 1307 as a rigorous ruler who loved the law. ‘Truly,’ said one preacher, ‘in our times no king’s kingdom was made firm and strong with so much justice and so much mercy.’ In terms of lawgiving this was certainly true: Edward’s reign, especially during its first half, had witnessed an unprecedented volume of legislation – a stream of wide-ranging statutes that led seventeenth-century commentators to dub the king ‘the English Justinian’. Recent research has put Edward’s contribution to this process in perspective. It is now appreciated that he had little personal interest or involvement in the practical business of lawmaking, or even in passing judgement. Nevertheless, that so much regulation was introduced during Edward’s reign was significant, and shows that the king was anxious that justice should be maintained. In this respect his attitude had not altered since, at the age of twenty, he had instructed his bailiffs to exhibit ‘common justice’ to all, lest he lose the favour of God and man, and his lordship was belittled.
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Modern historians have found fault with Edward’s justice, identifying several occasions when the king departed from such high ideals for his own or his family’s advantage. The most notorious example, the disinheritance of Robert de Ferrers, has already been discussed. Another incident, wherein royal ministers persuaded the dying countess of Devon to sell her lands to the king, thereby disinheriting her distant relatives, also looks highly suspect. There can be no denying that, in his desire to increase the Crown’s estate, Edward occasionally indulged in quite low skulduggery. Here too, however, it is important to retain a sense of proportion. It would have been a rare medieval monarch indeed who never manipulated the law to suit his own purposes. What mattered in Edward’s case was that, in spite of the odd lapse, his rule was generally perceived to be equitable. People could feel confident about approaching him for justice in a way they could not have done during the reigns of his father and grandfather. The king’s own attitude is well illustrated by a private letter he sent to the chancellor in 1304 concerning a royal ward called Thomas Bardolf. This young man had given offence by refusing to go through with a marriage that Edward had arranged for him, and the chancellor was therefore instructed ‘to be as stiff and harsh towards Thomas in this business as can be, without offending the law’. Were such a letter leaked from the heart of government today it would be enough to generate resignations, but thirteenth-century kings did not have to be so careful in their correspondence. What is more striking in this instance is that, even as he instructed his chancellor to be partial, Edward reminded him to stay within the limits of what was legal.
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Another quality that the eulogists singled out for praise was Edward’s piety. He was, in the opinion of one writer, ‘the most Christian king of England’. This description probably rested more on his reputation as a crusader rather than the kind of piety for which his father had been famous. ‘O Jerusalem, thou hast lost the flower of thy chivalry,’ was one poet’s response to the news of his passing, and the general emphasis on crusading in the obituaries seems to have been encouraged by the rumour that, in his dying moments, Edward had willed his heart to the Holy Land, along with a fighting company of eighty knights. (The story that he commanded his body be carried at the head of future armies until Scotland was conquered was only told later, and is palpably nonsense.)
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In many respects, however, the king’s piety was very similar to the kind practised by his father. Like Henry, Edward distributed alms to the poor on a grand scale, feeding (or at least paying) hundreds of paupers at his court every week. He also undertook the unpleasant business of touching people suffering from ‘the king’s evil’ – scrofula, or tuberculosis of the neck – and was apparently more sought out for this reason than any of his successors. Like his father, Edward was a frequent visitor to cathedrals and other places of worship, and he made rich offerings of gold, jewels and money at their shrines and tombs. He did not share Henry’s inordinate devotion to Edward the Confessor – that much was clear from the fact that Westminster Abbey, half-built at the time of his coronation, was still in much the same state at the time of his funeral. Nor did he indulge in ostentatious displays of piety in order to compensate for political and military failure. Edward’s pilgrimages were often undertaken in advance of military campaigns, and his ecclesiastical patronage was more eclectic. When his armies advanced, they carried with them the banners of a host of English saints. For Edward, pious conduct was a necessary buttress to military success. An inventory drawn up after his death reveals that the king possessed a veritable arsenal of ornamented relics, including an arm of St David, a nail from Christ’s cross, and even a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.
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It was small wonder that Edward believed in the efficacy of these and other relics. As another of his obituarists observed, he was an exceedingly fortunate king, at least to the extent that he survived numerous near misses. Many have been mentioned in the preceding pages: the storm at sea that prompted him to found Vale Royal Abbey, the chamber that collapsed beneath his feet in Gascony, the two battles from which he emerged unscathed and, most famously, the unsuccessful attempt on his life at Acre. The list could easily be extended. Nicholas Trivet, a later chronicler whose patrons included Edward’s daughter Mary, preserved two episodes that would otherwise be unknown. In 1297, while the king was at Winchelsea waiting to sail to Flanders, his horse was startled by a windmill and leapt clean over the town’s lofty ramparts, along with its royal rider. Miraculously both survived. On another, earlier occasion, a youthful Edward was reportedly playing chess in a certain chamber and, for no apparent reason, got up to stretch his legs, only to have a stone crash down from the vaulting in the place where he had been seated. This escape was said to be the source of his devotion to the shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham.
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Trivet also told a story of how Edward, out hunting one day, rode his horse through a river to pursue a man who had mistakenly presumed he could disregard royal orders with impunity. The chronicler’s intention was to demonstrate that the king was ‘heedless of danger when he wanted revenge’, but his tale has recently been taken to indicate that Edward also possessed ‘a violent temper’. Given the story’s suspiciously allegorical appearance, its value as evidence in this last respect is open to debate. Edward could undoubtedly get angry on occasion: financial records show that in 1290 he paid twenty marks’ compensation to an esquire whom he had assaulted with a stick, while in 1297 repairs were necessary to a coronet, the property of his daughter Elizabeth, after the king had thrown it into the fire. Beyond this, however, evidence of genuine royal wrath seems rather thin on the ground: there are certainly no stories of Edward falling to the floor and biting the rushes after the fashion of his Angevin ancestors. By the thirteenth century, as the murals in the Painted Chamber make clear, it was important that
ira
(anger) should be vanquished by
débonaireté
(urbanity, literally ‘having a fine air’). Naturally, that did not mean that the chamber’s occupants were always capable of similar self-restraint. But there is far more evidence of debonair activity at Edward’s court than there is for explosions of ire. His financial accounts show frequent payments to jesters, acrobats, minstrels and dancers (including, in the last instance, a certain Matilda Makejoy). They also record the charming fact that every year on Easter Monday the queen’s ladies-in-waiting would try to catch the king in bed, and he rewarded them with a ransom if they were successful.
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Of the remaining observations made by writers at the time of Edward’s death, most are bland or commonplace – he was ‘illustrious’, for example, or ‘noble’. One of the sermons preached before the pope, however, contained some words that were clearly well considered and that ring especially true. More than any other ruler, it was claimed, Edward ‘wished to know much about the changes and variations of the world … he never knew how to be at rest’. The preacher went on to substantiate his point by listing some of the places the king had visited in his lifetime: Spain, Wales, Flanders, Scotland, Gascony and the Holy Land. He could have also added France, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Savoy, North Africa and Cyprus: Edward was the most widely travelled English monarch until well into the modern age. And yet the king’s restlessness was never more apparent than when circumstances forced him to remain in one place. It tended to manifest itself in building work: his tower in Acre, his new towns at Bonnegarde and Burgus Reginae. There can be little doubt that Edward loved building, and the regularity of bastides must have appealed to his orderly mind. But it was military architecture above all that gave him the greatest delight. In spite of the lack of direct evidence, historians have inevitably wondered about how involved he was in the design of his great Welsh castles, but the answer must surely be: intimately. When, in 1302, the king wanted a new fortress in Scotland at Linlithgow, he entered into detailed discussions with Master James of St George, concerning himself with such matters as the construction of the towers and the depth of the ditch. If Edward took this much interest in a wooden pele that cost less than £1,000, it presupposes that he was equally if not more involved in the planning of castles that cost ten to twenty times as much.
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Edward, then, had the character of a great king – brave, wise, eloquent, just, pious – combined with an abundance of good fortune and a restless, venturesome nature. But what of his actions, and what of his motives? Were these also adjudged great by his contemporaries, or indeed by posterity? With regard to his youth the answer in both cases has generally been a resounding no. Matthew Paris, commenting on Edward’s alleged attack on another young man in 1256, had been deeply concerned. ‘If he does such things when the wood is green,’ the chronicler worried, ‘what can be hoped for when it is seasoned?’ Modern writers have also been unimpressed with Edward’s apparent juvenile delinquency. One twentieth-century historian called him ‘an irresponsible, arrogant and headstrong boy’ and labelled him treacherous, self-indulgent and incapable of self-discipline.
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Both judgements, however, seem unduly harsh if not wholly unfounded. There is no doubt that Edward was a pushy teenager, and that, like most teenagers, what he craved was greater independence. Given his notions about the way kings and knights ought to conduct themselves, it was almost inevitable that he should clash with his father, who, as well as being unwilling to cede authority, espoused a radically different idea of what kingship entailed. But when Henry’s government was overthrown, and father and son were shackled, Edward’s struggle to control his own destiny suddenly became far more serious, and so did his own conduct. That Edward tried to throw off the restraints that had been placed upon him does not automatically render his behaviour ignoble. Nor do his actions during a period of kaleidoscopic change seem particularly inconstant. What he wanted, and what he endeavoured to obtain, was the free disposition of his lands and castles. To do this he perceived it was necessary to ally himself with those demanding reform, but he soon found that this placed him in an impossible situation, caught between two sides in an increasingly bitter family feud. He may, perhaps, have regretted his decision to desert Simon de Montfort in the spring of 1261, as for a time it cost him many friends. But by the end of 1263 Edward’s decision was vindicated. Montfort in power proved to be a disaster. From that moment onwards, all but a minority of diehards saw that the surer guarantee of good government lay in supporting the king’s eldest son.