A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (74 page)

Naturally, though, it was in Scotland that the English failure proved most dramatic and the legacy of bitterness most lasting. The final, devastating decade of Edward’s reign had not merely halted the trend towards convergence but thrown it into reverse. Englishmen, remembering the raids of William Wallace, resurrected the hostile stereotypes of the previous century: the Scots were once again lumped with the Welsh and the Irish as faithless and barbaric Celts. Scotsmen, for their part, responded in kind. Before 1290 they had been pleased to christen their sons Edward – Bruce’s sole surviving brother and Balliol’s eldest son both bore the name. By 1307, however, Edward was regarded in Scotland as ‘the Covetous king’ of Merlin’s prophecy: after his death, the soothsayers foretold, the Celtic peoples would ‘band together, and have full lordship, and live in peace until the end of the world’.
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Fortunately for the English, the Bruces’ attempts to construct such a pan-Celtic alliance proved short lived. Yet in Scotland itself the tide was turned decisively. King Robert overcame his domestic opponents and consolidated his rule; English garrisons fell one by one before the onslaught of his forces. When, in 1314, an English army appeared north of the Border with the intention of saving Stirling, it was wiped out at nearby Bannockburn; Edward of Caernarfon – Edward II, as he then was – was lucky to escape with his life. Their enemies might not care to admit it, but the Scots had vindicated their right to independence. Yet because the English could not admit it, there could be no return to the days before 1290. Scotland, which had once seemed nothing less than England’s double, now defined itself against its southern neighbour. ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive,’ its leaders wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English.’
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Not all of these failures and reverses, of course, can be blamed on Edward I alone. The ideas that drove him had been developing for generations before his own birth, and were the accepted commonplaces of his age. Moreover, the swiftness with which English power in the British Isles contracted after his death was due in large part to the incompetence of his successor, whose behaviour as king was causing alarm in England even before his coronation. Edward II possessed almost none of the attributes that had made his father great, and from the first his rule was hopelessly compromised by his relationship with Piers Gaveston. The favourite had been recalled from exile as soon as the old king’s authority had expired; before the funeral had taken place he had been invested as earl of Cornwall.
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Part of Edward’s legacy, however, from which neither his son nor his successors could escape, was the use of extreme violence to solve intractable political problems. The shift is often dated to the new reign, as if to lay responsibility at the door of a degenerate younger generation, but in fact it had begun far earlier. It was first manifest in the summer of 1265, which witnessed ‘the murder of Evesham’; it was seen again at Shrewsbury in 1283, when the law of treason was twisted to justify the killing of a prince. And so inexorably on, with the executions of Rhys ap Maredudd, Thomas Turbeville and William Wallace, culminating in the orgy of blood-letting that had attended the final campaign in Scotland. In the last instance, the perpetrators were Edward II and his contemporaries. It was thus unsurprising that, when these men eventually fell out, they should use the same methods against each other. Gaveston was murdered in 1312; his killer, Thomas of Lancaster, in 1322. Few English magnates died happily in their beds in a reign that would end with the murder of the king himself.
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It is appropriate, therefore, that even in death Edward I should exhort men to vengeance. After his funeral rites had been performed in 1307, the king’s body, dressed in his coronation robes, was entombed near the altar of Westminster Abbey. As is well known, his tomb bears a famous inscription. The letters as they appear today were evidently painted in the sixteenth century, but the sentiments they express are almost certainly earlier.
EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST
, the legend reads.
PACTUM SERVA
.

The first part is easy enough to translate.
Scottorum malleus
means ‘Hammer of the Scots’, which is certainly an appropriate epithet. It is also the principal reason for believing that the motto was concocted soon after Edward’s death; as early as 1320, a visitor to the tomb described him as ‘the most Maccabean king’, and the Hebrew word
makabeh
translates as ‘hammer’.
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This being the case, the second part of the inscription may have a more specific meaning than is usually allowed.
Pactum Serva
is commonly mistranslated as ‘Keep the Faith’; a more accurate rendering would be ‘Keep the Vow’. In the early years of the fourteenth century there was only one vow that the nobility of England could have understood in this context: the vow they had all sworn at Whitsun 1306, when the legendary king had gathered them together for a feast in Westminster Hall, and committed them to avenge the rebellion of Robert Bruce.
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The real mystery of Edward’s tomb lies not so much in its inscription but in its uncompromising severity. One every side, the king is surrounded by the most elaborate funerary displays imaginable: the gilt-bronze effigies of his wife and his father; the brightly coloured, canopied confection that holds the bones of his brother. Yet Edward, inscrutable to the last, lies hidden in an unadorned box of black Purbeck marble. Once this was assumed to be a sin of omission on the part of his son, but that argument cannot be sustained. In the 1320s Edward II commissioned a new set of murals for the Palace of Westminster celebrating his father’s victories. If Edward I lacks an effigy, it was not for lack of filial devotion. The simplicity of his tomb, we are forced to conclude, was deliberate.

There are few parallels for such austerity in medieval Europe. The kings of Sicily are interred in similarly simple style, and so it is not impossible that Edward, as a sometime visitor to the island, may have drawn his inspiration from that direction. There was, however, another parallel closer to home, and that was the tomb that the king himself had constructed at Glastonbury for the bones of King Arthur. This too, according to seventeenth-century observers, had been a black marble box.
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In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men’s minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations.

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