Authors: Marc Morris
For the past four years or so, I have
been writing a biography of King Edward I, the working title for which was
Edward I. As it happens, all of my publications to date have been labelled in
this does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin fashion. My last book, for example, a
serial biography of the thirteenth-century earls of Norfolk,
was entitled The
Bigod
Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century. Similarly,
my first foray in the field of popular history was a television series and a
book about castles, both of which, after numerous agonised production meetings,
were eventually called Castle.
It therefore presented a novel
challenge when, some six months ago, my publishers informed me that, in today’s
competitive marketplace, Edward I would simply not pass muster. How, they
reasoned, would the book-buying public, historically curious but not
necessarily historically aware, distinguish him from the numerous other
monarchs who have shared the same name? This, I should say immediately, was a
suggestion I readily embraced, having reached much the same conclusion myself
in the course of researching the book. On those rare occasions when I ventured
out of the library, I had inevitably been asked what I was working on, and when
I replied ‘Edward I’, it often engendered a kind of mild panic in the eyes of
the questioner. Was he the gay one? No, he was the father of the Black Prince,
wasn’t he? (
this
mostly from French people); No, wait
a moment, an Englishman would interject, surely he was the Confessor? This
last, of course, caused yet more confusion. No, I would have to remind them,
Edward I was not the Confessor, but he was named after him. How, then, could he
be ‘the First’, some people worried, while others decided it was time to slip off
in search of another drink.
Thank heavens, therefore, for Mel Gibson (not a phrase that
historians of the thirteenth century are known to overuse). Invariably, the
quickest and surest route to helping the temporarily befuddled to identify the
king in question was to remind them of
Braveheart
,
Gibson’s hilarious biopic of the celebrated Scottish patriot, William Wallace.
Yes, of course, Edward I was ‘
Longshanks
’,
Braveheart’s
bad guy – a cruel, scheming monster, played
with relish by Patrick ‘The Prisoner’
McGoohan
,
ordering men into battle like some anglicised medieval Nazi commandant (and
hence, for my money, by far the best thing in it).
How about that for a title then:
Longshanks
?
Has a certain ring to it, and enables us to pin down the particular Edward
we’re after. The problem, however, is that
Longshanks
,
while it helps a good many people put Edward I into some sort of context,
doesn’t actually tell you much else about him, besides the fact that he was
remarkably tall (six foot two, to be precise: a figure established when
antiquarians cracked open his coffin in 1774 and measured his decomposing
corpse). Likewise, Edward’s other well-known, vaguely contemporary epithet,
‘The Hammer of the
Scots’,
must also be rejected
because it locates the king in too narrow a context. It was not until the end
of his reign that Edward turned his attention to Scottish affairs, and before
that he had already lived an astonishingly action-packed life.
Remember Simon de Montfort? It was Edward who defeated and
killed him in battle, thereby saving his future crown. Interested in the
crusades? So was Edward: before his accession he had travelled to the Holy Land
and back, taking in Sicily, Cyprus and North Africa
for good measure. Ever visited North Wales,
and marvelled at the magnificent castles at Conwy, Caernarfon,
Harlech
and
Beaumaris
? All of
them, and many others besides, are Edward’s handiwork, the end result of his
devastating conquest of 1282–83, a conquest which was never reversed and which
marked the end of Wales
as an independent nation.
Longshanks
, you soon realise, hardly
begins to do justice to the man. Nor, for that matter, do any of the epithets
that contemporaries attached to him. ‘Edward the Conqueror’, for example, was
how he was remembered in the decades after his death by the new English
settlers in north Wales.
Yet there was more to Edward than just war and conquest. True, he raised the
largest armies seen in Britain
during the Middle Ages – an impressive 30,000 men smashed Wallace’s forces at Falkirk. But Edward also summoned the largest parliaments
of the Middle Ages and promulgated the most legislation. To England, and to his duchy of Gascony
in southern France,
he gave the best government that they had experienced for more than a century.
He lived longer than any other medieval English monarch, and fathered no fewer
than eighteen children (fifteen of them by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile,
in memory of whom he erected the Eleanor Crosses). He travelled further than
any other king or queen of England
until the modern age. Not until Elizabeth I
lived on into the seventeenth century, and Edward VII visited India in 1875,
would Edward
I’s
records be broken.
The problem, therefore, remained: how to encapsulate such an
epic and varied life in a short and punchy title? Dozens of ideas were proposed
and rejected. All the time, however, that we were batting around words like
Conqueror and Hammer, one word lurked at the back of my brain, a word which was
often used by contemporaries to describe Edward and, until recently, by modern
historians too. Even Mel Gibson, in his enthralling director’s commentary to
Braveheart
, acknowledges that his villain was ‘a great
king’.
But what did Mel mean by this? ‘Great’ is an attractive word
but, as the BBC’s efforts to provoke a national debate on the matter in 2002
shows, people have very different ideas about what greatness entails. The Great
British public, when ask to place its greatest sons and daughters in rank
order, unsurprisingly put that celebrated scourge of fascism, Sir Winston
Churchill, in the number-one spot. But they also awarded a quite respectable
55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of
the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.
More baffling still was the appearance of the actor Michael Crawford at number
seventeen, just ahead of Queen Victoria.
Greatness, we can only conclude, is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Where, then, does this leave Edward I (number 92 on the BBC’s
list), apart from well below his rivals William Wallace (48) and Robert Bruce
(74)? For historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Edward’s greatness lay for the most part in his success as a lawgiver and
constitution-builder. Edward, we were once assured, was the king who had given
parliament its definitive form (the so-called ‘Model Parliament’ of 1295). The
sheer volume of legislation that the king enacted was such that it prompted the
seventeenth-century lawyer Sir Edward Coke to describe Edward as ‘our
Justinian’ (after the emperor who codified Roman law), and the name stuck. A
biography published in 1902 was actually entitled The English Justinian.
Another, written a few years before but in much the same spirit was called The
Greatest of All the
Plantagenets
.
It will hardly be a surprise to learn that neither of these
biographies
were
written by Scotsmen. North of the
Border there has been an equally long and wholly understandable tradition of
regarding Edward as a cruel tyrant, very much in the Patrick
McGoohan
mode. Similarly, the Welsh have found few positive
things to say down the years about a king who terminated their political
independence so decisively. ‘Ruin
seize
thee, ruthless
king!’ shouts the eponymous Bard at Edward in the opening line of Thomas Gray’s
famous poem. Perhaps the most damning indictment, however, has emerged in the
recent re-examination of Edward’s policy towards the Jews, a policy that
resulted in the largest state-sanctioned pogrom in British history, and ultimately
in the outright expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. Jewish and
(somewhat belatedly) non-Jewish historians have quite rightly suggested that
this should temper any positive general conclusions we might otherwise be
tempted to draw about Edward I.
Thus, in recent years, historians have been understandably
reluctant to use the word ‘great’ to describe this particular English king.
It’s a pity, because it was a word used to describe him by his contemporaries.
Edwardus
Magnus is a phrase found in obituaries written as
far afield as Westminster and the west of Ireland.
Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century folk, of course, had quite different
ideas about greatness to our own. They also praised Edward for his parliaments
and for his justice, but to them what made the king a truly awesome figure was
his success in war. ‘He ruled with the power of warring down his enemies’, said
one clergyman approvingly when he preached a memorial sermon before the pope.
We regard Edward’s expulsion of the Jews with horror; contemporary Englishmen
who shared his bigoted Christianity regarded it as one of his most commendable
acts – a fact that forces us to confront an unpleasant truth about our medieval
ancestors.
Yet even as they cheered his
victories, they were not oblivious to the consequences of his rule. As one poet
who marched in his army put it, the English king confronting his enemies was
like the three lions embroidered in gold on the red of his banner – dreadful,
fierce and cruel. And one anonymous
obituarist
put it
in even more telegraphic terms. Edward, he said, was peaceable to the obedient,
but to those who opposed him he was ‘a terrible king’.
When I stumbled across this line, I
realised I had my title. It was possible to allow Edward his greatness, as long
as we also acknowledged the terrible nature of his rule. On first hearing the
phrase ‘great and terrible’, many people remark on the apparent contradiction.
How can someone, or something, be both at the same time? Naturally, not
everything can be described in this way: we could hardly recommend to our
friends a great and terrible restaurant, or boast to them about our new, great
and terrible carpet. But when we move beyond the mundane and begin to
contemplate the mighty, great and terrible seem to be less
contradictory,
and even complementary adjectives. ‘The great and terrible wilderness’ is how
the Bible describes the Sinai Desert; ‘Do not tempt me!’ says Gandalf to Frodo,
alarmed by the hobbit’s offer of the One Ring. ‘I should have a power too great
and terrible.’
The kind of power, in fact, pretended by
another, altogether less bona-fide wizard.
‘I am Oz, the Great and
Terrible’, he booms, before being exposed as a pathetic little man hiding
behind the curtain.
Kings, like wizards, were expected to wield enormous power.
Some of them found it too much to handle and were merely terrible in the more
modern sense of the word. Others abused their power and were truly terrible, to
the extent that they could inspire great terror. King John, for example, that famously
bad king of England,
was regarded by contemporaries with considerable dread. Being terrible,
clearly, did not make one great. But did being great mean one had to be
terrible? When it comes to kings, I would argue that the answer must be yes.
William the Conqueror, Henry I, Henry II: all could justly be described as
great, and in each case this was partly down to their ability to inflict
immense terror. None of them, however, was greater, or more terrible, than
Edward I.
10. The Best of
Kings, the Worst of Kings: A Reassessment of Edward I
On an otherwise unremarkable building opposite Holborn tube
station, some five or six storeys above the commuter throng, sits a serene and
noble-looking Edward I. The work of a young sculptor Richard
Garbe
(d. 1957), he was placed there in 1902, and evidently
intended as a tribute: on the opposite corner of the same building sits a
similar statue of Edward VII, who was crowned that same year.
The accession of a new King Edward, the first in 350 years,
evidently prompted some of his subjects to look back through the annals of
English history in search of a similarly named exemplar. No doubt they quickly
dismissed as unsuitable the two boy kings, Edwards V and VI, the usurper Edward
IV and the unspeakable Edward II, and ignored the three unnumbered pre-Conquest
Edwards on the grounds of their comparative obscurity. Today they might have
considered the merits of Edward III, a successful king whose reign witnessed
the greatest English triumphs of the Hundred Years War. But at the start of the
twentieth century no one was in the mood to celebrate a man who appeared to
have gone looking for glory on the battlefields of Europe;
the victor of
Crécy
and the founder of the Order of
the Garter was at that time regarded as a feckless and irresponsible warmonger.
By a process of elimination, therefore, it had to be a statue
of Edward I. Like his namesake grandson, Edward had also been a warrior king.
His wars, however, were perceived to have been conflicts of quite a different
order, fought in the national interest, and forced him on him by the
rebelliousness of his subjects in Wales
and Scotland.
Moreover, the first Edward, unlike the third, could be held up as man possessed
of strong moral fibre, uxorious to an almost Victorian degree, the father of no
less than fifteen with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, in whose memory he
erected the celebrated Eleanor Crosses.
There was more to recommend Edward I, however, besides his
martial and marital virtues. What endeared him most to observers at the turn of
the nineteenth century were his roles as lawgiver and constitution-builder. It
was in the 1870s that William Stubbs, one of the founding fathers of history as
a modern academic subject at Oxford, had first published his Constitutional
History of England, in which he argued that it was under Edward’s firm guiding
hand that that most cherished of English institutions – parliament – had
attained its definitive form; so much so that he dubbed the
not-especially-noteworthy assembly of 1295 ‘the Model Parliament’. Recognition
of Edward’s achievement as a legislator, meanwhile, had a much longer pedigree.
In the early seventeenth century the lawyer Edward Coke, surveying the statute
book and noting how much of its contents had originated in the late thirteenth
century, declared that we should regard Edward I as ‘our Justinian’ – implying,
of course, that the king rivalled the Roman emperor who had codified imperial
law. It was an epithet that stuck. In 1902 – again, the year of the coronation,
and just as the two statutes were being hoisted into place in Holborn – the
juror and writer Edward Jenks published a biography of Edward I to which he
gave the subtitle ‘the English Justinian’. For some, it seems, the dawn of a
new Edwardian age was a positive invitation to sing the praises of their new
king’s most illustrious namesake. A certain Wallace Leonard Palmer spotted a
gap in Shakespeare’s canon and began penning his own cod-Shakespearean epic The
Life and Death of Edward I: a play in four acts. Alas, by the time it was
published in 1910 the world had moved on, Edward VII was dead and buried, and –
to the great loss of theatre-lovers everywhere – his masterpiece has rested in
utter obscurity ever since.
There were other reasons, however, why this burst of
enthusiasm for Edward I at the start of the twentieth century should have
proved short-lived. Truth be told,
Garbe
, Palmer and
even Stubbs were working with fairly intractable material. It was difficult to
present a king whose tomb is inscribed ‘Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots’
as a hero whom all Britons might hold in admiration. While Englishmen might
enthuse about the quality of Edward
I’s
justice,
north of the Border there was an equally longstanding tradition of regarding
him as a cruel oppressor. Another play about Edward I, published in Edinburgh in 1844, is
subtitled ‘The Tyrant’s Triumph’. Nor were the Welsh, for that matter, ready to
forgive the king who had terminated their independence so decisively with his
devastating military campaigns and mighty castles. ‘Ruin
seize
thee, Ruthless King!’ is how the eponymous Bard greets the arrival of Edward in
Thomas Gray’s famous poem, before proceeding to heap further curses upon the
conqueror’s head.
For a long time, Englishmen were happy to dismiss such
peripheral sniping as nothing more than Caledonian and Cambrian sour grapes.
‘No native of that northern kingdom,’ opined Robert Seeley in the preface to
his unambiguously titled Edward I: The Greatest of All the
Plantagenets
(1860
),
‘could be expected to write this king’s
history in a just and impartial manner.’ (Impartiality, of course
, being
the sole preserve of those lucky enough to live
south of the Tweed and the Solway.) It was
still possible, in the first half of the twentieth century, to present Edward I
in a largely uncritical light. Indeed, it was in the middle of the century that
the argument that Edward was a truly great king received its most powerful
restatement to date in the works of Sir Maurice
Powicke
.
In his Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947),
Powicke
urged readers ‘to forget everything that has happened since 1307 (the year of
Edward’s death) and to look at the world as he saw it’. By doing this, the
historian hoped to convince his audience that his subject was indeed ‘a great
man’, conventionally medieval in his tastes, and hence well suited to fill ‘a
great position’. As late as 1965, it was still possible to write that ‘the
stock of other medieval kings may rise or fall; that of Edward I remains firm
and … conspicuously high’.
This, however, was the first line of a well-known article by
K. B. McFarlane, in which the author went on to deliver a devastating broadside
against the king from which he has never recovered. McFarlane did not try to
knock corners off Edward for his conduct in Wales
and Scotland, or his
questionable conduct in England
during the last ten years of his reign. Instead, he hit the English Justinian
where it hurt the most, and called into question his reputation as a just
ruler. A historian who had pioneered the idea that medieval society might be
usefully examined from the point of view of the nobility rather than that of
the Crown, McFarlane proceeded to examine ‘a remarkable series of transactions’
between Edward and his great magnates, and argued that the king had acted
illegally, or at the very least unjustly and coercively, to persuade many of
these men and women to part with their lands and disinherit their families.
Immediately Edward’s hitherto high stock started to go into
free fall. In the same year that McFarlane’s article was published, a new
scholarly biography of Robert Bruce by the Scottish historian Geoffrey Barrow
appeared, in which the English king was subjected to similarly well-aimed
blows. Barrow gave substance to the age-old Scottish accusations of tyranny,
and further dented Edward’s prestige by questioning his credentials as a
paragon of chivalry. Women prisoners hung in cages on the outside of castle
towers; castle garrisons bombarded with missiles even after they had offered to
surrender; Scottish patriots – most notably William Wallace – ripped to pieces
in public and dispatched for public display: were these really the actions of a
great and noble king? Barrow thought not, and condemned Edward for his
‘meanness of spirit and implacable, almost paranoid hostility’. Within a few
years these sentiments were being echoed in other scholarly works, such as
Michael
Prestwich’s
War, Politics and Finance under
Edward I. The king’s defenders found themselves fighting a desperate rearguard
action. Lionel Stones published a very brief, excusatory book about Edward in
1968, and five years later a critical review of
Prestwich
.
Accordingly, when the latter came to write his own giant biography, published
in 1988, he drew a more balanced picture of the king, and in many instances
granted him the benefit of the doubt.
But the Celtic assault continued. Just as
Prestwich
went to press, Rees Davies was delivering a series of lectures in Belfast that
would eventually become a book called Domination and Conquest, in which Edward
I appears as the antithesis of
Powicke’s
‘ordinary
Christian gentleman’. Not only is he ‘ruthless’ as in Gray’s poem; he is, in
addition, ‘sinister’ and even ‘chilling’ – this last on account of the writs he
sent out in the winter of 1282, in which he proposed ‘to put an end finally …
to the malice of the Welsh’. And it was not just the Welsh, of course, for whom
Edward devised a final solution. His reign also witnessed the total expulsion
of all Jews from England,
a fact which, as Colin Richmond pointed out in an excoriating article of 1992,
most of the English historical profession had contrived to ignore, or to view
in sympathetic terms. They would not do so any more. When Michael
Clanchy
came to write a new epilogue about Edward I for the
second edition of his England
and its Rulers (1998), he pointed out that, because of the expulsion, the king
‘has affinities with Hitler’.
From hero to Hitler in just a hundred years: how the mighty
have fallen!
Small wonder that no one has been tempted to
erect any new statues of Edward I in the past century.
Who now, to adapt
McFarlane’s metaphor, would want to buy shares in such a king? Nevertheless,
what I aim to do in the remainder of this article is to reconsider some of this
criticism. My intention is not to whitewash Edward or to excuse any of his
actions; only to place the criticism of him in some kind of revised
perspective.
To start in an obvious place, we may observe that modern
criticism of Edward I
is
almost entirely at odds with
contemporary praise for the king. At the time of his death, Edward was lauded
as brave, eloquent, wise, just and pious. In both Westminster and the west of
Ireland he was described as ‘Edward the Great’, and in the years thereafter his
life continued to be celebrated, both in written form and as mural paintings on
the walls of various royal and
episcopal
palaces.
So what, you might reasonably say: eulogists are bound to be
eulogistic. What of contemporary criticism of the king? The problem is
,
there really isn’t that much. If we go back to the very
beginning of Edward’s career, we find, unsurprisingly, that he was condemned
for being an unruly teenager. The chronicler Matthew Paris has a well-known
(but suspiciously vague and uncorroborated) story about how Edward, out one day
with his gang of thuggish followers, met another young man and ordered his
gratuitous mutilation. Other more credible evidence shows that, by the time he
was twenty, Edward was determined to put his wayward past behind him. In a
private letter of August 1259, the future king wrote to the chief official in
his lordship of Chester,
instructing him to deal justly with everyone. ‘If … common justice is denied to
any one of our subjects,’ he declared, ‘then we lose the favour of God and man,
and our lordship is belittled’.
Another well-known piece of criticism was levelled at Edward
a few years later in the course of his struggle with Simon de Montfort. In The
Song of Lewes, one of Montfort’s clerical acolytes suggested that
Edwardus
was like a
leopardus
– a
beastly blend of vice and virtue. While brave like a lion (
leo
), he was also shifty and duplicitous like a
panther (
pardus
). McFarlane took this ex parte
statement as the starting point in his famous article, arguing that it was a
more accurate guide to the king’s conduct than the empty words of his
eulogists. Yet McFarlane overstated his case. There can be no doubt that, in
one or two of his dealings with the nobility, Edward overreached
himself
and committed acts which were unjust. But many of
the other examples that McFarlane went on to adduce – the king’s land-deals
with the earls of Gloucester, Hereford,
Lincoln and Norfolk – hardly bear out the accusation of
injustice. All of these men entered into arrangements with the Crown
voluntarily. In fact, as another private letter written towards the end of his
life proves, Edward had never abandoned his earlier respect for what was legal.
‘Be as stiff and harsh … in this business as can be,’ he instructed his
chancellor in 1304, ‘without offending the law’. Edward’s court was never
perceived as unjust, as those of his father and grandfather had been. ‘Truly,
in our times no king’s kingdom was made firm and strong with so much justice’,
said a preacher before the pope in 1307, and in general terms he was right.
The only real criticism that was levied at Edward during the
first two decades of his reign arose as a result of his determination to
recover the rights that he contended had been usurped during the lax rules of
his predecessors. Disgruntlement with the king’s famous Quo
Warranto
inquiry (so-called because of the inquisitors persistent demand to know ‘by
what warrant’ a landowner claimed his special privileges) mounted during the
late 1280s, partly because the inquiry intensified in these years, and partly
because there were no parliaments during this period – Edward spent the years
1286–89 overseas, attending to his duchy of Gascony. But on his return Edward
punished the judges and ultimately compromised on Quo
Warranto
,
allowing that landlords could retain their privileges if they were able to show
more than a century of continuous usage. Unlike the implacable tyrant of some
texts, this was a man who was quite capable of finding a middle course.