The Perfect King (3 page)

That was how he ended a two-volume study of Edward III: an exhortation to disregard the man's achievements and to meditate on the barbarity of his behaviour, completely failing to consider him as a man in his haste to condemn the values of the age.

Longman's portrait was deemed 'remarkable for its justice, its variety of interest, and its completeness as a picture of the times' by Edward's next biographer. The Reverend William Warburton was, in fact, a
little
more sympathetic to Edward than Longman, and more subtle, pointing out that Edward 'understood better perhaps than any other sovereign of his dynasty the great importance of keeping on good terms with his people', adding that 'almost in every successive parliament he had the credit of making concessions to the nation
...'
However, Warburton's compliments always have a fatal sting in the tail, in this case adding: 'but he was, in all probability, quite as arbitrary as the most arbitrary of his predecessors'." Unlike Longman he does not damn Edward outright for his warrior-gallantry, but be
little
s him, stating that 'as a soldier and a legislator he looms large between Edward II and Richard II, but seems a man of ordinary stature when measured with the great first Edward or the greater first William'. On and on he goes, diminishing Edward at every opportunity, mainly for his failure to have lived in other centuries. But then Warburton was a man who saw the Black Death as one of the 'real glories' of the fourteenth century, for by it the English serf was freed from servitude.' In so doing he shows how little he understands the social priorities of the fourteenth century. He also demonstrates a gross detachment from everyday human existence: the agonising and lonely deaths of one in three of the population of Europe was the antithesis of glory in the fourteenth century, just as it would have been in the nineteenth. For Warburton, another 'real glory' was the
loss
of Gascony, allowing England to 'acquire its insular character'. Probably only Englishmen between the French Revolution and the Great War could have seen the acquisition of an insular character as a positive development. Basically, in Warburton's eyes, Edward was a bland third-rater because he had not contributed to nineteenth-century industrial democracy, as far as Warburton could see. Rarely has a biographer been so unfair in his expectations of his subject.

The third and last of the Victorian biographers was the best writer of the three and the worst historian. Dr James Mackinnon was a biographer of such extreme prejudice and perverse judgement that one quakes under his sentences. Yet, steadying ourselves after reading his outrageous and wrong judgements, we have to reflect that he too was a product of his time. Writing in
1900,
in a society whose fear of war was of paramount concern to men such as himself, the fact that Edward was a warmonger was enough to seal his fate.

Throughout [Edward's French war] we are repelled not only by its heartless brutality, but by the sordid motives that actuate it. Would-be conquerors of the stamp of an Edward are impervious to considerations of humanity or morality. Let Edward conquer, even if the world perish! But apart from moral and human considerations, it really is marvellous that it did not occur to the aggressor that devastation was a questionable path to a people's love and submission. Without prejudice, I think I may conclude, from a calm view of ends and results, that in this matter of external statesmanship, Edward is without balance, without true insight, without morality, without real grandeur, and his reign is that of a man who exhausted his country in the pursuit of selfish, and therefore essentially unpatriotic objects.'

Dr Mackinnon was not entirely negative about Edward. In fact, unlike Warburton, he allowed a few complimentary comments to stand without qualifying them with gratuitous faint-praise. He acknowledged that Edward did not seek to play the despot over the nation, and was 'not devoid of the good qualities of an administrator'. He admitted that he did not rule without reference to the law, that he encouraged free trade (a great virtue in the Great Britain of
1900),
that he employed Chaucer and that he was devoted to building 'in keeping with the trend of the age'. But then he socks Edward a huge blow.

We could wish that there were no reverse side to this picture, yet we greatly fear that the reverse side is
the
picture. It would be going too far to say, as some have done, that he regarded his country solely as a tool of his ambitious schemes of conquest, but he certainly did so in far too large a degree. There must have been something radically wrong in the regal conceptions of a monarch who loaded himself with debt and extorted from an unwilling people
...
enormous sums for the maintenance of a war undertaken mainly from motives of ambition
..
. Edward made war not only on his enemies but on his people.'

Even more extremely, just before going on to blame Edward personally for failing to produce an English poet equivalent in greatness (in Dr Mackinnon's opinion) to Petrarch, he gives the knife he has plunged again and again into Edward's reputation a final twist.

The strong personality of a virtuous king can make its own moral atmosphere, and exert an incredible influence for good, even if the materials he has to work with are none of the best. The master mind, the noble soul is after all the measure of his age, on the throne at least. For this mastery, this nobility, betokening the truly great man, we look in vain in Edward III.'
5

So why is this book called
The Perfect King?
Surely, if there is such doubt about his achievements, and if we cannot judge past leaders by our own standards, 'perfection' is an inappropriate term for anyone, especially a king. All kings have failings, and Edward III had as many as most men. But I am inspired by the idea that a monarch's vision of kingship is an important factor - perhaps the most important factor - in understanding his life and reign. Kingship is a creative act. To be a good king requires vision, in the same way as to be a good architect or a good military commander requires vision. Obviously vision alone is not enough: a medieval king was required to realise his ambitions under pressure, mindful that thousands of lives, including his own, depended upon his decis
i
ons. But we may observe that the least secure medieval kings were those whose concept of kingship did not match their subjects' expectations. 'The perfect king' is not what Edward III was: it is what he
tried
to be. If all statesmen are less than perfect, the best we can hope for is that they have some vision, some principles, and some idealism, at the outset of their careers at least.

The idea that a leader's vision of his role may be the key to understanding his character underpinned the volume which was the precursor to this study:
The Greatest Traitor: the Life of Sir Roger Mortimer.
In that work the centuries of opprobrium and denigration which had encrusted the historical reputation of Mortimer were stripped away to see how he himself would have construed his relationship with the king. He was portrayed alongside other characters who had royal associations to show his role models, his rivalries at court, and the opportunities open to him. In this way his ambitions and vision were contextualised, and his character - or at least his career — could be understood in its varying stages, not as a static finished product but as a human development.

It is harder to do this with a king. Earls can be compared with earls, barons with barons, but the social pyramid permits no comparisons for a monarch. Hence we find kings being compared with each other. This is justif
iable in some respects: Edward II
I was inspired by his grandfather (Edward I) and deeply conscious of his father's failings. But it would be wrong to compare him as a monarch with, say, William I, or even his grandfather, for the challenges he faced were of an altogether different nature. This is why it is intellectually incongruous to find kings compared in the pages of history books, and judged as less or more successful in relation to each other, like so many schoolboys in the curriculum of national progress. Yes, we may play the teacher and call out the names of Edward I, Henry V, Richard I and William I to award them each a gold star for being outstanding war leaders. But in so doing we must consider the opportunities open to them. Why not call out Henry II in the same group? Because he fought no war sufficiently important for that to become the chief characteristic of his reign. This was not because he lacked the qualities of a war leader. His reputation was so great that he did not need to demonstrate his leadership skills on the field of battle. In describing the life of a medieval king, we need to get behind the traditional images of war leaders and legislative reformers to see the individual in relation to his own ambitions and the expectations of his contemporaries, carefully distinguishing between the achievements of the ruler and the reign.

The above problems of royal historical biography - extricating the character of the man from the obscuring effects of historical judgement, distinguishing between the character of the king and the characteristics of his reign, and assessing the king's achievements in terms of his own vision and challenges — are general, and apply to most political leaders. The biographer of Edward
III
must deal additionally with problems which are peculiar to his reign. The most obvious is the extraordinary romanticism of the sources and the chivalric fervour of the period. To read about the events of Edward's reign is to experience the opposite of the 'willing suspension of disbelief; one
constantly
has to question whether events could really have happened as recorded by contemporaries. The opposite effect is at work: the constant
nagging of disbelief. Edward III
's experiences are so extraordinary that the period
1326-50
reads at times like a fairy tale with footnotes. This raises some serious issues. How can we account for the unattainable ambitions of men who dreamed of chivalrously fighting to the death: an elite whose very
raison d'etre
was to don armour and charge into
battle
, hoping for a glory which was not only personal but spiritual? Will we ever be able to understand them? The age is too much the stuff of
Boys' Own
stories: the valiant warrior, the noble king, the lady and her lover. The modern world simply does not believe in heroics and passions on this scale. Scholarship especially runs scared of fervent quests for glory. If we acknowledge the existence of such feelings, we tend to diminish them: the fearless knight becomes illiterate and ignorant, the passionate lady becomes a woman frustrated by a male-dominated society. We cynically explain the motives of the man who goes on campaign, or fights to the death for his lord. Perhaps only the anonymous men at the bottom of the social spectrum - the landless labourers, who lifted their spades in the years following the Black Death and started to conform to the modern stereotype of the downtrodden peasant, resentful of his servitude - gain widespread and genuine modern sympathy.

There is another side to this romanticism/cynicism coin. At some points in Edward's life the evidence does not read as fable, but should. Edward
III
and his contemporaries were some of the greatest propagandists who ever lived, and inclined not only to spin a skirmish as a chivalric victory but also to downplay an embarrassment, or to destroy evidence relating to secret or compromising events. This is best represented in the fake death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle in
1327.
Edward purposefully suppressed discussion of his father's survival. He personally destroyed evidence (his chamberlain's accounts) relating to the period when we might reasonably have expected him to have been arranging the return of his father's corpse to England.' This creates the most extraordinary problems for the biographer, who cannot simply ignore Edward Ill's relationship with his father's keepers, or the circumstances of his survival, after
1327.
With so little definite evidence extant, and so much evidence relating only to nondescript 'secret business', it is hardly surprising that many historians prefer to avoid the debate, and hide behind a cloak of ill-defined scepticism. It does appear - superficially at least - to be the safest intellectual position. But in historical biography, to err on the side of caution is still to err. An understanding of a subject's character will not be illuminated by his biographer's own timidity or ignorance. The bottom line is that the difficulty of treating a hidden or secret aspect of a man's life is not a good reason for his biographer to ignore it, quite the reverse.

The
questions arising from Edward II’
s false death in Berkeley Castle are complicated, as one would exp
ect, and a biography of Edward II
I is not the place to go into the matter in great depth. But the implications for Edward III of his father's secret survival were far more important than any other writer to date has been prepared to admit. Suffice to say that, as a preliminary to this study, these questions have been revisited, discussed with leading scholars of the period, argued out, checked and revised. The result is the most thorough analysis of the information structures underpinning the narrative of the demise of a medieval English king. In particular, the fake death in Berkeley Castle and its repercussions are discussed at length in an article in
The English Historical Review
(the foremost peer-reviewed historical journal). This concludes that we may be 'almost certain' that Edward II was still alive in March
1330.
An analysis of the post
-1330
evidence for Edward II’
s custody in Northern Italy is also being prepared for scholarly publication. Abstracts of these papers appear in Appendices Two and Three of this book respectively.

The last problem facing a biographer of Edward III which needs to be mentioned is perhaps the most obvious. The sheer scope of the man's life is awesome and hugely challenging. Writing this book has, at times, felt like experiencing the most beautiful, escapeless nightmare: the subject is so vivid, fascinating and inspiring; but the man ruled for fifty years! It would take considerably more than fifty years to become fully acquainted with all the documentary and physical evidence remaining from the reign, and to sift it for what is pertinent to Edward himself. True, five other British monarchs have reigned even longer (Henry III
, James VI of Scotland, George II
I, Victoria and Elizabeth II), but their lives would not be easy to encapsulate either. Furthermore
, the sheer dynamism of Edward II
I gives his reign several dimensions not present
in any of these others. Edward II
I was not just head of state, he was his own prime minister, his own foreign minister and his own field marshal. He was his own lawmaker and justice. He was a patron, a consumer, an innovator and an arbiter of taste. He was also a husband, a father and a friend to many. To write a biography of a man who actively associated himself with so many roles is like trying to write a study of a dozen politicians, military chiefs, economists, law lords and multibillionaire art collectors and philanthropists rolled into one.