Kings and Castles

by Morris, Marc

  Many people, confronted with the long line of heroes and villains who have at one time or another sat on England’s throne, would no doubt struggle to identify Edward I. His life, unlike those of several of his successors, was never celebrated by Shakespeare; he was neither hunchbacked nor notably handsome; he did not murder any nephews nor meet with a grisly end; to the best of our knowledge, he never urged his men once more unto the breach, nor offered his kingdom in exchange for a horse. It is understandable, therefore, that this thirteenth-century king should sometimes slip from our collective national consciousness, or be confused with his numerous royal namesakes (altogether we have had eleven King Edwards). But it is also a great pity, because Edward I was the most important of them all, and, indeed, one of the most important monarchs this nation has ever known.

  Edward has not been entirely overlooked in popular culture. In 1995 he made his big-screen debut in Braveheart, appearing as ‘Longshanks’, the villainous nemesis of the film’s hero, Sir William Wallace. The nickname, at least, had some basis in contemporary fact: Edward was a remarkably tall man for his day and age, standing around six foot two in his silken socks (such was the length of his corpse when exhumed in 1774). But otherwise, as you might expect, Gibson’s biopic provides a poor guide to understanding the king’s character and motivations, especially since it deals with only the last decade of a remarkably long reign. Edward was the longest lived of all England’s medieval monarchs, 68 years old when he died in the summer of 1307. Not until Elizabeth I limped on into the seventeenth century was his record broken.

  And what a life he had lived. Before his accession, Edward had served one of the toughest apprenticeships of any English ruler, having seen his father, the ineffectual Henry III, stripped of power, and having suffered defeat and imprisonment at the hands of his uncle, Simon de Montfort. It fell to Edward to lead the royalist fightback and restore Henry to full authority, a feat he eventually achieved in 1265 at Evesham, where he met Montfort in battle and had him hacked to death.

  Restoring the power of the Crown remained one of Edward’s principal preoccupations for the rest of his days. The other was recovering Jerusalem for Christendom. In 1270, still uncrowned, Edward became the second of only two English kings (the other being his great uncle, Richard the Lionheart) to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. It was, much to his disappointment, an unsuccessful expedition, and it remained Edward’s lifelong ambition to return east at the head of a far greater host. Nevertheless, his crusade, and his other youthful adventures in Europe (to Spain, for instance, where he married Eleanor of Castile), made Edward the most widely travelled English monarch until well into the modern age. Not until the future Edward VII visited India in 1875 did any king or queen travel further.

  Plans for a new crusade, however, were ultimately dashed by struggles closer to home. Edward returned from the East determined to assert his authority on all fronts. One of his initial projects, for example, was to rebuild the Tower of London – the massive scale of the site that exists today is largely Edward’s achievement. A grander architectural legacy still arose as a consequence of the king’s intervention in Wales, which prior to this point was essentially an independent country. When the native Welsh princes met Edward’s demands for submission with defiance, the king responded by terminating their power forever. In 1277 and 1283 Wales was conquered in two devastating campaigns, and conquest was cemented with the most spectacular string of castles ever created. The mighty fortresses at Harlech, Conwy, Beaumaris and Caernarfon (to name just the four most famous) are all World Heritage Sites, and testimony to the awesome power that the English medieval state achieved with Edward I at the helm.

  For the first half of his reign Edward enjoyed almost unqualified success. As well as victory in Wales, there were triumphs on the domestic front. The Crown’s finances were righted by the creation of a national customs system; new laws were promulgated and the peace well kept. Parliament, a novel but hitherto malfunctioning institution, was transformed into a forum in which the nation could come together and devise common remedies. In 1290, for example, the knights of the shires assembled in Westminster to solve the pressing problems associated with Jewish credit. In a profoundly anti-Semitic age, the solution was a simple one, and Edward ordered the total expulsion of all Jews from his kingdom – the first European monarch to take such a measure.

  From that moment on, however, Edward’s success started to unravel. Just a few weeks after the Expulsion, he lost his beloved queen, Eleanor of Castile. Around the same time, news arrived of the death of Margaret, the so-called ‘Maid of Norway’, heiress to the Scottish throne and fiancée of Edward’s namesake son. The collapse of this matrimonial alliance – a scheme that would have seen England and Scotland united in 1290 rather than 1603 – persuaded Edward to impose himself on the Scots by force. They responded by allying themselves with the French, and the English king soon found himself at war with two formerly friendly neighbours. Edward spent his final years, not fighting in the Holy Land as he had hoped, but engaged in a ceaseless round of campaigns north of the Border. It was en route towards the Border that he eventually died, trying but failing to stamp out the rebellion of Robert Bruce. A king both great and terrible, he left England far stronger and more united than he found it at the time of his accession. But he left a legacy of division between the peoples of the British Isles that has lasted from his day to our own.

  9. Encapsulating Edward I

  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 f
oot 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.

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sp; 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.