by Morris, Marc
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 mi
ght 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.
The king’s desire to appease his subjects in 1290 brings us to his expulsion of the Jews. There is no point trying to defend him, as some have done, on the grounds that the exercise was carried out efficiently and that the incidents of murderous violence involved were unauthorised and apparently few in number. Edward had no sympathy with the Jews and had already visited plenty of violence on them of his own accord. A decade earlier, to maximise the profits of an impending recoinage, he had instituted a covert crackdown on ‘coin-clippers’ – criminals who shaved silver off the edge of his coins to make new ingots. Of those convicted and hanged, twenty-nine were Christians but almost ten times that number were Jews, which makes Edward I responsible for the biggest pogrom in British history.
His expulsion of the Jews, by contrast, is not quite as remarkable or record-breaking as is often portrayed. Edward, it is true, became the first king to enforce a nationwide Jewish exodus. Yet all this proves is that his was the powerful king of a precociously united kingdom; for more than a century, other kings, princes and counts had been expelling Jews from their demesnes to the fullest extent of their more limited authority. Simon de Montfort, for example, whose name is commemorated by a new university in Leicester, had expelled the Jews from that town at the start of his English career. Moreover, he had done so expressly for the salvation of his and his family’s souls. Thirteenth-century Europe was a profoundly anti-Semitic place, and no corner of it more so than England. What motivated Edward to expel the Jews in 1290 was not simply his own personal hatred; it was his desperate need of money, which could only be satisfied by a grant of tax from parliament. The knights of the shires, those heroes of Victorian constitutional history, were duly summoned, and demanded the expulsion as the price of their consent. The expulsion, in short, was a popular act in every sense: Edward received the biggest tax of the English Middle Ages, and his subjects cheered him for his pious performance in driving ‘the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’. It is quite easy to present Edward I as a Hitler figure; more difficult, perhaps, to confront the fact that all Englishmen once shared his virulent anti-Semitism.
We could likewise easily condemn Edward for his wars, but this too would be to adopt an anachronistic stance: contemporaries were quick to praise him. ‘Long may he live and conquer and rule’, wrote a jubilant English clerk in Rome when he heard that Edward had defeated the Welsh, ‘that domestic enemy … the disturber of English peace’. After the king’s death, it was recalled with approval that ‘he tried to war down all those who wished to throw his people in confusion’ – this from a sermon preached before the pope. Medieval monarchs were expected to go after their enemies with fire and sword. As one poet proudly put it, the English king confronting his foes was alike to the three lions on his banner: ‘proud, fierce and cruel’. Another writer put expressed the same point in even more concise terms. To the sons of pride, he said, Edward I was ‘a terrible king’. The terror he unleashed against the Scots has been the basis of much modern criticism. Yet it has been recently and convincingly argued that, in prosecuting this war, Edward’s conduct was entirely in keeping with the contemporary laws of arms. If anything, in fact, Edward was surprisingly lenient in his treatment of the Scots, at least until 1306. One north-country English chronicler averred that the king was too compassionate.
Nevertheless, there are limits to the amount we can forgive or understand Edward’s behaviour, even when judged by the standards of his own day, and this is most obviously the case in relation to Scotland. The English and the Scots, unlike the English and the Welsh, got on well in the thirteenth century. To take just the most obvious examples, Edward’s aunt, Joanna, had been married to Alexander II (king of Scots from 1214–49), and Edward’s sister Margaret was married to Alexander III (1249–86). The kings of England had always taken the trouble to stress their superiority in this relationship, and the Scots, in return, had always politely insisted on their independence. But in 1290, following the tragic deaths of Alexander III and all his direct heirs, Edward saw a unique opportunity for extracting from the Scots an unqualified admission of their subordination. He appealed to history to make his case, ordering a trawl of monastic chronicles to unearth the evidence that would prove his right to overlordship. That case, built as it was on flimsy or fantastical foundations, failed to convince, and the Scots rejected both the king’s dodgy dossier and his demand for submission. But when argument failed Edward bullied and coerced, and at length the Scots crumpled, and told the English king what he wanted to hear.
Edward’s triumph, however, was short-lived. As soon as he had finished browbeating the Scots into submission, he found himself on the receiving end of similar aggression from the king of France, who confiscated and invaded his duchy of Gascony. Edward was dragged into a Continental war which, in different circumstances, he might have concluded with reasonable speed.
But, because of his recent hostility, the Scots, who might otherwise have sided with him, allied themselves with the French, and as a result Edward found himself embroiled in ceaseless fighting for the rest of his days. In his efforts to beat the Scots and the French, he was forced to undermine much of the constructive achievement of the first half of his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military service; taxation was demanded at punitive levels and, as a result, the political consensus in England began to collapse. Faced with opposition to his demands for money and military service, the consensus-builder resorted to evermore arbitrary measures, attempting to levy taxes without consent, and disregarding his subjects’ demands for the confirmation of their existing liberties. Once again, Englishmen started to regard Edward as an untrustworthy creature.
By the time of Edward’s death in July 1307, this crisis had subsided. The French had returned Gascony; the Welsh, who had also rejoined the fray, had been re-conquered; England was once again politically acquiescent. Only in Scotland was there ongoing trouble in the shape of Robert Bruce, but this too looked certain to be a passing thing. There seemed little doubt at the time that the newly proclaimed Scottish king would soon be defeated, captured, and treated to the same grisly death that William Wallace had experienced just two years before.
In conclusion therefore, we must surely allow Edward I the greatness that has been denied to him in almost all recent writing. We are, after all, talking about the man who out-generalled and defeated Simon de Montfort in battle; who, alone of all the crusade leaders of 1270, reached the Holy Land; the man who conquered Wales and built the castles at Conwy, Beaumaris, Harlech and Caernarfon; the man who for a time gave England the best government it had enjoyed since the Norman Conquest and left an enduring legacy in the shape of his laws and in the development of parliament. All of this can be admitted, provided at the same time we recognise that Edward was also, as contemporaries observed, a terrible king. He was, as one native Irish annalist put it, ‘a knight most prudent, most violent and most valiant. It was by him that the greatest number of people fell in his time.’ Terrible in his wars, Edward also made a terrible error of judgement in trying to lord it over Scotland, destroying the previously good relations that had existed with England, and leaving a legacy of vengeance that endured for centuries, and that still resonates today.