EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND. By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Surnamed Longshanks, born 1239, crowned 1274, died 1307. Son of Henry III, he defeated and slew Simon de Montfort in his father’s reign and took part in the fourth crusade. On his accession to the throne he completed the subjugation of Wales and in all ways approved himself an able and powerful monarch. The most signal events of his reign were those connected with the subjugation of Scotland. At first successful, it was only in the last months of his long reign that Robert Bruce’s coronation as King of the Scots opened the way for a final defeat of English claims and arms under Edward II.]

In his own time, and among his own subjects, Edward was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward’s very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled; like them willful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. He inherited, indeed, from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But for the most part his impulses were generous, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgiveness. “No man ever asked mercy of me,” he said, in his old age, “and was refused.” The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. “It is I who have brought you into this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink.” A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection lay, in fact, beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing. Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his father’s death, though it gave him a crown; whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother; whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife’s bier rested. “I loved her tenderly in her lifetime,” wrote Edward to Eleanor’s friend the Abbot of Cluny; “I do not cease to love her now she is dead.” And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier Angevins disappears in Edward. He was the first English king since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than that which closes the long contest over the charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong.

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in Edward’s career. Under the first king, whose temper was distinctly English, a foreign influence told most fatally on our manners, our literature, our national spirit. The rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus was now making its influence dominant in Western Europe. The “chivalry” so familiar in Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy, before which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward’s nature from which the baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety, save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable chivalry of his day. He had been famous from his very youth as a consummate general; Earl Simon had admired the skill of his advance at Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a tenacity and force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a commissariat which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery, and to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But his fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people’s love of hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier—tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action. When he encountered Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned prowess, after Evesham, he forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. At his “Round Table of Kenilworth” a hundred lords and ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the faded glories of Arthur’s court. The false air of romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his “Vow of the Swan,” when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class, and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. “Knight without reproach” as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.

Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its influence on Edward’s mind was the new French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties, such as commendation, into a definite vassalage. But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time. When the “sacred majesty” of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage, every constitutional relation was changed. The “defiance” by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason, his after-resistance “sacrilege.” That Edward could appreciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never willfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which he had borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of nobleness and meanness, that we must look for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward’s conduct and policy.