For almost a fortnight Edward’s death remained a closely guarded secret. According to Walter of Guisborough, anyone who spoke of it during this time was imprisoned. Only three letters are known to have been dispatched the following day: one to the queen, one to the earl of Lincoln and one to the prince of Wales. This last was received on 11 July, and Edward of Caernarfon set out at once for the north-west, arriving a week later to mourn over the body. It was not until 20 July that his rule was proclaimed in Carlisle Castle, and the veil of secrecy surrounding his father’s death was lifted.1
As the news spread throughout England, it elicited a chorus of despair. ‘Death has taken him, alas!’ cried Peter Langtoft. ‘My heart is in desolation,’ wrote another Englishman in French. ‘Me thuncheth that deth hath don us wrong,’ said yet another in his native tongue. When messengers found the pope in Poitiers he was reportedly unable to stand on account of his grief. During the last days of July prayers and sermons were recited in Poitiers Cathedral – the first of their kind to be said for any king at the Curia – and across the city the bells rang out. Back in England Edward’s body began its long journey southwards from Burgh by Sands, led by the bishop of Coventry, and slowed by a crowd of lamenting subjects.2
Edward of Caernarfon was able to accompany this procession only during its opening stages; after a few days he had to return to Carlisle in order to lead the abandoned host. Their expedition, however, proved short lived and uneventful, and no doubt the English troops were deeply dispirited. They advanced into south-western Scotland, but Bruce wisely chose to remain hidden, and less than a month had elapsed before the campaign was called to a halt. The new king returned to the Border, where he paused to receive the homages of loyalist Scots, and then continued south to attend his father’s funeral.3
Since the start of August Edward’s corpse had lain embalmed in Waltham Abbey in Essex, not far from London. Around 18 October it began the final stage of its journey. On entering the capital it was received with maximum honour, resting for consecutive nights in the priory of Holy Trinity and St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as being taken to other city churches besides. At length it was brought to Westminster Abbey, where the funeral was held on Friday, 27 October. The service, says Guisborough, was attended by magnates of all lands and diverse regions, and Edward was laid to rest amongst his fathers.4
Contemporaries were in no doubt: this was a farewell to a truly great king. Edwardus Magnus was a phrase that sprang readily and naturally to the minds of men from Westminster to the far west of Ireland. Some went further still. Peter Langtoft averred that there had been no greater king since the time of Arthur, and in Poitiers one of the pope’s preachers ventured that his subject had been no less and perhaps more worthy of praise than Alexander. In Westminster itself, meanwhile, there was no such hesitation. According to the local writer who composed the longest lament of all, Edward had been entirely without equal, outshining not only Arthur and Alexander but also Brutus, Solomon and Richard the Lionheart. ‘We should perceive him to surpass all the kings of the earth who came before him,’ was this author’s unstinting conclusion.5
On what basis did this conclusion rest? Several obituarists went on to justify their superlative assessment and, unsurprisingly, one reason stood out above all others. Edward, as Guisborough put it, had been a king ‘most strong’. ‘The most renowned combatant on steed,’ opined Peter Langtoft, ‘he had no equal as a knight in armour.’ ‘King Edward was an outstanding warrior from his adolescence,’ added the Westminster eulogist, ‘in tournaments most mighty, in war most pugnacious.’ That these and other authors were right to remember their former leader as a valiant fighter is hardly open to doubt. Evidence of Edward’s courage and prowess in arms is abundant across his entire career. His personal participation in tournaments appears to have ended in 1273, after an especially bloody encounter at Chalon-sur-Saône in France drew condemnation from the pope. But the king had continued to throw himself into the even deadlier business of war regardless of the risks involved. As late as 1304, as his Westminster obituary recalled, he had very nearly been killed by crossbow bolts and other projectiles during the siege of Stirling. It is especially noteworthy that in respect of his valour Edward’s reputation was not simply the work of flatterers. After the Battle of Lewes in 1264, even his enemies had acknowledged that ‘he was not slow to attack in the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none’.6
Of course, physical strength, and even valour, while crucial, were by themselves insufficient: tyrants could also be strong and courageous. To be truly useful these qualities had to be combined with wisdom, and here too the obituarists were in agreement. Edward was the wisest and most prudent king, said Guisborough; ‘full of understanding’, added Langtoft, while another author affirmed that ‘all the things he did, he wisely brought them to an end’.7 Again, it is difficult in general terms to disagree with this assessment. Wisdom is clearly a more subjective quality than valour; what seems wise to one person at a particular time may seem less wise to another, or in retrospect. The fundamental measure of Edward’s wisdom, however, is that he was a good judge of other people. He could spot frauds (such as the knight who claimed to have been cured of blindness at the tomb of Henry III), and he had a talent for selecting men of outstanding ability to serve him. As one of the preachers in Poitiers put it: ‘He did not rule in a frivolous state of mind, nor under the influence of flatterers … but with the prudent counsel of good and wise men.’ Certain names spring immediately to mind. Robert Burnell, the longest serving chancellor until the eight eenth century; Otto de Grandson, a brave soldier and a brilliant statesman. Both had served Edward since his youth, at a time when his faculty for recruiting the right people was already demonstrably superior to that of his father. Roger Leybourne, Roger Clifford, Roger Mortimer – many of those whom he bound to his side were men of his own warlike stamp. Yet Edward also proved adept at choosing the best lawyers and clerics to serve at his court. His wisdom was such that he could channel their differing talents and satisfy their considerable (and often competing) ambitions.8
The corollary of this – contrary to what some historians have asserted – is that Edward’s lordship was emphatically good. A king who shared their longing for feats of arms, adventure and the pursuit of noble causes – this was a king worth serving for his own sake. Unlike his father, Edward had no need to buy loyalty with lavish grants of land or money. He had friends but not favourites. As his Westminster obituarist explained, men would come from all over the king’s dominions simply in the hope of joining the company of his knights. But those who served him well Edward did reward generously. The extensive new lordships given to Henry de Lacy, Reginald de Grey and John de Warenne in Wales, or to Thomas de Clare in Ireland, are a standing argument against the spurious notion that Edward was somehow lacking in largesse.9
Masterful in the management of his own household, Edward was no less competent in managing the wider political community. He took care, for example, to involve his greatest magnates in the running of the realm, consulting them in council on matters of importance. He proved able to handle the prickliest of characters, placating them where possible, overruling them when necessary. Thus Gilbert de Clare was allowed to lead armies in south Wales and to marry the king’s daughter, but given a severe dressing-down when he failed to respect the Crown’s authority.
An important part of Edward’s success as a leader, also mentioned by his Westminster obituarist, was his ready eloquence. According to a later writer, the king had some form of mild speech impediment – possibly a lisp. If this was so, it clearly did not affect his powers of persuasion. One thinks of his success in talking round former Montfortians in the wake of a bitter civil war – men like John de Vescy, who went on to follow Edward for the rest of his days. One also recollects the broad Christian coalition he built in the Holy Land, and his speech outside Westminster Hall that moved an archbishop to tears. It is a pity that no one preserved any of the pre-battle harangues that the king must surely have delivered, for he was clearly an orator of considerable skill.10
Eloquence, of course, had been held against him by his Montfortian enemies. Edward was said to ‘cloak himself in pleasant speech’ but then go back on his word. This, the author of The Song of Lewes opined, showed that he thought himself above the law, and prompted the lament, ‘O Edward, thou dost wish to become a king without law; verily, they would be wretched who were ruled by such a king’. But to judge from his obituaries, these fears had been unfounded. Edward was lauded in 1307 as a rigorous ruler who loved the law. ‘Truly,’ said one preacher, ‘in our times no king’s kingdom was made firm and strong with so much justice and so much mercy.’ In terms of lawgiving this was certainly true: Edward’s reign, especially during its first half, had witnessed an unprecedented volume of legislation – a stream of wide-ranging statutes that led seventeenth-century commentators to dub the king ‘the English Justinian’. Recent research has put Edward’s contribution to this process in perspective. It is now appreciated that he had little personal interest or involvement in the practical business of lawmaking, or even in passing judgement. Nevertheless, that so much regulation was introduced during Edward’s reign was significant, and shows that the king was anxious that justice should be maintained. In this respect his attitude had not altered since, at the age of twenty, he had instructed his bailiffs to exhibit ‘common justice’ to all, lest he lose the favour of God and man, and his lordship was belittled.11
Modern historians have found fault with Edward’s justice, identifying several occasions when the king departed from such high ideals for his own or his family’s advantage. The most notorious example, the disinheritance of Robert de Ferrers, has already been discussed. Another incident, wherein royal ministers persuaded the dying countess of Devon to sell her lands to the king, thereby disinheriting her distant relatives, also looks highly suspect. There can be no denying that, in his desire to increase the Crown’s estate, Edward occasionally indulged in quite low skulduggery. Here too, however, it is important to retain a sense of proportion. It would have been a rare medieval monarch indeed who never manipulated the law to suit his own purposes. What mattered in Edward’s case was that, in spite of the odd lapse, his rule was generally perceived to be equitable. People could feel confident about approaching him for justice in a way they could not have done during the reigns of his father and grandfather. The king’s own attitude is well illustrated by a private letter he sent to the chancellor in 1304 concerning a royal ward called Thomas Bardolf. This young man had given offence by refusing to go through with a marriage that Edward had arranged for him, and the chancellor was therefore instructed ‘to be as stiff and harsh towards Thomas in this business as can be, without offending the law’. Were such a letter leaked from the heart of government today it would be enough to generate resignations, but thirteenth-century kings did not have to be so careful in their correspondence. What is more striking in this instance is that, even as he instructed his chancellor to be partial, Edward reminded him to stay within the limits of what was legal.12
Another quality that the eulogists singled out for praise was Edward’s piety. He was, in the opinion of one writer, ‘the most Christian king of England’. This description probably rested more on his reputation as a crusader rather than the kind of piety for which his father had been famous. ‘O Jerusalem, thou hast lost the flower of thy chivalry,’ was one poet’s response to the news of his passing, and the general emphasis on crusading in the obituaries seems to have been encouraged by the rumour that, in his dying moments, Edward had willed his heart to the Holy Land, along with a fighting company of eighty knights. (The story that he commanded his body be carried at the head of future armies until Scotland was conquered was only told later, and is palpably nonsense.)13
In many respects, however, the king’s piety was very similar to the kind practised by his father. Like Henry, Edward distributed alms to the poor on a grand scale, feeding (or at least paying) hundreds of paupers at his court every week. He also undertook the unpleasant business of touching people suffering from ‘the king’s evil’ – scrofula, or tuberculosis of the neck – and was apparently more sought out for this reason than any of his successors. Like his father, Edward was a frequent visitor to cathedrals and other places of worship, and he made rich offerings of gold, jewels and money at their shrines and tombs. He did not share Henry’s inordinate devotion to Edward the Confessor – that much was clear from the fact that Westminster Abbey, half-built at the time of his coronation, was still in much the same state at the time of his funeral. Nor did he indulge in ostentatious displays of piety in order to compensate for political and military failure. Edward’s pilgrimages were often undertaken in advance of military campaigns, and his ecclesiastical patronage was more eclectic. When his armies advanced, they carried with them the banners of a host of English saints. For Edward, pious conduct was a necessary buttress to military success. An inventory drawn up after his death reveals that the king possessed a veritable arsenal of ornamented relics, including an arm of St David, a nail from Christ’s cross, and even a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.14
It was small wonder that Edward believed in the efficacy of these and other relics. As another of his obituarists observed, he was an exceedingly fortunate king, at least to the extent that he survived numerous near misses. Many have been mentioned in the preceding pages: the storm at sea that prompted him to found Vale Royal Abbey, the chamber that collapsed beneath his feet in Gascony, the two battles from which he emerged unscathed and, most famously, the unsuccessful attempt on his life at Acre. The list could easily be extended. Nicholas Trivet, a later chronicler whose patrons included Edward’s daughter Mary, preserved two episodes that would otherwise be unknown. In 1297, while the king was at Winchelsea waiting to sail to Flanders, his horse was startled by a windmill and leapt clean over the town’s lofty ramparts, along with its royal rider. Miraculously both survived. On another, earlier occasion, a youthful Edward was reportedly playing chess in a certain chamber and, for no apparent reason, got up to stretch his legs, only to have a stone crash down from the vaulting in the place where he had been seated. This escape was said to be the source of his devotion to the shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham.15
Trivet also told a story of how Edward, out hunting one day, rode his horse through a river to pursue a man who had mistakenly presumed he could disregard royal orders with impunity. The chronicler’s intention was to demonstrate that the king was ‘heedless of danger when he wanted revenge’, but his tale has recently been taken to indicate that Edward also possessed ‘a violent temper’. Given the story’s suspiciously allegorical appearance, its value as evidence in this last respect is open to debate. Edward could undoubtedly get angry on occasion: financial records show that in 1290 he paid twenty marks’ compensation to an esquire whom he had assaulted with a stick, while in 1297 repairs were necessary to a coronet, the property of his daughter Elizabeth, after the king had thrown it into the fire. Beyond this, however, evidence of genuine royal wrath seems rather thin on the ground: there are certainly no stories of Edward falling to the floor and biting the rushes after the fashion of his Angevin ancestors. By the thirteenth century, as the murals in the Painted Chamber make clear, it was important that ira (anger) should be vanquished by débonaireté (urbanity, literally ‘having a fine air’). Naturally, that did not mean that the chamber’s occupants were always capable of similar self-restraint. But there is far more evidence of debonair activity at Edward’s court than there is for explosions of ire. His financial accounts show frequent payments to jesters, acrobats, minstrels and dancers (including, in the last instance, a certain Matilda Makejoy). They also record the charming fact that every year on Easter Monday the queen’s ladies-in-waiting would try to catch the king in bed, and he rewarded them with a ransom if they were successful.16
Of the remaining observations made by writers at the time of Edward’s death, most are bland or commonplace – he was ‘illustrious’, for example, or ‘noble’. One of the sermons preached before the pope, however, contained some words that were clearly well considered and that ring especially true. More than any other ruler, it was claimed, Edward ‘wished to know much about the changes and variations of the world … he never knew how to be at rest’. The preacher went on to substantiate his point by listing some of the places the king had visited in his lifetime: Spain, Wales, Flanders, Scotland, Gascony and the Holy Land. He could have also added France, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Savoy, North Africa and Cyprus: Edward was the most widely travelled English monarch until well into the modern age. And yet the king’s restlessness was never more apparent than when circumstances forced him to remain in one place. It tended to manifest itself in building work: his tower in Acre, his new towns at Bonnegarde and Burgus Reginae. There can be little doubt that Edward loved building, and the regularity of bastides must have appealed to his orderly mind. But it was military architecture above all that gave him the greatest delight. In spite of the lack of direct evidence, historians have inevitably wondered about how involved he was in the design of his great Welsh castles, but the answer must surely be: intimately. When, in 1302, the king wanted a new fortress in Scotland at Linlithgow, he entered into detailed discussions with Master James of St George, concerning himself with such matters as the construction of the towers and the depth of the ditch. If Edward took this much interest in a wooden pele that cost less than £1,000, it presupposes that he was equally if not more involved in the planning of castles that cost ten to twenty times as much.17
Edward, then, had the character of a great king – brave, wise, eloquent, just, pious – combined with an abundance of good fortune and a restless, venturesome nature. But what of his actions, and what of his motives? Were these also adjudged great by his contemporaries, or indeed by posterity? With regard to his youth the answer in both cases has generally been a resounding no. Matthew Paris, commenting on Edward’s alleged attack on another young man in 1256, had been deeply concerned. ‘If he does such things when the wood is green,’ the chronicler worried, ‘what can be hoped for when it is seasoned?’ Modern writers have also been unimpressed with Edward’s apparent juvenile delinquency. One twentieth-century historian called him ‘an irresponsible, arrogant and headstrong boy’ and labelled him treacherous, self-indulgent and incapable of self-discipline.18 Both judgements, however, seem unduly harsh if not wholly unfounded. There is no doubt that Edward was a pushy teenager, and that, like most teenagers, what he craved was greater independence. Given his notions about the way kings and knights ought to conduct themselves, it was almost inevitable that he should clash with his father, who, as well as being unwilling to cede authority, espoused a radically different idea of what kingship entailed. But when Henry’s government was overthrown, and father and son were shackled, Edward’s struggle to control his own destiny suddenly became far more serious, and so did his own conduct. That Edward tried to throw off the restraints that had been placed upon him does not automatically render his behaviour ignoble. Nor do his actions during a period of kaleidoscopic change seem particularly inconstant. What he wanted, and what he endeavoured to obtain, was the free disposition of his lands and castles. To do this he perceived it was necessary to ally himself with those demanding reform, but he soon found that this placed him in an impossible situation, caught between two sides in an increasingly bitter family feud. He may, perhaps, have regretted his decision to desert Simon de Montfort in the spring of 1261, as for a time it cost him many friends. But by the end of 1263 Edward’s decision was vindicated. Montfort in power proved to be a disaster. From that moment onwards, all but a minority of diehards saw that the surer guarantee of good government lay in supporting the king’s eldest son.
Having won the struggle for power with Montfort, Edward had two main motives that would occupy him for the rest of his life. One was the recovery of Jerusalem; the other was the recovery of the rights of the Crown. The former, however misguided it may seem today, was regarded as the highest ideal of Edward’s age, and by pursuing it he won lasting international fame. The latter was made manifest at the moment of his coronation, and prosecuted with vigour in the months and years that followed. In England, the effort was cleverly handled. By presenting the Crown as the friend of the oppressed, the new king won widespread popular support, and this enabled him to begin recouping his father’s losses. Magnates who had usurped royal rights were made to answer for their actions; smaller landowners, meanwhile, thanks to the development of parliament, were given a greater voice, and in turn became Edward’s most consistent allies. For the first time since the Norman Conquest, England had a government that was perceived to be working in the interests of the majority of its subjects.
The consequence was that a minority of subjects suffered. In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country’s Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it is true, the first European leader to carry out an expulsion on a nationwide scale, but this only goes to show that he was a powerful ruler of a precociously united kingdom. Other kings, earls and counts before him had expelled Jews to the furthest extent of their more limited authority. To say this much is not to deny that Edward was a thorough-going anti-Semite: he was, as his pogrom of 1279 proves all too clearly. It is merely to emphasise that, in his anti-Semitism, Edward was altogether conventional. A bigoted man, he lived in a bigoted age, and was king of a bigoted people. Abhorrent as it seems to us today, the fact that ‘he expelled the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’ was regarded by his Westminster obituarist as one of Edward’s most commendable achievements.19
Chief among his achievements in contemporary eyes, however, was his success in war – and war, of course, was another consequence of Edward’s determination to recover his rights. ‘The most victorious king’, ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’ – Edward was, as one poet put it, ‘a king who knew much of war’, and in war all his talents – bravery, strong leadership, eloquence, strategic sense, organisational ability – came to the fore. The result, as we can appreciate in retrospect, was conflict on an uncommonly awesome scale: the largest armies seen in Britain until the seventeenth century, and the most spectacular chain of castles ever constructed.20
With the possible exception of historians, who tend to get swept along by all the excitement, modern observers would probably be less ready in their praise. But to thirteenth-century Englishmen, who perceived themselves to be surrounded by many perils, it was more important to have a warlike king than a peaceable one. Edward, said one preacher admiringly, ‘tried to war down and subdue all those who wished to throw his people into confusion’. As the author of The Song of Caerlaverock explained poetically, the king confronting his enemies was like the three lions embroidered in gold on the red of his banner – dreadful, fierce and cruel. The Westminster obituarist put it in even more telegraphic terms. Edward, he said, was peaceable to the obedient, but to the sons of pride he was indeed ‘a terrible king’.21
The sons of pride in the first instance were the princes of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his brother Dafydd, whose dynasty Edward warred down to the point of extinction. Whether he was justified in doing so has been a much-debated question in modern times. Contemporary Englishmen, as we have already seen, entertained no such doubts. To them the Welsh did not seem to be an oppressed people; rather they were considered to be an immoral, lazy, anarchic, turbulent and faithless race – ‘that domestic enemy’, as one vitriolic cleric put it, ‘the disturber of English peace’. In view of such hostile attitudes, one is bound to wonder just how important the king’s own contribution really was. It is doubtful whether Wales would have been conquered so thoroughly, so ruthlessly, so swiftly and so successfully had Edward I died in the Holy Land. It is equally doubtful that it would have survived as an independent power even had that been the case. By the time Edward arrived home in 1274, his peace with Llywelyn was already compromised by clashes in the March, and the March itself was a reminder that the English and the Welsh had been at loggerheads for more than two centuries. To this extent, both the king of England and the princes of Wales were representatives of their respective peoples. The Welsh, in truth, had too far to travel, economically and socially, for the English to cease regarding them as barbarians. Consequently, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which native power in Wales could have endured. Whether by sudden conquest or slow erosion, English domination seems a foregone conclusion.22
It seems equally certain that England would have eventually gone to war with France, though here too the historian has the advantage of hindsight. To Edward himself it seemed more natural that the two kingdoms should get along well. Their courts shared a common chivalric culture, and the royal families had been happily intermarried for two generations. In retrospect, however, the four decades of peace from 1254 to 1294 seem like a remarkable but brief interruption to long centuries of hostility. Edward certainly did not want a war with France; he worked hard in the first half of his reign to try to minimise friction with his Continental overlord, and gave Gascony the best government it had experienced for over a hundred years. But the same forces of nationalism and bigotry that were making the English increasingly intolerant of the Welsh and the Jews were also growing apace in France, and by the early 1290s they had infected the French court. This happened in secret, of course, so Edward’s failure to foresee the coming conflict should not be held too strongly against him. His only mistake was to negotiate without consulting his councillors, and for this his subjects chastised him accordingly (up to this point, said one chronicler, he had seemed like another Solomon). Yet when they too realised that the seizure of Gascony was the result of French trickery, they soon forgave him. ‘King of France, thou hadst sin,’ said one English poet in 1307, ‘to hinder the will of King Edward to go to the Holy Land’, and there can be no doubt that this was a fair judgement.23
The expulsion of the Jews, the conquest of Wales, the resumption of war with France: all required Edward I in order to occur precisely how and when they did, but all might easily have happened without him. What would have been almost impossible to foresee in, say, 1272, and what might well not have happened had, for example, Edward died in Acre that summer, was that England should go to war with Scotland. It was not just that the English and Scottish royal families had been intermarrying for several generations, nor even that similarly convivial cross-border relations had been maintained by their respective aristocracies. For a century and more before Edward’s day, Scotland had been busily approximating itself to England: welcoming English settlers and adopting English customs. Here the trend was not one of growing intolerance, but of increasing convergence.
For this reason alone, the mid-point of Edward’s reign stands to be regarded as a watershed moment in British history. The year 1290 was eventful in so many ways. It saw the king’s compromise over his Quo Warranto campaign, the finalisation of his plans for a second crusade, and the total expulsion of all England’s Jews. At a more personal level, it also witnessed the marriage of two of his daughters and the death of his beloved queen. All of these events, however, paled in significance compared to the death in September that year of Margaret, the Maid of Norway, heiress to the Scottish throne and intended bride of Edward of Caernarfon.
Had the Maid lived, and had this marriage taken place, the ramifications would have been far-reaching: a union of the Crowns, three centuries before the eventual union of 1603, only far more natural and amicable; Robert Bruce and John Balliol fighting alongside Edward I in a future war against France, just as their fathers and brothers had fought alongside him at Lewes and in the Holy Land; the French war resolved more swiftly as a result, and Edward travelling east for a second time, again with Scotsmen in his company. Nor is it unrealistic to imagine a more distant future, in which nobles from both nations, cousins in spirit as well as in blood, went on to tackle together the problematic peoples to the west whom both regarded as barbarians. In Edward I’s own day, his friend John de Vescy had participated not only in the conquest of Wales but also in the Scottish conquest of the Isle of Man, fighting under the banner of Alexander III. A future king of an Anglo-Scottish realm, leading an integrated Anglo-Scottish aristocracy, might well have dealt decisively with the ‘wild Irish’ or ‘wild Scots’ of the Western Isles, resulting in a British Isles that was precociously united.24
But none of this was to be. It happened that the Maid died, and Edward decided to lord it over the Scots, with fatal consequences. It meant that his war with France was far more protracted and expensive than it otherwise need have been, and it meant that he was committed to a war of conquest in Scotland that he lacked the resources to win. The combination of these two conflicts, moreover, had a disastrous impact on his other dominions, undoing much of the constructive work the king had carried out earlier in his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military service; Ireland was bled dry in the quest for supplies; England was taxed more heavily in the space of four years than it had been in the previous two decades, as well as being made to bear other oppressive burdens besides. Edward argued bitterly with the Church and with his magnates, and brought his people to the brink of rebellion, while in Wales rebellion actually occurred. Throughout this time, the king himself began to act in an unrestrained manner, bullying when persuasion failed, going back on his word, and becoming massively angry in the face of mounting opposition. ‘Either you will go or you will hang!’ he told Roger Bigod in front of a stunned parliament at Salisbury.
Eventually, in England, much of Edward’s behaviour was excused. ‘We know you to be a good and prudent prince,’ said Bigod in 1300, presumably remembering the king’s earlier record as a consensus builder rather than his more recent arbitrary acts. It was precisely because he had been such an excellent ruler before the crisis that Edward retained or recovered the loyalty of most of his subjects. Moreover, as he entered his seventh decade, he found that his contemporaries were dying out, and the new generation at his court had less desire to contradict a king who had already attained legendary status. The prime example in this category is provided by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and namesake son of Roger Bigod’s erstwhile ally. The old earl had died in 1298 apparently urging his offspring not to abandon the struggle for the Charters, but Humphrey junior did nothing of the sort. Instead he moved swiftly to ingratiate himself with Edward, supporting the king in war and marrying his widowed daughter, Elizabeth, in 1302. By 1306 he had acquired the status of favourite son-in-law; in the spring of that year he was rewarded with Robert Bruce’s forfeited estates.25
Men like Humphrey de Bohun, or for that matter Roger Bigod, did not doubt that Edward had been right to act as he did in Scotland. They too had read their copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth and knew that the kings of England had the right to rule the whole of Britain (indeed, they argued as much in a collective letter to the pope in 1301).26 They shared in Edward’s triumph in 1304 and did not doubt his greatness because war in the north subsequently re-erupted. Success seemed all but secured at the time of the king’s death in 1307. It only remained to take out Bruce and the two kingdoms that he had briefly ruled would once again be united.
But Edward’s legacy, largely because of his action in Scotland, was not one of unity but of profound and lasting division. In Ireland English power was already in retreat by 1307, such was the damage that the Scottish wars had caused to the colony, and in the decades that followed the lordship there went into steep decline. Crown revenues fell sharply. Within a year of the king’s death it was deemed necessary to bring the rolls of the Dublin exchequer inside the castle at night on account of the threat of war. Ultimately royal government would contract to a small area confined by ‘the Pale’, and although some English settlers continued to live beyond it, they found a settled English way of life impossible to maintain. Those dwelling in towns developed a permanent siege mentality, living in constant fear of attack from ‘the wild Irish, our enemies’. Meanwhile, those English magnates who remained in Ireland survived only by compromising with the natives, adopting Irish political customs and an overtly Irish way of life. They sported Gaelic names and learned to speak the language; some even found fame as composers of Gaelic poetry.27
In Wales, by contrast, there was no such compromise, and the result was a society in some respects even more bitterly divided. At a political level, English power prevailed: there could be no arguing with the wholesale nature of the conquest that Edward had inflicted. Welsh lords who wished to do so could play subordinate roles, serving as sheriffs in the new colonial administration, or even as knights in the royal household. But at a popular level there was no such mutual understanding; culturally, Wales and England remained worlds apart. As in Ireland, the English settlers locked themselves away in the new Edwardian boroughs, always suspicious of native intentions. The people of Caernarfon complained in 1345 that they suffered daily from ‘the malevolence and enmity of the Welsh’. When uprisings occurred, as they did in 1316 and more famously in 1400, the English were always able to crush and contain them. But the Crown had no interest in Wales beyond maintaining the divided status quo. Nothing symbolises the revised limits of royal ambition in the principality better than the fate of its two principal castles. Caernarfon and Beaumaris, incomplete at the time of Edward’s death, were left in that state by his successors. In 1330 building work on both sites was abandoned forever.28
Naturally, though, it was in Scotland that the English failure proved most dramatic and the legacy of bitterness most lasting. The final, devastating decade of Edward’s reign had not merely halted the trend towards convergence but thrown it into reverse. Englishmen, remembering the raids of William Wallace, resurrected the hostile stereotypes of the previous century: the Scots were once again lumped with the Welsh and the Irish as faithless and barbaric Celts. Scotsmen, for their part, responded in kind. Before 1290 they had been pleased to christen their sons Edward – Bruce’s sole surviving brother and Balliol’s eldest son both bore the name. By 1307, however, Edward was regarded in Scotland as ‘the Covetous king’ of Merlin’s prophecy: after his death, the soothsayers foretold, the Celtic peoples would ‘band together, and have full lordship, and live in peace until the end of the world’.29
Fortunately for the English, the Bruces’ attempts to construct such a pan-Celtic alliance proved short lived. Yet in Scotland itself the tide was turned decisively. King Robert overcame his domestic opponents and consolidated his rule; English garrisons fell one by one before the onslaught of his forces. When, in 1314, an English army appeared north of the Border with the intention of saving Stirling, it was wiped out at nearby Bannockburn; Edward of Caernarfon – Edward II, as he then was – was lucky to escape with his life. Their enemies might not care to admit it, but the Scots had vindicated their right to independence. Yet because the English could not admit it, there could be no return to the days before 1290. Scotland, which had once seemed nothing less than England’s double, now defined itself against its southern neighbour. ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive,’ its leaders wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English.’30
Not all of these failures and reverses, of course, can be blamed on Edward I alone. The ideas that drove him had been developing for generations before his own birth, and were the accepted commonplaces of his age. Moreover, the swiftness with which English power in the British Isles contracted after his death was due in large part to the incompetence of his successor, whose behaviour as king was causing alarm in England even before his coronation. Edward II possessed almost none of the attributes that had made his father great, and from the first his rule was hopelessly compromised by his relationship with Piers Gaveston. The favourite had been recalled from exile as soon as the old king’s authority had expired; before the funeral had taken place he had been invested as earl of Cornwall.31
Part of Edward’s legacy, however, from which neither his son nor his successors could escape, was the use of extreme violence to solve intractable political problems. The shift is often dated to the new reign, as if to lay responsibility at the door of a degenerate younger generation, but in fact it had begun far earlier. It was first manifest in the summer of 1265, which witnessed ‘the murder of Evesham’; it was seen again at Shrewsbury in 1283, when the law of treason was twisted to justify the killing of a prince. And so inexorably on, with the executions of Rhys ap Maredudd, Thomas Turbeville and William Wallace, culminating in the orgy of blood-letting that had attended the final campaign in Scotland. In the last instance, the perpetrators were Edward II and his contemporaries. It was thus unsurprising that, when these men eventually fell out, they should use the same methods against each other. Gaveston was murdered in 1312; his killer, Thomas of Lancaster, in 1322. Few English magnates died happily in their beds in a reign that would end with the murder of the king himself.32
It is appropriate, therefore, that even in death Edward I should exhort men to vengeance. After his funeral rites had been performed in 1307, the king’s body, dressed in his coronation robes, was entombed near the altar of Westminster Abbey. As is well known, his tomb bears a famous inscription. The letters as they appear today were evidently painted in the sixteenth century, but the sentiments they express are almost certainly earlier. EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST, the legend reads.PACTUM SERVA.
The first part is easy enough to translate. Scottorum malleus means ‘Hammer of the Scots’, which is certainly an appropriate epithet. It is also the principal reason for believing that the motto was concocted soon after Edward’s death; as early as 1320, a visitor to the tomb described him as ‘the most Maccabean king’, and the Hebrew word makabeh translates as ‘hammer’.33
This being the case, the second part of the inscription may have a more specific meaning than is usually allowed. Pactum Serva is commonly mistranslated as ‘Keep the Faith’; a more accurate rendering would be ‘Keep the Vow’. In the early years of the fourteenth century there was only one vow that the nobility of England could have understood in this context: the vow they had all sworn at Whitsun 1306, when the legendary king had gathered them together for a feast in Westminster Hall, and committed them to avenge the rebellion of Robert Bruce.34
The real mystery of Edward’s tomb lies not so much in its inscription but in its uncompromising severity. One every side, the king is surrounded by the most elaborate funerary displays imaginable: the gilt-bronze effigies of his wife and his father; the brightly coloured, canopied confection that holds the bones of his brother. Yet Edward, inscrutable to the last, lies hidden in an unadorned box of black Purbeck marble. Once this was assumed to be a sin of omission on the part of his son, but that argument cannot be sustained. In the 1320s Edward II commissioned a new set of murals for the Palace of Westminster celebrating his father’s victories. If Edward I lacks an effigy, it was not for lack of filial devotion. The simplicity of his tomb, we are forced to conclude, was deliberate.
There are few parallels for such austerity in medieval Europe. The kings of Sicily are interred in similarly simple style, and so it is not impossible that Edward, as a sometime visitor to the island, may have drawn his inspiration from that direction. There was, however, another parallel closer to home, and that was the tomb that the king himself had constructed at Glastonbury for the bones of King Arthur. This too, according to seventeenth-century observers, had been a black marble box.35 In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men’s minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations.