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.