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 foot 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 McGoohanmode. 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.