Kings and Castles by Morris Marc

Author:Morris, Marc [Morris, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Endeavour Press Ltd.
Published: 2012-10-08T23:00:00+00:00

10. The Best of Kings, the Worst of Kings: A Reassessment of Edward I

On an otherwise unremarkable building opposite Holborn tube station, some five or six storeys above the commuter throng, sits a serene and noble-looking Edward I. The work of a young sculptor Richard Garbe (d. 1957), he was placed there in 1902, and evidently intended as a tribute: on the opposite corner of the same building sits a similar statue of Edward VII, who was crowned that same year.

The accession of a new King Edward, the first in 350 years, evidently prompted some of his subjects to look back through the annals of English history in search of a similarly named exemplar. No doubt they quickly dismissed as unsuitable the two boy kings, Edwards V and VI, the usurper Edward IV and the unspeakable Edward II, and ignored the three unnumbered pre-Conquest Edwards on the grounds of their comparative obscurity. Today they might have considered the merits of Edward III, a successful king whose reign witnessed the greatest English triumphs of the Hundred Years War. But at the start of the twentieth century no one was in the mood to celebrate a man who appeared to have gone looking for glory on the battlefields of Europe; the victor of Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter was at that time regarded as a feckless and irresponsible warmonger.

By a process of elimination, therefore, it had to be a statue of Edward I. Like his namesake grandson, Edward had also been a warrior king. His wars, however, were perceived to have been conflicts of quite a different order, fought in the national interest, and forced him on him by the rebelliousness of his subjects in Wales and Scotland. Moreover, the first Edward, unlike the third, could be held up as man possessed of strong moral fibre, uxorious to an almost Victorian degree, the father of no less than fifteen with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, in whose memory he erected the celebrated Eleanor Crosses.

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.

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