Take a look at this guy. It's a climactic scene in *That Movie*, and old beardy
here in the unflattering metal hat is about to order his archers to shoot at
his own men in order to win a battle. Check out those true-blue eyes. Brrr. And the prosthetic nose.
Pretty nasty, huh? That's the least of his crimes. Elsewhere in *That
Movie* he institutes the mass rape of newlywed women in Scotland, hangs unarmed
Scottish noblemen, beats the tar out of his own son and – in a scene that
appears to be played for laughs - throws a homosexual out of a window.
That's Edward Longshanks for you, the 'most ruthless man to ever sit on the
English throne' according to the strange leper/hobbit-type creature that is Robert de Bruce's father in *That Movie*. He's a mean, nasty, cruel,
inhuman piece of work, played to perfection by the late Patrick McGoohan. And
what's more, he's got one of those posh BBC English accents, which is always a
clear sign of evil.
Turning
to a 1960s textbook my father gave me - 'The Living World of History', no less -
we have a rather different description of the same man: 'King Edward I, who
reigned from 1272 to 1307, was a rare character. Tall and erect and sinewy, his
length of leg gained him the nickname of "Longshanks." He was a proud
and truly royal prince, a fearless and peerless knight, and altogether a man's
man."
So there - separated by just a few decades, we have one portrayal of Edward as
a peerlessly erect - *blush* - prince, and then the sneering slimeball of
Mel's opus. Divergence of opinion on Edward is nothing new. Victorian
historians tended to lionise him, such as Bishop William Stubbs, who
called him The English Justinian. We don't hark much to the Victorians these
days, what with them being horrid imperialists who got sexually aroused by
table legs and all - yah, no, it's totally true, I saw it on a
documentary somewhere - but the generally positive view of Edward's
reign and achievements is still maintained by modern academics such as
Michael Prestwich.
Elsewhere opinions on Edward are pretty negative, and undoubtedly influenced by *That Movie*. I've noticed in recent weeks
some extreme comments made about him on internet and Facebook forums
(surely the founts of all knowledge), including wild claims that he was in the
habit of torturing and murdering his prisoners, and a sort of medieval Hitler who
committed mass genocide on a more or less daily basis. The poor guy can’t catch
a break anywhere, and one recent author of self-proclaimed ‘historical
integrity’ claims that Edward wasn’t even his father’s son, but the bastard
offspring of an affair between Simon de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence. Portraying
English medieval queens as wanton adulteresses who had affairs and then
foisted their backstairs spawn on the throne is a nasty tendency in recent
historical fiction, and really needs to stop.
Edward could certainly be cruel. Matthew Paris records an unpleasant
story, possibly untrue, of the youthful Edward and his Lusignan buddies
setting upon and mutilating a defenceless peasant for a laugh. He at times
behaved with great savagery in Scotland and Wales, including the infamous massacre at
Berwick, the incarceration of Bruce's female relatives in hanging cages, and
his refusal to allow the garrison at Stirling to surrender until he had tried
out his new toy, the gigantic siege engine 'War-Wolf', on the
defences. More horrors could be added to that list. Medieval warfare was
unimaginably brutal, and Edward's enemies were equally ruthless.
Contemporaries accorded Edward a great deal more respect than they did
his predecessor and successor. Hard he may have been, but the 'first knight of
Christendom' united England after the catastrophes of his father's reign,
earned a heroic reputation on Crusade, made monumental legal reforms, and
strengthened the power of the English crown. More than that, he was lucky (he
once narrowly avoided being crushed by a collapsing ceiling while playing
chess), had the gift of inspiring loyalty in his barons (most of the time)
and was supremely successful in war. 'England rejoice, thy prince is
peerless,' was the verdict of the Lanercost chronicler after the Battle of
Falkirk, which was the kind of press Henry III and Edward II
could only dream about. Bar a serious crisis in the late 1290s,
Edward was extremely popular with his English subjects. One of the most
popular acts of his reign – obscene to modern eyes – was his expulsion of the
Jews in 1290. As Sharon Penman said on her blog recently, Anti-Semitism was a
virus that all medieval Christians inhaled at birth, and the English were no
exception.
In
person, Edward must have been mesmerizing. At six feet two inches, he was
taller than most of his contemporaries, with arms too long for his body, a
drooping eyelid inherited from his father (not Simon de Montfort) and a lisp.
His rages were terrifying, and one prelate was said to have dropped dead from
sheer fright after Edward erupted at him. He did indeed assault his son, the
future Edward II, on at least one occasion, tearing clumps of hair from the
prince’s head and kicking him out of the room after Young Ned had unwisely
asked for lands to be bestowed on his best friend, Piers Gaveston.
There
was a softer side to this towering bully, and some evidence of a sense of
humour. He broke down and wept when informed that his (real) father had died,
and fell to pieces when he lost his beloved first wife, Eleanor of Castile. “My
harp is turned to mourning”, he wrote as her funeral cortége travelled south to
London, and the final staging-post of her journey, Charing Cross, is testament
to his love for her: ‘Charing’ is a corruption of ‘Cher Reine’ or ‘Dear Queen’.
A record of a bet Edward had with the royal laundress Matilda of Waltham, in
which he challenged her to a horse-race (and lost), suggests he was capable of
cracking a smile, as does the letter he wrote in the 1300s concerning Nicholas
de Segrave: that knight, Edward recommended, was to be given plenty of parkland
to roam in, for ‘we well know his talent for running away’. The joke creaks,
but it’s something.
And
then there are the slaughtered innocents of Berwick. Ultimately, Edward was a
hard man in a hard time, and in many ways an alien and repellent figure to our
eyes. But very few medieval kings could possibly be described as pleasant
people by modern standards, and it wasn’t their job to be nice. As cruel and as
able as his despised grandfather, King John, but a great deal luckier and more
successful, Edward I could perhaps be judged as W.L Warren judged John: a man
with ‘the abilities of a great ruler, but the inclinations of a petty tyrant’.
