Kings and Castles by Marc Morris

meanness, denied his ancestral right to inherit his earldom when
still a teenager. Having spent almost forty years pressing for redress, he was
no doubt rather surprised in his old age to find his claim suddenly upheld, and
seems to have let his imagination get the better of him. Back in the real
world, there was no likelihood that England might fragment into tiny
pieces, each governed by an independent earl who thought himself the equal of
the king. It was no longer possible to say to the king, ‘I am an earl,
therefore you cannot touch me’. Instead, the earls had developed a new theory:
something along the lines of ‘we are earls, and therefore we can replace you’.
Before the deposition of Edward II in 1327, no king of England had
been permanently removed in this way. In the late Middle Ages, however, many others would share his fate. And it was the earls, above
all, who were the kingmakers.

 
    8. Introducing
Edward I

 
    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,