It was a worse loss to England than any there knew. Yet they knew enough to draw a cry of horror and sorrow from the lips of all those that heard the news. And a fortnight later, on the 17th of December, they all stood at Charing Cross, to see the funeral procession wind down from the north road, and set down the black bier for its last momentary rest on the way to Westminster.
It is rather singular that the two items which alone the general reader usually remembers of this good Queen’s history should be two points distinctly proved by research to be untrue. Leonor did not suck the poison from her husband’s arm—a statement never made until a hundred and fifty years after her death, and virtually disproved by the testimony of an eye-witness who makes no allusion to it, but who tells us instead that she behaved like a very weak woman instead of a very brave one, giving way to hysterical screams, and so distressing the sufferer that he bade four of his knights to carry her out of the room. Again, Edward’s affectionate regret did not cause the erection of the famous Eleanor Crosses wherever the bier rested on its journey. Leonor herself desired their erection, and left money for it in her will.
The domestic peace of the royal house died with her who had stood at its head for nineteen years. To her son, above all others, her loss was simply irreparable. The father and son were men of very different tastes and proclivities; and the former never understood the latter. In fact, Edward the Second was a man who did not belong to his century; and such men always have a hard lot. His love of quiet, and hatred of war, were, in the eyes of his father, spiritless meanness; while his musical tastes and his love of animals went beyond womanish weakness, and were looked upon as absolute vices. But perhaps to the nobles the worst features of his character were two which, in the nineteenth century, would entitle him to respect. He was extremely faithful in friendship, and he had a strong impatience of etiquette. He loved to associate with his people, to mix in their joys and sorrows, to be as one of them. His favourite amusement was to row down the Thames on a summer evening, with music on board, and to chat freely with the lieges who came down in their barges, occasionally, and much to his own amusement, buying cabbages and other wares from them. We should consider such actions indicative of a kindly disposition and of simplicity of taste. But in the eyes of his contemporaries they were inexpressibly low. And be it remembered that it was not a question of associating with persons of more or less education, whose mental standard might be unequal to his own. There was no mental standard whereby to measure any one in the thirteenth century. All (with a very few exceptions, and those chiefly among the clergy) were uneducated alike. The moral standard looked upon war and politics as the only occupations meet for a prince, and upon hunting and falconry as the only amusements sufficiently noble. A man who, like Edward, hated war, and had no fancy for either sport or politics, was hardly a man in the eyes of a mediaeval noble.
The hardest treatment to which Edward was subjected, whether from his father in youth or from his people at a later time, arose out of that touching constancy which was his greatest virtue. Perhaps he did not always choose his friends well; he was inclined to put rather too much trust in his fellow creatures; and Hugh Le Despenser the elder may have been grasping and mean, and Piers Gavestone too extravagant. Yet we must remember that we read their characters only as depicted by the pens of men who hated them—of men who were simply unable to conceive that two persons might be drawn together by mutual taste for some elevated and innocent pursuit. The most wicked motives imaginable were recklessly suggested for the attachment which Edward showed for these chosen friends—who were not of noble origin, and had no handles to their names till he conferred them.
It is only through a thick mist of ignorance and prejudice that we of this day can see the character of Edward the Second. We read it only in the pages of monks who hated their Lollard King—in the angry complaints of nobles who were jealous that he listened to and bestowed gifts on other men than themselves. But we do see some faint glimpses of the Edward that really was, in the letter-book but recently dug out of a mass of State papers; in the pages of De La Moor, (Note 1), the only chronicler of his deeds who did not hate him, and who, as his personal attendant, must have known more of him in a month than the monks could have learned in a century; and last, not least, in that touching Latin poem in which, during the sad captivity which preceded his sadder death, he poured out his soul to God, the only Friend whom he had left in all the universe.
“Oh, who that heard how once they praised my name,
Could think that from those tongues these slanders came?
... I see Thy rod, and, Lord, I am content.
Weave Thou my life until the web is spun;
Chide me, O Father, till Thy will be done:
Thy child no longer murmurs to obey;
He only sorrows o’er the past delay.
Lost is my realm; yet I shall not repine,
If, after all, I win but that of Thine.”
(See Note 2.)
To a character such as this, the loss of his chief friend and only reliable intercessor, when just emerging from infancy into boyhood, was a loss for which nothing could atone. It proved itself so in those dreary after-years of perpetual misunderstandings and severities on the part of his father, who set him no good example, and yet looked on the son whose tastes were purer than his own as an instance of irredeemable depravity. The easiest thing in the world to do is one against which God has denounced a woe—to put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.
Another item of sorrowful news reached London with the coffin of Queen Leonor. It was the death of the baby Queen of Scotland, by whose betrothal to Prince Edward the King had vainly hoped to fuse the northern and southern kingdoms into one. It left Scotland in a condition of utter distraction, with no less than eleven different claimants for the Crown, setting up claims good, bad, and indifferent; but every one of them persuaded that all the others had not an inch of ground to stand on, and that he was the sole true and rightful inheritor.
The only claimants who really had a shadow of right may be reduced to three. If the old primitive custom of Scotland was to be regarded—a custom dear to all Celtic nations—by which illegitimate children were considered to have an equal right to the succession with the legitimate ones, then there could be no question that the heir was Patrick de Galithlys, son of Henry, the natural son of Alexander the Second. But if not—and in this respect undoubtedly the custom had become obsolete—the struggle rested between John Baliol and Robert Bruce, of whom the first was the son of Dervorgoyl, daughter of Margaret, eldest daughter of David Earl of Huntingdon, brother of King William the Lion; while the latter was the son of Isabel, the second daughter of David. Every reader knows that the question was submitted by consent of the Scottish nobles to Edward the First as arbitrator, and that he gave his decision in favour of Baliol. In other words, he gave it against the existing law both of England and Scotland, which did not recognise representation, and according to which the son of the second sister ought to have been preferred to the grandson of the elder.
The anxiety of our kings to bring in this law of representation is a curious psychological fact. Richard the First tried to do it by will, in leaving the crown to his nephew Arthur; but the law was too strong for him, and the rightful heir succeeded—his brother John. Edward the First contrived to abrogate the law, so far as Scotland was concerned, a hundred years later. And eighty years after him Edward the Third tried again to alter the English law of succession, and this time the experiment succeeded. But its success was due mainly to two reasons—the personal popularity of the dead Prince whose son was thus lifted into the line of succession, while the rightful heir was extremely unpopular; and the fact that the disinherited heir gave full consent and assistance to the change in the law.