Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

And, lastly, Simon of Montfort has taken a swift stride through several centuries and, arriving at the modern idea that the making of nations and the ordering of the world can be achieved by Talk, has, after not a little violence and the spilling of considerable blood that might have been better spent, got together that first Parliament or Talking-Machine, whose successors have so sorely hindered the progress of the world and balked the efforts of those appointed by God, and not by the counting of noses, to do its work.

So the two noisy and somewhat foolish centuries have rolled away into a blessed oblivion with a good deal of shouting and swaggering, of strife and bloodshed, but of little progress, saving that one Roger Bacon has lived and written a certain book and made himself a name for ever.

But all this time the work with which we are here most concerned, the making of an empire, has been waiting for the next God-sent man to come and do it, and this man was Edward Plantagenet, surnamed Longlegs, next in lineal succession, not as king, but as Empire-Maker, to him who won the fight at Senlac and got himself so well obeyed that “no man durst do anything against his will”—which was a great deal to say of any one in such days as those.

Edward of the Long Legs came on to the stage of History with long, swift, determined, and, in short, wholly characteristic strides. The Talking-Machine of the good Earl Simon had worked noisily, as is usual with such machines, and had produced little but sound and fury.

There was war all round, and the usual anarchy in Ireland and Wales. Llewelyn, Lord of Snowdon, for instance, had pitted himself gallantly against the logic of circumstances, and was seeking to reconstruct the ancient and now impossibly obsolete Celtic empire.

“Be of good courage in the slaughter, cling to thy work, destroy England and plunder its multitudes!” his bards had sung to him, and so he had honestly set himself to do, not recognising the fact that empires are neither made nor re-made by mere methods of miscellaneous blood-letting.

To the north, Scotland was divided by schisms and rent by the bitter jealousies of its nobles and clan-chieftains, savage, rude and poor, but gallant, strong, and very full of fight, as the English were to learn later on.

Over the Narrow Seas the wide domains which William the Norman had kept with his sword and which the second Henry had greatly increased by inheritance and marriage, were slipping piecemeal away from the throne to which they did not of right divine belong, and with which it was therefore impossible that they should remain.

Such, in briefest outline, was the scene into which Edward Longlegs strode, and of which he was to be for thirty-five years the central and dominating figure. His first look round, as it were, showed him the nature of the task which it was his destiny to forthwith set about.

With that clearness of vision without which no man has any chance of success in the business of empire-making, he instantly pierced the dust-storms of battle that were rising all about him, and the mist-clouds of debate which Earl Simon’s Talking-Machine had commenced to vomit forth, and behind and beyond these he saw a certain Fact, a prime necessity which had to be faced—in short a real Something of an infinitely greater importance than tribal warfare, the aspirations of bard-inspired princelings, or even parliamentary debates.