Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

This was neither more nor less than the fact that, when the Maker of all things mapped out this part of the world, it pleased Him in His wisdom to put England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland into one little group of islands, and from this fact Edward Longlegs drew the deduction that the King of Kings had intended them to be under one lordship.

It seems a simple thing to say now, a fact so patent that the mention of it seems superfluous. So does the larger fact that the world is round; but it was a very different matter in the times and circumstances of Edward Longlegs, and, indeed, his first and greatest claim to stand next in succession to William the Norman in the royal line of empire-makers consists in this: that he was capable of that master-stroke of genius which clearly demonstrated an imperial principle of which six hundred years of history have been the continuous and emphatic endorsement.

No sooner was the bloody fight of Evesham over and the good Earl Simon had breathed out his generous, if somewhat premature soul in that last cry of his: “It is God’s grace!” than Edward Longlegs seems to have set himself to prepare for the task that was to be his. He was not to be king in name for some seven years more, but as the historian of the English People with great pertinence remarked: “With the victory of Evesham, his character seemed to mould itself into nobler form.” In other words he was, perchance unconsciously, performing that indispensable preliminary to all really great and true public reforms, the reformation of himself.

Hitherto his life had been none of the best. He had been the leader of a retinue that had made itself something like infamous in the land. He had intrigued first with one party and then with another. He is accused of a faithlessness which, it is said, forced the good, though mistaken, Earl Simon into armed revolt against his liege lord—though this may, after all, only have been a stroke of wise and necessary policy, since he possibly saw even then that Chaos would not reform itself into Cosmos just for being talked at.

Then again, and with curious resemblance to William of Normandy, and later of Hastings and England, he had avenged an insult to his mother by the slaughter of some three thousand men in the rout of Lewes and a quite unjustifiable indulgence in pillage and slaughter when the Barons’ War was finally over.

“It was from Earl Simon,” says John Richard Green in one of those limpid sentences of his, “as the Earl owned with a proud bitterness ere his death, that Edward had learnt the skill in warfare which distinguished him among the princes of his time. But he had learnt from the Earl the far nobler lesson of a self-government which lifted him high above them as ruler among men.”

It seemed, indeed, as though, by this reformation of himself, he was to typify that reformation of England which it was his life-work to begin. The new Edward was to be the maker of the new England.

His first action after the war was characteristic of the man and the work that he was to do. The cessation of the fighting, as was usual in those days, had left an undesirable number of truculent warriors of various ranks wandering at large about the kingdom with their legitimate occupation gone. Edward, with that instinct of order characteristic of all true empire-makers, saw in these the possibilities of disorder, and with a happy combination of wisdom and adventure turned their swords and lances away from the bodies of their fellow-citizens by taking them to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.

An incident of this excursion has been adorned by one of those pleasant fictions which, if the paradox may be pardoned, are none the less true for the fact that they are false. Edward, having sent certain hundreds of Moslems to Paradise with a perhaps unnecessarily ruthless dispatch, was considered by the sect of the Assassins to be a person who would be better dead than alive in Palestine, and so one of them, after several attempts, succeeded, as one may put it, in interviewing him privately with a poisoned dagger. The fiction has it that his consort, Eleanor of Castille, sucked the poison from the wound with her own sweet lips and so saved his life.

It is a pretty story, but, unfortunately for its authenticity, no one seems to have heard of it or thought it worth the telling until Ptolemy of Lucca told it a good half-century afterwards. But the truth underlying it remains, and this truth is that Edward Longlegs was blessed with that greatest of all earthly blessings, a loving and devoted wife.