A History of England, Period I. Mediæval Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

The importance of the reign.

From the reign of Edward began what may be properly spoken of as the English monarchy. The last reign had brought prominently forward the two great points which constituted the nationality of the country. Primarily the object of the baronial party had been to separate England from the overwhelming importance of its foreign connections, and to prevent it from becoming a mere source of wealth to foreign adventurers. In this the baronial party had succeeded. While declaring themselves national, they had been obliged to have recourse for support to other elements of the nation than those from which the ruling class had hitherto been formed. The advance of these new classes had, as has been seen, been gradual. Already, in earlier reigns, the principle both of election and representation had been, on more than one occasion, accepted. But it was the formal admission both of knights of the shire and of burghers to parliamentary privileges, even though the practice had not been continued, which rendered it impossible long to ignore the growing feeling that all classes should in some way be consulted about what interested all.

Edward the first English king.

His political views.

His legal mind.

His success.

His enforced concessions.

Edward was well fitted, both by position and character, to play the part of the first English king. He had given distinct proofs in the earlier part of the late baronial quarrels that a good and national government was what he desired. But it would be wrong to suppose that he was at all inclined to what we should now call liberal policy. In the latter part of his father’s reign he had made it clear that to his mind a strong monarchy was a necessary condition of good government. It was only gradually, and in accordance with a love of symmetrical government which strongly characterized him, that he recognized the advantage of the complete admission of the hitherto unprivileged classes to the rights of representation. He set before him as his object the establishment of a good and orderly government in the national interests, but carried out by a strong, nay despotic monarch, subjected only to the restrictions of the law. This is indeed another prominent characteristic of the King, in which he went along with the tendencies of the age. His mind was essentially legal, and just at this time the Roman and civil law were forcing their way into prominence throughout Europe. In Edward and his great rival Philip IV. of France, we have, allowing for their differences in personal character, instances of the same course of action. They both intended to make use of feudal law, interpreted more or less by the Roman law, and pressed to its legal and logical conclusions, to strengthen the monarchy. It is thus that we find Edward constantly enacting statutes and constitutions, making use of feudal claims to compel the submission of his neighbours, and exerting to the full, sometimes even beyond the limits of honesty, the rights the constitution gave him, but never wilfully transgressing what he regarded as the law. He was successful in carrying out the two first branches of his threefold policy; in the third he failed. Good government he established by a series of admirable administrative enactments, and by that power of definition which a living historian[44] has attributed to him, in spite of the difficulties presented by the independent position of the Church, and by the disorders still remaining from the late troubled times. Nationality he was able to foster both by foreign wars and by his great plan of connecting all the kingdoms of Great Britain. But in his efforts to establish an absolute monarchy, he was met by the financial difficulties into which the late reign had plunged the Crown, and by that entanglement in foreign politics which the English possessions in France, of which he was not yet quite free, continually caused. Urged by his wide schemes to have recourse to arbitrary means for replenishing his treasury, he excited again an opposition similar to that of his father’s reign, and found himself obliged to make concessions which effectually prevented any of his successors from attempting to render the Crown independent.

First Parliament. Statute of Westminster. 1275.