[2] Knighton, ii., 127.
Edward's abounding energy was even more gladly devoted to war than to the chase. He was an admirable exponent of those chivalric ideals which are glorified in the courtly pages of Froissart. Not content with the easy victories which fall in the tiltyard to the crowned king, Edward was anxious to show that his triumphs belonged to the knight and not to the monarch, and more than once jousted victoriously in disguise. The same spirit led him to challenge Philip of France to decide their quarrel by single combat, and to win a personal triumph when masking as a knight attached to the service of Sir Walter Manny. He was liberal to the verge of prodigality, good-tempered, easy of access, and, save when moved by deep gusts of fierce anger, kindly and compassionate. His easy good nature endeared him both to foreigners and to every class of his own subjects. Not only did he enter fully into the free-masonry which regarded the knights of all Christian nations as equal members of a sworn brotherhood of arms, but he extended his favours to the London vintner's son who earned his bread in his service, and entertained the wives of the leading London citizens, side by side with the noble ladies in whose honour he gave the most quaint and magnificent of his banquets. Pious after a somewhat formal fashion, he was unwearied in going on pilgrimage and lavish in his religious foundations. Though no prince was more careful to protect the state from the encroachments of churchmen, his orthodoxy and devoutness kept him in good repute with the austerest champions of the Church. He could choose fit agents to carry out his policy, and his campaigns were a marvellous training ground for gallant and capable warriors.
Edward seldom lost sight of the material and economic interests of his subjects. He was the friend of merchants, the father of English commerce, the patron of the infant woollen manufactures, and a zealous champion of the maritime greatness of his island realm, which boasted that he was "king of the sea". Though his financial exigencies often led him to sell excessive privileges to alien traders, this policy did little harm to his subjects, for few of them were ready as yet to embark in foreign commerce. A true patriot, who declared that his land of England was "nearer to his heart, more delightful, noble, and profitable than all other lands," he succeeded in making Englishmen conscious of their national life as they had never been before; and he won for his fatherland a foremost place among the kingdoms of the world. His network of diplomatic alliances was dexterously fashioned, and enabled him to supplement the resources of his own subjects.
The breadth of Edward's ambitions hindered their complete accomplishment. Like Edward I., he undertook more than he could carry through, and, though his panegyrists praise his patience in adversity no less than his moderation in prosperity, his merely animal courage and vigour broke down under the weight of misfortune. Thus the glorious king, who in his youth vied with his grandfather, seemed in his old age to have nearly approached the fate of his wretched father. In early life he won the love of his subjects. It was only in the first years of his reign that the violence and greed of his disorderly household, which inherited the evil traditions of the previous generation, bore so heavily upon the people that Englishmen fled at his approach in dread of the purveyors, who confiscated every man's goods for the royal use.[1] The somewhat shallow opportunism which abandoned, with little attempt at resistance, every royal right that stood in the way of his receiving the full support of his parliament, at least had the merit of keeping Edward in general touch with his estates. The wanton breaches of good faith, by which he sometimes strove to win back what he had lightly conceded, were regarded as efforts to save the sovereign's dignity, rather than as insidious attempts to restore the prerogative. Unjust as was the very basis of his French pretensions, they were backed up by a show of legal claim that satisfied the conscience of king and subject, and to contemporaries Edward seemed a king regardful of his honour and mindful of his plighted word. If his generosity verged on extravagance, and his affectation of popular manners and graciousness on unreality, Englishmen of the fourteenth century were no severe critics of a crowned king. It was only when in his later years Edward laid aside the soldier's life, and abandoned himself to the frivolous distractions and degrading amours[2] which provoked the censure even of his admirers, that the self-indulgent traits inherited from his unhappy father stood revealed.
[1] The Speculum regis Edwardi (ed. Moisant) was written before 1333, and the attribution of its composition to Archbishop Islip and the inferences drawn in Stubbs' Const. Hist., ii., 394, are therefore unwarranted; see Professor Tait's note in Engl. Hist. Review, xvi. (1901), 110-15.
[2] Chron. Anglia, 1328-1388, p. 401.
Edward was before all things a soldier. He was not only the consummate knight, the mirror of chivalry, but a capable tactician with a general's eye that took in the essential points of the situation at a glance. His restless energy ensured the rapidity of movement and alertness of action which won him many a triumph over less mobile and less highly trained antagonists; while they inspired his followers with faith in their cause and with the courage which succeeds against desperate odds. Yet the victor of Crecy cannot be numbered among the consummate generals of history. His campaigns were ill-planned; and he lacked the self-restraint and sense of proportion which would have prevented him from aiming at objects beyond his reach. The same want of relation between ends and means, the same want of definite policy and clear ideals, marred his statecraft. Yet contemporaries, conscious of his faults, magnified Edward as the brilliant and successful king who had won for himself an assured place among the greatest monarchs of history, "Never," says Froissart, "had there been such a king since the days of Arthur King of Great Britain."[1] Even to his own age his senile degradation pointed the moral of the triumphs of his manhood. The modern historian, who sees, beneath the superficial splendour of the days of Edward III., the misery and degradation that underlay the wreck of the dying Middle Ages, is in no danger of appraising too highly the merits of this showy and ambitious monarch. Perhaps in our own days the reaction has gone too far, and we have been taught to undervalue the splendid energy and robustness of temperament which commanded the admiration of all Europe, and personified the strenuous ideals of the young English nation.
[1] Froissart (ed. Luce), viii., 231; cf. Canon of Bridlington, p. 95.
The internal history of the first few years of Edward's reign was uneventful. John Stratford became chancellor after Mortimer's fall, and remained for ten years the guiding spirit of the administration. Translated on Meopham's death in 1333 to Canterbury, he continued, as primate, to take a leading part in politics. His chief helper was his brother Robert, rewarded in 1337 by the see of Chichester. The brothers were capable but not brilliant politicians. The worst disorders of the times of anarchy were put down, and parliaments readily granted sufficient money to meet the king's necessities. After a few years, the strife of parties was so far hushed that Burghersh was suffered to return to office, and it looks as if the balance between the Lancastrian party, upheld by the Stratfords, and the old middle party of Pembroke and Badlesmere, with which Burghersh had hereditary connexions, was maintained, as it had been during the least unhappy period of the preceding reign. The country was growing rich and prosperous. The annalists tell us of little save tournaments and mummings, and the setting up of seven new earldoms to remedy the gaps which death and forfeiture had made in the higher circle of the baronage. The earldom of Devon was revived for the house of Courtenay; that of Salisbury in favour of the trusty William Montague, and an Audley, son of Despenser's rival, was raised to the earldom of Gloucester. William Bohun, a younger son of the Humphrey slain at Boroughbridge, became Earl of Northampton, an Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, a Clinton Earl of Huntingdon, a Hastings Earl of Pembroke, and Henry of Grosmont, the Earl of Lancaster's first born, Earl of Derby. A new rank was added to the English peerage when the king's little son, Earl of Chester in 1333, was made Duke of Cornwall in 1337. The old feuds seemed dead and with them the old disorder. But Edward was ambitious of military glory, and it was natural that he should seek to reverse the degrading part which he had been forced to play in relation to Scotland and France. His hands being tied by treaties, it was not easy for him to make the first move. Before long, however, circumstances arose which gave him a chance of taking up a line of his own with regard to Scotland. From that time Scottish affairs mainly absorbed his attention until the outbreak of troubles with France.
The establishment of Robert Bruce on the Scottish throne had been attended by a considerable disturbance of the territorial balance in the northern kingdom. Many Scottish magnates, deprived of their lands and driven into exile, had abodes in England, and all might well look for the favour of the king in whose service they had been ruined. The treaty of Northampton made no provision for their restoration, and Edward showed himself disposed to uphold it. Their estates were in the hands of their supplanters, the nobles who had gathered round the throne of the Bruces. Thus it was that the exiles were cut off from all hope of return, and saw their only possibility of restitution in the break-up of the friendship of Edward and David. In like case were the English magnates who still entertained hopes of making effective the grants of Scottish estates which they had received from Edward I. and Edward II. For both classes alike every fresh year of peace between the realms decreased their chances of obtaining their desires. They failed to persuade Edward to go to war with his brother-in-law and repudiate formally the obligations imposed upon him by his mother and her paramour. But the minority of King David had unloosed the spirits of disorder in Scotland. Though the vigorous and capable regent, Sir Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, showed himself competent to stem the tide of aristocratic reaction which swelled round the throne of his infant cousin, he was one of the old generation of heroes that had aided King Robert to gain his throne. Were he to die, or become incapable of acting, there was no one who could supply his place. The Disinherited—thus they styled themselves—were encouraged both by the apathy of Edward III. and the weakness of Scotland to make a bold stroke on their own behalf.