EDWARD I TO EDWARD III, 1272–1377

In the 1080s, Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, had declared that he would become King of England even if he were in Alexandria when his father died. It was an empty boast. In the entire period between 1066 and 1272, only one King had followed his father on to the English throne as his father’s eldest son, and the circumstances here, with the accession in 1216 of the nine-year-old Henry III, at the height of civil war, with most of southern England under rebel or French control, were hardly an advertisement of the stability of English kingship. By contrast, in 1272, not only was Henry III’s eldest son accepted unquestioningly as England’s King but, in bizarre fulfilment of Curthose’s boast, he happened at the time to be, if not in Alexandria, then returning across the Mediterranean from crusade in the Holy Land. Edward’s very name, chosen in honour of Edward the Confessor, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, promised stability and a return to good order.

In the century after 1272, England was to be ruled in turn by three kings, all named Edward, each of them of very different character. The heroic, crusading Edward I is generally ranked amongst the premier league of great English kings, responsible for the conquest of Wales, for the first attempted English conquest of Scotland and for the restoration of royal authority after the chaos and confusion of his father’s reign. By contrast, Edward I’s son and heir, Edward II, ranks if not as the worst, then as perhaps the most feckless of England’s medieval rulers, utterly unsuited to his position, a sexually ambiguous wastrel, literally a layabout who had difficulty even in getting up each morning, persuaded after fifteen years of weak rule and disasters both in foreign and domestic policy into a final period of tyranny and extortion which plunged England into yet further baronial rebellion and led eventually to his deposition and murder.

Whatever qualities Edward I had possessed skipped a generation, being reborn in Edward III, albeit that the character of the new King, like that of Edward I before him, was moulded in quite deliberate determination to avoid the failings of his father. Edward III it was who built up the great war machine of England, reviving the military glories of his grandfather’s reign, setting England on course to become a state organized for war. As the son of the King of England and of a daughter of the King of France, Edward III inherited a claim to the French throne, leading after 1337 to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, that great slogging match in which the national and political identities of both countries were reforged. It is already symptomatic of the emergence of English identity, that, even in 1340, when Edward III came to devise a new style for himself, as King of both nations, he chose to place England above France in the list of his titles: ‘Edward King of England and France’, positioning (in his letters to the English, though not on his seal or his letters to the French where he styled himself ‘King of France and England’) what in the twelfth century would have been regarded as the cart of French plenty very much behind the proud and no longer supine English horse.