Young Edward

To appreciate this, we need to begin in the sunnier uplands of the 1260s and 70s. Here, Edward had already shown himself gifted with the sort of military and administrative skills necessary for successful kingship, but which his father, Henry III, had so signally lacked. A wild youth (aged only twenty-one, he and his cronies had smashed all of the windows of the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Southwark, in one of the earliest recorded examples of upper-class, Bullingdon Club-like love of the sound of broken glass), the future King Edward I had proved himself both brave and ruthlessly competent. His escape from imprisonment at Hereford in 1265, having pretended to test a number of horses whilst out riding and then making off on the swiftest of them, and his subsequent defeat of Simon de Montfort, his former military tutor, at Evesham, were merely the springboards from which Edward launched himself upon crusade in the East. He thereby fulfilled crusading vows that had been left unfulfilled by every previous Plantagenet king save for his now legendary ancestor, Richard I.

Not only did Edward acquire kudos merely by embarking on crusade, but his expedition, although marked by no dramatic improvement in the fortunes of the Latin East, garnered legends of its own. Within a century, it was being claimed that Edward’s wife, Eleanor of Castile, had sucked the venom from his wounds when a Moslem assassin stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. Other versions attributed his salvation to one of his household knights, or to a magic stone given by the Master of the Temple, perhaps ground up and used as a purgative. Edward’s career as a successful crusader, the Olympic gold, or Oxbridge blue, of medieval warrior prestige, was in no small part responsible for his later fearsome reputation as king. In one person he seemed to combine the heroism of Richard the Lionheart with the administrative efficiency of Henry II.

Three problems above all had dogged the fortunes of Edward’s father: the lack of financial resources by which the crown could pursue its ambitions beyond the frontiers of England; the longstanding rivalries with England’s neighbours, above all the kings of France, focussed upon the continuing demand that the former Plantagenet lands be restored to English rule; and the difficulty of controlling an English political elite unprepared to meet the costs of the King’s own household or military ambitions. Edward was not slow to master all three problems, employing the lessons that he had learned from his uncle, Simon de Montfort, the kudos that he had secured from his victory over Montfort at Evesham, and his newly won status as a veteran of the crusades to advertise a kingly panache very different from the feckless piety of his father. Success in battle would henceforth be matched to reform of government. Reform in turn would be rewarded with financial subsidies from the English elite sufficient to pay for yet further success in war.