6 MODERN ATTEMPTS TO RESTORE LECT. I. general sifting of history became prevalent, and one after another, the judgments of the last age began to be attacked. The great Church movement of our own day sent forth the late Mr. Froude, Dr. Giles, and others, as the champions of Becket,-writers who, while they exposed the errors of the post-Reformation estimate, threw at the same time a halo of such absurdly ideal perfection around their idol, as showed that opinion was far enough from having settled down to its final level. Perhaps an indication of the advent of a fourth phase, an approach to the final level, may be found in the late works of Deans Milman and Hook, and of Canon Robertson. It can scarcely be held that the memory of Edward I. is as near the point of being justly appreciated. The views maintained upon his character are still too discordant. Little has been done as yet towards a due distribution of praise and blame. Lingard, Sharon Turner, and Palgrave, have indeed done much to clear his character on the Scotch and some other questions; their independent and truly English spirit has protected them from a slavish adherence to the Scotch view; and quite lately the memory of the great king has found a most vehement defender in the anonymous author of The Greatest of all the Plantagenets.' But though many fallacies are excellently exposed by this last-named author, the praise of Edward is far too reckless and indiscriminate, and has probably seriously interfered with a general reception of his views. * We shall * An abstract of this Lecture, in the form of a criticism of the above book, was delivered by the Lecturer before the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, and is printed in their Transactions for Trinity Term, 1864. Dean Hook, in his third volume of the 'Archbishops of Canterbury,' published in 1865, speaks of "The LECT. I. THE TRUE VIEW OF HIS REIGN. 7 avail ourselves of his help, where we can, with gratitude; but it is impossible to avoid the conviction that a complete life of Edward I. is still a desideratum. A few of the salient points of that life will be sketched in this Lecture, in order to justify the foregoing remarks. Let us take the three great military periods of Edward's career,-the Civil, the Welsh, and the Scotch wars,—and let us watch the equally furious literary battles waged in each case for and against his fame. The Constitutional questions of his reign arise out of the military events of it. And, first, let us regard him as he enters public life. All accounts agree in presenting us with a very interesting picture of the youth of this Prince. From his mother, one of the four famous daughters of the Count of Provence who all became queens, seem to have come his more brilliant qualities. But his father, though a man of great weakness of character, transmitted to him the inestimable inheritance of sincere religious habits and domestic purity. The Prince came out of a virtuous home, and he repaid the debt. Many little incidents preserved by the chroniclers prove the deep affection which existed between him and his parents. There must have been something real at bottom to stand the Greatest of all the Plantagenets' with respect, though he complains that it is the work of a lawyer who has taken a brief for a client; and it has evidently influenced the only history of Edward I.'s reign which has appeared since its publication (in the second volume of Mr. Pearson's History of the Early and Middle Ages of England,' 1867). That history is indeed on the whole so fair, and will probably do so much towards restoring the proper position of the reign, that the usefulness of publishing this Lecture may be questioned. Nevertheless, it contains an independent view, being delivered so long previously, and far from an identical one; and it claims to be the first attempt to utilize the efforts of the above-mentioned author. 8 EDWARD'S EARLY LIFE AND LECT. I. test of witnessing a conduct so destructive of respect as that of Henry III. Yet almost from the first, and still more and more as he plays a more leading part, we find him applying himself to the task of supplying his father's deficiencies, concealing his faults, labouring in his cause, and bearing him, like another Anchises, out of the conflagration. There is no more beautiful picture in English history. The short exceptional period when he sided with the barons may well be justified. While he was taking up the duty thus lying in his path, he was gaining the most thorough education prince ever had. Not only did he escape the usual fate of princes,—the smooth and easy life, the training of luxury and flattery, the absence of that efficient restraint and discipline which alone can temper vigorous natures into true metal, but he had the thorough training of positive adversity. He could hardly have remembered the time when his father's home had not been a scene of distress. Bickering and strife were familiar at Court. The ascendancy which the great qualities of Montfort obtained over his imagination must have been accompanied with a sense of bitter shame at the degradation of his own flesh and blood. There are many indications of the impression made upon his generous young mind by the treatment his parents had to undergo. Had it not been for his early and most happy marriage, it is hardly conceivable that he could have been saved from a hardening and souring of his temper for life. Probably, indeed, to this time may be traced some share in the formation of that severity of character which, with every deduction for the bias of historians, we cannot but observe showing itself as he drew towards the end of his career and difficulties thickened round him. LECT. I. CONDUCT IN THE CIVIL WAR. * 9 In judging of Edward's conduct in the Civil war, much will depend on the view we take of his great opponent. The memory of Montfort is, like that of Edward, a battle-ground. The ardent admirers of "Simon the Righteous," an increasing body, can find no fault in their idol, and of course, therefore, can find little room for the praises of Edward. But even though we should hold Edward to have been right in the main throughout this struggle, we need not, like Carte and the anonymous author above named, indiscriminately condemn Montfort. Edward's conduct appears to have been very much like that of Hyde and Falkland under similar circumstances. Each engaged for a time, from a sense of duty, in the anti-royal cause. The Crown had put itself in the wrong, and must be resisted at whatever cost. Soon its opponents are in the wrong, and the Crown is in imminent danger. Those who do not mean that the monarchy shall be destroyed must rally round it. This is surely the true heroic course. There would have been more ground for the extravagant admiration of late bestowed on Montfort's memory had he stopped in his career when to stop would perhaps have been to sacrifice himself. He chose what was more natural, to go forward in his course, to make himself king in all but the name, to trample the royal princes in the dust, and with them one after another of those who had helped him in his ascent to power. His fame must follow his error. Not the praises of the satirical song-writers of the day—mostly, by-the-bye, ecclesiastics of those new Orders which he had patronized not his pseudo *This headlong assault upon the memory of any person who opposed Edward throughout the whole course of his reign is the most faulty characteristic of "The Greatest of all the Plantagenets." 10 SIMON DE MONTFORT. LECT. I. canonization by the people, not even his merit in summoning the Assembly of 1265, can avail to save his memory from reproach. Some portion of the modern eulogy is fairly deserved, but only as far as relates to the time when he was the fearless leader of a rightful resistance, when he was the friend of Grosseteste (who, it should be remembered, died long before the armed struggle), and before he had allowed himself to be carried away by the force of circumstances, and, we can hardly doubt, the hopes of a crown. During this conflict Edward had become more than a consummate knight (Froissart calls him and Bruce the first knights in Europe of their times); he had learned from Montfort the highest generalship a feudal age admitted. He had also taken his part for life against the dictation of the English aristocracy. Yet he had at the same time learnt what were the wants, the motives, and the power of that aristocracy, and had studied the true relations of the different classes of Englishmen to one another. He had learnt, in short, at the age when alone such lessons can be learnt, the secrets of practical politics. It was a long and rigorous apprenticeship; but it was thus he gained that rare knowledge of which his conduct in after years often showed he had the possession,-how to resist as long as there was any hope of success, for fear that concessions, once wrested, might be turned into fatal precedents; how to concede so as to lose as little ground as possible, and preserve for his successors the prerogative without which monarchy in that age could not exist. It was the same in his civil and military policy. It became his special characteristic to prove his power first, to show his clemency afterwards. After this civil war, terrible and prolonged as |