Book Review: A Great and Terrible King

A Great and Terrible King:Edward I and the Forging of Britainby Marc MorrisPegasus Books, 2015“The first major biography about the formidable Edward I” proclaims the proud publisher's notice for Marc Morris's new book A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, a sweeping claim the good folks at Yale University Press didn't make back in 1988 when they published Michael Prestwich's 600-page Edward I, probably because they had in mind John Chancellor's The Life and Times of Edward I, which had been written in the shadow of the magisterial work of F. M. Powicke. In other words, Morris's book breaks no new ground: this is a well-biographied king.Which only underscores the question Morris himself poses right at the beginning of his book: “Why devote a sizable chunk of one's own life to re-examining the deeds of a man who has been dead for seven centuries?” The answer, acording to his latest biographer? Because “the reign of Edward I matters.”Unlike his enthusiastic press agents, Morris himself is a careful scholar with a rich awareness of his historian predecessors. His previous book The Norman Conquest, was as well-grounded an introduction to that oft-studied subject as any reader could want, and A Great and Terrible King continues in that vein: it's a fine and very readable overview of Edward's life and reign, from the incessant physical contests of his youth to his rise to the throne of England and subsequent incessant wars against his fellow kings, wars in Europe, Wales, and most famously Scotland (so outstandingly chronicled in Fiona Watson's Under the Hammer). As Morris proved in his earlier book, he has good instincts for when to narrow his overview in order to present a revealing anecdote or vignette, as in this moment from Edward's assault on the Scottish garrison at Stirling Castle:

Eventually, after twelve weeks of bombardment and pyrotechnics, the garrison indicated their willingness to surrender – a decision probably encouraged by the sight of a truly giant trebuchet, the work of more than fifty men for two whole months, approaching the point of completion. Unfortunately, Edward had by this time developed a personal interest in the Warwolf, as the beast had become known, and insisted that no surrender would be accepted until his new toy had been tested. Some modern historians have condemned him for this, though at the time nobody seemed to think his behaviour so very unreasonable: the defenders, after all, had been targeting the king throughout the siege and, indeed, had on two occasions come within a whisker of killing him. At length, on 24 July – presumably after the Warwolf had scored a few hits – a surrender was accepted.

And likewise the domestic side of Edward's life is handled with skill and concision, shifting from one emotional register to another in an attempt (more successful than Prestwich's, but less detailed) to do justice to this deceptively complicated man. Morris does as sensitive and insightful a job relating Edward's storied love for his wife, for instance, as he does relating Edward's infamous decision to expel all the Jews from his kingdom, a move Morris describes as by no means inevitable, given its timing:

An expulsion, therefore, might cut the Gordian knot of England's Jewish problem, but financially it would be a backward step. The Jews were no longer the great cash cow they had once been – successive royal depredations, culminating in the king's own coin-clipping pogrom of 1279, had seen to that – but 1290 was not a year for doing away with any form of revenue, no matter how small. Indeed, it looks very much as if, in June that year, Edward was preparing to tallage the Jews, hoping to squeeze out of them what little money remained.

And, perhaps in a reflection on his 21^st century audience, he's much readier to speculate on Edward's personal dimensions than was Prestwich before him (although both are equally happy repeating the ancient chroniclers' assertions about Edward's great height, strength, and temper), and just as in The Norman Conquest, his speculations feel remarkably sound:

Wisdom is clearly a more subjective quality than valour; what seems wise to one person at a particular time may seem less wise to another, or in retrospect. The fundamental measure of Edward's wisdom, however, is that he was a good judge of other people, He could spot frauds (such as the knight who claimed to have been cured of blindness at the tomb of Henry III), and he had a talent for selecting men of outstanding ability to serve him.

This was a hard king, a wearer-down of men and castles, a stern-minded man who brooked no rivals, suffered no fools, and disliked injustice in the only way kings, who were the fonts of justice, could: personally. He fought unending wars, but he also did enormously pioneering work to reform England's laws and empower England's Parliament (the work that “mattered,” as Morris rightly contends). Seven centuries ago, the universal justification for the wisdom of monarchy could easily have worn Edward's face; true, you might get a weak man (like Edward's father) or a tyrant (like Edward's son), but you could also get a king like Edward for forty years, and as Morris puts it, “Edward's lordship was emphatically good.” Unlike his father, Morris continues, “Edward had no need to buy loyalty with lavish grands of land or money. He had friends but not favourites.”Powicke's works are gone from sight, and even Prestwich's monumental biography is only hanging on by a thread, but readers are in luck: a smart and first-rate biography of this pivotal figure is now stacked on the front tables of every retail bookstore in the US and UK (the former with a so-so cover, the latter, as usual, with a so-so cover tweaked into something truly stylish). This terrifying warrior-king gets a new season before his distant beneficiaries.