Monarchs From England

"He was the flower of earthly warriors, under whom to fight was to rule, to go forth was to prosper, to contend was to triumph ... Against his foes he was grim as a leopard, toward his subjects mild as a lamb."

"Edward the third, your King of rich renowne, Against the French did use his conquering sworde: Mauger their beardes, he did possesse their Crowne, The French were faine, to serve him as their Lord. Take courage then, maintaine your Countries right, Gainst Rabsica, in Gods name enter fight."

"You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow."

"...we benignly wish that all and each of the natives of the kingdom who will subject themselves willingly to us, as the true King of France according to wise counsel, before next Easter, offering due fidelity etc. to us, as King of France, performing their duties...should be admitted to our peace and grace and to our special protection and defence."

"Henrico regi Angliæ natus est filius, quem ab Othone legato baptizatum, in honorem gloriosissimi confessoris et regis Edwardi, Edwardum vocavit."

"As he lay dying he sent his last words of counsel to his absent son. He urged him to persevere in the subjection of Scotland, and to avoid unworthy favourites. His last thoughts turned to the two great enterprises on which he had bent his mind—the subjection of Scotland and the recovery of the Holy Land. Even after his death he longed to share in those great works. He begged his son to carry his bones about with him in his Scottish campaigns, so that even the dead Edward might still lead his warriors to victory against the hated enemy. He also requested that his heart should be sent to the Holy Land with a train of a hundred knights to fight for the recovery of the Sepulchre of the Lord."

"A son was born to Henry, King of England, whom the ambassador Otto baptized and named Edward in honour of the most glorious confessor and King Edward."

"Whan Kyng Philip of Frauns was fled thus cowardly fro the sege of Caleys, thei of the same town offered the town to Kyng Edward withoute any poyntment. And he lay in the town a month, considering the strong disposicion thereof. Thanne, at instauns of the Pope, was taken trews betwix the two Kyngis for a yere. Aboute the fest of Seynt Michael, the Kyng took the se into Ynglond and there had he grete tempest, and mervelous wyndes; and thanne he mad swech a compleynt onto oure Lady, and seide, "O blessed Mayde, what menyth al this? Evyr, whan I go to Frauns, I have fayre wedir, and whanne I turne to Ynglond intolerable tempestes.""

"We will and concede for us and all our heirs and successors, by the common counsel, assent and consent of the prelates, magnates, earls and barons and communities of our realm in our parliament that the Kingdom of Scotland, shall remain for ever separate in all respects from the Kingdom of England, in its entirety, free and in peace, without any kind of subjection, servitude, claim or demand."

"...our progenitors, the kings of England, have before these times been lords of the English sea on every side...and it would very much grieve us if in this kind of defence our royal honour should be lost."

"It is true that Edward I has been far less roughly handled by historians than have some of the English kings. He has not suffered the fate of Charles I, who has been arraigned, tried and sentenced over and over again since he faced his judges in Westminster Hall, although in these later proceedings not his life but his reputation has been at stake. On the other hand, Edward's posthumous career among scholars has not been as spectacular as that of the Conqueror, but it is not entirely unremarkable. During the last two centuries he has been turned from a strong ruler into a national king; from a national king into an aspiring tyrant; and now from an aspiring tyrant into a conventional, if competent, lord. That these changes represent a growth of knowledge about him and his age is clear enough. What is no less important, they represent a growth of understanding as well."

"On the 21st September [1274] Burnell was made Chancellor. From that date, and with the able assistance of that minister, began the series of legal reforms which have gained for Edward the title of the English Justinian; a title which, if it be meant to denote the importance and permanence of his legislation and the dignity of his position in legal history, no Englishman will dispute."

"The greatest of all the Plantagenet kings was Edward III. Edward inherited the throne as a teenage puppet king under his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer, who were responsible for the removal of Edward II. He soon shook off their influence, and the next three, triumphant decades of his reign are described in Part VI, 'Age of Glory.' In these years, the Plantagenets expanded in every sense. Under the accomplished generalship of Edward, his son the Black Prince, and his cousin Henry Grosmont, England pulverized France, and Scotland (as well as other enemies, including Castile), in the opening phases of the Hundred Years' War. Victories on land at Halidon Hill (1333), Crécy (1346), Calais (1347), Poitiers (1356) and Najera (1367) established the English war machine – built around the power of the deadly longbow – as Europe's fiercest. Success at sea at Sluys (1340) and Winchelsea (1350) also gave the Plantagenets confidence in the uncertain arena of warfare on the water. Besides restoring the military power of the English kings, Edward and his sons deliberately encouraged a national mythology that interwove Arthurian legend, a new cult of St George and a revival of the code of knighly chivalry in the Order of the Garter. They created a culture that bonded England's aristocracy together in the common purpose of war. By 1360, Plantagenet kingship had reached its apotheosis. Political harmony at home was matched by dominance abroad. A new period of greatness beckoned."

"This diplomatic revolution, part of the growing bureaucratization of government, was complemented by a revolution in political ideas that we can measure in the changing use of the term “state.” In the fourteenth century the Latin term status (and vernacular equivalents such as estat or state) was mainly used with reference to the standing of rulers themselves, much as we would today use the term “status.” Thus the chronicler Jean Froissart, describing King Edward III entertaining foreign dignitaries in 1327, recorded that his queen “was to be seen there in an estat of great nobility.” Gradually, however, usage was extended to include the institutions of government. In the works of Machiavelli, written in the 1510s, lo stato becomes an independent agent, separate from those who happen to be its rulers. In a similar vein, Thomas Starkey, the English political commentator of the 1530s, claimed that the “office and duty” of rulers was to “maintain the state established in the country” over which they ruled. The thrust of such arguments was to limit the power of kings by postulating their higher obligation to the common good. In radical hands this implied that subjects had the right to overthrow tyrannical rulers, which is what happened in the English civil wars of the 1640s and Europe’s bitter wars of religion. Responding to this crisis of governance,Thomas Hobbes moved the debate to a different level, defining the state as “an artificial man” abstractly encapsulating the whole populace, who enjoys absolute sovereignty (his “artificial soul . . . giving life and motion to the body”) which is exercised in practice through a sovereign ruler. This gradual but dramatic word shift, from the medieval state of princes to the person of the Hobbesian state, was hugely important for political thought. It also reinforced the decline of dynastic summitry: diplomacy, like governance, was no longer regarded as the sole prerogative of princes."

"That Edward was above all things an English king, no one will deny. That the most important results of his work were seen in the organisation of English institutions and in the attempted extension of English rule over the rest of the British Islands is equally plain. But it is a very false and one-sided view that ignores his constant and vivid interest in his Aquitanian inheritance, and that puts aside as of no account his watchful care of English interests in Europe, and his constant efforts, in cases where direct English interests were very little involved, to uphold some sort of European balance, while strenuously striving to preserve or restore the peace of Europe."

"No king laid more emphasis on his duty to hold his own and to recover what he had lost. And it was a social duty, to be enforced on him by his counsellors if he neglected it himself. In matters touching his state he insisted on discussion in council, sometimes in parliament, before he had made a decision... The king takes good and learned counsel. He and his vassals are one. Justice must be observed, self-help restrained, corruption—the curse of social relationships everywhere—investigated and punished."

"Edward had friends, but no favourites; he picked out suitable or congenial men as he pleased, but it never enterred his mind to "pack" his court. He was the king. He used aliens freely and had foreign friends, but he did not put them in positions of permanent trust at the centre of affairs, nor did he admit them to the intimate places of household administration. There were few foreign clerks in the wardrobe during his reign. The court was so English that the large number of aliens in Edward's service raised no outcry."

"Which puissant Princes raigne and life, wee cannot heere shut up with a nobler Euloge, than that where-with our Great and Judicious Antiquary [William Camden] hath already deportrayed him, as a Prince of chiefe renowne, to whose heroicke minde God proportioned (as a most worthy Mansion) a bodie answerable, so that as well in beautie and goodly presence, as in wisedome and valour, hee was sutable to the height of his Regall Dignitie, whose flourishing youth his Destinie did exercise with many warres and troubles of the State, so to frame & fit him for the British Empire; which, being King, he so managed with the glory of his Welsh and Northern victories, that by due desert he is to be reputed a chiefe honour of Britannie."

"When all deductions are made, Edward remains one of the greatest of English kings even in his foreign relations. He won for England a sure and foremost place in the councils of Europe. His honesty of purpose and his ability of conception have won the warmest praises both from his own contemporaries abroad and from those modern foreign writers to whose works we must, to the disgrace of English scholarship, have recourse if we wish to learn how truly great was the great English king when all Europe welcomed him as the mediator of peace, when his friendship was sought by every power of Western Europe, and when he made the name of England respected and feared in Germany, in France, in Spain, and in Italy."

"Here lies the glory of the English, the flower of kings past, the pattern for kings to come, a merciful king, the bringer of peace to his people. Edward III, who attained his jubilee. The undefeated warrior, a second Maccabeus, who prospered while he lived, revived sound rule, and reigned valiantly, now may attain his heavenly crown."

"Edward, however exceptionable his character may appear on the head of justice, is the model of a politic and warlike King: He possessed industry, penetration, courage, vigour, and enterprize: He was frugal in all expences that were not necessary; he knew how to open the public treasures on a proper occasion; he punished criminals with severity; he was gracious and affable to his servants and courtiers; and being of a majestic figure, expert at all bodily exercises, and in the main well proportioned in his limbs, notwithstanding the great length and the smallness of his legs, he was as well qualified to captivate the populace by his exterior appearance, as to gain the approbation of men of sense by his more solid virtues."

"The enterprizes finished by this prince, and the projects which he formed and brought very near to a conclusion, were more prudent, more regularly conducted, and more advantageous to the solid interests of his kingdom than those which were undertaken in any reign either of his ancestors or his successors. He restored authority to the government, disordered by the weakness of his father; he maintained the laws against all the efforts of his turbulent barons; he fully annexed to his crown the principality of Wales; he took the wisest and most effectual measures for reducing Scotland to a like condition; and tho' the equity of this latter enterprize may reasonably be questioned, the circumstances of the two kingdoms promised such certain success, and the advantage was so visible of uniting the whole island under one head, that those who give great indulgence to reasons of state in the measures of princes, will not be apt to regard this part of his conduct with much severity."

"But the chiefe advantage which the people of England reaped, and still continue to reap, from the reign of this great prince, was the correction, extension, amendment, and establishment of the laws, which Edward maintained in great vigour, and left much improved to posterity: For the work of wise legislation commonly remain; while the acquisitions of conquerors often perish with them. This merit has justly gained to Edward the appellation of the English Justinian."

"The royal hero of this time was Edward I, a tall and relentless king who was said to be so fierce that he once literally scared a man to death. Under Edward's belligerent leadership, the English were finally induced to cease fighting one another and turn their attentions on their neighbours: Scotland and Wales. Edward I's brutal attempts to become the master not only of England but the whole of Britain are the subject of the 'Age of Arthur.' The popularity of Arthurian tales and relic-hunting increased as a new mythology of English kingship was explored. Edward cast himself as the inheritor of Arthur (originally a Welsh king) who sought to reunite the British Isles and usher in a great new age of royal rule. Despite flurries of outrage form his barons, who began to organize political opposition through the nascent political body known as parliament, Edward very nearly succeeded in his goals, and his influence over England's relations with Scotland and Wales has never entirely waned."

"...an English ship we had, noble it was and high of tower, it was held in dread throughout Christendom: the rudder was neither oak nor elm but Edward the Third, the noble knight."

"He was so handsome and great, so powerful in arms, That of him may one speak as long as the world lasts. For he had no equal as a knight in armour For vigour and valour, neither present nor future."

"In his own time, and amongst his own subjects, Edward was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the distinction between conquerors and conquered had passed away, and England felt herself once more a people, she saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to her earlier kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of his race, wilful and imperious as his people, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but in the main just, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious."

"Edwardus Primus Scotorum Malleus hic est, 1308. Pactum Serva"

"Here is Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots, 1308. Keep the Vow."

"In Edward the line of English Kings begins once more. After two hundred years of foreign rule, we have again a King bearing an English name and an English heart—the first to give us back our ancient laws under new shapes, the first, and for so long the last, to see that the Empire of his mighty namesake was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of dominion beyond the sea. All between them were Normans or Angevins, careless of England and her people. Another and a brighter æra opens, as the lawgiver of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus seated once more upon the throne of Cerdic and of Æthelstan."

"Perhaps he will be rightly called a leopard. If we divide the name it becomes lion and pard; lion, because we saw that he was not slow to attack the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none. ... A lion by pride and fierceness, he is by inconstancy and changeableness a pard, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech."

"A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection lay in fact beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing... He is the first English king since the Conquest who loves his people with a personal love, and craves for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws."

"When you get rid of a turd, you do a good job."

"With the single exception of the accession of Elizabeth, no such fortunate event ever occurred in English history as that which placed Edward I. upon his father's throne. By him the bases were settled upon which the English constitution rests. With marvellous sanity he comprehended the purport of every true thought which was floating on the surface of the age in which he lived. Perhaps no man, excepting Cromwell, possessed of equal capacity for government, ever showed less inclination to exercise arbitrary rule. He knew how to mould his subjects to his own wise will, not by crushing them into unwilling obedience, but by inspiring them with noble thoughts. When he first reached man's estate, he found his countrymen ready to rush headlong into civil war. When he died, he left England free as ever, but welded together into a compact and harmonious body. There was work enough left for future generations to do, but their work would consist merely in filling in the details of the outline which had been drawn once for all by a steady hand. All the main points of the constitution were accepted at his death. That the law was to be supreme; that that law was to be obtained from a body which should represent all the various classes and interests of the kingdom, and which was therefore most likely to look with fairness upon all; that power was to be lodged in the hands of the Government sufficient to combat against anarchy, whilst it was powerless to encroach upon the rights of the subjects—were means fully acknowledged by that great King, and brought out by him into practical operation."

"Terra Walliae cum incolis suis, prius regi jure feodali subjecta."

"The laws the Irish use are detestable to God, and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed law."

"A prince unequalled by any who had reigned in England since the Conqueror for prudence, valour and success."

"For James the free exercise of Catholicism was the essential thing which, he believed, would lead inevitably to its re-establishment in England without any need for coercion. He thought once Englishmen could see how Catholicism had been misrepresented they would willingly turn to the true faith, especially if that had the weight of royal approval behind it. So long as Catholic worship were freely allowed, other details of the toleration were of secondary importance, merely a matter of tactics. Whether James wanted toleration for Dissenters as well as for Catholics varied according to circumstances. He was not a tolerationist in the sense that he believed that honest differences of opinion could be or should be permitted within a state or that no one church had a monopoly of truth: in fact he believed the opposite. His advocacy of toleration was the product of the self-confidence of his bigotry: if Catholicism were tolerated, it would triumph completely and inevitably and then the question of toleration would lose all meaning."

"That this view was extremely naive goes without saying. But James never believed that anyone could honestly and sincerely hold opinions different from his own. He explained opposition in terms of personalities, faction, self-interest, misrepresentation or conspiracy but never in terms of principle... He did not understand that after a century and a quarter of continuous Protestantism Englishmen could not be (and did not wish to be) disabused of their misconceptions about Catholicism by a missionary effort as puny as the one that he mounted. He failed to appreciate that Protestants could be sincerely attached to their beliefs. His schemes were doomed to eventual failure because the vast majority of Englishmen would not willingly turn Papist."

"James's Catholicising policy might seem insane; it can be explained only by his naive and grossly inflated expectations of conversions. Fortified by his sense of divine mission, he believed with a conviction born of faith that converts would appear, not because he had any rational grounds for thinking that they would but because he desperately wanted them to... He blundered on with the blind optimism of a man whose mind was determinedly closed to any thought of failure... [W]hen William invaded, few were prepared to resist him. In less than four years James had destroyed the strongest political position that any Stuart ever enjoyed. He had turned the Tories from vociferous loyalty to sullen apathy. And he had achieved this by concentrating single-mindedly on the line of action that the Tories could not stomach – the promotion of Popery."

"As Charles defaulted to his father’s autocratic habits, his throne returned to the vulnerability of the 1640s. On his deathbed in 1685, he showed more concern for his mistresses than his monarchy, and predicted that his brother’s reign would be short. So it proved. Louis’s revocation the same year of the Edict of Nantes (which had guaranteed freedom of worship for Protestants) flooded England with Protestant refugees, and every pulpit resounded to tales of Catholic atrocities. James II's Catholicism was toxic. He had to suppress a rebellion by the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, and began appointing Catholics to senior positions in the army, the church and Oxford University. He used his patronage to pack Parliament with loyal Tories. Even so, with the succession securely Protestant, all might have survived but for a final crisis. In June 1688, James’s wife gave birth to a son, thus removing Mary and William from the succession and substituting a Catholic infant. The battered Restoration compromise was in tatters."

"James the Second, who was a very good King, but unhappily believed that it was necessary for the salvation of his subjects that they should be Roman Catholicks."

"That King James the Second, having endeayour'd to subvert the Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the Original Contract between King and People; and by the Advice of Jesuits, and other wicked Persons, having violated the Fundamental Laws; and withdrawn himself out of the Kingdom, hath Abdicated the Government, and that the Throne is thereby become Vacant."

"He loved and aimed at absolute power, and believed that nothing could introduce and support it but the catholic religion, as the Romanists call theirs; and this increased his zeal for it, and that zeal increased his disposition to arbitrary power: so that in truth, his religion and his politics were partly the cause of each other, and indeed they cannot easily be separated."

"In retrospect the Revolution justified the policy of Exclusion. The events of the reign of James II fulfilled Whig predictions, proving that Popery was incompatible with the liberties as well as the religion of the nation. His conduct demonstrated to all that the Crown could not be allowed to retain those prerogative powers which had brought about the defeat of the Whigs, but which James had then turned against the Tories and the Church of England. Later generations disowned Shaftesbury, but they did not repudiate the principles on which the case for Exclusion, as well as the Revolution, rested—that political power should reside with those who possessed the greatest weight in society, and that in the last resort sovereignty rests with the people, the interests of the nation taking precedence over those of the Crown."

"In 1685 and 1686, James II struck several more blows to the Whig network in an attempt to silence the radical voice. Early in the first year of his reign, James moved to put the press under stricter supervision. His government was also quick to move against persons accused of distributing seditious papers or telling seditious tales. Bookstores were raided. Benjamin Harris's stocks were seized, wherein books were found with such titles as English Liberties (Henry Care's book) and A Scheme of Popish Cruelties. In December 1685, warrants to arrest anyone dispersing "seditious, scandalous, and unlicensed books, pamphlets, pictures, and papers" were issued. James's crackdown seems to have successfully hindered the production of radical books and pamphlets in England. The number of books printed in 1686 is the lowest of the entire decade. But the king could not eradicate the dissemination of oppositional propaganda completely or control his subjects' minds, many of which were already influenced by Whig revolution culture. Throughout his reign, persons were still arrested, charged with voicing seditious opinions or distributing seditious libels. Books promoting the Protestant cause were still smuggled in from Holland."

"King James the Second; who was a sour, cruel, and tyrannical disposition, and a zealous Papist. He resolved at once to be above the laws, make himself absolute, and establish popery; upon which the nation, very wisely and justly, turned him out, before he had reigned quite four years; and called the Prince of Orange from Holland, who had married King James's eldest daughter, Mary."

"A great king, with strong armies and mighty fleets, a vast treasure and powerful allies, fell all at once: and his whole strength, like a spider's web, was so irrecoverably broken with a touch, that he was never able to retrieve, what for want both of judgment and heart he threw up in a day."

"James ascended the throne with all the ease of Richard Cromwell. He took every measure which forethought could enjoin to grasp the royal power, and his earliest declarations carried comfort to an anxious land. He tried to dispel the belief that he was vindictive or inclined to arbitrary rule. "I have often heretofore ventured my life in defence of this nation, and I shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties." He declared himself resolved to maintain in both State and Church a system of government established by law. "The laws of England," he said, "are sufficient to make the King a great monarch." He would maintain the rights and prerogative of the Crown, and would not invade any man's property. He is even reported to have said that "as regards his private religious opinions, no one should perceive that he entertained them." Nevertheless, from the moment he felt himself effectively King, on the second Sunday after his accession, he went publicly to Mass in his chapel. The Duke of Norfolk, who carried the sword of state before him, stopped at the door. "My lord," said the King, "your father would have gone farther." "Your Majesty's father would not have gone so far," rejoined the Duke."

"In particular, the ruling elite seems to have taken a wait-and-see attitude to William's invasion. But as James hesitated to act, his support began to evaporate. The first to go over to William was Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (1661-1723), the king's own nephew. By mid-November, the lords lieutenant who had been asked to raise the militia did so- and then marched it over to the prince of Orange: Lord Delamere (1652-94) gave his Cheshire tenants a choice, "whether [to] be a slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a Freeman." Thus, at the moment of crisis James II turned out to be vulnerable on the last long-term issue that had cost his father the crown, that of local control. Ultimately, that control still rested with the landed aristocracy who held estates in the localities. In the course of two successive mornings between November 23 and 25, James awakened to find that his other son-in-law, Prince George, his dearest friend, Lord Churchill, and the head of the most staunchly Royalist family in England, James Butler, second duke of Ormond (1665-1745), had gone over to William. On the 26th he learned that Princess Anne had also fled the court, leading James to lament, "God help me... my own children have forsaken me.""