Chris Given-Wilson

Chris Given-Wilson (born 1949) is a British historian and academic specialising in medieval history.

Quotes

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

All quotes are from the first edition hardcover in the Penguin Monarchs series, ISBN 978-0-141-97796-6

• That there was a tendency for strong and successful kings to be succeeded by weak and unsuccessful ones is one of the commonplaces of medieval English history: Edward I was followed by Edward II, Edward III by Richard II, Henry V by Henry VI, and so on.
  • Preface (p. ix)

• These were the men – the earls, bishops and barons – with whom a medieval king had to establish a modus operandi. It was his inability to do so that lay at the heart of Edward II’s failure.
  • Preface (p. xi)

• The Gaveston years, 1307 to 1312, set the course of English politics for a decade. Soul-baring and humiliating for the king, they stripped him of his regal mystique and spread a poison through the arteries of the body politic that proved ineradicable as long as Edward occupied the throne; they brutalized and militarized political society; they gave rise to a reform programme that became the touchstone for baronial opposition; and they fatally undermined the English position in Scotland.
  • Chapter 2, “‘My Brother Piers’” (p. 25)

• Seeing Robert Bruce mounted on ‘a little palfrey’, Sir Henry de Bohun the nephew of the Earl of Hereford, sought immortality by charging directly at him, but when a blow from Bruce’s axe split his head in two he was obliged to settle for mortality.
  • Chapter 2, “‘My Brother Piers’” (p. 28)

• Edward’s triumph in 1321-2 gave him the opportunity to establish a strong and responsible rule in England.…England ached for peace, and for the first time since his accession Edward could govern on his own terms.
  It was an opportunity spectacularly squandered.
  • Chapter 4, “‘Make it Your Business that We Become Rich’” (p. 76; ellipsis added for the sake of continuity)

• Edward’s pride in his army – ‘such as has never been seen in our time, or in the times of our ancestors’ – shows that despite twenty years’ experience of campaigning in Scotland he still had not learned from his mistakes.
  • Chapter 4, “‘Make it Your Business that We Become Rich’” (p. 81)

• As so often, a quick war was followed by a slow peace.
  • Chapter 4, “‘Make it Your Business that We Become Rich’” (p. 89)

• What was disturbing was the dichotomy between Edward’s behavior and his almost Olympian view of kingly office. The latter he learned from his father, but whereas Edward I acknowledged (albeit reluctantly) that there were in the end limits to kingly power, his son seems to have been unable to conceive of opposition to his will as anything other than disloyalty. Edward II was enormously stubborn. He was also devious and untrustworthy, continually making promises he had no intention of keeping. He evidently saw nothing wrong in such behavior: it was his birthright, his prerogative.
  • Chapter 5, “Imagining Edward” (p. 104)

• The grimly inventive repertoire of punishments meted out by both sides during Edward’s reign proclaims it as an age of visceral hatred and almost unparalleled savagery within the English ruling class. Before 1312, no English earl had been executed since 1076; after 1330, it would be nearly sixty years until another was condemned for treason.
  • Chapter 5, “Imagining Edward” (p. 105)

• Ultimately, however, it was Edward’s inability to fulfill the two overriding obligations of a medieval king – to administer the law without partiality, and to defend his realm – that lay at the heart of his tragedy. This was a very personal failure, the collapse of the moral authority of Edward’s kingship, a resounding endorsement of Aristotle’s much-quoted dictum that a ruler who could not control his private passions would not be able to control his kingdom.
  • Chapter 5, “Imagining Edward” (p. 105)

• Explaining why he was the first English king to be deposed is in many ways easier than explaining why it took twenty traumatic years to happen. Edward faced challenges that would have tested the abilities of any king; his singular quality was the talent he possessed for alienating those who could have helped him to overcome them.
  • Chapter 5, “Imagining Edward” (p. 109)