The volume entitled “The Greatest of the Plantagenets,” was correctly described in its title-page, as “an Historical Sketch.” Nothing more than this was contemplated by the writer. The compilation was made among the manuscripts of the British Museum, in the leisure mornings of one spring and summer; and so soon as a fair copy had been taken, it was handed to the printer. The work was regarded as little else than a contribution towards an accurate review of what is both the most interesting and the most neglected period of our English history.

Its reception exceeded by far the author’s anticipations. Very naturally—it might be said, quite inevitably—many of those who admitted the general truth of the narrative, were ready to charge the writer with “partisanship,” and with taking a “one-sided vie” of the question. It is not easy to see how this could have been avoided. A great literary authority has said, that the first requisite for a good biography is, that the writer should be possessed with an honest enthusiasm for his subject. And in the present case his chief object was to protest against what he deemed to be injustice. It was his sincere belief, that for about a century past an erroneous estimate of this great king’s character had been commonly presented to the English people. He endeavoured to show that this had been the case; to explain the causes, and to lead men’s minds to what he deemed to be the truth. Such a task could hardly be performed without giving large opportunity to an objector to exclaim, “You write in a partisan spirit.”

When a new view of any passage in history is presented, many fair and honourable men, while they yield to the force of evidence, cannot help feeling some reluctance—some dislike to the sudden change of belief which is asked of them. Such men will often be found to object to the manner in which their old opinion has been assailed, even while they admit that that opinion was erroneous, and can no longer be maintained.

So, in this case, even those who advanced this charge of partisanship were generally ready to concede, that an altered view of Edward’s character had been not only propounded, but in a great measure established. Thus the Dean of Chichester, Dr. Hook, while he “differs widely from some of the author’s conclusions,” admits that “his argument is always worthy of attention,” and describes the volume as one in which “everything that can be advanced in favour of Edward is powerfully stated.”1 So, too, the Oxford Chichelean Professor of History (Mr. Montagu Burrows), speaks of the book as “a bold, and on the whole, successful attempt to reclaim for him; who is perhaps the only sovereign of England since the Conquest who has a right to the title of ‘Great,’—that position of which he has been deprived for more than a century.”2 And Sir Edward Creasy calls it “an earnest, elaborate, and eloquent defence of Edward I. against all the imputations that have been made upon him;” and adds, “my frequent references to this volume will show how much I value it.”3

The success, then, of the author’s attempt to rectify a prevalent error, has been clear and indisputable. All that he proposed to do has been done—the estimate of this great king’s character which prevailed a dozen years ago, has been considerably elevated—the justice which the writer claimed for him is now almost universally conceded.

But a desire is expressed by most of these critics—and it is a natural and laudable desire—that, as a result of the whole, a history, in the ordinary sense, of this great sovereign, and of the remarkable period in which he lived, might be given to the British public. The writer has entirely sympathized with this desire, and he has waited several years in earnest expectation of the appearance of some such work. Nothing of the kind, however, has yet been given to the world; nor is there any announcement of such a purpose. It seems to him, therefore, that it is in some sort his duty to review his former work; to consider how far it is justly chargeable with “partisanship,” and to reduce it, so far as he is able, to the proper form and proportions of a permanent history.

He feels the more impelled to attempt this, from an increasing conviction that not the sovereign only, but the time in which he lived and reigned, alike present to the mind of the dispassionate student, a subject meriting and richly repaying a careful examination. The chief features of the period in which this prince was born, and in which he lived, are more remarkable than even that union of great qualities by which he himself was distinguished.

This fact—the unusual concurrence of many symptoms of advance and of excellence at that period—has already been noticed by more than one writer. Lord Macaulay said: “It was during the thirteenth century that the great English people was formed. Then first appeared with distinctness that Constitution which has ever since preserved its identity; then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative assemblies which now meet, held its first sittings; then it was that the Common Law rose to the dignity of a science; then, that our most ancient colleges and halls were founded; and then was formed a language, in force, in richness, and in aptitude inferior to the tongue of Greece alone.” Another writer adds, that “it was this age of all ages, to which every Englishman ought to look back with the deepest reverence. In this thirteenth century our Constitution, our laws, and our language, all assumed a form which left nothing for future ages to do, but to improve the detail.”

This language is strong, and yet it does not fully describe the fact. The union of solid and real advance with more ornamental characteristics is very remarkable. It is true, as the writers whom we have just cited observe, that this thirteenth century—the life-time of Edward the First—saw the rise into existence of the English people, of the English language, and of the English constitution; but there were also several other appearances which were stranger than these. The realm had been, for many years, almost destitute of a settled government; it had suffered from something nearly approaching to anarchy. The Norman dukes who domineered over it only vouchsafed to their province of England an occasional visit; often manifesting very little care for it. Richard I., out of a reign of nine years, spent only a few months in this island. His successor was the worst king that England ever saw, and did his utmost to plunge the realm into ruin and absolute confusion.

It fills us, therefore, with wonder, to observe that so soon as these two pernicious rulers had departed, and the land was left in the hands of a weak and incompetent, but well-meaning youth, symptoms of revival of all kinds became perceptible. Not only did the English people and the English language come to light in this realm, but mind, and intellect, and taste all uprose together. “It is curious,” says Lord Campbell, “that in this turbulent reign (of Henry III.) there should have been given to the world the best treatise upon law of which England could boast, until the appearance of Blackstone’s Commentaries. For comprehensiveness, for lucid arrangement, for logical precision, this author, Henry de Bracton, was unrivalled for many ages.”4 Nor did this great lawyer stand alone. The same period gave us Roger Bacon, and, with him, Antony Beck and Chancellor Burnel, two of the greatest statesmen that England has ever known.

In the fine arts, also, England, though not yet rid of tumult and civil war, made equal or still greater advances. Henry really valued the arts; his wife was a cultivator and a patroness of poetry, and he himself resolved to raise, at Westminster, a new and splendid shrine for the remains of the last of the Saxon kings; ornamenting it, also, with pictures of great Saxon achievements. This royal taste for architecture was in accordance with the popular feeling. It was in the latter half of this century that Westminster Abbey, the old St. Paul’s, the Temple church, and the cathedrals of Salisbury and Norwich were built, while during the same period, the churches of Lincoln, Ely, Ripon, Exeter, and Wells, all received important enlargement. Nor was Edward himself, though a soldier and a statesman, at all indifferent to these matters. He raised in Westminster Abbey two monuments to his father and his consort, of which an eminent critic of our own day says: “Few figures can surpass, in simplicity and beauty, the effigy of queen Eleanor, and those on the crosses erected to her memory are almost equally fine.”5

The last words remind us, naturally, of another comparison. The king of England, in A.D. 1290, lost his dearly-loved consort; and he paid to her memory every tribute of affection and of sorrow that he could conceive, or that could be suggested to him. Her funeral “presented one of the most striking spectacles that England ever witnessed.”6 And he then strove to perpetuate that memory by monumental works, both within the Abbey and in twelve other places. In our own day we have witnessed a similar bereavement. We have been conscious, too, of the existence of a sorrow as deep and as enduring as that of the Plantagenet king. But have we, with all the wealth and all the refinement of this nineteenth century, been able to exceed, or even to equal, those outward and permanent expressions of sorrow which king Edward conceived and compassed in the earliest days of the English people and kingdom?

A consummate judge of these matters has truly said that “The reign of Edward I. is the period of the most perfect and beautiful Gothic buildings, when English art attained to the highest eminence it has ever yet reached.”7 And do we not all know, as a simple matter of fact, that if we, after a lapse of six hundred years, wish to raise a building of more than ordinary beauty, we are compelled to have recourse to the noble works which were achieved in the days of Edward I.? there being within our reach no purer or loftier models.

The age, then, in which this great monarch lived was a very extraordinary age. To ascribe its singular fruitfulness in every department of human excellence to his influence, would be altogether irrational and absurd. He himself was only one fact or feature among many. But it crowns the whole edifice with singular grace, to find—in the days which produced a Bracton and a Roger Bacon, a statesman like Burnel, a divine like GrosstÊte—the throne filled by a man like Edward, whose first thought was of uprightness,8 whose mind was a “legislative mind,”9 and who wrestled and fought his way through a period of no common difficulty and trouble, with such “cleanness of hands” as to leave him, at last, one of the noblest examples that it is possible to adduce, of a ruler “fearing God and working righteousness.”

Those who are acquainted with the former publication will recognize in the present, whole pages, sometimes whole chapters, which merely reproduce what had been therein said. Perhaps one third of the book is thus composed. Wherever a passage of plain and simple narrative, disputed by no one, occurred, there seemed to be no good reason for merely putting it into new phraseology. But all the more important and controverted questions have been reconsidered, and the chapters which concern them almost entirely rewritten.

The portrait which faces the title-page is given because there seems good reason to think that it is, substantially, a true representation. England possessed, as we have said, in the days of Edward, good sculptors as well as good architects; and it is tolerably certain, that the artist employed to erect at Carnarvon a statue of the king, would be a man competent to execute that work in a creditable manner. It is true that at the present moment, the hand of time has nearly destroyed every feature. But a century and a half ago, the statue was, doubtless, in a better condition. An artist accustomed to detect, with a practised eye, not only what was, but what had been, might gather from the brow, from the mouth, from the chin, and from the general contour, a tolerably accurate idea of the general portraiture. George Vertue, in his researches for the illustration of Rapin’s history, visited Carnarvon, believed that he gained from the statue a just idea of what Edward had been, and brought away a drawing of it, which he carefully engraved. From that portrait the present frontispiece has been taken.