A Great and Terrible King
Page 54
Part of Edward's legacy, however, from which neither his son nor his successors could escape, was the use of extreme violence to solve intractable political problems. The shift is often dated to the new reign, as if to lay responsibility at the door of a degenerate younger generation, but in fact it had begun far earlier. It was first manifest in the summer of 1265, which witnessed 'the murder of Evesham'; it was seen again at Shrewsbury in 1283, when the law of treason was twisted to justify the killing of a prince. And so inexorably on, with the executions of Rhys ap Maredudd, Thomas Turbeville and William Wallace, culminating in the orgy of blood-letting that had attended the final campaign in Scotland. In the last instance, the perpetrators were Edward II and his contemporaries. It was thus unsurprising that, when these men eventually fell out, they should use the same methods against each other. Gaveston was murdered in 1312; his killer, Thomas of Lancaster, in 1322. Few English magnates died happily in their beds in a reign that would end with the murder of the king himself.
It is appropriate, therefore, that even in death Edward I should exhort men to vengeance. After his funeral rites had been performed in 1307, the king's body, dressed in his coronation robes, was entombed near the altar of Westminster Abbey. As is well known, his tomb bears a famous inscription. The letters as they appear today were evidently painted in the sixteenth century, but the sentiments they express are almost certainly earlier. EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST, the legend reads. PACTUM SERVA
The first part is easy enough to translate. Scottorum malleus means 'Hammer of the Scots', which is certainly an appropriate epithet. It is also the principal reason for believing that the motto was concocted soon after Edward's death; as early as 1320, a visitor to the tomb described him as 'the most Maccabean king', and the Hebrew word makabeh translates as 'hammer'.
This being the case, the second part of the inscription may have a more specific meaning than is usually allowed. Pactum Serva is commonly mistranslated as 'Keep the Faith'; a more accurate rendering would be 'Keep the Vow'. In the early years of the fourteenth century there was only one vow that the nobility of England could have understood in this context: the vow they had all sworn at Whitsun 1306, when the legendary king had gathered them together for a feast in Westminster Hall, and committed them to avenge the rebellion of Robert Bruce.
The real mystery of Edward's tomb lies not so much in its inscription but in its uncompromising severity. One every side, the king is surrounded by the most elaborate funerary displays imaginable: the gilt-bronze effigies of his wife and his father; the brightly coloured, canopied confection that holds the bones of his brother. Yet Edward, inscrutable to the last, lies hidden in an unadorned box of black Purbeck marble. Once this was assumed to be a sin of omission on the part of his son, but that argument cannot be sustained. In the 1320s Edward II commissioned a new set of murals for the Palace of Westminster celebrating his father's victories. If Edward I lacks an effigy, it was not for lack of filial devotion. The simplicity of his tomb, we are forced to conclude, was deliberate.
There are few parallels for such austerity in medieval Europe. The kings of Sicily are interred in similarly simple style, and so it is not impossible that Edward, as a sometime visitor to the island, may have drawn his inspiration from that direction. There was, however, another parallel closer to home, and that was the tomb that the king himself had constructed at Glastonbury for the bones of King Arthur. This too, according to seventeenth-century observers, had been a black marble box.
In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men's minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations.
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