Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 23

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It becomes necessary at this stage to consider the character of Edward not only in the light of his earlier record but also with regard to what follows. He had been a great king and he would continue to be great, but in a far different sense. The wise lawgiver, the just administrator give way now to the conqueror. A modern analysis might suggest that he had a split personality, but this would not be accurate, for the qualities that begin to come out strongly in him had always been there. While engaged in the heavy task of codifying the laws, he had been dealing with Wales. The precision and dispatch with which he concluded the Welsh campaigns had stamped him as a military leader of high mark, but in the settlements he made with the people of that country he had been decisive rather than admirable or just.

There have always been forces at work in the world which override justice. The sufferings that the defeated Saxons endured for two centuries after Hastings were gradually forgotten in the fusing of the two races. Who will say that the Indians of North America should have been allowed to keep that continent for themselves? Down through the ages empires have fallen, generally through the aggression of inferior races, but out of the resulting confusion good has come. It may have been that the English people, who were stirring and moving toward greater things, could not have endured forever a troublesome neighbor on their very doorstep; and this can be cited, perhaps, as in some measure a justification for Edward in the case of Wales.

But Scotland was a different matter. The Scottish people were troublesome neighbors also, and the border line between the two countries would inevitably have been the scene of continuous forays back and forth. But the trouble was far enough removed to make a solution possible that would fall short of absorption. The full blame for what happened cannot, however, be laid on the shoulders of Edward. The selfishness, pride, and treachery of many of the leading noblemen of Scotland made it impossible for them to agree among themselves. They invited Edward to come in and allowed him arbitrary powers. His culpability lay in his willingness to take full advantage of this and to wield the weapons thus placed in his hands with the thoroughness of a conqueror and, at times, the machiavellian skill of later-day diplomacy.

It has already been said that Edward was a thorough, if superior, Plantagenet; and the members of that gifted and dynamic family had always displayed the conquering strain. Edward was not the first king of England to cast covetous eyes on Scotland. It was unfortunate for his place in history that the great opportunity to act came in his day. It is hard to believe that the king who was so temperate and just in so many things could have allowed the hates engendered in war to lead to the butchery at Berwick and to the execution with such barbarity of the great Scottish leader, William Wallace. Otherwise his case might have rested on his work as a maker of forward-looking laws and as the foster father of the House of Commons, and he could have been acclaimed without any reservations as the best of English kings.