Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1103 page)

And that is the reason it don’t break down.

I won’t trust one leg, nor two, nor three,

To carry my weight when I sit me down;
I want all four of ‘em under me —

Priest and People and Lords and Crown.

I sit on all four and I favour none —

Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown —
And I never tilt in my Chair, my son,

And that is the reason it don’t break down!

When your time comes to sit in my Chair,

Remember your Father’s habits and rules:
Sit on all four legs, fair and square,

And never be tempted by one-legged stools!

CHAPTER V

THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272 — 1377

Edward I, II, and III (notice the grand old
Saxon name; we are all one people now) may be called Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the
Poltroon, Edward the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward I.

He ranks with the half dozen greatest
“makers of England,” with Alfred, William the Conqueror, Henry II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and Victoria the Great. I should, indeed,
say “makers of Britain,” for it was Edward who planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding shape to our Parliament, who dealt the first successful blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed his soldiers with the all-conquering longbow. His care for our coast defences was an example to his descendants. His legal reforms were hardly less than those of Henry
II, and at the end of his reign the law of
England and the law courts of England hadtaken the shape that they bore down to the nineteenth century.

Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable man, of rather narrow sympathies, and could be very cruel to his foes. He had learned much from his father’s muddled reign; he would engage in no rash foreign adventures to please the Pope or any one else. Of course, he must defend his one foreign possession, Gascony;
and he fortified it very strongly. Occasionally he was obliged to fight King Philip IV of
France, but that was because that cunning gentleman was trying to swallow not only
Gascony but also little Flanders, which was now the most important market for English wool, and also because Philip was helping
Edward’s enemies the Scots. What Edward himself was really set upon was the union of
Wales and Scotland to England. With Wales he was finally successful. After two or three long and patient campaigns, full of painful marches and costly castle-building, he managed to shut up Llewellyn, the last “Prince of North
Wales,” in the mountainous district of Snowdon; and when Llewellyn was killed in a skirmish, Edward organized Wales into counties,
with regular sheriffs, judges and law courts,
all under the English crown. From that time the eldest son of the King of England has
always borne the name of “Prince of Wag!^
The first Englishman to be Prince of Wales could at least speak no English when the title was given to him, for he was only a few hours old. But the King stained his victory by the cruel execution of a Welsh prince, David, who,
after all, had only done what all Celtic princes had been doing for centuries, namely, promised to submit and then rebelled again.

With Scotland Edward just failed, and his failure brought a terrible retribution on both countries. For nearly a century before this time Scotland had been at peace with England, and its southern half had been growing richer and happier. Many Norman and
English barons owned lands on both sides of the border and so were “vassals” of the kings of both countries. Even the Scottish King held a small English earldom, and for that he was, of course, the “vassal” of King Edward.
But the crown of Scotland he held from God alone, as Edward held the crown of England.

King Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286,
leaving an infant grand-daughter known as the
“Maid of Norway.” Edward at once proposed to marry her to his eldest son. Nothing could have been better for both kingdoms, and all reasonable Scots would have welcomed a union. But in 1290 the baby queen died, and

at once there was a dispute for the crown between several great Scottish barons. They appealed to Edward, and in their appeal acknowledged him to be “overlord” of Scotland.
He gave his decision in favour of John Balliol,
who was duly crowned at Scone as King of
Scotland.

Then, in his new capacity as overlord,
Edward began to bully Balliol and to treat
Scotland as if it were already a part of England.
Balliol was a weak creature, and threw himself into the arms of Philip of France, who saw a splendid opportunity of diverting Edward from Flanders and Gascony by aiding the
Scots. So was founded the great alliance between France and Scotland which was to last for over two hundred years. Edward thereon declared Balliol deposed and sent men to conquer Scotland. He only succeeded in rousing every Scottish heart to desperate resistance. Of this resistance a small landowner, called William Wallace, was the first hero. Edward, with his mailed knights and his terrible archers, gave Wallace and the
Scots a severe thrashing at Falkirk (1298), but he could not hunt down a whole nation in that wild hill country. During the nine years between the battle of Falkirk and Edward’s death it became a war to the knife between thetwo nations, which ten years before had been ready to lie down like lambs together.

The result was that, for fifty miles on each side of the border, the land became a desert,
through which swept, almost yearly, fierce raids from either country; and this state of things continued far into the sixteenth century.
Every Scot whom Edward caught he would hang as a traitor (Wallace was hanged in 1305),
which was quite a new practice in foreign or even in civil war, wherein there had been a great deal of “live and let live” on either side.
Like other narrow and upright men, Edward failed to see that those who resisted him could be as upright as himself. Yet he was such a good soldier and so patient that he had very nearly finished off the conquest of all Southern
Scotland when he died on his last campaign in
1307. “Carry my bones into battle against them,” were his last instructions, “and on my tomb carve ‘Edward, the hammer of the
Scots.’” But it was too late; Scotland had just found a deliverer in Robert Bruce, a baron of
Norman descent, who was crowned at Scone in 1306 as King Robert I.

Great as a warrior and imperialist, Edward was even greater as a lawgiver and organizer.
All his laws obtained the full sanction of the now regularly constituted House of Lords.

The House of Commons generally met at the same time, and was made up of over two hundred borough-members and seventy-four
Knights of the Shire. It had, at first, no share in the
law-making
, but it constantly petitioned in favour of particular laws. The clergy, after a short struggle, preferred not to be represented in Parliament except by their bishops and great abbots, who sat with the
Lords; but Edward allowed them two assemblies called “Convocations,” one in the Archbishopric of Canterbury and one in that of
York. These bodies voted taxes for the clergy to pay, just as Lords and Commons voted them for the laymen to pay.

The House of Lords also became the chief law court to which you could “appeal” from all the three “common” law courts, which were now fixed at Westminster, with a separate staff of judges for each. In some cases,
if you couldn’t get justice anywhere else,
you might go to the King himself, who would order his Chancellor to look into your case; and that was the beginning of the
“Court of Chancery.” The Chancellor was the greatest official in the kingdom and kept the King’s “Great Seal,” with which all legal documents must be sealed. One of the most useful laws which Edward made was called

It Mortmain,” forbidding people to lea^e more lands to the Church, which was growing a little too powerful. Another was the “Statute of Winchester,” a great measure for compelling all men to help in keeping the peace; it created
“police-constables” (with whom, as friends or foes, most boys are still familiar) in every town and village. Another was a law allowing the free sale and division of great estates of land.
In ail his laws, as in all his wars, we may say that Edward, like Henry II,
took his people into his confidence
, which is the secret of good government. It was expensive, as all good government must be; and, as no one likes paying taxes, there was once a sort of outbreak, both of barons and clergy, against the expense of it.
Edward was very angry, but he gave way and confirmed Magna Charta, with the additional promise added that he would take no taxes at all without consent of his full Parliament.

He kept his promise. “Pactum serva”
(keep troth) was his motto. Indeed the country was now able to bear heavy taxes.
Early in the twelfth century an order of monks called “Cistercians” had begun to devote themselves to breeding sheep on a great scale,
in order to sell wool; and England at the end of the thirteenth century was the greatest wool-growing country in the world. We didnot yet know how to weave fine cloth, so our wool was all exported to Flanders, and Parliament said that every sack that was sent there should pay the King
6s.
8
d.
The “Flemings”
(men of Flanders) wove the cloth and sent it all over Europe. This trade made it more important than ever for our kings to keep the sea clear of pirates, and Edward worked hard at this task. There were other rich trades such as that in wine with Bordeaux, and in furs and leather with North Germany; foreign merchants had to pay the King something for leave to come to sell and buy, for as yet there were very few English merchant-ships.

Edward I’s quarrel with the clergy was a very short and simple affair. The English
Church had been long growing more and more a part of the nation and less and less dependent on the Pope. But still the Pope was the head of all European churches, and had to be obeyed if possible. In 1296 Pope Boniface VIII
startled the whole of Europe by absolutely forbidding any clergyman to pay any taxes to any king. It was only a few years since
Edward had got his regular system of taxing the clergy comfortably arranged. He and the
King of France rose in wrath against this absurd suggestion. Edward simply told his clergy that he would put them “out of law”
(i.e.,
withdraw all legal protection from them)
if they obeyed the Pope; and he seized all their wool by way of precaution. They very soon gave way. The King of France went much further; he sent men to Italy who maltreated the haughty Pope and the Pope died, perhaps in consequence of the rough handling he got.
He put a creature of his own on the Papal throne, and compelled him to come and live in France. For seventy years this “Captivity”
of Popes lasted (1305-78), and, as England was at war with France for much of that time,
the respect of Englishmen for a French Pope was naturally slight. After the “Captivity”
came the “Schism” (division) (1378-1415),
during which there were two and sometimes three persons each calling himself Pope. In fact the old Church of the Middle Ages was fast going down hill.

Edward’s death closes the best period of these “Middle Ages.” From that time to the
Reformation the country, except in material wealth, did not improve. Even the glorious foreign wars of Edward III brought in the long run more harm than good to England.

Edward II (“the Poltroon”) was a most impossible person, heartless, ignorant, extravagant, cruel, and weak-minded. Men rubbed their eyes and said, “Is this creature the sonof ‘Pactum serva’?” He gave up the Scottish war at once, and, when in 1314 he was obliged to take it up again, his enormous army got a most thorough thrashing from the Scottish spearmen at Bannockburn. He hung on the neck of a low-class Gascon favourite, who made fun of the sober English barons till they caught and killed him. Edward afterward took a fearful revenge on such barons as he could catch, especially on his cousin Earl
Thomas of Lancaster. Thus began a feud between the Crown and this man’s family which ended in the overthrow of Edward’s great-grandson Richard II and eventually in the civil “Wars of the Roses.”

The barons grew worse as well as the King
 — for no one class in a country can be bad without the others suffering; they used the meetings of Parliament to carry on their quarrels. Several of them were of royal descent
(from younger sons of Henry III and Edward
I); these had married great English heiresses,
and began to fight each other for lands and earldoms. The King seemed to be at their mercy. At last, in 1327, a general rising,
headed by the wicked French wife of Edward,
swept him away and set up his son, aged 13,
as Edward III. Edward II was a bad King;
but his deposition and murder were a bad job,because there had been no one great national grievance, only a lot of private ones of certain great nobles. He had wasted his life, and in the end was deposed for nothing in particular.