A glorious road to ruin

We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison, Edward III is an icon. He lived his life in the manner that medieval men expected of a king. He looked the part. He won his battles. He made the right sort of people rich. In the chronicles of his time, his character is completely concealed behind a mask of conventional praise.

Picking up a book titled The Perfect King, one might expect to find the same sort of treatment. Ian Mortimer does not disappoint. This is an old-style thumping yarn, full of blood and thunder, heroism and adulation. Here we have Edward the Conqueror, Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the Builder, and Edward the Patriot. Edward the Spendthrift and Edward the Bully are kept well out of sight. The bombastic and self-righteous propaganda, which irritated even in its author’s day, is hardly mentioned. Mortimer has made a serious attempt to add a more rounded view of the king’s personality to the traditional accounts of campaigns, palaces and banquets. But it suffers from the bias implicit in the title. The bad bits have been left out.

The reign of Edward III was one of the longest in English history, half a century, from 1327 to 1377. It was a reign dominated by war, first with Scotland and then with France. Edward’s great victories at Halidon Hill (1333) and Crécy (1346), and his son’s capture of the king of France at Poitiers (1356), set standards of achievement by which his successors were still being judged in the 16th century.