Gotham Diary:
“Too Depressing!”
24 September 2014
My bedtime reading these days has been rather lurid: Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England. I am currently inching my way through the disastrous reign of Edward II (1307-1327) — inching by two little Kindle pages at a go, before I drop off to sleep. Jones’s book is perfect for bedtime. I already know the story, but not from Jones’s point of view, which is considerably more vivid and dramatic than that taken by the contributors to the great old Oxford History of England.
If I have one complaint with Dan Jones, a complaint that might make me seem to look down on his book, academically and snobbishly, from the finer atmospheres of my ivory tower, it is that he rubs the sharp edges off the enormous differences in mindset and even, I believe, higher consciousness between men and women of the Middle Ages and ourselves. The old kings and queens, despite their different costumes and pastimes, were just like me, and if they walked into the room, we could all have a nice chat. (Being dead, they’ve given up putting on airs.) The complaint is notional, because I knew that it would be there to be made when I bought the book, and indeed bought the book in spite of it, bearing in mind that I was looking for bedtime reading, not institutional history. If Jones’s historical perspective, which flattens the distance between then and now, is not interfering in the least with my enjoyment, it is, however, worth bearing in mind.
I have nothing but praise, however, for Jones’s briskly literate style, which should give the younger readers for whom this sort of book was once intended no example of cant or solecism. I can only wish that more non-fiction writers aiming at popular audiences would write so correctly. Jones shows again and again that there is nothing about Standard English to be afraid of.
Edward {II} was accused by the chronicler Ranulph Higden of preferring the company of “jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, [and] sailors” to fraternizing with nobles and knights, and indeed sailors, bargemasters and carpenters were recorded dining in the king’s chamber at times during the reign. “If only he had given to arms the attention that he expended on rustic pursuits he would have raised England on high,” bemoaned the anonymous author of The Life of Edward II, a contemporary history of the king’s reign. A royal messenger once said that the king preferred thatching and ditching (countryside hobbies better suited to lower-class craftsmen than to princes of the blood) to hearing Mass. Although other evidence suggests that Edward was conventionally pious and could hold his own in battle, he did not enjoy or hold tournaments, nor did he sponsor great chivalric occasions such as the Feast of the Swans at which his father had belted him as a knight. This lack of interest in the proper conduct of kingship eventually reduced him to a figure of popular derision.
Edward also had a reputation for favoritism, and this was a great deal more damaging. He spent his entire adult life under the shadow of cronies with whom he fostered unhealthy obsessions. “The king dishonoured the good people of his land and honoured its enemies, such as flatterers, false counsellors and wrongdoers, who gave him advice contrary to his royal estates and the common profit of the land, and he held them very dear,” wrote the Anonimalle chronicler. There were several such favorites during Edward’s lifetime, but only one for whom his passion ran highest of all. From as early as 1300 Edward was dominated by one notorious individual in particular, Piers Gaveston.
Good stuff, no? Jones treats contemporary chroniclers very much as the salty commentators that they intended to be, and he knows just when to cut them off.
Never let it be said that I didn’t glean any nuggets of insight from Dan Jones. Jones explicitly opens the door on reading the downfall of Edward II for hints as to what the reign of his direct descendant, Edward VIII, might have been like had it been allowed to continue. The later Duke of Windsor was another king with a weakness for favorites and a belief that kings get to do what they like in their spare time.
Alas, Edward was unable to perceive this. He saw Gaveston’s exile as a personal attack on the man he loved rather than as a political act undertaken for the good of the realm.
Makes you sit up, that one does. The strongest evidence that Edward was gay or had sex with Gaveston and others is in the end nothing more than the intense massing of baffles, built up over the centuries by officials and academics, to stifle discussion of the matter. When I was in school, it was “obvious” that Edward was a queer, because historians were so constipated about the details of those “unhealthy obsessions.” But all we know for certain is that Edward fathered Edward III, a guaranteed manly man. There were lots of reasons aside from difference in gender for the king’s lack of interest in his French queen.
In David Hume’s highly eccentric account of the reign, Edward II was an enlightened monarch whose taste for favorites in fact adumbrated the cabinet system, which had only just come into being in Hume’s day. The historical consensus, however, firmly holds Edward to have been an irresponsible man without any political imagination at all. His father and son, both very strong kings, might bluster all they liked about royal prerogative, but they took care to make sure that their position (as distinct from particular policies) had broad support among the military and ecclesiastical establishments. They were always, at least until the debilitations of old age, highly respected kings. Edward, it seems clear, did not know the meaning of respect.
As I read along, the words of Roger de Bris, in The Producers, keep coming to mind: “We’ll have to change the story. They’re losing the war! It’s too depressing!”