A NEGLECTED REIGN.*
FEW and evil were the days of the pilgrimage of Edward, second of that name, King of England. His twenty years of failure come between the nearly forty years' reign of his illustrious father and the half-century of the rule of his famous son. His name is associated with the great English defeat at Bannockburn, with years of famine, with conspiracies and civil war, and his chief claim to our sympathy lies in the hideous circumstances of his fall and his death. The verdict of his contemporaries upon his personal character has been -confirmed by history, and is summed up in Professor Tout's description of him as a " strong, handsome, weak-willed, and frivolous King, who cared neither for battles nor tournaments, neither politics nor business, and had no other wish than to amuse himself." In the Ford Lectures delivered last year at Oxford, Professor Tout, one of our two most distinguished living exponents of mediaeval history, surprised his audience by the new light he threw upon the importance of the reign of Edward II. in English history, and this book is an expansion of the lectures. Professor Tout did not hit upon his subject by any happy chance, or take up, by accident, a neglected topic, to find it capable of fertile treatment. Like Mr. Horace Round, he has devoted much attention to the development of English administrative institutions from the offices of the King's Court and the Royal Household, and in the course of his investigations he came to the conclusion that in the troubled reign of the second Edward is to be found the turn- ing-point in the whole process by which Court administration became clearly differentiated from national administration.
The clue to Professor Tout's novel theory is to he found in a problem itself not unfamiliar. Edward II., like his far stronger predecessor, Henry III., was successful in ignoring roles and regulations which a revolutionary opposition had compelled him nominally to accept. Students of the reign have been inclined to surmise that the explanation of this fact must lie in some misunderstanding of his personal character ; he must have had more energy and determination than we are usually inclined to allow him, or than his own generation believed him to possess. Professor Tout finds the explanation in his suggestion that " the King's Court was not a mere fortuitous aggregation of disconnected and incompetent
• The Place of the Reign of Eduard II. in English History.. By T, F. Tout, Bishop Fraser Professor of Mediaeval and Ecclesiastical History in the University of Manchester. Manchester : at the University Press. [108. 6d. net.] courtiers, but a solidly organized institution, with traditions of government," which "had under its control resources of administration that enabled it to direct every department of the State." It is impossible to attempt to give any summary of the evidence on which Professor Tout relies, and, indeed, his state- _ ment in this book is itself, to some extent, condensed from a fuller exposition which he hopes to give in a larger work. We have been accustomedto casual references to the Wardrobe, and the modern significance of the word has unconsciously assisted our ignorance of its import in the fourteenth century. But the Wardrobe of Edward II. was, in Professor Tout's words, "a Court office which, retaining its primitive indifferentiated character, was at once the Court department of finance and of administration," and the "almost permanent officials of the Wardrobe," along with their colleagues of the Chancery and the Exchequer, not merely enabled Edward II. to despise revolutions, but organized numerous and remarkable adminis- trative reforms. The reformers of the Royal Household, and its development of "vigorous offshoots which gradually became new offices of state on their own account," form the most striking and original part of this learned work. That Pro- fessor Tout has made out his case we do not doubt, but it is not easy to grasp the full significance of his revolutionary treatment of English institutional history. He himself speaks modestly of the general effect of his discovery upon the writing of history, and it has been so long in his own mind that he may have found his proper bearings and may be right in disclaiming "any new revelation " ; but to his readers it does come as a revelation, full both of positive results and of possible suggestions.
Professor Tout's argument is not confined to administrative history. He doubts whether the decadence of the period of Edward II. is as clearly ascertained as it is generally accepted. The early failure of the reign he attributes to the circum- stance that the policy of Edward I. was " on the verge of collapse at the moment of the great king's death," and that only his death and the Scottish troubles of his last year prevented his establishing a system of despotism. "It is easy," he says, "to imagine a history of England in which Edward I. appears as the English Philip the Fair, as the organizer of despotism, not as the pioneer of constitutionalism. That such was not the case of English history is, I think, largely due to the reign of Edward II." This, in itself, has not the novelty of other portions of Professor Tout's book, but be has given a new meaning and new foundations to opinions which have often been glibly expressed, and it is a distinct advance to say, as he shows there is good reason for saying, that " it was only as a result of the reign of Edward II. that the institutions of his father assumed the form in which they became permanent in history." His argument, that the resemblances between the reigns of Henry III. and Edward IL are merely superficial, itself gives considerable room for thought. His whole book demands the most careful attention from historical students, and it is not easy to overrate its value and its importance. It is perhaps ungracious to offer a criticism on the style of such a book, but we cannot suppress a protest against Professor Tout's continual use of an ugly technical jargon in such sentences as : " I have already stressed the dearth of great men," or "we must not over-stress the current view," or even "for a time this king stressed his chamber even more than his father had done."
Previous page
