ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
XVL—EDWARD IV.
ANY attempt to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion respecting the real conduct and character of Edward IV. is attended with the difficulty to which we have already alluded in speaking of the Princes of the House of Lancaster, and in a still higher degree. Not only are the contemporary accounts few and meagre in the extreme, as well as the materials from other sources ; but these contemporary chroniclers, with one solitary exception, are either strong Lancastrians, or did not compose their histories until after the battle of Bosworth and the overthrow of the House of York, when it had become the fashion and their interest to exalt the Lancastrian interest at the expense of the memory of its rival. One circumstance, however, has, to some degree, operated in favour of Edward's personal fame,—his being the father of Henry VII's wife and Henry VIII.'s mother. Influenced, no doubt, by this consideration, the writers of the Tudor period, while they studiously decry the Yorkist as opposed to the Lancastrian cause, have been induced to soften their censure of the first sovereign of the former family, and indulge in some panegyric, while not concealing the salient faults of his character. Thus, in a personal point of view, we have, perhaps (between these con- flicting influences), in their delineations, as far as they go, a greater approximation to impartiality and the actual truth than is often met with in contemporary writings.
The difficulty in arriving at an estimate of Edward does not in fact lie so much in our imperfect knowledge of the facts of his life and conduct, as in the task of deducing from these anything like an intelligible and consistent character. Never have the intel- lectual and sensuous, the masculine and the voluptuous qualities been presented in any King in greater intensity and in more strikingly antagonistic contrast. The King and the Man seem both alike to resolve themselves into several independent and thoroughly dis- similar persons, each of whom has his history and each of whom has left behind a strong impression on his times ; and so distinct appears to be the action of each that we are inclined to ask, not only Which is the real Edward ? but Had the real Edward any paramount and governing characteristic at all? And yet all these distinct phases of character seem to be established on satisfactory evidence, and the problem appears to have puzzled and misled contemporaries as much as it does ourselves, and to have baffled to some extent even the crafty insight W Louis XL of France. Our own portrait therefore must be presented with considerable diffidence and a certain amount of reserve.
The antagonism begins in Edward's physical constitution and personal appearance. "King Edward," writes in the early Tudor period Polydore Vergil (who had excellent means of in- formation, and considerable discrimination in availing himself of them), "was very tall of personage, exceeding the stature almost of all others, of comely visage, pleasant look, broad-breasted, the residue even to his feet proportionably correspondent." Sir Thomas More describes him similarly as "a goodly personage, and very princely to behold ; of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean made." That he was handsome to an uncommon degree all writers concur in stating. De Comines, who knew him, twice mentions that he was the most beautiful prince he had ever seen, or of his time ; and De Comines, as a counsellor of the Duke of Burgundy and Louis XI., had ample opportunities of making such a comparison. A story is told, though we do not possess it on contemporary authority, which is not in itself im- probable, and at any rate illustrates the popular tradition of this personal beauty and attractiveness. He asked an old lady what she would give him towards the war, and she replied, "For thy lovely face thou shalt have twenty poundal" which was twice as much as the King expected, who thanked and kissed her. This personal beauty was, no doubt, thvource of what we may call the effeminate side of Edward's character. It made him a magni- ficent fop, and with the natural temperament of which it was the index, made him also an epicurean of the first water in every part of his ordinary life,—an unrestrained glutton, an indolent and self-indulgent voluptuary, and a reckless and unscrupu- lous seducer. De Comines says he indulged himself in a larger share of ease and pleasure than any prince in his time. To the same writer it appeared that "his thoughts were wholly employed upon the ladies, on hunting, and on dressing. In his summer's hunting, his custom was to have tents set up for the ladies, where he treated them often in a splendid and magnificent manner." He did not confine his entertainments to the upper classes ; indeed, it became more and more his custom, as his life advanced, to mix familiarly with all classes. The London citizen Fabyan, writing at the beginning of the Tudor period, tells us that "in July, 1481, the King invited the Mayor and part of the Corporation to a hunt in Waltham Forest, and feasted them with a rich dinner and wine in a bower of green boughs, and gave them plenty of venison at parting. The next month he sent two harts and six bucks to the wives of the Mayor and aldermen, with a tun of wine to drink with them." His Court was a model of stately magnificence. He was very fond of music, and very liberal in his allowance to his minstrels. He took great pleasure in setting off his fine person to the best advantage, and in introducing new fashions in dress. His tailor, Guillemi Fault, had an allowance of a shilling a day, and five pounds a year from his purse. The new fashion that he chose for his last State dresses was to have very full hanging sleeves, like a monk's, lined with the most sumptuous furs, and so rolled over his shoulders as to give his tall person an air of peculiar grandeur. A Sumptuary Act gave him an opportunity of fixing the distinctive marks according to dress of every grade of society, from the cloth of gold of the Royal Family, down to the cloth of two shillings a yard and under of the labourer, servant, or artificer. For Edward, with all his familiarity among various classes, was a great stickler for distinctions of rank. Women's Rights, however, were recognized by a proviso that the Act should not extend to the wives of any but the two-shillings-a-yard class. Unless he is belied, he was as curious in his amatory as in his sumptuous tastes. He used to say, we are told, that he had three mistresses who excelled in three distinct properties. One was the wittiest, another the williest, the third the holiest harlot in his kingdom.
His great self-indulgence brought on during the last part of his life a corpulence which injured his personal appearance, and it also contributed, no doubt, in a great measure to his premature death before he had completed the forty-first year of his age. It also impeded that activity of movement, and lessened the prompt- ness of action, which once distinguished him, and which spring from a strong physique, and an energetic and powerful mind. They also, at a comparatively early period, gave a wrong impression of his capabilities, and so brought upon the King disappointments and dangers which he would probably have otherwise avoided. De Comines deemed him a man of no great insight or foresight. The Earl of Warwick, while abroad, gave out, at any rate, that he looked on him as a very weak prince ; and Louis some- times also professed to despise him, though he prided him- self on no part of his policy so much as on the warding off of Edward's invasion of France. The inaction and seeming indiffer- ence of Edward no doubt really deceived many others, and induced them to miscount on his inefficiency at the moment of trial. But in England, at any rate, as time wore on, the King's real charac- ter became better understood, and it was known that the lion, though slothfully couchant, was not sleeping ; that although the spring from repose might be sometimes deferred too long for safety yet when it came it was well aimed and terribly effective. From his father Edward had inherited, together with good looks and popular manners,lpowers of great bodily activity and endurance, an unwearied and indomitable energy and perseverance, a deter- mined will, a mind of no common clearness and grasp, and a spirit which, when roused, could be as fierce and unrelenting as it was ordinarily good-natured and humane. When the emergency called for the exercise of these powers, the pleasant indo- lent voluptuary became another man, and woe to those who had calculated on his inertia I Nor was he altogether lost in pleasure-seeking, even in his most epicurean moods. We find that he distributed persons throughout the country, among the manors and strongholds, in various places of posi- tion, whose duty it was to watch carefully all that went on in the heart of society, and send him regular and minute accounts of events and of men. These he carefully perused and mastered, and as his memory was extraordinary, he never forgot what he had thus learnt, and is said to have acquired an unrivalled knowledge of the workings of English society, and of the character of individual men throughout the kingdom. All England learnt this in time, and all England was awed into quiet by the knowledge, and even crouched under his omnipresent administration. Thus, while he seemed to be a mere trifler and man of pleasure, he quietly watched the play of the social chessboard, and if he sometimes delayed his own decisive move until it was too late, he did so from over-finesse, rather than from ignorance or indifference. For, like other able men, he rather liked to 'disguise his ability in ordinary times, and to affect an insouciance and indolence which had no existence in fact. His self-confidence in his own resources and power of turning the tables suddenly against an adversary, led him sometimes to let the dangers accu- mulate until the immediate result was a rather humiliating defeat. He delayed so long any preparations against the threatened invasion of Warwick in 1470, and so coolly neglected the warnings of his brother-in-law of Burgundy, that he found himself in a few days a seemingly hopeless fugitive, seeking shelter and craving assist- ance in the very quarter from which the timely warning had pro- ceeded. How wonderfully his brave spirit supported him under these circumstances, and how great was the display of wise daring and equally effective prudence, patience, and self-restraint during the memorable expedition which ended in his restoration to power, clothing but a perusal of the contemporary and authoritative narra- tive of that revolution which we fortunately possess can convey aty idea of.
The reader, however, of the narrative must go to its perusal ,with no idea of finding excessive scrupulousness on the part of Edward. He was probably not worse, and perhaps better, on the point of veracity than most of the leading men of his age ; but he had nothing of the sacred regard for a promise which marked the 'character of his rival Henry when he was left to his own better mind. Edward was not an habitual liar or perjurer, but he scru- pled at neither lie nor perjury, nor any other deceit, when he thought the occasion called for it. He was a very scrupulous observer of the forms of religion, perhaps all the more so because be so fre- quently violated the substance. He had entered on his reign with a prejudice against the Church, which had been generally the sup- porter of the House of Lancaster, and during the first ten years of ES administration he seems to have incurred the displeasure of the -ecclesiastics, and to have in one instance, at any rate, interposed his veto to prevent an enactment which would, under the cover of -common fame, have placed the life of every suspected Lollard at the mercy of any personal enemy. But after his restoration, Edward seems to have felt the necessity of courting, or at least 'conciliating the Church, and we find him praised by clerical (writers as an ardent enemy of heresy, and judicious and liberal patron of the clergy.
It is a difficult question to answer whether the Government of Edward was really popular. Personally, as we know, he was popu- qar at the beginning of his reign, and also for the most part during his second term of government. His personal and administrative popularity had certainly declined at the time when Warwick over- threw him ; the authoritative account of his restoration already alluded to leaves no doubt on this point, especially as relates to the feelings of the Londoners, usually his greatest admirers. The Rolls of Parliament (meagre in the extreme during this reign) are silent as to any complaints of grievances, and contain no Act for the redress of any such. But we know that Edward first intro- duced the illegal device of extra-Parliamentary Benevolences, and the quasi-Parliamentary assembly which, after his death, invited lie brother Richard to assume the Crown, speaks out plainly and indignantly against the system of government under which the nation bad groaned. There probably was a designed and designing exaggeration in this statement, in order to support the deposition 'of Edward's son, but the account given of Edward's system of espionage leaves an impression of terrorism.
The probability is that Englishmen bore with much without complaint through fear of the miseries of a renewed civil war. The character of the King himself, and of his Government, also was such as to lull any disposition to resistance. Although he resorted at times to illegal means of raising money, Edward (during his -second government) depended far more on his power of econo- anizing on the money which he obtained in a regular manner.
'There was comparatively light, regular taxation during this period, and the King, who had found an empty exchequer, left, it is .admitted by unfriendly writers, a very full one, and a nation growing rapidly in wealth and prosperity. This prosperity and wealth arose partly from the King's support of municipal privileges :and patronage of commercial enterprise, and still more from his abstinence from needless wars, and his discouragement of an habitual warlike spirit. Most skilful and successful as a -soldier himself, and flinging himself into any enterprise with the
spirit of a crusader or knight-errant, Edward had no penchant for war in itself, and disliked and despised fruitless and purpose- less warfare. Although nothing would have tended more to establish his throne for the moment than the reconquest of France, and though he himself was very desirous of checking the increasing power of Louis XI., he never would commit himself and the coun- try to such an undertaking without fair prospects of rapid success. He landed once in France with a great army, but it was because he had an assurance from the Duke of Burgundy of his zealous assistance ; but on Burgundy failing him altogether, he had no scruple—his courtiers had still less—in receiving a sum of money and an annual payment from Louis, and withdrawing his army. On another occasion, he had abandoned his preparations for a similar expedition, on a like desertion of the Duke of Bretagne. That he should not care to interfere by arms to prevent the annexation of the dominions of either of these princes to the Crown of France, may have been a mistake in policy, according to the views then generally entertained, but will not be imputed as a great fault by politicians of the present day. His foreign policy, indeed, generally wise and successful, though not ambitious, received some sort of dishonour in this .matter, owing to the belief that his inaction was caused or assured by the promise which Louis held out to him of a marriage between the heir to the French Crown and Edward's eldest daughter ; and his anger at the breach of this engagement is said to have contri- buted to the fatal result of the King's last illness. But if in this case his wife's ambition (to which his desire for this match was attributed) seconded too strongly the restraining influence of his constitutional love of peace, the effect of this temperament in general was most beneficial on the nation at large. A state of peace became the rule instead of the exception in their daily life, and the arts and habits of peace rapidly superseded those of war. And with peace came Caxton and his printing-press.
Had Edward lived a little longer, this state of things might have been considerably modified. The death of Louis had not only wounded his pride, but roused him to a more lively consideration of the growing power of an astute and unscrupulous rival. Though pacific, Edward would have been the last man in his kingdom to allow himself to subside into a mere cypher in the eyes of Europe, and his death probably prevented a struggle in which Louis might have found out his mistake in playing fast and loose with a man of Edward's temperament and abilities. But Edward seems not to have taken Death into his calculations on any point. He felt so full of life, that he built up his policy at home as well as abroad too much on an assumed longevity. He crushed and he overawed the great nobles, and raised up a new nobility out of his wife's relations and the strongest men who would do his service. But affectionate and devoted husband and father as he was (notwithstanding his irregularities and seeming carelessness), he forgot to provide against the danger to his family after his death, from the animosity of these depressed nobles, and he forgot that they might find a leader in one of his own blood. He left a very excellent and sensible paper of rules for his eldest son's daily life and education, but he forgot to secure his succession by binding it up with the selfish interests of the most powerful men. In his self-reliance, be was as reckless in offending them as he had been in outraging Warwick's pride ; but be lived to bear the brunt of 'Warwick's resentment, and to weather the storm. In the present instance, the inheritance of hatred and revenge was bequeathed to a child, who paid forfeit for it with his life. But strange as it may appear, Edward, though he watched every one, was too self-confident to be easily suspicious, and trusted most men till distrust became a manifest necessity.
Edward IV.—to condense our estimate into a few words— was a shrewd but unscrupulous man of the world, with the aptitudes and instincts of a great conqueror and a profound statesman, and with the sense of responsibility and self-reliance of a self-made King, but with the tastes of an easy and selfish man of pleasure, and with the habits of a roue..
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