In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object
of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national
king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away,
when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended
for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger but
an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair
or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward's very
temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the
typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and
imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged,
stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too,
just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant
of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is
this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of
Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited
indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his
punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who
ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped
dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard
selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the
house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the
most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful,
averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he
said in his old age, "and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of
his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the
bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to
drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. "It is I
who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty
fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink."