Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange
tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject throughout his
realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his
father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of
vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as
memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier
rested. "I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's
friend, the Abbot of Cluny; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead."
And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All
the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign kings disappeared in Edward.
He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with
a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them
we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand
in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England
understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels
between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as
they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection
of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene
during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face
with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned
himself frankly in the wrong.


[Sidenote: Influence of Chivalry]

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and
outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in
Edward's career. His reign was a time in which a foreign, influence told
strongly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the
sudden rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy was now making