rce 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."
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