Book Description

Excerpt from The Captivity and Death of Edward of Carnarvon Had the barons worked together as a single party, they could easily have reduced the weak king to helplessness. But the magnates were so distracted by local and family feuds that it required some great crisis to make them take up a common line of policy. Their co-operation was the more difficult since their natural leader, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, was a man whose character was not at all unlike that of his cousin the king. More brutal, vicious, and capricious than Edward, Thomas resembled his kinsman in his laziness, his neglect of business, his wish to shuffle out of responsibility and in his habit of leaving all his affairs to be executed by the officers of his household. The consequence was that there was not only a king, who would not govern, but an opposition leader who could only oppose. In I3l2, and again more completely after Bannockburn, the opposition became the government. Earl Thomas now showed himself even more in competent than his cousin. He refused to govern he continued as victor to hold aloof from affairs, abiding in the same sulky isolation in which he had lived when he was in opposition. Consequently the failure of Thomas was even more complete than the failure of Edward. Hence the extraordinarily purposelessness of much of the politics of the reign, hence the long-drawn-out intrigues, negotiations, and threaten ings of war that take up so much of the story of the chroniclers. The real struggle was not so much between Edward and Thomas as between the organised households through which, like all mediaeval magnates, the king and the earl governed their estates and exercised their political authority. And as between the two there can be no doubt but that the followers of the king were abler, more serious, and better organised than the followers of the earl. They showed great skill in setting the rival factions of the opposition against each other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.