Skip to content

These were the men – the earls, bishops and barons – with whom a medieval king had to establish a modus operandi. It was his inability to do so that lay at the heart of Edward II’s failure.

— Chris Given-Wilson Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

Another quote →

More quotes by Chris Given-Wilson

As so often, a quick war was followed by a slow peace.

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

Edward’s pride in his army – ‘such as has never been seen in our time, or in the times of our ancestors’ – shows that despite twenty years’ experience of campaigning in Scotland he still had not learned from his mistakes.

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

Seeing Robert Bruce mounted on ‘a little palfrey’, Sir Henry de Bohun the nephew of the Earl of Hereford, sought immortality by charging directly at him, but when a blow from Bruce’s axe split his head in two he was obliged to settle for mortality.

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

Explaining why he was the first English king to be deposed is in many ways easier than explaining why it took twenty traumatic years to happen. Edward faced challenges that would have tested the abilities of any king; his singular quality was the talent he possessed for alienating those who could have helped him to overcome them.

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

The grimly inventive repertoire of punishments meted out by both sides during Edward’s reign proclaims it as an age of visceral hatred and almost unparalleled savagery within the English ruling class. Before 1312, no English earl had been executed since 1076; after 1330, it would be nearly sixty years until another was condemned for treason.

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship (2016)

All Chris Given-Wilson quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Chris Given-Wilson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.