KINGS PART 1

YEARS AGO ENGLISH PAL DAVID ROBERTS, husband of Anita, the latter Innes Ireland’s secretary, recited to me a poem recounting England’s rulers from William I (the Conquerer to some; the Bastard to others) to Victoria.  

Above, in David Roberts’ own hand. Below, a gift ruler from the Roberts.

I recalled these in reading Tom Johnson’s “Who Plucked the Little Dog?,” a review of Caroline Burt and Richard Partington’s book Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State; this, in London Review of Books, February 20, 2025. 

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State, by Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Faber & Faber, 2024.

IndeBound writes, “Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting—including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords—as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England’s emergent statehood.”

These English rulers are Nos. 7 through 12 of David’s poem, Nos. 28 through 33 of my Rulers of Britain. Here, In Part 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits gleaned from Johnson’s review of the Burt/Partington book.

Edward II, King of England, reigned from 1307 until deposed in 1327. Image from BL Royal MS 20 ii via Wikipedia.

Edward II and a Fellow Named John. In quite a tale, Johnson recounts, “In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent nurse.”

Have we the makings of a good bio series here?

Johnson continues, “He was brought before Edward II who sarcastically greeted him, ‘Welcome, my brother,’ and intended to keep him as a fool. But who was fooling whom? Edward changed his mind and John was tried for treason, condemned, drawn through the streets and hanged, his corpse left on display so long that ‘bones … clung to bones.’ Most chroniclers agreed that the pretender had been inspired by the devil. The imposture had been plausible, one added, because Edward II was so disappointingly unlike his father.”

Johnson posits, “What if Edward II had simply handed over his crown and sceptre to John the tanner’s son and walked off into the sunset? Things certainly would have turned out better for Edward, whose disastrous reign ended with his deposition less than a decade later, when a long-simmering conflict with Roger Mortimer spilled into open war. According to conventional accounts, he was captured by his enemies in the winter of 1326, shuffled around a bit while the nobility decided what to do with him, and then quietly murdered at Berkeley Castle in the late summer of 1327.”

Edward III. Then came Edward III, who, Johnson writes, “liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man.’ ”

However, Ned II’s tale is hardly over. Tomorrow in Part 2 Johnson likens him to Elvis. 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025