The broad lines of Edward’s policy during the thirty-five years of his kingship had already been laid down for him during his rude schooling.  The ineffectiveness of his father’s government inspired him with a love of strong rule, and this enabled him to grapple with the chronic maladministration which made even a well-ordered medieval kingdom a hot-bed of disorder.  The age of Earl Simon had been fertile in new ideals and principles of government.  Edward held to the best of the traditions of his youth, and his task was not one of creation so much as of selection.  His age was an age of definition.  The series of great laws, which he made during the earlier half of his reign, represented a long effort to appropriate what was best in the age that had gone before, and to combine it in orderly sequence.  The same ideals mark the constitutional policy of his later years.  The materials for the future constitution of England were already at his hand.  It was a task well within Edward’s capacity to strengthen the authority of the crown by associating the loyal nobles and clergy in the work of ruling the state, and to build up a body politic in which every class of the nation should have its part.  Yet he never willingly surrendered the most insignificant of his prerogatives, and if he took the people into partnership with him, he did so with the firm belief that he would be a more powerful king if his subjects loved and trusted him.  Though closely associated with his nobles by many ties of kinship and affection, he was the uncompromising foe of feudal separatism, and hotly resented even the constitutional control which the barons regarded as their right.  In the same way the unlimited franchises of the lords of the Welsh march, the almost regal authority which the treaty of Shrewsbury gave to the Prince of Wales, the rejection of his claims as feudal overlord of Scotland, were abhorrent to his autocratic disposition.  True son of the Church though he was, he was the bitter foe of ecclesiastical claims which, constantly encroaching beyond their own sphere, denied kings the fulness of their authority.

Edward’s policy was thoroughly comprehensive.  He is not only the “English Justinian” and the creator of our later constitution; he has rightly been praised for his clear conception of the ideal of a united Britain which brought him into collision with Welsh and Scots.  His foreign policy lay as near to his heart as the conquest of Wales or Scotland, or the subjection of priests and nobles.  He was eager to make Gascony obey him, anxious to keep in check the French king, and to establish a sort of European balance of power, of which England, as in Wolsey’s later dreams, was to be the tongue of the balance.  Yet, despite his severe schooling in self-control, he undertook more than he could accomplish, and his failure was the more signal because he found the utmost difficulty in discovering trustworthy subordinates.  Moreover, the limited resources of a medieval state,