The Perfect King Quotes

“Lord Acton’s famous phrase: ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“According to the Theory of War, which teaches that the best way to avoid the inconvenience of war is to pursue it away from your own country, it is more sensible for us to fight our notorious enemy in his own realm, with the joint power of our allies, than it is to wait for him at our own doors. King Edward III (1339)”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“Fortunate beyond measure… wise and provident in counsel, well-learned in law, history, humanity and divinity. He understood Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and High and Low-Dutch, besides his native language. He was of quick apprehension, judicious and skillful in nature, elegant in speech, sweet, familiar and affable in behaviour; stern to the obstinate, but calm and meek to the humble. Magnanimous and courageous above all the princes of his days; apt for war but a lover of peace; never puffed up with prosperity nor dismayed at adversity. He was of an exalted, glorious, and truly royal spirit, which never entertained anything vulgar or trivial, as may appear by the most excellent laws which he made, by those two famous jubilees he kept, and by the most honourable Order of the Garter, which he first devised and founded. His recreations were hawking, hunting and fishing, but chiefly he loved the martial exercise of jousts and tournaments. In his buildings he was curious, splendid and magnificent, in bestowing of graces and donations, free and frequent; and to the ingenious and deserving always kind and liberal; devout to God, bountiful to the clergy, gracious to his people, merciful to the poor, true to his word, loving to his friends, terrible to his enemies… In short he had the most virtues and the fewest vices of any prince that ever I read of. He was valiant, just, merciful, temperate, and wise; the best lawgiver, the best friend, the best father, and the best husband in his days.5”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“It is better to eat the dog than be eaten by the dog’, Montagu had remarked quietly to the king, after being dismissed from Mortimer’s presence.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“Until the late twentieth century scholars lacked the methodological sophistication to go beyond the face value of the records and chronicles and deconstruct the information structures underlying the various bodies of evidence. Furthermore, by the late twentieth century it had become academically very unfashionable to question whether specific kings were murdered. A general assumption was made that the evidence was insufficient to warrant any major revisiting of the deaths of any of the four secretly ‘murdered’ kings (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Edward V), and any attempt to research and explain the supposed later lives of the first two and the younger brother of the last in terms of a genuine survival resulted in prompt scholarly dismissal, regardless of the merits of the argument. The result was an example of ‘group think’, an intellectual stalemate in which the scholarly élite is so hostile to deviation from an accepted orthodoxy that no individual within the élite is in a position to question it, and no individual outside the élite will be taken seriously if he holds such unorthodox views.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“the ambition to be a better king was no longer there. The emphasis had turned from the king seeking success to one whose measure of success was simply to get through each day in a kingly fashion, and to enjoy himself if he had the chance. As a result, he wanted nothing much to change politically. It was in this spirit that he ordained that every man should practise with the longbow.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“Edward’s success was largely due to his consistency on certain key principles: not to agree a treaty until the war was finally won but merely to allow truces; never to allow the war to be fought on home territory, and above all never to do anything which might stir up strife among the magnates.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“A society which was basically confident that God’s will protected them was completely unprepared for the shock which followed. As the plague reached a town or village, a number of people very suddenly grew sick and died. What was worse, the plague lingered, so that even if you were not among the twenty per cent to die in the first month or so, there was a good chance you would be caught up in the next month’s mortality.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“Leaving aside the political circumstances of the fourteenth century, it was the first major battle between two well-resourced martial kingdoms in which victory was obtained by projectile weaponry rather than hand-to-hand fighting. In that sense it marks the advent of modern warfare”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“Each archer in the English camp could fire between six and ten arrows per minute. If each man fired at the slower rate, to ensure accuracy, and if there were only five thousand archers in the English army, the Genoese—who numbered no more than six thousand—were suddenly struck by thirty thousand arrows per minute,”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“He learned many things from the events of early 1341, but perhaps the most important was that his ministers had to be ruthlessly efficient and utterly loyal to him. He could not rely on parliament to appoint and dismiss such men.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“So the relatively free hand he gave to representatives to set the legislative agenda was not simply due to his need for taxation. It follows that he cannot be credited with the reforms of 1340 except in one important respect: he allowed these statutes to be enrolled.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“The ambition to be a ‘perfect’ king was not incompatible with the ruthless destruction of food supplies and defensive structures, or any other aspect of the efficient prosecution of a bloody conflict.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“What if Mortimer were to turn against him? Edward would be exposed as having officially announced his own father’s death and having subsequently attended the funeral, when a false body was lowered into a royal grave. How on earth could he, Edward, do anything but support this upstart monster, Mortimer? He had not only been tricked, he had been trapped. And his mother was part of the plot. There was no one to whom he could turn.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“It is better to eat the dog than be eaten by the dog’, Montagu”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“He may not have been the perfect king he tried to be, but, given the unattainable heights of his ambition, we have to applaud his achievement. For better or for worse, he helped to make the English nation what it is. And for better or for worse, he helped us become what we are.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation

“Scholarship especially runs scared of fervent quests for glory. If we acknowledge the existence of such feelings, we tend to diminish them: the fearless knight becomes illiterate and ignorant, the passionate lady becomes a woman frustrated by male-dominated society. We cynically explain the motives of the man who goes on campaign, or fights to the death for his lord. Perhaps only the anonymous men at the bottom of the social spectrum-the landless laborers, who lifted their spades in the years following the Black Death and started to conform to the modern stereotype of the downtrodden peasant, resentful of his servitude-gain widespread and genuine modern sympathy.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation