The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

CHAPTER XI.

THE CONFIRMATION OF THE CHARTERS.

Punishment of the judges—Banishment of the Jews—Scottish succession—The French quarrel—The ecclesiastical quarrel—The constitutional crisis—The confirmation of the charters—Parliament of Lincoln—Its sequel—War of Scottish independence—Edward’s death.

Evils consequent
on the
absence of
the king.

Edward completed his work in Wales at the end of the year 1284. The next year was spent in legislation, and in the summer of 1286 he went to France. Edmund of Cornwall acted as regent in his absence, and he stayed away for three years. For two out of the three the country was at peace; in 1288, however, the absence of the king began to tell, and in 1289 the need of money for home and foreign purposes became pressing. The news that the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford were engaged in all but open warfare on the Welsh marshes, and that the collected parliament of 1289 had refused to sanction a new tax before the king came home, brought Edward back in the August of that year. He found that the public service had suffered sadly from the removal of the guiding hand. Complaints were pouring in against the judges of the Courts of Westminster; violence and corruption were charged upon the chief administrators of the law; and the king’s first work was to try the accused, to remove and punish the guilty. The two chief justices and several other high officers were, after careful investigation, deprived of their places. The next thing was if possible to gain a stronger hold over the uneasy earls. Gilbert of Gloucester, whose assistance had enabled Edward to overthrow Earl Simon at Evesham, and who had been the first to take the oath of fealty at his accession, had been throughout his career marked by singular erratic waywardness. He was not yet an old man, and a project had been on foot for some time, by which he was to marry the king’s daughter Johanna, who was born at Acre during the crusade. This was now carried into effect, and thus one of the most dangerous competitors for influence in the country was bound more closely than ever to the king.

Banishment
of the Jews.

That done Edward looked round for means of raising money. And this was found in a device which has ever since weighed heavily on his reputation. The Jews were banished from England, and in gratitude for the relief the nation undertook to make a grant of money. The measure was no doubt generally acceptable; it was backed by the clergy, by the strong influence of Eleanor of Provence, the king’s mother, and by his own bitter prejudice. Harsh, however, as this measure was, it was not a mere act of religious persecution. The Jews had, unfortunately for the nation and for themselves, devoted themselves to usurious banking when usury was forbidden to Christians. They had thus come to wear the appearance of oppressive money-lenders. They lived, too, under a system of law devised by the kings to keep them ever at the royal mercy; their accumulated stores of gold lay conveniently under the king’s hand, and Henry III., whenever he wanted money, had been able to obtain it by extortion from the Jews. But, last and worst, they had allowed themselves to be used by the rich as agents in the oppression of the poor; they had made over the mortgages on small estates to the neighboring great land-owners, and in other ways had played into the hands of the nobles, whose protection was necessary to their own safety. They were hated by the poor. Great men, like Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, had longed to see them banished; the accusation of money-clipping and forgery was rife against them, and two hundred and eighty had been hanged for these offences since the beginning of the reign. Edward was too bigoted or perhaps too high-minded to wish to retain them as useful servants when the nation demanded their expulsion. They were banished, and the price paid for the concession was a tax of a fifteenth granted by clergy and laity in the autumn of 1290.

Claims of
Edward upon
Scotland.

Just at this time the death of the young Queen of Scots opened to Edward the prospect of asserting his supremacy over the whole island, a prospect which within a few years tempted him to claim the actual sovereignty of Scotland. The design of a marriage between the young queen and Edward’s eldest surviving son, Edward of Carnarvon, which had been already concluded, shows that the king contemplated the union of the two kingdoms in the next generation; her death disappointed that hope, but there is no reason to suppose that Edward, when he undertook to settle the Scottish succession, had in his eye any project of conquest.

The Scottish
kingdom.

The case of Scotland was very different from that of Wales. The Scottish people were a rising not a declining nation. The Scottish kingdom was a collection of states held by different historical titles, and inhabited by races of different origin, not a nationality struggling for existence. Southern Scotland was far more akin to Northern England than to Northern Scotland; inhabited by people of English blood and English institutions, and feudally held, like great part of England, by Norman barons. The royal race was a Celtic race, but Celtic Scotland gave to the kings little more than a nominal recognition; the strength of the royal house was in the Lowlands. Ever since the Norman Conquest the relations between Scotland and England had been close. Of the several provinces over which the Scottish king now ruled, Lothian was a part of the ancient Northumbria, which had been granted, according to English accounts, by either Edgar the Peaceable or by Canute to a Scottish king. South-western Scotland, or Scottish Cumberland, had been given by Edmund I. to Malcolm. The whole Scottish race had acknowledged as their father and lord Edward, the West Saxon king, the son of Alfred; and William the Conqueror, and William Rufus, and after him, had extorted a recognition of the superiority or overlordship of the King of the English. These were shadowy claims, certainly; but since the middle of the twelfth century there had been several instances in which either the King of Scots or his son had received English estates and dignities and done homage for them. The earldoms of Northumberland and Huntingdon had been thus held by Henry, son of David I., and the latter by his son William, the Lion. Homage had on several occasions been rendered without any very distinct understanding whether it was for the English earldoms, for the Lowland provinces, or for the whole Scottish kingdom, that the overlordship of the English crown was acknowledged. Henry II. had, indeed, after the capture of king William, compelled both him and his barons to recognize his superiority in the strictest terms, but Richard had liberated them from that special bondage, and the mutual reservations or compromises, which both preceded and followed that short period of subjection, left the claims as vague as ever. Except during the same period the relations of the two kingdoms had been, since the death of Stephen, fairly friendly. The Scottish kings were married to kinswomen of the English kings; their political progress followed at some short distance behind, but in the footsteps of the progress begun under Henry II., and for nearly a century there had been only short and languid intervals of war. Now and then the Scots had pillaged or intrigued, but the two crowns were generally at peace. Edward’s design for the Scottish marriage would have turned the peace into union; but the time was not come for that.

Decision of
Edward in
favor of
Balliol.

These facts will explain the position taken by Edward in 1290. He believed that upon him, as overlord, devolved the right of determining which of the many heirs was entitled to the succession. With great pomp and circumstance he undertook the task; obtained from the competitors a recognition of his character as arbitrator, and, after careful examination, decided the cause in favor of John Balliol, a powerful North Country baron of his own, in whom according to recognized legal right the inheritance vested. He was careful to obtain, on Balliol’s accession, a distinct homage for himself and his heirs for the whole kingdom of Scotland. This was the work of 1291 and 1292; early in 1293 symptoms began to show themselves that the result would not be lasting. The rising troubles in the North were followed by an alarm on the side of France. The opportunity given by these troubles, and the means taken by Edward to meet them, combined to produce the complication of difficulties which brought about the great constitutional crisis of the reign in 1297. The several points must be taken in order: the relations with France first.

Relations of
Edward
with the
French
king.

In France Edward still possessed Gascony and some small adjoining provinces, which, after all the vicissitudes of the preceding century, had, mainly by the honesty and friendly feeling of Lewis IX. and Philip III., been preserved to the French descendants of Henry II. In 1279 Eleanor of Castile, his wife, had claimed as her inheritance the little province of Ponthieu, lying on the coast between Flanders and Normandy, and her claim had been recognized by Philip III. But Philip died in 1285, and his son, Philip IV., generally known as Philip the Fair, was a true inheritor of the guile and ability of Philip Augustus. Edward’s long visit to France, from 1286 to 1289, had been spent partly in arranging for a continuance of friendship with the king, and partly in securing and reforming the administration of Gascony; but he must have been aware that the jealousy with which Philip viewed him would sooner or later take the form of downright hostility. Until 1293, however, they continued to be friends. In that year a series of petty quarrels, between the Norman coast towns and the English sailors, and an outbreak between the Gascons and their neighbors, gave Philip his opportunity. He summoned Edward to Paris to render an account for the misdeeds of the offenders, and on his non-appearance condemned him to forfeiture. This was done with considerable craft. Edward, who had lost his faithful wife in 1290, was engaged in a negotiation for marriage with Margaret, the sister of Philip; in preparation for that marriage a new enfeoffment or settlement of Gascony on the King of England and his heirs was agreed on. As a step towards that settlement the fortresses of Guienne were for form’s sake placed in Philip’s hands, and as soon as he had hold of them he declared Edward a contumacious vassal, for not having obeyed his summons to Paris. This was done in May, 1294.

Consequences
of the
quarrel with
Philip the
Fair.

The news of this outrageous proceeding was received in England with great indignation, and for a moment it appeared that the nation was unanimously determined to uphold the rights of the king. Even John Balliol, the King of Scots, who had got himself into trouble owing to his divided duties to his subjects and his overlord, and who was present in the Parliament which Edward called in June, offered to devote the whole produce of his English estates to maintain the righteous cause. A great scheme was set on foot for foreign alliances: the Spaniards were asked for substantial assistance; the princes of the Low Countries, the King of the Romans too, were taken into pay. A thorough scheme for the defence of the coast and organization of the navy was devised. Edward’s urgent needs or consistent policy led him to assemble, as we saw, the estates of the kingdom, in a way in which they had never been brought together before, and the parliaments of 1294 and 1295 completed the formation of the constitutional system. But a rising on the Welsh border prevented any general expedition in 1294; and the dread of a common enemy threw the Scots in 1295 into correspondence with France. Edward, provoked at the delay, pressed by the deficiency and waste of his resources, had recourse to very exceptional measures for raising money, and so produced a reaction against the foreign war, and a combination of political forces most dangerous to his own authority, and most trying to the new machinery of government at the very moment of its completion. The model parliament of 1295 was followed by the crisis of 1296, and the confirmation of charters of 1297.

Relations of
Edward
with the
clergy.

So strong a king, so determinate a policy, was sure to provoke complaints; the very enforcement of order wears the appearance of oppression. Both clergy and laity had their grievances, and Edward’s extremity gave them their opportunity. The clergy with a certain number of bishops at their head, had throughout the struggles of the century ranged themselves on the side of liberty. The inferior clergy had always had much in common with the people, and John’s conduct during the Interdict had broken the alliance which ever since the Norman Conquest had subsisted between the great prelates and the court. Stephen Langton had set an example which was bravely followed. Henry III., by his love of foreigners, his obsequious behaviour to the popes, and his unscrupulous dealings in money matters alienated the national Church almost as widely as John had done; while Simon de Montfort had conciliated all that was good and holy. But when Henry III. with the abuses which he had maintained, had passed away, and when Church and nation alike saw that Edward was laboring for the benefit of his people with all his heart, matters might have been changed. There was doubtless need for watchfulness on the part of the clergy, for the ministers of the court were always on the lookout for means to limit the spiritual power; but defensive watchfulness is a different thing from aggression. Three successive archbishops had ruled since Edward’s accession, all of them anxious to promote the independence of the Church and to diminish the power of the crown, even if it were to be done by throwing the Church more entirely into the hands of the Pope. Hence it was that Archbishop Peckham in 1279 had declared himself the champion of the Great Charter, although the Great Charter was not assailed, and had in a council at Reading passed several canons which were intended to limit the king’s action in ecclesiastical causes. Edward in return had taken his opportunity of repressing what seemed to him to be ecclesiastical innovation; he had interfered to prevent the publication of the canons, and had made the archbishop apologize and withdraw them. Not content with this, he took advantage of the occasion to pass the statute “De Religiosis,” by which he prevented the clergy from acquiring more land than they held at the time, without express permission. The taxation of the clergy too was heavy; the popes were as willing to minister to Edward’s needs as they had been to supply his father with money from the revenues of the English Church. More than once they had empowered him to collect a three years tenth of all the revenue of the clergy for the purpose of a crusade which was never carried out, and in 1288 Pope Nicolas IV. ordered a new and very exact valuation of all church property. This valuation included both temporal property, that is land, and spiritual, that is tithes and offerings. Such a permanent record laid them open at any moment to exaction. But Edward was not satisfied to have to ask the Pope’s leave to tax his own subjects, whether clerical or lay; he had begun to assemble the clergy in councils of their own, for the purpose of obtaining money grants, and, a little later, gave them a representative constitution as an estate of parliament. They were, on the other hand, unwilling to obey the summons to attend a secular court, and to spend their money on secular purposes, much more so when it was demanded out of all proportion and without reasonable consultation. Robert Winchelsey, who became archbishop in 1294, was fitted to be the leader of a strong ecclesiastical opposition. He was a pious, learned and far-seeing man, but he was fully possessed with the idea that the king was determined to subject the Church to the State; and he knew that in the Pope, Boniface VIII., he had a friend and supporter who would not desert him. He was ready to fight the battle the prospect of which was very near.

Quarrel between
Edward and the
clergy.

Edward regarded the situation of affairs in 1294 as entitling him to assume the office of dictator; to take all advantage of the law offered him for raising men and money; but, if he saw means which the law did not warrant, to use them also as justified by the necessity of the case. So he not only assembled the barons, clergy, and commons, to obtain money grants from them, but seized the wool of the merchants and took account of the treasures of the churches. It is true that by negotiating with the merchants in assemblies of their own he obtained their consent to pay a large increase of custom on the wool, and that he did not actually confiscate the church treasure, still the measures were oppressive and alarming; and when in the autumn council of 1294 he demanded one-half of the revenue of the Church the alarm became a panic. The clergy yielded, only to find another heavy demand made on them the next year; but the king was becoming irritated by delay and the clergy emboldened by papal support. Boniface VIII., in February 1296, issued a famous Bull called, from its opening words, the Bull Clericis Laicos, in which he forbade the king to take or the clergy to pay taxes on their ecclesiastical revenue. Armed with this Archbishop Winchelsey in 1297 declined to agree to a money grant, and the king replied by placing all the clergy, who would not submit, out of the protection of the law.

Discontent of
the greater
barons under
the growth of
the royal
power.

But by this time the spirit of the laity was roused. Gilbert of Gloucester was dead, and the heads of the baronage were Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the Marshall, and Humfrey Bohun Earl of Hereford, the Constable of England; men not of high character or of much patriotism, but of great power and spirit, and eager to take the opportunity of asserting their position, which the king’s measure for enforcing equal justice had threatened to shake. Bohun, too, had been imprisoned on account of the private war which he had carried on against Gloucester in 1288. Edward’s legal reforms had touched the baronage like every other class. A close inquiry into the title by which they held their estates and local jurisdictions—the commission, as it was called, of “quo warranto”—had alarmed them in 1278; then the Earl Warenne had boldly averred that his warrant was the sword by which his lands had been won, and by which he was prepared to defend them. They found too that, although the new legislation in some respects gave them a stronger hold on their vassals, that advantage was counterbalanced by the stronger hold which the king gained by it over themselves. They did not care to have too strong a king, or one who ruled them by ministers of his own choosing. When, then, early in 1297, Edward called for the whole military force of the kingdom to go abroad, part to follow him to Flanders to support his allies, and part to go to Gascony, they determined to thwart him. It was a moot question how far they were bound to foreign service at all; the king himself seemed to be asking them for a favor rather than a right. They knew that the clergy were hostile on account of the taxes, and the merchants on account of the wool; they would make the king feel their strength. Edward himself acted unwisely; he had become exasperated with the delay; he had lost his early and best counsellor, Robert Burnell, and had taken in his place Walter Langton, the treasurer, a faithful but unpopular and unscrupulous man, and he had conceived the notion, which was probably a true one, that the barons wished to embarrass him. The plea of necessity by which he tried to justify himself must also justify him with posterity.

Assembly of
the barons at
Salisbury.

Reconciliation
of Edward and
Archbishop
Winchelsey.

The year 1297 saw the contest decided. In February, the king had summoned the barons to meet at Salisbury. When they were assembled the two earls refused to perform their offices as marshal and constable; the clergy were in a state of outlawry, and the king did not venture to summon the representatives of the commons. The assembly broke up in wrath. Edward again laid hands on the wool, summoned the armed force, and put in execution the sentence against the clergy; the barons assembled in arms, the bishops threatened excommunication. In spite of this, the king, in July, collected the military strength of the nation at London and tried to bring matters to a decision. As the earls would not yield he determined to submit to the demands of the clergy, and to use his influence with the commons so as to get, even informally, a vote of more money. Winchelsey saw his opportunity. If the king would confirm the charters, the Great Charter and the charter of the forests, he would do his best to obtain money from the clergy; the Pope had already declared that his prohibition did not affect voluntary grants for national defence. The chief men of the commons, who although not summoned as to parliament were present in arms, agreed to vote a tax of a fifth; and the people were moved to tears by seeing the public reconciliation of the archbishop with the king, who commended his son Edward to his care whilst he himself went to war.

Confirmation
of the
charter
establishing
the right of
the people
to determine
taxation.

But the end was not come even now. The archbishop and the earls knew how often the charters had been confirmed in vain in King Henry’s days; and it was an evil omen that the king, whilst offering to confirm them, was attempting to exact money without a vote of Parliament. They drew up a series of new articles to be added to the Great Charter, and, after some difficulty, forced them upon the king just as he was preparing to embark. Edward saw that he must yield, but he left his son and his ministers to finish the negotiation. As soon as he had sailed the earls went to the Exchequer and forbade the officers of that court to collect the newly-imposed tax; the young Prince Edward was urged to summon the knights of the shire to receive the copies of the charter which his father had promised, and on October 10 the charters were re-issued, with an addition of seven articles, by which the king renounced the right of taxing the nation without national consent. It is true that these articles were not drawn up with such exactness as to prevent all evasion, and Edward I. and Edward III. are accused of using the obscurities of the wording to justify them in transgressing the spirit of the concession. But the confirmation of the charters, however won, was the completion of the work begun by Stephen Langton and the barons at Runnymede. It established finally the principle that for all taxation, direct and indirect, the consent of the nation must be asked, and made it clear that all transgressions of that principle, whether within the letter of the law or beyond it, were evasions of the spirit of the constitution. The seven articles were these: by the first the charters were confirmed; by the second all proceedings in contravention of them were declared null; by the third copies of them were to be sent to the cathedral churches to be read twice a year; and by the fourth the bishops were to excommunicate all who transgressed them. These four were the contribution of the prelates, the condition under which the clergy had been reconciled. By the fifth article the king declared that the exactions, by which the people had been aggrieved, should not be regarded as giving him a customary right to take such exactions any more; by the sixth he promised that he would no more take such “aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of the realm;” and by the seventh he undertook not to impose on the wool of the country any such “maletote” or heavy custom in future without their common assent and good will. It would have been clearer if the rights renounced had been absolutely renounced and clearly specified. The king and his servants soon learned that, without taking such taxes and maletotes as had been complained of, they could by negotiating with the merchants raise money indirectly without consulting parliament, but that excuse was never allowed by the parliament to be sufficient, and, when they could, they closed every opening for evasion. Thus was England’s greatest king compelled to make to his people the greatest of all constitutional concessions, at the very moment at which by his new organization of Parliament he had placed the nation for the first time in a position in which they could compel him to fulfill it. It was to some extent a compromise, in which both parties felt themselves justified in putting their own interpretation on the terms by which they had been reconciled, but it is not the less a landmark in the history of England, second only to Magna Carta. The confirmatio cartarum is the fulfillment, made now to the whole consolidated people, of the promises made in the charter to a nation just awaking to its unity and to the sense of its own just claims.

Dissatisfaction
of Edward with
his subjects.

Re-confirmation
of the
Charters.

Before we turn again to the military work of the reign, the war for the subjection of Scotland, which was one of the main causes of Edward’s difficulties at this time, and which furnished him with hard work for the rest of his life, we may briefly sum up the sequel of the great constitutional crisis. Not the least of the causes that led to Edward’s irritation, and provoked him to impolitic violence, was the thought that the nation did not trust him. From the beginning of the reign he had labored indefatigably for their good; he had amended their laws, and had given them what, to all intents and purposes, was a new and free constitution. He felt that he had a right to their confidence, and a right to direct, if not also to control, the mechanism which he had created. But as yet it was only thirty years since the Battle of Evesham. Men were still alive who remembered the countless tergiversations of Henry III., and who, so warned, could scarcely help suspecting that Edward in the hour of need would repudiate his obligations, as his father had done. They did not profess to be satisfied with the act of confirmation which Edward sealed at Ghent on November 5, 1297. As soon as he returned from Flanders, in the following year, the earls insisted on a renewal of the act, and, before they would join him in the Scottish war, the king had to promise to grant it. In March, 1299 the promise was fulfilled, but the confirmation was even now regarded as incomplete. The enforcement of the charter of the forests involved a new survey of the forests, and the king, when he promised that this should be done, made a distinct reservation of the rights of the crown, and of some questions which had just been referred to the court of Rome. The reservation appeared to the people to be an evident token of insincerity; and to calm the excitement Edward, two months afterwards, executed an unconditional confirmation. Still, however, it was declared that the forest reforms were intentionally delayed; and in a full parliament, held at London in March, 1300, the confirmation was repeated, additional articles being embodied in an important act called “The articles upon the charters.” In consequence of these the survey of the forests was made and the report of the survey presented to a parliament held at Lincoln in January, 1301, at which all the old animosities threatened to revive, and the barons, backed by the commons, and with Archbishop Winchelsey at their head, subjected the king to a pressure which he felt most bitterly and never forgave.

Papal
claims over
Scotland.

Quarrel of
Edward
with Archbishop
Winchelsey.

Again he was in grievous want of money. The Pope had claimed the overlordship of Scotland, and it was of the utmost importance that he should receive a united and unhesitating answer from the assembled nation. In spite of all the concessions that Edward had made so reluctantly, showing by his very reluctance that he intended to keep them, a new list of articles was presented as conditions on which money would be granted. Nay, even if the king agreed to the articles, the Archbishop, on the part of the clergy, would consent to no grant that the Pope had not sanctioned. Again Edward yielded, although he refused to admit the article in which the Pope’s consent was mentioned. It was by thus yielding probably, that he obtained from the whole assembled baronage a distinct denial of the Papal claims over Scotland. But the prelates and clergy did not join in the letter addressed in consequence to the Pope; and Edward, putting the two things together, chose to regard the archbishop as a traitor in intention if not in act. The knight who had presented to him the articles at Lincoln, was sent for a short time to prison, as a concession perhaps to Walter Langton, whose dismissal had been asked for. Winchelsey’s punishment was delayed as long as Pope Boniface lived; but, when Clement V. in 1305 succeeded him, the Archbishop was formally accused, summoned to Rome, and suspended, nor was he allowed to return to England during the remainder of the reign. This quarrel is a sad comment on the conduct of two great men, both of whom had at heart the welfare of England; but if the balance must be struck between them, it inclines in favor of Edward. He may have been somewhat vindictive, but his adversary had taken cruel advantages of his needs, had credited him with unworthy motives, and with a guile of which he knew himself to be innocent; and the archbishop had, in order to humiliate him, laid him open to the most arrogant assumptions on the part of the Pope. Winchelsey wished to be a second Langton; Edward was not, and was incapable of becoming, a second John.

Edward and
the foreign
merchants.

The New
Custom.

The Parliament of Lincoln closes the constitutional drama of the reign; but two or three minor points in connection with what has gone before may be mentioned here. In 1303 and 1304 Edward was again in great straits for money, and he did not wish to be again subjected to the treatment which he had endured at Lincoln. In searching for the means of raising a revenue he recurred to the same source from which he had obtained the custom of wool at the beginning of his reign—the assistance of the merchants. He called together the foreign merchants in 1303 and offered them certain privileges of trading, on the condition that they should consent to pay import duties. They agreed; and, although an assembly of English representatives from the mercantile towns refused to join in the arrangement, the institution held good. The “New Custom,” the origin of our import duties, was established without the consent of parliament, although not in direct contravention of the Act of 1297, for it was a special agreement made with the consent of the prayers and in consideration of immunities received. In 1304 he adopted an expedient even more hazardous, and collected a tallage from the royal demesne; yet even here he avoided breaking the letter of his promise. Such tallage was not expressly renounced in 1297, and it was now sanctioned by the consent of the baronage, who raised money from their vassals in the same way. In 1305 he did a still more imprudent and dangerous act, in obtaining from Clement V. a formal absolution from the engagements taken in 1297. Except in a slight modification of the forest regulations, which was perhaps made rather as a demonstration of his power than as a real readjustment of the law, he took no advantage of this absolution. These three facts, however, remain on record as illustrations of Edward’s chief weakness, the legal captiousness, which was the one drawback on his greatness. The last was too grievously justified by the morality of the time, and proves that in one respect at least Edward was not before other men of the age.

Rebellion
in Wales
under
Madoc.

We turn now to trace the course of events which had so powerfully affected the king’s action during these critical years. We saw him in 1294 preparing for an expedition to France, which was delayed until 1297 by troubles in Wales and Scotland, and by the political crisis on which we have dwelt so long. The Welsh revolt under Madoc, a kinsman of the last princes, involved an expedition which Edward himself in the winter of 1294 led into Wales. It was an unseasonable undertaking, and attended with no great success. Madoc was, however, taken prisoner in 1295, and the rebellion came to an end. The Scottish troubles were more general and lasted much longer.

Summons of
Edward to
Balliol.

Alliance of
Scotland
with France.

Scottish
war.

Surrender
of Balliol to
Edward.

Truce between
England
and
Scotland.

John Balliol had from the beginning of his reign felt himself in a false position, distracted between his duties to Edward as his suzerain and patron, and his duties to his subjects. By a curious coincidence Edward had summoned him to appear as a vassal in his court to answer the complaints of the Earl of Fife, in the very year that he himself was summoned to appear at Paris to answer the complaints of the Normans. The neglect and contempt with which Balliol was treated may have embittered his feelings towards Edward, yet in 1294 he had been the foremost of the barons in offering help against France. But it is clear that he was not a man of strong will or decided views; that he could not easily bring himself to break with Edward, and so throw himself on the support of the Scottish baronage, and that even Edward’s support did not make him strong enough to defy them. He halted between the two and lost his hold on both. In 1295 the Scottish lords determined, in imitation of the French court, to institute a body of twelve peers who were practically to control the action of Balliol, and opened negotiations for an alliance with France. Such an alliance was then a new thing, but in its consequences it was one of the most important influences of mediæval history, for it not only turned the progress of Scottish civilization and politics into a French channel, leading the Scots to imitate French institutions, as they had hitherto copied those of England, but gave to the French a most effective assistance in every quarrel with England, down to the seventeenth century. As soon as Edward learned that such a negotiation was in progress he demanded that, until peace should be made between Philip and himself, the border castles of Scotland should be placed in his hands. This was at once refused, and war broke out. In March, 1206, Edward took and sacked Berwick, and the Scots threatened Carlisle. The unfortunate Balliol seeing himself at last compelled to choose between the two evils, renounced his allegiance to Edward, and almost immediately paid the penalty of his temerity. The Earl Warenne won a great victory at Dunbar in April, and took Edinburgh; Balliol surrendered in July, and was obliged to resign the crown to his conqueror. The Scottish regalia were carried to England. The coronation-stone, which tradition identified with the stone on which the patriarch Jacob had rested his head at Bethel, was removed from Scone to Westminster. The chief nobles of Scotland were led away as hostages, and Scotland, if not subdued, was so far cowed into silence that during 1297 Edward thought it safe to leave it under the government of the Earl Warenne. Sir William Wallace, the somewhat obscure and mythical hero of Scottish liberation, remained, however, in arms against him, and he in September defeated the Earl Warenne at Cambuskenneth, and drove the English out of the country. Edward’s expedition to France, so long delayed, terminated in March 1298 in a truce of two years, which was renewed in 1299 and turned into a peace in 1303. As a pledge of the arrangement Edward married Margaret, the sister of Philip, in 1299. The Scots thus lost at first the active help of their new ally. Immediately on his return Edward resumed the attack upon them, and the victory won at Falkirk in July 1298 proved his continued superiority, while it served to stimulate the national aspirations of the Scots, and, what was even more important, taught them that, if they were still to be free, they must learn to act as a united people.

Affairs in Scotland
after the
fall of Balliol.

Wallace’s victory at Cambuskenneth had earned for him the jealousy instead of the confidence of the Scottish nobles; the defeat at Falkirk was made an excuse for declining his leadership and clinging to the shadowy royalty of the imprisoned Balliol. They chose a council of regency to govern Scotland in his name. Three regents were elected; the bishop of St. Andrew’s was one; the other two were John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, and Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick; sons of two of the lords who had competed for the crown when Balliol was chosen. Wallace was not even named. Some small successes now fell to the Scots: in 1299 they compelled the English garrison in Stirling Castle to capitulate; in 1300 they foiled the invading army by avoiding a pitched battle, and, at the close of the campaign, obtained by the mediation of the French a truce which lasted till the summer of 1301. It was just then that Boniface VIII., had laid claim to the suzerainty of Scotland, and Edward’s time was spent during the truce in obtaining from his barons a unanimous declaration against that claim. This, as we saw, was done in the parliament of Lincoln. Although the papal argument was one to which Edward could not refuse to listen, Boniface’s influence with Archbishop Winchelsey gave him more trouble than the illusory claim.

The Scottish campaign of 1301 was a repetition of that of the preceding year; Edward spent the winter in the country and built a castle at Linlithgow; and another truce was made, which lasted to the winter of 1302.

Campaign of
Edward in
Scotland.

Capture and
execution of
Wallace.

The conclusion of peace with France in 1303 left Edward free to direct all his strength against Scotland; and the Scots, under Comyn as regent, were now in better condition to resist. They had defeated the English army under Sir John Segrave in February, and were preparing for greater exertions, when the news arrived that not only the Pope but the French had deserted them. No provision in their favor was contained in the treaty of peace; and Edward was already in the country in full force. The year 1303 appeared to be a fatal year to the hopes of Scotland. Edward marched the whole length of the country as far north as the Moray Frith, and within sight of Caithness. Stirling alone of all the castles of the land was left in the possession of the native people, and after a futile attempt under the walls of Stirling to intercept the invader, they seem to have given up all idea of resistance. The so-called governors of the Scots surrendered and submitted on condition of having their lives, liberties, and estates secured; a few patriotic men were excepted from the benefit of the act, the chief of whom was Wallace, against whom as the leading spirit of liberty Edward’s indignation burned most hotly, and whom the selfish and jealous lords cared least to protect. Stirling, after a brave resistance, surrendered in July, and Scotland seemed to be at last subdued. The hero Wallace, taken by treachery in 1305, was sent to London to be tried and put to death as a traitor. The execution of this sentence is one of the greatest blots upon Edward’s character as a high-minded prince. Only the profound conviction that his own claims over Scotland were indisputably legal and that all the misery and bloodshed which had followed the renewal of the war must justly be charged upon Wallace—a conviction akin in origin to the other mistakes which we have traced in Edward’s great career—can have overcome the feeling of admiration and sympathy which he must have felt for so brave a man.

Edward’s new
constitution for
Scotland.

Return of
Robert Bruce
to Scotland.

Wallace perished in 1305. In the same year Edward drew up a new constitution for Scotland, dividing the country into sheriffdoms like the English counties and providing machinery for the representation of the Scots at the meetings of the English parliament. But the arrangement was very short-lived. Scarcely four months had elapsed when the new and more successful hero of Scottish history, Robert Bruce, declared himself. He was the son of the regent Earl of Carrick, but had hitherto clung to the English interest, in the hope that Edward would at last set him in the place of Balliol. When the new measures for the government of Scotland were drawn up, disappointment, mingled perhaps with the shame which Wallace’s death must have inspired, led him to quit the court and return to Scotland. At Dumfries, early in 1306, he slew John Comyn, the late regent, whom he could not induce to join him. He then gathered round him all whom he could prevail on to trust him; and by his energy and military ability took all his enemies by surprise. In March, he was crowned at Scone.

Reverses of
Bruce.

His success was too great to be permanent; before the close of the summer Aymer de Valence, Edward’s lieutenant, had driven him into the islands, and the king himself soon followed and put an end to all collective opposition. Still Bruce was active, and defied all attempts to crush him. Constantly put to flight and as constantly reappearing, he kept the English armies on the alert during the winter of 1306 and the spring of 1307; and in July, on his last march from Carlisle against him, king Edward died.

Death of
Edward I.

His character
and
motives.

Edward had just passed into his sixty-ninth year. He was older than any king who reigned in England before him, nor did any of his successors until Elizabeth attain the same length of years. His life had been one, in its earlier and later portions, of great exertion, both bodily and mental; and constant labor and irritation had made him during his latter years somewhat harsh and austere. His son, Edward, gave no hopes of a happy or useful reign; he had already chosen his friends in defiance of his father’s wishes, and been rebuked by the king himself for misconduct towards his ministers. Edward had outlived, too, most of his early companions in arms; he saw a generation springing up who had not passed through the training which he and they had had, and who were more luxurious and extravagant, less polished and refined than the men of his youth. An earnestly religious man, he had been unable to keep on good terms with the great scholar and divine who filled the see of Canterbury, or even with the Pope himself. The people for whom he had labored and cared, were scarcely as yet able to understand how much they had gained by his toil; how even in his foreign undertakings he was fighting the battles of England, and earning for them and for their posterity, a place which should never again be lost in the councils of Europe. But though his bodily strength was gone his mental vigor was not abated, nor his belief in the justice of his cause. When he made his solemn vow, at the knighting of Prince Edward in 1306, to avenge the murder of Comyn and punish the broken faith of the Scots, he looked on them not as a noble nation fighting for liberty, but as a perjured and rebellious company of outlaws, whom it would be a shame to him as a king and as a knight not to punish. The sin of breaking faith, the crime which his early lessons had taught him to think the greatest which could be committed by a king, the temptation to which he believed himself to have overcome, and which he even inculcated on posterity by the motto “Pactum serva” on his tomb—in his eyes justified all the cruelty and oppression which marked his treatment of the Scots. Cruel it was, whatever allowances are to be made for the exaggeration of contemporary writers, or for the savageness of contemporary warfare. Yet it was not the bitter cruelty of the tyrant directed against the liberty of a free nation.

Edward’s death took place at Burgh-on-the Sands, in Cumberland, on the 7th of July, 1307. His character we have tried to draw in tracing the history of his acts. His work remains in the history of the country and the people whom he loved.