HENRY II. was succeeded on the English throne by his eldest surviving son, Richard I.; he by his younger brother John; he by his son Henry III.; he by his son the first and greatest of the Edwards. The reigns of these four kings fill the whole of the thirteenth century, with a few years of the end of the twelfth, and a few of the beginning of the fourteenth: Richard I. having reigned from 1189 to 1199; John from 1199 to 1216; Henry III. from 1216 to 1272; Edward I. from 1272 to 1307. Old Froissart observes that it was an opinion commonly entertained by Englishmen, and the truth of which had been often exemplified from the days of King Arthur, that between every two valiant kings of England there was most commonly one of less sufficiency both of wit and of prowess. How far this rule may have obtained in more antient times we shall not stop to inquire, but from the Norman Conquest it may be said to have held good, with but slight exception, for nearly four centuries and through a succession of more than a dozen sovereigns. From the Conqueror to Henry IV. inclusive, the only interruption to such a regular alternation of the good and the bad, or at least of the strong and the weak, had been the coming together of Henry II. and his son Richard I., followed by that of John and his son Henry III. Even here there was the balance of the two valiant kings against the two of less prowess and wisdom.
At any rate there can be no question about the old notion having proved true in the case of the first and second Edwards; for, as Froissart says, "the good King Edward the First was right valiant, sage, wise, and hardy, adventurous and fortunate in all feats of war, and had much ado against the Scots, and conquered them three or four times; for the Scots could never have victory nor endure against him: and after his decease his son of his first wife was crowned king and called Edward the Second, who resembled nothing to his father in wit nor in prowess, but governed and kept his realm right wildly, and ruled himself by sinister counsel of certain persons, whereby at length he had no profit nor laud; for, anon after he was crowned, Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, who had often before given much ado to the said good King Edward the First, conquered again all Scotland, and brent and wasted a great part of the realm of England, a four or five days' journey within the realm, at two times, and discomfited the king and all the barons of England at a place in Scotland called Stirling, by battle arranged the day of St. John Baptist, in the year of our Lord 1314." And many other were the disasters and disgraces of Edward of Carnarvon's unhappy twenty years' reign, besides the loss of Scotland and the defeat and rout of Bannockburn.
On the 24th of January, 1308, about six months after his accession, Edward II. was married at Boulogne to Isabella, daughter of the French king, Philip IV. (surnamed le Bel, or the Fair); five kings in all, and four queens, including the bride and bridegroom, being present at the ceremony. Edward was in his twenty-fourth year; the French princess was only in her thirteenth, but was already famous as the greatest beauty in Europe. "One of the fairest ladies of the world," Froissart calls her. In tradition and history, however, she lives as little less than a beautiful demon. Never has beauty, never has a marriage been more fatal than hers was to herself, to her husband, to both their native lands. The radiant girl who now gave Edward her hand was in the end to deprive him of his crown and of his life; a long imprisonment of eight and twenty years was to be the dower of her own widowhood; and from their union was to spring a quarrel between their two countries, which it was to take nearly a century of bloodshed and desolation to fight out:—
"Mark the year, and mark the night,
When Severn shall re-echo with affright
The shrieks of death through Berkeley's roofs that ring;
Shrieks of an agonizing king!
She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate,
From thee be born who o'er thy country hangs
The scourge of heaven!
He who was thus to prove "the scourge of heaven," to his mother's land and race was her eldest son Edward, born at Windsor Castle on Monday the 13th of December, 1312. Young Edward appears to have been known till near the end of his father's reign as Earl of Chester; he was summoned to parliament by that title in 1320, and in each of the four following years. In May, 1325, Isabella proceeded to France on the pretence of negotiating a treaty of peace between her husband and her brother Charles IV., the new king of that country; and in September following she was joined there by her son Edward, who with his father's consent set sail, splendidly attended, to be invested by the French king with the dutchy of Guienne and the earldom of Ponthieu, which his father had consented to resign to him. He did homage for the two fiefs, and received investiture; but, although he had promised his father to hasten his return, he remained abroad till the 24th of September of the next year, when he landed at Orwell in Suffolk with his mother, come, with her paramour Mortimer, to make open war upon her husband. The last instrument issued in the name of Edward II. was on the 20th of January, 1327; on the next day he is understood to have formally resigned his crown in the castle of Kenilworth to commissioners sent to him by the parliament; his son was proclaimed as Edward the Third on Saturday the 24th. His reign, however, for some reason which is not known, was reckoned as having commenced on the 25th. His father is supposed to have been murdered in his dungeon in Berkeley Castle on the 21st of September.
The new king, a boy of fourteen when he was thus raised to the throne, was of course at first king only in name, and all power and authority were in the hands of his mother and Mortimer. He was marvellously alert, however, in assuming manhood in various ways. If he was not allowed any share in the government of the country, he was thought already old enough both to rule an army and to rule a wife. Within a few months after his accession, he put himself at the head of a great force, and went forth to fight the Scots; and in the beginning of the next year he was married at York to Philippa, the second daughter of William Count of Hainault, to whom he had been contracted by his mother shortly before their return from the continent.
Edward's first campaign, however, must detain us for a little; for the incidents were both remarkable in themselves, and they have been recorded in much detail by the writer to whom we must be principally indebted throughout our sketch. Froissart, indeed, is not so much a great historian as a great historical painter—the greatest that ever painted in words. He is extremely inaccurate in dates and names, and other such prosaic matters, and even in his own proper line he may be suspected of having sometimes intermixed a little fancy with his facts; yet he may be always trusted, better than almost any other writer, for what is after all the most important truth, the characteristic spirit or inner life of what he describes; and even in this part of his chronicle, which relates to events that happened before he was born, and in which therefore he writes to a greater extent than in the latter portions of it from report, he has thrown in much of what he had actually seen along with what he had only heard, and, if the sketching be in so far a copy, the colouring at least is his own. The account of the demonstration (for it was hardly more) which Edward made on the northern border is a great deal too long to be extracted in full; but we will select some of the more striking incidents, or those in which the young English king figures the most conspicuously. As we abridge the narrative, we will retain as much as possible of our author's style and manner, adhering for the most part to the excellent old English translation by Lord Berners.