Of the sisters of John Scot, Margaret, the eldest, was the grandmother of John Baliol, who became a competitor for the crown of Scotland. Isabella, the second sister, by her marriage with Robert le Brus, the Lord of Annandale, had a grandson—the brave and heroic Robert Bruce—the “Bruce of Bannockburn,” and the idol of the Scottish people.
After Henry the Third had assumed the Earldom of Chester the castle of Beeston was left to the charge of castellans, and the people of Cheshire had a sorry time of it; for David, the son of Prince Llewelyn, endeavoured to cast off the English yoke, and long and bloody were the struggles for freedom on the one hand, and for dominion on the other—the county being overrun and ravaged alternately by friends and enemies until nearly every rood of land was soaked with the blood of the combatants. In the attack made by the King in 1245 the whole borderland was laid waste, and the wyches or salt-pits were destroyed. Eleven years later the county was plundered and desolated by the Welsh; and in the year 1256 the young Prince Edward, to whom Henry had two years previously assigned the Principality, made his first progress into Cheshire, when his castle of Beeston was placed in the charge of Fulco de Orreby. This year was an eventful one, for before its close the Welsh again arose in insurrection, when Prince Edward was compelled to retire; but the King marched an army to his support, wasting the harvest as he advanced, and well-nigh depopulating the county, when, as the ancient chronicler, Matthew Paris, records, “the whole border was reduced into a desert, the inhabitants were cut off by the sword, the castles and houses burnt, the woods felled, and the cattle destroyed by famine.”
The day was not far distant when Beeston was to be wrested from its royal possessor, and find itself garrisoned by the soldiers of a rebellious subject The struggle between the Crown and the Barons had commenced, and was continued under varying circumstances; but the Sovereign was eventually borne down by the union of ambitious nobles. The rival armies met at Lewes, and in that hollow which the railway now traverses, on the 14th of May, 1264, the King saw his army defeated by the valorous Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester, aided by the forces of the Welsh Prince Llewelyn, and he himself, with his son Prince Edward and the King of the Romans, made prisoners. The next day a treaty, known as the mise of Lewes, was entered into; but the King and his son were detained as hostages until all matters in dispute should be settled. In this forced peace Edward was compelled, by a deed executed at Woodstock, December 24, 1264, to surrender his Earldom of Chester, and with it his castle of Beeston, to the victorious De Montfort, in whom the administration of the realm was then virtually vested.
The victory was short-lived; but it had a result that will be ever memorable, for immediately after, De Montfort summoned a great council of the nation—the first in which we distinctly recognise the Parliament of England; for he not only called together the barons, prelates, and abbots, but also summoned two knights from each county, two citizens from each city, and two burgesses from each borough. Thus was the democratic element—the foundation of the House of Commons—first introduced; and, as the Poet Laureate sings, England became
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom slowly broadens down,
From precedent to precedent.
De Montfort was now in the fulness of his power; but his elevation was dangerous for himself. His natural and acquired superiority provoked the jealousy of those around him, and brought about his own destruction. As when the light is brightest, so the shadow is ever darkest, and his success was the ultimate cause of his downfall. The Parliament which sprang out of the turbulence of civil war assembled on the 26th January, 1265; and in the month of May following Prince Edward, thanks to the fleetness of his horse, having effected his escape from Hereford, where he had been in “free custody,” placed himself at the head of a numerous army, the loyal barons being speedily in arms. Gloucester, Monmouth, and Worcester, were successively taken; De Montfort’s son was defeated at Kenilworth; and then the victorious Royalists advanced to Evesham, to give battle to the father, who was posted there. The contest, which lasted until night, was marked with unusual ferocity; no quarter was asked or given; the Avon was crimsoned with the blood of the slain; and, to add to the horrors, while the dreadful carnage was going on, the air was darkened, and a storm such as England has rarely witnessed burst over the combatants. Drayton, in his “Polyolbion,” describes the horrors of that dreadful day—
Shrill shouts, and deadly cries, each way the air do fill,