Edmund was received at Paris with apparent kindness, and the queen and the queen dowager expressed great desire for the restoration of peace. But they represented to him that Philip was chiefly enraged at some insults which he had received from the Gascons; and that, if Edward would give him temporary possession of that province, so as to vindicate his honour in the sight of that people, he would engage to restore it immediately, and would accept a very easy satisfaction for all other injuries. This sort of formal and temporary possession, given to the superior lord, was not an uncommon thing in those days. We have already seen that Edward in the Scottish arbitration, had the kingdom and its castles put into his hands, on his engaging to restore them to the rightful owner; and he did so restore them. In the present case he does not seem to have supposed it possible that two crowned queens could be lending themselves to a fraud. “Therefore,” says Hume, “he sent his brother orders to sign and execute the treaty with the two queens. Philip solemnly promised to execute his part of it, and the king’s citation to appear in the court of France was accordingly recalled. But the French monarch was no sooner put into possession of Gascony than the citation was renewed; Edward was condemned for non‐appearance; and the province by a formal sentence was declared to be forfeited and annexed to the crown.”[60]
To a prince like Edward, this must have been a double mortification. He was himself the very soul of honour, and to find his equals and associates capable of fraud and deceit must have been grievous to him. He also prided himself on maintaining to the full all the rights and honours of the crown which he wore; and hence to be robbed of a noble province by mere chicanery and falsehood, would be doubly vexatious. But to this loss he never for a moment submitted, nor did he cease his efforts till he finally regained that territory for the British crown.
In the summer of 1294, he prepared a large armament for the recovery of the province; and appealed to the clergy at Winchester for a liberal aid, which was readily granted him. A parliament held in November gave him a tenth, which was voted and paid with more than ordinary readiness; and Edward was preparing to lead his forces in person, when a new peril called for his presence in another direction. The Welsh had felt aggrieved a year or two before, by the levy of a fifteenth, granted by parliament, and collected by English officers in a manner to which they were, as yet, unaccustomed. Hearing now that the king was about to sail for Gascony, they deemed it a favourable juncture for an attempt to throw off the English yoke. It was always their wont to act by a sudden outbreak. Accordingly, taking advantage of a fair at Carnarvon, a rendezvous was appointed, and the leaders succeeded in surprising the castle and in putting all the English to the sword. A small force, under the earls of Lancaster and Lincoln, advancing into Denbighshire, was defeated by the Welsh; and on the whole, Edward felt that it would be unwise to leave England with such a sore unhealed.
He therefore proceeded, in November, into Wales, having placed the expedition for Gascony under the orders of the earl of Richmond, who had with him de Vere, St. John, and other officers of distinction. The king kept his Christmas at Conway; but shortly afterwards, attempting to penetrate further in spite of the season, he was placed for a short time in a position of difficulty and peril. He had led the way, with the vanguard, over a mountain stream, which, rising suddenly, became impassable, and thus divided the few men who were with the king from the rest of the army, while the baggage and provisions were still in the rear. Thus separated from the main body of his forces, the king was blockaded by the Welsh, and found his little party nearly destitute of provisions. There was not bread enough for their wants, and water mixed with honey was the only drink that remained to them. A single keg of wine was discovered, which the soldiers naturally proposed to reserve for the king’s use. But Edward rejected the thought, exclaiming, “No, in a case of need all things should be in common; and we will all fare alike till God shall give us release. I, who have led you into this difficulty, will know no preference.” Happily the waters soon began to subside; the rest of the army found means to join the king; and the Welsh were quickly put to flight.[61]
We shall see the king, a few years later, in his sixtieth year, sleeping, the night before the battle of Falkirk, on the open heath, with his shield for his pillow, and his horse for his companion. And doubtless it was this soldierly frankness and hardihood, joined with his knightly fame, and his never‐failing success, which gave him such remarkable command over his soldiers, and made a campaign under his leadership so attractive and popular a duty.
This Welsh insurrection did not long detain the king. The leaders of the outbreak, Morgan and Madoc, were soon reduced to difficulties, and threw themselves upon Edward’s mercy. Madoc was confined for a time in the Tower of London; of Morgan we only hear that “he received mercy.”[62]
Meanwhile, the hostilities between the Normans and the people of the Cinque Ports raged with augmented fury. The English commanded the Channel, landed where they pleased in Normandy, and ravaged the towns and villages near the coast. They took and burnt Cherbourg. Philip equipped a fleet of three hundred ships, and this large force succeeded, for a time, in doing some injury to the Kentish coast. But the French had no great cause for triumph. The “Chronicle of London,” now in the British Museum, briefly records, under date of the year 1297, that “the Normauns came to Dovarre, and brent a great part of the towne; but they were sclayn every moder’s son; ther eschaped none.” One French ship, with three hundred soldiers on board, grounded hear Hythe, and fell into the hands of the Kentish men, ship and crew.
One part of Philip’s plan failed through the detection of one of his agents. One Thomas de Turberville, a knight of some note in Glamorganshire, being taken prisoner by the French, offered his services to Philip, holding out large expectations of aid he could render to the invaders. He represented that, if released, he could obtain from Edward the command of one of the Cinque Ports; and could thus give the French fleet and forces a secure landing‐place. He was accordingly permitted to return, and began to use his best endeavours to carry his plans into effect. But probably his anxiety to be employed on the Kentish coast awakened suspicion; his correspondence was intercepted, and letters, explanatory of his purposes, were seized. He was brought to trial; the evidence was conclusive, and he received sentence of death. And here we see what the real punishment for high treason at that time was. His guilt was more plain and more heinous than that of the Jesuit priests, who, in Elizabeth’s reign, conspired against her life and government, in obedience to their spiritual head at Rome. They were, not once or twice, but in considerable numbers, hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. But this Turberville, who had conspired, not against his sovereign only, but against his own people, whom he was willing to sell to a foreign invader, received the milder sentence of being drawn to the gallows on a hide or hurdle, there to be hanged and left hanging in chains. In a word, the punishment actually inflicted in Edward’s time for the crime of high treason was merely that which, in our own time, has been inflicted for piracy. And yet many writers have represented again and again that the terrible punishment for high treason, which was inflicted for several centuries in England, and which remained on our statute‐book until the days of Mackintosh and Romily, was devised and appropriated to that crime in Edward’s reign.
Philip’s wrath, however, grew with his defeats, and he began to form confederacies with other powers, such as Norway and Scotland, for the invasion and humiliation of England. And this brings us to the commencement of the fearful story of the wars between England and Scotland, which, in the year 1295 began to be contemplated, and in 1296 actually broke out. These wars lasted, in the days of Edward I. and II., for more than twenty years. They again and again broke out in subsequent reigns, until the union of the two kingdoms finally terminated them. The immediate question before us is,—With whom did they at this time originate?