The Life and Reign of Edward I.

by Robert Benton Seeley

To nine of these propositions the king gives his immediate assent. To two he gives qualified and doubtful answers. To one only—that in which the barons say, that they cannot insist on the taxation of the clergy against the will of the pope—the king gives his distinct disapproval. We shall give these three articles in the Appendix,[112] together with the answers of the king.

These twelve articles, then, with the king’s assent to nine of them, seem to have ended the disafforesting question, so far as this parliament was concerned. As a general result, we may say, that the king had piloted the vessel of the state through a difficult and perilous passage. The confederacy was defeated. Winchelsey’s purpose of weakening the crown by involving it in war with the barons, was frustrated. Edward succeeded in keeping his parliament together. There were no “withdrawals in anger,” as there had been on previous occasions. The barons, including even Hereford and Norfolk, passed on to the next question, the letter of pope Boniface; and they gave that letter a fitting reply. They then voted the king a fifteenth, and agreed to join him, in the summer, for a march into Scotland.

On the other hand Winchelsey had succeeded in doing some mischief. Though it is impossible, at this distance of time, to learn the details, it seems tolerably clear that the king was obliged to yield, in the matter of forest boundaries, more than he felt to be right and just. This clearly appears in the occurrences of the following years. And, whatever wrong of this kind may have been done, the primate strove to render irrevocable, by rising, at the close of the assembly, and pronouncing the greater excommunication against all who should depart from the agreement then made. He also adhered to his former course, of refusing to give the king any “aid” from the funds of the church.

And so ended this great parliament—an assembly of the most remarkable character, whether we look at its patriotic and spirited reply to the pretensions of the pope, or at its large and full exercise of all the proper duties of a representative assembly. With respect to the disafforesting controversy, it seems to have disturbed, rather than settled, that question. It established those new and reduced boundaries which had for some time previous been demanded; but, effecting this in a sudden and abrupt manner, it left occasion for many subsequent alterations.

The next step we perceive to have been taken, is one, which, like many other of Edward’s acts, has been grossly misrepresented by some prejudiced historians. It is said, in some of their narratives, that he “persecuted the two earls;” and it is always implied, that his animosity was excited by their zeal for “the charters.”

Now, if we look closely at the king’s steps, we shall find him perpetually associating with these two noblemen on friendly terms, long after they had opposed him in the matter of the charters. But the question he had now to deal with, was one of high treason. An offence had been committed, for the like of which many great men, in various periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, died on the scaffold. Yet Edward dealt with it in the most noble and generous way.

“There was opened to king Edward,” says Pakington in his “Chronicle,” “a conspiracy, wrought by the archbishop of Canterbury, and divers earls and barons, against him, at such time as he was in Flanders. And when the earl marshal was examined of this, and was not well able to clear himself, he made the king his heir, and put him in possession of all his lands. And the king gave him his lands again during his life; and also land of £1000 value in addition.”

Several of the chroniclers state, that the earl had no children, and was on bad terms with his brother, who was an ecclesiastic. But whether this were so or not, it is clear that the charge brought against him was one which involved him in great peril. All the writers whom we have already quoted, and Walsingham also, plainly tell us that it had been contemplated to employ force against the king. Now any man called before the king’s council on such a charge as this, would perceive, that not his estates merely, but his life also, was in danger. Hence his wisest and safest course, especially with such a monarch as Edward, was an immediate and frank submission.

And such a course, with the king, always led to a restoration of good feeling. In the days of the Tudors or the Stuarts, a nobleman who had been guilty of “conspiring against the king,” would soon have found his way to the scaffold. With Edward, the usage was very different. A face‐to‐face encounter—a frank confession and surrender on the earl’s part, was soon followed by forgiveness on the part of the king, and so the whole quarrel ended.

The case of the earl of Hereford differed in one important respect from that of Norfolk. The conspiracy spoken of by Pakington was said to have been commenced in the year 1297, when the king was in Flanders; although its last and most strenuous effort was made in 1301. But the earl of Hereford, who had been Norfolk’s supporter in 1297, had died in the autumn of the following year, and the present earl was a young man, his son. He had probably merely followed in his father’s steps, without any deep concernment in the plot. The king called him to an account, as well as Norfolk; but the young man found a different way of making his peace. He asked for the hand of one of the king’s daughters; and, having, like Norfolk, pleaded guilty, he surrendered, like him, his estates to the king, receiving them back again with the hand of the young princess. And so ended this transaction, which some historians have described as a “persecution” of the two earls.