Hereford and Norfolk abandoned active in favour of passive hostility. They refused to serve as constable and marshal, and Edward appointed barons of less dignity and greater loyalty to act in their place. While all England was busy with the equipment of troops and the provision of supplies, they sullenly held aloof. At last, when all was ready, Edward issued an appeal to his subjects, protesting the purity of his motives, and emphasising the inexorable necessity under which he was forced to play the tyrant in the interests of the whole realm. By the beginning of August such barons as were willing to go to Flanders began to assemble in arms at London. The young Edward of Carnarvon was appointed regent during his father's absence, and among the councillors who were to act in his name was the Archbishop of Canterbury. At last the king set off to embark at Winchelsea. While there, the earls presented to him a belated list of grievances. He refused to deal with their demand for the confirmation of the charters. "My full council," he declared to the envoys of the earls, "is not with me, and without it I cannot reply to your requests. Tell those who have sent you that, if they will come with me to Flanders, they will please me greatly. If they will not come, I trust they will do no harm to me, or at any rate to my kingdom." On August 24 he took ship for Flanders, and a few days later he and his troops safely landed at Sluys, whence they made their way to Ghent. Nearly a thousand men-at-arms and a great force of infantry, largely Welsh and Irish, swelled the expedition to considerable proportions. After all his troubles, Edward found that the loyalty of his subjects enabled him to carry out the ideal which he had formulated two years before. King and nation were to meet common dangers by action undertaken in common.
Everything else was ruthlessly sacrificed in order that the king might take an army to Flanders. The Gascon expedition was quietly dropped. But the gravest difficulty arose not from Gascony but Scotland. Edward's choice of agents to carry out his Scottish policy had been singularly unhappy. Warenne, the governor, was a dull and lethargic nobleman more than sixty-six years of age. He complained of the bad climate of Scotland, and passed most of his time on his Yorkshire estates. In his absence Cressingham, the treasurer, and Ormesby, the justiciar, became the real representatives of the English power. Cressingham was a pompous ecclesiastic, who appropriated to his own uses the money set aside for the fortification of Berwick, and was odious to the Scots for his rapacity and incompetence. Ormesby was a pedantic lawyer, rigid in carrying out the king's orders but stiff and unsympathetic in dealing with the Scots. Under such rulers Scotland was neither subdued nor conciliated. No real effort was made to track to their hiding-places in the hills the numerous outlaws, who had abandoned their estates rather than take an oath of fealty to Edward. When the English governors took action, they were cruel and indiscriminating; and often too were lax and careless. Matters soon became serious. William Wallace of Elderslie slew an English official in Clydesdale, and threw in his lot with the outlaws. He was joined by Sir William Douglas, the former defender of Berwick. By May, 1297, Scotland was in full revolt. In the north, Andrew of Moray headed a rising in Strathspey. In central Scotland the justiciar barely escaped capture, while holding his court at Scone. The south-west, the home both of Wallace and Douglas, proved the most dangerous district. There the barons, imitating Bohun and Bigod, based their opposition to Edward on his claim upon their compulsory service in the French wars. Before long the son of the lord of Annandale, Robert Bruce, now called Earl of Carrick, Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, and other magnates were in arms, and in close association with Douglas and Wallace.
Edward made light of this rebellion. Resolved to go to Flanders at all costs, he contented himself with calling upon the levies of the shires north of the Trent to protect his interests in Scotland. Early in July, Henry Percy, Warenne's grandson, rode through south-western Scotland, at the head of the Cumberland musters, and on July 7, the local insurgent leaders, with the exception of Wallace, made their submission to him at Irvine. Moreover, Edward released the two Comyns from their veiled imprisonment, and sent them back to Scotland to help in suppressing the insurrection. Henry Percy boasted that the Scots south of the Forth had been reduced to subjection. But a few days later Wallace was found to be strongly established in Ettrick forest and was threatening Roxburgh. At last Edward stirred up Warenne to return to his government. The king took the precaution of leaving some of his best warriors in England in case their services were needed against the recalcitrant barons or the Scots. Then, as has been said, on August 24 he crossed over to Flanders.
The constable and marshal were still in arms, and Winchelsea, who, in spite of his reconciliation with Edward, was in close communication with them, declined to take an active part on the council of regency. Two days before Edward took ship, Hereford and Norfolk appeared in arms at the exchequer at Westminster, and forbade the officials to continue the collection of supplies, until the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest had been confirmed. They strove to win the support of the Londoners, who had long had a grievance against Edward for depriving them of their right to elect their own mayor, and for subjecting the city to the arbitrary rule of a warden nominated by the crown. They forbade their followers to commit acts of violence, but they made it clear that there could be no peace until the charters were confirmed.
In August, Warenne grappled with the Scottish rising, but his own incompetence, and the half-heartedness of the Scottish magnates, on whom he relied, made his task very difficult. Wallace retreated beyond the Forth, and Warenne reached Stirling on September 10 in pursuit of him. He learnt that Wallace was holding the wooded heights, immediately to the north of Stirling bridge on the left bank of the Forth, not far from the abbey of Cambuskenneth. The Steward of Scotland, who, after the collapse of the revolt in the south-west, served under Warenne, offered his mediation. But no good result came from his action, and the English suspected treachery. Wallace took up a bold attitude, scorning either compromise or retreat. He had only a small following of cavalry, but his infantry was numerous and enthusiastic. The English resolved to attack him on September 11. The Forth at Stirling was crossed by a long wooden bridge, so narrow that only two horsemen could pass abreast. It was madness to send an army over the river by such a means in the face of a watchful enemy. But not only was the English plan of battle foolish it was also carried out weakly. Warenne overslept himself, and his subordinates wasted the early morning in useless discussions and altercations. When at last he woke up, he rejected the advice of a Scottish knight to send part of his cavalry over the river by a ford which thirty horsemen could traverse abreast, and ordered all his troops to cross by the bridge.
Wallace, seeing that the enemy had delivered themselves into his hands, remained in the woods until a fair proportion of the English men-at-arms had made their way over the stream. He then suddenly swooped down upon the bridge, cutting off the retreat of those who had traversed it, and blocking all possibility of reinforcement. After a short fight the English to the north of the Forth were cut down almost to a man. The English on the Stirling side, seeing the fate of their comrades, fled in terror, and their Scots allies went over to their country men. Among the slain was the greedy Cressingham, whose skin the Scots tanned into leather. Warenne did not draw rein until he reached Berwick, and in one day all Scotland was lost. The castles of Roxburgh and Berwick alone upheld the English flag. Wallace and Moray governed all Scotland as "generals of the army of King John". Within a few weeks of their victory, they raided the three northern counties of England.
Wallace had freed Scotland, but his wonderful success taught the contending factions in England the plain duty of union against the common enemy. A new parliament of the three estates was summoned for September 30. The opposition leaders came armed, and declared that there could be no supply of men or money until their demand for the confirmation of the charters was granted. No longer content with simple confirmation, they drew up, in the form of a statute, a petition requiring that no tallage or aid should henceforth be taken without the assent of the estates. This was the so-called statutum de tallagio non concedendo which seventeenth-century parliaments and judges erroneously accepted as a statute. The helpless regency substantially accepted their demands, and, on October 12, issued a confirmation of the charters, to which fresh clauses were added, providing, with less generality than in the baronial request, that no male-tolts, or such manner of aids as had recently been extorted, should be imposed in the future without the common consent of all the realm, but making no reference to tallage.[1] Liberal supplies were then voted by all the three estates, and Winchelsea, who all through these proceedings acted as the brain of the baronage, exerted himself to explain away the last of the clerical difficulties raised by the Clericis laicos.
[1] The Latin, Articuli inserti in magna carta, given by Hemingburgh, ii., 152, is quoted as a statute in the Petition of Right of 1628, under the title De tallagio non concedendo. The view of its relation to the French Confirmatio cartavum is that taken by M. Bémont, Chartes des libertés anglaises, especially pp. xliii., xliv. and 87. It is based on Bartholomew Cotton's nearly contemporary statement (Hist. Angl., p. 337).
On November 5 the king ratified, at Ghent, the action of his son's advisers. Thus the constitutional struggle was ended by the complete triumph of the baronial opposition. And the victory was the more signal, because it was gained not over a weak king, careless of his rights, but over the strongest of the Plantagenets, greedy to retain every scrap of authority. It is with good reason that the Confirmation of the Charters of 1297 is reckoned as one of the great turning points in the history of our constitution. Its provisions sum up the whole national advance which had been made since Gualo and William the marshal first identified the English monarchy with the principles wrested from John at Runnymede. In the years that immediately followed, it might well seem that the act of 1297, like the submission of John, was only a temporary expedient of a dexterous statecraft which consented with the lips but not with the heart. But in later times, when the details of the struggle were forgotten and the noise of the battle over, the event stood out in its full significance. Edward had been willing to take the people into partnership with him when he thought that they would be passive partners, anxious to do his pleasure. He was taught that the leaders of the people were henceforth to have their share with the crown in determining national policy. Common dangers were still to be met by measures deliberated in common, but the initiative was no longer exclusively reserved to the monarch. The sordid pedantry of the baronial leaders and the high-souled determination of the king compel our sympathy for Edward rather than his enemies. But all that made English history what it is, was involved in the issue, and the future of English freedom was assured when the obstinacy of the constable and marshal prevailed over the resolution of the great king.