The heavy hand of Edward fell upon earls as well as upon bishops. Even in the early days of his reign when none, save Gilbert of Gloucester, dared uplift the standard of opposition, Edward had not spared the greatest barons in his efforts to eliminate the idea of tenure from English political life. A subtle extension of his earlier policy began to emphasise the dependence of the landed dignitaries on his pleasure. The extinction of several important baronial houses made this the easier, and Edward took care to retain escheats in his own hands, or at least to entrust them only to persons of approved confidence. The old leaders of opposition were dead or powerless. Ralph of Monthermer, the simple north-country knight who had won the hand of Joan of Acre, ruled over the Gloutester-Glamorgan inheritance on behalf of his wife and Edward's little grandson, Gilbert of Clare. The Earl of Hereford died in 1299, and in 1302 his son and successor, another Humphrey Bohun, was bribed by a marriage with the king's daughter, Elizabeth, the widowed Countess of Holland, to surrender his lands to the crown and receive them back, like the Earl of Gloucester in 1290, entailed on the issue of himself and his consort. In the same year the childless earl marshal, Roger Bigod, conscious of his inability to continue any longer his struggle against royal assumptions and at variance with his brother and heir, made a similar surrender of his estates, which was the more humiliating since the estate in tail, with which he was reinvested, was bound to terminate with his life. In 1306, on the marshal's death, the Bigod inheritance lapsed to the crown. Much earlier than that, in 1293, Edward had extorted on her deathbed from the great heiress, Isabella of Fors, Countess of Albemarle and Devon, the bequest of the Isle of Wight and the adjacent castle of Christchurch. In 1300, on the death of the king's childless cousin, Earl Edmund, the wealthy earldom of Cornwall escheated to the crown. To Edward's contemporaries the acquisition of the earldoms of Norfolk and Cornwall seemed worthy to be put alongside the conquests of Wales and Scotland.[1]
[1] See John of London, Commendatio lamentabilis in Chron. of Edw. I. and Edw. II., ii., 8-9. See for the earldoms my Earldoms under Edward I. in ,Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new ser., viii. (1894), 129-155.
Even more important as adding to Edward's resources than these direct additions to the royal domains, was the increasing dependence of the remaining earls upon the crown. His sons-in-law of Gloucester and Hereford were entirely under his sway. In 1304 the aged Earl Warenne had died, and in 1306 his grandson and successor was bound closely to the royal policy by his marriage with Joan of Bar, Edward's grand-daughter. In the same way Edward's young nephew, Thomas of Lancaster, ruled over the three earldoms of Lancaster, Derby, and Leicester, and by his marriage to the daughter and heiress of Henry Lacy, was destined to add to his immense estates the additional earldoms of Lincoln and Salisbury. Edward of Carnarvon was learning the art of government in Wales, Cheshire, and Ponthieu. The policy of concentrating the higher baronial dignities in the royal family was no novelty, but Edward carried it out more systematically and successfully than any of his predecessors. He reaped the immediate advantages of his dexterity in the extinction of baronial opposition and in the zeal of the baronial levies against the Scots during the concluding years of his reign. Yet the later history of the Middle Ages bears witness to the grievous dangers to the wielder of the royal power which lurked beneath a system so attractive in appearance.
The truce with the Scots ended in November, 1302, and Edward despatched a strong force to the north under John Segrave. On February 24, 1303, Segrave, attacked unexpectedly by the enemy at Roslin, near Edinburgh, suffered a severe defeat. The conclusion of the treaty of Paris gave Edward the opportunity for avenging the disaster. He summoned his levies to assemble at Roxburgh for Whitsuntide and, a fortnight before that time, appeared in person in Tweeddale. After seven weary years of waiting and failure, he was at last in a position to wear down the obstinate Scots by the same systematic and deliberate policy that had won for him the principality of Wales. The invasion of Scotland was henceforth to continue as long as the Scottish resistance. Adequate resources were procured to enable the royal armies to hold the field, and a politic negotiation with the foreign merchants resulted in a ,carta mercatoria by which additional customs were imposed upon English exports. These imposts, known as the "new and small customs," as opposed to the "old and great customs" established in 1275, were not sanctioned by parliamentary grant: but for the moment they provoked no opposition. Thus Edward was equipped both with men and money for his undertaking. At last the true conquest of Scotland began.
No attempt was made in the Lothians to stop Edward's advance, but the Scots, under the regent, John Comyn of Badenoch, made a vigorous effort to hold the line of the Forth against him. Their plan seemed to promise well, for Stirling castle was still in Scottish hands. Edward crossed the river by a ford, and all organised efforts to oppose him at once ceased. Prudently leaving Stirling to itself for the present, he hurried to Perth. After spending most of June and July at Perth, he led his army northwards, nearly following the line of his advance in 1296, through Perth, Brechin, and Aberdeen, to Banff and Elgin. The most remote point reached was Kinloss, a few miles west of Elgin, in which neighbourhood he spent much of September. Then he slowly retraced his steps and took up his winter quarters at Dunfermline. In all this long progress, the only energetic resistance which Edward encountered was at Brechin. Flushed with his triumph, he ordered Stirling to be besieged, and from April, 1304, directed the operations himself. The garrison held out with the utmost gallantry, but at last a breach was effected in the walls, and on July 24 the defenders laid down their arms. Long before the Scots people despaired of withstanding the invader, the nobles grew cold in the defence of their country. In February, 1304, the regent and many of the earls made their submission. It was more than suspected that this result was brought about by the threat of Edward to divide their lands among his English followers. But on Comyn and his friends showing a desire to yield, the king readily promised them their lives and estates. Believing that his task was over, Edward returned to England in August after an absence of nearly fifteen months. He crossed the Humber early in December, kept his Christmas court at Lincoln, and reached London late in February. As a sign of the completion of the conquest, he ordered that the law courts, which since 1297 had been established at York, should resume their sessions in London.
A few heroes still upheld the independence of Scotland. Foremost among them was Sir William Wallace, who, since his mission to France in 1298, had disappeared from history. The submission of the barons to Edward gave him another chance. He took a strenuous part in the struggle of 1303-4, and he was specially exempted from the easy pardons with which Edward purchased the submission of the greater nobles. It was the daring and skill of Wallace that prolonged the Scots' struggle until the spring of 1305. But he was then once more an outlaw and a fugitive, only formidable by his hold over the people, and by the possibility that the smallest spark of resistance might at any time be blown into a flame. At last he was captured through the zeal, or treachery, of a Scot in Edward's service. In August, Wallace was despatched to London to stand a public trial for treason, sedition, sacrilege, and murder. He denied that he had ever become Edward's subject, but did not escape conviction. With his execution, the last stage of Edward's triumph in Scotland was accomplished. Though the full measure of Wallace's fame belongs to a later age rather than his own, yet it was a sure instinct that made the Scottish people celebrate him as the popular hero of their struggle for independence. His courage, persistency, and daring stands in marked contrast to the self-seeking opportunism of the great nobles, who afterwards appropriated the results of his endeavours. Yet we can hardly blame Edward for making an example of him, when he fell into his power. Even if Wallace had successfully evaded the oath of fealty to Edward, it is scarcely reasonable to expect that the king would consider this technical plea as availing against his doctrine that all Scots were necessarily his subjects since the submission of 1296. It was Wallace's glory that he fought his fight and paid the penalty of it.
A full parliament of the three estates sat with the king at Westminster from February 28 to March 21, 1305. The proceedings of this assembly are known with a fulness exceeding that of the record of any of the other parliaments of the reign.[1] Among the matters enumerated in the writs as specially demanding attention was the "establishment of our realm of Scotland". Three Scottish magnates, Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, and John Mowbray were particularly called upon to give their advice as to how Scotland was to be represented in a later parliament, in which the plans for its future government were to be drawn up. They informed the king that two bishops, two abbots, two barons, and two representatives of the commons, one from the south of the Forth and the other from the north thereof, would be sufficient for this purpose. This further "parliament" assembled on September 15, three weeks after the execution of Wallace. It consisted simply of twenty councillors of Edward, and the ten Scottish delegates. From the joint deliberations of these thirty sprang the "ordinance made by the lord king for the establishment of the land of Scotland".
[1] See Memoranda, de parliamento (1305), ed. F.W. Maitland (Rolls Series).
Following the general lines of the settlement of the principality of Wales, the ordinance combined Edward's direct lordship over Scotland with a legal and administrative system separate from that of England. John of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, the king's sister's son, was made Edward's lieutenant and warden of Scotland, and under him were a chancellor, a chamberlain, and a controller. Scotland was to be split up for judicial purposes into districts corresponding to its racial and political divisions. Four pairs of justices were appointed for each of these regions, two for Lothian, two for Galloway and the south-west, two for the lands "between Forth and the mountains," that is the Lowland districts of the north-east, and two for the lands "beyond the mountains," that is for the Highlands and islands. Sheriffs "natives either of England or Scotland" were nominated for each of the shires, and it was significant that the great majority of them were Scots and that the hereditary sheriffdoms of the older system were still continued. The "custom of the Scots and the Welsh," that is the Celtic laws of the Highlanders and the Strathclyde Welsh, was "henceforth prohibited and disused". John of Brittany was to "assemble the good people of Scotland in a convenient place" where "the laws of King David and the amendments by other kings" were to be rehearsed, and such of these laws as are "plainly against God and reason" were to be reformed, all doubtful matters being referred to the judgment of Edward. The king's lieutenant was bidden to "remove such persons as might disturb the peace" to the south of the Trent, but their deportation was to be in "courteous fashion" and after taking the advice of the "good people of Scotland". Care for the preservation of the peace, and for administrative reform, is seen in the oath imposed upon officials and in the pains taken to secure the custody of the castles. The Scots parliament was to be retained, and recent precedents also suggested the probability of Scottish representation in the parliament of England. If Scotland were to be ruled by Edward at all, it would have been difficult to devise a wiser scheme for its administration. Yet the Scottish love of independence was not to be bartered away for better government. Within six months the new constitution was overthrown, and the chief part in its destruction was taken by the Scots by whose advice Edward had drawn it up.
Edward at last felt himself in a position to take his long deferred revenge on Winchelsea. The primate still kept aloof from the councils of the king, and his spirit was as irreconcilable as ever. He gained his last victory in the Lenten parliament of 1305, when he prevented the promulgation of a statute, passed on the petition of the laity, but agreed to by all the estates, which forbade taxes on ecclesiastical property involving the exportation of money out of the country.[1] At this moment the long vacancy of the papacy, which followed the pontificate of Benedict XI., Boniface VIII.'s short-lived successor, had not yet come to an end. Soon, however, Winchelsea's zeal on behalf of papal taxation was to be ill requited. On June 5, 1305, Bertrand de Goth, a Gascon nobleman who since 1299 had been archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected to the papacy as Clement V., through the management of Philip the Fair. A dependant of the King of France and a subject of the King of England, the new pope showed a complaisance towards kings which stood in strong contrast to the ultramontane austerity of his predecessors. He refused to visit Italy, received the papal crown at Lyons, and spent the first years of his pontificate in Poitou and Gascony. Ultimately establishing himself at Avignon, he began that seventy years of Babylonish captivity of the apostolic see which greatly degraded the papacy. Though Clement's main concern was to fulfil the exacting conditions which, as it was believed, Philip had imposed upon him, he was almost as subservient to Edward as to the King of France. His deference to his natural lord enabled Edward to renounce the most irksome of the obligations which he had incurred to his subjects, to punish Winchelsea, and to restrain Roman authority by laws which anticipate the legislation of the age of Edward III.