Difficulties arose almost from the first. Not only had Balliol to contend against the implacable hostility of the Scottish patriots; the disinherited split up into rival factions after their triumph, and their divisions played the game of the partisans of the Bruces. The Earls of Athol and Buchan quarrelled with Balliol. Buchan, besieged by the partisans of David Bruce in a remote castle, was forced to surrender and quit Scotland for good. Athol was distinguished by the violence and suddenness of his tergiversations. After deserting Balliol for the patriots, he once more declared for the two Edwards, and persuaded many of the Scottish magnates to submit themselves to them. So long as the English king remained in Scotland, Athol was safe. On Edward's retirement to his kingdom in November, 1335, the nationalist leaders took the earl prisoner and put him to death. The war dragged on from year to year, with startling vicissitudes of fortune, but at no time was Balliol really established on the Scottish throne, and at no time did Edward III. really govern all the ceded districts.
Scottish business detained the English king and court mainly in the north. Edward was in Scotland for most of the winter of 1334-5, keeping his Christmas court at Roxburgh. In the summer of 1335 he led an army into Scotland and penetrated as far as Perth. Again in 1336, he marched from Perth along the east coast, as far as Elgin and Inverness. The Scots refused to give him battle, and their tactics of evasion and guerilla warfare soon exhausted his resources and demoralised his armies. This was Edward's last personal intervention in the business. He had long been irritated by the persistent interference of the French king in Scottish affairs, and his anger was not lessened by his hard plight forcing him, on more than one occasion, to grant short truces to the Scottish insurgents at Philip's intervention. His relations with France were becoming so strained that he preferred to spend 1337 in the south and entrust Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, with the conduct of the fruitless campaign of that year. Early in 1338, Edward made his way once more to Berwick, but his intention of invading Scotland was suddenly abandoned on the news of a threatened French expedition to England recalling him to the south. This was the decisive moment of the long struggle. Henceforth the English king could only devote a small share of his resources to an undertaking which he had not been able to compass when his whole energies were absorbed in it. The patriots, who had always dominated the open country, now attacked the castles and fortified towns, which were the bulwarks of the Edwardian power. Within three years all the more important of these fell into their hands. In 1339 Edward Balliol's capital of Perth was beset by Robert, the Steward of Scotland, who had recently undertaken the regency for his uncle David. On the approach of danger, Balliol was ordered to England, and Sir Thomas Ughtred, an English knight and one of the disinherited of 1332, was entrusted with the command. By August he had been forced to surrender, and Stirling soon afterwards opened its gates to the gallant and energetic steward. In 1341 Edinburgh castle was captured by a clever stratagem, and a few weeks later David and Joan returned from France. The king, then seventeen years old, henceforth undertook the personal administration of his kingdom. Once more there was a King of Scots whom the Scottish people themselves desired. The first military enterprise of Edward's reign ended in complete failure.
During the years of Edward Balliol's attempt on Scotland, it was the obvious interest of the English king to maintain such relations with France as to prevent the tightening of the traditional bond between the French and the Scottish courts. There were plenty of outstanding points of difference between England and France, but neither country was anxious for war, and the result of this mutual forbearance enabled Edward III. to deal with the Scots at his leisure. A survey of the relations of the two realms during the first ten years of Edward III.'s reign will show how, despite the reluctance of either party to force matters to a crisis, the Kings of France and England gradually drifted into the hostility which, from 1337 onwards, paralysed the progress of the English cause in Scotland.
At the moment of the fall of Edward II., England and France were still nominally engaged in the war which had followed the second seizure of Guienne by Charles IV. The difficulties experienced by Isabella and Mortimer in establishing their power made them as willing to give way to the French as to the Scots. Accordingly, on March 31, 1327, a treaty of peace was signed at Paris. By this treaty Edward only gained the restoration of certain of his Gascon vassals to the estates of which they had been deprived through their loyalty to the English connexion. He pledged himself to pay a large war indemnity, and accepted a partial restitution of his Gascon lands. Like so many of the treaties since 1259, it was a truce rather than a peace. Many details still remained for settlement, and it was pretty clear that the French, having the whip hand, would drive Gascony towards the goal of gradual absorption which had been so clearly marked out by Philip the Fair.
Charles IV. restored to Edward such parts of Gascony as he chose to surrender. He retained in his hands Agen and the Agenais, and Bazas and the Bazadais, on the ground that Charles of Valois had won them by right of conquest in 1324. This policy reduced Edward's duchy to two portions of territory, very unequal in size and separated from each other by the lands conquered by the French king's uncle. The larger section of the English king's lands extended along the coast from the mouth of the Charente to the mouth of the Bidassoa. It included Saintes with Saintonge south of the Charente, Bordeaux and the Bordelais, Dax and the diocese of Dax, and Bayonne and its territory. But in no place did the boundaries go very far inland. Along the Dordogne, Libourne and Saint-Émilion were the easternmost English towns. Up the Garonne, the French were in possession of Langon, while, in the valley of the Adour, Saint-Sever, perched on its upland rock, was the landward outpost of the diminished Gascon duchy. In the east of the Agenais the two châtellenies of Penne and Puymirol formed a little enclave of ducal territory which extended from the Lot to the Garonne. But this second fragment of the ancient duchy was of no military and little commercial value, being commanded on all sides by the possessions of the French king. Moreover, the fiefs dependent on the Gascon duchy had fallen away with the attenuation of the duke's domain. In particular the viscounty of Béarn, now held by the Count of Foix, repudiated all allegiance to its English overlord. Even a thoroughly Gascon seigneur, such as the lord of Albret, was wavering in his fidelity to his duke. It was no longer safe for Gascons to risk the hostility of the king of the French.
Within a year of the treaty of Paris, the death of Charles IV. further complicated Anglo-French relations. Like his brothers, Louis X. and Philip V., Charles the Fair left no male issue; but the pregnancy of his queen prevented the settlement of the succession being completed immediately after his decease. The barons of France, however, had no serious doubts as to their policy. The inadmissibility of a female ruler had already been determined at the accession of both Philip V. and Charles IV., and it was clear that the nearest male heir was Philip, Count of Valois, who had recently succeeded to the great appanage left vacant by the death in 1325 of his father, Charles of Valois, the inveterate enemy of the English. As the next representative of the male line, the French at once recognised Philip of Valois as regent. When his cousin's widow gave birth to a daughter, the regent was proclaimed as King Philip VI. without either delay or hesitation. Thus the house of Valois occupied the throne of France in the place of the direct Capetian line in which son had succeeded father since the days of Hugh Capet.
Even Isabella and Mortimer protested against the succession of Philip of Valois. Admitted that the exclusion of women from the monarchy was already established by two precedents, could it not be plausibly argued that a woman, incapable herself of reigning, might form "the bridge and plank"[1] (as a contemporary put it) by which her sons might step into the rights of their ancestors? Strange as such a conception seems to our ideas, it was not unfamiliar to the jurists of that day. It was in this fashion that the Capetian house claimed its boasted descent and continuity from the race of Charlemagne. Such a principle was actually the law in some parts of France, and it was a matter of every-day occurrence in the Parisis to transmit male fiefs to the sons of heiresses, themselves incapable of succession. Edward, as the son of Charles IV.'s sister, was nearer of kin to his uncle than Philip, the son of Charles's uncle. Surely a man's nephew had a better right to his succession than his first cousin could ever claim? From the purely juridical point of view, the claim put forward by Isabella on her son's behalf was not only plausible but strong.
[1] Viollet, Hist. des Institutions politiques et administratives de la France, ii., 74, from a MS. source. See also Viollet, Comment les Femmes ont été exclues en France de la Succession à la Couronne, in Mém. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, xxxiv., pt. ii. (1893).
Happily for France, the magnates of the realm dealt with the succession question as statesmen and not as lawyers. A later age imagined that the French barons brought forward a text of the law of the Salian Pranks, as a complete answer to Edward's claim from the juridical point of view. But the famous Salic law was a figment, forged by the next generation of lawyers who were eager to give a complete refutation of the elaborate legal pleadings of the partisans of the English claim. No authentic Salic law dealt with the question of the succession to the throne,[1] and the bold step of transferring a doctrine of private inheritance to the domain of public law was one of the characteristic feats of the medieval jurist, anxious to heap up at any risk a mass of arguments that might overwhelm his antagonists' case. The barons of 1328 rose superior to legal subtleties. To them the question at issue was the preservation of the national identity of their country. The vital thing for them was to secure the throne of France, both at the moment and at future times, for a Frenchman. Any admission, however guarded, of the right of women to transmit claims to their sons opened out a vista of the foreign offspring of French princesses, married abroad, ruling France as strangers, and it might be as enemies. They chose Philip of Valois because he was a Frenchman born and bred, and because he had no interests or possessions outside the French realm. They could not endure the idea of being ruled by the English king. He was not only a stranger, but the hereditary enemy. The Capetian monarchy must at all costs be kept French.
[1] Viollet, op. cit., pp. 55-57; cf. Désprez, Les Préliminaires de la Giurre de Cent Ans, p. 32.