In the first month of 1306, however, the weary Scottish war broke out again, with the appearance of a new insurgent chief. Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick, grandson of the claimant to the throne of 1292, had hitherto pursued a shifty Robert Bruce. policy, wavering between submission and opposition to the English invader. He had been in arms more than once, but had finally adhered to the pacification of 1304, and was now entirely trusted by the king. But he was secretly plotting rebellion, disgusted (as it would seem) that Edward had not transferred the crown of Scotland to the line of Bruce when the house of Baliol was found wanting. Though he found himself certain of a considerable amount of support, he yet could see that there would be no general rising in his favour, for many of the magnates refused to help in making king a baron whom they regarded as no more important than one of themselves. But the insurrection was precipitated by an unpremeditated outrage. Bruce was conferring at Dumfries with John Comyn, the late regent, whom he was endeavouring to tempt into his plots, on the 10th of January 1306. An angry altercation followed, for Comyn would have nothing to do with the scheme, and Bruce and his followers finally slew him before the altar of a church into which he had fled. After this crime, which combined the disgrace of sacrilege with that of murder under tryst, Bruce was forced to take arms at once, though his preparations were incomplete. He raised his banner, and was hastily crowned at Scone on the 25th of March; by that time the rising had burst out in many shires of Scotland, but it was neither unanimous nor complete. Edward by no means despaired of crushing it, and had raised a large army, when he was smitten with an illness which prevented him from crossing the border. But his troops, under Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, pressed north, and surprised and routed Bruce at Methven near Perth. The pretender’s brother Nigel and many of his chief supporters were taken prisoners, and he himself escaped with a handful of followers and took refuge in the Western islands. Edward ordered young Nigel Bruce and many other captives to be executed; for he was provoked to great wrath by the rebellion of a magnate who had given him every assurance of loyalty. He intended to follow de Valence to Scotland, and to complete the suppression of the rising in person. But this proved beyond his strength; he struggled as far as the border in July, but could not shake off his disease, and was forced to linger, a broken invalid, in the neighbourhood of Carlisle for many months. Meanwhile his lieutenants failed to follow up with energy the victory gained at Methven, and in the next spring Bruce reappeared in the Lowlands, gathered new levies, and inflicted a defeat on de Valence at Loudoun Hill. Roused to anger King Edward rose from his bed, mounted his horse, and started for Scotland. But after struggling on for a few miles he fell by the way, and died at Burgh-on-Sands, just inside the English border, on the 7th of July 1307.
Despite the chequered fortunes of his later years the reign of Edward had been a time of progress and prosperity for England. He had given his realm good and strong governance; according to his lights he had striven to keep faith Character of Edward I.’s rule. and to observe his coronation oath. He had on more than one occasion quarrelled with his subjects, but matters had never been pushed to an open rupture. The king knew how to yield, and even opponents like Winchelsea and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford respected him too much to drive him to an extremity. The nation, however much it might murmur, would never have been willing to rebel against a sovereign whose only fault was that he occasionally pressed his prerogative too far. Edward’s rule was seldom or never oppressive, the seizure of the merchants’ wool in 1297 was the only one of his acts which caused really fierce and widespread indignation. For his other arbitrary proceedings he had some show of legal justification in every case. It would have been absurd to declare that his rule was tyrannical or his policy disastrous. The realm was on the whole contented and even flourishing. Population was steadily increasing, and with it commerce; the intellectual activity which had marked the reign of Henry III. was still alive; architecture, religious and military, was in its prime. He was himself a great builder, and many of the perfected castles of that concentric style, which later ages have called the “Edwardian type,” were of his own planning. In ecclesiastical architecture his reign represents the early flower of the “Decorated” order, perhaps the most beautiful of all the developments of English art. In many respects the reign may be regarded as the culmination and crowning point of the middle ages. It certainly gave a promise of greatness and steady progress which the 14th century was far from justifying.
With the great king’s death a sudden change for the worse was at once visible. The individual character of the reigning king was still the main factor in political history, and Edward II. was in every respect a contrast to his Edward II. father. He was incorrigibly frivolous, idle and apathetic; his father had given him much stern schooling, but this seems only to have inspired him with a deeply rooted dislike for official work of any kind. He has been well described as “the first king since the Conquest who was not a man of business.” Even Stephen and Henry III. had been active and bustling princes, though their actions were misguided and inconsequent. But Edward II. hated all kingly duties; he detested war, but he detested even more the routine work of administration. He was most at his ease in low company, his favourite diversion was gambling, his best trait a love for farming and the mechanical arts of the smith and the gardener.
His first acts on coming to the throne caused patriotic Englishmen to despair. His father, on his death-bed, had made him swear to conduct the Scottish expedition to its end. But he marched no further than Dumfries, and then Piers Gaveston. turned back, on the vain pretext that he must conduct his parent’s funeral in person. Leaving Bruce to gather fresh strength and to commence the tedious process of reducing the numerous English garrisons in Scotland, he betook himself to London, and was not seen on the border again for more than three years. He then dismissed all his father’s old ministers, and replaced them by creatures of his own, for the most part persons of complete incompetence. But his most offensive act was to promote to the position of chief councillor of the crown, and disperser of the royal favours, a clever but vain and ostentatious Gascon knight, one Piers Gaveston, who had been the companion of his boyhood, and had been banished by Edward I. for encouraging him in his follies and frivolity. Piers was given the royal title of earl of Cornwall, and married to the king’s niece; when Edward went over to France to do homage for Gascony, he even made his friend regent during his absence, in preference to any of his kinsmen. It was his regular habit to refer those who came to him on matters of state to “his good brother Piers,” and to refuse to discuss them in person.
It was of course impossible that the nation or the baronage should accept such a preposterous régime, and Edward was soon involved in a lively struggle with his subjects. Of the leaders of opposition in his father’s reign both Baronial opposition. Hereford and Norfolk were now dead. But Archbishop Winchelsea had returned from exile in a belligerent mood, and the place of Norfolk and Hereford was taken by an ambitious prince of the royal house, Thomas, earl of Lancaster, the son of the younger brother of Edward I. Thomas was selfish and incompetent, but violent and self-assertive, and for some years was able to pose successfully as a patriot simply because he set himself to oppose every act of the unpopular king. He had several powerful baronial allies—the earls of Warwick, Pembroke and Warenne, with Humphrey Bohun of Hereford, who had succeeded to his father’s politics, though he had married the king’s own sister.
The annals of the early years of Edward II. are mainly filled by contemporary chroniclers with details of the miserable strife between the king and his barons on the question of Gaveston’s unconstitutional position. But the really Progress of Bruce in Scotland. important feature of the time was the gradual reconquest of Scotland by Robert Bruce, during the continuance of the domestic strife in England. Edward I. had laid such a firm grip on the northern realm that it required many years to undo his work. A very large proportion of the Scottish nobility regarded Bruce as a usurper who had opened his career with murder and sacrilege, and either openly opposed him or denied him help. His resources were small, and it was only by constant effort, often chequered by failures, that he gradually fought down his local adversaries, and reduced the English garrisons one by one. Dumbarton and Linlithgow were only mastered in 1312. Perth did not finally fall into his hands till 1313; Edinburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling were still holding out in 1314. During all this time the English king only once went north of the Border—in 1311—and then with a very small army, for Lancaster and his friends had refused to join his banner. Yet even under such conditions Bruce had to retire to the mountains, and to allow the invaders to range unopposed through Lothian and Fife, and even beyond the Tay. With ordinary capacity and perseverance Edward II. might have mastered his enemy; indeed the Comyns and Umfravilles and other loyalist barons of Scotland would have carried out the business for him, if only he had given them adequate support. But he spent what small energy he possessed in a wretched strife of chicanery and broken promises with Thomas of Lancaster and his party, dismissing and recalling Gaveston according to the exigencies of the moment, while he let the Scottish war shift for itself. It must be confessed that the conduct of his adversaries was almost as contemptible and unpatriotic. They refused to aid in the war, as if it was the king’s private affair and not that of the nation. And repeatedly, when they had Edward at their mercy and might have dictated what terms they pleased to him, they failed to rise to the situation. This was especially the case in 1311, when the king had completely submitted in face of their armed demonstrations. Instead of introducing any general scheme of reform they contented themselves with The “Lords Ordainers.” putting him under the tutelage of twenty-one “lords ordainers,” a baronial committee like that which had been appointed by the Provisions of Oxford, fifty years back. Edward was not to levy an army, appoint an official, raise a tax, or quit the realm without their leave. He had also to swear an obedience to a long string of constitutional limitations of his power, and to promise to remove many practical grievances of administration. But there were two great faults in the proceedings of Thomas of Lancaster and his friends. The first was that they ignored the rights of the commons—save indeed that they got their ordinances confirmed by parliament—and put all power into the hands of a council which represented nothing but the baronial interest. The second, and more fatal, was that this council of “ordainers,” when installed in office, showed energy in nothing save in persecuting the friends of Edward and Gaveston; it neglected the general welfare of the realm, and in particular made no effort whatever to end the Scottish war. It was clearly their duty either to make peace with Robert Bruce, or to exert themselves to crush him; but they would do neither.
Gaveston’s unhappy career came to an end in 1312. After he had been twice exiled, and had been twice recalled by the king, he was besieged in Scarborough and captured by the earl of Pembroke. He was being conducted to London to be tried in parliament, when his two greatest enemies, Thomas of Lancaster and Guy, earl of Warwick, took him out of the hands of his escort, and beheaded him by the wayside without any legal authority or justification. The unhappy king was compelled to promise to forget and forgive this offence, and was then restored to a certain amount of freedom and power; the barons believed that when freed from the influence of Gaveston he would prove a less unsatisfactory sovereign. The experiment did not turn out happily. Bruce having at last made an almost complete end of the English garrisons within his realm, laid siege to Stirling, the last and strongest of them all, in the spring of 1313. Compelled by the pressure of public opinion to attempt its relief, Edward crossed the border in June 1314, with an army of 20,000 foot and 4000 men-at-arms. He found Bruce prepared Battle of Bannockburn. to dispute his advance on the hillside of Bannockburn, 2 m. in front of Stirling, in a strong position with a stream in front and his flanks covered by rows of pitfalls, dug to discomfit the English cavalry. The Scots, as at Falkirk, were ranged in solid clumps of pikemen above the burn, with only a small reserve of horse. The English king, forgetting his father’s experiences, endeavoured to ride down the enemy by headlong frontal charges of his men-at-arms, and made practically no attempt to use his archery to advantage. After several attacks had been beaten off with heavy loss, the English host recoiled in disorder and broke up—the king, who had kept in the rear all day, was one of the first to move off. The flower of his knights had fallen, including his nephew, the earl of Gloucester, who was the only one of the great magnates of the realm who had shown loyalty to him during the last six years. The Scots also made many prisoners; the disaster was complete, and the wrecks of the beaten army dispersed before reaching the border. Bruce followed them up, and spent the autumn in ravaging Northumberland and Cumberland.
Thomas of Lancaster, who had refused to join in the late campaign, took advantage of its results to place the king once more in complete tutelage. His household was dismissed, he was bidden to live as best he could on an Thomas, earl of Lancaster. allowance of £10 a day, and all his ministers and officials were changed. For more than three years Lancaster practically reigned in his cousin’s name; it was soon found that the realm got no profit thereby, for Earl Thomas, though neither so apathetic nor so frivolous as Edward, was not a whit more competent to conduct either war or domestic administration. The Scots swept everything before them, ravaging the north at their will, and capturing Berwick. They even made a great expedition to Ireland, where Bruce’s brother Edward was proclaimed king by the rebellious Celtic septs, and rode across the whole island, exterminating the Anglo-Irish population in many districts (1315-1317). But the colonists rallied, and cut to pieces a great Irish army at Athenry (1316), while in the next year Roger Mortimer, a hard-handed baron of the Welsh march, crossed with reinforcements and drove back Edward Bruce into the north. Resuming his advance after a space, the rebel king was routed and slain at Dundalk (Oct. 14, 1318) and the insurrection died out. But it had had the permanent result of weakening the king’s grip on the north and west of Ireland, where the Englishry had been almost exterminated. From this time forth until the reign of Henry VIII. the limit of the country in full subjection to the crown was always shrinking, and the Irish chiefs of the inland continued to pay less and less attention to orders issued from Dublin or London.
Though the Scottish expedition to Ireland had been beaten off, this was not in the least to be ascribed to the credit of Lancaster, who was showing the grossest incompetence as an administrator. He could neither protect the Border, nor even prevent private civil wars from breaking out, not only on the Welsh marches (where they had always been common), but even in the heart of England. The most extraordinary symptom of the time was a civic revolt at Bristol (1316), where the townsfolk expelled the royal judges, and actually stood a siege before they would submit. Such revolts of great towns were normal in Germany or Italy, but almost unknown on this side of the Channel. All this unrest might well be ascribed to Lancaster’s want of ability, but he had also to bear—with less justice—the discontent caused by two years of famine and pestilence. In August 1318 he was removed from power by a league formed by Pembroke, Warenne, Arundel and others of the lords ordainers, who put a new council in power, and showed themselves somewhat less hostile to the king than Earl Thomas had been. Edward was allowed to raise an army for the siege of Berwick, and was lying before its walls, when the Scots, turning his flank, made a fierce foray into Yorkshire, and routed the shire-levy under Archbishop Melton at the battle of Myton. This so disheartened the king and the council that controlled him that they concluded a two years truce with Robert of Scotland, thus for the first time acknowledging him as a regular enemy and no mere rebel (1319).