The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

THE CONFIRMATION OF THE CHARTERS.

Punishment of the judges—Banishment of the Jews—Scottish succession—The French quarrel—The ecclesiastical quarrel—The constitutional crisis—The confirmation of the charters—Parliament of Lincoln—Its sequel—War of Scottish independence—Edward’s death.

Evils consequent
on the
absence of
the king.

Edward completed his work in Wales at the end of the year 1284. The next year was spent in legislation, and in the summer of 1286 he went to France. Edmund of Cornwall acted as regent in his absence, and he stayed away for three years. For two out of the three the country was at peace; in 1288, however, the absence of the king began to tell, and in 1289 the need of money for home and foreign purposes became pressing. The news that the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford were engaged in all but open warfare on the Welsh marshes, and that the collected parliament of 1289 had refused to sanction a new tax before the king came home, brought Edward back in the August of that year. He found that the public service had suffered sadly from the removal of the guiding hand. Complaints were pouring in against the judges of the Courts of Westminster; violence and corruption were charged upon the chief administrators of the law; and the king’s first work was to try the accused, to remove and punish the guilty. The two chief justices and several other high officers were, after careful investigation, deprived of their places. The next thing was if possible to gain a stronger hold over the uneasy earls. Gilbert of Gloucester, whose assistance had enabled Edward to overthrow Earl Simon at Evesham, and who had been the first to take the oath of fealty at his accession, had been throughout his career marked by singular erratic waywardness. He was not yet an old man, and a project had been on foot for some time, by which he was to marry the king’s daughter Johanna, who was born at Acre during the crusade. This was now carried into effect, and thus one of the most dangerous competitors for influence in the country was bound more closely than ever to the king.

Banishment
of the Jews.

That done Edward looked round for means of raising money. And this was found in a device which has ever since weighed heavily on his reputation. The Jews were banished from England, and in gratitude for the relief the nation undertook to make a grant of money. The measure was no doubt generally acceptable; it was backed by the clergy, by the strong influence of Eleanor of Provence, the king’s mother, and by his own bitter prejudice. Harsh, however, as this measure was, it was not a mere act of religious persecution. The Jews had, unfortunately for the nation and for themselves, devoted themselves to usurious banking when usury was forbidden to Christians. They had thus come to wear the appearance of oppressive money-lenders. They lived, too, under a system of law devised by the kings to keep them ever at the royal mercy; their accumulated stores of gold lay conveniently under the king’s hand, and Henry III., whenever he wanted money, had been able to obtain it by extortion from the Jews. But, last and worst, they had allowed themselves to be used by the rich as agents in the oppression of the poor; they had made over the mortgages on small estates to the neighboring great land-owners, and in other ways had played into the hands of the nobles, whose protection was necessary to their own safety. They were hated by the poor. Great men, like Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, had longed to see them banished; the accusation of money-clipping and forgery was rife against them, and two hundred and eighty had been hanged for these offences since the beginning of the reign. Edward was too bigoted or perhaps too high-minded to wish to retain them as useful servants when the nation demanded their expulsion. They were banished, and the price paid for the concession was a tax of a fifteenth granted by clergy and laity in the autumn of 1290.

Claims of
Edward upon
Scotland.

Just at this time the death of the young Queen of Scots opened to Edward the prospect of asserting his supremacy over the whole island, a prospect which within a few years tempted him to claim the actual sovereignty of Scotland. The design of a marriage between the young queen and Edward’s eldest surviving son, Edward of Carnarvon, which had been already concluded, shows that the king contemplated the union of the two kingdoms in the next generation; her death disappointed that hope, but there is no reason to suppose that Edward, when he undertook to settle the Scottish succession, had in his eye any project of conquest.

The Scottish
kingdom.

The case of Scotland was very different from that of Wales. The Scottish people were a rising not a declining nation. The Scottish kingdom was a collection of states held by different historical titles, and inhabited by races of different origin, not a nationality struggling for existence. Southern Scotland was far more akin to Northern England than to Northern Scotland; inhabited by people of English blood and English institutions, and feudally held, like great part of England, by Norman barons. The royal race was a Celtic race, but Celtic Scotland gave to the kings little more than a nominal recognition; the strength of the royal house was in the Lowlands. Ever since the Norman Conquest the relations between Scotland and England had been close. Of the several provinces over which the Scottish king now ruled, Lothian was a part of the ancient Northumbria, which had been granted, according to English accounts, by either Edgar the Peaceable or by Canute to a Scottish king. South-western Scotland, or Scottish Cumberland, had been given by Edmund I. to Malcolm. The whole Scottish race had acknowledged as their father and lord Edward, the West Saxon king, the son of Alfred; and William the Conqueror, and William Rufus, and after him, had extorted a recognition of the superiority or overlordship of the King of the English. These were shadowy claims, certainly; but since the middle of the twelfth century there had been several instances in which either the King of Scots or his son had received English estates and dignities and done homage for them. The earldoms of Northumberland and Huntingdon had been thus held by Henry, son of David I., and the latter by his son William, the Lion. Homage had on several occasions been rendered without any very distinct understanding whether it was for the English earldoms, for the Lowland provinces, or for the whole Scottish kingdom, that the overlordship of the English crown was acknowledged. Henry II. had, indeed, after the capture of king William, compelled both him and his barons to recognize his superiority in the strictest terms, but Richard had liberated them from that special bondage, and the mutual reservations or compromises, which both preceded and followed that short period of subjection, left the claims as vague as ever. Except during the same period the relations of the two kingdoms had been, since the death of Stephen, fairly friendly. The Scottish kings were married to kinswomen of the English kings; their political progress followed at some short distance behind, but in the footsteps of the progress begun under Henry II., and for nearly a century there had been only short and languid intervals of war. Now and then the Scots had pillaged or intrigued, but the two crowns were generally at peace. Edward’s design for the Scottish marriage would have turned the peace into union; but the time was not come for that.