Edward’s new
constitution for
Scotland.
Return of
Robert Bruce
to Scotland.
Wallace perished in 1305. In the same year Edward drew up a new constitution for Scotland, dividing the country into sheriffdoms like the English counties and providing machinery for the representation of the Scots at the meetings of the English parliament. But the arrangement was very short-lived. Scarcely four months had elapsed when the new and more successful hero of Scottish history, Robert Bruce, declared himself. He was the son of the regent Earl of Carrick, but had hitherto clung to the English interest, in the hope that Edward would at last set him in the place of Balliol. When the new measures for the government of Scotland were drawn up, disappointment, mingled perhaps with the shame which Wallace’s death must have inspired, led him to quit the court and return to Scotland. At Dumfries, early in 1306, he slew John Comyn, the late regent, whom he could not induce to join him. He then gathered round him all whom he could prevail on to trust him; and by his energy and military ability took all his enemies by surprise. In March, he was crowned at Scone.
Reverses of
Bruce.
His success was too great to be permanent; before the close of the summer Aymer de Valence, Edward’s lieutenant, had driven him into the islands, and the king himself soon followed and put an end to all collective opposition. Still Bruce was active, and defied all attempts to crush him. Constantly put to flight and as constantly reappearing, he kept the English armies on the alert during the winter of 1306 and the spring of 1307; and in July, on his last march from Carlisle against him, king Edward died.
Death of
Edward I.
His character
and
motives.
Edward had just passed into his sixty-ninth year. He was older than any king who reigned in England before him, nor did any of his successors until Elizabeth attain the same length of years. His life had been one, in its earlier and later portions, of great exertion, both bodily and mental; and constant labor and irritation had made him during his latter years somewhat harsh and austere. His son, Edward, gave no hopes of a happy or useful reign; he had already chosen his friends in defiance of his father’s wishes, and been rebuked by the king himself for misconduct towards his ministers. Edward had outlived, too, most of his early companions in arms; he saw a generation springing up who had not passed through the training which he and they had had, and who were more luxurious and extravagant, less polished and refined than the men of his youth. An earnestly religious man, he had been unable to keep on good terms with the great scholar and divine who filled the see of Canterbury, or even with the Pope himself. The people for whom he had labored and cared, were scarcely as yet able to understand how much they had gained by his toil; how even in his foreign undertakings he was fighting the battles of England, and earning for them and for their posterity, a place which should never again be lost in the councils of Europe. But though his bodily strength was gone his mental vigor was not abated, nor his belief in the justice of his cause. When he made his solemn vow, at the knighting of Prince Edward in 1306, to avenge the murder of Comyn and punish the broken faith of the Scots, he looked on them not as a noble nation fighting for liberty, but as a perjured and rebellious company of outlaws, whom it would be a shame to him as a king and as a knight not to punish. The sin of breaking faith, the crime which his early lessons had taught him to think the greatest which could be committed by a king, the temptation to which he believed himself to have overcome, and which he even inculcated on posterity by the motto “Pactum serva” on his tomb—in his eyes justified all the cruelty and oppression which marked his treatment of the Scots. Cruel it was, whatever allowances are to be made for the exaggeration of contemporary writers, or for the savageness of contemporary warfare. Yet it was not the bitter cruelty of the tyrant directed against the liberty of a free nation.
Edward’s death took place at Burgh-on-the Sands, in Cumberland, on the 7th of July, 1307. His character we have tried to draw in tracing the history of his acts. His work remains in the history of the country and the people whom he loved.