In his calling together the estates of the realm Edward the First
determined the course of English history. From the first moment of its
appearance the Parliament became the centre of English affairs. The hundred
years indeed which follow its assembly at Westminster saw its rise into a
power which checked and overawed the Crown.
Of the kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered this mighty strength
not one was likely to look with indifference on the growth of a rival
authority, and the bulk of them were men who in other times would have
roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need of the Crown. The
century and a half that followed the gathering of the estates at
Westminster was a time of almost continual war, and of the financial
pressure that springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered them.
In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought mainly an effective means
of procuring supplies for that policy of national consolidation which had
triumphed in Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But the
triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, and the strife brought
wider strifes in its train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an
acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France,
the war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of social, of
political, of religious revolution within England itself, of which that
acknowledgement was to be the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered
round England the more the royal treasury was drained, and now that
arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means of filling it lay in a
summons of the Houses. The Crown was chained to the Parliament by a tie of
absolute need. From the first moment of parliamentary existence the life
and power of the estates assembled at Westminster hung on the question of
supplies. So long as war went on no ruler could dispense with the grants
which fed the war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it was
impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the grievances of which
Parliament complained and by granting the powers which Parliament demanded.
It was in vain that king after king, conscious that war bound them to the
Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war. So far was the ambition of
our rulers from being the cause of the long struggle that, save in the one
case of Henry the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive
at peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless diplomacy strove to
draw from victory as from defeat a means of escape from the strife that was
enslaving the Crown. The royal Council, the royal favourites, were always
on the side of peace. But fortunately for English freedom peace was
impossible. The pride of the English people, the greed of France, foiled
every attempt at accommodation. The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves
in vain. King after king patched up truces which never grew into treaties,
and concluded marriages which brought fresh discord instead of peace. War
went ceaselessly on, and with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth
of the Parliament.
The death of Edward the First arrested only for a moment the advance of his
army to the north. The Earl of Pembroke led it across the border, and found
himself master of the country without a blow. Bruce's career became that of
a desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he
found shelter were bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be king of their
foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that transformed the murderer
of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of
commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships
of his career with a courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the
legends that clustered round his name we see him listening in Highland
glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass
single-handed against a crowd of savage clansmen. Sometimes the small band
which clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunting and
fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their enemies tracked them to
their lair. Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail
and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags. Little by little,
however, the dark sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed. James Douglas,
the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally
to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he
surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the
dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the
wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and
wood-pile on fire.
A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the
revival of the country went steadily on. Pembroke and the English forces
were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between
the new king and his baronage. The moral purpose which had raised his
father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy,
idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the
intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no
love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign
struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to
taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses
added to the Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of throwing off
what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he
designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly
dependent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the
"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary
government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly
superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close
of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate the
great officers of state had been curtly rejected, but the royal choice had
been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of
prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with royalty they might
be such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and opinions
of their order. The aim of the young king seems to have been to undo the
change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the policy of
the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his ministers men of
an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power, and
representatives of nothing but the policy and interests of their master.
Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a family of Guienne, had been his
friend and companion during his father's reign, at the close of which he
had been banished from the realm for his share in intrigues which divided
Edward from his son. At the accession of the new king he was at once
recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the
administration. When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France, the
daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned by his father to provide
against any further intervention of France in his difficulties with
Scotland, the new minister was left as Regent in his room. The offence
given by this rapid promotion was embittered by his personal temper. Gay,
genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the quickness and
audacity of Southern Gaul. The older ministers were dismissed, all claims
of precedence or inheritance were set aside in the distribution of offices
at the coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage to
fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed his
opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung nicknames about
the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor," Pembroke "the Jew,"
Warwick "the Black Dog." But taunt and defiance broke helplessly against
the iron mass of the baronage. After a few months of power the formal
demand of the Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in
May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished from the realm.
But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite. In Ireland he was
unfettered by the baronage, and here Gaveston found a refuge as the King's
Lieutenant while Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention of
France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the Scotch war again
brought the king and his Parliament together in the spring of 1309. It was
only by conceding the rights which his father had sought to establish of
imposing import duties on the merchants by their own assent that he
procured a subsidy. The firmness of the baronage sprang from their having
found a head. In no point had the policy of Henry the Third more utterly
broken down than in his attempt to weaken the power of the nobles by
filling the great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house. He had made
Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to the nation
in the Barons' war. In loading his second son, Edmund Crouchback, with
honours and estates he raised a family to greatness which overawed the
Crown. Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had
received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby
on the extinction of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,
was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships
the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the weight of these great baronies was added
his royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.
His mother was dowager queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's
side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English
queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far
from the succession to the throne. Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a
nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the
king into a really national policy. As it was his weight proved
irresistible. When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston
the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament
which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm
should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one "Ordainers" with
Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.
Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. A triumph in Scotland
would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of
his father's military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an
army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern
realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the "Ordinances" which the
twenty-one laid before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston was
banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine
bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out
of the realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared
to be illegal. Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the
barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.
Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the
king's servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice. The great
officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the
baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in
Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent
himself from the realm. As the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked
on Parliament rather as a political organization of the nobles than as a
gathering of the three Estates of the realm. The lower clergy pass
unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere taxpayers whose part was still
confined to the presentation of petitions of grievances and the grant of
money. But even in this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real
representation of the country. The barons no longer depended for their
force on the rise of some active leader, or gathered in exceptional
assemblies to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of war. Their action
was made regular and legal. Even if the Commons took little part in forming
decisions, their force when formed hung on the assent of the knights and
burgesses to them; and the grant which alone could purchase from the Crown
the concessions which the Baronage demanded lay absolutely within the
control of the Third Estate. It was this which made the king's struggles so
fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, and then withdrawing to the North
recalled Gaveston and annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated the
favourite, and the barons, gathering in arms, besieged him in Scarborough.
His surrender in May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of Warwick had
sworn that the favourite should feel his teeth; and Gaveston flung himself
in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity "from his
gentle lord." In defiance of the terms of his capitulation he was beheaded
on Blacklow Hill.
The king's burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats of vengeance; a
feigned submission of the conquerors completed the royal humiliation, and
the barons knelt before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon
which seemed the deathblow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless
to conquer the baronage he could still by evading the observance of the
Ordinances throw the whole realm into confusion. The two years that follow
Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A terrible
succession of famines intensified the suffering which sprang from the utter
absence of all rule as dissension raged between the barons and the king. At
last a common peril drew both parties together. The Scots had profited by
the English troubles, and Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of
its Earl, who had joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of
success in his favour. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch
fortresses fell one by one into King Robert's hands. The clergy met in
council and owned him as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who
still held to the English cause were coerced into submission, and Bruce
found himself strong enough to invest Stirling, the last and the most
important of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward. Stirling was
in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused England out of its civil
strife to an effort for the recovery of its prey. At the close of 1313
Edward recognized the Ordinances, and a liberal grant from the Parliament
enabled him to take the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof on the
ground that the king had not sought the assent of Parliament to the war,
but thirty thousand men followed Edward to the North, and a host of wild
marauders were summoned from Ireland and Wales. The army which Bruce
gathered to oppose this inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was
stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising ground flanked by a little
brook, the Bannockburn, which gave its name to the engagement. The battle
took place on the twenty-fourth of June 1314. Again two systems of warfare
were brought face to face as they had been brought at Falkirk, for Robert
like Wallace drew up his forces in hollow squares or circles of spearmen.
The English were dispirited at the very outset by the failure of an attempt
to relieve Stirling and by the issue of a single combat between Bruce and
Henry de Bohun, a knight who bore down upon him as he was riding peacefully
along the front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small hackney and held
only a light battle-axe in his hand, but warding off his opponent's spear
he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was
shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the battle the English archers
were thrown forward to rake the Scottish squares, but they were without
support and were easily dispersed by a handful of horse whom Bruce held in
reserve for the purpose. The body of men-at-arms next flung themselves on
the Scottish front, but their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space
along which the line was forced to move, and the steady resistance of the
squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder. "The horses that were
stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled right rudely."
In the moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, whom they
mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, spread panic through the English
host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its thousands of brilliant horsemen were
soon floundering in pits which guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or
riding in wild haste for the border. Few however were fortunate enough to
reach it. Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in
escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell into
the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the footmen were ruthlessly
cut down by the country folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich
plunder of the English camp left its traces on the treasure-rolls and the
vestment-rolls of castle and abbey throughout the Lowlands.
Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland: but terrible as the blow was
England could not humble herself to relinquish her claim on the Scottish
crown. Edward was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal firmness Bruce
refused all negotiation while the royal title was withheld from him and
steadily pushed on the recovery of his southern dominions. His progress was
unhindered. Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster at the head of
the Ordainers became supreme. But it was still impossible to trust the king
or to act with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties the Scots
plundered as they would. Their ravages in the North brought shame on
England such as it had never known. At last Bruce's capture of Berwick in
the spring of 1318 forced the king to give way. The Ordinances were
formally accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers
belonging to the barons' party added to the great officers of state. Had a
statesman been at the head of the baronage the weakness of Edward might
have now been turned to good purpose. But the character of the Earl of
Lancaster seems to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his position.
Distrustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable of governing, he stood
sullenly aloof from the royal Council and the royal armies, and Edward was
able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick during the campaign of 1319
to the Earl's charge. His influence over the country was sensibly weakened;
and in this weakness the new advisers on whom the king was leaning saw a
hope of destroying his power. These were a younger and elder Hugh Le
Despenser, son and grandson of the Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl
Simon at Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may have been, they were
able men, and their policy was of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance
of Gaveston. It lay, if we may gather it from the faint indications which
remain, in a frank recognition of the power of the three Estates as opposed
to the separate action of the baronage. The rise of the younger Hugh, on
whom the king bestowed the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its
coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, was rapid enough to
excite general jealousy; and in 1321 Lancaster found little difficulty in
extorting by force of arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of
popular sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to the royal cause
by an insult offered to the queen, against whom Lady Badlesmere closed the
doors of Ledes Castle. The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging
this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the opening of 1322 he
found himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster
convoked the baronage to force him again into exile, the weakness of their
party was shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered with the
Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north on the advance of the
royal army. At Boroughbridge his forces were arrested and dispersed, and
Thomas himself, brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried and
condemned to death as a traitor. "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven," cried
Lancaster, as, mounted on a grey pony without a bridle, he was hurried to
execution, "for my earthly king has forsaken me." His death was followed by
that of a number of his adherents and by the captivity of others; while a
Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against the Despensers and
repealed the Ordinances.
It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence
of the royalists, that we owe the famous provision which reveals the policy
of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning "the estate of
our Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and the
people shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments by our
Lord the King and by the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and
commonalty of the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed." It
would seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much of the
sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all
legislative action by the baronage alone. The same policy was seen in a
reissue in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most beneficial
provisions of the Ordinances which had been formally repealed. But the
arrogance of the Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure of a
fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The barbarous
forays in which the borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting
Northumberland woke a general indignation; and a grant from the Parliament
at York enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North. But Bruce
as of old declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the
invaders into a ruinous retreat. The failure forced England in the spring
of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which
Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. We see in this act of the
Despensers the first of a series of such attempts by which minister after
minister strove to free the Crown from the bondage under which the
war-pressure laid it to the growing power of Parliament; but it ended, as
these after attempts ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who planned
it. The pride of the country had been roused by the struggle, and the
humiliation of such a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.
It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this disastrous
reign.
In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father, had been hampered
not only by internal divisions but by the harassing intervention of France.
The rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a
revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of Charles
the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called
Edward over sea. But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, and a
fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the Agénois brought about
the seizure of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of the
French. The quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward's queen,
Isabella, a sister of the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her
home and bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries. Isabella
hated the Despensers; she was alienated from her husband; but hatred and
alienation were as yet jealously concealed. At the close of the year the
terms of peace seemed to be arranged; and though declining to cross the
sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal homage
by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and
despatching him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King
Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agénois being reserved for
legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.
Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to
return to his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher
barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and
his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With
the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the
Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian
bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail
in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed
when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at
Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he
implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the
Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible
refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he
fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl
whom they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at
once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at
Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that
purpose at Westminster in January 1327.
The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the
earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had
proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf,
and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king
by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.
The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch
with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his
coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the
approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had
ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. A
deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent
of the discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward "clad in a plain
black gown" bowed quietly to his fate. Sir William Trussel at once
addressed him in words which better than any other mark the nature of the
step which the Parliament had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the
earls, barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient power, do
render and give back to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and
fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and discharge them
thereof in the best manner that law and custom will give. And I now make
protestation in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and
allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you
hereafter as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity." A
significant act followed these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the
steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used only
at a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal
service were discharged. The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate
which awaited the miserable king. In the following September he was
murdered in Berkeley Castle.
