Edward, who was just commencing an autumn campaign in Flanders which was
to lead to no results, sent home orders to summon a parliament, which
should raise men and money for the Scottish war. It was called, and made
a liberal grant for that purpose, but Archbishop Winchelsea and the
earls of Norfolk and Hereford took advantage of their master's needs,
and of his absence, to assert themselves. Taking up the position of
defenders of the constitution, they induced the parliament to couple its
grants of money with the condition that the king should not only confirm
Magna Carta--as had been so often done before--but give a specific
promise that no "maltolts," or other taxes not legally granted him,
should be raised for the future. Edward received the petition at Ghent,
and made the required oath. The document to which he gave his assent,
the _Confirmatio Cartarum_ (less accurately called the statute _De
Tallagio non concedendo_) marked a distinct advance beyond the theories
of Magna Carta; for the latter had been drawn up before England
possessed a parliament, and had placed the control of taxation in the
hands of the old feudal council of tenants-in-chief, while the
_Confirmatio_ gave it to the assembly, far more national and
representative, which had now superseded the Great Council as the
mouthpiece of the whole people of the realm.
The Scottish revolt had become so formidable that Edward was compelled
to abandon his unfruitful Flemish campaign; he patched up an
unsatisfactory truce with the king of France, which left four-fifths of
his lost Gascon lands in the power of the enemy, and returned to England
in the spring of 1298. In July he invaded Scotland at the head of a
formidable army of 15,000 men, and on the 22nd of that month brought
Wallace to action on the moors above Falkirk. The steady Scottish
infantry held their own for some time against the charge of the English
men-at-arms. But when Edward brought forward his archers to aid his
cavalry, as William I. had done at Hastings, Wallace's columns broke up,
and a dreadful slaughter followed. The impression made on the Scots was
so great that for some years they refused to engage in another pitched
battle. But the immediate consequences were not all that might have been
expected. Edward was able to occupy many towns and castles, but the
broken bands of the insurgents lurked in the hills and forests, and the
countryside as a whole remained unsubdued. Wallace went to France to
seek aid from King Philip, and his place was taken by John Comyn, lord
of Badenoch, a nephew of Baliol, who was a more acceptable leader to the
Scottish nobles than the vanquished knight of Falkirk. Edward was
detained in the south for a year, partly by negotiations with France,
partly by a renewed quarrel with his parliament, and during his absence
Comyn recovered Stirling and most of the other places which had received
English garrisons. It was not till 1300 that the king was able to resume
the invasion of Scotland, with an army raised by grants of money that he
had only bought by humiliating concessions to the will of his
parliament, formulated in the _Articuli super cartas_ which were drawn
up in the March of that year. Even then he only succeeded in recovering
some border holds, and the succeeding campaign of 1301 only took him as
far as Linlithgow. But in the following year his position was suddenly
changed by unexpected events abroad; the king of France became involved
in a desperate quarrel with the pope, and at the same moment his army
received a crushing defeat before Courtrai at the hands of the Flemings.
To free himself for these new struggles Philip made up his mind to
conclude peace with England, even at the cost of sacrificing his
conquests in Gascony. Bordeaux had already revolted from him, and he
gave up the rest of his ill-gotten gains of 1294 by the treaty of Paris
(May 20, 1303).
Edward again invades Scotland, 1303.
Now that he had only a single war upon his hands Edward's position was
entirely changed. There was no more need to conciliate the magnates nor
the parliament. His displeasure fell mainly on the archbishop and the
earl of Norfolk, who had so long led the opposition. Winchelsea was put
in disgrace, and ultimately exiled. Norfolk, who was childless, was
forced to sign a grant by which his lands went to the king after his
death--a harsh and illegal proceeding, for he had collateral heirs. But
the Scots, as was natural, bore the brunt of the king's wrath. In June
1303, a month after the peace of Paris, he advanced from Roxburgh,
determined to make a systematic conquest of the realm, and not to return
till it was ended. He kept up his campaign throughout the winter,
reduced every fortress that held out, and carried his arms as far as
Aberdeen and Elgin. In February 1304 the regent Comyn and most of the
Scottish baronage submitted, on the promise that they should retain
their lands on doing homage. Wallace, who had returned from France, kept
up a guerilla warfare in the hills for a year more, but was captured in
July 1305, and sent to London to be executed as a traitor. Even before
his capture it seemed that Scotland was thoroughly tamed, and was
destined to share the fate of Wales.
Edward's arrangements for the administration of the conquered kingdom
were wise and liberal, if only the national spirit of the Scots could
have tolerated them. The Scottish parliament was to continue, though
representatives from beyond Tweed were also to be sent to the English
parliament. The sheriffdoms and most of the ministerial posts were left
in the hands of Scots, though the supreme executive authority was put in
the hands of John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, the king's nephew. The
land seemed for a time to be settling down, and indeed the baronage were
to such a large extent English in both blood and feeling, that there was
no insuperable difficulty in conciliating them. A considerable fraction
of them adhered consistently to the English cause from this time forth,
and ultimately lost their lands for refusing to follow the rest of the
nation in the next insurrection.
But the delusion that Scotland had been finally subdued was to last only
for a year, although in 1305 Edward seemed to have accomplished his
task, and stood triumphant, with the northern realm at his feet, his
domestic foes humbled, and France and the papacy defeated. His last
short interval of peaceful rule was distinguished by the passing of the
Statute of Trailbaston in the parliament of 1305. This was a measure for
the repression of local riots, empowering justices in every shire to
suppress clubmen (_trailbastons_), gangs of marauders who had been
rendering the roads unsafe.
Robert Bruce.
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 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.
Character of Edward I.'s rule.
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 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.
Edward II.
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 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.
Piers Gaveston.
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 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.
Baronial opposition.
It was of course impossible that the nation or the baronage should
accept such a preposterous regime, and Edward was soon involved in a
lively struggle with his subjects. Of the leaders of opposition in his
father's reign both 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.
Progress of Bruce in Scotland.