and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet
us in Edward’s career. Under the first king, whose temper was distinctly
English, a foreign influence told most fatally on our manners, our
literature, our national spirit. The rise of France into a compact and
organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus was now making its
influence dominant in Western Europe. The “chivalry” so familiar in
Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love,
and courtesy, before which all depth and reality of nobleness
disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest
caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was
specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward’s nature
from which the baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was
pure, his piety, save when it stooped to the superstition of the time,
manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the
frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But he was far from being
wholly free from the taint of his age. His passionate desire was to be a
model of the fashionable chivalry of his day. He had been famous from
his very youth as a consummate general; Earl Simon had admired the skill
of his advance at Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a
tenacity and force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of
defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a
commissariat which enabled him to move army after army across the
harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick to discover the value of
the English archery, and to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk.
But his fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward when compared
with his fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people’s love of
hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier--tall,
deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action. When
he encountered Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned
prowess, after Evesham, he forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At
the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a
tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself
to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. At his “Round Table of
Kenilworth” a hundred lords and ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the
faded glories of Arthur’s court. The false air of romance which was soon
to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental
feeling appeared in his “Vow of the Swan,” when rising at the royal
board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder
of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its
narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class, and in its exclusion of
the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. “Knight without
reproach” as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers
of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.
Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its influence
on Edward’s mind was the new French conception of kingship, feudality,
and law. The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary
into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties, such as
commendation, into a definite vassalage. But it was specially through
French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, that
the imperial theories of the Roman law were brought to bear upon this
natural tendency of the time. When the “sacred majesty” of the Cæsars
was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal
baronage, every constitutional relation was changed. The “defiance” by
which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason, his
after-resistance “sacrilege.” That Edward could appreciate what was
sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms
of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as
congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow
technicalities. He was never willfully unjust, but he was too often
captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take
advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which
he had borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in
the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in
charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good sense was
overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him that
Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her national
independence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her
throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the
resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their
fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a character, in
its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of nobleness and meanness,
that we must look for any fair explanation of much that has since been
bitterly blamed in Edward’s conduct and policy.
ROBERT BRUCE.
BY SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON.
[Born Lord of Annandale and Earl of Carrick 1274, died King of
Scotland 1329. Robert Bruce was descended from the younger branch
of the royal line of Scotland, to which succession had reverted by
the death of Margaret, the “Maiden of Norway.” Brought up in the
English court, where he was a favorite of Edward I, who claimed to
be over-lord of Scotland, and, as such, feudal superior of her
kings, he had vacillated in his course in the wars which had been
carried on by Edward to enforce that claim. In 1306 he threw off
all indecision, accepted the Scottish crown, and was invested at
Scone. Severely defeated at the beginning by the lieutenants of
Edward, he was relieved, by the death of the latter while marching
to take personal command, of his most dangerous antagonist. Edward
II for some years did not push aggression against Scotland, and the
Scottish monarch had recovered nearly all his dominions, when
Edward marched against him with a great army. The Scots gained an
overwhelming victory at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and
royal Scottish authority was re-established. The complete
independence of Scotland was not acknowledged however, till 1328,
in the reign of Edward III.]
Toward a due understanding of the extraordinary merits of Robert Bruce
it is necessary to take a cursory view of the power with which he had to
contend and of the resources of that kingdom, which, at that critical
juncture, Providence committed to his charge. The power of England,
against which it was his lot to struggle, was, perhaps, the most
formidable which then existed in Europe. The native valor of her people,
distinguished even under the weakest reign, was then led on and animated
by a numerous and valiant feudal nobility. That bold and romantic spirit
of enterprise which led the Norman arms to the throne of England and
enabled Roger de Hauteville, with thirty followers, to win the crown of
the Two Sicilies still animated the English nobles; and to this
hereditary spirit was added the remembrance of the matchless glories
which their arms had acquired in Palestine.
The barons who were then arrayed against Robert Bruce were the
descendants of those iron warriors who combated for Christendom under
the walls of Acre, and defeated the whole Saracen strength in the battle
of Ascalon; the banners that were then unfurled for the conquest of
Scotland were those which had waved victorious over the arms of Saladin;
and the sovereign who led them bore the crown that had been worn by
Richard in the Holy Wars, and wielded in his sword the terror of that
mighty name at which even the accumulated hosts of Asia were appalled.
Nor were the resources of England less formidable for nourishing and
maintaining the war. The prosperity which had grown up with the equal
laws of our Saxon ancestors, and which the tyranny of the early Norman
kings had never completely extinguished, had revived and spread under
the wise and beneficent reigns of Henry II and Edward I. The legislative
wisdom of the last monarch had given to the English law greater
improvements than it had ever received in any subsequent reigns, while
his heroic valor had subdued the rebellious spirit of his barons and
trained their united strength to submission to the throne. The
acquisition of Wales had removed the only weak point of his wide
dominion and added a cruel and savage race to the already formidable
mass of his armies. The navy of England already ruled the seas, and was
prepared to carry ravage and desolation over the wide and defenseless
Scottish coast; while a hundred thousand men armed in the magnificent
array of feudal war and led on by the ambition of a feudal nobility
poured into a country which seemed destined only to be their prey.
But, most of all, in the ranks of this army were found the intrepid
yeomanry of England--that peculiar and valuable body of men which has in
every age contributed as much to the stability of English character as
the celebrity of the English arms, and which then composed those
terrible archers whose prowess rendered them so formidable to all the
armies of Europe. These men, whose valor was warmed by the consciousness
of personal freedom and whose strength was nursed among the inclosed
fields and green pastures of English liberty, conferred, till the
discovery of firearms rendered personal accomplishments of no avail, a
matchless advantage on the English armies. The troops of no other nation
could produce a body of men in the least comparable to them, either in
strength, discipline, or individual valor; and such was the dreadful
efficacy with which they used their weapons that not only did they
mainly contribute to the subsequent triumphs of Cressy and Azincourt,
but at Poitiers and Hamildon Hill they alone gained the victory, with
hardly any assistance from the feudal tenantry.
These troops were well known to the Scottish soldiers, and had
established their superiority over them in many bloody battles, in which
the utmost efforts of undisciplined valor had been found unavailing
against their practiced discipline and superior equipment. The very
names of the barons who headed them were associated with an unbroken
career of conquest and renown, and can hardly be read yet without a
feeling of exultation.
Names that to fear were never known,
Bold Norfolk’s Earl de Brotherton
And Oxford’s famed De Vere;
Ross, Montague, and Manly came,
And Courtney’s pride and Percy’s fame,
Names known too well in Scotland’s war
At Falkirk, Methoven, and Dunbar,
Blazed broader yet in after years
At Cressy red and fell Poitiers.
Against this terrible force, before which in the succeeding reign the
military power of France was compelled to bow, Bruce had to array the
scanty troops of a barren land and the divided force of a turbulent
nobility. Scotland was in his time fallen low, indeed, from that state
of peace and prosperity in which she was found at the first invasion of
Edward I, and on which so much light has been thrown by the ingenious
research of our own times. The disputed succession had sowed the seeds
of inextinguishable jealousies among the nobles. The gold of England had
corrupted many to betray their country’s cause; and the fatal ravages of
English invasion had desolated the whole plains, from which resources
for carrying on the war could be drawn.
All the heroic valor, the devoted patriotism, and the personal prowess
of Wallace had been unable to stem the torrent of English invasion; and
when he died the whole nation seemed to sink under the load against
which his unexampled fortitude had long enabled it to struggle. These
unhappy jealousies among the nobles, to which his downfall was owing,
still continued and almost rendered hopeless any attempt to combine
their forces; while the thinned population and ruined husbandry of the
country seemed to prognosticate nothing but utter extirpation from a
continuance of the war. Nor was the prospect less melancholy from a
consideration of the combats which had taken place. The short spear and
light shield of the Scotch had been found utterly unavailing against the
iron panoply and powerful horses of the English barons, while the hardy
and courageous mountaineers perished in vain under the dreadful tempest
of the English archery.
What, then, must have been the courage of the youthful prince, who,
after having been driven for shelter to an island on the north of
Ireland, could venture with only forty followers to raise the standard
of independence in Scotland against the accumulated force of this mighty
power! What the resources of that understanding, which, though
intimately acquainted from personal service with the tried superiority
of the English arms, could foresee in his barren and exhausted country
the means of combatting them! What the ability of that political conduct
which could reunite the jarring interests and smother the deadly feuds
of the Scottish nobles! And what the capacity of that noble warrior who,
in the words of the contemporary historian,[22] could “unite the prowess
of the first knight to the conduct of the greatest general of his age,”
and was able in the space of six years to raise the Scottish arms from
the lowest point of depression to such a pitch of glory that even the
redoubted archers and haughty chivalry of England fled at the sight of
the Scottish banner!
Nor was it only in the field that the great and patriotic conduct of
Robert Bruce was displayed. In endeavor to restore the almost ruined
fortunes of his country and to heal the wounds which a war of
unparalleled severity had brought upon this people he exhibited the same
wise and beneficent policy. Under his auspicious rule, husbandry
revived, arts were encouraged, and the turbulent barons were awed into
subjection. Scotland recovered during his administration in a great
measure from the devastation that had preceded it; and the peasants,
forgetting the stern warrior in the beneficent monarch, long remembered
his sway under the name of the “good King Robert’s reign.”
But the greatness of his character appeared most of all from the events
that occurred after his death. When the capacity with which he and his
worthy associates Randolph and Douglas had counterbalanced the
superiority of English arms was withdrawn, the fabric which they had
supported fell to the ground. In the very first battle which was fought
after his death at Hamildon Hill, a larger army than that which
conquered at Bannockburn was overthrown by the archers of England,
without a single knight couching his spear. Never at any subsequent
period was Scotland able to stand the more powerful arms of the English
yeomanry. Thenceforward her military history is little more than a
melancholy catalogue of continued defeats, occasioned rather by
treachery on the part of her nobles or incapacity in her generals than
any defect of valor in her soldiers; and the independence of the
monarchy was maintained rather by the terror which the name of Bruce and
the remembrance of Bannockburn had inspired than by the achievements of
any of the successors to his throne.
The merits of Robert Bruce as a warrior are very generally acknowledged;
and the eyes of Scottish patriotism turn with the greater exultation to
his triumphs from the contrast which their splendor affords to the
barren annals of the subsequent reigns. But the important consequences
of his victories are not sufficiently appreciated. But for his bold and
unconquerable spirit, Scotland might have shared with Ireland the
severity of English conquest; and instead of exulting now in the
prosperity of our country, the energy of our peasantry, and the
patriotic spirit of our resident landed proprietors, we might have been
deploring with her an absent nobility, an oppressive tenantry, a bigoted
and ruined people.
EDWARD III, KING OF ENGLAND.
BY DAVID HUME.
[Son of Edward II of England and Isabella of France, born 1312,
crowned 1327, died 1377. Edward achieved the highest renown by his
Scotch and French wars, the latter of which he undertook as
claimant of the French throne through his mother. Though the latter
part of his life was marked by many misfortunes, the achievements
of his reign stamp it as among the most important in the earlier
English annals. It was not until this period that the English
language became universally recognized as the national speech, and
the various race elements were thoroughly welded and made
homogeneous.]
The English are apt to consider with peculiar fondness the history of
Edward III, and to esteem his reign, as it was one of the longest, the
most glorious, also, that occurs in the annals of their nation. The
ascendant which they then began to acquire over France, their rival and
supposed national enemy, makes them cast their eyes on this period with
great complacency, and sanctifies every measure which Edward embraced
for that end. But the domestic government of this prince is really more
admirable than his foreign victories; and England enjoyed, by the
prudence and vigor of his administration, a longer interval of domestic
peace and tranquillity than she had been blessed with in any former
period, or than she experienced for many ages after. He gained the
affections of the great, yet curbed their licentiousness; he made them
feel his power, without their daring, or even being inclined, to murmur
at it; his affable and obliging behavior, his munificence and
generosity, made them submit with pleasure to his dominion; his valor
and conduct made them successful in most of their enterprises; and their
unquiet spirits, directed against a public enemy, had no leisure to
breed those disturbances to which they were naturally so much inclined,
and which the frame of the government seemed so much to authorize.
This was the chief benefit which resulted from Edward’s victories and
conquests. His foreign wars were in other respects neither founded in
justice nor directed to any salutary purpose. His attempt against the
King of Scotland, a minor and a brother-in-law, and the revival of his
grandfather’s claim of superiority over that kingdom were both
unreasonable and ungenerous; and he allowed himself to be too easily
seduced, by the glaring prospect of French conquests, from the
acquisition of a point which was practicable, and which, if attained,
might really have been of lasting utility to his country and his
successors. The success which he met with in France, though chiefly
owing to his eminent talents, was unexpected; and yet from the very
nature of things, not from any unforeseen accidents, was found, even
during his lifetime, to have procured him no solid advantages. But the
glory of a conqueror is so dazzling to the vulgar, the animosity of
nations is so violent, that the fruitless desolation of so fine a part
of Europe as France is totally disregarded by us, and is never
considered as a blemish in the character or conduct of this prince; and,
indeed, from the unfortunate state of human nature, it will commonly
happen that a sovereign of genius, such as Edward, who usually finds
everything easy in his domestic government, will turn himself toward
military enterprises, where alone he meets with opposition, and where
he has full exercise for his industry and capacity.
It is remarked by an elegant historian that conquerors, though usually
the bane of human kind, proved often, in those feudal times, the most
indulgent of sovereigns. They stood most in need of supplies from their
people; and not being able to compel them by force to submit to the
necessary impositions, they were obliged to make them some compensation
by equitable laws and popular concessions. This remark is, in some
measure, though imperfectly, justified by the conduct of Edward III. He
took no steps of moment without consulting his Parliament and obtaining
their approbation, which he afterward pleaded as a reason for their
supporting his measures. The Parliament, therefore, rose into greater
consideration during his reign, and acquired more regular authority than
in any former time; and even the House of Commons, which during
turbulent and factious periods, was naturally depressed by the greater
power of the crown and barons, began to appear of some weight in the
constitution. In the later years of Edward, the king’s ministers were
impeached in Parliament, particularly Lord Latimer, who fell a sacrifice
to the authority of the Commons; and they even obliged the king to
banish his mistress by their remonstrances. Some attention was also paid
to the election of their members; and lawyers, in particular, who were
at that time men of character somewhat inferior, were totally excluded
from the House during several Parliaments.
Edward granted about twenty parliamentary confirmations of the great
charter; and these concessions are commonly appealed to as proofs of his
great indulgence to the people and his tender regard for their
liberties. But the contrary presumption is more natural. If the maxims
of Edward’s reign had not been in general somewhat arbitrary, and if the
great charter had not been frequently violated, the Parliament would
never have applied for these frequent confirmations, which could add no
force to a deed regularly observed, and which could serve to no other
purpose than to prevent the contrary precedents from turning into a
rule, and acquiring authority. It was indeed the effect of the irregular
government during those ages that a statute which had been enacted some
years, instead of acquiring, was imagined to lose force by time, and
needed to be often renewed by recent statutes of the same sense and
tenor. Hence, likewise, that general clause, so frequent in old acts of
Parliament, that the statutes enacted by the king’s progenitors should
be observed--a precaution which, if we do not consider the circumstances
of the times, might appear absurd and ridiculous. The frequent
confirmations of the privileges of the Church proceeded from the same
cause.
There is not a reign among those of the ancient English monarchs which
deserves more to be studied than that of Edward III, nor one where the
domestic transactions will better discover the true genius of that kind
of mixed government which was then established in England. The struggles
with regard to the validity and authority of the great charter were now
over; the king was acknowledged to lie under some limitations; Edward
himself was a prince of great capacity, not governed by favorites, not
led astray by any unruly passion, sensible that nothing could be more
essential to his interest than to keep on good terms with his people;
yet, on the whole, it appears, that the government at best was only a
barbarous monarchy, not regulated by any fixed maxims nor bounded by any
certain undisputed rights which in practice were regularly observed. The
king conducted himself by one set of principles, the barons by another,
the Commons by a third, the clergy by a fourth. All these systems of
government were opposite and incompatible; each of them prevailed in its
turn, as incidents were favorable to it; a great prince rendered the
monarchical power predominant; the weakness of a king gave reins to the
aristocracy: a superstitious age saw the clergy triumphant; the people,
for whom chiefly government was instituted, and who chiefly deserve
consideration, were the weakest of the whole. But the Commons, little
obnoxious to any other order, though they sunk under the violence of
tempests, silently reared their head in more peaceable times; and while
the storm was brewing were courted on all sides, and thus received still
some accession to their privileges, or at worst some confirmation of
them.
RIENZI.
BY EDWARD GIBBON.