EDWARD I. 1272-1307

DIGRESSION CONCERNING THE CONSTITUTION OF PARLIAMENT.

The expenses attending these multiplied wars of Edward, and his preparations for war, joined to alterations which had insensibly taken place in the general state of affairs, obliged him to have frequent recourse to parliamentary supplies, introduced the lower orders of the state into the public councils, and laid the foundations of great and important changes in the government.

Though nothing could be worse calculated for cultivating the arts of peace, or maintaining peace itself, than the long subordination of vassalage from the king to the meanest gentleman, and the consequent slavery of the lower people, evils inseparable from the feudal system, that system was never able to fix the state in a proper warlike posture, or give it the full exertion of its power for defence, and still less for offence, against a public enemy. The military tenants, unacquainted with obedience, inexperienced in war, held a rank in the troops by their birth, not by their merits or services, composed a disorderly, and consequently a feeble army; and during the few days which they were obliged by their tenures to remain in the field, were often more formidable to their own prince than to foreign powers against whom they were assembled. The sovereigns came gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine, so apt to recoil upon the hand which held it, and exchanging the military service for pecuniary supplies, enlisted forces by means a contract with particular officers, (such as those the Italians denominate Condottieri,) whom they dismissed at the end of the war. The barons and knights themselves often entered into these engagements with the prince, and were enabled to fill their bands, both by he authority which they possessed over their vassals and tenants, and from the great numbers of loose, disorderly people, whom they found on their estates, and who willingly embraced an opportunity of granting heir appetite for war and rapine.

Meanwhile the old Gothic fabric, being neglected, went gradually to decay. Though the Conqueror had divided all the lands of England into sixty thousand knights fees, the number of these was insensibly diminished by various artifices, and the king at last found, that by putting the law in execution, he could assemble a small part only of the ancient force of the kingdom. It was an usual expedient for men who held of the king or great barons by military tenure, to transfer their land to the church, and receive it back by another tenure, called frankalmoigne, by which they were not bound to perform any service. A law was made against this practice, but the abuse had probably gone far before it was attended to, and probably was not entirely corrected by the new statute, which, like most laws of that age, we may conjecture to have been but feebly executed by the magistrate against the perpetual interest of so many individuals. The constable and mareschal, when they mustered the armies, often in a hurry, and for want of better information, received the service of a baron for fewer knights' fees than were due by him; and one precedent of this kind was held good against the king, and became ever after a reason for diminishing the service. The rolls of knights' fees were inaccurately kept; no care was taken to correct them before the armies were summoned into the field; (We hear of one king, Henri II. who took this pains; and the record called Liber niger Scaccarii was the result of it.) it was then too late to think of examining records and charters, and the service was accepted on the footing which the vassal himself was pleased to acknowledge, after all the various subdivisions and conjunctions of property had thrown an obscurity on the nature and extent of his tenure. It is easy to judge of the intricacies which would attend disputes of this kind with individuals, when even the number of military fees belonging to the church, whose property was fixed and unalienable, became the subject of controversy; and we find in particular, that when the bishop of Durham was charged with seventy knights' fees for the aid levied on occasion of the marriage of Henry II.'s daughter to the duke of Saxony, the prelate acknowledged ten and disowned the other sixty. It is not known in what manner this difference was terminated; but had the question been concerning an armament to defend the kingdom, the bishop's service would probably have been received without opposition for ten fees; and this rate must also have fixed all his future payments. Pecuniary scutages, therefore, diminished as much as military services: (In order to pay the sun, of 10,000 marks, as king Richard's ransom. twenty shillings were imposed on each knight's fee. Had the fees remained on the original footing as settled by the Conqueror, this scuttage would have amounted to 90,000 marks, which was nearly the sum required. But we find that the other grevious taxes were imposed to complete it: a certain proof that many frauds and abuses had prevailed in the roll of knights fees.) other methods of filling the exchequer, as well as the armies, must be devised: new situations produced new laws and institutions; and the great alterations in the finances and military power of the crown, as well as in private property, were the source of equal innovations in every part of the legislature or civil government.

The exorbitant estates conferred by the Norman on his barons and chieftains, remained not long entire and unimpaired. The landed property was gradually shared out into more hands; and those immense baronies were divided, either by provisions to younger children, by partitions among co-heirs, by sale, or by escheating to the king, who gratified a great number of his courtiers, by dealing them out among them in smaller portions. Such moderate estates, as they required economy, and confined the proprietors to live at home, were better calculated for duration; and the order of knights and small barons grew daily more numerous, and began to form a very respectable rank or order in the state. A they were all immediate vassals of the crown by military tenure, they were, by the principles of the feudal law, equally entitled with the greatest barons to a seat in the national or general councils; and this right, though regarded as a privilege which the owners would not entirely relinquish, was also considered as a burden which they desired to be subjected to on extraordinary occasions only. Hence it was provided in the Charter of king John, that while the great barons were summoned to the national council by a particular writ, the small barons, under which appellation the knights were also comprehended, should only be called by a general summons of the sheriff. The distinction between great and small barons, like that between rich and poor, was not exactly defined; but, agreeably to the inaccurate genius of that age, and to the simplicity of ancient government, was left very much to be determined by the discretion of the king and his ministers. It was usual for the prince to require, by a particular summons, the attendance of a baron in one parliament, and to neglect him in future parliaments; nor was this uncertainty ever complained of as an injury. He attended when required; he was better pleased, on other occasions, to be exempted from the burden; and as he was acknowledged to be of the same order with the greatest barons, it gave them no surprise to see him take his seat in the great council, whether he appeared of his own accord, or by a particular summons the king. The barons by writ, therefore, began gradually to intermix themselves with the barons by tenure: and, as Camden tells us, from an ancient manuscript now lost, that after the battle of Evesham a positive law was enacted, prohibiting every baron from appearing in parliament who was not invited thither by a particular summons, the whole baronage of England held thenceforward their seat by writ, and this important privilege if their tenures was in effect abolished. Only where writs had been regularly continued for some time in one great family, the omission of them would have been regarded as an affront, and even as an injury.

A like alteration gradually took place in the order of earls, who were the highest rank of barons. The dignity of an earl, like that of a baron, was anciently territorial and official: he exercised jurisdiction within his county; he levied the third of the fines to his own profit; he was at once a civil and a military magistrate, and though his authority, from the time of the Norman conquest, was hereditary in England, the title was so much connected with the office, that where the king intended to create a new earl, he had no other expedient than to erect a certain territory into a county, or earldom, and to bestow it upon the person and his family. (This practice, however, seems to have been more familiar in Scotland, and the kingdoms on the continent than in England.) Butt as the sheriffs, who were the vicgerents of the earls, were named by the king, and removable at pleasure, he found them more dependent upon him, and endeavoured to throw the whole authority and jurisdiction of the office into their hands. This magistrate was at the head of the finances, and levied all the king's rents within the county: he assessed at pleasure tile talliages of the inhabitants in royal demesne; he had usually committed to him the management of wards, and often of escheats; he presided in the lower courts of judicature, and thus, though inferior to the earl in dignity, he was soon considered, by this union of the judicial and fiscal powers, and by thee confidence reposed in him by the king, as much superior to him in authority, and undermined his influence within his own jurisdiction (There are instances of the princes of the blood who accepted of the office of sheriff. - Spelman in voce Vicecomes. ) It became usual, in creating an earl, to give him a fixed salary, commonly about twenty pounds a year, in lieu of his third of the fines; the diminution of his power kept pace with the retrenchment of his profit, and the dignity of earl, instead of being territorial and official, dwindled into personal and titular Such were the mighty alterations which already had fully taken place, or were gradually advancing in the house of peers, that is, in the parliament; for there seems anciently to have been no other house.

But though the introduction of barons by writ, and of titular earls had given some increase to royal authority, there were other causes which counterbalanced those innovations, and tended in a higher degree to diminish the power of the sovereign. The disuse into which the feudal militia had in a great measure fallen, made the barons almost entirely forget their dependence on the crown: by the diminution of the number of knights' fees, the king had no reasonable compensation when he levied scutages, and exchanged their service for money; the alienation's of the crown lands had reduced him to poverty ; and, above all, the concession of the Great Charter had set bounds to royal power, and had rendered it more difficult and dangerous for the prince to exert any extraordinary act of arbitrary authority. In this situation, it was natural for the king to court the friendship of the lesser barons and knights, whose influence was no ways dangerous to him, and who, being exposed to oppression from their powerful neighbours, sought a legal protection under the shadow of the throne. He desired, therefore, to have their presence in parliament, where they served to control the turbulent resolutions of the great. To exact a regular attendance of the whole body would have produced confusion, and would have imposed too heavy a burden upon them. To summon only a few by writ, though it was practised, and had a good effect, served not entirely the king's purpose; because these members had no further authority than attended their personal character, and were eclipsed by the appearance of the more powerful nobility. He therefore dispensed with the attendance of most of the lesser barons in parliament; and in return for this indulgence, (for such it was then esteemed,) required them to choose in each county a certain number of their own body, whose charges they bore, and who, having gained the confidence, carried with them, of course, the authority of the whole order. This expedient had been practised at different times in the reign of Henry III., and regularly during that of the present king. The numbers sent by each county varied at the will of the prince; they took their seat among the other peers; because by their tenure they belonged to that order: the introducing of them into that house scarcely appeared an innovation and though it was easily in the king's power, by varying their number, to command the resolutions of the whole parliament, this circumstance was little attended to in an age when force was more prevalent than laws, and when a resolution, though taken by the majority of a legal assembly, could not be executed if it opposed the will of the more powerful minority.

But there were other important consequences which followed the diminution and consequent disuse of the ancient feudal militia. The king's expense in levying and maintaining a military force for every enterprise was increased beyond what his narrow revenues were able to bear: as the scutages of his military tenants, which were accepted in lieu of their personal service, had fallen to nothing, there were no means of supply but from voluntary aids granted him by the parliament and clergy; or from the talliages which he might levy upon the towns and inhabitants in royal demesne. In the preceding year Edward had been obliged to exact no less than the sixth of all moveables from the laity, and a moiety of all ecclesiastical benefices, for his expedition into Poictou, and the suppression of the Welsh and this distressful situation, which was likely often to return upon him and his successors, made him think of a new device, and summon the representatives of all the boroughs to parliament. This period, which is the twenty-third of his reign, seems to be the real and the true epoch of the house of commons, and the faint dawn of popular government in England. For the representatives of the counties were only deputies from the smaller barons and lesser nobility: and the former precedent of the representatives from the boroughs, who were summoned by the earl of Leicester, was regarded as the act of a violent usurpation, had been discontinued in all the subsequent parliaments; and if such a measure had not become necessary on other accounts, that precedent was more likely to blast than give credit to it.

During the course of several years, the kings of England, in imitation of other European princes, had embraced the salutary policy of encouraging and protecting the lower and more industrious orders of the state; whom they found well disposed to obey the laws and civil magistrate, and whose ingenuity and labour furnished commodities requisite for the ornament of peace and support of war. Though the inhabitants of the country were still left at the disposal of their imperious lords, many attempts were made to give more security and liberty to citizens, and make them enjoy unmolested the fruits of their industry. Boroughs were erected by royal patent within the demesne lands; liberty of trade was conferred upon them: the inhabitants were allowed to farm at a fixed rent their own tolls and customs: they were permitted to elect their own magistrates: justice was administered to them by these magistrates, without obliging them to attend the sheriff or county-court: and some shadow of independence, by means of these equitable privileges, was gradually acquired by the people. The king, however, retained still the power of levying talliages or taxes upon them at. pleasure; (The king had not only the power of talliating the inhabitants within his own demesnes, but that of granting to particular barons the power of talliating the inhabitants within theirs. See Brady's Answer to Petyt, p. 118. Madox, Hist. of the Exchequer, p. 518.) and though their poverty and the customs of the age, made these demands neither frequent nor exorbitant, such unlimited authority in the sovereign was a sensible check upon commerce, and was utterly incompatible with all the principles of a free government. But when the multiplied necessities of the crown produced a greater avidity for supply, the king, whose prerogative entitled him to exact it, found that he had not power sufficient to enforce his edicts, and that it was necessary, before he imposed taxes, to smooth the way for his demand, and to obtain the previous consent of the boroughs, by solicitations, remonstrance's, and authority. The inconvenience of transacting this business with every particular borough was soon felt, and Edward became sensible that the most expeditious way of obtaining supply was, to assemble the deputies of all the boroughs, to lay before them the necessities of the state, to discuss the matter in their presence, and to require their consent to the demands of their sovereign. For this reason he issued writs to the sheriffs, enjoining them to send to parliament, along with two knights of the shire, two deputies from each borough within their county, (The Writs were issued to about 120 cities and boroughs) and these provided with sufficient powers from their community to consent, in their name, to what he and his council should require of them. "As it is a most equitable rule," he says, in his preamble to this writ, "that what concerns all should be approved of by all; and common dangers be repelled by united efforts;" (Brady of boroughs, p.25, 33, from the records. The writs of the parliament immediately preceding remain; and the return the knights is there required, but not a word of the boroughs a demonstration that this was the very year in which they commenced. In the year immediately preceding. the taxes were levied by a seeming free consent of each particular borough. beginning with London. Id. P31, 32, 33, 11, from their records. Also his Answer to Petyt p. 40, 41.) a noble principle, which may seem to indicate a liberal mind in the king, and which laid the foundation of a free and an equitable government.

After the election of these deputies by the aldermen and common council, they gave sureties for their attendance before the king and parliament: their charges were respectively borne by the borough which sent them; and they had so little idea of appearing as legislators, a character extremely wide of their low rank and condition, that no intelligence could be more disagreeable to any borough, than to find that they must elect, or to any individual than that he was elected to a trust from which no profit or honour could possibly be derived. They composed not, properly speaking, any essential part of the parliament; they sat apart both from the barons and knights, who disdained to mix with such mean personages; after they had given their consent to the taxes required of them, their business being then finished, they separated, even though the parliament still continued to sit, and to canvass the national business; and as they all consisted of men who were real burgesses of the place from which they were sent, the sheriff, when he found no person of abilities or wealth sufficient for the office, often used the freedom of omitting particular boroughs in his returns; and as he received the thanks of the people for this indulgence, he gave no displeasure to the court, who levied on all the boroughs, without distinction, the tax agreed to by the majority of deputies (There is even an instance in the relies of Edward III., when the king named all the deputies. Brady's answer to Petyt p.16. If he fairly named the most considerable and creditable burgesses, little exception would be taken. as their business was not to check the king, but to reason with him, and consent to his demands. It was not till the reign of Richard II., that the sheriffs were deprived of the power of omitting boroughs at pleasure, see Stat. at large, 5th Richard I., cap. 4.)

The union, however, of the representatives from the boroughs gave gradually more weight to the whole order; and it became customary for them, in return for the supplies which they granted, to prefer petitions to the crown for the redress of any particular grievance of which they found reason to complain. The more the king's demands multiplied, the faster these petitions increased both in number and authority; and the prince found it difficult to refuse men whose grants had supported his throne, and to whose assistance he might so soon be again obliged to have recourse. The commons, however, were still much below the rank of legislators. Their petitions, though they received a verbal assent from the throne, were only the rudiments of laws: the judges were afterwards entrusted with the power of putting them into form and the king, by adding to them the sanction of his authority, and that sometimes without the assent of the nobles, bestowed validity upon them. The age did not refine so much as to perceive the danger of these irregularities. No man was displeased that the sovereign, at the desire of any class of men, should issue an order which appeared only to concern that class; and his predecessors were so near possessing the whole legislative power, that he gave no disgust by assuming it in this seemingly inoffensive manner. But time and further experience gradually opened men's eyes, and corrected these abuses. It was found that no laws could be fixed for one order of men without affecting the whole; and that the force and efficacy of laws depended entirely on the terms employed in wording them. The house of peers, therefore, the most powerful order in the state, with reason expected that their assent should be expressly granted to all public ordinances; (In those instances found in Cotton's Abridgement, where the king appears to answer of himself the petitions of the commons, he probably exerted no more than that power which was long inherent in the crown, of regular matters by royal edicts or proclamations, But no durable or general statute seems ever to have made by the king from the petition of the commons alone, without the assent of the peers. It is more likely that the peers alone, without the commons, would enact statutes.) and in the reign of Henry V., the commons required that no law should be framed merely upon their petitions, unless the statutes were worded by themselves, and had passed their house in the form of a bill.

But as the same causes which had produced a partition of the property continued still to operate, the number of knights and lesser barons, or what the English call the gentry, perpetually increased, and they sunk into a rank still more inferior to the great nobility. The equality of tenure was lost in the great inferiority of power and property; and the house of representatives from the counties was gradually separated from that of the peers, and formed a distinct order in the state. The growth of commerce meanwhile augmented the private wealth and consideration of the burgesses; the frequent demands of the crown increased their public importance; and as they resembled the knights of shires in one material circumstance that of representing particular bodies of men, it no longer appeared unsuitable to unite them together in the same house, and to confound their rights and privileges. Thus the third estate, that of the commons, reached at last its present form; and as the country gentlemen made thence forwards no scruple of appearing as deputies from the boroughs, the distinction between the members was entirely lost, and the lower house acquired thence a great accession of weight and importance in the kingdom. Still, however, the office of this estate was very different from that which it has since exercised with so much advantage to the public. Instead of checking and controlling the authority of the king, they were naturally induced to adhere to him as the great fountain of law and justice, and to support him against the power of the aristocracy, which at once was the source of oppression to themselves, and disturbed him in the execution of the laws. The king in his turn gave countenance to an order of men, so useful and so little dangerous: the peers also were obliged to pay them some consideration; and by this means the third estate, formerly so abject in England, as well as in all other European nations, rose by slow degrees to their present importance; and in their progress made arts and commerce, the necessary attendants of liberty and equality, flourish in the kingdom.

What sufficiently proves that the commencement of the house of burgesses, who are the true commons, was not an affair of chance, but arose from the necessities of the present situation, is, that Edward at the very same time summoned deputies from the inferior clergy, the first that ever met in England, and he required them to impose taxes on their constituents for the public service. Formerly the ecclesiastical benefices bore no part of the burdens of the state: the pope indeed of late had often levied impositions upon them: He had sometimes granted this power to the sovereign: the king himself had in the preceding year exacted, by menaces and violence, a very grievous tax of half the revenues of the clergy; but as this precedent was dangerous, and could not easily be repeated in a government which required the consent of the subject to any extraordinary resolution, Edward found it more prudent to assemble a lower house of convocation, to lay before them his necessities, and to ask some supply. But on this occasion he met with difficulties. Whether that the clergy thought themselves the most independent body in the kingdom, or were disgusted by the former exorbitant impositions, they absolutely refused their assent to the king's demand of a fifth of their moveables; and it was not till a second meeting that, on their persisting in this refusal, he was willing to accept of a tenth. The barons and knights granted him, without hesitation, an eleventh; the burgesses a seventh. Butt the clergy still scrupled to meet on the king's writ, lest by such an instance of obedience they should seem to acknowledge the authority of the temporal power: and this compromise was at last fallen upon, that the king should issue his writ to the archbishop; and that the archbishop should, in consequence of it, summon the clergy, who, as they then appeared to obey their spiritual superior, no longer hesitated to meet in convocation. This expedient, however, was the cause why the ecclesiastics were separated into two houses of convocation under their several archbishops, and formed not one estate, as in other countries of Europe, which was at first the king's intention. We now return to the course of our narration.

Edward, conscious of the reasons of disgust which he had given to the king of Scots, informed of the dispositions of that people, and expecting the most violent effects of their resentment, which he knew he had so well merited, employed the supplies granted him by his people in making preparations against the hostilities of his northern neighbour. [1296.] When in this situation, he received intelligence of the treaty secretly concluded between John and Philip; and though uneasy at this concurrence of a French and Scottish war, he resolved not to encourage his enemies by a pusillanimous behaviour, or by yielding to their united efforts. He summoned John to perform the duty of a vassal, and to send him a supply of forces against an invasion from France, with which he was then threatened: he next required that the fortresses of Berwick, Jedborough, and Roxborough should be put into his hands as a security during the war: He cited John to appear in an English parliament to be held at Newcastle; and when none of these successive demands were complied with, he marched northward with numerous forces, 30,000 foot and 4,000 horse, to chastise his rebellious vassal. The Scottish nation, who had little reliance on the rigour and abilities of their prince, assigned him a council of twelve noblemen., in whose hands the sovereignty was really lodged, and who put the country in the best posture of which the present distractions would admit. A great army, composed of 40,000 infantry, though supported only by 500 cavalry, advanced to the frontiers; and after a fruitless attempt upon Carlisle, marched eastwards to defend those provinces which Edward was preparing to attack. But some of the most considerable of the Scottish nobles, Robert Bruce, the father and son, the earls of March and Angus, prognosticating the ruin of their country, from the concurrence of intestine divisions and a foreign invasion, endeavoured here to ingratiate themselves with Edward, by an early submission; and the king, encouraged by this favourable incident, led his army into the enemies country, and crossed the Tweed without opposition at Coldstream. (28th March.) He then received a message from John, by which that prince, having now procured for himself and his nation pope Celestine's dispensation from former oaths, renounced the homage which had been done to England, and set Edward at defiance. This bravado was but ill supported by the military operations of the Scots. Berwick was already taken by assault; sir William Douglas, the governor, was made prisoner; above 7000 of the garrison were put to the sword; and Edward, elated by this great advantage, dispatched earl Warrenne with 12,000 men, to lay siege to Dunbar, which was defended by the flower of the Scottish nobility.

The Scots, sensible of the importance of this place, which, if taken, laid their whole country open to the enemy, advanced with their main army, under the command of the earls of Buchan, Lenox, and Marre, in order to relieve it. Warrenne, not dismayed at the great superiority of their number, marched out to give them battle. He attacked them (27th April) with great vigour; and as undisciplined troops. when numerous, are but the more exposed to a panic upon any alarm, he soon threw them into confusion, and chased them off the field with great slaughter. The loss of the Scots is said to have amounted to 20,000 men: the castle of Dunbar, with all its garrison, surrendered next day to Edward, who, after the battle, had brought up the main body of the English, and who now proceeded with an assured confidence of success. The castle of Roxborough was yielded by James, steward of Scotland; and that nobleman, from whom is descended the royal family of Stuart, was again obliged to swear fealty to Edward. After a feeble resistance, the castles of Edinburgh and Stirling opened their gates to the enemy. All the southern parts were instantly subdued by the English; and to enable them the better to reduce the northern, whose inaccessible situation seemed to give them some more security, Edward sent for a strong re-enforcement of Welsh and Irish, who, being accustomed to a desultory kind of war, were the best fitted to pursue the fugitive Scots into the recesses of their lakes and mountains. But the spirit of the nation was already broken by their misfortunes; and the feeble and timid Baliol discontented with his own subjects, and overawed by the English, abandoned all those resources which his people might yet have possessed in this extremity. He hastened to make his submissions to Edward; he expressed the deepest penitence for his disloyalty to his liege lord; and he made a solemn and irrevocable resignation of his crown into the hands of that monarch. Edward marched northwards to Aberdeen and Elgin, without meeting an enemy: no Scotchman approached him but to pay him submission and do his homage even the turbulent highlanders, ever refractory to their own princes, and averse to the restraint of laws, endeavoured to prevent the devastation of their country by giving him early proofs of obedience: and Edward, having brought the whole kingdom to a seeming state of tranquillity, returned to the south with his army. There was a stone to which the popular superstition of the Scots paid the highest veneration: all their kings were seated on it when they received the rite of inauguration; an ancient tradition assured them, that, wherever this stone was placed, their nation should always govern: and it was carefully preserved at Scone, as the true palladium of their monarchy, and their ultimate resource amidst all their misfortunes. Edward got possession of it, and carried it with him to England. He gave orders to destroy the records, and all those monuments of antiquity which might preserve the memory of the independence of the kingdom and refute the English claims of superiority. 'The Scots pretend that he also destroyed all the annals preserved in their convents; but it is not probable that a nation, so rude and unpolished, should be possessed of any history which deserves much to be regretted. The great seal of Baliol was broken; and-that prince himself was carried prisoner to London, and committed to custody in the Tower. Two years after, he was restored to liberty, and submitted to a voluntary banishment in France; where, without making any further attempts for the recovery of his royalty, he died in a private station. Earl Warrenne was left governor of Scotland: Englishmen were entrusted with the chief offices: and Edward, flattering himself that he had attained the end of all his wishes, and that the numerous acts of fraud and violence, which he had practised against Scotland, had terminated in the final reduction of that kingdom, returned with his victorious army into England.

WAR WITH FRANCE.

An attempt which he made about the same time, from the recovery of Guienne, was not equally successful. He sent thither an army of 7000 men, under the command of his brother, the earl of Lancaster. That prince gained at first some advantages over the French at Bourdeaux; but he was soon after seized with a distemper, of which he died at Bayonne. The command devolved on the earl of Lincoln, who was not able to perform anything considerable during the rest of the campaign.

But the active and ambitious spirit of Edward, while his conquests brought such considerable accessions to the English monarchy, could not be satisfied, so long as Guienne, the ancient patrimony of his family, was wrested from him by the dishonest artifices of the French monarch. Finding that the distance of that province rendered all his efforts against it feeble and uncertain, he purposed to attack France in a quarter where she appeared more vulnerable; and with this view he married his daughter Elizabeth to John, earl of Holland, and at the same time contracted an alliance with Guy, earl of Flanders, stipulated to pay him the sum of 75,000 pounds, and projected an invasion, with their united forces, upon Philip, their common enemy. He hoped that, when he himself, at the head of the English, Flemish, and Dutch armies, re-enforced by his German allies, to whom he had promised or remitted considerable sums, should enter the frontiers of France, and threaten the capital itself, Philip would at last be obliged to relinquish his acquisitions, and purchase peace by the restitution of Guienne. But, in order to set this great machine in movement, considerable supplies were requisite from the parliament; and Edward, without much difficulty, obtained from the barons and knights a new grant of a twelfth of all their moveables, and from time boroughs that of an eighth. The great and almost unlimited power of the king over the latter enabled him to throw the heavier part of the burden on them; and the prejudices which he seems always to have entertained against the church, on account of the former zeal of the clergy for the Mountfort faction, made him resolve to load them with still more considerable impositions; and he required of them a fifth of their moveables. But he here met with an opposition which for some time disconcerted all his measures, and engaged him in enterprises that were somewhat dangerous to him; and would have proved fatal to any of his predecessors.

DISSENSIONS WITH THE CLERGY.

Boniface VIII., who had successful Celestine in the papal throne, was a man of the most lofty and enterprising spirit; and, though not endowed with that severity of manners which commonly accompanies ambition in men of his order; he was determined to carry the authority of the tiara, and his dominion over the temporal power, to as great a height as it had ever attained in any former period. Sensible that his immediate predecessor, by oppressing the church in every province of Christendom, had extremely alienated the affections of the clergy, and had afforded the civil magistrate a pretence for laying like impositions on ecclesiastical revenues, he attempted to resume the former station of the sovereign pontiff, and to establish himself as the common protector of the spiritual order against all invaders. For this purpose he issued, very early in his pontificate, a general bull, prohibiting all princes from levying, without his consent, any taxes upon the clergy, and all clergymen from submitting to such impositions; and he threatened both of them with the penalties of excommunication in case of disobedience. This important edict is said to have been procured by the solicitation of Robert de Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, who intended to employ it as a rampart against the violent extortion's which the church had felt from Edward and the still greater, which that prince's multiplied necessities gave them reason to apprehend. When a demand, therefore, was made on the clergy of a fifth of their moveables, a tax which was probably much more grievous than a fifth of their revenue, as their lands were mostly stocked with their cattle, and cultivated by their villains, the clergy took shelter under the bull of pope Boniface, and pleaded conscience in refusing compliance. The king came not immediately to extremities on this repulse; but, after locking up all their granaries and barns, and prohibiting all rent to be paid them, he appointed a new synod, to confer with him upon his demand. The primate, not dismayed by these proofs of Edward's resolution, here plainly told him, that the clergy owed obedience to two sovereigns, their spiritual and their temporal; but their duty bound them to a much stricter attachment to the former than to the latter: they could not comply with his commands, (for such, in some measure, the requests of the crown were then deemed,) in contradiction to the express prohibition of the sovereign pontiff.

1297. The clergy had seen, in many instances, that Edward paid little regard to those numerous privileges on which they set so high a value, he had formerly seized in an arbitrary manner, all the money and plate belonging to the churches and convents, and had applied them to the public service; and they could not but expect more violent treatment on this sharp refusal, grounded on such dangerous principles. Instead of applying to the pope for a relaxation of his bull, he resolved immediately to employ the power in his hands; and he told the ecclesiastics, that, since they refused to support the civil government, they were unworthy to receive any benefit from it; and he would accordingly put them out of the protection of laws. This vigorous measure was immediately carried into execution. Orders were issued to the judges to receive no cause brought before them by the clergy; to hear and decide all causes in which they were defendants; to do every man justice against them; to do them justice against nobody. The ecclesiastics soon found themselves in the most miserable situation imaginable. They could not remain in their own houses or convents for want of subsistence if they went abroad in quest of maintenance, they were dismounted, robbed of their horses and clothes, abused by every ruffian, and no redress could be obtained by them for the most violent injury. The primate himself was attacked on the highway, was stripped of his equipage and furniture, and was at last reduced to board himself, a single servant, in the house of a country clergyman. The king, meanwhile, remained an indifferent spectator of all these violence's; and, without employing his officers in committing any immediate injury on the priests, which might have appeared invidious and oppressive, he took ample vengeance on them for their obstinate refusal of his demands. Though the archbishop issued a general sentence of excommunication against all who attacked the persons or property of the ecclesiastics, it was not regarded: while Edward enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing the people become the voluntary instruments of his justice against them, and inure themselves to throw off that respect for the sacred order, by which they had so long been overawed and governed.

The spirits of the clergy were at last broken by this harsh treatment. Besides that the whole province of York, which lay nearest the danger that still hung over them from the Scots, voluntarily, from the first, voted a fifth of their moveables the bishops of Salisbury, Ely, and some others, made a composition for the secular clergy within their dioceses: and they agreed not to pay the fifth, which would have been an act of disobedience to Boniface's bull, but to deposit a sum equivalent in some church appointed them; whence it was taken by the king's officers. Many particular convents and clergymen made payment of a like sum, and received the king's protection. Those who had not ready money, entered into recognizance's for the payment. And there was scarcely found one ecclesiastic in the kingdom, who seemed willing to suffer, for the sake of religious privileges, this new species of martyrdom, the most tedious and languishing of any, the most mortifying to spiritual pride, and not rewarded by that crown of glory whelm the church holds up, with such ostentation, to her devoted adherents.

ARBITRARY MEASURES.

But as the money granted by parliament, though considerable, was not sufficient to supply the king's necessities, and that levied by compositions with the clergy came in slowly, Edward was obliged, for the obtaining of further supply, to exert his arbitrary power, and to lay an oppressive hand on all orders of men in the kingdom. He limited the merchants in the quantity of wool allowed to be exported; and at the same time forced them to pay him a duty of forty shillings a sack, which was computed to be above the third of the value. He seized all the rest of the wool, as well as all the leather of the kingdom, into his hands, and disposed of these commodities for his own benefit. He required the sheriffs of each county to supply him with 2,000 quarters of wheat, and as many of Oats, which he permitted them to seize wherever they could find them: the cattle and other commodities necessary for supplying his army were laid hold of without the consent of the owners. And though he promised to pay afterwards the equivalent of all these goods, men saw but little probability that a prince, who submitted so little to the limitations of law, could ever, amidst his multiplied necessities, be reduced to a strict observance of his engagements. He showed, at the same time, an equal disregard to the principles of the feudal law, by which all the lands of the kingdom were held in order to increase his army, and enable him to support that great effort which he intended to make against France, he required the attendance of every proprietor of land possessed of twenty pounds a year, even though he held not of the crown, and was not obliged by his tenure to perform any such service.

These acts of violence and of arbitrary power, notwithstanding the great personal regard generally borne to the king, bred murmurs in every order of men; and it was not long ere some of the great nobility, jealous of their own privileges as well as of national liberty, gave countenance and authority to these complaints. Edward assembled on the seacoast an army, which he purposed to send over to Gascony, while he himself should in person make an impression on the side of Flanders; and he intended to put these forces under the command of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, the constable, arid Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, the mareschal of England. But these two powerful earls refused to execute his commands, and affirmed that they were only obliged by their office to attend his person in the wars. A violent altercation ensued; and the king, in the height of his passion, addressing himself to the constable, exclaimed, "Sir earl, by God, you shall either go or hang ! " "By God, sir king,'' replied Hereford, "I will neither go nor hang !" And he immediately departed with the mareschal, and above thirty other considerable barons.

Upon this opposition, the king laid aside the project of an expedition against Guienne; and assembled the forces which he himself purposed to transport into Flanders. But the two earls, irritated in the contest and elated by impunity, pretending that none of their ancestors had ever served in that country, refused to perform the duty of their office in mustering the army. The king, now finding it advisable to proceed with moderation, instead of attainting the earls, who possessed their dignities by hereditary right, appointed Thomas de Berkeley, and Geoffrey de Geyneville, to act, in that emergence, as constable and mareschal. He endeavoured to reconcile himself with the church; took the primate again into favour; made him, in conjunction with Reginald de Grey, tutor to the prince, whom he intended to appoint guardian of the kingdom during his absence; and he even assembled a great number of the nobility in Westminster-hall, to whom he deigned to make an apology for his past conduct. He pleaded the urgent necessities of the crown; his extreme want of money; his engagements from honour as well as interest to support his foreign allies: and he promised, if ever he returned in safety, to redress all their grievances, to restore the execution of the laws, and to make all his subjects compensation for the losses which they had sustained. Meanwhile, he begged them to suspend their animosities; to judge of him by his future conduct, of which, he hoped, he should be more master; to remain faithful to his government, or, if he perished in the present war, to preserve their allegiance to his son and successor.

There were certainly, from the concurrence of discontents among the great, and grievances of the people, materials sufficient in any other period to have kindled a civil war in England; but the vigour and abilities of Edward kept every one in awe; and his dexterity, in stopping on the brink of danger, and retracting the measures to which he had been pushed by his violent temper and arbitrary principles, saved the nation from so great a calamity. The two great earls dared not to break out into open violence: they proceeded no further than framing a remonstrance, which was delivered to the king at Winchelsea, when he was ready to embark for Flanders. They there complained of the violations of the Great Charter and that of forests; the violent seizures of corn, leather, cattle, and above all, of wool, a commodity which they affirmed to be equal in value to half the lands of the kingdom; the arbitrary imposition of forty shillings a sack, on the small quantity of wool allowed to be exported by the merchants; and they claimed an immediate redress of all these grievances. The king told them that the greater part of his council were now at a distance, and without their advice he could not deliberate on measures of so great importance.

DISSENSIONS WITH THE BARONS.

But the constable and mareschal, with the barons of their party, resolved to take advantage of Edward's absence, and to obtain an explicit assent to their demands. When summoned to attend the parliament at London, they came with a great body of cavalry and infantry; and before they would enter the city, required that the gates should be put into their custody. The primate, who secretly favoured all their pretensions, advised the council to comply; and thus they became masters both of the young prince and of the resolutions of parliament. Their demands, however, were moderate; and such as sufficiently justify the purity of their intentions in all their past measures: they only required that the two charters should receive a solemn confirmation; that a clause should be added to secure the nation for ever against all impositions and taxes without consent of parliament; and that they themselves and their adherents, who had refused to attend the king into Flanders, should be pardoned for the offence, and should be again received into favour. The prince of Wales and his council assented to these terms; and the charters were sent over to the king in Flanders to be there confirmed by him. Edward felt the utmost reluctance to this measure, which, he apprehended, would for the future impose fetters on his conduct, and set limits to his lawless authority. On various pretences he delayed three days giving any answer to the deputies; and when the pernicious consequences of his refusal were represented to him, he was at last obliged. after many internal struggles, to affix his seal to the charters, as also to the clause that bereaved him of the power, which he had hitherto assumed, of imposing arbitrary taxes upon the people.

That we may finish at once this interesting transaction concerning the settlement of the charters, we shall briefly mention the subsequent events which relate to it The constable and mareschal, informed of the king's compliance, were satisfied; and not only ceased from disturbing the government, but assisted the regency with their power against the Scots, who had risen in arms, and had thrown off the yoke of England. But being sensible that the smallest pretence would suffice to make Edward retract those detested laws, which, though they had often received the sanction both of king and parliament, and had been acknowledged during three reigns, were never yet deemed to have sufficient validity; they insisted that he should again confirm them on his return to England, and should thereby renounce all plea which he might derive from his residing in a foreign country when he formerly affixed his seal to them. It appeared that they judged right of Edward's character and intentions: he delayed his confirmation as long as possible; and when the fear of worse consequences obliged him again to comply, he expressly added a salvo for his royal dignity or prerogative, which in effect enervated the whole force of the charters. The two earls and their adherents left the parliament in disgust; and the king was constrained, on a future occasion, to grant to the people, without any subterfuge, a pure and absolute confirmation of those laws which were so much the object of their passionate affection. Even further securities were then provided for the establishment of national privileges. Three knights were appointed to be chosen in each county, and were invested with the power of punishing, by fine and imprisonment, every transgression or violation of the charters: a precaution which, though it was soon disused, as encroaching too much on royal prerogative, proves the attachment which the English in that age bore to liberty, and their well-grounded jealousy of the arbitrary disposition of Edward.

The work, however, was not yet entirely finished and complete. In order to execute the lesser charter, it was requisite, by new perambulations, to set bounds to the royal forests, and to disafforest all land which former encroachments had comprehended within their limits. Edward discovered the same reluctance to comply with this equitable demand; and it was not till after many delays on his part, and many solicitations and requests, and even menaces of war and violence, (we are told by Tyrrel, vol. ii. .145, from the Chronicle of St. Albans, that the barons; not content with the execution of the charter of forests. demanded of Edward as high terms as had been imposed on his father by the earl of Leicester; but no other historian mentions this particular.) on the part of the barons, that the perambulations were made, and exact boundaries fixed, by a jury in each county, to the extent of his forests. Had not his ambitious and active temper raised him so many foreign enemies, and obliged him to have recourse so often to the assistance of his subjects, it is not likely that those concessions could ever have been extorted from him.

But while the people, after so many successful struggles, deemed themselves happy in the secure possession of their privileges, they were surprised in 1305 to find that Edward had secretly applied to Rome, and had procured from that mercenary court, an absolution from all the oaths and engagements which he had so often reiterated, to observe both the charters. There are some historians so credulous as to imagine that this perilous step was taken by him for no other purpose than to acquire the merit of granting a new confirmation of the charters, as he did soon after; and a confirmation so much the more unquestionable, as it could never after be invalidated by his successors, on pretence of any force or violence which had been imposed upon him. But besides that this might have been done with a better grace, if he had never applied for any such absolution, the whole tenor of his conduct proves him to be little susceptible of such refinements in patriotism; and this very deed itself, in which he anew confirmed the charters, carries on the face of it a very opposite presumption. Though he ratified the charters in general, he still took advantage of the papal bull so far as to invalidate the late perambulations of the forests, which had been made with such care and attention, and to reserve to himself the power, in case of favourable incidents, to extend as much as formerly those arbitrary jurisdictions. If the power was not in fact made use of, we can only conclude that the favourable incidents did not offer.

Thus, after the contests of near a whole century, and these ever accompanied with violent jealousies, often with public convulsions, the Great Charter was finally established; and the English nation have the honour of extorting, by their perseverance, this concession from the ablest, the most warlike, and the most ambitious of all their princes. (It mast, however, be remarked, that the king never forgave the chief actors in this transaction; and he found means afterwards to oblige both the countable and mareschal to resign their offices into his hands The former received a new grant of it; but the office of mareschal was given to Thomas at Brotherton the kings second son.) It is computed, that above thirty confirmations of the Charter were at different times required of several kings, and granted by them in full parliament; a precaution which, while it discovers some ignorance of the true nature of law and government, proves a laudable jealousy of national privileges in the people, and an extreme anxiety lest contrary precedents should ever be pleaded as an authority for infringing them. Accordingly we find, that, though arbitrary practices often prevailed, and were even able to establish themselves into settled customs, the validity of the Great Charter was never afterwards formally disputed; and that grant was still regarded as the basis of English government, and the sure rule by which the authority of every custom was to be tried and canvassed. The jurisdiction of the Star-chamber, martial law, imprisonment by warrants from the privy-council, and other practices of a like nature, though established for several centuries, were scarcely ever allowed by the English to be parts of their constitution: the affection of the nation for liberty still prevailed over all precedent, and even all political reasoning: the exercise of these powers, after being long the source of secret murmurs among the people, was, in fullness of time, solemnly abolished as illegal, at least as oppressive, by the whole legislative authority.

To return to the period from which this account of the charters has led us: though the king's impatience to appear at the head of his armies in Flanders made him overlook all considerations, either of domestic discontents or of commotion's among the Scots; his embarkation had been so long retarded by the various obstructions thrown in his way, that he lost the proper season for action, and after his arrival made no progress against the enemy. The king of France, taking advantage of his absence, had broken into the Low Countries; had defeated the Flemings in the battle of Furnes; had made himself master of Lisle, St. Omer, Courtrai, and Ypres; and seemed in a situation to take full vengeance on the earl of Flanders, his rebellious vassal. But Edward, seconded by an English army of 50,000 men (for this is the number assigned by historians,) was able to stop the career of his victories; and Philip, finding all the weak resources of his kingdom already exhausted, began to dread a reverse of fortune, and to apprehend an invasion on France itself. The king of England on the other hand, disappointed of assistance from Adolph, king of the Romans which he had purchased at a very high price, and finding many urgent calls for his presence in England, was desirous of ending, on any honourable terns, a war winch served only to divert his force from the execution of more important projects. This disposition in both monarchs soon produced a cessation of hostilities for two years; and engaged them to submit their differences to the arbitration of pope Boniface.

1298. Boniface was among the last of the sovereign pontiffs that exercised an authority over the temporal jurisdiction of princes; and these exorbitant pretensions, which he had been tempted to assume from the successful example of his predecessors, but of which the season was now past, involved him in so many calamities, and were attended with so unfortunate a catastrophe, that they have been secretly abandoned, though never openly relinquished by his successors in the apostolic chair. Edward and Philip, equally jealous of papal claims, took care to insert in their reference, that Boniface was made judge of the difference by their consent, as a private person, not by any right of his pontificate; and the pope, without seeming to be offended at this mortifying clause, proceeded to give a sentence between them, in which they both acquiesced. He brought them to agree that their union should be cemented by a double marriage; that of Edward himself, who was now a widower, with Margaret, Philip's sister, and that of the prince of Wales with Isabella, daughter of that monarch. Philip was likewise willing to restore Guienne to the English, which he had indeed no good pretence to detain; but he insisted that the Scots, and their king, John Baliol, should, as his allies, be comprehended in the treaty, and should be restored to their liberty. Their difference, after several disputes, was compromised by their making mutual sacrifices to each other. Edward agreed to abandon his ally, the earl of Flanders, on condition that Philip should treat in like manner his ally, the king of Scots. The prospect of conquering these two countries, whose situation made them so commodious to acquisition to the respective kingdoms, prevailed over all other considerations; and though they were both finally disappointed in their hopes, their conduct was very reconcilable to the principles of an interested policy. This was the first specimen which the Scots had of the French alliance, and which was exactly conformable to what a smaller power must always expect, when it blindly attaches itself to the will and fortunes of a greater. That unhappy people, now engaged in a brave though unequal contest for their liberties, were totally abandoned by the ally in whom they reposed their final confidence, to the will of an imperious conqueror.

Continues