Palgrave has stated reasons which throw considerable doubt I Edward the Confessor has the credit of being the first EDWARD I., king of England, surnamed Long-shanks, from the excessive length of his legs, was the eldest son of King Henry III. by his wife Eleanor, second daughter of Raymond, count of Provence. He was born at Westminster, June 16, 1239. In 1252 he was invested by his father with the duchy of Guienne; but a claim being set up to this territory by Alphonso X., king of Castile, who pretended that it had been made over to his ancestor Alphonso VIII. by his father-in-law, Henry II., it was arranged the following year that the dispute should be settled by the marriage of Prince Edward with Eleanor, the sister of Alphonso, who thereupon resigned whatever right he had to the duchy to his brotherin-law. After this, by letters patent, dated February 14, 1254, we find the lordship of Ireland, and by others dated February 18, in the same year, all the provinces which had been seized from his father, John, by the king of France, granted by Henry III. to his son Prince Edward. (Rymer, I.) Edward early manifested a character very unlike that of his weak and imprudent father. While yet only entering upon manhood, we find him taking part in important affairs of state. Thus the agreement which Henry made in 1256 with Pope Alexander IV. in relation to the kingdom of Sicily, which the pope granted to Henry's second son Edmund, was ratified by Prince Edward in a letter to his Holiness, still preserved. In 1258 he signed, along with his father, the agreement called the Provisions or Statutes of Oxford, by which it was arranged that the government of the country should be put into the hands of twenty-four commissioners, appointed by the barons; and two years after, when Henry violently broke through this engagement, Edward came over from Guienne, where he was resident, and publicly expressed his disapprobation of the king's conduct. For the next two or three years Edward may be regarded as placed in opposition to his father's government. In 1262, however, Henry, in a visit which he paid him in Guienne, succeeded in gaining him over to his side, and from this time the prince became the king's most efficient supporter. In the summer of 1263, the quarrel between Henry and his barons came to a contest of arms, which lasted, with some brief intermissions, for four years. During this period the military operations on the king's side were principally conducted by Prince Edward. In the beginning he was unfortunate, having been driven first from Bristol and then from Windsor, and having been finally defeated and taken prisoner with his father at the battle of Lewes, fought May 14, 1264. After being detained however about a twelvemonth, he made his escape out of the hands of the earl of Leicester; and on the 4th August, 1265, his forces having encountered those of that nobleman at Evesham, the result was that Leicester was defeated and lost his life, and the king was restored to liberty. From this time Edward and his father carried everything before them till the war was concluded, in July, 1267, by the surrender of the last of the insurgents, who had taken up their position in the Isle of Ely. Soon after this, at a parliament held at Northampton, Prince Edward, together with several noblemen and a great number of knights, pledged themselves to proceed to join the crusaders in the Holy Land. The Prince accordingly, having first, in a visit to Paris, in August, 1269, made his arrangements with St. Louis, set sail from England to join that king in May, the year following. St. Louis died on his way to Palestine; and Edward, having spent the winter in Sicily waiting for him, did not arrive at the scene of action till the end of May, 1271. Here he performed several valorous exploits, which however were attended with no important result. His most memorable adventure was an encounter with a Saracen, who attempted to assassinate him, and whom he slew on the spot, but not before he had received a wound in the arm from a poisoned dagger, from the effects of which he is said to have been delivered by the princess, his wife, who sucked the poison from the wound. At last, having concluded a ten years' truce with the Saracens, he left Palestine in August, 1272, and set out on his return to England. He was at Messina, on his way home, in January, 1273, when he heard of the death of his father on the 16th of November preceding. He proceeded on his journey, and landed with his queen in England 25th July, 1274. They were both solemnly crowned at Westminster on the 19th of August following. The reign of Edward I., however, appears to have been reckoned not from the day of his coronation, according to the practice observed in the cases of all the preceding kings since the Conquest, but, according to the modern practice, from the day on which the throne became vacant, or at least from the 20th of November, the day of his father's funeral, immediately after which the clerical and lay nobility who were present in Westminster Abbey on the occasion had sworn fealty to the new king at the high altar of that church. The first military operations of Edward's reign were di- The conquest of Wales was followed by the attempt to ward was at this time involved. The expenses of his Scottish and French wars had pressed heavily upon the resources of the kingdom; and when he asked for more money, both clergy and laity refused him any farther grant without a redress of grievances and a confirmation of the several great national charters. After standing out for some time, he was obliged to comply with these terms: Magna Charta and the Charter of Forests were both confirmed, with some additional articles, in a parliament held at Westminster in October of this year. Meanwhile, although he had got disencumbered for the present of the war on the Continent, by the conclusion of a truce with King Philip, the rebellion in Scotland had already gained such a height as to have almost wholly cleared that country of the English authorities. The forces of the government had been completely put to the rout by Wallace at the battle of Stirling, fought on the 11th September, and in a few weeks more not a Scottish fortress remained in Edward's hands. Wallace was now appointed Governor of Scotland, in the name of King John (Balliol). In this state of things Edward, about the middle of March 1298, returned to England from Flanders where he had spent the winter. He immediately prepared to march for Scotland. The great battle of Falkirk followed on the 22nd of July, in which Wallace sustained a complete defeat. But although one consequence of this event was the resignation by Wallace of his office of governor, it was not followed by the general submission of the country. The next five years were spent in a succession of indecisive attempts on the part of the English king to regain possession of Scotland; the military operations being frequently suspended by long truces. At length, having satisfied his barons by repeated renewals of the charters, and having finally relieved himself from all interference on the part of the king of France by a definitive treaty of peace concluded with him at Amiens on the 20th May, 1303, Edward once more set out for Scotland at the head of a force too numerous and too well appointed to be resisted by any strength that exhausted country could now command. The result was again its temporary conquest, and merciless devastation from the Tweed to the Murray Frith. The Castle of Stirling was the last fortress that held out; it did not surrender till the 20th of July in the following year. Edward meanwhile had wintered in Dunfermline; he only returned to England in time to keep his Christmas in Lincoln. Wallace fell into his hands in a few months afterwards, and was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor, at Smithfield in London, on the 23rd August, 1305. But another champion of the Scottish independence was not long in appearing. Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, whose grandfather had been the chief competitor for the crown with Balliol, had resided for some years at the English court; but he now, in the beginning of February, 1306, suddenly made his escape to Scotland; and in a few weeks the banner of revolt against the English domination was again unfurled in that country, and the insurgent people gathered around this new leader. Bruce was solemnly crowned at Scone on the 27th March. On receiving this news Edward immediately prepared for a new expedition to Scotland; and sent the Earl of Pembroke forward to encounter Bruce, intending to follow himself as soon as he had completed the necessary arrangements. The army of Bruce was dispersed at Perth on the 19th June by Pembroke, who had thrown himself into that town; and the king of the Scots became for a time a houseless fugitive. But the great enemy of that unfortunate people had now reached the last stage of his destructive career. Edward got no farther than a few miles beyond Carlisle in his last journey to the north. After spending the winter months at Lanercost, where he was detained by a severe illness, he appears to have arrived in that city in the beginning of March, 1307; here he was again taken ill, but his eagerness to advance continued unabated: having somewhat recovered he again set out, although he was still so weak and suffered so much pain that he could accomplish no more than six miles in four days. On the 6th of July he reached the village of Burgh-upon-Sands, and next day expired,' to copy the words of Lord Hailes, in sight of that country which he had devoted to destruction.' On his death-bed he is said to have enjoined his son and successor to prosecute the design which it was not given to himself to finish: according to Froissart, he made him swear that after the breath had departed from the royal body he would cause it to be boiled in a cauldron till the flesh fell off, and that he would preserve the bones to carry with him against the Scots as often as they should rebel. This oath, however, if it was taken, was not kept. The corpse of King Edward was interred in Westminster Abbey on the 28th of October. Edward I. was twice married. By his first wife Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III., king of Castile and Leon, he had four sons: John and Henry, who both died in infancy while their father was in the Holy Land; Alphonso, born at Maine in Gascony, 23rd November, 1273, who died at Windsor, 4th August, 1285; and Edward, who succeeded him. He had also by Eleanor nine daughters: Eleanor, born in 1266, married to Henry earl of Bar; Joanna of Acre, born in that town in 1272, married first to Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hereford, and secondly to Sir Ralph Monthermer; Margaret, born 1275, married to John duke of Brabant; Berengera, born in 1276; Alice; Mary, born 22nd April, 1279, who at ten years of age took the veil in the monastery of Ambresbury; Elizabeth, born in 1284, married first, to John earl of Holland and Zealand, secondly, to Humphrey Bohun earl of Hertford and Essex; Beatrice; and Blanch. Queen Eleanor died 28th November, 1291, at Grantham, or, according to another account, at Hardeby, in Lincolnshire: her body was brought to Westminster Abbey to be interred, and crosses were afterwards erected on the several spots where it rested on the way, namely, at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Goddington, Northampton (near which town one exists), Stoney Stratford, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham, (where the cross, a very beautiful one, still stands, and has been lately restored,) and Charing, then a village near London, but now the centre of the metropolis, under the name of Charing Cross. Edward's second wife was Margaret, eldest daughter of Philip III., and sister of Philip IV., kings of France. He was married to her on the 10th of September, 1299, she being then in her eighteenth year. By Queen Margaret he had two sons: Thomas, born at Brotherton in Yorkshire, 1st June, 1300, afterwards created earl of Norfolk and earl marshal; and Edmund, born 5th August, 1301, afterwards created earl of Kent; and one daughter, Eleanor, born at Winchester, 6th May, 1306, who died in her childhood. Queen Margaret died in 1317. The rapid narrative that has been given of the acts of his reign sufficiently indicates the main constituents of the character of this king. He had his full share of the ability and the daring of the vigorous line from which he was sprung; a line that (including himself) had now given nine kings to England, and only two of them not men of extraordinary force of character. With all his ambition and stern determination, however, Edward neither loved bloodshed for itself, nor was he a professed or systematic despiser of the rules of right and justice. It is probable that in his persevering contest with the Scots he believed that he was only enforcing the just claims of his crown; and his conduct, therefore, ferocious and vindictive as in many respects it was, may be vindicated from the charge of want of principle, if tried by the current opinions and sentiments of his age. Putting aside considerations of morality, we perceive in him an ample endowment of many of the qualities that most conduce to eminence-activity, decision, foresight, inflexibility, perseverance, military skill, personal courage and power of endurance; and, united with boldness in conceiving and executing his designs, great patience and sagacity in preparing and managing his instruments, and bending circumstances to his will. Engaged as he was during the greater part of his reign in war, he was not advantageously placed for the full application of his talents to the business of civil government; but his reign is notwithstanding one of the most remarkable in our history, for the progress which was made in it towards the settlement of the laws and the constitution. On this account Edward I has often been styled (though, as is obvious to any one who knows what Justinian's legislation was, not with any propriety) the English Justinian; and Sir Matthew Hale (Hist. of the Common Law of England, chap. 7) has remarked that more was done in the first thirteen years of his reign to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom than in all the next four centuries. Blackstone has enumerated under fifteen heads the principal alterations and improvements which the law underwent in the reign of Edward I.: we can only here notice the confirmation and final establishment of the two great charters; the definition and limitation of the bounds of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the ascertainment and distribution of the had been passed prohibiting the Jews from taking interest for money on pain of death. powers and functions both of the supreme and the inferior | courts; the abolition of the practice of issuing royal mandates in private causes; the establishment of a repository for the public records of the kingdom, few of which,' as Blackstone remarks, are antienter than the reign of his father, and those were by him collected;' the improvement of the law and process for the recovery of debts by the Statutes Merchant and Elegit [ELEGIT]; and the check imposed on the encroachments of the church by the passing of several statutes of mortmain. The object of the statute De Donis was to render lands which were the subject of this particular form of grant inalienable, and so far to put restraints upon the disposal of landed property, which however were soon evaded. [CONDITION; ESTATE.] Upon the whole, we may observe,' concludes Blackstone after Hale, 'that the very scheme and model of the administration of common justice between party and party was entirely settled by this king. The forms of writs by which actions are commenced, it is added, were perfected in this reign. While the English laws were fully extended to Ireland and Wales, it was under Edward I., also, that the foundations of the constitution of the kingdom may be considered to have been laid by the new form and the new powers which were then assumed by the parliament. The earliest writs that have been preserved for summoning knights, citizens, and burgesses to parliament, are, as is well known, those that were issued by Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, the leader of the barons, in 1264, in the name of king Henry III., who was then a prisoner in his hands. Whether this representation of the commons was then first introduced or not, it was in the course of the succeeding reign that it first became regular and influential. The division of the legislature into two houses, in other words the institution of our present House of Commons, appears to be clearly traceable to the time of Edward I. It was in his time also that the practice began fairly to take root of the king refraining from arbitrary exactions and coming to parliament for supplies, and that the earliest effective examples were afforded of the grant of supplies by that assembly being made dependent upon the redress of grievances. Edward I., with all his military habits and genius, had at length the good sense to perceive that the time was come for abandoning the attempt to govern by the prerogative alone, which had been clung to by all his predecessors from the conquest: in his disputes with the barons he never allowed matters to come to a contest of force, as his father and grandfather had done; and in the latter part of his reign, although more than once compelled to stop short in his most favourite designs by the refusal of the national representatives to furnish him with the necessary means, he seems to have kept to the system of never resorting to any other weapons than policy and management to overcome the opposition with which he was thus thwarted. It was in the last year but one of this reign that the royal assent was given to the famous enactment commonly called the Statute de Tallagio non Concedendo,' by which the right of taxation was first distinctly affirmed to reside in the parliament: no tallage or aid,' the first chapter runs (in the old English translation), shall be levied by us or our heirs in our realm, without the good will and assent of Archbishops, Bishops, Earls, Barons, Knights, Burgesses, and other Freemen of the land.' principle had been conceded ten years before (by the 25th Edward I., c. 6), but not in such explicit terms. The same The trade and foreign commerce of England appear to have advanced considerably during the reign of Edward I.; but rather owing to the natural progress of the civilization of this country and of Europe, than from any enlightened attention which the king showed to these interests. He seems to have been principally solicitous to turn the increasing intercourse of the country with foreign parts to his own particular profit by the increase of the customs. A few of his laws, however, were beneficial to the trading community, and were made with this express object, especially the act for the better recovery of debts, commonly called the Statute of Merchants, passed at Acton-Burnell in 1283; and the extension of the same by a subsequent act; and the Elegit above mentioned. On the other hand, he lowered, though slightly, the real value of the coin, thereby setting the first example of a most pernicious process, which was afterwards carried much farther. He also cruelly pillaged and oppressed the Jews; and finally, in 1290, expelled the entire body of that people from England, and seized all their houses and tenements. Before this (in 1275) a law The most distinguished names in literature and science that belong to the reign of Edward I. are Duns Scotus, his disciple William Occam, and the illustrious Roger Bacon. Among the historical writers or chroniclers who flourished at this time, may be mentioned Thomas Wikes, Nicolas Trivet, Walter de Hemmingford, and, according to one account, Matthew of Westminster, though he is placed by some considerably later. The law writers of this reign are the author of the work entitled Fleta, Britton (if that be not a corruption of Bracton), Hengham, and Gilbert de Thornton, chief justice of the King's Bench, the author of an abridgment of Bracton, which has not been printed. EDWARD II., the eldest surviving son of Edward I., was born at Caernarvon 25th April, 1284, and became the heir apparent to the crown by the death of his elder brother, Alphonso, a few months after. In 1289 he was affianced to the young queen of Scotland, who died the following year. On the 1st of August, 1297, his father, before setting out for Flanders, assembled a great council at London, and made the nobility swear fealty to the prince, whom he then appointed regent of the kingdom during his absence. The parliament in which the first statute De Tallagio non concedendo received the royal assent was held at Westminster by prince Edward a few months after his father's departure. In the summer of 1300 we find him accompanying his father in a military expedition to Scotland, and he is particularly mentioned as leading one of the divisions of the army, called the Shining Battalion, in an encounter with the Scottish forces on the banks of the river Irvine. As he grew towards manhood, however, he appears to have begun to form those vicious associations which were the chief source of the calamities of his life. It is recorded by Stow and Fabyan that in October of this same year the notorious Piers Gaveston was banished by the king from about the person of prince Edward, who, through his persuasion, had been guilty of several outrages against the bishop of Lichfield, and the prince himself was ordered to prison for stealing the bishop's deer. Gaveston was the son of a knight of Gascony, and is admitted to have been distinguished by his wit and accomplishments as well as by his personal advantages, but he is affirmed to have, as the prince's minion, carried himself to men of all ranks with unbearable insolence. In 1301 Edward was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. He was again in Scotland with his father in the expedition in the summer of 1303: while the king proceeded along the east coast, the prince marched westward, and the latter afterwards wintered in Perth, while his father remained in Dunfermline. When Edward was preparing for his last Scottish expedition after the insurrection under Robert Bruce, he knighted his eldest son at Westminster on the morrow of Whitsuntide, 1306; after which the prince bestowed the same honour on three hundred gentlemen, his intended companions in arms. He was at the same time invested by his father with the duchy of Guienne. The royal banquet that was given on this occasion is celebrated for what is called the Vow of the Swans, an oath taken by the king to God and to two swans, which were brought in and set upon the table, that he would take vengeance on Robert Bruce and punish the treachery of the Scots. The prince also vowed that he would not remain two nights in the same place until he reached Scotland. He set out accordingly before his father, and as soon as he had crossed the borders he began to signalize his march by such unsparing devastation that even the old king is said to have reproved him for his cruelty. While king Edward was at Lanercost in February, 1307, he found it necessary, with the consent of the parliament there assembled, to issue an order banishing Gaveston for ever from the kingdom, as a corrupter of the prince. It is doubtful, notwithstanding the story told by Froissart [EDWARD I.] if the prince of Wales was with his father when he died on the 7th of July following; but he was at any rate at no great distance, and he was immediately recognized as king. His reign appears to have been reckoned from the day following. The new king obeyed his father's injunctions to prosecute the war with Scotland, by proceeding on his march into that country as far as Cumnock, in Ayrshire. But here he turned round without having done anything, and made his way back to England. Meanwhile his whole mind seems to have been occupied only with one object~ the advancement of the favourite. A few dates will best show the violence of his infatuation. His first recorded act of government was to confer upon Gaveston, now recalled to England, the earldom of Cornwall, a dignity which had hitherto been held only by princes of the blood, and had a few years before reverted to the crown by the death, without issue, of Edmund Plantagenet, the late king's cousin: the grant, bestowing all the lands of the earldom as well as the dignity, is dated at Dumfries, the 6th of August, 1307. About the same time Walter de Langton, bishop of Lichfield, who was lord high treasurer, was imprisoned in Wallingford castle, as having been the principal promoter of Gaveston's banishment. In October the new earl of Cornwall married the king's niece, Margaret de Clare, the daughter of his sister, Joanna, countess of Gloucester. He was also made guardian during his minority to her brother, the young earl. The grant of several other lordships followed immediately, and it is even said that the reckless prodigality of the weak king went the length of making over all the treasure his father had collected for the Scottish war, amounting to nearly a hundred thousand pounds, to the object of his insane attachment. Finally, he left him guardian of the realm while he set out for Boulogne in January, 1308, to marry Isabella, the daughter of the French king, Philip V., to whom he had been affianced ever since the treaty concluded between Philip and his father in 1299. The marriage took place on the 25th of January, and on the 25th of February the king and queen were crowned at Westminster. The history of the kingdom for the next five years is merely that of a long struggle between the king and his disgusted nobility about this Gaveston. The banishment of the favourite being insisted upon by a formidable league of the barons, Edward was obliged to give in; but instead of being ignominiously sent out of the country, Gaveston was merely appointed to the government of Ireland. In June his royal master accompanied him as far as Bristol on his way to that country. Even from this honourable exile, however, he returned in October following. The barons immediately again remonstrated, and in March, 1310, the king found himself compelled to sign a commission by which he resigned the government of the kingdom for the ensuing year into the hands of a committee appointed by the parliament. A sentence of banishment was soon after passed upon Gaveston, and he retired to France; but by the close of the year 1311 we find him again in England. The earl of Lancaster, the king's cousin, now placed himself at the head of the malecontents: finding petitions and remonstrances unattended to, he and his associates at length openly rose in arms: Gaveston was besieged in Scarborough castle, and having been forced to surrender, his career was ended by his summary execution at Warwick on the 19th of June, 1312. Having thus attained their main object, the insurgent barons made their submission to the king, and a peace was finally concluded between the parties in December. In the course of the last two or three years Robert Bruce, left unmolested in Scotland, had not only nearly recovered every place of strength in that country, but had been accustomed to make an annual plundering inroad across the borders. It was now determined to take advantage of the cessation of domestic dissensions to effect the re-conquest of the northern kingdom; and in June, 1314, Edward set out for that purpose at the head of the most numerous army that had ever been raised in England. The issue of this expedition was the signal defeat sustained at the battle of Bannockburn, fought the 24th of June, at which the magnificent host of the English king was completely scattered, he himself narrowly escaping captivity. After this the few remaining fortresses in Scotland that were still held by English garrisons speedily fell into the hands of Bruce; the predatory and devastating incursions of the Scots into England were renewed with more audacity than ever; and Bruce and his brother Edward even made a descent upon Ireland, and for some time contested the dominion of that island with its English masters. At length, in September, 1319, a truce for two years with the Scots was arranged with difficulty. Nor was it long observed by the party most interested in breaking it. The Scots easily found pretences on which to renew their attacks, and Edward's efforts to check them proved as impotent as before. Meanwhile, a new favourite began to engross him, Hugh e Despencer, the son of a nobleman of the same name. P. C., No. 567. Upon him Edward now bestowed another daughter of his sister, the countess of Gloucester, in marriage, and many large possessions. Another armed insurrection of the barons was the consequence; and in July, 1321, the Despencers, father and son, were both banished by act of parliament. Before the end of the same year, however, they were recalled by the king; and now for a short time the fortune of the contest changed. The earl of Lancaster was taken and beheaded at Pontefract, 23rd March, 1322; and the sentence against the Despencers was soon after formally revoked by parliament. About twenty of the leaders of the insurrection in all were put to death; but the estates of many more were forfeited; and most of the immense amount of plunder thus obtained by the crown was at once bestowed upon the younger Spencer. Edward imagining that he had now an opportunity of which he might take advantage, set out once more for the conquest of Scotland in August, 1322; but after advancing as far as Culross, in Fife, he returned without having accomplished anything more than the destruction of a few religious houses; and on the 30th of March, 1323, he concluded another truce with the Scots, to last for thirteen years. New storms, however, were already rising against the unhappy king. Charles IV., called the Fair, the youngest brother of Edward's queen, had recently succeeded to the French throne, and had begun his reign by quarrelling on some pretence with his brother-in-law, and seizing Guienne and Edward's other territories in France. After some other attempts at negotiation, it was resolved that queen Isabella should herself go over to France to endeavour to bring about an arrangement. The queen had been already excited against the Despencers; she had long probably despised a husband who was the object of such general contempt, and who besides openly preferred his male favourites to her society. At the French court she found collected many English nobles and other persons of distinction, whom their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, or the enmity of the Despencers, had driven from their country. All these circumstances considered, it is easy to understand how she might naturally become the centre and head of a combination formed by the discontented exiles among whom she was thrown, and their connexions still in England, for the professed object of compelling her husband to change his system of government and of removing the pernicious power that stood between the nation and the throne. Among the foremost figures of the association with which she thus became surrounded was the young Roger de Mortimer, a powerful baron, who had made his escape from England after having been condemned, for taking part in the former confederacy against the Despencers, to imprisonment for life. There is no doubt that the connexion between Queen Isabella and Mortimer became eventually a criminal one. The plot against the king was begun by the conspirators contriving to get the heir-apparent, Prince Edward, into their power. It was arranged that King Charles should restore Guienne upon receiving from the prince the homage which his father had refused to render. On this Prince Edward, now in his thirteenth year, was sent over to France to his mother. The first use Isabella made of this important acquisition was to affiance the boy to Philippa, the daughter of the earl of Hainault, who in return agreed to assist her and the confederates with troops and money. Thus supported, she set sail from Dort with a force of 3000 men, under the command of the earl's brother, and landed at Orwell in Suffolk, the 22nd of September, 1326. She was immediately joined by all the most distinguished persons in the kingdom, including even the earl of Kent, the king's own brother. Edward, deserted by all except the two Despencers and a few of their creatures, left London, and took refuge at first in Bristol; he then embarked for Ireland, or, as another account says, with the design of making for the small isle of Lundy, at the mouth of the Bristol Channel; but being driven back by contrary winds, he landed again in Wales, and shut himself up in Neath Abbey, in Glamorganshire. Meanwhile, the queen's forces attacked the castle of Bristol, where the elder Despencer, styled earl of Winchester, had been left governor by the king. When the siege had lasted only a few days, the garrison rose in mutiny and delivered up the old man. He was ninety years of age; but his grey hairs did not save him; he was immediately executed with every circumstance of barbarous insult the ingenuity of his captors could devise. The next day (26th VOL. IX.-2 P October) the prelates and barons in the queen's camp declared Prince Edward guardian of the kingdom. The king was discovered in his place of concealment about three weeks after, and was conducted in custody first to the castle of Monmouth, and then to that of Kenilworth. The younger Despencer was also taken; he was hanged and quartered at Hereford on the 24th of November. The parliament assembled on the 1st of January, 1327; and after going through some forms of negotiation with the imprisoned king, it was resolved, on the 25th of that month, that the crown should be taken from him and conferred upon his son Prince Edward. A deputation announced this resolution to the deposed monarch. He re mained for some months longer at Kenilworth: he was then transferred successively to Corfe, Bristol, and Berkeley Castles. At length, when it was found that mere insult would not kill him, he was, on the night of the 20th of September, murdered in the last-mentioned place by his keepers Sir Thomas Gournay and Sir John Maltravers, who with detestable brutality thrust a red-hot iron into his bowels through a pipe, thus contriving to destroy him without leaving any external marks of their atrocious operation. Edward II. left by his Queen, Isabella of France, two sons, Edward, who succeeded him, and John, born at Eltham 15th August, 1316, created earl of Cornwall, in 1327, who died at Perth in October, 1336; and two daughters, Joanna, married 12th July, 1328, to Prince David, eldest son of Robert Bruce, afterwards King David II. of Scotland, and Eleanor, who became the wife of Reginald Count of Guelders. The statutes down to the end of the reign of Edward II are commonly distinguished as the Vetera Statuta.' Pleading now began to assume a scientific form. The series of year-books, or reports by authority of adjudged cases, is nearly perfect from the commencement of this reigu. The only law treatise belonging, or supposed to belong, to the reign of Edward II. is Horne's Miroir des Justices. The circumstances of the reign were as little favourable to literature as to commerce and the arts. Warton observes that though much poetry now began to be written, he has found only one English poet of the period whose name has descended to posterity; Adam Davy or Davie, the author of various poems of a religious cast, which have never been printed. Among these, however, is not to be reckoned the long work entitled The Life of Alexander,' which is erroneously attributed to him by Warton, but which has since been conclusively shown not to be his. It is printed for the first time in Weber's Metrical Romances. There is still extant a curious Latin poem on the battle of Bannockburn, written in rhyming hexameters by Robert Baston, a Carmelite friar, whom Edward carried along with him to celebrate his anticipated victory, but who, being taken prisoner, was compelled by the Scotch to sing the defeat of his countrymen in this jingling effusion. Bale speaks of this Baston as a writer of tragedies and comedies, some of which appear to have been English; but none of them are now known to exist. EDWARD III., king of England, the eldest son of Edward II. and Isabella of France, was born at Windsor (whence he took his surname), 13th November, 1312. In the first negotiations with the court of France after the breaking out of the quarrel about Guienne in 1324, a proIV., for a marriage between a daughter of his uncle, the count de Valois, and the young prince of Wales, as Edward was styled; but it was coolly received by the king of England, and ended in nothing. In September of the year following Prince Edward proceeded to Paris, where his mother now was, and did homage to his uncle, king Charles, for the duchy of Guienne and the earldom of Ponthieu, which his father had previously resigned to him. He was induced by his mother to remain with her at the French court, notwithstanding the most pressing letters from his father (Rymer, iv.), begging and commanding him to return. Meanwhile Isabella, having previously solicited from the pope a dispensation (which however she did not obtain) to permit her to marry her son without his father's knowledge, had arranged a compact with William earl of Hainault, by which the prince was affianced to Philippa, the second of the earl's four daughters. Edward was soon after carried by his mother to Valenciennes, the residence of the earl of Hainault, where he met Philippa, and, it is said, fell ardently in love with her. He landed with his mother in England in September, 1326; was declared guardian or regent of the kingdom about a month after; and was proclaimed king on the deposition of his father, 25th January, 1327. [EDWARD II.] He was crowned at Westminster the following day. Some attempts have been made in modern times to dispute the justice of the character which has been generally given of this king, and to throw the blame of the civil disposal seems to have been made by the French king, Charles tractions which rendered his reign so unhappy and so ignominious a one, rather upon his turbulent nobility than himself. Hume, whose good nature and indolent generosity of feeling inclined him in this as well as in other cases to side with the unsuccessful party, while his quiet temper made him also constitutionally averse to that revolt against established authority and those other irregular proceedings with which the barons are chargeable in their contest with Edward II., has written the history of the reign with a studied endeavour to put the former in the wrong throughout, and to represent Edward as the victim, not of his own weaknesses and vices, but rather of the barbarism of the age. The facts, however, on which the common verdict rests cannot be thus explained away. It may be admitted that among the motives which excited and sustained the several confederacies against the king, and in the conduct of some of those who took the lead in them, there was violence and want of principle enough; it is of the nature of things that the baser passions should mix themselves up and even act an important part in all such conflicts, however righteous in their origin and general object; but nothing that can be alleged on this head can affect the question of Edward's unfitness to wear the crown. That question must be considered as settled, if not by the course of outrage against all decency manifested by his conduct in the matter of Gaveston, certainly by his relapse into the same fatal fatuity The government of the kingdom during the king's mia few years after, when he fell into the hands of his second nority was placed by the parliament in the hands of a refavourite Despencer. Hume has spoken of the acts of mal-gency, consisting of twelve noblemen and bishops, with administration objected to the king and his minions as 'of a Henry earl of Lancaster (the brother of Thomas, executed nature more proper to excite heart-burnings in a ball or as- in the preceding reign) at their head. The queen however sembly than commotions in a great kingdom.' The ad- and Mortimer (now created earl of March) from the first mitted fact of the universal indignation which the acts in assumed the chief management of affairs, and soon monoquestion did excite is a sufficient answer to this statement polized all power. They must be considered as having been of the case. the real authors of the murder of the deposed king. Their authority seemed for the moment to be rather strengthened than otherwise by the failure of a confederacy formed among the nobility to effect their overthrow in the winter of 1328-9. In March, 1329, signal proof was given of their determination and daring in the maintenance of their position, by the fate of the king's uncle, the earl of Kent, who having become involved in what was construed to be a plot against the government, was put to death on that charge. To the reign of Edward II. belongs the memorable event of the suppression in England, as in the other countries of Europe, of the great order of the Knights-Templars. Their property was seized all over England in 1308; but the suppression of the order in this country was not accompanied by any of that cruel treatment of the persons of the members which they experienced in France. In 1324 the lands which had belonged to the Templars were bestowed upon the order of St. John of Jerusalem. The most important legal innovation of this reign was that made by the statute of sheriffs (9 Edward II., st. 2), by which the right of appointing those officers was taken from the people and committed to the chancellor, the treasurer, and the judges. Several of the royal prerogatives, relating principally to tenures, were also defined by the statute entitled 'Prerogativa Regis' (17 Edward II., st. 1). Meanwhile the king, young as he was, and although thus excluded from the government, had not passed his time in inactivity. He was married to Philippa of Hainault, 24th January, 1328. A few months after his accession he had marched at the head of a numerous army against the Scotch, who had again invaded and ravaged the northern counties; but they eluded all his attempts to come up with them, and after a campaign of three weeks this expedition |