Part 14

When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there was nothing to fear. Henry’s petulant wit broke out in his reply: “If I fear the thunder,” said the king, “I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world.”

The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of English freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simon became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which he inherited through his mother, and a secret match with Eleanor, the king’s sister and widow of the second William Marshal, linked him to the royal house. The baronage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor’s breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first husband’s death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome. Simon returned to find the changeable king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, soon restored to favor, and before long took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. In 1248 he was appointed governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of order made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. The complaints of the Gascons brought about an open breach with the king. To Earl Simon’s offer of the surrender of his post if the money he had spent in the royal service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the king hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a word!” A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the earl once more returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.

Simon’s character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the strict and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was the friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his “constancy,” the firm, immovable resolve which trampled even death under foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward I chose as his device, “Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties both at home and abroad he “thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the failure of all support or funds from England, and the king’s desertion of his cause, till the work was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Grosseteste show how early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He sends to Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste’s on “the rule of a kingdom and of a tyranny,” sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. “Better is a patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “than a strong man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city.” “What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace of your own household?” It was to secure “the peace of his fellow-citizens” that the earl silently trained himself as the tide of misgovernment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered itself round the stern, grave soldier who “stood like a pillar,” unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn.

In England affairs were going from bad to worse. The Pope still weighed heavily on the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and again in 1255, the great council fruitlessly renewed its demand for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the chief officers of the crown were appointed by the council. Henry indignantly refused the offer, and sold his plate to the citizens of London to find payment for his household. The barons were mutinous and defiant. “I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,” Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk when he refused him aid. “And I will send you back the heads of your reapers,” retorted the earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and by the refusal of supplies, the crown was penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry’s acceptance of a papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in favor of his second son, Edmund. Shame had fallen on the English arms, and the king’s eldest son, Edward, had been disastrously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. The tide of discontent, which was heightened by a grievous famine, burst its bounds in the irritation excited by the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 1258 opened, and the barons repaired in arms to a great council summoned at London. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of the charter--its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage, and a definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the charter, and his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken.

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. “Now England breathes in the hope of liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their foes are vanquished.” The song announces with almost legal precision the theory of the patriots. “He who would be in truth a king, he is a ‘free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of his kingdom, but nothing for its destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king’s duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.... Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be known what the generality, to whom their own laws are best known, think on the matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their own affairs which are at stake, they will take more care, and will act with an eye to their own peace.... It concerns the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.” The constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated before.

It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. A new Parliament was summoned in January, 1265, to Westminster, but the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics. But it was just this sense of his weakness that drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the Parliament of the realm.

EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Surnamed Longshanks, born 1239, crowned 1274, died 1307. Son of Henry III, he defeated and slew Simon de Montfort in his father’s reign and took part in the fourth crusade. On his accession to the throne he completed the subjugation of Wales and in all ways approved himself an able and powerful monarch. The most signal events of his reign were those connected with the subjugation of Scotland. At first successful, it was only in the last months of his long reign that Robert Bruce’s coronation as King of the Scots opened the way for a final defeat of English claims and arms under Edward II.]

In his own time, and among his own subjects, Edward was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward’s very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled; like them willful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. He inherited, indeed, from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But for the most part his impulses were generous, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgiveness. “No man ever asked mercy of me,” he said, in his old age, “and was refused.” The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. “It is I who have brought you into this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink.” A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection lay, in fact, beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing. Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his father’s death, though it gave him a crown; whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother; whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife’s bier rested. “I loved her tenderly in her lifetime,” wrote Edward to Eleanor’s friend the Abbot of Cluny; “I do not cease to love her now she is dead.” And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier Angevins disappears in Edward. He was the first English king since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than that which closes the long contest over the charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong.

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in Edward’s career. Under the first king, whose temper was distinctly English, a foreign influence told most fatally on our manners, our literature, our national spirit. The rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus was now making its influence dominant in Western Europe. The “chivalry” so familiar in Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy, before which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward’s nature from which the baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety, save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable chivalry of his day. He had been famous from his very youth as a consummate general; Earl Simon had admired the skill of his advance at Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a tenacity and force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a commissariat which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery, and to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But his fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people’s love of hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier--tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action. When he encountered Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned prowess, after Evesham, he forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. At his “Round Table of Kenilworth” a hundred lords and ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the faded glories of Arthur’s court. The false air of romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his “Vow of the Swan,” when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class, and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. “Knight without reproach” as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.

Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its influence on Edward’s mind was the new French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties, such as commendation, into a definite vassalage. But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time. When the “sacred majesty” of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage, every constitutional relation was changed. The “defiance” by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason, his after-resistance “sacrilege.” That Edward could appreciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never willfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which he had borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of nobleness and meanness, that we must look for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward’s conduct and policy.

ROBERT BRUCE.

BY SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[Born Lord of Annandale and Earl of Carrick 1274, died King of Scotland 1329. Robert Bruce was descended from the younger branch of the royal line of Scotland, to which succession had reverted by the death of Margaret, the “Maiden of Norway.” Brought up in the English court, where he was a favorite of Edward I, who claimed to be over-lord of Scotland, and, as such, feudal superior of her kings, he had vacillated in his course in the wars which had been carried on by Edward to enforce that claim. In 1306 he threw off all indecision, accepted the Scottish crown, and was invested at Scone. Severely defeated at the beginning by the lieutenants of Edward, he was relieved, by the death of the latter while marching to take personal command, of his most dangerous antagonist. Edward II for some years did not push aggression against Scotland, and the Scottish monarch had recovered nearly all his dominions, when Edward marched against him with a great army. The Scots gained an overwhelming victory at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and royal Scottish authority was re-established. The complete independence of Scotland was not acknowledged however, till 1328, in the reign of Edward III.]

Toward a due understanding of the extraordinary merits of Robert Bruce it is necessary to take a cursory view of the power with which he had to contend and of the resources of that kingdom, which, at that critical juncture, Providence committed to his charge. The power of England, against which it was his lot to struggle, was, perhaps, the most formidable which then existed in Europe. The native valor of her people, distinguished even under the weakest reign, was then led on and animated by a numerous and valiant feudal nobility. That bold and romantic spirit of enterprise which led the Norman arms to the throne of England and enabled Roger de Hauteville, with thirty followers, to win the crown of the Two Sicilies still animated the English nobles; and to this hereditary spirit was added the remembrance of the matchless glories which their arms had acquired in Palestine.

The barons who were then arrayed against Robert Bruce were the descendants of those iron warriors who combated for Christendom under the walls of Acre, and defeated the whole Saracen strength in the battle of Ascalon; the banners that were then unfurled for the conquest of Scotland were those which had waved victorious over the arms of Saladin; and the sovereign who led them bore the crown that had been worn by Richard in the Holy Wars, and wielded in his sword the terror of that mighty name at which even the accumulated hosts of Asia were appalled.

Nor were the resources of England less formidable for nourishing and maintaining the war. The prosperity which had grown up with the equal laws of our Saxon ancestors, and which the tyranny of the early Norman kings had never completely extinguished, had revived and spread under the wise and beneficent reigns of Henry II and Edward I. The legislative wisdom of the last monarch had given to the English law greater improvements than it had ever received in any subsequent reigns, while his heroic valor had subdued the rebellious spirit of his barons and trained their united strength to submission to the throne. The acquisition of Wales had removed the only weak point of his wide dominion and added a cruel and savage race to the already formidable mass of his armies. The navy of England already ruled the seas, and was prepared to carry ravage and desolation over the wide and defenseless Scottish coast; while a hundred thousand men armed in the magnificent array of feudal war and led on by the ambition of a feudal nobility poured into a country which seemed destined only to be their prey.

But, most of all, in the ranks of this army were found the intrepid yeomanry of England--that peculiar and valuable body of men which has in every age contributed as much to the stability of English character as the celebrity of the English arms, and which then composed those terrible archers whose prowess rendered them so formidable to all the armies of Europe. These men, whose valor was warmed by the consciousness of personal freedom and whose strength was nursed among the inclosed fields and green pastures of English liberty, conferred, till the discovery of firearms rendered personal accomplishments of no avail, a matchless advantage on the English armies. The troops of no other nation could produce a body of men in the least comparable to them, either in strength, discipline, or individual valor; and such was the dreadful efficacy with which they used their weapons that not only did they mainly contribute to the subsequent triumphs of Cressy and Azincourt, but at Poitiers and Hamildon Hill they alone gained the victory, with hardly any assistance from the feudal tenantry.

These troops were well known to the Scottish soldiers, and had established their superiority over them in many bloody battles, in which the utmost efforts of undisciplined valor had been found unavailing against their practiced discipline and superior equipment. The very names of the barons who headed them were associated with an unbroken career of conquest and renown, and can hardly be read yet without a feeling of exultation.