ᎣᎣᎣ CHAPTER VIII. "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king! Mark the year and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright, The shrieks of death, through Berkeley's roofs that ring, GRAY. The House of PLANTAGENET continued from the Accession of EDWARD I. to the Death of EDWARD II. UNTIL the accession of Edward I., A. D. 1272, the hereditary order of succession had been constantly either invaded or endangered. Even in the Anglo-Saxon times this irregularity occurred; the Great Alfred was elected king to the prejudice of his elder brother's children, Edred usurped the right of his nephew Edwy, and Edward the Confessor became king instead of his elder brother Edmund Ironside's son. In the Anglo-Norman times we find younger brothers seizing the inheritance of their elder brother, as in the case of William Rufus and Henry Beauclerc; the latter monarch's daughter saw her birthright usurped by Stephen, and John seized the rightful inheritance of his elder brother Geoffrey's son; and even when Henry III. ascended the throne, the crown had actually been placed upon the head of Louis the Dauphin. At Henry's death, however, so secured was felt to be the rightful inheritance of his son Edward, although absent from England, that the prince did not consider it necessary to hasten his return, but passed nearly a year in France before he came to England. The fame which he had acquired in Palestine, hardly inferior to that of Coeur-de-Lion, his success against Leicester during his father's reign, his moderation, and his military talents, caused him to be received with joyful acclamations by the people, and he was crowned with his consort Eleanor at Westminster, August 19th, 1274. After correcting the various disorders which had arisen during the long and troubled reign of his father, and teaching the barons to expect a more vigorous and impartial administration of justice, Ed 1 Edward's brother-in-law, Alexander III., King of Scots, attended this ceremony, accompanied by one hundred knights on horseback, who, on dismounting, turned their steeds loose among the crowd; and this example was followed by Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, and by the Earls of Pembroke, Gloucester, Warenne, and their equally numerous trains of knights. Vide KNIGHTON. ward turned his active and warlike thoughts to the conquest of Wales, whose prince Llewellyn had been deeply engaged in all the plots of the Montfort faction: and in 1283, the principality was united to the English crown, and soon after, A. D. 1284, April 25, a son Edward being born to the king at Caernarvon, he was created Prince of Wales, since which time the title has been always bestowed upon the eldest sons of the sovereigns of England soon after their birth. "The Welsh," says Walsingham, "were highly joyed when they heard that the young prince was to be known by the title of Prince of Wales, reputing him to be their legitimate sovereign since he had been born amongst them." The king's next and more difficult enterprise was directed against Scotland, which country he hoped also to annex to England. Alexander III., who had married Edward's sister, died from an accident in 1286, leaving only a daughter, Margaret, married to Eric, King of Norway, and their daughter Margaret, called the "Maid of Norway," was recognized as successor to her grandfather, and although an infant and abroad, was acknowledged Queen of Scotland. Edward wished to unite the young queen to his son Edward, that in time the whole island might form one monarchy, an alliance to which the Scottish nation seemed not averse; but the treaty came unfortunately to an end by the untimely death of the young princess, on her passage from Norway to Scotland. The unhappy contest for the crown which followed, in consequence of the failure of male issue to William the Lion, will be treated of more fully in the chapter of the Kings of Scotland; it will suffice now to allude briefly to the part borne by Edward in the affair. The interregnum was occupied by this able and politic prince to revive his claim of a feudal superiority over Scotland, founded upon the alleged cases of homage performed by the Scottish monarchs to the kings of England; a claim which, setting aside the fact that the homage was for lands in England, had been expressly renounced by Richard I. In the year 1301, Edward sent a remarkable document to Pope Boniface VIII., to which a hundred and four of his barons assembled in parliament testified their concurrence by setting their seals. In this letter Edward attempts to prove the superiority of England by historical facts deduced from the time of Brutus the Trojan, who, he said, founded the British monarchy in the age of Eli and Samuel, then alludes to the 2 The Scots, not to be behind their rivals in claiming a lofty pedigree for their nation, in 1320 sent a document to the Pope John XXII., in which they derived their descent from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. As a fitting parallel to the English and Scottish claims of antiquity, we may add that Irish genealogists affect to derive the O'Briens, Marquesses of Thomond, from Hiberius, a cotemporary with Moses! In 1547, extensive dominions and heroic virtues of King Arthur, and at last vouchsafes to descend to the time of Edward the Elder. He then asserts it to be a fact "notorious and confirmed by the records of antiquity," that the English monarchs had often conferred the kingdom of Scotland on their own subjects, had dethroned those vassal kings when unfaithful to them, and had substituted others in their stead; and he displays with great pomp the full and complete homage which William the Lion had made to Henry II., without however alluding to Coeur-de-Lion's abolition of that extorted deed. It is almost needless to say that every instance brought forward by Edward was warped and strained to suit his purpose.3 But the Scottish nation, not yet enlightened as to Edward's policy, had agreed to appoint him umpire between the competitors for the crown, which, as is well known, he awarded to John Baliol, less, it is presumed, on account of his better right, than that he expected to find in him an obedient vassal. The subsequent invasion of Scotland by Edward, and the heroic resistance of the Scots, first under the immortal Wallace, and afterwards under the Bruce, A. Kelton published "A chronycle, with a Genealogie declarynge that the Brittons and Welshmen are lineallye dyscended from Brute, newly and very wittely compyled in meter. 12mo. 3 As well might the kings of France have claimed the sovereignty over England, because our kings performed homage to them for Acquitaine and Poictou. |