709 



EDWARD L 



EDWARD I. 



710 



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 rather 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 directed 

 against the Welsh, whose prince Llewellyn, on being summoned to do 

 homage, had contemptuously refused. Llewellyn was forced to sue 

 for peace in November 1277, after a single campaign ; but in 1281 he 

 again rose in arms, and the insurrection was not put down till 

 Llewellyn himself was slain at Llanfair, llth December 1232, and hU 

 surviving brother Prince David was taken prisoner soon after. The 

 following year the last-mentioned prince was barbarously put to death 

 by drawing, hanging, and quartering, and Wales was finally united to 

 England. 



The conquest of Wales was followed by the attempt to conquer 

 Scotland. By the death of Alexander III. in 1235, the crown of that 

 country had fallen to his grand-daughter Margaret, called the Maiden 

 of Norway, a child only three years old. By the treaty of Brigham, 

 concluded in July 1290, it was agreed that Margaret should be 

 married to Edward, the eldest surviving son of the English king ; but 

 the young queen died in one of the Orkney Islands on her voyage from 

 Norway, in September of the same year. Edward made the first open 

 declaration of his designs against the independence of Scotland at a 

 conference held at Norham on the Tweed with the clergy and nobility 

 of that kingdom on the 10th of May 1291. Ten different competitors 

 for the crown had advanced their claims ; but they were all induced 

 to acknowledge Edward for their lord paramount, and to conseut to 

 receive judgment from him on the matter in dispute. His decision 

 was finally pronounced in favour of John Balliol, at Berwick, on the 

 17th of November 1292; on the next day Balliol swore fealty to him 

 in the castle of Norham. [BALLIOL.] He was crowned at Scone under 

 a commission from his liege lord on the 30th of the same month ; and 

 on the 26th of December he did homage to Edward for hia crown at 

 Newcastle. The subject king however was soon made to feel all the 

 humiliation of his position ; and the discontent of his countrymen 

 e<|u illing his own, by the summer of 1294 all Scotland was in open 

 insurrection against the authority of Edward. Meanwhile Edward 

 hd become involved in a war with the French king Philip IV. The 

 Grit act of the assembled estates of Scotland was to enter into a 

 treaty of alliance with that sovereign. But although he was farther 

 embarrassed at this inconvenient moment by a revolt of the Welsh, 

 Edward's wonderful energy in a few months recovered for him all 

 that he had lost. In the spring of 1296 he laid a great part of 

 Scotland waste with fire and sword, compelled Balliol to resign the 

 kingdom into his hands, and then made a triumphant progress through 

 the country as far as Elgin in Moray, exacting oaths of fealty from 

 all classes wherever he appeared. It was on his return from this 

 progress that Edward, as he passed the cathedral of Scone in the 

 beginning of August, carried away with him the famous stone, now in 

 Westminster Abbey, on which the Scottish kings had been accustomed 

 to be crowned. He now placed the government of Scotland in the 

 hands of officers appointed by himself, and bearing the titles of his 

 ministers. But by the month of May in the following year Scotland 

 was again in flames. The leader of the insurrection now was the 

 celebrated William Wallace. He and his countrymen had been 

 excited to make this attempt to effect their deliverance from a foreign 

 domination, partly by the severities of their English governors, partly 

 by the circumstances in which Edward was at this time involved. 

 The expenses of his Scottish and French wars had pressed heavily 

 upon the resources of the king lorn ; and when he asked for more 

 money, both clergy and laity refused to make 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 Korests 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 

 AVallace at the battle of Stirling, fought on the llth September, and 

 in a few weeks more not a Scottish fortress remained hi 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 Scot- 

 Lin'l. The great battle of Falkirk followed on the 22nd of July, in 

 which Wallace sustained a complete defeat. But although one conse- 

 quence of this event was the resignation by Wallace of his office of 

 governor, it wai not followed by the general submission of the 

 country. The next five years were spent in a succession of indecisive 

 attempt* on the part of the English king to regain possession of Scot- 



land; 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 con- 

 cluded 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 Moray Firth. The 

 Castle of Stirling was the last fortress that held out ; it did not sur- 

 render till the 20th of July in the following year. Edward mean- 

 while 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 of August 1305. But 

 another champion of the Scottish independence was not long in appear- 

 ing. 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 dominion was again unfurled in that 

 country, and the insurgent people gathered around this new leader. 

 Bruce was solemnly crowned at Scone, on the 27th of March. On 

 receiving this news, Edward immediately prepared for a new expedi- 

 tion 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 of June, by Pembroke, who had thrown himself into that 

 town ; and the king of the Scots became for a time a houseless fugi- 

 tive. But the English monarch 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 at Carlisle 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 from 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 eight 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 eons : John 

 and Henry, who fcoth 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 towu in 

 1272, married first to Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hereford, 

 and secondly to Sir Ralph Monthermer; Margaret, born in 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 West- 

 minster Abbay 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 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 6th 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 hia 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 



