Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

1306.

His coronation.

once claimed the throne of Scotland, and was indeed crowned king. It must have been a dreary ceremony. Very few friends or attendants were present to do him honour; the sacred stone was gone; the nobleman whose right and duty it was to set the crown on his head refused to come. But his sister, the Countess of Buchan, a brave and loyal lady, without either his consent or her husband's, came to take his place. Edward was so enraged that, forgetting all his chivalry, he afterwards punished this poor lady by shutting her up in a den or cage like a wild beast's, in Berwick Castle.

20. For a time everything went ill with Bruce, and he was at last reduced to hide himself in the mountains of the Highlands, as Alfred had done in the marshes of Somersetshire. But he never lost heart nor courage. He had a faithful band of friends, who trusted and loved him with all their hearts. All sorts of romantic stories are told of their adventures; how they were hunted about with bloodhounds; how Bruce stood singlehanded against whole armies, daunting them by his kingly bearing and terrible right arm; how they waded streams and lurked in caves, and could never be caught; how Bruce kept up the spirits of his comrades by reading aloud to them as they crossed great lakes in wretched boats. All these stories are delightfully told by Walter Scott in 'Tales of a Grandfather.' But none of them were written down till after Bruce was dead, and which of them are true and which are only fables, no one can tell now.

1307. Death of Edward I.

21. How was it all going to end? As long as Edward lived no one could say who would conquer, he or Bruce. But he was old now, his end was drawing near. He roused himself to make one more effort to realize the great desire of his life, and started once again for Scotland. But before he could set foot in the country, though he was within three miles of it, worn out by the fatigues of the journey, he died at a place called Burgh-on-the-Sands, on one side of the Solway Firth. There he gave his dying commands to his son. One of them was that his heart should be carried to the Holy Land, where he had been on the Crusade in his young days with Eleanor; but his bones were to be wrapped in a bull's hide and carried forward at the head of his army until Scotland was subdued. He seems to have thought that the mere sight of his bones would terrify the Scotch, whom he had so often conquered. This command, though a harsh and vindictive one, did not seem quite so strange in those days as it does to us. It

was the custom then to think a great deal of what became of a man's body after he was dead. Bruce himself afterwards wished his heart to be carried to the Holy Land. When Richard I. died he had ordered his body to be divided into parts, and buried in different places: his heart was carried to the city of Rouen, which had always been faithful to him, and which he loved; his body was laid at his father's feet in token of submission and duty; and the "more ignoble parts" were buried among his rebellious subjects at Poitou. So that a man's burial was a kind of symbol or token of his last feelings and thoughts. Edward, whose dying effort had been to conquer the Scotch, wished his bones still to carry on the work.

But none of this was done. They carried his body back from the Solway Sands, and for sixteen weeks it lay at Waltham Abbey, by the grave of Harold, the last of the old English kings. Then it was conveyed to Westminster, and buried near his father. His tomb is not beautiful, like some of the others; it looks almost like "a sepulchre hewn out of a rock," and on it is carved in Latin "This is the hammer of the Scotch people."

22. As soon as Edward was dead it seemed as if all his work in Scotland fell to pieces. He was succeeded by his son Edward, the same who had been born at Carnarvon Castle, and was the first English Prince of Wales. Edward II. was a poor, weak, idle fellow, not at all like his father, not at all fit to cope with Bruce. He marched a little way into Scotland, but did nothing of any importance, and then turned back again into England.

23. More and more of the Scotch nobles and people now gathered round Bruce, and he pressed harder and harder upon the English. His principal helpers were his brother Edward, his nephew Randolph, and his friend Lord James of Douglas. All of these vied with each other in great deeds, and were constantly striving who could gain most favour and glory in the eyes of the king and the nation by their valiant acts and successes against the English. At last they had done so much that the English had no place of any importance left to them but Stirling Castle, and that was closely besieged by Castle.

the Scotch.

Stirling

24. The English felt that they must now make a great effort to save that fortress, and win back their lost ground. Edward II. therefore marched into Scotland himself, at the head of a great army. It consisted of fully 100,000 men, and was beautiful and terrible to look upon, with its splendidly-armed knights and horses, and its countless banners and pennons.

1314. Battle of

burn.

Bruce had not half the number, but then he was a host in himself. It might be said of him, as Napoleon said when he saw the Duke of Wellington walking up a hill, "There go 20,000 men." He had too his brave Randolph and Douglas at his side. 25. They met near Stirling Castle, by the side of a brook called Bannockburn. Randolph was set to watch against any of the English army entering Stirling Castle, which they were come to relieve. By some mischance a Bannock troop of English cavalry very nearly made their way in before Randolph perceived them. "See, Randolph," said the king, "a rose has fallen from your chaplet." Randolph hastened to retrieve his fault; he rushed off with his men to stop the English before it was too late. He had but foot-soldiers to oppose the English horse, and not half so many even of them. Douglas, his friend and rival, saw that he was hard pressed, and rode after with his followers to assist him. But long before they reached the spot Randolph and his infantry had driven off the English, and when Douglas saw the horses, many of them riderless, fleeing away, he called on his men to stop; for, said he, “Randolph has gained the day; since we were not soon enough to help him in the battle, do not let us lessen his glory by approaching the field." This was the true magnanimity of a noble knight.

26. Every one in Bruce's army seemed to have the heart of a hero, and in spite of all the mighty English horsemen, and the far-famed English archers, the Scotch won a triumphant victory. Never before or since have the English been so utterly defeated. The king fled for his life, and escaped safely to England. Those of the English who would not flee, and there were a great many of them, were left dead on the field, or were taken prisoners.

1328. Peace of Northampton.

27. After this great victory Bruce's success was complete. The English could never recover from it, and were scarcely able to defend even their own border. The Scotch made inroads into England, and defeated them on their own ground. At last a treaty was signed at Northampton, fully acknowledging the independence of Scotland and her king. This was the very year before Robert Bruce died; a rich reward to him, and precious fruit of all his toils. He left a glorious name behind him, which is as dear, and deserves to be as dear, almost, to the Scotch nation as that of Alfred is to the English.

LECTURE XXVII.-CIVIL WAR AND FOREIGN WAR.

Edward II. His father's last commands.

Piers Gaveston. The Lords Ordainers. The Despensers. The queen. Deposition of Edward. His murder. Edward III. The French wars. Froissart. The Black Prince. Battle of Crecy. Calais.

1307. Edward II.

1. WE have seen how Edward II. lost all that his father had gained in Scotland. The rest of his reign was quite of a piece with this. We need not blame him for not obeying that order of his father's respecting his bones, which had a cruel and unchristian sound; but he also disobeyed another of his dying commands which he undoubtedly ought to have kept. This was that he should send away a special friend and favourite of his, who, as the old king saw, would be likely to give him bad advice and to bring him into trouble. The favourite was a young Frenchman named Piers Gaveston, who had been brought up with him, and to whom he was deeply attached, but whom the English nobles soon began to hate as deeply. It seems only human nature that they should have done so. Gaveston was quick, brilliant, and frivolous. He came from Gascony, a part of France which was noted for its inhabitants being vain and self-confident; so much so, indeed, that the terms gasconade, gasconading, have become English words meaning boasting and bragging; just the very sort of thing which is most hateful to a proud, solid Englishman. Accordingly, he soon made himself quite detestable to them.

Gaveston.

2. He was very accomplished, very skilful in tournaments and in all the things which make a show; he was also very elegant and choice in his dress. He wore beautiful flowered shirts, and embroidered girdles, and was extremely good-looking. In all things he seemed to outshine the nobles of the land. He managed to win all the prizes at the tournaments, and threw a good many of the English lords off their horses. We can fancy it was not very pleasant to them to see themselves eclipsed in this way by an

upstart foreigner; and if Gaveston had had any sense or modesty he would have kept more in the background, and not been always showing himself off.

3. But the king was as foolish as he was himself. He seemed to lay himself out to affront the English nobles. At his coronation he put Gaveston above all of them; he made him carry the crown, and walk next to himself and the queen. Not content with empty honours, he gave him great riches, both in lands and money. He made him Earl of Cornwall, which before that had always been a title belonging to a prince of the royal family, and he married him to his own niece.

4. As soon as the parliament met, after the new king had been crowned, the very first thing they did was to demand that Gaveston should be banished. Edward was obliged to give in, and indeed took most solemn oaths that he would never let him come back. But we know oaths did not count for much at that time; and in very little more than a year Gaveston was back again, in high feather. Neither he nor the king had learnt any wisdom. The king made as much of him as ever. He, on his part, affronted the nobles even worse than before. He gave some of them insulting nicknames. The king's own cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, who took part with the lords, he called " an old hog." The Earl of Pembroke he called "Joseph the Jew." We can hardly say, in those days, when every one so hated and despised the Jews, which would be thought the worst, to be called a "hog" or a "Jew." The Earl of Warwick he called "a black dog."

5. The foolish king thought all this very witty, and fine fun. But the nobles did not think it fun. The Earl of Warwick vowed a terrible vow that some day Gaveston should "feel the black dog's teeth." A more important person still was affronted, the queen herself. Edward was married to Isabella, the daughter of the King of France. She was very beautiful, and indeed was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world; but there was not much love between her and her husband even to begin with. She soon became disgusted at Edward's devotion to his favourite, and never, to the end of his life, did she forgive him.

6. All this time Edward was constantly in want of money, which of course gave the lords and the country great power over him. It was thoroughly well settled now that the Resistance. king could get no money without the consent of parliament, and the parliament would never give him any money when he was doing things which offended them. Gaveston had to go away before the barons would even come to parliament at

« ZurückWeiter »