A.D. 1252 Henry quarrels with the Earl of Leicester. 1253 May 3. Henry solemnly swears in Westminster Hall to observe the charters, and obtains money. Prince Edward marries Eleanor, daughter of Alphonso, king of Castile. 1256 Richard earl of Cornwall is elected king of the Romans; is crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle. 1258 May 2. Parliament is assemble at Westminster; the barons appear armed. June 11. The parliament called the "Mad Parliament" meet at Oxford; committee of government appointed, and three sessions appointed to be held yearly; the king takes oaths to observe these acts. 1261 Feb. 2. Henry dismisses the committee of government; seizes the Tower and the Mint; Prince Edward joins the barons; the king publishes a dispensation from the pope absolving him from his oaths taken at Oxford. 1263 April. The Earl of Leicester returns to England. Oct. Henry defeats the barons, and Prince Edward joins him. 1264. The king and the barons refer their differences to the arbitration of Louis IX. of France; the civil war again rages. May 12. Battle of Lewes; the king, the King of the Romans, and Prince Edward, are taken prisoners; the truce of Lewes is concluded. 1265 Parliament is called, in which for the first time representatives appear. Prince Edward escapes; battle at Kenilworth. Aug. 4. The battle of Evesham; the Earl of Leicester is slain. Parliament at Winchester; London deprived of its charter; dictum of Kenilworth. 1267 Parliament at Marlborough; the dictum of Kenilworth accepted. 1270 July. Prince Edward sails for the Holy Land. 1271 Edward lands at Acre; takes Nazareth; the Moslems are massacred; returns to Acre; is wounded by an assassin. Dec. Richard, king of the Romans, dies. 1272 Nov. 16. King Henry dies at Westminster, and is buried in the abbey. BOOK IV. 98.-ANNALS OF EDWARD I. From the "Penny Cyclopædia." 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. 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. The more important of the transactions in which the Prince was engaged, have already been narrated. After the war of the barons was ended, in 1267, 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 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, 11th December, 1282, and his 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 1285, 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 consent 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. 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 his crown at Newcastle. The subject king, however, was soon made to feel all the humiliation of his position; and the discontent of his countrymen equalling his own, by the summer of 1294 all Scotland was in open insurrection against the authority of Edward. Meanwhile Edward had become involved in a war with the French king Philip IV. The first 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 Murray, 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 new 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 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, 1363, 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. 99. THE CONQUEST OF WALES. GOLDSMITH. The Welsh had for many ages enjoyed their own laws, language, customs, and opinions. They were the remains of the ancient Britons, who had escaped the Roman and Saxon invasion, and still preserved their freedom and their country uncontaminated by the admission of foreign conquerors. But as they were, from their number, incapable of withstanding their more powerful neighbours on the plain, their chief defence lay in their inaccessible mountains, those natural bulwarks of the country. Whenever England was distressed by factions at home, or its forces called off to wars abroad, the Welsh made it a constant practice to pour in their irregular troops, and lay the open country waste wherever they came. Nothing could be more pernicious to a country than several neighbouring independent principalities, under different commanders, and pursuing different interests; the mutual jealousies of such were to harass the people; and wherever victory was purchased, it was always at the expense of the general welfare. Sensible of this, Edward had long wished to reduce that incursive people, and had ordered Llewelyn to do homage for his territories; which summons the Welsh prince refused to obey, unless the king's own son should be delivered as a hostage for his safe return. The king was not displeased at this refusal, as it served to give him a pretext for his intended invasion. He therefore, (A.D. 1277), levied an army against Llewelyn, and marched into his country with certain assurance of success. Upon the approach of Edward, the Welsh prince took refuge among the inaccessible mountains of Snowdon, and there resolved to maintain his ground, without trusting to the chance of battle. These were the steep retreats that had for many ages before defended his ancestors against all the attempts of the Norman and Saxon conquerors. But Edward, equally vigorous and cautious, having explored every part of his way, pierced into the very centre of Llewelyn's territories, and approached the Welsh army in its last retreat. Llewelyn at first little regarded the progress of an enemy that he supposed would make a transient invasion, and then depart; but this contempt was turned into consternation when he saw Edward place his forces at the foot of the mountains, and surround his army, in order to force it by famine. Destitute of magazines, and cooped up in a narrow corner of the country, without provisions for his troops, or pasturage for his cattle, nothing remained but death or submission; so that the unfortunate Welsh prince, without being able to strike a blow for his independence, was at last obliged to submit at discretion, and to receive such terms as the victor was pleased to impose. Llewelyn consented to pay fifty thousand pounds, as a satisfaction for damages; to do homage to the crown of England; to permit all other barons, except four near Snowdon, to swear fealty in the same manner; to relinquish the country between Cheshire and the river Conway; to do justice to his own family; and to deliver hostages for the security of his submission. But this treaty was only of short duration: the oppression of the conqueror, and the indignant pride of the conquered nation, could not long remain without |