Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/370

356 service, the ceremony being the same as practised on a king's death. On the 24th King Edward III. was proclaimed, it being declared to be by the full consent of the late king; on the 28th the young monarch received the great seal from the chancellor, and re-delivered it to him; and on the 29th he was crowned at Westminster by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The extreme youth of the king enabled Queen Isabella, his mother, to have the chief power of the crown vested in her. But her unconcealed connection with the Lord Mortimer made her very soon lose the popularity which her pretence of driving away the Spensers had obtained her. Both barons and people looked with ill-suppressed jealousy and disgust at the dangerous position of Mortimer; and, however completely the late king had forfeited public favour, it was not long before the people began to feel that it was not the part of a wife to have invaded the kingdom, and deposed and pursued to death her husband and the father of her children. Isabella had indeed pretended to lament over the necessity, and to bewail the afflictions of her husband; but her actions belied her words and tears, for she still pressed on his abdication, and was all the time living in open adultery with her paramour Mortimer. Thus public feeling, the inspiration of nature, grew, and there wore not wanting monks who boldly denounced from the pulpit the scandalous life of the queen, and awoke a feeling of commiseration for her captive husband. Those who beheld the proud Mortimer actually occupying, in the name of the queen, the seat of royal power, burned with natural indignation at the degradation of the throne; those who beheld the unfortunate Edward, gentle and depressed in his fallen fortunes, became touched with compassion for him. The Earl of Leicester, now Earl of Lancaster, though he had a brother's blood in his remembrance, could not help being affected with generous and kindly sentiments towards his prisoner, and was even suspected of entertaining more honourable intentions towards him.

These things were whispered to Isabella, and the king was speedily removed into the care of Sir John Maltravers, a man of a savage disposition, and embittered against the king by injuries received from him and his favourites. Maltravers appeared to study the concealment of his captive, removing him from time to time from one castle to another in the space of a few months. At length Lord Berkeley was added to the commission of custody, and the unhappy captive was lodged in Berkeley Castle, near the river Severn. While Lord Berkeley was there he was treated with the courtesy due to his rank and to his misfortunes; but that nobleman being detained at his manor of Bradley by sickness, the opportunity was taken to leave him in the hands of two of the most hardened and desperate ruffians that the world ever produced, named Gournay and Ogle. These men appeared to take a savage delight in tormenting him. They practised upon him daily every indignity which they could devise. It is stated that one day, when Edward was to be shaved, they ordered cold and filthy water from the castle ditch for that purpose; and when he desired it to be changed, they refused it with mockery, though the unfortunate prince burst into tears, and declared that he would have clean and warm water.

These modes of killing were, however, too slow for those who wanted to be secure from any popular revulsion of feelling in favour of the deposed monarch; and one night, the 21st of September, 1327, frightful shrieks were hoard from the castle, and the next morning the gates were thrown open, and the people were freely admitted to see the body of the late king, who, it was said, had died suddenly in the night. Of the nature of that disease there was no doubt on the minds of any one, for the cries of the sufferer's agony had reached even to the town, waking up, says Holinshed, "numbers, who prayed heartily to God to receive his soul, for they understood by those cries what the matter meant." The murder of Edward of Caernarvon is one of the horrors of history. The fiends who had him in custody, it came out, had thrown him upon a bed and held him down violently with a table, while they had thrust a red-hot iron into his bowels through a tin pipe. By this means there appeared no outward cause of death; but his countenance was distorted and horrible to look upon. Most of the nobles and gentlemen of the neighbourhood went to see the body, which was then privately conveyed to Gloucester, and buried in the abbey, without any inquiry or investigation whatever.

Edward, at the time of his murder, was forty-three years old. He had reigned nineteen years and a half, and spent about nine months in his woful captivity after his deposition.

Maltravers, Gournay, and Ogle were held in universal detestation. Gournay was some years afterwards caught at Marseilles, and shipped for England; but was beheaded at sea, as was supposed, by order of some of the nobles and prelates in England, to prevent any damaging disclosures regarding their accomplices or abettors. Maltravers found means of doing service to Edward III., and eventually obtained a pardon.

This reign presents a melancholy example of the miseries which befell a nation in those days from a weak king. In those rude times, the throne was not fenced about and supported by the maxims and institutions which now-a-days enable very ordinary kings to fill their high post without any public inconvenience, and verify the observation of the celebrated Swedish chancellor, Oxenstjerna, "See, my son, with what very little sense a kingdom may be governed." In the time of Edward II. the convenient maxim was not introduced that a king can do no wrong. The monarch seemed to stand alone amid a race of powerful and ambitious barons, who wore always ready to encroach on the throne, and could only be restrained by a strong hand. The king had not, as now-a-days, his council, his ministers, and various officers, to share his responsibilities, and afford him their united talents and advice. He acted more fully from his own individual views, and therefore the consequences to the nation were the more directly good or evil as the king was wise or not. In this king's reign we find the arms of the nation disgraced, its hold on Scotland .and France weakened, and the existence of internal discord and much civil bloodshed. We do not find those great enactments of laws which distinguished the reign of his father, and the estates of the crown were greatly wasted on unworthy favourites. Yet, oven in this reign the people gained something, as they have always done, from the necessities of kings. The barons, by the ordinances which they