Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/329

Rh REIGN OF HENRY III.] ENGLAND 311 By these provisions the royal power was practically put in commission, very much as it had been by the Great Charter in the latter days of John. It is specially to be noticed that at this stage the king s eldest son Edward, afterwards King Edward I., appears on more than one occasion on the popular side. He and Simon were for a while fellow-workers. But Henry, like John, rebelled against the provisions which cramped his power, and about the same time Edward was reconciled to his father. The matters at issue between the king and his people were now submitted to the judgment of the king of the French, St Lewis himself. But Lewis, if a saint, was also a king. By the mise of Amiens (1274) he annulled the Provisions of Oxford, as overthrowing the royal authority ; but at the same time he decreed that the nation should keep its ancient liberties. To men who held that the Provisions of Oxford were, like the Great Charter, simply a re-enactment of ancient liberties, such an award seemed inconsistent on the face of it. There was now no hope but in arms. The civil war now begins ; Earl Simon, a stranger by birth, is the leader of the barons and people of England. King Piichard of Germany, who once seemed destined to hold the place which Simon had come to hold, was now fighting ou the side of his brother and fellow-king. So were the two kings sons, Edward of England and Henry of Germany. Kings and kings sons were overthrown at Lewes (May 13, 12G4), and the royal authority passed into the hands of the earl. By him, early in the next year, was held the great Parliament, the first to which representatives of the boroughs were summoned along with prelates, earls, barons, and knights of the shire. But quarrels presently arose between Earl Simon and his fellow barons. Edward, kept for a whtla in ward with his father, escaped and gathered an army. In the fight of Evesham (4th August 1265) Simon was overthrown and killed, and was canonized, not by the Iiomo which he had always withstood, but by the popular voice of England. The war lingered at Simon s castle of Kenilworth, and, as in the days of Hereward, in the marshes of Ely. Peace was at last made (1267) ; and the terms on which it was made, and the generally con ciliatory character of Edward s policy towards the vanquished, already showed how much he had learned from the uncle who had fallen before him, but whose work he was destined to bring to perfection. The peace of the last few years of Henry s reign seems wonderful after the storms which had filled up the greater part of it. Edward could leave the land in safety to go on the crusade ; and, when his father died (1272) in his absence, his succession to the crown was at once recognized and his peace proclaimed. To say that he was the first king who reigned without election is almost a question of words. At no time in our history would there have been, in such a case as this, any chance of opposition to the eldest son of the last king. What really shows how fast the new ideas of kingship had advanced is the fact that Edward reigned for nearly two years without coronation. Henry died November 16, 1272. The reign of Edward was held to begin with his proclama tion four days later ; the doctrine that the king never dies ession is a later device still. Edward was then in Sicily, nor was his return a hasty one. He passed leisurely through several parts of Europe ; he suppressed disturbances in his duchy of Aquitaine, and was crowned seventeen days after his arrival in England (August 19, 1274). Nothing could show more clearly than this how fast the office con ferred by election and coronation was passing into the possession handed on by simple hereditary succession. The reign of Edward which thus began is one of the most memorable in the whole course of English history. It is more than an accident that he was the first king since the Conquest who bore one of the ancient kingly names. Under him we feel at once that the work is done, that all Reign of traces of conquest, all traces of distinction of races, have Edward, passed away. We have again an united English nation, under a king English in name and in heart. For the first time since the Norman carne, England has a king whose whole policy is thoroughly English, whose work seems in so many ways a falling back on the work of the old native kings, specially of the king whose name he bore. For the first time since the Conquest, we have a king who is neither surrounded by foreign favourites nor has his policy directed to foreign objects. As duke of Aquitaine, Edward could not avoid wars and controversies with France; but wars and controversies with France were in his days something altogether secondary. His objects were those of the old West-Saxon kings, to be the lawgiver of England, and, as far as might be, to make England co extensive with Britain. Still, like some other kings, Edward has been misunderstood through not attending to the chronology of his reign. His Scottish warfare, which is perhaps the first thing which is suggested by his name, takes up only the last nine years of a reign of thirty-five. He had been king nineteen years before the controversy as to the Scottish crown arose. So in the earlier part of his reign the Welsh warfare, which in the popular con ception stands alongside of the Scottish warfare, has very much the air of an episode in a time mainly given to internal legislation. The reign naturally falls into two divisions. In the first, from 1272 to 1291, internal affairs are most prominent, though it also takes in the conquest of Wales and some important dealings with France. In the latter part, from 1291 to 1307, Scottish affairs are, or seem to be, predominant. And yet it is during this time that the greatest constitutional step of all is taken, and that parliament distinctly assumes its later form. The immediate occasions of the Welsh war arose out of Conquest the disputes of the last reign. The Welsh prince Llywelyn, of Walas. who still held the north-western part of Wales by the title of Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdon, had been allied with Simon; his subjects had shared in the earl s warfare, and he was himself betrothed to the earl s daughter. Disputes arose out of Llywelyn s refusal to meet the English king and do his homage. In 127G he was declared to have forfeited his fiefs, and in the next year he was constrained to surrender the eastern part of his territory and to do homage for the rest. In 1282 a revolt began, in which David, the brother of Llywelyn, who had been hitherto in Edward s favour and was enriched with English honours, seized the castle of Hawarden and massacred all who were in it. The revolt was put down ; the land was speedily conquered ; Llywelyn died in war ; his brother was put to death as a traitor. The part of Wales which had thus far kept its separate being as a vassal state was now forfeited to the overlord. Through out a great part of the land English law was introduced. Shires, with their system of administration, were formed; boroughs were founded; castles were built to keep down the malcontents. The principality was designed to form a separate apanage for a younger son of the English king; but, as Edward, the first English prince, succeeded to the crown by the death of his elder brother, the title of Prince of Wales has since commonly been borne by the eldest son of the English king. The Welsh revolted again, even in Edward s own time ; but their revolt was only for a moment. Later revolts were of importance only when the malcontents contrived to connect themselves with English rebels or with foreign enemies of England. The general tendency of things was to closer union between the kingdom and the principality, down to the complete incorporation of Wales with England in the sixteenth century. Fourteen years passed between the conquest of Wales a;.d