The Plantagenets: The Three Edwards Part 6

The curious part of the story is that his old enemy, Bishop Langton, was selected by the prince as mediator in the matter. The bishop, most unwillingly, conveyed the request to his sovereign and was the victim of the first stages of the royal indignation. When young Edward was summoned into the cabinet, he was seized by his father and dragged by the hair (so it is said) about the room.

"Thou wouldst give away lands!" cried the king. "Thou who hast never won a rod!"

It was on the young Gascon that the punishment fell. He was banished to his first home in Gascony.

It is not recorded whether Gaveston was compelled to obey the rules imposed on those sentenced to banishment. This was what they had to do: proceed at once to the nearest seaport and embark on the first s.h.i.+p leaving for the continent; and, in cases where a vessel was not immediately available, to strip each day to s.h.i.+rt and drawers and wade out into the water until it reached the chin, as an earnest of their intention to obey the sentence.

The haughty Gascon would have found this daily ritual a humiliation hard to bear. However, as Dover was designated as his port of departure, he probably experienced no delay in getting off.

CHAPTER XVI.

Last Stages of an Eventful Reign

1.

THE concluding years in the life of Edward were not happy ones. He had retained most of his teeth and his eyes were filled with the same fire while his hair which had once been the color of straw was now a snowy white; but the aches of old age and many campaigns were in his bones. His temper had become shorter. He was having trouble with Robert de Winchelsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his barons, with his son, and with Scotland.

Archbishop Winchelsey is less well known than he should be, considering the controversial part he played through the latter half of the reign. He had been a rather handsome man and a speaker of considerable power, but by the time he was chosen to succeed Peckham he had become corpulent and coa.r.s.e of feature. His manner was open, friendly, and even jovial. He was a man of real piety and his personal life was above reproach. A spare trencherman, he refused to eat anything but the plainest food and had the best dishes given to the poor, much to the indignation of his servants, who thought they should be considered first. The archbishop never spoke to women.

This was an age when the Church struggled to maintain the supremacy of Rome over temporal power. The Pope, Boniface VIII, the most violent contender for that principle, had fallen foul of the taciturn but volcanic Philip the Fair and had issued a bull, Clericis laicos, in which the clergy were forbidden under pain of excommunication to give any part of their revenues to temporal rulers without papal consent. This was aimed at Edward as much as at France, for he had been exacting heavy subsidies from the churchmen of England.

What stand would Winchelsey take in this delicate position? He soon made it clear. At a convocation in St. Paul's he delivered a sermon in which he said, "We have two lords over us, the king and the Pope, and though we owe obedience to both we owe greater obedience to the spiritual than to the temporal lord."

The other bishops, who knew the temper of their temporal lord and had made a point of meeting his demands, sat in silent dismay. Edward was enraged beyond measure when he heard what had happened, and from that time on there was continuous trouble between them. At first Winchelsey refused to allow any subsidies at all. When Edward demanded a fifth of all church revenue, the archbishop compromised with an offer of a tenth. Finally the latter agreed to allow each bishop to make his own decision but flatly refused to give as much as a s.h.i.+lling of the Canterbury revenues. This dispute went on for years. The other bishops resented the uncompromising att.i.tude of the primate because of the difficulties in which it involved them, and Winchelsey found himself with few friends, except among the common people, who saw a successor to the martyred Thomas Becket in the militant but tactless archbishop. There were minor troubles as well. Winchelsey took the part of the prince in some of his disputes with his father. He never missed a chance to trample on the toes of the Archbishop of York, denying him the right to carry his episcopal cross in front of him on his visits to Canterbury territory.

Then the situation changed. Boniface died, partly as a result of the French king's attempt to have him kidnaped and carried into France. In 1305 the choice fell on a Gascon, Bertrand de Goth, who was Archbishop of Bordeaux and who took the name of Clement V. His selection, without any doubt, had been due to French influence and gold. His first two acts of any moment were evidence of this. Instead of going at once to Rome, he had his coronation at Lyons and then returned to Bordeaux. Here he filled the cardinalate with Frenchmen. Winchelsey found himself without papal support in his struggle with the king. Edward had at an earlier stage ordered the sheriffs to confiscate the lay fees in the province of Canterbury, with the result that the archbishop had found it necessary to subsist on charity. Even his horses had been seized and he had been forced to travel on foot, which was particularly trying to one of his increasing corpulence. Two of Winchelsey's most active enemies, Bishop Langton of Lichfield, who acted as treasurer, and the Earl of Lincoln, were sent to Lyons to represent Edward at the new Pope's coronation, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to poison Clement's mind against the archbishop; which, under the circ.u.mstances, was not a difficult thing to do. The new Pope lost no time in acting. On February 12 he suspended the archbishop from all his functions and summoned him to appear before the curia within two months. During Winchelsey's last visit to London, Archbishop Greenfield of York came down and triumphantly paraded the streets of the city with his cross carried erect in front of him.

The primate's first move on receiving the summons from the Pope was to see Edward and beg for his aid. The king received him in what contemporary writers called his torve mood. He displayed no trace of cordiality. His eyes were hot with anger, his words incisive and unfriendly. He proceeded to go over the archbishop's record in full detail, stressing every move he had made to oppose the royal will. The archbishop is reported to have broken down and wept copiously.

Early historians gave a different reason for the bitter anger of the king. It was said he produced a letter which Winchelsey had written to one of the two earls BiG.o.d and Bohun at the time they set themselves up in opposition to the king's will. It was no less than a proposal to remove the king and put the young prince on the throne in his place. There was no doc.u.mentary proof of this, and the story has since been ignored as too impossible to believe. If the primate had been indiscreet enough to broach such a suggestion, he would not have been so foolhardy as to put it in writing. The king's reaction also would have been much more drastic. A charge of treason would have been laid against Winchelsey without any doubt.

The situation was taking on a dramatic resemblance to that which led to the murder of Thomas Becket. Edward made it clear that he could no longer abide the presence of the primate in the kingdom and that he had no intention of interceding for him with the Pope. The upshot was that Winchelsey, pale and shaken from this exhibition of royal wrath, left London and made preparations to obey the papal summons.

The primate crossed the waters to Bordeaux, where the Pope was still holding his court. He refused Winchelsey an audience in curt and unfriendly manner. This reception, coming on top of everything else, affected the archbishop so adversely that he suffered a stroke.

If the quick communications of modern days had been possible then, there would have been much holding of breaths in ecclesiastical palaces and state chancelleries, for at this point the parallel with the Becket case became startlingly close. If the old archbishop had died, there would have been a general belief that he had been persecuted to death by his unfriendly king and the indifferent pontiff. The wave of horror which swept the Christian world when Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral would not have been equaled, but the indignation would have been deep and lasting. Edward was so complex in character that it is impossible to say what his reaction might have been in that event. Fortunately for the king, the primate did not die: it was Edward himself who heard the call to another life while Winchelsey continued to await the Pope's pleasure. It seems that the archbishop had told his followers that he had had a vision of the king's death and so he was prepared for it. He recovered from the effects of the stroke rather quickly when the confirmation of his vision was received.

2.

The trouble Edward was having with the barons was not concerned with anything they were doing at this time; it went back to the sharp encounters of the past. When he gave instructions to the delegation being sent to attend the coronation of Pope Clement at Lyons, he asked them to discuss with the pontiff a matter which "lay deep in his heart." He still felt the humiliation of being compelled to agree to the Confirmatio cartarum. He had only agreed, he declared, because of the dire straits he was in at the time, and he still felt that the barons had taken advantage of his position. What he desired, in short, was to be relieved of the oath he had taken at the time. It did not prove a hard matter to arrange. The Gascon-born Pope granted him the absolution at once.

This was a familiar situation to anyone whose memory went back to the previous reign. Henry III, that weatherc.o.c.k king, had on many occasions broken the restrictions placed upon him by the Great Charter and, on being brought to heel by the barons, had abjectly sworn oaths to sin no more. The ink would hardly be dry on his signature when messengers would be on their way to Rome to ask for absolution of his vows. This was always granted him and so he had no hesitation about breaking his oath whenever it seemed advantageous to do so.

This was outrageous behavior, but in a weak and fickle king it came to be accepted. But here was Edward preparing to follow in the same path, and that was a different matter. Edward was a strong king and not one from whom such shabby tactics were expected.

Did it mean that a belief in autocratic rule was so deeply rooted in all kings that even Edward, the most enlightened monarch of his day, was no different from any others in this respect? Did it mean that, when he was improving and codifying the laws, he was acting with a reservation, a secret conviction that he himself would be above any of the restrictions established? Or did it mean that he had outlived that fine phase of his life and now lacked the clear sense of kingly responsibility with which he had begun his reign?

The last explanation seems the most likely. He was old and short-tempered and resentful of anything that stood in his way. He was seeing the past in a different light, remembering the rebuffs and losses he had sustained and thinking less of the triumphs and satisfactions. Certainly the refusal of the Scots to lay down their arms and acknowledge themselves conquered was a contributing factor.

2.

Edward's dissatisfaction with his heir had been increasing with the years. The prince had grown into a reasonable facsimile of his father, being tall and of a handsome and sometimes impressive appearance; but there the resemblance seems to have stopped. His physical strength was great, but he did not enjoy using it in martial exercises. He was not then, and never would be, a soldier. Instead he liked to employ his great muscles in manual ways. He could shoe a horse, and enjoyed doing so, and he could thatch a house. Horses, in fact, were a pa.s.sion with him, and his household records are full of information about his interest in breeding them. From the Earl Warenne, the loser at Stirling Bridge, he purchased a fine stud, and from one of his sisters he secured a white greyhound of which he became very fond. These interests were commendable enough in their way and, if he had been lucky enough to have been born the son of a country gentleman of no great prominence, he might have gone through life without attracting any unfavorable notice. It was his great misfortune that he had been born a prince, and with bad appet.i.tes that developed inordinately because of the power that came into his hands.

The king strove to instill in him a love of order and a capacity for attention to administrative detail, against the day when the complexities of the justiciary and the chancellery at Westminster would demand his attention. This does not appear to have been in any degree successful. Edward II remained to the end of his days incapable of any such concentration.

The greatest of the old king's worries was the vulgarity of his son's tastes and the low-grade a.s.sociations into which they plunged him. There is a wardrobe item, dated 1298, of a payment of two s.h.i.+llings to Maude Make-joy for dancing before the prince in King's Hall at Ipswich. This is the only reference available to this particular episode, but it is not difficult to reconstruct the scene: the royal youth of fourteen, already tall and stout of limb, dressed no doubt in parti-colored hose and with the richest of materials on his back, lolling in his seat and laughing in loud approval of the sinuous twistings and stampings of Madame Maude, and calling to one of the familiars of the household to drop a suitable reward into the probably not too clean palm of the lady; with, in all probability, his tutors seated in the idle circle, grinning and slapping their spindly thighs. This seems the only explanation to account for the listing of such a minor item in the household accounts. The official who gave the money to the dancer would not expect to be paid for it by the prince and would take this method of making certain of reimburs.e.m.e.nt.

There is a record also of compensation paid to one of the court fools because he had been made the b.u.t.t of some particularly painful horseplay on the part of the prince.

The king seems to have been most particularly distressed by the freedom of talk indulged in by his son. Edward was not one of the strong and silent young men. He liked to talk. In fact, he seems to have been a bit of a babbler and would speak freely of anything he had heard, even though it might be in the nature of a secret of state. Undoubtedly it reached the stage where interested parties, even the envoys of foreign states, made a point of learning the gossip of the princely household.

On the credit side of the ledger there were instances where he showed flashes of n.o.bler impulses. He was generous and sometimes kind. It must be added, however, that such intervals were brief and could not be construed as an indication of the real character of this most frivolous of all the Plantagenets.

The members of this kingly family seem to have been subject to a rule of rotation. Henry III was the son of John, the worst of kings, and the father of the best, Edward I. The unfortunate prince with whom these brief references are concerned was an outward copy of his father but with no solidity or fineness of character. Nonetheless, he in turn was to beget the great conqueror king, Edward III. What is known of the youth and the formative years of Edward II leaves a feeling of pity for this princeling to whom dignity was burdensome and who had no inner reserves of power to draw upon when faced with the grave responsibilities of kings.h.i.+p. His father seems to have sensed this, for he alternated firmness with kindly understanding in his efforts to train his successor.

Perhaps Queen Eleanor was partly to blame. She was so completely the wife that she had little time left for the care of her children. Edward, it is evident, was left without much motherly attention while the devoted queen accompanied her beloved husband on his state processionals and his incessant campaigns.

CHAPTER XVII.

Robert the Bruce

1.

THE family of the Bruces, second choice in that arbitration for a crown, had never been reconciled to the selection of John de Baliol as King of Scotland. The grandfather had died in 1295 and had been followed by his son, the Earl of Carrick, in 1304, leaving the grandson, who is known in history as Robert the Bruce, to continue the family pretensions.

The Earl of Carrick had been a romantic figure. He contracted a marriage with the widowed Countess of Carrick when she was a royal ward, without the king's consent. The story ran that he was hunting on her estates and she saw him there for the first time, falling in love with him so completely and violently that she instructed her men to abduct him. They were man and wife when they appeared again in the public eye. Though some skeptics declared this was all a ruse to cover up the fact that Bruce had married her with no regard to the royal wards.h.i.+p, it seems to have been a love match. At any rate, they brought into the world five sons, four of whom were destined to die violently in the struggle for Scottish freedom, and five daughters, all of whom married husbands of high lineage.

The Earl of Carrick was so little reconciled to the decision in favor of Baliol that he made an excuse to go to Norway when Baliol summoned his first Parliament. After that ineffective monarch ran foul of Edward's power and was sent into exile, Carrick demanded the reversion of the crown. But Edward had other plans. He was reported to have responded in verse: Have I nought ellys to do nowe But wyn a kynryck to gyve yhowe?

After that the second Bruce seems to have receded into a purely minor part and died quietly, and unhappily, on his English estates.

The grandson in the meantime had been turning his coat with a regularity that made his career a difficult one to follow. At one stage he would be superintending the English efforts to breach the stout walls of Stirling Castle with the machines King Edward had brought up from England, called by such expressive names as the Tout-de-Monde, the Parson, and the Lup-de-Guerre. At another he would be sharing the guardians.h.i.+p of Scotland with Comyn the Red in open defiance of the English king. He was forgiven several times and taken back into the king's peace. Edward, in fact, showed a degree of patience with him that is hard to reconcile with his harsh treatment of others.

Then things began to clarify for the sole guardian of the Bruce holdings and claims. Wallace, who had stood by Baliol, had been executed. Baliol himself was falling into blindness in exile at Castle Gaillard in Normandy and had lost interest in Scottish affairs. Comyn the Red, who now took on himself the Baliol claims because of a distant relations.h.i.+p, was a ruffler and a hothead. Robert the Bruce, no longer content to play small parts in the sanguinary drama, stalked to center stage and a.s.sumed the leading role.

Robert the Bruce had not intended to declare himself as early as this. It was known that Edward had only a short time to live, and Bruce was wise enough to realize it would be the better part of valor to wait for the death of that stout warrior before unfurling the Scottish royal flag. But an incident forced his hand.

On the tenth day of February, 1306, he went to Dumfries and there met John Comyn the Red in the Franciscan monastery. Dumfries stood on the north bank of the Nith and, despite the fact that it was a peaceful and prosperous town of wide and friendly streets, it had become the scene of much fighting and bitterness between the adherents of Scotland's many monarchial parties. The town had been originally of Baliol sympathies because the Princess Devorguila, mother of John de Baliol, had built its stone bridge of nine tall spans. Why Bruce and Comyn met there has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is believed they came by appointment to discuss the situation. There was no love lost between them certainly. At an earlier meeting in Selkirk Forest, the Red had leaped upon the younger Bruce and threatened to kill him. The same trace of black blood showed itself at once, although this time it was Bruce who attacked the other. It was in front of the high altar that this occurred, and Bruce's pa.s.sion ran so high that his dagger struck deep into the Comyn's side. And so the man who had thought himself ent.i.tled to command at the battle of Falkirk and had left Wallace to face the attack while he rode off ingloriously with the Scottish cavalry, fell to the stone floor.

There is a legend that Bruce came out of the monastery very pale of face and agitated of spirit to join his friends who had waited outside.

"I sank my dagger in the Comyn's side," he said. "I think he is dead."

"Then I shall go back and make sure," declared one of his men, drawing his own dirk, which was one of the long and heavy variety used by the men of the Highlands.

Comyn was still alive, and so the follower of Bruce stabbed him again and thus made certain of his death.

The same legend has it that, before going to meet Comyn the Red, Bruce had received from a friend in England twelve pennies and a pair of spurs as a warning of treachery. It is a good story, and although it smacks of minstrelsy and invention, it is worth the telling.

The die was cast. There would be no forgiveness after this, even if Bruce had sought it; and at last he saw the light and was prepared to fight now in spite of everything. He proceeded to act with creditable dispatch. He went to Scone, where he was met by that brave churchman, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, and given absolution and the coronation robes. It was an ill.u.s.trious company which a.s.sembled there to declare their support to the new leader. In addition to Wishart there were the bishops of St. Andrews and Moray; the earls of Lennox, Atholl, and Errol; young Sir James Douglas, a nephew of the king and later the Earl of Moray; a considerable smattering of the gentry bearing such names as Barclay, Fraser, Boyd, and Fleming; the four brothers of Bruce-Edward, Nigel, Thomas, and Alexander-and last but certainly not least Isabella, Countess of Buchan.

It was, in fact, an imposing representation of the n.o.bility of Scotland. What a different reading it might have given to history if all these blue-blooded Scots had a.s.sembled on the hilltop near Falkirk and ranged themselves behind the leader with the heavy claymore, William Wallace!

The right spirit certainly was displayed by the Countess Buchan. She was a daughter of Duncan, Earl of Fife, but her husband was a Comyn (popularly called Patrick-with-the-Beard) and on that account a bitter enemy of the Bruce. She stole away from home, ordering the fastest horse in the stables to be saddled for her use. Arriving at Scone before the ceremony, she announced that, as her brother, the present Earl of Fife, was away, she had come to place the crown on the head of the new king in his stead. This honor was conceded to her.

2.

Edward had been so certain that the conquest of Scotland was complete that he had set himself to the task of establis.h.i.+ng administrative machinery for that country after the order of things in England. For the purpose he had summoned to Carlisle a small group of barons and bishops, English as well as Scottish. The outcome was a division of the northern country into judicial districts over which justices and sheriffs were appointed. Edward signed the necessary papers and threw down his pen, convinced that he had completed his task.

Almost immediately, however, the word reached him that new fires of rebellion were blazing on the hillsides in the north and that Robert Bruce had been crowned at Scone. He swore a mighty oath that this time there would be no compromise. Aymer de Valence, a relation of Edward's in descent from the second marriage of the beautiful widow of King John, was his lieutenant in Scotland. Orders were sent him that all who had taken up arms must be killed or made prisoners and executed. In the meantime an army was a.s.sembled in England and was started north under the nominal command of Prince Edward. To prepare him for his responsibilities, the young prince was knighted at Westminster. In turn, then, the prince knighted two hundred and seventy young gentlemen who were to have their baptism of fire with him.

Conferring knighthood had developed into a complicated and rather beautiful ceremony since the beginning when the accolade, a tap on the shoulder with a sword, had sufficed. It began the previous evening when the candidate was shaved and then taken to a special chamber where a bath was prepared with scented water and a covering of linen and rich cloths. While he bathed, two old knights talked to him solemnly about the duties of the order. Later still he was led to the chapel, where he stood throughout the night, keeping watch over his armor and saying prayers and meditating. At break of day he bathed again, confessed, heard ma.s.s, and offered a taper with a piece of money stuck in the white tallow. With his future squire riding before him and carrying the sword and the gold spurs which were to be attached to his heels, he made his way to the great hall. Here he knelt on one knee and was given the accolade. The knight who performed the ceremony would say a few words, not the usually accepted phrase, "I dub thee knight" (this came in later, when the ceremony had been much simplified), but some felicitous message such as, "Be thou a brave and gentle knight, faithful to thy G.o.d, thy liege lord, and thy lady fair." Finally there would be feasting and drinking and telling of stories and listening to the minstrels. At one time the candidate was supposed to confer his spurs on the cook of the establishment as a fee, but this was never general, nor did it survive long, for gold spurs were not easily come by and a cook, after all, was only a cook.

In order that all this shaving and scrubbing and standing vigil could be carried on with two hundred and seventy candidates at one time, very special arrangements had been made. Some of the trees in the Temple Gardens were cut down to make room for the tents of this great mob of embryonic knights and their squires and servants. Some stood watch over their armor in Temple Church, but most of them performed this essential part of the ritual at Westminster Abbey. The next day the young men, their faces glowing from the unusual attention of two baths in a few hours, their eyes s.h.i.+ning with the proper exultation, were led up one by one for the official tap on the shoulder. The crush was so great in the abbey that two men were suffocated in front of the high altar. There could not have been any room left in the great church for the sanctuary seekers who infested it ordinarily, lurking in the shadows, begging furtively for food, and under no circ.u.mstances venturing outside. Perhaps they had been herded together and shut up in the crypt until the ceremony was over.

It seems certain that the king, who could more accurately be called longheaded than long-legged, had planned this brilliant ceremony for a double purpose: to present his tall son to the people of England in the most favorable light, and to impress on the idle mind of that young man a fitting sense of the important part he would soon be called upon to play.

After the ceremony of knighthood was over, there was a feast for all who had taken part, a truly gargantuan meal, with great haunches of venison and roasts of beef and mutton and scores of casks filled with the best wines from Bordeaux. Near the end of the feasting and drinking, two swans under folds of gold network were placed on the table before the king. He swore "by the gracious G.o.d of all and the two swans" that he would avenge the death of Comyn the Red and not rest himself until he had killed Robert the Bruce. It was then the turn of Prince Edward, and he proceeded to swear, also over the brace of swans, that he would never rest more than one night in the same place until the land, meaning Scotland, had been conquered. It will be observed that both father and son were more sensible in the nature of their vows than most kings on the point of riding out to war. It had been the usual thing for them to swear never to bathe, never to have a haircut nor to have a beard trimmed until their objectives had been attained; with the result that it was often impossible to tell a mighty king or a bombastic knight from the shrewels that scared crows away from the grain fields.

One of the candidates who was awarded his spurs on this busy day was a dark young man whose family had played an active and not always admirable part in the Marcher country. His name was Roger de Mortimer and his bright dark eye was destined to win the favor of a certain beautiful lady far, far above him. Included in the number also was a handsome young fellow named Hugh le Despenser, junior. These two were to play spectacular parts in the painful story of Edward II. It would have been better for both of them, and certainly for poor Prince Edward, if they had overslept that morning and never had the opportunity of being knighted, and so have been prevented from getting into things at all; for both of them, after periods of strutting and imposing their wills on others and earning the hatred of everyone, would die the painful death reserved for traitors, while Edward, largely because of their activities, would suffer a still more ignominious end.

3.

Aymer de Valence was not a brilliant soldier but he was crafty. When he reached the neighborhood of Perth and found the Bruce ready to meet him with an army hastily a.s.sembled but filled with new fire and zeal, he declined the invitation to fight a pitched battle. Later in the day, when the Scots had dropped back to Methven and were unprepared, he attacked them suddenly and won a complete victory.

Bruce retreated into the hills but, realizing that his cause was a lost one for the time being, he finally found refuge with the small force still faithful to him in the western isles. The rest of his men, who had returned to their homes, were not so lucky. Many were captured and either hanged or beheaded as the old king had ordered. Nigel Bruce was captured in Kildrummy Castle and taken to Berwick, where he was hanged. Thomas and Alexander were defeated in an effort to land a force at Lockryan and were sentenced by Edward himself to be dragged at the tails of horses to the gallows and there executed. Sir Simon Fraser was sent to London to provide a spectacle for the citizens. Here he was executed in what had now come to be the accepted way; he was hanged first, then drawn and quartered and his head cut off to be placed in the n.o.ble company of what little was left of Wallace's head rotting on London Bridge.

Edward seems to have had an ingenious turn for devising punishments. When he learned that the Countess of Buchan had been captured, he had her sent to Berwick and ordered that a cage be constructed there in which she was to be confined "at his pleasure." The cage was built in one of the high turrets of Berwick Castle, in the shape of a crown, in view of the nature of her offense. It was of strong latticework, crossbarred and strengthened with iron. Here the brave countess, refusing to express any contrition, was kept, as one chronicle phrased it, "like a wild beast" and was an object of curiosity to all visitors at the castle. Two women, both English and so not likely to feel sympathy for her, were selected to keep a watch on her and supply her needs.

The king's original purpose may have been to hang the cage outside the turret where all who pa.s.sed could look up and see the prisoner. It was found that the weather was too severe for this, what with the heavy rains and the bitter cold of the winters. A compromise was made by which the cage was suspended outside only when the day was fine.

Here the brave lady remained for four years, as Edward II continued her punishment after his father's death. Her husband, who was called Comyn the Black because of his beard, made no effort to get her free. He was so determined to avenge the murder of Comyn the Red that he took up arms on the English side. He never forgave his wife, and it was not until his death in 1313 that she was freed from the less rigorous confinement in a monastery to which she had been sent after her release from the cage.

There is a legend that in the next century Louis XI took a leaf from the English king's book and punished Cardinal Balue for an act of treason by putting him in an open cage elevated on the tower of one of the royal castles. Here the cardinal, who had once been entrusted with most of that sly king's dirty work, was kept for eleven years, through rain and sleet and frost, a supply of food and a bottle of wine being lowered to him on the end of a rope once a week.

Robert the Bruce had struck too soon and it had been costly, in lives, in possessions, and in prestige. But he would come back. The next spring would see him land again on the west coast, with small forces but with high hopes. The days of indecision, of time-serving, were over. From this time onward he would have one thought only, one purpose in life, to break, no matter at what cost, the chains that Edward had riveted on Scotland.

CHAPTER XVIII.