Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Gaveston arranged the whole ceremony; but as his own display was his chief thought, he managed to affront every one, and more especially the young Queen and her uncles, so that Isabel wrote a letter to her father full of complaints of her new lord and his favorite, and Philippe entered into correspondence with the discontented nobility.
Jedburgh, Stirling, and Edinburgh, were the last castles still in the hands of the invaders. The Castle of Edinburgh, aloft on the rock frowning above the town, had been held by the English full twenty years, and, when Randolph was sent to besiege it, was governed by a Gascon knight named Piers Luband, a kinsman of Gaveston.
The Earls of Gloucester and Warrenne reduced the forest of Selkirk and the district, and restored the English power there; while the king's favourite, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, went by sea to Perth and tried to reduce the surrounding country, but the Scotch, as usual, retired before him, and he, too, after a time, returned to Berwick.
The King issued writs summoning his nobles to meet for his coronation on the 25th of February, but they took the opportunity of insisting that Gaveston should be dismissed from favor.
After a few months of power the formal demand of the Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished from the realm. But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite.
By this long and important statute Gaveston was banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out of the realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared to be illegal.
Imagine an Edward II. endowed with absolute and unquestioned powers of tyranny, imagine some pestilent Piers Gaveston, or Hugh de le Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous despotism of the back stairs, and you have some faint picture of the government of Rome under some of the twelve Caesars.
The closing years of the reign of Edward II. of England were endangered by the same partiality for favourites which, had disturbed its beginning. The de Spensers, father and son, played at this period the part which Gaveston had performed twenty years earlier.
He had long held the title of Commander of the Irish forces, "in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Gascony;" he had successfully resisted Gaveston in the meridian of his court favour; the father-in-law of a King, and of Earls of almost royal power, lord paramount of half the island-such a subject England had not seen on Irish ground since the Invasion.
The latter, after all, was the most probable; and, upon the whole, I felt more than ever convinced that he was the person I suspected him to be. Tell how the fates my giddy course did guide, The inconstant turns of every changing hour. Pierce Gaveston, by M. Drayton. Je me retire donc. Adieu, Paris, adieu! Boileau.
Word Of The Day