That midsummer battle of Bannockburn undid all the work of Edward I.,
and made Scotland an independent kingdom for three hundred years longer.
Ill-government, a discontented nobility, and a feeble King, had brought
England so low, that the troops could not shake off their dejection,
and a hundred would flee before two or three Scottish soldiers.
Bruce ravaged the northern counties every summer, leaving famine and
pestilence behind him; but Edward II. had neither spirit nor resolution
to make war or peace. The mediation of the Pope and King of France
was ineffectual, and years of warfare passed on, impressing habits of
perpetual license and robbery upon the borderers of either nation.
CAMEO XXXIX.
THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE.
(1292-1316.)
_Kings of England_.
1272. Edward I.
1307. Edward II.
_King of Scotland_.
1306. Robert I.
_Kings of France_.
1285. Philippe IV.
1314. Louis X.
_Emperors of Germany_.
1292. Adolph.
1296. Albert I.
1308. Henry VII.
1314. Louis V.
_Popes_.
1296. Boniface VIII.
1303. Benedict XI.
1305. Clement V.
Crusades were over. The dream of Edward I. had been but a dream, and
self-interest and ambition directed the swords of Christian princes
against each other rather than against the common foe. The Western
Church was lapsing into a state of decay and corruption, from which she
was only partially to recover at the cost of disruption and disunion,
and the power which the mighty Popes of the twelfth century had gathered
into a head became, for that very cause, the tool of an unscrupulous
monarch.
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