land Barons to rally
to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he
surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the
dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the
wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and
wood-pile on fire.

[Sidenote: Edward the Second]

A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the
revival of the country went steadily on. Pembroke and the English forces
were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between
the new king and his baronage. The moral purpose which had raised his
father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy,
idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the
intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no
love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign
struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to
taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses
added to the Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of throwing off
what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he
designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly
dependent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the
"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary
government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly
superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close
of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate the
great officers of state had been curtly rejected, but the royal choice had
been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of
prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with royalty they might
be such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and opinions
of their order. The aim of the young king seems to have been to undo the
change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the policy of
the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his ministers men of
an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power, and
representatives of nothing but the policy and interests of their master.
Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from