ed a family to greatness which overawed the
Crown. Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had
received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby
on the extinction of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,
was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships
the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the weight of these great baronies was added
his royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.
His mother was dowager queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's
side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English
queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far
from the succession to the throne. Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a
nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the
king into a really national policy. As it was his weight proved
irresistible. When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston
the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament
which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm
should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one "Ordainers" with
Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Ordainers]

Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. A triumph in Scotland
would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of
his father's military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an
army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern
realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the "Ordinances" which the
twenty-one laid before it. 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. Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the
barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.
Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the
king's servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice. The great
officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the
baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in
Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent
hims