e difficulty created by the demand for personal homage
by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and
despatching him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King
Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agenois being reserved for
legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.
Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to
return to his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher
barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and
his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With
the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the
Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian
bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail
in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed
when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at
Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he
implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the
Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible
refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he
fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl
whom they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at
once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at
Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that
purpose at Westminster in January 1327.

[Sidenote: Deposition of Edward]

The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the
earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had
proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf,
and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king
by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.
The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch
with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his
coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the
approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had
ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. A
deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the ass