A horrible succession of famines laid waste the land. A
fresh campaign against Scotland ended in a humiliating truce for
thirteen years. The Queen, Prince John's mother, on pretence of
concluding a treaty between her husband and her brother, King Charles
the Fourth, carried off Prince Edward, a child twelve years of age, to
France. There she was joined by her vile favorite Mortimer; and neither
threats nor entreaties could persuade her to return until she landed at
Orwell in 1326 with a great following of exiled nobles, and proclaimed
her son Edward "guardian of the realm." Deserted by all, her wretched
husband was at last captured in Wales and carried to Kenilworth, where
he was deposed by the Queen and Parliament in 1327. He died a few months
later, murdered by Mortimer's orders at Berkeley Castle.

[Illustration: EFFIGY OF JOHN OF ELTHAM.]

His downfall was the sign for a new outbreak in Scotland. Bruce broke
the thirteen years' truce; and the boy-king, Edward the Third, marched
against him only to meet with fresh disaster. The tide of fortune
however was turning. Isabella and her favorite were fast becoming
odious to the nation; and in 1330 Edward, the future conqueror of
Cressy, with his own hands arrested Mortimer at Nottingham, whence he
was hurried to execution. The Queen-mother went into lifelong seclusion
at Castle Rising in Norfolk; and the young king assumed the control of
the affairs of the kingdom.

In 1328, the year after his brother Edward's accession to the crown,
John of Eltham was created Earl of Cornwall in a parliament at
Salisbury. The next year Edward journeyed to France to do homage for his
lands there; and Prince John was made "Custos of the kingdom and King's
Lieutenant while he went beyond the seas." It seems an extraordinary
responsibility for a boy of fourteen. But those Plantagenets were a
strong and precocious race. Edward the Third was only eighteen when he
took the reins of government into his own hands in 1330--the year that
his eldest son, the famous Black Prince, was born. And the Black Prince
won his spurs in the glorious fight of Cressy when he was barely
sixteen. So there was nothing very unusual in the young Earl of Cornwall
administering the government of the kingdom during his brother's absence
in France, and again later on while the king was in Scotland.

[Illustration: TOMB OF JOHN OF ELTHAM, ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL.]

In 1333, when he was seventeen, proposals of marriage were