stom,
and made Scottish resistance inevitable.

The expulsion of the Jews, the reform of the administration, the statute
_Quia emptores_, the treaty of Tarascon, the humiliation of Gloucester,
and the successful issue of the Scottish arbitration, mark the
culminating point in the reign of Edward I. The king had ruled twenty
years with almost uniform success, and his only serious disappointment
had been the failure of the crusade. The last hope of the Latin East
faded when, in 1291, Acre, so long the bulwark of the crusaders against
the Turks, opened its gates to the infidel. With the fall of Acre went
the last chance of the holy war. Before long the peace of Europe, which
Edward thought that he had established, was once more rudely disturbed.
Difficulties soon arose with Scotland, with France, with the Church, and
with the barons. These troubles bore the more severely on the king
because this period saw also the removal of nearly all of those in whom
he had placed special trust. The gracious Eleanor of Castile died in
1290, at Harby, in Nottinghamshire, near Lincoln,[1] and the devotion of
the king to the partner of his youth found a striking expression in the
sculptured crosses, which marked the successive resting-places of her
corpse on its last journey from Harby to Westminster Abbey. A few months
later Edward's mother, Eleanor of Castile, ended her long life in the
convent of Amesbury, in Wiltshire. The ministers of Edward's early reign
were also removed by death. Bishop Kirkby, the treasurer, died in 1290,
and Burnell, the chancellor, in 1292, soon after he had performed his
last public act in the declaration of the king's judgment as to the
Scottish succession. Archbishop Peckham died in the same year. New
domestic ties were formed, and fresh ministers were found, but the
ageing king became more and more lonely, as he was compelled to rely
upon a younger and a less faithful generation. Of his old comrades the
chief remaining was Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, while the removal of
Burnell brought forward to the first rank prelates whose position had
hitherto been somewhat obscured by his predominance. Prominent among
these were the brothers Thomas Bek, Bishop of St. David's, and Anthony
Bek, Bishop of Durham, members of a conspicuous Lincolnshire baronial
family. Both of these for a time strikingly combined devotion to the
royal service with loyalty to those clerical and aristocratic traditions
which, strictly interp