n. He had against him the separatist local feeling which Scottish
history and ethnology made inevitable, and it took time for him to
obtain that prestige, which should hedge a king, and raise him above
the crowd of feudal earls and clan chieftains, who thought themselves
as good as the sometime Earl of Carrick. Such dignity and distinction
Bannockburn supplied, and such measure of national unity and strong
monarchical authority as Scotland ever enjoyed, came from the triumph
of him who became, even more than Wallace, the hero of the new nation.
For the next few years the Scots took the aggressive. They induced the
French kings to renew the alliance which Philip IV. had made with them
in the early years of the contest. They obtained papal recognition for
their king and the withdrawal of the ban of the Church on Comyn's
murderer; they plundered northern England from end to end, and broke
down Anglo-Norman rule in Ireland; they plotted for the resurrection of
the Welsh principality; and, worse than all, they made common cause
with the baronial opposition. Hence it followed that the political
results of the victory were as important to England as they were to
Scotland itself. The troubled history of the next eight years reveals
in detail the effects of Bannockburn on England. Edward's defeat threw
him into the power of the ordainers. The ordainers, when called upon to
govern, showed themselves as incapable as ever Edward or his favourites
had been. The results were misrule, aristocratic faction, popular
distress, and mob violence. Ineffective as are the first seven years of
the reign of Edward of Carnarvon, the eight years which followed
Bruce's victory plunged England deeper into the pit of degradation,
from which neither the king nor the king's foes were strong, wise, or
honest enough to release her.

CHAPTER XIII.

LANCASTER, PEMBROKE, AND THE DESPENSERS.

Bannockburn was almost welcomed by the ordainers, for it afforded new
opportunities of humiliating the defeated king. While Edward tarried at
Berwick, Lancaster was in his castle of Pontefract with a force far
larger than his cousin's. Loudly declaring that the true cause of the
disaster was Edward's neglect to carry out the ordinances, he announced
his intention of immediately enforcing their observance. At a
parliament at York, in September, Edward delivered himself altogether
into Thomas's hands, ordering the immediate execution of the
ordinances, and rep