ong as Guienne, the ancient patrimony of his family,
was wrested from him by the dishonest artifices of the French monarch.
Finding that the distance of that province rendered all his efforts
against it feeble and uncertain, he purposed to attack France in a
quarter where she appeared more vulnerable; and with this view he
married his daughter Elizabeth to John, earl of Holland, and at the same
time contracted an alliance with Guy, earl of Flanders, stipulated
to pay him the sum of seventy-five thousand pounds, and projected an
invasion with their united forces upon Philip, their common enemy.[**]
He hoped that, when he himself, at the head of the English, Flemish, and
Dutch armies, reenforced by his German allies, to whom he had promised
or remitted considerable sums, should enter die frontiers of France,
and threaten the capital itself, Philip would at last be obliged to
relinquish his acquisitions, and purchase peace by the restitution
of Guienne. But in order to set this great machine in movement,
considerable supplies were requisite from the parliament; and Edward,
without much difficulty, obtained from the barons and knights a new
grant of a twelfth of all their movables, and from the boroughs that
of an eighth. The great and almost unlimited power of the king over the
latter, enabled him to throw the heavier part of the burden on them;
and the prejudices which he seems always to have entertained against the
church, on account of the former zeal of the clergy for the Mountfort
faction, made him resolve to load them with still more considerable
impositions, and he required of them a fifth of their movables. But he
here met with an opposition, which for some time disconcerted all his
measures, and engaged him in enterprises that were somewhat dangerous to
him; and would have proved fatal to any of his predecessors.

* Homing, vol. i. p. 72, 73, 74.

** Rymer, vol. ii. p. 761. Walsing, p. 68.

Boniface VIII., who had succeeded Celestine in the papal throne, was a
man of the most lofty and enterprising spirit; and though not endowed
with that severity of manners which commonly accompanies ambition in men
of his order, he was determined to carry the authority of the tiara,
and his dominion over the temporal power, to as great a height as it
had ever attained in any former period. Sensible that his immediate
predecessors, by oppressing the church in every province of Christendom,
had extremely alienated the