before the earls and barons that still tarried with him at Lincoln.  His appeal to their patriotism was not unsuccessful.  A letter was drawn up, which was sealed, then and subsequently, by more than a hundred secular magnates, in which Boniface was roundly told that the King of England was in no wise bound to answer in the pope’s court as to his rights over the realm of Scotland or as to any other temporal matter, and that the papal claim was unprecedented, and prejudicial to Edward’s sovereignly.  A longer historical statement was composed by the king’s order in answer to Boniface.  It is not certain that the two documents ever reached the pope, but they had great effect in influencing English opinion and in breaking down the alliance between the baronage and the ecclesiastical party.[1] Winchelsea’s influence was fatally weakened, and the period of his overthrow was at hand.

    [1] See, on the barons’ letter, the Ancestor, for July and
    October, 1903, and Jan., 1904.

The triumph over Winchelsea made Edward’s position stronger than it had been during the first days of the Lincoln parliament.  That assembly ended amidst the festivities which attended the creation of Edward of Carnarvon as Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, and Count of Ponthieu.  The new prince, already seventeen years of age, had made his first campaign in the previous year.  But all the pains that Edward took in training his son in warfare and in politics bore little fruit, and Edward of Carnarvon’s introduction to active life was only to add another trouble to the many that beset the king.

When the truce with Scotland expired, in the summer of 1301, Edward again led an army over the border, in which the Prince of Wales appeared, at the head of a large Welsh contingent.  Little of military importance happened.  Edward remained in Scotland over the cold season, and kept his Christmas court at Linlithgow.  Men and horses perished amidst the rigours of the northern winter, and, before the end of January, 1302, the king was glad to accept a truce, suggested by Philip of France, to last until the end of November.  Immediately afterwards he was called to the south by the negotiations for a permanent peace with France, which still hung fire despite his marriage to the French king’s sister.  The earlier stages of the negotiation were transacted at Rome, but it was soon clear to Edward that no good would come to him from the intervention of the curia.  The fundamental difficulty still lay in the refusal of Philip to relax his grasp on Gascony.  Not even the exaltation, consequent on the success of the famous jubilee of 1300, blinded Boniface to the patent fact that he dared not order the restitution of Gascony.  “We cannot give you an award,” declared the pope to the English envoys in 1300.  “If we pronounced in your favour, the French would not abide by it, and could not be compelled, for they would make light of any penalty.”  “What the French once lay hold of,” he said again, “they never let go, and to have to do with the French is to have to do with the devil."[1] A year later Boniface could do no more than appeal to the crusading zeal of Edward not to allow his claim on a patch of French soil to stand between him and his vow.  With such commonplaces the papal mediation died away.