an English knight and one of the disinherited of 1332, was entrusted with the command.  By August he had been forced to surrender, and Stirling soon afterwards opened its gates to the gallant and energetic steward.  In 1341 Edinburgh castle was captured by a clever stratagem, and a few weeks later David and Joan returned from France.  The king, then seventeen years old, henceforth undertook the personal administration of his kingdom.  Once more there was a King of Scots whom the Scottish people themselves desired.  The first military enterprise of Edward’s reign ended in complete failure.

During the years of Edward Balliol’s attempt on Scotland, it was the obvious interest of the English king to maintain such relations with France as to prevent the tightening of the traditional bond between the French and the Scottish courts.  There were plenty of outstanding points of difference between England and France, but neither country was anxious for war, and the result of this mutual forbearance enabled Edward III. to deal with the Scots at his leisure.  A survey of the relations of the two realms during the first ten years of Edward III.’s reign will show how, despite the reluctance of either party to force matters to a crisis, the Kings of France and England gradually drifted into the hostility which, from 1337 onwards, paralysed the progress of the English cause in Scotland.

At the moment of the fall of Edward II., England and France were still nominally engaged in the war which had followed the second seizure of Guienne by Charles IV.  The difficulties experienced by Isabella and Mortimer in establishing their power made them as willing to give way to the French as to the Scots.  Accordingly, on March 31, 1327, a treaty of peace was signed at Paris.  By this treaty Edward only gained the restoration of certain of his Gascon vassals to the estates of which they had been deprived through their loyalty to the English connexion.  He pledged himself to pay a large war indemnity, and accepted a partial restitution of his Gascon lands.  Like so many of the treaties since 1259, it was a truce rather than a peace.  Many details still remained for settlement, and it was pretty clear that the French, having the whip hand, would drive Gascony towards the goal of gradual absorption which had been so clearly marked out by Philip the Fair.

Charles IV. restored to Edward such parts of Gascony as he chose to surrender.  He retained in his hands Agen and the Agenais, and Bazas and the Bazadais, on the ground that Charles of Valois had won them by right of conquest in 1324.  This policy reduced Edward’s duchy to two portions of territory, very unequal in size and separated from each other by the lands conquered by the French king’s uncle.  The larger section of the English king’s lands extended along the coast from the mouth of the Charente to the mouth of the Bidassoa.  It included Saintes with Saintonge south of the Charente, Bordeaux and