by ten yearly instalments.  The task was harder for a poor country like Scotland than the redemption of Richard I. had been for England.  On hostages being given, David was released, and Edward, without relinquishing his own pretensions to be King of Scots, took no steps to enforce his claim.  The event showed that Edward knew his man.  The instalments of ransom could not be regularly paid, and David never became free from his obligations.  Nothing save the tenacity of the Scottish nobles prevented him from accepting Edward’s proposals to write off the arrears of his ransom in return for his accepting either the English king himself or his son, Lionel of Antwerp, as heir of Scotland.  This attitude brought David into conflict with his natural heir, Robert, the Steward of Scotland, the son of his sister Margaret.  The tension between uncle and nephew forced the Scots king to remain on friendly terms with Edward.  For the rest of the reign, Scottish history was occupied by aristocratic feuds, by financial expedients for raising the king’s ransom, by the gradual development of the practice of entrusting the powers of parliament to those committees of the estates subsequently famous as the lords of the articles, by David’s matrimonial troubles after Joan’s death, and by his unpopular visits to the court of his neighbour.  Warfare between the realms there was none, save for the chronic border feuds.  When David died in 1371, the Steward of Scotland land mounted the throne as Robert II.  This first of the Stewart kings went back to the policy of the French alliance, but was too weak to inflict serious mischief on England.

In January, 1358, preliminaries of peace were also arranged with the captive King of France, and sent to Paris and Avignon for ratification.  Innocent VI. was overjoyed at his success, and Frenchmen were willing to make any sacrifices to bring back their monarch, for immediately after Poitiers a storm of disorder burst over France.  The states general met a few weeks after the battle, and the regent, Charles of Normandy, was helpless in their hands.  This was the time of the power of Stephen Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris, and of Robert Lecoq, Bishop of Laon.  But the movement in Paris was neither in the direction of parliamentary government nor of democracy, and few men have less right to be regarded as popular heroes than Marcel and Lecoq.  The estates were manipulated in the interests of aristocratic intrigue, and, behind the ostensible leaders, was the sinister influence of Charles of Navarre, who availed himself of the desolation of France to play his own game.  For a time he was the darling of the Paris mob.  Innocent VI. was deceived by his protestations of zeal for peace.  As grandson of Louis X. he aspired to the French throne, and was anxious to prevent John’s return.  Edward had no good-will for a possible rival, but it was his interest to keep up the anarchy, and he had no scruple in backing up Charles.  There was talk