to trial elsewhere than before his peers.  The Commons demanded and obtained the appointment of commissioners elected in Parliament to audit the grants already made.  Finally it was enacted that at each Parliament the ministers should hold themselves accountable for all grievances; that on any vacancy the king should take counsel with his lords as to the choice of the new minister; and that, when chosen, each minister should be sworn in Parliament.

[Sidenote:  Close of the truce]

At the moment which we have reached therefore the position of the Parliament had become far more important than at Edward’s accession.  Its form was settled.  The third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power.  The principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses had been established by formal statute.  But the jealousy of Edward was at last completely roused, and from this moment he looked on the new power as a rival to his own.  The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up than he revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had passed as done in prejudice of his prerogative and only assented to for the time to prevent worse confusion.  The regular assembly of the estates was suddenly interrupted, and two years passed without a Parliament.  It was only the continual presence of war which from this time drove Edward to summon the Houses at all.  Though the truce still held good between England and France a quarrel of succession to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in 1341 and called Philip to the support of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and Edward to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on year after year.  In Flanders things went ill for the English cause.  The dissensions between the great and the smaller towns, and in the greater towns themselves between the weavers and fullers, dissensions which had taxed the genius of Van Arteveldt through the nine years of his wonderful rule, broke out in 1345 into a revolt at Ghent in which the great statesman was slain.  With him fell a design for the deposition of the Count of Flanders and the reception of the Prince of Wales in his stead which he was ardently pressing, and whose political results might have been immense.  Deputies were at once sent to England to excuse Van Arteveldt’s murder and to promise loyalty to Edward; but the king’s difficulties had now reached their height.  His loans from the Florentine bankers amounted to half a million.  His claim on the French crown found not a single adherent save among the burghers of the Flemish towns.  The overtures which he made for peace were contemptuously rejected, and the expiration of the truce in 1345 found him again face to face with France.

[Sidenote:  Edward marches on Paris]