At Berwick Edward received Balliol’s formal defiance.  “Has the fool done this folly?” the king cried in haughty scorn; “if he will not come to us, we will come to him.”  The terrible slaughter however had done its work, and his march northward was a triumphal progress.  Edinburgh, Stirling, and Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol himself surrendered and passed without a blow from his throne to an English prison.  No further punishment however was exacted from the prostrate realm.  Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its forfeiture to be the legal consequence of Balliol’s treason.  It lapsed in fact to its suzerain; and its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage in Parliament at Berwick to Edward as their king.  The sacred stone on which its older sovereigns had been installed, an oblong block of limestone which legend asserted to have been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the Confessor.  It was enclosed by Edward’s order in a stately seat, which became from that hour the coronation chair of English kings.  To the king himself the whole business must have seemed another and easier conquest of Wales, and the mercy and just government which had followed his first success followed his second also.  The government of the new dependency was entrusted to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English Council of Regency.  Pardon was freely extended to all who had resisted the invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly enforced.

[Sidenote:  Confirmation of the Charters]

But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had more than exhausted the aids granted by the Parliament.  The treasury was utterly drained.  The struggle indeed widened as every month went on; the costly fight with the French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was planning a yet costlier attack on northern France with the aid of Flanders.  Need drove him on his return from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion which seemed to recall the times of John.  His first blow fell on the Church.  At the close of 1294 he had already demanded half their annual income from the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance that the Dean of St. Paul’s, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead of sheer terror at his feet.  “If any oppose the King’s demand,” said a royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, “let him stand up that he may be noted as an enemy to the King’s peace.”  The outraged Churchmen fell back on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the bull of “Clericis Laicos,” issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further taxation.  In 1297 Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this bull to make