It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence of the royalists, that we owe the famous provision which reveals the policy of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning “the estate of our Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and the people shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments by our Lord the King and by the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and commonalty of the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed.”  It would seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much of the sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all legislative action by the baronage alone.  The same policy was seen in a reissue in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most beneficial provisions of the Ordinances which had been formally repealed.  But the arrogance of the Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure of a fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened the Crown.  The barbarous forays in which the borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting Northumberland woke a general indignation; and a grant from the Parliament at York enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North.  But Bruce as of old declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the invaders into a ruinous retreat.  The failure forced England in the spring of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which Bruce was suffered to take the royal title.  We see in this act of the Despensers the first of a series of such attempts by which minister after minister strove to free the Crown from the bondage under which the war-pressure laid it to the growing power of Parliament; but it ended, as these after attempts ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who planned it.  The pride of the country had been roused by the struggle, and the humiliation of such a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.  It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this disastrous reign.

[Sidenote:  Isabella]

In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father, had been hampered not only by internal divisions but by the harassing intervention of France.  The rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of Charles the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called Edward over sea.  But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, and a fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the Agenois brought about the seizure of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of the French.  The quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward’s queen, Isabella, a sister of the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her home and bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries.  Isabella hated the Despensers; she was alienated from her husband; but hatred and alienation were as yet jealously concealed.