At the close of the year the terms of peace seemed to be arranged; and though declining to cross the sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal homage by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and despatching him to join his mother at Paris.  The boy did homage to King Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agenois being reserved for legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.  Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to return to his court.  Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy.  With the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the Count of Hainault by promising her son’s hand to his daughter; the Italian bankers supplied funds; and after a year’s preparation the Queen set sail in the autumn of 1326.  A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at Orwell.  Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl whom they had slain.  The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that purpose at Westminster in January 1327.

[Sidenote:  Deposition of Edward]

The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had proved himself unworthy to rule.  Not a voice was raised in Edward’s behalf, and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.  The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor.  A deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent of the discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward “clad in a plain black gown” bowed quietly to his fate.  Sir William Trussel at once addressed him in words which better than any other mark the nature of the step which the Parliament had taken.  “I, William Trussel, proctor of the earls, barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient power, do render and give back