as well as for the late king’s murder, a murder which had been the work of his private partizans and which had profoundly shocked the general conscience.  But the young king clave firmly to his mother, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed the league broke up without result.  A feeling of insecurity however spurred the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his opponents.  The Earl of Kent, who was persuaded that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to restore him to the throne, tried before a Parliament filled with Mortimer’s adherents, and sent to the block.  But the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the young king to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a minister who treated Edward himself as little more than a state-prisoner.  A few months after his uncle’s execution the king entered the Council chamber in Nottingham Castle with a force which he had introduced through a secret passage in the rock on which it stands, and arrested Mortimer with his own hands.  A Parliament which was at once summoned condemned the Earl of March to a traitor’s death, and in November 1330 he was beheaded at Tyburn, while the queen-mother was sent for the rest of her life into confinement at Castle Rising.

[Sidenote:  Edward and France]

Young as he was, and he had only reached his eighteenth year, Edward at once assumed the control of affairs.  His first care was to restore good order throughout the country, which under the late government had fallen into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France for further enterprises in the North.  A formal peace had been concluded by Isabella after her husband’s fall; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought about new jealousies between the two courts.  The three sons of Philip the Fair had followed him on the throne in succession, but all had now died without male issue, and Isabella, as Philip’s daughter, claimed the crown for her son.  The claim in any case was a hard one to make out.  Though her brothers had left no sons, they had left daughters, and if female succession were admitted these daughters of Philip’s sons would precede a son of Philip’s daughter.  Isabella met this difficulty by a contention that though females could transmit the right of succession they could not themselves possess it, and that her son, as the nearest living male descendant of Philip the Fair, and born in the lifetime of the king from whom he claimed, could claim in preference to females who were related to Philip in as near a degree.  But the bulk of French jurists asserted that only male succession gave right to the French throne.  On such a theory the right inheritable from Philip the Fair was exhausted; and the crown passed to the son of Philip’s younger brother, Charles of Valois, who in fact peacefully mounted the throne as Philip the Sixth.  Purely formal as the claim which Isabella