seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be
followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces
which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the
superficial unity of Christendom.

The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustrated
the importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showed
how incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblest
king. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commons
of England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas of
Lancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin,
Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of the
significance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. He
felt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish and
dynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'
War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim was
invented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories to
fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was
Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's
clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne,
from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were
bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed
under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which
England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its
feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural,
especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a
sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a
Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had
grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French
became more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gave