Edward III

Edward III. (1313-1377). Like his grandfather, Edward III. passed a stormy youth amid the distraction of family quarrels and national turmoil. It is a very significant comment upon the death of Edward II. that the young king took an early rpportunity of killing his mother's paramour, and' of keeping her out of mischief for the rest of her life. The first part of his reign was occupied by the question of .Scotland. Here a kinel of see-saw was going on between Edward Balliol and David Breice, but Edward made a temporary balance by defeating the regent Douglas, eet Halidon Hill in 1333. But Eelward now entered upon the great scheme of his life - the obtaining of the French crown, a project which has had a lasting influence upon national history, first, as leaving a legacy of so-called natural antipathy between the English and French races; secondly, as being the root of many liborties which were concessions to the need of winning the hearts of the people of England; and thirdly, the wars led to the thorough fusion of the different and thitherto discordant elements of the national races. Edward and his son, the Black Prince, prosecuteel the war in France - winning first the battle of Crecy, and then the battle of Poitiers, where a king of France was captured, after the interlude of the siege of Calais, where Philippa (with all her blushing honours thick upon her of having captured a king of Scotland) is said to have interfered to prevent her husband from committing an unknightly deed. Edward's later days were dark. His warrior son dead, his French conquests passing away, and the thought of leaving the crown to a grandson ill-fitted to cope with ambitious and powerful nobles, and his own great faculties failing, seemed but a poor outcome of a glorious reign.