ne which legend asserted to have
been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was
removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the
Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in a stately seat, which
became from that hour the coronation chair of English kings. To the king
himself the whole business must have seemed another and easier conquest of
Wales, and the mercy and just government which had followed his first
success followed his second also. The government of the new dependency was
entrusted to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English
Council of Regency. Pardon was freely extended to all who had resisted the
invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly enforced.

[Sidenote: Confirmation of the Charters]

But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had more than exhausted the
aids granted by the Parliament. The treasury was utterly drained. The
struggle indeed widened as every month went on; the costly fight with the
French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was planning a yet
costlier attack on northern France with the aid of Flanders. Need drove him
on his return from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion
which seemed to recall the times of John. His first blow fell on the
Church. At the close of 1294 he had already demanded half their annual
income from the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance
that the Dean of St. Paul's, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead
of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's demand," said a
royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that he may
be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back
on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the
bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a
bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their
ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further
taxation. In 1297 Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this bull
to make any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a general outlawry of the
whole order. The King's Courts were closed, and all justice denied to those
who refused the king aid. By their actual plea the clergy had put
themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to
submission; but their aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury. The
pres