in arms and affairs to which Edward had long striven to inure him. When
all thus seemed favourable, a sudden storm burst in Scotland which
plunged the old king into renewed troubles.

[1] _De recuperatione terre sancte_, ed. C.V. Langlois (1891).

[2] John of London, _Commendatio lamentabilis_, pp. 5-6.

In 1304 Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, became by his father's death the
head of his house. Though he had long adhered to the regency which had
governed Scotland in Balliol's name, he had now made terms with Edward,
and had taken a conspicuous part in bringing about the pacification of
Scotland under its new constitution. But the double policy, which had
involved him in the shifts and tergiversations of his earlier career,
still dominated the mind of the ambitious earl. At the moment of his
submission to Edward, he entered into an intimate alliance with Bishop
Lamberton of St. Andrews, the old partisan of Wallace. Lamberton was
then, like Bruce, on Edward's side, and as John of Brittany had not yet
personally taken up his new charge, the blind confidence of Edward
entrusted him with the foremost place among the commissioners who acted
as wardens of Scotland during the king's lieutenant's absence. Bruce,
still remembering his grandfather's claim on the throne, welcomed the
definitive setting aside of Balliol. While Edward believed that
Scotland was quietening down under its new constitution, Bruce was
secretly conspiring with the Scottish magnates, with a view to making
himself king. His chief difficulty was with the late regent, John Comyn
the Red, lord of Badenoch. The Bruces and the Comyns had long been at
variance, and the Red Comyn, who was the nephew of the deposed King
John, regarded himself as the representative of the Balliol claim to
the throne, and was not unmindful how his father had withdrawn his