The task which lay before Edward might well have daunted a stronger man.  The old king had failed in the great purpose of his life.  Scotland was in full revolt and had found a man able to guide her destinies.  The crown was deeply in debt; the exchequer was bare of supplies, and the revenues both of England and Gascony were farmed by greedy and unpopular companies of Italian bankers, such as the Frescobaldi of Florence, the king’s chief creditors.  The nobles, though restrained by the will of the old king, still cherished the ideals of the age of the Barons’ War, and were convinced that the best way to rule England was to entrust the machinery of the central government, which Edward I. had elaborated with so much care, to the control of a narrow council of earls and prelates.  Winchelsea, though broken in health, looked forward in his banishment to the renewal of the alliance of baronage and clergy, and to the reassertion of hierarchical ideals.  The papal curia, already triumphant in the last days of the reign of the dead king, was anticipating a return to the times of Henry III, when every dignity of the English Church was at its mercy.  The strenuous endeavour which had marked the last reign gave place to the extreme of negligence.

Edward at once broke with the policy of his father.  After receiving, at Carlisle, the homage of the English magnates, he crossed the Solway to Dumfries, where such Scottish barons as had not joined Robert Bruce took oaths of fealty to him.  He soon relinquished the personal conduct of the war, and travelled slowly to Westminster on the pretext of following his father’s body to its last resting-place.  He replaced his father’s ministers by dependants of his own.  Bishop Walter Langton, the chief minister of the last years of Edward I., was singled out for special vengeance.  He was stripped of his offices, robbed of his treasure, and thrown into close confinement, without any regard to the immunities of a churchman from secular jurisdiction.  Langton’s place as treasurer was given to Walter Reynolds, an illiterate clerk, who had won the chief place in Edward’s household through his skill in theatricals.  Ralph Baldock, Bishop of London, was replaced in the chancery by John Langton, Bishop of Chichester.  The barons of the exchequer, the justices of the high courts, and the other ministers of the old king were removed in favour of more complacent successors.  Signal favour was shown to all who had fallen under Edward I.’s displeasure.  Bishop Bek, of Durham, was restored to his palatinate, and the road to return opened to Winchelsea, though ill-health detained him on the Continent for some time longer.  Conspicuous among the returned exiles was Peter of Gaveston, whom the king welcomed with the warmest affection.  He at once invested his “brother Peter” with the rich earldom of Cornwall, which the old king, with the object of conferring it on one of his sons by his second marriage, had kept in his hands since Earl Edmund’s death.