In 1267, Henry and Prince Edward, being driven to the greatest extremity by the Earl of Gloucester and other Barons, whom their oppressions and unlawful exactions had forced to take up arms, when every hope failed them, and even the Tower of London was besieged by a numerous army of enraged assailants, they were very opportunely relieved from their perilous situation by the assistance of 30,000 Scots, whom Alexander sent to their relief; and with these auxiliaries they were enabled to withstand, and afterwards to subdue, their exasperated and refractory subjects. The debt of gratitude which was thus incurred, Edward had not an opportunity of discharging, till after the death of Alexander, when the Scots, with a generous confidence, which their own conduct naturally inspired, applied to him to act as umpire in settling the succession to the crown. How honourably he acquitted himself in the discharge of the duties of the trust thus reposed in him, and how generous was the return he made for their good offices, the reader requires not to be told. Two nations, who had for nearly a century regarded each other with feelings of mutual good-will, and had lived in a state of friendly intercourse highly beneficial to both, were suddenly transformed into the most inveterate enemies; and an implacable spirit of animosity engendered between them, which it required the slow revolution of ages to soften and obliterate. The guilty ambition of this short-sighted tyrant entailed upon the British states a quarrel the most bloody, the most expensive, and the most insane that perhaps ever existed between two nations. By the ridiculous pretensions of the one, the improvement of both countries was retarded, and their frontier populations demoralized into cut-throats or plunderers, who wandered in search of their prey over a land barren as the desert, which might otherwise have been teeming with the fruits of honest and profitable industry.