This sudden change in the royal fortunes alarmed the barons, and many made submission; but Edward cast them into prison, and seized their castles. Great Lancaster was now sorely discomposed, and learned, too late, to fear the monarch whose authority he had so openly slighted. It had been long suspected that this potent noble had entered into a confederacy with the Scots, to avert the doom which would probably overtake him if deserted by the English barons, or defeated by the royal forces. The time had now arrived when it was necessary to call in the national enemy to his rescue; and in this crisis of his fortunes he openly avowed his unpatriotic measures, took up arms, and urgently appealed to the King of Scotland for assistance. Before those redoubtable warriors, Moray and Douglas, assembled their men-at-arms and pikemen, the promptitude of Edward had prevailed. Finding that he could not maintain himself against King Edward until succoured by the Scottish reinforcements, Lancaster marched northward, and was joined by the Earl of Hereford. This accession of strength did not, however, enable him to assume the offensive, although it encouraged him to make a stand at Burton-upon-Trent, where he took up a position that commanded the bridge, in the vain hope of holding the royal forces at bay, and of receiving reinforcements from the disaffected barons. The noble blood that had already been shed in requital of treason against the crown had operated forcibly upon the reasoning faculties of Edward's violent and restless barons, and they prudently kept their steeds in stall, and swords in scabbard, leaving Lancaster and Hereford, with their band of adherents, to make the best of their quarrel with the King, alone, and unaided, unless they could succeed in reaching the Scottish border and forming a junction with the Scots under Randolph and Douglas. It would have fared ill with the nation if Lancaster's design had succeeded, for although Robert Bruce was too wise a monarch to attempt to annex any of the English territory, being satisfied to strictly maintain the integrity of the Kingdom of Scotland, yet Lancaster might have involved the nation in the distractions of a wide-extending civil war, for placed in so desperate a position he would necessarily have urged the Scots to press any advantage that their arms might have achieved, and although the resistance of the English would have been the rising of the nation against a foreign invader, yet Lancaster might have succeeded in winning over some of the barons, especially as Edward knew not the art of attaching them to his interests, but was possessed of an unhappy facility in disgusting them by his too-obvious lack of the qualities necessary to a great prince in the middle ages.