The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “Then why do you believe that we need help?” Will’s tone was dry. He had not yet tasted his wine and was holding the cold rim of the pewter cup against his chin.

  “Because I think you have no real idea of what you need to do next.” No one reacted, and Bruce’s eyes shifted from Will to Andrew and back again, sliding over me as though I was not there. “I did not say that to offend you,” he went on. “But you have no idea what is needed to govern a country, and yet that is what you have condemned yourselves to do from this day forth—you now need to govern.” He threw up his hands. “Where you may find guidance in doing that is in God’s hands. It is most certainly not in your own.”

  Will pulled himself to his full height. “Grant us a trace of wisdom, Lord Bruce, at the very least.” His emphasis on Bruce’s name and title was slight enough to avoid outright offensiveness, but it was there nonetheless. He continued, almost in a growl. “We’re not quite as helpless as you seem to think. We have identified our priorities and we are well aware of what we need to be getting on with.” He nodded to me, because I had prepared the notes on all we had discussed before Bruce’s arrival, and I read the list aloud.

  “How to deal with the nobles,” I began. “The magnates and mormaers. How to deal with the Church, when the three strongest bishops in the realm are all absent. How to get rid of English garrisons now left in Scotland, now that they are cut off and isolated. How to deal with the governance of the realm, so that the machinery of government, including the law courts and the royal court of chancery, keeps working. And last, but first in overall importance, how to replenish the treasury and rebuild the realm’s economy.”

  Bruce’s eyebrows had risen high on his forehead as he listened to the litany, and now he placed his open palm on his left breast and bent forward in his seat in a mock bow. “Well done, my friends,” he said, with no trace of mockery in his voice. “I’m both impressed and relieved, for I believe you have managed to include everything that needs to be achieved in that short list. Achieving it all will take more lifetimes than we have among us all, for that kind of endeavour is never ending, but the fact that you have identified the elements so readily tells me you might be better prepared than I had thought.”

  “You’re wrong on what comes first, though, Jamie,” Will said quietly. “Finding money is important, but the most important consideration facing us now is what to do about the magnates and the mormaers, for until we find a way to deal with that, we won’t be able to do anything about the treasury.” He looked directly at Bruce. “And in that, Earl Carrick, you may perhaps be able to offer us some assistance.”

  “With the magnates?” The look on Bruce’s face was not encouraging. “I doubt they’d pay much heed to me. I’ve been away too long, and I’m a Bruce now in a Comyn country.” He stopped, seeing how Wallace was shaking his head. “What?”

  “We don’t need for you to go a-preaching on our behalf,” Will said. “We need more practical assistance, in the kind of thinking that people of your rank and station use. To begin, you can help us decide what to call ourselves. You were right about the letters from the noble houses. We have many of them and they all need to be answered, but how should they be answered? We are not magnates or mormaers and we have no grand titles. Andrew is of de Moray, but he is not a knight, though he will be soon. And I am a verderer, when not beyond the law. So what will we call ourselves in dealing with the dignitaries of the world?”

  Bruce thumped a clenched fist on the table. “Hah! See? At one thrust you have punctured the bladder of empty air that keeps the majority of men from ever achieving anything worthwhile! What should you call yourselves, indeed. You should call yourselves exactly what you are, awarding yourselves the honours you have won and which no one can take away from you, and you should do it by honouring and including those who made it possible—the ordinary folk of Scotland. In all your writings, you should name yourselves Andrew Moray and William Wallace, commanders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland and the community of that realm.” He paused, looking from one to the other of them. “You might think it sounds pretentious now, but it is not. It is precisely who and what you are. So say it out loudly, then let the doubters and the sneerers try to fault you for any part of it. Any man who dares to challenge you will be declaring himself to be no friend of this realm or its community.”

  I was stricken dumb by the beauty and perfection of what he had defined, and I was glad to see that both Will and Andrew were gaping at him.

  “By the living God, Sir Robert,” Will said, “I openly aver I stand henceforth in your debt. That solution is perfect—you agree, Andrew? Perfect.”

  Will stopped and gazed at the earl and then shook his head. “You know, I have no wish to like you or admire you, for you stand as an example of all the things I disapprove of in this land of ours. You appear much of the time to be more English than Scots, and your allegiance has, for years now, been freely given to England. But you’re a Bruce, and you were driven out when King John Balliol was chosen over your grandsire. Now, even though you have turned your back on England, there is a voice inside me that wants to ask, ‘Will he turn his coat on me?’ But for all of that, I cannot seem to help myself from liking you, and I believe we will be grateful for any help you can give us.”

  The Earl of Carrick smiled. “It gladdens me to hear that,” he said. “So let us see about finding something to eat, and then we may settle in and come to grips with the items on your list. There are people, excellent people throughout the land who we can conscript to help.” He looked at me again. “Of course, most of them will be priests or monks—clerics of some description—since few others read or write well enough to help us keep the records that will be necessary or draft the number of letters and communications we might require.”

  Will scowled. “What kind of communications?”

  “Straightforward ones, explaining to people how you intend to run the country now that it is open to change. I am assuming, of course, that you have no intention of restoring the status quo to what it was before Edward invaded?”

  “If you mean leaving all the power in the hands of the noble houses again, then you are correct. I won’t do that. Not without some form of accountability. And if that means that we may, in time, need an army of recruits from every monastery in the realm, we’ll recruit them. And if we are to have accountability on such a scale, we will need courts and magistrates to enforce penalties for lapses of that accountability. The great houses will continue to administer their own affairs, but they will be held accountable to this community of the realm of which you spoke. Their days of ignoring the laws of the realm and simply riding roughshod over everyone in pursuit of their own ends are over.”

  Bruce shrugged. “From what I know of such things, the great houses will benefit greatly by all that in the end, no matter how much it grieves them at the start. Accountability will bring stability, and everyone will gain from that. They’ll all get over their discontent eventually, one way or the other.”

  Andrew asked him, “And are you sure you want to be identified with this? Your peers may deem you traitor to your own class.”

  “I care not for that,” Carrick said. “But I will not be a part of it. I’ll do what I can do at this time, and I’ll help you to set things in motion, but I have much to take care of on my own nowadays. My earldom needs my attention and my father’s territory of Annandale has been neglected for too long, so I’ll assist you now, say, for the remaining months of this year, but after that I must be about my own affairs.”

  Will nodded. “So be it, then. Now let us see about finding some food, and then we’ll get to work.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE PERTH ASSEMBLY

  Despite his lack of training and experience, Will showed an amazing aptitude for the task to which he had newly turned his hand, and in the course of the ensuing four days he achieved much, mentored and guided by the willing Earl of Carrick. I watched them as their relationship quickly b
ecame easy and natural, and they worked together smoothly, with Will spending most of his time listening and asking questions that Bruce seemed happy to answer at length. Will was twenty-seven that year, and Bruce was four years younger, but the mentor-to-student relationship was unstrained despite the disparity. Will was eager to learn, his attention captured and his imagination challenged by the magnitude of the task facing him—and not merely him, but all of us who took part in that exercise, Andrew included. Bruce, for his part, appeared to be comfortable in the task of teaching, and he was more than merely familiar with much of the subject matter, for in his relatively short lifetime he had absorbed a profound understanding of the mechanics of both government and governance, having learned the basic elements of both at his father’s knee. And then later, when he had begun to grow towards manhood, he had been shown the finer points from the perspective of his formidable grandsire and namesake, the Noble Robert, Bruce of Annandale who, at the age of more than seventy, had come within hand’s grasp of wearing the crown itself.

  I served as notary for everything that was discussed among the three of them during that time, and for days my fingers were in a constant state of cramp, black with ink, and painfully tight and knotted from the effort of writing without respite for hour after hour, for the list of things to be addressed grew bewilderingly once we had begun to apply ourselves. The truly daunting part of what we were doing, though, was our awareness that we were merely identifying things that needed to be attended to; we were doing nothing at all to deal with them.

  There had been no formal gathering of parliament or governing authorities for years, since the dispossession of King John, and the country was in chaos, close to anarchy and on the edge of famine. All of that was bad enough, but now with the flight of Surrey’s army, the English administration itself had come to a halt; local officials everywhere were scrambling to escape and save themselves from an angry and vengeful populace, and there was no one, anywhere, with the authority or ability to step forward and replace them.

  With Wishart, Fraser, and Crambeth out of the picture, even the Church was in disrepair, the normally firm grip of the bishops effectively annulled. Alpin of Strathearn, the recently appointed Bishop of Dunblane who was the sole Scots bishop not to have been forced to swear allegiance to Edward Plantagenet, was unable to provide much help, being too new to his post and consequently lacking the power and influence to assert himself sufficiently. And Archibald, the Bishop of Moray, although a formidable presence in earlier days, had held his seat now for forty-four years and was palsied and increasingly infirm. The only other man who might have been expected to contribute to the struggle was Nicholas of Brechin, bishop of the powerful east coast diocese of Dundee, but he, too, was newly consecrated, little known, and reputed to be in ill health.

  Elsewhere in Scotland, the prelates were a lacklustre crew, reluctant to take an open stance for or against the English claims, save for Thomas of Kirkcudbright, the Bishop of Galloway, who had never made any secret of his loyalty to the English Archbishop of York, and Henry de Cheyne, the Bishop of Aberdeen, detested by the people of his diocese, who had never concealed his allegiance to Edward of England and anyway was now a fugitive, hiding somewhere in the northern mountains in fear for his life.

  After Bishop Wishart’s imprisonment, the occupying English had focused upon harassing and oppressing the parish priesthood throughout the realm. As a result, more than half the parishes of Scotland had no priest, an intolerable situation that deprived the people of the comforts and necessities of their religion in their daily lives. Ordained priests are the only people who can administer the sacraments of God’s Church, so it followed inevitably that half the people of the realm were therefore forced to live without the blessings of the divine sacraments: marriage, baptism, confirmation, confession, the Holy Eucharist, and the Holy Anointments or last rites. It was a situation that screamed for redress yet was incapable of being quickly resolved, since, without the presence of active bishops, no new priests could be ordained in Scotland.

  There was no shortage of priests in England, and the Archbishop of York had already professed, to all who would listen, his devout willingness to provide an unstinted supply of fresh new priests to fill the vacancies that existed throughout Scotland. To allow York to supply English priests to Scotland, though, was unthinkable, tantamount to surrendering all authority to England, since it would permit the unrestricted dissemination of England’s wishes, viewpoints, and dictates among Scotland’s faithful.

  In the hope that Bishop Wishart’s deputy would be able to aid us in addressing this dire situation, I had written to Canon Lamberton on the night of our first discussions, inviting him to join us or to send us some assistance. I told him about Bruce’s participation, and outlined our concerns and our activities to that point, and I had sent the letter off to Glasgow by fast courier. What would come of that remained to be seen, but there was no doubt in my mind that the perilous health of Scotland’s Church was of overriding import to everything we were discussing.

  The layman’s world was equally endangered: the land was infested with army deserters, outlaws and thieves who roamed unchecked, pillaging and killing at will because they knew there was no one to arrest or punish them. The law courts were no longer operable, for the English had usurped their function. Scots judges, magistrates, and lawyers had been imprisoned, dismissed from their positions, or in some instances simply made to vanish. In some parts of the country plague and pestilence were widespread, and there were reports of entire communities that had simply disintegrated, their occupants scattered, homeless, and destitute. On the eastern coast, the centres of maritime trade and commerce had suffered widely. Piers and docks, warehouses and storage areas, harbour-works and flood-banks had all been either badly damaged or dangerously neglected, and inland bridges and fords everywhere were largely in disrepair, abused and, in the case of the river fords, almost obliterated.

  We were confronting a disaster of overwhelming magnitude, and it seemed that the closer we looked, the more we discovered and the worse the situation appeared. And yet we achieved much within a very short time. We had no shortage of supporters waiting to be put to use, for all of Scotland, it seemed, was flocking to Stirlin’ toun. All of Scotland, that is, except those of the nobility too proud or yet too stubborn to acknowledge what had taken place.

  At Bruce’s suggestion, beginning on the morning of the second day of our talks, and using the copying resources of the secretariat at Cambuskenneth Abbey and the exact inscription of Will and Andrew as leaders of the army of Scotland and the community of that realm, invitations had been sent out to that community by courier to attend a gathering that would be held at Perth on the twenty-fifth day of September. The location of the event would be the Blackfriars Monastery. This was a sometime royal residence and the traditional site of such major events as church councils and national gatherings, since it housed the largest public chambers in the region, dwarfing those of the neighbouring Scone Abbey. Of necessity, the summons was of short notice, but there was no other option, and such a gathering was long overdue. An assembly, they called it, for it could not be called a parliament, lacking a royal command, and the legally required forty days’ notice for a convention of the estates was out of the question, given the circumstances in effect. And so an assembly it was deemed to be, convened to examine the immediate needs of the realm in consequence of the recent victory at Stirling. It was agreed that every noble family in Scotland should receive an invitation.

  “And what will we do if they don’t come?” Andrew asked, and we all looked at him in surprise.

  “Who?” Bruce asked.

  “The magnates. What if they stay away?”

  “Oh, they’ll not stay away.” Will’s voice was a low, rumbling sound filled with disgust. “They’ll come running, never fear about that. They’ll be afraid not to, lest they miss some chance of profiting from what comes next. The English are gone, but they’ll be back, and when they come
next time, they’ll come in earnest. But that’s a year away at least, depending upon how Edward’s wars in France progress, and in the meantime there’s not a magnate in the land who won’t be wanting to know what we intend to do to change things between now and then. They won’t think to take the responsibility upon themselves, but they won’t hesitate to foist it onto us. But that doesn’t answer your question, does it?” He made a harrumphing sound, but he was smiling. “If they should fail to come, we will do exactly what we would have done had they been there—we’ll get on with addressing the needs of the realm. For it is the realm that is important here, not the hurt feelings and posturing puffery of offended, foolish folk who should know better.

  “But they will come, believe me,” he went on. “And they’ll be no more tolerant or considerate of anyone else than they have been in the past. They’ll whine and cavil and carp and complain and try to browbeat one another and everyone else nearby”—he switched to broad, exaggerated Scots in mid-sentence—“but they canna browbeat you and me, young Murray, for we’re the chiels wha won the Stirlin’ fight, and our army’s our ain. They canna touch it or lay claim to it, and God knows they winna daur dispute it.

  “This assembly is for the community.” He flicked a finger towards Bruce. “That same community o’ the realm that you’re aey harpin’ on about, Rob. So it should be open to that community and whaever else wants to come, forbye the gentry an’ nobility. The high kirkmen will a’ be there, needless to say—the bishops and abbots and priors and deacons o’ a’ the great kirks—but we should hae the common parish priesthood, too. They’re the ones wha stay amang the ordinary folk an’ dae maist o’ the work, anyway. And then there’s the burghs—a’ the provosts and councillors should be there, forbye the magistrates. And the trade guilds, as well. And even the minor local gentry, knights and sodgers.”