by Simon Schama
Edward, one suspects, took good note of these conditions and perhaps even found them inoffensive, for in 1291 he had no plans to colonize the kingdom to the north as he had Wales. What counted for him was that ceremony in the meadows on 13 June when the Scottish lords and Guardians had placed their hands in his and recognized him as ‘superior and direct lord of the kingdom of Scotland’.
With that satisfaction, the beauty contest could begin in August 1291 at Berwick, then, of course, still a Scottish city. Nor was the occasion just a charade allowing Edward to pick the stooge of his choice. A hundred and four ‘auditors’ were to hear the claim (modelled on the 105 centumviri of the Roman Republic), just twenty-four nominated by the English and eighty by the principal Scots competitors. After a small army of monks had sifted and sorted a dense body of ancient documents, the competition rapidly boiled down to two candidates, both claiming descent from the daughters of Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, the brother of King William the Lion: Robert Bruce of Annandale (the grandfather of the future King Robert I) and John Balliol, Earl of Galloway. Although no love was lost between the families of the Bruce and the Balliols (who were allied to the great clan of the Comyns in the southwest), they were very much the same kind of Scottish aristocrat – not at all unpolished dwellers of the glen but well-travelled Francophone families of Anglo-Norman ancestry, boasting several scattered manors in England and France. Both had, in fact, served Edward on his campaigns in Wales. Bruce had even been Edward’s governor of Carlisle – a crucial strategic posting – fortified against the possibility of Scottish incursions into England. By Roman law Bruce had the better claim, being closer in degree to the last ruling dynasty. But by feudal law, which emphasized the succession of the eldest son, it was Balliol who had the edge.
At first the English king honoured his side of the pact. John Balliol was inaugurated at Scone (by both Scots and English bishops), and duly got his castle back. Was his succession, as some Scots historians have always maintained, a carefully sprung trap, the weaker candidate chosen to play the part of a puppet? No one believed this at the time. Balliol was not shoved down the throats of the Scots as the pro-English candidate. He was the clear and free choice of the vast majority of the ‘auditors’. Nineteen of Bruce’s nominees at Berwick actually ended up voting for Balliol. None of this is to say, though, that Edward was blithely prepared to hand over the keys to the Scottish kingdom after a mere pro forma recognition of his overlordship. He had kept, after all, the four pieces of the broken Great Seal of Scotland carefully in his treasury in Westminster. And from the beginning of the reign of King John Balliol, Edward let it be known that he meant to test it in practice, early and often. As with Wales, those tests were, in the first place, legal. Edward hardly needed to invent cases brought to him as a supreme royal arbiter; he was almost immediately besieged by a host of plaintiffs who didn’t much like judgements they had received from Scottish courts: Manxmen and Hebrideans, who were not at all pleased to be incorporated into greater Scotland; feuding Macdougalls and MacDonalds in the western isles; most of all Macduff, Earl of Fife, who had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment by the new King John.
As in Wales, the issue of adjudication was the issue of sovereignty. By being so obliging to Scottish suitors, Edward was, of course, rubbing King John’s nose in the inferiority of his status and in effect demoting him from a judge to a defendant! As such, he was summoned to appear before the King’s Bench towards the end of 1293. After initially declining, John eventually showed up at Westminster Hall where he was treated to abuse and ridicule. At first, well briefed by his Scots advisers, he held his ground and invoked the agreement of 1290 by which Scotland’s laws and customs were to be preserved intact. He was then subjected to one of Edward’s blood-curdling tirades, threatened with the confiscation of his castles and (at least) imprisonment should he persist in this contumacious nonsense. Inevitably John – like so many who faced Edward’s wrath – crumbled and grovellingly renewed his submission.
In Scotland the reaction was a mixture of fury and dismay. A council of twelve – akin to the Guardians – stripped the king of his powers and, much like the council of fifteen established at Oxford in 1258, transferred them to themselves. They were now Scotland, and they were of a mind to resist Edward’s demand for feudal levies to accompany him on a war expedition to France; not only to resist, in fact, but to switch sides, for a delegation in the spring of 1295 travelled to France to conclude an alliance, promising to cement it by a marriage between the daughter of John Balliol and the son of Philip IV. Given what was about to happen, this might look like suicidal folly. But the Scots must have taken heart from believing they were joining a long-overdue anti-English coalition: France, Scotland and Norway in alliance and, most hearteningly for them, a huge uprising in Wales which had actually succeeded in taking the supposedly impregnable royal castles, including Caernarfon, the biggest of them all.
It was, nonetheless, a colossal miscalculation. When the Scottish army mustered near Selkirk, the troops had not gone into war in any serious fashion for two generations. Edward, now almost sixty years old, with a great mane of white hair flowing down over his shoulders, still tall, bony and upright, remained very much the warlord without peer. His tactics were unsubtle. The Scots needed, quite simply, to be smashed. The army to do the job put even the Welsh campaign in the shade: some 25,000 foot soldiers and almost a thousand knights. The first target was Berwick, the richest and most populous city in Scotland. The actual military work of taking the castle was, in fact, just a prelude to the real job at hand, which was to inflict on the unfortunate inhabitants of the town a slaughter of such horrific dimensions that it would instruct the rest of the country on what to expect if it continued to resist. Over three days an immense massacre – at least 11,000 souls, including countless women and children – took place. One chronicler grieved: ‘blood streamed from the bodies of the slain so copiously that mills could be turned by its flow.’ What was left of Berwick was burned to ashes, reduced to ground zero. It would be made over as an English city and colonized with Northumbrian settlers; the border between the two kingdoms would always run to the north of it.
From Berwick, ignoring Scottish raids into Northumbria (which English chroniclers claimed took the lives of 200 children at Corbridge), Edward’s juggernaut proceeded to roll over the Scottish feudal army at the battle of Dunbar. The entire campaign of destruction took less than three weeks, and at the end of it Edward seemed to be standing on the neck of Scotland’s freedom. One by one, the great earls made their submission, including the elder Bruce. At Kincardine Castle in July King John was made a mockery of once more, forced to confess his rebellion and to dress in the white surcoat of a penitent, while his royal insignia was torn from his chest like a court-martialled subaltern. He was now, in both England and Scotland, a pathetic object of derision – ‘Toom Tabard’ (the ‘empty coat’) – and was taken off to imprisonment in the Tower of London. The humiliation was once again, as in Wales, a calculated exercise in demoralization. The royal treasures of Scotland, including the Black Rood of St Margaret, were hauled off to Westminster as was the Stone of Destiny, on which Scots kings had been inaugurated at Scone Abbey and which was now to be presented to (who else?) Edward the Confessor. A special coronation chair was custom-designed to hold it which became, in effect, the first identifiable ‘throne’ of the monarchs of England, who, from Edward I to Elizabeth II, have been crowned sitting upon the most precious emblem of Scottish sovereignty. When the great seal of Scotland was handed to Edward, he set it aside with a facetious profanity, commenting that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’.
The separate kingdom of Scotland was not eliminated, however, for Edward had never been interested in ruling it directly as king. He continued to style himself as ‘lord’, while introducing a colonial administration run, of course, by Englishmen – William de Warenne (who disliked the Scottish weather enough to stay, for the most part, south of the borde
r on his estates in Yorkshire) and the more effective treasurer Hugh Cressingham. To formalize the country’s dependence, every freeholder in Scotland was now required to come forward and swear an oath of fealty tothe conqueror.
The vast majority did just that. But there was one who did not, and that was a tenant of James the Stewart called Malcolm Wallace. And this Wallace had a brother, William, whose intervention in the Anglo-Scots wars, though brief, was extraordinarily dramatic. Celebrated by historians of the nineteenth century as a national hero, debunked by professional historians as a self-serving renegade and immortalized once more courtesy of Mel Gibson and the big-screen Braveheart, Wallace is one of those larger-than-life figures whose epic romance refuses to go away. In fact, much of what is known or imagined about Wallace comes from two histories, the Scotichronicon and the bardic poems of ‘Blind Harry’, both of which date from the fifteenth century. What we do know with more certainty does nothing to strip Wallace of his heroic importance, but makes him much less of a people’s champion and even less of a solo act. Far from being the homespun-wearing, oatmeal-eating man of the glens of Hollywood’s imagination, Wallace grew up in the genteel manor house owned by his father in Strathclyde in southwest Scotland and attached to the following of the great aristocrat, James the Stewart. But there is also no doubt that if he was not the ‘runaway from righteousness’ of English propaganda, he did, at some stage, cross the line into outlawry. This was precisely the period, throughout Britain, when wronged knights, gone to the greenwood (or the highlands and islands), were cropping up in popular culture like mushrooms after the autumn rain. And even after cutting through the dense thickets of mythology surrounding Wallace, there is still enough substance to see how he became set on his career of patriot-avenger. His father was certainly killed by an Englishman. And though we don’t know for sure if he had been goaded to fight in the city of Lanark by an English soldier who tried to take his shortsword saying, ‘What’s a Scot need a knife like that, as the monk said who last screwed your wife?’ But whatever it was, Wallace didn’t like it and started a riot. He managed to escape but left behind his betrothed, Marion, who was taken by the sheriff as a hostage for the outlaw and summarily killed. Wallace returned, killed the sheriff, an Englishman called Haselrig, and went on the run and the rampage, collecting myths and men with every stop along the way.
It may be that in the years before 1297 Wallace had been a fugitive, carving his way through the English in southwest Scotland, the line between freedom-fighting and out-and-out thuggery becoming increasingly blurred. But his hit-and-run exploits would not have made much difference had not the whole of Scotland been close to the boil in the spring and summer of 1297. It is certainly true that word of Wallace’s exploits spread like wildfire, along with the rumour that he was physically some kind of giant among men and the saviour of the old realm. Men of all sorts and conditions flocked to his camp in the traditional mustering place of Selkirk forest, armed with Lochaber axes, spears and claymores. If he was declared outlaw, so much the better, since it was the English law he was defying, and the quarrel of the two laws had been at the heart of the unequal dispute between Kings Edward and John. Throughout his entire fiery rebellion Wallace never ceased to profess himself King John’s loyal man.
Wallace’s was never a one-man campaign. North of the Forth, Andrew Murray matched or surpassed Wallace by leading a guerrilla campaign that made the highlands effectively ungovernable for the English. It was when Wallace marched north to the Firth of Forth and Murray marched south that a wildfire rebellion turned into something like a serious military operation. By this time, some of the most powerful men in Scotland had come on board, including James the Stewart and the violent and bloody-minded William Douglas, who had kidnapped the Englishwoman who became his wife when she had come north of the border to visit relatives! Many of the magnates were moved by a sense of their country’s humiliation: their king was a pathetic prisoner in the Tower. The younger Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, repudiated his oath to Edward, saying: ‘no man holds his own flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception. I must join my people and the nation into which I was born.’ Many others had less lofty motives, mainly the settling of local scores, while others stayed loyal to the English king for the same reasons, preferring a distant to a nearby lord.
But by the time that Wallace laid siege to Dundee Castle in August 1297 something like a national crusade was well under way, blessed by the fathers of the Scottish Church, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow and Archbishop Fraser of St Andrews. It was their aggressive participation that finally gave the uprising its moral legitimacy. Armed with both men and faith, Wallace and his allies later that month caught an English army at the river in front of Stirling Castle. Confident of their superiority, the English commanders – the most important of Edward’s officers in Scotland, de Warenne and Cressingham – sent out a feeler to see if Wallace wished to treat. His famous reply was: ‘Tell your commander that we are here not to make peace but to do battle, to defend ourselves. Let them come on and we shall prove this in their very beards.’ The taunt was meant to provoke the English out from their position by the castle and across the river to deal with the Scots. It worked like a dream. Wallace and Murray waited, the majority of their men concealed at the wooded top of Alton Craig, until a portion of the heavily armoured knights were obligingly packed on the narrow bridge. They then swooped down to attack. The result was a bloody traffic jam of catastrophic proportions for the English. With nowhere to go, some attempted to turn about, others to swim for it, a bad idea for those in chain mail. Thousands of the trapped English and Welsh were cut down where they stood – Wallace himself swinging an immense battle sword – or drowned in the muddy river. After Cressingham, the treasurer, was killed, his skin was flayed from the body and turned into a belt for Wallace’s broadsword.
Elated with triumph, Wallace now described himself in letters as ‘the commander of the army of the kingdom of Scotland’, although he was, in fact, still acting on behalf of the forlorn King John imprisoned in London. Taking advantage of the shock inflicted at Stirling Bridge, Wallace led an army across the border into Northumbria, committing the usual atrocities as he went, but neither there nor in Scotland itself was he able to take any of the royal castles other than Stirling. As so often happened in Scotland’s history, a great victory was followed by an even more stunning defeat. Wallace’s posthumous reputation for irregular warfare is belied by the fact that his natural element (like that of most Scots gentlemen) was the all-out battle rather than the guerrilla escapade. At Falkirk, in July 1298, Wallace was facing not Edward’s deputies but the king himself, and yet another army, swollen with recruits from subdued regions of the Plantagenet empire: from Gascony and Wales (2000 from Gwynedd alone). They had all been fed stories of the monstrous Wallace, who was said to have skinned Englishmen wholesale, and forced nuns to dance naked for his barbarian pleasure. Badly outnumbered, Wallace packed his men into the defensive formation of four schiltrons: circular hedgehogs of 2000 men bristling with 12-foot spears to gore advancing cavalry. ‘I have brought you to the ring,’ he is reputed to have said, perhaps over-merrily. ‘Now let us see if you can dance.’ Dance they did, or at least they stood their ground for hours, as wave after wave of knights punctured themselves on the schiltrons. But eventually the weight of massed troops, especially the rain of arrows from Welsh and Gascon archers, took a fatal toll, the schiltrons were forced open and Wallace’s men went down by the thousand. ‘Bodies covered the field,’ wrote one lamenting chronicler, ‘as thick as snow.’
Calamitous as it was, there was no immediate capitulation after Falkirk. Although the English controlled southern and eastern Scotland, the experience of Murray in particular had educated the Guardians in the possibility of a flexible defence, advancing and retreating from highland and backcountry fastnesses as circumstances allowed. So what followed for five years was an equally sombre war of attrition. Realizing that he could not afford another round of imperia
l castle-building to subjugate the natives, Edward committed himself to taking them from the Scots and either garrisoning them or destroying them. For year after year, with grim resolution, Edward returned to Carlisle and Berwick to assemble his armies, and he trudged up through Scotland, implacable and relentless, taking the country abbey by abbey, castle by castle. The royal armies were built for stamina, micro-cities on the move, supplied by fifty or sixty ships brought to the Tweed or the Clyde. His devastation left behind long, bitter memories. In Galloway in the southwest, when the castle of Caerlaverock was destroyed, 300 of its defenders were hanged from the battlements. At Bothwell 7000 English soldiers dragged an immense siege engine across the Clyde and smashed their way through the fortress walls. The war became a murderous academy of siege warfare. The Roman treatise of Vegetius was consulted to come up with ever bigger and more monstrous devices to hurl projectiles at the masonry; some of them were given affectionate nicknames as if they were pet hounds. At Stirling in 1304 the garrison, desperate to surrender, ash on their heads, wanted to do so before Edward had had a chance to try out his latest toy called, ominously, ‘the war wolf’. Needless to say, the king refused to permit the capitulation until the machine had done its work with who knows what dreadful results. At Dunfermline in 1303 the abbey itself, the royal necropolis, was put to the sack so that the Scots should have no illusions about the posterity of their kings.
By 1304, understandably, many of those who had originally committed themselves to resistance had had enough and came to what was called the king’s peace at Strathmore. They knelt and were pardoned. In victory Edward was shrewd enough to be selective in his punishments. The lords who abandoned the Scottish cause had their lands restored. William Wallace, on the other hand, who was betrayed in 1305 by some of his own countrymen, was made to undergo a hideous show trial. Accusing Wallace of violating his feudal oath was particularly grotesque, since he (unlike virtually all of the other leaders of Scotland) had never shown the slightest sign of pledging allegiance to Edward. But the king brushed aside these technical niceties to get on with the real business of making a spectacle of the presumptuous rebel. Made to wear a laurel crown, Wallace was dragged to his execution where live disembowelment awaited him.
