With her death, the succession was again thrown into chaos. At least fourteen men—most, though not all, Scots; after centuries of intermarriage among the noble families of Europe, plausible candidates could be found in Flanders, Denmark, and even Spain—put their clerks to work describing their own claims. Most of them were almost laughably tenuous, but two were not: Both Robert le Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol of Galloway were descended from David I, and neither was the least bit shy about announcing it. The eighty-year-old le Brus, or Bruce, was known as “the Competitor,” and it wasn’t a reference to his love of knightly games. So competitive was he that he assembled his own armed force, including both the knights who held land in fief to him, and others who were essentially freelance (the term is telling) and led it to Perth, where the Scottish barons were in council.
Balliol’s own supporters armed themselves in response. Civil war loomed. One of the Guardians—no one knows who first proposed it, and, given the consequences, no one subsequently claimed the idea—thought to ask for an outside mediator to settle the competing claims: the king of England, Edward I.
Edward was then fifty-one years old. He had held England’s throne since 1272, and his relationship with his northern neighbor had, to this point, been more than amicable. He was a close friend to Alexander III, despite some moderate tension about the homage the Scottish king owed for his own English manors. He was also physically imposing—known as “Longshanks” for his great height—a superb soldier and gifted administrator, “one of the most able and ably advised” of all England’s monarchs. He had dominated his own barons, conquered Wales, and built roads and castles almost beyond numbering to consolidate his kingdom. In the fourteenth-century chronicle The Song of Lewes, he is described as
Valiant as a lion, quick to attack the strongest and fearing the onslaught of none. But if a lion in pride and fierceness, he is a panther in fickleness and inconstancy . . . The treachery or falsehood by which he is advanced he calls prudence and the path by which he attains his ends, however crooked, he calls straight, and whatever he likes he says is lawful.
And the end he had in sight, lawfully or not, was Scotland. He’d been looking northward for years before the Guardians called him in; within days of Alexander’s death, Edward I had made a personal loan (of £2,000) to the Maid’s father, King Erik of Norway, out of concern for his northern border, which he knew his French opponents were already eyeing.
From the eleventh century to the nineteenth, France was always the primary strategic concern of any British ruler. England, by the end of the thirteenth century, had lost most of the French territories that, a century earlier, had rivaled those of the Capetian king. France had three times the population of England and Wales combined, so Edward’s desire to expand his own realm is partly understood by the need to counter France. Not that Scotland would help much in that regard; it had fewer than five hundred thousand inhabitants; mostly ethnic Celts, but also including Norsemen, Anglo-Saxons, and—in coastal enclaves that were virtually extraterritorial colonies—Germans, Scandinavians, Frenchmen, and especially Flemings, who were so dominant in the wool trade that they virtually ruled both Aberdeen and Berwick.
By the end of the Medieval Warm Period, English monarchs ruled more territory in France than their once-and-future sovereigns, the kings of France. Shown are the English territories on the Continent at the time of the death of Henry II in 1189; the boundaries of the Kingdom of Scotland are as of the death of Alexander III in 1286.
For Edward, Aberdeen and Berwick were the real prize. Along with Perth, Inverness, Roxburgh, and Edinburgh, they formed the core of Scotland’s economy: Not the country’s poor farmland, but its well-situated seaports.* Berwick was so wealthy that the Chronicle of Lanercost described it as “a city so populous and of such trade that it might justly be called another Alexandria, whose riches were the sea, and the water its walls.”
However, Scotland’s wealth was more a rationalization than a rationale. Edward’s desire to extend his sovereignty northward was just another example (and not an especially notable one) of a phenomenon occurring everywhere in Europe by the end of the thirteenth century. Nations were coalescing into what would become their modern forms from the Urals to the Atlantic, from Scandinavia, to France, and even to the Iberian Peninsula, where Christian kingdoms—Galicia, Asturias, and especially Aragon and Castile—were well embarked on the Reconquista that would drive out the Muslims who had ruled it since the eighth century. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Europe had more than five thousand independent quasi-states: baronies, duchies, kingdoms, and principalities. Three centuries later, five hundred. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, two hundred, and only a few dozen today.
In any event, Edward wanted Scotland. In November 1289, he had negotiated the Treaty of Salisbury that provided, among other things, that the Maid of Norway would not enter into any marriage contract without his consent and then, within weeks, betrothed his own son to her, as a first step to unifying the two kingdoms. In July 1290, the Scottish nobles pushed for another agreement, the Treaty of Birgham, that set out a long list of provisions intended to prevent unification: They demanded that no homage be given for Scottish lands to anyone outside Scotland; that all offices of state must be held by Scotsmen; that there be no taxation of Scots for anything but Scottish purposes; and that no Scotsman would ever be subject to any legal proceeding held outside the kingdom. Edward, “however crooked,” agreed, after inserting a clause after all the provisions reading “saving the rights of the King of England.” Immediately thereafter, he occupied the Isle of Man.*
Despite this, the Guardians invited their southern neighbor to arbitrate Scotland’s destiny. One supposes that their inexplicable trust in the good intentions of the king of England was shaken when, on May 30, 1291, Edward assembled the lords of Scotland, and asserted his sovereign authority over the nation’s yet-to-be-named king. He did so in a manner typical of the king, who, in the words of a modern historian, combined courteous legality with an undertone of menace, as he asked, “Can you produce any evidence to show that I am not the rightful Suzerain?”
The question was rhetorical; Edward had an army, and the Scots didn’t. Making the best of a bad situation, the Scots replied that they were unable to accept Edward’s generous offer of overlordship, since it would bind a king who was not yet named. Nonetheless, in the name of the “community of Scotland,” they offered provisional agreement: they would accept an English overlord, if Edward agreed in turn to return the sovereignty within two months to the new king of Scotland, once he was named. The Guardians then resigned their offices, upon which Edward reappointed them.
Which left a decision to be made: Edward Longshanks was going to be the overlord (or “suzerain”), but who would be Scotland’s king? Edward convened a great court—“great” for its size, if nothing else: 104 auditors, 24 appointed by Edward and 40 each by the two great-great-grandsons of King David I: John Balliol and Robert Bruce, the Competitor—to hear arguments, and choose Scotland’s next king.
Of the ornate, quasilegal briefs about who had the better claim—one closer in blood, another from the “senior” branch, and so on, with citations going back to the Book of Exodus—the lesser said the better.* Primogeniture was not yet decisive in such matters, which was a good thing for Bruce, since Balliol was definitely the senior descendant of David I. However, this just made the decision a purely political one: four earls declared for Balliol, six for Bruce; two bishops for Bruce, six for Balliol; the south for Bruce, the north for Balliol, and so on. To the surprise of no one, the forty auditors selected by Bruce voted for him; the forty picked by Balliol proved just as loyal. This, of course, gave Edward’s twenty-four auditors the deciding vote, and if anyone was cynical enough to observe that this was probably his plan all along, no record of it survives.
The criteria of Edward’s auditors were slightly different from those of the
other eighty: to the English king, the best choice was the man easiest to bully, and despite the age of the Competitor, he was not what anyone would call biddable. Neither was he slow to recognize a trap; once he realized that Balliol would be Edward’s choice, he delegated his claim to his son, the earl of Carrick, upon which the earl delegated the claim to his son. The Competitor’s tactic was a delaying one: his son would retain the earldom of Carrick as a fief from Edward, he himself would keep Annandale, and his grandson—a seventeen-year-old named, like his father, grandfather, and half a dozen ancestors, Robert Bruce—would still be able, when the political winds shifted, to claim the throne of Scotland.
The court selected Balliol as Scotland’s new king on November 17, 1292. Less than six weeks later, King Edward I of England ended any doubt as to his plans for Scotland: He had already, in June 1291, asserted that “the realms of England and Scotland are joined together.” In January 1293, he forced Balliol to free him from all the earlier promises he had made to Scotland’s Guardians, most especially the Treaty of Birgham. Scotland was to be an English fief, forever.
• • •
However important Scotland was to King Edward’s ambitions, it was neither as rich nor as populous as his traditional holdings in France. Though diminished since Henry II’s reign a century earlier, he was still the lord of large holdings in the Aquitaine, particularly its most southerly region, Gascony. Or, he was until May 1294, when King Philip IV of France seized them. Edward immediately renounced his obligation to give homage as the province’s duke (he was also still count of Ponthieu, though Normandy had been ceded to the French king by Henry III) and started alliance-building. By 1295, he had recruited the king of Aragon, a number of German principalities, and various parts of the Low Countries, particularly the count of Flanders. Only after he had surrounded Philip of France with potential belligerents did he begin mobilizing his own army. He summoned the knights who owed him military service in payment for their fiefs—the feudal host—and, for the first time, included levies from Wales and Scotland, both of whom responded with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. In the fall, Wales rebelled, and the Scots elected a ruling council—four bishops, four earls, and four barons—to negotiate directly with Philip IV, and sent an embassy on their behalf to sign a treaty of alliance, which they did on October 23.
The treaty called for mutual defense and aggression: As long as France and England were at war, Scotland would wage war on England as well; if Scotland were invaded, Philip IV would send assistance; if Edward left England, Scotland was obliged to invade south. King John Balliol’s son would wed a French princess to seal the deal, which was ratified by Balliol and the twelve-man ruling council on February 23, 1296.
Edward’s reaction was predictable, and swift. Before the embassy had even returned from France, he seized all the land in England held by Scottish lords, and on March 1, summoned both his army and his fleet to invade Scotland. In April, Edward ordered every Scot in England arrested as a potential enemy combatant, and Balliol, as directed by the council, called the Scottish lords to provide their feudal levies. Virtually all of them answered; all of them, that is, except the Bruce family.
The plan, hatched even before the election of Balliol, to have a Bruce on the winning side in any possible conflict between Scotland and England, was still very much in play. The death of Robert the Competitor the preceding year had simply changed the players: The Competitor’s son became lord of Annandale and a vassal of Edward I; his son, the youngest Robert Bruce, became earl of Carrick, simultaneously a vassal to the Scottish king and an aspirant to the throne of Scotland.*
It surprised no one that the Bruces, who had never even acknowledged Balliol’s kingship, also failed to provide him with armed men to resist the king they had acknowledged. There was, however, a cost. When the Bruces refused the feudal levy of 1296, they forfeited their properties in Scotland, which Balliol granted to his brother-in-law, John Comyn, the earl of Buchan.* Partly to retrieve them, and partly to renew his family’s claim on the Scottish throne, the newly made earl of Carrick, the twenty-two-year-old Robert Bruce, marched north with the English host.
The army that Edward led into Scotland in the spring of 1296 was far larger and more experienced than the one the Conqueror had led at Hastings two centuries before. For twenty years, the English king had applied great administrative skill to his naturally warlike temperament—he had put down baronial rebellions in the 1260s, gone on Crusade in the 1270s, and conquered Wales in the 1280s—in the creation of an army that couldn’t yet be called national but wasn’t entirely feudal, either. England’s improved administration and increased wealth—among other things, the expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290 produced a huge windfall, as Edward expropriated all their property—permitted him to pay a significant number of troops directly, rather than by relying on feudal obligations. Moreover, new taxes, and duties on imports and exports, gave the king a regular supply of cash. With the cash came creditworthiness, and loans from his Italian bankers, the Riccardi and the Frescobaldi. The cash paid not just for Edward’s household contingents but for a strong supply system (one that was designed to use sea transport to reinforce armies in the field—a clear advantage in combat everywhere, but especially against the Scots, with their enormous coastline).
As a result, Edward commanded military resources larger than anyone in Europe; only Constantinople, and the Islamic caliphates, could put larger armies into the field. And, just as army pay was evolving from the typical feudal arrangements, in which vassals were responsible for their own arms, armor, and food, so too was the army itself. Its shock troops were the royal household knights, paid out of the royal wardrobe, and typically providing a third of the cavalry in an expedition; the other two-thirds were more traditionally organized, and led by knights banneret, a rank somewhere between knight bachelor and the true nobles such as barons and earls.*
The army of 1296 wasn’t completely dependent on its five thousand heavy cavalry. More than ten thousand foot soldiers, recruited by levies throughout England’s counties, and at least five thousand archers accompanied the king north.
The Scots had nothing that could stand in Edward’s way. By the end of March, the English had advanced to Berwick, on the River Tweed—the “other Alexandria.” Led by the warlike bishop of Durham, Antony Bek, and Robert de Clifford, the English demanded the surrender of the castle’s garrison. One source states that the crews of some English supply ships, having run aground, were slaughtered by the Scots, but it seems likely that this is a retrospective excuse for the events that followed. Though Edward permitted honorable surrender by the garrison’s commander, Sir William Douglas, and the knights occupying the city’s castle, feudal honor did nothing to protect noncombatants. As many as ten thousand of the city’s residents—tradesmen and artisans, women and children—were massacred; thirty Flemish merchants, who were obliged to support the king of Scotland by treaty, fought so ferociously that all died at their posts. Thousands of bodies were hung by the city’s walls and left to rot for weeks as an object lesson to other rebels.
If it was intended to intimidate Balliol, it failed. The Scottish king had little value as a military leader; he avoided combat himself and had neither the stature nor the talent to direct a strategy to be conducted by subordinates. But he was enormously important as a symbol, being the only man who could agree to terms with Edward. So when Balliol sent word that he refused to come to Edward in order to pay fealty, the English king reportedly said, “If he won’t come to us, we’ll go to him,” and did. A column of English cavalry under John de Warenne, the earl of Surrey, was sent north, and met, near Dunbar, an undisciplined and overmatched Scots army commanded by John Comyn of Badenoch, where Warenne easily wiped out what was left of Scottish resistance.
Balliol’s rebellion, such as it was, was effectively over. On July 10, the Scottish king surrendered at Montrose, where he suffered the latest in a long line of humiliations inflicte
d by his English overlord: the king’s escutcheon—the shield exhibiting his coat of arms—was publicly torn from his uniform, earning him the name by which seven centuries’ worth of Scottish schoolchildren know him: Toom Tabard, or “empty tunic.” Scotland’s Stone of Destiny (sometimes the Stone of Scone, for its traditional location), which had been used in the coronation of every Scottish king for centuries, was taken to Westminster Abbey, and her king to the Tower of London.*
But first, Edward had some more spleen to vent against his Scottish subjects. Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, who lacked the determination if not the self-regard of both his father, the Competitor, and his son, thought he was to be named Scotland’s new king, and said so to Edward, whom he had loyally followed into Scotland that spring. The king’s reply, reportedly, was, “Have we nothing to do but win kingdoms for you?” Instead, he named Warenne, the earl of Surrey, as viceroy of Scotland. (Like the king, Warenne liked Scotland better at some distance, and as a result, soon returned to his Yorkshire home, leaving Hugh de Cressingham as the real ruler of the new “province.”) Other Englishmen were appointed to the various royal offices of treasurer, chancellor, and the like. A month after the humiliation and abdication of Balliol, Edward presided over an even more provocative event: the Berwick parliament, which commenced business on August 2, 1296. Every noble in Scotland was commanded to attend, and to offer an oath of fealty, known subsequently as the “Ragman Roll.” Significantly, the oaths were given to Edward personally, since he was unwilling to admit even the existence of a Scottish kingdom. He was restoring a rebellious province to his rule, not conquering a foreign nation.
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