A Great and Terrible King

by Marc Morris

  What undoubtedly refocused everyone's attention on the overlord-ship question was the behaviour and subsequent punishment of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The Welsh prince, having pointedly failed to attend Edwards coronation and then withheld his homage, was torn down to size in 1277 by an angry Edward at the head of devastating armies. When, the following year, a much diminished and chastened Llywelyn was permitted to marry his fiancee (in England, before the English king, on the feast-day of England's premier royal saint), Alexander, now a widower, was again among the guests. Before crossing the Border he had insisted on an escort of English earls and bishops to emphasise his importance and his independence. But the knowledge of what had happened to the prince of Wales must have impinged heavily on the king of Scotland's consciousness, for Alexander had come south at Edward's bidding in order to perform his homage.

  This was not necessarily the major concession it might sound. From the mid-twelfth century the kings of Scotland had held certain lands in England (Tynedale and Penrith). Since Alexander held these estates from Edward, it was entirely right and proper that he should formally acknowledge the fact. The homage he owed, in other words, was personal and private, and should not have affected his status as king of Scots. After all, Edward I, as duke of Gascony, had himself done homage on two occasions to consecutive kings of France, with no prejudice to his position as king of England.

  Edward, however, was determined on this occasion to make more of it. When Alexander offered to do his homage soon after the wedding at Worcester, his brother-in-law demurred. It would be better, Edward explained, if the act took place before his full council in Westminster in a fortnight's time. The English king was clearly angling for a major concession and wanted to be sure that everyone saw him land his catch. Anxious not to offend, Alexander and his advisers agreed, but once again stressed that they were only condescending as a favour. The ceremony finally took place on 28 October in the king's chamber at Westminster, as Edward had planned, but accounts of what happened differ depending on whether they are Scottish or English. What is clear is that, as in a game of poker, everyone kept their cards concealed until the last possible moment. When Alexander came to speak his lines, he did the limited, personal homage that was appropriate for his English estates. Only then did the English show their hand, when the bishop of Norwich interjected that the Scottish king should also do homage to Edward for Scotland. According to the Scottish source, this provoked Alexander to respond with a robust rejoinder. 'Nobody but God has the right to homage for my kingdom of Scotland,' he declared, 'and I hold it of nobody but God himself!'4I

  At the time of Alexander's death, therefore, overlordship was an old controversy, but still a live one. It would remain so until the English agreed to drop their pretensions or until the Scots agreed to accept them. Consecutive kings of Scotland had proved staunch in defence of their independence. But now the Scots had no king, only a succession crisis that they needed English help to resolve. Edward I saw a great opportunity.

  In the spring of 1291 the Scots were given to understand that the king of England was ready to offer them the friendly and neighbourly advice that he had allegedly promised the previous autumn. We do not know precisely what messages had been exchanged in the interim. But by May that year, probably at Edward's suggestion, the Guardians and many other leading Scots had assembled in Berwick. This was an obvious location for the transaction of Anglo-Scottish business. Not only was it the largest and richest of Scotland's royal burghs; it was also the closest to England, for it sits by the coast on the north shore of the River Tweed, fixed since 1237 as the eastern part of the Border. As for Edward himself, the Scots knew that he was headed for Norham, where an English parliament had evidently been summoned for 6 May. Situated some five miles upstream from Berwick on the Tweed's opposite bank, Norham was a much smaller settlement, but had the outstanding attraction of a magnificent stone castle, established in the twelfth century by the bishops of Durham. It was the northernmost point at which the king and his court could be accommodated in any comfort prior to leaving England.

  Leaving England, however, was not part of Edward's plan. By 9 May the Scots gathered in Berwick had received the news that the king expected them to come to him. This was an unsetding invitation: they had assumed that the business of choosing between John Balliol and Robert Bruce, being a Scottish matter, would be transacted in Scotland. If it were done in England, there was the risk that, now or later, this might be interpreted as a sign of Scottish submission. Against such anxieties, though, the Scots did have Edward's promise from the previous year that Scotland would remain 'free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England', and their confidence was further bolstered by the letters they secured from Edward on 10 May, promising that no prejudice should arise from their actions. Thus reassured, a delegation of Scotsmen crossed the Tweed to Norham later that same day.

  It was, in fact, far worse than they had feared. Once inside the castle at Norham, the Scottish delegates were treated to an introductory speech by Roger Brabazon, an English royal justice. After a lot of flowery rhetoric about the beauty of peace and so on, they were told that Edward had come north to do right to anybody who had a claim to the Scottish throne. This implied that the king envisaged other candidates besides Bruce and Balliol, which would, in turn, alter the nature of his intervention. With more than two claimants, a straightforward arbitration of the kind anticipated by the Scots would become impossible. Edward was therefore proposing an alternative arrangement, namely that he should act, not as arbiter, but as judge. This was a role that he naturally felt entitled to assume, given the fact that he was Scotland's rightful overlord.

  The Scots were stupefied. It was surprising enough to discover that there were apparently other claimants besides Bruce and Balliol, but the corollary was outrageous. The king of England their overlord? They protested, with pardonable exaggeration, that they had never heard of such a novelty.

  Edward had expected such a reaction — he had, after all, received a similar response from his late brother-in-law in 1278. Accordingly, he had taken the trouble on this occasion to prepare his ground thoroughly in advance. Two months earlier, a search of the archives had been ordered - and not just the royal ones. In abbeys and priories all over England, monks had been made to ferret through their chronicles and muniments in an effort to build the king's case. Given that the trawl was so extensive, the haul was disappointing (inevitably, of course, given that the superiority that Edward took for granted was built on exceedingly weak, and for the most part fantastical, foundations). Nevertheless, in the days before the Scots had crossed to Norham, a crowd of clerics had told the king what he wanted to hear: his was indeed the superior right. This enabled Edward to present the Scots with a two-fold challenge. If they would not concede his overlordship as a matter of course, he said, they should disprove the facts set out in his new dossier. Or, as an alternative to both these options, they could decide the matter by force.

  It was Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow and Guardian, who recovered himself sufficiently to respond on behalf of the startled Scots. In the first place, he said, it did not matter what they, as temporary custodians, might or might not concede: only a king of Scotland could answer such a momentous demand. Secondly, the bishop took Edward to task over his reasoning: they were not obliged to prove him wrong; rather he should prove himself right. Thirdly, and more caustically, Wishart reminded the English king that he was supposed to be a crusader, and observed that a threat to unleash war against a defenceless people did him no credit. At this last Edward was predictably enraged, and prompted to issue a new threat. He would indeed lead a crusading army, he declared - against the Scots!

  Amid these acrimonious scenes, the meeting at Norham broke up, with nothing agreed between the two sides beyond the need for a three-week adjournment. For the Scots, obviously, it had been a total disaster: they had come to the Border expecting the happy resolution of their problems by a friend, only to be confronted
with ultimatums and undisguised belligerence.

  Yet for Edward, too, the encounter had been highly unsatisfactory, and had turned out quite contrary to expectation. The king, to be sure, had anticipated some opposition to his demands - hence the massive effort to prove himself right by documentary means. But the scale and fervour of Scottish resistance had left him reeling, with no response other than angry threats of force. And force, as the bishop of Glasgow had discerned, was an inappropriate answer in present circumstances.

  The fact of the matter was that Edward, like the Scots, had been misled. In February the king had received a letter from Robert Bruce, in which the latter had made it abundantly clear that he and his supporters were willing to endorse the English interpretation of Anglo-Scottish relations. At one point in this letter, for example, Bruce had referred explicitly to the submission made by William the Lion in 1174 and the subsequent decision by Richard I in 1189 to nullify it. This reversal, Bruce suggested, could hardly have been right, for Scotland was a limb of the English Crown, and surely 'one must keep the Crown whole'. Edward, of course, did not need to be convinced that this was the case, but to hear it coming from a Scotsman must have been music to his ears. Bruce had gone on to say that, whenever the English king was ready to come north and demand his right, the Bruce family and their friends would be ready to obey him.

  Edward, therefore, had come north expecting a far easier ride than the one he had in the event experienced. Bruce, it was now clear, had not spoken for the majority of his countrymen, with the result that they and the English king now found themselves in a bitter impasse. The three-week adjournment ended, predictably, with a flat refusal from the Scots to return to Norham.

  By this stage, however, Edward had come up with a new way to exploit the situation. The Scots maintained that only a king of Scotland could answer the demand for an admission of English overlordship. Edward's rejoinder was to seek individual admissions of his superior right from all those contending for the royal ride. If all the men who might one day be king were willing to acknowledge England's superiority, so this logic ran, then Scotland's current custodians — the Guardians — could have no grounds for further objection. The English king could take possession of the vacant kingdom, and award it to whichever candidate he adjudged to have the strongest claim.

  In deciding on this strategy, it is likely that Edward acted in collusion with Robert Bruce. Certainly, when the suggestion of individual submissions was made public around 5 June, Bruce was among the first to throw his hat into the ring and recognise the English king's right. John Balliol, who was probably still in Berwick at this point, evidently held out a little longer, and may have made a last-ditch appeal for arbitration rather than judgement. But the following day, no doubt fearing that he would be ruled out of the race, Balliol too returned to Norham and agreed to Edward's terms.

  The swift submission of the two principal competitors (now joined by a host of other less likely candidates) had the inevitable effect of weakening Scottish resistance. Balliol's capitulation was all the more significant in that he was accompanied across the Tweed by John Comyn, not only his brother-in-law but also one of the Guardians. The six men entrusted in 1286 with safeguarding Scotland's future had since been reduced to four, but only by death's intervention; Comyn’s surrender on 6 June represented the first desertion from their company for political reasons.

  The three remaining Guardians, however, and those Scots still with them at Berwick, continued to hold out. (No doubt the presence among their ranks of the indomitable bishop of Glasgow served to stiffen their resolve.) Unlike the claimants, they had nothing to gain by falling in with the king of England's wishes. On the contrary, they could easily end up violating the solemn oath they had sworn to preserve Scotland for Alexander Ill's heirs. The same was true for the twenty or so constables who had been entrusted with the keeping of the kingdoms royal castles. These men were not going to give up their custodies to Edward I until they were satisfied that he would abide by his promise of the previous year to leave Scotland free and independent, and they were certainly not about to surrender anything to the king while he was claiming to be their overlord. When Edward tried to claim the castles in that capacity after the submission of Bruce and Balliol, he met with a firm refusal.

  Nevertheless, the stalwart Scots at Berwick could not hold out for ever. Nor could the threat of force, no matter how improbable or unconscionable it might appear in retrospect, have been entirely absent from their minds. It was not just an impatient English king waiting on their doorstep, but the English royal household, swelled by the presence of half a dozen English earls. Moreover, from the start of June this implied might had been reinforced with 650 crossbowmen, and all the while the Scots negotiated they were conscious of an English fleet lurking off the coast near Lindisfarne. This might not have been gunboat diplomacy, but it came pretty close.

  Eventually, after six more days of argument, a compromise solution was found. Despite the intense English pressure, the Scots remained staunch in their refusal to admit Edwards overlordship, so the way forward became a complicated legal fiction. The king himself now put in a claim to the Scottish throne, and proposed that he should take custody of the kingdom and its castles, not as an overlord, but simply as one claimant acting on behalf of all the others.

  This was a formula that the Guardians felt able to accept: it meant that Edward would gain control of Scotland, not by dint of any existing superiority, but because the Scots themselves had agreed to grant him its keeping for a limited period. Put more concisely still, he was not taking the kingdom from them: they were giving it to him. The significance of this crucial distinction was reinforced by the fact that the transfer took place not in England but in Scotland. To the last, the Guardians had refused to cross the Tweed, and in the end it was Edward who was obliged to make the short boat trip from Norham Castle. It was in the meadow of Upsettlington, on the rivers north shore, that the deal was finally struck. On 12 June the Guardians surrendered their seal, along with the custody of the royal castles, and the English king promised to maintain the laws and customs of Scotland. The following day all those Scots present swore fealty to Edward in his capacity as Scotland s temporary caretaker-'chief lord and guardian of the kingdom, until a king is provided'.

  * *

  Now that Edward had obtained seisin of Scotland, the momentous business of providing a king could begin. The preliminaries for hearing this great case — 'the Great Cause', as it was dubbed in the eighteenth century — began at Norham immediately after the agreement of 12 June. But the proceedings proper were adjourned to the start of August, at which point the case was set to resume on the Scottish side of the Border. The delay gave the various claimants - now thirteen in number, excluding Edward himself — a few weeks to consult their legal teams and prepare their arguments. At the same time, it also offered Scotland's new custodian the opportunity to obtain a wider recognition of his role. In July Edward embarked on a tour of the heartlands of the Scottish kingdom — the prosperous royal burghs clustered around the Firth of Forth. At Haddington, Edinburgh, and Linlithgow, Stirling, Dunfermline and St Andrews he stopped to receive oaths of fealty of the inhabitants. Given that his lordship was expected to last only a little while longer, the English king was going to considerable lengths to have it acknowledged by as many Scots as possible.

  By 2 August Edward was back at the Border, only this time in Berwick, and the following day the proceedings to decide the Scottish succession began. The case, it had been agreed in June, would be determined by a special tribunal of 105 men — the number apparently suggested by the courts of similar size that had sat to consider inheritance disputes in Ancient Rome. Twenty-four of these auditors had been chosen by Edward (whose own inclusion brought the royal contingent to twenty-five); the remaining eighty men had been selected by Bruce and Balliol, who were thereby evenly represented with forty auditors apiece. The shape of the tribunal, in other words, reflected the reality of the contes
t, and was probably a concession to the Scots. In spite of the multiplicity of candidates that Edward had encouraged in his attempt to wrangle an admission of overlordship, this was now implicitly acknowledged to be a two-horse race.

  Nonetheless, the other candidates had to be heard, even if only to have their claims dismissed. Accordingly, much of the opening business at Berwick was devoted to a consideration of the case of Florence, count of Holland. By any reasonable reckoning, Count Florence was a no-hoper, but his arguments do take us to the heart of the debate about who should be Scotland's next king.

  In the decade 1280-90, as we have seen, three generations of the Scottish royal family - Alexander III, his children, and his only grandchild — had died out entirely. The same was also true of the previous generation, at least in the legitimate lines. The search for a new king of Scots therefore had to begin one generation further back, in the time of Alexander's grandfather, William the Lion (who reigned from 1165 to 1214). Now that William's own bloodline had failed, the succession was generally reckoned to have passed to his younger brother, David, whose descendants were several, and included both Balliol and Bruce.

  Count Florence, however, claimed to have an additional piece of information that crucially altered the story. It was his contention that David, in return for a grant of land from his older brother, had resigned his right to the Scottish throne. That right had consequently been fixed on their sister, Ada, who - it just so happened — was the great-great-grandmother of Florence. The count contended that he could prove all of this from documents, given time to find them. It was, to say the least, an optimistic claim, and unlikely to have commanded much credence with the majority of the 105 auditors, not least because both the Bruce and Balliol camps had a vested interest in throwing it out. It must, therefore, have come as a considerable surprise to most of the court when, just nine days into their deliberations, Edward announced that there would be a second adjournment to allow Florence to unearth his alleged evidence. Surprise, moreover, must have quickly turned to anger when the king went to declare that this new adjournment would last ten months.