The Path to the Throne

by H A CULLEY

  James Douglas’ duties were done when the new Countess of Carrick left the hall, accompanied by her ladies, and he wended an unsteady path towards the pages’ room. He made it halfway there before he was sick. He still felt ill when he got there but felt even worse when an enraged page master came and made him get down on his hands and knees with a cloth and bucket to clear the mess up.

  Gavin Stewart didn’t vomit but he felt decidedly dizzy as he followed his master who was being half carried and half dragged by Robert’s friends, not without some difficulty, up the circular staircase to his bedchamber. When they burst in, Isabella was already undressed and in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. Her maids fled giggling and screaming from the roistering men, who quickly undressed the groom. When he was naked they encouraged him to join his wife in the marital bed with a few slaps to his bare behind. Once in bed together, the couple were treated to various ribald suggestions as to how they should spend the night before his friends took their leave.

  Gavin dragged the bed curtains shut to give the couple some privacy and then collapsed onto his truckle bed. However, this didn’t stop the room spinning around and around and he knew that he would feel awful in the morning. He just wished that he had never listened to James Douglas’ stupid idea. Gavin rarely got into trouble but he knew from others in the countess’ household that young James was always up to mischief. As a squire he should have known better than to allow himself to be led astray by a page.

  They were on their own but Robert waited until he heard Gavin’s gentle drunken snores waft across the bedchamber before he took the eagerly waiting Isabella in his arms and kissed her passionately. Robert used his hands to make sure that Isabella was thoroughly aroused before he allowed himself to take the final step. She gasped as he entered her and the evidence that she had been a virgin stained the sheets. She gasped even more as he brought her to climax after climax throughout that long night.

  Nine months later Marjorie Bruce was born at Turnberry Castle. Whilst Robert was delighted by the arrival of his daughter, the birth had not been an easy one and his wife had lost a lot of blood. For days he fretted over her condition but there was nothing that the physicians could seem to do for Isabella, except to apply leaches or otherwise let blood from her. They claimed that this was ridding her body of evil humours, but it seemed to Robert that they were only making her condition worse; her face growing ever paler. She never recovered, dying just before Christmas 1296.

  Robert was inconsolable and moped around the castle, disinterested in everything, even the momentous events happening in the country. Eventually, in February 1297, his father rode north from Carlisle to see his son.

  ‘Robert, you’ve got to stir yourself out of this morose lethargy. Edward is making a stupid mistake by replacing all the Scottish sheriffs and other officials by Englishmen and that damned treasurer, Hugh Cressingham, is bleeding the country dry with his taxes. If we’re not careful there’ll be a revolt and heaven knows what that will lead to.’

  ‘I applied to him to recognise me King of Scots now that Balliol is disgraced but he just laughed and said that no Scot could be trusted. He won’t even assign us to any of the Scottish appointments that are now in his gift, not even the sheriffdom of Ayrshire that I held before.’

  That shook Robert out of his lassitude and his eyes flashed with anger.

  ‘What? After all we have risked and lost in supporting him, he won’t give us any reward? Perhaps it’s time we considered our loyalty to him.’

  ‘I agree. But we don’t have the power base to oppose him on our own. I’ve been in touch with James Steward, whose also lost his appointment as Sheriff of Renfrew, and, of course, his title of High Steward is meaningless as there is no King of Scots any longer.’

  ‘Hasn’t Edward taken that for himself, then?’

  ‘No, apparently he holds the view that, with Balliol’s abdication, the Kingdom of Scotland has ceased to exist and it is now part of England, much the same as Wales is now.’

  ‘The people will never stand for that. The Scots are a proud nation and hate the English.’

  ‘Yes, but the nobles have divided loyalties. Many of them have wealthy estates in England and they can’t afford to oppose Edward. The people need leaders, they can’t act on their own . That’s why I have been in contact with Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow and James Stewart. I believe that they will join us in a revolt.’

  ‘What about the Comyns? They are the most powerful political family in Scotland?’

  ‘They will never support us; in any case they are still licking their wounds after the Balliol fiasco and half of them are in prison in England.’

  ‘Then we should take advantage of the absence to build up our power base,’ the Earl of Carrick said with a gleam in his eye.

  ~#~

  Wallace’s peaceful sojourn at Ellerslie didn’t last long. He had just sat down with Mary for their midday meal one day in early May 1297 when Malcolm came rushing in to say that a troop of Englishmen were riding up the glen. William told Malcolm to run and warn as many of the men as possible to arm themselves and congregate near the small timber-built church before he pulled down the leather baldric with his two handed broadsword hanging from it in its scabbard and slung it over his shoulder. Next he picked up his bow, strung it and slung his quiver over the other shoulder. Pausing only to knock an arrow to the bowstring and to kiss Mary, he stepped out of his house and waited for the six horsemen to reach him.

  ‘Are you William Wallace?’ the man leading them, obviously a knight by his dress and the gold spurs on his feet, demanded without preamble.

  ‘I am; who wants to know?’

  ‘I am ordered by Sir William Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanarkshire, to arrest you for the murder of his brother and four other persons.’

  ‘That was during the late war between King Edward and King John of Scotland. He died in a fair fight.’

  ‘Tell that to the Sheriff’s Court in Lanark. Now divest yourselves of your weapons and come with me. You won’t need your horse, my orders are to tie your hands and make you run all the way behind my horse. If you can’t keep up it will save the expense of a trial.’ The knight gave him a sadistic grin.

  He died with it on his face as a quarrel fired from Malcolm’s crossbow smashed into his skull. His blood and brains splattered the men next to him as the knight fell sideways off his horse and crashed to the ground. His courser, startled by the thud and the sudden lack of weight on his back, reared up, disrupting the attempts of the three serjeants with crossbows to return fire.

  William quickly took aim and his arrow punched one of the mounted crossbowmen out of the saddle. Just as William had nocked a second arrow to his bow, two more of his men ran up with bows and the three of them started to rain arrows down on the other four as they struggled to get their horses back under control. It didn’t take long before it was all over. The English soldiers had considered the Scottish farmers to be beneath contempt so the attack had been unexpected. They paid for their arrogance and only one managed to turn his horse and gallop away. Unfortunately for him, Malcolm had already had the foresight to send a dozen men to cut off any retreat and, within twenty minutes of Malcolm coming to warn William, all six Englishmen lay dead.

  It didn’t take a fool to realise that William Wallace and all the people living at Ellerslie would now be killed if the English caught them, so early the next morning a long column of people left the glen, their few carts piled high with their possessions. At Kilmarnock the column split in two, the women and children heading south towards the wilds of Ettrick Forest and the men heading east to Lanark. It was with a heavy heart that William said farewell to Mary, wondering if he would ever see her again.

  The castle lay high on the east bank of the River Clyde, near the confluence with the Mouse Water. It was an imposing structure built of stone and at first Wallace couldn’t see a way in. He had no more than thirty men with him together with an assortment of older boys and youths
aged from thirteen upwards. He knew that the garrison had to be at least sixty strong. They outnumbered his little band and they were professional soldiers; furthermore they were protected by the high stone walls of the castle.

  Malcolm and Angus, a youth of sixteen, slipped into Lanark as dusk was falling and made for one of the taverns facing the market square. Lanark was not a big town and it had few hostelries. This one looked promising: neither the haunt of cutpurses and lowlife nor the sort of place which merchants were likely to gather. They wanted somewhere where servants who knew the castle well would drink.

  They were in luck. As they sat in the corner trying to listen to the conversations going on around them whilst avoiding the interest of others, they heard someone at the next table complaining about the way they were treated in the castle. The speaker sounded as if he was the type to enjoy complaining and his companions were evidently bored with his whingeing. After a while they got up and left him on his own.

  Malcolm and Angus sat down at his table and he looked up from contemplating the dregs in the bottom of his tankard with alarm.

  ‘That looks to be empty, let me fill it up for you.’ He nodded at Angus, passing him the tankard.

  It took an hour of listening to the shortcomings of everyone the man, an assistant cook, worked with before Malcolm steered the conversation around to the castle itself. By now Angus had made two more trips back to the plank supported on two empty barrels that served as a bar and the man was becoming a little tipsy.

  Twenty minutes later Malcolm had learned of the waste chute that took rubbish out of the castle and deposited it in the Clyde. The outlet was hidden just under the water below a prominent rock on the shoreline. It was Angus who thought to ask if the assistant cook had trouble with the top of the chute because it was always left locked. Apparently it wasn’t; it was meant to be but the guards had got careless and the large heavy padlock had disappeared.

  That night ten of the slimmer youths armed only with daggers were led by Malcolm up the waste chute. Malcolm was now nineteen but, although it was a tight fit and he nearly got stuck a couple of times, he was just small enough to make it up the chute. The smell of rotten food, and worse, was overpowering but eventually they made it to the top, which proved to be in a storeroom. What the wretched cook hadn’t revealed was that the room was kept locked via a locking bar and a padlock on the other side of the door. It took the boys, working in pairs, three quarters of an hour to work the mortar loose so that the stone into which the locking bar fitted could be removed. By now it was one of clock in the morning and the interior of the keep was very quiet. Malcolm and his boys crept through the kitchen out into the inner bailey. For some reason that door wasn’t locked, but then the food wasn’t kept in the kitchen itself and presumably it was left open for the scullions and spit boys to light the fires and get preparations for breakfast underway in a few hours’ time.

  The Scots edged around the outer wall of the inner bailey to the gate into the outer bailey. This was guarded by two very bored men-at-arms who were sitting on stools plying dice on the ground. Beside them was a door which presumably led to the guard room where their fellow guards would be sleeping.

  Malcolm gestured to a boy of fourteen who he knew was adept at skinning game and signalled him to follow him quietly and drew his hand across his throat to indicate what he wanted. The boy nodded and swallowed apprehensively. He had never killed a man before but he knew that everyone depended on him and pride overcame his nerves. Malcolm crept up behind one sentry and the boy the other. At Malcolm’s nod both drew their daggers sharply across the sentries’ throats. Blood spurted out of their severed throats and they collapsed soundlessly into their killers’ arms. Malcolm quietly lowered his man to the ground but the weight was too much for the boy and he fell through his arms to the ground with thud.

  The Scots waited with bated breath but no-one seemed to have heard so they clustered around the door to the guard room. As Malcolm opened it, he peered cautiously inside. The small room was full of men sleeping on the ground, snoring loudly. An empty wine flagon in the middle of the floor told its own story. Malcolm beckoned his boys inside and they soon cut the throats of the men inside. Two of the younger boys wiped their fingers in the blood and then daubed it on each other’s faces as some sort of blooding ritual. They were about to giggle, perhaps in reaction to the release in tension, when they became aware of Malcolm glaring at them.

  The way through to the outer bailey was guarded by a stout double gate but there was a smaller pedestrian gate cut into it. It took a quarter of an hour to find the keys to it in the guardroom and then the Scots slipped through it and clung to the shadows as they made their way round to the postern gate. Again, this was locked but Malcolm soon found the key hanging on a hook beside the gate. Once he opened it he was greeted by the impatient face of William Wallace.

  ‘What took you so bloody long? I was certain we would be discovered standing here, sticking out like a jester in a nunnery. Never mind; you can tell me later. Come on,’ he whispered to the men behind him.

  Once inside they split up into their prearranged groups. One dealt with the sentries on the walls of the outer bailey and another with those at the main gate and in the guard room there. A third went up the staircase in the keep and silenced the lookouts at the top.

  Wallace then concentrated his men again before leading the assault on those sleeping in the great hall. Leaving them to finish off the English knights, squires and servants, who were still half asleep, Wallace and Malcolm charged up the circular staircase to the solar.

  As William burst in he found the fat Sheriff of Lanarkshire trying to pull on his hose with his sword gripped in his right hand. A girl of no more than eleven or twelve lay in the bed screaming with the covers pulled up to her chin. William Haselrig feebly tried to block Wallace’s blow with his sword but it was knocked out of his hand. Wallace pointed to the scar on his cheek.

  ‘Remember when you gave me this in London and murdered a squire for no better reason than he was a Scot. Well, now you’re going to die for no better reason than you’re English.’

  With that Wallace swung again with two hands on the handle of his sword at the fat knight’s neck and watched as his head flew across the room trailing blood. More spurted out of his neck briefly before his heart got the message that communication with his brain had been severed.

  He told the girl, who proved to be a Scots lass from the town who had caught Heselrig’s roving eye, to get dressed and get out. He also let the women and pages go before looting and then firing the castle just as dawn was breaking.

  As the flames lit the sky behind them, Wallace’s raiders headed south to join their families in Ettrick Forest.

  ~#~

  Andrew Murray the Younger of Petty had, quite independently of Wallace, raised the standard of revolt in the North at the same time as the attack on Lanark. His family supported John Balliol and the Comyns and his father was one of those being held prisoner in England after the fiasco at Dunbar. Rather than make an immediate attack, as Wallace had done, before raising an army, Andrew Murray had started by recruiting the men of Morayshire at a place called Avoch.

  The Sheriff of Elgin, Sir Reginald Cheyne, was a Scot, but one whose loyalty was to King Edward. He called a meeting of all those considered loyal to Edward at Inverness in late May 1297 to discuss the situation. The meeting was inconclusive but one of the participants, the English Constable of Urquhart Castle half-way down Loch Ness, was ambushed by Murray on his way back to his castle.

  The ambush was only a partial success for Murray; he won the encounter but the constable escaped and fled to Urquhart Castle, which Murray was unable to take without siege engines. However, he had more success at Duffus Castle, owned by Reginald Cheyne, and burned the timber fortress to the ground. He then conducted a very successful campaign to lay waste the land in Morayshire and Aberdeenshire held by Edward’s supporters. Men flocked to his banner and all the English-held castles in
northern Scotland fell to him, even Castle Urquhart eventually. He then raided Aberdeen and burned all the English ships in the harbour.

  Edward was too preoccupied with preparations for his campaign in Flanders to be distracted by rebellion north of the border, so he released the Earl of Buchan from the Tower of London on condition that he put down the rebellion. Buchan recruited his brother, Alexander Comyn and Henry Cheyne, Bishop of Aberdeen and brother of Sir Reginald, to help him and in early July he led his army out of Aberdeen to confront Andrew Murray.

  The two armies met on the banks of the River Spey at the ford on the road from Aberdeen to Inverness. Murray and Buchan rode forward and met in the middle of the ford.

  ‘Why do you bring good Scotsmen here to fight me and mine at the behest of Longshanks, Buchan? Do you think they’ll follow you and do the work of the English?’ Andrew asked with some scorn.

  John, Earl of Buchan, was thirty eight and he bridled at being taken to task by a youth of twenty, not yet officially a man, and his social inferior.

  ‘You watch your tongue, Murray, and show me the respect I deserve.’

  ‘You’ll not get any respect from me whilst you remain Longshank’s lickspittle,’ Andrew replied with some vehemence. Buchan eventually tore his eyes away from the irate glare of the young man.

  ‘Aye, well. It does me little credit to serve him, I grant you, but if it’s the price I have to pay to get out of that damned Tower, it’s one I’m prepared to pay.’ He paused and looked back at Murray with a small smile playing at the corner of his lips.