A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (50 page)

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.
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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 title. 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.
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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 III’s heirs. The same was true for the twenty or so constables who had been entrusted with the keeping of the kingdom’s 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.
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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.
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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 Edward’s 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 river’s 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’.
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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.
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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 contest, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

What was Edward up to? One possibility, which cannot be entirely discounted, is that both he and Florence were sincere in their belief that the necessary proof existed, and that Edward was actually entertaining the thought of passing judgement in the count’s favour. Florence’s son John was engaged to be married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth (b. 1282), so the count’s candidacy represented a second chance to construct a marriage alliance between England and Scotland. Florence was also financially beholden to Edward, and would doubtless have made a pliable client king.

It is more likely, however, that the lengthy delay was a deliberate ploy on Edward’s part to extend his temporary tenure of Scotland. In ten months’ time the king would have had custody for more than a year and a day – a period that, from a legal point of view, might be deemed at a later date to strengthen the English claim to overlordship. As such, the long adjournment was another piece of chicanery by Edward in keeping with his earlier efforts to exploit Scotland’s difficulties to England’s advantage, and no doubt explains the care he had taken to extract oaths of fealty from the Scots during the previous month. The Scots themselves must have been infuriated, especially in view of the fact that the king had promised at the outset to provide a speedy resolution to the succession crisis. But the transfer of lordship and of castles that had taken place in June meant that this was now Edward’s show. It would stop and start at his discretion, and it would run for as long as he deemed necessary.
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The court at Berwick therefore broke up. Florence hurried off, ostensibly to hunt for his documents, the other competitors went to their own parts, and Edward returned to England. The king’s affairs in the south had remained for the most part quiet and orderly during his absence, but there were nonetheless one or two items that required his immediate attention.

The first was the funeral of his mother. Eleanor of Provence had died, aged sixty-eight or very nearly so, on Midsummer’s Day, but her burial had been purposely delayed until her eldest son could be present. To the evident surprise of some people – including, it seems, Eleanor’s younger son, Edmund – the queen was not laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, but in the more remote surroundings of her latter-day home at Amesbury. Possibly this was Eleanor’s own, quietly kept intention; it is hard to imagine that Edward would have deliberately disregarded his mother’s last wishes had she wanted to be buried at Westminster. At the same time, it is also fair to remark that, following the recent decision to create new golden effigies of Henry III and Eleanor of Castile, the abbey already had its idealised images of kingship and queenship. Edward was therefore quite content to see his mother – beloved by the king himself but still remembered throughout the kingdom as a virago – interred in the quiet Wiltshire countryside. On 9 September a great crowd of magnates and prelates attended Eleanor’s funeral at Amesbury; but thereafter, except in Amesbury itself, her memory was allowed to fade away.
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The other major item on Edward’s agenda in the autumn of 1291 was the March of Wales, which for the past two years had been disturbed by a violent dispute. The earls of Hereford and Gloucester, respectively the lords of Brecon and Glamorgan, had locked horns over a debatable strip of land that lay between their two territories. In 1289 Gloucester had begun to build a castle, Morlais, to assert his claim, Hereford had in due course retaliated, and the result had been a private war. This in itself was uncontroversial: one of the benefits (or burdens, depending on one’s viewpoint) of being a Marcher lord was the right to settle disagreements at sword-point, and without reference to the Crown. The issue had become contentious on this occasion because, at an early stage, the king had called on both earls to desist, yet Gloucester had continued to make raids into Hereford’s territory. A subsequent royal commission sent to the March in 1291 had been similarly disregarded. Gloucester had not even bothered to attend its hearings, and those other Marchers called to bear witness against him had closed ranks in refusing to do so. The old maxim that ‘in the March of Wales, the king’s writ does not run’ was clearly felt to be under threat.
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